I don’t like beer. In fact, I could say that I hate beer and not feel bad for using such a strong word. I have tried to acquire a taste for it. I have taste tested everything from Amstel Light to ooh-la-la Chimay. I’ve even experimented with fruity additions like Hefeweizen with a twist of lemon, Corona Light with lime, and beer’s prissy little sister, cider. It doesn’t matter. It’s still beer. It all tastes the same…eau de toilette. (That's "toilet water" for those of you who don't speak Korean.)
I don’t like beer, but we bought this six-pack of Lazy Days Pale Ale because I am a sucker. When I see something in cute packaging my inner Hello Kitty goes into girl-fem overdrive and “ohmigodhowcuuuuute!” comes *eek!*-ing out. Packaging. I am a sucker for cute/ pretty/ smart/ sassy/ elegant packaging. It could be nail polish, crackers, table salt – it doesn’t matter. If caviar actually came in tiny glass sphere wrapped in pink tissue and cellophane, I’d consider buying it. Well, I’d buy it, but of course feed the contents to my neighbor’s cat and keep the packaging for myself. I may be a sucker but I still have taste.
Most of the time I am able to resist the urge to snatch up a pretty little thing, hug it to my chest like a silly monkey and blindly shell out shameful dollar amounts for nothing but paper, ink, and a very smart designer. I look (and inevitably shriek), but rarely touch because though I am am an easy target for marketers of all things teeny tiny adorable and particularly pink, I am an even bigger sucker for a sizable savings account. Yes, I may have been born into Generation X(cess), but I’m a Baby Boomer in disguise. The one thing for which I credit my Dad is drilling the Rule of 72 and the Time Value of Money into our heads when we were still in elementary school. Hey, I may be burning the meter with my blood pressure because I’m eating $0.39 instant ramen three times a day today, but I’ll be plaquing up my arteries with surf and turf when I’m…65! Yay.
Anyway.
The point is that even though my first instinct was to pass the bottled beachy sunshine, I bought it because it was on sale. Duh. See? I’m not really a sucker for packaging. I’m just a victim of price discrimination!
I didn’t finish my bottle of Lazy Days Pale Ale, but don’t let that be an indication of its true quality. I don’t think I’ve ever finished an entire bottle of anything, even PBR. Lazy Days tasted like…beer. Except that it had the faintest hint of sweetness, it was not so wildly different from any of the rest that it would change my taste toward beer.
So that’s the “beer” part of Lazy Days. Here’s the “blogging” and “broken” parts of Lazy Days.
My July 2006 was 31 lazy days with respect to blogging. I think I got the wind knocked out of me at the beginning of the month with censorship and wasn’t quite able to recover, especially with things breaking left and right. Some of it's fixed, but I still have a few posts to complete (they are listed as “in progress”) but the rest are indexed here for your reading/eating pleasure:
Saturday, July 1 – Yo, SHF, Let's Kick It - Ice Ice Baby
"Oh, come on. Don't *ugh* like you couldn't rap the whole first verse from memory."
Sunday, July 2 – When a Blog Can't Keep Up with My Mouth - June 2006
"I am fast and furious with words, despite my Asian heritage and despite my Asian-in-a-white-society upbringing that led to early pigeon-holing into "must be brilliant with numbers." However, I am not good with math, science, golf, the violin...or art."
Monday, July 3 – Famima!! (in progress)
Tuesday, July 4 – Reviews in Five Words or Less - Five for the Fourth
"I love my country, but firecrackers make too much noise."
Wednesday July 5 – Uzen Sushi - This One is for Keira Knightley (in progress)
Thursday, July 6 – Brentwood Farmers Market - Life is No Longer a Blog of Cherries
"Do I really have to be so brutal and bitchy in a review? Do I really have to write so much about non-food things on this food blog? Do I really have to swear like a sailor, and use such erotic themes, innuendos and sometimes blatantly sexual statements that turn this blog into a whore-iffic exhibition of girl gone wild in the kitchen?!?!"
