I have comments, but I need to do this other stuff before I can draft a suitable reply.
I'm generally very prompts about replying to e-mail, but I don't have a good system for flagging old e-mails that need attention. If I don't reply to something within the same day I can often forget about it if it isn't important.
The one advantage of e-mail conversations involving several people is that it makes it more likely that somebody else will reply and push it back to the top of the pile.
If you draft a reply consisting only of "Nutsack" and set it to automatically send in a certain date, you'll do so much better at keeping track of the need to reply.
That's actually NickS's real name.
Sorry, Nick, I didn't mean that like it sounded.
Clearly the optimal strategy is to send out a mass email to everyone who applied offering them the job, and then hire the first person who responds.
Although it seems that students barely look at their email anymore, if my experience sending out class announcements is anything to go by.
Is this the thread to compare inbox sizes and response times? Once upon a time Unfogged was for deviant sex talk, now it's office efficiency? How the mighty have fallen. Or become middle-aged and boring.
I'll start! My sex life has always been boring.
1. Personal email, only 3 unread, not counting the junk mail folders, which I never look at. I originally left those 3 unread because they seemed important, I couldn't deal with them at the time, and I thought marking them unread would be a good way to flag them for my attention. It's been at least four months. Whoops. I'm looking for them now.
2. Work email, everything gets read, but that just means clicking on them long enough for Outlook to mark them as read. I try to respond to things ASAP, e.g. right away if possible, later that day or the following morning if I have to give it some thought. Things that require attention but I can't respond to that quickly get that red flag icon as a reminder to not forget them.
3: Gmail's "snooze" feature is helpful for this--it removes the letter from your inbox, then moves it back after the snooze period is over. I find this more effective than e.g. Outlook's flagging system.
Sorry, Nick, I didn't mean that like it sounded.
No worries, I laughed at 4/5.
Still, "Nick Nutsack" would be NickN.
I also mark e-mail unread to set something aside for later.
I accidentally marked about 50 e-mails as "read" recently -- I highlighted the whole folder and hit Ctrl-Q -- and it turns out there is no way in Outlook to undo when you mark them read that way.
There was zero fallout from this. Whatever I left undone stayed harmlessly undone.
One of the clients here is horrible about it. I need her approval for a certain document. As far as I can tell this is just a pro forma thing; as contractors we can't call this kind of thing done until one of the clients has approved it, but they never have feedback on the technical side of things and very rarely have it on the organizational/administrative side either. As of today it's 11 weeks since I first asked her to look at it. I've send her literally a dozen emails (I counted) and also spoken to her in person and by Skype and involved my manager. Multiple times the client has said she'd review it, but she still hasn't actually done so as far as I know. I've long since stopped caring about it. I figure as long as I remind her as clearly as I can every week or two and document it, I've done my due diligence. If anyone wants the document, it's her problem.
9: Interesting. I'll try to look into it. Wouldn't matter too much, I feel like staying on top of things at work is a bigger problem, but it might be nice to know about.
The best way to implement this is to train/promote internally, backfiling with fast hiring on on temp/probationary basis. But most corps seem to consider anyone already working for them to be an idiot/sucker,
I'm stealing this practice from a comment in the Twitter thread about adding to the end of emails to certain coworkers " ...and this is what I intend to do tomorrow unless you advise otherwise." Concentrates the mind." It will save me having to actually go and talk to anybody, like some kind of animal.
" Unless I hear otherwise, I'll assume your approval for wiring $400,000 to my mom."
"In order to save water and soap, unless I hear otherwise, tomorrow I will add 'Upon Customer Request' to the top of the 'Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning To Work' signs in the restrooms."
15: I mean, that is pretty well established by TOS on software and "driving into this building means you agree not to sue us" signs in parking lots
So many people here drive into buildings. I always assumed they got sued by the building's owner.
Somebody drove into the grocery store, a Giant Eagle, by me. Then somebody drove on top it. Then somebody shot two people leaving it. I've been trying to get people to call it the Death Eagle since then, but failing.
Possibly because nobody died in any of this.
I can think of a simple way for you to remedy that.
You can jump out once the car has enough momentum.
I think they put up a sturdier fence, so it's harder to drive on top of the store now.
26: Seems like a less sturdy roof would be more effective.
Around here we have a different problem.
I though Alaskan windshields are steeply pitched so that mooses can slide off without causing damage.
