Paulina Gretzky and Dustin Johnson are having a baby boy

Posted: 12/26/2014, 10:30am | Matthew Schwerha

Paulina Gretzky, daughter of the “Great One” Wayne Gretzky, is expecting a baby boy with professional golfer Dustin Johnson.

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Johnson is currently on leave from the PGA Tour because of what some have reported as a drug suspension

The Outlaw

The extraordinary life of William S. Burroughs.

“Naked Lunch” brought to social notice themes of drug use, homosexuality, hyperbolic violence, and anti-authoritarian paranoia. Credit Photograph by Richard Avedon / “William Burroughs, New York, July 9, 1975”/© The Richard Avedon Foundation

“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves.” So starts “Naked Lunch,” the touchstone novel by William S. Burroughs. That hardboiled riff, spoken by a junkie on the run, introduces a mélange of “episodes, misfortunes, and adventures,” which, the author said, have “no real plot, no beginning, no end.” It is worth recalling on the occasion of “Call Me Burroughs” (Twelve), a biography by Barry Miles, an English author of books on popular culture, including several on the Beats. “I can feel the heat” sounded a new, jolting note in American letters, like Allen Ginsberg’s “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” or, for that matter, like T. S. Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month.” (Ginsberg was a close friend; Eliot hailed from Burroughs’s home town of St. Louis and his poetry influenced Burroughs’s style.) In Burroughs’s case, that note was the voice of an outlaw revelling in wickedness. It bragged of occult power: “I can feel,” rather than “I feel.” He always wrote in tones of spooky authority—a comic effect, given that most of his characters are, in addition to being gaudily depraved, more or less conspicuously insane.

“Naked Lunch” is less a novel than a grab bag of friskily obscene comedy routines—least forgettably, an operating-room Grand Guignol conducted by an insouciant quack, Dr. Benway. “Well, it’s all in a day’s work,” Benway says, with a sigh, after a patient fails to survive heart massage with a toilet plunger. Some early reviewers spluttered in horror. Charles Poore, in the Times, calmed down just enough to be forthright in his closing line: “I advise avoiding the book.” “Naked Lunch” was five years in the writing and editing, mostly in Tangier, and aided by friends, including Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. It first appeared in 1959, in Paris, as “The Naked Lunch” (with the definite article), in an Olympia Press paperback edition, in company with “Lolita,” “The Ginger Man,” and “Sexus.” Its plain green-and-black cover, like the covers of those books, bore the alluring caveat “Not to be sold in U.S.A. or U.K.” (A first edition can be yours, from one online bookseller, for twenty thousand dollars.) The same year, Big Table, a Chicago literary magazine, printed an excerpt, and was barred from the mails by the U.S. Postal Service. Fears of suppression delayed a stateside publication of the book until 1962, when Grove Press brought out an expanded and revised edition. It sold so well that Grove didn’t issue a paperback until 1966.

As late as 1965, however, a Boston court confirmed a local ban, despite testimony from Norman Mailer arguing the book’s literary merit. (Another supporter was Mary McCarthy, who, in the New York Review of Books, praised Burroughs’s “crankish courage” and compared “Naked Lunch” to “a worm that you can chop up into sections each of which wriggles off as an independent worm. Or a nine-lived cat. Or a cancer.”) A year later, the Massachusetts Supreme Court reversed the ban, on the ground of “redeeming social value,” a wobbly legal standard in censorship cases then and after. Thus anointed, Burroughs’s ragged masterpiece brought to social notice themes of drug use, homosexuality, hyperbolic violence, and anti-authoritarian paranoia. Those temerities and his disarmingly starchy public mien—he was ever the gent, dressed in suits, with patrician manners and a sepulchral, Missouri-bred and foreign-seasoned voice—assured him a celebrity status that is apt to flare anew whenever another cohort of properly disaffected young readers discovers him. The centenary of Burroughs’s birth, on February 5th, promises much organized attention; an excellent documentary by Howard Brookner, “Burroughs: The Movie” (1983), is about to be re-released.

Contrary to Kerouac’s mythmaking portrayal of him—as Old Bull Lee, in “On the Road”—Burroughs was not a wealthy heir, although his parents paid him an allowance until he was fifty. His namesake grandfather, William Seward Burroughs, perfected the adding machine and left his four children blocks of stock in what later became the Burroughs Corporation. His son Mortimer—the father of William and another, older son—sold his remaining share, shortly before the 1929 crash, for two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars. Mortimer’s wife, born Laura Lee, never ceased to dote on William; Mortimer deferred to her. 

Burroughs started writing at the age of eight, imitating adventure and crime stories. He attended a John Dewey-influenced progressive elementary school in St. Louis and played on the banks of the nearby, sewage-polluted River des Peres. Miles quotes him recalling, in a nice example of his gloatingly dire adjectival style, “During the summer months the smell of shit and coal gas permeated the city, bubbling up from the river’s murky depths to cover the oily iridescent surface with miasmal mists.” When Burroughs was fourteen, some chemicals he was tinkering with exploded, severely injuring his hand; treatment for the pain alerted him to the charms of morphine. He then spent two unhappy years at the exclusive Los Alamos Ranch School for boys, in New Mexico, memories of which informed his late novel “The Wild Boys” and other fantasies of all-male societies. 

Burroughs was a brilliant student, graduating from Harvard with honors, in English, in 1936. He sojourned often in Europe; in Vienna, he briefly studied medicine and frequented the gay demimonde. He had become aware at puberty of an attraction to boys, and had been so embarrassed by a diary he kept of a futile passion for a fellow-student that he destroyed it and stopped writing anything not school-required for several years. Later, in psychoanalysis, he traced his sexual anxiety to a repressed memory: when he was four years old, his nanny forced him to perform oral sex on her boyfriend. The tumultuous experience of having his first serious boyfriend—in New York, in 1940—triggered what he laconically called a “Van Gogh kick”: he cut off the end joint of his left pinkie. 

After a short hitch in the Army, in 1942, Burroughs received a psychiatric discharge. He then worked briefly as a private detective, in Chicago, where, however, he enjoyed his longest period of regular employment—nine months—as a pest exterminator. His delectable memoir of the job, “Exterminator!,” the title story of a collection published in 1973, employs a tone, typical of him, that begs to be called bleak nostalgia: “From a great distance I see a cool remote naborhood blue windy day in April sun cold on your exterminator there climbing the grey wooden outside stairs.”

The creation story of the Beats is by now literary boilerplate. Burroughs moved to New York in 1943, along with David Kammerer, a childhood friend who had travelled with him in Europe, and Lucien Carr, an angelically handsome Columbia University student whom Kammerer was stalking. Ginsberg, a fellow-student, was enthralled by Carr, and later dedicated “Howl” to him. Kerouac, who had dropped out of Columbia and served in the Navy, returned to the neighborhood in 1944. With Carr as the catalyst, and Burroughs, whom Kerouac goaded to resume writing, a charismatic presence, the Beat fellowship was complete. 

