ST ch 19 French 75s, Greasy Thumb Guzik

Mon May 11 13:56:24 UTC 2026

Do ya think Thomas Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson might've had a couple two-three phone conversations?

" . . . Champagne Cocktails, Sidecars, French 75s, Jack Roses, and Ward Eights flow without interruption. Staircases grand and otherwise being left unpatrolled by ship's security, allowing different classes of passenger all to shuffle together . . . "

ST 134

French 75:

" . . . There are very few cocktails that have the same level of prestige as a Manhattan, Old Fashioned, or Cosmopolitan, but a French 75 is one of them. The classy boozy drink, which dates back to the early 1900s, is typically made with one part gin, three parts champagne, lemon juice, and simple syrup or sugar (via Liquor.com). If you're impressed by the amount of alcohol content in this spiked concoction, just wait until you hear the cocktail name's bizarre origin story.

According to Difford's Guide, the French 75 cocktail is named after the French army's weapon of choice during World War I: the French 75-millimeter light field gun. The outlet reports that over 20,000 guns of its kind were made and fired during the war, along with 200 million shells. A soldier was able to fire 15 rounds of ammo per minute, making it one of the deadliest on the market. As news of the war spread in 1914, one French bartender decided to create a specialty WWI-inspired cocktail coined "Soixante-Quinze," otherwise known as Seventy-Five. The drink immediately started being compared to its namesake gun, being referred to as "the most powerful drink in the world" and "hits with remarkable precision." However, the Seventy-Five back then is not exactly the French 75 we drink today . . . "

Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/645640/the-bizarre-origin-story-of-the-french-75-cocktail-name/

Saw One Battle After Another a couple of days ago. "French 75" appears to be a group modeled after the SDS or Black Panthers but set in the present tense rather than the late 1960s/early 1970s like 24fps. Obviously there will be many parallels, in this case I'd say that both 24fps and French 75, for all their bluster, simply didn't have the firepower to take down "The Man", both have people with differing agendas, some of which were incompatible with the goals of their respective organizations, sometimes with each other. The seeds of their destruction might well be the Inherent Vice of the very sort of people who would be committed to such high-risk anarchistic causes such as these. A lot of FAAFO going on. Hugh Romney became Wavy Gravy because being a clown made it less likely the cops would beat the holy crap out of him.

Think of the craziness of the SDS era, like the raising of the Pentagon in 1967:

" . . . Midway through 1967, Hoffman was looking for ways to push the mostly apolitical hippie movement toward explicitly political ends. A veteran of the Civil Rights Movement through the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he found one way when he became involved with the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an affiliated group of organizations also known as “the Mobe.” At the time, the Mobe had begun planning the largest protest yet against the war: a two-day demonstration in Washington that organizers hoped would draw 100,000 people.

The Mobe had recently hired the renowned anti-war protestor Jerry Rubin as the Washington demonstration’s project director, and the first thing the Berkeley radical did was inject a little West Coast logic into the East Coast radicals’ plans.

The initial conception of the protest had been to occupy the Capitol, but that, Rubin suggested, might send the wrong signal to the public, suggesting that the marchers wanted to shut down the democratic process and thus were offering only more political negativity. His friends behind the Be-In, he told his Mobe colleagues, had an idea for a different stage on which to perform their dissent—the Pentagon.

Even before the Be-In, Bowen had spoken to Rubin, and anyone else who would listen, about the occult significance of the five-sided pentagram and the significance that might be inscribed for it as representing evil forces at work in the world.

More than the Capitol, Rubin now agreed, the Pentagon was a natural symbol of the war. As such, it would serve as a far more resonant target.

Apprised of this new plan, another voice from the original Be-In, the poet Gary Snyder, contributed the idea that what was needed at the Pentagon was not just a protest but an exorcism.

Like a mystical arms race, Bowen went one better than Snyder and suggested that the exorcism should include a ritual that would actually lift the Pentagon off American soil and into the air.  Time magazine later reported the intention of the proposed ritual would turn it “orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled” and the war would come to an immediate end . . . "

Fifty Years Ago, a Rag-Tag Group of Acid-Dropping Activists Tried to "Levitate" the Pentagon https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-rag-tag-group-acid-dropping-activists-tried-levitate-pentagon-180965338/

24fps drops right into this mise-en-scène, while French 75 is very much of our era. One might say the French 75 is more realistic in their goals, at least on the surface. The French 75 demonstrates its youthful folly somewhat differently than 24fps. But in the end both counterforces are overwhelmed by a far greater force.

