Piss-Pour | In case you haven't heard, brewers Miller and Anheuser-Busch are engaged in open hostility, carpet-bombing each other with respective new ad campaigns that serve only to illustrate, once again, that if they spent half as many resources on production as on marketing, they might -- might -- produce beers worth drinking once in a while, rather than the unimaginative, watery, flavorless brews they serve up now. This latest bloodsport between the two heavyweights and longtime bitter rivals involves attacking each other with a directness that is rare in advertising; even those 1990s relics, the Budweiser lizards, which were never as funny as their iconic omnipresence suggested, have reappeared, much to the delight of suckers for cheap gags.

If A-B and Miller have to saturate the public's radio and television airwaves with advertisements for gag-inducing products, and judging by the average American sporting event, they do, I wish those ads could be as clever as Bud Light's legitimately funny "Real Men of Genius" spots. They don't make me want to drink Bud Light, of course -- not even Donald Rumsfeld holding a pair of brass knuckles could impel me to accept so tortuous a fate -- but at least they're witty.

So what's a good beer lover to do? Drown my sorrows, I suppose -- and fortunately, I have a refrigerator now stocked with a six-pack of my current fave. Cheers.