The time has come for this international business blogger to bid you farewell. While working on this and brewha-ha has been fun, it has also taken a lot of time from my law practice and our blog, erblawg. Thanks for being a good audience! [Read more]

Paul Newman always seemed like a standup guy, and so the man who played everything from Cool Hand Luke to Doc Hudson’s voice in the movie Cars will be sorely missed. He was one of a rare breed, Hollywood men who marry and stay faithful, and who live far from the strange micro-system which is Los Angeles. Apparently he was also a beer drinker, at least according to the BBC, which claims Newman “credited a regular beer intake for his good fortune.” According to an interview with David Letterman, Newman preferred suds over grapes because “It’s the drink of the common man,” although it would also seem he had a tendency to have a few more than might be advisable in one sitting. So, while you’re hoisting that Oktoberfest... [Read more]

The US has been a leader in financial markets for quite a while now. Unfortunately, as anyone interested in international business knows, that may well be changing considerably. Why? Well, necessary deregulation combined with some archaic laws which remained led to a veritable regulation-phobia, and most everybody involved was making too much money to care. The result? That lack of oversight led to excessive risk taking by entities which were either implicitly government-backed or which, as it turns out, were simply “too large to fail.” That, and many Americans are sitting on properties which aren’t likely to be worth what they paid for them for quite a long time. Now, that lack of oversight looks to beget yet another. As taxgirl... [Read more]

Ok, I promised more information about Kraft’s Bull’s Eye Barbecue Sauce with Guinness in my last post, and here it is. We took your basic pork ribs, cooked them over a combination of charcoal and hard wood coal (since I like the taste of the hard wood but find it difficult to control for longer cooking times), and the result you can see in the picture above. It was, quite frankly, the best ribs I’ve ever made. That, unfortunately, had little to do with the sauce. As per the instructions on the bottle, I added the sauce towards the end of the cooking time. It’s a relatively mild sauce, with only a little bit of spice to it, but you can clearly taste the Guinness. I’m not sure where the “draught” comes... [Read more]

I was going to – and will – write a bit about the incredible ribs I made using Kraft’s Bull’s Eye Guinness Barbecue sauce, but first, an aside. I love Wikipedia, but there’s actually an entry for this product in Wikipedia. Does that mean they have an employee whose job it is to create Wikipedia entries on every product ever made by Kraft? Or is someone really so enamored of a product whose claim to fame is having once been offered at Burger King that they feel the need to put it on Wikipedia? The internet is a strange and wondrous place. [Read more]