Sunday Drive

We went a' motoring this Sunday. It was a beautiful day for a drive, and, as if it were the 1920s and autos were novelties, we took to ours and hit the road.

We drove the Mulholland Scenic Corridor, the route along a mountain ridge in the northern section of Los Angeles. Named for an early water commissioner, Mulholland Drive is an iconic street that connects the mountains to the beaches. Well, that was the plan anyway, but today there's construction and dirt sections, and it disappears in Bel Air somewhere.

We drove from our place in Long Beach up the 710 to downtown LA, switched to the 101, got off at the Hollywood Bowl and picked up Mulholland. We proceeded to follow it all the way west past the 405, got stuck in Bel Air, then found our way to Ventura Blvd, and followed it to Topanga Canyon, and came down to the PCH, and weaved our way home.

It started out strange, though. The past few days have been loud with non-commercial air traffic, and today was no different, with these two loud helicopters roaring overhead as we first entered the freeway:

There are some cool lookouts to which we plan on taking our next set of visitors. I've got some pictures.

This is from the first lookout west of 101 along Mulholland Drive. It's a pretty clear shot of downtown LA, with the Hollywood Bowl mostly cropped out of this picture. It's in the lower right-hand quadrant, and you could hear musicians practicing. It soudned pretty cool, ethereal classical music instead of Hwy 101 prominently in the picture.

This lookout was crawling with tourists, tourists buses, a limo, and a gang of German bikers. It was wacky. Also visible from here is Griffith Observatory, off to the left (not pictured).

Here's that same shot with a little more magnification. Easier to see is the iconic Capital Records building in Hollywood in the foreground.

The next stop on our voyage was the Universal City overlook. This was less than a mile away, but looking the other way from the Hollywood hills we were driving along. If you can see close enough, you'll see the NBC studios, Universal Studios amusement park, and the Disney Burbank animation studios, all planted in the same few square miles on this side of these mountains. Just a few short miles along 101 and you're heading straight into downtown LA

Those weren't the only crazy things we saw. When there was a wild traffic jam at 1:25 on a Sunday afternoon, we thought it was just that particularly shitty stretch of highway. Turns out:

There was no blood or gore, just some nervous looking folks.

Then, as we passed right through the heart of LA on the 101, there's this cool structure across the highway from the LA Cathedral. Corrie said it's part of a high school, and that inside is a cool viewing spot. I'll say. I was kind of impressed with this shot, taken right from the speeding car:

While driving along Topanga Canyon Road, there's a moment where the air noticeably changes; it becomes more crisp, and the dense hotness has vanished. To us that made sense. "On the beach side now," Corrie said when at one point. In no less than two more turns, the canyon that had surrounded us opened up to this view:

We turned left down the PCH at that point and say this crazy building sitting up on a hill:

That turns out to be the Getty Villa, part of the Getty's various museum properties in the Santa Monica mountains.

This was a trip I'd been wanting to take for some time, and I'm glad we got to go today. I'm thinking it would be best on the first clear day after a rain, when the air's been cleaned and you might be able to see all the way out to Long Beach.

And, lastly, poking out on center, the Observatory:

(No) Celebrations for Post 1000

With all my blogs floating around the interwebs I had a quick thought: I should plan out my combined 1000th post and do a little thing for it here, on my original blog. Finally, a few days ago I decided to look at the numbers.

I thought about as a flash, out of the blue: if I have over 800 with the original, and over 100 with the Observatory, then I'm probably pretty close with the sports, food, pop-culture, library, travel, local Long Beach scene, and now flags&logos and the one with my dad and brother...and as my head went though the list I got a sinking suspicion that I'd gone over 1000 a while back without catching it.

Indeed.

The sports blog has almost 90 posts, the library is up to nearly 40, the food and pop-culture are both in the 20s, and all the others are in the teens. After adding them up I was around 1140.

Oh well. I'll be able to catch it here, for sure.

For the uninitiated, my dad and brother Dan and I started a blog called Sherwood and Sons where we talk shop over movies, sports, books, and whatever else strikes our fancy. The Flags and Logo blog is more just for me, about how I like to see things arranged next to each other.

Phonetic Addition and Subtraction

The English language is in the Germanic family of languages, developed after the Norman invasion of England. It's almost easy to imagine it like German-frenchified.

