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Just in case you missed it

By: Billy BeerSlugger

Will Ferrell was back on SNL a week or so ago and they did another Celebrity Jeopardy which is absolutely hilarious.  Even Norm McDonald makes a cameo as Burt Reynolds.  Easily one of the best series of sketches in Saturday Night Live History and maybe one that will never be done again.  This sketch is almost 10 minutes so if you’re watching this at work I salute you for sticking it to the man for 1/6 of an hour.

Oh and by the way, this is from Hulu. If you have not yet checked it out I suggest you do so. It will be as big or bigger than YouTube in the coming years. Go ahead and quote me.  I was saying this even before they were doing TV commercials for it with Alec Baldwin and Dennis Leary.

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Sierra Nevada Summerfest

sierraBy: Luan Zuccarello

One word – Delicious! I want to start out by saying that I celebrate Sierra’s whole catalogue of beers, and I would even put the Pale Ale in my top 3 of all time. The Summerfest fits the traditional summer beer perfectly with its clean refreshing taste, and it finishes with the typical Sierra Nevada “hoppiness” at the end. If hoppy beers are not your thing, ala Billy Beerslugger, you should stay away. As my one Uncle always says, “It’s like chewing on Hops”.

A little background about the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company – It was established in 1980 by two homebrewers. The first batch of Sierra was brewed right out of their own kitchen! They joined a brewer of the month club to taste home-brews much like their own, and quickly learned what a great product they produced. Sierra Nevada currently produces around 700,000 barrels a year and is a steadfast on BeerAdvocates.com Top 25 list.

From the Website:

alcohol content 5.0% by volume yeast Bottom-fermenting Lager Yeast
beginning gravity 11.8 Plato bittering hops Perle & Saaz
ending gravity 2.8 Plato finishing hops Saaz
bitterness units 32 malts Two-row Pale & Munich


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Creep v. Romantic – Life is just not fair.

By: F.X. Galvin

There is a fine line from being a stalker creep to being a cute, hopeless, romantic. Everyone knows this outside of the exception, the real creeper who calls non-stop, will not take no for an answer, is talking marriage after two weeks, and is writing you Irish country songs with your name in the lyrics (true story, really). Well anyway, after having this conversation about a personal issue with a couple of my attractive female friends this is what I came up with. . . It is really all about your looks, which is just not fair.

I might as well give you the background story. Last Saturday night I was at a family party at a restaurant with about 25 people. Throughout the night a server/waitress (pick your poison) caught my eye. A cute girl about 5’2, beautiful black hair, slender build, with light eyes and light skin. Anyone who knows me and my taste in women knows that I have a soft spot for Irish girls with light eyes and light skin. Anyway, throughout the night, I had several engaging conversations with the server, well, as engaging as you can get with a room full of 25 nosy relatives. Our final conversations lasted about 10 minutes when we discussed several things, mostly the fact that we share the same alma mater. Anyway, I could not find the opportune time to get her number. I was not throwing it out there in front of my family. The risk of embarrassment was much too great. I would never live it down from my younger cousins and sisters if I got “Sorry, I have a boyfriend.” Also, by that time of the night I could not get her alone anywhere in the restaurant because all of the servers were conversing, finishing up their side work.

So. . . that leaves me with a dilemma, How do I get this girl’s number? Usually, I would not care and would let this girl go but something about the combination of Server Chick’s looks and personality wants me to get to know her. That led to this conversation and the topic of this article. How can I attempt to get this girl’s number without looking like a creeper. This could go wrong on so many levels. 1) She could tell me I’m a creep; 2) She could tell everyone she knows I’m a creep, which might eventually get back to me or someone I know; 3) She could have a boyfriend that tries to beat my ass or embarrasses me. (I could be wrong but I usually have a good gauge if a girl has a boyfriend but its not perfect. It is comparable to some girls having gaydar, I am pretty good at boyfriend-dar or something like that.)

