Month: August 2015

Should Cardinals fans worry about the Randal Grichuk injury?

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071815-MLB-Randal-Grichuk-LN-PI.vresize.1200.675.high.54Any time a theme park ride closes down, the people waiting in line get mad and depressed. What it would have been like to ride that thing? Right now, across a hot St. Louis, St. Louis Cardinals fans are disheartened by the idea of the Randal Grichuk experience being closed until September. The talented 25 year old rookie of the year candidate is going on the disabled list with a right elbow strain. The complete severity of the injury is unknown, but the warning signs are enough for the team to act quickly after the MRI this morning. Should the fans freak out?

The answer is no. Grichuk, while impressive and durable with the bat, wasn’t powering this offense singlehandedly. This moderate attack doesn’t operate on one boom stick anymore. Grichuk was essentially a sniper in a band of versatile weapons that scratch out just enough runs to help out the best pitching staff in baseball. They still have Stephen Piscotty and Jason Heyward out there(who combined for three home runs Sunday), and Matt Carpenter and Jhonny Peralta have handled business this month.

Grichuk’s power will be missed. The kind of pop that can turn a silent Friday game into a quick Cardinals lead like he did with a 2 run home run against the Marlins. A bat that had grown more lethal over the course of the season. One that accumulated 43 extra base hits(21 doubles, 7 triples, 15 home runs) and a .561 slugging percentage. Sure, he had 97 strikeouts(at least 3 multi-K games every ten game set) but he was drawing more walks as the weeks passed by. Grichuk’s lethal ability to crank baseball 100 mph was only improving so the spectacle will be missed.

What happens next? Tommy Pham will come up, be inserted into the roster and have another chance to showcase his skills. Brandon Moss isn’t going to improve sitting on the bench, so the loss of Grichuk gives him renewed time in left field. Jason Heyward, by the looks of today’s lineup, will get some time in center field while Stephen Piscotty moves to a place he is most comfortable at and that’s right field. The next man up mentality will persevere here.

Why should fans not worry? Remember that great pitching. The pitching that the Cards have built their success on this year didn’t lose an arm today. The starters may have lost some run support with the Grichuk injury but the performance doesn’t expect to be diminished.

After all, look at the losses this lineup has faced this season. Matt Adams since late May. Matt Holliday, except for 10 games, since early June. Jon Jay for the past two months(or all season). Peter Bourjos…oh I forgot, he just doesn’t play that much. Grichuk is the latest blow to a team that knows how to roll with the punches.

While the hottest theme park ride in town heads to the disabled list, guys like Heyward and Piscotty can step up and take over now. Aging AAAA talents like Tommy Pham can rise to the occasion. Kolten Wong, rest or not, can hopefully find comfort in the #2 spot. An offense that struggles to score runs no matter who comes or goes will soldier on top of the best pitching in baseball.

Randal Grichuk isn’t gone for good, folks. He’s just hurt and needs time. Keep your head up and enjoy Cardinals baseball. If any team knows how to endure, it’s the Birds.

The Fog Lights will lift you up on the darkest of days

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Fog Lights 5“Met you a thousand years before…seems like yesterday. Time is like walking through a door. Go through but never go away.”-Lead The Way

The greatest musicians are honest on the stage. They sit or stand, and they play their hearts out, leaving nothing to chance. For they are brittle individuals when they step away from the stage, on it they are kings and queens. Listening to The Fog Lights heart and soul, Justin Johnson and Jim Peters, the immediate connection is forged due to that instant chemistry and honesty. Their debut album, Manhassett, is an album to own and not just rent. It’s a CD you will need on the highest of good days and the lowest of darkest ones as well.

The musicians built a folky pavement for their 12 songs to ride on and it’s an easy going familiar yet potent sound. When folk is done right, it instantly takes you back to a memory in your lifetime. It’s not just about driving down the highway with the window down. Manhassett takes you right back to your high school days, when you didn’t know who you were or what you wanted to be yet. The mystical emptiness that everybody gets sucked up into at some point in their life.

The regretful bluesy “Fear” is a street with littered doubts shaken all around. “Fear is in your heart. That’s the place to start. Second time around. The walls are coming down. If you feel nothing, then it meant nothing at all.”

“I had a dream”, which could be the mantra for all independent fighting musicians, drifts through that moment of grasping an idea and feeling relief. “I felt the breeze, seemed to put me at ease, I can sail the seven seas.”

