Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Sorry, gang. I got into a serious mood to clean up tonight, and I didn’t want to lose momentum. The bad news: the long post I wanted to write tonight didn’t get written. The good news: my desk is finally clean! Here are some cool/interesting things for you to look at.

# I’m always interested in stories by writers who bond with their families over Giants games, but as I was reading this one I sort of felt it was falling short. And yet by the end, I had managed to get a piece of dust in both my eyes. So I don’t know. Just judge for yourself.

# Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know about my staunch belief that parking is the hub on which the entire urban experience rests. Here’s another Times piece, this time about the perils of free parking. Expect more of this from your favorite blogger.

# Boston has a lot of squares. Would you believe that not all of them are square-shaped?

Listen to Will Dailey sing a song about my beloved former neighborhood.

This weekend, your favorite blogger attended the American Craft Beer Festival at the Seaport World Trade Center here in sunny Boston, Massachusetts. I’m a professional writer, but I’m struggling to come up with the words to describe the childlike joy that fills my heart every time I walk through those convention center doors and see 86 craft brewers pouring more than 400 different beers. It’s enough to make you believe that there just might be a providential force benevolently watching over us, dedicated to helping us achieve happiness in this existence.

Every year, I print out this master list of all the brewers and beers, and try to highlight the ones that I absolutely must try. For whatever reason, I completely forgot to do that this year, so I was flying blind. Every year, I also promise myself that I’ll take notes and blog about the experience, and every year I fail to get it done. Not this time! Using a streamlined, no-frills approach of using simple annotations on my handy Beer Fest guide, I was able to create a bare-bones record of my experience. I won’t lie: the tasting cup is tiny, but you can sip as many different beers as you want in three and a half hours, so my note taking um, suffered as the day progressed. But let’s take a walk through and see if I can’t tell you a little bit about my day and some of the excellent beers I tasted.

Stay pretty? Not a problem, postcard.

# The toast of last year’s fest was the relatively new Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project, a brewer based out of Cambridge (although they don’t have an actual brewery, so they’re not quite based anywhere). In fact, by the time I made it to their booth last year, they were all out of beer. This time around, I made sure I went to them first. I’ve had their Jack D’Or American saison before, so I tried the Fluffy White Rabbits, which is described as a “hoppy Belgian triple” (get it?) I scribbled down “light, hoppy, sweet,” but for the life of me, I can’t recall anything else about it. Chalk that up to it being the first beer I had. The good news is, I wouldn’t have bothered to write anything down if it sucked.

# The craft beer industry is the craft beer industry because none of these breweries can even touch the big guys like Anheuser Busch–InBev and MillerCoors. The Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams, is the largest American-owned brewery, and they famously tout in ads how small (something like 1 percent?) their share of total beer sales in America. All this being said, there are still some big guns in the craft beer community: Brooklyn Brewery, San Diego’s Stone Brewing Company, Boston’s Harpoon Brewery, Delaware’s Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Vermont’s Magic Hat Brewing Company, and California’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, to name a few.

These are breweries that, honestly, have nothing to prove. They’re the prime movers of the industry, and some of the most reliably innovative brewers out there. That said, some stood out and some lagged behind on Saturday. Brooklyn offered a virtuoso lineup of brews: I started off with a taste of the Brooklyn Summer, an English “light dinner ale” which, out of the tap, is my second favorite beer ever. I immediately got back into line to taste the Sorachi ale, a dry-hopped saison. (A saison, also know as farmhouse ale, is described by the good fellows at Beer Advocate as “a very complex style; many are very fruity in the aroma and flavor. Look for earthy yeast tones, mild to moderate tartness. Lots of spice and with a medium bitterness. They tend to be semi-dry with many only having touch of sweetness.”) This one failed to disappoint; if you know Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, you know I appreciated the extra touch of hops. I also had a sip of their Dark Matter, a brown ale aged in whiskey barrels. Just think this, with an actual whiskey aftertaste. Delish!

