This Bud’s not for U.S.

Roadrageous!
I dislike cell phones as much as the next curmudgeon—especially when you’re driving along and Suzie Sorority Girl cuts you off in her (insert pretentious car here … never mind, I will) Jetta, Beemer or Hummer, as she’s yapping with her BFF on a Saturday morning. You know what I’m talking about … you honk your horn and she doesn’t hear you ‘cause she’s so wrapped up in what her BFF did at that kegger the night before, and when you pull up alongside her and flip her off, she just ignores you because she knows she made a faux pas, so you ram her with the side of your car and she flies off the side of a cliff like the Nazis did in the famous truck-chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark …

… and you smirk a mighty smirk of satisfaction.

Keep both eyes on your crotch
It is because of situations like the one above that we have a new law in California that says you can’t talk on your cell phone while behind the wheel unless you shove a Bluetooth into your external auditory meatus or, for those with newer, fancier automobiles, talk to people through your tweeters.

Question: Is the new law really going to make Californians safer drivers?

Answer: Nay.

It just frees up our hands to do other things like … munching on a Happy Meal, maybe a two-for-one taco, or slurping a Starbucks quadruple vanilla Frappuccino, applying makeup, or smacking bickering brats in the back seat (wait, that’s illegal, too, right?).

Radio talk-show hosts Armstrong and Getty pointed out that while it’s illegal to talk on the phone the old-fashioned way while you drive, there is no law that prohibits talking through your speakers—sans phone—while holding, say … a banana to your ear.

Now people will just text (which is still legal), and therefore stare down at their laps as they drive. Or, if you’re cheap like me, you might just use the speaker phone and set the phone in your lap … and stare at it.

I predict that in the future we’ll probably have invisible cars, sorta like Wonder Woman’s jet, where cops can see everything that’s going on inside our vehicles, right down to the can of Budweiser in the cup holder. Then we’re really screwed.

This bid’s for InBev
But maybe we should think twice about drinking a Bud while driving. In keeping with our patriotic call to “buy American,” U.S. citizens should instead stow an American- (and, for some, locally) made Sierra Nevada in their consoles.

After more than a month of offers and counter offers, Belgian company InBev finally announced that “This Bud’s for us,” after purchasing the American beer giant for a cool—or should I say, ice cold— $52 billion from Anheuser-Busch.

It’s a sad day in America. This is Budweiser, dammit—the Clydesdales, the talking frogs, Bud Bowl, Spuds MacKenzie. Anheuser-Busch makes about 50 percent of beer sales in the U.S., and was the last hold-out among the country’s top three (No. 2 Miller was sold in 2002 to SABMiller, a company with roots in South Africa, and third-place Coors was bought by Canada-based Molson in 2005).

It kinda hurts—especially at a time when most of the products we buy come from other countries. Although a new Bud Trappist might take the sting out of it.

Early Morning would
Just when Jake Early couldn’t get any more Jake Earlian, the local artist just submitted a couple of designs to God-sized indie rockers My Morning Jacket to be used for posters for the band’s upcoming Evil Urges tour.

The longtime MMJ fan contacted the band a couple years ago about the idea of creating a show poster; they were into the idea, but were just coming off the road supporting 2005’s Z. Now one of the biggest bands in the world is touring the world, and Early’s work will be seen on posters for two September dates in Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Early said this week that the designs are quite different from his work on display at Chico Paper Co., and feature a bear and a quail … that’s all I got … we’ll have to wait to see the images in the next couple of weeks.