Once upon a time, I blacked out in Prague. Supposedly.

According to third-party reports, it was a beautiful night. The soft glow of the streetlights illuminated a scene from a Kafka novel - one full of possibility, but with a tinge of unknown seediness and compelling danger - while the low hum of chatter punctuated the serenity of the scene. Vendors hawked cartons of cigarettes to passers-by, footsteps of arm-in-arm lovers clacked on cobblestone streets, vaudevillians performed impromptu juggling and puppet acts for a mostly disinterested and sparse crowd.

And we missed all of this. We were those jelly-legged, stumbling drunks that give the scene so much … well, character.

We had neglected Rule One of first-time absinthe consumption: Slow down, enjoy the experience and have only a few drinks. Not an entire bottle. While the events of evening are fuzzy, the allure of the beverage was unmistakable. Slightly illegal? Check. Marked by an arcane ritual with something called louche? Yep. Able to make stationary objects vibrate in your field of vision? Most certainly.

With such an appeal, absinthe was bound to make a comeback. I was seeing a burgeoning Internet trade hinging on thujone - which is supposedly the reason behind the so-called ‘absinthe effect’ - but then in the November issue of Wired, the efforts of Ted Breaux, a New Orleans native interested in distilling a pure, historically accurate version of the drink, discovered that the compound may not be as integral to the drink as previously thought. His new distillation, Nouvelle-Orleans, containted less than five parts per million of the stuff.

Wow, great, interesting. I forgot about the article ten minutes later.

Until last week. The the first article in the March 13, 2006, issue of the New Yorker talked about this crazy new absinthe guy named Ted Breaux who is trying to reverse-engineer a beverage that has been blamed for Van Gogh’s cutting off of his own ear. Crazily enough, the article seemed vaguely familiar.

From the Wired piece:

Dressed in a black muscle T-shirt, blue jeans, and a Dolce & Gabbana belt, Breaux looks as if he’d be more at home on Bourbon Street than in a research lab.

And from the New Yorker:

Breaux seems an unlikely man to revive a drink with such a fearsome reputation. Amiable, muscled, and bespectacled, he is a picture of wholesomeness.

Granted, the New Yorker piece was peppered with overly-erudite phrases (’like an image from the medieval Book of Hours’ or ‘Neuchatel, home to Val-de-Travers, was one of only two cantons to vote against the measure’), but it was pretty much the same piece. C’mon, New Yorker. You’re better than that. Granted, the overlap in readership between the two publications is most likely miniscule, but even the dateline in the third sentence showed the datedness of the piece, as Jack Turner writes ‘on a crisp, clear fall morning …’ Scooped by Wired, and all he would have had to do would be to ask me all about the effects of absinthe.

Not that I could have remembered anyway.

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Postscript. This picture is why you don’t go out with your entire office on St. Patrick’s Day and start imbibing at noon. I’m on the left. With my eyes closed.