Well anyway, the plan I came up with goes like this. Buy a thank you card, write her some witty, funny, cute note, and insert my number telling her to call or text me. I have to throw in text because I do not want her to think I am completely spineless and giving the option of her shooting me her number, allowing me to call her back. I weighed several options and this seemed the best. I ran it by two of my good girl friends Mandy, and the Artist Formerly Known as HR chick, now known as Peaches. Mandy and Peaches both approved and said if I was right and the girl had interest, it may be my best bet at this juncture. I made a point to say “Are you sure I don’t look like a creeper?”

That’s when Peaches gave me a great analogy. She said “no, you don’t look like John Goodman.” This went over my head and I asked her to explain. She said “look buddy, do you think if John Cusak’s character in “Say Anything” was not good looking it would not have been creepy instead of cute when he showed up at “Ione Sky’s” house in the middle of the night blasting a boombox.” Good point right. She went on further “Don’t you think if John Goodman was the John with the boombox, the cops would have been there in less than five minutes tackling his ass.” Wow, amazing you hit this one on the head.

I thought about this notion and decided that the difference between being creepy and romantic is not fair, it really comes down to looks. Essentially, since I’m not ugly so I may be able to get away with the thank you move, but if I was obese or had some type of deformity, which made me look like “Shrek,” I would be fucked. Sometimes life is not fair, which is bullshit.

The older I get the more I realize why some people do internet dating. I use to bash people who participated and have ripped on several of my friends who have done it but I get it. Some people just do not want to put up with this shit anymore. They just want to act the way they want without being characterized. Obviously, if you have read some of my previous posts I am not one of those people and rather do things the fun, awkward way. It is sick but I actually enjoy it, which I guess puts me in a minority.

I guess this also works the same way for women. As a guy, reluctantly I have to admit, I give better looking girls more leeway than ugly or mediocre girls. If I am dating a hot girl I let her get away with more, annoy me more, so on and so forth. Once a mediocre girl with a good personality gives me one too many phone calls, gets clingy, or forgets checkout time from my place on Sundays is 11am, she gets automatically 86’d from my Blackberry.

This just really is not fair on either side and I really do not fore see an answer to this problem. I wish I had a better solution but I don’t. I’ll write a follow-up article on the results of Server Chick.

To Be Continued. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Corona – You need the Lime

600px-corona-6packBy: Billy BeerSlugger

I kind of laugh when I see people go for a case of Corona and pick up a bunch of limes.  These people usually don’t know why they put the lime in the beer, they just do it.  Welcome to Corona 101:

So why do you put the Lime in Corona? Well there’s a bunch of theories but we’ll discuss the most accepted one.

Corona is traditionally drunk with  either a lemon or lime because before the the advent of refrigerated trucks the beer would get skunky and rancid on the trip from Mexico to the U.S.  Putting a little citric acid (lime/lemon juice) in the beer not only masked the taste of this skunked beer it also killed some of the bacteria that had grown in the bottle.

The clear bottle only compounds this problem because sunlight or light from fluorescent bulbs such as those used in refrigerated display cases significantly damages the taste of beer.  The essential hop oils spoil from exposure to UV light.  Brown bottles mitigate sun damage to beer.

So think about that when you go to have your next Corona and Lime.  You may just be drinking a skunky beer.

I’ll shift my attention to the new Bud Lite Lime.  In the commercial it states that it is enhanced with 100% Natural Lime Flavor.  If it was 100% natural why wouldn’t they just say 100% natural lime juice and not flavor? Budweiser is intentionally trying to mislead the beer drinking public with this statement.  Obviously there is some sort of processing involved there. In this case natural does not mean organic.  High Fructose Corn Syrup is considered natural though you wouldn’t really think of it as natural as real sugar.  Just like 100% natural lime flavor is not 100% natural lime juice.

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The Jewish Nationality

starBy: Billy BeerSlugger

I was chatting up a young lady Thursday night and things are going pretty well.  We’re doing the regular introductory questions, “Where are you from?”, “Where do you live?”, “What college did you go to?”.  Then things get a litttle interesting. I noticed she kind of had an olive colored skin and asked what was her heritage was.  She replied, “Jewish”.

First of all if someone asked me where my ancestors originally hail from I’m going to say I’m Irish/Welsh.  How I’m not going to answer the question is “Oh I’m Catholic” because that’s my religion (or at least that’s how I was raised).   I was running out of witty things to talk about and decided to settle on this topic for awhile, respectfully of course.

