Banned in Boston?

Beer served in a plastic cup at the Sam Adams Bar & Grill at Merchantsauto.com Stadium, Manchester, NH

You’ve probably heard the story about a man being killed by a shard of glass from a beer mug, as the result of a bar fight at the Landsdowne Pub in Boston.  Now, this bar is serving all drinks in plastic cups.  I don’t know what this bar is like, because I’ve never been there, but this is probably a good idea.

But now, according to an article on BeerAdvocate.com, the Boston licensing board is considering banning glass containers in ALL of the city’s bars.

It’s one thing to drink beer from plastic cups at a baseball game or other sporting event.    In addition to eliminating the risk of drunken fans throwing glass containers at players on the field, or at other fans in the stands, there are other practical reasons.  The cost of breakage would go through the roof, and make ballpark beer even more expensive than it already it.  And then they’d have to worry about washing all those glasses that don’t get broken.

Even at the Sam Adams Bar & Grill, which is located inside the NH Fisher Cats’ ballpark in Manchester, all drinks are served in plastic or paper cups.  This place has a really nice mahogany bar and all, and looks like the sort of place where you’d not expect your beer to be served in a plastic cup.  But they also allow people to take drinks out of the place and into the seating area of the ballpark.  They can’t watch every single person the whole time, so plastic all around makes the most sense.

On the other hand, I would not want to go into a nice beer bar and have my beer served in a plastic cup.  Different styles of beer are supposed to be served in different kinds of glassware; something they can’t do if they were forced to use only plastic.  Rather than give you a lesson on proper beer glassware, here’s a basic article about it from BeerAdvocate.com.  Many beer lovers have assorted glassware in their homes (we have a good collection), and we expect bartenders at better beer bars to know what beer goes in what glass.

The banning of glass would hurt these businesses.  Who is going to pay top dollar for a fine beer dinner, when all of the brews are served in plastic cups?  Beer geeks will simply go to places outside of Boston, the people who plan the beer dinners will have them at other restaurants, etc.

Also, at these higher-end establishments, people are less likely to get so drunk that they get into fights.  There is a huge difference between “beer geeks” like us, and people who go into some dive bar to get drunk on Bud Light or some other cheap, mass-produced swill.  Beer geeks enjoy the flavor of beer, we don’t drink to get so drunk that we can’t taste anything.  We’ve grown way beyond the college days of keggers and cases upon cases of Natty Light.

Those who drink to get drunk do not only not care what their beer is served in, they also do not care what beer they drink, as long as it’s cheap and there is plenty of it.  So the places that cater to such a clientele should, by all means, eliminate serving anything in glass.  But they should also be paying more attention to patrons who’ve had too much, and shut them off as necessary.  This not just because of potential bar fights, but for the safety of the general public.  You would not want someone to get so drunk that they cannot safely drive home.  Even the better beer bars should be paying attention; they would not likely serve somebody endless glasses of some 9.0% ABV double IPA.  As much as I personally love beers like this, I might have one serving at the beer bar, and then switch over to something with a lower ABV (alcohol by volume).

Hopefully, the owners of beer bars and brewpubs in Boston will speak out against this stupid law, and it will never be passed.  Let the bar and restaurant owners decide what to do, according to what would be best for them.  But don’t put people out of business over an issue which is not applicable to their establishment.

Opinion – The Massachusetts Bottle Bill

So now, Massachusetts wants to expand their current “bottle bill” by including containers other beverages, such as water, juice, iced tea, etc.  Right now, only containers of soda and beer come with a five-cent deposit, to be refunded upon return of said containers.  Story here.

My opinion?  Not only is this a bad idea, but I wish they’d do away with the whole bottle bill.  It’s nothing but a time-consuming annoyance that is completely unnecessary.  If more cities and towns would encourage recycling, then people could just put these containers out in their recycling bin once a week, and have them taken away.  See?  You can recycle without it taking up too much time and hassle.

Most stores that are convenient to us have bottle/can return machines, as shown here.  You just stick the containers in one by one, and when you are done, you push a button, and they give you a receipt, kind of like one that comes out of one of those Epson tm-t88iv receipt machines. You take it to a cashier in the store and they give you your money. Simple, huh?  But not so fast…

Every single time I have tried to use one of these things, I am pushed and shoved by other people trying to use them, you’d think it was Fort Knox, the way they go crazy and can’t wait their turn to use the machines.  It’s absolutely insane!

There are two Kappy’s stores near us that have a redemption counter, and for the most part, those are easier to deal with than the machines.  But sometimes there are lines, and often, even if there is no line, you have to wait for someone to come and take your stuff.  They do not have a dedicated container redemption person, usually it’s one of the cashiers who comes over and takes care of it, when s/he is not busy ringing up customers.  And the fact is, the most convenient times for us to return anything would be evenings and weekends, when Kappy’s and similar stores are the busiest.  So there you have the time-consuming part!

So, you may ask, why don’t we just put them into the recycling bin and let homeless/poor people take them if they want them?  After all, there are a LOT of people in our town who go around with carts that they stole from Stop & Shop and pick through people’s garbage looking for deposit containers.

Because they can’t just be satisfied picking through the recycling bins, that’s why?  They have to rip through every single garbage bag looking for more, and they often leave a mess.  And now that we have a Pay-As-You-Throw program here, we have to pay up to $2 per trash bag.  If the bags are all ripped up, the trash collectors won’t take them, we have to put the trash into another $2 bag and hope that it won’t get ripped up again by the time the garbage truck comes back next week.  And anything that is strewn on the ground, WE have to clean up.  More time-consuming crap!  By not putting out ANYTHING that might be worth money, we’ve managed to keep these people away from our trash.