In any case, German and French, while directly unrelated, are both in the larger Indo-European language family, that contains the Romantic, the Germanic, the Slavic, the Celtic and the Baltic families, as well as Romanian. Basque, totally unrelated to everything is also in Europe, is a bit of an orphan. The other "main" family of languages in Europe is the Finno-Urgic, which has Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian.

There's a reason I'm mentioning this. In English, we use two letters for the theta sound. In the Hellenic alphabet, which is used for writing Greek, they use a single symbol, the "theta", for the "t-h" sound.

In English we combine "t" and "h" to get the sound "th". Okay. So what? In German, one of the parents of English, they don't regularly use the theta sound. Whereas we use the, this, that, and thing, German uses der/die/das, diese, das, and dinge. We've replaced the "d" with "th". In fact, Germans rarely make a theta sound, since in common use, an "h" after a consonant is used to lengthen to sound of the vowel that proceeds it. Example: "Neanderthal", in German, has no theta sound, and could be more easily written as "Neandertaal", and is now mostly written as "Neandertal".

I'm giving the background because those languages are connected, and their differences are mostly skin deep. To get to the root of the title of this post, phonetic addition and subtraction, we'll be looking at unrelated languages and another, more fundamental sound issue, a phonetic basis.

The languages are English and Magyar (Hungarian), and the sounds are "sssssssssssssssssssssss" and "sssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh". Sounds I'm familiar with.

There is a reason that the "S" is shaped like a snake, and in the Indo-European languages it makes the "sssssssssssssssssssss" sound. But in Magyar, this isn't the case.

In Magyar, the letter "S" actually makes the "shh" sound. The capitol city of Budapest, in Hungary, is actually two cities joined by the Donau (the Danube River): hilly Buda on one side, and flat-landed Pest. There, though, when you hear the locals say it, they call it Pesht and Budapesht.

But that's how we would write it. In Magyar spelling conventions, my last name would be Serwood, and it would sound the same.

We, in English, add the symbol of the letter "h" to the letter "s" to form the "shh" sound. Phonetic addition by symbol addition.

Well, if the "S" in Magyar is the "shh" sound, then what do they do for the sound "sss"?

What they do is add the letter "z" to the letter "s" to get the "sss" sound. Which may be one of the cooler combos in the Latin alphabet. I've friends with last names Szyarto and Szetella, pronounced like "Syarto" and "Setella", which may not be that normal looking anyway, but with the "z", one may bet even more perplexed.

In truth, if you see someone's name has the "sz" combo, you can pretty much be sure that they're family came from Hungary, or there's a Magyar patriarch somewhere along the line.

They, in Magyar, add the symbol of the letter"z" to the letter "s" to form the "sss" sound. Phonetic subtraction by symbol addition.

I like to imagine the "z" slicing the "hhh" sound off the original Magyar "s" = "shh" sound. It is, of course, much more complicated than that.

The sounds, "sss" and "shh" happen in different places in the mouth, and we English speakers take for granted that the primary sound for the letter "S" has to be the "sss" sound, when there's not a necessarily physical reason for that to be the case.

Dusting Dallas

It looks like they've transported back to 1966 in Dallas, the 9th largest city in America.

They've had a bad outbreak of West Nile virus, the worst seen in the States since it arrived. It's brought along by mosquitoes, and what's the best method for killing large swaths of 'skeeters?

Well, dropping a fine mist of poison from an airplane at 300 feet, of course. Remember, if you live in that neck of the woods, stay inside onthose nights, and if you find yourself outside, shower as soon you can afterwards.

They're not messing around in Texas, which has already seen 17 deaths, 10 in Dallas/Fort Worth alone.

Sometimes the "best" solutions were done away with almost fifty years ago.

I'm sure you've heard all about this, but you can check it out here if you'd like.

Quick "Batman 3 (7?)" Note

We went to see Christopher Nolan's The Dark Night Rises this past Sunday. I can say that I wasn't ever all that excited about seeing this movie. I like Nolan and his movies, and I guess I like Batman, but superhero movies haven't been that high on my must-see list.

I think I saw Batman Begins in the theater, I know I saw the Dark Knight in theaters (but that was the only time I saw it)(there was a bar across the street from the theater and I had to pee before the trailers ended). But this year, neither Spider-Man, nor this, nor the Total Recall remake really excited up my blood.

