The Best Hraka Around
Never wait in line at a keg party again.
This Patented product allows up to 4 beers to be poured simultaneously from one standard keg of beer.
“The Octopus Tap completely changed the dynamics of a recent large party,” said Tyra Forbes, a professional in the restaurant industry. “This new tap stopped the bottle neck at the keg, which allowed the party to spread out more evenly. It really made the party much more enjoyable.”
North Coast Brewing Company’s Red Seal Ale
The apple-like aroma, and the tart flavor with refreshing citrus after notes, makes it one of a kind. The hops are strong as you take a sip and dissipate gradually, creating a rather nice finish. On the bottle, next to the adorable “red seal” it reads, “Water, malted barely, hops, yeast, and that’s all.” I refuse to believe it. There is a secret ingredient, and when I discover it, I will win a medal. They must have put that on the bottle to aggravate people like me.
and
But Beer Lao has managed to obtain a near mythical status amongst beer lovers in Thailand. Forced to swill often badly brewed and poorly conceived Thai beers Beer Lao has created a reputation by word of mouth alone. Critics and the media have routinely praised the beer; it was named Asia’s best beer by Time Magazine and lauded as the Dom Perignon of Asian beers by the Bangkok Post.
…a side-by-side comparison of a PBR from the US against one brewed under license in Canada by Sleeman of Guelph. Even though any possible outcome of this project will not advance the human condition one bit, I took on the challenge.
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To be honest, the beers taste pretty much the same - sort of bland, the pablum of beers yet without off flavours and somehow comforting. Like pablum, no self respecting adult would look forward to the taste but, once presented with it (like a new father feeding pablum to his little baby for the first time and scraping it off his hands knees and forehead), one is less turned off than one might expect.
The Nature Conservancy is buying out trawling permits.
The group has bought six federal trawling permits and four trawling vessels from fishermen in Morro Bay, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The tactic is designed to reward fishermen for forgoing fishing methods that can damage sensitive marine ecosystems.
Financial details weren’t disclosed, but each fisherman received “several hundred thousand dollars a piece,” said Chuck Cook, director of the group’s California coastal and marine program. Rather than punishing fishermen, Cook said, “you try to provide economic incentives for treating the habitats and fisheries well.”
Wonder how much an NC permit costs at the moment. We could buy one, save it till the Conservancy comes calling, then pay for beach rentals for the rest of our lives.
A sport angler is lucky to be alive after he was impaled by a leaping, 800-pound blue marlin and knocked overboard during a fishing competition off the coast of Bermuda.
Ian Card, 32, is in stable condition after undergoing emergency surgery for a fist-sized chest wound when a hooked marlin struck him with its bill just below the collarbone.
Step one: Get a boat.
The right bottom for Leger is what is commonly called “spotty bottom,” which consists of sandy spots with vegetation around them. If the water is clear, you can see the light and dark patches.
“If the water is cloudy, you can use a depth finder to locate the right bottom,” says Leger. “Spotty bottom will show up as ragged rather than a slick-straight line. And it’s easy to distinguish between rock and grass. Rock reflects back stronger, creating more peaks, and will be more in a square shape.”
And if you’re willing to put in the effort, you may even find the fishing better than expected in the deeper water.
“Several years ago there was a rat epidemic and the government agreed to give a cash bounty for each rat tail brought to the government office. The gestation period for rats is 30 days and the Vietnamese began to breed rats, quickly increasing the population and creating a cash crop.”
When your job relies on killing rats, you find rats any way you can, even if it means perpetuating the rat problem by breeding them yourself.
Similarly, when your job requires you to find racism everywhere, that’s what you do, even if it means perpetuating racist memes. Case in point, Lewis Diuguid of the Kansas City Star, who finds racism in a beer ad.
No, not this one.
Nor this one.
No, according to Lewis, this is the racist ad.
Why is it racist?
The Boulevard Brewing Co. beer billboard uses the racist rhyme “Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Moe….”
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The “eenie, meenie, minie, moe” rhyme grabs people, but it has an awful history, which is far from cute.
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The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes traced the rhyme in America to the 1850s when slavery was at its zenith. Then the verse was “Eena, meena, mina, mo, Catch a nigger by his toe; If he squeals, let him go, Eena, meena, mina, moe.”
The N-word in the mid-1970s was “replaced by tigger, tiger, spider, beggar, etc.” the book said.
To most people, including the VP of Boulevard Brewing, that would mean that rhyme is no longer racist.
Bob Sullivan, vice president and chief marketing officer with Boulevard Brewing, said no one had complained about the beer billboard. “It’s a choice campaign,” he said.
“It has nothing to do with race, color or creed,” Sullivan said. “You would be the first person who’s brought that to our attention.”