I tried explaining to her why i thought Jewish was not a nationality.  You can’t be from Jew because it doesn’t exist.  If I’m wrong please point it out to me on a map.  I would have accepted German Jew, Italian Jew,  Indian Jew, Spanish Jew, Egyptian Jew, African Jew or maybe Isreali.  Why do you have to bring the religion into it though?  I asked her if she knew which part of the world her Jewish family came from but she didn’t know, she just knew she was Jewish.

Not that it’s terribly important to me to know where this girls family originated because it’s not, if I were her though it’s just something I would want to know for my own edification.  I’m just bringing this stuff up with her because I have nothing better to talk to her about.  To me a blow job is a blow job and it does not have a nationality, and that’s the real goal here.  Though from what I’ve heard from some former co-workers I was barking up the wrong tree hoping to get a BJ from a Jewish girl.  They tell me you’d be hard pressed to find a Jewish girl that will put non-kosher cock in her mouth.  In this instance, they were right.

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Who will be the Sixers Color Commentator in 2009-2010?

Sports with Bob McFlurry

In case you didn’t know Bob Salmi is out as the color commentator fo rhe 76ers after only one season.  I’ve got nothing against Bob Salmi, he’s great on Sixers Post Game Live but just didn’t mesh as well as the Sixers management had hoped.  Previous to the 2008-2009 season Steve Mix’s contract was not renewed and he was subsequently replaced by Salmi.

I’m here making an impassioned plee to please get Steve Mix back in front of a microphone and teaming with Zumoff.  Zumoff is at his best when paired with Mix.  There was a noticable lack of cohesion this year and bringing back Mix would solve that problem immediately.  They really effortlessly play off of each other and you can genuinely tell they like and respect each other.

I know Mix can be somewhat critical of the Sixers and officiating sometimes but you must take the good wiht the bad.  I’m fine with him bashing the Sixer s a little, I do it all the time when I’m watching them.  If they are playing sloppy or a player is continuing to make dumb plays mix calls them out on it.  Maybe not what the Sixers want but I like to hear an honest voice in the broadcast booth.

It would be as dumb as signing Sam Dalembert to a contract extension if they did not regain Mix as their voice of reason in the booth.

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McDonald’s Commercials

By: Billy BeerSlugger

What’s up with McDonald’s commercials getting geared increasingly and increasingly more toward the minorities over the last 10 years or so.  When I was i kid you had Ronald McDonald trying to keep the Hamburgalar (Rabble Rabble) from stealing all the food or Jordan and Bird throwing up unmakable shots or it was all about what the new toy was  in the Happy Meal.  McDonald’s was marketed towards kids who in turn bugged their parents to buy them McDonalds.

Now, i guess in a major swing of target audiences, McDonald’s it seems is seeking to lure in the African American community especially (which in turn brings the white kids as well since they want to be black).  Even their current slogan, “I’m lovin’ it” leaves off the g in loving to evoke a more ethnic tone.

Some of the commercials are just taking on very stereotypical racist themes like the one with the R&B singer, his girlfriend and the 10 piece fired chicken nuggets she won’t share, “Girl ya got a 10 piece please don’t be stingy”.  It’s got all the elements there, black people, fried chicken and R&B.  Though McDonald’s must run these ad’s through dozens of focus groups to make sure it’s too funny and disarming for you to realize.

Then you have the little kid doing the Cha Cha Slide at the dinner table.  Parents are dressed well, like the Huxtibles and the kid comes in wearing 80’s rap fashions and dancing etc.  Eventually his gets his dad into it.  If I came to the dinner table with a boom box my dad would have slapped me so hard in the back of the head even my little brother would have felt sorry for me. And what’s up with those apple bites? Any apple I’ve ever seen that gets sliced eventually the flesh turns brown even if you put them in a bag. Another ecological marvel engineered by those kooky scientists at Hamburger University.  Is Ronald McDonald shitting out Magic Apples that don’t go bad?

