Calvin's Weblog

Who knew that beer could be so dangerous???

There are a lot of dangerous and deadly things you can do with a bottle of beer. Drop one off the top of the Empire State Building, and it's a deadly weapon. Crack someone upsite the head with it during a bar fight, and it's a deadly weapon. Consume copious quantities of it then go joyriding in your Hummer, and it's a deadly weapon... but I don't think I've ever seen a beer that's just "sitting there" minding it's own business become so violently dangerous ... that is, not until this Saturday.
Some background: As part of my new budget for 2005, I've cut my alcohol budget in half. Yeah, I know, if you need to BUDGET your beer, you're probably buying too much of it. Well anyway, part of my plan was to make more beer at home and buy less beer from the outlets. I've made butt-loads of beer at home before, and can get my CPB (cost per bottle) down to 28 cents by using cheap ingredients, refined sugar, and tap water... pretty good deal compared to the $2 a bottle at beer store prices, but the quality of the home brew is so poor, and the effort you've gotta put into it is so great, that I decided to wimp out this time and go to a U-Brew place and have them make my beer for me. The CPB of going to one of these places is about 90 cents, which, when you know how low THEIR cost must be, seems like a royal rip off, but it's still half the price of commercial beer, with the same quality - so, that's my excuse.

Saturday was bottling day, and Carole and I made an event of getting up early, and going down to bottle (and sample generous amounts of) our fresh new beer. I use plastic 500ml bottles, but the people right next to us had glass Corona bottles, and they looked really cool. We had to twist on the hard plastic caps, one by one, but they got to use a cool capping machine. I said to Carole "You know, these bottles have really been useful over the years, but capping and cleaning them sure is a pain in the ass, we should get some of those cool glass bot..." BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!

Glass shoots across the room in all directions - landing all around us, but miraculously not hitting either of us. The two people in front of the Corona bottles weren't quite as lucky, though nothing a few bandaids didn't fix - fortunately! The sound was like a gunshot, and the blast was intense. We had absolutely no idea what happened - I was so startled that the beer I was filling was foaming over the top and over my hand... Carole was stunned too - looking at the large chunks of jagged glass that hit on either side of where she was sitting - one of them actually sitting on the counter right between us.
The U-Brew operator calmly saunters over and exclaims "Hairline fracture. That happens to glass bottles occasionally." He looks around, picks up a hunk of what used to be the mouth, and says "Yup, see? There was a crack. Too much pressure." He turns around, drops the hunk into the garbage and says "You gotta watch out for those..." as he walks away.
The guy sitting at the filling station next to us gives his rattled, beer soaked wife a examining once over, then glances down at himself and realized that his arms are bleeding. "You got any bandaids?" He queries timidly in a trembling voice.
"In the bathroom." the proprietor replies as he casts a motioning glance down the hallway.

Carole and I look at each other as if we're both about to say the same thing... "On second thought, these plastic bottles are just fine!"

In other news, I'm having a lot of fun with my new DVD burner - I burned seven movies this weekend, plus we actually got out to a theatre to see Hide and Seek. It wasn't at all what I expected, and didn't think it was nearly as well done as it could have been, but real killer did elude me until the very end - so who knows, maybe they did a good job... or maybe there were so many red herrings, false leads and pathetically contrived twists that I just gave up trying. I liked the camera work, and Dakota Fanning is absolutely amazing, but I made a rule decades ago... any horror movie that resorts to the old "screaching cat jumping out of the closet" gag for a cheap thrill is obviously limping along on weak writing and is desperate for real suspense, and therefore a BAD movie. This may be a narrow minded analysis, but guess what... they did it - in a DeNiro movie no less... that's another sign of a bad movie actually, when a modest budget film spends all their dough on getting a couple big name actors, that usually means they're compensating for a weak script. Ah, enough from me... you be the judge.

I also won a couple online poker touneys this weekend - all for play-money, but it's still fun to win!

Posted by Calvin at January 31, 2005 08:37 AM