# Harpoon was a sponsor of the event, so they got a prime location with additional taps. Good, because if the Brooklyn Summer is my second favorite beer, then the Harpoon IPA is Numero Uno. (I rhapsodized about this nectar back when I thought I was leaving Boston forever.) This time around, I sampled their 100 Barrel Series offering, Pott’s Landbier, an easy, not-too-hoppy not-too-malty session lager that was vaguely reminiscent of another of Harpoon’s 100 Barrel beers, the kellerbier, a truly tasty style that for the life of me, I can never find anywhere.

# I was a little disappointed with Stone. These guys make notoriously hoppy (and delicious) beers liek Arrogant Bastard and Ruination. When I said up top that there are brewers that don’t have anything to prove, the corollary is that they can take some risks. And the corollary there is that some risks blow up in your face! Stone’s booth featured their cask-conditioned IPA, each dry-hopped with a different variety of hops—Centennial, Chinook, Amarillo, Nugget, and Columbus. It was an interesting experience, tasting how different types of hops affect the taste of a beer you’re already familiar with. However, not every type was a hit, and being cask-conditioned ales at a beer fest, the brews came out kind of tepid. Other people can disagree, but I find that my beer tastes better cold. It was sad, because looking at the Stone offerings in the guide, I was really looking forward to having my hair blown back. It was not.

# I’m not a great food/taste writer. I just have a hard time describing how things smell and taste. Things taste the way they taste. What do you want from me! I say all of this because I really liked the Shipyard Summer Ale, an American pal. But the best way I could describe it was that it had a feety, socky taste. In a good way! Anyone that’s ever eaten a piece of cheese knows what I’m talking about.

# Every time you go to one of these beer festivals, you run the risk of discovering a completely new style that you never knew you liked, but thereafter can’t live without. I got a taste for the aforementioned saison style at last year’s beer fest. This year, the honor went to a style that I had never even heard of: the black IPA. Apparently, in the beer community, there’s a bit of a controversy as to whether the black IPA represents a new style or simply a fad. (I’m apt to agree with the Idaho Statesman’s take.) The fact remains, though, that the stuff is tasty. I tried two types of black IPA on Saturday: one from Clown Shoes, which is actually contract-brewed out of Mercury Brewing in Ipswich, and one from Blue Hills Brewery in Canton. The virtue of the black IPA (or Cascadian Dark Ale, as a vocal faction of beer enthusiasts want to call it) is that it combines the malty taste of a stout, with the light body and hoppy character of an IPA. The Blue Hills iteration leaned in the IPA direction, while the Clown Shoes leaned toward the stout. Both were excellent. I’m very much looking forward to more examples of this delectable brew trickling eastward.

There’s a bunch more beers that I tried and loved, but this post is getting a little long. If there’s a demand for more insight, let me know in comments.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that this isn’t a “Let me tell you about what I did today” kind of blog. But let me tell you what I did yesterday.

It was an exceptionally pleasant day here in the Hub of the Universe, and since I had the day off for Great Friday, me and sweet, sweet Alice went out for a little ride. I took the bike path through the Southwest Corridor Park all the way down to the Arnold Arboretum. (Which, for all of my readers in Boston, is a treasure, and you should all visit.) Anyway, I hopped off for a bit to check out the scenery. I walked off the road and heard something scurry out of the gutter. I look down, only to see an effing SNAKE! A wild snake! In the middle of Boston! So I’m chasing this serpent through the grass, and I almost stepped on ANOTHER SNAKE! The place was awash with this scaly devils. My little guy eventually stopped near a tree, and I was able to snap this picture:

See? See?

It’s only a tiny little garter snake, but still! A snake, in the foreboding urban hellhole! How cool is that?

On another note, I wound up riding like, 19 miles through Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, and my legs were KILLING me. But it was fine, because I had the day off, and it was gorgeous out.