Carr ended Kammerer’s pursuit of him late on the night of August 13, 1944, by stabbing him and dumping his body in the Hudson River. (The new movie “Kill Your Darlings” tells the tale in only somewhat embellished fashion.) Burroughs then replaced Carr as the group’s mentor. According to Miles, Kerouac and Ginsberg didn’t yet know that Burroughs was gay, and played matchmaker by introducing him to Joan Vollmer, an erudite, twice-married free spirit with a baby daughter, Julie, of uncertain paternity. Burroughs and Vollmer became inseparable and, they believed, telepathic soul mates, but he continued to have sexual encounters with men. In 1946, he started on heroin. (An uncle, Horace Burroughs, whom he idealized but never met, was a morphine addict who committed suicide in 1915, when the drug was legally restricted.) Vollmer favored Benzedrine. 

Postwar New York updated Burroughs’s trove of criminal argot. He saw a lot of Herbert Huncke, a junkie and a jack-of-all-scams—whom Ginsberg called “the basic originator of the ethos of Beat and the conceptions of Beat and Square”—and other habitués of Times Square, whose doppelgängers roam the fiction that he had not yet begun to write. In 1946, Vollmer became pregnant. Burroughs, who could be startlingly moralistic, abhorred abortion; and so a son, Billy, joined the family. Envisioning himself as a gentleman farmer, Burroughs had acquired a spread in East Texas, where he cultivated marijuana, though not very well. He drove a harvest to New York with Kerouac’s “On the Road” icon, Neal Cassady—whom he disdained as, in Miles’s words, “a cheap con man”—but it was too green to turn a profit. After a drug bust in New Orleans, Burroughs jumped bail and settled in Mexico City. For three years, he took drugs, drank, picked up boys, hosted friends, and cut a sorry figure as a father. (With Vollmer also drinking heavily, the children’s lot was grim.) A Mexican scholar of the Beats, Jorge García-Robles, details the louche milieu in another new book, “The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico” (Minnesota). He writes that Burroughs found the country “grotesque, sordid, and malodorous, but he liked it.”

During those years, Burroughs also wrote his first book, “Junky.” A pulp paperback published in 1953, under the pen name William Lee, it recounts his adventures through underworlds from New York to Mexico City. It features terse, crackling reportage, with echoes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The narrator’s first meeting with “Herman” (a pseudonym for Huncke) isn’t auspicious: “Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from his large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast.” “Junky” attracted no critical notice. Burroughs wrote two other books in the early fifties that weren’t published until after “Naked Lunch.” “Queer”—centering, in Mexico City, on one of his arduous opiate withdrawals and a frustrating romance with a young man—saw print only in 1985. The most emotional work in a generally icy œuvre, it was written around the time, in 1951, of the most notorious event in Burroughs’s life: his fatal shooting of Vollmer, in a drunken game of “William Tell.” 

“A ninja is silent as darkness, so—tippy-toes, people, tippy-toes!”Buy the print »

García-Robles and Miles agree in their accounts of Vollmer’s death. At a friend’s apartment, she balanced a glass on her head, at Burroughs’s behest. He had contracted a lifelong mania for guns from duck-hunting excursions with his father, and was never unarmed if he could help it. He fired a pistol from about nine feet away. The bullet struck Vollmer in the forehead, at the hairline. She was twenty-eight. He was devastated, but readily parroted a story supplied by his lawyer, a flamboyant character named Bernabé Jurado: the gun went off accidentally. Released on bail, Burroughs might have faced trial had not Jurado, in a fit of road rage, shot a socially prominent young man and, when his victim died of septicemia, fled the country. Burroughs did the same, and a Mexican court convicted him in absentia of manslaughter, sentencing him to two years. In the introduction to “Queer,” Burroughs disparages his earlier work and adds, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death,” because it initiated a spiritual “lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.” García-Robles avidly endorses this indeed appalling consolation, casting Vollmer as a sainted martyr to literature.

Miles relates that Burroughs had told Carr, after he killed Kammerer, “You shouldn’t blame yourself at all, because he asked for it, he demanded it.” Some of Burroughs’s friends, including Ginsberg, opted for an analogous understanding of Vollmer’s death as an indirect suicide, which she had willed to happen. Burroughs’s craving for exculpation eventually settled on the certainty that an “Ugly Spirit” had deflected his aim. As a child, Burroughs had been infused with superstitions by his mother and by the family’s Irish maid, and all his life he believed fervently in almost anything except conventional religion: telepathy, demons, alien abductions, and all manner of magic, including crystal-ball prophecy and efficacious curses. For several years in the nineteen-sixties, he enthusiastically espoused Scientology, in which he attained the lofty rank of “Clear,” before being excommunicated for questioning the organization’s Draconian discipline. And he furnished any place he lived in for long with an “orgone accumulator”—the metal-lined wooden booth invented by the rogue psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich for capturing and imparting cosmic energy. Miles begins “Call Me Burroughs” with a scene of a sweat-lodge ceremony conducted by a Navajo shaman to finally expel the Ugly Spirit, in Kansas, in 1992. The heat and smoke caused Burroughs to ask to truncate the proceedings.

Vollmer’s parents took Julie into their home, in Albany, and she dropped out of her stepfather’s life. Burroughs sent Billy to be raised by Laura and Mortimer, in St. Louis, and joined them, in 1952, after they moved to Palm Beach, Florida. But he didn’t stay long; he set out to work on his third book, “The Yage Letters,” a quest through the jungles of Colombia for a fabled hallucinogen that, he had written in the last sentence of “Junky,” “may be the final fix.” He found and duly lauded the drug, but the journey seems its own reward, making for fine low-down travel writing. He needs a motorboat to take him upriver: 

Sure you think it’s romantic at first but wait til you sit there five days onna sore ass sleeping in Indian shacks and eating hoka and some hunka nameless meat like the smoked pancreas of a two-toed sloth and all night you hear them fiddle-fucking with the motor—they got it bolted to the porch—“buuuuurt spluuuu . . . ut . . . spluuuu . . . ut,” and you can’t sleep hearing the motor start and die all night and then it starts to rain. Tomorrow the river will be higher.

The book wasn’t published until 1963. In the meantime, two volumes of a trilogy, “The Soft Machine” and “The Ticket That Exploded,” came out, soon followed by the third, “Nova Express.” These were written largely in London and Paris, between trips to Tangier, where Burroughs had lived for several years, starting in 1954. They advanced his claim (with some precedents in Dadaism and Surrealism) to literary innovation: the “cut-up” technique of assembling texts from scissored fragments of his own and others’ prose. The trilogy is a sort of fractured science fiction, telling of underground struggles against forces of “Control”—the shape-shifting, all-purpose bête noire of Burroughs’s world view. It is easier to read than, say, “Finnegans Wake,” but hard going between such bursts of dazzle as the “resistance message”:

Calling partisans of all nations—Cut word lines—Shift linguals—Vibrate tourists—Free doorways—Word falling—Photo falling—Break through in Grey Room. 