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Sullivan thinks that time and the wording change in the rhyme have been enough to disassociate it from its racist past. He said it would be “a huge stretch” now to make the connection.
Others agree, among them a judge, 12 members of a jury, and an appeals court, all of whom decided a lawsuit against Southwest Airlines based on a flight attendant’s use of the nursery rhyme was baseless.
But the plaintiffs alleged that the rhyme in question was a racist insult aimed at them personally. (There was, apparently, once a version of this rhyme that contained an offensive reference to blacks). Grace Fuller claimed that hearing the rhyme was such an insult to her that she had an immediate epileptic seizure on the plane, and another one after arriving at her destination, that left her bedridden for a week.
Notice anything odd in the paragraph above? Let’s make it just a bit more obvious.
The Aero-News Network:: “There was, apparently, once a version of this rhyme that contained an offensive reference to blacks”
Lewis Diuguid: “Eena, meena, mina, mo, Catch a nigger by his toe; If he squeals, let him go, Eena, meena, mina, moe.”
Most of America is perfectly happy to let “eenie, meenie, minie, moe” shed its racist association, but Lewis Diuguid cannot. He’s constructed a healthy career based in large part on finding racism where ever he looks. So, like the rat farmers of Vietnam, it’s in his best interest to make sure that the supply doesnt run out, even if he has to propagate the racist ideas himself.
Postscript: The idea that the original form of “eenie, meenie, minie, moe” was racist is debatable at best, as WordOrigins.org points out.
Various tales about this children’s counting rhyme are circulating, mostly untrue. The rhyme is not an ancient number system that comes down to us through the mists of time. (Usually the tales say the words are Anglo-Saxon or Celtic numbers.)
Early American versions of the rhyme tend to contain the line catch a nigger by the toe. In early British versions, chicken or tinker are used instead, but even in the Britain the racist version was common by the early years of the 20th century. With rhymes such as these, there is no “original” version and there are countless early variants. The use of nigger is just one variant among many. Claims that any counting rhyme that begins with eeny, meany, miney, moe is racist are absurd. There are racist versions of the rhyme to be sure, but most are just innocent.
Having a yen for original sources, I tracked down the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes to see exactly what it said. See for yourself.
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Undoubtedly the most popular rhyme for counting-out both in England and America until the mid-1950s; this version is Anglo-American also in origin, the first and last lines being old British, the middle two from New England. In the mid-1970’s “nigger”, was being replaced by “tigger”, “tiger”, “spider”, “beggar”, etc. The rhyme is not found recorded until comparatively recently. JOH did not know it. Nor did Northall (1892) who knew fifty-six counting-out rhymes. But Bolton in America (1888) who secured one version from Scotland and one from Ireland, found it in colloquial use in almost every State in the Union. The earlier English versions, “Catch a tinker” and “Catch a chicken by his toe”, seem to have been completely supplanted by “Catch a nigger”. The word nigger was common in American folk-lore but is unknown in any English traditional rhyme or proverb. Charles Francis Potter (Harper’s Bazaar, May, 1950) compares the rhyme with the French-Canadian game,
Meeny, meeny, miney, mo,
Cache ton poing derriere ton dos…
and suggests that the “Catch a nigger by his toe” line is an American corruption of it about 100 years ago. The first line has more venerable parentage. It is said (Notes & emeries, 1855) that the following was repeated by children in New York as early as 1815:
Hana, mana, mona, mike;
Barcelona, bona, strike;
Hare, ware, frown, venae;
Harrico, warrico, we, wo, wac.
Bolton compares many similar versions with the German,
Ene, tene, mone, met,
Pastor, lone, bone, strei,
Ene, fune, herke, berke,
Wer? Wie? Wo? Was?
and F. W. P.Jago in his Glossary of the Cornish Dialect gives a rhyme beginning
Ena, mena, mona, mite
Basca, lora, hora bite.
While one of the commonest Austrian counting-out formulas in the present day is
Eine, meine, mine, mu,
Und draust bist du.
of which the first line sounds all but identical with the English. These words may be a memory of ancient numerals, as in the Shepherds Score “Ina, mina, tethra, methera”, and the distant starting-point of the nursery verse, whose dark mystery was expressed by Kipling:
Eenee, Meenee, Mainee and Mo
Were the first Big Four of the Long Ago.
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Ironically enough, if “catch a tinker by the toe,” was the earliest version of the rhyme, then it was indeed racist in origin–though I suspect Mr. Diuguid might be a bit surprised at the group of people it referred to.
Notes: Billy Dee Williams image courtesy A Story without Heroes: The Cautionary Tale of Malt Liquor
Former Congressman Frey has a blog of sorts: The Frey Report.
*The gestation period for rats is normally 21-24 days, not 30.