It seems to us . . .
Beer vendors, a tribal consideration and Australia ponders a papal cat
Updated: 07/19/08 6:52 AM
THIS BUD’S FOR WHO?: Our world has been shaken. Budweiser and Labatt are now kin, not just competitors. And the King of Beer’s crown, at least in the eyes of one editorial cartoonist (see tomorrow’s pages), has been replaced by a Belgian beret as Belgian brewing giant InBev acquires Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion, which is a lot of suds in any language.
And then it hit us — could the iconic American beer’s equally iconic mascots, the Clydesdales, be collateral damage? The big European draft horse, if you’ll pardon the pun, is the Percheron, which went from medieval warhorse to puller of French stagecoaches to farm animal.
They couldn’t. They wouldn’t. Would they?
Then again, we did get our Clydesdales from Scotland, which is just a few short hops — so to speak — from Belgium. Cheers.
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FILLING THE SLOTS: We couldn’t help noticing that when the Seneca Nation of Indians decided it needed to hire a top-notch attorney for a possible lawsuit to keep its casino project rolling, it signed up Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe.
Wonder how deeply into the resume the Senecas actually got, after seeing that name.
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CAT’S MEOW: We’ll avoid any cheap jokes involving the first three letters in “Catholic” here. We’ll just comment that surely the Australian media have better things to do than front-page speculation on whether or not Pope Benedict XVI, in Sydney this week for the massive Catholic Youth Day gathering, actually was harboring a borrowed cat at the bush-country retreat where he was staying before his public appearances.
It seems there’s an unwritten no-pets rule at the Vatican’s papal residence. Papal bulls apparently are OK, but cats aren’t. We say the heck with it — if the pope wants a pet cat, it’s nobody’s business but his. And the cat’s.
