Thursday’s holiday ad is for Miss Rheingold of 1958, Madelyn Darrow, who’s getting out of a horse-drawn carriage laden-down with some beautifully Christmas presents. Mine never look that good, though I’m usually too lazy to even include a bow. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the thought that counts, not the wrapping.
Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Wright Brothers plane flying at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. Today, 56 years later, the Man Will Never Fly Memorial Society was founded, also at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The society appears to be completely tongue-in-cheek, as evidenced by their “history” and “mission.” Still, you have to long any organization whose motto is “Birds Fly, Men Drink.”
Our History
Our Society was born at Kitty Hawk on one of those dark and windy nights when nothing flew; even the seagulls bounced from place to place like hoppy toads. Our founders, who had been invited to attend a ceremony on December 17, honoring a pair of bicycle mechanics from Dayton Ohio, began drinking and thinking on the evening of December 16. They drank and they thought until the myth of the Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903 became as hard to swallow as the bootleg rye they imbibed.
Thus was born the society’s motto: “Birds Fly, Men Drink”. And thus its purpose: Exposure of the widely held myth of machines moving through the air with men “flying” them. This myth, it was clear, had its origins in folklore, long before the Wright Brothers. First came the nonsense of Cupid flying through the air. Then there was the fairy tale of Pegasus, a winged horse. Next came the fabled Arabian carpet. And the bit of flummery about a flying stork that dropped babies down chimneys. Small wonder that humankind, nourished on such nonsense, would believe that bicycle mechanics could move through the air like winged fowl.
Accepting the challenge these myths have perpetuated, The Man Will Never Fly Memorial Society has fought the hallucination of airplane flight with every weapon at its command save sobriety. We remain dedicated to the principle that two Wrights made a wrong at Kitty Hawk.
Our Mission
Members of the Man Will Never Fly Society are not opposed to flight. Birds do it, Bees do it, even educated fleas do it, as Cole Porter once said. But when you stop to think about it, do you actually believe that a machine made of tons of metal will fly? Small wonder that the editor of a Dayton newspaper said, when informed of the mythical first flight in 1903. “Man will never fly. And if he does, he will never come from Dayton.”
The Society’s members believe that balloons fly, but we do not believe in flying machines. Indeed, members of the Society have proposed a variety of apparati for movement through the ozone. One of our members is even cultivating an enormous jumping bean which, when saddled and heated by a laser, will propel a human for great distances.
But let us hear no more of plane moving through the air, unless they are hurled by carpenters. Airports and airplanes are for the gullible. Little do “plane” passengers realize that they are merely boarding Greyhound buses with wings, and that while aboard these winged buses, given the illusion of flight when cloud like scenery is moved past their windows by stagehands in a very expensive theatrical performance.
We ask you to gather under our banner and combat the myth that man can, did, or will ever fly, except in his or her imagination.
Wednesday’s holiday ad is also for Ballantine, this one from 1953. It shows an invisible refrigerator outdoors during winter, with the idea that the reader will equate Ballantine beer with the “Flavor that chill can’t kill,” whatever that means.
Tuesday’s holiday ad is for Ballantine, from 1940. Part of a series of dioramas Ballantine used in their ads at that time, the holiday one uses a triple wreath on the door with the pilgrim kissing his gal on the cheek.
The Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC) has produced a couple of PSA videos about safe drinking during the holiday season. The latest, How To Throw A Party is hilarious. With wonderfully cheesy music, faux grainy 8mm school film quality, and purposely groovy language it manages to get across a relatively good message about safe drinking over the holidays and even includes some decent party tips. Enjoy.
A week earlier, the OLCC debuted Safe Oregon Holidays. While not quite as retro as How To Throw A Party, it does still include a few gems.
Not to be snarky, but I especially love the designated driver … on horseback. Are they suggesting that’s how she’ll transport her drunk friends home?
Join me in congratulating our own Rich Higgins on being named a “Master Cicerone.” That makes Rich one of only three people to achieve the designation of “master.” If you don’t know Rich, he’s currently the brewmaster at San Francisco’s Social Kitchen & Brewery, a brewpub at 9th Ave. and Irving St. in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood, and is also the President of the San Francisco Brewers Guild and Director of SF Beer Week. He also operates the beer consultancy Rich Higgins Consultant à la Bière.
From the press release:
Rich Higgins is one of two candidates to pass this year’s Master Cicerone exam, becoming one of three individuals to achieve this pinnacle certification of beer expertise. The Master Cicerone exam was offered in the Chicago area in October of this year, occurring over two days and consisting of ten hours of essay questions, two hours of tasting and sensory panels, and two hours of oral examination.
Congratulations Rich!
Rich Higgins in his Social Kitchen brewery.
Maybe I was on to something when yesterday I suggested that we’re entering the “Golden Age of Beer Films.” Michael Ryan Lawrence, founder of Philly Philms, let me know this morning that there’s at least one more beer film in production. His film, Beeradelphia, is done being filmed and he’s in the editing process. A new website should be up next Monday, and that will feature “clips from the film, production photos, a blog” and more. You can also sign up for a newsletter there where you can follow along as announcements are made.
