I thought Id found my ideal bar in Berlin then it closed. Now its back, and it has taught me an important lesson about the dangers of nostalgia A few years ago I found my perfect pub, right in the heart of Berlin. The size of a police cell, clad in a dark oakwood panelling that had been saturated with more than 120 years of spilled beer, cigarette smoke and tears, Alt Berlin was as inviting as a walk-in ashtray. There was only one window, which the owners werent allowed to open because of noise ordinance laws, and the graffiti above the urinal that read smells like pee spirit had been written by a man whose nose was as truthful as his punning was poor. Most tourists who stumbled in from the local high street walked straight out again. But those who dared stay were rewarded by locals with tales of how Bertolt Brecht and Joseph Roth used to prop up the bar in the 1920s, or how Quentin Tarantino and Bill Murray popped in for a pilsner when they were in town for filming. The bar staff displayed that grim-faced duty of care that is often mistaken for rudeness. At 4am in the morning, after far too many beers, they nursed me back to life with a plate of fried meat patties, potato salad and pickled gherkin. Even if you werent a local, Alt Berlin turned you into one. The triumph of my discovery was short-lived. Having survived two world wars and a near third, my perfect bar closed down a few days after I had found it in April 2014. The lease had run out and a new investor needed the space for a luxury clothes boutique. When I moved back to Berlin earlier this year, I searched in vain for a replacement. The bartender at Hackbarths had that same moody determination, but the pickles were a letdown. The crowd at Mbel-Olfe were too noisy; the regulars at Slumberland, in Schnefeld, too uniformly old. Over the past few months, liberal left journalists like me have mocked the Brexit camps desire to wrench their country back to an era of empire, casual sexism and draught stout served from pewter pots, but these days the nostalgic tendency is strong in all of us. For here I was, cursing the world for failing to recreate an experience I had had only two years earlier. Then, last week, a friend took me to a new bar around the corner from his flat, and I couldnt believe my eyes as we walked through the door: there was the same oak bar, the same handwritten table reservations on crumpled cardboard, the same neon sign reading: Das schnste aller Dinge, ein schneller Schluck bei Ernst und Inge (The best of all things, a quick gulp at Ernst and Inges). One of the old regulars at Alt Berlin had bought up the interior and moved it into the annexe of the old dancehall he owned. Even some of the old bar staff had been rehired. Alt Berlin was back. Or was it? A popular thought experiment used in philosophy classes cites the Greek legend of Theseus, who returned from Crete to Athens in a ship whose rotting planks were over the years replaced with stronger timber. Once every part had been replaced, the experiment asks: was Theseus ship still Theseus ship? And what if, as was the case with Alt Berlin, someone had collected all the cast-off original features and built a new bar was that still Alt Berlin? As it happens, the new Alt Berlin didnt feel like the old Alt Berlin: the regulars were different, the potato salad had been replaced with sourdough bread, and the fact that the bar was now located next to the head offices of the BND, Germanys intelligence agency, somehow lessened the old establishments illicit backstreet charm. But I still enjoyed the evening, and I was glad that I had been able to kill off my stupid obsession. With every beer, the new Alt Berlin looked to me more like a clever postmodern joke, a very literal-minded re-enactment of what is already happening to our cities. An old local of mine in Clerkenwell had over the space of 12 years changed its name from the New Red Lion to the Bull, then to the Queen Boadicea and finally to the Blacksmith and Toffeemaker, its name, selection of draughts on tap and bar snack menu ever more desperately trying to denote a traditional, historic proper East End experience amid hyper-gentrifying surroundings, until it had dreamed up kitsch steampunk saloon fantasy specialising in gin and suet puddings. It made me think how useful it would be, in this age of politicians promising to make their country great again, if we could just temporarily recreate the good old days and spend some time testing if they were really as good as we remembered them. A month in a model-village Britain with blue passports and unregulated working hours. A week in a toytown Germany where they still have the deutschmark but no Italian wine, French cheese or Spanish ham on offer in the supermarket. A day in timewarp 1950s America, with a booming economy and a racially segregated society. It may just make you want to open that window at the back of the bar and get a breath of fresh air. Source: http://allofbeer.com/beware-politicians-promises-of-a-return-to-the-good-old-days/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/beware-politicians-promises-of-a-return-to-the-good-old-days/ Our pets are so precious to us, they are far more than just animals that we look after and have around for company. They become our best friends, and part of the family. Although it’s very easy to bond emotionally with our pets, sharing a cuddle or playing games together will do that, being on the same wavelength intellectually is less common. Sure, you can train your dog, hamster or rat to be obedient, (cats too, but that may prove to be a little more difficult!) but what we have here are true geniuses, unique personalities that go far beyond what we would imagine from an animal! This list, compiled by Bored Panda, is about those times when animals have surprised us with their intelligence. When people were able to understand just what their pets were thinking, and communicate with them on a higher level! Scroll down to check them out for yourself, and feel free to share your own articulate animals stories in the comments below! This is a completely true story. Weird, but true, and shows a really impressive level of intelligence in my cat. It happened when I was a teenager. I’m sitting on the couch, and my cat walks into the room and starts meowing loudly, but not coming to me. So I stand up and go toward him, and he starts walking away, so I follow. He leads me, meowing the whole way and looking back to make sure I’m following, to the bathroom. Weird, right? Just wait. So we’re in the bathroom, and he hops up on the toilet and, get this, he PEES IN IT. I was floored. One, he peed in the toilet. Like a person. He’d never done that before. It’s impressive that he knew what a toilet was for. But two, he brought me there to show me. Why? This is where the real intelligence comes into it. Well, he stops peeing and turns to look into the toilet and then looks at me. So I look in the toilet. It’s full of blood. He had a terrible kidney infection (as the vet later confirmed), and this is how he told me. Think of all the things he had to understand to do this!! He had to know he was sick and in which part of his body the infection was. He had to know that the bathroom was the place where I deal with the part of my body that matches up with his sick part. He had to know what a toilet was for and how to use it. And he knew that if I understood the problem, I’d be able to fix it. Seriously, that cat was incredible. We used to have a cockatoo, as well as some cats and dogs. We were teaching the dogs some tricks, and the cockatoo was just doing his bird thing. Every day, the same routine: get some treats, call the dogs, sit, stay, lay down, roll over, get a treat, etc. One night we were watching TV and hear the cockatoo call the dog by name. “Sit. Stay. Lay down. Roll over. Good Boy”. We heard something hit the floor, and then he called out the next dog’s name. Walked into the kitchen to find the cockatoo in the spot we always stand, giving orders to the dogs (who were obeying!), and then pulling treats out of the cup and dropping them on the floor. This went on for some time. Dogs now liked the cockatoo, and would let him ride on their backs. Cockatoo would call them, tell them to lay down, would climb on, and ride around like a king. The dogs knew what’s up, would walk to the kitchen, and stand by the counter. Cockatoo would hop up and drop them a treat, say “good boy”, and hop back on. Funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I am diabetic and one night I fell on my carpet from weakness and disorientation. My beloved dog, who now rests in Heaven, brought my emergency kit from my bathroom counter so I could take my medication. Just writing this post brought tears to my eyes. I will always remember you Bumper. My cat yawned, so I stuck a finger in his mouth. He sort of stared at my curiously as he shut his mouth, but didn’t bite down hard. A few minutes later, he’s sitting on my chest and I yawn. He proceeds to put his whole paw in my mouth. When was I was young my family moved a long distance with two pets, a cat and a dog. My mom said that cats can try to run off to find home after a move so we had a cat collar with a long leash to hold her while we were unloading the trailers. I heard my Australian Shepherd bark twice on the back porch. Abby NEVER barked unless something was serious. I ran back there and my cat had run around a chair many times and then jumped off the chair with not enough room on leash to be on ground and was hanging there choking. When I rounded the corner Abby was trying to chew through the leash. Best dog ever. Both cat and dog lived long happy lives. I witnessed this with my uncle’s dog. My uncle was lying on the couch and she was lying on his feet and legs. He let out a huge fart which was aimed directly at her face. She lifted her head and glared at him and he started laughing. She got up and walked away in disgust. A few minutes later she came back, jumped up on his chest, stuck her butt in his face and farted on him and walked away. I laughed so hard I cried and gave her so many treats. First Christmas we had our cat she saw us handing out presents and opening them and abruptly ran off. About twenty minutes later she comes back with a dead bird and dropped it in the present pile. It’s uh definitely the thought that counts? I had the best dog ever. One night I was fast asleep and he was gently “biting” my hand just enough to wake me up. Once I woke up he started tugging on it as if to say, follow me. It was so weird. SO I follow him and he leads me to the side door or my house, sits facing the door and barks ever so silently. I then realize someone is outside picking the lock. I called 911. It was a drunk guy, no idea what his intentions were once he got in, but my dog for some reason managed to get him arrested. He probably would have been scared away had my dog just barked, but for some reason the old boy wanted to alert me quietly. When I was an infant, I was in my crib next to my parents bed. I somehow got twisted up and started suffocating in my blanket. This cat jumped on my mom’s face until she woke up, then jumped into my crib. Had it not been for her, I would have died. My golden retriever leaves a shoe on the bed, without fail, for my wife or I to find if we are both gone at the same time. My theory is that she did it once, and we came home, so now she does it every time we leave to ensure that we come back. Like a doggy superstition. After doing this for years, my wife had to leave the state for a week. My first day back from work, there was a shoe on the bed. Normal. After my second day back (wife is still gone), there were three shoes on the bed. After my third day returning from work alone, every shoe and boot in the house was laid out on the bed and couches, and all of my wife’s dirty socks were in a bowl. It may not be the smartest thing she’s ever done, but it really made me think about how she thinks. When I was a kid, we had two dogs: