If Vengeance Be My Destiny is a new, weekly comic appearing exclusively at The Cincinnati Man. This is the first installment.
The end of May is upon us. Hell yeah, you think. Summer! It’s time to spend my weekend in the garage, or out on a hike, or on the lake… but alas, reality holds no such pleasures for you. What Summer really means: Wedding season. If you’re between the ages of 26 and 35, chances are you have at least 2 of these to head to this summer (I have 3). If you’re going to get dressed up, dance to crappy music and eat overpriced cake you might as well look good doing it. This brings us to today’s topic: tying the perfect windsor knot in your tie.
This site is probably the best tutorial I’ve found, especially helpful because of it’s step-by-step pictures. The real key, no matter how many times you read directions, is practice. Grab your favorite (or crappiest) tie, stand in front of the mirror, and do tie it several times until it gets right. Then, spend the next four times trying to reproduce it. Just like everything else, practice makes perfect. Here’s the breakdown:
1) Drape the tie around your neck, wide end on your right and narrow end on your left. The bottom of the narrow end should be about 1/3 of the way down the length of your chest, though this changes based on your torso length.
2) First, cross the larger end over the narrow end. We’ll call this the crossed position. Holding the intersection firmly, curl the larger end behind and up between your neck and collar, and pull it straight out.
Bring the larger side down, back to the crossed position.
3) Next, we’re going to wrap it all the way around. From the crossed position, wrap the larger end under and pull snug (adjusting your fingers to hold it in place) then bring it across the front. This part requires a bit of trickery, as you need to use your fingers to both hold the shape of the knot and give yourself enough slack on the front of the knot to push the larger end through in the next step.
4) By this time you should have some semblance of that V shape the windsor is known for, but enough slack on the last wrap around (I leave a single finger’s width) to make this possible. Bring the larger end back up through the neck and then down through the slack front of the knot, and pull until just barely taut. Don’t let go yet!
5) Grab the narrow end, keeping your other hand on the knot to preserve its shape, and gently pull on the narrow end to tighten the knot. Push the knot gently up until it reaches your collar (don’t choke yourself) and snug it up.
Now, look in the mirror, realize that your initial starting position was way off, and that the tie falls above your belly button, pull it out (just tug on the knot) and start over. Soon, you will best looking guy desparately in line at the free beer bar, watching the Electric Slide, and hoping for death.
TITTIES!
Some of us just understand places like Vegas. Some of us just want worry-free over-indulgence and feel some primal desire to “cut loose”, even if that means wallowing in depravity. For most men, Vegas is so well known for being the mecca that quells these fiery urges, that there really is no other way to spin it. It is Sin City, a modern day cocktail consisting of equal parts Sodom and Gomorrah. We, as men, regard this as a universal truth. It is why we love it. From the thrill of the win, to the pleasures of the flesh, Vegas pays off in more than just huge dividends, it brands us with unforgettable stories, which if the commercials tell you, you can keep in Vegas or share with the world. It is with this newly-realized dogma that I offer you my battle with a Cheetah.
My party of six, which consisted of my uncle Sean, a lesbian, and 3 other gentleman whom everyday acquaintances would consider to be upstanding, had been consulting the entire day about our first Vegas strip club, and decided alcohol would definitely kill any lingering inhibitions we had about going. A sixth glass of cheap red wine coarsing through my system did nothing for how giggly I had become at the prospect of engaging in a veritable buffet of women dancing to dollars at my every whim. Sure, we wanted upstanding beautiful woman, but we also wanted sleaze. Our club of choice? Cheetah’s Gentleman’s Club.
I was too far in the into my surreal drunkenness to tell you my exact location, but I knew Cheetah’s wasn’t too far from the well-traversed sidewalks of the Vegas main strip. My uncontrollable laughter seemed to crescendo when the building came into view, an edifice that fulfilled every awful cliche about strip clubs that anyone has ever possibly imagined. I didn’t care. The pink neon “Cheetah’s” hovering above me welcomed me, dared me to be all my mother never wanted me to be. My heart began drumming a beat harder than what I was used to, and I loved it. The behemoth of a man at the door nodded and quickly opened the door.
I never imagined that so many amazing women existed in one place at one time, a harem of 8′s, 9′s and the occasional and rarely given 10′s, as the scale goes. I had to have them all…or at least as many as I could until the sun drove me back to the crypt like a depraved, drunken creature of the night.
I figured that I’d require 100 singles to get the debauchery underway and the bartender was more than happy to assist. Within a few minutes he had changed my Ben into a hundred smaller counterparts. As if on cue a beautiful blond began rubbing my shoulders, notifying me that she had been well paid to show me one hell of a time, gesturing to Sean, adorning the world’s largest shit-eating grin, who winked and nodded from a dark corner. She led me to her own private quarters, where I then sat upon a Red Velvet throne the likes of which would make Bootsy Collins jealous that it was not his personal collection. She threw herself onto me undulating a well-choreographed dance to the pulse pounding rhythms of the music that enveloped us. I was eager to say the least to give her all my attention, so I proceeded to put the stash of one hundred $20 dollar bills in my pock…
Wait a minute…I concentrated, making sure that it wasn’t just a case of drunken vision. This wasn’t possibly correct. Did he give me…?
