Bay Rum (Stop Putting Bay Laurel in It!)

Forget all those nasty, medicinal aftershaves: a good bay rum is spicy, herbal, and refreshing. This is on my "classic male scents" list, along with Creed Green Irish Tweed, Creed Silver Mountain Water, and 4711/other eau de colognes. When your grandpop came home from from the barbershop, he probably smelled like either bay rum or EDC.

The "bay" in bay rum does not refer to bay laurel, so you can ignore all the ridiculous recipes you'll find online calling for bay leaves as an ingredient. Instead it refers to Jamaican bayberry (allspice). Also, you can't substitute allspice berries for allspice leaves. It really is better and cheaper to just buy a bottle of the real deal rather than to whip up a batch of boozy spices from a fake recipe. Although, if anyone were to procure the proper ingredients and mix me up a batch made with Sailor Jerry.... oooh.

Bay rum is used for cleansing and healing. You can cleanse candles and workspaces with it, add it to baths, add it to washes/scrubs. Roots and herbs are sometimes soaked in it to make special formulas. Sometimes for healing it is rubbed on the body, downwards from head to toe, to cleanse away and pull the illness off the person. For example: To draw out a fever, mix it with cool/ice water and rub the person downwards with a clean rag while praying. Repeat every so often until the fever breaks.*

If you mostly use Florida Water to cleanse, consider switching to bay rum. It's, at least in my experience, more traditional to conjure, and the prices are stable. Florida Water keeps getting more and more expensive for no good reason. Well, I think I know why. "Hoodoo" has been a fad (ugh) for the past few years, and all the internet crowd wants is Florida Water. I mean, I got turned onto Florida Water too, it smells nice and it used to be cheap. But I refuse to pay $7-$14 per bottle when I can get bay rum for $3-$7.

The easiest brands to locate in brick and mortar stores are Superior 70 and Clubman Virgin Island Bay Rum. Burt's Bees used to make a good one, but I'm pretty sure it's discontinued. Try pharmacies (especially Walgreens), Dollar General, and Sally Beauty Supply.

Don't let the light shade fool you, it's pretty good.

*all my standard disclaimers apply... healing should always be a partnership with your medical doctor

4711 - The Original Eau De Cologne

I must confess: I am OBSESSED with perfumes and perfumery. Scent is our strongest memory and emotional trigger. Whenever I'm not feeling well, I dig into my perfume collection for something to perk me up. (Right now I've got the flu, but I'm awash in Chanel no. 5) Andy Warhol once said that perfume is a way to take up more space, and indeed, various spirits are associated with filling rooms with unexplainable scents. Since Andy Warhol loved perfume so much, he requested to be buried with a bottle of Estee Lauder's Beautiful... I imagine that's what his spirit would smell like. Anyway, the point is, perfume is special.

4711 has such a wonderful, nostalgic scent. Produced in Cologne, Germany for over 200 years, this is the original echt kölnisch wasser. 4711 is responsible for "cologne" becoming a generic term in perfumery. Hoyt's and Florida Water are less-expensive stateside interpretations of this fragrance, to give you an idea of the scent. Several members of my family have owned this, it's such a classic. When I think of conjure perfume, this is the first one to jump to my mind, followed by Hoyt's, and then Bay Rum. Florida Water is honestly at the bottom of the list. Like I've said before, FW is something I picked up later in life.

4711 is used just like Hoyt's. You can wear it for luck (especially gambling), anoint hands/mojos with it, add it to baths/washes/scrub water, soak herbs/roots in it (such as High John) to make special formulations.

 I once read that Pete Townshend used to snort 4711. I think that's fabulous.

If you can get your hands on a vintage bottle (pre-1980's) the scent is superior, but the new formula is still pretty good. Though not traditionally used in conjure, Roger&Gallet's Farina Eau de Cologne is closer to the original smell. In the "Most Expensive" category is Chanel's Eau de Cologne, which outlasts any other cologne I've tried. Guerlain's Eau de Cologne Imperiale is another classic cologne you can check out. (I only list all these for any die-hard cologne fans)

If you love 4711, they've been putting out several variations of it in recent years with their Acqua Colonia line:

Aloes/Agarwood/Oud Oil

I haven't tried them yet, but Eden Botanicals looks very promising. They have 5% dilution agarwood oil, sourced from cultivated trees, for very affordable, low prices. They have pure agarwood oil too, but it's expensive and so concentrated that if you've never worked with it before, you're better off trying a dilution first.

I'm Such a Sucker for Packaging

Doesn't Egyptian Magic cream look like something out of an old curio catalog?

I dig the CEO's name:

And yes, I love it. I just wish they sold smaller jars for travel.

The St. Anthony Chant

Whether looking for a lost TV remote or a kid who's wandered off in the store, this little chant is a simple trick to help you find a missing object/person in a hurry.

St. Anthony, 

St. Anthony, 

please come around. 

Something is lost

that needs to be found.

Keep chanting until your search has ended. You won't have to chant long, St. Anthony works very fast. Remember to thank him afterwards.

I Suck At Blogger

I never added a way for people to follow my blog. It's fixed now. Although, now I can't lie to myself and say the lack of a subscription button is the only reason I don't have any followers.

My Four-Leaf Clover (And How to Find Your Own!)

This is the largest four-leaf clover I've ever found. I keep it pressed in my copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. It's very common to keep them pressed in Bibles.

The placement in (the second) fourth chapter was by chance, believe it or not.

Now, my dad taught me that four-leaf clovers are only lucky if you find them by chance. This is a very common belief. Thankfully, I found this one when I was getting out of my car and had this behemoth just staring me in the face.

Others feel that a four-leaf clover is always lucky, so if you wish to go hunting for a lucky charm of your own, here are some tips:

-Make sure you're actually hunting around in clover. Look-alike species include wood sorrel and oxalis.

-Look in patches of white clover (that's what mine is). It's the species most likely to produce extra leaves. White clovers have white flowers. The leaves of white clover can be oval or heart-shaped and they have a single faint, jagged, horizontal band of pale green.

-Once you find your four-leaf clover, keep looking. There's usually a few mutations in the same patch. Mark the location and return to it every so often.

-You can also dig up the four-leaf clovers you find with a few of the clovers around them and replant them together in a cluster. The closer they are together, the more likely the mutation is to be passed on and spread. (I can't guarantee the luck of farmed four-leaf clovers.)

You might think if four leaves are lucky, 5 or 6 leaves must be extra lucky. I mean right? Wrong. If you find a clover with extra leaves, you're supposed to pluck off the extra leaves, possibly even leaving them at a crossroads or casting them into a moving body of water. Then again Fry's seven-leaf clover was extremely lucky...

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the most leaves ever found on a single clover was 56.