a Pyrenean Shepherd, and a Labrador Retriever. The Retriever was a goofy idiot, but the Shepherd was smart. One day, the Retriever gets loose (we had to tie him up in the yard because he kept chasing things and running away), and the Shepherd runs after him. We never even realized what had happened until we saw the Shepherd coming back with the Retriever, holding the would-be runaway’s leash in his mouth, and leading him back to the house. Must have been a weird sight for the neighbors. If all of the spots on the couch were taken, my dog would scratch the door to go out and when someone gets up he would take their spot. My cat (about 4 months old at the time) hadn’t come back for at least 2 days and I looked for her everywhere. I was getting worried since she never really left for more then a couple of hours. I guess my Labrador sensed how worried I was and realized it was because of the cat. So he decided to run out the door, while I wasn’t playing attention. (He also knows how to open doors.) I didn’t realize till later and I thought I had lost both of them. When around 8pm I heard meowing coming from outside. When I looked outside I saw my lab holding my kitten by the head. My chickens held a funeral. In our flock of maybe ten bantams, there was one elderly, respected hen. Even the brash rooster, who would spend most of his time chasing other chickens away from ‘his’ feed, meekly made space for Grey Girl when she slowly made her way over to the chicken feed. She was mother and grandmother to many of them, and you could tell how much they esteemed her. One morning, I open the chicken coop as usual, but not a chook was to be seen. Normally they’d be all running out to find the night’s bounty of bugs, but not this morning. I walk inside the pen to see what’s up. There is a circle of chickens. An actual circle, with Grey Girl’s body right in the middle. All the chooks are making this weird wailing sound, which I had never heard before. I am in no doubt they were mourning the passing of their elder mother. What’s more, the body was lying outside the shed where she would have been roosting. There is a good chance that she was actually pulled out of the claustrophobic, poo-filled shed and placed in the open space by the chickens, so they could pay their respects. After about half an hour the chooks all wandered off and I buried the body. And I never saw that behaviour again. We had a dog that liked to roam the neighborhood too much so we installed one of those wireless fences that give a shock from a collar when you cross it. The law requires it to beep and give a warning before the shock to train the dog to stop, which is good. But she figured out that if she got near it then it would start beeping. So she went to where the beeping started and laid down. Then just lay there until the beeping stopped and she knew the battery was drained and too weak to shock her so she would just walk across. Not current pet but a dog I had as a teenager. Dog jumps up on the couch “No, you’re not allowed on the couch, go lie in your bed” Dog leaves the room. A moment later he returns with his bed and throws it on the couch. Gets back up on the couch in his bed and stares at me. “… Fair enough…” My neighbor is a zoo-keeper and he loves working with the chimpanzees and the otters. Story about the chimp: he was closing up this one male chimps sleeping cage for the night, and then realised he’d lost his keychain. He saw the chimp holding them, and asked to get them back. Chimp refused. He then said “here, I will give you a banana for the keys!” Chimp then proceeded to unhook ONE key from the key chain and hand it back to him. 18 bananas later, and the keys were returned. This chimp is quite famous in Scandinavia – he was rejected from his mom as a newborn and was raised with the zoo-keepers family until he was re-introduced to the flock around a year later. There’s books and TV-series (from the 70s) about him. I had a German shepherd when I was little that would run around our backyard and frantically (but very gently) remove any toads he found from the yard when he saw us getting ready to mow the lawn. He was the sweetest guy. My old pit bull just knew when I was suicidal and came for cuddles. Just would sit there whilst I cried into her fur and patiently wait it out then lick me and stay longer. My dog is super sneaky. He’s not allowed on the furniture, and never ever tries to get up on the couch or bed unless we invite him. One day I was taking a shower and had forgotten a body wash I had just purchased, so I left the shower running and ran out to my room to grab it really fast. I found him on the couch happily rolling around on his back. As soon as he realized I was there he froze for a moment, jumped off the couch and ran to his bed. That’s when I realized the little jerk waits for me to get in the shower to get on the furniture and knows to listen for me to turn the shower off so he knows when to stop! I snuck downstairs and watched my small dog delicately push the chairs and a couple cardboard boxes around into an specific orientation, then wildly parkour across the objects in order to get to my dinner sitting on the table. He also carefully moved the fork out of the way using his claws so that it wouldn’t make any noise. I notified him of my presence right before he started eating and he just froze and then looked really guilty. In addition, when I have a panic attack, my dog will sometimes bring me his favorite stuffed animal because I assume he thinks it will comfort me like it comforts him. One of my cats learned how to turn the internet off. I mean, he realized everbody goes crazy when he goes behind the TV stand and messes up with the wires. So when we’re not paying enough attention to him (usually if we’re on our phones or the computer), he just unplugs the router. I don’t think he knows how much power he has. Every morning for breakfast I always eat fruit and that weekend there was a farmers market selling fruit for cheap so I bought a TON. I couldn’t fit them in the fridge so I left a few bags on the side in the dining room (reachable distance) I shit you not, I woke up and was surprised to see an apple next to me. Over the next few days, my dog would get up in the morning, go in the bag, and get a fruit to put next to me on the bed. He proceeded to do this for the next two weeks until we ran out. My dog Bailey (Lab/Husky) and her BFF Tess (Boxer) were in our backyard playing around. Tess, being a total idiot as usual, decided to go exploring in the back (all forest, hills, creeks and such) and takes off. Not wanting to lose both dogs, my daughters called Bailey to stay. They tried calling Tess for 10 minutes before they found me to come help. I came and tried the same for a few minutes. Once I realized that there were no sights or sounds of Tess, I turned to Bailey, and said, “Bailz, where’s Tess?” We played this game with Bailey regularly. She would find anyone in our family if you asked her to. So I sent her off into the forest looking for Tess. No hesitation on Bailey’s part. Another 10 minutes go by. Sun is going down. Forest is quiet. We start calling for Bailey to return. Sure as shit, not 2 minutes later, they both come back. It was from some distance too as we could hear them crashing through the bush a ways off. Bailey knew she done good. Acted like she just cured cancer. Many cookies were had. I had a cat that learned how to open the fridge, and then my dog started begging my cat for food. And then the cat started getting into the fridge just to feed the dog. I patiently await the day where my pets decide to overthrow me and have me fixed. I’m not fighting it, that’ll only make it worse in the long run. While I was out, my dog pulled a piece of paper out of the trash and pooped on it so that he wouldn’t poop on the floor. I had a cat, a good friend, a long long time ago whom I still miss. He was a big tabby with awesome tan/orange stripes. I would climb up to the roof sometimes to avoid my housemates and relax and stare at the moon. One night I climbed up there, and he was up there. He saw me and seemed to get very happily excited to see me. He ran to one edge of the roof, looked down, then looked at me. Then, he ran to another edge, looked down, looked at me. He did that at every edge. I figured out what he was doing. At the last one, I said, “ok. Thank you for showing me. Don’t worry. I won’t go too far and fall off.” He looked very satisfied, walked to me, and laid on my chest, and we watched the moon together. One of my cats back when I was a kid, Thomas, got a urinary tract infection somehow. We would’ve never known because he’s both an indoor and outdoor cat and usually went outside to relieve himself. One day he jumped up into the bathroom sink, pushed the plunger down to stop the water leaving the basin, and pissed in it. Afterward he stood over it crying until someone came and saw the bloody urine in the bowl. He found a way to directly tell us “Yo, something’s wrong with me.” He could also open doors on his own. My gentle giant of a newfoundland did that growl once. We were on a road trip and I had to pee. Accidently picked a gas station in a bad part of town but I had to go. Left the dog in the car and while I went in i got asked for money to which I responded I don’t have any on me. Had the following conversation on the way out. Him: “I’ll walk you to your car so you can find your money” Me: “no” Him (while following me): “it’s no big deal I can wait for you to find it” I’m freaking out now trying to figure out of I can get into the car and lock the door fast enough. Come back to see my newfoundland – the gentlest dog ever baring get big ass teeth and doing the once in a lifetime growl through a cracked window. The guy SPRINTED away. Then We drove through a McDonald’s and got her a whole cheese burger (which she never gets) I had a pair of gold fish that grew to be quite large. Their names were nemo and toad. When nemo was dying toad did everything in his power to “revive” him. Including swimming alongside him and under him to boost him up and giving up larger potions of the food. After the nemo passed away toad got super depressed. He wouldn’t eat at all and spent all day moving the little pebbles at the bottom of the fish tank from one side of the tank to the next. he died not long after My chocolate lab woke me up one night barking in my face. I was really mad because he does that. When i got up to see what was up I soon realized I was having a massive Heart Attack. He saved my life. Thanks Luke. We lived in an apartment complex that didn’t allow pets. Unfortunately the people who frequently drove into the complex and dumped unwanted cats & dogs weren’t aware that residents weren’t allowed to have pets. One evening, there was an orange tabby crying piteously in the yard behind our building just 25 yards from one of the busiest roads in our city. The neighbor across the breezeway said that she saw him tossed out of a car that morning. I was worried that he would get creamed on the road and spent two hours sitting in the grass next to him with a bowl of ground hamburger to earn his trust. I had no idea what I was going to do with him after that, I just didn’t want to see him starve or get run over. After a few weeks we worked out a living arrangement – he stayed in the apartment during the day with food and water and a bed and then went outside at night. We had to keep his presence hidden so that the apartment management wouldn’t fine us or evict us. We couldn’t keep cat food bowls outside or a litter box inside (the staff collected garbage, so they’d know if I was dumping used cat litter). Due to his effervescent personality we started calling him Jonsey, the Shithead (Aliens reference). We were working on a solution house him permanently, but it was going to be a few more months before we could either get him into a rescue or move to a new residence that allowed pets. One night, during a round of terrible thunderstorms and heavy rain Jonsey