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hkmaly

Story Friday, Dec 13, 2019

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2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... I find unlikely that changing the cards would be like normal part of the spell. Clothes, sure, but cards are not something you usually think about as part of you. And, obviously, in modern times card physically changing wouldn't help, as the information is in remote database anyway.

Note that Elliot apparently got away with his gender change by combination of impudence and using his girl charm on the principal. And when Ellen was separate individual, DGB took care of all official documents.

Since magic doesn't exist in my universe, I can neither agree nor disagree with you.

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20 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

Why would anyone lock a door which is not hung in a doorway?

Well, if the lock is connected to a "locking" spell, the point would be to cast the spell, not lock the door. Also, it's possible it wasn't locked by a sentient being - it could be something automatic. I even thought it might have been triggered by a spell being used near it, though in that case it seems odd it didn't activate until now.

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If the click is locking the door or turning off something, I have another possible suspect: Lavender. Maybe she doesn't want Edward to be distracted by shenanigans in Edward's basement... or maybe she wants to give the kids their privacy... or, of course, both.

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1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

How sad that place sounds

Well, I do have sufficiently advanced technology, so there's that.

 

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

I have found that friendship is magic. Even entirely without ponies.

OK, I do have metaphorical magic where I live, but that's a pretty low bar.

Speaking of which, I will go to bars (or pubs, as some of you call them) with friends, but they generally do not allow ponies; the height of the bar does not seem to be a factor. Beer works its magic. Yes, it is often American beer, so we do have to consume more of it, although we are sufficiently urban that the better bars will have import beer and ale, often on tap. The advantage of the low bar is that as you stumble out of the door of the higher one, it tends to be easier to go downhill, so you will often end up at the lower one.

 

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1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Beer works its magic. Yes, it is often American beer

That hardly counts as beer. I mean, I don't have personal experience, but I know lot of Americans visiting Europe mostly for beer. In fact, I don't know any American visiting Europe for any OTHER reason. Unless you count Obama, but I don't know him good enough to know if he had some beer here or not. Maybe all that talk about diplomacy and stuff was just excuse and he came for the beer.

Hmmmm ....

150608120428-obama-merkel-3-super-169.jp

18 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

If the click is locking the door or turning off something, I have another possible suspect: Lavender. Maybe she doesn't want Edward to be distracted by shenanigans in Edward's basement... or maybe she wants to give the kids their privacy... or, of course, both.

Hmmmm ... we didn't though about the possibility Edward is on the other side of those doors before ...

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14 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

That hardly counts as beer.

LOL, I think I already said that, and pointed out that I can get imported beer. Rather easily, as a matter of fact. It is more expensive, but not as much as you might think. Tax raises the baseline to where it's not cheap either.

 

Two Americans walk into a pub in London. They ask for beers.

The bartender gets them each a beer.

"No, we want Budweiser."

He thinks for a couple of seconds, then drinks their mugs.

After a while, he unzips his fly, pees in their mugs, and hands them to the drinkers.

 

Also, home brewing is popular, and is legal, and microbreweries have exploded on our landscape. There's probably a dozen in my town.

 

14 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

In fact, I don't know any American visiting Europe for any OTHER reason.

You don't get out much, then. Recall that prior to the 1490s, the population of the Americas was entirely Native American. Most of us have some connection with somewhere else. I'm roughly 50% Solvene, 47.5% Spanish, with a smidgen of Dutch and I don't know what else.

One coworker is a US citizen, born here to US parents, was raised mostly in Canada, and also holds an Irish citizenship by virtue of ancestry and visits every couple of years.

Not exactly a positive, but as a legacy of WWII and the Cold War, we have bases scattered around Europe. Quite a few US servicemen spend years there. One of my daughters was stationed in Bavaria for a couple of years, and one of my coworkers was born in Germany to a US military family.

I've never been to Beerfest, but if I wanted to go to one, I wouldn't have to go to Germany. We have dozens, modeled on the German Beerfest, because, we're basically not from here, remember? Ethnic food? Please, I can walk to several. I have many choices within a short drive, and almost anything I could imagine within an hour. The weird thing is, this is often true in rural areas due to the way the US was settled.

Many of our small towns identify with a specific nationality, and in the region I was raised in, we had ethnic radio stations. My school mates had Italian, German, and Eastern European surnames.

Visiting Europe for me would be connecting with my heritage, meeting family, seeing new things. I would want to see architecture, art, and historical sites. I'm a bit of a rail fan, and your highly functional rail system fascinates me. American business thinking tends to be very short sighted, and infrastructure suffers; rail was important her, but it no longer competes. Of course, I would try the cuisine.

I would not ignore beer, but it would not be why I am there. I doubt that I'm atypical in that regard.

 

14 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Unless you count Obama, but I don't know him good enough to know if he had some beer here or not.

<Jaw drop> I thought this was well known. Visit to a bar in Moneygall, with the hoisting of a Guinness. Check this article out.

 

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3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said: Beer works its magic. Yes, it is often American beer

That hardly counts as beer.

My take on it: American beer is cheap domestic turtle piss. Good imported beers are the premium mictural excretions of exotic terrapins.