Things changed, though, and I felt like seeing this one. Maybe it was reading about Nolan's existential issues forming the backbone of the movie.

In any case, it's a pretty good movie. Tom Hardy's Bane's voice cracked me up throughout. It wasn't totally joyless like Green Lantern, but it did take itself pretty seriously.

I liked it; it was moody and dark and presented a reality in which superheroes exist with a dourness that the Watchmen comic nailed while the movie didn't as squarely as this one. Also, the action wasn't blur of shadows where you can't tell what the hell's going on.

The main purpose of this note, I suppose, is this: Both Corrie and I agreed that while this was a pretty good Batman movie, and the Nolan-trilogy might be the most realistic and serious take on a superhero infested world---which would make it the best superhero trilogy yet---the two Tim Burton Batman films were more fun.

I don't mean that they're necessarily more fun movies to watch---it just seems like the actors are having more fun, the director's having a ball, and the crew just had a blast making it all come together.

Those two movies are probably even darker than Nolan's, and the star-power almost coexisted within the frame of the universe. Jack Nicholson, Jack Palance, Christopher Walken, Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer, all big names in Hollywood, but they all somehow fit in Tim Burton's world.

Maybe they're better, maybe their not, but they are different. I think all fans would agree that Nolan's and Burton's are definitely better than Joel Schumacher's abominations efforts.

Mexico Takes Gold, Brazil faces Disaster, and Other Olympic Notes

I don't really want to dwell on the Olympics too much longer, so with this (longish) post coming after the final ceremonies dragged on, I'll try and not post anymore about it. Like in 2010, when I mentioned my rationale for enjoying quadrennial sporting events, here it's much the same. The Summer Olympics are larger it seems, and more in your face, and trying to watch it sometimes grates on my last nerve, and the contrived stories are hard to swallow, but we do get to see some stars, right?

1) Gold for Mexico and Disaster for Brazil

In the men's gold medal soccer match, Brazil faced Mexico, and a first-time gold medal winner was going to be crowned. Not being terribly surprised that Mexico hadn't ever won a gold medal isn't news, but Brazil? I believe this was their third silver medal, which means three failed attempts to get a gold medal, which is the only piece of hardware in international soccer the Brazilian team has yet to win.

Olympic soccer is different from the World Cup variety in that it uses a country's U-23 team--their Under-23 years old team. Nations are allowed three players overage, but everyone else has to be 23 or under. This is in order to keep the Olympics from becoming an event that rivals the World Cup in importance.

An error within the first thirty seconds let Oribe Peralta of Mexico score a quick goal, and left Brazil staggered. After halftime, Peralta scored again on a beautifully executed header, and Brazil really started to press, even fighting amongst themselves. Hulk scored in extra-time to bring the score to its final of 2-1, and all across LA the party was starting (not to mention a few hours south).

That there is a guy on the Brazilian team named Hulk seems like it would really only make sense if the guy looks like the Hulk---which he does, strangely enough. They also have Neymar, a young kid who Pele spoke about as being the next great Brazilian super-duper star, and he's looking like he's up for it. They've got a big dude known simply as Juan, and the poofy-afro guy and the sleek older goal-scoring machine guy.

Between Hulk and Neymar and Juan and the old sleek guy, they were a freaking powerhouse during every match they showed on TV, which was every match. This team scored at least three goals in every game they played. In the game against Honduras, Brazil conceded a goal, then tied it, then conceded another goal, then tied it, and then went ahead, winning 3-2. At no point that game did it seem like Brazil was not in complete control. An amazing thing to see.

This Brazilian squad has the majority of the team that will be performing in the World Cup in 2014, which will be hosted by...Brazil. This is pretty much their World Cup team, an event their hosting, and anything short of the gold medal was going to be a disaster.

This was to be part of a larger argument to thrust the majority of this Brazilian team into that old argument about best ever. Olympics, 2012; then hosting the World Cup (which anything short of winning will be catastrophic); then, they were to try and defend their medal in the Olympics in 2016. Where are those games going to be held? Rio.

Brazil gets the next World Cup, and the next summer Olympics.

