musing

Amazon tells me I should be reading You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself, a title so long you can’t tweet it. It’s not published yet, but I put my request in at our local library and I’m already fifth in line.

I’m interested in the Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and it might even turn out to be related to beer.

As long as I’ve veered off topic, a few links:

* Tim Tebow, Converter of the Passes, at GRANTLAND.

This fine paragraph comes with an equally fine footnote (that’s second):

“In doing so, he has managed to take on outsize significance in the league despite largely failing to excel on the field and despite the fact that the NFL already reads culturally like the result of a right-wing blogger shotgunning a wine cooler and deciding to ‘make things fabulous.'”

The F-15 flyovers, the martial fanfares, the crisp green lawns, the body armor, the commercials in which giant whooshing branding irons burn the low APR of a Chevy Silverado directly onto the screen, etc. It’s as if the guy who invented Branson, Mo., looked at his work and said, “Screw this, I can do better.”

* Robert Parker Predicts the Future (of Wine), in Food & Wine. I like the last one: “Diversity will be the word.” OK, now I’m thinking about beer. I’m in favor of a beer world where the local choices include Strawberry Rhubarb Tart (related to a witbier and including the flavors in the name) and Zwickel (an unfiltered, traditional lager in the spirit of a helles). It is possible to appreciate the new without discarding the old.

* My favorite not snarky and not beer tweet of the day: “Beware: Journalists mixing with numbers! Know the differences between a margin and a ratio http://bit.ly/ua6W55.”

* Bonus beer link: Beers Made By Walking Hike #7 at North Cheyenne Canyon. This is such a great idea.

* My favorite snarky and beer tweet (I hope I don’t regret adding this – so please remember New Beer Rule #5) of the day, from @robsterowski: “@D_I_N_G At this stage it wouldn’t surprise me if the entry on Brooklyn Brewery had mistakes in it.”

First a few words from Simon Johnson.

Sometimes, I’m not interested in the moving target, the hope and expectation, the thrill of the chase.

I’m in it for the moment. I want to get my hands round the blighter.

I’m in it for the kill.

Now go drink some beer. I’ll be working on this list at the Schlafly Fresh Hop Festival myself.

If you thought Jeff Alworth was unimpressed with the Oxford Companion to Beer yesterday then read what Martyn Cornell has written today.

No summarizing from me. You must go read it. (Then go buy Amber, Gold & Black: The History of Britain’s Great Beers. Support proper research. Beer: The Story of the Pint also belongs in your library, but it’s out of print, so buy something he earns royalty for.)

But I do have to mention the sentence in his post where I stopped, shook my head, laughed, rolled back my chair and slapped my knee. Honest.

Even Wikipedia is getting that right now.

Words you don’t want on your tombstone.

Things I learned reading Advertising Age coverage of the National Beer Wholesalers Association meeting in Las Vegas:

* Beer Industry Looks to Rebuild ‘Brand Beer’

I would not apply for that job.

* The “Here’s to Beer” website still works, although the copyright is 2009 and the third of three Twitter posts is date 02.25.2009 (or 25.02.2009 if you wish).

I looked because National Beer Wholesalers Association president Craig Pursor says “there’s got to be some refocus and some collaboration.” Collaboration by exactly what brewing entities isn’t clear.

* “The brands that are growing are the brands the rich people drink,” said Harry Schuhmacher, editor of Beer Business Daily.

Thank goodness you don’t actually have to be rich to drink them.

I will leave it to you to consider the beer connections.

Last week, The NY Times’ outgoing restaurant critic, Sam Sifton, asked this Question for Curious Readers: What role, if any, does “authenticity” play in our understanding of good restaurants?

Interesting comments, one of which led to a post in David Byrne’s Journal (yes, that David Byrne) which poses many questions: “When does a little bit of illusion connote authenticity to us by enhancing our enjoyment and our experience (illusory as it might be)? When does it either not ring true at all or go so far and become so perfectly accurate, as to enter the creepiness of the uncanny valley?”

(Couldn’t resist injecting one comment. We’ve all been in that faux Irish pub, right?)

Today, Jonah Lehrer writes in The Frontal Cortex about the “drive for distinctiveness” that appears to be an essential component of Westerners. You know, standing in line with everybody else, so you can be the only one you know to have tasted [fill in the beer name]. He examines the findings of two social scientists presented in “Food, sex and the hunger for distinction,” a paper I’ll try to work into “For the Love of Hops” because, well, wouldn’t you buy a book with that in the bibiography?

Anyway, he concludes, “. . . this won’t be news to retailers. They’ve long catered to our desire for uniqueness, selling us mass-produced commodities that promise to express our real, authentic selves.”