Starry Wisdom

I bought a 6 pack of Budweiser American Ale this evening. I’ve been interested in trying it since they advertised on the This American Life podcast earlier this year, but I noticed it in a store before. So anyway, the six pack was $7.50 at Mollie Stone’s.

Here is my assessment – this beer is OK. It’s completely unlike anything else from the Buddweiser line, but then again, it’s not an American lager, the most boring sort of beer around. It’s not really exiting, mind you – the claimed “hoppy finish” is hoppy only when compared to normal Bud, but still, it’s fairly tasty. Would be a good beer on a hot day, for instance. It’s just overpriced, as it’s not a real craft brew.

I think I should explain the origin of the name Regibarto, which you may or may not have seen me reference before. Probably not, but it’s worth explaining anyway. My sister-in-law (my brother’s wife), is pregnant, and due any day a few days ago. However, my future nephew is not here yet, so I still can and do refer to him as Regibarto.

“Why Regibarto?” you may ask.

The answer is that I am a cad.

Earlier this year (March or April), my parents were visiting me from Chicago. One afternoon, when we were killing some time at my apartment before dinner, my mom asked me if I had talked to my brother recently about possible names for her upcoming grandson. Now, I had spoken to my brother, but he just said the same thing he had told me before, that they didn’t have a name yet, and I took that as a good answer. But my mom, she would have nothing of this, because I think at the time she wasn’t very happy with the names being bantered about. They were mostly gaelic names, such as Finbar and Brom. Names which my mother was not too pleased.

Anyway, knowing this fact, I decided, on the spur of the moment, to create a name of such immense humor and power that any other name would seem normal. This name, I decided, somehow, was Regibarto. And so I told my mother that I knew of a non Gaelic name they were considering, and that it was on my brother and sister-in-law’s short list. Of course, being me, I could not do this with a straight face, so I was giggling sitting next to my mother on the couch. But somehow, she believed me enough to call my brother up on the spot and try to confirm this insanity! Unfortunately, my brother wasn’t in the proper game playing mood, so he denied that he had ever heard the name Regibarto.

This might have been the end of the name, if it weren’t as awesome as it is. But to this day, my mother has been using it to refer to the still unborn nephew. And, I have to say, even once he is named by his parents, the poor kid is going to have to deal with a crazy uncle who refers to him as Regibarto from time to time!

Talking to Paul at work today, he surmised that it might be that the encoding was off, and instead of the receiver thinking that the dialog should go to the central channel (in phase on L and R inputs) it should go to the rear channel (out of phase on L and R inputs). I guess that’s a bit simplified for how Prologic works, but the upshot of this talk is that I hooked up my surround speakers to see if the audio was going backwards. Well, no, now it is properly going to the CENTER CHANNEL. Which is great, it works now, but that means that netflix had a bug the other night.