And it’s even more gorgeous today! I’m about to head out for some drinky-poos with my pals, but I thought I would pass this along. It’s the writers for the Morning News, talking about their favorite outdoor drinks. In that spirit, I suppose I’ll reminisce. The god’s honest truth is that I don’t really have a favorite outdoor drink: I find the idea that beautiful weather can be combined with alcohol to be one of the more miraculous concepts ever conceived, so I’m profoundly grateful for any mojito, pina colada, or Natty Ice. I do have some wonderful memories of liming it up with some cold Coronas, but if I had to choose a go-to outdoor bev, it would have to be a gin and tonic. And not one of those wimpy ones they give you at the club. I’m talking a pint glass, with like four ice cubes, and about six glugs (as in “glug-glug-glug-glug-glug-glug”) of Sapphire. Mm mm good. Feel free to leave your favorites in comments.

I’m not sure if y’all are familiar with hockey, but about a week and a half ago, the Boston Bruins’ Marc Savard was knocked out for the season by a cheap-shot, blindside elbow from the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Matt Cooke. It was a self-evidently dirty play. I’m not here to talk about that. I’m watching fans walking home from the Garden out my window as I write, after the Bruins’ first meeting with the Penguins since that savage hit. I don’t know what happened, and whatever did transpire is immaterial to my argument.

I’m here to talk about the palpable bloodlust among Bruins fans for the chance to get some revenge against Pittsburgh. This judgment is based on my completely unscientific reading of various website comments and Facebook status updates today, but considering Sports Illustrated’s hockey writer was lamenting the NHL’s lack of disciplinary action against Cooke, and I’ve been reading stories about this game on non-sports blogs, I think it’s safe to say that some type of retaliatory vengeance was on the mind of many Bruins fans today.

If you take a step back from your ingrained understanding of the game of hockey, it should be a little strange that we’re even having this discussion. After the hit on Savard, the outcry against Cooke was loud, sustained, sincere, and justified. Hockey is a physical game, but there’s no place for headshots like the one Savard suffered. But look where that’s gotten us: an expectation that somehow, the Bruins would retaliate. Would they go after Cooke? Would they go after Sidney Crosby, the Penguins’ star? Would retaliation take the form of a similar cheap hit, or a gloves-on-the-ice brawl?

Even that Farber column I linked to above, written before tonight’s game even took place, takes retaliation for granted: the NHL could have prevented the violence that will inevitably occur, but failed! Now the Bruins have no choice!

But of course they had a choice. Cycles of violence are called cycles of violence for a reason, whether they occur on the streets or on the ice. It’s the same principle. What would be the consequence of the Bruins collectively saying “We’re going to stop this. It was an unfortunate thing that happened to our star, but two wrongs don’t make a right.” Would other teams find them to be soft? Possibly, but what’s the consequence of THAT? More cheap shots? I doubt it, given that Cooke’s hit has put those types of hits on the NHL’s disciplinary radar. Generally rougher play? Fine. If it’s within the confines of the rules, I’m sure the Bruins are capable of defending themselves. I’m approaching this as a rational person, of course, and not as a hockey player, or a hardcore hockey fan. Assuming retaliation, though, is a very pernicious fact of NHL life.

And think of what that assumption entails. Bruins fans, and a good portion of the hockey world, booed Cooke lustily. And then what did they, certainly in some cases, cheer for, and in other cases tacitly accept? Some sort of similar hit against a Penguins player. It shouldn’t be hard for someone with self-awareness to realize the hypocrisy at work. As one of our great philosophers has reminded us this season, what if it were you hanging up on this wall? Hockey fans should know better.

Actually, this is a great idea NOT in action, but it should be!

Think of any generic bar you’ve ever been in, and think about the thought that went into designing it. If you’re a bar owner, you’re going to focus on the bar. You’re going to focus on the places where people are going to sit down and eat and drink. You’re going to focus on the dance floor, or the Big Buck Hunter Game, or the mechanical bull, or whatever. These are the things that make your bar what it is.

