Three cheers

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Fed hikes interest rates for the first time in three years; how perspective shifting can change just about anything; and over 100,000 centenarians live in Japan.

Let’s get into it!

As you can probably guess from the photo above, the Seoulside is a minty cocktail, packed with citrusy freshness to take the edge off a hot late summer day.

The drink is a riff on the Southside, which was invented just prior to Prohibition and contains gin, lemon juice, mint, and simple syrup.

The Seoulside swaps out the gin for soju, and was invented by Andy Han, the head bartender at Atlanta’s Lazy Betty. He designed it to show off how soju can function as the base spirit of a cocktail, even though it contains less alcohol than a traditional hard liquor.

“You can pair [soju] with ingredients that highlight the notes you get from the spirit, but it’s also something I like to call a bridge,” says Han. “If a recipe calls for two ounces of vodka, and I go half soju, half vodka, I’m cutting some of the alcohol out.”

The Seoulside is a standard sour cocktail, easily swappable with drinks like the Sidecar, Gimlet, or Daiquiri. Han likes to include the mint leaves in the shaker in order to extract as much flavor as possible when mixing the drink up.

“The fun thing about this drink is that those bright, herbaceous, citrus notes go great with the vegetal starch notes of soju,” he says.

The way we choose to see things has a profound impact, not just on how we feel about something, but even on what happens next, and next after that.

In her book Calm Within the Storm, Robyne Hanley-Dafoe talks about the way perspective shapes an event, and how building “Everyday Resilience” can filter the lens through which we see the world.

She describes the experience of being late for work, but every traffic light is red when you get to it. Then she questions how this exact experience would feel if you were just on your way to deliver somebody some excellent news. The feelings would probably be quite different, despite the experience being identical. Perspective.

Sometimes (if we’re lucky), it’s an epiphany about something that frees us from what’s often a tunnel-visioned approach to life. It’s dark in there, and it costs a lot to keep the lights on. Under the sun, light is free.

Hanley-Dafoe advises several steps in shaping or pivoting one’s perspective, starting with training the mind to be curious. Seeking out different points of view can help shape and change our own.

She also suggests changing one’s perspective by literally changing locations. A change of scenery reminds us the world isn’t actually that small, and whatever was bugging us on last Thursday’s commute probably doesn’t matter.

There may be some sort of magic going on in Japan, because the government just announced the country now has over 100,000 people living in it over 100 years old.

The data provided showed an increase of 7,914 compared to last year, bringing the total up to 107,677.

That’s more than in the United States, despite Japan’s population being just over one third the size. The amount added just in the last year is equal to two thirds of all centenarians living in Canada.

Perhaps most striking, however, is that 88% of the centenarians living in Japan are women; just 13,379 males are over 100.

The number has grown exponentially since the country began tracking figures. While the population size has also soared, there were just 153 centenarians in 1963, and it took until 1981 for the country to break 1,000. It was only 17 years later that it broke 10,000, and 14 years after that, it broke 50,000.

“I’m very pleased that many people are living a long, healthy and active lives,” Health Minister Kenichiro Ueno told reporters Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. He cited advances in medical technology, a greater uptake in healthy dieting, broad improvements in general health care, and robust social safety nets as contributors to the rise of Japan’s centenarians.

For all we know, human history was stained with tears shed over a bit of milk spilled on the floor, and then someone finally put a stop to it in the 17th century.

“There’s no use crying over spilled milk” is one of the most common idioms, and though its sentiment surely dates back further than 1659, the first known use of the phrase can be traced to Welsh author James Howell’s book, Paramoigraphy (Proverbs), which came out that year.

“No weeping for shed milk” he said, likely oblivious to the fact that his work would be known for its coining of a phrase still used 367 years later.

By 1738, the phrase had evolved, seemingly with the help of the widespread adoption of William Shakespeare’s prose. “Tis a folly to cry for spilled milk" the phrase had become, when it appeared in Johnathan Swift's essay Polite Conversation.

In 1872, it appeared in Britain’s Once A Week magazine, worded as “there’s no use crying over spilt milk,” ostensibly reaching its final (or at least current) form, albeit with an old English spelling of the word “spilled.”

Work those pipes

Once you get the melody going, you may figure out which lyric is which—find out how well you know your tunes with today’s trivia 🎤