About a decade ago, I designed a personal pipe tobacco blend. It used a lot of dark fired Kentucky Burley, layered Virginias favoring the blonde variant, mucho dark burley, a pinch of cigar leaf, and a dusting of Latakia.
3 CommentsKarbach – Texas Lager (2026)
So, you wanted an ideal summer beer. This comes very close. Tasting like a hybrid between 1980s Miller and Coors, it is an American adjunct beer which favors the barley flavor but keeps the easy drinking sweet soft texture of Murkan beer.
No CommentsWatch the Skies (2025)
For a movie that preserves the 2010s type of speculative sci-fi in a 1980s story arc, Watch the Skies delivers quirky Swedish weirdness in a story that makes sense without being saccharine.
8 CommentsThe Blues Brothers (1980)
We thinking apes who live through memories of conclusions derived from event change in sense simulacra of the world find ourselves continually going over memory, wondering if what we know now is what we knew then and if it is even real.
6 CommentsTags: capeshit, film, french revolution narrative, slapstick
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Very few movies manage to be relevant, or to show us something about life that makes us want to re-engage from our comfortable armchair debt servitude, and very few do it so insightfully and elegantly that they might be “classics,” but this film surely qualifies.
11 CommentsTags: cinema, francis ford coppola, john milius, joseph conrad, t.s. eliot
Runaway (1984)
As AI and automation rise into mass consciousness, it is worth revisiting this Michael Crichton film from 1984 which points out that if a tool is made universal, it will also be hacked by some dark actors.
7 CommentsTags: AI, cinema, michael crichton, runaway, tom selleck
Wernesgrüner Brauerei AG – Pils Legende (2025)
When you travel through Germany, you encounter many cities and towns each with their own local brewery, and they all make beer slightly differently. Like Warsteiner, Wernesgrüner Pils Legende offers a light beer with a slight spicy malt flavor and relatively low sweetness.
14 CommentsTags: beer, pilsner, wernesgruner
D&Q The Beer Station (Houston, TX)
If you are stuck in Houston, more pity to you. It has renown only for being less suck than Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio, and less hipster than Marfa or Marble Falls. But if you like hot, wet, and flat places which are more international than the UN, it might warm your heart.
14 CommentsCecil’s Pub Reopens In Blighted Concrete Culturevoid Houston
It baffles the mind as to why someone would try to open a killer pub in Houston, but Cecil’s Pub comes from an older time, when Houston had culture (Anglo nerd pioneer cowboy) and was a small city instead of the place people go when they fail in Los Angeles and New York.
2 CommentsTags: beer, cecil's pub, jonah herd
Tsingtao Brewer – Premium Lager (2025)
Chinese products often imitate and build upon those in the West, and Tsingtao improves upon the American adjunct lager — beer made with rice or corn as the primary fermenting grains — by making a lighter, cereal-like version of Corona Extra with a little fizz and spice to keep it interesting.
No CommentsTags: american adjunct beer, beer, tsingtao