The problem with meese, aside from the sheer size, is that they are tall enough that if you hit one, they topple right into the passenger compartment through the windshield.
31 is correct. They're really big animals.
Hence the picturesque pitching.
32: I'm pretty sure I'm repeating what you said here some years ago. Except for the plural.
I can't really picture the sort of pitching Mossy has in mind, but I think it implies an unrealistic idea of the amount of automobile manufacturing in Alaska.
I think maybe you should check with Standpipe.
Like this. IDK if that angle is mice-optimized. But you're inventive frontier people, I'm sure you've figured it out.
Air travel is indeed a good way of reducing (but not eliminating) the risk of hitting moose.
All those frozen-lake landings.
Pfft, moose are such pussies, a couple thousand bugs can kill them.
29 The report doesn't mention if the moose was killed. Or what its name was.
They have to contact next-of-kin first.
I read 31's "passenger compartment" as "glove compartment", which made sense coming from Moby, but then teo agreed which threw me.
41 makes me sad.
the Vermont moose team found that of the 29 calves in their study that winter (one having shucked its collar), 15 died of tick infestation. Fifty-two percent. New Hampshire and Maine had similar results. Northern New England's moose had officially had their fourth tick epizootic event in five years, their sixth in 11.
I think we need to encourage the opossum population to help control the ticks. Maybe I should start leaving garbage out?
I used to always be up to date with my inbox. If you emailed me, you'd pretty much get a reply within an hour. I'm also generally, very conscientious about work, anyway.
But ... turns out, there's a certain threshold of workload above which, I can't do that. In my current job, I spend a lot of my time above that threshold. So, if you were to ask me in an interview, say, how many emails I had that I hadn't followed up on, or people I owed a reply to, that I hadn't replied to, it'd be non-zero. Which wouldn't reflect at all, really, on my competence, but would reflect on the working environment I am in.
Our work is switching to holding email for only three months. This is frustrating because my timelines for resolving issues can be months. For example, we hired a new manager person who was supposed to take away a few of my more administrative responsibilities. One of those is getting approval for new SOP documents. I handed them over in November and have heard nothing back since. If at some point, my boss wants to know whether I handed it off appropriately, finding the email chain is going to be SO MUCH HARDER. There are so many e-mails I send that say things like, "Hi, could you please do X?" (Where X is their job) and set follow-up reminders in my calendar to email weekly or monthly follow-ups because it will take at minimum three rounds of requests to get even minimal action.
That said, I have 13,000 messages in my Inbox, all read, nothing that I owe anyone at the moment other than actual science results. I'm not sure at what point it would become unsustainable to send at least, "I am so sorry, can't get to this until Friday, is that OK?"
One can hardly blame them, what with the exponentially rising cost of storage.
49- we have the same policy at my new job. I was very good at my previous job at finding some obscure but important detail because they used Google and I was fairly well organized and good at using search parameters. Now we have Outlook and the 90 policy and I've already had trouble finding stuff that I know I had but that has been swallowed by the time limit. I imagine it's a corporate compliance thing so that if there ever was discovery in some legal proceeding they could say that they had definitively turned over all records because they'd only have 90 days' worth.
Basically it's all the lawyers' fault, as usual.
51: Aaaaaaugh. That is totally me, too. (Although it's all Outlook, I am pretty systematic/predictable so search is easy.) Nice to justify a decision when someone forgot why or go back to a conversation and point to prior agreement. Or find a trend. (Hey, something goes wrong with the heat every November 15 - is there some scheduled changeover by Facilities?) And yes, legal document review is the driver. Small company got bought by bigger company. Site now needs to comply with corporate standards.
It's not all lawyer's faults. They keep having lawsuits where the defendant's management turns out to have sent emails reading, "Thanks for letting me know about the illegal thing we are doing. But let's keep doing it because not doing it will cost money. Also, I just love committing crime. Especially crime where the victims are mostly just like people who will be in the jury pool if we are ever sued about this. Ready to go get lunch? The cafeteria is serving panda."
Wow. We use outlook, and I did notice at a certain point that things were being auto-archived more regularly, but I don't think they're disappearing altogether. 90 days seems insanely short to purge the memory hole.
Every 90 days, forward your entire inbox to yourself.
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NMM to Stanely Donen, last of the great golden age of Hollywood directors.
