May 27, 2010 Shank Hall, Mil­wau­kee, Wis­con­sin
Moon­al­ice poster by Chris Shaw

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice, the tribe likes beer. Beer goes really well with hemp, as well as with base­ball. Unfor­tu­nately, beer is not com­pat­i­ble with aging. As they get older, mem­bers of the tribe expe­ri­ence a grad­ual, but steady dete­ri­o­ra­tion in our abil­ity to retain beer. Even­tu­ally, we get to the point where we drink beer in the bath­room to save time. For­tu­nately, hemp has no such issues!

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, the Brew­ers’ sausage races are decended from an ancient Moon­al­ice har­vest rit­ual. Back in the 19th cen­tury, the Moon­al­ice tribe in these parts used to com­pete to see who pro­duced the best hemp. In the early days, the Hemp Har­vest Queen would sam­ple all the entries and pick a win­ner. Unfor­tu­nately, the Har­vest Queen usu­ally passed out before she got through the eval­u­a­tion process. They tried using lots of Har­vest Queen’s, but with the same result. So in the end, some­one sug­gested a race. The farm­ers each dressed up as a doo­bie and ran around a field. The Ital­ian Doo­bie won most of the time, but that was because it cheated.

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, Mil­wau­kee is an urban heat island. Urban Heat Islands have an aver­age nightly tem­per­a­ture is sig­nif­i­cantly higher than the sur­round­ing areas. Don’t know about you, but we thought this sounded very sus­pi­cious. Not the heat part. That makes sense. But are peo­ple in Mil­wau­kee sig­nif­i­cantly higher than folks in the sur­round­ing areas? We can con­firm that the only town in Wis­con­sin that rivals Mil­wau­kee in terms of ele­va­tion is Madi­son, which is where we’ll be on Sunday.

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, tonight’s poster depicts Mrs. O’Leary’s bull. This is the one that left town after the Great Chicago Fire, moved up here to Mil­wau­kee and started brew­ing “light” beer.

Happy Birth­day Pete!

M282