I typically drink my coffee hot and black, even on warm days. But on this particular afternoon, the heat had me craving something cooler — so I brewed up iced coffees for my wife and myself. Then I reached into the humidor for a quick smoke.

The Dunbarton Polpetta Petit Puros is a cigar I hadn’t tried before. It recently showed up in two different cigar-of-the-month subscriptions, so it had definitely caught my attention.

I’ve enjoyed the Black Label Trading Co. La Madonna Negra numerous times over the past couple of years, and recently revisited one that had been resting in my humidor for nearly two years — left from my original pre-release order.

Cloaked in a rich U.S. Connecticut Broadleaf Maduro wrapper, the cigar features an Ecuadorian Habano binder and fillers from Nicaragua and Pennsylvania. It boasts a soft box press and is dressed with striking black, white, and gold-accented bands that contrast beautifully against the reddish-chocolate hue of the wrapper.

This well-aged stick burned evenly and delivered a medium- to full-bodied experience. Dark chocolate, espresso, and dark cherry took center stage, while subtle notes of black pepper and cedar added depth and complexity in the background.

That said, this particular cigar did present a tight draw initially. After a few minutes of struggling, I reached for the PerfecDraw tool and extracted a sizable stem that had clearly been restricting airflow. Once cleared, the draw opened up nicely, producing copious smoke and allowing the cigar’s full flavor profile to shine through.

As I enjoyed the La Madonna Negra, I reached for a nearly depleted bottle of Uncle Nearest 1856 Premium Whiskey — a bottle I realized I’ve somehow never written about in these Musings.

Uncle Nearest is a Tennessee distillery named in honor of Nathan “Nearest” Green, the formerly enslaved man who taught Jack Daniel the craft of distillation. The “1856” marks the earliest documented involvement of Nearest Green as the master distiller for the operation that would eventually become the Jack Daniel's Distillery

While technically not a bourbon due to Tennessee whiskey's legal classification requirements, Uncle Nearest 1856 is extremely close in profile. It undergoes the Lincoln County Process, which involves filtering the spirit through sugar maple charcoal before aging — an essential characteristic of Tennessee whiskey. In every other respect, it meets the legal standards of a bourbon. Whether Tennessee whiskey is bourbon remains a long-running (and mostly semantic) debate — one I’ll leave to others.

On the nose, the 1856 offers notes of vanilla, caramel, and toasted oak. The palate brings brown sugar, maple syrup, charred oak, and a touch of spice, all carried with a gentle heat from its 100-proof strength.

Compared to the Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7, the “classic” example of Tennessee whiskey, Uncle Nearest is richer, bolder, and more layered — closer to a classic bourbon than its softer Tennessee sibling. One reason my bottle’s nearly empty: I've found it makes a fine Old Fashioned and has often been in my rotation for that cocktail.

As for the pairing, La Madonna Negra was an ideal companion to the whiskey. The cigar’s dark chocolate and espresso notes harmonized with the whiskey’s vanilla and caramel, while the 100-proof backbone of the Uncle Nearest stood up well to the cigar’s bold character.

Cheers!

It was a productive week on the starting my own company front. I signed my first two clients, and I'm expecting another contract this week. It's not paying all, or even most of the bills yet, but it is paying some of them. More importantly, the incoming cash lengthens my runway for when I run out of money to sometime next year. My nervousness at going solo is starting to turn to excitement as my plans come to fruition and I start to consider what my life will look like next year when this is working fully. I have an MBA and I actually built a pro-forma income statement and tested various scenarios to gauge my odds of making a living on my own. It was fun to work those financial analysis muscles, and seeing the plan actually work is cool too. I've proved the idea is valid and the strategy is solid. Now is the hard part, executing.

The reality in the US is that working for a company is not job security. Almost all white collar professional work in the US is "at-will." For those of you not in the US, that means you can fired at any time for any reason, or no reason at all, excepting specific protected cases like race, sex, national origin, etc. Not that the current administration would actually enforce those laws. In late stage capitalism doing a good job does not provide job security in corporate America. If you are going to live the uncertainty, you might as well do it on your own where you keep all the profits instead of making some rich asshole richer.

We saw the Indigo Girls in concert this week. It was brutally hot, but 100% worth it. I also published my top 5 books list for the first half of the year. This afternoon, I'm attending a lecture on the historical impact of the Declaration of Independence at my favorite local brewery. Yes, I'm paying to listen to a history lecture at a brewery. I'll probably have a post about that in July.

Harper is an open source grammar checker that works 100% locally. I use Language Tool because it seemed less icky than Grammarly, but I need to install this and give it a test run.

