This week's column.....

A gasoline powered, portable margarita mixer.
I’ve been doing the outdoors thing for quite a while. I’ve seen my share of camp stove espresso makers, but this takes the gadget cake. I think that’s what the designers were going for.
Just how much of a boozer do you have to be for this thing, with almost as much horsepower as my boat, to make sense? Apparently I just don’t drink enough.
The TailGator is billed on the Web site, www.totallygross.com, as a companion for tailgating, picnics and “camping, kayaking, cross country skiing….”
A picture being worth a thousand words, the site shows a photo of some happy men (men – can you believe it) with a mountain, a lake, a glacier and a kayak in the background and a used handle of tequila in front of them.
Because as everybody knows, you don’t carry cans of beer into the mountains. They’re heavy, inefficient and can explode at high altitudes (or so I hear).
But in backcountry exploits where every ounce matters, why carry this 10-pound contraption (though it does get a reported 6,500 mpg, margaritas per gallon – I’ll bet even more in the hybrid model) when an ice-filled bag beaten by a rock will do the same thing?
This comes from the same minds that gave us hot dogs that come injected with cheese. Getting cheese used to involve a cow. Then the process was simplified to just going to the store. But when slicing your own cheese became too laborious, we developed processed, packaged, pre-cut cheese.
Now you can buy hot dogs already shot up with cheese (you don’t want to see how they had to crossbreed the pigs to make this happen) – because sometimes even reaching for the Cheez Whiz is too much work.
Cure for cancer? No. Cheese-filled mystery meat? Yeehaa! Isn’t Western civilization great?
But really, what can you do when, while traipsing through the backcountry, miles from the nearest Mexican restaurant, you decide you really, really need a margarita, or a pink flamingo #2 or a monkey’s gland (yes, that is a real drink).
I started my Amish-tech margarita-making experiment with a run to the alphabet store (I’d like a fifth of Cyrillic, please) for some tequila. I don’t believe I’ll be able to write this off on my monthly expense report.
Then our graphics guru and former bartender, Lindsay, gave me some tips on making margaritas and I asked our managing editor, Margarita, for some advice.
But by the same name rational I, John, ought to know a lot about toilets and my friend Peter should just keep his mouth shut.
I later asked a copy editor, Janet, about whether the drink’s name should be capitalized because it’s derived from a woman’s name. It remains lowercase.
Back at my apartment, I proved that is doesn’t take a two-stroke, 2 ¼ horsepower, 24cc engine to make a margarita. And the age-old, low-tech, non-internal combustion hammer doesn’t cost $369.95 (including carrying case). It was free because it came out of my Dad’s toolbox.
True to form, it took me a while to find my long-lost shaker of salt (I don’t use it often – trying to eat healthy). But Alan, one of our reporters, agreed that I’d made some pretty good margaritas, even if I did need input from a cast of thousands.
It takes a village, really.