I believe that there are in fact three warring states of booze.  The three kinds of booze do not generally get along.  Here’s how I’d break it out:

The High Test Kingdom of Liquor, The Principate of Wine, and the Republic of Beer.

The High King of Liquor is certainly Scotch.  And many of the roles the Maximum Leader suggests for other distilled spirits are appropriate.  But really, the wines would never submit to the rule of another alcohol.  The Prince of the Wines (after a recent civil war) is the House of Cabernet from California.  They displaced the French Cabernets, who are now plotting in return.  The nobility of the Principate is largely the red wines.  The awkward bourgeoisie - putting on airs, but still with red clay on their feet, is the blush and zinfandels.  The yeomanry is the white wines, though some white wines still cling to noble titles like saxons in Plantagenet England.  The serfs are the box wines. 

The republic of beer is a low place.  The vast majority of the population is low income industrial workers, the proletariat of thin American style lagers.  There is a vibrant entrepreneurial class, though, of independent craft brewers.  Some of these have become successful, and have started aping the manners of the nobility of the Liquors and Wines.  There is also a large corporate managerial class, wholly owned by the large lager magnates, but who aspire to higher quality than they actually possess.  In a curious inversion of life in America, the darker beers are the more respected and wealthy.

In the mountains between Wine and Liquor, there is a barbarous, semi-independent state inhabited by piratical and impoverished fortified wines.  The high sulfate content of the soils there leaves life very hard indeed.

The Vatican astronomer noted that denying that there is no life anywhere else in the universe is putting limits on the (presumably unlimited) creativity of God.  Sadly, the article does not go into more interesting territory - I’d like to see what Vatican policy is regarding missionary efforts to aliens, and whether the holy mother Church feels that the anal probing greys have souls.  Cause, if they abduct me, I’m killing them sumsabitches.  But I don’t want to commit a sin.

There’s a Bill sneaking its way through the government, called the “Orphan Works Bill,” and it’s absolutely worthy of Germany ca. 1935 (which, if you think about it, wasn’t ALL that different than America ca. 2008). I’m parroting the email I received from my local writers’ organization.

Ian

There’s a reason why Google, Getty, Disney, et al are interested in seeing
this bill pass:

http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=CqBZd0cP5Yc

PASS IT ON

The Orphan Works Bill promotes theft of creative work, pure and simple.
This bill, currently under consideration in Congress, will deny you the
right of immediate ownership over the product of your own creativity, and
therefore makes it increasingly difficult to make money–much less a
living–from it.

Copyright law, as it is now, acknowledges that the work you create is
legally yours–your own property–as soon as you create it.

The Orphaned Works Bill will deny that right of ownership. It requires that
the creator of any work must pay to register that work before it can be
legally deemed the property of the creator. It means you have to register
with a private company to have it copyrighted. That means your work can be
“orphaned” as soon as it’s created, especially since such companies don’t
exist right now.

Should someone copy your work and leave off your name, it becomes “orphaned”
especially when the copied work is copied again and again. These days, this
happens all too easily. That repeated copying makes it difficult to
discover who created the work in the first place–even for the “diligent”
copier.

In addition, it pits million- and billion-dollar companies that want easy
access to creative work against artists who can hardly make ends meet from
their own work as it is. Why? Because it puts the burden of proof on the
creator of the work, rather than the copier.

Worse, it seriously erodes the property rights of citizens of the U.S. as
outlined in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution.

Write your senator and congressperson now.

Find your state representative:

https://forms. house.gov/ wyr/welcome. shtml

Feel free to forward this e-mail.

“The three great rights are so bound together as to be essentially one
right. To give a man his life, but deny him his liberty, is to take from him
all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty, but take from
him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still
leave him a slave.”

- George Sutherland, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court,
1921.

I had a bunch of Euros I needed to exchange, so I went to the currency exchange window at the local bank.

Just one lady in front of me . . . an Asian lady, who was trying to exchange yen for dollars, and she was a little irritated.

She kept asking the teller, ‘Why it change?? Why it change?? Why it change??’ Then she continued, ‘Yesterday, I get two hunat dolla fo yen. Today I get ony hunat eighty dolla?? Why it change?’

The teller shrugged his shoulders and said, simply and carefully, ‘Fluctuations.’

The Asian lady glares at the banker, ‘Fluc you white people, too!’

Beer Production Threatened By Climate Change

According to New Zealand climatologist Jim Salinger, climate change may result in reduced malted barley, which would limit beer production. What do you think?

Fake responses included:

Heidi Marsico,Systems Analyst
“Very clever, ‘Dr. Salinger,’ or should I say, Al Gore!”

Hans Weinburger, Secretary
“Could this limit the ability of my neighbor to brew his own beer, discuss brewing his own beer, boast about his talent for brewing beer, and browbeat his neighbors into trying his beer? Because in that case this could be a good thing.”

Here’s what’s going on, with Amazon.com playing the drunken frat boy to Print-On-Demand Publishers’ ugly girl home alone on a Saturday night.

And in case you’re interested, yes it is affecting me and my book sales. My reaction is here, complete with a troll commenter whom I strongly suspect to have Amazon ties.