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28 minutes ago, Don Edwards said:
 

My take on it: American beer is cheap domestic turtle piss. Good imported beers are the premium mictural excretions of exotic terrapins.

Dude, there aren't enough turtles to account for that. (Unless you are referring to "It's turtle all the way down".)

The Clydesdales are associated with Bud, and would have a more copious output.

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4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:
6 hours ago, hkmaly said:

In fact, I don't know any American visiting Europe for any OTHER reason.

You don't get out much, then.

Going out more wouldn't help. I'm not that good at making friends.

4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Visiting Europe for me would be connecting with my heritage, meeting family, seeing new things.

Well, visit Europe and tell me how it went. Then I would be able to say I know one american who visited Europe for other reason than beer :)

4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

I would not ignore beer, but it would not be why I am there. I doubt that I'm atypical in that regard.

Probably not. I wasn't trying to claim my experience is typical.

4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:
6 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Unless you count Obama, but I don't know him good enough to know if he had some beer here or not.

<Jaw drop> I thought this was well known. Visit to a bar in Moneygall, with the hoisting of a Guinness. Check this article out.

"Don't know him good enough" confirmed.

4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

"No, we want Budweiser."

Depends on which Budweiser: Anheuser-Busch or Budweiser Budvar Brewery ...

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3 hours ago, Don Edwards said:
 

My take on it: American beer is cheap domestic turtle piss. Good imported beers are the premium mictural excretions of exotic terrapins.

Yes, the imports are not cheap. :D

Anyway, I blame Prohibition for the low quality of American beer. During Prohibition, the piss beer was the only kind that was legal (beers and ciders below IIRC about 5 proof, i.e. 2.5% alcohol by weight were allowed). This resulted in a whole generation growing up believing that this was the way that beer was supposed to be, and so they just kept it that way afterward.

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1 hour ago, ijuin said:

Anyway, I blame Prohibition for the low quality of American beer.

If it is any consolation, my wife claims that Denmark's biggest beer brand is even worse. I would not know, being teetotal, but this seems to be supported by the fact that a great number of Danes also compare it to horse piss.

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Was there a long period after WWII when better beer was hard to get? If so, then that poor-quality beer's popularity might be due to a similar reason--people grew up with it or acquired a taste for it due to it being all they could get for years.

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1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

I never heard of that second one, so I'd Czech it out.

 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Going out more wouldn't help. I'm not that good at making friends.

Any idea why?

 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

Well, visit Europe and tell me how it went. Then I would be able to say I know one American who visited Europe for other reason than beer :)

It's on the bucket list.

 

1 hour ago, hkmaly said:

"Don't know him good enough" confirmed.

Well, there's two different Barrack Obamas, from the point of view of the voters. Half of us think he was a very reasonable president, bookended by two incompetents; the right thinks he's the worst thing that ever happened to the USA. I cannot adequately explain their point of view; it seems irrational to me.

For my tastes, he did not live up to initial expectations, albeit, there was a concerted effort by the right to thwart him, and they were largely successful. Still, some of the responsibility is his; the roll-out for his healthcare plan was incredibly dysfunctional, and that was all in his wheel house. Still, I would rate him in at least the top 20% of our past leaders. He inherited a lot of problems, many of which he fixed or at least mitigated, the economy did well, and there were some efforts toward social reform.

A surprising bit about the reaction of the right is that Obama was really not all that liberal, he was pretty much a moderate. Prior to his presidency, he was a "work across the aisle" kind of guy. But, then again, a lot of their own Republican heroes would not pass muster either, if they reflected on their views. (Not much danger of that; reflection and self-awareness it not part of their skill set.)

As a human being, he's fairly admirable. Articulate, erudite, hard working, yet knows how to humanly relate, took care of his family, inclusive of the marginalized, willing to learn and change his stance (a rare trait in a high level politician), took time to interact with people who would never be in a position to return a political favor. My biggest regret about his presidency is that we lost a good legislator prematurely.

Perhaps also noteworthy, if you check before and after photos of US presidents, many of them age horribly while in office. Obama does not seem badly impacted by his tenure.

 

 

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1 hour ago, ijuin said:

Yes, the imports are not cheap. :D

Anyway, I blame Prohibition for the low quality of American beer. During Prohibition, the piss beer was the only kind that was legal (beers and ciders below IIRC about 5 proof, i.e. 2.5% alcohol by weight were allowed). This resulted in a whole generation growing up believing that this was the way that beer was supposed to be, and so they just kept it that way afterward.

I would agree about Prohibition being the cause, but would say that the sentiment toward prohibition was why various limits were retained after it was repealed. When I was younger at least, alcohol content of beer in the US was still limited by law, not just by tradition and inertia. Nor could you import stronger at that time.

 

7 minutes ago, ijuin said:

Was there a long period after WWII when better beer was hard to get? If so, then that poor-quality beer's popularity might be due to a similar reason--people grew up with it or acquired a taste for it due to it being all they could get for years.

Yes, see above. At least well into the 70s. I don't know when it changed. I'm really not that much of a beer drinker that I'd track this, I don't generally have any in my fridge. What I know is often through exposure through peer influence, drinking with friends.

