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Posting this on behalf of @Avrus (aka John) who blogs for Cigar Federation and went down to the IPCPR in New Orleans. He met up with Hamlet at the Rocky Patel booth and conducted the following interview. Many of us here know or are familiar with Mr Paredes down in Cuba. Here's our first look at him plying his wares in the US of A. His debut NC cigar Tabaquero released via Rocky Patel. Enjoy, the Hamlet Interview

Finally got to smoke this delicious PRA JUN 10 Juan Lopez No. 4! Cheers! Bill

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UME MAY 14 The king...big flavors hitting the back of my throat like Mike Tyson. Construction was slightly off. Must have been rolled on a Friday. Overall very good cigar. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Great to have a party Mille fleur after a few days of battling a flu Absolutely amazing

lets try this again coro

So here is a bit of a Preamble to this post. I have recently started my Cuban Cigar hobby and have been smoking for the past year. I already have quite a few favourites and have purchased a few boxes from our fantastic host, however I wanted to see what else is out there to try. As luck would have it I came across this fantastic thread- http://www.friendsofhabanos.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=123429 and decided to put together a sampler pack for myself based on recommendations from the members here. I tallied up what were the most voted for cigars from each Marca and then went and purchased them (excluding the ones I have already, or have already tried). Should keep me busy for a while They have finally all arrived and so its time to post some pictures of my Ultimate Overboard Sampler based on members recommendations. There are 34 in total. - Bolivar Belicosos Finos - Cohiba Genios - Cohiba Secretos - Cohiba Magicos - Cohiba Lanceros - Cuaba Distinguidos - Diplomaticos No. 2 - El Rey Del Mundo Choix Supreme - Juan Lopez Seleccion No. 1 - Juan Lopez Seleccion No. 2 - Hoyo des Dieux - La Gloria Cubana Médaille d Or No. 2 - Montecristo Especiales No. 2 - Montecristo No. 2 - Partagas 8-9-8 - Partagas Lusitanias - Partagas Shorts - Partagas Seleccion Privada Ed.Lim. 2014 - Por Larranaga Petit Coronas - Por Larranaga Montecarlos - Punch Punch-Punch - Quai D’Orsay Coronas - Rafael Gonzalez Perlas - Ramon Allones Gigantes - Romeo y Julieta Churchills - Romeo y Julieta Wide Churchills - Romeo y Julieta Exhibicion No. 4 - Saint Luis Rey Regios - Saint Luis Rey Serie A - San Cristobal de La Habana El Príncipe - Trinidad Fundadores - Trinidad Reyes - Vegas Robaina Famosos - Vegas Robaina Don Alejandro

1998 Hoyo Churchills HF aged selection. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Tight but I struggled through it. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Great interview John...you really captured the essence of the man As for you Jamie....love you hermano.

A very nice PSP Monte 2. I started off with a Bolivar LCDH Liberatador, but after lighting I noticed it started to take the shape of a cone in the center as it burned so I pitched it [emoji17] Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Fired up the BFF from a sampler I picked up from our host last night. It was great! draw and flavour was excellent, the burn was a bit off at times though but fixed itself about 1/2 way thru.

Decisions, decisions... I decided to go with the ERDM Choix Supreme ELG AUG 14 because of time constraints but that JL 4 is definitely on deck for tomorrow! Cheers! Bill

A couple of boxes from recent 24:24's from our host: Wish I'd picked up more than one box of the '11 Connie 1's, as they're smoking great!

Here's an article I wrote, it includes a few images as well as a video of Hamlet rolling a pipe cigar. http://cigarfederation.com/profiles/blogs/ipcpr-2015-rocky-patel-tabaquero-by-hamlet-paredes Here's a direct link to the rolling video (no sound):

I'm out having an Upmann PC LUB MAY 14.

how much weight do i have to lose again?

You guys sure that is Hamlet and not some imposter? He didn't use the F word once throughout the whole interview!