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Speaking of competence, giving money to people so they can stand around in an apartment wearing bulletproof vests and tweet about riding around Minneapolis in an armored car seems like a remarkably new low in right-wing grifting.
I saw it on Yglesias's Twitter, the thing from Webster.
ydnew, would using a ticket or issue tracker work better for your job?
... uh, with some corporate norm of not putting illegal actions into the tracker?
Those could be listed in a separate "Things We're Not Doing" file.
53: what's especially fun is that at least one person is guaranteed to preserve the really incriminating stuff somehow. Corporate CYA beats corporate compliance every time. So all that's really being protected is the job security of some drone who can say it's not my fault, I wrote a really tight retention policy but they violated it.
Like that episode of M.A.S.H. where the military investigators "lost" the evidence that Hawkeye sent in to show that it was the U.N. that shelled those civilians and Major Burns saved the day by keeping other evidence in an attempt to show-up Hawkeye.
I tracked down 58/61.
I'm thinking I found the wrong calling and I should go into grifting full time.
I bet grifters answer their email very quickly.
They do. That Nigerian guy always responds to my emails in under 10 minutes, and he's grifted millions of dollars that he's going to share with me.
62: I'm not quite sure how to set it up from my end. Our Facilities department runs on a ticketing system, but they close them every Friday and don't reopen them, and I couldn't track recurring issues from my end except through the email confirmation of the request. Other departments don't have anything resembling a transparent system for handling work requests, so I just end up emailing over and over on a schedule, adding higher ups as needed until someone does their job. ("Hi, could you please review my written SOP? Thank you!" Then, "Hi, I didn't get a response to my request, just wanted to make sure it was received since it's been a couple weeks" "Hi, I wanted to check in on status of review. Do we have a timeline for getting this into use?" "Hi, My boss would really like to get this reviewed and into use; is there anything further you need from me?") I like many things about my job (generally highly independent work!) but dealing with other departments makes me wonder how the fuck these people continue to be employed.
It sounds as if ydnew could quietly automate much of her workload without anyone noticing.
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"When I was a governor I gave respect to the people. I did not use thugs."|>
55: I know you're joking, but that would be a sure-fire way for me to get fired; lots of medical record numbers in my e-mails.
My place holds on to stuff for 10 years. I don't know when it goes into the Outlook archive.
I followed the link in 66, and the grift is way dumber than I would have ever imagined.
There was a funny news story of someone going to one of the "no-go" neighborhoods in Paris and interviewing people on the street. What really set the tone was how banal the neighborhood looked.
When I worked in Corporate America, I knew a guy who got tired of all the work emails we got. His particular grievance was the unnecessary redundancy: HR would announce some new policy, and we'd hear about it six different ways including multiple emails.
So one day, he select-all/deleted his entire inbox. Poof. Just like that. And...nothing happened. He was very proud of this experiment, but I always thought he should have abandoned email entirely to test whether that would get you fired.
I wouldn't get fired, since I'm the boss, but I would very likely get disbarred. And deservedly so. I really just have no comprehension of the folks who think one can delete, unread, some vast trove of work email that hasn't already been sorted with some carefully crafted rule.
I have no unread unopened mail in my inbox or spam folder.
While we're on stupid policies- apparently in some foreign airports that serve flights to the US as well as other countries, you have to go through security with the usual shoes off and limited liquids, then go through the shopping and restaurant area, then go through another no-liquids checkpoint surrounding the US destination gates after which there are no bathrooms or water fountains. "We'll give you water on the plane," they claim.
They give you a ton of water on the plane, but then charge you $25 to use the bathroom on the plane. And they charge you $200 in a cleaning fee if you piss in the barf bag because it turns out those things won't hold actual liquid for very long.
What you do is you double up the barf bags.
There's only one per seat and everybody needs to go.
Our Facilities department runs on a ticketing system, but they close them every Friday and don't reopen them
Took me a while to notice that you didn't say they fulfil the requests... they just close the tickets?
Fulfilling the requests probably would take a lot more time.
81: Exactly. I think there might be some sort of penalty for having open tickets (or grading on response time), so like 82 says, they just close them, because that is easier. There doesn't appear to be a penalty for just closing tickets. Then, it's back to follow up requests and reminder e-mails.
||Schlitterban decapitation charges dismissed. That photo is not of someone I would trust to design a water slide or roller coaster.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/us/water-slide-death-charges.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage
|>
People respond to incentives, even really stupid ones like Green Stamps.