Seriously though, I would have liked to been in the room when McDonald’s executives decided, “Yea were going to target the African American community with our ad’s now and leave the kids alone.  Demographics show we can increase profits in urban areas by……”  I would also like to see some data in terms of Race consumption of McDonald’s from when they shifted the advertising until now.  I bet there’s huge increases year by year.

Then last year during the Olympics i see a commercial for the Southern Style Chicken Biscuit.  The commercial has a bunch of athletic people of many races (if you notice some have British accents so you know the product must be good).  Basically McDonald’s is telling you if you eat a fried chicken biscuit in the morning you can be an Olympic athlete too.  That’s what Olympians eat.

All in all if I were an African American I’d be pissed in so many ways because in essence what the shift in focus of McDonald’s advertising is telling me is that they think black people are more gullible than children. Why would they have changed their advertising strategy?  Does McDonald’s make more money off of minorities than it ever could have off of children and on top of that not have to bribe them with a happy meal toy?

That’s just how I see it…..

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Drunk game of the week – Dizzy Bat

By: F.X. Galvin

What is Dizzy Bat? First, you cut out the bottom of a wiffle ball bat. (the handle portion, not the head portion.) That along with a wiffle ball and beer are the only props you need to play this game. Once your equipment is modified you essentially only need two people to play dizzy bat even though the more people who play the better. The person who wants to do the actual dizzy bat gets the wiffle ball bat and dumps one beer into the bat. Next, he puts the head of the bat on the ground and puts his forehead on the other end of the bat. Then, he spins two times in a circle, then proceeds to chug the beer from the bat. After chugging is complete, he again spins two more times in the abovementioned fashion. Finally, the batter attempts to regain balance and the other participant pitches a wiffle ball to the batter in which he attempts to hit. As you can imagine it is very rare for the batter ever to hit the ball.

Where does this game take place? Dizzy Bat is popular for tailgating sporting events and also at barbeques. It is obviously an outdoor game, so it can only be played at limited locations in optimal weather conditions. If high winds are in the forecast you essentially will never hit the ball. Really though, the point is not really to hit the ball, it is to chug a beer out of a wiffle ball bat and to spin without killing yourself.

A major downfall to this game is that you are basically chugging a ton of head from a light beer out of a dirty ass wiffle ball bat. After spinning twice with the beer in the bat a great deal of beer will turn into head which makes it much more difficult to chug. I have seen Dizzy Bat without the initial spins and it begin with the chugging but what fun is that. You might as well do it right if you are going to do it at all. I once had a coach who constantly bitched during conditioning when we would try to cut corners, “Don’t cheat, you’re only cheating yourself.” I agree with that message in this instance. If you are going to do a Dizzy Bat, do not cheat, you might as well go all the way and do all the spins.

Anyway, of course I have a quick story to go with this post. Last Tuesday I went to the Phillies game. The game happened to be a dollar dog night. For those who do not know, dollar dog nights are a mecca for underage college students and high school kids. Well anyway, I arrived at the game around 5:30pm right after work. The people I was meeting for the game had a greater distance to come and did not get to the game until after 6:00pm. While I was waiting, I met up with my little sister, Wine-in-a-boxslugger. My sister is 20 and she had just gotten home from college. She met up with approximately 25 of her underage friends from high school around 3:00pm, who also had recently gotten home from college. To my surprise, she gave me a bud light. I was surprised because I expected some form of Beast or at best, Nattie Light. As I cracked the beer, I noticed some of the college kids were playing Dizzy Bat.

At this point a girl who was approximately 5′ and about 105 lbs was starting to do a dizzy bat. She chugged the beer like a champ, then things went all downhill. She attempted to spin two times after chugging, but during the second rotation, the bat was about 16 inches off the ground. After she attempted the second spin she never regained balance. The young dizzy batter in a three point stance proceeded to run head first into a newer, red mustang. Hilarious, she laid a hit on that mustang about as hard as Sheldon Brown hit Reggie Bush in the 2007 NFC Divisional Playoff. Stupid bitch speared a car but hit it head on. Amazingly, she popped right back up like nothing was wrong and grabbed another beer amid some laughter. Even funnier, no one really ridiculed her for taking a face plant into a mustang which I find even more amazing. So this Dizzy Bat attempt gets and F for effort but an A for making me laugh. Over a week later I’m still thinking of this girl taking on a mustang one-on-one and laughing out loud. Her Dad would be proud.

