Next stop, bartlett's.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: UP FRONT - Commentary on cheap liquor and Calvinist guilt makes one famous

David Bailey calls it my 10 minutes of fame--discounting the 15 that Andy Warhol predicted everyone would get. Then again, Bailey, former managing editor and present investor in BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA, works for an in-flight magazine, and the airline industry, in its scramble to survive, has had to cut everything by a third.

Anyway, here's how I came to be quoted in Forbes. Well, it wasn't actually the magazine but the Forbes.com Web site. And it was more like a paraphrase. But the piece in which it appeared also made MSNBC.com's front page Oct. 28. Fleeting though e-fame might be, it isn't everyone who gets recognized as the go-to guy for erudite commentary on the interplay of cheap liquor and Calvinist guilt.

The context was an article on small-batch bourbons, those trendy, mellow brands that the author described as: "Yuppie whiskey, if you like." A Brit based in New York, Nick Passmore also free-lances for Sky, so he had called Bailey seeking some rebel yelp to spice up his piece. Bailey--who'd often heard my riff on why, as a failed Baptist, I prefer bourbon that bites back, that you swallow with a shudder--sicced him on me.

I was ready when he rang. I gave him the guilt-in-the-gullet quote and told him about growing up in a home with a liquor cabinet: It was the one under the kitchen sink. I opined as to how this small-batch stuff never would catch on because it didn't come in pints that conveniently slipped into a back pocket. I was about to regale him with how moonshiners--as if I knew anything about making liquor--used to slip lye into their product to sharpen the flavor. Nick, being a pro, knew he had enough. He hung up, probably wondering what Snopesean hell he'd stumbled into.

The story was posted a few days later, a well-crafted account built around...