Why We Like Sir Alec Guinness

Yeah, sure, Alec Guinness played Colonel Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai, Jamessir Bensonmum in Murder by Death, and Obi-Wan Kenobi in The Only Reason Americans Under Forty Remember Alec Guinness, and his name is an anagram for genuine class. But as if that weren’t enough already, here’s another great reason to like him:

In case you haven’t spotted it, check out the t-shirt he’s wearing under his Jedi robes.

It’s an obvious connection to make, of course, given his last name,¹ of course, and he’s probably not the first movie star to enjoy a drink—assuming there was any available, what with Oliver Reed being alive at the time. But the possibility that he had that same t-shirt on while the cameras were rolling makes Alec Guinness—not to mention Obi-wan Kenobi—just that much cooler.


NOTE
1. Alec Guinness’s last name, for those of you who aren’t keeping up, is “Guinness.”

Popular Misconceptions about St. Patrick’s Day

 

  

MYTH: Somebody else out there has a shirt that reads “Kiss me, I’m Irish,” so you probably shouldn’t wear yours.

FACT: We’ve never heard this joke before. Come here and give us a kiss.

MYTH: Actual Irish—that is, people found in Ireland and were born there—don’t habitually wear shirts that read “Kiss me, I’m Irish.”

FACT: Believe it or not, they wear them all the time. Of course, being in Ireland, they already know they’re Irish, so they don’t bother with that part of the phrasing. Also, because certain regions of the world express certain sentiments in slightly different ways, their shirts read simply “Fuck you.”

MYTH: Wearing lots of green will make you seem more authentically Irish.

FACT: Wearing lots of green actually makes you authentically Irish. In fact, any sort of association with green qualifies you for citizenship.

The most famous Irishmen of the twentieth century.

 

MYTH: If you don’t wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, you will get pinched.

FACT: We refused to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day throughout our high school career, and claimed that the reason for our stance was that we had actual Irish heritage and didn’t need to bother.¹ In truth, this was secretly an ingenious ploy to get pinched by the girl we liked at the time.² It didn’t work. Never—not once—did we get pinched. It’s okay, though, because she’s dead now.³

MYTH: The Irish are a belligerent, violent people.

FACT: Why don’t you say that to my face, you rotten son of a bitch.

Fortunately, stereotypes of violent Irish are
nowhere to be found in today’s sensitive culture. 

 

MYTH: Didn’t you just love Braveheart?

FACT: Most of the characters in Braveheart were Scots, who come from Scotland—which is a totally different country than Ireland. Really! they have a flag and everything. In fact, the only Irish people you’ll find in the film are one unkempt eccentric and several thousand humorous, belligerent, and easily dispatched extras. The bad guys were English, as all true bad guys are, and of course the hero, William Gibson Wallace, is equal parts American, Australian, and crazy.

It could be worse. I’m only playing a crazy person.

MYTH: Some Irish, and even some Americans of Irish descent, might find it a bit disappointing or even insulting that Americans “honor” the Irish culture by getting blind shitfaced and vomiting on things they’re too drunk to identify.

FACT: The Irish are so constantly, uniformly paralytic drunk that they don’t realize they’re being stereotyped.

MYTH: Drinking green beer will make you more Irish.

FACT: Drinking green beer will make you a fucking idiot.

NOTES

1. We are absolutely 100% half-Irish, if you don’t count the technicality of having been born in the United States of America, just like both our parents, all of our grandparents, and most of our great-grandparents.

2. This is true.

3. Technically she’s not dead; a shocking time-travel accident caused her to kill her own grandfather, so it’s more accurate to say that she simply never existed.

Drunk History: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass

We at Bowling in the Dark take some pride in our 100% semi-original content. While other bloggers may shamelessly regurgitate other people’s material, we do our best to pretend it all comes straight from us. That’s the Bowling in the Dark Guarantee.¹

Sometimes, though, our hectic work schedule gets to be too much, and we find ourselves with nothing of our own to post. Unlike other websites’ jokes, manufactured by the thousand in dismal third-world sweatshops, each one of our jokes is painstakingly hand-crafted by dedicated sub-Saharan African artisans in clean and sanitary working conditions, and while we love their work, sometimes they struggle to keep up with demand.