And Ryan, thank you for everything you have done to make Hamet's transition to the US so seamless. You are a rock mate and he will never forget

Are you hiring?? I'm motivated! ;-)

Pretty sure my next box NC box purchase will be the Tabaquero Hamlet Salamones!

Enjoyed an 05' Monte No 1... 1st and 2nd thirds were delicious, took a dive in the 3rd then came back towards the end

and that's the way you do it if starting out. .....congratuations and enjoy

'12 RA Superiores, great smoke! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

HURR that has been sitting for at least a year, very nice.

Jethro Tull: Thick As a Brick

Earlier today I smoked a Siglo IV MEL ABR 08, and right now I'm having a RA Superiores MUR MAR 13.

This review made me want to go see the film even more I wont be paying to see it though

GOFISH UNDERWATER FISHING CAMERA Fishing cameras are nothing new. The GoFish Underwater Fishing Camera just updates the category for modern times. This cylindrical shooter attaches to your line and captures your angling adventures in 1080p, with built-in infrared lights to make sure you don't miss a shot due to darkness. The camera is stabilized, and has a 170° wide-angle lens, built-in microphone, and a rugged body that's waterproof down to 150m. All your footage is saved to a microSD card, and when it's time to head to shore, there's built-in Wi-Fi so you can easily offload and share your best clips.

Thanks for sharing, thats Hamlet in a nutshell right there

Same here. Thankfully my local b&m has the NC I enjoy. Illusione, Crowned Heads... Last pickup was: Crowned Heads TAA Angel's Anvil 2015 Las Calaveras 2015 robusto & corona gorda Tatuaje Casita Criolo which I remember as enjoyable, but this stick was garbage.

Shark gets an interview. Poor bastard. http://newsthump.com/2015/07/20/shark-survives-attack-by-australian-surfer/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

Well, you've convinced me that they must be a good band!

Box of L’atelier CÔte D’or.... A fairly limited release, with a flavor I find to be a mix between the Tatuaje Black Label and the standard L'atelier line (two of my favorite NCs). I plan to rest these for a year or more to see how the flavor matures.

You beat me to it Jer

A box of Illuisione Holy Lances and a fiver of Warped Cigars La Colmena Amado No. 44.

Looking forward to the release hitting the market. To say Hamlet's rolling area was busy would be an epic understatement. We made no less than a dozen passes before there was a window of opportunity to catch him. Balls to the wall every day.

This is a great idea I would like to encourage all US forum members go google Cigar Rights of America sampler. You can get a great sampler at a good price, and support fighting the control freaks that are making it illegal to smoke cigars everywhere. Fight, brothers! Fight! (I don't think I am breaking any rules, but if I am please delete this post)

Sounds like a great blend Jaime, looking forward to trying it! Congrats on your new son

ah man, that's great. Thanks Frank for posting, John for making the interview and Rob & Rob for obvious reasons! Right here and there, that is what cigars are about.

I will meet him next month at a Rocky Patel sponsored Cigar Dave event in Buffalo, NY. One of the cigars I receive there will be one of his new Hamlets. Will let everyone know how it is. I will also give Hamlet a handful of Cubans for his enjoyment. Can't wait for August 15

