How can I be sure?

How can I? Be sure of what? A fair way to eliminate the surplus titles for my list. Alphabetically? By word count? By character count? Randomly?

It's going well today. I nearly have my quota of question marks. A few crap jokes and Stalin references and this will be a regulation post. (I do have my rules, you know. I've determined the exact number of characters in each post for the next three years. It's based on a complex mathematical formula. I won't bore you with the details, but it involves my shoe size, the phase of the moon and the public bar price of Tetley's Mild on the same date 25 years previously. The punctuation (number and type of) is calculated from the day number in the Babylonian calendar and the distance between earth and Io on that day. That's why my sentences are so short. The algorithm generates far too many full stops.)

All the packages from Britain I'd been waiting for arrived yesterday. The 2005 Statistical Handbook of the British Beer and Pub Association (one of my favourite books), the issues of Private Eye I reordered because someone here couldn't be arsed to deliver them the first time, "The Tetley Brewery, Leeds" and a July issue of Private Eye. The post here is very post-modernist. The last four issues of Private Eye have been dated (in order of delivery) October, July, September, July. I wonder what happened to those from August? (That's all the questions marks for today. I now either have to be assertive or to do some re-editing.)

Tomorrow. I'll start using titles from the list tomorrow. If I can think of a way of weeding out nine. Pin. That's it. I'll get the kids to stick a pin into a printed list of the titles. The ones they hit, follow William Patrick Hitler into obscurity.


. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Right. Andrew's pin has decided. The lucky titles are:

Brettanomyces: The Musical
Backpedalling
Floaters (The Good Kind)
Floaters (The Bad Kind)
A Day Without Details
Going to America
Alternative grains
Oettinger
out of the can
warm piss
Base malts now and then
Things I like about the BJCP style guidelines
Parenting tips for beer obsessives
Fruit and vegs that should not be used in beer
Bubbles in my Beer
Dutch Bar Snacks (the "bitterballs" question)
Dutch v. Belgian Oud Brun
How To Shop For Beer In Holland
Archeological Evidence of Long Term Beer Aging Pre-1850


These are the unhappy losers:

It Was Like That When I Found It
Debbie Does Den Haag
Average Maltsack Corn Counts, 1857-1913
Double IPA: say it one last time
Why Grimbergen blonde is a good beer
The Reinheitsgebot is a joke
Belgian Brewing Logs, pre & post WWI
Beer ads 1910-1920
Ron's Favorite Crap Jokes (continuing series)


A shame. Some of my favourites have missed out.

Just like Earl, I'll work through the list in no particular order. I wonder where I'll start. (Bum, I have to leave this incorrectly punctuated, because I'm not allowed any more question marks today.)