A+E

Ty-Ku All-Natural Sake Liqueur

First impression: The bottle is fun—it lights up when you lift it from the table, it’s conical, the liqueur inside is green like Scope. Come to think of it, it looks like a lava lamp. The pour: smooth. The smell: egad. Worse than medicinal, it’s herbal-medicinal. Herbal liqueur. This should be a good thing, a healthy thing, but the sweet, pungent aroma quickly nauseates. I don’t know if it’s the ginseng or Asian pear, yuzu or oolong tea, but something in there is too sweet and grassy. Like the wrong scent of car air freshener. The first sip: mmmm. Surprisingly better than the smell. The burn: perfect, warm. The second sip: soft on the tongue, clean. At 40 proof, the third minty sip sanitizes my neocortex, and by the fourth sip, I feel like I’m sitting under a giant bonsai tree listening to xylophones, gnawing on a car air freshener, at one with my inner Ty-Ku.

It’s hard to understand why the distributors of An Inconvenient Truth ($29.99 aaa) and Who Killed the Electric Car? ($26.96 aaa) didn’t release them before the midterms. In addition to building a solid case for the dangers posed by global warming, An Inconvenient Truth also proved that Al Gore wasn’t a robot, successfully making two points simultaneously. Who Killed the Electric Car? employs an array of celebrities, from Phyllis Diller to Mel Gibson, to explain how Big Oil, Big Auto and Sort-of-Big Hydrogen convinced government regulators to thwart widespread commercial acceptance of battery-powered vehicles. Watch these movies before piling into your Expedition for the Thanksgiving slog to Grandma’s house.