Signs of the Apocalypse

Upon arrival at work, I tend to scan a few websites for the day's headlines. I went over to washingtonpost.com and found this gem:

Bartender, Pour Me Another Cup Perhaps Inevitably: Caffeinated Beer

My first thought: End of civilization, coming of cokeihol-swilling Antichrist, etc... I like how that's mentioned within the 2nd paragraph of the story.

Obviously, this is a monumental cultural milestone and it raises important questions that we as a society must answer. For instance: Is adding America's favorite stimulant to America's favorite alcoholic beverage the greatest scientific breakthrough of the 21st century? Or the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it? Or what?

The thing that annoys me about this garbage is that it's all marketing based. It's like the people at Pizza Hut who keep trying to make innovative pizzas. "No thank you, I don't need the pizza box to be edible, nor filled with extra cheese."

The beer is called B{+E} -- with the E raised up, like an exponent in math, which is why the name is pronounced "B to the E." (The B stands for Budweiser. The E stands for extra.) Sold in 10-ounce cans, B{+E} contains 54 milligrams of caffeine -- about half the dose found in an average cup of coffee. B{+E} also contains ginseng, the fabled herb, and guarana, an Amazonian berry frequently found in Brazilian soft drinks. "It's beer with something extra," says Dawn Roepke, Anheuser-Busch's brand manager for new products. "It's new, it's innovative, it's different."

As with Michelob Ultra, anyone purchasing 'B to the E' should be immediately flogged. A further question is taste. I like heavy lagers, or more appropriately, I like to drink Beer that tastes like Beer. Of course others don't agree with me.

"It has an aroma of blackberry and a little bit of cherry, which is unexpected," says Nathaniel Davis, the brew master who created B{+E}. "It has typical beer flavors, like hops and malt, and it finishes with what we're calling the wow factor." What's the wow factor? "That bright, slightly sweet tart finish," he says. "People who drink it, their eyes light up and they say 'Wow!,' among other things."

Having a brewmaster speaking about things like the 'wow factor'. Heresy. Burnings and impalings should ensue. Beer is sacred, and I suppose I am a fundamentalist. I wonder if this so called 'brewmaster' has ever been to the beer Vatican in Pilsen? If he's tasted the golden brew that's fresher than a mountain stream, with a thick brown head that has the earthy smell of a farmer's field on an autumn evening? Is there no time to remember the past?

Roepke says she's not worried about this. "We at Anheuser-Busch encourage our adult consumers to use all our products in moderation," she says. "We market B{+E} to today's contemporary adults, and they've told us that they want something to help them keep up with their fast-paced and highly social lifestyle. If they stay out late having fun with their friends and do it responsibly, we'll be very happy."

And so it is. Check out the article, which I would nominate for a Pulitzer prize. Is Bob Woodward involved anywhere? This is scandalous, and is surely a sign that Satan will soon unleash hell on earth. For this I blame yuppies that won't take the time to appreciate a good beer. Bastards.

Saturday Update

Hey folks. My good friend Paul Beck clued me into this news story, which may be the greatest of all time: "Man peed way out of avalanche A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it. Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains. He told them that after the avalanche, he had opened his car window and tried to dig his way out. But as he dug with his hands, he realised the snow would fill his car before he managed to break through. He had 60 half-litre bottles of beer in his car as he was going on holiday, and after cracking one open to think about the problem he realised he could urinate on the snow to melt it, local media reported. He said: "I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I'm glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there." Parts of Europe have this week been hit by the heaviest snowfalls since 1941, with some places registering more than ten feet of snow in 24 hours." Wow.

Seth MacFarlane

As Family Guy will soon be entering its long awaited fourth season, check out this interview with the show's creator. I really like his reaction towards his near-death experience (he was booked on one of the 9/11 planes) "O: You didn't resolve to make the most of every moment? SM: No, no. If anything, I started drinking more."

Population Decline

An interesting link about depopulation in Europe. Here is another article about falling population in the world. I blame McDonalds. People all over the world are getting fat like americans. Once you're fat and unhealthy, your sex drive decreases. And when all the chicks are fat you're not gonna wanna get it on with them. Discuss.

