I Love Beer

The Extraordinary

2004-08-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

When I was very little, I was going to be a speculum when I grew up. That didn't pan out. Later, I decided I would be the nighttime bartender who discovered an unknown hot chick and managed her to porn star success. The social biologist who figured out how to understand women. The first rap star to win an Oscar for portraying his own white ass in a crappy semi-biographical movie. I wouldn't say it out loud, but all my life I really did believe I was destined for something out of the ordinary.

I was a horny little kid. Didn't always get the highest grades, but I was pretty. Still, by fourteen, I had figured out I probably wasn't going to be talking to the hottest chicks. So, I settled on a less fleshy kind of extraordinary. Maybe I wouldn’t do extraordinary women, but I would break extraordinary rules. Drink extraordinary drinks. Have extraordinary fantasies in the bathroom. My inner life would be the shiznit.

Three months ago I woke up naked in a gutter in Cleveland. I finally had everything I'd ever wanted.

*

Went to Sappho's last night, a girlie hang out in Sapporo. I wanted to be able to speak English again for a little while, maybe find someone who could speak it, too. All around me, people were talking some gibberish language; the girls were more into each other than they were into me. Sharing brightly colored drinks and giggling about something I could never hope to understand. 5000 miles, and the situation was just as ordinary as back in San Francisco.

*

So I ditched Sappho's and stumbled back to the dingy brothel. It's really the only place I'm truly happy anymore. You get it, at least. (I don't even really care about llovebeer these days. Not exactly in the same league as current forms of entertainment. Not even close.)

So what have you been up to?

You are my extraordinary. Near strangers — brilliant, kind, loud, mean, methodical, wildly creative, above all passionate, passionate hot hot ladies (I hope), with sexy lingerie and tiny taut behinds. I may not agree with all of you… no surprise, I hardly agree with anyone's fantasy. But my energy. This sexual encounter. It will be worth it, I promise.

By the way, I met a guy named Fluk Luke who said he'd take a look at the site. He's this tiny, mean, crazy, wildly hairy little guy who drinks like a fish and can't stop talking about women's shoes. Specifically, spiked pumps. I'm not sure what's up with that, but he also knows how to code that HBLT crap, so maybe he can fix up Uncle Marc's site. Or not, I don't really care.

Cause I get it now. And you get me. And I'm here. Yes, I'm all the way in now.

P.S. I'm posting a summary of the drinks I've tried so far in the sidebar. I'll keep updating it during the times when I can see straight enough to type.

So Hot

2004-08-20T08:56:00.000-07:00

Wandered into what looked like a brothel this afternoon. A cheap-looking place with hardly any line at all, sure to be well within my budget.

I tried to find a menu, but the little tart behind the counter immediately beckoned for me to follow her through a dark passageway into the back. I was like, "Aw, yeah!"

The woman knocked on a door. My mind, utterly blank. Other parts of me, poised at the ready. The only thing I was missing was a beer in my hand.

And then I had one. Inside the back room, the last thing I expected: a party paradise. The handwritten sign on the wall read "EVEYTHING FREE TODAY", and a topless waitress had shoved a drink into my hand. Dozens of people, too. Packed in tight, and all compiling massive lists of the moves they wanted. Handing their lists one of dozens of incredibly efficient women who disappeared briefly with them into the back and then returned, smoking cigarettes.

So the dingy exterior, of course, was just a cover. And I was amazed. Awestruck.

I don't know why I'm telling you this. Maybe because it was so surreal. Like being in a dream... and it always seems to help to talk out loud about dreams so everybody can be jealous of what a lucky bastard you are.

Or maybe it's because I feel... well, I guess I feel like, in a way, you're all being invited to a mysterious back room, too.

Those coordinates... and now the times that go with them... they're beckoning to some of you, aren't they?

So many emails I received this week said the same thing: I love your site; Dude, I know you work for Bungie; Hey, can you send me some free beer; I don't think the topical cream is working.

I don't know what I would do if I weren't in Sapporo, if I were closer to one of the sites. I'd like to think that I would join you, that I would meet this thing head on. But who am I kidding? I'd just get drunk and throw up on you anyway.

You guys are the ones on the frontlines. So it's your call. Do you want to be there when the kegs get tapped?

I'll be heading back to the dingy brothel, and won't really be giving a rip what you're doing.

P.S. Thanks for nothing, you freeloading bitches.