A second trilogy—“The Cities of the Red Night,” “The Place of Dead Roads,” and “The Western Lands”—published between 1981 and 1987, reverts to fairly normal narration, filled with scenes of sexual and military atrocity in a succession of mythic cities. Its heroes include Hassan-i Sabbah, the historical leader of a sometimes homicidal sect in eleventh- and twelfth-century Persia. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” Sabbah is supposed to have said (and was so quoted by Nietzsche). The prose is nimble and often ravishing, but marred by the author’s monotonous obsessions and gross tics—notably, a descent into ferocious misogyny, casting women as “the Sex Enemy.”

The biography, after its eventful start, becomes rather like an odyssey by subway in the confines of Burroughs’s self-absorption, with connecting stops in New York, where he lived, in the late nineteen-seventies, on the Bowery, in the locker room of a former Y.M.C.A., and, returning to the Midwest, in the congenial university town of Lawrence, Kansas, where he spent his last sixteen years, and where he died, of a heart attack, in 1997, at the age of eighty-three. Miles’s always efficient, often elegant prose eases the ride, but a reader’s attention may grow wan for want of sun. Most of the characters run to type: dissolute quasi-aristocratic friends, interchangeable boys, sycophants in steadily increasing numbers. Names parade, from Paul Bowles and Samuel Beckett (who, meeting Burroughs at a party in Paris, denounced the cut-up method as “plumbing”), through Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, to Laurie Anderson and Kurt Cobain. Most prominent is Brion Gysin, a mediocre artist of calligraphic abstractions. Burroughs met him in Tangier, in 1955, and bonded with him in Paris at a dump in the Latin Quarter, known as the Beat Hotel, whose motherly owner adored literary wanderers.

Gysin and Burroughs deemed each other clairvoyant geniuses. They collaborated on cut-ups, extending the technique to audiotape, and foresaw commercial gold for Gysin’s “Dreamachine,” a gizmo that emitted flickering light to mildly hypnotic effect. It flopped. Burroughs took to making art himself, especially after Gysin’s death, in 1986: he created hundreds of pictures, on wood, by shooting at containers of paint. These have been widely exhibited and sold. They are terrible. Burroughs had no visual equivalent of the second-nature formality that buoys even his most chaotic writing.

Ginsberg comes off radiantly well in Miles’s telling, as a loyally forgiving friend. He tolerated Burroughs’s amatory passion for him, which developed in the fifties, as long as it lasted. Much of Burroughs’s best writing originated in letters to the poet, who took a guiding editorial hand in it. It was Ginsberg who hatched the title “Naked Lunch,” by a lucky mistake, having misread the phrase “naked lust” in a Burroughs manuscript. (I think of Ezra Pound’s editorial overhaul of “He Do the Police in Different Voices”—Eliot’s first title for “The Waste Land.”) Ginsberg effectively sacrificed his own literary development, which sagged after “Kaddish” (1961), to publicizing his friends and, of course, himself. Burroughs disparaged his puppylike attendance in Bob Dylan’s entourage. (Burroughs’s aloofness, like his obsession with mind control, reflected memories of a reviled uncle, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a pioneering public-relations expert whose clients included John D. Rockefeller and the Nazi Party.) But Burroughs liked his own growing fame. He gave readings to full houses. Appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” in 1981, and in Gus Van Sant’s “Drugstore Cowboy,” in 1989, spread the popularity of his gentleman-junkie cool.

The biography’s most painful passages involve Billy, who both idolized and, for excellent reasons, resented Burroughs. What might you be like, had your father killed your mother and then abandoned you? In 1963, when Billy was sixteen, Burroughs, bowing to his parents’ insistence, briefly took charge of the troubled lad in Tangier. The main event of the visit was Billy’s introduction to drugs, condoned by Burroughs. In and out of hospitals and rehabs, Billy wrote three novels, of which the first, “Speed” (1970), detailing the ordeal of amphetamine addiction, showed literary promise. In 1976, father and son reunited at the Naropa Institute, in Boulder, where Ginsberg and other poets had initiated a program in experimental writing, and where Burroughs was teaching, with crotchety flair. Billy, who had received a liver transplant for cirrhosis, engaged in spectacular self-destruction. Miles writes, “Billy wanted Bill to witness the mess he was in; he was paying him back.” Billy died in 1981, at the age of thirty-three. Burroughs seemed to regret only that he had not sufficiently explained the Ugly Spirit to him. He responded to his son’s death by varying his current methadone habit with a return to heroin.

“Virtually all of Burroughs’s writing was done when he was high on something,” Miles writes. The drugs help account for the hollowness of his voices, which jabber, joke, and rant like ghosts in a cave. He had no voice of his own, but a fantastic ear and verbal recall. His prose is a palimpsest of echoes, ranging from Eliot’s “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” (lines like “Midnight shakes the memory / As a madman shakes a dead geranium” are Burroughsian before the fact) to Raymond Chandler’s marmoreal wisecracks and Herbert Huncke’s jive. I suspect that few readers have made it all the way through the cut-up novels, but anyone dipping into them may come away humming phrases. His palpable influence on J. G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Kathy Acker is only the most obvious effect of the kind of inspiration that makes a young writer drop a book and grab a pen, wishing to emulate so sensational a sound. It’s a cold thrill. While always comic, Burroughs is rarely funny, unless you’re as tickled as he was by such recurrent delights as boys in orgasm as they are executed by hanging.

Some critics, including Miles, have tried to gussy up Burroughs’s antinomian morality as Swiftian satire. Burroughs, however, wages literary war not on perceptible real-world targets but against suggestions that anyone is responsible for anything. Though never cruel in his personal conduct, he was, in principle, exasperated with values of constraint. A little of “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” goes a long way for many readers, including me. But there’s no gainsaying a splendor as berserk as that of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. When you have read Burroughs, at whatever length suffices for you, one flank of your imagination of human possibility will be covered for good and all. 

