Month: February 2008

It’s February 29th. It happens once every four years. That means we’re allowed to drink four times as much beer tonight. You can cite this blog as authority. Anyone who disagrees is obviously mathematically challenged.

It’s a good drinking weekend for me. My children’s parochial school holds its annual fundraiser tonight and tomorrow (mostly tomorrow). It’s an auction party, and it’s very cool, which must be a fairly rare thing for a parochial school fundraiser. We sell enough beer to warrant leasing a beer truck, which means we’ll have more than just Budweiser and Bud Lite. In fact, we’re getting a premium beer (this one) that meets the German Beer Purity Law. It’ll be a bit pricey, but reasonable ($3 for 16 ounces). I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll end up dropping over a thousand dollars on auction items (“Had to buy that EShPN fishing basket!” “But honey, you hate fishing.” “Yeah but, it’s like, you know, sho cool”), but I budget for it every year.
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Jack Daniels’ master distiller is retiring. It’s fine with the folks at Modern Drunkard Magazine.
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Interesting pie chart:

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The last section of Chapter 1 is now posted to Beer Man (see left sidebar). The new stuff starts after the triple asterisk.
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I’ll have to recommend that my local brewpub start this tradition: Naming a local beer drinker of the year. Too bad the article doesn’t say what criteria is used. Are you, for instance, automatically disqualified if you drink Bud Lite? Do you have to drink the sponsor’s beer, or are you expected to drink hundreds of different brands? Is it based on objective criteria at all, or is it rather a subjective thing (“Joe here is a lot of fun and likes … Read the rest

I didn’t get home from work until 10:00 last night, which is about thirty minutes past my bedtime. By the time I got to bed, it was way past. No time for blogging today, though I have two quick things:

1. One out of every ten adult Americans is a lapsed Catholic. Let that sink in, and you realize that’s an amazing statistic. I believe it, though. In my small town, I run into people who “used to be Catholic” all over the place: old adults and young adults, those who now go to other churches and those who only worship in bars. Our parochial school is struggling to stay afloat, but it’s not because we’re losing Catholic children to the public schools (though that’s a small part of it). It’s because, demographically, we simply don’t have enough Catholics in town that are able to pay the tuition (we have a lot of Hispanics, but the tuition is a real struggle for them). If all of the lapsed Catholics sent their kids to our parochial school, we’d have a waiting list.

2. A red banner month: For the first time ever, The Daily Eudemon has brought in over 6,000 different visitors in one month. And to think it happened in the shortest month of the year, while I was battling illnesses that would’ve killed lesser mortals, while worrying about my hair loss and my fading Playgirl centerfold gig prospects. Can a call from Oprah be far away? … Read the rest

For extra credit, who can name for me Cheech and Chong’s seven movies?

Oaksterdam University prepares people for jobs in California’s thriving medical marijuana industry. For $200 and the cost of two required textbooks, students learn how to cultivate and cook with cannabis, study which strains of pot are best for certain ailments, and are instructed in the legalities of a business that is against the law in the eyes of the federal government.

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While looking up how many Cheech and Chong made, I ran across this Wikipedia plot summary of Next Movie. It begins, “Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie opens with the two aging stoners stealing gas in a trashcan, spilling it on themselves, and subsequently blowing up their car after trying to light a joint with gasoline fumes filling the vehicle.”

Now that’s art.
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Great assortment of English castle pictures over at Let Britannia Rise. Check it out.

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Need a hymnal cover for your iPod? How about iPod disco lights? You can find them at this list of 10 weird iPod accessories.
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Fellow Detroit Tigers fans: Feel-good Tiger story of the year. The Tigers are loaded, but don’t get cocky. They could be fantastic, they could struggle. Either way, they’ll be good, but they’re not a lock for the playoffs.
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Dial 1-900-Auction: Gennifer Flowers is putting the tapes of her recorded conversations with Bill Clinton during their 12-year affair on the auction block, Vegas Confidential learned Monday.