In what is easily my favorite song on the album(which means it got the most replays and even had my three year old son singing along), “Wait” can be the mountain of contempt we all face on a daily basis. “Running down a stream, change your name for me, those that believe float away. Look out below. The tears of fallen snow is more than we can do or say.” Peters makes “wait on me now” sound like a rally cry for everybody who feels the need to run but are constantly stuck in neutral guarded by cement. Simple acoustic support is all that is needed on this golden track that will sound as crisp and pure in 50 years as it did on a calm Tuesday.

The scared Say Anything ballad “The Real Me” takes you down the time where you first wanted to open up to the one you love but didn’t know how to trust or give a piece of yourself away. “I don’t see the light in you. Other say its shining through. You know I want to treat you right. It’s just most nights I am so tired. Want to finally be, want you to see…the Real Me.”

Johnson and Peters’ biggest weapons here are their soulful voices and acoustic guitars that they swing like samurai sounds across your eardrums, slicing away the harsh reality of your condition while they explain how they came to be.  A banjo, harmonica and backup players may surface here and there, but it’s more or less these two fellas strumming along. That’s all great music is. Someone telling what they are and where they came from through via a tune.

My belief is that in order to give an album a fair shake, a person must listen to it at least three times. It’s like riding in a car. You must take it out for a variety of drives. Test the engine, brakes and see how it makes you feel. When I slipped this disc into my player, I didn’t want to take it out and that’s because Johnson and Peters are storytellers first and foremost. They aren’t fancy, don’t wish to stand toe to toe with U2 or The Rolling Stones. They just want to play music, give you an experience and make you remember what honest good music sounds like. Along the way, you may relax and forget about your problems for a short while.

If you need to see The Fog Lights live in order to truly buy what they are selling, you are in luck because they are playing all around St. Louis in the next few weeks. This Friday, August 7th, they are playing in The Open Highway Music Festival at the Off Broadway Music Venue. On September 5th, they are playing inside the Music Record Shop along with Emily Wallace. On September 8th, they play GadellNet Saturday Sessions at Tower Grove’s Farmer’s Market as part of Twangfest.

You can purchase their CD at any of their shows but first, get a taste by listening to their lead single. When it comes to these guys, it’s simplistic yet potent music that instantly makes you feel. That kind of music doesn’t need a genre. It just takes over. As the band said after their album release show at Blueberry Hill on July 25th via their Facebook page, “Thanks for being a part of this journey. Thanks for believing in music.” The Fog Lights make you believe in music again.

A year later, I miss Robin Williams…a lot

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I miss Robin Williams, a lot, and I’ll tell you why.

There aren’t many actors who could transition seamlessly between comedy and drama. I am talking about inside the same movie, not separate projects. Inside one scene, Williams could go from smiling funny man to hyper serious monologue delivery guy and it was impressive. He cared about the films he did and the people he worked with. He was a 63 year old kid right down to the very end, which came a year ago in his home in California. After battling drug addiction, depression and a new foe in Parkinson’s Disease, Williams took his own life. He did this mere weeks after completing work on an indie drama called Boulevard, with director Dito Montiel. His loss stings a year later.

A month ago, Williams’ often forgotten political satire film, Man of the Year, came on during the morning. What was meant to be a 5 minute glance turned into a 90 minute sitdown with a film I came to admire through multiple viewings. It was about a comedian accidentally being voted President of the United States and the fallout from it. It had Lewis Black, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Linney. It wasn’t supposed to work. Williams made it work, with his signature blend of sarcastic comedy and sharp wit.

The best actors aren’t the ones who can mix into an All Star cast and shine. The best ones are the performers who can take an ordinary looking piece of crap and turn it into gold. Williams did with Man of the Year, which was directed by Barry Levinson. There weren’t many actors who could have played this role so well. I felt the same way about another critically maligned film, Patch Adams. It wasn’t supposed to work but Williams made it watchable. He was magnetic, an actor who had a desire to connect with his audience through any means necessary.

In the end, Williams will often be remembered for his work in three films and for good reason. 

1.) Good Morning, Vietnam

2.) Dead Poets Society

3.) Good Will Hunting

Sure, Mrs. Doubtfire can sneak in there but those three are the cornerstones of his long reaching career. He also dueled with Al Pacino in Christopher Nolan’s Alaska thriller, Insomnia. He played Teddy Roosevelt in the Night at the Museum films. He was The Fisher King. The voice of a genie in Aladdin. The doctor in Hugh Grant’s Nine Months. The outrageously funny host in The Birdcage.