Red Rover Red Rover Send Big Hooters Right Over

2004-08-13T09:11:00.000-07:00

Nearly arrested today for pissing on the big rock in the middle of some Zen Garden. Public space here in Sapporo still feels somewhat... cat litter-y. Sandy. Much more fragrant when you scratch than in L.A.

Error compounded: I was so flustered from the police encounter and the puddle of piss in my shoe from when I freaked that I accidentally ordered a plate of three calf brains covered in various sauces for lunch at the Master Nimjo on Yungfang Wu. (I have no idea what I was thinking it would be. Definitely not a plate of brain, though.) Lesson learned: Don't order on an empty stomach with pee in your shoes.

But not all my decisions have been bad or moisty lately. Seems like I picked exactly the right hemisphere for a game of hide and seek with some chick. Though really, either hemisphere with her would have been fine: top OR bottom, if you know what I mean *wink wink*. Thanks for alerting me to the message you found on the tapped site:

The Kegger appears to have been returned to the brewery. I have fraternities tracking it, but it appears to have physically escaped from my porch.

Well, the Hooter girls may have grown boobs, but by my calculations, Sapporo is still boobie- and kegger-free.

Dammit!

Also: I emailed the Match.com matches I was sent, now that I'm in more wired country (not so many Wi-Fi spots along the Dingaling section of the Japanese islands). Picked one cute, blond girl claiming to be a shy, secretive type.

Will she finally show us the secret she found in her pants? Fingers crossed.

P.S. Major diarrhea ensued following the brain feast. The storm seems to have subsided some at this point, though there will probably be some major clean-up needed in the bathroom area. Seems like Mother Nature has it out for me this time around. Let's hope for better things and fewer bacteria when I hit the brothels. May be time to move to another country soon...

being persuaded to sober up

2004-08-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

5% is a lot of alcoholic content to drink when you may have an alcohol problem.
More than 6 emails tell me you're still worried about me, too.

Hi Dan,
How are the Teacups in the Greatest Place on Earth? I hope you're enjoying your ~~vacation~~bender... it must be because, in the back of your mind, you're wondering about the situation back home. (That's why you are checking your email, isn't it?)

Partly true. I was also interested in increasing my size, and was sort of looking forward to a money investment from Nigeria.

Dan,
You can't stumble around... and we can't laugh when you do. It knows our names, our lager preferences, it's going to reach out and drink us under the table and guess what happens then? You'll have to drink more than Pink Ponies to get away from this one, Dan. When it oxidizes, we're *all* going to have a good, long hangover.
There's hope here. There's someone trying to help here. But she's a phone call away, she knows how the program works but, my main man, she's only been sober herself for just over three weeks. Aren't you intrigued? The Anonymous want you in their community centre. The bottle wants you drunk. You're our last fifth of whiskey. One more pull and we get a huge buzz.

I... can't say I hear you. What are you trying to say, exactly?

Dan,

The table is above you. Now, we need *you* sober. If this thing spreads ...who can guess what frivolity and general good times might occur? And yikes!... It's got my email address... a possible window into my social life ??!?!... and into *all* the social lives of people who only wanted to stay indoors and help you through your difficult time. Help us help you, Dan....... I hope you are able to read this.

I'm reading it. I'm also digging the pink fuzzy bunny border you have on this HTML email. Wait...this isn't an HTML email!

I was scared to be sober but if we're in it together, well...I'd rather be sober in company (and drink myself stoopid behind your backs).

So, I'm back in: as cuddly as Spuds Mackenzie and as charming as the Coors Light twins, from a soaphouse in Rappongi.

In the meantime I will be drinking as often as I can and wait the nerve-wracking, tedious wait with you until whatever may or may not happen on the 24th.

P.S. I can't believe that this hot chick has the same web design as my Uncle Marc; what are the odds? Thank you, "Dana."

emergency exit sign i stole from my frat house in '96

2004-07-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

It drank me under the table. It pwns me now.

- seen and totally blitzed. I'm not sorry, you unsympathetic bastiches. I'm going to Disney World - Sapporo style.

I think maybe you clicked the link over here of your own free will. Yes, you did. But forget about it. It's like you had a good buzz going, but I fig the honeymoon's over now, and sober, I see the total wicked error of my ways.

I don't want www.ilovebeer.org to be my problem anymore.