I wonder if any of the people I grew up with or their kids went down that slide before it was closed. It's probably not something you can ask on Facebook as it might come across as "which of you are negligent parents?"
Send her an email asking when there will be a vote.
Reader: they did not give us enough water. They came through with the drink cart once on a six hour flight.
Ring the call button and ask for more. In an Oliver Twist voice.
Did you know that for only a dollar you can make the whole bar listen to Joelene.
If you forget the difference between Van Morrison and Morrissey, someone will play Every Day Is Like Sunday.
In what I think of as a healthy ticket-tracking system, only the person who opened a ticket can close it. Or their manager, perhaps. But the action of the plumber or coder who believes it's fixed is to describe what they did and why they think it's fixed and the status changes to Resolved or Verify and the person with the problem closes it or reopens it with more information (or ignores it, but that doesn't bother anyone).
Other standard processes get their own stations of the peeved! When you had done your SOP thing it would be marked as the problem of the department that was supposed to review it. Oy.
I had no idea how fondly I felt about a good running ticketing system, but really, it allows for a huge amount of work getting done without a lot of actual interpersonal communication, let alone these echoing email reminders.
Does your company have a scary or enviable competitor? Could you start a whisper campaign about how clear their ticketing system is?
my Tickets get closed by somebody else, but they usually ask first. My Human Resources health insurance questions have been "resolved" with only half done answers, but I think that's because nobody knows.
94.last: Or see if the competitor is hiring.
74: I've been to several of the "no-go" neighborhoods in Berlin. Food's good, although that's true in plenty of other ordinary Berlin neighborhoods too.
94: "stations of the peeved" is lovely.
98 Last time I was in London I was walking around with a friend who lives there (can't remember where exactly, I think it was on the East End) and he goes "this is a no-go zone" and pointed out the mosque on the corner and we had a laugh and then went into a nearby pub and drank a bunch of beers till we were tipsy and then we had a curry around the corner.
I would really like to know where the no-go zones are in London. Is there a Google Maps overlay?
99: This is one of those ironic twist movies where it turns out you were dead the whole time.
100 Dan Kas/zeta on twitter regularly mocks all mostly American Islamophobic paranoiacs who go on about London's no-go zones, frequently with pics he took in said 'no-go zones'.
I would really like to know where the no-go zones are in London. Is there a Google Maps overlay?
Bellingcat has collated some of the maps that have done the rounds, including one that shows Tower Hamlets, Newham, and Waltham Forest in their entirety as an "Islamic Zone." Canary Wharf is presumably a isolated outpost of Western civilization.
In the coalmine, if you will.
Easy mistake; those are no-Go zones. Chess, backgammon or Mousetrap only.
||
So I recently just started rewatching Archer from the beginning. It's still funny, though probably more embarrassing to admit to liking than before.
|>
I just saw the most reason seasons and agree it is both depraved and funny.
OT: I think this fever has revealed the hidden downside to my plan to wash the dishes less often by just drinking out of whatever glass is on the counter.
I'm shaking with chills and sipping rye for medicinal purposes while watching Ken Burns on Prohibition. Turns out the whole thing was Ohio's fault.
In a recapitulation of human technical progress, Carry Nation first destroyed saloons with rocks before moving on to the metal hatchet.
This documentary isn't helping me think that the American political system will stand-up to an obviously bad idea promoted by conservative Protestants to penalize immigrants.
Dauschunds were stoned to death and Catholics highly suspect.
The brewers were the public face of both drinking and the Kaiser.
Just a random co-occurrence of xenophobia and religiosity?
119: No. Deliberately done.
118: Yes. It's lucky for them that the name Adolf didn't have any particular face with a toothbrush mustache to associate with it yet.
I guess because of the pilgrims, I have to say Protestant extremism.
Obviously the people before them were deficient in hating immigrants.
I didn't realize that the word "scofflaw" was created after Prohibition to describe those who broke it.
126: The Native Americans failed to prevent immigrants. I thought that was pretty clear.
That's a really long coast to wall.
But I meant, which motive came first for Prohibitionists? Was the temperance actually just instrumental?
It's probably for the best that the wave of fake rabbis (because of their legal access to wine) didn't happen during the modem debate on the Palestinians.
Catholic priests also had the ability to buy wine, but they are easier to check if they are real. At least if you're a small town police force.