Reese Witherspoon was 'terrified' of 'Wild' sex and drug scenes

© /Harper's Bazaar Reese Witherspoon was 'terrified' of 'Wild' sex and drug scenes

Reese Witherspoon opens up about the emotional experience of making her new movie "Wild" in an upcoming Harper’s Bazaar UK cover story. From the first time she read Cheryl Strayed’s best-selling memoir, Witherspoon was overwhelmed by the story of a woman using a treacherous hike to test her limits and get through emotional turmoil.
The actress recalls, “At the end of it, I was in a river of tears. I was so moved by Cheryl’s words. I didn’t know who this woman was but I had to call her.” And she did, calling Strayed the next day and telling the author, “I want to hug you. I feel like I know you. I feel like I went on this journey with you. I would love to option this book.”
As a producer of the project, Witherspoon knew that if she wanted to act in it, she’d have to go to different places than she’d ever gone before. ‘To be honest, if this was an open-casting project, I don’t know if anyone would have cast me,” she admits. “I could be wrong. It’s nothing like any movie I’ve ever done -- it was a way of challenging myself.”
Speaking of how the role resonated with her, the Oscar winner says, “This idea that we are our own saviors, our own heroes. That’s hard, but also incredibly uplifting. I think I realized, probably in my twenties, that there’s no going home, do you know what I’m saying?… Well, maybe when I was 18. I was like, ‘My parents can’t pay for me to have a life or go to college.’ Whatever I was going to do in my life, I had to do it myself.”
She also explains of wanting to do "Wild," “It wasn’t as if there was a lack of roles being offered to me. It was the dynamic aspect of playing a really interesting, complicated person that was not readily available. Honestly, I don’t know a woman who isn’t complicated. It’s strange that you don’t see many complicated women on film; complicated meaning complex, I should say.”
What about the content of the story, which includes sex and heroin use? “There were small descriptions in the script,” Witherspoon tells the magazine. “But when he started describing what we were going to do, that’s when I started to panic. I was like, ‘Wait. What are you talking about?’… I would have fired myself a couple of times during rehearsals because I was so scared, oh my God. I got my s--- together, but it took me a while.’”
“I’ve never done drugs, so I was really confused. I didn’t know what I was doing. It just required being in a really raw emotional place that didn’t feel good,” she tells the outlet. But the sex scenes were even more difficult for Witherspoon. “That’s, like, three percent of the movie, but it took up a tremendous amount of fear in my mind because it’s daunting,” she explains. How did she do them? “I never looked ahead at the schedule. I would wake up in the morning and say, ‘What are we doing today?’ And I’d prepare on the way to work. Sometimes I was just terrified. Like a cat on a raft… ‘You can’t make me do it.’”
Were there times when Witherspoon thought of bailing? She says, “I think about backing out of everything. I get to the beginning and I’m like, ‘I do not want to make this movie.’ I’ve never had an experience where I was like, ‘I can’t wait to start.’ I don’t know why. It’s always going to require something that doesn’t feel good, some sort of challenge or emotional gutting. It’s not a fun space to live in a lot of the time. It’s why I enjoy doing comedies. It’s much easier, thinking of what rhymes with truck.” What do you think of what Witherspoon has to say?

Angela Coates Viral: Model Angela Coates Mug Shot Stuns, Goes Viral

Angela Coates viral mug shot has turned her into an internet sensation, it stunned Twitter to the point of the young woman being dubbed the new #PrisonBae, a tittle, hot convicted felon with blue eyes, Jeremy Meeks held tightly since June.

Is Angela Coates the new Jeremy Meeks? The internet says yes, but the two attractive individuals don’t really have much in common besides appealing mug shots.
Meeks, 30, is a married father with past ties to street gangs, described by cops as a “violent street terrorist.” Meeks was busted during a gang investigation, but he maintains his innocence. If the popular felon is found guilty, he could spend the next 10 years in prison.
22-year-old Angela Coates is an aspirant model and actress from Florida who was arrested last month for disorderly conduct in Dekalb County, Georgia. Her bail was set at $360 and she was free less than 14 hours after her arrest. Coates is a former Jet Magazine “Beauty of the Week” and she is now speaking out to tell the world her side of the story.
According to the young model, the mug shot that made her famous was the result of a big misunderstanding that took place in front of a nightclub in Atlanta. Coates told Inside Edition:

“I actually didn’t even go into jail-jail. I didn’t even get into one of the orange jumpsuits. I was in holding for about 13 hours.”

Despite all the attention, Coates would have preferred that her mug shot did not go viral. The woman who some say has sexy pulp lips was embarrassed by the whole incident. She added:

“It was kind of funny, but at the end of the day it’s still very serious to me, because I take my career very serious and my life very serious. It was the worst experience, it really was.”

Although men have rushed online to offer her some help, the model also had to face mean comments from anonymous people on social media. This is not something that she is very happy with. Coates writes on Twitter:

“So since I’m “hot” or “attractive” I’m a thief or a gold digger? Smh I hate this world. But since I’m beautiful I’m just a horrible person. OK young world.”

The model with perfectly shaped eyebrows says that cops were wrong for arresting her. She explains:

“Police take advantage of their authority each and every day and people assume that since I am “attractive” that my life is perfect. Well it’s not I was wrongfully arrested last month by an officer who abused his authority. Good night.”

So, what does Angela Coates want the world to know about her? She is more than a hot woman with the perfect mug shot, she states:

“I design shoes, my best friend was my dog who got killed. I love Disney world and am very family oriented. I put my pants on just like you.”

The model is moving on with her life, Wednesday night (September 24), she has a club hosting gig in Florida.

What are your thoughts on Angela Coates viral mug shot?

Why I hate the damned Cardinals: An essay

By Noah Jarosh  @NoahJarosh on Sep 5 2014, 3:09p 30

Mike McGinnis

Get the latest Milwaukee Brewers news with Brew Crew Ball

The Cardinals have burned the Brewers often. Here are some reasons why I do not like them.

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The Cardinals are my least-favorite team in baseball. There isn't another team in the league that I dislike more. Everything they do bugs me. I suspect this is also true for many Brewers fans, though some might dislike, say, the Cubs more or at least on an even-tilt.

I try to be a positive person, always looking on the bright side of things. But the Cardinals are the target of most of my frustrations. Brewers losing? Damned Cardinals! Something goes wrong at work? Cardinals are the problem! Significant other leaves me? Tony La Russa got to them.

Catch my drift? Here is a detailed reasoning of why I hate the Cardinals, which sometimes I feel bad about because the guys over at Viva El Birdos seem pretty great actually (stop being good people and let me hate you) and....ehhh, I don't really feel bad.

They aren't fun

One thing I will genuinely never-ever forgive the Cardinals for is their immense hatred of the Brewers' untucking of jerseys after wins in 2008 and 2009. Our untucked heroes were a fun, young lineup that would remove their jerseys from the confines of their pants after wins out of respect for blue collar workers that are ubiquitous in Milwaukee. The celebration stemmed from outfielder Mike Cameron and his father, who would untuck when he got home after a long days work.

Now, OK, so this is the kind of thing where I think people get too serious about sports and forget what they are great for. Sports are, in the end, entertainment. They're an escape from Real Life. They allow us to root for something outside of us, and they are meant for us to enjoy them. There's a reason why I hate The Unwritten Rules -- half of them seem based around keeping the sport as dull as possible while the rest are about hitting batters for perceived slights.

