Tom’s mix of cocktail tricks
QUESTION Did Tom Cruise perform his own bartending stunts for Cocktail?
Tom Cruise and co-star Bryan Brown performed their own stunts under the tutelage of John ‘JB’ Bandy, winner of the 1986 TGi Fridays flair bartending olympics.
Flair bartending was a 1980s phenomenon in which bartenders twirled their bottles and shakers about to create theatre for their clientele. some bartenders achieved remarkable levels of skill, akin to that of jugglers or circus performers.
in 1986, TGi Fridays’ Ceo Daniel scoggin held the first Bartender olympics in Woodland Hills, California. Bandy was the winner. in 1987, after 34 bartenders had been interviewed, he was hired as a ‘trainer and consultant’ for Cocktail.
Bandy spent three months working with Cruise and Brown while filming in New York, Toronto and Jamaica.
He taught them all his best moves, including his Hippy Hippy shake routine — although the ending, where Cruise bounces the cocktail shaker off the floor, was fake. He also taught Cruise his trick of sliding matchbooks with a lit match in across the bar to waiting customers.
Bandy later said: ‘They were great guys; very easy to teach and get along with. They were agile and worked hard, although most of what you saw in the film was for the cameras. Quite often Tom or Bryan would get the trick right just enough while the camera was on them, then they would drop it off shot.’
Cocktail was a commercial hit, grossing nearly $200 million internationally. it opened new avenues to Bandy; he released a training video, olympic Bartending, then travelled the world flipping bottles and teaching seminars.
Kim Francis, London E12.
QUESTION Was shale oil extraction developed in Scotland?
James ‘Paraffin’ Young (1811-1883) was a hero of scottish industry who established Britain’s oil-refining industry with a product known as oil shale. Confusingly, oil shale is a different substance to shale oil, a liquid oil which, like shale gas, is locked in underground shale formations and can only be released by hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’.
oil shale is a rock that contains varying amounts of a waxy substance called kerogen, which, when intensely heated, liquefies to produce a precursor to crude oil and other petroleum products.
Young was working at a colliery in alfreton, Derbyshire, where he developed a method for extracting oil from a substance called cannel coal (‘candle coal’). He found a high yield of oil could be extracted from cannel coal at Boghead Colliery, near Bathgate, West Lothian.
in 1851 he established what some consider the first commercial-scale oil refinery at inchcross, near Bathgate, extracting crude oil, paraffin oil, paraffin wax, naphtha, gas, coke and ammonium sulphate fertiliser — all products that returned high profits.
as Boghead ran out of cannel coal, Young realised his process could be used on oil shale. This unusual black rock was found beneath much of West Lothian and parts of midlothian and Fife. it was first used to produce oil at works in the Broxburn area in about 1860.
Young established Young’s Paraffin Light and mineral oil Company to develop and operate a new integrated oilworks, refinery and candleworks at addiewell.
it provided the basis of an industry that, for more than half a century from 1865, mined three million tons of oil shale annually from under West Lothian.
The fortunes of the scottish oil shale industry changed during World War i. Britain’s holdings in the Persian Gulf led to the import of cheap crude oil, which undermined the viability of the industry.
Dr Ken Bristow, Glasgow.
QUESTION Why are Costa Rica and Belize stable, while other Central American countries are rife with crime?
NEITHER Costa rica nor Belize is without crime. Belize has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, although when you take into account its small population (it has the lowest population density in Central america, with 35 people per square mile), such statistics are greatly misleading.
There are areas in the southern part of Belize City that are best avoided, but that is the exception in what is a mostly peaceful country.
Belizeans are famously laid-back, making them culturally non-violent. The minister of foreign affairs, Wilfred elrington, once said of his people: ‘if there’s some disagreement, some problem or conflict, we just go home. We don’t argue or fight. We just move on.’
There hasn’t been an armed insurrection, coup d’etat, invasion or anything of the kind in Belize in well over 100 years, since long before it was even a country.
Like Belizeans, the people of Costa rica enjoy a stable government and political system. They do not have an army.
after a civil war in 1948, Costa rican politicians decided to abolish the military and introduce a special police force instead. The constitutional assembly approved this and drafted it into the constitution in 1949.
Having no standing army has freed up the country’s budget, allowing the government to invest in many social programmes, with the highest priorities being education, a social safety net and healthcare — all leading to stronger social bonds that created a more content and safer population.
Central america is made up of seven countries — the remainder being Guatemala, el salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. one significant reason for their high crime rates is the rapid pace of urbanisation over the past 50 years.
This concentrated various risk factors for lethal violence — poor government services, inequality, dislocated families, unemployed young men, easily available firearms — even as it brought together the factors needed for economic growth.
Emilie McRae, Trowbridge, Wilts.
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