All too often we forget the incredible depth of technology behind the weekly ritual of TNiPN@*. We tend to only become aware of the strategy of High Available Guinness (HAG) when it rises to the forefront during a complete and utter venue failure. Yet we should all be super grateful that this system exists.

On a Thursday-night-to-Thursday-night basis, we now take for granted the high level clustering technology that has become invisible to us. When our personal tracheas becomes all dried out like mummy throats, new pints of Guinness pop out the ether, as if by magic, to deplete our thirsts. Not much thought goes towards the underlying technology behind this fantastical system. We tend to ignore the sophisticated advances in place that we contantly rely upon while we quaff with abandon.

Yet redundant Guinness and fall-over Guinness (RG/FOG) are technologies that we heavily depend on. If this organized set of established procedures didn't exist, we could easily be left puckered up and ass out.

Last night I became painfully aware of this. Thursday Night is Pigdog Night at the Mallard was as risky proposal in the first place; the Mallard is an actively hostile bar towards Pigdog, as well as all of the bad people in the Universe. Pigdog has had many terrible run-ins with the Mallard in the past, and The Mallard has since been considered a third or fourth-class venue. Being one of the only bars in the East Bay to serve Guinness on two big smoking porches, it has somehow remained on the list of approved TNiPN@* locations, just because.

But last evening the TNiPN@* architecture came under EXTREME load. Unexpectantly, we were thrust into a situation that caused us to rely upon our back-end technologies much more heavily.

As usual, upon arrival at the venue, we ordered several Guinness clusters with redundant Guinness clusters on order. It was our usual streamlined system -- nobody's glass would ever fall empty. Parallel ordering and resupply protocols were strictly adhered to.

Once the entire Pigdog team arrived, we brought our full infrastructure strategy to bear. Multiple Guinness clusters arrived at the table approximately every 10-15 minutes. Legacy beers, and beers with ugly implementations were feeding into the system as well. It was the usual fine, humming machine.

The flow of beer and cigarettes was running extremely efficiently by 9:30 P.M. I was personally able to access several threads of Guinness simultaneously without any performance problems whatsoever, and other substances were being scheduled, and additional equipment was being brought online.

That's when the Mallard's sub-manager on duty, an ugly man on tranquilizers, appeared next to our implementation table. His face seemed to somehow embody Albany, and it's fascist COPS culture.

"I'm sorry, but we have to ask you to suspend all of your processes NOW, and leave our liquor operations center IMMEDIATELY," he said.

The Mallard, located in Albany, a town with one cop for every five residents, and a history of Ludditism inre the entire recreational drug field, is just the WORST damn bar there is, so there was no point in arguing. We had to suspend our research and leave at once, abandoning TWO entire Guinness test pints behind (which really chaps my hide). I kicked the building as I left.

Once you're in Albany, you're in Albany. The township is not strategically located, hence one of our only options was to move to the hillbilly scum bar known as the Hotsy Totsy, where they only do experiments with Budweiser and ch*** pr0n. Or we could move on down the street to the Ivy Room, a place that bills itself as dive bar (a generous approximation), with very little scientific credibility whatsoever, or any other kind of credibility at all for that matter. As beveratologists doing SCIENCE -- something that Albany doesn't understand anymore -- and not wanted to completely stop our flow of Guinness, we settled for the Ivy Room. The Ivy Room became our fallover bar (thank goodness we have a fallover methodology!) Once again our HAG system came to the surface, and tried to keep the flow of Guinness level.

But Goddamn, the Ivy Room didn't have Guinness!! It only had miniature mug-sized pitchers, and NO GUINNESS AT ALL. The Ivy Room no longer experiments with fine and delicious European stout, if it ever did. The place must have been crushed by overwhelming negative peer review, probably back in the 1970s. These days they specialize in ghastly musical experiments.

The experiments are particularly brutal and inhumane. The DJs spin R&B music and only one man dances. He wears an English cap, and is forced to tap dance like Gene Kelly wearing a plaid sports coat. I am not able to discern the meaning or purpose of the experiment, but what they do to this man is so humiliating, and the music was so blaring that I was forced to retreat outside in front of the bar many times, where I smoked cigarettes with Tjames and discussed the latest developments in Forth with George Perry, as Albany police prowlers constantly drove by.

However, at all times, I did have beer! This is what is so amazing about HAG. Even when Guinness is not immediately available, the amazing Pigdog system allows for the temporary substitution of other beers! I have no idea what the hell I was drinking at that late stage in the evening. It sure wasn't Guinness. But at all times a constant amount of beer was flowing to all of our beveratologists, and the system kept on performing.

I hope that this artice has been illustrative of the awesome methodology and beveratology behind every TNiPN@*. It is easy to take the Pigdog Night infrastructure for granted, but my point is that maybe we should all try to be a little more aware of the underpinnings of a finely-tuned system that props us all up and keeps fine brew streaming down our throats. We hardly notice it until an emergency situation confronts us. Remember, TNiPN@* couldn't happen without SCIENCE.

punchbowl@pigdog.org