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Category: Beer Books
25th November 2020 | Art of Beer, Beer Books, Beer By Design, Books, CAMRA, Marketing, Writing
Beer By Design: My new book out now
With around 2500 breweries in the UK, many of whom sell core ranges, seasonals, limited editions and collabs, it's never been harder to stand out from the pack. That's why the look of beer has become the most creative and diverse of any packaged product. And that's why my wife and I did a book about it while (white) shielding.
Before I was a writer, I worked in advertising – and enjoyed it for a time. I was fascinated by the idea of brands: originally a simple mark of ownership, they evolved into carriers of additional meaning. At first, they were symbols of trust, of consistency and quality. Every tin you buy with a Heinz logo on it, every Cadbury's chocolate bar, is going to taste the same as the last one. If we like that taste, we remain loyal to most things that carry that logo. Then, brands took on a more abstract sense. If lots of people who are like you all think that a certain brand is cool, then by extension, in their eyes, you're cool if you wear it. Over the last thirty years we've all learned to use this abstract quality of brands, whether we do so consciously or not. We use brands and logos to build an idea of ourselves that we want to project to the world.
After Bass became the UK's first registered trade mark, beer brands developed certain stylistic conventions that remained fundamentally unchanged for over a century. The oval, or "racetrack" shape, use of a simple symbol, various cues of quality. It all started to look a bit… samey.
In the 21st century, craft beer tore up the rulebook of how successful beer branding was supposedly done. It set itself directly in opposition to conventional design to prove that it wasn't part of the mainstream.
This led to an extraordinary explosion of creativity. Among people who insisted they were influenced by the beer and not the marketing, like mainstream drinkers were, some enormously powerful brands were built.
Not all of it works as successful commercial branding, but most of it is gorgeous to look at, and some of it works as art in its own right.
And this branding revolution has affected the whole beer market, inspiring even established mainstream brands to rediscover the craft and art of design. This was pretty welcome for some older cask ale brands that had previously started to look dated and out of touch, and could now look contemporary in ways they never would have dared before craft moved the goal posts.
Sometimes, creative use of type, combining heritage typefaces with a few modern tricks, can make a brand look cool while still remaining true to its roots: a hard thing to pull off when it's much easier to look like you're desperately dad-dancing in a market you no longer understand.
Alternatively, a distinctive style of illustration can establish a common look across a wide range of beers at the same time as marking them out as different from everyone else.
Even the biggest brands realised there was more to the broader idea of craft than being small and independent, and rediscovered an idea of craft in their design that was firmly based in their heritage and longevity.
My wife Liz, who spent years working in the design industry, worked as picture researcher on this book. She had countless conversations with designers, artists and people working for breweries, and eventually gathered artwork from over 220 different breweries. When it came to making a book that looked as beautiful as a tome on design should, we didn't have room for all of it. (We feature about 145 breweries in the book in total.) That's why Liz will be launching a new blog – BeerByDesign.co.uk -tomorrow, and has also set up @BeerByDesignUK on Twitter and Instagram. This book is only the start of a conversation about design in which we aim to show some work in more depth, give behind the scenes peeks at how things develop, and interview designers and brewers about their work.
There's still a lot of shit design out there, and there are conversations to be had about what should or shouldn't go on a beer label, how it's regulated, and whether or not it works. But for now, we're keeping Beer By Design to the good stuff, things we like to look at, and things we believe help sell beer. If there is a job to do on the poor stuff, then maybe by showing the good stuff, we can inspire others to raise their game.
So please, if you're a brewer, artist or designer who thinks your work should be featured, or if you're a big fan of someone you believe should be here, go to BeerByDesign.co.uk and let us know!
You can of course buy the book from Amazon, but I'd prefer if you bought it from the CAMRA bookshop, for two reasons. Firstly, I think it's great that CAMRA were prepared to publish a book like this. It's a real sign that the organisation is taking a more modern, inclusive approach to beer than it has in the past, so it would be nice to show them how right they were to do it. And secondly, I get a significantly higher royalty on copies sold through CAMRA than through anywhere else.
Finally, we're holding the official launch party via Zoom tomorrow night, Thursday 26th, at 7pm, and you're invited. If you'd like to see me and some of the featured brands and designers talking about the book, and have a chat, sign up here. It will almost certainly end with one of these.
Beer By Design: it's the saviour of your Christmas shopping list.
There's a longer, more in-depth preview of the book over on my Patreon. You can sign up from just £1 a month. But sign up at the £25 level, and you'll get a free, signed copy of the book as a thank you. same goes for any future book I publish while you're still signed up at that level.
What should CAMRA do now to save cask ale – and itself?
I just finished writing my next book
What Ails Cask Ale? Part Two
Where were you while we were getting pie?
25th June 2020 | Beer, Beer Books, Beer Writing, Craft - An Argument
The future of "craft beer" depends upon us changing the arguments around it.
My new book, Craft: An Argument is published today. Written and self-published in the last thirteen weeks, it's an argument at least ten years in the making.
Does anyone still care about the meaning of the term "craft beer"?
I'm afraid I do – passionately.
Debates – sometimes furious arguments – have been going on for at least fifteen years now. I often hear craft beer dismissed as a "meaningless marketing term", both by people who think it's been co-opted by big brewers, and by people who think it never meant anything in the first place, on the grounds that it lacks a tight, technical definition.
Attempts by industry bodies to create such a definition have been fighting an orderly retreat since 2005: they began as multi-faceted lists of all the attributes many of us visualise when we think of craft beer. Thanks to both the growth and diversification of craft brewers and the attempts by Big Beer to co-opt craft, from an industry point of view, the only meaningful aspect of "craft beer" is that it is produced by an independent brewery. Brewer's Associations around the world are steadily rebranding as associations of independent brewers, and seem to be quietly retiring the word "craft" from use, just as they did "microbrewery" a decade ago.
So "craft beer" is in all kinds of problems. If we say craft = independent, like the US Brewers Association currently does, then Yuengling Light – a cheap, adjunct-filled mass-market lager made by a massive corporation – is officially a craft beer. Meanwhile, Goose Island Bourbon County Barrel-aged stout – regarded by many as the best barrel-aged stout in the world – is not a craft beer, on the grounds that Goose Island is now owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev. In this warped reality, it's hardly surprising if people think "craft beer" has lost its usefulness.
The thing is, millions of people around the world are really into something they call "craft beer". To many of them – particularly the early adopters and the people who are really engaged whit the industry, independent ownership is a really important part of what they're buying into. But to people who are already happy drinking beer owned by large corporations, and just getting into craft, telling them they "should" be drinking independent beer is a bigger task.
So this book is an attempt to separate craft beer from independence, and express its meaning in a way that works for any beer or brewery.
I argue that small, independent breweries not only need protection from rapacious Big Beer for their own sake, but also because they give the whole beer market the energy and dynamism that keep it healthy.
But that's no longer quite the same thing as craft, because big breweries and craft breweries change as they affect one another. So to find a new understanding of and relevance for the idea of craft beer, I've looked at the much older idea of craft as it applies beyond beer.
Firstly, there's this nonsensical idea, which many craft beer fans are reluctant to acknowledge, that craft beer has to be from a newish brewer rather an a traditional, long-established firm, and that it has to come with cool, funky packaging and design. There is no other area of craft where these factors are even considered. But every time someone argues that traditional British cask ale, which is produced in small batches by a master craftsperson, marketed locally, using established techniques and ingredients to create a product that is more flavourful and complex than mainstream beer, is not a craft beer, they expose the fact that for them, craft is more about image than the beer itself.
Looking closer at the broader idea of craft puts real ale at the heart of craft beer. And maybe that's why these are the beers that directly inspired the US craft beer movement the first place.
In addition, I found that independence and ownership are never mentioned in discussions of "craft" outside beer. Craftspeople always had wealthy patrons, sponsors or customers. What really matters is that craftspeople have some independence of action – that they are in charge of how they work, and can feel some degree of ownership over the tools they use, and a say in how the work turns out. It is far, far more likely that this will happen in a small, independent organisation than a large corporation, but not exclusively so.
Another important point to note is that we assume crafted products will be higher quality than mainstream, mass-manufactured products, and that the person making them will have a higher than average degree of skill. We expect this in craft beer and take it for granted. But it is absolutely not guaranteed. Craftspeople in other areas serve long apprenticeships before they can adopt that title. While there are apprenticeships and qualifications in craft brewing, no one is under any obligation to take them before buying a brew kit and calling themselves a craft brewer. Problems of quality and consistency in craft brewing are a threat to its integrity.
Finally, craft is as much an emotional idea as it is a practical one. It's a rejection of the values of a mainstream that enforces homogeneity and conformity. When you can buy a cheap, perfectly made thing of reliable quality, even if it's a bit dull – be that an IKEA chair, a Big Mac or a can of Budweiser – you're making a statement by spending more money on a crafted alternative. You're buying into a set of ethics and values as well as buying a thing.