In what was likely one of the worst bartending blunders of all time, the dumbass had mistakenly given me one hundred fresh, crisp $20 dollar bills in place of what was supposed to be just singles. In one instant my 100 dollars ballooned into $2000 dollars, all on account of human error. My heartbeat stopped, the one in my pants kept going, oddly, as if it were a separate entity.
I was sobering at a disappointing rate. There are moments in life that define us as men, and then there are those that define us as human. This was one of those moments.
” Hey,” Miss Actress hopeful-turned-stripper said, lifting my chin to meet her eyes, ” just relax, this will be fun.” She had mistaken my awe for hesitation.
” No, It’s not that,” I began. I’m not sure I was even aware I had just made a decision. I followed with “I’ll be right back.”
Two thousand dollars was an amazing stroke of luck. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head of the big fat doorman beating the hell out of some poor bartender, just because the till was slightly off. Needless to say, he was speechless for almost two minutes as he conferred with his fellow workers, that this guy from Cincinnati had actually returned the two G’s he had been given by mistake. The rest of the night, my money was no good there. They gave me a comp. FREE TITTIES! FREE LIQUOR!
” What girls do you like?” he would query, eager to seal his thanks forever in my eyes.
” That goth chick is awesome,” I said, taking full advantage of my candy store pass. Free lap dances and free drinks all night long in Vegas felt like a pretty just reward to me.
My uncle tells the story to this day. I feel a sense of pride, I must admit, when I learned this little nugget about myself in a strip club in Vegas. I’m okay with it; the facts of the experience was much richer than what the money might have offered. The barrage of women will forever remain nameless, but not faceless, deep within the recesses of my mind. I think my mother would be proud.
The Saturday Dump Festival is a list of all the crap we wasted time on this week, put in one place so you can ruin your Saturday inside on the computer.
Mike Tyson offers a weirdly sensible reason for chewing the shit out of Evander Holyfield’s ear.
The only reason that I bought a bottle of Stone Ruination is because I’d heard good things. 
Having tried Stone IPA recently, I felt like I more or less knew what to expect: a kind of “turned-up-to-eleven” version of the original Stone variety.
I feel like I do a pretty good job of advertising the fact that I have a pretty unsophisticated palate in general, and that I’m still in the beginning stages of developing an opinion about the varieties, brands, and tastes of beers out there. I’ve never been a giant fan of IPA’s in general, although I would readily admit that I do have an appreciation of them and have been known to try ‘em every once in a while.
So, when I saw Ruination on the shelf at my local beer hole, I pretty much had to try it. The bottle’s label is painted on, and I liked that. There was a stupi-long essay on the back, the content of which I can’t remember and don’t feel like recalling. Whatever. Perhaps most importantly, though, the statement “100+ IBU‘s” read, to me anyway, like something of a challenge.
Upon opening the bottle, I was greeted by a distinctly flowery smell. This almost always means that the beer’s going to taste, as I’d characterize it, “perfumey.” Ruination pours a very cloudy, golden color. The head was very fluffy, a slightly yellowish color, and left a sticky lacing around the inside of the glass.
It's like a garden walk in a glass.
I was pleased that my senses and experience hadn’t deceived me; this is one of the more perfumey beers I’ve ever had. It’s pretty damn bitter, too: at least the label didn’t lie. The finish on this beer is very, very long–the bitter taste hangs on the tongue for a good while and almost opens the sinuses, much in the way a good breath mint might do. Unlike a breath mint, however, Ruination isn’t quite as refreshing.
In the end, I can see how drinking Ruination might be a novelty, based on its bitterness alone. There’s not much taste here other than the hops alone, as far as this unsophisticated tongue can tell. I’d put Stone Ruination IPA at a “Fairly Decent” on the ol’ TCM CTS scale.
It was with some measure of trepidation that I purchased a bottle of Abita Amber Lager. About 75% of the beers I’ve had since the beginning of this year have been beers that are totally new to me. The second-worst I’ve had in that time was a skanky bottle of Abita Golden.
In the interest of fairness and a willingness to give a brewer a second chance, I dropped a couple bucks on Abita Amber. I’ll openly admit to being afraid to even open the bottle. It seems a silly thing to say, but I don’t like to drink bad beer. I know–who does? But Budweiser keeps selling like fucking crazy, so what do I know?
Regardless, I cracked open the bottle and took a big whiff. It’s probably not fair that I was relieved that it didn’t smell like an anchovy’s twat, but it’s more or less true. The beer poured easy enough, and left a somewhat yellowish, fluffy head.
I’d never seen a yellowish head on a beer before, and I found it to be somewhat curious. I dove in, still scared of a beer. A fucking beer.
If you’re already familiar with Abita’s offerings, you can guess that this fear was allayed just about immediately. Abita Amber’s a solid beer, well-balanced between hops and malts. There’s kind of a yeasty, almost bready taste to it, with a very slight bitter undertone to the whole thing. In general, the beer’s flavor is light, as it’s a Pilsner/Lager style beer. Very drinkable. It’s not necessarily the kind of beer you “savor,” so to speak, but it is definitely of a higher quality than your more inexpensive, super-mass produced ambers.
On the TCM “crap-to-superb” scale, Abita Amber Lager rates a “Pretty Good.” I’d drink it again, and I might even buy a six pack sometime.
