Blogrolling in our time

If you’ve bought Jeff “Beachbum” Berry’s new book, Sippin’ Safari — and if you haven’t you should — you may have noticed on the back cover the flattering comment I made about the author. And if you bought the paperback edition of And a Bottle of Rum, you may have noted Jeff’s flattering comment about my book on its front cover. Spy magazine used to call this practice of mutual endorsements “logrolling in our time” — which was visually much more appealing than “backscratching in our time.”

Most readers probably believe that such “coincidences” come about through some sort of country club conspiracy, where old friends genially agree to prop one another up — a sort of poor man’s version of the Bush Administration and the Haliburton Corporation.

In fact, arriving at such mutual endorsements involves protracted and often heated negotiations, often fraught with unspoken recriminations about the quality of the other’s work and dark allusions to one another's personal hygiene. I have to give Jeff’s negotiators this: they are very persuasive, and in exchange for that envelope of photographs they mentioned, I am pleased to offer the following expanded endorsement:

If you’ve browsed through and sampled recipes from Jeff’s first three books, which served up authentic recipes of the ancient tiki bars, you’ve probably been intrigued enough to wonder about the stories behind them. Wonder no more! Sippin’ Safari provides the captivating backstory behind these drinks — and the story is largely that of Filipino immigrants, many of whom started at Don the Beachcomber’s in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s, and then scattered into a diaspora of tiki drink experts who traveled with their own passports.

Those passports happened to be the little black books with the recipes written in code. The restaurant owners often didn’t know the drink recipes, but simply hired those who did. By treating the recipes like a state secret, the keepers of the secrets ensured they would always be employable. Jeff tracked many of these books down, and with the patience of a Cold War spy cracked the codes. This is, truly, a remarkable story, and the book's price is worth it for the recipes alone.

If you want to know more, you’ll need to buy the book.

Logrolling doesn’t seem to be much in fashion these days — perhaps because, like so much else, it’s migrated to the internet. Logrolling has been replaced by blogrolling. Now, blogs endlessly report on what other blogs are reporting, and links fly back and forth through Siberiaspace, via what the senior Senator from Alaska envisions as something like “blog inter-tubes.” I believe these look like those large sawmill sluices, although carrying chunks of information rather than lumber. Someday I hope to travel to Alaska and see them.

Until then, I will occupy myself by sending readers down the sluice to Jeff Berry’s blog, where one can read his (mostly fictional) account of how we came to recommend one another’s book.

I look forward to the return of those photographs.

Amazon: Sippin' Safari