Again, it's far more likely that small, independent brewers will embody all of these aspects, but it's not guaranteed that a big brewer never will or a small craft brewer always will. So there's a crucial difference between small and independent, and craft.
This doesn't get us to a tight, measurable definition of a craft beer or a craft brewer. But tight, measurable definitions go against what craft is all about. Craft is the embodiment of innate knowledge and skill, to the extent that many people who possess this skill cannot begin to put it into words. Craft beer is a concept that is full of meaning, far richer than any attempt to pin it down to a tight definition has ever captured. The lack of such a definition doesn't really diminish that meaning. For craft beer to survive and flourish, we need to hold any brewery to account on the skills and behaviours that truly make it craft – or not. Because this is what any craft beer drinker – be they a passionate flag-bearer for independence or a mainstream drinker looking for a change from Bud – is expecting when they buy the product.
Craft – An Argument: Why The Term 'Craft Beer' is Completely Undefinable, Hopelessly Misunderstood and Absolutely Essential,is available now in e-book format on nearly all major platforms around the world.(Links in this post are to amazon.co.uk but the book is also available on your local Amazon site, Kobo, Nook, and Google Play. It will be on Apple iBooks as soon as we figure out their Kafkaesque bugginess.) The book will also be available in a print-on-demand version by the end of the week, and an audiobook as soon as the incessant fucking drilling outside our house allows us to finish recording it.
Advance Reviews of Craft: An Argument
"One of the leading beer thinkers of our time, Pete delivers up well crafted, important insights into the nature of modern brewing. A must-read for brewers wanting to find their sense of place amongst the shifting sands of marketing, business, consumers and trends."
Matt Kirkegaard, Brews News
"In 2009's Hops and Glory, Pete Brown took a cask to India in order to reveal the true nature of India pale ale. In 2020's Craft: An Argument, he does the metaphorical equivalent to arrive at the meaning of 'craft' as it pertains to beer. While the journey is certainly shorter, it is no less rigorous, compelling, or splendidly entertaining."
Stephen Beaumont, co-author, The World Atlas of Beer
"Exciting and exuberant, this is a fascinating and fantastically articulate argument and polemic that heads straight to the heart of craft beer, written by a master craftsman at the height of his literary powers."
Adrian Tierney-Jones, 1001 Beers: You Must Try Before You Die
Writing a Book in Lockdown, Week 3: Here Come the Hard Yards
Under The Influencer
Calling publicans and bar staff – we need your for cask ale research!
What Ails Cask Ale? (Part One)
4th June 2020 | Beer Books, Beer Writing, Craft - An Argument
Lockdown Book Project Week 10: The book's written – but still so much to do
I'm writing and self-publishing a book in 13 weeks and sharing the experience for anyone doing or thinking of doing the same. This week: on the mad dash between manuscript and publication.
'Authentic Artisanal Beer' – craft beer buzzword bingo in this free-to-use stock photo from pexels.com
Days till publication: 21
I now know my book almost by heart.
A week after finishing it, I went over it and did a detailed edit before giving it to Liz for its 'proper' edit. The book is in three parts. She loved part two, hated part one, and was confused by part three. Luckily, part two is by far the longest part.
So I rewrote part one and gave it back to her. Since then I've read through and re-edited the book twice more. It's now just starting to show the kind of polished sheen it needs before it's good enough to publish.
It's at a stage where I now feel happy sending it out to a few primary readers to get their thoughts. While I await their response, there's time to briefly forget about the text itself and start focusing on all the other aspects of self-publishing – much of which is new to me.
Firstly, there are the practical aspects of routes to market. We now have the book listed as an e-book on all amazon territories, and I can see that people are pre-ordering it. Liz is spending most of her time trying to work out how to sort print-on-demand copies, which looks easy but turns out to be needlessly labyrinthine. Next week, we record the audiobook, and then we can work out how to get that listed too.
But it's also time to crank up pre-release marketing. Liz used to write press releases for a living, so she's doing one as I speak, and I'm pulling together a list of places for it to go out to. We've come to the conclusion that it's definitely a book more for those close to the brewing industry and craft beer movement than it is for a more general leadership. That may be niche, but in global terms it's a pretty big niche, so we're trying to make sure we cover all key territories.
All of this is a steep learning curve, but it's also a springboard for creative thinking. While I was writing the book, Liz was researching Patreon, the platform that allows creatives in any discipline to charge a subscription to access their work. I launched mine yesterday.
Patreon will go on to become a workflow and revenue stream in its own right, but it inspired me to come up with what I hope will turn out to be some successful promotional ideas. I created a pledge tier at £10 which gets people a copy of the book, and also their name in the back. At the £6 tier, I'm distributing a sample chapter in advance so people can get a sneak preview and give their feedback. I'm also trying to work out details of an online launch party, where Patrons get advance notice to sign up.
This is all changing the way I approach work and, if successful, is a model I'll build on after lockdown ends.
If you're doing a similar project, do remember to spend as much time as you can on marketing and trying to build a buzz. It takes repetition will probably push you out of your comfort zone in terms of how you feel about promoting yourself, but it's what any business and any publisher would do. Or any good one, at least.
My new book Craft – An Argument: Why The Term 'Craft Beer' is Completely Undefinable, Hopelessly Misunderstood and Absolutely Essential, will be published in e-book, audiobook and print-on-demand formats globally on 25th June. The ebook is available for pre-order now. (Links in this post are to amazon.co.uk but the book is also available on your local Amazon site.)
Lockdown Book Project Week 12: One Week Till Launch!
Beer Writer of the Year
Thinking of writing a book on lockdown? Here's how I start mine.
When Michael met Stef and Martin
21st May 2020 | Beer Books, Beer Writing, Books, Craft - An Argument, Writing
Lockdown Book Project Week 8: Why EVERYONE needs an editor.
I'm writing and self-publishing a book in 13 weeks and sharing the experience for anyone doing or thinking of doing the same. This week: the edit. Or rather, the first of the edits.
Image sourced from pxhere.com and marked free for personal and commercial use.
Publication date: five weeks from today.
Before I was a published writer, but when I knew I wanted to be one more than anything else, I would pore over the acknowledgements page in every book I read, searching for clues. Did these writers have people, or types of people, in common, who made the difference between them and me?
Apart from thanking long-suffering partners and family members, the most effusive thanks were always saved for the editor. I simply couldn't understand why. OK, so they cut a few words out, checked your spelling and took you out for lunch to celebrate the launch. I'm not saying that's not important (especially the lunch, now I earn what most writers earn) but it hardly came top of any list I would think of compiling.
And then, an editor at Pan Macmillan called Jason Cooper commissioned my first book.
Okay, that was definitely worth one of the biggest thank yous. But I soon learned that an editor did so much more.
I don't want to talk too much about professional publishing because this series of blog posts is aimed at people thinking of self-publishing, but you do want to try and get as close to a professional standard as you can, and I'm lucky enough to know now what that looks like.
Once an editor is convinced of the worth of your book, they become your voice, your ally, your champion inside the publishing house, fighting your corner against sales, marketing, publicity, design and everyone else to get them on board with your vision.
They become invested in the book, because this is now their reputation riding on it too. They only bought it because they love it just like you do. At worst, they're a valuable sounding board. At best, they are co-creators with you.
I over-wrote my first three books to an outrageous extent. Knowing I was brilliant, I couldn't see where any of my excellent words could be cut. On the first two, Jason showed me. I always remember one page with a very long paragraph on it that I said could not be shortened. Jason eventually took his red pen and crossed out about half the words, and after he'd finished, the paragraph somehow said more than it had before.
Of course, any good writer should be able to do a good chunk of this themselves. But you get too close to the subject when you've been working on it for two years or more. You forget where the base level of knowledge of your target reader is. Your forget how much you knew yourself about your subject before you started. So you can lose sight of what detail is important to exclude, and to include. After Jason left Pan Mac, Jon Butler edited Hops & Glory. Editors also need to be able to handle the fragile ego of the author, and my favourite note from Jon on the first draft of Hops & Glory read, "Pete, I'm absolutely loving this. So interesting. My only comment so far is that I've picked up a book about a sea voyage to India, and I'm on page 156 and I'm still stuck on a canal boat just outside Burton on Trent…"
The last editor I worked with on a narrative book was Cecilia Stein, who has just moved on from Penguin. Cecilia reminds me of the quote attributed to Michaelangelo, who, when asked how he sculpted so well, replied that he simply cut away all the bits that didn't look like the object or person he was carving. On The Apple Orchard and Pie Fidelity, Cecilia could see the book inside my first draft that was very similar to the book I thought I was writing, but better, and she helped bring that book out of me instead, cutting away all the bits that were not part of it.
