The world is a complicated place, and I’m not qualified to govern it. Which sucks, because I could use the extra income and what I imagine to be the generous travel allowance, but I’m just not cut out for the Supreme Overlord life. I cannot, for example, fold a fitted sheet or find Austria on a map.
But there are some simpler matters I’d like to address should I ever be appointed to a junior planetary management role. It’s very frustrating that so many obvious mistakes go uncorrected due to little more than collective inertia. For instance, we all know Daylight Savings Time is complete horseshit. It may be popular among smoke-detector-battery salesmen and miniature-golf concessionaires, but the other 99 percent of us have no good reason to monkey back and forth with the clocks a couple times a year. A Drunkspin administration would end that farce.
I would also make sweet potatoes smaller. I don’t have the agronomy all worked out yet, but I’d hire the right people to get it done, because no one ever needs that much potato in one sitting.
And once I had time-shifting and orange starches under control, I’d address the simpler matter of statehood for Washington, D.C. This seems the most obvious of all. It’s ridiculous enough that Puerto Rico isn’t a state; D.C. is like a Puerto Rico that happens to border Virginia and contain the president’s home office. That seems pretty state-y to me!
As I understand it, the primary opposition comes from predictable partisan concerns over what color state it would be; from pissant existing states who don’t want to share their inflated power (Rhode Island knows it could maybe get by with just one senator, and they fear we might all realize that if we really opened the issue back up); and from people who take too much comfort in the tidy 50-ness of the current map.
I’d be perfectly comfortable with 51 or more states, and I’d also be willing to pacify the round-number fetishists by rolling the Dakotas back into just one state. There are plenty of ways to skin this cat, and I’d be open to all of them as long as we ended up with statehood for Washington, D.C. And when this happens, we will all celebrate with a toast of DC Brau’s The Public Pale Ale, the flagship beer from the national capital’s first modern brewery.
The last rational argument against D.C. statehood expired when DC Brau opened in 2009. Any district that can host a president, a Smithsonian, and a brewery can be trusted to run its own budget, choose a couple senators, and appoint a state bird. Now that this is settled, let’s kick back and celebrate with a beer.
The Public pours a hazy light orange color, and it’s very well carbonated. The aroma is a tiny bit soapy and very floral, with what struck me as a lavender wave floating over light citrus and medium caramel notes. The flowers fade a bit on the palate, with a touch of pine toughening things up while the citrus and caramel stick around until the long, dry, almost austere finish.
The Public has an interesting combination of flavors, and although it’s not at all boozy, I’d have guessed it was a bit higher than its 6-percent alcohol-by-volume. This is a very good and surprisingly complex beer—some may find it a bit disjointed, even, but it works great for me—that’s still easy to drink, with broadly appealing flavors to match its egalitarian name.
This is Drunkspin Daily, the Concourse’s adequate source for booze news, reviews, and bullshit. We’ll be highlighting a beer a day in this space; please leave suggestions below.
Image by Jim Cooke.
Will Gordon loves life and tolerates dissent. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., and some of his closest friends have met Certified Cicerones. Find him on Twitter @WillGordonAgain.