BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: An accumulated thirst -- or, lots of kegs floated at Pints&union.

I am somewhat flabbergasted by the tally, but happily so.

After four "official" business days preceded by two "soft" evenings, something like 800 pints of draft beer have been consumed at Pints&union, including two full kegs of Fuller's London Pride -- and only one of the other blown kegs was an IPA (Bell's Two Hearted).

That's 100 pints of IPA (a very good IPA, I might add) and 700 of the other styles. Bottles and cans are moving at a nice clip, too. Yesterday an old friend in the restaurant business took a look at the beer list.

"This is great. There's something here for everyone."

Music to my ears, kind sir. Another exchange on Reddit produced this comment.

I’m actually really impressed by those tap choices. Solid but not intimidating beers. I’ll definitely be grabbing a Fuller’s or an Urquell.

It's far too early to judge, and as Tom Hanks might have noted in an alternate universe, there's no gloating in the beer business. Still, it's gratifying to play a role in a plan finally coming to fruition. On Sunday afternoon, Joe Phillips posted at the Pints&union Fb page.

I saw all walks of life, many different age groups, strangers becoming friends. That's what a public house is for. No more blaming, no left or right, no more terms like "Boomers" or "Millennial's"; we are all in this together. Thank you for showing up and meeting someone new and getting back to what matters, and that's "us" as a whole. Thank you so much for a great first week, we look forward to seeing you again soon.

Pints&union will reopen on Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. Business hours next week are easy to remember: 4:00 p.m. to to 2:00 a.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Monday is our Ruhetag -- the "quiet" or "rest" day (translation: closed on Monday. Sunday hours are coming fairly soon.

As the kegs started popping on Saturday night, I was reminded of a hilarious 1950’s-era Australian song that I first heard performed by the Dubliners with heavily bearded and gravelly-voiced Ronnie Drew singing the lead. The song is based on a true story and the tale is told here: The Original "Pub with No Beer."

It's lonesome away from your kindred and all
By the camp fire at night where the wild dingoes call,
But there's nothing so lonesome so morbid or drear
Than to stand in a bar of a pub with no beer.

Now the publican's anxious for the quota to come
There's a far away lock on the face of the bum
The maid's gone all cranky and the cook's acting queer
What a terrible place is a pub with no beer.

Then the stock-man rides up with his dry dusty throat
He breasts up to the bar, pulls a wat from his coat,
But the smile on his face quickly turns to a sneer,
When the bar man said sadly the pub's got no beer.

Ther's a dog on the 'randa-h for his master he waits
But the boss is inside drinking wine with his mates
He hurries for cover and cringes in fear
It's no place for a dog round a pub with no beer.

Old Billy the blacksmith first time in his life
Has gone home cold sober to his darling wife,
He walks in the kitchen, she says you're early me dear,
But he breaks down and tells her the pub's got no beer.

ON THE AVENUES: Riders in the Hummer.

ON THE AVENUES: Riders in the Hummer.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Most of what I know about Australia has been sporadically gleaned from a handful of books, documentaries and films, although far less of the Crocodile Dundee variety than Children of the Revolution and Gallipoli. The latter brought Mel Gibson to American audiences; he was born in the United States but moved to New South Wales as a boy. On the other hand, the classic movie era actor Errol Flynn came from Hobart, Tasmania, which is part of the Australian commonwealth, and later became an American citizen.

The Manic Street Preachers, a band from old Wales, have a song about Australia. Appropriately, it’s called “Australia.” Australian bands you may have heard include INXS, AC-DC and Men at Work. Peter Garrett, the angular fellow in the Midnight Oil song about aboriginal lands, was an activist who eventually became a politician.

My friend Graham, born Canadian and now New Albanian, toured Down Under a decade ago, and he has provided first-hand testimony. So have various natives encountered while traveling. Back during my salad days in Europe, it seemed to me that the Australians were a blessed caste of backpackers. They had an untouchable quality, as such: If an American and an Australian were caught at 4 a.m. urinating on a sacred statue in the central square, only the Yank would be hauled away to jail. The gendarmes would merely laugh at the Aussie, who would be shooed away to sleep it off.

Such nice, harmless lads, and not imperialist at all!