Nick's Travel Tip #18

For a good photo of yourself next to something cool, find a Japanese guy to take the picture. The Japanese have several advantages: 1) They are everywhere. 2) They are easily identified by their large floppy hats. 3) They have amazing camera skills. 4) They won't run off with your camera, because theirs is much, much better than yours.

The Internet Pub

It's cool 'cause it's less pretentious than the common internet cafe. the problem is that i have to keep packing up my computer to go to the bathroom and, yes, i am drinking czech Budweiser. and it is about 75 cents for half a liter.

Snowstorm

It's snowing like crazy outside. As a Texan, I vacillate between finding this frightening and exciting. On one hand, it turns the city a rather pretty shade for a bit, covering up the nasty greyness of post-communist Eastern Europe. On the other hand, trying to get from a party in Dejvice to my home in Zizkov by night tram, with a stop for a Gyro, in the middle of a snowstorm really really sucks. I woke up on Sunday afternoon and my Economist, which lives in the front pocket of my coat, was all stiff and stuck together due to the insidious storm. Luckily it’s still readable, because if not I’d be stuck on the Metro every morning with nothing to look at but my fellow weirdos.

Fridaze

The girlfriend is at her flat today, home sick with a cough. This apparently isn't abuse of the government's generous illness benefits - she claims to be incapacitated. I hope this doesn't interfere with her promise to cook me dinner. My new years resolutions are resounding failures: I swear too much, drink too much, and hang around too many pubs. I guess i'll have to get addicted to crack before I can be born-again and become the 55th President of the United States. My inaguration will consist entirely of a giant taco dinner on the Washington mall. Considering Latinos will make up 437% of the American population by that time, a good Siesta sounds like the perfect way to start. As for Friday: I am going to try to avoid spending my entire weekend in dank, underground pubs. Tomorrow I will find a gym so i can exercise (?Activity without beer!?!) and go to a party (drinking will be at the lowest level socially allowed). Sunday will consist of varied attempts to make my computer play movies on the Tv and further NFL viewing. You might note that this does not include travel. I cannot leave the country. 'You're and American!' you might add, raising a fist that would put the fear of God and the US Air Force into that Moldavian border guard. But this problem is self-imposed. My passport is currently languishing at the Czech Consulate in NYC. I sent it there a month ago to get my near-mythical LONG TERM VISA. Due to bureaucratic intransegence in the area of 'pre-paid postage', my passport remains in a drawer somewhere. So although my trip to Kyiv for the Ukranian elections were stymied by lack of funds, my trip to Baghdad for the Iraqi elections will be stopped due to simple lack of government papers. Sigh. But don't worry, mom. I live in Eastern Europe - You never know when the next revolution will be!

Travelling

Wow, I've managed to avoid posting anything for a while. Probably because not much is happening here. This city turns grey in winter - grey sky, grey buildings, grey ground (the product of snow + dirt), and grey people. Most folks spend their time bundled up, rushing from one pub to the other to meet friends around a warm table and reminisce about the previous warm season with a pint. This strikes me as quite reasonable. Cold weather = warm pub w/beer. Hot weather = cool restaurant with margarita. maybe our two countries aren't so different after all. On a different note, my friend Ben has been travelling through Eastern Europe for about a week and a half. He's done several things very well on this trip: 1) Has come east. Western europe is like Disneyland, generally really expensive and boring. The east is grittier, weirder, and definitely has way hotter chicks. 2) He travelled to see friends, and saw the places on the side. This is the best - you travel alone, but you have a friend as a tour guide in every city. I need to meet some people from Moscow and Istanbul now. 3) Copious alcohol consumption. That's understood 4) His trip was about 2 weeks. This is the right amount of time for living out of a backpack. Anything after this and you start to smell permanently like wet dirty socks. And believe me, there's nothing worse than being in a stuffy hostel room full of twentysomething backpackers, and waking up at 5am, gagging because the air is so thick with the smell of wet, dirty socks.