Our confusion around editing is that with a book-length project, there are actually two edits, which in my experience are done by two different people. What Jason, Jon and Cecilia did is known as the structural edit. When we think of the red pen, the punctuation and grammar corrections, we're talking about the copy edit.
I'm grateful to have worked with such brilliant editors in large publishing houses. Because it's taught me that, even on a self-published project, I need both edits. I know why I need them, and I firmly believe that any writer of any level of experience or ability needs them too.
So how can you get this level of edit if you're self-publishing?
There are various options. I'm very lucky in that I'm married to someone who has never worked as a literary editor but is so good at it she's thinking of it as a next career. Liz is what Stephen King refers to as my "primary reader." She is my biggest fan and greatest critic. She is the person I want to get engaged in the subject, the person I want to make laugh and, occasionally, cry. She's perfect for my subject area in that she loves drinking craft beer but shuts off from any geeky discussion about it. When I was working with Cecilia, it turned out that Liz's instincts were exactly the same as hers. Liz would make suggestions that I would disagree with or be sceptical about, and then Cecilia would make exactly the same points.
A book is like having a baby. You have to completely trust whomever you hand it over to to look after. That bond of trust is a special thing, and when you find it, you have to trust what that person says. They're nearly always right.
On Craft: An Argument, Liz gets the dubious honour of being thanked as both long-suffering partner and editor. She even came up with the revised title, which editors usually do for me – I'm rubbish with titles. She's spent most of this week reading a paper copy of the first draft, scribbling notes furiously on a pad beside her, making noises of surprise, confusion, and occasionally, satisfaction. If you're looking for objective support from your biggest fan and greatest critic, then, "This is brilliant, I really enjoyed reading it, especially part two, and except for part one, which is all over the place and I have absolutely no idea what's going on, why we're here or why you're talking about any of this," is just what you need to hear.
If you're not lucky enough to have such a partner, at least try giving it to two or three friends who you know are going to be straight with you – people who are close enough to you to know that they'e not going to hurt your feelings or jeopardise the friendship, but are on your side and aren't going to take the piss or be cruel just because they're jealous of your ambition. Even Stephen King does this. If you are part of a community of writers, you could even do a contra deal with another writer to do a through and honest structural edit of your work and return the favour for their future project. I believe a writer can learn to do a structural edit pretty easily. I just don't think a writer is capable of doing it on their own work.
If you have a bit of budget to spend, websites such as peopleperhour.com are full of freelancers who would be happy to do an edit for you for a modest hourly rate.
Whatever you do, don't assume you can get by without this fundamental step. Sadly, a solid structural edit seems to be going out of fashion thanks to big name authors being too important to disagree with or push back against, and topical books being rushed to market to capitalise on news or current affairs or the notoriety of the author.
I promise you this, as someone who has now been through the process ten times: however good you think your first draft is, and however confident you are in your abilities to write brilliantly and then be an objective judge of your own work, a firm structural edit WILL improve the quality of your book.
I won't talk too much about the copy edit, which we're hoping to get to early next week, because I think it speaks for itself: I mean, have you ever read my tweets?
The Pub: A Cultural Institution
'Miracle Brew' is coming – at last!
19th May 2020 | Art of Beer, Beer, Beer Books, Beer Marketing, Beer Writing, Books, Writing
Brewers! Design agencies! I want YOU for my next book project.
You wait ages for a book and then two come along at once. Here's a new project I'm delighted to be working on with CAMRA Books: "The Art of Beer".
In a perfect world, as a full-time writer of books you should be promoting the book that just came out, finishing off the next one, and planning the one after that, all at the same time. Lead-times are long in publishing, and a years gap between finishing one project and starting the next can easily turn into a three-year gap between the publication of one book and the next.
It never works out like that in reality. Timelines get stretched in some places and compressed in others. Coronavirus has really exacerbated this.
So: the paperback of my last book, Pie Fidelity, was published on 23rd April but thanks to warehousing and distribution issues related to lockdown it is only available this week. I'll come back to that later in the week.
My self-published book, Craft: An Argument, is almost finished and will be published on 25th June.
And now I'm starting work on my next one. The Art of Beer will be a lavishly illustrated book about beer design and packaging, published by CAMRA Books in October 2020.
I came into beer from marketing and still occasionally get involved in consultancy on packaging design. As Chair of the Beer and Cider Marketing Awards, I've had the job of overseeing the judging of best beer packaging design sat a time when designers have thrown the rulebook out of the window. Now I get to celebrate all of this in book form.
It would be very, very easy to gather together images of the coolest craft beer labels and cans around at the moment, and fill a book with wonderful designs like these:
Magic Rock, by Richard Norgate
Black Iris, by Kev Grey
Siren, by voyagebrand.co.uk
And we will certainly be doing a lot of that. This is book to be gazed at with longing.
But I wouldn't be able to think of myself a a writer if that was all it did.
So while the book will major on beautify craft beer designs, it will also tell the story of beer design, labelling and packaging from when it really took off as a discipline in the late nineteenth century until the present day.
We'll start with why brands became so important, looking in particular at why the UK's first ever registered trade mark was for Bass Pale Ale:
The first UK trade mark
We'll look at the theory of how branding is supposed to work, and the tricks designers use to make a product stand out from the competition, and make you desire it.
We'll explore the how and why of beer logos:
Since 1964, the 'e' n Heineken has been tilted so it 'smiles'.
Milton Glaser's original sketches for the Brooklyn logo
We'll talk about why some brewers prefer typographical designs, and how that works:
Devastatingly simple, universally admired, and much copied: The Kernel
And we'll look at why certain picture-led routes are enduringly popular:
Local history is enduringly popular for cask ale
We'll also be looking at the history of bottles and cans, the clever use of different bottle shapes, crown cap designs, and secondary packaging such as gift boxes, six-pack holders and so on.
If you are a brewer or design agency that is really proud of your design work, and you'd like it to feature in the book, please drop us a line on petebrownsemail@gmail.com. We have only two rules:
1. While we're not limiting this to British beers only, any beer featured must be readily available on sale in the UK.
2. Whole there's a lot to be written about poor or questionable design, this book will only feature designs that the team think are beautiful or are otherwise important in the history and evolution of beer design.
So please – sen us your beers! And if you're a beer fan rather than a brewer and you think there's a beer we should definitely feature, let me know. (And thanks to everyone who did so when I asked this question on Twitter and Facebook last week.)
Bass Ale is back. I wish I were more delighted.
Tasting Beer: Some Thoughts and Reflections
The Premature Demise of Craft Beer: How Fake News Really Works
30th April 2020 | Beer, Beer Books, Beer Writing, Books, Craft Beer, The Meanings of Craft Beer, Writing
Lockdown Book Project Week 5: Hitting The Wall
I'm writing and self-publishing a book in 13 weeks and sharing the experience for anyone doing or thinking of doing the same. This week: what happens when you lose your way.
Word count at the start of this week: 40381
Word count this morning: 38345
There's a point when you're running a marathon where you hit a wall – or so I've been told. And if writing a feature or blog post is a sprint, writing a book is a marathon. The wall is waiting here too, halfway through. Everything stops. Your confidence runs like piss down your legs. You're a fucking idiot for even trying this. What were you thinking, you deluded twat. Go home. Get under the covers. Never show your face again.
I try to achieve something different, something more, as a writer with each book I write. I go to different places. I wrestle with how much of myself to put into the text. It's always difficult – I make sure of that. My last book was my most personal yet, in a subject area I hadn't really written about before. It got really tough in the middle. At one point I turned to Liz and said, "I don't think I can do this. I've taken too much on. I can't deliver the book I promised to the publisher. I think I'm going to have to pay back the advance. I've reached the limit of what I can do. I've never felt like this before."
She looked at me steadily and said, "Lovely, you've said that in the middle of every single book you've written."
This time is different, but of course it always is. This time there's no advance, and Liz is the publisher. The motivation to keep going has to come entirely from within.
This project was designed to provide structure and purpose to our lives during an indefinite period of lockdown, and also to provide a source of income at some point in the near future. It's a buttress against the stress we all feel around Covid-19, but yesterday the fear and anxiety got through.
I had a bad day.
I bet every single one of us is having bad days and good days. Yesterday I heard some grim projections about the future for pubs – even grimmer I should say – and became very pessimistic. I compartmentalise as a way of dealing with negative thoughts, and yesterday the bulkheads went and they flooded in.
This happened when I was already struggling with the book itself. Last week I talked about thickets. I've been in a really big one. People often say to me, "Ooh, you write just how you talk!" It's the biggest compliment anyone can give me, because it shows I've succeeded in hammering the subject into my style. But because my style is easy and open and readable, people sometimes think it must therefore be easy to write like that. It really isn't. Especially when you're dealing with complicated topics that are new to you, and you're trying to understand academic writing, retain it in your head, put your perspective on it, and then get the whole thing down in your own tone of voice and make it look simple and conversational.