Welcome To Mcity: The Fake Town Built For Testing Driverless Cars It’s been a tough road for driverless cars: We recently learned, for example, that all of the crashes involving Google’s test-phase autonomous vehicles have been caused by humans. Which is one of the reasons experts have just opened up a testing center in Michigan that’s trying to recreate the chaos of the human-built street in a controlled environment. It’s called Mcity: A $US10 million, 32-acre simulation of city streets, suburban roadways and everything in-between, designed by a group of researchers, government agencies and car companies in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Its moveable facades make it possible for researchers to rearrange any kind of conditions imaginable, from blind corners to odd intersections, all in the service of developing smarter autonomous vehicles. Gravel roads? Mcity has them. Paving brick? No problem. Freeway signs, graffiti, HOV lanes — it’s all recreated here, so that engineers and researchers can figure out how autonomous vehicles will react. Mcity is the first major project of a part-governmental/part-academic/part-commercial partnership called the University of Michigan Mobility Transformation Center. With million-dollar investments from companies like Nissan, Toyota, Ford, GM, Honda, State Farm, Verizon, and Xerox, it’s trying to build the testing infrastructure that will make varying levels of automation across cars more feasible. That includes driverless cars, sure, but it also including testing systems we already knew UM was working on, like vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity that allows cars to “talk” to each other and adjust accordingly. Teaching a driverless or connected vehicle about the world is surprisingly difficult because the world is unpredictable, and computers don’t deal well with surprises. “Even seemingly minor details a vehicle might encounter in urban and suburban settings have been incorporated into Mcity, such as road signs defaced by graffiti and faded lane markings,” the University explains in a release today. It’s actually these environmental eccentricities that are really challenging for driverless car tech. Sure, you can teach an autonomous vehicle to understand the way the road should look, 95 per cent of the time. What about when something unexpected happens? UM isn’t the only research centre trying to figure out how to teach a machine to react safely to unpredicted weirdness. At Google I/O this spring, Google X’s “Head of Moonshots” Astro Teller, described some of the bizarre ways in which the company is testing its self driving cars, including throwing beachballs at it, buying fake birds and having them swoop down towards it, and perhaps most hilariously, having someone hide in a canvas bag in the middle of the street and jump out. Even when you work for the moonshot team at the most powerful technology company in the world, sometimes you just have to shut up and zip yourself into a bag. Now that Mcity is open, odds are good we’ll be hearing more about autonomous testing soon. Whether UMich will be using Google’s patented bag-surprise technique remains to be seen.

Inhabitants Of This Isolated, Remote Island Kill All Visitors On Sight One might think that with the vast reach of the Western world, there no longer remains any people unaware of the conveniences of modern society. We needn't look further than the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal to disprove this notion; this is where the Sentinelese live, and they're one of the last uncontacted people on Earth. Estimates on their population vary greatly, in large part due to the hostility expressed by the islanders. Counts range from as low as forty, to as high as 500. Contact efforts have been made by Indian officials many times in the last century, and none of them have ended well. All recent observations of the island have been made from a great distance, and as such, getting an accurate headcount remains difficult. The Sentinelese people are hunter-gatherers, and are thought to have "directly descended from the first human populations to emerge from Africa, and have probably lived in the Andaman Islands for up to 60,000 years," according to Survival International, a human rights organization founded to protect the rights of indigenous peoples. As hunter-gatherers, it goes without saying that this group doesn't have any agricultural capabilities. More interestingly, there's no evidence that the Sentinelese have controlled fire. They're about as primitive a people as one might hope to find in 2015. A film expedition flew over the island a few years back, and ended up with some of the best footage ever taken of the islanders. the Sentinelese hold javelins as they see outsiders approaching. Photo taken by the Indian Coastguard after a member of the Sentinelese tribe fired an arrow at their helicopter – sent to the island on a tsunami relief effort in 2004. Satellite photo of the island – which is the size of Manhattan. The island is located within the Bay of Bengal. North Sentinel Island is part of the Andaman Islands – but their exclusion zone prohibits people from visiting. This photo from Google Maps shows a shipwreck which resulted in many deaths when the sailors clashed with the tribespeople.

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Congratulations on the birth of your Daughter! BTW, that's a good looking Monte 2. Dark and oily...ummmmm

2013 BOLIVAR ROYAL CORONA tubos version - one of the best , it is strange that versus nontube version --> this one is stronger, more flavourful , feels heavier and bigger (not box-pressed)

Cigars for last week... Romeo y Julieta Exhibicion No.4 POU JUN 13 Montecristo No.4 MAE OCT 14 San Cristobal de La Habana El Principe EML FEB 15

lulz Sent from my iPhone

PSP 2014 Monte 2 Rob, thank you for hand selecting the perfect box. This is a celebratory cigar for the birth of my daughter last Monday. This is the first moment I've had to crack open the box and enjoy the first cigar. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Cold Chisel!