When it came to Williams, diversity in the roles he took wasn’t just a factor in his career, it was a necessity. He aimed to try different things and thrill you in different ways. For the moviegoers who hate actors playing the same role over and over, Williams was the opposite. He challenged himself all the way down to the very end. The whole family could enjoy his work.

It’s just so sad that in the end, the actor felt a huge gushing pain in his own life so badly that he chose to end it. Close the curtain early. Stop the show. I wanted more and so did others. I didn’t lie awake at night waiting for another Williams gem, but I was confident in the way the actor could surprise me.

I’ll never forget his character sitting on that park bench, which has now become a memorial for fans, in Good Will Hunting. Looking at Matt Damon’s character Will and slowly healing the kid. I’ll never forget his character, Sean, telling Hunting about his late wife and how he ditched a World Series Boston Red Sox game to go “see about a girl”. That movie will play well for decades and Williams’ performance will always be the anchor in its genius.

Do yourself a favor tonight and watch a Williams film. Skip the sequel, reboot, remake, and latest horror adventure at the cinema and stay home. It doesn’t have to be a classic film from the Williams anthology. Jumanji(which ironically enough is getting a sequel soon) is a great family film. For a couple needing a quiet night of escapism, take a shot with Cadillac Man or Awakenings, both signature Williams gems. As is the case with anybody after they pass, instead of mourning them, celebrate their life and their work.

The best and most endearing thing about the movies is they never die and are accessible right next to you on your smart phone or neighborhood resting DVD player. Decades later, they are right there waiting to be watched.

While it is brutally sad Williams chose to exit stage left too early, his greatest hits will be with us forever. Take a couple hours tonight and spend it with Robin Williams. I guarantee he’ll make you laugh and cry all at once.

True Detective’s Season 2 Finale: A Giant Mess

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(In case you missed it on KSDK)

Picture yourself ordering a big juicy ribeye steak and you get a dried up bland T-bone steak cooked by a cook who hates his job. That’s what I got after 8 hours of heavy handed drama on HBO’s season 2 of True Detective. The finale stunk up the room and it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. How did golden boy Nic Pizzolatto round up all this talent and mess this up? Next time, Nic, buy a diaper and unload in that instead of all over people who pay top dollar for HBO and went into this summer expecting something better.

I gave this season time to grow on me. Think of spending a few hours with a VERY serious kid at a playground. He’s cool and wants to have fun but can’t stop talking about philosophical meanings and boring layered narratives. That’s True Detective in 2015. Overwrought and overcooked and just too much in the end. Worst of all, its creator lost his compass. Pizzolatto can write twisty seedy stories about the rugged battles we fight within our subconscious on a daily basis but believe me he had better than this assortment of characters running around with their heads cut off in the middle of this mystery plot.

Hey, there’s Vince Vaughn, trying to recover some dignity from a career that fell straight down the soft comedy rabbit hole. Vaughn was trained on theater and came up in Hollywood through dramas like Clay Pigeons and Return to Paradise. What happened to that magnetic presence from Swingers? Vaughn was miscast here as a former criminal trying to go straight and a stupid one at that. He couldn’t handle the dialogue and never seemed comfortable except for a handful of scenes. Maybe he bit down too hard on the comedy bug or maybe he wasn’t meant for this gym class.

Look at Taylor Kitsch, playing the most doomed closeted gay cop of all time. So serious, never smiling and tormented beyond belief. The main recipe this season was inner torture. Look at me, I am pale, unhappy and out of cigarettes. Show pity on me. Taylor’s Paul, an ex-soldier trying to ride a patrol bike who gets sucked into this crime investigation set to explode. He never seemed right for the job, the same way the actor never knew quite how to play his character. When he found his step, it was overacting. So visible and forced.

Same for Rachel McAdams, the beautiful talented actress who is working so much right now she may need a break. Sometimes, when actors work at much as she has in the past year, I wonder if they don’t know how to handle a big role like this. Her overprotective, damaged, knife wielding badge started out like someone we could like in a dirty cool way, but quickly her character boiled too much and the goods spilled out. By the end of Sunday’s finale, I really didn’t care what happened to her character because I never felt like I knew her.

