Without comment!

A REALLY big ad

Aussie beer.

Awesome ad.

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Continuing the beer theme

Also from the "Ugly" web site, a dog called Pabst. Don't know if it is a commentary on the brew or the dog but here it is.

It's so ugly blogger won't let me upload the picture!

This beer's for you, Sr Sobrino

This was going to be a "Without Comment" post, but I had to get in the homage [pretentious French pronunciation] to Joey who I hear is moving to an apartment in Charlotte right around the corner from a beer bar with 100 beers. It's from a link on Daily Dish to a cite honoring really ugly animals.

Snout Stout? Rogue? Anyone ever hear of any of these?

We are planning our first visit even as I type.

Congress does something postive!!

No, really. From the Washington Post by Dana Milbank:

... the House of Representatives found a new way to deal with the nation's problems. It passed a resolution in support of beer. "It does seem like a no brainer," sponsor Betsy Markey (D-Col) told Politico. Depends on how many you have.

now that's a change we can believe in.

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The Economy: basic research

A few weeks ago I was intending to write a post on how the economy was improving, at least from my myopic viewpoint here in the land of Wilkes. Mora struck hard for the first time this summer and I did something else. Wish I'd written it because I would have looked prescient. Which I sometimes am on the principle that even a stopped clock is right twice every 24 hours.

Things are indeed looking up this quarter. The economy doesn't seem to be in free fall anymore, and lord knows the $billions$ for clunkers program seems to have won the hearts and minds of every car dealer in the country (will they now vote Democratic?).

So why did I see this coming? Well, it could have been the $18 million that the Stimulus Program just added to the county schools budget virtually of of which will be spent locally, much of it in salaries. Or it could have been that my TIAA/CREF and 403(b) accounts both show a big increase in the latest quarterly report instead of the BIG decrease I've been seeing the last few quarters.

No - it was research, pure research of the most difficult and exacting kind. And thoughtful analysis of said rexearch.

I went on a field trip to Dudley's Pub and Grill and had a few beers with the owner. He told me that Dudley's had faced the bad economic news BEFORE the rest of the country was aware of it. By the time the bottom fell out of both the economy and the Republican presidential campaign his monthly receipts were cut in half. It stayed that way until a few months ago. Now his business is about back to normal.

One thing you can say for the good folks of Wilkes is that they are economically modest. Their finely tuned economic sensors are out there sniffing the wind for the slightest change. Apparently one of the first things to go is the weekly trip to the bar.

I'll go do some more research and alert you the next time this starts to happen. It's my civic duty you know.

and this was before the president convinced cable news that men setting around a small table sharing a beer was the single most important news event of the week. I was there first.

A temple of beer bottles

This temple was built by monks in Thailand out of a million green Heineken and brown local beer bottles according to Andrew Sullivan.




But what did they do with the beer?

A viable third party candidate!

Don't know much about her, except doggone it, she's as purty as a dewdrop. Can't tell if she is leftish or rightish, but check out her campaign promises. Cute little wink too. And her opponent, Mr Nobody - doesn't he look a bit familiar?

Anyway, I am interpreting the last three seconds of this ad as a promise of free beer for everyone.

she's got my vote.

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Sententiae sets the pace...

.... well, sort of. But I have noticed a number of times in the last year that a day or two after I have put up a post of a funny picture or an interesting article, Andrew Sullivan posts the same picture or article!

So, here is my post dated 16 July about a development of national import.

And here is Sullivan's blog posting on the same article, on 20 July!

Coincidence?

Budweiser Beer .... R.I. P.

Excuse me while I wipe the remains of that huge crocodile tear I shed off my keyboard....

... OK. .. Budweiser has been bought up by InBev, a Belgian company. Ha. Belgium, for you geographically challenged Americans is just a bit to the north of France. You can tell when you get there from France because the people speak better French.

