One New York Life

Go Blue.

Due to my current situation of being on antibiotics following vacation, I can sadly not consume alcohol for the next five weeks. I have one first draft left in the hopper (the last Sam Barrel Room) which will go up next week.

Everyone who knows how easy it is to lose weight has told me if I quit drinking I’ll lose like 20 lbs immediately. I can’t wait!

Tim Horton’s is coming to NYC on Monday!!!!!!!111ONE!ELVENTY!!!

In a couple months, Inside Pulse will celebrate it’s fifth anniversary since the brand separation from 411mania. Four-and-a-half of those five years were one headache after another — from people flaking and turning martyr to incredibly terrible service and constant crashing from our former four-figure/month, no-service webhost who couldn’t keep up with our traffic to our contracted-out server guys who thought it was perfectly reasonable to “upgrade” our server and put us down for days at a time to one-third of the ownership group not understanding that you can’t be an unreasonable dick to people who are writing for free stuff. About a year ago, we came thisclose to calling it a career and shutting the doors for good. It was approaching “not fun” and becoming an unbelievably-expensive hobby.

Then, Radio Exile‘s own Shawn M Smith convinced us to switch the whole thing over to WordPress to take all the development off the table. Then, we found the awesome Media Temple hosting service and a bunch of WordPress caching plug-ins that solved the hosting and database issues. Suddenly it became a slightly-less unbelievably-expensive hobby. The last six months *knocks wood* have been awesome. With the hosting issues and development issues largely solved, we’ve been able to go back to what we wanted to do in the first place. Content. That’s led to the new niche Food TV Blog and commercial review blog and The Beer Blog. It’s also let me start side-development again and I wrote up a cool little wrestling news aggregator that’s still alpha but, once finished, will be able to index all the current wrestling websites and, hopefully, be a launching point for people who want to get all their news about a fake sport in one place.

All of that leads up to something Jon Widro and I have been tossing around for about a year. He’s hosted PPVs for about three years and we thought it would be fun to podcast our post-PPV discussions. We finally bit the bullet and did it so I present the first Post-PPV Rewind Podcast. The first episode features myself, Widro, the aforementioned Shawn M. Smith, and long-missing Joshua Grutman. The volume is a bit, uh, temperamental and Grutman’s fidgeting was picked up in the microphone as a weird bass pulsing — but, production aside, I think for a first try it came out OK. On the upside, my recorded voice didn’t sound nearly as bad as I expected.

So, if you have 20 minutes and have any interest in wrestling, give it a listen. Just keep the volume low and turn the bass down.

Via Metsblog: Omar Minaya said [Carlos] Beltran will be put on disabled list with a bone bruise on his right knee.

Starting shortstop, center fielder, first baseman, 3-starter, 4-starter, set-up man.

I concede.

Bravest Ale

Brewed By: Possibly Anheuser-Busch, but unconfirmed.
Brewed In: ?
ABV: “About 5%”
Type: American Ale

What they say: Not much. It’s theoretically a house ale. However, an unconfirmed source gave me an interesting factoid. I was told that the “house ale” is really an InBevheuser product called “Horseshoe Ale” which is marketed to bars via distributors. The bars are offered this beer without the InBevHeuser label with the right to market it as their own house ale. On my initial review of this, I was going to make a comparison to Bud Select or American Ale — as it turns out, it might actually BE Bud Select or American Ale. I find this equally sketchy and awesome. Who knew I was getting a Fine Belgian Ale? Just remember everyone, just because the company isn’t American anymore doesn’t mean it loses the ability to be shady.

Why I Picked It: Bravest is a bar near my office that we discovered because of its proximity and relative cheapness. On Manhattan, the happy hour bars close to Grand Central Station are tremendously overpriced and serve the after work suit-and-tie crowd. The bars know customers are probably only having one or two drinks and everything’s priced accordingly. It’s normal to find $6 drafts and $8-$12 mixed drinks. The aura around Grand Central is spotty, but bars become mostly reasonable in the high 30s. The East 30s are mostly residential so everything is more neighborhoody. The only gotcha is to avoid places full of 19-year-old Long Jersey Kids looking to kill more Jagerbombs then they can handle. This is the bar’s house ale.

