give us your snow, keep your snowmobilers

You know, we old folks get the bad rap of never wanting to try anything new. I personally think that it is because we are wise enough in our experience to know that there is nothing new under the sun. Those good for nothing whippersnappers, they will sometimes talk in praise of the wisdom of the aged, but that is always about some hypothetical character, it is never about one of us in person.

There is this ill-founded sentiment crazy across the land that newer is a synonym for better. All I want to say is that sometimes a newer product is better, but I want to add an addendum, that sometimes it isn’t. And here is where I part ways with the whippersnappers who believe newer is always better.

There is some logic for this. When kids come into the world, they don’t know anything, whereas those of us who have been around awhile know a few things, so we have an advantage over them which they resent. But if something new comes up, then neither one of us knows anything about it, and so we are on equal footing. None of these kids has the vast knowledge of say, the blues that we have accumulated over many years of experience, so they invent rap.

But anyway, what I was thinking that maybe one of the reasons that you didn’t want to try craft beers was because it was new. This is probably not the case but if you throw that threat at someone it is kind of like calling them chicken, and sometimes it impels them to try something.

Mad Hatter IPA brewed by New Holland is as yellow as any Milwaukee’s Best. I never heard that about Bud being dry and Miller being sweet. Certainly not my experience in that they both taste perzackly the same to me. Most craft beers are on the hoppy side. The blurbs on the cans never speak of what kind of malt they are made from, but they go on and on about this or that kind of hops blended with this other kind of hops from this famed valley or whatever. Kind of like the way they describe some wines, and pretty silly I will agree, but I basically like a bitter beer and that’s why I like pale ales and IPAs.

Snowmobilers, what a bunch of losers. All winter long the papers are full of them fulfilling Darwin’s theory. Throw in the jet skiers, and the motorcyclists, and the dune buggy guys, all of them with the only idea in their head that the faster they are going and the more noise they are making the more fun they are having. Maybe I could speak to those Legs Inn people and open up the place in the winter and have specials for all snowmobilers on those really high alcohol IPAs.

Well I said if you held your hand out palm first, so that would make it your left hand, but I don’t want to get to deeply into the subject where we would be talking about what Illinoisans hold out for someone to poke to show where they live.

I was going to address that weather issue. In the rest of the country, Chicago is considered to be a place where it gets very cold in the winter. They always have that guy from CBS standing in the middle of Michigan Avenue asking the pedestrians if they think it is cold. But here in the heartland we know that Milwaukee is colder and so is Detroit, and how about that Minneapolis. Nobody speaks much of Cheboygan and I suspect you Cheboyganders like it just fine that way, but I went to look on my Yahoo weather thing and right now at seven AM you are one degree warmer than we are in Chicago. Well our weather is measured at O’Hare, and looking out my balcony windows towards the river and the lake I expect if I were to step out it would be somewhat colder.

The weather wasn’t much of a problem on my trip. It was in the teens and windy but no snow, and we didn’t do any back packing (backpackers, toss them in with the snowmobilers and their ilk. True, they don’t make much noise, but they are annoying, and as long as we are on the subject of annoying people let’s toss in skateboarders). It got a little chilling when we stepped out to read the historical markers (we never pass up a historical marker (we saw the point where the survey decided that Kansas was here and Nebraska was over there)).

People here are always saying that they don’t care how cold it gets as long as it doesn’t snow. That’s because all they care about is their stupid cars. Myself I love snow, nothing prettier in the world.

The thing about global warming is that while on average the surface of the earth will be warmer, some places will be hotter and some will be colder. There is speculation that that awful jet stream that gave us such a humdinger is because there is hardly any polar ice anymore, and we can expect winters like the last one all the time now.