Colin Farrell’s Ray was the only character I felt had a complete base to work off of. A cop whose wife was brutally raped, a crime that set Ray off on a revenge trail that left him thinking he had killed his wife’s attacker but spending the rest of his life not sure if his son was really his. Farrell adopted this deep slightly Southern drawl and assortment of plaid shirts and funky facial hair to rip into Ray. It was like his Miami Vice character went to Texas and came back a changed much more tormented dude. A sad one but a character we cared about. Farrell can visually project 80 emotions on his face but in the end, the showrunners did him wrong, at least in my eyes. They walked him into a trap. I didn’t expect characters to find happiness at the end, but I expected they’d read something better than what they found.

One character needed his comeuppance and didn’t get it. You’ll know if you watch.

Season 1 was brilliant because it had a sexy confidence, was extremely well written and felt fresh and rightfully gloomy. People were sad, drinking too much, way too violent, but they had a purpose throughout the misery. The season had a vibe and a pulse. It was a wild guitar solo that seemed to last for 7 hours before encore sprung this culmination of all the plot threads. It also had a white hot can’t go wrong Matthew McConaughey meeting the character of a lifetime in Rust Cohle. A man who preached about a flat circle. Maybe Pizzolatto should have stuck with that circle and brought him back, along with Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart.

To me, the biggest missing element from Season 2 was a foil for the seriousness of the main characters. Season 1 balanced McConaughey’s madness and wrenching monologues with the bewildered humor and light presence of Harrelson. Season 2 was missing a Woody Harrelson. Something to balance all the depressed folks out. Too bad.

Another missing element from Season 2 was director Cary Fukunaga, a maverick world creator from Season 1 who turned Louisiana’s swamp into a gothic lost and found crime zone. The rift between him and Pizzolatto split the marriage they shared via True Detective and deprived Season 2’s players of a great director. Without his compass(Fukunaga’s camera), Pizzolatto was lost this go around.

Maybe Season 3 brings back Cohle and Hart. Go back to what worked and what put you on the map, Nic. Season 2 found you without a purpose. Season 2 felt like leftovers in a broken refrigerator. It was the little brother trying to be as cool as the older star athlete and coming up short. Maybe fans were set up to be disappointed.

True Detective Season 2 tried to go big with a larger cast and wide spreading mystery plot. It misfired, badly. You can go back and watch it again, and I’m sure the effect wouldn’t be better. Only worse.

Nice try, Pizzolatto. Next time, find a worthy story, characters worth caring about and something fresh. Take some time my friend. You need it after that strikeout.

In the meantime, go catch up on Cinemax’s Banshee, a show that DOES NOT disappoint. Like ever.

A Good Year: The Quiet Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott gem

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Welcome to the midnight movie parlor temptation, where important sleep disappears and minds drift into the land of weird television. There are times when the bed never calls and the couch always has a bottle of whiskey and a barstool ready for you to put a dent into, and that is when midnight movie temptations come into play. The movies you’d never watch during prime time but somehow get sucked into like an average interpretation of Poltergeist in the middle of the night. For me this week, it was the forgotten Russell Crowe-Ridley Scott French estate fairy tale romance, A Good Year.

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Missing my friend Troy Siade

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I don’t get sentimental here often. I try to post 50 regular articles for every semi sentimental or personal piece. However, today I am going to talk about my late friend Troy Siade.

Manual Scoreboard
Manual Scoreboard- Manual scoreboard operators Troy Siade, left, and Danny Buffa take in the Cardinals-Giants game from their favorite spot behind the manual scoreboard at Busch Stadium Wednesday night.

Troy Siade would have been 50 years old today. He was an Italian prince in a white t-shirt and short blue jean shorts that made the manual scoreboard a place to be. You could have been as cold as the North Pole, and Troy would make you laugh. He had a way of cutting though the bullshit in life and made you happy to be around him. He would bust my chops because I was like a younger brother to him. I took it in spades and with a fair measure of pride. There were days where an hour would go by on the board and we would just give each other shit or bust each other’s balls while mixing in serious things to talk about. With Troy, it all came free and easy. 

I’ll never forget him driving our supervisor Joe Graman crazy by hitting on his pretty daughter when she came to visit the board. Joe was a military veteran so Troy would go all the way down to the National League or a decent distance from Joe and say something like, “Man, I just want to settle down, marry a girl, whose dad has a boat.” Yes, Joe had a boat. Troy would cut the tension in the room like a knife would slice through a warm slab of butter. He was fearless, hilarious and treated his friends like family.