“ . . . the mostly apolitical hippie movement . . . ”

Thanks to good old American know-how, brought to you by good old Americans like Dr. Albert Hoffman.

A tip of the Hatlo Hat to the CIA's MKULTRA program.

The creature "appears" to have escaped from the lab. Or maybe not.

Because the reference to sticky toffee pudding goes over my head, that will have to be left on the burner for a bit, hope it doesn't collapse. Seems that SticToPud is a rather fragile concoction.

Greasy Thumb Guzik:

Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik (March 20, 1886 – February 21, 1956) was the financial and legal advisor, and later political "greaser" for the Chicago outfit. 

Jake Guzik - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Guzik

" . . . By one account Guzik ingratiated himself with Capone by reporting a conversation he overheard between two men bent on killing the Big Fellow. For his part, Capone earned Guzik’s undying loyalty by personally blowing out the brains of a smalltime gangster who had mugged the little bagman on his rounds.

Guzik became Capone’s most skillful and trusted subordinate, overseeing the Organization’s army of quaking accountants. He proved himself so essential to the Organization’s prosperity and smooth operation that after Alphonse went to jail, and a paranoid Frank Nitto (Nitti) began culling the outfit of Capone’s staunchest loyalists, he never laid a glove on Guzik.

Like Capone, he was convicted of tax evasion and received a sentence of five years. But once he got sprung, Ricca and Accardo welcomed him back to the fold. After Capone’s release from federal custody, it was Guzik who told the press that his old pal was “nutty as a cuckoo” and thus no threat to his successors.

“Greasy Thumb”. In an era of criminal high fashion and… | by Andrew Ward | Medium https://medium.com/@andrew_ward/greasy-thumb-2a370fc2ea1e

"Next time you're in Chicago," Hicks amiably, "you might want to try a chop house called St, Hubert's, specializes in genuine English food."

 . . . St. Hubert: patron saint of hunters . . . 

St. Hubert - Saints & Angels - Catholic Online https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=3802

"Actually yes, we did of course, all but one's first stop in Chicago, but regrettably with no better than indifferent luck, though I do recall ever such a nice chat there with a Mr. Guzik."

"Greasy Thumb Guzik? Sounds like the place, all right. But, um . . ."

"Busy chap, corner table, constant procession to and from, not entirely respectable-looking, all seemed to be carrying paper bags of one sort or another."

"He's Al Capone's chief financial adviser."

"How marvelous and apparently quite thick as well with your Mr. Dawes, savior of the German economy." . . . 

" . . . The Dawes Plan temporarily resolved the issue of the reparations that Germany owed to the Allies of World War I. Enacted in 1924, it ended the crisis in European diplomacy that occurred after French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in response to Germany's failure to meet its reparations obligations.

The Plan set up a staggered schedule for Germany's payment of war reparations, provided for a large loan to stabilize the German currency and ended the occupation of the Ruhr. It resulted in a brief period of economic recovery in the second half of the 1920s, although it came at the price of a heavy reliance on foreign capital. The Dawes Plan was superseded by the Young Plan in 1929.

Because the Plan resolved a serious international crisis, the American Charles G. Dawes, who headed the group that developed it, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925. . . "

Dawes Plan - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Plan

"The joint is right next door to the Union League Club, see, big Republican Hangout, paths've been known to cross."

" . . . The Union League Club of Chicago is a prominent civic and social club in Chicago that was founded in 1879. Its second and current clubhouse is located at 65 W Jackson Boulevard on the corner of Federal Street, in the Loop neighborhood of Chicago. The club is considered one of the most prestigious in Chicago, ranking fourth in the United States and first in the Midwest on the Five Star Platinum Club list . . . "

Union League Club of Chicago - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_League_Club_of_Chicago

"But Al Capone, I say—Republicans and gangsters? How can such things be?"

Hicks blinks once, maybe twice. . . "

ST 135/136

Microphone drop.

"There must be a pony in here somewhere."