Friday, July 7 – Good Luck Bar - Raise the Red Lantern (in progress)
Saturday, July 8 – Pesto Pasta with Tomatoes, Pea Pods, and Mozzarella - Fancy a FIFA Wager?
"As soon as I caught a glimpse of Cristian *pause to let out a dreamy sigh with hand to a heaving bosom*....first I practically fainted, then I took a very keen interest in soccer."
Sunday, July 9 – Crêpes with Summer Berries and Cream - No Points for Second Place. Only Brunch.
"Isn't the batter difficult to get right? Doesn't the batter have to be prepared long in advance? Don't we need a special George Foreman lean, mean, crepe-making machine?!?!"
Monday, July 10 – Fred 62 - This Mac Daddy Has Balls (in progress)
Tuesday, July 11 – Café Bleu - I Can Be Bribed to K-town with Chicken Skin (in progress)
Wednesday, July 12 – Whisper Lounge - Whisper to a Scream
"You know you had a good night when..."
Thursday, July 13 – Hollywood Bowl - Packing Heat, Taking it to Go
"I thought Belle and Sebastian were a Beauty and a Crab."
Friday July 14 – Bastille Day - For France, Sarah Drinks Italy
"At what point does some certain seemingly insignificant event evolve into a full-blown holiday that has people drinking themselves topless, riding a donkey named Margarita straight into a kelly green river of beer?"
Saturday, July 15 – Potato Salad - Mitigating Hypocrisy
"Before I know it, I catch myself with a spoon mid-flight to my mouth, unable to stop myself from eating whatever it was that I so hypocritically cursed into the culinary circle of Dante’s hell in my mind and “no-thank-you”-ed out loud."
Sunday July 16 – Men, Their Refrigerators, and a Confession (or Two)
"The Manfridge™. It is the refrigerator that belongs to a man who clearly has no influence of a woman."
Monday, July 17 – Once Bitten, Twice Shy. Shall We Meet, You and I?
"...thanks to an entire patio full of pie-baking, tart-making, fish grilling, drink swilling, fruit salad-tossing, candy-flossing LA food bloggers and one teeny tiny little Deep End Diner-to-be, I am learning that meeting new people isn’t scary."
Tuesday, July 18 – Cha Cha Cha, Cabana Club, and Low/High Maintenance
"No guy ever admits he wants a high-maintenance girl. Out loud."
Wednesday July 19 – Jumak Sheeri - Ring My Bell (in progress)
Thurday July 20 – High Five! High Five! Barely Alive...but I'll Play Anyway
"Half of [the mixtapes] I received from any one of "friends" who used said tape to signify he wanted to be "more than friends" because the tapes had songs like Glory of Love, More than Words, and She's Like the Wind. All of the tapes have creative teenage tigerbeat titles like...uh, nevermind. I just can't incriminate myself like that."
Friday July 21 – The Best of LA - Los Angeles Magazine vs. The Delicious Life
“I am fully aware that this Best of LA list is, in no way, helping my obsessive list compulsion, whether it's building my own, or drooling over someone else's.”
Saturday July 22 – When Life Gives You Melons, Spellchecker Can't Help You
"I’m a blogger who is much better with Scrabble than with Pictionary."
Sunday July 23 – Broken - I Never Said I Wanted an Omelet
"Eggs. Hearts. Computers."
Monday July 24 – Near Ninety Degrees at 9 AM - I Need Some Ice Ice, Baby
"I think I need to get it through my head that I'll never be a rapper. Guess that means I should return all my bling."
Tuesday July 25 – Shamshiri Grill - Persian Conversion
"It is being so completely full and satisfied with what you have to the point of surfeited ecstasy that you know that there cannot, and is not, anything better."
Wednesday July 26 – Egg McSarah - Fixing to Relapse
"That fateful morning, I watched as the screen blinked the usual startup sequence. It clicked. It whirred. Then it sighed. It sighed to that devastating shade of blue that even Crayola wouldn’t dare touch."