I’ll never forget him getting sensual with a picture of Art Holliday in a suite at Busch after a game. He gave cocky flamboyance a brand new name every night downtown. Troy would walk down the ramp at Busch and say out loud, “Hey ladies, I drive a JAGUAARRRRR!” and “Man it sucks being RICH!” All a friend could do was laugh. You had to dig the guy. He was a one of a kind.

I looked up to him like the older brother I was deprived of during those days. Every year since he has been gone I feel this pain some nights when the Cards win big or a Jim Edmonds highlight is shown. Every August 14th I get my ass kicked emotionally and I hide it well because no one needs to see a bearded bald dude cry. I just miss him and wish he was still here.

The saddest thing in life is regret. A little while before he passed, Troy surprised my wife Rachel and I for a dinner. It was out of the blue and caught me off guard. We had previous plans with my parents and you don’t break those off. So we turned him down. I wish I would have brought him along. My dad and the two of us may have been asked to leave the restaurant because of how loud we would have gotten, but it would have been worth the trouble. Troy talked a lot, just like me. Nobody could shut him up. They couldn’t contain him. Only hope to try. That’s why I loved him. There are certain people you meet in life that you can be your 100 percent self around. Troy was one of them.

As humans we always think we have more time. That there will be another time. It’s a flaw. With Troy, there wasn’t. He got sick soon afterwards with Non Hodgkins Lymphoma and was gone soon afterwards. He would die before his 39th birthday on April 23rd, 2004. That shiny black hair gone and that unbreakable spirit somewhat tinted.

I just wish I had more time. I just wish I had more time with my friend. My brother from another mother. Someone who never made me feel the need to change or watch what I say.

Just another reminder that Cancer really fucking sucks.

Rest in peace my good friend. Troy would have loved to watch this moment from his favorite player, Jim Edmonds.

10 Ways a Beard Makes a Man Better

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(From the Archives)

The beard is no more.

While tragedy didn’t strike in the Buffa household in the form of death, illness or serious injury(which is amazing because we hung pictures today), the beard came to an end. The monstrous full friend that has went wherever I went for the past three months. The last time I had this little hair on my face was during the final weeks of Banshee Season 3. Yeah, the little things count when it comes to facial hair memories. We all know where we were when the towers fell or the stadium collapsed. Where the hell were you before you had the great wall of fur, gentlemen? I bet you didn’t think there was going to be a beard postmortem on your must read agenda today, but that’s the way we kick it here at Up All Night. We bring all kinds of stories and don’t just tell you who got traded, which movie is good or how the latest wrestling match changed your life.

Here are 10 ways a beard makes a man look tougher because once the hair fell, I suddenly felt like I couldn’t win any telepathic battles with large groups of men. (more…)

Tom Cruise makes “Rogue Nation” feel fresh

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Mission 5Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation‘s sign outside reads like this. Welcome to the Tom Cruise show. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to walk into Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation without an ounce of cynicism or pre-existing opinion of Cruise’s off screen persona and just enjoy a good old fashioned spy flick.

Let me tell you right now. The reason these films work so well, no matter the director, is the star. The face on the poster. The man carrying all the marbles and the boulders of pressure on this summer blockbuster scale. Cruise doesn’t just do his own fight scenes. He also hangs off the side of departing airplanes as they take off. He also rides motorcycles around roads hanging off steep cliffs. He also dives into large bodies or water and does all this at the ripe age of 50. When I think of Cruise and Mission Impossible films, the pursuit of authenticity comes to mind. He wants to make it as real as possible and he wants the audience to have as much fun as he did filming it.

The plot isn’t too distracting and has just the right amount of juice dripping from the grill at this cinematic barbecue. Cruise’s IMF team(Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames) are being hunted by a rogue “Syndicate”, who wish to destroy the unit and also make a lot of money in the process. This is a film where the bad guy isn’t really noteworthy. He’s got an accent, a nasally voice and an ability to tuck the bottom part of his face into a snarl. He wants to take Cruise’s Hunt down and do it all flashy like, which makes for amazingly rendered action sequences.

You don’t come to a Mission Impossible film to be wooed by Oscar caliber acting. You want to see what these guys do this time. They didn’t disappoint. Writer/Director Christopher McQuarrie(who wrote a past Mission film and is the creator of Usual Suspects) ups the ante here with Cruise and company. Leading up to the release, the scene where Cruise literally hangs off the side of a plane carried all the energy of the marketing campaign. That stunt is pretty cool and sets off the pre-credits sequence. It pales in comparison to the other stunts.

