Folks, I am taking a much-deserved and needed break for a week.  Actually, I’ve been offline for a few days already.  See, while I am gone, WordPress and Hootsuite might kick out a post or two I have scheduled.  Nice.
In any case, I saw this story before leaving, and it made me happy.  As a former resident of Kentucky (my Geography Ph.D. is from there), I find it awesome that there are more barrels of bourbon in Kentucky than there are . . . Kentuckians.  Barrels, people, not bottles.  Barrels.  I really don’t care if the hipsters are the ones driving the supply, as long as there is a huge supply.  I plan to dent a bit of that over the next week or so in a nice, slow manner . . .
So, in honor of bourbon and the memory of my father, a quick story.  My father went to law school at BC in the mid-late 1960s, and one of the guys he lived with his first year was from Kentucky – of one of the distilling families, with one of those southern names that ends with “the third”.  Anyway, this gentlemen arrived on campus with a few crates of bourbon . . . without the tax seals.  When my father and some of the other folks in the house inquired as to how this was possible, our southern friend replied “Well, every year a truck backs up to Daddy’s house, and they just unload a bunch of crates in the basement.  Daddy won’t miss these.”  Now, I don’t remember which bourbon this was, but my dad said it was the good stuff.  In any case, the few crates that everyone had assumed would last a year did not make it out of the winter, and one day they are dry.  So, everyone heads down to the liquor store.  They head over to the bourbon, when, to my father’s surprise, our southern friend immediately ducks down and starts scrabbling through the bottom-shelf brands – “Old Dirty Sock” is how my father characterized them.  My dad, taken aback, asked what the hell he was doing – why weren’t they buying the same stuff they had been drinking?  There was no answer, and a second later bourbon boy hollers “Aha!” and emerges, toting a bottle of some cheap, no-name brand of bourbon.  My father looks at him and says “why the hell would you drink this?”  The Kentuckian points to the bottle, and says “you see that county there?” (bourbons typically identify the county in which they were distilled on the label).  “Yep” says my father.  “Well,” says our southern friend, “there’s only one distillery in that county, and it’s Daddy’s.”
That’s right, the good stuff in a crappy bottle.  There’s a metaphor here for development, but I am on vacation.  Feel free to work it out yourselves.