Well?

It's On, Motherfuckers, Round 2
If you've been sleeping in a teenage cave (you know who you are), you might have missed the mysterious circumstances of the NHL Western Conference first round playoffs- Seeds 1-4 lost to seeds 5-8, which makes the Sharks the number 1 seed in the second round, which means home ice for any remaining Western Conference playoff series, which obviously meant absolutely nothing in the first round.

Game 1- Edmonton Oilers vs. San Jose Sharks
Sunday, May 7, 2006
5:00 PDT

Ok, so I've been getting pretty heavily into brewsnobbery, slopping down one or two large bottles of high-powered northwestern sloogie each night under the auspices of hobby but knowing it's pretext for highage. Anyway, in my quest for the perfect beer (read: tastiest brew with the highest ABV), I picked up an old guide that lists 1500 brouhahas on a 0-5 scale and lands just one with 4.8 or higher: the Rogue Imperial Stout. Cut to today, Tuesday, May 2, the year of the Apocalypse 2006, and Hedonist Beer Jive informs me that Rogue has a local affiliate, situated here, here in the heart of the enemy-

Rogue Ales Public House - Newport
673 Union Street, SF, CA

and I'm thinking that in my current way too many littl'uns NO ROAD TRIP STATUS, perhaps bridge roadage is all I'm good for. I'm thinking that afternoons are the perfect time for new flavors, and that nothing says I love me like a few tasty hours on a new barstool with the world's greatest stout. I call on one and I call on all to join me in sampling and then slugging this so-called world's greatest beer in the middle of some May afternoon when all the good people are biking or rollerblading or having their Escalades detailed. I'm calling on a death to habit, to routine, to mummifying couch trips filled with nothing more than munching newfangled Mexican spice chips and staring at Tiger's frustrated face in the native fescue. This is a call to urban adventure, to middle-age romance, to cheap, meaningless excuses to get loaded under the highbrow umbrella of all the other bullshit reasons I'm spouting. Somebone get toasty with me on Imperial Stout before the Lamb comes for the Chosen, leaving my skeleton burning on a flaming stool.

Here we go!

Finally some new news...

Everyman
by Philip Roth
The Disappearing Novel
A Review by Joseph O'Neill (from The Atlantic)
Following the historical panoramas of his recent work, Roth's new novel -- a novella, really -- is a transfixing summary biography of a seventy-one-year-old mortal from Elizabeth, New Jersey: "He'd married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he'd been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story."
Thus the personal history of this "average human being" is reduced almost to a surgical history: hernia trouble as a boy; a burst appendix and peritonitis in his thirties; and, in his fifties and sixties, disastrously recurrent cardiac difficulties that clutter him with six stents and a defibrillator. The vocabulary of heart disease hurled at the reader -- angiogram, anterior descending artery, ejection fraction, fatal cardiac arrhythmia -- is supplemented by the back braces, strokes, cancers, and migraines that plague our hero's nearest and dearest. The whole "onslaught" is horribly aggravated by his memories of carnal exaltation and bungled marriages and the beloved dead, not to mention by the awful truth that "there was nothing to be done. No fight to put up. You take it and endure it. Just give yourself over to it as long as it lasts."
Let's use a noun I've never used before: masterpiece. Whereas Roth's prize-laden recent fictions are a tad manipulative, in Everyman there is never any sense of a novelist trying to write a novel. Every sentence is urgent, essential, almost nonfictional. The sophistication and indirection forced on practically every writer are replaced by a straightforwardness of, yes, masterly authority. The text so thoroughly embodies, rather than displays, expertise that only after I'd finished reading did I realize that the protagonist's name had been withheld. Everyman is therefore that rarest of literary achievements: a novel that disappears as it progresses, leaving in one's hands only the matters of life and death it describes.

hyperlink

Put the a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com" word /a like this...

put the <> signs aroud the bold instructions and it will look like this when done...

Put the word like this...

If you haven't seen Colbert doing his thing at the correspondents thang, go here and check it out. Funny in a meta-funny way, as you're first struck dumb that the man is getting away with what he's saying, then you realize the jokes aren't all that great but you can't believe he actually has the cajones to do this, and you start bursting out not at the content but the context. Got it?