was less than thrilled to head outside and we weren’t hot on the idea either. So he curled up in the corner of the couch and we headed to bed. The following morning I woke up and stumbled for the coffee maker. My husband asked me if the reason I was so tired was because I was up late cleaning up after the cat. I had no idea what he was talking about. He told me to look in the kitchen sink. There was a dishrag lying in the bottom of the sink and when I moved it there was cat poop in the drain. It took me few seconds to figure out what I was looking at and what it meant. To my husband it looked as if I had cleaned up cat poop and, in disgust had just thrown it in the sink to deal with it in the morning. What had actually happened was that Jonsey needed to use the bathroom and, instead of using any of my many houseplants, the corner, or just about anywhere else, he had chosen the absolute best alternative to a litter box available to him – the empty kitchen sink. He’d done his business and courteously covered it over with the dishtowel I always kept draped over the neck of the faucet. He earned a forever home with us and we moved to a house a few months after that. We had pot belly pigs when we were little because my brother and I were allergic to cats and dogs. Smart little f*ckers. My brother and I would always yell “MOM! MOM!”, so one day my mom left for a couple days and the pigs got upset. One of them started squealing and then opening it’s mouth so it sounded like “MMMMMAMAMA”. Then the other one started doing it. So we had two pigs in the house screaming for mama. It was creepy as f*ck. On the few days I get to sleep in, if my cat decides his breakfast is too late he has learned to wake me up for it. early on, I apparently learned to sleep through his MRROOOOOOOWs by the bedside; as time went by, I learned to roll over & ignore him when he’d bat at me with his paws… …so he’s learned to get me up the one way I can’t sleep through: he’ll take a single claw & drag it very gently over my eyelid. it doesn’t hurt at all, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a more peculiar feeling. When I was in high school, my cat P.C. (short for personal computer which was my Dad’s idea) woke my Dad up in the middle of the night by knocking herself into my parents’ door and meowing very loudly. My Dad began to follow her downstairs not knowing why and she stopped at the air vent in the kitchen. My Dad immediately turned off the air. Turns out something caught on fire in the vent and the smoke detector hadn’t picked it up yet. I’ve had dogs all my life but the 3 I have now are all very special to me. They’re seriously smart. They’ll turn on the outside hose when they get thirsty on a hot day(even though they have ice water inside) but they’ll also get the bathroom door open when you’re taking a shower and turn the shower off when they think you’ve been showering for too long. They’re very smart but very scary. When my SO and I were walking around after we got done setting the tent up at a family camping trip(my SOs family) I went to go take a leak. So I took two of our German Shepherds to the bathroom with me and left her with one. She can handle them all of course but with deer and squirrels and stuff you just don’t know. I trust them to listen to her but why take a chance. So while I’m in the bathroom and my two dogs are hanging around outside I hear a distant but very angry and aggressive bark. Now, my dogs are very well trained and don’t bark for no reason unless told to. I hear one of my two let out a “wtf?” bark and another distant bark from my SOs dog. At that point my dogs start going crazy so I’m like what the f**k might as well let them go. I let them go and they just barrel over to where I left my SO, I’m talking full run and barking. Of course I pick my pace up and I get a look at the situation. It’s three guys cornering in on my lady. Only thing holding them off was the dog she had. I have to tell my SO to let her dog go right as my two get to her. All the dogs pounced at what seemed like exactly the same time and they all end up on the ground. But after that my dogs just take a seat right on top of the three guys. They don’t even try to fight the dogs off at that point. Ten seconds later after I called the dogs off I figure out why. All three dogs have bitten almost through one of each guys arms. It’s smart not to f**k with someone with a dog, or worse multiple dogs. I had taken my german shepherd out for a hike in an abandoned conservation area. It was a hot day, there was a creek with a deep pool, so I decided to strip nekkid and go for a swim. The dog and I splashed around a bit, then we got out, I pulled on my clothes, and carried on down the trail. My dog, however, wouldn’t follow. She was starting at something in the grass. I called, she looked up at me and then looked back at the grass. I went over to see what was so enthralling… turns out my car keys had fallen out of my pocket and she wasn’t budging until I picked them up. I have pet rats. One of them broke a tooth, and the infection spread to her brain (the teeth go all the way up above the brain). I had her on antibiotics, but she was a bit “tilted” to one side. When they were out on a table, I noticed her falling over near the edge of the table, and was afraid that she would fall. However, before I have time to react and move, another of my rats walk up to her, takes a firm but careful grip around the base of her tail and pulls her away from the edge of the table. Now, I know one should be careful in placing human thoughts in animal heads, but usually, a rat “biting” another rat’s tail is a surefire way to start a fight, and I can’t see any other reason to do it except that she saw ahead, noticed the potential problem, figured out what to do to solve it and implemented that solution. My cat has figured out how to turn on my heated mattress pad. Its just a little foot pedal near the headboard. With out fail I come home everyday to it cranked and her cuddled down near the foot of my bed, where the coils double. In the winter I sometimes wake up hot as hell and realize she’s turned it on while I was sleeping. I was at the park with my dog and started talking to another dog owner. He got bored and decided to leave without me. As soon as I realised I ran out of the park to find him walking down the street toward my house, the road was pretty busy so I nearly shat myself and started sprinting down the street after him. I saw him look both ways, wait for the traffic to stop for him and then cross the road. By the time I caught up to him he had already crossed and was just having a casual stroll home. About two weeks ago, just before we had to have him put down, I went to pick him up from the vets. They said he had improved overnight, the moment they said he could go home he jumped off my lap and went straight to the door. He kept looking back at me as if to tell me to hurry up. He was a brilliant dog. I work at a pet store, and a big part of the job is listening to people talk about how great their average-ass pets are. But man, every now and then you get a good one. We have a family that owns a couple of African Grey parrots. When the kids were teenagers, the parents went out of town for the weekend, specifying there should be no parties whatsoever in their absence. Naturally the kids throw the party, and manage to clean up brilliantly. They almost got away with it until at dinner the night the parents returned, the Greys started making this whole new range of sounds including the sound of a beer pop tab opening, and the sounds of ping pong balls hitting plastic cups and the floor. Busted by birds. She saved my life. I was sleeping, and started going into a diabetic seizure. My SO at the time was a very heavy sleeper (her dog). She jumped on the bed, whining and barking until my SO woke up. Ambulance was called, life was saved. There was a fire in my building once. My old kitty yelled at me until I followed her into a low corner of the bedroom. The air there was much clearer and I hid there with her until I was rescued by the firemen. She saved me that day. She’s gone now, but she was my best friend for 18 years. When I was a stupid kid, I was eating warhead hard candies. Instead of eating them like a normal person, I was squeezing one end and shooting it into my mouth. Well, I squeezed too hard and it got lodged in my throat. I made it to the back door (my dad was in the garage) before I collapsed. My cat ran out, and started swatting at my dad and got him to follow her. That was scary. I have two horses, Red, and Mickey. They are yarded next to each other, and there is enough of a gap in the fence that a clever horse may work out that they can just manage to pinch the others hay through it. Red took it a step further and realised that if he could steal Mickey’s hay, Mickey could steal his… So he waits until Mickey is distracted by his bucket feed, and then Red takes his own hay from his own feeder and deposits it across the yard, where it’s safe. He then goes back and takes Mickey’s hay and deposits it where it is safe. Then Red eats his hard feed and two lots of hay. We had to move all the hay feeders. My youngest son, a two time cancer winner, was recovering from a particularly ugly round of methotrexate. He was home recovering and my Pomeranian, who was always at my heel,wouldn’t leave his side. I was curious but not concerned and continued my morning chores. I was in the next room when Ping came in like Lassie and barked until I came to see. He returns to my sons side and began to shiver. My son was playing xbox, and seemed ok. I turned to go back to my chores and Ping let out a howl I didn’t think he was capable of and as I turned my son was seizing, full grand mal seizures that I recall clearly 11 years later. I was just in time to keep him from hitting head first on the hardwood floors. We just put my little Ping down last month. He was my best friend for 17 years, and my sons hero forever. We miss you Ping. I had a genius ferret. All of my ferrets were smarter than you might expect, but Mia was ridiculous. I have tons of stories, but here’s my favourite. My roommates and I used to hangout in a TV room that had door way with no door (entranceway?). Since I wanted the ferret to be able to run around while we were there, I put a baby gate across the exit. Took her ten seconds to climb it, of course. I then wrapped the gate in carpet runner, so she couldn’t scale it. She tried for a long time, but could find anything to get a grip on. Three of us are all kind of marveling at her commitment. She stops trying to climb, and just freezes for a minute, her eyes panning around the room like she’s concocting a scheme, and then she starts eyeballing a shoebox on the other side of the room. Eyes up on the gate, back to the box, back to the gate. My buddy says “No f*cking way. You think she’s figured it out?