
Hey, look, everyone: It's the first day of Seattle Beer Week, with more than 100 200 (!!!) beery events through May 19 (because a beer week should be longer than a regular week, obvs.). The sloshy fun includes the Tour de Pints bicycle-powered-beer-crawl, a beer-can-car derby at the Pine Box, and the Brewers Mini Golf Blowout in Interbay (“You can be sure there will be drinks on these links”).
Here are our mini-reviews of a handful of the grazillions of bars/pubs/restaurants hosting Beer Week events, and here is the full Beer Week schedule.
It is time to celebrate the best beer city in the world (according to Seattle Beer Week) with beer! It starts at four, meaning IT IS ALMOST BEER O'CLOCK!
"The other night at Westlake, my skateboarding was impeded by a strange multicolored glass object sitting on the planter. This turned out to be a rather large, blown-glass dildo, covered in Westlake's omnipresent slime and trash. It being Westlake, I just let it wash over me and kept skating. That is, until a passing meth enthusiast unwittingly picked it up and examined it. After a few puzzled moments, the general murmur of the horrified onlookers reached the ears of the unfortunate gutter-dildo examiner. This person's face at the moment they realized what, exactly, they were holding is not one I'll soon forget."
Read more over here. WARNING: NSFW picture. But you're not at work right now, are you?
It's things like this that make me proud to be of Irish descent. I think. The lede:
An Irish publican has been prosecuted after police found dozens of "nuns" drinking illegally, several hours past closing time on his premises.
Christy Walsh, who runs the bar in Listowel, County Kerry, has been fined a total of 700 euros (£605) after his pub was raided twice in one night.
He had helped to organise a charity event in the town last July, in which hundreds of people dressed up as nuns.
Begorra.

Right near Full Tilt in Columbia City, the Hummingbird Saloon specializes in Cornish pasties (YUM), and we hear from the excited neighbors that there will be shuffleboard. The name reportedly came from the owner admiringly watching a hummingbird attack a crow.
Next door to Anchovies & Olives, Ethan Stowell's smallish, windowed Bar Cotto serves salumi (including culatello, porchetta, and three kinds of prosciutto), small plates, bruschetta, and pizzas with various fancy toppings—and, of course, cocktails (some barrel-aged). Meats are $7 each or five for $25, and other stuff ranges from $7 to $16; seems like it might add up, but for the penurious, there's happy hour every day from 4 to 6 p.m. The name, they say, “basically just means ‘cooked’ in Italian.”
It's almost drinks o'clock!
The prospective beer list for brand-new Von Trapp's 25 taps looks promising for beer nerds. How promising? Here's what the king of Washington Beer Blog, Kendall Jones, has to say:
What excites me most about the opening lineup is the diversity of the list. Many of Seattle's great beer bars focus on big, Northwest style ales—IPA, Porter, Stout, and so on. Others focus entirely on German-style beers. Von Trapp's seems to be really focused on a broad range of beers, from traditional German-style lagers to robust local ales.
The beers on the opening lineup that most immediately whet my whistle would be Maisel Dunkel Weisse, Veltins Pilsner, Good Life Descender IPA, and the North Coast Old Rasputin. The Duchesse De Bourgogne is also a very nice touch. It's a Belgian beer—a Flanders Red Ale—that serves as a very good introduction to an exciting world of crazy-ass beer flavors. It's like a gateway beer for people who say they don't like sour beers. The Duchess is brewed with wild yeast. She can open your mind to a whole new world of beer flavors if you'll let her. She's like your first really crazy girlfriend. I know you're afraid it will hurt, but trust her. You won't regret it.
Hey, I love the Duchess too! Nothing like a gateway.
(Also: The Stranger is having the world's-best-ever local-music-and-beer fest. And it's Washington Beer Blog–approved!. You should come!)
Hey! The Stranger is having a beer-and-music partytime thingamajig called Penumbra (which means this) on March 16th, and none other than Washington Beer Blog—the local beer nerds' online headquarters, they really know their stuff, intimidatingly so—says it is officially not going to suck!
Seattle is the birthplace of great beer and great music. We are true leaders in that regard. For too long Seattle has been lacking a kickass beer and music festival. Typically, beer is an afterthought at our music festivals. And vice versa. Epic fail! The Penumbra Beer Bash intends to confront this problem head on.
Nearly 30 breweries are already involved. Good breweries. Really good breweries, actually. Go to the website and look at the list. You will be impressed and maybe even surprised.
Emily Nokes helped choose the bands, and among them are the Catheters, which is causing near-pants-peeing excitement around here.
So, YAY FOR GREAT LOCAL MUSIC* AND GREAT LOCAL BEER: Two great tastes that go great together!
*Apparently the Catheters guy lives in San Francisco now, but he's from here. And the other bands are local. Like Champagne Champagne! MAGNETIC BLACKNESS.

