The beer is called Tactical Nuclear Penguin. The brewers, called BrewDog, are in Scotland. Both of these facts make perfect sense. The BBC report that it will sell for $50 a bottle and that the label will have the following warning:

This is an extremely strong beer; it should be enjoyed in small servings and with an air of aristocratic nonchalance. In exactly the same manner that you would enjoy a fine whisky, a Frank Zappa album or a visit from a friendly yet anxious ghost.

Expect to see it in the hands of homeless people, who will enjoy it with an air of desperate diligence like they would enjoy lighter fluid, stealing someone's shoes or a visit from a friendly yet anxious police officer.

Yes, we know this is hard and we're very, very sorry to be saying this, but climate change has, according to some smarty-pants scientist, taken its toll our something we hold sacred: hops.

Czech climatologist Martin Mozny claims that a rise in air temperature has diminished the flavor-giving acidity of Saaz hops, a key, sanity-giving ingredient in pilsner lager. And things will only get worse.

It's not just Czech hops that are at stake here, says Francesco Tubiello, a crop specialist at the European Commission and a lead author of the agriculture chapter of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. "The famous hop-growing regions of eastern Germany and central Slovakia are facing the same situation," he says.

You see?! All the entire land of Europe has been endangered by the increased temperatures. And, more importantly, the world's drunks, who will now be forced to inebriate themselves with inferior alcoholic beverages, like rubbing alcohol, have no choice but to fight for survival.

This, friends, is an international tragedy. The only thing that could make us forget that we humans have destroyed our world is booze. And now that's gone. Someone, please, bring us a gun, for this life has become too ugly. Our symbolic amber waves of grain — or, more specifically, hops — have now been decimated. It's every man for himself, so arm yourselves. And bring a flask. You'll need it.

Image via defecto's flickr.

Sure, it can be time consuming, but then so can washing away the day's hack-attack sorrows at the local pub. This little office brew, discovered at Twitter HQ by Mashable's Ben Parr, offers at least a visual gulp, and the promise of beer to come, without anyone needing to leave the building — just the thing to cap a battle with Russian cyber armies. Of course, combined with the free falafels Parr snapped, and with previously-reported ideas for a games room, lockers and wine cellar at the Twitter offices, the beer does tend to lend Twitter something of a frat-house aura. It is the grunt-iest of the blogging platforms!

(UPDATE: We originally said Parr was Pete Cashmore. Sorry Ben!)

The official White House schedule announcing the suds summit courtesy of Patrck Gavin. We can't wait for quitting time.

Beer sales are down this year, surprisingly. Instead of going to the trouble of developing new products, beer companies have figured out that all they need to do is put their existing swill in a new package, and people will become excited! A beer bottle that turns blue to tell you when it's cold, to use one well-known, stupid example. And now: draft beer in a box:

The product, which is recyclable, is aimed at the 30% of beer drinkers who say they prefer draft beer to the bottled or canned variety, said Andy England, chief marketing officer at MillerCoors. "We're really trying to meet that occasion when you just got back from work and want to reward yourself," rather than "the party occasion," he said.

Why not "reward" yourself, with a frosty glass of beer from a box in your refrigerator, alone? The next step is death.
[WSJ. Pic: Flickr. Beer in a box costs more than an equal amount of beer in cans!]

Beer too: Sales of Heineken and other mid-market beers are down while the kind of beer you used to drink before wearing the empty cardboard 12-pack container around as a mask is flying off the shelf.

From the Times:

Growers are behind on sales of grapes, which are fetching much lower prices than last year. Sales are sluggish for wines retailing at $15 a bottle and higher. Meanwhile, distributors, restaurants and retail shops are reluctant to buy more wine, preferring to sell through what they already have.

[snip]

"People are drinking out of their cellars, the big distributors are throwing their weight around, and you add these things up, and from the winery perspective, the cash flow is brutal," said Steve Matthiason, a vineyard consultant who also grows grapes and makes small quantities of wine. "Everybody figures this is kind of a temporary thing, that when restaurants burn through their inventory they're going to have to start buying again, and distributors, too. But everybody is wondering when the levee is going to break, and you have harvest coming up."

"Drinking out of their cellars" is exactly what we like to imagine laid-off bankers are doing when they're not busy fending off $2 million-a-year offers from Citibank. But we digress. The beer industry is also seeing a flight to quantity, the Wall Street Journal reports—astonishingly, people can't even afford to buy Budweiser anymore:

Heineken sales sank 18% from the previous year in grocery, convenience and drug stores during the two-week period ended July 5, followed by Budweiser at 14%. Corona Extra sales dropped 11%, while Miller Lite declined 9% and Bud Light fell 7%. Coors Light sales held up better, falling less than 1% from a year ago.