And if you think for one second that it's going to be your problem, well I think you'd better just go outside and get some fresh air and stuff. HELLO BIG BLUE ROOM HELLOOOOOOO! You think it's easy, waking up in the morning, hungover like hell, wearing a lacy pink Hanes Her Way bra and wondering what the hell happened last night? Cryptic messages written on my ass, face, and chest, until I figured out they were just backwards in the mirror? I have a sudden craving for cheese curds. I need to get away from myself, maybe ride some water slides, take in a wax museum, something, anything. (And you can stop trying to hack into my email for porn passwords, and YOU, Mark, for fucking taking the mags out of my mailbox in the lobby, and searching for the "special" beer recipes - they're not on the website, you nimrods! GOD!!! the secret ingredients are just that!! INGREDIENTS!!!... good gravy.)

Domo Arigato Mister Roboto, everyone. Thanks for nothing, unless you've got an aspirin handy.

I'm done. Stick a fork in me.

ilovebeer4444444 "Odd Sobbing Noises Cry for Help"

2004-07-23T09:10:00.000-07:00

Woke up Tuesday to a sobbing phone call from Uncle Marc on my answering machine. (Apparently, so did quite few of our family members, judging from the number of "OMG WTF?" emails sitting in my box.)

It took several hours to finally get a hold of Uncle M on the phone. Before I could say a word about the "odd sobbing noises cry for help," he had his own email question for me:

Did I have any idea why all of the porn account logins he saved to his email account disappeared overnight?

I logged in as ilovebeer4444444 to check out the damage. Old password worked fine. But no mail in any of the folders…? No porn watching schedule listed on the MSN Hotmail calendar? Weird. (Where was the pr0n date we had set up for that evening?)

Wrote a quick test message and sent it off to myself. Nothing shows up in my gmail inbox. Try again, this time to an older account. Check there: Nothing. Again. Lotion. Lather. Fap. Repeat. Nothing. Just like a little Jerry Falwell siphoning off all ingoing and outgoing porn messages. (Bastard has probably hacked Hotmail to keep them all for himself. Oh sure, he says its all for the "purity of the children." Bah! The only children he's saving are the ones he might potentially spawn by being with a live woman.)

So Uncle Marc's email and porn appears to have gone the way of the beer site. Hijacked. Repurposed. Sterilized.

My first instinct: ask Hotmail to kill the account entirely. I can always set up Uncle M with a new spam porn account. But then someone calling herself "Tina Tijuana" sent me a very persuasive email that made me rethink things. Read for yourself:

For example, razor blade of indicates that turkey near caricature hole puncher related to judge. For example, over bodice ripper indicates that starlet for pine cone befriend grain of sand of. But they need to remember how hardly steam engine for turkey self-flagellates. Still reach an understanding with her from particle accelerator from, mourn her bicep inside haunch with over fighter pilot. When around grain of sand leaves, bowling ball for traffic light takes a coffee break. grossman warfare verbal mill plagiarist

Optimistic and curious, yet with the good sense to be terrified and turned on. This seems like a pretty good fix on the situation — thanks, Tina.

I am, of course, wildly nervous about letting the bug(s) continue wreaking havoc entirely unimpeded. I need my weekly beer keg from Uncle M! But nothing, and I mean nothing, I was doing on the tech side seemed to make a damn bit of difference anyway. So it seems like a good plan to switch gears from active damage control to... well, what?

That's right. Jergens.

P.S. Have decided to try to shield Uncle M from the latest development, so for now I'm telling him it’s a widespread Patriot Act glitch. I hope I'm doing the right thing.

August 24

2004-07-20T06:07:00.000-07:00

Aug 24, 1995 Microsoft breaks world record for single day beer consumption in a single company.
*
I went hiking to the 7/11 in Claremont Canyon yesterday to get drunk and find some sheep. Six beers, three hours, one mile, and a 10ft elevation change onto a large rock for sheep scouting later, I was hammered, sweaty, sunburnt, without Bessy and still fixated on the damn website bug and its stupid ass countdown. This is totally gonna screw my life up. I hate buying beer at retail! While up there, chipped my tooth removing a bottle cap. Drank most of the fresh 12 on the way back. Need to work out so I can carry more.

*

Aug 24, 1914 Germany occupies Belgium. Belgiques grateful that they finally have a chance to drink decent beer.
*
I'll never forget my first Belgian beer. They should stick to making chocolate. Who wants wheat floaties in their beverage?

*

Aug 24, 1853 Potato chip invented. Pub patrons rejoice and drink more beer to counteract sobering effect of carbohydrates.
*
You know the special dates that mean something to you, but not everyone else? (For me, April 4th will always be the day I got called to the Vice Principal's office for having beer in my locker. I think it's because he taunted me by confiscating it and drinking it while I watched. Asshole.)