Here’s how he describes the film:
Beeradelphia is not just about beer. It’s about the home breweries and the home brewers. The local breweries and local brew pubs. The bar owners and the bar patrons. The beer festivals and beer events and all those that make them possible. The beer authors and beer personalities that keep us in “the know.” And of course… A film about Philly and Beer would not be complete without all the madness that is Philly Beer Week.
Beeradelphia is expected to be released early next year.
Monday’s holiday ad is for Budweiser, from 1949. A couple takes a break from putting up the Christmas tree for a sandwich and a Budweiser. Frankly, it doesn’t look they’ve done enough work yet to warrant a break but perhaps it’s not so much a break as their way of drinking the whole time they put up their decorations.
I’m starting to think we’re about to enter a period of time replete with films about beer, the “Golden Age of Beer Films” perhaps? There seem to be an awful lot in production right now, and I keep hearing about another one seemingly every other day. The latest is “Beer Culture,” which will be a film about Colorado’s beer scene. The film is being made by FM Productions who a couple of days ago posted the first trailer for their movie.
Here’s their description of the film:
Beer Culture is a documentary film about the growing trend in Craft Beer set in the epicenter of it all, Colorado. Beer Culture explains the cultural phenomenon behind the growth of craft beer telling it through the stories of struggles and successes of some top brewers in Colorado including, New Belgium, Oskar Blues, Avery Brewing Company, Tommyknocker, Upslope, including much more. This film is set to debut in the Summer of 2011.
There was yet another interesting piece in his month’s Playboy, an essay toward the back by Jessica Warner, the author of a recent book, All or Nothing: A Short History of Abstinence in America. Her essay, The United States of Abstinence: How Saying No Became A Distinctly American Practice, is definitely worth seeking out, but here’s the salient bits.
She begins by outlining the history of the idea of abstinence itself.
In no place other than America has the idea of abstinence — whether from food, drink, drugs or sex — taken root so deeply. Your federal tax dollars are currently being used to tell kids to put off sex until they enter into a “biblical marriage relationship.” The 1980s gave us Nancy Reagan and her antidrug mantra “Just say no.” A century earlier, Anthony Comstock crusaded to outlaw smut, penny dreadfuls and contraceptives, while Frances Willard led America’s women in a fight against demon rum. There have been so many crusades it is easy to forget that at one time, in the 17th and 18th centuries, abstinence meant only one thing to Americans: no sex until marriage. The idea that people should abstain from all other vices first appeared in the 1830s. What began as a campaign against distilled spirits suddenly morphed into a campaign against all forms of alcohol and then against all other “stimulants” — tea and coffee, pickles and spices, meats and apple pie, fancy clothes and double entendres, narcotics and soft mattresses, and, last but not least, sex with oneself.
She then quickly outlines the early influences of religions, and how different Christian denominations reacted differently to temperance sentiments based on their own interpretations of scripture, and specifically a peculiar idea, or doctrine, known by different names, such as “Christian perfection, sanctification, the second blessing or holiness.” That notion was essentially the “touchstone for abstinence in America.”
That idea leads adherents “to believe [people] can overcome sin in its entirety” and so “Christian perfection and abstinence are mutually reinforcing concepts of extreme behavior.” These manifest themselves into “a declaration of all-out war on sin.”
Not every denomination feels as strongly, but the stronger that commitment, “the more likely it encourages abstinence.” And in places like Great Britain, for those same reasons the idea of abstinence never caught on in the same way. There, church leaders like John Wesley — of the Methodists — believed their “religion does not lie in doing what God has not enjoined or abstaining from what he hath not forbidden.”
Among modern evangelicals, the Pentecostals have the strongest commitment to Christian perfection and the highest rate of teetotalism, reaching 70 percent. In contrast, Baptist churches vary in their commitment to perfection, and their overall rate of teetotalism, under 55 percent, is correspondingly lower.
And the Baptists, who over the last few years have had their leaders come out very publicly against alcohol, are not all in agreement at any rate.
When the Southern Baptist Convention recently attempted to reaffirm its “total opposition to the manufacturing, advertising, distributing and consuming of alcoholic beverages,” its younger members objected, complaining that the resolution needlessly “draws a line in the sand.” For the modern evangelical, abstinence effectively means one thing only: saying no to sex outside marriage. There is a certain irony in all this, for in drawing the line at the sins of the sexual revolution, modern evangelicals have, quite despite themselves, returned to the status quo ante, that is, to the looser moral code of America before the great evangelical revivals of the 1800s. The interesting question is whether the list of taboos will continue to shrink and, if so, what will be the next thing to go.
To me, that’s a fascinating question as anti-alcohol groups appear to be gaining influence, especially politically, while younger generations seem generally less interested in their rhetoric. I’ll be very interested to read the entire book, All or Nothing: A Short History of Abstinence in America, which I ordered right after I finished the article.