Meanwhile, sales of "subpremium" beers including Busch, Natural Light and Keystone posted "substantial gains", according to Ad Age, which didn't provide the specifics.

Subprime borrowers drink subpremium beer. Of course, the rich will always be with us, so when it's not busy writing about how the wretched poors are mopping up the floor with rags at bartime and squeezing foul remnants into their mouths for a few moments of relief, it's writing about rich people drinking from ostentatiously oversized bottles of precious wine:

Frank DeSalvo's dinner guests have come to expect a bit of spectacle when their host serves wine. The process sometimes involves a wooden cradle, holding an exquisitely blown glass vessel containing the equivalent of 24 bottles of wine, being lifted by several men onto the table.

After dinner, they go out and light bums on fire for kicks.

Still! His wacky speech did attract a bit of attention, mostly from the bloggers and journalists currently documenting the most worrying of the eliminationist rhetoric of the fringes of the far-right. Like the invaluable Dave Wiegel whose Washington Independent reported that Terry is still really, really in to pretending he is John Brown.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.People For the American Way's Right Wing Watch has clips of the speech, in case you need some excuse to get really mad, this morning. It ended on a really weird note. The murder of George Tiller apparently is "a teaching moment for what child-killing is really all about," according to Terry's closing line (leave 'em laughing!). And then it's time to take everyone out for beer and wings—extra crispy!

We wish we were making any of that up! But we're not! Tomorrow at 1 p.m., in DC, insane anti-abortion activist Randall Terry's "Society For Truth and Justice" will throw a press conference about how to "derail Sotomayor and overturn Roe." The email promises that the conference will compare the murder of George Tiller to Nat Turner's slave rebellion and Terry himself reports that this cold-blooded shooting of an innocent doctor by a psychopath "will propel us to victory more speedily."

Now it can be tough to get positive press coverage if you are a dangerous lunatic who should be in a padded cell. But Terry's got that covered.

Time: 12:30 to 1:00 P.M., Chicken Wings and Guinness will be served (for members of the press only). (Please RSVP at 904-687-9804 by Wednesday morning.)

And that is why there will be like two dozen reporters at this press conference, tomorrow.

Here's the full email.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

From: Studio Staff
Date: Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 12:17 PM
Subject: Tiller, Sotomayor, Overturn Roe PRESS CONFERENCE Thurs. 1pm
To: [Redacted]

*How Tiller's death and office closing can help propel pro-life movement, derail Sotomayor and overturn Roe. Four Key Senators will be targeted to vote against Sotomayor; Catholic Bishops will play a role to defeat Sotomayor.*

Press conference 1 PM, Thursday, to announce details how Pro-life groups can derail Sotomayor, and root out hypocrisy in pro-life ranks.

Also: Emergency Pro-life leadership training to be held in DC, June 12-14, with Randall Terry, Dr. Alan Keyes, Norma McCorvey, and Father Norman Weslin. Pro-abortion activists threaten to disrupt meeting.

*For immediate release: Dateline: Washington DC Contact: Kathy Veritas, 904-687-9804*

Press conference will cover:

1) How Mr. Tiller's death can propel the pro-life movement forward based upon lessons from Nat Turner's slave rebellion, and how abolitionists responded;

2) Plans of pro-life groups to seize moment to defeat Sotomayor, and expose hypocrisy within the GOP; names of 4 key Senate Targets to be released.

3) The role certain Catholic Bishops must play to insure Sotomayor's defeat;

4) Upcoming pro-life training: Pro-abortion activists threaten to disrupt.

Location: National Press Club, 14th and F Street, Washington DC

Time: 12:30 to 1:00 P.M., Chicken Wings and Guinness will be served (for members of the press only). (Please RSVP at 904-687-9804 by Wednesday morning.)

Press conference to begin at 1:00 P.M.

Members of press will be provided concise yet comprehensive research on the above topics. Upcoming plans and details of June 12-14 seminar will be laid out.

Randall Terry States:

"Tiller's death will either set the pro-life movement back twenty years, or propel us to victory more speedily. The outcome depends on our courage over the next 3-6 months.

"If we follow the example of the abolitionists, we will prevail; if we run like French Soldiers, we will be imprisoned in irrelevance.