Up in New Hampshire, they do not have a bottle bill.  People just put their beer and soda containers into their recycling bins, they get picked up, end of story.  No skeevy people picking through the trash and making a mess.  Another good reason to move there.

When  we go up there for a weekend of Fisher Cats ball games, we always buy beer to drink in the hotel room, and we buy it in New Hampshire.  We always leave the empties in the room, in the beer box they came in, when we leave, because if we bring them home, we’ll have no choice but to put them into our recycling.  And since they LOOK like deposit bottles, they will attract the undesirables.  However, they will not work in the machines here, they have a special bar code on them saying that they came from NH.  But the hotel we always stay at has a restaurant/bar downstairs that serves bottled beer.  So they have big recycling barrels somewhere.  They can just dump our bottles into that.  And yes, I do leave a decent tip for housekeeping for this service.  I also don’t want to put them in the trash at home, because of Pay-As-You-Throw, it can get very expensive.

For a while, I was saving empty Sam Adams beer bottles, to use for bottling my own home-brewed beer.  These bottles do not have screw-top grooves on top, and can be capped using the bottle-capping tool that commonly comes with most home-brewing equipment kits.  I saved far more than I’ll ever need for making the typical five-gallon batch, we have a ton of them in our storage area, more than enough to allow for the inevitable breakage.  But now we have more than enough, no more room, we have to get rid of them somehow.

In our town, there is no limit as to how much we can put out each week for recycling.  This is a very good thing.  I think that a state law that would require people to put out more stuff for recycling would go a lot further than any bottle bill in keeping the streets clean and helping the environment.  Then there’d be no homeless people and such ripping open residential trash bags and leaving a mess.

As for people who buy a can of soda or a bottle of water at the store – why not put recycling containers next to regular trash containers on street corners, to make it easy for people to dispose of the containers?

Most working people are under serious time constraints.  But anyone, no matter how busy, can throw all of their empties into a bin and stick it out on the curb.  It only takes a couple of minutes, anyone has time for that.  It’s time for the bottle bill to go bye-bye.

Don’t ask the Governor’s office for help…

…at least not if it is a time-sensitive matter.

In my last post, I talked about how Mike had trouble getting his drivers license renewed.  He called Rep. Ed Markey’s office in Medford, and the issue was settled within the week.

But when this first happened, I was emailing everyone I could think of in an effort to get this settled.  Including Governor Deval Patrick’s office.  I figured that since this was an election year, they’d be wanting to kiss our asses to help.

To their credit, they did respond.  Only it was a bit too late.  Mike’s license expired on Saturday, and he was risking it by driving around for a couple of days with said expired license.  He had called Markey’s office on Thursday, they got the problem cleared up on Monday, he renewed the license on Tuesday.

Patrick’s office sent an email in response, and they called Mike today about the problem.  He was polite, told them that it had already been fixed, and thanked them.

It’s probably a good think that Rep. Markey’s office got this fixed as fast as they did.  The Governor’s office might still have taken forever to resolve this, as it goes on Beacon Hill.  We’d have a better chance of finding diet pills that work, than we would in getting a speedy response from anyone on Beacon Hill.

But any response at all is still better than the many other people who ignored us!

Beware of the Massachusetts RMV!

So yes, we should all know that we must renew our driver’s licenses in Massachusetts by our birthdays, every five years.  But long before it’s time, if you have EVER had a driver’s license or even just a learner’s permit in any other state, EVER…you may want to check your records in those other states before you renew.

Why?  Because Mike had trouble renewing his last week.  He went to the RMV in Revere.  He had filled out the form online, no problems, and fully expected to be allowed to renew.  But NOOOO…they refused, because they said that he still has a license in Utah!

WTF???  This made no sense, they’d may as well have told him that he needed to get some bpi training in order to qualify for a license.  He did have a LEARNER’S PERMIT in Utah, from back in 1993, when he was there to take a track driving course.  He decided that the course was not for him, and left Utah without ever having gotten behind the wheel of a big rig.  The learner’s permit expired, and that should have been the end of it.

Utah has no record of his ever having had a license there, just a learner’s permit.  Massachusetts uses a federal database, which is where the error was about this non-existent Utah license.  But he’d been allowed to renew in MA before!

Fortunately, Congressman Ed Markey’s office was able to help.  Mike called them, and a very nice guy named Matt straightened it out pretty quickly.  Mike went back to the RMV today, and got his license renewed, no problem this time.

So, if you live in Massachusetts, you might want to try to find out what this database says about you, long before it’s time to renew.  I had a learner’s permit in Maryland eons ago.  I was allowed to renew two years ago, but what if this federal database decides that I still have a Maryland license that i never got?

And if you do run into such a problem, call your Congressperson.  If they are any good at all, they will help you.  They do have the capability, as we now know.  If they don’t help you, send them a big hearty flipping of the bird by voting for their opponent in the next election!

Here we go again!

With the political attack ads, that is!  A little more than six months before the Massachusetts gubernatorial election, there is already a Republican attack ad on the air, bashing independent Tim Cahill.  Story here (with video of the commercial).

I was so happy to see the end of the special Senate election, in which Democrat Martha Coakley ran many, many vicious attack ads against Republican Scott Brown, who went on to shock the nation by winning the election in a state that is usually very blue, a state that has kept the late Ted Kennedy in office for almost 50 years.  I knew that the upcoming gubernatorial election was going to be ugly, but I didn’t expect to start seeing any ads at all until maybe the end of the summer.  I mean, this election doesn’t take place until November!

Maybe I should give up TV, or at least only watch online (where there are no local commercials) or PBS, until this is all over.  Otherwise, I’m gonna need hair loss treatments for women, because having to see these ads for the next six months is gonna make me pull my hair out!