This is my blog. There are many like it but this one is mine. My blog is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life. My blog, without me is useless. Without my blog, I am useless. I must publish my blog true. Before Chud I swear this creed.

And on that note, may I introduce my blog and my self... Xian's Super Fun Blog of Doom (I changed it from Super Fun Blog of Death to avoid alienating the kiddies), and welcome you to my thoughts cause... well, everyone else is doin' it, so why not.  Opinion has been set free (thank you Internets!).  So, enough of the introductory salutations and onward to the show...


The City of Weed  sounds like something akin to Homer Simpson's Land of Chocolate, but honestly it's just a city in California named after a guy named Abner Weed who founded the town in the late 19th century by picking up land cheap when he dropped a few hundred bucks for a lumber mill near Mt. Shasta.  Of course, everything is relative and a few hundred bucks was a considerable sum back then, but I digress... the City of Weed is really known for very few things, one of which is its name.  The city founders don't go out of their way to trade in on that name, but plenty of collegiate adventurers have traveled far and wide to have their picture taken next to just about any sign or banner that has Weed, CA. displayed on it.  The town's essentially one big in-joke for the 420 crowd and is frequently showcased for a few guffaws on late-night TV monologues, but among its various claims to fame is the current tussle the town is having with the Feds over its... beer.  


The Mt. Shasta Brewing Co. is a small microbrewery with big ideas on how to cash in on their location in the town of Weed (they're located on College Ave. which must say something about higher education... haw haw haw, but that's how it goes in good ol' Weed... bad puns, accidental or not, seem to be the coin of the realm in this quiet little mountain town).  They frequently have fun with the town's image via their Shastafarian Ale and distinctive labeling on the bottles.  What got them in trouble with the Federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, as the AP and Los Angeles Times recently reported, is their bottle caps which declare "Try Legal Weed" and a play on that old stoner motto "A Friend in [with] Weed is a Friend Indeed."  As you can see here, the caps are obviously having a laugh at the perception of the town's image.  Weed is, as the LA Times put it is " no counterculture haven," but still the overall perception persists, so why not have fun with it, right?  Well, the Feds, in their drug-war-addled reasoning, see things in shades of black and white rather than gray, and insist that the brewery and the brewery's owner, Vaune Dillmann, are purposefully crossing the line and selling something illegal, or at least putting forth the idea that something illegal might reside in that bottle along with the frothy suds of Mt. Shasta Brewery's Lemurian Lager.  As you can see, the law is clearly being broken here:


 

I dunno about you, but I really fail to see the federal offense.  Living in L.A., land of quasi-legal weed (the medicinal sort, of course, of course), we're subjected to advertisements for the Showtime hit Weeds and the oh-so-hot Mary Louise Parker doing pin-up poses with a very recognizable leaf in the background.  Perhaps this image wouldn't play well at Bureau headquarters or the fictional suburb of Agrestic:


 image

Showtime Networks (part of The Eye, formerly Viacom) knows how to market the hell outta this show by pushing the envelope for what the average American considers "good taste."  Personally, I find Mary Louise Parker in pinup pose to be simply awesome and the leaf itself completely inoffensive.  But let's take a closer look here and note the text: "A New Season Of Fresh Buds" (not to mention the tagline for Secret Diary of a Call Girl.  Making what, exactly? Hmmmm).  Somebody, please, hurry up and tell the FCC to read Showtime the riot act, pronto!  Our sensibilities are so easily offended in this, the 21st. century, y'know.

It seems patently absurd for the Feds to selectively decide where and when to run roughshod over rights of free speech (and crass marketing), but then much about today's bureaucracy seems ridiculous to the point of absurdity, when not being downright scary and dangerous.  Go figure, but for some reason the Feds simply don't have CBS Corp. on their radar, while a small businessman in a quiet little mountain town is about to get screwed blue over a similarly silly marketing stunt.  I've seen this Showtime ad on buses in L.A. as well as on billboards and at bus stops... folks simply don't seem to mind; they're rather blasé about it... maybe it's an L.A. thing. The folks at the Bureau for Booze and Cigs Tax n' Trade seem to think they can put a smokescreen up regarding their mission to save the consumer from false advertising, implying in a recent statement that the main reason for harassing a small town brewer is purely from a public interest standpoint.  Yet somehow, I doubt it's within the scope of their duties to play ombudsman for Joe Sixpack who, let's face it, ought to have at least a smidgen of smarts to figure out the labeling on a bottle of beer (as you can see here, beer can turn you into Jerkus, the Demon from Hell... as misleading as this sounds, it's true!).  As annoying as tsetse flies, the Bureau seems hellbent on making their case, but it seems to me the Feds should get seriously, yet legally*, drunk and reconsider their sanctimonious and hypocritical pogrom on Mr. Dillmann and his sudsy lager.


* inebriation in this case is protected and regulated by an amendment to the Constitution and various state and local laws.