The Diary of Our Own Jimmy Bracken: Not unlike the Oakland A's.

NABC has sent two brewers to Schlafly Brewery, a brewer to Huber Winery & Distillery, a salesperson to New Holland Brewing, one chef to Holy Grale, and a second to The Place Downstairs.

We may be on the verge of conclusive evidence attesting to the proposition that in big league sports terms, NABC is a small market team.

Since 1987, when the pizzeria was founded, several hundred people have worked for NABC in one capacity or another -- some for a little while, and others for a very long time. Many, and perhaps most, have gone on to bigger and better things. One's a chef in Louisville. One's a successful real estate professional in Texas. One's doing nicely on the Left Coast. Lots of them own their own businesses. It's impossible to keep track of them all, but it's always a pleasure to bump into successful alumni.

A business is not a person, but the life of a business resembles that of the individual. There are fast and slow times, fat and lean years, and good and bad periods. It's fun for a while, and then profoundly non-fun actions become necessary. People come and go, in life and business. It's all a jumble, and a blur.

Through it all, when it seems the hardest, it's useful to remember that we've been useful. A perfect record is impossible, and yet I'm satisfied that over the years, it's been a good relationship between management and team.

The challenge never changes: Keep it rolling. Some day, even I might decide what I'd like to do when I grow up.

Good reading: Pints and pubs in the UK.

For Friday reading, here are two recent articles surveying the state of drinks and pub culture in the UK. In the first, the sanctity of the pint measure is defended.

In praise of … the pint, editorial in The Guardian

There is a glass-half-full take on the government's blurry vision of beer being served in continental measures. Brits have an unfortunate tendency to pour strong foreign lagers – Stella, even Leffe – into a pint jar for which they were not intended, and to get poisonously pie-eyed in the process. But the solution is not to change the measure, it is to change the drink. The UK has a distinctive, venerable and varied tapestry of quality session ales, which can quite reasonably be slowly supped in decent quantities.

In the second, the history and current condition of the distinctly English pub and its pub culture are considered.

Public Houses: Time, gentlemen; an elegy on the British pub, by our obituaries editor, in The Economist

... The fate of the Hand & Racquet can be multiplied across Britain. Since 2005 more than 6,000 pubs have closed. Drive through the cities, and the once-proud Victorian keystones on every corner are likely to be shuttered and dead. Roam the suburbs, and the neat brick housing estates are haunted by mock-Tudor ghosts. Search the countryside, and increasingly only the strange, too-large front windows in a cottage, or an ornate iron sign-holder projecting from a wall, will tell you that a pub once stood here. More than half the villages in Britain now have no pub at all.

By request: Karl and the keg club.

Flashback: Letting the pints speak ... in 1994.

In the beginning, when the Public House had only two or three taps and we were seeking ways to encourage consumption, we had a "keg club."

The idea was to record the number of pints consumed overall, and when these pints totalled a keg, the drinker would get a prize of some sort (I can't remember what) and have his or her name recorded on a keg, which would be mounted somewhere inside the pub for viewing.

It was well intentioned, and for a while it was quite popular, and this in part came eventually to doom the project. No one had time any longer to keep track, and we became busier (perhaps I should say, became a real business") far sooner than any of us expected. Evenings stopped being intimate gatherings of friends, and became Mecca instead. There are good and bad aspects of both, I suppose. I'm happy that we the pub became successful, but I miss those times.

Karl was one of our earliest and most vocal advocates, and he fancied Guinness above all else. There'd been scattered murmurings about who could drink the most pints of Guinness, and after a trial run or three, and a "record" somewhere around 13 or 14, Karl announced that the end-all, beat-all, record-breaking day had arrived.

We took his car keys and arranged a ride home, and he proceeded to drink 18 pints in roughly 12 hours. I verified the count. A legend was born. A photo was taken.

Soon thereafter we began soft-pedaling the notion of drinking contests, although the tradition lives on in the form of periodic efforts to "run the gauntlet" during Gravity Head. Officially, the practive is discouraged ... but it's your hangover. Deposit car keys first, them do what you will.