 

 

 

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Sorry, I was asking Hack specifically about the conditions in Denmark, since she had mentioned piss-poor mass market beer there as well.

Anyway, if laws kept out the higher-quality beer for so many years, then that means that a lot of people were just used to the piss beer, which resulted in a LOT of inertia resisting any change once those laws were relaxed.

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2 hours ago, ijuin said:

Sorry, I was asking Hack specifically about the conditions in Denmark, since she had mentioned piss-poor mass market beer there as well.

Anyway, if laws kept out the higher-quality beer for so many years, then that means that a lot of people were just used to the piss beer, which resulted in a LOT of inertia resisting any change once those laws were relaxed.

In our case, the inertia applies to the lawmakers, but as soon as the gate was opened, the market provided.

No sympathy for OH and other Danes here. They have a short drive to real beer. We had Canada, but for most of the US, that's a long way for a pub crawl.

As far as I know, Mexican beer is oddly similar to US beer. Maybe they made it that way to make it exportable? It is fairly popular here, but it's not that different from our mainstream brands.

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5 hours ago, ijuin said:

Was there a long period after WWII when better beer was hard to get? If so, then that poor-quality beer's popularity might be due to a similar reason--people grew up with it or acquired a taste for it due to it being all they could get for years.

I am afraid that we have no such excuse. The Carlsberg brand used and still uses purely local Danish materials, and it was popular even before the wars. We even had a running gag about it in a TV series devoted to the history of the Carlsberg family. The faithful family coach driver would pour a bottle of their beer out into the harbor whenever they did something to the beer he disapproved of. (He would sometimes also do it if they made some in-family decision he disapproved of, like being shitty towards the younger son, for example.)

3 hours ago, ijuin said:

Sorry, I was asking Hack specifically about the conditions in Denmark, since she had mentioned piss-poor mass market beer there as well.

Thank you for specifying. I might not have noticed and answered if you hadn't. I'm sorry.

53 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:

No sympathy for OH and other Danes here.

Oh HELL no. We had absolutely no excuse. Not only did we live just north of the literal beer capital of the world, we also had hundreds of microbreweries ourselves, many of which produced excellent beer. These days Carlsberg has snapped them up, but thankfully hasn't shut the best of them down and let them continue to sell their own beer under their own imprint.

The really sad part? Carlsberg can brew quite decent beer. They have released some on brand craft beers that my spouse heartily approves of. It's just that their flagship brew is of a quality that would make a veterinarian pull a horse out of line to find out what was wrong with it.

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

/me adds your name to the List

:lol: I don't think the verb is add at this point. I'm curious, why did I never get a comment back on a "bag of Cole"?

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1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

The really sad part? Carlsberg can brew quite decent beer. They have released some on brand craft beers that my spouse heartily approves of. It's just that their flagship brew is of a quality that would make a veterinarian pull a horse out of line to find out what was wrong with it.

That's our situation. Early colonial immigrants had strong brewing traditions. The American colonies did not lack beer.

I've heard that cider was more popular for many years, and I prefer it myself. We also have a fair amount of meaderies, at least in my region, but I believe that is much more recent, maybe due to Ren Faire influence.

 

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Just now, Darth Fluffy said:

No sympathy for OH and other Danes here. They have a short drive to real beer. We had Canada, but for most of the US, that's a long way for a pub crawl.

I tend to go Coors Light most times, as long as it's nice and cold it tastes good, but I imagine that's like most mainstream North American beer, once it gets to near room temp it starts tasting skunky.

For the higher end stuff I usually get something like Alexander Keith's IPA or Red Amber Ale, though apparently the IPA isn't the same as they used to make it due to a change in formula to preserve it longer as it was shipped to soldiers during either WWI or II. I've also had some Mill Street Brewery coffee porter which is pretty much like drinking a Guiness without the creaminess.

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5 minutes ago, Scotty said:

I tend to go Coors Light most times, as long as it's nice and cold it tastes good, but I imagine that's like most mainstream North American beer, once it gets to near room temp it starts tasting skunky.

For the higher end stuff I usually get something like Alexander Keith's IPA or Red Amber Ale, though apparently the IPA isn't the same as they used to make it due to a change in formula to preserve it longer as it was shipped to soldiers during either WWI or II. I've also had some Mill Street Brewery coffee porter which is pretty much like drinking a Guiness without the creaminess.

I don't know what is still true, especially as the brands change hands, but Coors had special issues with distribution, such as you mention with "a change in formula to preserve it longer as it was shipped ..." - Coors did not have that. It was hard to find East of the Mississippi, which it no longer is, which hints that this is no longer true.

If I am buying beer for my own consumption, and it is available, I like ginger beers. Jamaica seems to produce more of these than anywhere else. Not ginger ale as sold in the US, which is ginger flavored soda water, but a a malt brew with ginger. An ale with ginger would probably be fine, but I don't know what you'd call it to not confuse what it is. Also, not alcoholic ginger beverages with no malt at all; I've tried a few, they are not the worst thing I've ever drunk, but I'm not a fan. The malt flavor seems important for the products I like.

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