I'm currently writing about the history of work, division of labour, and scientific management. I'm lightening this with reminiscences of going through the round window on Play School, and the enduring popularity of The Good Life, then trying to round it off with the story of a car advert from 1979. At the end of this bit in my notes, there's 2500 words on tools and machines and their relationship to craft and craftspeople. It doesn't belong here. It doesn't belong anywhere. But it's really important that it goes in somewhere. I can't find where it fits, but it has to. Whether it goes here or not, I need to link either it or the car ad directly to the meditation on nostalgia that follows, which then jumps to a bit about Colin Wilson's book The Outsider, before coming back to nostalgia again in a craft beer-specific context via a discussion of pricing. In other words, despite all my careful planning, it's a fucking mess.
I don't think I can do this. I've taken too much on. I can't deliver the book I promised. I've reached the limit of what I can do. I've never felt like this before.
I can of course, because I have nine times before. As a source of – not comfort exactly – but bitter, empty strength, I remember my favourite line from Samuel Beckett: "I can't go on. I'll go on." I pissed away yesterday afternoon playing Warhammer Total War, drank too much, slept through my alarm this morning, got to my desk two hours late.
And then I sat down, said goodbye to the 2500 words that had been blocking me, and started writing again. It's going quite well. I wouldn't have had the energy to stop and procrastinate and write this instead if it wasn't.
It happens to all of us. The difference between people who want to write a book and the people who have written books is the stamina to get through this wall.
When I was writing Man Walks into a Pub, one Saturday morning I heard the thwack of something heavy hitting the doormat. It was an A4 brown envelope which contained – I think – the fifth round of changes requested by my editor. "I can't do this," I said to Liz. I threw the envelope and its contents in the bin. I said "Fuck it. For the first time in six months, I'm going to read something that isn't about beer. Maybe I'll try again to be a novelist instead!"
I went to the book shelf and picked up a novel by Chuck Palahniuk. I got as far as the dedication, which said something along the lines of "To my editor, for saying this is not good enough. Again, and again, and again." I went to the bin, too out the envelope, and got to work.
That stage is still to come – Liz has promised me she will be as tough as she needs to be when she assumes the role of editor. So this is not the last wall. But it is the first. I think I've got over it. Or through it. Now I just need to go on.
My new book The Meanings of Craft Beer: Why The Term 'Craft Beer' is Completely Undefinable, Hopelessly Misunderstood and Absolutely Essential, will be published in e-book, audiobook and print-on-demand formats globally on 25th June. It really bloody well will.
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21st April 2020 | Beer Books, Beer Writing, Books, The Meanings of Craft Beer, Writing
Lockdown Book Week 4: Open Road, Thickets and Rabbit Holes
I've set myself the task of writing and publishing a book during lockdown, and sharing my experience with anyone else thinking of doing the same, especially if it's the first time you've tried. This week, we're finally deep into the main part: getting the words down.
Before I had my own first book published, I used to have a whole shelf of books with titles like 'How to become a published author.' I'd read the blurbs on the back cover and they'd invariably say something like "xxxxx is a global bestselling author who has written 18 books, and now they share their secrets!" And I'd think "Well how come I've never heard of you then?"
Then, one day, I spotted Stephen King's On Writing. I'd never read any of King's books at that point, but I thought, "He's one of the best-selling writers in the world. I bet he knows what he's talking about."
He does. I reread King every time before I start a book. Full or practical advice, it's also inspiring and makes you want to write.
Wanting to write is the most useful bit.
Actually sitting down and getting the words out is the hardest part of being a writer. There are bits where it feels like your brain is trying to climb out of your ear and make a run for it. Times when you look at the page and you just know that completing a sentence is beyond your powers. Yesterday I wrote 280 words in a day, and they are shit words that will need to be rewritten at some point. Today so far I've written 1800, and I feel like I have more to come if I can get other chores finished and still have some energy left.
Most writers I know have a specific time of day when it works best. Only you know when your time is. Bruce Robinson, writer of Withnail and I, wrote in the small hours of the morning, drinking red wine as he did so, until he was wankered by the time his family get up for breakfast. I used to enjoy my attempts at writing fiction in the evenings. But doing what I do now, the hours between 7am and 11am are precious. If I try to write all day, by the end, 80% of what I've done happens in that time slot.
For some writers it's about a word count rather than a time slot. I don't fetishise my wordcount as much as I used to, but it's still the measure of success I use in a first draft. Once the words are down you can move them, cut them, change them, polish them. I massively overwrite, and then rely first on my wife, and then my editor, to help me rein it back in. (On this book, that's the same person.)
Some novelists start writing not knowing how the story is going to turn out. For a heavily researched non-fiction book, you can't do that. That's why I spend so much time doing the planning I've spoken about in previous posts. I see the research and planning as laying road, and once the road is down, I can run along it. There are various adventures along the way.
I wrote the last thousand words I did today in less than an hour. There was a bunch of italicised notes sitting between chunks of finished text I wrote last week, and whenever I wrote those, for some reason this but wasn't happening, so I left it to come back to later. I refer to these bits as 'thickets'. They're usually caused by me having to synthesise several different lines of research, or link one big point to the next in a smooth way. They can hold me up for hours.
One useful way of getting through them is to switch from typing to trying to write out what I want to say longhand. It seems to call on a different part of the brain that looks at the writing in a different way.
If this doesn't work, the trick is to leave it and move on to something else, which is what I did last time I got stuck on this part. The brain continues to process its way through the thicket at some deep level, or maybe you were just so close to it you couldn't see the wood for the trees. Coming back to it today, it was suddenly clear again, a stretch of open road that I galloped down for about a thousand words before I needed a breather.
My other main hazard on the open road is the rabbit hole. This is when I'm running along and get tripped up by something seemingly small and innocuous. Last week, I wanted to write two sentences which showed that, craft beer notwithstanding, there was a general preference among a large number of people to buy from small, independent businesses rather than large corporations. So I googled these words and immediately got a hit on an American study that showed trust in both big and small companies was high, but trust in smaller companies was higher. Then the hit below that was from another study that showed only 30% of people trusted large corporations. Both studies were by reputable organisations with large sample sizes. The discrepancy might have had something to do with how the question as asked – it often does – but apart from that I wanted to find some UK stats for comparison, and soon I'd spent an hour getting increasingly frustrated researching something that will be a maximum of two sentences tossed off in passing, and may even end up being edited from the final manuscript.
So the next couple of weeks are about hitting the open road, getting the words down, and remembering to leave thickets and rabbit holes and come back to them later, as part of what builders refer to as 'snagging' at the end of a job.
To paraphrase Eric Morecambe, it's about getting the right words down – just not necessarily in the right order yet.
My new book The Meanings of Craft Beer: Why The Term 'Craft Beer' is Completely Undefinable, Hopelessly Misunderstood and Absolutely Essential, will be published in e-book, audiobook and print-on-demand formats globally on 25th June.
More new writing from me for the price of a pint: Why I'm launching a Patreon
What bacon rolls tell us about the decline of civilization
16th April 2020 | Beer Books, Beer Writing, Books, Craft Beer, The Meanings of Craft Beer, Writing
I'm writing and self-publishing a book during lockdown, and sharing my experience with anyone else thinking of doing the same, especially if it's the first time you've tried. This week: getting closer to the real words.
Every book has its own reading list
Word-count at the start of week 3: 21581
I started this series of blog posts by showing how I plan a book on my wall using post-its. To show what happens next, I need to jump back a bit.
This book was inspired by my having read one book in the stack above: Cræft, by Alexander Langlands. As the idea took shape, and grew from a rough talk to a scripted slideshow presentation, and then to a long essay and finally into a book-length treatment, so my reading expanded. I think this is only the second time I've had a book idea directly as a result of reading someone else's, but even if a book I telling the story of me taking a physical journey, I always do a lot of desk research before I set off. My reading for this project has been going on for about a year now.
The first few weeks of the process are great fun. I usually start off with one book, or maybe a Wikipedia entry, and check the sources and bibliography for other titles. Certain books are mentioned again and again, and you soon realise these are the pre-eminent books in their field. I tend to be a bit of a generalist with my own books, covering a broad area, so I'm never that worried about finding someone else who has done exactly what I'm aiming to do.
Once I have a list of every book I need, I can pick them up pretty cheaply. If you haven't come across it, AbeBooks is an aggregator of thousands of bookshops around the world. Unless one of the titles you're looking for is particularly rare, you can usually pick up any book for less than a fiver, including postage. If you're looking for something old and out of copyright, there's a good chance you can download a PDF or kindle of it for free from sites such as the Gutenberg Project.
The above photo shows the main pile of books I've used on this project.
