M A Padlipsky Memorial - Single Malt Department

All contents © 2011, 2021 The Literary Estate of Michael A. Padlipsky & William D. Ricker except as otherwise marked.

— MAP home — technical bibliogrpahy — SciFi —

the Scotch proto-Blogger

Mike was a Scotch blogger before there was a Web on which have WebLogs — by the medium of netmail (as they called it when they were inventing it, as he'd have said) and file transfer sharing of text files, which he then granted permission for some of the earliest Scotch websites to re-share.

His quest, called "Primary Research Area", was to find another bottle of the semi-mythical A&N MOHM Glen Grant 14, and secondarily, to determine what was the second-best single-malt after that, which resulted in The Research Notes.

• A story arc on MAP's quest, which he called his Primary Research Area.

  • Prolegomena to "The Malt and I" - backstory on his Scotch history before the MOHM, and initial hunt for MOHM. Gloss: "Prolegomena". (Alas if the implicitly promised full "The Malt and I" was drafted, i haven't found it yet, so we'll piece together ...)
  • Pun of the Year for 1986 (below)
  • 1995-1996 posts to MALTS-L - selected messages regarding the MOHM
  • need to find ?meaty digression on why I strongly prefer "grades" to numeric scores?
  • Supplementary Information and Illustration (2001)
  • Posthumous Postscripts: Denouement, Nemesis, & Epilogues (2011)
  • A Tasting For Mike (the Wake) - Mike catered his own wake: we samples some of the best of his Scotch cache.

• The Research Notes - Scotch notes from before Blogs (4th Ed, 1996)

  • PDF
  • WebPage

• Weirdest whisky bottles in his collection

Pun of the Year for 1986

(Other Puns of the Year (POTYs) are filed under Literary Works.)

The (D)ARPAnet/MILnet/DDN Internet Research Group (IRG) networking folks had periodic meetings in London and NATO regarding the digitization of allies. Mike regularly stopped off in Scotland on the way home.

I was asked to give a talk at Edinburgh University, since I was going to be in the neighborhood to do field work in my real area of research interest, what we call single malt Scotch and what they call malt whisky. Having mentioned why I was around at the start of the talk, I was delighted to be invited to take a dram afterwards by a rather seniorlooking gent, up in his office, which turned out to be quite a posh one, making me assume he was quite senior.

Since he had an appointment in a few minutes and I was supposed to go off to the pub with my local cohorts, we didn't even take time to sit, just exchanged a few pleasantries about our respective books and a thought or two about the particular malt whisky he'd happened to have in his desk. At the pub, I mentioned the incident to the gang and was informed that my host had been their new Professor of Computer Science, which, I might not now, was a relatively more distinguished rank there than in the States.

I replied that I had known that, but was pleased with the information anyway since it would make the event all the more memorable. Then I added that I had just realized I'd have had to remember it forever anyway, since it was, after all, the first talk I'd ever given that had received a standing libation.

-- MAP

(Other of his "potys" = "Puns Of The Year" will be filled under SciFi as Literary.)

— MAP home — technical bibliogrpahy — SciFi —