{"id":2173,"date":"2005-07-17T12:18:13","date_gmt":"2005-07-17T16:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=2173"},"modified":"2007-05-02T21:48:08","modified_gmt":"2007-05-03T01:48:08","slug":"raw-spirit-it-rips-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2005\/07\/17\/raw-spirit-it-rips-war\/","title":{"rendered":"raw spirit, it rips war"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wendy sent me Iain Banks&#8217;s <strong>Raw Spirit<\/strong> for my birthday, and I&#8217;ve just finished it. I very much enjoyed it; it&#8217;s more of an autobiography by way of some whisky distilleries.  We have favourite drams in common \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Laphroaig and Balvenie being a couple \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and we both have a failing for Mull Cheddar, the potency of which can only be described as sinus-clearing. It&#8217;s an amusing read, and you don&#8217;t have to be a whisky nerd or Banks geek to enjoy it.<\/p>\n<p>I applaud Iain Banks&#8217;s stand on the Iraq war, but I do wonder if he&#8217;s thought very hard about the the cause of the war. Banks witters on (sorry, but he <em>does<\/em> so, incessantly) about being a &#8220;petrolhead&#8221;, and describes his cars in intricate detail: LandRover TD5, BMW M5, Porsche 964 Carrera 4, Porsche 911, Jaguar MkII 3.8l. None of these have sane fuel economy, and fewer of these on the road might&#8217;ve meant we wouldn&#8217;t have needed to get palsy with the odious Hussein, then need to oust him later. Maybe the fumes \u00e2\u20ac\u201d whisky, weed or petrol \u00e2\u20ac\u201d went to Banksie&#8217;s head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wendy sent me Iain Banks&#8217;s Raw Spirit for my birthday, and I&#8217;ve just finished it. I very much enjoyed it; it&#8217;s more of an autobiography by way of some whisky distilleries. We have favourite drams in common \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Laphroaig and Balvenie being a couple \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and we both have a failing for Mull Cheddar, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,4],"tags":[499,501,500],"class_list":["post-2173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-cars-suck","tag-iain_banks","tag-iraq","tag-whisky"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-z3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2173"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4499,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2173\/revisions\/4499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}