Yuzu season is fleeting. It comes and goes. I guess they all do…Just like us…Ok, ok, let’s not start off on a bad foot here with the existential crisis so early on a fall behind morning…Back to yuzu…The little guys are annoying and wonderful. So many seeds! So little juice! So much unique flavor but so damn expensive. But you put a yuzu cocktail on the menu and people go downright rabid for it, even if it’s mediocre. And then, right when you want more, that’s it, they’re gone. Bon voyage, Yuzu, you were good.

If you know me, you know I love everything about space. I’m talking about the infinite zone just outside our atmosphere that is so mind bogglingly vast that it hurts my brain to even think about it, not the hollow space between your ears. Here’s an example of something I think of on an almost daily basis:

If you condensed our own sun into a black hole, that black hole would be about two miles in diameter. Now, just take into account that our own sun is so massive you could fit a million earths into it. That’s how dense a black hole is. Anyway, there’s a MASSIVE black hole, name, Sagittarius A*, out there in the center of our own Milky Way that is, wait for it, four million times the mass of our sun. It is so large that it encompasses the same area as our solar system which is nine billion kilometers in diameter (the orbit of Neptune, sorry Pluto).

The vastness of something so large and so consuming just sitting out there, gobbling even light itself…

My wife, Jo, happens to be a Sagittarius, a fire sign, if you believe all the astro-jazz. My son is a Leo, also fire, and my daughter is an Aries (fire). This simple, humble Virgo is surrounded, on a daily basis by an archer, a lion, and a ram. Most days I feel like one of those shitty gladiators thrown into the mix as cannon fodder.

The man who led black hole research for many years was none other than Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time and narrator of Into the Universe (along with Benedict Cumberbatch…I still want to come up with a Benedictine Cucumberbatch cocktail…). His big contribution to science involved much work surrounding black holes and his theory that they emitted radiation. It’s his claim to fame and even on his tombstone.

The equation on Stephen Hawking’s grave is a formula representing the “Hawking radiation temperature,” which describes the theoretical radiation emitted by black holes, and is often written as: “T = (hc^3) / (8πGM)” where T is temperature, h is Planck’s constant, c is the speed of light, G is the gravitational constant, and M is the mass of the black hole; essentially signifying that black holes are not completely black but emit a faint radiation due to quantum effects.

Just to be transparent, I’m not pretending to know anything about the above paragraph. I can barely compute how to calculate ABV in my house made liqueurs.

Maybe my tombstone will have my specs for the Incantation on it, my single greatest contribution to the Rustic Canyon Bar Program.

At any rate, this one is pretty good too:

Into the Yuzuverse

1.5 oz. London Dry Gin

1 oz. Yuzu Punch

.5 oz. Fresh Lime Juice

.5 oz. Lacto Asian Pear Syrup

.25 oz. Lemon Sherbet

2 Dashes RC yuzu Bitters

Shake, double strain into a small coupe with a half yuzu salt rim.

Your AI generated image for this post, #408, 11/2/24