Chris Baer

Some Suds with Your Slapshot?: Verizon Center’s New Beer Menu

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Beer & Hockey by Brad Lauster on flickr.com via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike LicenseIn July, Ted Leonsis, owner of the Washington Capitals, promised to bring better beer to the crowd at Verizon Center. Given the price of beer there, it’s the least he can do.

Doing what journalists do best, Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post‘s D.C. Sports Bog labored to compile a listing of where each of the beer choice is available this season at the Verizon Center, home of the Capitals.

Not surprisingly, mainstream domestic beers predominate the list.

Beer snobs quickly pointed out that having Bud, Bud Light, Bud Light Lime, Bud Light Wheat, Bud Select 55, Michelob, Michelob Amber Bock, Michelob Light and Michelob Ultra is like bragging about the incredible variety of Wonder Bread available at your brand new bakery.

But there were more than a few beers on the list that we’d all like to drink, leading to the next problem.

That problem being, of course, where to find the superlative suds. Dan Steinberg’s comprehensive location guide will help once you’ve narrowed down your decision.

Looking over the beer list, I have to confess that I don’t see much new from my visits last season. Kona Fire, Czechvar, Starr Hill, and Fordham Copperhead are the only selections I don’t recall. Still, the location guide will be handy for my next visit this year. Section 424 beer stand, here I come!

(Image courtesy of Brad Lauster via a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license.)

A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Helicopter Pilot

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To a young lad, can there be anything finer than an airbase open house?

Kiowa and Me

Um, no, not at all.

All those planes, all those helicopters, the vast expanse of the flight line and the cavernous hangars. It was like walking into an oversized toy chest. Plus you usually got to see the Thunderbirds or Blue Angels or, if you were really lucky, the Snowbirds perform.

I can’t quite pin down the location of this shot, taken at one of many open houses I attended at U.S. Air Force bases around the country, but that’s a U.S. Army Bell OH-58 A Kiowa behind me, serial 71-20571.

I haven’t been to a base open house in decades, even though one of the largest in the United States is held nearby every year at Andrews AFB. Perhaps the Andrews’ open house is just too large, the realities of the military mission too omnipresent.

Still, there was something special about a Midwestern base open house, the somewhat sparser crowds meaning more time to linger around the aircraft displays and shorter lines for walking through a B-52 or KC-135 over and over again. (I grew up on SAC bases, thank you very much.)

Despite it being the height of the Cold War (of which my young self knew naught), there was an innocence to the open houses then: this is our job, these are our tools. And, for a young lad, they were cool tools.

And, yes, the shades and the jauntily raked hat make the shot.

VideoGameGeek Needs You!

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VideoGameGeek at https://videogamegeek.comThe minds behind the super-comprehensive boardgaming site BoardGameGeek (and the sister site, RPGGeek), recently unveiled their latest catalog/database/comment/ranking/forum site, VideoGameGeek, focusing on, well, all things Video Game, from Pong consoles to virtualized versions of Pong in a browser and everything in-between. And they could use your help.

The site, like its siblings, relies on users to contribute descriptions, images, and other information about various games, building up a database on games new and old. There are plenty of other sites, some well established, that perform similar database functions for video games, but the Geek guys have demonstrated their ability to develop and nurture a fairly mature, intelligent audience, and one hopes that VideoGameGeek will provide a good forum for both preserving video game history and engaging with the many video games of the present.

They could use some help in populating the database, so head over to VideoGameGeek, if for no other reason than to refute my claim that Marathon is one of the finest games ever made.

Not that you would disagree with me, of course, because Marathon is, without doubt, one of the finest games ever made.

The Strategy Club

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In honor of the recent start of school in much of the United States, behold this scan from a Virginia high school yearbook I recently picked up at a library book sale. Harking from the 1979-1980 school year, this thirty year-old assemblage of wargamers and role players looks much like a gathering of the faithful would look today, though we’re a bit older, wiser, and jowlier.

Maybe not the Breakfast Club, but definitely the Strategy Club!

The Strategy Club!

The Strategy Club met every week to organize wargaming sessions. They had refought the great battles of history (on paper and game boards, of course). They adventured through the deepest underground labyrinths and bravely fought fantastic monsters.

Read through the ironic lens so common today, the club description could be seen as cutting and snide, perhaps, but I’m more inclined to see the descriptive text as a valiant attempt by a non-hobbyist to understand and explain just what these lads were up to in the science classroom every week.

I wonder if there are many similar clubs dedicated to wargames and role playing games in high schools today. As with any hobby, wargaming circles tend to ask where the “new blood” will come from and bemoan the “greying” of the hobby. In my own experiences with Fine Local Game Stores, I’ve seen plenty of younger gamers, but seldom involved in what we would consider board wargaming, focused instead on collectible card games and fantasy/sci-fi miniatures gaming.

How to get them interested in the intricacies of cardboard and combat results tables is a valid question. I think the best approach is not proselytization but rather approachability. Smiles and a willingness to interrupt a turn to answer questions at a game store go a long way towards converting kids from cards to cardboard. Not that there’s anything wrong with cards, of course.

Pastrami at Primanti’s and Polish Pierogis? Perfectly Pittsburgh

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All cities worth their salt lay claim to a foodstuff or two, be it the mysterious Washington half-smoke or the ubiquitous Philly cheesesteak. On a recent trip to Pittsburgh, that Venice on the Monongahela, I had the chance to sample two foods that are, if not unique to Pittsburgh, at least very well represented there: the fry-and-slaw-topped sandwich and the pierogi.

Fry-and-slaw-topped sandwich doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but it’s the culinary specialty of Primanti Bros., the chain of restaurants in Pittsburgh that serves it. The recipe is simple—meat and cheese topped with french fries, cole slaw, and tomato, served on two slices of thickly cut, soft-crusted Italian bread. It looks a little something like this:

Fries and slaw and meat, oh my!

The version above, a pastrami and cheese, with onion, from the Oakland branch of the chain, was, well, ok.

I understand the concept and the appeal, but it didn’t send me into the raptures that some of its devotees claim. There wasn’t nearly enough meat on the sandwich to counterbalance the heavy starch of the bread and fries, though for a shade under $7, I certainly got enough food.

Perhaps the other meat choices would have been better—the hot sausage and “kolbassi” versions sound promising—but the little bit of pastrami on mine didn’t add much to the experience. The cole slaw on top was the best part—almost dry and vinegar based, just as I like it.

A good sandwich, probably worth a stop if you’re in Pittsburgh, but not enough to inspire a road trip on its own.

And what would a jaunt to Pittsburgh be without sampling some pierogis, those lovely Eastern European dumplings? I didn’t have much time to search them out in Pittsburgh—ideally, one gets them from a Polish or Ukrainian church fair, made by hand and boiled to perfection in a well-worn pot carried over from the homeland—but I managed to get to a small Polish deli to grab a plate.

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Capitol Comics: Archie and the Gang in Washington, DC

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Despite the fact that Riverdale, much like Springfield, exists in every state in the U.S. and in no state at all, Archie Andrews and his chums still manage to visit places that do exist, including the Nation’s Capital, Washington, DC.

In one untitled story in Archie’s Double Digest 138 (January, 2003), Riverdale High takes the gang to Washington, DC, by bus. Given that the story appears in a digest, it’s almost certainly from an earlier time period, possibly, judging from the art, from the 1960s.

And of course, they visit the Capitol Building:

Archie and the Capitol Building

Not an altogether poor rendition of the west front of the Capitol, but one wishes there were that many trees still standing on the Capitol grounds after the Capitol Visitors Center construction . . .

Where else did Archie get up to his antics in DC?

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