If you’d like to expand your beer repertoire without paying top-shelf premiums, it’s time to capitalize on the revival of the growler and head over to your local micro brewery.

For the unfamiliar, growlers are 64-ounce beer bottles that look more like a jug than a bottle. Many micro brewers across the U.S. are tapping into the rising interest in fine beers by bringing back the growler. Growlers are more economical than purchasing beer by the bottle or six-pack and environmentally friendly to boot—when you’re done with your growler you can wash it out and bring it back to the brewery to get refilled. Who is taking advantage of the growler resurggeance? The New York Times writes:

“In the beginning we tried to figure out, ‘Who’s going to be our market?’ ” said Ben Granger, 32, an owner of Bierkraft, which began filling growlers in spring 2006. “We thought, mullet-heads and beer-bellied dudes. But the first run was ladies with strollers. They will tell you they’re buying them for their husbands. Three weeks later, they’ve got two. One’s his and one’s hers. The next one that caught me by surprise was dads coming in with their kids. Then there’s the beer crowd who’ll rush in to get on this or that before it’s gone. There’s no age limit.”

Michael Endelman, a journalist at Rolling Stone, is one of those growler-loving fathers. “I don’t go to bars too much anymore,” he said, gesturing to his baby daughter Mimi. “It just seems like a great way to be a beer geek without going out.”

Aside from the economical and environmental aspects of the growler, the quote from Michael Endelman above highlights one of the most popular aspects of the growler: you can get interesting and exotic beer for a song and then enjoy it at home.

Check out the full article at The New York Times for more information about growlers and the history behind them. They offer a list of NYC-centric suppliers of growlers and growler refills but you’ll have to call around to your local watering holes and breweries to find out who supplies and fills growlers. Once you find a place, make sure to ask what they’ve got on tap and then head over to previously reviewed RateBeer and Beer Suggest to compare beer notes.

Filmmaker Kevin Smith was booted off a Southwest Airlines flight last night for being too fat. Oops, sorry, for some sort of nebulous “safety risk”. Needless to say, Southwest is rapidly discovering what happens when you mistreat a customer with 1.6 million Twitter followers and a lot of spare time (not to mention a movie coming out).

In 1989, Hollywood heavy metal band Rock Sugar was stranded on a desert island. For the last twenty years, the only music they had to listen to was the 80’s pop CD collection of a 13 year old girl. And now, Rock Sugar has come home.

Left to their own extremely questionable survival skills, Rock Sugar managed to salvage several items from the sunken yacht. In addition to their instruments, they retrieved a hot pink battery powered boom box covered with stickers of Hello Kitty, a crate of batteries, 158 cases of schnapps and numerous articles of teenage girls clothing, most of which the band admit to trying on and several pieces of which apparently fit and looked “pretty frickin’ awesome.”

While you may be able to at last take the metal band off the deserted island, apparently you can’t take 20 years of exposure to 80’s pop out of the metal band. Prepare to have the line between pop and metal blown to smithereens and pour yourself a shot of Rock Sugar.

Because Pop Rocks.

Take it as a given that Twilight is critic-proof. You can say what you like about it. You can say that it’s a Harry Potter rip-off. You can say that it’s a deliberately manipulative and poorly-concealed conservative manifesto written in the form of a schlocky fantasy book. You can say that even thinking the word ‘Twilight‘ will immediately bring you out in 19 different types of ulcers.

But it doesn’t matter. So long as there’s at least one scene where Robert Pattinson gets to suck his cheeks in and look away into the middle-distance, millions of teenage girls will snap Twilight up and spend the next few hours urinating themselves and sighing wistfully at the same time.

However, just because Twilight is critic-proof, it doesn’t mean that some critics aren’t having a go. Specifically Stephen King. Since he’s       a) “not 14”      b) not female c) is capable of rational thought, it’s no surprise that Stephen King isn’t a Twilight fan. But what might be a surprise is that he’s starting badmouthing Twilight’s author Stephenie Meyer in public. The Guardian reports:

King compared the Mormon author to JK Rowling, saying that both authors were “speaking directly to young people”. “The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good,” he told an interviewer from USA Weekend.

What prompted Stephen King’s outburst? It could be jealousy – Stephenie Meyer’s books get turned into hopeless films that make millions of dollars, while Stephen King’s books get turned into hopeless films called The Mist that everyone ignores. It could be a generational thing – Stephen King remembers when he was the author of choice of creepy teenagers who smell like old towels, and he doesn’t like that someone else has taken his position. Or it could be that Stephenie Meyer actually is a terrible writer.

I really couldn’t say for sure. Because I’d need to read a Twilight book to find out, and I’m not mental.

Men constantly think about sex – or do they? Globally, people generally lose their virginity in their teens and as adults have sex an average of 103 times per year. While more men than women are satisfied with their sex lives, overall 44% of all people say they are pretty happy. Have a look at Sex by the Numbers for a graphic look at sexual gratification.

http://www.babelgum.com/embed/4023990

Every year around Spring Break and Mardi Gras young women contract Girls Gone Wild syndrome at alarming rates. The GGW Clinic in Sarasota Springs, NY is doing its part to keep this terrible illness from becoming a pandemic.

(Yes, it takes a moment for the video to load, stop emailing me.)

AKA : “How to Light a cigarette with an AK-47”