But, if you like watching soccer at its prettiest, Brazil, game-in and game-out would be worth your time. We're talking about a country that, besides sending 27k troops to the Italian front during WWII (and losing just over 900 of them) and sending a handful of seamen to the Allies in WWI (that didn't get used because the war ended), hasn't been involved in any military battles since the 1860s, and has never even lost any wars since it gained independence. Soccer has Brazil's most well-trained young men in anything, and it shows. Hosting and then losing the 1950 World Cup to Uruguay counts as one of the countries most tragic events, and that's not a joke.

In soccer, in Brazil, it's 2014 or bust.


2) What's the Deal with Usain Bolt Coverage?

Maybe I'm not the right guy to talk, since I don't have all the neato cable channels, but why the hell is the replay of the men's 4x100m so goddamned hard to find on NBC's Olympic coverage site? Am I being cynical if I wonder why we're being force fed the women's 4x100m, which is a spectacular result--the US ladies breaking the world record--while at the same time the non-US world record breaking  result is trying to be diminished?

That's probably too strong. We get tiny doses of Usain Bolt on regular NBC, and then the replays on the web are buried under replays of heats, of videos about Johann Blake and even a special about a rural sweet potato that makes racers like Asafa Powell and Usain and Johann so fast. Just show me the fucking race.

Usain Bolt is the greatest sprinter yet to race on Earth, and it's hard to argue that at this point (barring some failed drug tests, ahem, Carl Lewis). Over the course of '08 Beijing games and these games, Bolt's been in six events (three each), got six gold medals, and set four world records. He's broken his own records as well at non-Olympic games.

The sprints are marquis track and field events...they're just more marquis when Americans are winning I guess. Waiting to after 11 pm to show the races...please...


3) Hope Solo Enters my Ring of Great Athlete Names

Hope Solo, the foxy goalie for Team America, gold medal winning ladies of the soccer world, has a great name that signifies both her femininity, her sport, and her position in her sport.

Her and Alex Morgan? Goddamn...


4) Phelps vs Lochte

In the run-up to the events I kept hearing about this new swimmer, Ryan Lochte, hearing about how he was the next coming of Michael Phelps, how he was even better than Phelps. He even started showing up all over the place in commercials. Sweet, I thought, someone better than Phelps is going to be probably the greatest swimming phenom ever.

After doing some research I learned that Lochte is older than Phelps, and the perception that he was better came from the constant chatter about him, mostly due, I can only guess, to his victories over Phelps in American qualifiers.

I guess Phelps was holding it for the real games, as he went on to become the most decorated Olympian ever.

For sports fans, this is a pretty heady time to be watching sports. We've got, in Bolt and Phelps, two humans that could be considered the greatest ever at their sports. Add them to the lost that also includes Roger Federer, and maybe even Tiger Woods, and you could say that either this is just a thing we've created for the here-and-now crowd, or it's just one of those moments in life we're lucky to see.


5) Fat Man Lifts Fat Weight

Holy cow! I searched out and found on the NBC site the gold medal Clean & Jerk results. The Clean & Jerk is always more weight than the Snatch, the other weightlifting event.

I could probably make an entire post about the hilarity of the names of the two weightlifting events: the Snatch and the Clean & Jerk...

In any case, the C&J winner was a great big fat man from Iran, whose last name I find it easiest to consider as three names wedged together, Salimikordasiabi, lifted 247 kilograms. That's an equivalent of almost 545 pounds.

Wow. Now go fight that bear and put that shit to use.


6) No Heartwarming Redemption Video for Ukhov?

Ivan Ukhov is a Russian high-jumper who was best known for being the drunk guy, then lost his shirt, jumped in tee-, and eventually won the gold medal. I've changed the channel from seen background stories of redemption or rising in the face of great adversity about Oscar Pistorius--the Blade Runner from South Africa--and that runner from Grenada, Kenyard, so I know they have made them featuring non-US athletes.

Why not Ukhov? Is it because he looks like a hippie?

Well, it's more likely that it's because he's Russian, and they're not going to be letting any American company film any of their athletes for anything that isn't part of the games themselves.


7) Ribbon Twirling Surpisingly Mesmerizing

Dancing around with toys and props apparently is a medal worthy Olympic event, rather series of events, and I learned that Russia has dominated them since, eh, forever?

I was trapped, though, hypnotized almost, by the twirling of the ribbons, either solo or in the groups when three girls had ribbons and two had hula-hoops.

I heard that trampoline was also a medal worthy sport, but I didn't see any of it.


