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.