A World Of Brews: Announcing Session #21: Favorite Beer and Beer Judge Wanna Be!

The Session #21: What's your favorite beer?

The world's most expensive... and disturbing... coffee

I'm not sure I could bring myself to drink coffee that an animal shit out its ass, I don't care how rare, expensive or presitious it is...

Kopi Luwak beans from Indonesia are rare and expensive, thanks to a unique taste and aroma enhanced by the digestive system of palm civets, nocturnal tree-climbing creatures about the size of a large house cat....

Despite being carnivorous, civets eat ripe coffee cherries for treats. The coffee beans, which are found inside of the cherries, remain intact after passing through the animal.

Civet droppings are found on the forest floor near coffee plantations. Once carefully cleaned and roasted, the beans are sold to specialty buyers.

...So far, most of the orders have been from California.

I emphasized that last part. It so figures.

Fat asses

It's such a surreal pointer to the fact that there's too many fat people running around: Longer needles needed for fatter buttocks.

Fatter rear ends are causing many drug injections to miss their mark, requiring longer needles to reach buttock muscle, researchers said on Monday....

Two-thirds of the 50 patients in the study did not receive the full dosage of the drug, which instead lodged in the fat tissue of their buttocks, researchers from The Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin said in a presentation to the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

The article also points out the charming fact that "65 percent of U.S. adults are overweight or obese."

Ronald McDonald robs Wendys!

Yes, it's true: Ronald MacDonald robs Wendy's, loses job:

Now the 22-year-old MacDonald has been charged with stealing from a safe at the Wendy's restaurant where he worked.

The man is no relation to the cheerful, red-haired clown who is the face of the McDonald's advertising campaign.

It's nice that they clarified that he's not related to the "real" Ronald McDonald.

Gobbler

This woman is just creepy:

Sonya Thomas, 37, who weighs just 105 pounds (47.5 kg), beat seven men in the annual Thanksgiving Invitational: a race to eat a 10-pound (4.5-kg) turkey.

The smallest in the field, Thomas put her victory down to "swallowing fast."

"It was very dry and the skin was very dry," said Thomas, holding her trophy, a roasting pan, over her head. "I just tried to eat fast."

Venerated in competitive eating circles as "The Black Widow", the Alexandria, Virginia woman said she trained for the event, held at a delicatessen in New York, by chewing gum to get her jaw in top form.

She said she plans to eat turkey again on Thursday, but much more slowly so that she can taste every bite.

Her victory was no surprise. She is ranked as the No. 2 competitive eater in the world, behind Japan's Takeru Kobayashi, according to the International Federation of Competitive Eating, which sponsored the turkey-eating event.

Reminds me of the "King of the Hill" episode where Dale became a competitive eater... known in the circle (on the show at least) as "Gurgitators."

Renaming towns after websites

Town votes to rename itself Secretsanta.com

This town in Idaho, ordinarily called "Santa" (unusual in itself), voted to change their name to a website. For money.

I remember when Halfway, Oregon, did this--changed to Half.com, Oregon. The article mentions that, and the one in Texas--"Dish" Texas.

Would you really want to be living in a town that does this? I think that would just be too surreal.

blogger thoughts

I notice one thing Blogger has that WordPress.com does not seem to have is the ability for a user to have multiple blogs. WordPress.com seems to be one user, one blog mode... here though, it looks like you could have as many blogs as you wanted under the single user login.

God, you just gotta love free services.

Another thing, too--I could insert my Google AdSense ads here, since I have direct access to the HTML code. WordPress.com doesn't give you the ability to do that anywhere, as near as I can tell. That's a big plus for Blogger.

Incidentally, I keep writing "WordPress.com" as opposed to simply "WordPress" because I'm trying to differentiate between the open source WordPress product--which you can hack up endlessly and do all this stuff with--and the free online service. Seems anal retentive, I know, but I'm just that way.

First post

I just set up a new WordPress.com free hosted blog, and figured I'd start a Blogger one, too. The reason? Navel-gazing, of course--I want to see how well each respective (and free) service works, and since I write and maintain my own software and blog (at chuggnutt.com, naturally), I'm curious to see how other services handle blogging.

In the meantime, check out my regular blog, and my WordPress one, too.