A man who tolerates his wife’s infidelities is called a “wittol” or “cuckold.” What’s the equivalent for a woman? If there is no such word, perhaps we can coin one. How about, um, oh, I don’t know. A “Hillary”?

Harsh? Maybe. If I had any reliable indication she stayed with … Read the rest

I’ve come down with the stomach flu. It’s not nearly as bad as the bronchitis/flu/plague thing I had earlier this month (thank goodness), but highly unpleasant: Playing both ends of the court, mild headache, chills. I’m the seventh person in my house to catch it in seven days. Only Alex (14) and Tess (2) haven’t come down with it. Tess assures us she caught it last week, too, but we’re suspect. She saw that sick kids got unlimited TV watching and 7-Up, then suddenly she became sick. Wanted a wash cloth for the head, a blanket on the couch, etc., but within 45 minutes she was bouncing around and laughing. That hasn’t been the track the rest of us have taken with this thing, but it does appear to be a short-lived ailment.

Fortunately, I had some material ready to roll for Monday morning, which I went ahead and finished Sunday evening during a post-hurl reprise.
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The director of a Norwegian museum claimed yesterday to have discovered Disney cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War. It appears the Fuhrer was partial to the seven dwarves: Bashful, Doc, Gentile, and Hebe-hater.
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A group of researchers from the University of Oxford will spend $3.9 million on a three-year study to “explain” why humanity believes in God. Roger Trigg, a senior research fellow at the Center, said the almost $4 million would be used to respond to the question, “What is it that is innate in human nature to believe in God, whether it is gods or something superhuman or supernatural?” The answer: It is innate to believe in something that exists. Cultures everywhere believe in trees and dirt, love and hate, the sun and moon. Why this innate belief in such things? Because they exist.

Please … Read the rest

I missed the blood red moon lunar eclipse two days ago. Still depressed about it, I tried to make it up by going to the new brewpub and drinking six (eight?) Blue Moons after work (3:30ish, for reasons I can explain, but not without whining). I think it did the trick, but I feel a little groggy today and the first words I read from today’s Liturgy of the Hours were from Isaiah: “Wash yourselves clean!” Kind of a slappish wake up. I feel a little guilty now, but the energy drink is lifting my spirits . . . and my metabolism.
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I spent fifteen minutes this morning frogging around with a My Yahoo page. If you haven’t started a My Yahoo page, you might want to consider it. It has a lot of neat features. I will still use My Catholic dot Com as my homepage, but My Yahoo is now a quick link in the upper left corner.
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Dante needs to create an eighth circle for volume one: A pair of con artists ripped off a Girl Scout group when they exchanged a fake $100 bill for cookies, police said. Aquinas said that it is morally acceptable to steal if necessary to stay alive. I’m not sure Girl Scout cookies would meet the “necessary’ element.
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That’s it for today. A writing deadline looms. Until next week . . .… Read the rest

Not clear on whether he was knighted before this, in spite of this, or because of this: Tesco chief executive Sir Terry Leahy has been branded the “godfather of British binge drinking” by a Labour MP.
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Brewers care: Sam Adams to alleviate the Great Hop Shortage of 2008 by selling, at cost, 10 tons of hops to micro-breweries. No doubt a PR move, but also a righteous thing to do.
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The man who created the Sgt Pepper album cover has designed a beer bottle label to celebrate Liverpool’s Capital of Culture year. I might be able to get a six pack with a little help from my friends.
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Craft beers continue to soar in the marketplace. The Miller Lite crowd seethes: “Stop muddying up the waters with your hoity toity beers! Get back to pure mass-produced stuff.”

Though I’ll tell ya, Coors’ Blue Moon is one of my favorite beers now. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s mass produced. That’s some good stuff.
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Neat site: How Beer Works. I reply, “Very well, thank you.” But they have a bit more detail.
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Every state should have one: Beer Drinker’s Guide to Colorado.
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This week’s beer picture comes from Old Italy:

… Read the rest