8) Epilogue

I wanted this to be the last post about Olympic material, but I have one more observation I wanted to mention, but I'll put that somewhere else. It's just not ready yet (I have numbers to crunch). I also have a post that touches on a gesture I noticed many times during the games but isn't a gesture with a necessarily sports specificity. I'll get to that later also.

Ida and Dactyl

I don't know what the hell I was doing when I came across a photo on the Internet. How many cool stories start out like that I wonder? Well, out of all the directions I could go with that, I'll let you down easy...here's the picture, taken by the Galileo spacecraft:

This is one of the random things that occur in the universe, and specifically in our Solar System. The large rock is asteroid 243 Ida. She lives in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which is much thinner and sparse than I used to imagine when I was a kid. The smaller dot is Dactyl, Ida's moon.

Isn't that cool? Am I the only person who hadn't ever really thought about asteroids having moons?

Ida is about 35 miles long with an average diameter of about 19 miles. Dactyl, an average of 50 miles away and taking over four years to make a rotation, is an egg shaped rock with the longest axis 1 mile long.

Astronomers think it's highly unlikely that Ida captured Dactyl, that it makes more sense that it's the remnants of a collision from eons past.

Also, my godfather's mother is named Ida, and one of my brothers once had a cat that had many toes that they named Dactyl.

Earthquakes are Cool Until They Destroy Your House

Maybe a half-hour ago I was sitting on the couch when it started to rumble. It slowly, but noticeably, shook the couch for maybe thirty or forty seconds.

At first I thought it was kinda cool. It was exciting and almost massage like. As it kept on, though, the adrenaline started to flow, and a weird dread began to emanate from my gut. How exactly could I get about with this leg and crutches?

Our apartment building, a '20s era four-plex, is a solidly built cube, and we aren't nervous about its status during a quake. But tonight was the first time I could feel it in a few years.

It turns out it was a magnitude 4.4 quake centered in Yorba Linda, a city in Orange County. Here's a map I snatched from a local news website, and the star is where the epicenter is located.

I'm ready for the Big One.

Well...eh, I'll be ready for the Big One, in a couple of weeks when I can put weight on both my legs.

Happy Birthday Ryan!

My good friend Ryan celebrates his birthday today. I found an old photo the other week when an old roommate of both of ours was out visiting. The old picture was of Ryan and I, during out time in the dorms. It was night, we're wearing shorts, sandals and jackets, probably loaded. I'm thinking of sending it to Ryan.

Here's an old picture from Ryan's birthday in 2004. See how I screwed up the colors on my old PC trying to "fix" things? Dennis and Meagan round out the picture at Hudson's, which doesn't exist anymore (Moe's BBQ is in the location now).

In any case, Happy Birthday brother.

Usain Bolt Inspired Memories

I stayed up and watched the replay of the 100m finals although I known who'd won. The "Fastest Man Alive" remains Usain Bolt, king of tiny Jamaica, until maybe the 200m final, and we see if he can take that race as well, becoming the first man to win both the 100m and 200m at consecutive Olympics.

Watching the qualifying heats for the 100m sprint I saw American Justin Gatlin run his ass off, take his heat in commanding fashion. You didn't have to look close to see his muscular frame pumping for every iota of energy.

The next heat featured Usain in the first race I'd seen him in since 2008. He won it easily, looking like he was just out for a jog, his tall and slender shape easing along the track, needing less steps than everybody else. The differences between their style was striking, and two things crossed the brain: 1) talking with my old comrade at work in Manhattan, a Jamaican named Denton, about Bolt; and 2) an essay from David Foster Wallace about watching Federer is a religious experience.

For a person like me, watching a specimen like Usain Bolt is an experience; somebody just that much better than everyone else, knows he's that much better, and then acts like it. That part I think angers Americans, that he acts like he's the top sprinter and fastest man on Earth. I think he's earned it, but, knowing West Indian Islanders, and Jamaicans specifically, his whole act makes sense.

For a person like me, watching a specimen like Usain Bolt is an experience, but absolutely a different thing that what my friend Denton experienced. When the Beijing Olympics were going on, we'd chat about it. Well, I'd bring it up, and then he'd explain what running means to Jamaicans, how the biggest sporting event of the island of less than three-million is the annual high-school track championships. I wouldn't call how he spoke about Bolt as reverence, per se.