†She walks over to the box and starts sliding it across the floor, stopping every foot or so and checking her progress. Finally gets to the gate, hops on the box and jumps up and grabs the top of the gate. Whoop she’s up and over and dancing down the hallway. Dogs are awesome. I had a gentle giant growing up and once a guy drove up the road at double the legal speed in a narrow, twisted medieval street near a school, almost hitting both my dad and my dog. My dad loudly yelled “asshole” and gestured at the car, and the guy, proving he was even more an asshole than previously thought, stopped his car, got out and did a few steps to threaten my dad. My dog gently sat down, managed to make his fur double in size, and did the kind of growl you only hear dogs do once or twice in their lifetime, the kind that says “You better not make one more step”. My dad did not even have the time to think of an answer before the guy did a full U turn and got back in his car to drive away. My dad had a hard time telling us the story because he was laughing so much at the face the guy made. Also, seeing it’s about being intelligent, my old dog understood how to open silently the doors where the treats where and close them back, but never did it when someone was around. We had to film him. He also figured out once that every now and then, some old ladies would gather up in the house next door which was owned by the municipality to host club events. He knew when they would come somehow and would climb the garden wall to get some biscuits from them. I miss him. I once tried to put my roommate’s dog in his kennel. Sweet dog–he obeyed me and went inside without a fuss, then looked at me like, “okay, now what?” I closed the door, put the latch down, and told him to stay in there like a good boy. He gave me this look that said “are you serious with this?” Without missing a beat, he calmly lifted the latch with his nose and walked out of the kennel. I have a three month old pup who got dirt in her eye one day. Th eye kept tearing up and she held it partilly shut for a few hours. During that time I felt really bad for her and handed out a lot of treats. Since then, when I am eating, she begs by winking that eye with a tiny whimper. Her wink is nonstop. If she’s called by someone else in the home she looks at them with perfect eyes. I get the “broken eye” Once she gets the goods -fully working eyes. When I was raising my chicks and they were about adolescent age, my one hen died suddenly. I got home and her brother was having a fit in the coop, then when I pulled her out to go bury her he just sat and watched completely silent. I picked him up to return him to the coop, and he just closed his eyes, settled down, and sat completely silent in my arms for about an hour. It broke my heart. I never knew chickens could mourn until then. We had one remarkably intelligent pet rat. There was a number of intelligent things he did, but here are some highlights. His much larger older brother was keeping him away from one of the food dishes on the first level. He chews a hole in the bottom of a box on the top level and moves it down to the first level. He manages to move the box, with him inside it, and the hole he chewed perfectly aligned with the food dish. He camped his box right over the bowl, with him in it, blocking his brother out, where he could eat in peace. He was the master of manipulating his environment. Inside their cage was a number of levels and boxes. He would push them around, nest them, or chew them to get wherever he wanted to go. It was like watching someone playing a video game where they had to arrange boxes to get where they wanted. It was all the more impressive given he had limited mobility from his rear legs, and more than compensated in this way. We would put puzzles filled with treats in their cage to give them something to solve. Without fail he was always the one to solve them, no matter how many layers we would put on them. He had a few tumors removed over the course of his life. Without fail he always seemed to remove his stitches a day or so before he was scheduled to go back in for removal. Provided he could reach them. Everyone else would either leave them be or immediately try to remove them. No matter where you would put food blocks, he would carefully pick them up and place them in designated food bowls. He was extremely vocal in the way some dogs, like huskies are. Unlike others he would modulate his squeaks to try and communicate. RIP Felix, you brilliant little rat. I had a yabbie in my freshwater tank that is a genius. I one day watched him gather some food pellets into his cave, wait for the fish today eat the rest then a few minutes later place them in front of the cave entrance, then attacked and ate a fish that came to eat the pellets. He stockpiled his meal to later bait an even better meal. That f*cker is in his own tank now. The smartest thing I’ve seen my cat do is referee when my girlfriend’s kitten was trying to fight her older cat. We were initially terrified because my cat was found as a stray and you can tell that he’s had his ass kicked in a few fights back in the day. When we adopted him, when he’d hear the other cats start playfighting, he’d rush out to be there too. He weighed about twice as much as the next biggest cat, and we knew almost nothing about his personality at the time, so of course this filled us with terror. Well, we followed him out into the next room, and he had just managed to perch himself on the coffee table, above the action, and was just watching. When the older cat switched from playing to getting genuinely exasperated with the kitten, he tagged in so the other cat could get away. For months he would do this, so we figured he may have helped raise kittens when he was stray. Anyway, his personality is great, and he’s a sweet dumb boy and the best lap cat you could ask for. The vet at the shelter thought he would want to be an outside cat, but once we got him home it was very plain that that was not the case. I could leave the door open all day and he wouldn’t go anywhere; this cat has no interest in being outdoors again. I have a parrot. We have a black cat called shadow and he comes when we say his name. One day I hear Oliver (my parrot) saying “Shadow! Shadow!” while he’s in the kitchen on the stool. I look outside and shadow is at the door begging to be let in. Also once I accidentally woke Oliver up and he started grumbling, “sh*t sh*t sh*t!” My roommate’s dog. We were taking care of another dog for a few days and he was staying at our house. They got along well enough, but visitor dog kept trying to play and resident dog never wanted to. One evening, resident dog walks in to the living room to find visitor dog is in her favorite spot on the couch. She immediately barks, drops into a play bow, and starts jumping around to play with him. Visitor dog gets super excited that she finally wants to play and abandons the couch. Resident dog drops the playacting and reclaims her rightful throne. Carries his bone to you and pushes it into your hand. Then he starts chewing the other end of it while you hold it. When you try to pull on the bone to maybe start a tug-of-war game with him, he stops chewing and gives you a look like, “What the heck? Just hold it. You’re the one with opposable thumbs.” Not my current dog, but the family dog we got when I was a teenager. I came home and went to my room and she’s just barking for no reason. Not furiously, but an unfamiliar cadence and enough to be annoying. I finally come out of my room to see what she wants. I look out the window and see my car trunk lid hadn’t latched all the way and was wide open. Not that I had much of value in there, but as a broke college student in a neighborhood where anything not nailed down gets stolen, I thought it was pretty awesome of her. She got extra treats and pets that day. Husband used to have a large cat who, if his breakfast was “late”, would live the toilet seat up a few inches with his head then let go . BAM-bam-bam-m-m-m I put a pot of water on the stove and while waiting for it to boil I went and got involved in something else and forgot about it. After a while my siamese kitten came in and started meowing at me, in a very insistent way. I figured she just wanted attention so I gave her a few pets and just kept doing my thing. She kept meowing and started poking her claws into my ankles, not drawing blood but definitely enough to get my attention. She ran to the door and looked back meowing, so I followed her. She led me to the kitchen where the pot was starting to smoke because all of the water had boiled off. You know she got her favorite wet food and so many snuggles. My former boss had a parking lot clean-up and lawn maintenance business. He would send his two collies out around the parking lots collecting trash, and they’d bring it back to his truck. They loved it. It was amazing to see. About the otters, one summer an otter escaped from their enclosure, and was seen around the zoo/amusement park, swimming around people who had hired rowing and pedal boats. He’d go up to guests to beg for snacks, etc. All summer the guards tried to catch him, but he learned to recognise their uniforms, and stayed away. They finally succeeded in catching him when the guards dressed in civvies. My first cat ended up going through renal failure which caused him to urinate a lot. I would clean his box every day but sometimes I would get home from work late and he didn’t like that. He started using the toilet all on his own. I caught him one afternoon while cleaning the house. I was sweeping the hallway and as I passed the bathroom I heard the sound of peeing in the toilet. As I continued sweeping past the door it dawned on me that my husband was at work, leaving me home alone. So now I’m slightly disturbed and I slowly back up, broom in hand, and peer around the door jam into the bathroom. My cat is sitting on the toilet urinating and giving me a look that screams he wants some privacy. I was in so much shock I just gave him his privacy and went back to sweeping. After that day he refused to use his box anymore and in the final months of his life I actually had to go out and by him a trainer potty so he wouldn’t have to jump up on the toilet anymore. The lady at Walmart thought I was playing a prank on her when I told her what I needed the potty for. My cat figured out how to fill up my bathtub. He learned how to close the drain and would turn the water handle and would just sit there and watch the tub slowly fill up. It took me weeks to figure out what was going on. I had a very smart and wonderful golden retriever, Emma. She would sometimes try trading one of her gross rawhide chews for something we were holding if she wanted it–she once dropped her toy in my dad’s lap, nudged it towards him, and started “speaking” (not like a bark, more like dog complaining) while nodding at the apple he held. She would also distract our book smart but not street smart other golden if she wanted the toy the other dog had. She’d take a random toy, go up to one of us and make a big deal, jumping and barking and playing with us with the toy. Then when book smart dog dropped her toy and ran to see what all the fuss was about, Emma would immediately leave us and grab book smart’s toy and run off with it. One time she found a hurt dove and brought it to us in her mouth, holding it so gently. When my son was a baby, he was teething really bad. Constantly running a fever and cranky. we gave him lots of the tylenol suspension drops. One morning I had the baby wedged in the recliner while I was looking for something. Of course he was crying. Our dog, looked at the baby, ran upstairs, came back down a few seconds later with the tylenol, dropped it in the recliner where it rolled to the baby. Then the dog turned to me and barked until I picked it up. My cat knows that old grocery bags are what I scoop his crap into, so when I slip up and forget to clean his litter box he drags one in there to let me know. My step dad was a serious alcoholic (still is) however before he met myself and my mother he has this beautiful Staffie. Multiple people confirmed that if he was in the bar and the dog was worried. It could get out of the house. Onto a bus and to the main strip. It would then go in every bar one by one looking for him. If he didn’t find him, he would go back to one specific bar and sit on a chair and wait for him. Early in the morning, I open our sliding glass door to let my dog out. She stands there staring at me as I tell her to go to the bathroom and motion outside. After a 10 second staring contest I attempt to lead her outside by first going out myself. I then proceed to walk into the sliding screen door I failed to open and knock it off the rails. That was when I knew my dog was smarter than me. Our cat hears the mailman delivering the mail through the letter slot in the door. He races to it, grabs each piece in his teeth, and then drags them – one by one – to the chair where I’m sitting. If a piece of mai