So while we wait for our latest shipment of attempts at humor to arrive, please enjoy this American History lesson narrated by a drunk person, courtesy of Funny or Die.

Drunk History Vol. 5 w/ Will Ferrell, Don Cheadle & Zooey Deschanel from Will Ferrell

NOTES
1. Guarantees not legally binding in this dimension.

Rock n' Roll Trivia. Brought to you by Scotland.

“Hair of the Dog,” probably the most enduring song by Scottish rock band Nazareth, is one of that intriguing minority of rock tunes in which the song’s title is not mentioned anywhere in its lyrics. And unlike (for example) Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Faith No More’s “Epic,” or Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—for which the songs’ titles can be seen as describing either their style or themes—the phrase hair of the dog seems to be completely unrelated to its song, which depicts a man confronting and challenging a manipulative woman, telling her that she’s met her match.

Adding to the muddle is the fact that the phrase hair of the dog has a colloquial meaning, one that is also totally unrelated to the Nazareth song. Most everyone who has awakened to a crippling hangover after a night of alcoholic excess has thought—assuming the simple act of thinking isn’t unbearably painful—of taking a bit of the “hair of the dog that bit them.”

Novice drinkers or those unfamiliar with English-language slang will be relieved to learn that taking the hair of the dog that bit them does not necessarily involve being bitten by an actual dog—although it could be argued that a properly executed bender would, in fact, greatly increase one’s odds of being bitten by any number of species, most of them unsanitary.
 

“First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink,
then the drink bites the man and poops on the rug.”
We’re pretty sure that’s how the old saying goes.

Furthermore, hair of the dog does not involve mixing actual dog hair—or, God forbid, any other dog parts—into one’s drink. It’s fair to point out, though, that your average drunk is generally willing to eat or drink all sorts of awful things that a sane and sober person would never consider: dog food, dog hair, mat shots, bottles of Tabasco sauce, Jägermeister—the list is practically endless—and if you’ve managed to convince yourself that a tall glass of dog hair will make you feel less hung over, we won’t stop you unless you’re standing on our carpet at the time. 

No, to take the hair of the dog, in a drinking context, simply means to try to cure a hangover by getting right back up on that vomit-colored horse and starting to drink again.

To the non-drinker, this seems counter-intuitive and nauseating, even borderline crazy, not to mention likely to spiral into ever-bigger problems down the road. The experienced drinker, on the other hand, knows that the best way to undo a mistake is to continue making it, again and again and again, until coming to the partially-sobering realization that shut up, I don’t have a problem, I can quit any time I want.





Any listener with a passing knowledge of the English language will find it safe to say that “Hair of the Dog”—we’re talking about the song again now—has nothing to do with hangover cures, alcoholism, hair, bites, or dogs. How, then, to explain the title?

We’re glad you asked. Back in 1975, right around the time when Nazareth was working on the album that became Hair of the Dog (which, not coincidentally, contained the song of the same name), certain parts of human society actually were troubled by naughty language. This is why recording artists had to wait more than thirty years to truly express their musical genius through insightful song titles such as “Fuck” (Bring Me the Horizon), “Fuck” (Derrick Jensen), “Fuck You” (Cee Lo Green),  “Fuck You” (Nuno Bettencourt), “Fuck You” (Dr. Dre), “If You Seek Amy” (Britney Spears—she can spell, get it?), “Motherfuckeroos” (by a band called, believe it or not, Fuck),¹ “Shit” (Tall Tall Trees), “Shit?” (Whiskey Tango), and “People = Shit” (Slipknot), or band names such as Oh Shit! and Shit Robot.²

Nazareth wanted to name their album and the song Son of a Bitch—because, hey, they actually do say that in the song, quite a bit actually—but their record label didn’t like it. John Lennon could probably have gotten away with it, but Nazareth didn’t have quite the same clout, so instead they had to get clever. Hence, the title is a play on words, which is a kind of thing smart people sometimes do to convince themselves that they’re smart:

• A son, as you may be aware, is often an heir to his parents’ fortune or land; heir, pronounced correctly, sounds kind of like hair.³
• Bitch, as you may also be aware, is a name for a specific kind of dog.
• So, Hair of the Dog = Son of a Bitch.

