After dating my budding career in high school, my college education included a 30-some-year-old Italiano boyfriend, and in a few fast years I graduated to a 40-something financier closer to my father’s age than mine.

As my dad’s only daughter, dude deserves MoMA Store’s round flask for Pappa’s Day.

Though, if I can’t connect to the ‘net on my MacBook while spending 17^th with the family, I’m popping open Pop’s gift, filling it with amaretto, and liquor-lacing my soy latte while reading Lolita on my Treo. 

Beth of (oddly enough) The Beth Chronicles is a ThisNext kind of person, who expresses her blindingly cheerful personality in everything she says, buys, wears (she’s a t-shirt junkie)…and even drinks from. Check out her recent adventure where a friend of her, in true THisNext fashion, found the perfect coffee cup – the right size, the right shape, the right everything…but found it at a local restaurant rather than a store. And no, they didn’t steal it: they asked to buy one and got it for $4.00. They even had their choice of pink or blue. Now that’s totally ThisNext: knowing what really calls to you, and making it your own (without shoplifting).

What was that we said about cheap wine? Oh yeah, we love it. Thanks to Chow Magazine’s Chow for Now blog, we know where to get the good stuff. Cameron Hughes wine buys quality wine in lots, brands it themselves and sells it on the cheap. No winery, no grape-stomping, just direct-to-the-consumer wine selling action. It’s kind of like Two Buck Chuck only, you know, good.

News flash: Cucumbers are no longer just for putting on your eyes to reduce wrinkles. Turns out, they’re refreshing, cooling and ust plain delicious … especially when in liquid form. The inimitable Cookiecrumb at I’m Mad and I Eat tipped us off to the pure simplicity of running a cool cuke through a juicer, and savoring the soothing juice that ensues. Wheat grass, eat your heart out.

We don’t know about you, but we cannot do anything before that first cup of joe in the morning. That’s why we love this self-stirring coffee mug. Just touch the button on the handle, and a motor in the bottom whirrs at 3,000 RPM, so you can be sure you don’t end up with a sugary sludge at the bottom of your mug due to languid pre-brew stirring. Thanks to The Green Head for helping make our lives better from the minute we wake up.

Traditionally, a Pimm’s Cup is made with ginger ale, a spear of cucumber and, of course, Pimm’s, a mildly spicy, gin-based liqueur. It’s a refreshing and cooling drink, perfect for balmy summer days, especially when croquet is involved. But my mixological lexicon with respect to Pimm’s was limited to that one concoction, until now. Hungry Magazine offers an alternative version of the drink, with lemonade, 7-Up, citrus and cucumber. It’s a more complex rendition, yet none the less refreshing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to put on my tennis sweater and Docksiders. Has anyone seen my mallet?

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as they say. That’s why we love the new V8 V.Fusion drinks. They fool you into thinking you’re drinking sweet, yummy fruit juice while sneaking a full serving of vegetables in as well. The Peach Mango version somehow conceals sweet potato, yellow tomato and squash under its fruity cloak. (Mind you, tomatoes and squash are, technically, fruit, but that’s splitting hairs.) A Knowledge for Thirst tipped us off to this tasty tippler — as well as hundreds of other juices, sodas and other soft drinks. We definitely appreciate their honest ratings and glib, off-the-cuff reviews of a wide variety of ready-made beverages. We’ll drink to that!

Beer geeks, perk up your ears: The Spirit World has corralled up a flight of beer podcasts for your listening enjoyment. Personally, we prefer that beer go in our mouths, but you may find it equally enjoyable in the ear. Programming material ranges from listening to guys talk about the beers they’re drinking to a combination of beer and music. But whatever your predilection, there’s bound to be some brew worth listening to. And heck, any opportunity to add a new sensory element to something as beloved as beer is something we approve of.

There’s more to the alphabet of root beer than just A&W. In fact, according to avid root beerologist Luke Cole, the great initialled one doesn’t even make the top 10. Cole has combed the United States to ferret out the best brew for you, and has produced a comparative list each year since 2001. Mom-and-pop operations tend to lead the pack, perhaps unsurprisingly. And lest you become despondent over the inability to get a frosty mug of, say, Gale’s from Chicago, there’s even a handy page with places you can source some top-notch quaff.

We never believe in settling for second-best, and clearly neither does Luke!

(via Chow for Now. Photo by Debra Jane Selzer. Yes, that’s her real name.)

Unless you’re seriously into sazeracs, you probably don’t own a bottle of the Caribbean spicy syrup Falernum. (I know I don’t.) But with tropical and tiki drinks becoming once again trendy, you may find yourself increasingly running up against cocktail recipes that call for it. Not sure which one to buy? The Martini Republic, a veritable font of information on the matter, suggests you buy not one but two versions of the sticky stuff, depending on the types of cocktails that interest you. You’ll also get a tall glass of history with that.

Your cocktails are only as good as the ingredients you put in them. Martini Republic is there to make sure you pick the right ones. This is why we do what we do.

We love a nice hot cup of tea in the morning, but hate waiting until it’s cool enough to touch to drink it. Kitchen Contraptions spotted this double-walled mug that keeps contents hot yet is cool to the touch. How very ThisNext — hot stuff for cool people.

Sure, cold beer is the cure for summer heat. But if you’re looking for something more sophisticated, nothing cools like a cucumber cocktail. Liquor Snob steals borrows this refreshing cocktail recipe from the New York Times. With lime and mint, it’s much like a mojito, the “it” drink of a few years back, but the cucumber gives it that extra “aaahhh.” Kind of like spa water. With booze.

The recipe calls for either vodka or gin (specifically Hendricks). If gin’s not your thing, pump up the cucumber power by making your own cucumber vodka infusion. What could be cooler?

Here in San Francisco, summertime usually means breaking out the parka, but we’re currently gripped by a heatwave that has us up in the 80s. That may not sound too bad, but for most of us pasty-white fog lovers, it’s enough to make us wilt like hothouse flowers. I’m grateful, then, for the SudsPundit’s guidance on a collection of hot-weather-friendly lagers.

We’re all about the little things that make life better, and SudsPundit’s making the world a happier place for hot-weather endurers everywhere.

Certainly one of the best things about the blogosphere is that, no matter how narrow the niche, there are blogs, sometimes even entire networks of blogs to fill it. Take for example The Yummy Banana, a paean to all things that are made from, taste like or even just involve America’s favorite fruit. Without their tireless efforts, how would you know about this bubbly banana beverage? According to them, if you like bananas, you’ll like this drink. And if you like both, you’ll love The Yummy Banana.