from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/20-of-the-most-unbelievably-smart-things-pets-have-done-that-surprised-their-owners/ Wine is the most fascinating, complex and outright-sexy drink most women, and even some men, enjoy. Most people dont know this viceis actually pretty healthy for you. I mean, yes, people. It is alcohol, and Im definitely not telling you to abuse it. However, I am telling my fellow anxiety-ridden, health-freak friends not toquestion whether youre an alcoholic for having a glass of wine every night. For you, my fellow complex women, it simply means youre giving your body a chance to relax (in moderation, of course). Here arefive very simple facts that prove why wine actually improvesyour personal life. (I wont accept cash as a thank you. Buy me a bottle of wine, instead.) Wine could improve your sex life.Getting a little tipsy off of your favorite wine never hurt anyone. An Italian study showed that women who have two glasses of wine enjoy physical pleasure much more intensely, as opposed to women who dont drink wine at all. This is a pretty solid reason to drink wine if youre in a relationship, am I right? Or, if youre single like me, it gives you reason to hone your independence and enjoy your own body. It gives you all the more reason to get to know yourself a little better (however you mightinterpret that). Red wine is good for the heart.Red wine, typically more than white, has antioxidant properties and contains something called resveratrol, a natural phenol from plants. Its also suggested that resveratrol is a preventative antioxidant for cancer and heart disease. It is said to be found in the skin of grapes, and obviously, grapes make wine. Its healthy, its natural and its good for you in moderate amounts. Youll always look classy.Whether youre on a date or with friends at a bar, ordering a glass of your favorite wine is never a wrong choice. You are most definitelythe classiest person in the room. Ordering a glass of wine, as opposed to a beer, says, Im a woman, hear me roar. Itssubtle enough thatyoure not outright saying, Im getting trashed tonight, but youre not hiding from your own shadow, either. Youre owning your body, but inviting any kind of play you might want to get from this date, or that guy staring at you from across the room. Own it, girl. You are totally in control. Wine is fat free.Need I say more? I mean who needs food when you can have wine? Just kidding. We need food, butthink about it. No matter how much you consume, you are consuming zero fat. None. Nada. It makes you feel empowered AND is fat free. So never feel guilty about enjoying a glass (or a few). Wine can help relax youwhen youre overthinking everything.I find if Im having trouble making a complicated decision or if Im overthinking options to the point of exhaustion, I sit back with a glass of wine in hand to relax my thoughts a bit. A little bit ofwine helps ease my worries and helps me think things through a bit more simply. It alsohelps you go to sleep. The clearer life becomes, the more relaxed you are and the deeper the sleep youll get. Of course,wine can cause some serious hangover headaches the next day, so again, moderation is where its at. A glass of wine a day keeps the nightmares, anxieties and depressions away. So drink up, and drink responsibly. Subscribe to Elite Daily’s official newsletter, The Edge, for more stories you don’t want to miss. Source: http://allofbeer.com/5-reasons-you-should-never-feel-guilty-about-that-extra-glass-of-wine/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/5-reasons-you-should-never-feel-guilty-about-that-extra-glass-of-wine/ According to the FDA, NHS and Health Canada; the average adult should consume approximately 2000 – 2500 calories per day. This is a general guideline and your personal daily calorie intake will depend on your exact age, lifestyle (i.e., how active you are) and height/weight. Business Insider recently visited 14 popular fast food chains in the United States to see what a single meal of your entire daily calorie intake would look like. Depending on your level of nutrition knowledge the results may or may not surprise you. Be sure to check out Business Insider to see all of the fast food restaurants reviewed. [via Business Insider] McDonald’s – 2,010 Calories
Photograph by Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Starbucks – 2,030 Calories
Photograph by Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Subway – 2,010 Calories
Photograph by Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
KFC – 2,940 Calories
Photograph by Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Burger King – 2,990 Calories
Photograph by Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Taco Bell – 2,080 Calories
Photograph by Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Wendy’s – 2,480 Calories
Photograph by Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Chipotle – 2,045 Calories
Photograph by Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
Source: http://allofbeer.com/what-your-entire-daily-calorie-intake-looks-like-at-8-popular-fast-food-chains/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/what-your-entire-daily-calorie-intake-looks-like-at-8-popular-fast-food-chains/ On Oct. 17, 1891, “Colonel” William Heyward, owner of the Standard Buffet at 231 Broadway in New York City, across the street from the old Post Office (now replaced by City Hall Park), explained to his head bartender that he was going to replace the latter’s subordinates with a quartet of barmaids brought in from London and asked him to train them in the intricacies of American mixology and supervise their work. Nobody in the world was better fitted to that task than the man before him. William Schmidt, alias “the Only William,” was the most celebrated bartender and mixologist in America, a consummate artist at mixing drinks and, equally important, an eloquent and precise explainer of the intricacies of his art. Indeed, at the time, he was on the verge of publishing The Flowing Bowl, his landmark book dedicated to the topic. With William’s tutelage and recipes and the charm and brisk efficiency characteristic of British barmaids, the Standard Buffet would be packing them in with a trowel. There was only one problem: William would have none of it. “He could not afford to endanger his professional standing by consenting to work as [the barmaids’] director,” he told the Colonel. That same night, his last at the bar, he told his regulars simply, “I will not stand behind the bar with a lady.” He was a little more voluble to the press, as was his wont. “English barmaids can draw ale, but do you think that all of them put together could mix a ‘La Premier’ that would be fit to drink? And how about a ‘Life Prolonger,’ ‘Anticipation,’ ‘Sweet Recollections,’ Brain Dusters’ and ‘Canary Birds.’ Could they mix them?” Now, this was as fair as it was strictly grammatical, which is to say not much. No barman in America would be able to mix those drinks either, not unless William taught him, since they were all his original creations and none had as yet appeared in print. But playing fair was not the traditional American way when it came to women and bars. In England, when one entered an alehouse, coffeehouse, tavern, or inn—anywhere drinks were sold across a bar—it was customary since time immemorial to see a woman behind that bar. She pulled the pints of ale, opened the bottles of wine, poured the drams of brandy, rum orgin and even mixed the Punch, Gin Twist and other typical English drinks. In fact, it was women who made the first experiment in modern bartending possible, when James Ashley decided that all the Punch sold at his new London Coffee House would be mixed to order in front of his customers, and that he would sell it in quantities as small as a “tiff” (basically, a juice glass). Ashley was the host, but his head barkeeper, Mrs. Gaywood (alas her first name has yet to be uncovered), and her crew of young women did all the actual mixing and serving of drinks, and collected all the money for it. That was in 1731. Yet when the next major advance in the art occurred, which saw ice incorporated into the drinks and a far greater variety of individual beverages mixed to order, women were almost entirely absent. That took place in America, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. There, women had been excluded from behind the bar since Colonial days. Certainly, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the barmaid was, as one American who came across them in England noted in 1826, “a character rarely known in the United States.” Where one was found, what’s more, it was generally considered to speak badly for both her character and that of the bar. That taboo—sometimes, in some places made explicit by law, otherwise “merely” customary—lasted until the 1960s as a general matter, albeit with ever more frequent exceptions, and it still lingers to this day in dark, festering little pockets of the bar world. Unfortunately, bartending as a profession hasn’t received the historical study warranted by its longstanding importance in daily life (and here I’m not just talking about mine). I know of no book dedicated to this precise historical conundrum—why were there no barmaids in America?—and at this remove it remains a riddle. At the time, even Schmidt, the most floridly articulate of nineteenth-century bartenders, when pressed to justify his belief that “it was wrong to intrust [sic] ladies with the tools of his trade,” could only offer the tautology, “I don’t think that their place is behind the bar” because “behind the bar is no place for a woman,” and mutter darkly that “I doubt that any barmaid will ever succeed in making a good mixed drink.” It would have been good if one of the journalists who seemingly hung on William’s every word had persuaded him to expound on those reasons. For the first, the idea that behind the bar is no place for a woman, he would have probably said something like this: “Here in America our bars are rather rough places, even the fanciest ones, and always have been. There’s drinking, of course, and you know how that makes men act, and there’s usually some gambling going on, whether it’s euchre or faro tables or just dicing for drinks. There’s smoking and spitting and Lord knows there’s foul language and all kinds of other swinish behavior, from pissing in the cuspidors to passing out drunk on the floor to gut-puking and worse. And that isn’t the worst of it—there’s also the fisticuffs and the flying chairs and the gunplay. People get shot in our bars. We don’t want to subject women to that, or any of these things.” (Okay, he wouldn’t have mentioned the pissing and the puking, but no doubt he would have thought about them.) There is some truth in this. American bars were rough. The American propensity to haul out a gun and say it with lead is nothing new, and even a marble palace of mixology such as San Francisco’s Bank Exchange Saloon, the home of Pisco Punch, had the occasional shooting, like when someone put a bullet through Joseph Hayes’ brain at 7:30 one Monday evening in 1888 (nobody didn’t see nuttin’). As for the smoking and spitting and swearing and gambling and whatnot, well, sure. But men smoked in England, gambled there, drank and behaved badly there and the barmaids managed to take it in stride. (Fine, the spitting was a purely American thing, caused by our habit of chewing on plugs of tobacco.) And if there was less shooting, there was still some. And back in the eighteenth century, when every would-be gentleman carried a lethal little stabbing sword at all times, English bars had witnessed a shocking amount of bloodshed, and the barmaids managed to survive that well enough. But you didn’t have to go all the way to England to find female bartenders thriving. America is a big place and American women are plenty tough and determined. Despite custom and law and all those men, some women always found their way behind the bar. A thorough examination of the lives and careers of these pioneers deserves a