131: Ken Burns didn't say explicitly.
My Italian grandfather made wine in his basement, which was legal and easy if you don't care about how the wine tastes. My mom and uncles all said how much it sucked.
My Irish grandfather had home delivery from a bootlegger. It was a business expense for him.
Temperance and anti-immigrant sentiment both have long histories in American Protestantism, going back at least as far as the mid-nineteenth century, and they were closely intertwined from more or less the very beginning. The immigrants in question included Irish and Italians as well as Germans, with the relative proportions varying over time.
77 another no-liquids checkpoint surrounding the US destination gates after which there are no bathrooms or water fountains
God, I hate that. I forget all the places I've encountered it. Beijing, for one--special bag-check before boarding the plane. And they always claim it's not their policy, it's US policy and scold you about how you should know better.
My aunt said the bootlegger would open the door without knocking, set the bottles down, and really out without a word. Possibly because she was about ten when Prohibition ended.
Covington, KY, was mentioned for illegal distilling.
Was drinking by black people in the mix anywhere?
Only in all of the places were black people lived. You needed 36 states to ratify a constitutional amendment, so that was not sufficient and possibly not necessary.
And by mix I mean the ideology, not the shaker.
I KNOW WHAT YOU NEED TO AMEND THE CONSTITUTION MOBY WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR SOME FILTHY DACHSHUND
Also to what extent were workers paid in liquor?
Hardly at all, unless they were making their own.
And, to what extent was Prohibition reversed because it had created a huge unregulated industry where undesirables could make money?
I'm gonna go get a haircut, when I come back I want answers, discussion, and references.
I haven't got that far. I just learned that even people from the 1920s telling not-education-related stories about alcohol, find a way to let it be known they went to Harvard. Or Radcliff, depending on when that whole thing was integrated.
Grandma talked about harvesting dandelions when she was younger. She said they were making salad, never mentioning dandelion wine.
I could never get into Bradbury.
How long are you supposed to wait for the chills to break?
You mix equal parts rum molasses and chicken blood and drink it hot. RL Stevenson says it clears you right up, and he was a pirate.
I only have rye and packaged boneless, skinless chicken breasts.
I think you can use gunpowder instead.
Also, were there significant differences in the kinds of liquor various social strata drank?
Yeah, for example, if you go to a rich-people event that has alcohol, the beer will probably be Stella Artois. Nobody knows why; it's just the way rich people consume beer: in Stella-Artois form.
Apparently, Prohibition ended because you can't use fear to keep the local systems in line. The tighter they squeezed, the more will squeeze through fingers.
157: Poor people don't because the bottles are half an ounce smaller.
137 is great, a milkman but for hooch.
I guess she went to Vassar and figures strongly in the early days of not serving women from Dubuque.
Dubuque is bad luck for me. Twenty-five years ago I became uncontrollably sick and had to stop for the night.
It night have been another of the Quad Cities.
I'm not counting Stella as a significant difference. Unless Pabst is made from alfalfa or HFCS or something.
I find Pabst undrinkable. And I usually drink Straub.
Some old guy says men learned what the clitoris was because of illegal alcohol. He's old enough to know, I guess.
No cross examination to show her didn't just misinterpret the labia or something.
Except for a brief period in the 70s, PBS has been PG.
I don't think Al Smith is going to win, but no spoilers.
He lost because he was Catholic and pro-alcohol.
Repeal was successful because of drys being completely unwilling to compromise and reapportionment ending the dry strength in state legislatures. Which is cheering if you don't realize how long it took. Drys continued to not give a shit about violence or people dying from drinking alcohol the government poisoned with much notice.
Also, in shades of the Fugative Slave Act, they made it a crime to fail to report.
How many drys were bandwagoners who defected over time? And what were the bases of the opposition?
Not very many. Because they tried and failed to get a moderation of the law, such as legalizing beer and wine. Also, I'm betting the Great Depression will happen soon, making the Democratic Party more likely to win.
Mostly women from wealthy Northeaster suburbs at the start. According to Ken Burns.
Kids shouldn't take a history test based on this. I am really feverish.
Those women better have had shares in vineyards, otherwise I'll have to moderate my cynicism, which would cause me deep distress. Do you want to be responsible for that?
Little known fact: F. Scott Fitzgerald didn't like rich people.
Anyway, it turns out the big answer is so they could tax alcohol and give people jobs making alcohol.
