Here, Here, Some Beer

Friends were over on Saturday for meat, beer and conversation on the deck, despite rain that morning. By mid-afternoon, the deck was dry enough to sit around.

We had more meat and conversation than beer, though there were a few empty bottles left over afterward, as there have been before. And before that.

I acquired a “flight” of beers before the event at an area grocery store with a beer cave, and these are three of them. As usual, my beer-buying technique was to look for a variety of states and countries of origin, and interesting labels.

Raging Bitch was the hit among the beer names. Its acid-trip Ralph Steadman artwork was remarked upon as well.

A product of the Flying Dog Brewery in Maryland. Later, I read the marketing blarney on the bottle, attributed to Steadman. It’s pretty good:

“Two inflammatory words, one wild drink. Nectar imprisoned in a bottle. Let it out. It is cruel to keep a wild animal locked up. Uncap it. Release it… stand back!! Wallow in its goldenn glow in a glass beneath a white foaming head. Remember, enjoying a RAGING BITCH, unleashed, untamed, unbridled and in heat is pure GONZO!!”

Gonzo, eh? Maybe if you added peyote, which we did not. Otherwise, it was reportedly  a pleasant brew.

Voodoo Ranger, by New Belgium Brewing of Colorado and North Carolina, had another amusing label.
It didn’t assert its gonzo-ness. The label did say, “Brilliantly balanced for easy drinking, this pale ale is packed with citrus and tropical fruit flavors from eight different hop varieties.”

The center beer, PilsnerUrquell from Plzeň (Pilsen), Czech Republic, had the most conventional label, appealing to a drinker’s sense of tradition. The label said:

“In 1842, the Citizen’s Brewery of Plzeň brewed the world’s first golden pilsner and never stopped. We make it in the same way in the same place, with 100% of our ingridients from the same farming regions in Czech, as always.”

Not pictured is the grapefruit shandy that I tried, which a guest brought. It went down well, but in combo with meat and another bottle of beer, I later had a rare but fortunately fleeting bout of indigestion. I’d say it was worth it, though.

Prague 1994

Earlier this year, when I read about Prague in Patrick Leigh Fermor‘s A Time of Gifts, I found myself wondering, did I really visit the same city as he did? The answer is yes and no. He was there in 1934. I was there in 1994. That makes a considerable difference. But more importantly, he had a sharper eye for detail than I did, than I ever could hope to, and was informed by a better education and an all-around aptitude for the road.

GolemBut at least I’d heard of the Second Defenestration of Prague, which made it a really cool moment when we saw the window from which it happened.

And I knew about the Golem. Or at least the concept. So I was interested in Prague to pick up Golem by Eduard Petiška, a Czech author and poet in a country that seems to take its poets seriously (and who managed to have an asteroid named after him). The book is his own telling of the various stories about Rabbi Loew of Prague and the creature he created to protect the Jewish population of the city. What is it about the Czechs and automatons? After all, another Czech author, Karel Čapek, gave the world the word robot.

Speaking of authors from Prague, we also made our way to one of the places where Kafka lived. It’s the little blue-hued structure on this pedestrian street. At the time you could buy his works inside. Probably that’s still true.

ZlataUlickaKafkaKafka seems to be fairly well known in Japan, which might be something of a surprise, except when you consider the Kafkaesque elements of a salaryman’s life. Anyway, Yuriko was familiar with him.

And why is it always Kafkaesque? Guess Kafka-ish or Kafka-like or Kafka-oid don’t convey that sense of dread in the face of anonymous, malevolent functionaries.

A Ride on the Paternoster

Here’s a term I’d never heard before: paternoster elevator. Or, as Wiki defines it, in part: “a chain of open compartments (each usually designed for two persons) that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping.” The site has a helpful illustration.

The term was new to me, not the thing itself, because Yuriko and I rode one in Prague almost 20 years ago. We were astonished to find such a contraption. I never knew it had a special name, but I didn’t forget it.

This YouTube posting gives something of the sense of riding one, and since it was filmed in Prague, that might have been the very one we rode on. Here’s one in Copenhagen that I would have ridden if I’d known about it. I’m astonished that they’re still around even now.

As usual, I came to the term in a roundabout way. After proposing a coffee table book about dirty ice mounds, I remembered another one I came up with years ago, Great Elevators of Europe. For fun, I Googled that term, and the video about the paternoster came up.