In great summer beer news, White Birch Brewing in NH has started selling its Berliner Weisse in cans.

Michigan's got so many great microbreweries and brewpubs though. Ohio's got Great Lakes and… fields of corn.

Most principals start off as teachers, though they usually go through the interim step of Assistant Principal and get a Masters in School Administration.

Honest questions: Does HBO complain if bars have viewings when they broadcast boxing matches? Can premium sports networks file similar claims? Is it within legal rights to view a show live in public, but not a recording?

My suggested entry point would be The World. Platform is also really good, but may require a clearer understanding of Chinese society at the time and its only available in rather subpar DVDs.

If you a want a near-real world look at the glorious future of air travel, there's an early 30s film directed by Frank Capra called Dirigible, about air force buddies fighting to see whether a blimp or a plane will fly over the South Pole first. *SPOILER* The plane wins, but crashes, and then only the Dirigible can…

Sadly, it was also just not very good.

Well, Christianity specifically did not okay Confucian ancestor worship, which is one big reason why there was never a major conversion, despite the Jesuits gaining a lot of influence in the Chinese court during the 17th century.

That's probably because everyone was really into inbreeding up to 200-300 years ago or so.

The one bad note in TNG's finale is the quick line drop that suggests she and Geordi ended up married anyway.

Uh… while 300 may not be propaganda for US foreign policy per se (because I doubt Snyder made it with that intention, though Frank Miller probably did), it does reflect a lot of the same values and beliefs of said policy.

I don't think Hero is a "Fuck You" to Taiwan so much as it was just made to capitalize on the global potential of Wu Xia proved by Crouching Tiger's success. Certainly Taiwan and Hong Kong have a far better claim to the Wu Xia tradition of film than the mainland did at the time. The mainland film industry was in…

Hero's US release (don't know about UK) actually reads as more nationalistic than the Chinese release. The text that appears at the end is a fairly dry reading of historical fact, something like: "In 220 BC the King of Qin united China, ended the wars, built the great wall, and protected the nation and the people. He…

Yeah, The Third Man has always bored me a bit, though Orson Welles and the final chase are great. Odd Man Out is much better Carol Reed film (coming next month from Criterion!).

One of the most surreal experiences I had was walking from the "undergrad" section of Ann Arbor to the "grad school/professional" section at 4 PM on St. Patrick's day. The streets and bars went from crawling with kids passing/passed out to nearly deserted.

I think there's two kinds of hangovers; first the kind you get when you're young and binge drinking cheap crap without getting much water or food in between gulps. You wake up dehydrated and achey with a stomach full of acid and life is terrible.

This is true. Cathy would probably become the demon queen of literary hell, and then eat Daisy.

This film is great and I was lucky to catch it in a theater. It showed for one week at the local art theater that mainly caters to the 60+ crowd. There were a few retirees at my showing, and they had obviously been expecting the usual fluffy period drama.

I read it at 16 and loved it (as a horror novel), but it definitely helped that my mental image of Heathcliff somehow became entwined with Dracula.

Let's not be sexist. I'm sure Heathcliff, Gatsby, and Tom Buchanan are all down there too.