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Recent Stories May 6, 2003 John Stanton Bush's War on Jesus Sam Hamod W. Bush: the Little Snot, the Little Bully Robert Fisk Bush Says the War is Over: Tell It to the Shi'a Kathleen Christison A Roadmap to Nowhere Steve Perry Bush's War Web Log 5/06   May 5, 2003 Gary Leupp Phase Two: Syria and Iran Jorge Mariscal The Militarization of US Culture Ishmael Reed A Family Values Man Tarif Abboushi Sharon's Confidence: Bush Won't Come to Shove on Roadmap Leila Matsui Regime Change Begins at Home...Literally Steve Perry Bush's Wars Sam Smith Coalition of the Shilling   May 3, 2003 Ron Jacobs Tears of Rage: Remembering May 1970 Elaine Cassel William Bennett, a Freudian Perspective Sam Hamod Understanding the Shi'a of Lebanon Scott Fleming Getting Shot on the Oakland Docks Mickey Z. Cuba and Puerto Rico: 100 Years of Terror William S. Lind Don't Take Col. John Boyd's Name in Vain Dr. Bruce Blair The New Nuclear Terrorism Threat Joanne Mariner Cluster Bombs Over Iraq Anthony Gancarski Hot Fun in the Summertime Ilian Pappe Searching Jenin William MacDougall America's Kids Are All Right: Pre-Teen Conservative Commentators Seth Sandronsky Incarcerated and Invisible Rich Procter Over Our Dead Bodies Lenni Brenner How Bob Dylan Found His Voice Adam Engel American Bulk Poets' Basement Reiss, Guthrie, Albert Steve Perry Bush's War Web Log 5/03   May 2, 2003 Caoimhe Butterly Crowd Control American-style Neve Gordon US: No Right to Know About the Disappeared John Chuckman Tom Friedman's Life as a Pet Hamster Bradley Burston Betting on Abu-Mazen...To Lose Harvey Wasserman Bush's Military Defeat John Troyer Question Those Writing History Saul Landau The Cuba Conundrum Steve Perry Bush's War Web Log 5/02 Website of the Day Moussaoui's Quiz   May 1, 2003 Jeffrey St. Clair Santorum: That's Latin for Asshole Iain Boal A May Day Message to the FCC: "We Are Many; They are Few" Diana Johnstone About Cuba Sam Hamod Killings at Al Fallujah, City of Mosques Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Intelligence Fiasco Lee Sustar Greed Air: Airline Workers Agree to Pay Cuts, While Bosses Stuff Their Pockets Peter Linebaugh May Day at Kut and Kenthal Stew Albert Straight Shooters Steve Perry Bush's War Web Log 5/01 Website of the Day South Bay Mobilization   April 30, 2003 Ashley Smith Under Uncle Sam's Thumb: a History of Washington's Occupations Steve Perry Bush's War Web Log 4/30 Gary Leupp Shooting Schoolboys: Preliminary Thoughts on the Fallujah Massacre Robert Jensen Fighting Alienation in the USA Wayne Madsen The Four Horsemen of Propaganda Ahmad Faruqui Bush's Strategic Myopia About the Middle East Gabriel Kolko Iraq, the US and the End of the European Coalition Adolfo Perez Esquivel A Nobel Laureat's Letter to Bush: "You Talk of Freedom; You Detest Freedom"     April 29, 2003 Gary Leupp Disorder and Opportunity: the Results of the Iraq War Uri Avnery Don't Envy Abu-Mazen Anthony Gancarski Brush with the Law Mickey Z. POWs: Then and Now CounterPunch Wire How to Spin Israel on the Hill: Internal Lobbying Documents Robert Fisk Did the US Murder Journalists? Chris Floyd Bush Telegraphs His Punches on Syria Wayne Madsen About Those Iraqi Intelligence Documents Wallace Gagne Pilgrimage or Demolition Derby? Eliot Katz Playing Catch with Cracked Globes Steve Perry Bush's War Web Log 4/29     Hot Stories Elaine Cassel Civil Liberties Watch Michel Guerrin Embedded Photographer Says: "I Saw Marines Kill Civilians" Uzma Aslam Khan The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War: What America Says Does Not Go Paul de Rooij Arrogant Propaganda Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.   Subscribe Online Search CounterPunch

