Just in time for your New Year’s party

clipped from www.sfgate.com Ah, Zen. Sweet little name. Delightful and austere and hugely, strangely, wildly overexposed subset of lovely Buddhist philosophy and also of course the pseudo-slogan/catchword of a thousand products and attitudes and cliches strewn all over American pop culture, T-shirts to coffee mugs to wall calendars, pretty much the epitome and the poster child of the excessive and slightly annoying hyper-Westernization of Eastern spirituality. Well, except for maybe Tantra. And now, a swell kicker: Zen is also the name of a new booze product, a liqueur, something allegedly flavored to taste like green tea and ready to mix with your fave vodka or sake or whatever the hell you can think of because nothing says “deeply calming ancient spiritual practice” like, you know, knocking back shots of artificially sweetened moss-green liquid containing 20 percent alcohol by volume. Mmm, nurturing.