This sucks. Sleeman brewries, the third largest in Canada, is looking for a buyer. I don’t drink Sleeman’s regularly (and hence, I am the problem), but this is one more independent brewry down the tubes. You just know Molsen or Sapporo will buy them out and pirate the company for their lucrative distributorships; (Guinness, Sam Adams, and (surprise) Sapporo).

Just goes to show, buy local, buy often. It’s hard out there for the small guy. I raise a glass of Red’s Rye to the independant brewer. (Note to Founder’s.. call me. We need to fix your website.)
Link [via mister anchovy]

Someone I know and love just started blogging! Go check out J–‘s very first foray into the blogging world at Cheap Wine Blog.

If you like wine but hate the attitude you have to endure to get a great glass, then CWB is for you. Looking at wines from $5-20, CWB is going to be all about Wines You’re Not Afraid to Try.

Go on, check it out.

Kotaku posted an interesting chart today:

LFM…

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Please, don’t let this be the opening salvo in a barrage of B-list actors trying to make it huge ala Brokeback Mountain.
Liberace? Seriously? Of all the worthy people you could make a movie that about; they could have picked Matthew Shepard, Ian McKellen, or anyone who published a gay magazine prior to 1970 come to mind. But, beyond that, who better to immortalize the flamboyant star than… Nicolas… Cage… star of National Treasure (turned it off), Matchstick Men (fell asleep), and Gone in 60 Seconds (still don’t understand the premise).

Is there some aspect of Liberace’s life I’m not aware of? Is he really that popular that a movie was needed?

Link

…in no particular order.

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Only two things are certain: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
-Albert Einstein

“You can sugar-coat a poison pill, but it’ll still kill you. By the way, let me know if you want to go that way.”
-Dale Gribble, on King of the Hill

“Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”
-Ronald Reagan

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
-C.S. Lewis

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
– James D. Nicoll

“It is hard to believe a man is telling you the truth when you know you would lie if you were in his place.”
– H. L. Mencken

“A man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.”
-Euripides

“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.”
-Jonathan Swift

In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged.
— Bertrand Russell

5. Neil Young. Not for his latest album (which actually sounded good until he started singing), but because he’s Neil Bloody Young. Seriously, could anyone be more overrated? (save the flames; you’re not going to change my mind.)

4. Uber-Web-Design Guy. You know what, this site doesn’t validate. Neither does the web app I work on. And guess what; they both function just the same. Take your XHTML, CSS, and W3C standards and shove it.

3. Jason Calacanis – Sold out to AOL and wonders why people laugh at him now. If I never have to hear that voice on a podcast again, it’ll be too soon. And, yes, you cloned Digg; just confess and drift away.

2. Second Life players. Please, stop. What exactly do you do?

1. Steve Wozniak. Yes, you were famous. Yes, you’re very, very rich. Yes, you are doing great work in funding commercial space programs. But I’m so unbelievably sick of hearing about every time you get a new laser, ride a Segway, or comment on a company you no longer work for. Aren’t you overdue to build a plane that won’t fly?

YouTube, the ubiquitous video-hosting site, recently changed its terms of service to basically allow them to do whatever they want with the stuff you upload to them. This, of course, has completely freaked out the technorati because now their lip-synching videos will be commercialized by the company paying for their bandwidth! Oh noes! You mean it costs money to serve 100 million videos every day? You mean that leaching that bandwidth from the company comes at a price? YouTube isn’t Utopia?

Nightmare Scenario (TM) #1 is that YouTube will find that super-special music video, strip the audio, and sell it on a CD. Aside from the huge “Uh, yeah, right” that comes to mind, how would that be so bad? If you’re so farked for cash that you can’t publish your own work on, say, your own website (and therefore establish copyright), wouldn’t the free exposure do you some good? Any CD resulting from YouTube’s hypothetical effort would certainly reference the originating artists. No one would ever believe that some network engineers at YouTube created a CD full of diverse, high-quality audio to market under the YouTube name.

I understand the desire to have a single point of contact for all your XTREME roof jumpers and pirated clips of the Daily Show (which I highly enjoy, by the way), but this concept around the web that all services are supposed to a) free and b) completely without strings is a little too Pollyanna for me. YouTube is not your buddy, there to hand over bandwidth to you for no gain on their own part. YouTube is a business and needs to make money. Their money comes from vidoes, your videos. If you want to keep all the rights to your video, copyright it and host it yourself.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the hysterics (and the accompanying Wired article, certainly penned by a BoingBoinger or friends of such).

One question for the BoingBoinger’s; weren’t you celebrating a friend of yours having his book pirated recently? Something about free market and how cool that was. I’m just wondering how it is that actually getting free publicity by having your work pirated is a good thing, but when you give your own content to someone else who then legally distributes it for you and has yet to commercialize that, that’s bad. Just curious.

You read that right, FIFA suspended Zidane, who is retired, for 3 games. Zidane was kind enough to let FIFA save face by agreeing to do 3 days of community service instead of, you know, laughing his ass off.

For his part, Italian player Materazzi was given a 2-game suspension, which seems reasonable. I would’ve liked to see Materazzi banned from 2 World Cup games, but that’s not really a FIFA policy. Too bad he still won’t fess up about what actually was said.
Link

MITCH ALBOM: With on-field insults, it’s all in the head

Mitch manages to string together a fairly coherent column today about the Zidane head-butt. We’ll give him a break over the lateness of the column because he’s a) an American sportswriter b) in Detroit and c) is Mitch Albom.

But, he did catch the most important quote of the controversy to date: Zindane’s mother. Her pearl?

“Some things are bigger than football.”

She’s right, of course. And, despite her obvious bias toward her son, her statement is controversial in itself. Around the world, as Albom points out, we accept that “trash talking” is somehow part of the game, something almost venerated to the same level as the players ability to actually, you know, play.

Which is sad. I both played sports and watched my father play them for years. Was there trash talked? Sure. But the players who did it most were arrogant pricks who, frankly, didn’t get a lot of respect. They often stunk up the field, as well. Trash talking was almost exclusively consigned to the realm of the loser, the loud-mouth, foul-crying, whiney bastard who thought you always took the bat with the largest number on the end.
Mitch almost, but not quite, commits to sort of not liking trash talking by way of a huge stretch of an analogy. What he doesn’t do, of course, is pin the blame where it belongs; on the worst of the trash talkers. I wonder if that because any of them play in someone’s home town? Hmm, that would be an interesting question to ask. Good thing there’s a professional sports columnist on the case.