This Speaks for itself.

http://www.awfulplasticsurgery.com/ This is the most pathetic post I've ever made. But the link is REALLY entertaining.

Too much beer

I really had way too many beers this weekend. It's not because of my mom's fear - that i'm actually living in a cesspool of sin, and destined to end up in stained clothes with a dirty needle sticking out of my arm. It's mainly due to the NFL. Yes, I blame the NFL for my beer consumption. Contrary to my former post I watched a lot of football this weekend - 3 games. I spent a total of about 10 hours at a local American hangout called "sport bar zlata hvezda". This is the place with the all-night sports dungeon that i watched the rose bowl at. What do you do when you're watching NFL with 7 of your friends? You drink beer. I did this in the US, but was often constrained by 1)my car, and 2) lack of funds. The true reason I drink a lot of beer is that it's so cheap that there is no economic constraint on consumption, and there isn't the self-regulating problem of drunk driving accidents. This means that the beer is flowing. It has also helped with something else: I have ridiculous tolerance. Really really amazing. I'm not quite at a normal eastern european level yet, but I could drink your average fratboy under the table. I also really enjoy the 'drink a few beers with your friends' thing here, as opposed to the 'get dressed and drink half a bottle of vodka before you go out and act really stupid at some pretentious overpriced college hangout'. If this is growing up then I'm a fan. My friend is coming back from Wroclaw in poland tomorrow, and this is his opinion: "Wroclaw (prounounced VRAHTS-Woff) is probably the greatest place in the entire world...but only if you are 18-32 and single...." Unfortunately I'm not single, but I'll have to check this place out. I mean I can't go to Paris for the weekend, but a few days in Wroclaw are probably about as good...

The Weekend

My girlfriend will be fleeing Prague for the boonies this weekend, so I will be left to fend for myself in this weird beer-soaked city. My colleague asked me my plans for tomorrow, after giving a detailed hour-by-hour breakdown of his day, and i told him that my plan was to 'wake up'. That's it. I might watch a playoff game. Maybe i'll read my science fiction book all day. I might find a cure for cancer, or forget the funniest joke ever in the history of humankind. I like that kind of saturday. It is alive with possibilities, but the best of those is the possibility of doing absolutely nothing. I can't figure out anything else to post today. Come back tomorrow.

Link Roundup

Do you love Ali G? Then you will love this news article: For a long time I advocated this, but now that I have a girlfriend I can no longer support it or bad things will happen to me.

The Elite

"A coveted undergraduate admission to an Ivy League college is a ticket to success, right? But a recent paper by Peter Cappelli and Monika Hamori, both of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that the prestigious degrees aren't as valuable at America's largest corporations as they were a generation ago. If you want to run GE, you might be better off attending the University of Connecticut than Yale. " Read the whole article.

I love Indians

The dot kind, although I like the feathered kind as well. I must say, there isn't much more satisfying thing than finishing the day with an IT problem solved. We've been trying to put together a visual basic program here, but the essential problem has been that the raw data we need is inaccessable from our location on the server. All sorts of IT people have been telling us that we can't do stuff. So I call one of our IT people in India. Within two days he has everything fixed for me. As an outsourced person, this makes me proud. My Indian(dot) bretheren is a perfect example of outsourcing gone right. Yay, capitalism.

Attention Bumpkins

Read the fine print at the bottom of this page. Unbelievable!!!

Firsthand knowledge from a European in Turkey

Me: "Hey European Citizen: Is Turkey a European country?" Michal: "They play at the European Football Championship....So the answer is yes..."

Eastern Toilets

I was going to write a post about this, but I found this excellent one ready-made. Read the comments as well.

