Glen Brae 9 Year-Old

A peaty, smoky, slightly caramel nose gives way to discordant tones of apple, clove, cedar, and introspection. While some of the members present were delighted by its lightness and busy frivolity, your Secretary found it a disquieting dram, apt to give one thoughts of licking an exposed chair in a bus station, or happening upon a nude self-portrait one had no memory of ever taking.

Redpinnock 15 Year Diabolic Reserve

This notorious Speyside malt rarely makes its way overseas, and the Society was truly privileged to be able to sample it this summer. Does this whisky — distilled in casks lined with human skulls, tended to perfection by a master distiller who is rumored to be over 200 years old and completely mad — live up to its reputation? And how! A nose of peat, gravel, rainwater and bone scarcely prepares you for an explosive palette of oak, cherry, blood and iron, leveling off with a strong note of human fear. I don’t mind revealing that this whisky had an extraordinary effect on those in attendance: Mr. Rossini found himself reliving a harrowing childhood incident involving his Boy Scout troop, while Ms. Kreisler began to spontaneously recite what the members eventually identified as the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood,” a work she claims to have neither read nor heard of before.

Drumnadrochit Single-Cask 12 Year-Old

Despite some tantalizing rumors from our brother chapter across the pond, this is not a whisky at all, but an expression of untempered seawater larded with plant detritus and industrial refuse and allowed to mature, if that is the word, in a “cask” formerly used in the recycling of diesel oil. Further examination determined that the label was printed on an ordinary desktop printer, and that the signature it bore gave a clue to its true provenance. We salute the members of our Edinburgh chapter for another hearty jest at our expense. Such members, being devoid of ordinary human feeling, will no doubt delight to hear that Mr. Evans became violently ill after sampling this libation and was later found to have ingested a nearly invisible plastic filament that became entangled in his lower intestine. We wish Mr. Evans a speedy recovery and hope he is discharged from the hospital in time for next season’s tasting. We wish our Edinburgh brothers and sisters slow, lingering deaths.

Weesleekit Cask Strength (No age statement)

This unassumingly named, and now exceedingly rare, Eastern Highland malt packs quite a “wallop” — as the whisky world learned to its horror last spring, when a stray spark in the bottling plant set off an explosion that demolished more than half of the distillery and claimed dozens of lives. It will be the better part of a decade before the distillery is rebuilt and once again bottling; until that day, savor every drop of this pale, bold, exceedingly powerful dram. A nose of smoke, butane and lots of alcohol sets the stage for a taste that makes up for its complete lack of subtlety with a memorable attack across the palate. As this whisky numbs the tongue within seconds and renders all but the hardiest connoisseurs insensate with drunkenness, it made an ideal conclusion for the evening, which soon gave way to an exuberant revelry rarely to be found at our gatherings. Those photos of the event suitable for public viewing may be found posted to the Society’s website.

Hannoch 18 year-old; Glen Skye Masters Choice 14-year Reserve; Bogmannon Sherry Oak 10 year-old; Windex cleaning solvent (no age statement); Diet Rite Cola (canned September 2009); Dasani bottled water (expires February 2012)

Empty bottles of the above libations were discovered in the morning following the members’ enjoyment of the Weesleekit Cask Strength; however, as no member can recall consuming them, a report on their merits will have to wait for a future tasting.

Most of you reading this are probably old enough to remember the launch of Windows 95, even if that event, which took place a scant 14 years ago, seems to belong to another era. It is probably the most widely mainstream manifestation of techno-lust ever witnessed. Stories were legion of people queueing for midnight sales outside of CompUSAs, or wherever the hell people bought their software back then, or having Windows 95 barbecues and just generally getting all giddy about having a Windows that was actually usable. Probably a lot of the stories were made up, but it didn’t seem to matter; for the most part, they felt true. Hordes of people — hundreds of thousands, maybe millions — felt they were getting something new that was going to tangibly make their lives better. That doesn’t happen too often.

Anyway, whether you remember this or not, Microsoft certainly does. Every succeeding version of Windows has launched with an enormous fanfare, an attempt to demonstrate by sheer willpower that Windows is still very much a Big Deal. It’s kind of absurd when you think about it: retail sales of Windows represent only a trickle of the software’s vast currents of revenue. Most Windows installations are licensed to businesses or to computer manufacturers, and most consumers encounter a new Windows version either at work or when they bring home a new machine. It seems silly to expend so much time and money and hope — for these extravaganzas reek of a desire to impress, to delight, to awe — in order to market something that most people are simply going to buy, or otherwise acquire, anyway.

I tend to shy away from comparing Microsoft to the Borg or whatever other evil totalitarian entity strikes your fancy. But it’s hard not to look at a Windows product launch as one would look at, say, the annual pageant given on the birthday of some dictator in a banana republic. It is not enough for Microsoft to dominate, to be the single greatest presence in most people’s computing lives. They want you to love them, too. In Microsoft’s case, the desire is exacerbated by the fact that, for a time, people really did love them — back in 1995, when everyone lined up to buy what is still remembered as the most important consumer software upgrade ever.

Images of khaki-clad guys firing up the Weber must still be playing in Microsoft’s collective head, lo these many years later. How else to explain the company’s strategy for launching Windows 7? Its idea is to encourage people to host software parties, like Tupperware parties except that, presumably, the attendees will include men. Take a look at this, if you can get through it:

I frankly couldn’t. Blandness on that scale is almost beyond parody. I can’t watch that without thinking about those poor actors, hard-working folks no doubt, grateful for a shot at any high-profile gig, reading the script the night before, wondering how in god’s name to inject any kind of humanity or genuine feeling into something so anodyne. Their hearts must have sank anew on arriving at the set and seeing what appears to be a wall-mounted oven straight out of the Brady house. The only thing missing from the scene is Beaver, trotting in to grab a cookie and talk about how he can’t wait to install Windows 7 so he can use it to sync his Zune. It’s a shame Buñuel isn’t alive to see this.

Microsoft’s advertising has always been unusually revealing of the company’s culture, that peculiar brand of left-brainedness that is determined to be hip if only it could find the right algorithm for it. (People thought Jobs was being a snob when he said Microsoft had “absolutely no taste.” As usual, he was more right than most people realized.) There is something autumnal about this piece: it represents Microsoft wistfully and unashamedly reaching back into the past, trying to conjure up some lingering shred of that sunny autumn when the sun never set on Windows 95. Maybe they should look into licensing “Time Is On My Side.”