It should be noted that not once during Graham’s trekking tales did we ever share an ice-cold Foster’s Lager, because Foster’s most assuredly cannot be termed “Australian for beer” when it is mass-produced in Canada, not Canberra. Americans tend to remain ignorant of such important distinctions, and perhaps accordingly, many of us bought into the whole Crocodile Dundee shtick.

This is why I remain dubious of so many of my countrymen, although I can think of at least one Australian who felt the same way toward his.

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Earlier this summer, I finally read a novel about Australia: Riders in the Chariot, by Patrick White. The novel was published in 1961, and White was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973.

It probably is an understatement to suggest that White’s relationship with his homeland was psychological, visceral and adversarial. Reading the overview of his life and career, one readily sees the ambiguities: A well-traveled gay writer and intellectual returns to his native Australia after half a life spent elsewhere, and finds that his country is his polar opposite, embracing superstition, hypocritical piety and macho doltery in equal measures. In outspoken fashion, White spent the remainder of his days trying to square the circle, while ignoring calls to “go live somewhere else if you hate it so much here.”

How oddly familiar this sounds to generations of New Albany’s book readers.

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Riders in the Chariot traces the comings and goings, and an eventual convergence, of four very different residents of a fictionalized Sydney suburb (Sarsaparilla) in the late 1950s. Their common thread is not in any sense that of shared backgrounds. Rather, it is an ecumenical, non-denominational grasp of spirituality, because each of them has experienced visions of the flaming chariot described in the Book of Ezekiel.

The central characters are:

Mary Hare: An elderly, eccentric and virtually feral heiress inhabiting a crumbling mansion appropriately called Xanadu. Her decision to hire a housekeeper has unexpected consequences.

Ruth Godbold: The local washerwoman and mother to a large brood, abandoned by her husband and relegated to inhabiting a converted garage. She is the inadvertent glue for the neighborhood, and is largely ignored when not actively maligned.

Alf Dubbo: A peripatetic aborigine from somewhere in the scrublands, possessing only borderline literacy, he is largely uninterested in white culture, but is a gifted natural artist able to express himself only when painting.

Mordecai Himmelfarb: A former Jewish holy man and academic, he narrowly escaped the gas chambers and lost everything in the Holocaust. Resolved to flee European old ways, he sets out as a penitent, randomly selects Australia as a new home, and rejects his educational background in favor of manual labor in a bicycle parts factory.

---

Riders in the Chariot is rife with symbolism, and while much of it is Biblical in origin – at a critical juncture, Dubbo denies knowing Himmelfarb – the novel cannot be said to be religious. Those who have experienced the vision of the chariot have been exposed to a universal truth, not a sectarian dogma. Surrounded by dullards, they glimpse a kinder future, but like the proliferating undergrowth choking Hare’s unkempt property, there is a strong suggestion that any striving for ultimate truth that exists outside one’s individual consciousness is likely to fall prey to nature’s limitations, and humanity’s destructive nurture.

In short, spirituality doesn’t have a prayer in the face of mankind’s territorial proclivities, religious or otherwise. Life remains death: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust … and no one ever gets saved.

Obviously, the novel needn’t have been confined to Australia to achieve this conclusion. With only slight alterations, the setting could well have been New Albany. It might yet be. There is no happy ending, and yet there is much to be learned. The events that transpire to produce tragedy do not occur owing to divine decree. They result from conniving, fallibility, stupidity and fear on the part of human beings, who couldn’t manage to see a fiery chariot if it landed atop their corn hole boards.

I haven’t ever been to Australia, but Patrick White never came here, either. For some reason, that fact seems important.

"I think she was on her back when it happened but I was not paying attention because we were rolling around."

Australia grasps the obvious: It's a motel room, mate.

Woman injured while having sex on overnight work trip can sue employer; Australian court rules that woman, who was hurt when light fitting fell on her during sex in a motel, is entitled to compensation, by Alison Rourke in Sydney (Guardian)

 ... "This is not the 1920s, after all," (lawyer Leo) Grey told the court. Grey argued that sex was "an ordinary incident of life" commonly undertaken in a motel room at night, like sleeping or showering.

Lawyers for ComCare, the insurer of the woman's workplace, argued that while people needed to sleep, eat and attend to their personal hygiene, they did not "need to have sex".