And he says son of a bitch in the song! Get it?

Ha! I get it. It spells F-U- . . .
Wait, let me start over.

We’re well aware that many of our readers had probably either learned or figured out this little bit of irrelevance long ago. We ourselves caught onto it almost immediately when it was explained to us, several weeks ago. For the rest of you, though, we hope that this has provided a small but intriguing insight into the history of rock and censorship. And for any of you who seriously believe that “If You Seek Amy” is a clever title for a song, we’re quite confident that this absolutely boggled your minds.

NOTES

1. We’re guessing they bring the house down at all the junior-high dances they’re invited to play. Although the title “Motherfuckeroos” is such a bizarre combination of offensive and silly that we are forced to admit that we laughed when we first read it.

2. We suspect that they’re not very good. 

3. Pronounced incorrectly, it sounds like “tractor.”

Some Guy’s Adventures Through the Pint Glass, Part 7

Day 7: “It is something that man was not meant to disturb. Death has always surrounded it. It is not of this Earth.”

The Beer Mystery Case (artist’s conception)

The Beer Mystery Case, like the fabled Ark of the Covenant (which, incidentally, mimics the Case’s design), is steeped in history yet shrouded in secrecy. Its power is both mysterious and mercurial, oftentimes granting its users wondrous gifts, other times inflicting upon them nothing but incomprehensible face-melting terror.

This is why I don't drink Coors Light.

One would be right to wonder, then, if the world might have been better off had the Beer Mystery Case, like the Ark, stayed buried in the Egyptian desert forever. One would be right to wonder the same thing about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, too, but that’s neither here nor there.

Frankly, to rightfully question the motivations of the Beer Mystery case is far beyond the scope of mere human understanding. The mere notion of it is as laughable as, say, questioning the wisdom of Ryan Spilborgh’s beard. As some famous long-dead English guy once wrote, ours is not to question why, ours is but to drink some shitty beer and possibly barf.¹

So I, with this essential truth in mind and my fate clearly out of my hands, reached into the Beer Mystery Case and pulled out

Miller Genuine Draft, Miller Brewing Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.²

There’s a scene in the mock-rockumentary Spinal Tap where one of the fictional titular band’s albums, Shark Sandwich, is said to have been given a scathing two-word review: “shit sandwich.” Funny though that scene was, rest assured that we here at Bowling in the Dark would never stoop to such cheap, easy vulgarity to make a point.³

Miller Genuine Draft, ready to return from whence it came.

Our biggest complaint about Miller Genuine Draft was not its flavor (which was both thin and displeasingly bitter) or its color (which, as can be seen in the photo above, is unappetizingly similar to certain fluids that nobody in their right mind would contemplate drinking⁴), but that the Mystery Case saw fit to give us four of them.

Disappointing though Miller Genuine Draft is—and despite the red flag that comes up whenever something insists on being advertised as “Genuine” (much like a seedy used-car salesman inserting “honest” into his name)—there are, we have to admit, times where a cold MGD might prove to be welcome. For example, it would serve well as a chaser if you’re in the midst of a Nepalese drinking contest, and drinking an MGD would definitely be preferable to being trapped underground forever in the dark, surrounded by thousands of poisonous snakes. And we’re willing to admit that other good reasons to drink Miller Genuine Draft may indeed exist, but at the moment, none come to mind.

Some Guy’s rugged and adventurous rating for Miller Genuine Draft, then, consists of 1 (one) roasted Nazi henchman and 1 (one) smarmy exploding French archaeologist.

Naughty henchman (l), haughty Frenchman (r).

NOTES

1. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” 1854. Quoted verbatim.

2. Because the Miller and Coors breweries merged in 2008 to become MillerCoors—a name suggesting an almost total lack of imagination—Miller Genuine Draft is, technically speaking, a MillerCoors product. But its creation long predates the merger, and Coors already has plenty to answer for, so I will refrain from blaming them for MGD.

