For whatever reason, I encounter Canadian whiskey at hunting camps way more often than I do in restaurants, bars, or homes. Could be the lower price. Could be the mellow character, which lends itself to long hours of fireside sipping. Or it could just be tradition.

Jonathan Miles

Categorized in : Way Long Character Tradition

A mourning dove's beauty is an understated one: the colors of its feathers ranging through various shades of gray and drab violet, often with a striking splash of turquoise around the eyes.

Jonathan Miles

eyes colors feathers beauty

With the notable exceptions of rum drinks, black beans, fat brown cigars, the smiles of pretty girls, hot yellow sunlight, and fat men with guitars and bongos playing mambos, rumbas, and boleros late into the night, nothing in Cuba comes easily.

Jonathan Miles

black yellow men night

Bullies are bullies, and they're always uninteresting.

Jonathan Miles

uninteresting bullies always

Ask any deer camp old-timer for a foolproof recipe, and you're likely to encounter a lot of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup. There is a reason for that: Mushrooms plus cream plus game meat adds up to a perfect trinity of flavors.

Jonathan Miles

game you soup perfect

A Negroni demands your full, upright attention. It will not tolerate mindless swigging the way all those sweet summertime drinks do, which is just one reason no one has ever ordered one at a swim-up bar at a resort pool.

Jonathan Miles

pool attention sweet way

Havana is one of the great cities of the world, sublimely tawdry yet stubbornly graceful, like tarnished chrome - a city, as a young Winston Churchill once wrote, where 'anything might happen.'

Jonathan Miles

happen city great world

Bermuda's beaches are justly famed for their pink sands, colored by the pulverized shells of single-celled organisms called foraminifera. When occupied by bikini-clad sunbathers, the beaches, with Victorian primness, appear to be blushing.

Jonathan Miles

pink organisms victorian shells

For me, alcohol has this endless fascination that there's this substance that can enhance life so beautifully and destroy it so completely.

Jonathan Miles

destroy me alcohol life

Aside from the martini, the mint julep may be the most iconic cocktail in America.

Jonathan Miles

cocktail mint may america

Not long ago, in an excruciatingly remote village in the Australian Outback, I was startled to see a bartender in a cowboy hat measuring out a classically proportioned French 75 - something he'd picked up on the Internet, he told me.

Jonathan Miles

me village internet long

Young men feel they have much to prove; older men, as a very general rule, tend to feel more comfortable in their skins.

Jonathan Miles

feel prove young men

After a solid day of fishing, I'm craving something hearty. That's where a jug of buttermilk comes in. Poaching fish in buttermilk yields the luscious texture and pure flavor, but with a more substantial richness and a poaching liquid you'll want to lap up with a spoon.

Jonathan Miles

fish day you fishing

A hot, deep bowl of venison chili is as close to manna from Heaven as you're likely to find in deer camp.

Jonathan Miles

deep you hot heaven

The spectacle of a good bar fight, properly executed and healthily ended, is not merely annoying boorishness. The best of them - an admittedly minor slice - are shaded with the elements of high art.

Jonathan Miles

fight best good art

There is a mammalian side to all of us; on occasion, it rears its head, snarls, makes a mess, acts the fool, howls at the moon, gives or gets a black eye.

Jonathan Miles

fool black eye moon

David Benioff can hardly be classified as an underdog. The 2002 film adaptation of his first novel, 'The 25th Hour,' was directed by Spike Lee and starred Edward Norton.

Jonathan Miles

first underdog film novel

Though little known in the U.S., the Dakar is a sports juggernaut in Europe, where France's state broadcasting company runs more than 25 hours of coverage, and the leading drivers and riders are accorded the same status we give to Super Bowl quarterbacks.

Jonathan Miles

status more company sports

Except for a very few elite pro racers up front, the Dakar Rally is not, at heart, a contest among the competitors; the battle, instead, is between mankind - more precisely, Western mankind, with all its fire-breathing machinery and inexorable arrogance - and Africa, which has been proving itself untamable for centuries now.

Jonathan Miles

africa arrogance battle heart

For most of the competitors, winning the Dakar has little to do with the standings on the final day and everything to do with making it to the final day.

Jonathan Miles

little everything day winning

Driving a race car isn't too far a cry from driving any other sports car, but driving one through Africa in the middle of the night offers a wide scree of new sensations.

Jonathan Miles

cry car sports night