Thursday, November 11, 2010

It's Five O'Clock Somewhere - Sometime

Archaeologist Brian Hayden of Simon Fraser University in Canada would like us to acknowledge the role that beer has played in the Rise of Civilization. As an avid fan of Civilization, and a vocal advocate of beer for many years, I can back his assertion with a number of easily verifiable anecdotes.
2630 B.C.: Egyptian teenagers, having consumed more than a case of beer, make the creative leap of stacking their cans in an orderly, geometric fashion. This "beeramid" became the model for the architectural triumphs that were to become the Great Pyramids. Without the scale model offered up by these ancient adolescents, we might never have achieved one of the great wonders and tourist destinations history.
1509 A.D.: Michelangelo discovers that, while maintaining a pretty solid beer buzz for three straight years, he could paint the ceiling of a church while laying on his back. A shocked Pope Julius II wandered into the Sistine Chapel just about the time Mike had finished up his drunken vandalism, and decided to call it "a work of art." Why he didn't start on the walls or the floor, we may never know.
December, 1773: A bunch of drunks, dressed like Pocahontas, hop aboard a ship in Boston Harbor, hoping to find beer. Finding none, they do the only thing that right-thinking inebriated patriots could do: they started history's first environmental disaster by tossing a bunch of English Breakfast into the ocean, paving the way for future drunken idiots.
Today is Veterans Day, originally the celebration of the signing of the peace treaty ending World War I. Why not celebrate by recreating the event that lead to the beginning of that conflict, when a couple of Bosnian Serbs tossed back a few Hungarian brews and decided to pull a prank on the Archduke's motorcade.

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