3. We will do it, however, just to be jerks.

4. That is, Coors Light.

Some Guy’s Adventures Through the Pint Glass

Special Aloha Edition

There comes a time in nearly every married man’s life when he realizes that he’ll eventually have to cave in to the relentless pressure, pack his bags, and take that Hawaiian honeymoon his wife has been badgering him about ever since they got married two days earlier.

That time finally came for me not too long ago, and I return with good news: you, too, can make it through the interminable weeks in this hellish tropical paradise if you’re properly prepared. A good way to start is by bolstering yourself against relentlessly pleasant weather, horribly clear water, and nauseatingly beautiful scenery by familiarizing yourself with local customs and, if possible, popular slang terms. The following is far from a comprehensive list, but the terms below—coupled with the fact that everybody down there speaks English anyway—should be enough to get you through the day:

Ohana: family. I didn't actually hear this phrase in Hawaii, but it’s used a lot in Lilo & Stitch, and it seems safe to assume that Disney is as dedicated to accurate portrayal of languages as it is to authentic depiction of alien/islander interaction.

Mahalo: thank you.

Aloha: used interchangeably as both a greeting when arriving and a farewell upon departure. Renders any translation of the Beatles’ 1967 hit song Hello, Goodbye nearly meaningless.

Holy shit, check out the albino: I’m not convinced that this phrase is actually Hawaiian, and I don’t have any idea what it means. For some reason I heard it a lot, though. Usually when I had my shirt off.

Howzit: Hey; hello; what’s up. If you stand there and wait to hear “. . . going?” you will wait for a good long while, and look pretty stupid while you're at it.

Mai tai: Tahitian for “Fuck you, brain, you can’t tell me what to do anymore!!”

Ono: delicious.

This last one will come in handy if you decide to eat or drink anything while you’re in Hawaii, for example,

Primo Island Lager, Primo Brewing Company, Honolulu, Hawaii.

This beer was good, and the book was even better. Can’t say
I’d recommend the forty-five-dollar airport sandwich, though.

Primo Island Lager is, according to the Primo Brewing Company’s own website, ono-licious. Oddly, because ono means delicious (see above, again, if you have the worst memory on Earth), onolicious therefore translates rather clumsily as deliciouslicious.¹ I’m not going to dwell on that here, though; if you feel the need to read an asshole’s opinions on language use, check here, here, here, or here.¹

Know your Onos. From left to right, Oh no; Ohno; Ono; Ono-licious.

Primo Island Lager is not the heavy, thick kind of beer you might drink on a cold snowy night with your hands wrapped around a steaming bowl of hot chili. This is a good thing, of course, because it’s brewed in a place where the temperature rarely dips below the mid-60s. The visionary who brings his meaty, paint-thick winterbrau recipe to the Hawaiian islands is nothing less than a big fat idiot who’d better be prepared to accept failure.

Seriously, though, who really gives a shit how this beer tasted? This is where I drank it:

So without further ado, and at the risk of short-circuiting the positronic brain of any robot who happens to be reading this column, Some Guy’s carefully considered but somewhat logically-circular rating for Primo Island Lager is: Three (3) bottles of Primo Island Lager. High praise indeed.

For more of Some Guy’s Adventures through the Pint Glass, check here: Day 1  Day 2  Day 3  Day 4  Day 5  Day 6

NOTES

1. Linguistically speaking, this makes as little sense as the half-octopus, half-platypus creature known to science as the platypustopus. You’ve never heard of this animal before, but I know you want one.

2. Wow—looking at it right now, I realize that’s an awful lot of links to me being an asshole about language use. I’ll be happy to point you to a moment when I’m not being an asshole, as soon as one actually presents itself.

Some Guy’s Adventures Through the Pint Glass, Part 6

Day 6: “I wish it were winter so we could freeze it into ice blocks and skate on it and melt it in the springtime and drink it!”¹

As I sit here poisoning my liver on a warm July night, I can’t help but think that the polar bear has to be the luckiest animal on Earth.