"Our upcoming seminar is designed to raise up stout hearted, peaceful pro-life warriors, who do not fear, but follow this maxim: ".urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD." (William Lloyd Garrison)

—
Society for Truth and Justice
904-687-9804
P.O. Box 23775
Washington, D.C. 20026

[Photo: AP]

Compared to the average beer ad with a porn angle, this is Citizen Kane. [via Adrants]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The website is equally full of breasts and devoid of literary criticism, spiritual philosophy, and other non-breast-or-beer-related things. This vid (we have it backed up for when it gets pulled from YouTube, which should be any minute now. UPDATE: Yes it has happened.) is supposed to be you vs. the girl in a "staring contest," btw. Whatever. Copyranter is to blame.

No idea why they went to all this trouble—they spoofed Die Hard and 24 as well—but let's be glad they did, because not much real news is happening on this religion-tainted Friday. [Smooth Originals via Adfreak]

As with most college scandals, it involved a canoe race gone awry.

Thain was, at the time, a big wheel with MIT's Interfraternity Conference, and the IFC had been tasked with selecting 24 students to attend an all-expense-paid trip to LA for a canoe race sponsored by Anheuser-Busch (the '70s!). And there was some sort of scandal because Thain just picked his buddies, or something (it's really unclear, here, these '70s campus and frat politics), and he didn't pick any women MIT students, just presumably hotter girls from Boston College. Scandal!

Thain's habit of taking money he was entrusted with and handing whatever he didn't outright lost to his buddies was apparent even then.

They're concerned that their precious sun-kissed tots, who naturally adore the easy-going movie star, will be driven to drink after watching him lounging around the beach and having a few brews.

"Matt is rarely seen without a bottle or can of beer in his hand—he likes to unwind with friends. They surf and down beer after beer," says a tipster.

"The kids who play on the beach think Matt's cool because he's in movies. [The parents] don't want their sons and daughters watching Matt get tipsy. Matt thinks they are overreacting. He says he's a dad, too, and they should mind their own business." [Star]

The personality summary:

Tucker Max is an asshole but the kind of asshole that all of his asshole friends love because his antics distract them from the thinning hair and gentle mediocrity that characterize their post-college years.

The victim's personality:

Most Tucker Max stories involve him doing or saying crazy/offensive things, getting into trouble for them, and then going home with one of those girls who, when a guy says something sort of awful to her, hits him on the shoulder and says “you asshole” but also smiles and sticks to him like glue for the rest of the night. My dad was nice to me, so I don’t have this reaction, but I guess it takes all kinds.

The methodological analysis:

Invariably in Tucker’s stories, someone gets pissed off and says his jokes aren’t funny, and if that someone is a woman, she’s dismissed as ugly and/or fat and therefore too bitter and angry to get the joke, while if that someone is a man, he’s dismissed as being a meathead and therefore not cool or smart enough to get the joke. If you are confused by this last, let me clear it up for you: Tucker Max is unaware that he is the definition of a hazey, rapey, fratty meathead.

In the course of one paragraph, the author has summarized everything you will ever need to know about Tucker Max. The script—which, yes, involves midget sex—is called "Godawful" and "terrible" and many other things, although those two will suffice. We're looking into getting a copy of it ourselves; if you have one handy, email us.

[Read the entire takedown by The Script Reader. Somebody inform Michael Ian Black that his nemesis is open to attack.]

Dr. Leon A. Greenberg, Yale professor of physiology, said beer isn’t [intoxicating] – and should be reclassified to the non-intoxicating drinks.

This brought emphatic objection from other scientists. They wanted to know if the man who is “high” or “tight” isn’t also drunk. Beer certainly makes people “high” and “tight,” they said.

That's a good question! It depends on what this "high" or "tight" man is drinking?

For people to show consistently the “abnormal behavior” which goes with intoxication, the alcohol content of their blood must be 0.15 per cent or higher.

THE AVERAGE alcohol content of American beers is 3.7 per cent by weight. In order for the alcohol blood level to be at 0.15 per cent, there would have to be two and one-half quarts of 3.7 beer in the stomach. But the capacity of the human stomach is one and one-half to two quarts.

Therefore, no one can drink enough beer at one time to get intoxicated, according to theory. As for doing it by degrees: beer is destroyed or eliminated in the body at the rate of one-third of a quart an hour. So three quarts would have to be consumed in two or three hours, and this, he said, was “physiologically unnatural.”

See? It's air-tight. Back when 0.15 was considered, like, almost drunk. The good old days. Also it's totally true! We fiddled around with this handy intoxication calculator and we'd need to down 5 beers in one hour to get to like 0.11. And we'd still be legal to drive home to 1955! Thanks, science!

[via Adfreak]

[Copyranter]