You want young people to watch the game? Let it be fun and don't let stodgy teams muck it up. That's baseball's biggest problem, in my opinion. Yasiel Puig and Bryce Harper and Carlos Gomez are talked about as immoral examples rather than as fun, young, dynamic stars. Flipping a bat is not the same as flipping the bird, dammit.

Let teams untuck their shirts and do beast mode. It's fun and lighthearted and oh my god not hurting you in any way. No we're not cheating using ribbon boards, you weirdos.

They keep winning

I was talking to a dude at the bar the other day. He pointed out that the last time an NL team other than the Cardinals or Giants made the World Series was 2009, when the Phillies represented the league. The Cardinals have been to the World Series four times in the past ten years. The Cardinals haven't had a losing season since 2007. That's their only losing season since the turn of the millennium. Since 2000, they have a 1,351-1,056 record, a .561 winning percentage.

The Cardinals have the second most World Series appearances of any team in baseball and have been to the postseason in four of the last five years.

The Brewers have one World Series appearance. Back in 1982. When the Cardinals beat them.

1982

WE WEREN'T EVEN IN THE SAME LEAGUE BEFORE YOU STARTED HURTING US

2011

DAMN IT CARDINALS.

This

Versus This

They keep winning with weird voodoo magic

Starting pitcher goes down? They call up someone who pitches eight shutout innings. Somebody you've probably never heard of, probably. None of their prospects fail. None of them. Mediocre prospects become stars. Guys who are supposed to be out for two months come back in three weeks. Albert Pujols breaks an arm and gets a leg torn off in a freak needle-point accident and is back on the field two days later and cranking a pair of home runs.

Shelby Miller is practically called a failure already! Shelby Miller! He's 23 years old and has a career 3.43 ERA in 65 major league appearances! I've seen Cardinals fans call for him to be traded! They can afford to do that! They have one of the best major league teams and one of the best minor league teams! Stop it! STOP IT!

They keep winning against the Brewers

Year	Brewers Wins	Cardinals Wins
2014	5	8
2013	5	14
2012	6	9
2011	11	13
2010	8	7
2009	9	9
2008	10	5

And that only covers the years since the Brewers got good again. Only once has Milwaukee convincingly beat the Cardinals in a season series. And that was six years ago.

This is not an exhaustive list. There are more. But, man, I just really want to beat the Cardinals.

Every State in the USA, Ranked by Beer

ThrillistAugust 26, 2014

By: Ben Robinson and Andy Kryza and Matt Lynch

Credit: Jennifer Bui

It’s a great time to be drinking beer in America. Not that it was ever, you know, a BAD time to be doing that necessarily, but with craft breweries multiplying like rabbits who’ve been drinking beer, you can literally find some serviceable (if not downright tasty) local brews in all 50 states. Which made the process of ranking them all the more difficult, but we were up to the challenge, especially since it meant drinking and thinking about beer for weeks straight.

Here they are, all 50 states in the Union, ranked according to their beer. A couple notes about our criteria. Quantity and quality are both important, but quality’s a bit MORE important. If you’re a small state turning out a disproportionate amount of great beer, it did not go unrecognized. We also gave a boost to states who played a historical role in American beer as we know it today. We also argued a lot, so if you want to do that as well, please join us in the comments!

More: Every State In The USA, Ranked By Its Food/Drink

50. Mississippi

There’s a reason that Mississippi’s the home of the blues. It has a lot to do with the fact that the state’s got fewer breweries than Blind Willie Nine Fingers has digits.

49. West Virginia

Misty taste of moonshine, teardrop in my eye. Note: the teardrop is because there isn’t enough good beer to drink here.

48. Rhode Island

‘Gansett. That’s about all there is to say. ‘Gansett!! Luckily it’s really fun to say.

47. North Dakota

You’d think that two decades of enduring wood-chipper jokes would drive more North Dakotans to drink, but noh… noh, there’s not much brewing going on here, though a can of Fargo Brewing Co.’s Iron Horse Pale Ale is a mighty fine treat.

46. Nevada

Booze is a big business in the Silver State, but with respect to brewers like Great Basin, most of that silver is in Bullet form… given out for free. At the nickel slots.

More: 23 American Beers To Drink Before You Die

Credit: Jennifer Bui

45. South Dakota

When every biker from Portland, OR to Portland, ME comes rolling into Sturgis, they probably drink more beer than the collective frat population of the US. But they subsist on a diet of tallboys and Kid Rock. And while you’ll find local beer on many taps throughout the state, those taps are probably gathering dust next to a fresh macro keg. I frequent SoDak, and when I do, I subsist mainly on Crow Peak’s excellent 11th Hour IPA. There’s a beer scene lurking in the Black Hills, but it needs some nourishment. And support.

44. Nebraska

Luckily, the Cornhuskers’ 22 spot in the preseason AP poll is the only ranking this state really cares about.

43. Hawaii

People tend to vouch for the tastiness of the local beer they tried while in Hawaii, which is probably because THEY WERE IN Hawaii. Kona and Maui and the like make some solid beer, but it gets a bit of a perception bump from the Hawaiian mystique.

42. New Jersey

All sorts of silly laws, plus a statewide Red Bull-vodka addiction, stonewalled the development of Jersey breweries for years, but even though things have freed up a bit, they still don’t make Taylor Ham beer. Someone make Taylor Ham beer! If anyone answers that ridiculous plea, it’ll be ballsy up-and-comer Carton.

41. New Hampshire

Every person in New Hampshire is never more than two hours away from one of the top six beer states in the nation (gotta keep reading to figure out which!). So while the lack of an established scene aside from venerable Smuttynose is surprising, we don’t feel that badly for those who must choose daily between living free and dying.

More: 11 Things People Don’t Understand About Being A Bartender

Credit: Jennifer Bui

40. Wyoming

The combination of locals having a lot of time to hone their crafts and the influx of tourists — skiers, Dads who’ve been penned up in an RV with three kids who could care less about Old Faithful — has made this sparsely populated wilderness a solid beer spot, with Snake River and Black Tooth brewing some seriously delicious beers that collectively pack more IBUs than the state has residents.

39. Connecticut

Not a ton happening here, but Olde Burnside makes a uniquely sessionable Scottish Ale, and also sells longswords on its website.

38. Arkansas

Last year, the Arkansas Times — whose research we trust, because they obviously weren’t drinking 11% stouts while writing, unlike some people — reported that the number of breweries jumped from four to 19… and it’s growing. That, friends, is a renaissance, with breweries like Core Brewing and Ozark Beer Co. leading a serious charge from the South. In 10 years, after the brewers get more comfortable, expect to see Arkansas as a real contender.

37. South Carolina

South Carolina has 1) many respectable brewpubs, 2) not very many breweries whose wares make it outside state lines, and, perhaps best of all, 3) a border with North Carolina.

36. Kansas

Tallgrass makes some solidly enjoyable brews for sipping out of a cold aluminum tallboy. The rest of the state’s beer is kinda just… there. Much like Kansas.

35. Arizona

Stick to iced tea! What’s that? Arizona Iced Tea isn’t even made in Arizona? Fine. You know what is? Actually some decent beers (Four Peaks, SanTan), but, hey, things are getting competitive.

Credit: Jennifer Bui

34. Iowa

If Ray Kinsella had started a hop farm instead of a corn farm, brewing in Iowa would probably be… exactly the same, since he plowed over the bulk of said farm so he could have a catch with Ray Liotta. The bright side? Toppling Goliath, which five years ago brewed a half-barrel at a time, and now has road-trippers from all over the Midwest stopping by their taproom to drink that much in a sitting.

33. Tennessee

Whiskey, yes. Country music? Yep. Connie Britton’s charismatic turn as fading Nashville star Rayna Jaymes? Oh hell yes! Beer? Meh. That’s not to say that there’s not great beer — what up, Nashville’s Yazoo and Memphis’s Boscos — but the drop from great to mediocre is steeper than a Smoky Mountain cliff face. Plus, ain’t nobody — not even Rayna Jaymes — ever wrote a classic country song while drinking a fancy porter.

32. Kentucky

Look, bourbon will always be Kentucky’s first and greatest love, but breweries like Against the Grain are really giving it something to be proud of  when it comes to certain other alcoholic beverages. Of course, those bourbon barrels have gone a long way to helping breweries all over the country make your beer more delicious. Although oddly, Kentucky Bourbon Ale (the state’s most high-profile barrel-aged beer) is just okay.

31. Georgia

Georgia loses points for not requiring each and every one of its breweries to make a brew called Sweet Georgia Brown, but it really lands in the middle by a couple dozen middle-of-the-road breweries, but no truly great ones. A C+ average might be passing, but it’s hardly excelling.

30. New Mexico

No, we’re not going to make a Breaking Bad joke. But we are going to ding New Mexico for being hot as balls, which makes drinking a thick, delicious microbrew extra difficult. Also making it difficult is the fact that, despite the efforts of great brewers like La Cumbre and Chama River, nobody thinks of beer when they think of New Mexico. Except maybe Schraderbrau. And… DAMMIT!

29. Idaho

For a state best known for potatoes and, um, potatoes, Idaho’s throwing some serious clout around courtesy of ballers like Grand Teton, Sockeye, Laughing Dog, and the incredible Selkirk Abbey. But the scene isn’t fully formed yet, thanks in large part to the fact that lite beer tastes better while muddin’.

Credit: Jennifer Bui

28. Virginia

Virginia is for beer lovers. Or at least it’s getting there fast. Another state where weird laws (these ones involving how much food you needed to sell, for some God-awful reason) held brewing back for a while, VA’s got some real action going now, from entrenched favorites like Legend, Star Hill, and Devil’s Backbone, to new kid Smartmouth, whose canned IPA and Saison are (somewhat) specifically designed for you to drink on a boat. But they’re really good on land too! And all this leads to an interesting and telling halo effect: two of its cities — Richmond and Norfolk — are amongst the three finalists for Stone’s newest super-brewery/blissful outdoor drinking compound.

27. Louisiana

Louisiana’s another state where the joy to be had drinking beer there outstrips the actual quality of anything produced in-state. Obviously the beer discussion here starts with Abita. Purple Haze sounds more exciting than it tastes, but some of their less widespread releases make up for their more average flagships. If you’re looking for an intriguing up-and coming outfit to keep an eye on, Parish Brewing Co. merits your attention.

26. Oklahoma

Truth be told, a few years ago Oklahoma wouldn’t have placed nearly this high, but the meteoric rise of Prairie Artisan Ales as one of those “holy crap have you tried this” breweries that people cover some serious distance to visit has really raised its profile.

25. Alaska

Hey, it’s cold there. Often. Which leaves plenty of time to stay inside and brew. And they do, routinely rating as one of the top states in terms of barrels of craft beer produced per capita. But enough boring stuff! Get your hands on excellent brews like Midnight Sun Berserker, Alaskan Barley Wine, and Anchorage Bitter Monk.

24. Maryland

So yeah, it’s a little odd that Maryland’s most prominent craft outfit (Flying Dog), is a Colorado transplant, but the fact remains that the vast majority of the brewery’s tasty beer comes out of the Old Line State these days. They’re far from the only game in town, however. Stillwater is doing some seriously impressive work, like a damn-near-perfect Gose collab with Westbrook. Of course, old habits die hard, so the state still consumes plenty of Natty Boh, too.

23. Montana

Big Sky Brewing might be the ambassador for Montana brewing — Moose Drool being an essential brown, and Ivan the Terrible being a badass of a Russian Imperial — but with rising stars like Flathead Lake and Bozeman Brewing pouring high-quality wares, Montana’s becoming formidable on the scene. Bozeman will one day be a destination for beer lovers, provided you can deal with the requisite bluegrass music that accompanies your drinking.

22. Alabama

Homebrewing, the essential root of all the damn beautiful stuff in this story, has been legal in Alabama for barely over a year. So that’s crazy. Before that, a noble band of beermen toiled under the banner Free The Hops for almost a decade to get the legal ABV limit for any brewery raised from 6%. But after all that, the boom’s finally on, with the number of breweries doubling basically every year. One of the big deals: Good People, which has really cool cans, and fills them with a splendid double IPA called Snake Handler that would’ve gotten them all very arrested three years ago.

21. Utah

Utah! Get me two! That’s what you used to have to say when you ordered a beer in Utah, because it was mad weak. But outfits like Uinta (13.2% Labyrinth Black Ale) and Epic (11%, damn raisin-y barley wine) are saying eff that, except without cursing, because it’s still Utah. Plus, the 3.2 beer legend isn’t even true — for one, it’s actually 3.2% by weight, which means it’s in fact a whopping 4% by volume, and, for two, you just have to avoid the gas station and hit the government-run package store for the real stuff. Or, like, be in another state.

20. Texas

The only state to declare its own separate national beer and the home to venerable Shiner, craft beer has truly been exploding in Texas in recent years. Well, that’s been happening basically everywhere, but it’s Texas, so the explosion FEELS bigger. The Sours and Saisons coming out of Jester King are no joke. Wordplay! But for serious, they’re legit. Houston’s Saint Arnold, one of the OG’s of the Texas craft scene, continually turns heads with its special releases. Deep Ellum has been steadily making waves in DFW. Whether or not you’re drinking a Lone Star, it’s a good time to be drinking in the Lone Star State.