Think about it: name a lazier, more good-for-nothing animal on the planet. Go ahead, try. I dare you. It can’t be done, can it? At the risk of sounding like I’m stealing from someone else’s gig, polar bears are fat, lazy loafers who haven’t had to do a hard day’s work in their whole lives.

At the same time, though, they’ve carefully cultivated a reputation as terrifying, bloody-minded, stone-cold penguin killers. Now, I know what you’re saying:

• “they’re carnivores, killing is in their nature,”
• “polar bears mostly eat seal, not penguin,”
• “there are no penguins in the Arctic, asshole,”²

or even

• “I was with the polar bear that evening, she has an airtight alibi.”

But these trivial excuses become obvious nonsense in the face if incontrovertible photographic proof. Look at the poor little guy—he died so fast, he didn’t even have time to stop smiling.

But take a second look at that photograph. Did you notice the size of the ice floe? It’s tiny—barely the size of an American SUV—and rises little more than a foot or so out of the water. That’s no place to raise a family, and it’s but one small example of a critical global problem: glaciers are receding worldwide, and the Arctic ice pack—the polar bear’s natural habitat—is shrinking and breaking up, leaving these bears with fewer places to loaf and far more time in the water. Less time on solid ground (er, ice) means less time hunting and eating; more time in the water means more drowning and being devoured by MegaShark.

However, the best news of all for these poor lucky bastards is that despite being both lazy slobs and ruthless killing machines, they have somehow retained the ability to be cuter than a whole dump truck full of puppies, and it’s this intrinsic irresistibility that may allow them to dodge a watery doom. People love cute animals—even merciless penguin assassins—and will work their tails off to save them, even if it means shipping ice cube trays up to the North Pole and restocking the Arctic by hand. You really think it’s not about cuteness? Be honest, take a look at the four animals in the following pictures and tell me, if you’re filling up the last three spots on the Ark, which one doesn’t make the cut.

So now that we have this sad polar-bear business wrapped up, I’d like to turn our attention to a subject far more significant and far less publicized: the receding popularity of ice beer, which, much like the polar ice caps, once blanketed vast swaths of the North American continent in chilly misery, turning life into a bleak and perilous struggle for survival.

If you’re too young to remember the Dawn of the Ice Beer,³ ice brewing became popular in the 1990s as a way to increase a beer’s alcohol content⁴ while simultaneously cutting back on that pesky “flavor” thing that, for some brands, was little more than a distracting side effect. Breweries with a reputation for producing complex, flavorful beer—Guinness, New Belgium, Warsteiner, and O’Dell, to name a few⁵—generally steered clear of the “ice beer” fad, whereas Miller, Budweiser, Busch, Natural, and Keystone all jumped in with both feet. So I, despite having avoided ice beer since my college days, have decided to jump in as well by reviewing both

Bud Ice (Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis, Missouri) and
Keystone Ice (Coors Brewing Company, Golden, Colorado).

 

My reaction to Bud Ice was not as negative as I expected, but this is primarily because the details of the tasting are a bit hazy—two bottles of Bud Ice emerged from the Beer Mystery Case on my return from a dinner out with family, and said dinner had involved a couple of 22-ounce glasses of Fat Tire (a beer with a genuine reputation for flavor, courtesy of Fort Collins’ New Belgium Brewery). Upon making it home I poured what I thought were two glasses of water, giving one to my brother-in-law in a display of questionable hospitality, and probably would not have realized my mistake had I not fallen up the stairs a couple of times over the remainder of the evening. Bud Ice is much like Bud Light—and this is not praise—except its taste is a bit thinner, less substantial, and harder to remember the next morning.

On the other hand, my cans of Keystone Ice (motto: “Only 83% as crappy as regular Keystone!”), were my first drink(s) of the evening,⁶ and I was therefore fully aware of my surroundings and in clear control of my beer-tasting faculties. However, that didn’t make all that much of a difference—I left my Keystone Ice experience with no memorable impression of smell or flavor, other than that it tasted sort of like Keystone, but also sort of like Bud Ice. To its credit, though, it did help me get to sleep pretty quickly. 5.9% alcohol content by volume, indeed.