Friday and such

Fridays aren't that cool for me anymore. I generally wake up at 11, go eat lunch, read a bit, and I'm at work at 2. I get off at ten, meet my gf downtown, then go to sleep. The problem here is that I do this EVERY DAY, not just Friday. I no longer have friday afternoon to laze around and be happy that I won't be at work until monday morning. No more happy hours, no summer sunsets on some mexican restaurant patio. No friday afternoons at Barton Springs (and believe me, this is the one i miss most). I guess i'm whining a bit here. I sleep in every day, yet have a job. I can go out every night. It's true. But it's just so damn cold and dark here that I feel like complaining. On to my next point: where are the blogs? Come on people, Blog was the most searched word on the internet in 2004. Well, maybe I made that up. But still, how am I still the only one blogging out there? I mean, lil'steve has got to be doing something interesting! Kyle can tell us stories about how girls get more desperate as they reach their late twenties. Paul can regale us with supreme cour criticism, amanda can just bitch about my own blog, Kejia can probably blow us all out of the water with that nice and shiny Princeton education...come on people! Anyway I might post something this weekend. My friend Ben is coming in for a week from Texas for some beer sampling. In his email he specifically cites the 'Roxy' as being a place he wants to go to. That's like saying you are going to New York City, but are really excited about seeing East Rutherford, NJ. But the Roxy is quite a place, and like the stinking mound of feces known as New Jersey, deserves its due. So everyone enjoy their weekend, drink the requisite amount of margaritas, watch some reality-tv reruns, and write me an email if you have something to say that is worth a response. Unlike me.

Football season is over

Mostly because I don't care about the NFL any more, football is over. Texas has won the Rose Bowl in one of the greatest sphincter-clenching games of all time. Oklahoma has lost another national championship game, this time to a PAC-10 team (weak, guys). And there were some other teams, too. This is pretty much the first time in years that the season has ended on a positive note. Although I must say that personally I miss the tactile smells and sights of a college football game. 80,000 people wearing orange shirts. That weird cannon-sulfer mixed with 10,000 hot dogs smell that makes me hungry. Trashy girls on the hunt for the newest STD. Students who drank 'a little too much' before the game, spend half their time collapsing onto the people in front of them, and have to be escorted off by police while yelling disgusting yet surprisingly amusing anecdotes about their situation. And, of course, the big cow in the end zone, drugged up higher than the mayor of Washington DC. Of course, I can always go to a Slavia-Sparta hockey or football game. They're like UT games (lots of cops and cooked meat) except the crowd is exclusively drunk men looking for a fight. Often enjoyable. Of course eurofootball is super boring compared to texasfootball, but then slavia football isn't a cornerstone of my cardivascular system in the way that the longhorns are.

Bloggy Goodness

Sometimes at the end of the day it's hard for me to come up with a post. For example: today I spent most of my time trying to learn Visual Basic, so that I could more easily display reports in Excel. Learning VB is the equivalent of placing a drill next to my head, turning it on, and pushing it into my cerebellum. Except I think those people feel better than I do in the end. This weekend my friend is coming into Prague, and we'll be doing a good pub crawl along the Vinohrady/Zizkov border. I can't imagine how awesome it would be if those bars had wi-fi: pub blogging. The posts begin describing heated political discussions, and end with me singing the praises of some b-movie star's breasts. With grammar and punctuation being lost upon the journey. Sigh.

Resolutions

I've been trying to come up with some good New Year's resolutions. Last year's big one was to stop tearing little pieces of paper up, my nervous habit. I decreased that by about 80%. So this year's resolution aims for the same decrease: I am going to stop swearing. I don't know why, but it seems like a good idea.

Mistakes

I purchased the DVD 'Bridget Jones Diary' as a Christmas present for Jana. I knew this was a bad idea as I purchased it, sort of like that 7th vodka shot or my entire 7th semester of college, but I could do nothing to stop it. And of course it's playing at her apartment every time I show up there. And I even copied the soundtrack for her, so i have to listen to the music of 'Bridget Jones' even when the movie's not playing. All of this could have easily been avoided had I simply turned on my brain.

Happy '05

Sorry for lack of bloggy goodness, I was in a bad mood last week, and I spent most of my weekend in non-wi-fi enabled Czech drinking establishments ('pub', in the local expat vernacular). I will be increasing my posting in the coming days, so please come back around Thursday.