The sequence that takes the cake is a scene where Hunt dives into a government facility that is guarded by 100 feet of concrete and protected by a pool of water that whips around like a hurricane when you are in it. Hunt’s desperate plea to extract a chip, card or whatever is revealed slowly and raises the stakes as the three minute timer on his watch counts down. Folks, we all fear drowning but what the filmmakers do here is create a truly harrowing yet fun experience. We are sucking the oxygen out of our own lungs watching Hunt try to dangle.

The motorcycle chase is filmed extremely well, and all the gun fights sound authentic, ringing off a Michael Mann like echo in your ears. It’s almost as if the Fast and Furious gang challenged Cruise and company to create the most outrageous action set pieces, and the veterans just winked and went to town. I’m sorry, Vin Diesel, but when it comes to real action stunt work, Cruise has you beat big boy.

Rogue Nation is just smart enough to make us forget about the outlandish stunts, plot threads and somewhat uneven pacing at times. It’s alert, confident and delivers the goods you come to expect when seeing the trailer.

The cast is cool as silk, with Renner and Baldwin providing some levity with biting one liners and humor. It’sRebecca Ferg good to see Rhames back and Pegg is always a reliable comedic presence. The steal here though is newcomer Rebecca Ferguson, a gorgeous Swede who takes turns helping and betraying Hunt’s crew. Ferguson isn’t just a pretty face. She’s athletic enough to fulfill the action duties and has a naturally beautiful body that doesn’t seem anything overly fancy or anywhere near ordinary. Whether she’s climbing up her opponents to wrap her legs around their neck and stab them in the chest or she is racing on a motorcycle, Ferguson holds her own and then some and her co-stars know it. There’s something about a pretty lady with an European accent who can throw a punch and take one as well that just knocks me out. You’ve been warned, Emily Blunt and Kate Beckinsale.

While it’s not as polished as the first one or as slick as the last, this 5th round of Mission Impossible daredevil work is a worthy piece of summer entertainment. Whenever the plot starts to spin out of control and everybody is wearing fake masks and throwing kicks and shooting all over, Cruise grounds it all with his hard work and dedication to the character and the series. He’s a thinking man’s action hero and is all the fuel this Mission needs.

Also, Rebecca Ferguson doesn’t hurt.

AMC’s Better Call Saul Doesn’t Achieve Greatness

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Question: Would you still watch Better Call Saul if there was no Breaking Bad first?

Would you still dig the characters and story as much?  If there was no precedence of the iconic show that marks its future, would Better Call Saul be as juicy? Does it have the merits to build an entire show on or is it a nostalgic ride that reminds people of their departed favorite show? It’s a question many struggle with and I posed to myself as the first season comes to an end Monday night.

The truth is the show is an uneven mess and varies in tone so much that a viewer can get lost on the way to figuring out if this show is truly great or simply riding the coattails of its meatier predecessor. Mixed within the seedy Albuquerque land that co-creator Vince Gilligan paints in this universe are scenes of heavy hitting power and poignancy but they are more scattered than one would like. During the first nine episodes, the writers can’t figure out when to properly unmask their anti-hero, Jimmy McGill, and reveal him as Saul Goodman, the character many know and love from Breaking Bad. (more…)

The Dirty Dozen: 12 Coolest Beer Names

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What if there was a Dirty Dozen remake with characters carrying the name of 12 cool beers?

If Hollywood is going to churn out remakes, sequels and reboots like Starbucks cranks out latte’s, they may as well insert a cool twist. Tuesday marked National Beer Day across the United States and that meant calling upon the tastiest beers in the land. Being a huge fan of craft beer(Budweiser fans can take their watered down mess back to the pool), I have become addicted to tasty rarely known cool sounding beer. Thankfully, a lot of the beer I love has a cool name to match the delicious taste. I’m the Most Interesting Man in the World when it comes to beer. I don’t love it every night, but when I do partake in the buzz inducing confines of the rich flavored alcoholic holy land beverage, I like to acquire some memorable beers. Why waste all those brain cells on crappy beers? Let’s assemble the 12 Tastiest Beers with the Best Names to create our Dirty Dozen Movie Cast.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found beers named Chuck Steak, Biff Webster or Slowjack Keys yet. Sorry George Carlin. The search continues. While I ponder the late great comedian’s disapproval, I fire up the casting. (more…)