One New York Life

Day 1 (Thursday, 7/28/11)
Dublin
9:30 AM: The flight to Dublin is way, way shorter than I expected. It was 5 hours and 15 minutes arrived a half-hour early. Dublin has an airport express shuttle that goes right through the city and, really, I should have taken it. It stopped directly in front of the hotel. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover that until the day before and didn’t research enough. So I decided to take a cab. How bad can it be?

9:45 AM: Like London, cab drivers are friendly and the hotel is forever from the airport. In what turned out to be standard this week, the cab driver and I end up talking a lot about New York. Nearly all the Irish people I spoke with had family who’d emigrated to New York State. This made “New York” a pretty handy in with most people. He also told me that his wife likes to travel once a year to New York to shop since it’s so much cheaper here without VAT and the fact 1 Euro = 1.5 USD. America, F*ck Yeah!

10:30 AM: 40 Euro later I arrive at the hotel. We found the hotel on Jetsetter which is rapidly becoming one of our favorite websites for travel stuff. In what would become a theme this week, the hotel was amazingly accommodating with early check-in and late check-out. They let me check-in a full three hours early. The continental breakfast included a bowl of cereal, croissant, fruit salad, coffee, and toast for 6 Euro.

11:00 AM: The room is pretty large with a gigantic bed, a 48-inch widescreen TV, and a fireplace. Love it. I stare longingly at the bed but really don’t want to sleep. I have to kill 6 hours before PLR arrives from India. The choices are 1) pub 2) walk. I go with 2.

11:15 AM: I walk toward the center of Dublin and find out a couple of things rather quickly. First, the hotel is pretty far from the city center, so I’m walking a long way while drunkenly tired. Second, Dublin, much like Boston, tends to change the name of their streets every block. Unlike Boston, though, there are no street signs. Like seriously none. Every once in a while on a corner there’s a sign embedded in to a building. Otherwise, it’s really tough to figure out where you’re going. Third, if I’m not careful, I’m going to wind up hopelessly…

12:00 PM: Lost. At some point I confused St. Stephen’s Green and Merion Square Park while walking around. I have no idea where I am so I wander in random directions. I am, surprisingly, saved by my iPhone’s compass.

12:30 PM: I give up on being lost long enough to find a pub. It’s still not beer time, but it is burger with Irish cheddar time.

1:15 PM: Walking Southeast. I finally come across a canal I definitely crossed earlier… just a little further down it. It occurs to me I should have walked to the coastline as I had less a chance of getting lost and more a chance of finding good seafood.

2:30 PM: After walking semi-aimlessly for 2 hours, I get back to the Hotel. Another two hours until PLR gets in from India. I guess I could shower and then read for a…..

5:30 PM: I wake up to someone trying to get in the room as the porter is trying to lug PLR’s absurdly oversized suitcase in to the room. We have a small reunion before PLR goes to wash off India.

8:00 PM: NOW it’s time to go to a pub. We find McCloskey’s a block away from from the hotel. It is…. wonderful. For the first two hours we are the youngest folks in there by 30 years. Then a couple groups 10 years younger come in and both groups appear to know each other. Fish and Chips and Guinness is the meal of choice. I can’t state enough how much I love pubs. Nobody’s really “too old” or “too young” to be there, you can go in there with a laptop or a newspaper and just sit and read, the television is turned off when there’s nothing on it, and there doesn’t need to be music at “shout over” volume.

12:30 AM: Head back. Neither of us have slept in about 30 hours and our romantic reunion is cut short by copious amounts of snoring. Paris it ain’t.

Day 2 (Friday, 7/29/2011)
Dublin
8:00 AM: I wake up at the crack of dawn (for me) and shower. We head down for breakfast and dominate another version of the continental breakfast. It’s such a lovely morning we decide to………. head back upstairs because PLR is still tired.

9:30 AM: I’m feeling relatively awake so I………. join PLR in her jetlag hangover nap.

2:30 PM: While I’d like to say that those five hours weren’t wasted, they were totally wasted. We decide to try and make the Guinness Brewery today. What I presumed was the brewery turned out to be Guinness Storehouse as Ireland (or Dublin) has health laws that disallow brewery tours. I convince PLR to walk. She agrees but I know I’m probably in for trouble as the walk is not short.

3:00 PM: PLR starts getting annoyed with the walk.

3:15 PM: PLR starts getting really annoyed with the walk.

3:30 PM: I may be murdered abroad soon.

3:45 PM: We arrive! The storehouse is more of museum of the brewing process than anything else which is… fine, I guess. Best suggestion if you go: buy your tickets online. The ticket area has about a dozen kiosks to pick up pre-purchased tickets and two long “buy tickets now line” staffed by cashiers dealing with language barriers.

4:15 PM: The storehouse includes either a pint in the “Pour Your Own Guinness” area or a pint in the Storehouse’s Gravity Bar. I chose (obviously) to pour my own pint. Our group included a group of about 10 Italian kids who looked barely out of high school. I poured my own Guinness and got a certificate stating I passed the class, which gives me more Guinness-pouring skills than 89.3% of the bartenders in Manhattan.