Thursday July 27 – New India Grill - Ladies Who "Buffet"
"...there is still the issue of germs, but I’m pretty sure that science has proven that spicy foods and curry both kill bacteria."
Friday July 28 – Paht Bing Soo - Snorting the Dessert Might Get You High
"This is pure snow! Do you have any idea what the street value of this mountain is?!?!"
Saturday July 29 – Rosalind's Ethiopian - Can I Get a Wot Wot?
"And what if your inner Angelina is pushing you toward Africa? That is multi-leg, multi-carrier, multi-day travel that will also require several bacteria-fighting cocktails taken by injection."
Sunday July 30 – Extreme Makeover, Blog Edition
"There were no drastic cuts nor vacuum suction. Just a nip here, a tuck there, a little micro dermabrasion to make everything a little smoother, and *blush* there was an augmentation."
Monday, July 31 - Sugar High Friday no. 21 - Ice Ice Baby, to the Extreme
“thank you to everyone for not laughing me out of the blogsophere with my tribute to that urban lyricist Robert Van Winkle.”
So there it is. All of July in one tight little post. Now to bring on August...
** a year ago today, katmandu kitchen did not include a sherpa **
tags :: food : and drink : beer : cooking : blogs : blogging : restaurants : reviews : los angeles
Owen says
OK Sarah - I always wondered but now it is official - you are completely insane. Beer is it. The business. What one prefers to drink. Better than wine. Better than water. Healthy (kinda sorta).
OK - wine is OK for a change of pace - but seriously...all I can think is that there is some kind of genetic error involved and that you really, really deserve our pity...
All joking aside, if you don't like the LAzy Days and since you don;t like to waste things, I can take it off your hands for only the price of shipping...don't be a stranger to the paper chef...
Eudaimo says
Screw that. Don't waste your time running to the post office. Eudaimo will come pick it up!
Anonymous says
...welll, how is it??
u says
The problem with beer is that it doesn't age well. So, the great Franconian and Bavarian beers down at your local beer store just aren't as good as they were when they left Germany. That said, I think you should look for a Julius Echter from Würzburger Hofbräu, which is one of my favourites when fresh off the tap on a warm Würzburg afternoon. Next, if you want to try something completely different, that will make you question your entire weltanschauung, try a rauchbier from Schlenkerla; it should go well with a spicier instant ramen, or perhaps smoked fish.
I hope those links work. Both of these brands should be available at your better local beer stores. C'mon, beer rules!!! :)
LACheesemonger says
LOL, where were all these "Manfridge™" guys, when the July 16th entry came out?
Btw, just like you cannot rely on the LATimes for much in the way of decent wine info (S. Irene Virbilla has the most elitist East Coast, old-school bad taste I've seen yet from the staff-not really a very good food writer either), don't rely on Manfridge guys for beer advice. Isn't Fall the time for Lazy Days? Sarah on her couch watching Peyton & Brett with a bottle of Bud Light, lol- couch potato Sundays? :)
There's an older DL entry with Sarah's mom & beer I should update, but for now, let's just say if you know what your talking about, some beers age very well. Uhh, like those in this picture (once in a blue moon I'll have a beer with others, not that I really like it much more than Sarah does, I just don't drink it as often as she does ;) ). I had the 1999 to the right in the picture, around New Years (Dec. 2005) and it was quite smooooth from bottle aging-excellent. I never drink beer alone, it's too bitter for my tastes; with the right foods, and a mellow ale, you don't need to 'acquire' a taste. Stout & cigars, I'll leave that to those Chicago women, lol; as I'll never acquire a taste for any of them. I think I had a few of the 1985 (only one of each of the older ones left now) bottles in the mid-90's and they were even better than the 1999 (they started filtering them more in the late 90's, Sierra Nevada makes an unfiltered Christmas/Holiday Ale that likewise ages well)