P.S. – I could swear that this girl is Wine-in-the-boxslugger’s best friend. She says she doesn’t even know her and that she was a grade younger than her. How dare I assume they could possibly be friends. Come on admit it, you know you are hanging with her tonight.

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The 5 Worst College Social Scenes in the Philadelphia area: #2

By: F.X. Galvin

Swarthmore College – Where the Freaks Come Out at Night

Sorry for the delay in writing this article. I had an insanely busy week and a half and just did not have the time. The free time I had last week, I got bombed. Sometimes, writing for beerslugger.com has to take a back seat to actually slugging beers.

Well anyway the #2 worst school to party at in the Philadelphia area is Swarthmore College. This place is an absolute freak show. In my introductory article, I made a point to rip on the French painter look that so many Drexel males sport. Swarthmore has a whole school of these wacks. Guys dress like they have not showered in six days, have ridiculous beards, and wear disgusting clothes. They want to show the world who they are, that they are the societal norm, and want to tell you all about it. Girls at Swarthmore are weird as shit, who, majority of the time, dress like hippies with massive khaki pants to match their greasy hair. My theory is that they are already ugly and by rocking this look they can give the excuse “they are who they are and this is how they like to look.” Ok whatever, there are hot hippies. . . remember Jenny from “Forrest Gump?”. . . Smoking hot.

Alright, I get it. It is another one of those trendy Liberal Arts colleges like Haverford that boast about how intellectually superior it is compared to the rest of the minions that reside in the United States. This campus reminds me of the movie “PCU,” minus the protests. A bunch of over-opinionated circus freaks who want to put their stamp on life while looking like a homeless person who sleeps under the overpass on 6th and Callowhill Streets.

Swarthmore College usually will make national headlines for some academic reason but it did make news in the late 1990s for an athletic story. The school lost a record, 28 straight football games. The Swarthmore Garnet Tide is actually ranked as the 6th worst football team in United States history by ESPN. In 1999, Swarthmore broke the three year streak against Oberlin College, who is ranked as the 5th worst college by ESPN. This game was dubbed “The game someone had to win.” Classic, what losers…Well anyway, after 122 years, Swarthmore’s football team was disbanded in 2000, the year after its historic win, as the school cited lowering admission standards to let in football players as the reason. Really, this school could use 50 or so football players to whip the French painters asses until they shaved their beards. Honestly, the football team of 50 or so people would only make up a little more than 3% of its student body of approximately 1,500. Every other school in America lowers it standards for athletes, (especially football players) why should Swarthmore act out? Because the school is above you or so it thinks. What a bunch of assholes. Also, the team sucked, how much lower was it dropping the admission standards? Something smells if you ask me. . . I think there is a conspiracy afoot.What does this have to do about Swarthmore’s social scene? Not that much really, I am just trying to make a point.  When a school disbands the catalyst to parties, a football team, it obviously is on a different planet.

Ok, to get to the partying. . . Well, its on-campus parties are lame unless you want to sip scotch whisky, smoke a bone, and read poetry of your favorite literary genre. It is pointless to name authors because every one of the opinionated freaks has his own favorite author and genre and will give you a hundred reasons why. I know I am not giving a fair shake to all the students at Swarthmore. I know some students with some sense of reality do attempt to throw small parties in their dorms and apartments. For those students I give them credit for making the best of a terrible situation. Find the few people you like, get wasted, and screw among the group. In the end, you will eventually leave the place with an excellent education and you can go on to a cool grad or professional school and live like a real college student.