Credit: Jennifer Bui

19. Delaware

It feels a little crazy to put a state this high basically on the strength of a single brewery, but it feels less crazy when said brewery is Dogfish Head, which has thus far managed the tricky balancing act of becoming an absolute powerhouse while maintaining serious quality and a distinct lack of the “they’re too big now” cliche that beer snobs sometimes fall into. For a state with a lack of glitz and glamour that made for arguably the best joke in Wayne’s World, Dogfish Head gives them some cache and a top 20 ranking to boot.

18. Indiana

The NASCAR set might account for beer drankin’, but it’s hard to overlook the presence of Three Floyds, whose Dark Lord Imperial Stout, Zombie Dust, and Dreadnaught IPA represent some of the Midwest’s most beloved beers. Throw in Shoreline’s bourbon-barrel stout and Upland’s lambics, and you’ve got enough powerhouse brewing to make it impossible to ignore Indy.

17. Florida

When you live in Florida, you have to deal with all the other people who live in Florida, not to mention the people who visit. So it’s nice that the rest of the normal, beer-loving folk have some excellent options to calm their nerves. Rapp and 7venth Sun represent some intriguing rising stars, and Funky Buddha’s Maple Bacon Coffee Porter is rightfully an object of obsession. But the shining-est star of Florida’s beer scene is Tampa’s Cigar City, which can go beer-to-beer with anyone. Hunahpu’s is about as flawless a rendition of the “people will line up to get this” imperial stout as you’ll find anywhere.

16. Minnesota

The most famous beer-beard in Minneapolis belongs to the guy behind Dangerous Man Brewing, who, by all accounts, is a totally nice dude. And considering that he’s pledged in a Hill Farmstead-y way to simply running a primo tap room and never bottling or distributing a drop, he’s also the perfect one to cement the Minnesota brew movement — a quiet but supremely burly scene that most people outside the state don’t even know exists. Surly’s locally famed cans just made it to Chicago, but to drink many of the rest — Summit, 612Brew, Harriet, Lucid, and the next big thing, Fulton — you’ve gotta make a trip to the Twin Cities. Might be worth staying a few days.

15. North Carolina

North Carolina, raise up, do not spin your beer around like a helicopter ‘cause then it’ll explode everywhere, and that’d suck, since many of them are quite delicious. Foothills’ Jade IPA is fantastically drinkable (which might not be the exact way you’d describe its superb Bourbon Barrel-Aged Sexual Chocolate Imperial Stout), while Fullsteam, Big Boss, Highland, and Mother Earth cover about as much territory as a drinker could hope. And they don’t, like, make the beer, but Sam’s Quik Shop in Durham is one of the coolest places to buy it in the country — don’t be fooled just because it looks like a gas station convenience store that’s about to get held up.

Credit: Jennifer Bui

14. Maine

Last year, I spent a week in an extremely non-air-conditioned cabin in Belfast, Maine. I cooled off with Allagash Saison during the day, distracted myself from mosquitos via Shipyard XXXX IPA come night, and, in between, sipped Summer Session Ales from Peak Organic, so I could feel healthy or whatever. It basically all comes from Portland, a beer boomlet that challenges even its West Coast namesake thanks to dozens of full-scale operations and brewpubs that ensure all those lobster rolls are properly accompanied.

13. Illinois

It marked the end of a craft beer era in Illinois when Goose Island was bought out by the big boys, but it remains a local fixture, and all the whimpers about “selling out” seem to mysteriously vanish anytime they’re releasing a special Bourbon County Stout variant as everyone scrambles to get their hands on some. That’s not to say Goose was the only game in town (which felt like the case not all that long ago). Half Acre, Revolution, and Pipeworks are all expanding their reach at an impressive clip, and Chicago has gone from a bit of a behind-the-times beer town to quickly accelerating towards the front of the pack.

12. Ohio

Great Lakes. That’s all you need to know. Except not really, since you should also be very, very aware of IBU boundary-defiers Hoppin’ Frog, the newly dominating Rust Belt, Cinci’s Christian Moerlein, rapidly expanding Fat Head’s (they’re not just life-size wall stickers of NFL players and the Jonas Brothers anymore!), and barrel-aging fiends Thirsty Dog. Yes, much of Cleveland’s economy is based on LeBron James. But thanks to joints like Nano Brew and open fermentation hideaway Indigo Imp, it’s only a matter of time before beer catches up.

11. Missouri

Sure, the baseball stadium in St. Louis was named for beer before stadium naming rights really became a thing, but Missouri has plenty going for it beer-wise besides a certain iconic American brand calling it home. Boulevard is NOT made of broken dreams, but rather delicious beer, particularly their Belgian stuff. And right in Budweiser’s backyard you’ve got standout brews from the likes of Schlafly and Perennial. Have you had the latter’s Barrel-Aged Abraxas? No? You should do something about that.

10. Massachusetts

We may take them as a given today, but you can’t deny Sam Adams’ role in ushering in the era of SO MUCH GOOD BEER in America that even folks in Mississippi will be upset about their ranking because there are breweries everywhere (even if most of them don’t have the resources to make a crazy decadent and resource-intensive brew like Utopias). Of course, plenty of other standout breweries have followed in Sam Adams’ wake in the Bay State, from Harpoon and Night Shift, to Clown Shoes, Trillium, and Jack’s Abby.

Credit: Jennifer Bui

9. New York

Brooklyn’s so huge you can drink it in Helsinki, Blue Point’s recent sale to Anheuser-Busch made them somehow feel even bigger than that, and Ommegang cross-brands delicious Game of Thrones stouts with Hound-like abandon. But New York brewing is still about the small-scale local guys who keep outdoing themselves, from upstate’s venerable Captain Lawrence, to recent scene-stealer Other Half, to Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø, the scraggly-bearded, Brooklyn-based, gypsy-brewing genius behind Evil Twin — praise his Even More Jesus, fear his Molotov Cocktail.

8. Pennsylvania

Tröegs, Stoudt’s, Yards, Victory, Voodoo, Sly Fox, Weyerbacher: all always fantastic. Iron City: one of the world’s most lovable crappy beers. Yuengling: maybe not what craft-heads crave, but it’s the country’s oldest brewery (wait, you haven’t had someone drinking Yuengling tell you that?!?), and the very stuff that splashed out of dance-floor Solo cups all night at my cousin’s wedding in a barn on a PA sheep farm. Part of William Penn’s ‘’Great Treaty” to secure his land involved giving up a barrel of beer; we all got plenty back in return.

7. Wisconsin

There was a time when Milwaukee made approximately every beer consumed by every man who came home from work with grease on his shirt. Today, those canned brands of yesteryear are dead, or sold off and made in, like, California. But the Brothers Leinenkugel are statewide icons, New Glarus’ Spotted Cow is the first beer referenced by cheeseheads everywhere (even though nobody can get it outside the state), the baseball team’s name is the damn Brewers, and there used to be an urban legend that Miller Park’s taps were fueled by a beer pipe that ran directly from the brewery. An urban legend we will perpetuate, right here. Miller Park’s taps are fueled by a beer pipe that runs directly from the brewery!

