Events

Shazbat. A friend sends this clip:

Crain's has a good summary today of new moderate-alcohol beers that craft brewers in the area are making: In June, Temperance Beer Co. released the first batch of Greenwood Beach Blonde, a creamy ale that checks in at 4 percent alcohol. The beer became the Evanston brewery's second-most popular, and the first batch sold out so quickly at Temperance's taproom that owner Josh Gilbert decided to broaden his focus: When Temperance made a second batch last week, it was immediately canned and sent to...

My cousin, a professional musician, parted with his stage piano recently, so now I have it. Since I last took piano lessons during the Reagan administration, I worried I'd have to start from scratch. Nope. I remember a lot of the pieces I worked on as a kid (mainly from the Anna Magdalena Bach notebook), and I'm even making some of the same errors I did back then. It's pretty cool. And I found most of my old books, including exercises, which I'm also doing just fine except that my hands aren't as strong...

Forty years ago today, President Nixon resigned, and Gerald Ford was sworn in 38th President of the United States. Nixon's speech from the previous evening: Harry Shearer's recreation of the moments before this speech is worth seeing. (The blog post title is from Girlyman.)

As a city boy, the country occasionally surprises me. The Cleveland client has an office well outside Cleveland in rural Geauga County where we've spent some time over the last few weeks. One of the senior guys there hunts. And this is how I got to taste fresh, smoked pheasant last week—complete with a warning about birdshot:

He thinks we should all use GMT instead: [W]ithin a given time zone, the point of a common time is not to force everyone to do everything at the same time. It's to allow us to communicate unambiguously with each other about when we are doing things. If the whole world used a single GMT-based time, schedules would still vary. In general most people would sleep when it's dark out and work when it's light out. So at 23:00, most of London would be at home or in bed and most of Los Angeles would be at the...

- There's something very important I forgot to tell you. - What? - Don't reboot Ghostbusters. - Why? - It would be bad. - Look, I'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing. What do you mean 'bad?' - Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. - Total studio reversal! - Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.

New York Times writer Tim Kreider reflects on his 19-year-relationship with a stray cat he adopted while on vacation: Biologists call cats “exploitive captives,” an evocative phrase that might be used to describe a lot of relationships, not all of them interspecies. I made the mistake, early on, of feeding the cat first thing in the morning, forgetting that the cat could control when I woke up — by meowing politely, sitting on my chest and staring at me, nudging me insistently with her face, or placing...

From yesterday's game—with its 22,000 paid attendance: Progressive Field holds 43,500 people (compared with Wrigley's 41,100) and yet has worse attendance this year. The Cubs are averaging 32,000 fans per game, with no game coming in under 25,000 paid; Cleveland is getting 18,600 per game with some early spring games pulling in fewer than 10,000. This, despite the Cubs holding onto last place like they're afraid to fall off the chart, and the Indians actually being the wild card at the moment....

Score one for the client. We got to go to tonight's Indians game at Progressive Field. Nice seats, too. Sadly, the Reds won 9-2, and we got rained on. And the Indians kind of played like Cubs. Nice client, though.