Is gin juice? Kind of?
Click the photo, and then vote for the correct answer!
Today started off TERRIBLE! But now? Everything is better. Why? Because, thanks to this video by Ze Frank, I now know where I stand in the universe... and it's all thanks to Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman is ultimately responsible for everything in the universe, because... Morgan Freeman. For example, "Morgan Freeman doesn't have sex. When he smiles a baby simply appears in a field full of kittens." Want to learn more about Morgan Freeman, and his role in/as the universe? Morgan Freeman this Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman.
If you want more celebrity bullshit posts, post 'em. And please note that the two Seahawks posts were by regular actual employees of The Stranger, and one of them was so disdainful as to actually constitute a Golden Globes post.
And the Seahawks game was more important: There's a Golden Globes every year. The Seahawks do not make the post-season every year.
It's like I hardly know you anymore, Slog. It's like you're a different blog now.
Why waste time EATING, when you can drink? Click the photo to find out more...
Shortly after I got my drivers license I drove to a New Years Eve party and got totally blitzed. The next morning my mother burst into my bedroom, startling me awake. "What happened to the car?!" she angrily screamed at me.
"What?" I replied from my half-awake hungover haze.
"What happened to the car?!" She demanded again.
I thought for moment, and then settled on the truth. "I got really drunk last night," I told her, "so I left the car at the party and walked home."
I was not punished for my behavior. In fact, I think my mother was kinda proud. I wasn't particularly experienced at either drinking or driving, but even at sixteen I had the commonsense (or perhaps the fear instilled from my recent drivers ed course) not to combine the two.
And that's what makes it such a big scandal every time an elected official like Senator Michael Crapo (R-Idaho) gets pulled over on a DUI. These are people who should know better. (They're also people, as Atrios repeatedly points out, who can afford a cab or a driver.) And no, the booze is not an excuse for their lack of judgment. A 0.11 percent blood alcohol level is drunk enough to know you're too drunk to drive, but not so drunk that you're incapacitated to the point that you just don't give a shit.
So to dismiss this as a temporary lack of judgment is to let him off to easy: Senator Crapo chose to drive drunk because that's who he is. Something to remember the next time he moralizes on anything.
Whuuut?!? A drunk goat? What is happening here? PLEASE VOTE!
... besides worrying about the election, and being sad that Halloween is over? Or maybe you're a closet Cheech & Chong fan? Maybe you just love poetry? If you said yes, to any of these, click the photo. Click it now.
Raw broccoli? Raw liver? Tampax? Beer? Read more (and add yours) here. Happy Halloween! Hell is for children!
Two word hint: WET VAGINA. See what I mean! Oh, how I love my job.

Pine and 11th, outside the Comet.
Did you watch last Sunday's Breaking Bad? Then you saw the final shocking scene everyone's talking about, right? Well, did you know there was an "alternate ending" for that scene? It's more shocking (and hilarious) than the original by far! SPOILERS AHOY!!
Did you know a cute flasher, a woman with a broken vagina, and a naked man in a dumpster are all competing for the illustrious title of The Stranger's Drunk of the Week? It's true! Go vote! Photos slightly NSFW.

The first Seattle weekend in which liquor was sold at grocery stores failed to unleash the torrent of violent, dangerous behavior that opponents of privatized liquor (including the national beer industry, cops, and employee unions who staffed state-run liquor stores) had warned us about.
Asked if there was any uptick in alcohol-related crime this weekend, Seattle Police Department sergeant Sean Whitcomb said no. "As far as community issues at grocery stores, nothing that's on our radar," Whicomb said. He fielded input from a few other officers who also reported no liquor-at-Safeway-related mayhem, even though liquor was sold at retail outlets until 2:00 a.m. instead of the bankers' hours of the state-run stores. This weekend did bring a few major crimes, he said, including a stabbing and a person with a gun. But alcohol-related? "Nothing that would rise to the level of police concern at this point." Admittedly, it's the first weekend, and more alcohol availability can lead some types of people to abuse alcohol.
So if you see any drunken brawls in the produce aisle, you know what to do. "We ask people to give us a call and we will investigate," Whitcomb said.
Tipsy British woman insists sitting on the awning is fine, learns lesson.
Thank you, Reddit.

It's the Seattle Supersonics vs. the Philadelphia Flyers! Who's gonna win it? How many chicken wings have you eaten? On a scale 1-10, how drunk are you? Who's calling in sick tomorrow?
Note: It's actually President Obama's 3rd SoTU address. We are so drunk that we forgot. Sue us.

Today's the day the MLA Conference lands in Seattle, which means that right now, there are so, so many language nerds in Seattle. And where you find language nerds, you also find an overpowering desire to get very drunk. That's why the New York Review of Books is hosting a free, open meetup tonight at the Sorrento Hotel's fireside room starting at 5:30.
You don't have to attend the MLA in order to go get drunk with NYRB tonight; in fact, I'm willing to bet they'd welcome anyone who enjoys booze, books, and the occasional debate/fistfight over grammar. It should be a fun time, with any number of sexy-librarian-looking folks enjoying the ambiance and looking for tips on how best to enjoy Seattle. Go and give them a warm welcome on behalf of the city; it's easy to not be shy when you know every other person there is a book nerd, too.
The results are in, the poll is closed, and a winner has been declared! The drunk you'll see on the cover of tomorrow's Regrets issue is...
Guy Stuck in a Traffic Barrel!
It was a very, very close race. Traffic barrel guy won over Soap Lake Sarah by only 26 votes.

Congrats, Mr. Guy Stuck in a Traffic Barrel! Be sure to pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper to see him in all his cover-boy glory.
There are clearly two favorites in this week's Drunk of the Year poll:

It's so close! Especially with the whole weekend left for voting. Who will win? Have you voted yet? Get over there and do it! The winner will be on the cover of next week's issue.