Once I have my books, I have a fairly laborious research process that I would love to improve upon, but haven't been able to. I read each book with a pencil in my hand, marking the passages I think I might want to directly refer to, and writing any thoughts that occur to me while reading in the margin. After I've finished each one, I sit with the book at my desk, and write up a set of notes, each book in a separate word document, copying out the marked passages and either paraphrasing them or typing them as direct quotes. I write up my marginalia in italics so I can see what were my own thoughts and insights and what I'm taking from the text itself. At a certain point, when I think I have enough research (and it's never easy to drag yourself from the research to the writing phase) that's when I go through all my notes and generate the famous wall of post-its, to which I add much more of my own material, notes from travel if I've done any for the book, and so on.
I detailed last week how I get from a wall of random post-its to an outline of the book in a word document. At this stage, I would love it if I could just start writing, referring back to my notes as and when I need to. On an article, that would be easy. But for a 50,000- to 100,000-word book, the scope of it, the expanse of it, is simply too much for me to keep in my head at this stage. I think this is why so many people who would love to write a book are daunted by the prospect: how do you keep any kind of coherence over such a long slog?
By the time I'm close to finishing writing a book, the whole thing is alive inside my brain. I know where every key point is, almost down to the page number. I can almost see the shape and structure of the book in my head, and turn it in virtual space to look at it from all angles, checking the joins and the flow. But when I'm in that state, there's no room for anything else in my brain. If my wife pops her head round the door and asks if I'd like a cup of tea, I forget my name and what day it is, and find myself completely unable to answer. This is not a good place to be for any longer than a week or two. So to get to that state at the right time, I have to use more tricks.
(By the way – if you're writing a book that's more of a reference or guide, you don't need to worry about any of this. If you know you're writing a guide to, say, the best 300 beers from Belgium, you know how long each entry has to be and what information has to be in it. It's no less of a slog, and the monotony of it brings its own special endurance challenges, but at least the route is clearly marked out for you. With a long-form narrative – fiction or non-fiction – you have to lay down the road before you can travel upon it.)
So here's what I've been doing over the last week.
My notes from books gave me my post-its, and the post-its gave me my outline. But by the time I've written the outline down, I can't remember who said what or where most things come from. At this stage, I have no option but to go back to my notes and go through them in detail to start fleshing out the outline.
I'm learning a lot of new stuff here, in a subject area I haven't explored before. I'm not yet quite confident enough with the fine detail. The structure is different from anything else I've written in that it's not a story – chronological or based on a journey or whatever – it's an argument. So I know the book falls into parts 1, 2 and 3, and that part 2 itself splits into an intro and three main sub-parts: (o), (i), (ii), and (iii). So I go through every page of my notes, and mark up which part of the book each point belongs in.
As I write or cut and paste each point across, I put a line through it.
Often, as I'm copying a point across, or I put two previously separate bits together, it will spark a thought and I'll write a sentence, a paragraph, or even a page or two. Every single rush or spark of inspiration is precious, so I let it run its course before going back to transcribing the notes. Anything that's cut and pasted joins the italicised outline, to distinguish it now from my own text in the main font.
I'll be honest: this bit doesn't feel like proper writing. But by the end, I know that, say, part 2(i) is all about the nineteenth century Arts & Crafts movement and that every point I have about Arts & Crafts is in part 2(i) of the document, in approximately the right order. I now have a 20,000-word manuscript, some of which has random outbursts of writing which hopes to make it to the finished text, the rest of which still needs to be rewritten and joined up into a proper narrative.
So that's the boring bit out of the way. I have nearly everything I need in the document that will eventually become the book. Next task: actually write the bastard, in my own words.
The Meanings of Craft Beer: Why the term 'craft beer' is completely undefinable, hopelessly misunderstood and absolutely essential, which be published in e-book, audiobook and print-on-demand formats globally on 25th June.
Book events this summer – and this weekend!!
Lockdown Book Project Week 6: Available for Pre-Order!
Craft Beer Skull Watch: The first in an occasional series
2nd April 2020 | Beer Books, Beer Writing, Books, The Meanings of Craft Beer, Writing
The Meanings of Craft Beer: My lockdown book, out 25th June
I've set myself a 13-week project: to write and self-publish a new book that I've been wanting to write for the last year. Here's what it's all about.
I find myself between jobs. Between assignments. Between books. We have no household income for now. Being a freelance writer is precarious enough at the best of times. Being a freelance writer in the first industry to be completely shut down by Coronavirus is pretty absolute.
Lockdown is psychologically tough for everyone. The thing is… back in the olden days I used to pay good money to hire a cottage near the sea where I could be on my own, not speak to anyone, and rarely leave the house. It's something I do at least once, if not twice, in the process of writing a book. I get the most insane amount of work done in those writing weeks. So now I'm presented with similar circumstances (albeit without the sea, sadly) the sensible thing to do would seem to be to write a new book. So yesterday, I took to social media to gauge interest in a self-published e-book and audiobook (the lead times on paper books are much longer) and the response has encouraged me to make it happen. So here goes!
This is an idea that grew out of a short, ten minute talk, into a longer 25-minute talk, and then into an hour-long slideshow presentation. I was expecting people to be annoyed by it. Instead, the audiences of those shows asked me when the book was coming out. When I said there was no book, they told me in no uncertain terms that there should be.
It's fair to say that it's a niche topic and both my agent and the usual publishers I work with have no interest in it. But publishers work in one country at a time and the niche audience who will be interested ion this book on a global scale os pretty big, hopefully. So digital self-publishing is the way to go.
OK Pete, but what's the frikkin' book ABOUT? I hear you ask. OK, here goes.
A year or so ago, I picked up this then-newly published book:
It mentions craft beer once on the first page, and then never again. Instead, it puts forward an argument for working with your hands and reviving skills that our technological age has seemingly deprived us of.
It made me realise that the word 'craft', when shackled to the word 'beer', has had its meaning changed quite substantially. It also made me realise that one big reason there is no satisfactory definition of 'craft beer' is that in order to have one, you need to have the definition of the word 'craft' fairly locked down. And it isn't. It's a word that shifts meaning and struggles against being pinned down.
From here I went off on a journey exploring the concept of 'craft' in its broadest sense: the difference between craft, art and science; the artificial separation of manual work and intellectual work; the difference between learned knowledge and innate knowledge and how craft unites the two. I explored the Victorian Arts & Crafts movement and visited William Morris's house in Walthamstow. I read books by hippie furniture makers, Victorian wheelwrights and professors of linguistics. Each book I read had something important and life-affirming in it. It was a diverse selection of voices, but each one spoke about what makes work, and ultimately life, more meaningful.
Coming back to conversations around craft beer with this broader perspective on craft, I realised that we're talking about the wrong things. Craft beer is – or can be – an important, meaningful and nourishing concept. In fact it is. When I've been speaking to drinkers and makers of craft beer about some of the ideas I've explored, they recognise them from their own experience, instantly. But our conversations aren't framing that experience in a useful way, and that's why all those debates around the definition of craft beer are so fruitless and infuriating.
So at the moment, the book is called The Meanings of Craft Beer: Why The Term 'Craft Beer' Is Completely Undefinable, Hopelessly Misunderstood, and Absolutely Essential. Like most of my books, it's totally about beer, and at the same time, kind of not really about beer at all.
The book falls into three three parts:
Part One: 'Craft Beer' is Completely Undefinable
I kick of by looking at the evolution of the concept of craft beer, analysing and demolishing attempts to give it a concrete, technical definition, and exploring why this is an impossible task.
Part Two: 'Craft Beer' is Hopelessly Misunderstood
Here, in the main part of the book, I explore the broader concept of craft and, where relevant, give examples from beer. I look at the definition of 'craft' itself, before going into detail around what I see as three key times when interest in craft spiked, and why:
i) The Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century, in response to the industrialisation of work (when brewing was going through its own industrial and technological revolution.)
ii) The craft revival of the 1970s, in response to the automation of manual labour and the growth of big brand corporations (when CAMRA appeared in the UK and what would later be called craft brewing emerged in the US.)
iii) The craft revival of the 2010s, in response to online existence, the absolute dominance of corporations, and the deskilling of white-collar work (when the craft beer boom went global.)
Part Three: Craft Beer is Absolutely Essential
Having destroyed definitions of craft beer, then looked at the world of craft more broadly, we come back to 'craft beer' and rebuild it using what we've learned. I'll argue that even if it can't be technically defined, it remains a meaningful and important concept, and focus on the issues that make it so. I finish by looking at alternative terms and dismissing these too, before suggesting a tongue-in-cheek solution for what we should in fact call it.
If that sounds like something you'd be interested in reading, keep checking in here, where as well as writing the book, I'll also be going through my process, sharing my thoughts around it and talking about how I work, in case that's useful for anyone else who is considering using this strange time to write that book you've always wanted to write.
I'm currently weighing up different options for publication, looking at the pros and cons of Kindle, Patreon etc. I'll share my experience of this side of things too. My intention is to publish an e-book and audio book (with me narrating) on 25th June, retailing at somewhere between £5 and £7.
I hope you'll buy it.
Write (or tweet, or Instagram, or podcast) about beer? If so, what can we do to help?
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Pete Brown is a British writer who specialises in making people thirsty. He is the author of nine books and writes widely in the drinks trade press and consumer press.
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text:
Q: How to make `st_join` stricter? I used st_join() to combine t1 and t2.
library(sf)
j <- st_join(
  x = t1,
  y = t2
)

t1 represents voting precincts boundaries and t2, school zone boundaries. In some cases, the boundaries of t1 fit perfectly in one school zone but because the borders touch two other zones, st_join lines up a precinct with three zones.
How can I make st_join stricter so that if a precinct in t1 is mostly or seemingly entirely within a zone boundary of t2, the precinct lines up with only that zone, no others?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Older and wiser: Stars share biggest lessons they've learned about aging, sex and beauty in 2022
Celebrities share their unique perspectives on what aging means to them. (Photo: Getty Images and Nadeen Nakib)
Whether it's advertisements for anti-aging skin care products or yearly 30 under 30 lists, the world often places a great importance on youth. Yet the truth is, aging is a gift — one not everyone gets to experience. It's also one that comes with wisdom, new perspective and plenty of life experience. This year, Yahoo Life's series Unapologetically spoke to individuals who have walked many different paths and have a unique outlook on what it means to get older. For some, aging includes a hotter sex life. For others, it's about caring a lot less about what people think of them.
While youth may be applauded, there are plenty of reasons to embrace the aging process — just read what these stars have to say about it.
"I don't focus on age. Age is so irrelevant. Who cares about how old anybody is? I could tell you that I'm 30 or I could tell you that I'm 70 — I'm still the same person sitting here. I don't think that age has anything to do with anything. I'm just me. I'm just Donna." — Donna D'Errico
"It's important, particularly for women, to claim every day that they have been on this earth because it's not easy ... I am so much happier in my own skin as a 40 year old woman than I have been at any point in my life. I think something happens in your mid to late thirties where you just start realizing like, 'Oh, I don't have to give a s*** about what anybody else thinks about me ... I'm not here to do anybody else's work or anybody else's job. I'm not here to live anybody else's truth. I'm just here to fully, 100% be me.' And I finally feel like at 40 years old, I'm really embracing that and loving it and enjoying it." — Jodie Sweetin
Celebrities speak out about what aging means to them. (Photo: Nadeen Nakib)
"There's plenty of women my age who really love going on vacation, prancing around the beach, wearing whatever they want to wear and not being afraid of other people making sneering comments. So I think it's just about really saying, work out what you're comfortable with, work out what you believe in. And whilst always being open to new opportunities and to change, stick to your guns when you know something you feel strong about." — Elizabeth Hurley
"I'm not a young spring chicken anymore and, it is what it is. I do the best I can. I eat pretty good. I exercise. I just try to stay healthy, and be the best I can at my age. That's all you can do." — Vanna White
"Sex after 50 is amazing…You know why? Because you take your time. There's no Energizer bunnies going on after 50. After 50, you know what you want and you're not afraid to say it." — Sherri Shepherd
"The mantle of sex symbol is quite a heavy one decades later. You're frozen in time in celluloid history at the peak of your beauty and at your goal weight. You can't help but chafe at the thought that people are comparing you favorably or unfavorably to what you look like when you're age 23 — but you have to let that go." — Tia Carrere
"I have ridden my sexuality along into my older age and very happily so, and I'm grateful for that … It takes courage and a willingness. What's important is to know that you don't have to stay sexually active, [but] you can stay sexual. We always have those vibrators that are getting more and more sophisticated every year. And, um, boy — do I get sent a lot of vibrators." — Jane Fonda
"We need to provide examples for young women of what aging well looks like, and what being healthy looks like, as opposed to telling them that it's OK to lose 16 pounds to fit into Marilyn Monroe's dress. I think that is a dangerous destructive message. Hopefully, I'm here to inspire other women to join this movement, to be who we are and know that this is not only is this enough, it's more than enough." — Melissa Gilbert
"Now that I'm in my 40s, what I'm most unapologetic about is the times when I'm 'feral.' It's an Australian word — it's when you're not put together, your hair is a mess, you don't have makeup. Before, I used to be like, 'Oh my God, I don't want people seeing me like that.' Now I'm like, 'You know what? If you're coming around to my house, I'm just going to be feral, in my natural state.' I'm not going to [have] any pretenses, or anything like that." — Rebel Wilson
"I don't feel any different, really, then when I was 40 or 50. Am I younger in spirit than I am in age? Probably — until I, you know, run and jump and suddenly realize that I don't land quite as well as I did before." — Jane Seymour
"The thing about ageism for women in Hollywood is that it's changing. Women are making their own projects. We're writing our own stories. Those projects aren't just for young women and men, they're for people that are experienced and seasoned. That's why it's so important that we get more creative people in the process to write different types of stories that don't just focus on one body type or culture, or one age or gender … A lot of people over 50, they want to see themselves." — Loni Love
"I believe that it's a misconception that women can't be sexy over a certain age … The acceptance of our bodies comes at a later date. I live much more in my body now than I ever did. My body actually feels like it belongs to me and I can't say that about my youth ... My 30s, it wasn't really about being sexy. It was having your body work to create something. So that, that was like a 10-year kind of journey. And it wasn't until my 40s that I started thinking of sex as my experience, not someone else's experience that I just navigated." — Brooke Shields
"I'm about to turn 44 and I've started looking back a bit, because you've got enough to look back on. And I have a lot of regrets. I get frustrated with myself for not knowing better, and I didn't know better. So I don't know how I could have made different choices, not having any better understanding. But I wish I had known better, I guess, and that I had not spent so much time in this dark place of fear." — Katherine Heigl
Going on an adult all-girls holiday is good for you – here's why
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Hilary Duff remains close to ex Joel Madden
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Paris Hilton welcomes first child
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Melissa Gorga admits she believed rumour Kyle Richards took Ozempic
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'Pitchfork' reports that Nicks has added solo North American tour dates in between her co-headlining shows with Billy Joel this year. All together, she will be performing 23 shows. Nicks will start in California in March and wrap in Minneapolis in November. The shows will mark Nicks' first performances since the death of her Fleetwood Mac bandmate, Christine McVie. McVie died at the age of 79 after a short battle with an illness in November. Nicks later took to social media to pay tribute to her dear friend.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Smart City Networks, the nation's leading digital technologies provider for the convention industry, welcomes Andrea Mocino as the company's latest intern for its Las Vegas office.
A rising senior enrolled in Valley High School's Academy of Hospitality and Tourism program, Mocino will spend ten weeks at the firm's headquarters, learning about Smart City's business processes. She will divide her time among the company's various functional departments, including customer support, accounting, quality assurance, systems development, marketing, technology and project management. The academy prepares students for jobs in the tourism industry by educating them on the principles of hospitality, event planning, marketing, customer service and other key aspects of the profession.
The paid internship is offered through the National Academy Foundation to give students the opportunity to put their classroom learning to practical, real-world use. Interns not only get to practice their chosen trades, but they also learn professional work habits and gain valuable insights into workplace expectations. "Our company's success is built on developing people and technology," Smart City President Mark Haley said. "We are excited to help Andrea explore potential career paths. It is gratifying to see this talented young lady express an interest in the technological side of hospitality." Mocino is a member of the Valley High varsity flag football, soccer, and track and field teams.


text:
TWO lucky ranters will WIN a pair of tickets to either Djuki Mala or Cirque Éloize Hotel courtesy of Civic Theatres Toronto!!
sandra Uncategorized 0 Comments
CONTEST: TWO lucky ranters will WIN a pair of tickets to Cirque Éloize's HOTEL or Djuki Mala's performance courtesy of Civic Theatres Toronto!!
TWO (2) tickets to Djuki Mala – Feb 2: St Lawrence Centre – prize valued at 150++
TWO (2) tickets to Cirque Éloize Hotel – Feb 6: St Lawrence Centre – prize valued at $170++
DJUKI MALA
Join a joyous celebration 40,000 years in the making. Direct from Elcho Island, Australia, Djuki Mala perform a high-energy and stunning fusion of traditional Indigenous culture, contemporary dance and storytelling. Toronto audiences will experience some of the more intimate moments and turning points that have shaped Djuki Mala and a rare and insightful view into Aboriginal Australia. Djuki Mala is a marvel of timing, comedy and clowning with a hefty dose of heart and soul. If there is one show this year that is guaranteed to leave you feeling genuinely happy then Djuki Mala is it!
