Golden Glory

This is a 4.5% beer from Badger. There are funny floral motifs on the bottle and I remember buying this beer several times and for some reason I always forget about its taste. But it is actually good, somewhat different than your ordinary real ale, as if some juice was mixed into the brew. Indeed, the back of the bottle says that "peach blossom extract" has been added to "enhance the floral blend". Whatever. Very fresh, slightly lemonly, to be served chilled. Ideal for summer afternoons, not very much so on winter nights by the fireplace. Taste profile on the back of the bottle gives it high sweetness and fruitiness.

San Miguel

Shared this one with Maja in Kasbar today. Shitty tasteless lager. I hate cheap beers...

Marco Rossignoli: The complete Pinball Book

I bought 3 book this New Year. One on beer (shit one, more on that on a later post), a Che Guevara bibliography (still waiting to be read) and this jewel about pinballs. It sounds like sad cases' hobby, but pinballs are actually incredibly cool and this book is just a very good introduction to the history and inner workings of pinballs. You can sort of see that he is not a professional writer, the style is a bit shabby every now and then, but the guy is so keen it is just joy to read him. It goes through all the history including flippers, bumpers, scoring devices, mutli platfors, EM-SS transition, pinball art, alternative experiments, etc., etc. It is amazing how much text the guy actually managed to write on the theme without repeating himself much... For example, did you know that flippers didn't exist before fifties and the first time they put them in, they pointed outwards? Or that flippers used to be just 2 inches long? And that you had to manually push ball into the lane using a strange contraption on early pinballs? Warmly recommended.

Cotswold Way

Tesco, my closest and dearest supermarket, a huge chain where 1 in 8 pounds spent in Britain is spent, still manages to come up with a new good beer every now and then. Cotswold Way by Wickwar Brewing is one good beer. If you don't chill it out, you get a perfect real ale at room temperature, kind of stuff you drink at beer festivals and old smelly pubs. Evokes memories of my undergraduate years in King Street parade. I will not go on about malty-chocolaty-hopy crap some beer enthusiasts are so keen on; this is just a jolly drinkable beer for relaxed evenings.
Update: Don't drink this beer cool! Just done that and it tastes much worse!

Kingsdown Special Ale

Ha, new beer in Tesco and no picture on the net. Made by Arkell from Swindon. It says "Strong Brew" on the bottle, but at 4.5% doesn't seem that strong to me, even for a real ale. There is a blurb on the back of the bottle about them being the finest "Victorian Stem Brewery" in the world. What exactly that mean is not clear, although they say something about raw material being fed on the top of the building and casks of ale coming out at the bottom - a bit like conveyor belt. The beer itself is actually quite good, a smooth traditional real ale with lingering taste. Too bad Maja spilled the bottle half-way through.

Virginia Woolf: K Svetilniku

To je moja tretja knjiga od gospe Woolfove, prebral sem še Orlando (pred nekaj meseci) in Valove (pred nekaj leti), oboje v originalu. Valove imam v spominu kot boljše, so pa precej podobni. Orlando je povsem drugačen in malo slabši, četudi še vedno berljiv... Tokrat sem bral v slovenščini v prevodu Rape Šuklje, v bistvu je lepo brati dobre prevode in ta je bil precej soliden (čeprav se je Maja pritoževala obratno).
O Woolfovi se nikakor ne morem izdelati mnenja, nekaj časa se mi zdi ok, nekaj časa povsem jadna. Ima res dober feminističen cinizem, gospa Ramsayeva, ki je tipičen produkt 19 stoletja se ves čas prepričuje, da je zadovoljna, da je zgolj žena tečnega postaranega filozofa in poskuša poročiti še vse ostale v njeni bližini. Tudi tok zavesti ji gre dobro od rok, precej prepričljivo, ampak hkrati nekoliko dolgočasno za bralca - po pravici povedano so debilnosti, ki krožijo ljudem po glavah relativno dolgočasne. Najslabše ji pa gre, kadard začne razpredati o umetnostu, v K Svetilniku obstaja pisateličin alter-ego, slikarka Lily, ki vidi, ki gleda, ki tako vse uvideva in doživlja, da človeka primer srat, čeprav izgleda sicer čisto ok človek.
Tri do štiri.

Budweiser

I tried the Budweiser beer for the first time ever last Saturday. Not that I was particularly keen on it, I just wanted to try this ephemeral omnipresent Yankee beer. And it was exactly as I expected, a watery, slightly bitter lager. A bit like Lasko (one of the two equally crap Slovene beers)...

Harvard Business Review on Entrepreneurship

Ok, couldn't get a more decently sized picture. A good book, not too much bullshit, but general common-sense that might be useful when you try to get rich as I do every now and then. A collage of papers from different authors - every now and then they blatantly contradict themselves; some papers much better than the others. My biggest problem is that all this is pre-internet (my copy is a 99 reprint, but articles date mostly 85-95) and business, marketing and distribution models were considerably different then. Still, who made millions there is likely to be able to make them now. Chapter about commercialising technology is particularly crap, and "How much money does your new venture need?" is also surprisingly useless. Chapters on how to write a successful business plan and the one on milestones are particularly good and so is the quite amusing rant by Arthur Rock, a legendary venture capitalist.

Tangle Foot

According to the bottle, this is a premium traditional ale. There is a short story on the bottle about the head brewer, who invited his staff on the tasting session for his new creation and they all got hammered and head brewer's feet got tangled on the way out and hence the name. They call this idiotic fall "a sudden loss of steering". :)

Quite good, but not quite malty enough for my taste. Still, consistent with "deceptively drinkable" description found on the bottle. Fairly strong at 5%, not much head-ache afterwards.

Brooklyn Lager

I've noticed this beer being sold in Tesco for 1.20 pounds per bottle, rather cheap.

The bottle advertises "..Broklyn Lager is a revival of Brooklyn's pre-Prohibition all malt beers." And indeed the inside is a superb, rudimentary tasting beers evoking what I want to think were smoky bars in foggy 1920 New York with feeble street lighting and old cars...