Cocktail Thursday: Middle Tennessee State Edition

If your Georgia Bulldogs are coming off a big win and playing a Conference USA team while a giant distraction looms offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, you could probably use a drink. I can help you with that.

I’ve experienced five hurricanes personally. That is, five which were at hurricane strength when they passed over my head, in addition to the various detritus of tropical cyclones which pass through the Peach State annually. The first was Hugo, which attacked adolescent me personally by emptying then depositing my family’s almost new above ground swimming pool into a pine tree.

Katrina inconvenienced me by flattening my bank and knocking down a tree I had to clean up on her way through to do real, lasting harm in Louisiana and Mississippi. The others have been a varying mix of sitting in the dark listening to the roar of 3 inch per hour rainfall, watching giant oaks sway 30 degrees in either direction but mercifully not snap, and then picking up roof shingles the next day. None of them was fun in any conventional sense of the word.

I don’t know if Kirby Smart has any good hurricane stories. Growing up in Bainbridge, only a stone’s throw from the Gulf of Mexico as the crow flies, then coaching at LSU, Valdosta State, and in Miami, I expect he’s prepared for a football game with one eye on the Weather Channel on a few occasions.

What I do know about Kirby Smart is that he abhors distractions and breaks from routine. Changing the time of his team’s game from 7:15 at night to high noon on Saturday is certainly a break from the routine his staff had likely laid out, albeit a necessary one.

Middle Tennessee State is not favored to even be in the game against Smart’s team. But the Blue Raiders will benefit somewhat from a Georgia team that’s got a big conference game coming up next week now having the added distraction of pushing their game up seven hours and likely in front of a less enthusiastic home crowd. Kirby Smart is aware of these things. He will challenge his team to handle the situation appropriately. That’s not good news for the Blue Raiders. I expect the Bulldogs to overcome the distractions and rain down on the Raiders like an angry storm.

And what is the appropriate cocktail with which to greet a game in which the Blue Raiders may be walking into their own personal hurricane? This ain’t rocket science: a Blue Hurricane.

It’s made by mixing 2 ounces of light rum, 1 and a half ounces of blue curacao, 3 ounces of orange juice, and 2 ounces of pineapple juice over ice. You can blend the concoction if you want, though frankly that seems like a lot of work. And it ain’t happening if your power is out, anyway. Either way, this beverage contains 30% of your daily RDA of vitamin C, which should be enough to ward off the scurvy for a couple of weeks. And as you know, this is officially a scurvy-free weblog.

So gas up the generator, freeze some milk jugs full of water, and enjoy a Blue Hurricane.

Let’s also use this as the open thread for tonight’s college football action, as well as all related meteorological banter. Until later . . .

Go ‘Dawgs!!!