And Don't Call Me Shirley

Hello everyone.  I’d like to start this megapost by officially declaring New Jersey to be the worst place on earth.  You might notice the formatting/font on this post is different from the previous posts (as I’m assuming it’s going to be).  Well, that’s because I had to type this post up on a word document and transfer it to blogspot here.  Why am I going about writing a post this way?  Well, NEWARK’S AIRPORT MAKES YOU PAY FOR WIFI!!!  I’m stuck at the airport about three hours early, on my way to Phoenix and I am internetless.  I’ll be damned if I fork over the ten dollars to use airport’s wifi.  And, AND, they use Boingo, which is the worst thing on earth.  I was in the Detroit airport for nine hours one time and decided to actually pay for the wifi (congratulations New Jersey, you and Detroit share a common crappy feature!).  Well, in doing so, it installed this Boingo program on my computer to connect to the internet.  After I was done, I forgot to uninstall the program.  Well, next time I’m in a “Boingo Hotspot,” the program automatically opens, connects to the internet, and CHARGES ME EIGHT BUCKS for internet I DID NOT WANT.  Well, suffice it to say, I immediately tried to uninstall the program, but the thing about Boingo is, it hides itself nice and good on your computer.  I actually had to call those a-holes to figure out how to permanently uninstall it.  Well, long story short (too late), I’m not about to drop ten bucks on Boingo in New Jersey.

With that rant out of the way, let’s talk about beer, shall we? I last left you guys on my in-laws couch on Friday, discussing my Thursday night beer drinking.  I’d like to verify that, but I can’t check the site, what with no internet and all.  Well Friday night I went to my friends’ wedding.  I like weddings.  I really do.  You see a bunch of people you haven’t seen in forever.  Everyone’s automatically your friend there, even if you just met them.  Everyone can freely dance around like an idiot, despite the fact they’d never be caught dead doing so at a dance club.  You get to do the chicken dance and talk to drunk uncles.  They're great.  As long as you follow one simple rule.  Open bar.  You’d think this would be a no-brainer, really.  But I’ve been to weddings with no open bar.  They are as bad as they sound.  No one is your friend.  No one dances.  There are no drunk uncles.  Anyway, my friend of course had an open bar (an hour of which was in a legitimate castle!), and I had myself five Sam Adams Lagers and a Yuengling.

Saturday I went to one of my favorite places in Pennsylvania, Bethlehem Brew Works.  I love that place.  We (Liz, myself, Liz’s friend and her husband) originally tried to go this place called the Bookstore, one of those new speakeasy places that has like a hidden door and no electricity and makes fancy cocktails and stuff.  In NYC they are getting, as they say, “played out,” but I thought this one looked kind of cool because I think part of the appeal is that they are unexpected.  You expect to see them in NYC.  In Bethlehem, PA, not so much, so that’s kind of neat.  Anyway, it was booked solid and we couldn’t get a seat.  Outside I listened to about eight people that didn’t get in make the same “I guess we didn’t have the right password” joke and then promptly stabbed them all to death.  With a trail of bodies in our wake, we bolted on over to the Brew Works where I had a…here’s where the internet would be great right now.  I had two beers.  One was called Machine sHop and the other was a Belgian ale whose name is eluding me right now.  Damn you New Jersey!  Anyway, they were both pretty good.  I thought the unnamed Belgian ale was a little thin but it was super spicy which made up for it.  The Machine sHop was described, if I am remembering it correctly, as a Belgian with an American hops twist.  Well, it tasted like a super hoppy pale, which was nice.  I didn’t exactly get where the Belgian part came in, but I liked it nonetheless.

Anyway, I am off for Arizona now.  While there I will attempt to take the Southern Sudan route and solve the state’s problems with beer drinking.  If there is a place that could use (and, let’s be real, actually attempt to create instead of destroy) some peace and prosperity, it’s Arizona.  I’ll sit down the with governor for a beer or two.  She should be game, her last is Brewer after all.  And with the greatest joke I’ve ever made and will ever make occupying the previous sentence, I’m out!

Total Beers: 399 (400th beer will be, appropriately enough, drank with my dad who hates this whole endeavor!)

Where I Should Be: 391.780

UPDATE: My flight got delayed by two hours.  I caved.  But in the spirit of not-caving, I'm posting this post as originally written in my word doc.