Historian. Author. Ranter. Idea Junkie.
This a blog. Sort of. I rarely use it anymore.
Listening to, while repairing dead urls in new website, Powers of Heaven.
Dead link repair moving forward. Not as far as heaven (heaven in this case being when I finish the job), but making progress.
While repairing dead links in new blog: Rutter's Requiem.
Listen and try not to weep.
There are few things I enjoy more than a solid contrarian. (*1)
Two of my favorite such animals are Alan McLeod at The Good Beer Blog and Andy Crouch at The Beer Scribe. I've never met either of them; wouldn't know them if they walked in the door and smacked me over the head, but they enjoy high ranking on my List of Favorite People.
Recent evidence at hand: Apparently there's some controversy raging in the beer world about beer "styles." Alan weighed in here with a dollop of common sense.
Andy weighs in on a different matter when he questions the craft brewing party line about who is and isn't a "craft" brewer.
(While you're there, read his previous post about the blog "love fest" surrounding the upcoming Beer Wars film.) (Again, full disclosure: I'm in that film and will be at the live panel that follows the April 16 debut.)
Contrarians. You gotta love 'em.
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*1: Never mind the dictionary definition. Mine is that a contrarian is one who, while all around her others are drifting with the tide or furiously swimming against it, stops, treads water, and says "Hey, folks, before you're all hurled to shore or drowned, why don't we stop, ponder the situation, and apply some common sense and logic." Or words to that effect.
Fascinating article in this morning's Wall Street Journal: the focus is the number of people who are using the current economic crisis to follow their dream -- of becoming a brewer. You can read the article here.
What's most interesting to me is how much the tone of the article smacks of the early 1990s, when everyone and her sister was hopping on craft brewing as the Next Great Employment Gig. Anyway, worth reading, and the piece (which ws written by David Kesmodel, who is, in my opinion, the best beer industry journalist out there) also contains a video. Have at it.
Meaning: so I can say that at least I wrote something on the blog today. (*1) (*2)
If you're looking for a great blog that follows the implosion/explosion of 21st century journalism, you could do worse than read the one sponsored by the Nieman Journalism Lab. It's the one blog in which I get truly bogged down every day (blogged down??).
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*1: I have an excuse, sort of: I wrote several thousand words of the new book this morning. That's not unusual -- I spend most of my time working on the new book -- but there are some days when, after cranking out new-book-words, my word-well runs dry (to say nothing of my energy).
*2: Man, I HATE the burden of guilt that accompanies the days I don't blog. I gotta get over that. And I bet if I hadn't been raised Catholic, it would be a hell of a lot easier to do so.
Jeremiah McWilliams, the Lager Heads blogger and reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has returned from his company-imposed furlough. I'm so glad -- not just because I hope this helps the P-D, and Jeremiah, stay in business, but because his absence has reminded me (and I hope you) that journalists like him to do the heavy lifting when it comes to covering their beat.
Website of Maureen Ogle, author and historian. Books include Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer; In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America; and Key West: History of An Island of Dreams.
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