So I was hanging out in the arcade at the student union, waiting for the Noam Chomsky speech (which ended being rather boring, but that’s a whole other thread), and decided I wanted a soda.
You know how sometimes a machine will cough up an extra can? Well, this time, I got about 20 root beers all at once.
After a carefully thought-out assessment of the situation (which I cleverly disguised by shouting “HOLY CRAP!”), I tried to figure out what to do with my bounty. I felt that keeping them would’ve been stealing, but on the other hand, there wasn’t anyone to hand the sodas off to. And if I didn’t do something with them, they would’ve been taken anyway (they were clogging the machine something fierce).
Anyway, people were staring, wondering what I was going to do with all my soda.
So I went ahead and gave a root beer to every damn person in the arcade. It felt good, and I had a couple cans left over to smuggle into the speech.
I think I’d like to be a professional philanthropist. I wonder what it pays.
The Gods of Root Beer are stern and dark. Standing on the high rocky mountain peak they survey the brutal and bloody battlefield of the earth, bestowing their bounty on the virtuous and mighty. You have done well, my friend. <cue Manowar song>
This happened to me one night at the computer center at my university, back in the late '70s. I put in my 50 cents, and wound up with a whole armful of programming fluid (Jolt Cola – All the sugar and twice the caffene!). I walked back into the terminal room, and started passing them around.
The whole crew was pretty well wired that evening!
[old fart mode]It was just as well, as I had a 2300-line assembly language program to turn in the next morning, and I lost it all through fumble-fingers. There was no backup, and I had to recreate the damned thing from a three-day-old hard copy. It was a long night, but the rebuilt program was pretty damned honed, and I got it down to 1800 lines…[/old fart mode]
Root Beer is a Good Thing. Mmmmmm. I am jealous of your bounty.
As for brands, frankly, I’ll take most any root beer over most any other soft drink. IBC, A&W, Hires, Barq’s…have you had Saranac? Wonderful. Or Boylan’s - man, have you ever had their Birch Beer (aka: The King of Pop)? Amazing…
I pray to the Root Beer Gods and beseech them to release their bounty upon me like manna from heaven…
Ah, the beer of the root. Sassafrass ale. Boot rear. Truly the elixir of life.
I must put in a vote for IBC as the highest achievement yet in the performance art of root brewery. Some years ago I attended a wedding reception at a restaurant that served over 180 kinds of beer. Being about the only non drinker in the crowd, I asked about root brewski. Twelve different varieties, I was told. So I spent my evening nursing all sorts of brands, ranging from the sublime (ah, the '94 vintage!) to the truly nasty (Snapple? This is a joke, right?). At the end of which I concluded that nothing held a candle to my beloved IBC.
Of course, part of that may be because I once seriously overdosed on A&W. Studied in Italy for a semester and rootbeer was impossible to find. But I brought back a case from the Nuremburg PX during a trip, and drank myself under the table. To this day I can only take A&W in a float. After all, IBC makes lousy floats. The water in it forms big chunks of flavorless ice. Tsk.
