With my sniffles continuing, I headed online for cutting-edge curative ideas, and stumbled upon the suggestion for a useful piece of medical equipment: a hair dryer.

Apparently, at least two doctors claim that blowing the dryer up your nose for three to five minutes at a stretch, a few times a day, works wonders.

To me, the science seems compelling. Rhinovirus grows best at temperatures around 91 degrees, and dies above 105. So, significantly raising the temperature of your sinuses and nasal passages for a few minutes should kill much of the virus, and reduce the ability of the rest to reproduce. Plus, warm air dries everything out, temporarily shrinking tissue and relieving sinus pressure. Finally, heat interrupts the histamine reaction, preventing swelling and sensitivity to other allergens.

All of which, as I said, seems to make sense. The problem being that blowing a dryer up your face causes you to turn bright red, which in turn causes your girlfriend to collapse on the floor, hysterically laughing at the impractical stupidity of this whole idea, which prevents you from doing it more than once.

Still, the empiricist in me kind of wants to try again. Any smarter folk than I with some anecdotal evidence or scientific rationale care to spur me on?

Every six months or so, Barabara Graustark, now editor-at-large for The New York Times, and previously editor of the “Living” sections, takes me out to dinner, to pick my brain for story ideas, and then to steal my signature drink.

Every good alcoholic needs a signature drink, a fallback choice at fine drinking establishments. And every good alcoholic knows the best signature drinks are those whose recipes are duly swiped from fellow hard drinkers. For the past year, mine has been the Sidecar, up, nothing on the rim, according to a recipe stolen from an agent at CAA. Before that, a Grey Goose martini, up, very dirty, courtesy of a Napa vineyard owner. But, of late, those Sidecars have seemed stale, the dirty martinis even further out-of-date.

So it was, while watching Casino Royale, a particular thrill to hear James order what I’d long known to be a real Bond martini: a Vesper Lynd, named after his love interest in that first Ian Flemming novel. In the other Bond films, James had simply ordered his martinis as ‘vodka, shaken, not stirred’. And for good reason, the Vesper Lynd sounding more gasoline substitute than cocktail:

3 parts Gordon’s Gin
1 part vodka
1/2 part Kina Lillet

Still, on a lark, I ordered one up while out in California for Thanksgiving. And again on two subsequent evenings. Then, this afternoon, I stopped by the inimitable Morrell Wine to requisition a bottle of Lillet for my own liquor shelf. Now, once my cold clears (and, let’s be honest, likely before), I’ll be mixing up countless iterations of this remarkably counter-intuitively smooth-drinking beverage.

It seems I’ve found my new signature drink. And, even better, stolen it from the very best.