Hoover lost the white working class, except at Stanford.
And crush the local non-WASPs by the relentless pressure of agglomerative NYC capital?
160:
Unfortunately both Wiedemann and Bavarian suffered the same fate - they had old inefficient pre-Prohibition breweries that couldn't compete when the national brands came on the scene.I feel so validated. Interesting link, but I don't see that it shows different strata drinking different stuff. It shows German people making and buying German-style beer, but it doesn't show segregation of German beer, by ethnicity or by class. When I say substantially different what I'm getting at is stuff like, Slavs starting their own shady stills because no-one else made vodka.
"if you go to a rich-people event that has alcohol, the beer will probably be Stella Artois."
Good lord. That is very much not the case over here. Here the universal nickname for Stella Artois is "wifebeater" and it's seen as a football hooligan beer. Not sure what the classy beer would be; Grolsch maybe? Heineken? Asahi?
Topless Europe o'erhops America yet again.
Nah, American beer is way hoppier than European.
Were you, yourself, to be required to pluck hops from their high-climbing vines, balanced comically upon the tremendous stilts traditionally required for that purpose, would you venture forth more boldly beneath the panoply of social-democratic healthcare or that of the paltry latter-day imitation thrashing painfully upon the blighted lands of Blue America? The question answers itself.
OK, I've had a look and the Rivoli Bar at the Ritz has three bottled beers: Meantime Pale Ale, which is a rather nice one brewed in Greenwich; Saltaire Brewery Stout from Yorkshire, which I don't know; and Green and Pleasant, an organic microbrew, which I also don't know. No lagers at all.
The Wolseley doesn't serve any beer at all, and the Three and Six Bar in Fortnum's serves its own brand pilsner, ale and cider.
So it seems that the classy option is some sort of superior ale, possibly a microbrew.
Nominees are, however, required to pass certain tests, whose nature is sufficiently indicated by the fact that a certain distinguished explorer came to grief through accepting, and smoking, a powerful Trichinopoly cigar as an accompaniment to a '63 port. On the other hand, dear old Sir Roger Bunt (the coster millionaire who won the £20,000 ballot offered by the Sunday Shriek, and used it to found his immense catering business in the Midlands) was highly commended and unanimously elected after declaring frankly that beer and a pipe were all he really cared for in that way. As Lord Peter said again: "Nobody minds coarseness but one must draw the line at cruelty."
196 would have been my guess, mutatis mutandis. The only imported lagers regarded as classy are Czech, I think. I haven't tried the Saltaire stout, but I had a bottle of their Blonde (4% bitter) once and it was quite good.
199 reminds me of the guy who electroplated his mistress. I'm also reminded of that when I walk by the bench with the statue of Dr. Starzl seated on it.
199 reminds me of the guy who electroplated his mistress.
Goldfinger? I can't seeing him knowing which port to respect somehow.
It was a Peter Wimsey story set in the club discussed in 199. I can't remember if that quote was from that story or the one where the guy dies in his chair there.
Has anyone looked in Dr. Oops's basement?
Yes, it's a quote describing the Egotists' Club from "The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers".
Good lord. That is very much not the case over here. Here the universal nickname for Stella Artois is "wifebeater" and it's seen as a football hooligan beer. Not sure what the classy beer would be; Grolsch maybe? Heineken? Asahi?
This is interesting. Heineken and Stella Artois are virtually identical in American culture. Heineken is a bit passé because it had its first big marketing campaign in... must be the early 90s, and now has been replaced by Stella. Grolsch doesn't really get advertised, but it's around and it's in the same category.
In the before time, most restaurants used emptied Grolsch bottles (the kind with the cork on a wire frame, for salad dress containers. People were simple and happy and easily impressed.
And no imported beer is considered to be in the "cheap and bad" category, unless it's imported from Canada. Not even Carlsberg.
Stella is a decent go to beer when they don't have anything better
Either Labatt's or Molson is horrible. I can't remember which.
I grew up with someone who went into the army and was stationed in Germany. He said he always ordered Budweiser when he was there because it was imported.
In my experience, Stella is the beer of people who don't really drink beer very often.
Stella is the beer of people who don't really drink beer very often.
Over here it's the beer of people who do little else. Once you drop below the level of drinking Stella, you're basically on the street drinking Special Brew or Buckfast.
Well that's just weird. It has a foreign name! It must be classy!
