By Steve Rhodes

An occasional look at the magazines laying around Beachwood HQ.
Beer Me
I’m thinking Beachwood Beer is next.
“Gasparine wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he had become something of a beer geek,” Burkhard Bilger writes in The New Yorker. ” (His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.) A few years earlier, he’d discovered a bar in downtown Baltimore called Good Love that had several unusual beers on tap. The best, he thought, were from a place called Dogfish Head, in southern Delaware. The brewery’s motto was ‘Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People.’ It made everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries.”
Mmm, cloudberries . . .

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Posted on November 24, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

A periodical look at the decreasing number of periodicals laying around Beachwood HQ.
By the end of the presidential campaign, Joe Biden – not Sarah Palin – had become the gaffe-prone vice-presidential candidate hidden out of sight for fear that he would capsize the top of the ticket.
His gaffes weren’t surprising; he’s made a career of making them despite his enormous intelligence and political skill. In part, his mouth and his past as a lying plagiarist led the media to mostly dismiss Biden as a joke when he was running for president early in the campaign. The minute he was selected as Barack Obama’s running mate, however, Biden was transformed; suddenly he was the wise foreign policy guru and old Washington hand who would add ballast to Obama’s light resume.
And suddenly – thanks to the dark hand of David Axelrod – he was a working-class kid from Scranton, not the elegant senator from Delaware with exquisite tastes and hair plugs.
“Although Obama seems to have chosen Biden partly because of his legislative experience, the campaign introduced him by emphasizing his biography – a moving story,” the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza wrote in “Biden’s Brief,” which appeared in the magazine’s October 20 edition.

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Posted on November 10, 2008