It’s difficult to give an accurate or helpful rating to a drink—in this case, two—that almost completely fails to register in my memory. So instead I’ll give two ratings, because if you’re inclined to buy Keystone or Budweiser in the first place (either their regular or their “ice” versions), odds are your goal is not to slowly savor a tasty beer, but to get a good cheap buzz on and act like a jackass. So, Some Guy’s rating for Bud Ice and Keystone Ice are as follows:

(1) If you’re a grown-up with any sort of developed/sophisticated taste for beer, Bud Ice and Keystone Ice get our lowest rating yet, one (1) happy severed penguin head.

(2) If you’re a college kid on a budget, looking to get loaded on a lonely Friday night without breaking the bank on a high-class beer such as Coors Light, then either Bud Ice or Keystone Ice would be a fine choice. For the sad, sorry purpose of getting you hammered in your dorm room while playing Xbox, Bud Ice and Keystone Ice get three (3) BITTER BEER FACES.

For more of Some Guy’s Adventures through the Pint Glass, check here: Day 1  Day 2  Day 3  Day 4  Day 5  Day 6

NOTES

1. Barry Badrinath (Jay Chandrasekhar) from Beer Fest, a movie about beer drinking that is only barely watchable even when drunk.

2. You poor, stupid, gullible sap—you’ve bought the polar bears’ shoddy alibi hook, line, and sinker.

3. If you really are too young to remember this, you’re probably too young to drink anyway. Come back and finish reading this column when you grow up, youngster.

4. The increased alcohol content has something to do with how the ice-brewing process removes more of the yeast—or removes it earlier in the process—than happens in regular brewing,thus weakening the flavor. To be honest, I didn’t really look into it. If you actually expected to find beer information in this beer review, then, wow, are you ever barking up the wrong tree.

5. You may not have heard of a couple of these breweries (here I’m addressing potential future readers of Bowling in the Dark, not current actual readers), but they make very tasty beer.

6. There’s a third can still in the fridge, for those of you who are counting down the Case. I’ll get to it later, I’m sure, but probably won’t write about it.

Some Guy's Adventures Through the Pint Glass, Part 5

Day 5: They speak of my drinking, but never think of my thirst. (Scottish proverb)

 

The familiar word claymore comes from the decidedly less-familiar Scottish Gaelic word claidheamh-mòr, which translates (from what I’ve read, anyway; my Gaelic is rusty at best) as “really big sword.” Wielded with both hands by fierce men without pants and often exceeding five feet in length—still talking about the literal sword here, you perverts—the claidheamh-mor for centuries was used to casually and cleanly split human heads in two. 
 

Since the Second World War, the word claymore has probably been more recognizable as the name of an American anti-personnel mine (invented, interestingly, by a Norman A. MacLeod—a name that suggests Scottish heritage, and possibly even a secret life as an immortal swordsman from the Dark Ages). The Claymore mine raised the ante on its ancient counterpart by unleashing destruction not just within its immediate vicinity but up to a range of some one hundred yards.

 

The claymore, in both its medieval and its modern iterations, has spread pain and destruction not only in the country (or countries) of its birth but also worldwide, and bears the blame for the creation of tens if not hundreds of thousands of sobbing widows and orphans.

By an odd coincidence, today’s selection from the Beer Mystery Case is Claymore Scotch Ale, Great Divide Brewing Company, Denver, Colorado.
 

 

One of the first things I noticed about this beer after fifteen or sixteen hours of staring at the label was that, despite its name, Claymore Scotch Ale is not brewed anywhere near Scotland. Denver, Colorado, is in fact quite far from Scotland, separated from it by (among other things) an ocean, island nations populated by leprechauns and/or volcanoes, several American states, and the flattest and least exciting parts of Colorado. That’s a long way for a beer to travel; even the European Swallow is not known to migrate so far (and of course the African Swallow is non-migratory).

 

That said, though, while it may not be brewed in Scotland, it seems safe to assume that Claymore Scotch Ale is nevertheless at least based on some sort of ancient Scottish recipe, one designed to terrify and humiliate the English in medieval drinking contests and later smuggled across the Atlantic hidden in some sort of newly-invented engine part, or possibly a coconut.
 