But in any physical space, there are forgotten areas. The corners. The spaces along the wall between tables. The surface underneath the bar. My question is, why aren’t these spaces filled with coat hooks?

This might not apply to my loyal readers in San Diego and Fort Lauderdale who can leave the house any day of the year in culottes and flip flops, but up here in the Cradle of Liberty, it gets COLD. In the winter half of the year, there’s no getting around going out to the club wearing your heaviest coat. There’s a fair number of places you come across that have a coat check, but in my experience, that’s less than half. So you get there, ready to hoist some brews or dance with some fly tinies, but before you can get down to business, you have to figure out a place to stash your coat. Which leads to an entire evening of anxiety, as you wonder whether Tommy from Saugus is going to pull what he thinks is his coat—it’s not his, it’s yours!—out of a huge amorphous blob of wool and nylon in the corner, and even if he does find his coat, he’s either spilled the rest of his gin and tonic on yours, if he hasn’t already knocked it onto the ground into a not-quite-yet-dried-up puddle of Bud Light because let’s be honest, you’re not out dancing at a place that’s particularly diligent about mopping up spills as the course of the evening progresses.

Do it next time you’re out. Go to the bar, look around, and count all the different places where there should be a place for one to hang one’s coat. There’s enough for everybody!

For whatever reason, there’s been a lot of biking-related articles and posts on the ol’ Intertubes. Up here in the Hub, the Globe ran a story about Boston’s plan to institute a bike-sharing program. Perhaps in response to the anti-biking firestorm that erupted in the comments section, the Globe ran a piece a week later lambasting Boston cyclists for their bad habits and lawlessness. Tsk tsk tsk!

Bostonist did a serviceable takedown of that particular story, so I won’t rehash all of the arguments that make drivers sound as wacky as tea-bagging town-hall protesters. I could very well have put up my little GIF buddy and shook harder are car operators (I actually probably will eventually, but whatever), but instead, I’d like to address what I see as the most substantive issue in the whole drivers vs. bikers standoff.

Ryan Avent touches on it here. Money quote:

The other thing to think about is that cyclists typically have no natural place on the road. Pedestrians have sidewalks and cars have their lanes, and a cyclist must navigate his way between the two, which isn’t easy or comfortable.

I remember when I was a kid, graduating from riding-my-bike-around-the-block-for-fun to riding-my-bike-to-get-places, I was amazed and a little frightened to learn that bicycles are supposed to be ridden in the street. Why? Because it’s just not intuitive. Here I am, flesh and bone, on 30 pounds worth of steel and rubber, riding cheek to jowl with Civics, Suburbans, and 18-wheelers. That’s just dangerous! Which leads me to the question at the heart of this post.

Why are bikes and cars governed by the same laws?

Has anyone seriously addressed this issue? It makes so little sense. Cars are faster, larger, and less nimble than bikes. Just saying that these two wildly different classes of vehicle have to share the road doesn’t make them equal. It strikes me as a lazy, cheap, and unimaginative way of dealing with the very real problem of bikes and cars coexisting. It doesn’t require lawmakers to either a) come up with a reasonable set of parallel regulations to govern bicyclists, or b) pony up for the infrastructure that would make bicycling safer. As it stands, bikes inhabit a little-policed no-man’s-land between driving and walking. It’s really the worst of all worlds for bicyclists and drivers alike.

Bicyclists aren’t scofflaws, by and large. I’ll parrot what most bicyclists who have written on the subject have said about the “lawlessness” of bikers: most of the time, when a cyclist breaks the law, it’s to pursue what they see as the safest or least absurd route.

I say safest because sometimes, riding on the sidewalk is safer than riding on the road. I ride on the sidewalk, the wrong way, down Martha Road every morning to get to the Museum of Science. Why? Because going the right way on the road would take me into fast moving traffic. My rolling at half a mile an hour down the sidewalk is a much better option for everyone.