The moment you stop eating what everyone else eats, stop buying what everyone else buys, stop believing what everyone else believes — not because you're rebelling but because you're paying attention — you discover something unsettling: most people are sleepwalking. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
-What if Everything You Were Told About Happiness is Wrong?

This queer online zine can only be read via Telnet.

This mashup of 80s metal songs with "hell" in the title is an absolute work of art. Make sure you stick with it to the end, or at least through the extended guitar solo cuts.

Substack sucks, but you already knew that.

I found this new to me band this week, Massive Wagons. It's blues based bar room rock and roll done incredibly well. Check out this tune from their latest record, which takes on the British government.

Next week's edition may be delayed due to the Independence Day holiday in the US. We are no longer a functioning representative democracy, but we'll still take the day off. I expect it to renamed in honor of the orange shit gibbon in the near future.

And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.

It was a productive week on the starting my own company front. I signed my first two clients, and I'm expecting another contract this week. It's not paying all, or even most of the bills yet, but it is paying some of them. More importantly, the incoming cash lengthens my runway for when I run out of money to sometime next year. My nervousness at going solo is starting to turn to excitement as my plans come to fruition and I start to consider what my life will look like next year when this is working fully. I have an MBA and I actually built a pro-forma income statement and tested various scenarios to gauge my odds of making a living on my own. It was fun to work those financial analysis muscles, and seeing the plan actually work is cool too. I've proved the idea is valid and the strategy is solid. Now is the hard part, executing.

The reality in the US is that working for a company is not job security. Almost all white collar professional work in the US is "at-will." For those of you not in the US, that means you can fired at any time for any reason, or no reason at all, excepting specific protected cases like race, sex, national origin, etc. Not that the current administration would actually enforce those laws. In late stage capitalism doing a good job does not provide job security in corporate America. If you are going to live the uncertainty, you might as well do it on your own where you keep all the profits instead of making some rich asshole richer.

We saw the Indigo Girls in concert this week. It was brutally hot, but 100% worth it. I also published my top 5 books list for the first half of the year. This afternoon, I'm attending a lecture on the historical impact of the Declaration of Independence at my favorite local brewery. Yes, I'm paying to listen to a history lecture at a brewery. I'll probably have a post about that in July.

Harper is an open source grammar checker that works 100% locally. I use Language Tool because it seemed less icky than Grammarly, but I need to install this and give it a test run.

The moment you stop eating what everyone else eats, stop buying what everyone else buys, stop believing what everyone else believes — not because you're rebelling but because you're paying attention — you discover something unsettling: most people are sleepwalking. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
-What if Everything You Were Told About Happiness is Wrong?

This queer online zine can only be read via Telnet.

This mashup of 80s metal songs with "hell" in the title is an absolute work of art. Make sure you stick with it to the end, or at least through the extended guitar solo cuts.

Substack sucks, but you already knew that.

I found this new to me band this week, Massive Wagons. It's blues based bar room rock and roll done incredibly well. Check out this tune from their latest record, which takes on the British government.

Next week's edition may be delayed due to the Independence Day holiday in the US. We are no longer a functioning representative democracy, but we'll still take the day off. I expect it to renamed in honor of the orange shit gibbon in the near future.

And that is it for this week. Remember, in a world where you can choose to be anything, you can choose to be kind.

I've completed 23 books so far this year, with another 5 or 6 started and abandoned. These are the top 5 so far. At least a couple of these are destined to end up on my annual top 5 list. I have hundreds of other book reviews on this site.

The Ballad of Perilous Graves by Alex Jennings

Normally, you don't judge a book by its cover, but in this case, go ahead and do it. It's a stunning book cover and a perfect harbinger of what to expect in this book. If your reaction to the book cover is, “cool,” you can add this to your to-read list.

This is a stunning debut novel. It's fantasy, set in a post-Katrina New Orleans around 2015, IIRC. This New Orleans is soaked in magic, with a series of songs powering the magic and keeping everything in balance. Except that somebody is stealing the songs, throwing everything out of whack and opening a rift that allows spirits and humans to cross a usually forbidden passage between New Orleans and its mirror in the spirit world, Nola. Nola is a city of zombie cab drivers and a magical sky car system to get around. Our heroes are a trio of three young kids, aided by some magical artifacts obtained on a quest set up by Grandma. There is also a parallel story line involving a 20-something trans ex-pat who has returned to New Orleans. He ends up on his own magical quest to find his cousin, who is presumed dead in a magical accident, but no body has been found.

There are many players in this story, and keeping up with them as the POV shifts, and following where you are (New Orleans or Nola) can be a bit of a challenge at some points in the book. But stick with it. Ultimately, this is a love letter to New Orleans, both the place, the spirit, and the music.

Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario

The author won a Pulitzer for her newspaper reporting in The LA Times about Central American immigration to the US. Consider this book the extended version of that reporting. The journey is harrowing, with kids as young as 8 or 10 leaving Honduras headed North to the US, often in search of their mother's, who had gone North years earlier to earn enough money to support their kids from afar. The journey involves extended stretches riding on top of trains, with young kids dying or losing limbs from a fall just about every day. They also have to dodge gangs, corrupt police, the Mexican immigration police, and legit cops. Along they way they get help from churches and locals who sympathize with their plight. Even if they make it to the US and find their family, they live in fear of being deported daily. That fear is probably much more real these days versus when the book was written 20 years ago.

You'll learn a lot about immigration, and you'll also understand why Trump's send them all back strategy can not work. Enrique failed 8 or 9 times before finally making it into the US. Conditions are so bad in many places in Central America that the risk of death pales against the misery of staying home. Most of these folks are not criminals, they are refugees. And they should be treated as such.

Everything Burns by S.A. Cosby

This is Cosby's 5th book, I think. By now, you know what you are getting in a S.A. Cosby book. It'll be set somewhere east of Richmond, VA, within a few of hours drive of the city. There will be crime. It will be violent. People will die, and those deaths will be graphic. Almost all the main characters will be black, and the plot is usually driven by systemic racism in some way. This time the story revolves around a family that owns the local crematorium. A brother is on the wrong side of the local drug gang, and his successful, rich, older brother home from Atlanta has to fix things. In this case, fixing things involves financial fraud, crypto scams, execution style murders, and people burned alive in the crematorium. At the end of the book I wasn't sure if there were any good guys in this story.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi

If the news reported, completely seriously, that the moon and all known moon rock samples instantaneously turned to cheese (or a cheese like organic matrix per the official NASA statement), how would you deal with it? How would the President deal with it? Your neighbors? Evangelical preachers? And then, what if the moon turning to cheese appeared to trigger a life ending event on earth?

Can an author really did into those meaty questions with this ridiculous premise? Scalzi can. Did I mention the cheese related puns? He bounces back and forth between chapters where he very seriously considers how an evangelical preachers would explain this to the flock, and then in another chapter we spend the day with a Hollywood producer sitting through pitch after pitch of bad cheese related TV and movie pitches. It's not a traditional follow two main characters through a story book. It's more like an anthology, which each chapter considering how one specific group or person is dealing. There is a light connection weaving through the story, but I'm not sure it was even necessary.

Somehow when you finish this book you'll find yourself thinking about the meaning of life and cheese puns at the same time.

The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown

An early leader for my book of the year. It's an inventive story involving books that bestow various powers on whoever has possession. The book of doors allows you to time and place travel simply by walking holding the book, thinking of where or where and when you want to go, and walking through any door.Our heroine Cassie comes into possession of the Book of Doors and upon realizing its power, finds herself pursued across time and space by dark forces that would possess the books for evil. So time travel set in the modern day world with good and evil, all very well executed.

This was a good month for concerts. Last week, a free ticket from a friend put me in the third row at The National for Aimme Mann, with Jonathan Coulton opening. Coulton came to fame back in Web 2.0 when he did a stunt where he wrote a song every week for a year, selling them all off his website. It lead to him walking away from his web developer job to be a full time musician. And here he is in 2025 opening for Aimee Mann. His music is very humor forward, which was an interesting contrast to Mann's more somber take on the world. Alas, Coulton did not play my favorite of his tunes, Code Monkey.

Aimee Mann played the entire Lost in Space album, in what was essentially a COVID delayed celebration of the 20 year anniversary of the record. She describes the record as her most depressing album. It definitely is not get up and dance music. Alas, she did not dip into her big breakthrough with Till Tuesday, so I did not get to hear Voices Carry live.

Two night ago the Indigo Girls sold out the stage at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens. The opening act was Katie Pruitt. Katie is an up and coming County / Americana singer-songwriter with a powerhouse voice. You can check out her new single on YouTube.

The Indigo Girls were sans band for this tour. It was just Amy, Emily, and their violin player. I last saw them in a tiny club in Atlanta 30+ years ago. The heat index when Katie hit the stage was 100F. It was down to 95F when The Indigo Girls started at 8 PM. It felt like their song choices leaned hard into their more issue focused tunes, which is not a surprise given the state of life in the US. They were fabulous, as you would expect. Alas, they did not play my favorite Indigo Girls tune, Southland in the Springtime.

0 for 3 on hearing my favorite tunes live, but still 4 fabulous performances.