May 7, 2003 CounterPunch Diary Breasts, Martinis, Hitchens: Quoting Under the Influence? by ALEXANDER COCKBURN Not so long ago I commented on a column by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, in which this well-known toper addressed himself to the theme of How To Make Drink one's Slave and Not One's Master. Having already had rich sport with Hitchens's bizarre excursus on this theme I'll confine myself here to a sentence in that same column that was widely quoted as an example of Hitchens' trenchant wit. It dealt with the matter of how many dry martinis should a prudent drinker confront at cocktail time. Here's what Hitchens wrote: "On the whole, observe the same rule about gin martinis--and all gin drinks--that you would in judging female breasts: one is far too few and three is one too many When you get the shudders, even slightly, it's definitely time to seek help." Discussing this passage back in February of this year, just after his Vanity Fair column was published, I decided to pass lightly over the issue of the shakes. but his math about the gins was definitely off. As far as dry martinis go, there's been sound evidence in the past to take Hitchens as at least a six-breast guy, with the Artemis of Kybele as his beau ideal. The first time I read the sentence about martinis and breasts it struck as creepy. After all, these days there are a fair amount of women out there, some of them readers of Vanity Fair, who have had a mastectomy. Shouldn't his editor at Vanity Fair have suggested to Hitchens that maybe he might want to reconsider the line? Then, after a nudge from an interested reader, I began to look around, to see whether Hitchens had simply collared the line. These days possible borrowings aren't that hard to check, at least at an elementary level. I went to the Google search engine on my computer and typed in "breasts; martinis; Hitchens." Up came three citations on my original column plus two news stories, one of them in the Washington Post, crediting Hitchens with the breasts/martinis quip. At this rate he'll be in Bartlett's with it in a year or two. But it's not his line. I slightly refined my search and in five minutes came across the same basic edict in food and drink columns from the 1990s. For example a piece by Kathleen Sloan, June 8 1995, in the Eye WEEKLY, Toronto's arts newspaper had her offering advice to children taking their fathers out to dinner, "If he tries to order a third, remind him that martinis are like a women's breasts: two are perfect, three is just too many". Christopher Pyne, a cartoonist, used the line in his "Slappy Says" strip in early 2001. On his BK Lounge website, dated 2002, Bryan Knox ran the line. I emailed him and he answered that "I heard that quote for the first time around 1990ish and really am not sure who originally said it. It sounds a lot like a Johnny Carson quote to me." Then, on another website, Bestman.com, devoted to the ever-popular theme of cocktails, I found the quote, attributed to the late great San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, who died in 1997. It was crisper than Hitchens' version: "Martinis are like breasts, one isn't enough, and three is too many." It was next to another joke from the golden age of dry martinis, by Alexander Woollcott, "I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." Caen often wrote about the therapeutic powers of "Vitamin V", aka the vodka martini, and he seems a likelier candidate than Carson. The line sounds a little too edgy for the latter. I feel sure Caen used the line in one of his columns, though whether he claimed to have made it up, I don't yet know. The San Francisco Chronicle's electronic data base doesn't go back beyond the mid-90s. Why didn't the Vanity Fair checking department google the line, just to be on the safe side? Well, that's the problem with checking departments. They never see the wood for the trees. Where did Hitchens get it from? Maybe from Caen. He has, or he used to have, a very good memory for this kind of thing. Why didn't he throw in one of those cover-your-ass phrases, like "as the old tag goes." Too many six-breast martini evenings and your memory rots. Next thing you know, Hitchens will be claiming he captured Baghdad single handed. The only question the checker will think to ask him is whether he'd had two or three martinis under his belt at the time.   Yesterday's Features Paul de Rooij An Activist in the Trenches: an Interview with Gretta Duisenberg Anthony Gancarski Money to Burn: in Defense of Bill Bennett John Stanton Bush's War on Jesus Sam Hamod W. Bush: the Little Snot, the Little Bully Robert Fisk Bush Says the War is Over: Tell It to the Shi'a Kathleen Christison A Roadmap to Nowhere Steve Perry Bush's War Web Log 5/06   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /