Tulip City Dispatch

  Free beer, free beer, that's my favorite brand,  sing Da yoopers, if I didn't have to buy it, it's the best beer in the land.   So, too, says Your Favorite Uncle At Thanksgiving.  Warm, flat, funky, it don't matter to me, the greatest beer in this whole world is the one you buy for me. But then, the side comments set in: "Sam Adams?  That tastes like shit." "Founders?  Yeah, I worked there when they were brewing.  The hops smelled like sewage - they smelled like sewage!  I called my guys off because I thought we broke a sewer line!" "Want a Bud?  No?  You brought your own?  You're a beer snob now." "I don't drink that yuppy beer." "I like Busch because Busch Light is too redneck for me" I'd like to posit the idea that Baby Boomers don't really even like beer. By 1910, before Prohibition, there were 1,498 breweries in the United States.  By 1979, that number dwindled to fewer than 50.  While the quantity

 Over the weekend, I met a guy for beers.  The guy was the host of the Grand Rapidians Play Videogames podcast (which, upon further review, I have not actually reviewed yet ).  We got talking about podcasts and media, and how we'd initially encountered each other on teh intarnetz:  through a Discord server for The Daily Zeitgeist podcast.  I made the comment about how I followed TDZ host, Jack O'Brien, from his former job at Cracked.com.  Without Jack starting Cracked.com, then leaving to form TDZ, and me getting into the TDZ Discord server, I wouldn't have met that guy for beers. Cracked also begat Robert Evans , who has done battlefield reporting from places like Iraq and Syria, and has done front-line reporting in the upheavals in Portland, Oregon in summer 2020.  His insights into current events had influence on my attitudes toward future history .  It's important to reflect on current events as a historical blog, because that way, 20 years down the road , people wi