MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

Happy birthday, America.



[Via Newsweek Archivist]

I’m old enough to remember this. Billy Carter was basically America’s embarrassing kid brother who fulfilled almost every redneck stereotype that even people from the South believed about the South.

Naturally the media loved him, and while it wouldn’t be fair to say he singlehandedly defined the image of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, I do suspect he’s at least part of the reason why a lot of people don’t remember Carter’s term that fondly. Carter had his own problems, to be sure, but having a buffoonish brother probably didn’t help.

But hey, he’s yr brother, what can you do, right?

I sometimes wonder how someone like Billy Carter would fare in today’s political climate where the more of a buffoon you are, the more air time you get. At the very least he’d probably be a guest contributor on cable TV news channels. 

Anyway, here’s some more details on Billy Beer.

Redneck power,

This is dF

[Via Vintage Vixen Obsessed]

Drink safely,

This is dF

Especially when his own customers give her crap for it. 



[Via Mostly Forbidden Zone]

Why is all the rum gone,

This is dF

[Via Too Much Soul]

Pass it around,

This is dF

( It’s martini time! )

Make mine a tall one,

This is dF

Booze, cigars and gratuitous boobs are available in the Teaf Def Citadel Lobby Bar ...

( Like so ... )

Also, we have video games and appropriate lounge music from Mr Jim Thirlwell.



It’s martini time,

This is dF

Via Texas Cheeseman (again), better known to some of you as puffdoggydaddy, who runs a very fine tumblog here.

Stay thirsty,

This is dF

This is Billy Dee Williams. And these are the rules.

FUN FACT: You could do ads like this on TV in the 80s.

Works every time,

This is dF

I’ve written elsewhere about the film Smokey & The Bandit, and the observation that, while it’s basically an excuse for car stunts, it’s also something of a snapshot of modern Southern culture circa the mid-late 70s (albeit one that Photoshops out all the guns, churches and pro wrestling).

But this BoingBoing article by Maggie Koerth-Baker reminded me that it’s also something else: a commentary on the state of the American beer industry.

Young people watching the film today might not get why Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed would have to drive all the way to Texas for a beer run. The clue is in the specific beer they were getting: Coors.

I remember people in Nashville making a big deal about this, because at the time, Coors was in fact unavailable east of the Mississippi due to federal liquor laws and state tax regulations. One reason this was a big deal was that Coors had a rep for being a damn good beer because it didn’t use preservatives or stabilizers.

The BoingBoing article digs deeper, looking at the state of the US brewing industry at the time, and how home brewing eventually caught on as a response to the mass-produced swill that passed for beer at the time – the exception being Coors.

Which then, says Koerth-Baker, begs the question:


See? And you thought SATB was just a dumb, funny car-chase movie.

Okay. It was, really. But it IS true that when I moved to Colorado circa 1987, I drank a lot of Coors primarily because of that film.

East bound and down,

This is dF

I get emails.

Sometimes they contain The Future.



That’s a demo of “surface computing”, a user interface that ostensibly could replace yr keyboard, mouse and even yr monitor. Put another way, it could turn yr desktop into a giant iPad.

Or, in this case, it could turn the table at a restaurant into an interactive menu, game console and message board.

NCR Corporation and DesignerCity list some potential apps:


I’m a little skeptical about people using tables in bars to chat to other people at other tables. But then for all I know, people at bars spend as much time updating their Facebooks and Twitters as they do actually talking to people.

I know I would – at least in the boring bars (and most bars these days are boring places). But then yr not likely to find me in such bars anyway, since I take all my drinking advice from Charles Bukowski and George Thoroughgood.

That’s me in the corner,

This is dF