4:18 PM: Pam tries Guinness and……….. appears to like it?

4:25 PM: Reasons Ireland rules. Guinness Storehouse: Conference Center.

4:30 PM: PLR and I are sitting enjoying our Guinness when one of the Italian tourist kids comes over and asks me to take a picture. I stand up and, instead of a camera, he hands me the translator thing they hand non-English speakers at the door. This is apparently wildly funny in Italy. I toss it back, laugh, and ask if this is the best joke they have. They appear to not understand. Italy: Europe’s New Jersey.

5:00 PM: I buy a Guinness shirt. In Gaelic because, well, why not? Gaelic is an odd language. It’s always written in their specific Gaelic font, which makes it hard to read. It users our letters in odd arrangements. It sounds like someone speaking French backward.

5:30 PM: PLR and I grab a cab and ask to go to the “Temple Bar” district. He snorts and asks if we’re sure. He asks where we’re from, we tell him, and we immediately go in to “I love it and have family there mode.” He tells to skip Temple Bar as it’s silly, overrated, and that locals call it “Sodom and Begorrah”. I can’t stop laughing at that. He pulls over on the side of the road and tells us “Temple Bar’s on that side of the street. Up this side of the street, you’ll find better food and drinks about 2 Euro less.” Awesome. Seriously, the best advice I can offer an American traveling in Ireland is to be from New York.

6:00 PM: We wander around some streets looking at the number of people spilling out on to the street. Since they banned smoking in pubs, it appears the thing to do in the UK/Ireland is to take advantage of the six week summer by just taking beers outside. These are not plastic cups, either… but full (real 20 oz) pint glasses. I’m not sure how people get more beers because the bars are mobbed and I don’t see waitresses.

6:30 PM: We pick a restaurant out of the air. As we walk in, a woman appears to be eating a pot pie. This looks amazing.

6:45 PM: Sweet Lord. The special is a duck pot pie. The last time PLR and I had duck in a restaurant was DC and it led to a duckfat coma. Surely that won’t happen again with a meat pie baked in its own fat with extra pastry carbs?

7:30 PM: Gorging.

7:45 PM: Impending duckfat coma.

8:30 PM: Post dinner cocktails and tea go down. Does not avert impending coma.

8:45 PM: We get a cab back to the hotel and discover a new fun thing about Ireland. Giving the name of the street is not enough. One needs to know which version of the road they want as many neighborhoods have roads with the same name. This IS Boston which has like 25 Beacon Streets.

9:00 PM: PLR has achieved duckfat coma. I am not quite ready to go to bed so I go downstairs to the bar for a couple Guinnesses. She joins me for a drink and has a cider. I have 3. In my defense, the patio was open and I could sit outside.

11:00 PM: While I loved our hotel and everyone who worked there, I find it odd the owners decided to have a dance club in the basement that doesn’t open until 11 PM on Friday and Saturday. I suppose this is a good way to get people in rooms who don’t want to drive home, but it’s not the best for, you know, everyone else. The whole hotel has thrumming bass until 3 or 4 AM, at which point the clubbers spill out in to the street and do what drunk people do. Street noise hasn’t really bothered me since college but there are a many reasonable people who would have been furious.

Up Next: Dublin Part 2

I really and truly wish I had an interesting story to tell here. At the end of February, I started work on a particularly awful project at work that sucked the life out of me for eight weeks. 75-90 hours a week for eight weeks to almost finish on time. April 13th saw me and my friend Steve take a trip to Lexington, Kentucky to tour the Kentucky Bourbon Trail (as anyone who follows me on Twitter certainly knows). April 20th saw PLR and I take our annual trip to the Finger Lakes Wineries where we proceed to spend an increasingly absurd amount of money on wine for the year. In 2007, I think we spent $150 on wine. This year may have topped $400. On wine, beer, and bourbon. It led to the following obvious joke as I put the fourth crate of wine in the trunk:

Me: “I think we have a problem.”
PLR: “A drinking problem?”
Me: “No more room.”

Also in the Finger Lakes PLR and I, in the least surprising announcement in the history of dating, finally got officially engaged after six years of Manhattan cohabitation. We celebrated that by coming to Mechanicville over Easter weekend so I could tell everyone in one fell swoop. I also got to finally experience the differences in telling friends about an engagement between guys (“Oh. Nice. You sure?”) and girls (“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”).

Following the engagement, we promptly went home and she went to Miami and I came back to Albany to continue my project of death before we head up to Montreal. As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, it’s baffling to me that in 2011 with $4.00 gas the best way to travel to Montreal is still driving 400 miles. The train somehow takes 11.5 hours and the flight for two is almost $1,000. Mind you, the total flight time would be less than 90 minutes.

There are about 8 half-hearted false starts sitting in the queue, including the skeleton of two beer reviews (one of which was actually started on paper) and a diatribe about my pending divorce from the Mets that has gotten increasingly more bitter now that the television crew is openly discussing trading Jose Reyes and David Wright.

So, yeah, I’m sorta back and I bury the lead with the best of them.

Blogging is hard, reasoning to come later.

Packers -3.5 over Bears — over 43.5

Jets +3.5 over Steelers — over 38.5

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.