What distinguishes this school from Haverford, Penn, Drexel, and the Universities of Arts and Sciences is the lack of off-campus places to hang out. Swarthmore itself is dry. Yes, you heard me, the whole town is dry. There is nowhere to go to drink or even buy a case of beer. Also, Swarthmore is located in Delaware County, not within 20 minutes of any real social hub. The Main Line, which has a nightlife I have already ripped, is more than 20 minutes away. Center City Philadelphia is about 30 minutes away. Conshohocken and King of Prussia are also about 25 minutes from Swarthmore. I guess the Swarthmore students could frequent the same establishments as Widener students but I just cannot see it. I cannot picture a Swarthmore hippie rocking Dewar’s on the rocks at a Mac Dade Boulevard bar in Delaware County jamming to top 40 music or classic rock. I cannot picture a French Painter grinding up his girl who is in desperate need of shampoo and makeup at Bootleggers, listening to “Lima Bean Riot” cover “Fall Out Boy.” Sorry, if I am wrong, by all means comment. (The Haverford girls did but failed to get the point. I will explain further in a follow up article.)

Really, you could argue that no one actually goes to Swarthmore to party, students go there to be a hippie intellect. Well, even though I gave Penn a pass for essentially the same reason, it is an Ivy League institution, is located in Philadelphia, and is a cab ride away to any hot spot in the city. Swarthmore is just a freak show with no outs. No on-campus parties, no off-campus bashes, and not a decent bar within twenty minutes. After reading this, you are probably wondering what school could be worse than this place.

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The Cost of Getting Drunk

helmet-decal-us-medicBy: Bill BeerSlugger

There is apparently a Bill floating around in congress that will increase taxes on Beer, Wine and Liquor.  Supposedly the tax will increase 48 cents a six-pack, 49 cents per bottle of wine and hard liquor would see an increase of 40 cents per fifth.

This is all being proposed to pay for expaning health coverage for 50 million uninsured Americans.  The cost of this would be in the neighborhood of 1.5 trillion dollars over the next 10 years, all of which could never be paid with just an increase in beer and liquor tax.

The proposed tax increases are on lifestyle choices that contribute to rising medical costs and has been seen elsewhere in cigarette tax increases.  The “Sin Tax” as my grandmother called it.  There may also be new taxes levyed on Soda and other sugary drinks as they are linked to obesity. Though no new taxes are proposed for diet drinks because Aspartame and other Artificial Sweeteners never caused cancer in lab rats or anything, right?

I get it that you want to tax unhealthy behaviors.  Tobacco and Alcohol can cause health problems and thus can cause insurance rates to rise etc. There are other factors that Alcohol brings to the table like Drinking & Driving Accidents/Deaths.  One study I read cited that an increase in the alcohol tax would curb college binge drinking and trips to the emergency room for Alcohol poisoning and alcohol related injuries.  The main reason being higher alcohol prices and the same budget would mean less alcohol to go around.  I get that a little bit as well.

What I don’t get is why they have to tax Alcohol to pay for the uninsured.  Why not tax alcohol and put it towards lowering premiums for the insured who are already paying a portion of their health care premium to care for the uninsured.

On top of the Alcohol and Soda tax, lawmakers are also proposing a tax on healthcare which is provided by employers. Currently about 164 million people get their insurance through work and the money spent on insurance premiums is deducted from their taxable income.

So not only is a portion of my insurance premium already going to pay for the uninsured, they are also going to tax the money I pay for the insurance premium and increase taxes on the beer I drink to forget about how high my fucking taxes are, to pay for the uninsured.

Not to get into the politics of the Health Care, but yes I want certain groups in America to have access to health care.  At the very least I believe every child until the day they graduate high school should have free health care provided they don’t drop out.  And yes people with disabilities absolutely should have their health care covered, within reason.

However, the cost of getting these 50 some million uninsured Americans falls on the people who have done things right.   The situation is akin to having your dog shit on the carpet and then telling him “Good Boy” and giving him a treat.  For whatever reason, these 50 million people don’t have health insurance, I bet a good portion of them have the money coming in to pay for insurance but  choose to spend it on other things like booze, cigarettes and lottery tickets to name a few.

There are obviously family’s that are trying to do the right thing but just can’t make ends meet.  I feel for them, I really do and I’m sure there’s ways we can help them.  I just don’t think that giving everyone healthcare at the expense of the already overburdened middle class is the way to do it and certainly not by increasing the cost of a case of beer by $2.

I could be wrong though….