I've heard good things about Buckfast, but never seen it.
I like Stella. But then again, I have been known to buy Budweiser not because it is cheap, but because it is what I want to drink.
I think the US analog for Stella is Rolling Rock -- a flavorless beer that is overpriced once you get out of its home region. I bet Moby can buy it for $4 a sixpack.
Don't know. Haven't drank it since they moved all the jobs making it from Latrobe to New Jersey.
By "Budweiser" I take it people are referring to the Anheuser-Busch crap, not the Budvar brewed in Budweis (Budějovice), which is fine if you want a lager style beer.
220: We would be in violation of several laws if we were referring to anything else other than the Anheuser-Busch crap.
219: So it's not really authentic Pennsylvania beer any more! I didn't know!
Stella is meh, and if you're drinking it from bottles you have to deal with that flakey shiny wrapper around the bottle neck. Liable to make a mess. While Heineken isn't amazing, it's superior to Stella on all dimensions. (Here in the US, real Czech lagers and Stella usually aren't served at the same places, so you need to find appropriate comparables.)
In the past year I've had a lot of meh East Asian lagers, and I've firmly established that Sapporo >> Tsingdao.
That's because the labeling is deceitful.
220 Indeed, which puts me in mind of this classic bit of contrarian trolling from the ever-entertaining derauqsed.
BTW, I don't know if I have you, chris y, or AL or someone else for putting me onto Graves' "Count Belisaurius" but I finished it last week and it really scratched that Claudius itch nicely. Highly recommended. Anything anyone know of in a similar vein?
My favorite US/UK drinking difference is that cider is seen as classier than beer here. As opposed to the liter bottles of Strongbow secondary students chug in the UK.
225: if I didn't recommend it then I should have; it's rather good. I rate it above "I, Claudius" myself. Shame it couldn't have been made into a similar BBC series but I suppose for "I, Claudius" all you need most of the time is a couple of indoor sets, Derek Jacobi, John Hurt and some bedsheets, while for "Count Belisarius" you need 500 armoured Gothic horsemen, the Nika Riots, the Hagia Sophia and the siege of Rome.
I really admire ajay's dedication to research in this thread.
But if we look at the beer drunk by the 1% here, as opposed to the 0.1%, I'd think it's mostly craft stuff. More or less genuinely crafty. Not often lager at all.
228 It might well have been you! I rate it close to the Claudius books (which is very highly). Any similar recommendations?
I'm wishing I hadn't read all the Flashman.
My favorite US/UK drinking difference is that cider is seen as classier than beer here. As opposed to the liter bottles of Strongbow secondary students chug in the UK.
It's classier because it's what women drink instead of beer.
228. If I were Jeff Bezos, I would entertain myself by directing movies which would be entirely uncommercial or could be made commercial only by dumbing down beyond all hope of rescue. Belisarius would be near the top of my stack, along with Vidal's Julian, Duggan's Conscience of the King and, just for the hell of it, Conan Doyle's The White Company. I would also make a TV series of the Anabasis of Xenophon. Because I could.
In the past year I've had a lot of meh East Asian lagers, and I've firmly established that Sapporo >> Tsingdao
Sapporo's Yebisu brand is the best of the Japanese mass-market lagers, but I've rarely seen it here.
Barry, are you up to scratch on Alfred Duggan? Somewhat politically incorrect but hugely entertaining.
Czech Craft beers are starting to be a thing in CZ. The formerly smallish breweries have pretty much all consolidated, and there are a few shitty domestic beers now (Krusivice is not appalling, but basically should lose to anything else there). I haven't looked into ownership of Velkopopovicky Kozel which I think got bought and got a little worse though still good if more reliably and widely distributed. The only CZ craft I can remember is Permon, pleasant offerings.
90% of adequate beer is IMO freshness and ideally no pasteurization, along with some attention to ingredient and process quality. Exported CZ beer is much better from a keg than a bottle generally, and any bottle that's been shipped or stored in warm weather suffers for it.
The Sapporo could easily be fresher. If you bought it in the US it was probably brewed in La Crosse, WI.
231/233: NW gleefully introduced me to Duggan's The Conscience of the King, for which I will always be grateful, and Winter Quarters may also suit you, Barry. And have you read any Mary Renault?
just for the hell of it, Conan Doyle's The White Company.
Finding this in the local library when I was twelve or so made me very happy.
