Wetting a line.

I must confess that I've been too busy and preoccupied this year to have sufficient time for composing the screeds that formerly defined my existence as a beer writer of sorts. This is a matter of regret, but sometimes life intrudes.

On a good day, I'm still capable of poking sticks though the bars of the American swill asylum, as with this week's Louisville Eccentric Observer column: Mug Shots: The Bud Isn't Your Buddy.

Yes, I realize that lobbing potshots at Budweiser is like shooting benumbed fish in a barrel, but the reason I persist in doing it is to watch the reaction ... and, inevitably, there is a reaction, although sometimes it takes a while. Usually the reaction resembles the same type of graceless, ham-fisted extortion that has played such an important part in the American icon's business model for the past century.

In a society that presumably values free expression, should A-B's unhappiness about words written in a newspaper column be conveyed in any way other than words of the company's own expressing a contrary point of view, with readers left to decide on their own?

I possess no information to suggest that anyone connected with A-B has ever read anything I've ever written or cares if they have. But for better or worse, I don't trust 'em. Consider yesterday's column a curmudgeon's fishing expedition. We'll see if there were any nibbles.