I remember one night during our seminar Old Dog and I borrowed a shot glass and a pint glass from Dick, the owner. I remember once also when we borrowed a couple lemons so that Old Dog could display his juggling skills, likely why Dick the owner doesn't loan us things anymore. Anyway we also had a glass of water and we filled that shot glass sixteen times and poured it into the pint glass and on the sixteenth try it didn't quite make it. Later research revealed that a pint glass holds fifteen and a half ounces, and it is called a pint glass not because it holds sixteen ounces, but because it is called a pint glass.
Rather than get into if Jesus was the walking fatally wounded when He was meeting and greeting after the cross and later succumbed, which I am pretty sure is blasphemy and will be sending Beagles to the down elevator while Old Dog and myself inspect our new halos, and say nope, we never saw or read the words of Beagles ever in our lives, I would like to speak of beer glasses.
Back in Champaign, from when I first got off the train in 1963 until I boarded the train to old San Antone (getting off one stop earlier in Austin but I wanted to say old San Antone) in 1984, a draft beer came in kind of a peculiar, in retrospect, hour-glass shaped vessel called a pilsner glass, though to my mind a true pilsner glass tapers all the way to the bottom, making a perhaps less stable vessel, but a more elegant quaff.
But odder, and again in retrospect, because it seemed perfectly normal at the time, the glass held only twelve ounces. What the fuck. Let me say it again. What the fuck. Perhaps this was because all bottles and cans held 12 ounces. Except for quarts, oh those brown-hued Big Berthas, but that is a story for another day. And when you ordered a bottle you got this little juice glass, like four ounces, which I guess, it gave you something to do with your hands, along with smoking your cigarette and if you were a cool old-timer shaking salt into your beer, I think of those old guys and I find it hard to believe that I am now older than them, well most of them.
I think in Texas I still drank out of the pilsners, and maybe a few years later when I came back to Gage Park dead broke and visited the bars on 55th and Kedzie Avenues it was still pilsners, but by 92 when I moved into Marina City it was all pints. Was there ever a period when pints and pilsners coexisted, when you asked for a beer and the bartender asked if you wanted a pint or a pilsner?
It's about one degree with a wind chill in the teens this dawn, but I reckon it will warm up a bit and if there is no oppressive wind I shall take a survey at the Ten Cat tonight.
And speaking of beer glasses whatever happened to mugs? While I admire the capacity of the pint glass, I am not a Miesian, and do not believe less is more when it comes to design, and I like the feel of that little handle in my fingers. But I suppose the pints are easier to store, all in all more efficient, and I wouldn't want to be in favor of anything that impeded the smooth delivery of beer,
But I expect that when my work on Earth is done myself and Old Dog (because what the hell) will be sitting in the Alpha and Omega Bar and Grill drinking from frosted mugs and pilsners, while far below, at the 666 Tap, Beagles will be lucky to get a warm juice glass of yellow beer and every time he tries to take a sip the bartender will smack him with a cold wet bar rag and ask him to tell him again the story of how He succumbed to His wounds
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