I *loved* the White Company when I was at school and I don't know if I dare reread it now. It's the adventures of a company of British mercenaries in France in the 100 years war. Pure Brexit porn, of course; also the anti-GoT to mediaeval brutalism.
225 &ff: Gillian Bradshaw's historical novels. I particularly like _Island of Ghosts_.
A movie of _The White Company_ that looked like the Wyeth illustrations all through would be totally my bag.
Put it this way: the only immediately less PC book I can imagine is "Flashman in the Famine" and George Macdonald Fraser died with that unfinished, indeed unstarted.
240 also too. Is that the one in which one of the heroes is proud of having stolen a goosefeather bed from an old French peasant woman?
Barry, have you been through the two Dorothy Dunnett series? Niccolo Rising is probably better than the Lyman Chronicles, but they're both in the big chewy historical nonsense category you seem to be looking for, and at six or seven fair-sized books each, there's plenty of them.
243: It is! And a loaf of sugar.
I would also make a TV series of the Anabasis of Xenophon.
Yes to this. I used to read Anabasis once a year. And rather than make such a TV series it looks like a completely unnecessary remake of The Warriors as a TV series is in development.
Many thanks for the recommendations above, I'll check out the Duggan and the Mary Renault (where should I start with her?)
235 And I don't care whether it's pc or not, I mean, I'm a big Flashman fan.
The Sapporo could easily be fresher. If you bought it in the US it was probably brewed in La Crosse, WI.
One of the Japanese brands--Kirin?--advertises itself as an import, because it's brewed in Ontario.
Kirin in the USA is brewed under contract by Anheuser-Busch. Probably also good for freshness.
246 last: I'd probably start with the two Theseus books (The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea). But the first two books of the Alexander trilogy are also great. I have a soft spot for The Last of the Wine because that was the first of her books I read as a teenager, and it made a huge impression even though I had no idea who Alcibiades was.
Then I'm probably thinking of the Sapporo brewed in Guelph.
I'll check out the Duggan and the Mary Renault (where should I start with her?)
I would read them in chronological order of publication. The first one, The Last of the Wine, is very good; the next two, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea, about Theseus, are in my view the weakest, but try them and skip them if you don't like them. After those it just gets better: The Mask of Apollo; The Alexander trilogy: Fire from Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games; and The Praise Singer, which is my favourite.
Sadly "Conscience of the King" is not available on the Kindle store but I've downloaded Winter Quarters and will also have a look at the Renault and some of LB's recommendations above. I should also get around to reading Wolf Hall.
You now have two totally contradictory recommendations. Good luck.
Do read Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. They suffer slightly from too modern a sensibility, but they're very good. Apparently she's blocked writing the third one because she can't bear to kill the old rogue off.
Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, about the French Revolution, is also really good.
Completely agree with 255. If Mantel can't kill off Cromwell, she should go back and read more Dunnett. GRRM ain't got nothin' on her.
I think with Mary Renault there is an effect depending on which you first read and at what age. I completely agree with Chris that the Praise Singer is wonderful but I first read the Theseus books as an adolescent, which made them incredibly vivid to me. Perhaps because of her treatment of sex, or desire, as such a huge force -- I don't know. But I find they live in my memory much more than the others. There is a much cruder tone to them than to the ones set in the fourth and fifth centuries BC.
It may not matter too much, since all are good.
Apparently we've got Conscience of the King on Kindle. Certainly available on UK Kindle, where there is a firm (Bello) republishing lots of Duggan.
I use him as my touchstone of a humane Catholic conservative. In his world terrible things happen all the time. All human endeavour is limited. Courage and style are virtues in and of themselves. War and probably slavery are inevitable. The world is *not quite* irredeemable. The problem is how to be decent under those circumstances. This is a world view which easily slides over into contempt for the losers, but with him it does not.
The Conscience of the King is a literally Machiavellian book. Cerdic is a sociopath who is nonetheless profoundly shrewd about politics and power. He founds a kingdom which will endure, using methods which will condemn him to eternal damnation. You can read it as a better class of Flashman romp but I think a crucial part of it is his glancing reflection, towards the end, that perhaps his brother Paul, the bishop, was right. He has, of course, slaughtered the bishop over his own altar some chapters back. It was the only way out of a potential embarrassment. What else could he do?
Sounds good; I will look it up.
And yes, the White Company is rather good.