And I say least absurd because, honestly, when I’m sitting there at a red light with the rest of the cars on the road, and I’m watching pedestrians cross the street because there’s no cross-traffic, what’s the point? If I were to hop off my ride and walk it through from corner to corner, I’d be entirely justified and within the boundaries of the law. (In fact, the City of Boston advises bicyclists to use crosswalks if traffic is too heavy to make a left turn.) Why wouldn’t I roll through a red light if there were no cars coming?

Now, I understand, the law is the law. But there’s a powerful cognitive dissonance here. And I also understand that if cars acted in the same way as bikes, there’d be chaos.

Which leads me to this recent post from Matt Yglesias. The main thesis:

The basic idea of traffic rules—separated uses, painted lane markers, giant signs, etc.—is to make it safe for the drivers of cars to drive their cars very quickly. That’s an okay design principle for a highway, but its nearly-universal adoption as a design principle for urban roadways is arguably very misguided.

Yglesias has a tendency to throw radical ideas out there and let his commenters hash them out, and this particular case is no different. No one expects Commonwealth Avenue to become a wide-open free-for-all of walkers, bikers, and drivers. But it’s been done elsewhere. And it’s at least worth thinking about how we can develop more effective, and more safe, ways of bikes, cars, and pedestrians sharing the same space.

I haven’t read Spider-Man comics in a while, so I don’t know what the context is here, but my pal passed along this link featuring pages from Spidey’s recent jaunt up to the Hub of the Universe. How fun!

Not sure if you heard me complain about the weather up here in the Hub of the Universe for the past month or so. I do my best to have an Epictetus-esque stiff upper lip when it comes to the weather, but this past June just weighed on me, as it did most people around here.

Why? Because it’s been like, a hundred years since the last time Boston had a more miserable June. The good folks over at the Boston Globe put together this nifty interactive calendar to show you just how ridiculously crappy the weather was. Look at it! Only 27 percent of the suns rays shined on us last month! On a third of all June days, there wasn’t even enough sunlight to cast a shadow!

That’s not weather. That’s a month-long sojourn into a hellish nightmarescape of sodden dread. You had to be here. It’s not even that the sun didn’t shine. It’s that the cold, damp atmosphere actually fed on the dreams of an already existentially disturbed populace. It was terrible.

And then it was sunny and in the mid-70s last weekend, and everyone just moved on. It’s amazing what actually getting your daily supply of vitamin D can do for the spirits.

So I bought a bike this weekend, in order to ride to work in the mornings. I’ve been meaning to do this for years, dating back to when I lived in Allston. Problem is, I never had anywhere to put a bike. I never felt good locking one up outside in Allston, and then when I moved to the Theater District, I lived on the fifth floor of a walkup in a crummy neighborhood. Now that I’m in the North End, I can store a bike in the basement of my building. I rode it around yesterday, and I tested out a route to work today (and went to the grocery store). It was pretty good!

Here’s a map of the bike path I’m going to use for most of the way. I picked it up at the Museum of Science, and took it all the way to Western Ave. in Allston. I took Western to Market Street, then made a right onto Washington at Brighton Center, then onto Foster Street to Commonwealth. I gotta say, I think I hit every hill possible once I got away from the river. I might try to get onto Commonwealth a little earlier. We’ll see.

But the bike. Here she is.

<3 <3 <3

Isn’t she beautiful? Nice wide saddle. Rack. Fenders. Oh, those fenders. She’s just a gorgeous bike. I’ve got a pannier (that’s bike-speak for “bag”) that fits right on the rack, and fits a decent haul of groceries. I’ve got a good lock, lights, the whole nine. I’ve got that opium-like high that only comes from owning new stuff, and I gotta tell ya, treasured reader, I’m bustin’.