The second Friday of the year. My cold is lifting. I can stop carrying on like I've been struck down with the plague.
The metrosexual's poster boy is coming to the United States. David Beckham has signed to play for the LA Galaxy. If I understand correctly, Beckham has a hot wife but likes being the object of homosexual lust. That's enough to keep me away from soccer for the second forty years of my life.
I watched The Office with my family last night. Dwight Schrute quit. Because I don't watch any TV, except The Office, occasional Seinfeld re-runs, and sports, I had no idea whether this was a re-run. I thought maybe the rest of the world knows whether he comes back, so I searched Technorati. Based on the blogosphere, last night wasn't a re-run and no one knows whether he's gone for real. One blogger said he heard that the actor (Riann Wilson--aged 38) has been having health problems. We'll see. I'm sure NBC is loving the suspense buzz it has stirred up.
Brews You Can Use
Perhaps the biggest brews news this week: It's the twelfth day of the year, and I haven't had a drink. My busy-ness and cold have made it unappealing. I'm curious to see how long I dry on. I'm guessing it ends Saturday evening, but we'll see.
Famous drinker Jimmy Buffet turned 60 last month. Good essay at Slate. Excerpt (from conclusion):
Two decades ago, in "Pirate Looks at Forty," Buffett cast his plight in mock-historical terms: "Yes I am a pirate, two hundred years too late/ The cannons don't thunder, there's nothing to plunder/ I'm an over-40 victim of fate." More recently, in the Parrothead anthem "Here We Are," Buffett put it in starker terms. "It's the child in us we really value," Buffett sings. That message has proven to be very good for business, and there's no reason to doubt Buffett's sincerity. Somewhere right now–probably a very warm, palmy place–the pirate is looking at 60 in the same way that he will look at 70, and, if his liver holds up, 80. Through a boozy haze, with the blue ocean gleaming on the horizon just over the rim of a shot glass, it looks awful lot like 18.
A new brewery prepares to open in Cleveland. The Cuyahoga folks oughtta be excited:
Lottig, who will serve as vice president and brewmaster, said Moulton-Levy was interested in developing a process to retain the healthful benefits of beer. He found a method to retain an abundance of vitamin B and other nutrients in the beer.
Lottig's first two brews will be a pale ale and a helles lager, and he hopes to have them on the market in the first quarter of next year. He says his style of beer-making is European: big flavor, but not an over-the-top brew that won't pair up with food.
Nightmare time: "Beer prices may soon rise for consumers because of the increasing costs of barley and other raw materials."
From the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Spin it however you want:
[A] pair of health economists found that American males who drank heavily when they were tenth-graders in 1990 earned more money in 2000, on average, than their peers who were teetotalers as teens. (The researchers found no such link for women.) Meanwhile, a study from the libertarian Reason Foundation reports that self-described drinkers (male and female) earn 10 percent to 14 percent more than nondrinkers. Drinking, the authors argue, may help build the kinds of social networks that lead to workplace success. The Reason study also finds that men who frequent bars at least once a month earn a further 7 percent wage boost. For women, however, regular barhopping has no discernible effect–on earnings, anyway.