It was an implicit understanding about something in the world, something that was true and just a fact of life: payday is Friday, my Throggs Neck apartment is off the 6 train, and Usain Bolt is the most important and exciting Jamaican on the planet. To say that he was a sense of pride would colossally underestimate his impact on the Jamaican people.

When Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce became the first Jamaican woman to win the gold medal in the 100m in Beijing, the men and woman sweep complete, Jamaicans were soaring.

That they both defended their gold medals was mostly expected by Jamaicans, but not in the cynical way Yankee fans expect postseason births. It's the pure joy of expectation, the kind you can still get over-the-moon excited about, the kind that will still payoff emotionally. Like the little boy from St. Louis who "knew" last October that the Cardinals would win the World Series, even when Texas was down to a single strike to win the whole enchilada.

Usain Bolt to me reaffirms that humans have the capacity to be...to be...to be able to fulfill a certain high level of ability, like an artist or wordsmith that can still blow your mind.

Is that a what a religious experience is like?

Who Likes Mister Boffo?

I grew up with two of Joe Martin's comic strips in my paper, "Mr. Boffo" and "Willy 'n Ethel". I was thinking about them recently as I read two very good strips in my Long Beach local paper.

"Get Fuzzy" is always good, but the two that have (relatively) recently caught my attention are Tony Carillo's "F Minus" and the award winning "Cul de Sac" from Richard Thompson.

I first noticed "Cul de Sac" while living in Texas. It was a weird and twisted and starred kids, and then I noticed that one of the kids' friends was named Loris Slothrop, and I was hooked. Anyone who'd name a character "Slothrop" was going to be a fan of mine.

I noticed "F Minus" while living in Brooklyn, and it appeared in the Daily News. One strip remains one of my  all time favorites: a woman is in bed and she's telling her fella "Be careful if you go out this late honey; there's a strangler on the loose," while he's got a hat low on his brow, his jacket's collar turned up and he's holding a length of rope.

The off-beat style of "F Minus" had me thinking of "Mr. Boffo" and the comics I grew up with. I started looking up information in Joe Martin, and found that he still writes three daily strips and appears in many, many papers.

"Mr. Boffo" and "Will 'n Ethel" are the ones I know of, while the third is "Cats with Hands", a strip depicting a world where cats have opposable thumbs. There are some classic examples in the "Cats with Hands" archives.

I then heard about the strangest and rarest of the appearances of Mr. Boffo. Joe MArtin and his son Jay got together and produced a comic book adventure, half drawn by Joe and half drawn by Jay, an aspiring comic book illustrator. In it, Earl, the name usually associated with the main character in "Mr. Boffo", turns into a huge superhero while his little dog, Weederman, gets turned into a big heroic werewolf type creature.

I was able to locate, and procure a copy of this rarity. The seller must not have had any idea what he had. But with this weird thing, does anyone really have an idea?

Earl Boffo and Weederman go to hell. Well, not really...a thing from another dimension falls to earth and gives them special powers, and a marauding trio get their due from the newly minted super Boffo and his lovable dog-monster. It is really something else.

This is the kind of comic book I collect nowadays: weird, random shit that means something to me.

There are no ads inside, and the black and white artwork from Jay looks a little amateur, but it is still something that I'd never imagined.

Here's the back cover, with one of Joe Martin's oldest variant jokes, the "I think he's quitting", with people looking out onto another person making an 'F' in grass or snow.

One of my favorite "Mr. Boffo" strips from when I was a kid had a little banner in the upper corner that said "The Award for the Laziest Man in the World", and we see Earl sitting up in bed saying to himself "Didn't I do this yesterday?"

For those uninitiated, you might want to check out Joe Martin's site.

Big Beer, Part 2

I printed a long list of beers brought to market by the InBev/Anheuser-Busch monster in the last post, and I wanted to make sure that people know that there are plenty more beers that are released in Asia and Europe and South America that I didn't print.

With the majority of the beer market being taken by InBev and Coors-Miller, another two forms of Big Beer are around that I'm going to highlight here.

Pabst Brewing is the first. Pabst Brewing Company was founded in 1844 in Milwaukee, but was renamed Pabst in 1889. At one point it was the largest brewer in America and sold the most beer out of everyone. The current namesake, Pabst Blue Ribbon, resurrected by hipsters calling it PBR, is named such because of the blue ribbons the company tied around the necks of the bottles, a practice that lasted from 1882 to 1916. Originally it was called Best Select, and then Pabst Select.