The beer that resulted from that long trek, Claymore Scotch Ale, has a burned, ashy smell, as if it had been brewed in an old fireplace. And it’s very dark, not in that “dark beer” sort of way but in that “absorbs all light within its event horizon” sort of way. The first sip, however, proves to be surprisingly painless, far less harsh than I anticipated. However, the label’s descriptions of the beer as “hardy” and “wee heavy” show a touch of subtle understatement not expected from the average bit of beer advertising. 
 

What the Great Divide Brewing Company’s marketing department probably should have put on the label was that—if you’ll pardon the crude expression—Claymore Scotch Ale will put hair on your balls.¹ And if you don’t have balls when you start drinking a glass of Claymore, you will by the time you’re done. 
 

God help you if you drink two.

 
The first few sips left a noticeable and not-altogether-pleasant aftertaste, but by the end of my second glass, that aftertaste has developed into something far more palatable, sweeter and with the barest suggestion of chocolate. Also, I’m suddenly aware that I can no longer feel my feet.
 
Scotland has given the world the steam engine, the flush toilet, the telephone (which was invented in America, but by a Scot), several good films starring Sean Connery² and Brian Cox, and “Auld Lang Syne.” On the other hand, not everything to come out of Scotland was genius; they’re also responsible for the kilt—known to Scottish Buddhists as trou wu trou³—and the caber toss, which, while not stupid, crazy, or cruel, still ranks right up there with chess boxing as one of the weirdest sports on Earth.

 

It’s hard to say whether Claymore Scotch Ale belongs in the genius category or the kilt-wearing/caber-tossing category⁴—possibly because I’ve had two of them on top of an early-afternoon black-and-tan, so clearly my judgment of good ideas vs. stupid ones is more than a little suspect. I’m happy to report, though, that this is a pretty damned good beer, and if I survive the hangover with my vision intact, I’ll probably find my way to the liquor store sooner or later for a couple more Claymores.
 

Some Guy’s rating for Claymore Scotch Ale: four thumbs up, two tossed cabers, and one crippling, eyeball-bruising headache.⁵

For more of Some Guy’s Adventures through the Pint Glass, check here: Day 1  Day 2  Day 3  Day 4  Day 5  Day 6

NOTES

1. If you won’t pardon the expression, please stop reading before you get to this point of the review.

2. Also The Avengers and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

3. Translated roughly as “pants without pants.”

4. Please keep in mind, angry Scottish and Scottish-American readers, that I’m not actually disparaging kilt-wearing, caber-tossing, or being Scottish. I’m merely suggesting that they’re not quite as brilliant, all things considered, as the steam engine or the flush toilet. Disagree with me all you want, but please, put down the giant tree.

5. I can’t help but notice that I have few, if any, pictures of actual Scots in this column. As much as that sucks for Scotland, and probably for my credibility, I suppose it’s appropriate for a review of a Scotch ale brewed some 4,400 miles from Scotland. And it’s probably no weirder than the fact that in Highlander, the 100%-Scottish Sean Connery plays a Spaniard, and the Scottish character (Duncan MacLeod) is played by a Frenchman. Although if this is the weirdest thing you can find in a movie about a 400-year-old Scotsman wielding a samurai sword in a worldwide fight for survival against other immortals who die only when their heads are chopped off, then you may be paying attention to the wrong parts of the movie.

Some Guy’s Adventures Through the Pint Glass, Part 4

Day 4: Thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, “. . . I drank what?”

Nestled against an unforgiving shoulder of the Rocky Mountains is Golden, Colorado, home of the Colorado School of Mines, a nationally-renowned engineering school. The small but prestigious Mines is known for accepting a wide selection of gifted high school nerdlings, dorks, and brainiacs and transforming them—through the liberal application of heat, pressure, and homework—into shockingly successful paycheck magnets who have learned to design, build, test, demolish, or extract from the bosom of the Earth things that regular folks like you and me probably can’t even spell.

