The King of Beers

 

My wife drinks a lot of water. It has to be lukewarm, though, so there's always a pint glass full of water waiting for her on our kitchen counter. She's been doing this for decades, but I couldn't have told you at gunpoint what was written on any of the glasses she uses.

All that changed this morning. After she drained her glass of water she exclaimed. "Hey, there's something written at the bottom of this glass ... it says 'King of Beers'!" I looked over and saw that she was holding one of our two Siena College souvenir beer glasses (shown above). Lord knows when or how we got them. We certainly didn't get them when we attended the school in the 70's. Pint glasses – and Budweiser beer, for that matter – were a bit too fancy for our on-campus Rathskeller, aptly known as "The Rat". As I recall, we drank Schaefer or Genny Cream out of plastic cups. Those pint glasses must've been a giveaway at a Siena reunion many years ago. 

To be honest, I never looked closely at these glasses and rarely used them. I'm not a Budweiser drinker and all of their garish advertising overpowered the Siena logo. At any rate, I peered into the bottom of the glass and, sure enough, there was something etched down there:

I looked closer.

If you click on the photo above you'll see that not only is "King of Beers" etched on the bottom, so is a map of the world! Well, sort of. North and South America are portrayed pretty clearly, and Europe is positioned somewhat correctly, but what the hell are those land masses to the east of South America? Australia and New Guinea? It's tough to say. All I know is that someone went to a lot of trouble to create that etching, and it made me wonder why. So off I went down another Internet rabbit hole. As luck would have it, it was a very shallow hole, requiring only a single search:

"budweiser" "king of beers" "map" "glass" "bottom"

It led me to a discussion on Stack Exchange on the purpose of etchings on the bottom of beer glasses and introduced me to the key term: "nucleation point". After bouncing around a couple of craft beer sites, here's the gist: The etched pattern on the inside bottom of a glass is called a nucleation point. When beer comes in contact with it, it causes carbon dioxide bubbles to be released. Among beer aficionados, a steady stream of bubbles rising from the bottom of the glass is highly desirable as it aids in head retention and provides enhanced aroma. 

There you have it. So the next time you stop into your local bar for an $8 pint of beer, don't just get it in any glass. Tell the bartender, "I'd like that in your finest nucleated glass, if you please." You might as well get your money's worth.

Wordle, the New York Times and Newspeak

 

On January 31, 2022, the New York Times announced that it had purchased the rights to a cute little word-playing game called Wordle that had become an international sensation. My first thought was, "Oh no, the Times is going to ruin it. They'll put it behind a paywall or throw advertisements around it." Which was kind of sad because many friends and family members were playing it and it had become a daily source of entertainment, especially the trash-talking. Little did I know what the New York Times would do to it.

My first inkling of their incompetence occurred on February 15th. In their haste to cut over from the old version on a UK server to their version on a NYT server, both servers were active. Inexplicably, if you connected to the UK version, the word of the day was AGORA. If you connected to the NYT version, the word of the day was AROMA. This should have immediately set off an alarm bell in my head. After all, the true genius of the game is how simply it is constructed. Its code contains the entire database of words that can be used for answers, and each answer is linked to a specific date. As such, the only way that the two versions could yield different answers is if the list of possible answers had been altered. And that's exactly what had happened.

By an astounding coincidence, the first Wordle word of the NYT era was AGORA, a word that is pretty obscure to the average American. As such, the NYT decided to eliminate it from the list of valid answers and the word AROMA (the next word on the list) was used instead. While they were eliminating words, The Times also decided to get rid of words with British-specific spelling like FIBRE, which also seemed reasonable.

Then, they went berserk. 

Someone managed to convince the powers that be that "sensitive or offensive" words needed to be eliminated too. Words like SLAVE, WENCH, WHORE and LYNCH. Not only would these words never appear as answers, they would not even be accepted as guesses. Ironically, all of these words can be found in articles written by the Times!

With this in place, imagine your frustration when you're in mid-Wordle and the consonants W, H, and R are still in play along with the vowels E and O. Maddeningly, you'll be unable to guess WHORE.  Almost certainly it wouldn't be the correct answer to the puzzle but it would greatly improve your chances of winning on the next guess. 

But that's actually the least objectionable aspect of this.

When a friend of mine heard about this, he sent me a one-word text: Newspeak. If you're unfamiliar with the term it probably means you've never read "1984", the classic novel by George Orwell. Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, a totalitarian regime, and was used to restrict ideas, thoughts and communication. As an example, Newspeak didn't have a word for freedom, so the concept of freedom didn't exist either. Negative words were replaced by words preceded by "un-"; the word "bad" became "ungood". Orwell's warning: a government that creates the language and mandates how it is used can control the minds of its citizens.

The NYT is hardly a totalitarian regime. But it was dabbling in a bit of Newspeak when it decided to eliminate a perfectly valid collection of non-obscene words from our thought process. Yes, enslaving someone is objectionable, but knowing about slavery, being able to converse about slavery or being able to joke that you are a "slave to your job" is perfectly reasonable. Calling a woman a "bitch" might be harsh but commiserating with someone by saying "life's a bitch" is hardly objectionable.

By calling these words "insensitive or offensive" and eliminating them from being used in a silly little word game, the NYT gave credence to all of its detractors who constantly accuse them as being absurdly politically correct. 

Postscript:

The above Letter to the Editor was never published by the New York Times. In fact, I never got any response whatsoever from the Times. So, as promised, I canceled my subscription on February 23, 2022. But I wasn't able to unsubscribe simply by email. The Times made me interact via chat with an individual labeled as "steven". Our exchange (edited for brevity) can be read by clicking here.

 Just as I had hoped, my bold and courageous stance against Big Brother-like censorship had made an immediate and undeniable impact:

It's not important that their stock price rebounded to 43.99 less than a week later. My point had been made.