Now Pabst Brewing Company is a holding company for old brands of beer, many coming from Milwaukee. It's almost like the French company that own the rights to the name Atari and its logo (which, by the way, is a very cool logo). PBC locally sources the beer titles they hold. They do not brew beer; they hire breweries to brew it.

When I saw a list of the brands the hold, I was surprised: it read like a list of the beers we were able to get at the local supermarket in Bed-Stuy in 12-pack form. All of those beers were brewed in Saranac, NY, an upstate brewery town that likely makes most of the North Atalantic's slate of PBC beers.

Here's the list: (Some of the beers or brewed by Miller in some spots...)

Pabst Blue Ribbon
Schaefer
Schlitz
Jacob Best (named for the original founder of the 188 brewery that became Pabst)
Old Milwaukee
Stroh's
Old Style
Olympia Genuine Draft
Ranier
St. Ides
Colt 45
National Bohemian
Lone Star
Ballantine Ale

Schaefer, Schlitz, Old Milwaukee, and Ballantine were all pretty much available to us in the Stuy. So were St. Ides and Colt 45, of course. Schaefer, Schlitz, and Old Milwaukee were the only ones ever to be seen in 12-pack form that weren't one of the A-B/Coors/Miller beers. And while we lived in Texas, sometimes the allure of the five-dollar sixer of tall-boys from "The National Beer of Texas" was too strong, so I've had my share of Lone Star.

So that's Pabst, and my second example of Big Beer. Likely it's beer being brewed in an Anhueser-Busch style, or, in a large scale setting. At least there's enough business to keep breweries open in places like Saranac and Rochester and San Antonio.

But, that's also kind of how Anheuser-Busch works, outsourcing their production to other "local" plants.

I guess that's a mixed bag.

So, this whole little discussion I was inspired to write because I drank a beer. Corrie had picked up two six-packs of bottles, both from a company called Wild Range, one IPA and one Amber Ale. The bottles had a picture of a howling wolf, but they used different color schemes. I was holding the IPA with the gray color scheme. It was cold and covered in condensation. I took a sip.

Whoa! Did Corrie slip me a boiler-maker? My next mouthful made it more clear.

Remember the last time you had Scotch? Didn't you think that that warm gasoline awesomeness would be so much better if it were cold and carbonated and 6.5% percent instead of 50%? That's the best way I could describe that "IPA": it was like carbonated Scotch. I'm not the biggest fan.

Corrie thought it was sweet and weird. The Amber Ale was cold and plain, and to me didn't taste like much of anything. We decided from then on out to pull out our pint glasses and split one of each beer between the two and mix them. It made it mostly palatable.

Has anyone heard of a beer called Steel Kettle Whistle? I found a twelve pack of cans at a Fresh & Easy grocery store marked at $5.99. I had never heard of it, and I was sure it wasn't very good, but the price was right to give it a go. When I went up to buy it, the machine told me it was actually only $4.99. It was like it knew.

It was pale and had less flavor than even Lone Star, but wasn't bad in any real sense. You get what you pay for.

I started to do some research. I still haven't found the location of the brewery, but it's being distributed by something called World Brews. Headquartered in Novato, the generically named World Brews is a subsidiary of Winery Exchange. Winery Exchange, according to their website is a wholesaler who supplies stores with brands. They have wine, liquors, and beers. Currently some of their beers can be found in Fresh & Easy grocery stores.

Steel Kettle Whistle can be found only in Fresh & Easy. Wild Range, my Scotch bottle, is another one of the Winery Exchange beers.

This is another face of Big Beer, my third example. They try to make it seem like they find small breweries and get them wholesaled to stores (like Fresh &Easy), and that may prove to be the case, which seems like it would be the best use of Big Beer power. If it's true, of course. I'm not totally convinced it's not like the PBC-style Big Beer from earlier.

Here's a link to the beers available from the shadowy World Brews, it's just too much to write here. The link has all variations on their 26 brands, but since you'd need to go to specialty stores in the random states to even find them, it seemed less important than the long list of InBev beers from the first post.

This makes me want a nice, big beer. As a relative once said, describing us all and using the first person, "I'm a vehry thearsty man."

Big Beer, Part 1

I drank a beer the other day that inspired this post, rather, two posts, but really it had been cooking for a while.

