My monthly column is up at The Register and it's about beer: What's Brewing in the Blogosphere? Subscription required. Excerpt:
Most every well-read Christian has heard of the Inklings, the literary group that counted J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis among its members. The professors spent ample hours in an establishment called the Eagle and Child, drinking beer and critiquing one another's writings.
I've always been struck by one Inkling fact that is often overlooked: Many of their meetings took place on Tuesday mornings. And they weren't merely enjoying the pub's pretzels.
In an e-mail, biographer Joseph Pearce told me, “It's certainly safe to assume that Tolkien, Lewis, et al drank ale during the morning gatherings at the Eagle and Child. This is clear from the memories of others who joined them at these gatherings and is also clear from at least one of Tolkien's letters.”
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Bring back a sane drinking age. The evidence is accumulating that 21 is arbitrary and capricious and harmful (see this earlier post; scroll to last blurb) and now this:
The official story goes that the 1984 Federal Uniform Drinking Age Act, which threatened to withhold federal funds from states that didn't raise their drinking age to 21, ended the glory days of teens driving to another state to get drunk and then careening home. According to federal estimates, pushing a uniform minimum drinking age nationwide saved 21,887 lives through 2002. New research argues that it wasn't so: By studying state-by-state data, the authors found that most of the reduction in fatalities came from states that had raised the drinking age before the federal law went on the books; in states that raised the drinking age to comply with the federal pressure, there was little effect. Furthermore, fatalities in states that raised the age early dipped only briefly; in the other states, they either remained steady or increased after the age was changed. The authors conclude that the overall reduction in traffic deaths has had more to do with safer cars and better medical treatment for accident victims than with policies handed down from on high.
Link.
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The Big Three of American brewing with become the Big Two. Brewers Molson Coors Brewing Co. and SABMiller said today they will combine their U.S. operations in a joint venture. The makers of Miller Lite, Original Coors and Coors Light said they will share ownership equally in the new venture . . .
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Basic math: 80 beers (60 pints) = 4-week hangover. Nasty stuff. They say Alexander the Great died of a hangover. Sounds like this fellow came close.
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Oxford produces something for the common man: The Oxford Companion to Beer. It's slated for publication in 2011. That's quite the publishing forecast.
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Yikes, Greenpeace and I have a common enemy: Budweiser. But for entirely different reasons.
