Getting colder!
"Life ain't all beer and skittles, and more's the pity;
but what's the odds, so long as you're happy?"
Trilby Part I. George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier (1834-1896)
Today, before I get to the matter of beer and skittles, I want to tell you about another small matter
which tickled my funny bone:
The AARP Monthly Meeting
Every month, I submit information to the Carroll County Times, to make sure that people read about our up-coming meeting. Recently, the receiving program has been changed. So, first, I had to spend hours convincing the new software that I was not a terrorist. Once that was done, I had to get our information into the CC Times calendar. In my submission, I was redundant with the location: The Elks Lodge in Westminster, Maryland.
On December 31, 2014, I finally was able to locate our information in the online section of the calendar. They had altered my words somewhat, but the information was there enough to allow a searcher to read about the meeting. And.. for those who needed the location.. instead of Elk's Lodge in Westminster, it was shown to be either: Elk Mountain, Colorado; Elk Mountain, California; Elk Mountain, Wyoming; or Elk Mountain, California..... take your pick.(Bring your skis!)
To help you get to the meeting.. you could access the GPS set up on their website. I asked for a list of the travel steps.. as reward, I was given directions down Maryland Rt 140 to Rt 795.. to the Baltimore Beltway.. to the Baltimore/Washington expressway.. to the Washington DC beltway.. to an area in DC.. then back on the DC beltway.. and finally, off the Beltway and to a Federal building . Huh??
Luckily, all of these instructions became moot today, the day of the meeting. I wonder how many people tried to find us based on the Internet instructions. We did have a small crowd.. ? I'm anxious to see what will happen when I try to get our February 2015 information published.
All right.. let's get to the matter I hinted at in the beginning of this blog entry:
Boozers
The Wall Street Journal says that people in Belarus drink more alcohol than any other people in the world. They consume 1.75 liters of pure alcohol per person per year. Americans drink just 9.2 liters... but people in Moslem Pakistan drink the least of anybody: Just 0.1 liters.
I was talking to somebody today who is a world-traveler... and he said that as soon as most Moslem folks get on an airplane, they remove their ethnic identifiers and booze it up just like everybody else on the plane.
I've mentioned that when my Grandfather worked in the family undertaking business during Prohibition, he was forced to drink embalming fluid. Yuk!
Let me reiterate a "boozer" story here.. if you heard it before, close your ears.
Small Beer:
When I came back from Europe in 1956, I sometimes would treat my Grandfather (the Senator) to some beer at the Buttonwood Café (a local "watering hole" in the West End of New Bedford, Massachusetts.) At the time, you could buy a "small beer" for 5 Cents. This was 4 ounces of Dawson's beer.. a local delicacy back then.
I would lay a $1 bill on the bar and my Grandfather and I would enjoy 20 of the 4 ounce beers. That equates to 80 ounces of beer, or 40 ounces each, a little more than a quart apiece... an amount that we could definitely handle. It was an enjoyable social time.. I loved my Grandfather and guess what... today..60 years later, I look exactly like him.
Anyway, one day, while we were drinking our beer and swapping stories, the radio was playing in the background (TV? what was that?)... and the announcer said something like this: "Today, the telephone bandit struck again in the West End, escaping with the contents of two telephone coin boxes..."
A few minutes later, my old friend, Charlie walked into the café. Charlie had helped me deliver newspapers some years earlier. I had to let him go after I found that he was also helping himself to some of the collection money. In spite of that, my Grandfather and I liked Charlie and invited him to sit down with us and have some beer. Charlie thanked us and then offered to buy the rest of the beer. We thought that this was great, and accepted his offer, as he reached into all of his pants pockets and pulled out piles and piles of nickels and laid them on the bar.
Here's another one.. be forewarned:
Green Beer:
When we lived in Randallstown, Maryland (1962-1975) I liked to make beer and mentioned it to one of my co-workers who was the son of Polish immigrants. He told me about some beer that his father used to make in Poland. Kumiss. It was made of horse urine! He said it was very tasty. Well, maybe, but I didn't try it. Instead, I tried another recipe that he suggested.. it was basically just hops and yeast and sugar. However, there was a secret ingredient: grapes.
I made a large batch of the water, hops, yeast and sugar, and let it ferment for a few days. Then I bottled it, placing a grape in every bottle before capping them. The theory was that the grape would cause more fermentation in the bottle and give the beer a sparkling taste. I put the newly filled bottles on the shelves lining the pathway from the front to the back of my garage. I used some green bottles that looked very nice.
After a few more days, I went out to the garage and checked the bottles.. it looked like the grapes had gotten even fatter in the enclosed bottles, which I took to be a good sign. Then, I went to the back door and walked out into the 30 degree cold Winter day. I felt very uncomfortably cold, so I immediately stepped back inside where I noticed that something strange had just happened.
Apparently, the sudden cold reacting on the warm grapes had caused each and every bottle to explode and shards of green glass were everywhere embedded in the shelves and the wall.. if I had been inside a second before, I would have been covered with green glass slivers.. and probably would not have been alive. A close call, and a very instructive one.
But.. I kept on making beer.
"Who's fond of his dinner
And doesn't get thinner
On bottled beer and chops"
from Patience.. Sir William Gilbert.
Elaine thinks that I should only have one beer per day... I'll agree to two.. although I try to keep to one because I want to lose weight.
A gentleman told me today that his father got off work in Baltimore at 4 pm.. and didn't get home until 7:30 pm .. 6 days a week, because he had to drink a case of beer each day. Except Sunday.. because he was a very religious man. When he retired, he weighed over 300 pounds.. but when he stopped drinking so much beer, he got down to 160 pounds. Wow!
I've already told you somewhere about my late wife, Elaine's uncle Didier (Eduard), who came to visit us in Baltimore with a case of beer under a block of ice in his trunk. He kept drinking beer throughout the whole trip and then got more for the trip back to Massachusetts. But he did not get fat from beer drinking.. he just died early from liver problems.
I could go on for hours with stories about beer, but I think that is enough for now. See Ya!
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