The Thousand Islands Duty Free Store on Hill Island near the Alexandria Bay Bridge across the Saint Lawrence River has a few one-liter bottles of Wild Turkey Rare Breed that it is selling for $38 CAD or $31 USD. That is not a good price. That is arbitrage.
Here’s how Breaking Bourbon describes Wild Turkey Rare Breed:
Scents of caramel and toffee combine with bright orange zest and light citrus. Seasoned oak adds depth and hints towards the older bourbon in the blend, but doesn’t overpower the brighter notes. The strength of the proof is also notable, as the intensity of it makes itself known with a deep inhale… A sweet and spicy mix of rye spice, maple sugar, caramel, and leather finds intensity immediately. Sweet clementines and a hint of tobacco provide an extra layer of depth, adding a bit of intrigue to an otherwise traditional flavor profile.
To a civilian, the synesthesia needed to describe tastes never makes sense (‘A dry wine with a flinty aftertaste’; ‘the bouquet of an aborigine’s armpit’). A good single malt scotch reminds me of Michelle Pfeiffer as a young woman – slim, smart and subtle. A good bourbon, by contrast, is like Rosie Perez – full-bodied, strong, in-your-face. Most bourbons don’t have the complexity of, say, a Talisker or a Laphroaig, but good bourbons do. You just have to look for it amid the riot of orange zest, citrus, rye, maple sugar and tobacco.
Rare Breed is not just a good bourbon. It is a very, very good bourbon. It is probably the best bottle of bourbon you can buy for under $80. I recently discovered a high trim-line Old Forester that is comparable, but it cost quite a bit more. A 750 ML bottle of Rare Breed goes for $59.99 in my local liquor store. I feel lucky when I buy it for $49.99 in the New Hampshire liquor store on I-95 between Boston and Portsmouth. So everyone – and I mean everyone here – should run, not walk, run, to the duty free store on Hill Island. Bring your non-drinking friends to boost your tax-free quota. Monetize, and enjoy responsibly.
George Seferis said that, wherever he traveled, Greece wounded him. Like a synesthetic description of the feel of tannin on a palette, we know what he meant by that, although we can’t really say it.[1] If you asked him what he meant, he probably would have said that, if he understood the statement, he would have written an essay rather than a poem. One theme that runs throughout his poetry is exile. Seferis was born in a Greek-speaking part of Asia Minor near Smyrna (modern Izmir) that was seized by the Turks after the First World War. His family was rausted in the exchange of populations of the early 1920s, and he never saw the house where he was born or his home-town again. He was part of the government-in-exile after Greece was invaded during the Second World War. Many of his poems from this period are dated with locations such as Cairo, or South Africa. He felt betrayed by the Brits (‘Friends from the other war’) during the tensions over Cyprus during the 1960s and 1970s. For him, ‘Greece’ meant the sun on the enormous white rocks that were arranged in the shape of temples and amphitheaters in along the coast of what is now Turkey by people who spoke a language unrelated to that of the current habitants. In Shakespearean tragedy, the climactic scene often arrives at midnight. That makes sense in a northern country where it rains during official coronations and the sun barely shines for four months of the year. In the Mediterranean, the pitiless mid-day sun is the main event.
Here he is, describing that landscape:
As the pine tree at the stroke of noon
engorged by resin
strains to bring forth flame
and can’t endure the pangs any longer-
Summon the children to gather the ash
to sow it.
That is what Seferis meant by the Greece that wounded him wherever he travelled. It is the feeling of sun, rocks, exile and loss. Since he couldn’t return to it, he had to carry it with him behind his eyeballs wherever he travelled.
Casella Waste Systems is quite different from Seferis’ Greece. You do not need to close your eyes to experience Casella. It is everywhere. Open your eyes and look around. Chances are, you are six feet from a dumpster bearing the Casella logo right now.
I have written about Casella before. The company was founded by Doug and John Casella in Rutland, VT in 1975. It went public in 1997 (ticker symbol: CWST), and became a vampire squid in the early aughts. They operate by buying up the competition, jacking up prices and charging you for services you didn’t know you used. They deserve respect, because they are good at what they do. That is sucking blood from owners of manufactured housing communities.
Casella is the reason the Soprano family left the waste management business in 2002. They are in talks to buy Taiwan Semiconductor, Google, Amazon, Tesla, and Walmart (they tell bankers that the Walmart merger will create synergies. ‘We buy the crap from China, sell it, and then cart it away’). A subsidiary of Casella now dominates both the on-line security space and physical protection rackets. They have a controlling interest in Amazon’s new pharmacy. They have purchased all the producers of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds outside of Russia (Putin is not a fan) and are running experiments regarding the use of psychedelics to control consumers’ behavior. Chat GPT and its competitors are Casella products.
They eat antitrust regulators for brunch.
I get offers to buy this blog every day. ‘We are a family business! We will take care of your property!’ ‘I was browsing the web the other day with my wife and noticed your blog’. ‘We are principals, not agents. Contact us now’. I turn down all offers politely but firmly. ‘Contact me in ten years’, I say. ‘Or when rates go down, or when I start drooling on myself. Whichever happens first.’ The offers from Casella have been exceptionally persistent. I understand that they are buying up competing blogs in the manufactured housing space. In the worst-case scenario, they will buy up all my competitors and block my access to customers or suppliers. Their final offer will be I hand over the keys and I don’t get my legs broken. It will be an offer I won’t be able to refuse.
In the past month or so, I have traveled throughout the Northeast and the northern Midwest. Wherever I have gone, I have seen evidence of Casella’s growth. At first, when I saw a dumpster with the Casella logo, I said, ‘I know them. They haul crap from my park in central New York.’ Then, I began to recognize them for that they are, i.e. so many cancerous lesions spreading throughout a decrepit body politic. Here are some images. Wherever I travel, Casella wounds me:
Readers are encouraged to send in their own images of Casella dumpsters and port-o-sans, with a caption denoting the location. We will award a prize (a backrub by the Dirtlease writer of your choice) to the person who sends the image of the dumpster farthest removed from the Casella Urheimat of Rutland, VT.
[1] An analogous rule has been enshrined in American First Amendment jurisprudence under the supreme-court-justices-know-pornography-when-they-see-it doctrine of obscenity.
Sell!
Poivre!