HOTEL by Cirque Éloize
On stage February 6-16 in the Bluma Appel Theatre at the St. Lawrence Centre (27
Front St E, Toronto). "A magical performance forging new paths in the world of contemporary circus arts." –The Resident – Mashantucket, Foxwoods
For its 25th anniversary, Cirque Éloize once again presents a touching, poetic, one-of-a-
kind creation. HOTEL is the story of a place and the travelers who come passing through it.
A stopover where lives intersect, collide and juxtapose for a brief time to generate tales
and memories. Acrobatics, theatre, dance and live music, will draw spectators into a colorful, timeless
world. Avant-garde stage design, inspired by the elegance of the great hotels, will carry
the narrative. All that remains is to enter through the lobby door and get swept away by
the grandeur and poetry of HOTEL.
Presented by Desjardins.
BUY tickets for both performances HERE: http://www.sonycentre.ca/calendar-event-details/?id=4
**IF you want to buy Cirque Éloize, Hotel tickets, you can save 15% on all performances by using the code ACROBAT. You can save 25% on the matinee performances (Feb 10 and Feb 16 at 1:00 pm) by using the code FAMILY**
YOU must be a member of the Facebook group, The MOM Rant (Because We Can): https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheMOMRant/
To be ENTERED into the FACEBOOK contest you NEED to do the following THREE things:
1. LIKE this POST
2. LIKE the Sony Centre Facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/SonyCentreTO/
3. TELL US BELOW WHY YOU WOULD LIKE THE PAIR OF TICKETS TO DJUKI MALA or CIRQUE ÉLOIZE, HOTEL
*ADD TEN (10) MOM (OR MOM-TO-BE) FRIENDS TO OUR GROUP FOR AN EXTRA BALLOT*
*ADD TWENTY (20) MOM (OR MOM-TO-BE) FRIENDS TO OUR GROUP FOR TWO EXTRA BALLOTS*
*GOOD LUCK!!
OFFICIAL RULES: **TWO lucky ranters will WIN a pair of tickets to Cirque Éloize's HOTEL or Djuki Mala's performance courtesy of Civic Theatres Toronto!!**
1. No purchase necessary. All members of The MOM Rant (Because We Can) Facebook Group are eligible to enter the contest.
2. One entry per member is allowed. Members can enter on multiple platforms.
3. Any Ontario resident nineteen (19) years of age or over is eligible to win, except the moderators and immediate families of Sandra Zichermann and employees of Civic Theatres Toronto or its affiliates, partners and sponsors, employees, advertising agency and consultants, and other sponsors.
4. By entering the **TWO lucky ranters will WIN a pair of tickets to Cirque Éloize's HOTEL or Djuki Mala's performance courtesy of Civic Theatres Toronto!!** CONTEST: the entrant hereby agrees and consents to the terms and conditions of this contest.
5. The contest period is from Monday, January 21, 2019 starting at 5:00 pm EST to – Friday, January 25, 2019 at 5:00 pm EST.
6. To enter the **TWO lucky ranters will WIN a pair of tickets to Cirque Éloize's HOTEL or Djuki Mala's performance courtesy of Civic Theatres Toronto!!** Contest, the entrant must follow the above steps to enter:
7. On Friday, January 25, 2019 by 11:00 pm EST., TWO (2) winners will be randomly selected out of all the entries posted. The process by which the winners are selected is as follows: Sandra Zichermann, the owner/administrator, puts all the eligible ballots into a hat or container mixes it around counter-clockwise three (3) times and then pulls two (2) winning ballots from the lot of ballots. Sandra may also choose the winners via a random name generator application.
8. TWO (2) prizes are available to be won. The prize for the winner consists of the following item:
9. A Pair of tickets to see either Djuki Mala or Cirque Éloize, Hotel
10. The winner may be announced LIVE on the Facebook fan page or on Instagram.
11. The winner must complete a time limited, mathematical skill testing question administered over the phone or live through Facebook Live.
12. Proof of identification must be provided upon request. In order to be declared the winner, the potential winner must first correctly answer a mathematical skill-testing question. Before being awarded the prize, the potential winner will be required to sign a Contest Release Form. The winner shall authorize the release of their name and photograph for advertising and publicity relating to the contest, in perpetuity.
13. In the event that a potential winner is not eligible, cannot be contacted by Sandra Zichermann, admin/moderator of The MOM Rant (Because We Can) by January 26, 2019 at 10:00 pm EST., does not correctly answer the mathematical skill-testing question, or does not sign the Contest Release form, Sandra Zichermann, admin/moderator of The MOM Rant (Because We Can) shall have the right to disqualify that potential winner and to draw an alternate potential winner.
14. Sandra Zichermann, admin/moderator of The MOM Rant (Because We Can) Facebook Group, The MOM Rant (Because We Can) Facebook Fan Page, @themomrant on Instagram and Twitter and the momrant.com, reserves the right to disqualify an entrant of the contest at any time should they not fulfil any requirements of the contest.
15. Prizes are non-transferable, non-refundable, have no cash value and must be accepted as awarded. No substitutions. Prizes may not be sold or bartered. The winning name will be provided by Sandra Zichermann to Civic Theatres Toronto – who will then arrange the prize directly with the winners.
16. Civic Theatres Toronto reserves the right at its sole discretion to substitute the prize for another prize of equal or greater value if the prize as described cannot be awarded for any reason.
17. By entering this contest, each entrant releases Facebook and Instagram for all liability or risk involved with this contest and Facebook and Instagram is in no way held responsible or liable in any way related to this contest and each entrant completely releases Facebook and Instagram from any and all accountability.
18. By entering this contest, each entrant acknowledges that this promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook and Instagram. By participating in this promotion, you agree to a complete release of Facebook and Instagram from any claims.
19. All entries and photos become the property of Sandra Zichermann, admin and moderator of The MOM Rant (Because We Can) and Civic Theatres Toronto.
20. Rules and regulations are subject to change without notice.
21. Sandra Zichermann, admin and moderator of The MOM Rant (Because We Can) and Civic Theatres Toronto's decisions are final.
22. You are providing your information to Sandra Zichermann, admin and moderator of The MOM Rant (Because We Can) and Civic Theatres Toronto and not to Facebook or Instagram. Participation in this promotion is subject to the official rules.


text:
Geno Auriemma surpasses Pat Summitt, takes over sole possession of No. 2 on all-time wins list after 103-35 rout of Butler
State police search sprawling Farmington home once owned by Fotis Dulos' development company
UConn men missing three 'building blocks,' and more takeaways from a frustrating loss to St. John's
Dom Amore: Connecticut idol George Springer must find a way to repair his reputation as Astros cheating scandal roils baseball
UConn student died in Bolton crash with propane truck
Petition urges UConn and its president to condemn two students who were spotted at rally before the Capitol riot in D.C.
As UConn women ramp up for Butler following host of COVID-related postponements, reality of why season continues remains clear to Geno Auriemma
Czech firearms company in negotiations to buy Colt, an American legend and Connecticut fixture for nearly 175 years
'He just flipped:' Arrest warrants reveal new details in Peter Manfredonia case; UConn student led police on multi-state manhunt after murders
The NCAA has announced updates for its March Madness planning. What do they mean for the UConn women?
Wally Lamb Returns To Three Rivers, Norwich Flood For New Novel 'We Are Water'
Mega-dosing vitamin D: Doctor-prescribed 50,000 IU vitamin D may be right for some patients
Michelle Troconis issues statement saying she never should have trusted Fotis Dulos, doesn't know what happened to Jennifer Farber Dulos
Nothing Wrong With Banning Cars On Lawns
To Build More Subs, Electric Boat Needs More Suppliers
By Stephen Singer
The president of Electric Boat detailed Monday how the submarine manufacturer will respond to a boom in manufacturing as the U.S. and its allies face threat
GROTON — To keep up with the new and growing demand for submarines, the president of Electric Boat said Monday that the manufacturer must expand the vast network of companies that support the industry.
Speaking at EB's annual legislative outlook in Groton, President Jeffrey Geiger said congressional support for submarines in Pentagon spending "has really been profound."
"There's a lot of great work on our horizon," he told an audience of about 100. The company, which employs 14,500, will add thousands of new employees in coming years.
Geiger said after his presentation that EB is doing an analysis of its suppliers, which number 3,000 in 47 states. It takes two to three years to bring in new suppliers, and boosting the base "needs significant effort," he said.
[Business] Brian Shactman joins WTIC-AM morning show to co-host with Ray Dunaway »
The national industrial base has shrunk, Geiger said. "We're at an inflection point, trying to build it back up," he said.
More than 1 million parts make up a submarine, which EB says is a more sophisticated machine than the space shuttle and operates for 35 years. EB partners with Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.
EB, a subsidiary of General Dynamics Corp., has been building about two Virginia-class attack submarines a year, once a coveted goal, and is beginning the design work for the Columbia, a ballistic submarine.
