Beacon, NY — Remember how I said I was going to bake some bread to make the wine shop smell nice for customers?

TOTAL SUCCESS . . . EVERYONE IS COMMENTING ON THE WONDERFUL SMELLS COMING FROM THE KITCHEN . . . No surprise there; you put me in the same room as some flour and yeast, you know there’s gonna be trouble . . . mad loaves poppin’ out of the WOLF STOVE (by the way, that stove gets pretty cold, LOL, small burn on my finger right now, LOL stove not kickin’ very much butt) . . .

More customer sales initiatives tomorrow! For now, how about buying some wine?

Guys, I had a stroke of wine-related genius this afternoon. People love wine, right? And what goes well with wine? FOOD. People love to drink wine and eat food at the same time. And this wine store that I’m looking after has a world-class kitchen. It even has one of those stoves called “WOLF STOVE” that looks like it could cook a moose in about ten minutes.

So what’s my genius idea? I decided to bake some bread. When the evening rush starts, people will walk into the store and say, “Oh my God, what smells so good? Is that fresh bread?” and I’ll be like, “It is, and would you look to buy about fifty bottles of wine to go with it?”

I’ll let you know how my experiment in sales psychology turns out . . . 

My wife just sold, like, four bottles of wine to someone. They were looking for this hot wine called “Luzon Verde,” which we happen to have in stock because I just unloaded a case of it because it’s one of the bangin’-est new wines on the scene.

Another thing that happened was a wine salesman stopped by with his new catalog. But my wife and I aren’t authorized to buy any wine for the store, so we just accepted the catalog and said we would pass it along to the owners.

Then something really crazy happened — the wine salesman ASKED IF WE WANTED TO DRINK A SAMPLE OF WINE! He said, “Would you like to try the new Cote du Rhone”(?) and we were like, “Umm, no thank you because we’re both chewing gum at the moment.”

JUST ANOTHER DAY IN THE WORLD OF WINE . . . I think I could get used to this . . . Let me sell you some wine . . . city friends, come on up on the commuter train and I’ll sell you some delicious tasty wine like you wouldn’t believe . . .

Just sold a bottle of Carpene Malvolti Prosecco . . . a fine sparkling wine for your mind! The wine comes in a 750ml bottle — a big fat bottle — and you can drink it before a meal or on its own.

Come in and get some wine . . . it’s one of the all-time best drinks ever invented.

Here I am in the store, ready to SELL SOME WINE!  Email me if you want to know where the store is. It is the best wine store in the Hudson Valley. (Would I work anywhere else?)

Looking around, I see over 100 bottles of wine. From bargain-priced reds (my favorite) to really expensive and fancy champagne! LET’S DO THIS!!!

All good in the Afghanihood:

Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.

LOL, the “Good War.”