whole book, not a couple of paragraphs in a drink column, and I hope one day soon they will get one. In the meanwhile, a few names that would have to be included. One would need to begin with Catherine “Kitty” Hustler (1762-1832), who was immortalized (as “Betty Flanagan”) by James Fenimore Cooper in his 1821 novel, The Spy, set during the Revolution in the so-called Neutral Ground that lay in Westchester County, New York, between the British lines and the American ones to their north. Born Catherine Cherry in Pennsylvania, she married Thomas Hustler, a Continental soldier, in 1777 and—the important part—supposedly kept a tavern in the Neutral Ground (that part is hard to document, understandably), where she either invented or helped to spread that quintessential American drink: the cocktail. She was keeping a tavern outside Buffalo when Cooper met her in the 1810s. Then there’s Martha King Niblo (1802-1851). Born in New York City to a porterhouse-keeper, she grew up in the trade (one of the only sanctioned paths for women to work behind the bar was as part of a family business, a fact which, in the 1850s, led Fritz Adolphy, a St. Louis beer-garden proprietor, to legally adopt all 90 of his barmaids when the city fathers moved to get rid of them). When her husband, William Niblo, opened “Niblo’s Garden,” an outdoor space dedicated to music, relaxation and refreshments north of the city in what is now SoHo, Martha ran the bar. She may also have invented the mighty Sherry Cobbler, one of the most popular drinks of the nineteenth century. She certainly took a large hand in popularizing it. San Francisco would deserve a chapter of its own, covering everything from the saloon where, as a British traveler found in 1853, “three comely-looking American girls tend bar, and are deep in the mystery of making rum punches, brandy smashers and gin cocktails,” to—well, you could take your pick. San Francisco in the early days was a wide-open town, where standard American norms and taboos were very much open to renegotiation and, in 1852, of the 127 retail liquor establishments listed in the City Directory, 20 were kept by women. Now, the majority of these were in the “Barbary Coast,” the city’s rowdy vice district, and were probably, let us say, extended-service establishments. But they also included bars like Mrs. Waters’ Arcade, which featured concerts, Mrs. Whitney’s large saloon, on Commercial Street, and above all Ellen Moon’s Cottage, on California Street. Mrs. Moon, a Welshwoman who came to the city from Australia, was something of a local fixture, running first the Cottage and then the much-beloved Ivy Green, on Merchant Street, until her suicide in the 1863. One could go on: Why shouldn’t there be some recognition of women, such as Christiana Berresheim, in 1911 the oldest barmaid in Massachusetts and the only one in Boston; the “smart, dashing” Kate McMillen of Cincinnati; or even poor Jane Robinson, shot to death behind the bar of her and her husband’s saloon in Dennison, Ohio, in 1882? Of course, these are the rare exception; their names only recoverable now with much digging, but they were known in their day and are enough to have proven to someone like William that women could do the job. Nor were those bad conditions William and his ilk deplored immutable. That is proved handily by the experience of one San Francisco saloonkeeper who, in 1886, installed behind the bar of his large establishment on Fourth Street a young woman who was ready “with a demure look and a condescending smile for the highly respectable habitués of the place, and a mixed air of superiority and indifference for ordinary ‘drunks’ and loudly dressed ‘dudes.’” “No ruffianism,” he told a reporter, “no loud swearing or vulgar language, no fights or glass breaking are ever seen or heard in my place nowadays, and I attribute the peaceful and church-like state of things to the presence of my lady bartender, while at the same time I never did a better business.” This suggests that what was really keeping the women out was the fact that whatever men said, they didn’t want to clean up their behavior and they were keeping the women out so they didn’t have to. But that’s too simple and puts women on a pedestal. As our Fourth Street saloonkeeper noted, “of course there are girls and girls,” and there were plenty working behind the bar who would, if anything, have encouraged rowdy behavior. So far we’ve just been talking about women in the “respectable” saloons. There were also plenty of women working in low dives, tough women such as Frances Schultze and her barkeeper, Martha Zutgesell, who beat the hell out of a strike-breaking cop when he tried to drag a striker out of their Chicago saloon in 1903. Or Jane Hynard, Mary Miller and “Bertha,” all hauled in on the same night in 1879 (from separate bars) for breaking the New York Excise law, or Salina Freeman, an African-American bartender from Richmond, who, in 1900, got fined $10 for sparking a five-way rumble in another saloon. In fact, the further down the socioeconomic scale one goes, the more one is likely to find a woman behind the bar, which—those bars not coincidentally being the most dangerous, although often not by a lot—neatly turns the “no place for a woman” argument on its head. That leaves us with William’s other argument: that women were incapable of mastering the intricacies of the craft. Here, he did actually attempt to explain what he meant: “I do not think that a bartender should be merely a beer slinger… I believe that a conscientious bartender, who knows his business, should have a higher aim than simply mixing drinks. It is his privilege to prescribe for his customers the drinks that will suit them best the different hours of the day. The art of properly mixing drinks and calculating their effect is a delicate one, and much too difficult for ladies to learn.” I’d like to hear what Mrs. Gaywood or Martha King Niblo would have to say to such obvious horseshit. I’m sure Lottie Brummer and her sister Annie, Nellie Lanhan and Maggie Connolly, Col. Haywood’s four barmaids, had a good laugh at it and all or William’s other fulminations. Sure, it took them a little while to get up to speed. But after a week training with one Sam Bergen, who taught them the basic recipes, and another week or two of practice, they did just fine. “American drinks?” one of them told a reporter from the New York Sun a month into the gig, “Oh, we’ve found them no trouble… American drinks are very easy to make, really. As for cocktails—and those we find are the most common drinks by far—we learned to make them in no time. We’ve also learned all about fizzes, and, in fact, everything that has ever been called for.” The only thing that gave them any trouble was a popular bit of foolishness known as the Pousse Café, which involved layering various spirits and liqueurs on top of one another in a tiny cordial glass. To be honest, that one gives me more than a little trouble, too. I’ll bet it even vexes a modern bar-master like Jeffrey Morgenthaler orIvy Mix, maybe just a bit. And yet Schmidt kept claiming that he wanted women out from behind the bar because they couldn’t mix the drinks. Indeed, years later, he convinced another reporter from the Sun, too lazy to double check thing in the paper’s morgue, that the women actually “gave up in despair” when confronted with orders for the various American drinks, rather than mixing them to their customers’ satisfaction, which is what really happened. (As far as I can determine, the women lasted at the bar until sometime in mid-1892, when Hayward ran into some of his periodic business problems; eventually he and William were reunited.) So if it wasn’t about mixing drinks, and it wasn’t about protecting the precious flower of American womanhood from the foul atmosphere of the bar, what was the taboo against barmaids about? Any answer, I think, would have to be sketched out along these lines. During Colonial times, men fell into the job of tending bar, particularly in parts of the country where women were in short supply. With the diminished class system that prevailed over here, it wasn’t seen as a somehow degrading or unmanly service job. It was seen for what it was, a moneymaking job with a fair amount of independence and just enough craft to earn its expert practitioners the respect of a nice-sized chunk of the populace. The more men mystified that craft part of the job by mixing up outlandish concoctions, tossing drinks between cups in long liquid arcs, dashing this and that into the glass with knowing winks, setting things on fire, so on and so forth, the more they could justify their high pay—and their exclusive possession of the job. Having spent an inordinate amount of time at modern craft cocktail bars, most of which (but, shamefully, not all of which) have no problem at all placing women behind the bar, I can confidently state that they’re fully as capable of mystifying the craft with pointless razzle-dazzle as the men are. And that, I believe, is progress. Source: http://allofbeer.com/why-did-it-take-america-so-long-to-have-female-bartenders/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/why-did-it-take-america-so-long-to-have-female-bartenders/ Bender Bending Rodriguez may be a fictional robot from a canceled sci-fi cartoon show, but to fans, he’s so much more than that. This misanthropic, lovable antihero has anger issues and every sort of vice, but under the filth is a heart of gold. Before you start your next binge-watch of Futurama, take a gander at these fascinating facts about Bender. 10 things you never knew about Bender1) It’s canon that Bender is a MacIn the season 1 finale, the Planet Express crew takes a tour of the Slurm Factory where we get to see them hang out with good ole’ Slurms McKenzie. Earlier in the episode, Professor Farnsworth scans Bender with a new device called an F-Ray, whereupon we discover that our dear friend Bender is powered by a 6502 microprocessor, the same processor that was used to power the Apple II. In an interview with Vulture, writer David X. Cohen explained why. “This is straight from me,” Cohen said. “When I was in high school, I spent many of my teen years until five in the morning programming video games of my own invention, so I became extremely and intimately familiar with this chip. It ran at 1 MHz—we’re used to hearing GHz nowadays—and so you had to be a nimble programmer to get it to do what you wanted it to do.” 2) Apple was all over Bender’s funeralIn season 7’s “Forty Percent Leadbelly,” the world briefly believes Bender has been killed by a train. Apple funded Bender’s funeral, though apparently in the future, the company barters for ad space. During the funeral, folk artist Silicon Red sings Bender a Mac-themed eulogy, including the lyrics:
3) Bender has a John Hughes connectionBender was named after John Bender from The Breakfast Club. Played by Judd Nelson, John Bender was a tough bully from the wrong side of the tracks who hid a soft and sensitive side underneath his gruff demeanor. We have no idea how that inspired Bender. 4) Bender’s antenna is a multitoolBender’s antenna is more than just a transmitter. Over the course of the series it has been a beer tap, a popcorn butter pump, a flusher, a snooze button, a timer, a voice mail notification system, a voicemail deletion button, an audio tape dispenser, a pager, an unintentional cable signal blocker, and a timer for Bender’s internal digital camera. Screengrab via Ann Marie Jukic/Pintrest 5) Bender came off the assembly line like thisBender was built in the year 2996 in Tijuana, Mexico, by Momcorp, and he came off the assembly line as an adorable little tyke, though one with attitude. His first words as a baby were, “Bite my shiny metal ass,” spoken as he enjoyed his first beer. READ MORE:
6) Bender is mortalUnlike other robots, Bender does not have a backup unit to house his data in case his body is destroyed. Momcorp saw this as a defect and had Bender ordered to be destroyed, but he was saved by Hermes. This also means if his hard drive is destroyed, he will die once and for all. 7) Despite being born in 2996, Bender is one of the oldest beings on EarthIn the movie “Bender’s Big Score,”we learn that Bender is actually millions of years old thanks to his use of the Time Sphere. Time travel through the Time Sphere is one way, so each time Bender is sent back in time he’s forced to wait thousands of years in the limestone cave under Planet Express. There is no exact accounting of how old Bender currently is on the show. 8) Bender has a soulAlthough he lacks a backup unit, Bender apparently does have a soul. In “Ghosts in the Machines,” he is killed by Lynn, an ex-girlfriend and suicide booth. His ghost haunts the Earth, only able to communicate by possessing other robots until he proves himself worthy of resurrection by saving Fry’s life. Apparently, his soul left his body without his hard drive being destroyed. At least he had fun as a ghost. 9) Don’t assume you know Bender’s family historyBender’s grandmother was a bulldozer. We learn this fact in “The Beast with a Billion Backs,” when Leela is trying to shame him into trying harder during a game. Leela shouts, “Come on, Bender, your grandmother could push harder than that!” Bender says, “No crap! My grandmother was a bulldozer.” Way to gender shame, Leela. READ MORE:
10) Bender’s most common words are only partly what you’d expectAlthough his character is known for a wide range of profanity, it isn’t until “War is the H-word” that we officially learn Bender’s most frequently uttered words. They are: 1. Ass Editor’s note: This article is regularly updated for relevance. Source: http://allofbeer.com/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-your-old-pal-bender-from-futurama/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-your-old-pal-bender-from-futurama/ Posters in LA targeting Meryl Streep over her links to Harvey Weinstein are a swipe back for her criticism of the president, says the artist behind them A rightwing guerrilla artist in Los Angeles has claimed responsibility for posters that depict Meryl Streep as an enabler of Harvey Weinstein, calling them revenge for the actor’s criticism of Donald Trump. Sabo, a former US marine who considers leftism a “disorder”, told the Guardian on Wednesday he created the posters that show Streep with a red stripe across her face and the text “She knew”, a reference to accusations that she had knowledge of Weinstein’s alleged sexual abuse of women. Sabo, 49, said he and two collaborators conceived the campaign as retaliation for Streep using her latest Oscar-tipped film, The Post, to bash Trump. “She’s swiping at us so we’re swiping back.” Source: http://allofbeer.com/rightwing-artist-put-up-meryl-streep-she-knew-posters-as-revenge-for-trump/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/rightwing-artist-put-up-meryl-streep-she-knew-posters-as-revenge-for-trump/ In the late 1990s, something weird happened that made everyone suddenly start giving a crap about wrestling. It was called “The Monday Night Wars,” and it basically boiled down to this: Two wrestling programs went head-to-head every Monday night in a battle to nut-slap each other out of existence. What made it so damn addicting was that you could watch these organizations being pricks to each other in real time. They poached each others’ stars on a regular basis. WCW would announce WWF spoilers live on the air to prevent people from switching over to their show (which was taped). Hell, at one point, WWE sent a group of wrestlers to interrupt WCW’s live broadcast, which was being performed in the next town over. Eventually, Vince McMahon won. He bought WCW, and that was that. Unfortunately, ratings have been dying ever since, and they recently admitted during an interview that they don’t know how to fix it. I do. Don’t get me wrong here. I’ve never worked in the industry. The only people I’ve ever wrestled didn’t know it was going to happen until I pounced on them. I don’t know how contracts work or the process they use for creating an episode of RAW. But I do know what made me start watching wrestling, what made me continue watching wrestling, and what eventually made me say “Fuck wrestling.” And I know a whole titload of people who feel the same way. The short version is that WWE has lost sight of what makes a TV show (not just a wrestling show) interesting. The long version is a lot more complex. So for the people who aren’t afraid of words, let’s break that down … #5. The “Creative Department” Basically Doesn’t ExistSome time around 2008, the WWE switched its content from beer, cursing, blood, and ass to a TV-PG rating. Wrestling fans love to speculate as to why that happened, but there’s no single underlying reason. You could easily write several books on possible causes, ranging from the double-murder/suicide of Chris Benoit the previous year to an attempt to clean up so they could sell more toys and video games. They’re a publicly-traded company with stockholders to protect. So be it. But there’s a reason I’m bringing this up, and it’s a pretty important point. When fans talk about how the Attitude Era was so much better (and they talk about it constantly), they often attribute its high ratings to the adult-oriented content. While I’m sure that cursing and titties did play a role in its popularity, what they forget to factor in (aside from the fact that the Monday Night War itself was a huge selling point) was that in that era, every major character had a storyline. Stone Cold was fighting back against a corrupt boss who was actively trying to keep him from becoming the face of the company. The Undertaker had a dark secret from his past: a little brother, whom he thought had died in a fire, was found to be alive and coming for revenge. Mick Foley was slowly going insane and developing split personalities. He was easily manipulated by Vince McMahon, and was being used as a pawn in a greater plot. Nobody does a “fuck your mother” look quite like Vince. It sounds silly, doesn’t it? Then again, Star Wars was about a boy with space magic and a sword made out of light who defeated his robot father with love. The point is that everyone had a deeper motivation than just “I want to be the champion.” I can’t remember the last good storyline in the modern era of wrestling. They’ve started a few, but it doesn’t feel like anyone in the company knows how to follow through and deliver on them. For instance, they created a mysterious redneck cult called “The Wyatt Family” who are super creepy. They often speak in vague, ominous riddles, which is pretty cool, because it makes you want to stick around to see what it all means. For months, the WWE built up their coming debut, and when they finally arrived, it was pants-shittingly awesome: So they’re coming after Kane? Awesome. Why? What do they want with him? In the following weeks, we’d find out that they were going to show him the true meaning of the word “fear,” and they were going to turn him into the demon that they know he is. Even more awesome. So they’re going to recruit him into their cult? Turn him to the Dark Side? Nope, they had a match, and after the Wyatts won, the plot was over. Kane didn’t join their cult. The Wyatts didn’t progress into a bigger, better story. It turns out that Kane just needed some time off to go film See No Evil 2, and having the Wyatts “injure” him was a means of explaining his absence from TV. Keep in mind, this is the most interesting story they’ve had in several years. The majority of the others boil down to, “I want to win this match because I can wrestle better than you.” They set up a match between The Rock and John Cena one year in advance, based entirely on the storyline “John Cena talked shit about me.” That’s not an exaggeration. That was the whole story: a “meet me in the playground after school” beef. And what that tells us as fans is, “If these two extremely popular guys wrestle each other, you will buy tickets or subscribe to our network, no matter what.” I’ve put more effort into wiping my ass than the “creative” team put into that booking, and that’s become par for the course in the WWE. So how do they fix that? A good start would be to come up with defined stories for every single person who enters that ring. Give them a reason to be there. Hell, give us a reason to be there — make us come back next Monday because we have to find out what happens next. This isn’t some radical idea. This is TV 101. It’s something they understood back in the Attitude Era, and I’m blown away that they don’t understand it now. #4. There Is No Longer Any Suspense Or SurpriseIn the industry (and for hardcore fans), championship titles mean one thing: This is the person the WWE has marked as the company’s highest standard. For most other fans, it is a prop. It’s the reward that a hero receives for overcoming the odds and defeating the villain, or the trophy a villain receives for being extra good at evil. Either way you look at it, whoever holds that title is the good guy or the dickhole, as both a performer and a character. There’s a very simple formula that all of wrestling has used since the invention of pay-per-view, and it goes something like this. Good guy wrestles bad guy every week for a month. He loses most of those matches because the bad guy is a cheating asshole. They then have a match at a pay-per-view, and the good guy finally wins the title. The audience feels vindicated. Now, you either up the ante for their story and take it to the next level, or that match becomes the ending point to their feud, and you introduce a brand-new story with a brand-new dickhole. And you know his name is Chad. It doesn’t always play out that way, but that’s the general idea. It’s Pavlovian; you feel good when the hero wins, so you keep coming back for that payoff. It’s emotional heroin. It’s a way to coax people into buying tickets, and it totally works. If you’re going to see a title change hands, you’re going to see it there, so you might as well buy a ticket and see it firsthand, right? Actually, it’s not quite that simple. Let’s go back to 1999, when WWE hit their highest ratings. Because of the Monday Night War, both companies had to constantly surprise the audience. They were forced to do something every week that, if you missed it, made you think, “FUCK! Why did I pick that night to feed my kids?!” The easiest way to accomplish that was by throwing away the old pay-per-view payoff format and make new champions on the totally free TV show. That year, the WWE World Heavyweight Championship changed hands 12 times. Six of those times happened on regular TV. In 2015, the title changed hands four times (two of which happened in the same pay-per-view). Of those four, exactly one happened on RAW. In fact, if you don’t count the one time they held a tournament to claim a vacated title, the last time a heavyweight championship was “legitimately” fought for and won by a challenger on regular TV was November of 2010. Before that, June of 2009. Before that, July of 2006. Before that, September of 2003. And the belts are really weird-looking now. But that’s the big title, right? What about the Intercontinental Championship? It’s not as important in the eyes of regular fans, so there should be more flexibility in moving it around. In 1999, that one changed hands 10 times (technically 11, but that’s the year Owen Hart died, so there was a special circumstance involved). Five of those were on TV. In 2015, it happened five times — only one of them wasn’t on a pay-per-view. So what am I tuning in for, exactly? There aren’t any compelling storylines, so it’s definitely not for that. I’m not being surprised by an underdog coming out of nowhere and upsetting the champion. Any time they introduce a match and say, “This is for the title,” I can say with near-certainty that the title is staying right where it is. You can predict the outcome of those matches before they even start. It takes away 100 percent of the suspense. At that point, I’m just watching two guys pretending to fight … and that’s just kind of weird. If the WWE wants people to start giving a crap again, they’re going to have to reintroduce the element of surprise. If not with the championship titles, then at least with some good old-fashioned heel turns (good guy suddenly turns bad) or face turns (bad guy suddenly becomes good). That used to be a weekly occurrence back in the height of wrestling’s popularity, but now they follow the same rules as title switches, which is “NOPE! If you want to see that, you’ll PAY for it, fucker!” #3. There’s Something Modern Wrestlers Don’t Understand About Their RolesOne of the most valuable assets in all of wrestling, regardless of the company, is a good heel. Someone the fans genuinely hate. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, because a lot of guys who try end up sounding like an actor who’s playing the role of a villain, instead of a man with genuine disdain for the audience. The person who can do that is vital because when he finally gets the shit kicked out of him by the hero, the audience feels retribution. His defeat is their reward for tuning in week after week. He is an emotional catalyst. But there’s a second part to that role. Given enough time, most heels will inevitably develop a following. Or another wrestler will need to take over that spot in order to prevent the show from becoming a bucket of dead squid. At that point, the villain needs to flip and turn into the hero. Very few people are able to do that. For example, here’s what Alberto Del Rio looks like as a heel: Every part of that is fucking vile. Not just his actions — beating up a lowly ring announcer — but also the look on his face, the sound of his punches and kicks, the way he smugly holds up his belt to the crowd as if to say, “There’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.” Watching that makes you want to hurt him. That is what Alberto Del Rio was born to do: Be a remorseless punching machine. He plays the part of an evil turd perfectly. Here’s what he looks like as a babyface: Every part of that is fucking vile. Not just his ridiculous “I’m a good guy now” speech, but also the way the words unnaturally flop out of his stupid suckhole. The fake gas station manager’s smile. Trying so hard to convince us that he’s on the level. He wasn’t trying to trick the audience there — he’s just that bad at playing a babyface. Watching that makes you want to hurt him. Now I want you to take a look at Stone Cold Steve Austin as a heel: That’s a pretty damn good heel. It feels like he’s going to come right out of the screen and kick your ass, just for having the gall to watch him on TV. Let’s see what he looks like as a babyface: Oh. Well, hell. It’s almost like he kept the same exact ass-kicker attitude, except he pointed that aggression toward established heels instead of established faces. Huh. That’s weird. I thought that when a wrestler went from villain to hero, he had to put on a big-ass smile and give everyone an enthusiastic thumbs-up. I mean, I know that Stone Cold became one of the biggest stars the WWE has ever seen, but surely he was a fluke, right? Nobody else could make that work … This is why people have a hard time accepting guys like The Big Show, Roman Reigns, and John Cena as babyfaces. When they’re playing heels (or at least thugs), all three of those guys can pull off “scary ass-kicker.” We know that when they enter the ring, someone’s getting skull-fucked. But when they switch roles and become babyfaces, they turn into smiling, thumbs-up, pandering jackasses, and it’s embarrassing. It’s not that the audience doesn’t believe in them as good guys. It’s that we don’t want them representing us. Let me put it this way, because this is a huge topic of debate among wrestling fans: The hero in that ring represents the audience. He or she is a projection of who we want to be. They’re not just defeating the villain for their own purposes … they’re saving us from his bullshit. When we see ourselves projected into the spot of the good guy, we want that representation to be badass. We don’t want to be Superman. We want to be Wolverine or Deadpool or Punisher. Sometimes, Bugs Bunny: The people who want to see John Cena turn heel aren’t just saying it because they’re sick of him playing Superman. That’s a big factor, but it’s not the whole reason. A huge part of their argument is that they know what happens when you take a stale, played-out babyface and inject him with ruthless brutality and anger: He becomes unpredictable, he becomes a threat … he becomes interesting. Then, after a year or two, when you finally switch him back to the hero role, he keeps that ruthless attitude, and we back him 100 percent. Every guy in the videos I linked above has gone through it, and it made them better characters. But what you don’t do is start high-fiving audience members and sucking their assholes for cheap pops. Am I right, people of beautiful NORTH CAROLINA?! The second a babyface starts doing that is the second we start firing up the “boooooring” chants. Source: http://allofbeer.com/5-reasons-wrestling-fans-are-giving-up-on-the-wwe/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/5-reasons-wrestling-fans-are-giving-up-on-the-wwe/ A man has driven a sports car across 21 countries, starting at the most northerly pub in the world and finishing at the most southerly. Ben Coombs, 38, from Plymouth in Devon, drove 20,000 miles across three continents from the Arctic Circle to the southernmost tip of Chile. It took him seven months to complete the challenge. Mr Coombs described the final pub as “a dive”, but said “it’s the journey that matters, not the destination”. The idea for the adventure came while he was having a pint in a pub on Dartmoor. The journey started on the Norwegian island of Svalbard in an abandoned mining settlement called Pyramiden, which has a population of four. Mr Coombs said finding the northernmost bar “was an easy investigative process”. “Pyramiden is less than 700 miles from the North Pole, is the northernmost settlement on earth with a permanent civilian population, and has only one bar,” he added. “The residents all live in the only building still functioning – the town’s old hotel – which happens to have a still-functioning bar.” To find the most northerly and southerly pub, Mr Coombs looked for licensed premises where anybody could walk in off the street and buy a beer. Although there are bars in Antarctica they are located on bases and are not accessible to members of the public or are not licensed, he said. So Mr Coombs looked for the southernmost settlement outside Antarctica, and came across Puerto Williams in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. From Pyramiden, Mr Coombs drove his green 20-year-old TVR Chimaera, called Kermit, across Europe to Southampton from where the car was shipped to New York in August. He then travelled across the United States to California, before heading south to Mexico. A number of friends joined him for various stages of the journey in the two-seater convertible car. “Central America quickly passed beneath our wheels, before we shipped the car around the Darien gap from Panama to Colombia,” Mr Coombs said. “Then it was just the small matter of an 8,000-mile drive across Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina to get to the last bar on earth.” The final destination was Puerto Williams, where Mr Coombs arrived on 12 February and found the southernmost bar. “It’s a bit of a dive actually,” he said. “We’re talking plastic patio furniture inside, Chilean line dancing on the TV, and a menu which consists only of lager and cheap whisky. “There are probably more appealing places to travel 20,000 miles to get to, but that’s not really the point. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.” Related TopicsSource: http://allofbeer.com/man-completes-20000-mile-pub-adventure/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/man-completes-20000-mile-pub-adventure/ Municipality near the US border says brewery that makes Corona, Modelo and other beers is using so much water from wells that region is becoming bone dry A brewery satisfying Americans thirst for Mexican beers such as Corona is sucking so much water from wells in an arid region near the US border that it has left one municipality bone dry, according to a local mayor. WE HAVE NO WATER FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION, Mayor Leoncio Martnez Snchez of the municipality of Zaragoza, wrote in single-sentence letter to Coahuila state governor Rubn Moreira. Zaragoza is currently suffering through water shortages so severe theres barely a drop of water when you open the tap, Martnez told the Guardian. A nearby brewery run by the US firm Constellation Brands currently draws water from wells drilled to a depth of 500 metres, and Martnez said that plans to increase production at the plant would aggravate the current situation, especially as the federal government ramps up plans for fracking in northern Mexico. Were worried because were already being impacted by this extraction of 1,200 litres of water per second by the brewery, he said. Its contradictory that while Constellation Brands has industrial amounts of water to make beer, the municipality of Zaragoza doesnt have 100 litres [per second of water] of water to give people to drink or use in their homes. The brewery which sits in the municipality of Nava, 45 kilometres south of the US border at Eagle Pass, Texas makes Corona and other brands of beer such as Modelo for export to the United States. Constellation Brands, which bought the plant in 2013, subsequently announced a $2.27bn investment to expand the facility and a glass factory, saying it would churn out 20m bottles of beer per day by the end of 2017. Martnez says the deep wells supplying the brewery are located approximately 20 kilometres from the municipal seat and have caused water supply problems in Zaragoza since being drilled a decade ago. [The government] gave them this land and these wells on a silver platter, he said. Constellation Brands said in 2014 that the Nava brewery would implement water-conservation practices and recycle 30% of the water it uses. The expanded brewery would also create 2,500 jobs, the company said. These are erroneous comments, brewery spokesman Csar Isidro Muoz said of the mayors letter. Even if the brewery did not exist, Zaragoza would still water problems. He added the brewery was built in an area with an abundance of water and that the local aquifer is recharged at a rate that is greater than the amount withdrawn to make beer. Mexico has become one of the worlds biggest beer exporters over the past two decades and the United States now imports more beer from Mexico than all other countries combined. The Coahuila state government has disputed suggestions of a water crisis in the region, saying the shortages only impact two neighbourhoods, local media reported. It added that water delivery was a municipal responsibility. Water crises are common in the region, said Ral Pacheco-Vega, public administration professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics Northern Mexico is extraordinarily dry and it has extreme climatic conditions. It doesnt have a lot of rain, therefore, there is a lot of water scarcity, he said. Even though Mexico has a constitutional mandate to have water for everyone, were still privatizing it, were still giving concessions to private entities on the premise of bringing jobs. Source: http://allofbeer.com/americans-taste-for-mexican-beer-sucking-up-water-supply-mayor-says/ from https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/americans-taste-for-mexican-beer-sucking-up-water-supply-mayor-says/ |
AuthorHi my name is Samantha Roberts I am 23 years old and I just graduated with my BSN degree I love to enjoy going out with friends on my spare time and enjoying the Bachelor life. Archives
April 2019
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