Tuesday, January 25, 2011

What are you drinking with the State of the Union?

I poured a bomber of Stone's Ruination IPA into a Sam Adam's imperial pint glass with minimal froth over the lip juust in time for Boehner to shock me with his choice of tie color for this momentous occasion (gasp! pink! startling!) Biden looks like he's two bombers ahead of me already. I didn't really think this pairing out beforehand. In fact, I had forgotten I'd meant to watch the address until about 8:55, at which point I was relieved to remember that I'd grabbed the last bottle off the shelf while I was buying rice and beans earlier tonight. I had just been thinking about how heavy my tax burden is on my meager salary and worrying about how I'd afford health care this year when - gasp - my shitty grocery store is stocking RUINATION?? I put the hydroponically grown brussels sprouts back on the shelf. Priorities.

I'm told the IBU's on this baby clock out way over 100. For those of you who don't know, that's fucking bitter. That's about twice as bitter as, say, Smuttynose IPA, and several times more bitter even than John Roberts who evidently pulled himself out of his own stinky shithole to attend the address tonight.

Did Obama just mention Google and Facebook while talking about American innovation? Didn't he see The Social Network? Innovation is alienating, and makes you disrespect women, and drink shitty beer.

The first moment of unabashed sentimentality just occurred. I didn't catch the whole thing, but I could tell from the tone of voice that it was an imitation of a student-teacher relationship, one in which a teacher just derived great joy and satisfaction from helping a disenfranchised student achieve his full potential. This is the reason I chose a 7.7% abv, palate-destroying beer, I just realized. It makes the necessity of appealing to American sentimentality digestible. He just mentioned he's on a first-name basis with a 55 year old furniture builder who just got her degree in biotechnological nano micro combustible engineering, or something. Her name is Kathy, which is a good, strong, conveniently American name.

I'd like to say I'll be live blogging the address all night, but I've moved on to reading the witty back of this bottle of Ruination. You can find it on the NYTimes anyway, or any other news outlet you like, except for Fox News, which I hear is just transcribing white noise instead.