While you were doing kegstands, going shirtless in 5° weather to a football game, vomiting into your shoes (or somebody else’s), or showing up drunk, stoned, or naked to final exams, your contemporaries at the School of Mines were reading, computing, studying, stressing out, having minor emotional breakdowns, and then studying some more. Pressed to excel, the students at the Colorado School of Mines show a drive and motivation that matches their extreme intelligence, and this is why they’re out there earning bushels of money while the rest of us vegetate in front of the computer for hours on end, reading (or writing) pointless drivel² instead of checking the classified section for jobs.

. . . or at least that’s what they want you to believe, and by and large, the public has bought it. A closer look by a trained eye, however, reveals startling evidence to suggest that Mines students aren’t nearly as smart as they look:

First of all, they’ve freely chosen to live in a town that, on its best days, tends to smell like a frat-house carpet; 

Second, they voluntarily sequester themselves in an environment where the male-to-female ratio approaches roughly 1,732 to 1³;

Third—and most important—Mines students, on the relatively few times where they do relax (weekends, mostly, but also during E-Days, a traditional yearly celebration of drinking, games, and social interaction better described as the Orgy of Normalcy), all these alleged geniuses voluntarily and openly drink gallons upon gallons of

Coors Light, Coors Brewing Company, Golden, Colorado. 
 

It pains me to criticize any sort of alcoholic beverage, because they’re all very close to my heart, like beloved children that make me fall over and say rude things to strangers. And I realize that by criticizing Coors Light, I risk being savagely beaten by an angry mob of Orediggers swinging slide rules and graphing calculators, but I can’t help but tell the truth: this beer sucks.

Not only does Coors Light have an unfortunate tendency to taste like Windex⁴ when not sufficiently refrigerated, but also even its own advertising department makes it clear that even they don’t like the beer. Think about this: Coors Light, the “Silver Bullet,” is or recently was advertized as “the coldest-tasting beer in the world.” The coldest-tasting beer in the world. Seriously.

Look, people, cold is not a flavor. This is as dumb as calling it “the tallest-smelling beer in the world”—even if it’s true, it’s meaningless.

And beyond its coldness, you’ll rarely find flavor mentioned at all in Coors Light’s advertising. Instead, you’ll be told that the little mountains on each can will turn blue when the beer is cold. I can only assume that this was developed for beer drinkers with no nerve endings in their hands or tongues, because feeling a cold beer can is usually a good way of telling if it’s cold, and if that doesn’t work, actually drinking the beer generally does the trick.⁵

But that’s neither here nor there—more important is this: what does it tell you when the best selling point the marketing folks can find has to do with the can they put the beer in?

A: It tells you that this beer sucks (see above). If the packaging of your product is an actual selling point, you really ought to consider improving your product.

Don’t get me wrong, Coors Light isn’t poisonous or anything; I’ve had several drinks that were worse and not only lived through it, but probably became a better person for it. Coors Light is merely a colossal disappointment for somebody looking for a complex, flavorful beer. It’s certainly more than adequate as a chaser for that shot you’re going to regret in about forty-five minutes, or for washing down stronger drinks like unsweetened lemonade or lukewarm tap water. I don’t know how old you are, but no matter how young or healthy you are, you have only a finite number of drinks left to drink before you kick off. Make sure you make the right choice.

I’m afraid I have to give Coors Light my lowest rating yet: Three (3) snarling werewolves, one for each can of Silver Bullet that came out of the Beer Mystery Case.

For more of Some Guy’s Adventures through the Pint Glass, check here: Day 1  Day 2  Day 3  Day 4  Day 5  Day 6

NOTES
1. For example, I’ve never been able to spell “skyscraper” or “coal.”
2. Please note the proper spelling, drivel instead of dribble. As internet misspellings go, this one bugs me almost as much as “wallah” for “voilà.”
3. It could be argued that the skewed male-to-female ratio at the School of Mines does support the notion that the female students are pretty smart . . . but as women in Alaska like to say, the odds may be good, but the goods are odd.
4. Yes, I know what Windex tastes like. I suppose I’m going to get a lecture about this. What are you, my mother?
5. And if your tongue can’t tell you whether the beer is cold, what the hell does it matter what temperature it’s at anyway?