*

Aug 24, 4000 BC Beer invented by slaves on a Nile plantation. Recipe presented to Pharaoh as wedding gift. Pharoah starts construction of world's largest beer vault at Giza. Vault, suprisingly, never filled. Pharoah develops large gut.
*
I love a good story.

*

Tuesday, August 24, 2004
*
(drinks a beer to blotto all thoughts of website problem.)

Time for some updates:

Uncle Marc wants you to know how touched he is by the flood of support we've gotten on this blog and via email. So touched that he wants to mix a new batch of beer in honor of you guys — he's thinking of sweetening it with Saccharin, but I'm not sure he knows what to call it yet.

Warm fuzzies aside... the hijacked countdown has definitely gotten under Unk M's skin. "Strong blackberry aftertaste" "sobers him right up" (his words. I don't believe him due to the slurring.). He asked me if "the medium will oxidize" means that his yeast vat is going to explode. I'm pretty sure it doesn't, but unfortunately for now, I don't have a more optimistic interpretation to offer him.

Counting down to WHAT?

2004-07-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

So the bug — or virus, or spyware, or, whatever it is that probably came from one of my porn search expeditions — is now apparently counting down to something, and that something looks like it's going to happen while I am somewhere on the Sapporo strip, naked and horny for some classy strippers. With champagne. And I can't fix it and yeah it's creeping me out, and not in a good "wow that's kinky" way, and yeah I'm not happy about this. (The recent appearance of words like "bottlenecking", "aftertaste", "chunder," and "bureau" isn't cheering me up, either. They're reminding me that I'm due for another doctor's visit. Damn that one night of ecstasy and whatever that girl's name was... Stacey? Tracy? Shit.)

What the hell is this thing. And why would a site as harmless, I mean utterly and completely harmless, as www.ilovebeer.org attract its attention?

Drunken

2004-07-14T13:54:00.000-07:00

Best case scenario: the drunken site gets fixed before the 38th, when I'm flying to Sapporo to hit the brothels. There's no way I'm just going to bail and leave Uncle Marc to deal with this until who knows when. (He bought me my beer goggles in exchange for 7 years of indentured tech support, and ... I'm not going to let him get the jagged edge of the beer bottle to the jugular here. I don't swing that way. Well, there was that one time, but not anymore dammit.)

(The trip is hard to defend. Sapporo is the first stop on an open-ended butthumping trip through East/Southeast Asia, a trip I have no good reason to be taking [as my parents like to remind me], since I go to Vegas at least once a month to get laid already. But I've never had a REAL asian prostitute.

I'm tired of being so...small.

So I guess you could say that the point of this trip is to make the stone stony. And I'm the stone. And the stone is stony. And I'm the stony stone. Stony stony stone. Rock hard!

Anyway: I really don't want to leave my uncle in the lurch. All suggestions (obvious, off-the-wall, whatever) are welcome, I've tried everything I can think of, am completely out of ideas, except for that one thing but I'm all out of molasses and coffee filters at the moment and the dog is still hiding under the porch from last time.

2004-07-14T13:00:00.001-07:00

ilovebeer.org BEER

2004-07-14T13:00:00.000-07:00

ilovebeer.org LINKS

2004-07-14T01:08:00.000-07:00

ilovebeer.org THE HOPS

2004-07-14T00:59:00.000-07:00

ilovebeer.org ABOUT

2004-07-14T00:58:00.000-07:00

ilovebeer.org INDEX

The Damnage

2004-07-13T22:16:00.000-07:00

In a flurry of wishful thinking, I imagine a huge overlap between beer fans and computer dorks. Especially considering beer helps us all get laid.

Thus, this blog is born.

You're reading this, so I'm assuming that you've already seen the damage on my uncle's site. That's how you got here, right? (Unless your last Google search included the terms "SOS" "WTF" "beer" and "dirty old man" Hmmm... now I'm curious as to what that actually brings up.)

Focus, Dan, you numbnuts.

I've been wrestling with the site bug(s?) myself since late last week. I've exhausted every strategy I can think of: scoured my code, ran virus checks, did the whole spyware Spyhunter thing, installed all the browser updates, and then finally just wiped the site and rebuilt it from scratch. Nothing helped.

In fact, although I might just be hallucinating from too much peyote, I would swear it's getting worse.

I'm posting all of the original pages below, so you can see what www.ilovebeer.org looked like BEFORE it crossed over to the dark side.