JAMES LILEKS writes that things are looking up:

One of the few virtues of growing up in the 70s is the constant realization that everything is better. I mean, everything. Food. Architecture. Shampoo. Politics. Coffee. Music. Magazines. Television. Cars. Industrial design. Consumer electronics. Video games. (When I was a kid our version of a deathmatch was Pong; tonight I hooked up the Xbox to the large TV and played Jedi Knight in widescreen mode.) Beer is better.

Beer is better. I started to make a classic, self-deprecating American-beer joke in an email to a Canadian friend and then stopped: it’s not true anymore that all American beer tastes like water. And he’s enough younger that he might not even remember a time when it was true. Who would have predicted that, twenty years ago?