Today's Featured Article - Real Ale
Ahh..Real Ale. It's been the favourite tipple of the working man and anyone else who enjoys a refreshing, healthy drink that's full of flavour and goodness ever since it was invented by the Ancient Egyptians more than 6,000 years ago. Back in the days of the Pharaohs Real Ale was brewed from a mixture of sand, crushed dead beetles and cat's urine - the recipe has changed since then, of course - but not much!...Real Ale has the same delicious taste that has made it the most popular drink in the world ever since.
Real Ale forms part of the culture in many beer-drinking nations and has acquired various social traditions and associations, such as beer festivals and a rich pub culture involving activities such as pub crawling and pub games such as bar billiards and fighting.
The term Real Ale was invented during the 1970s when an organisation was created with the aims of protecting Britain's time-honoured tradition of brewing and drinking the types of beer henceforth known as Real Ale - since the late 1950s, people had increasingly been turning their backs on Real Ale and instead drinking much more unreal ale, which is also called nothing, and worst of all lager which has no flavour and is only suitable for homosexuals and girls. To be classified as a Real Ale, a beer must be "brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed." Like Germany's Rheinheitsgebot beer purity law, this can be seen as quite restrictive - however, anybody who knows anything about the history of beer can tell you that, over the millennia, it has been brewed from all sorts of things. In addition to common ingredients such as wheat and barley, beer has also been made at various times from wood, pine martins, pebbles, toad's breath, cheese and old car tyres; so just about anything can be considered a 'traditional' ingredient...(more...)
Yesterday's Featured Article - Boko Haram
The Congregration for Psychedelia & Jihad, known by its Hausa name Boko Harum, are aBritish-West African entertainment group best known for their 1967 worldwide smash “A Whiter Shade of Pale” and their record-breaking residency in the Marquee club of NorthernNigeria at Kaduna. This residency now stretches to five years, compelling Boko Harum to forcibly abduct teenage girls to act as fans - their original fans long since having died of old age or factional violence.
Although noted for baroque and classical influences, Boko Harum’s philosophy has always included both Soul and the grittier sounds of R&Bintegrated with subtly poetic lyrics celebrating the lighter side of life and the virtues of unceasing interfaith warfare. Like The Beatles and the Stones before them, they were known for their soothing melding of rhythm and melody, and for the promotion of wholesale slaughter of innocents to usher in world peace. Critics have called their music "derivative" and their message "dangerously deranged" but few have disputed that their emergence from the 60s British music scene was a considerably more positive step for humanity than that of The Bee Gees. (more...)
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