The U.S. Navy sees a need for more ships and submarines. It said last month that the number of ships needs to increase to 355 from 308, about 15 percent. Of that, the number of attack submarines should rise to 66, up from 48, the Navy says.
Electric Boat expects to hire this year about 2,000 workers, with about 1,300 split evenly between Groton and Quonset Point, R.I. Other Groton-based jobs include 400 in design and engineering work and 300 finance, personnel and other administrative jobs.
The EB workforce is expected to rise by a net of 1,200 this year, bringing employment at EB to more than 15,000. That's expected to rise to 18,000 by 2030.
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That number is up significantly from the 1990s but still far fewer than the 25,000 or so during the 1980s, when the Reagan administration drove up Pentagon spending. Geiger said the subs from the two eras are not comparable, however.
Developing a workforce to keep up with expansion at EB also is a challenge. Rep. Joe Courtney, whose congressional district includes EB, said that efforts to develop the workforce have been funded largely by the U.S. Department of Labor and that continued support is uncertain.
Engineering and Manufacturing of Columbia-Class Submarine at Electric Boat to Start
Engineering ,manufacturing begins for Columbia submarine
Workforce issues at EB are "the No. 1 question" raised by the Navy, he said.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who did not attend the briefing, said in an interview that he has urged Defense Secretary-designate James Mattis to increase Pentagon spending on workforce training.
"The Department of Defense should not only be buying weapons, but investing in people who make them," said Blumenthal, a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Geiger said EB plans to spend $1.5 billion in Rhode Island and Connecticut to increase assembly and other space. Engineering and work on getting permits are expected to begin this year with "significant construction" in 2019 and 2020, he said.
Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said submarine defense is an essential part of U.S. military strategy. For example, China, which is becoming more aggressive in the South China Sea, is "light years ahead" of where it was five to 20 years ago, he said.
"We have enjoyed for the extent of our time on this earth the supremacy of the seas because of the products that we make through the shipbuilding programs, but our adversaries are catching up," said.
Brian Shactman joins WTIC-AM morning show to co-host with Ray Dunaway
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Manchester creates curbside program to support downtown merchants during pandemic
News @3 Newsletter
Catch up on the day's top headlines sent directly to your inbox weekdays at 3 p.m
Submarine manufacturing in Connecticut got a boost in defense spending measures that passed Congress late last year. More than $5 billion was budgeted for two Virginia-class submarines, including $85 million more than what President Obama sought. In addition, last week, $773 million was made available in a separate fund for the Columbia.
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, U.S. military strategy downplayed the role of submarines, turning instead to drones and airborne reconnaissance that were seen as stronger tools against terrorists.
That's changed as the U.S. faces new threats from China, Russia and Iran.
Richard Blumenthal
Joe Courtney
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Oh dear. I think we've gone and integrated the littlest one.
So I'm in the office at home, working away, and after oh I dunno, ten minutes the repetitive sound finally manages to get my attention. 'Hello, puppy calling do you want to play with me?' Another Vtech chart topper in the endless hit parade of drives-you-demented ditties that they have.
There are two standard voices that come with Vtech toys, the English one and the American one. Both of them are unhinged. The English one comes with an absolutely impossible pertness from a cheerful school of elocution that has NEVER existed outside of the minds of directors of pertly cheerful British war movies from the forties. You wonder how many fluffy woodland creatures had to suffer to counterbalance this sheer evil naiceness.
The American one sounds like it's been sleep deprived and force fed pure sugar for days and is GOING TO MAKE YOU CHEERFUL IF IT'S THE LAST THING I DO! Smile with me!!
But I'm going mildly off topic. I'd been at my desk, remember. And after ten minutes of the insanely happy 'Hello, puppy calling do you want to play with me?' I wondered why Jacob was being so quiet. This was what I saw outside the office door.
Move round to the side and you see where the insane jollity was coming from.
He slept that way for ages! Hard pillow, crap soundtrack, he didn't care! And if you look close, you can see the marks on his face from pushing the big Vtech button. We all got scarred by Vtech, although I think they're mostly disappeared.
Course, the mental anguish you go through never really leaves you, does it? Fellow sufferers know the insane stare. They'd sympathise if they weren't already driven to distraction. All it might take to push them over the edge is to whistle a tune from the First Steps Baby Walker.
That Vtech will mess you up. Kids, I know what I'm talking about. That Vtech will mess you up. I think I might be even repeating myself over and over. I know for sure Jacob's mother does. Watch out, that Vtech will mess you up.
All a y'awl! Lookid me crawl!
Stop press: The following giant baby has been spotted terrorising the lower-lying levels of a suburban house in north Dublin.
The giant baby is armed and somewhat toothed but not quite legged yet. At-risk items include stools, coffee tables, clothes horses, bigger brothers' casually discarded toys, artwork and shoes etc, telephone wiring and dog tails.
Do not approach giant baby!
Deceptive smile will lead to vicious dribbling. Reports of gleeful hair pulling cannot be confirmed but make no mistake, this rapid moving critter is leaving a wake of destruction in his, er, wake. You have been warned.
Coming next: Giant Baby Lab Attack!!
Seeing as nobody else is doing anything about bringing the glorious minute-by-minute news of me to you, my fashion-starved friends, I've once again had to take control of the the entire internet to update you all. The world is in imminent danger of economic ruin and unimaginable collapse, it's true, so why not check out my big white boots?
Aren't they cool? And has anyone ever shown a pair of dungarees how they should be worn more successfully than I do? That's right, they have not.
I admire you for your intelligent and insightful analysis, all of you. I totally dominate the camera. And the catwalk. Not so much catwalk as crawl perhaps, but I wouldn't be the first supermodel not to be able to hold themselves upright on a given day, would I? Heh heh. Oh listen to me! Who am I to fire cheap shots at a much maligned segment of society? Forgiveness!
Ha ha ha hic! Shares in me are on the floor!
Ha! Fooled you. I hadn't been drinking at all! I was just stress testing the furniture round these parts. Something tells me it's going to get a lot of testing. And stress. What do you think of my mechanic chic?
Ooh… be two weeks before we get a replacement for this gasket, love.
I've also seen fit to let them know that I am fully aware of where their noses are. Well if they're silly enough to ask, it would be rude of me not to answer by honking good and hard on said proboscis, no? I'm just about beginning to do the hug thing too, but I'm not sure they're ready for it yet. Whaddya say, Elbog?
They're also starting to annoy me with flash cards and repeating words over and over again. What a pain. If I say 'Ball' back to them do you think it'll make them go away? Or will they just harrass me more? What should I do, gentle readers?
Put the kettle on! There's visitors!
Seems that while we've been blogging, Jacob and I, the cyberbell has been ringing and a neat queue has formed at the door. The lovely India Knight has linked to us at The Times Online and now we've been caught napping.
This blog hasn't had a lick of paint in forever, Jacob's been hopeless at encouraging me to post new info, he hasn't written a sodding thing himself since he turned fourteen months last week and now we'll really have to organise our shoddy categories so people can muddle around in a vaguely not lost way. And as if that wasn't embarrassing enough, these aren't even my best y-fronts.
Ach so what! This is us, you're most welcome to our place and don't worry about the snow on your boots.
Happy birthday to me. Hurrah etc.
So, a week ago I was a size zero. Then the goshest thing happened. I woke up and I was one! One what, you ask? Shaddap smartypants, I reply.
A whole year of me-ness. What could possibly be nicer for that bunch of yokels I live with, more life affirming and pleasant? That's right dear readers, absolutely nothing. It is for you I write, because let's us face it, they won't get my pithy understatement. But they could have tried to get me some nice presents at least, no? Look at this tat. A boombox that lacks boom and could fit in my nappy undetected? A Thomas the Tank Engine camera THAT DOESN'T BLOODY WORK!? Where's the iPod? The champers? The dancing girls? Bah!
Well I suppose I should be happy that they stuck a candle on a cake that whatsername 'baked' for me. Digestive biscuits smothered in chocolate. Nice. Nice potential at least. If you happen to have teeth. I tried to give a few of the gathering vultures the evil eye but feh, they all love you when you have a big fat cake. There were ten people involved in this travesty of a party. I've got prizes* for anyone who can guess which one of the ten didn't get a lick of his own birthday cake. Go on, have a go. Can't win if you're not in.
And don't you lot dare pity him! He needs all the educational readjustment he can get! Jacob's fadder* indeed. Want to see what he thought was the funniest thing all night? Go here. I'm not even going to do the dweeb the favour of posting it here. It isn't funny or clever – and no sniggering there, you at the back. You know who you are!
* Thanks for that, Carl.
…thanks to a lot of blue voters?
My name is Jacobama and I endorse this message.
And well done to all you red voters out there who made your votes count too. Didn't mean to exclude you all, and glad to see everyone making this whole voting lark work so well.