Silflay Hraka

Compiled with the assistance of Young’s Old Nick.
This fabulous barley wine is a malty, velvety smooth and full bodied beer with a rich dark ruby colour. Old Nick is overflowing with sumptuous flavours of fruit and hops, with a complex bitterness on the finish.

South Carolina okays high alcohol brews.

It’s been a bad year for crap beer. More here.

Texas beer sales blocked by….Texas beer distributor?

There’s a lolcat for everything, now.

Brew Reviews: Anchor Steam, and Liberty Ale, Blue Tongue Traditional Australian Pilsener, Hopleaf, Pearl River

Around twenty minutes later after going to sleep I started to get an excruciating pain in my lower abdomen that felt like broken glass chips were slicing up the inside of my gut. Nothing seemed to help alleviate my pain and after an hour or so I finally sat on the toilet and managed to explosively relieve myself but the pain didn’t subside. I ended up staying on the toilet crying in pain half the night before I somehow collapsed from exhaustion. It would be another full day before I had normal bowel movements again.

The went back to “One-Eyed Wangs” the day after that and told Mr. Wang about the beer. Mr. Wang shrugged and then said “This time you got unlucky can!”.

It’s Chris Firey’s job to talk to the clueless.

Advice on Belgians.

News from Mordor.

For the core Bud family — in which Bud Light is growing while Bud and Bud Select are declining — brewery execs laid out a differentiated marketing positions by brand. Bud Light remains about good times; new Bud advertising emphasizes taste; and Bud Select is a trade-up brand.

One flavor, three marketing campaigns!

How to avoid selling beer at the ball park.

Stalking the endangered German beer styles.
But drinking a Kölsch is more than just drinking a beer: it’s like drinking an entire culture.

By German law, only beers brewed in Cologne may be called Kölsch, and they must be served in the tall, cylindrical glasses called stange. The Kölsch waiter, known as a Köbes, is almost always clad in blue and is universally known for a sharp tongue. (Request a glass of water instead of beer and your Köbes will probably ask if he should bring soap and a towel, too.)

In Praise of Budweiser.
…bollocks to your “microbreweries”. These so-called “craft brewers” are a newfangled modern invention and have very little to do with the traditions of the brewing industry. We have no real way of knowing what beer tasted like in Ye Olden Days Of Bavaria Etc, but it was probably horrible. Beer as it is drunk today is a product of the Industrial Revolution; it was arguably the first recognisably modern industry. It is not an artisanal product and up until very recently could not be produced in small batches at all with any acceptable consistency of quality. “Microbrews” are in general wildly overpriced – some of them are quite nice because they use extremely expensive ingredients, but they are not intrinsically better than industrially produced beers. There are good and bad industrially produced beers – I am only arguing here that Budweiser is one of the good ones, because it has an excellent pedigree, it is 100% natural, the recipe has never been altered and it has never compromised on the quality of ingredients.

The previous Carnival may be seen here.

Praise for our boy John.

It’s not that he’s a foppish elitist who spends $400 on a haircut. He’s a foppish elitist who has servants to make appointments at the beauty salon for him.

I’d have some sympathy, but I cut my hair with an electric clipper and a hand mirror, sitting on the steps of the deck so no one has to sweep up.

Lucifer’s Hammer, 12,000 BC.

The Clovis people of North America, flourishing some 13,000 years ago, had a mastery of stone weaponry that stood them in good stead against the constant threat of large carnivores, such as American lions and giant short-faced bears. It’s unlikely, however, that they thought death would come from the sky.

the team’s three principal investigators, claims immense wildfires scorched North America in the aftermath, killing large populations of mammals and bringing an abrupt end to the Clovis culture. “The entire continent was on fire,” he says.

A quarter of younger Muslim Americans support suicide bombings in some circumstances

So how many is that?

According to this site there are 7 million Muslims in the U.S., of which some 26% to 39% are under 30. That’s a range of about 2 to 3 million. Let’s take the low end and call it 2 million. 25% of 2 million is 500,000. So, according to the poll, 500,000 Muslim Americans support the idea of suicide bombing under some circumstance or another.

Seems a bit of a stretch to get that out of a poll that only contacted 1,050 Muslims. That’s about 68 people answering “Yes” to the “Are suicide bombings ever justified?” question.

Update: Turns out there aren’t 7 million Muslims after, just 2.35 million, so one should reduce all the results of the calculations above by two-thirds.

Live by the satellite radio, die by the satellite radio.

XM Satellite Radio experienced a second day of outages Tuesday after software problems resulted in the loss of one of the network’s four satellite signals, the company said.

An XM spokesman said he had no information on how many of the company’s eight million customers were affected.

I know of 4, two of which incessantly complain on the way to school because they’re unable to listen to Kenny Curtis and The Animal Farm.

Chasing a world record…….gar?

Despite being one of the oldest fish, alligator gar are one the least understood species. Of little interest to sport fishermen, biologists don’t know much about the life cycle of these oversized rough fish. Make no mistake — gator gar are rough customers.

Truck keys aren’t the only thing the duo has found in a gar’s stomach. They decided that a gar will eat anything it can catch, including fish, birds, turtles, snakes, and mammals. The most unusual stomach contents they’ve found in a gar was a full-grown beaver.

Rolled Ngnat out of bed this morning, after her mother had failed twice in the same endeavor, to discover that she was covered in raised pink blotches. As she’d spent the weekend with an upset stomach, fever, and headache, our first thought was “chicken pox,” an exceptionally interesting–in the Chinese sense of the word–diagnosis in light of the pregnant lady who sleeps just down the hall from her room.

So, off to the doctor she went, where our fears of Varicella zoster were dismissed out of hand. The rash, we were informed, was a reaction to whatever virus has been swimming in her bloodstream, not the dreaded poultry pox itself. More importantly, it only showed once the infectious period of the disease was over, so Ngnat could go to school after all.

Which she did, though this was the third time in the last four days we’ve showed up late thanks to the vagaries of viral progression. I expect she’ll make up whatever work was missed next week, when her teacher will have more time for individual instruction thanks to the multiple absences from children we’ll have ensickened.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

The British have always been proud of their tradition of hospitality and asylum, which has benefited Huguenots escaping persecution, European Jewry, and many political dissidents from Marx to Mazzini. But the appellation “Londonistan,” which apparently originated with a sarcastic remark by a French intelligence officer, has come to describe a city which became home to people wanted for terrorist crimes as far afield as Cairo and Karachi. The capital of the United Kingdom is, in the words of Steven Simon, a former White House counterterrorism official, “the Star Wars bar scene,” catering promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fund-raisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war.