An afternoon at Castaways: Trivial thoughts, bad jokes

Doc’s report:

Driving the 5.5 miles from my launch site at Coonan’s to my port at Castaways, I sailed past the Bier Garten at the 3.4-mile marker. I think it speaks to my credibility that I measure trips as the distances between bars.

Passing the Bier Garten, I thought of a recent trivia category I aced there: beer history. (The category prompted a question: “When is trivia no longer trivial?”)

Here are the questions. No Googling or scrolling. The answers are at the end:

1. When someone asks you to mind your “p’s and q’s,” what reference to a British bartender’s request are they making?
2. Pilsner beer originated in what country?
3. During fermentation, what two ingredients of beer are produced?
4. A beer becomes “skunked” as a result of the introduction of what element?
   

Good luck.

When I met Harry and our friend the G-Man at Castaways, each had changed, even at their advanced ages. The eponymous Harry had received his first haircut in years, from his recently acquired son-in-law; as a result, like his kinsman Samson, he’d lost most of his strength and required physical therapy on his back. Evidently, the therapy worked to the extent that he can once again lift three wildly varying drinks in a two-hour time span: a mai tai, a blue Hawaiian and a Cranium Crush, a beer from a brewery in Petoskey.

Harry’s bar tab of about $20 put me in mind of a scene from W.C. Fields’ “The Bank Dick”: 

Fields: “Was I in here last night? And did I spend a $20 bill?”
Bartender:  “Yeah.”
Fields: “Oh, boy, what a load that is off my mind. I thought I’d lost it.”

Nor is Harry’s strength diminished to the extent that he cannot “pick” the “pickle,” from his Fifth Street garden, which, to judge by his description of it, rivals that of our first parents. He’s

Julie the bartender ...

labeling them Fifth Street Dills, with the slogan "We’ll Take the Fifth.”

For his part, the G-Man was celebrating the arrival of his first Social Security check. He’d already sprung for a round of drinks for the 20 idlers in his golf league, and he was sufficiently ebullient to anticipate his impending jury duty with good humor: “I’ll take the fifth, too.”

My review of Castaways is simply an unqualified recommendation. Julie, our very charming and competent waitress, had fingernails the color of topaz.

Castaways has some mint in a glass behind the bar for mojitos, but most of it is in a box in the cooler. My attempt at humor -- “My parents kept me in a box in the cooler until I was four” -- met with mixed results.

Lots of good one-liners were inspired that afternoon. After I told everyone about my exploits as a janitor during the recent county fair -- I found both a used condom and a dirty diaper in one

... and her fingernails

public shower, e.g. -- someone called used condoms behind the livestock exhibit “baaaad.”

Harry is reading a book about the semi-colon; he paused, however, in the middle.

Someone said the solution to our bridge problem isn’t tolls, but trolls (like in “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.”). I offered that Harry would have been casting to type as a troll before his aforementioned haircut.

At Castaways, you’re anything but. No isolated forsaken sailors here. It’s a warm, friendly, social place with good food on a nice river rolling ceaselessly, as we all are, out to the bay.

So rather than making strained references to the Hanks film, or to Shakespeare’s “castaway” plays -- “Twelfth Night” and the “Tempest” -- I’ll just semicolon it and give you the answers to that trivia question:

1. Remember to pay for your “pints and quarts.”
2. The Czech Republic
3. Alcohol and carbon dioxide (bubbles)
4. Light, or sunlight. Hence, the colored bottle.
   

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See the hairy guy's report on Castaways: A blue Hawaiian, a Cranium Crush and an appetizer to wrestle with along the Kawkawlin River