Today's Hoot
Steve H. of LittleTinyWit insists that he scooped the rest of the media with his report on Hillary endorsing Gore for 2004:

"Al would be a fine President," said Senator Clinton, "I support him wholeheartedly. He really turned his life around after failing out of both divinity school and law school. It's no discredit to Al that on an exam, he once claimed there was a disciple named 'Blitzen.' "

Not to mention Sleepy and Dopey - pulling the sled was really tough on them, although why they needed a sleigh in Israel is beyond me.

But the real hoot is his latest column, Steve Feels Pretty, which relates the culmination of his maiden homebrewing effort.

You LUCKY little bastards. You're here with me on this auspicious occasion, to share the most glorious day of my pathetic existence. The day I cracked a semi-mature bottle of my first home-brewed ale.

Truly, you are not worthy.

As you know, or should, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to start making my own beer. Because making beer is the most important thing a human being can do, apart from performing breast augmentations.

Okay, strike that. Breast augmentation sucks. You lie down on the table with perfectly useful small breasts, they shoot you full of gas, and you wake up with stiff, numb, asymmetrical Frankenboobs that, with time, get so hard that when you jog, they clack .

But what's brewing without drinking stories?

I remember one night I was on the Broadway Local platform at 96th street, waiting for the train that would take me back to within staggering distance of my dorm, and I suddenly realized I was about to board a whole other kind of uptown express. My friends and I had been to McSorley's, and we were all filled to the gills with McSorley's Dark, AKA Pryor Double Dark, a marginally acceptable brew McSorley's served (and still serves).

Between me and the tracks, there were a few black-overcoated theatergoers mumbling pretentiously about Harold Pinter. I gently put my hands on their shoulders, asked them to pardon me, walked over to the tracks, bent gracefully from the waist, and let loose with a blast that arced over the rails and nearly hit the opposing wall. Then I walked back through the speechless, horrified crowd and rejoined my friends without missing a beat.

Reminds me of my sole homebrewing effort which took place while I was in college back in the Dark Ages before homebrewing was legal in the USA. (No, I am not older than dirt.) My partners in crime and I assembled all of the necessary brewing ingredients and apparatus (or loose approximations thereof), but discovered that we lacked empty bottles. This prompted the purchase of a case of evil brewery beer whose consumption also served to lubricate the brewing effort. In fact, it overlubricated the brewing effort which was generally regarded afterward as a complete disaster. As a gauge, it was reckoned that the best bottles were the ones whose tops blew off.