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Presentation (5): I don’t know whether or not the semi-shady purchase of this beer comes with a free tap design, but I was impressed with this tap. It’s a long tap with a huge fireman’s helmet on top and a FDNYish shield on the side. The only presentation score is really the tap and it does a good job by standing higher and more noticeably than the rather pedestrian beer selections in this bar. 4

Originality (5): They claim it as an ale, but I find the claim somewhat dubious. The beer sits amongst the Coors Lites and Budweisers of the world, so pretty much anything different would stand out. This bar is, mostly, a Budweiser bar — featuring Bud specials and the like, so this is an original gem amongst others. On the other hand, after being told this really isn’t an offering original to the bar, I find myself hard pressed to give them big points. 1

Body (10): The initial pour is a somewhat pedestrian reddish amber with a small head. It’s ale-thin, as promised, but the hoppiness of the ale was something of a surprise. I usually expect these standard house ales to have a certain body type and this wasn’t it. 6

Taste (10): As previously mentioned, my original notes told me to compare this to Bud Select or Bud American. It’s a light, kind of refreshing ale with a blast of hops in the aftertaste. It’s too hoppy for me, personally, but so are a lot of things. I did like the flavor after I got used to it but, for me, I’ll stick with the $3 Bud specials before I’ll pop the extra $2 for a pint of this. 7

Efficiency (10): The really hoppy flavor kills any hope of efficiency for me. During happy hour, for $2.50/pint, it’s as efficient as any other 5% draft. After it kicked up to $5/pint after happy hour — well, $5 pint isn’t terrible by Manhattan standards, but there’s nothing so amazing in the flavor that it would prevent me from buying the “always $3 Budweiser”. 4

Versatility (10): Tough to rate versatility on a beer that’s only available at one bar in Manhattan (supposedly). However, even in this bar where there are better beers available cheaper, I wouldn’t recommend it. To be fair, I’ll not rate the versatility here because it’s really not possible. N/A

Final Grade: 22 of 40 = 27.5 of 50 — OK beer.

I’ll be going to the first game at Citi Field today. For the occasion, I joined Twitter. We’ll see how it goes, but you can follow me on Twitter for opening day.

It took until March 10th, but I finally did it. My entire back-log of stuff is done and scheduled. I have completed a New Year’s Resolution.

All of Battlestar Galactica this week, random crap spaced out over the next month, a half-dozen beer snobs in the can, and finally able to get back to baseball in a couple weeks.

I hereby retire from making New Year’s Resolutions. I’m going out on top.

I’d like to thank new blogroll entrant Overthinking It for finally addressing something that’s bothered me about Back To The Future since my ill-advised attempt to be a physics student my first year of college.

To make an awesomely long story very, very short… The Earth orbits the sun at a speed of about 30 km/s 20 miles/second while rotating at a speed of about 0.3 miles/second at the Equator. Since Hill Valley isn’t exactly on the Equator (but surprisingly, does appear on Google Maps) the relative speed is a little less. We’ll call it 0.25 miles/second for ease of math.

Using Einstein’s 1-minute trip, for the Delorean to appear at the exact same location it had to travel about 1200 miles along the Earth’s orbit while compensating about 15 miles along the Earth’s surface. Since we see Marty’s perspective when he goes to 1955, we know the trip is nearly instantaneous to the driver (confirmed by the human eye being unable to see any time differential on Einstein’s watch) and we can say that Einstein traveled about 1200 miles in less than a millisecond or so — about 4 times the speed of light.

I have no big point to tie this together. Only that Doc Brown doesn’t get nearly enough credit for creating a machine that can not only travel through time, but also solving the speed of light problem. And props for someone actually doing the math close to how it’s supposed to be done.

I would say this officially meant Beer Pong had jumped the shark, but:

The real drama centered on Albany’s the Iron Wizard Coalition. These guys made last year’s finals and sank their final cup while their opponents, Chauffeuring the Fat Kid, still needed four. They went triple Gramatica, jumping and dancing and hugging. “I had that money spent,” says Mike Hulse, 28, of the Wizards.

But they forgot about beer pong’s diabolical redemption rule, which allows a last chance as long as you don’t miss another cup. Fat Kid never did. Four straight sinks. Pong history. Kid wound up winning the game and the cash. “Do I think about it?” says Hulse, who doesn’t make much working for a cable company. “I think about it every time I look at a bill. Every freakin’ time.”

My boy Hulse, quoted by Rick Reilly, on ESPN.