6. Vermont

I once went into a beer store in Burlington asking for Heady Topper, and they laughed and laughed and told me to come back really early on Monday morning, so I could maybe score some in the half-hour before it sold out. But The Alchemist’s cult cans are only part of the story in the state with the US’s most breweries per-capita. See/drink Harpoon, Fiddlehead, craft harbinger Magic Hat, Long Trail, Lawson’s Finest Liquids (check the maple bourbon barrel-aged Sticky), and most prominently, Hill Farmstead, which many consider the world’s most currently dialed-in beer-maker, despite its tired “barn brewery to slightly larger barn brewery” origin tale.

5. Washington

Washington has long been one of the most formidable beer states, growing the majority of the country’s hops and giving hipsters something to drink with Olympia and Rainier, until those breweries sold out like so many grunge bands. We kid, of course, because Washington’s home to more than 200 breweries, highlighted by greatness like Seattle’s Elysian and Pike, the organic pioneers of Olympia’s Fish, Stevenson’s powerhouse Homo Erectus-brewing Walking Man, and Tacoma’s Harmon. But Washington also achieves greatness with “micro” beers for the masses, brewers like Pyramid and Redhook that bottle inexpensive bombers that help convert the skeptics across the nation to craft beer via the allure of a lower price tag. That, of course, draws the ire of beer snobs…  something that always happens when a local company finds tremendous success. Especially in Seattle. Because popularity is sooooooo lame. But lucky for them, there are enough breweries in the state to let them have a lesser-known go-to pint, and a quality one at that.

Credit: Jennifer Bui

4. Michigan

The Great Lakes State may not be a prolific hops producer, or contain one brewery for every man, woman, and child (they do have about two for every 100,000 adults, according to the Brewers Association). But mittens were meant for holding cold brews, and Michigan happens to host some of the best damned breweries in the country.

There’s a reason that the annual release of Bell’s Oberon is like a state holiday, and why its Two-Hearted is consistently ranked among the best IPAs in the world, even as many drinkers don’t realize it’s an IPA. Or why Larry Bell’s neighbors to the North, Grand Rapids’ Founders, has become one of the nation’s most respected brewers, so much so that Grand Rapids is now on the map as a destination beer city. Why, folks set up shop in the tiny lake town of Bellaire just to sip Short’s, or head South to Dexter for a look at how Jolly Pumpkin is made.

Beer in Michigan is a way of life, an economic booster that’s helping Detroit pull out of the apocalypse and a soul cleanser up in the UP, where long winters are made better with a growler from Ore Dock. And if that’s not convincing enough, consider this: in Ann Arbor and East Lansing, when the chaos of a tailgate clears, you’ll see as many empty bottles of craft beer scattered about as you will tallboys with holes punched in the side. In Michigan, beer love starts early.

3. Colorado

Everywhere you look in Colorado — literally everywhere — there is beer. There is no escaping the beer. This is a good thing. Everyone with a beard brews beer, and everyone has a beard, which, by the law of syllogism or something, means literally everyone brews beer. And, damn, do they do it well.

Oskar Blues started the craft can revolution, and if you haven’t had a GUBNA, change that. Avery has an entire run of bombers called the Dictator Series. New Belgium is distributing with the big boys thanks to an amber ale and a cruiser bike. Crooked Stave is souring things that man previously assumed un-sour-able. Great Divide has proven once and for all that the Yeti exists, and he will mess you up. And the whole state’s in on it — even the guy who just had a frozen chocolatini with dinner can rattle off 10 upstart breweries you won’t hear of for years. Beer is everywhere. Everywhere is beer.

2. California

Manifest Destiny gave us California, and it gave us back beer. Literally, the entire state makes the stuff, from Weed Alehouse & Bistro in a city called Weed (seriously) about 40 minutes from the Oregon border, all the way down to San Diego, which we’re gonna go ahead and deem the most dominating beer city in world history — thanks to Stone and Green Flash of course, but also Port, Coronado, Lost Abbey, Ballast Point, AleSmith (find their Wee Heavy), and the other 70+ operations brewing flawless beer with abandon.

God, there’s just so much to talk about here. Without hoppy vanguard Sierra Nevada, 99% of the beers we’re lauding (and… this story!) probably wouldn’t exist. Lagunitas’ commitment to growing national distribution while maintaining quality is second to none. 21st Amendment has a Watermelon Wheat to lure the beer-scared in, plus a perfectly portioned canned Lower De Boom barley wine to finish them off. Anchor’s been making whatever the hell steam beer is for almost 120 years. Firestone Walker’s Double Jack is probably the most deceptive 9.5-percenter you’ll ever accidentally drink too much of. And then, of course, there’s Pliny. Pliny, Pliny, Pliny! Pliny. And no, it’s not overrated.

Credit: Jennifer Bui

1. Oregon

California and Washington might have more brewers, but dammit, they’ve also got more people. More importantly, they don’t have the density of Oregon’s offerings. Or the quality. Oregon’s long been at the forefront of the craft industry, with brewers like Widmer Brothers, Rogue, Full Sail, and Deschutes leading the national charge as gateway beers for people who want something more out of their pints. But they’re just the OGs of what might be the epicenter of the craft beer movement.

Much ballyhoo has been made of the sheer number of breweries in the Portland metro area, which tops out at more than 70 and counting… but this isn’t a case of quantity over quality. It’s a case of quantity meeting quality head on. Portland houses an insurmountable number of great breweries — not good, pretty good, or wonderful, but effin’ great breweries — that are changing the landscape of modern brewing. Hair of the Dog, Breakside, Cascade, Upright, Ecliptic, the Commons, Burnside, Lompoc… it just keeps going. Even the “crappy” breweries by Portland standards would bury most of their peers based on pure deliciousness.

But that’s just one city in a state full of amazing brewers dotting the state, from the coastal Pelican to the high desert’s 10 Barrel, mid-state’s Ninkasi, Southern Oregon’s uncleverly named Southern Oregon Brewing, Mt. Hood’s Double Mountain… basically, if you enter a city or town in Oregon without a solid brewery, you’ve probably crossed into Washington or Idaho. Or maybe the capital of Salem… which sucks. But you’ll still find a great brewpub serving some of the best beer in America, made in Oregon, with Oregon hops, by a bearded Oregonian who’s probably in a band that sucks… that’s the Oregon way. Oregon beer, more than any, has helped introduce the masses to the potential of drinking great brews, and, with new breweries seemingly opening on a weekly basis, it’s the best damn place to be a beer lover in the US.