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All too often we forget the incredible depth of technology behind the
weekly ritual of TNiPN@*. We tend to only become aware of the
strategy of High Available Guinness (HAG) when it rises to the
forefront during a complete and utter venue failure. Yet we should
all be super grateful that this system exists.
On a Thursday-night-to-Thursday-night basis, we now take for granted
the high level clustering technology that has become invisible to us.
When our personal tracheas becomes all dried out like mummy throats,
new pints of Guinness pop out the ether, as if by magic, to deplete
our thirsts. Not much thought goes towards the underlying technology
behind this fantastical system. We tend to ignore the sophisticated
advances in place that we contantly rely upon while we quaff with
abandon.
Yet redundant Guinness and fall-over Guinness (RG/FOG) are
technologies that we heavily depend on. If this organized set of
established procedures didn't exist, we could easily be left puckered
up and ass out.
Last night I became painfully aware of this. Thursday Night is Pigdog
Night at the Mallard was as risky proposal in the first place; the
Mallard is an actively hostile bar towards Pigdog, as well as all of
the bad people in the Universe. Pigdog has had many terrible run-ins
with the Mallard in the past, and The Mallard has since been
considered a third or fourth-class venue. Being one of the only bars
in the East Bay to serve Guinness on two big smoking porches, it has
somehow remained on the list of approved TNiPN@* locations, just
because.
But last evening the TNiPN@* architecture came under EXTREME load.
Unexpectantly, we were thrust into a situation that caused us to rely
upon our back-end technologies much more heavily.
As usual, upon arrival at the venue, we ordered several Guinness
clusters with redundant Guinness clusters on order. It was our usual
streamlined system -- nobody's glass would ever fall empty. Parallel
ordering and resupply protocols were strictly adhered to.
Once the entire Pigdog team arrived, we brought our full infrastructure
strategy to bear. Multiple Guinness clusters arrived at the table
approximately every 10-15 minutes. Legacy beers, and beers with ugly
implementations were feeding into the system as well. It was the usual
fine, humming machine.
The flow of beer and cigarettes was running extremely efficiently by
9:30 P.M. I was personally able to access several threads of Guinness
simultaneously without any performance problems whatsoever, and other
substances were being scheduled, and additional equipment was being
brought online.
That's when the Mallard's sub-manager on duty, an ugly man on
tranquilizers, appeared next to our implementation table. His face
seemed to somehow embody Albany, and it's fascist COPS culture.
"I'm sorry, but we have to ask you to suspend all of your processes
NOW, and leave our liquor operations center IMMEDIATELY," he said.
The Mallard, located in Albany, a town with one cop for every five
residents, and a history of Ludditism inre the entire recreational
drug field, is just the WORST damn bar there is, so there was no point
in arguing. We had to suspend our research and leave at once,
abandoning TWO entire Guinness test pints behind (which really chaps
my hide). I kicked the building as I left.
Once you're in Albany, you're in Albany. The township is not
strategically located, hence one of our only options was to move to
the hillbilly scum bar known as the Hotsy Totsy, where they only do
experiments with Budweiser and ch*** pr0n. Or we could move on down
the street to the Ivy Room, a place that bills itself as dive bar
(a generous approximation), with very little scientific credibility
whatsoever, or any other kind of credibility at all for that matter.
As beveratologists doing SCIENCE -- something that Albany doesn't
understand anymore -- and not wanted to completely stop our flow of
Guinness, we settled for the Ivy Room. The Ivy Room became our
fallover bar (thank goodness we have a fallover methodology!) Once
again our HAG system came to the surface, and tried to keep the flow
of Guinness level.
But Goddamn, the Ivy Room didn't have Guinness!! It only had
miniature mug-sized pitchers, and NO GUINNESS AT ALL. The Ivy Room no
longer experiments with fine and delicious European stout, if it ever
did. The place must have been crushed by overwhelming negative peer
review, probably back in the 1970s. These days they specialize in
ghastly musical experiments.
The experiments are particularly brutal and inhumane. The DJs spin
R&B music and only one man dances. He wears an English cap, and is
forced to tap dance like Gene Kelly wearing a plaid sports coat. I am
not able to discern the meaning or purpose of the experiment, but what
they do to this man is so humiliating, and the music was so blaring
that I was forced to retreat outside in front of the bar many times,
where I smoked cigarettes with Tjames and discussed the latest
developments in Forth with George Perry, as Albany police prowlers
constantly drove by.
However, at all times, I did have beer! This is what is so amazing
about HAG. Even when Guinness is not immediately available, the
amazing Pigdog system allows for the temporary substitution of other
beers! I have no idea what the hell I was drinking at that late stage
in the evening. It sure wasn't Guinness. But at all times a constant
amount of beer was flowing to all of our beveratologists, and the
system kept on performing.
I hope that this artice has been illustrative of the awesome
methodology and beveratology behind every TNiPN@*. It is easy to take
the Pigdog Night infrastructure for granted, but my point is that
maybe we should all try to be a little more aware of the underpinnings
of a finely-tuned system that props us all up and keeps fine brew
streaming down our throats. We hardly notice it until an emergency
situation confronts us. Remember, TNiPN@* couldn't happen without
SCIENCE.
xxxlover@pigdog.org
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