New York is chock full of native cuisine, the likes of which is available nowhere else in the world. Bagels, pizza, falafel, black and white cookies, dirty water dogs... it's just too bad I don't live there, huh?

Long Island, on the other hand, is a culinary wasteland. Sure, there's Long Island Duckling, but we stole 'em from Peking. Sure, there's the Long Island Potato, but Idaho's got the potato crown pegged. Long Island Iced Tea? Yeah, baby, we have a winner!

The Long Island Iced Tea is a beverage whose origins are cloaked in the shadows of Prohibition. Sometime in the 1920s, somebody came up with the clever idea of mixing together as many kinds of hooch as possible, adding in a splash of cola, and calling it "iced tea." Because, no, you really can't smell the alcohol from five feet away. That's the aroma of a sunny afternoon in Hindoostan, officer! An alternate history says that bored, alcoholic housewives in the 1950s invented the drink. Nobody would notice such a small amount of several liquors gone from any one bottle, and they'd always seem to be drinking iced tea. Me, I like the Prohibition one better.

My barhopping days are years in the past, so I was forced to make my own LIT. Vodka, check; gin, check; triple sec, check; hey, wait, where's the rum? Fortunately, my pirate friend Phil was coming to town for Talk Like a Pirate Day, bearing the finest rum the islands have to offer. Long Island, that is.

We mixed shots together with abandon, resulting in a tall, cool beverage. In honor of the occasion, I biggified my hair and drank up.

The taste is a lot like, well, paint thinner. At first. But then you find you dno;t mund it as muxh as yo ukeep derinkking. Teh boottm hqlf invh is danb tzsty! Man, I lovey uo guyts. Yoi're th BEST. No, Imean itfrr rael. I AM NO TDRUNXJK, so jusdt shuyt up. Cvan spmeone driovbe me homwe.?/