I suppose I should be sorry to lose such an American icon, but I just can't. During its career Bud and its masters crushed dozens of regional breweries on its march to the seas. As Edward McClelland puts it in his Salon.com article,

Imagine the Budweiser Clydesdale team on a cross-country rampage, with a decrepit, tipsy August A. Busch Jr. strapped to the lead horse, wearing a bright red St. Louis Cardinals cowboy hat. Starting on the West Coast, platter-hoofed horses trample a can of Blitz-Weinhard, spewing suds all over the streets of Portland, Ore. Moving south to San Francisco, they stamp on bottles of Lucky Lager. In their hometown of St. Louis, they crash through the wall of a Griesedieck* Bros. brewery, rolling hundreds of barrels into the Mississippi. They're seen next in Cincinnati, kicking a Hudepohl taster to death. The Clydesdales' tour of destruction ends in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Busch orders them to urinate in a vat of Piels, cackling that no one will be able to tell the difference.

Alright - so it's a bit much, but he makes a good point. And tells quite a bit about the history of beer in America.

As for me, I've never gotten over moving away from St Paul: no more Pigs Eye Beer for me. Well, we'll always have Busch Gardens.

*btw, does anyone else remember the Poppa Joe Griesedieck (pronounced just the way to produce maximum giggles) radio commercials? Or the National Bohemian fox singing 'brewed on the shores ... of the Chesapeake Bay!


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This Bud's for You, Mr Sobrino

Yes. Now you can bathe in the odor of your favorite suds.

Though I am still trying to figure out why.

Guinness - target of bandits!

I always knew Guinness was a valuable commodity, but I wasn't expecting anyone to stage a daring daylight heist of the stuff! Here's the story, courtesy of National Review Online. Let's all hope this is a Robin Hood bandit.

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) — Irish police were hunting for a beer bandit who stole 450 full kegs from the Guinness brewery — the largest heist ever at Ireland's largest brewer.

National police said a lone man drove into the brewery — a Dublin landmark and top tourist attraction — on Wednesday and hitched his truck to a fully loaded trailer awaiting delivery to city pubs.

Diageo PLC, the beverage company that owns Guinness, said the brewery had never suffered such a large-scale theft before in its 248-year history.

Police said the raider took 180 kegs of Guinness stout...Police declined to say whether the theft had been captured by closed-circuit surveillance cameras. No description of the suspect was issued, suggesting that nobody got a good look at him.

Marxism and Beer

Most political movements are about petty little concerns like education or defense or law and order. Thank God some people have a sense of what's really important. Take this political movement in the 70s:

Britain's remarkably successful Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) is a representative instance: founded in 1971 to reverse the trend to gaseous, homogenized 'lager' beer (and the similarly homogenized, 'modernized' pubs where it was sold), this middle-class pressure group rested its case upon a neo-Marxist account of the take-over of artisanal beer manufacture by mass-producing monopolists who manipulated beer-drinkers for corporate profit - alienating consumers from their own taste buds by meretricious substitution.
[Tony Judt, Postwar]

Come the Revolution! I'll have an ale.

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Just for Murty Abu Mags

So as I was saying to Abu Mags after my second pint of Oatmeal Porter (a health food, btw), Ann Coulter is so into it for the money and NOTHING ELSE. She has no more ideological commitment to conservatism than she has to Neo-Manicheanism. He wanted proof. Abu Mags believes that as loathsome as she is, Coulter is a sincere true believer.

Ha! I said, only slightly slurring my words. I'll put something on the blog that will convince you. And here it is. Click here, watch the video, pay no attention to what Coulter is saying, but watch the look on her face in the final half second.


by the by - ever wonder why Philip Pullman, in his Dark Materials trilogy, named the arch villainess, the one who maims and psychically destroys children, Mrs Coulter? Just wondering, myself.

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Just for Mr Sobrino (and other beer lovers)

Here's the latest on the WaPo local mass market beer test.

Like you I am still trying to figure out how Consumer Report rated Old Milwaukee as the best mass market beer in America. It's things like that that explain why they hate us!