I'm a fan of beer. I love beer, maybe not as much as I love coffee, but it's close. I've even made my own beer, which is so microbrewery that it makes my friend Ryan look like a legit company.

One thing I basically avoid is Budweiser, as any craft-beer fan/snob willingly does. I did have some Budweis, from Budvar in the Czech Republic, while visiting Prague, and it was good. They have an agreement with Anheuser-Busch that their Budweis and American Budweiser won't appear in the same country. That stable of countries is shrinking for the brewery from Budweis, I'm sure. It used to be continental Europe had no Anheuser-Busch, but I think they're slowly letting it in. It probably has something to do with the Belgium-Brazilian conglomerate InBev's acquisition of Anheuser-Busch a few year's back.

So...off topic for a second...

The alcohol market in America is massive, and the industry for beer is around $95 billion.

Anheuser-Busch has pretty much always had the largest market share, but they've been on a splurge since the '60s, and really going crazy in the last decade. They've grown from 16% in the mid-sixties to just under 50% nowadays.

They have almost half of an almost hundred-billion dollar market. They're one of the main suppliers of advertising cash. One person I remember hearing during a documentary said that it makes sense that they have to spend that much money--they have to convince people to drink beer as horrible as they make.

If you look in the beer aisle of your local supermarket you'll see huge swaths of Bud, Bud Light, and many other brands from the monster.

While A-B was out gobbling up market-share, American beer-lovers developed their tastes and began looking for other options. The fastest growing section of the alcohol market is microbrewery and craft beer. It's getting so crazy that A-B went bought up popular local brands (like Rolling Rock) and filled the bottles with their own beer, and then started a series of craft-beer-like brands that do their bit to make you think they're truly microbrews. One way to tell, though, is that they're far cheaper than other micros.

Watching an interview with the founder of Dogfish Head Brewery discuss how they're making that particular batch--the passion obvious as he stands above a glass chamber filled with hops and the beer is slowly filtered over and out the bottom--is fun and refreshing. Now, contrast that giddyness to the CEO of A-B, a robotic looking weirdo talking in monotone about their "master brewers concocting specialty brews, you know, adding a little of this, a little of that," and you get the creeps. You know they're in their with their esters trying to make a chemically strange malt beverage.

A-B has also sued Dogfish Head for their use of the word "Punkin'" in one of their seasonal ales. A-B says it's too general. This is a case that Dogfish Head will likely win, but they'll spend buckets of cash on lawyers and court fees. Another aspect of how the "chiller effect" works, where major companies sue for reasons that are lost causes, just to tie little folks up in court until they go bankrupt.

InBev is obviously threatened by consumer's desire for better beer, and is looking to quash the little brewery.

Support your local or microbreweries!

There are a few things you can do, as intrepid beer drinkers, or non-drinkers who like to mess up supermarket manager's days:

1) Ask your supermarket to place the microbrews in a better spot on their shelf (unless that's not a problem)(it usually is);
2) If you have lots of time, you can demand from your congresspeople an end to the current three-tiered system of brewery/distributor/marketplace. This system screws everybody who's not InBev/A-B or Coors/Miller (in an effort to combat A-B, Coors and Miller merged);
3) Use your purchasing power to simply not support InBev or A-B.

That's the number one thing you can do without any real effort.

Here's a list of beers to avoid, and it is surprisingly long:

InBev had a long history in Europe, but since their acquisition, they became part of the problem.

Obviously, anything with Budweiser in the name (Bud, Bud Light, Bud Ice, etc)
Bass
Beck's
Boddingtons
Bohemia
Brahma
Busch
Franziskaner
Goose Island
Green Valley (fake microbrew)
Hoegaarden
King Cobra
Kona
Labatt
Land Shark
Leffe
Lowenbrau
Michelob
Natural Ice, Light
Old Dominion
Rolling Rock
Schooner
Shock Top
Spaten
St. Pauli
Stella Artois
Tequiza
Ziegen Bock (big in Texas)

And also, you can avoid the beers that they have a minority ownership in as well:

Modelo
Red Hook
Widmer Brothers

That list has a lot of beers I used to drink, but there's still lots of beers out there. Next time you're in the supermarket check out how much shelf real estate goes to Anheuser-Busch/InBev. Makes you think.

Also, I didn't get to the part where I talk about the beer I had the other day.