Ommegang Rare Vos

This is the beer that I'm drinking as I write this and the one that inspired this post.

Year after year this beer is always delicious. I go through beer phases. Sometimes I can't get enough hops, sometimes all I want to chug is wheat beers. But it's always the right time for a Rare Vos. It's not too strong, it's not too anything. It's the Goldilocks beer. But it is distinctive too.

The perfect beer?

Cigar City Jai Alai

There are a lot of great IPAs. They all emphasize different aspects of hops. There's a very complicated balancing act in an IPA's creation. Hop resin bitterness has to be balanced by malt, and too much of either crowd out the hop oil's flavor.

Jai Alai focuses more on the hop's delicate flavors than, say, some West Coast IPAs like Sierra Nevada. But no question it's an IPA, it's just less skewed to the punch-you-in-the-face end of the spectrum.

Green Flash Palate Wrecker

This beer is the un-Jai Alai.
Just a shitload of hops, a high ABV, and an awesome, awesome taste.

It's amazing that a beer has this ridiculous amount of hops, and it's not overkill. Truly astounding. But after a pint I'm done with it for the night.

OK, maybe two pints.

Orval

Another classic. There's nothing else like it. Sometimes I go into a beer store and find a bottle that's a year or two old. This is a good thing. The Brux has had time to dry it out.

A place near my home includes Orval in their low-priced happy hour. $3 for an Orval is a beautiful thing. There's no reason for these monks to make another beer.

North Coast Brewery Old Rasputin

Another beer that could be had at stupidly low happy hour place. Old Rasputin will knock you on your ass, but you won't mind.

Big, bad-ass stouts abound, but Rasputin is my favorite.

*As I near the end of my Rare Vos I'm losing my interest in details.

Gouden Carolus Classic

Any Gouden Carolus beer could be on this list. They have a distinctively flavored yeast strain that's delicious in all their beers.

Rodenbach Grand Cru

In the U.S. Flanders reds are mainly drunk by beer dorks. Normal people are turned off by the sweet and sour flavor and the fleshy smell. Flanders reds are unlike anything most people associate with beer.

But when you get past the initial shock Rodenbach is fucking delicious.

Terrapin Monk's Revenge

The Belgian IPA is one of my favorite beer categories. It's basically a tripel with more hops. Monk's Revenge is one of the first that I found widely available that was also great.
Other greats are Green Flash Le Freak, La Chouffe Houblon, and Gouden Carolus Hopsinjoor.

Paulaner Hefe-Weizen

My personal favorite of the big German hefe-weizens. Once the temperatures rise I never fail to crave these after a bicycle ride.

Franziskaner's great too, and there are others. But I'm not a fan of Tucher.

Well, that's it for now. I need to eat something. I'm getting loopy.
This list is subject to change at any moment. Later.

This little book, Hitchens's last, is too brief. I completed it in one sitting with a single glass of porter. I imagine it was painful for him to write this. At the time of its writing he had lost his voice and much of his dexterity. Perhaps the terseness here can be attributed to the words having had the time to concentrate in his mind before their release.

The book is a collection of several essays from Tumortown, a land where he went to live after his diagnosis of esophageal cancer. He proposes a handbook for communication between denizens of the healthy world and those of Tumortown. For the healthy, it would have suggestions on topics to avoid, and advice on how to be neither too rosy nor too blunt. As an example of rosiness he imagines hearing of someone's grandmother who "was diagnosed with terminal melanoma of the G-Spot. But she hung in there and last year she climbed Mt. Everest."

The book is often sad, mostly because of his characteristic relentless honesty in laying out the facts, but there's never enough time to dwell on the morbid content. He never lingers on anything sympathy-inducing before he sets off ridiculing some stupidity, like Fundamentalists on YouTube betting whether he'll experience a deathbed conversion.

To this he says, "If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does."

He goes on to deride intercessory prayer, even those made by friends for his benefit: "A different secular problem also occurs to me: What if I pulled through and the pious faction contendtedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating."

There is no grand insight in this book. Just his wit and humanity. He did what he was best at until he couldn't.

I'll end this with my favorite part of the book, an etiquette suggestion for those from Tumortown: advice on how not to behave. His example is Randy Pausch, the star of the viral video "The Last Lecture." This video was seen by millions and has as many devotees who attest to its profound, life-affirming qualities.

This article in Slate is interesting but too short, and it raises many questions.

That the lives of unsuccessful suicides become financially better after the attempt is interesting. They are often forced into psychiatric treatment that may have been unavailable to them before. It's worth considering how mental illness is a drain on society, since you have all these people (more suicides than murders and 20 times more attempted suicides than successful ones) living pained, disorganized lives. From a rational economic view, this may be a good case for more funding of public mental health.

Also, the Suicide Prevention movement has spent the last decades advocating that suicide must never be considered rational.

I understand why we would want to prevent people from being handicapped by a social stigma. Yet, it's obvious that suicide can be a rational decision. It's certainly not, as G.K. Chesterton said, "the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence." I love Chesterton, but this is one of those times when his innate intelligence is warped by his Catholicism.

Interest in existence has its limits. Sometimes it's not worth the trouble. A rational view of death and suicide acknowledges that life ends sooner or later, and that some ends are preferable to others. However, many Americans seem to think life must be extended at all costs, and that death is something we succumb to after everything has been tried. This is stupid and causes unnecessary suffering.