The Supreme Tradition of Spelling Bees

Weather- and-time dependent, shilgia.

Another cool video.

#3934 that wouldn't sell well in the UK.
Lillets are a brand of feminine hygiene products.

#3940 Well, I guess they won't try exporting to the UK then! It's good stuff though -- three kinds -- either a base of red or white wine, plus some orange-flavoured alcohol + some spices. The third one was based on a sweetish white wine (like a Sauternes, but obviously not a Sauternes*).

It was a local thing in a village called Podensac, and the people were buying the stuff by the case. It's not even especially cheap. I paid my bottle of the sweetish one 17 euros. The others cost about 9 €/bottle. Our friends bought one of each and we had some of the red the next day -- you add a slice of orange peel to the glass.

• I said obviously not a Sauternes because of the price of the stuff. We stopped in the village called Sauternes. It does absolutely no advertising, unlike Saint-Emilion for example. We went to have a look at the shop selling the wine -- Château Yquem has a separate page on the price list. Most of the bottles cost between 380-450€. However, the wine from 2005 cost 770€/bottle.

So, intenational Women's Day, ha ha.

I was just signing on to say happy International Women's Day to all, but Kerouac2 beat me to it with his heartfelt greetings. Last year President Rahmon decreed that March 8 would henceforth just be Mother's Day here in Tajikistan. Nevertheless, today the streets were full of women of all ages in their best, many carrying flowers.

CK

I'm listening to my local community radio station which is playing nothing but women performers or composers today.

The opening shot of "Washington DC" in that pigeon video looks like it's based on MArket Street in San Francisco, looking toward the Ferry Building.

I've seen Lillet for sale here, but not on every streetcorner.

And yes, Happy International Women's Day to everyone observing it. And happy Tajikistiani Mother's Day to all you Tajik mothers.

Lillet was bought by Ricard in 2008, so their marketing has become much more ambitious. It wasn't even easy to find outside Bordeaux before.

Being bought by Ricard is not always a good thing.

They bought GWS (a Georgian wine maker) about 10 years ago. Since then they've run the winery down, all the best people left. They went from being the top quality Georgian producer, now I could name 6 or 7 better than GWS. I think their agenda was to buy up GWS' list of restaurant customers in Georgia to sell them overpriced French mineral water.

I had never even heard of Lillet until I saw people talking about it on sites like Fodor's and Trip Advisor. About six months later, I finally saw it in a hypermarket for the first time. A lot of the posts about it concerned people ordering it to show how knowledgeable they were about French apéritifs and being met by a totally blank stare from the waiter.

This is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. Frankly, one symbolic day is pathetic, so I can't imagine celebrating the event. In Asia, a lot of women get the day off. I bet they spend the day cleaning house and changing diapers. Whoopee. When will women get authentic equality instead of symbolic bullshit?