I went to Seattle, WA last weekend to visit Sameer (friend from high school) for the weekend. On Saturday we went to the Chateaux Michelle winery and the Redhook brewery. The brewery tour was fairly interesting. Sameer and I had gone on the brewery tour 4 years earlier but after having worked for Anheuser-Busch for a year, I had a new appreciation for what A-B does. Red Hook's yearly output is roughly 220,000 barrels a year. There are 31 gallons in a barrel (which is 2 kegs of beer). To put that in perspective, if each person in America got together with 4 of his/her friends and each group of 5 scarfed down one pint of a Redhook brew, that would come out to 220,000 barrels. To compare, Anheuser-Busch brews 101 million barrels of beer each year. If each person in America drank 90 pints of Budweiser, the total amount of beer drank would be equal to Anheuser-Busch's yearly production. A-B's flagship brewery in St. Louis, MO produces 14 millions barrels of beer each year. That is 63 times the total production of Redhook. On Sunday, Sameer and I drove to Vancouver. Our first stop there was the International Buddhist Society, which turned out to just be a Buddhist temple. The lady at the door sensed we were outsiders and showed us around and even tried to teach us some things. Then she kept insisting that we stay for a free lunch and that the lunch was REALLY REALLY good. All in all, a dissapointment (to me at least). Then we proceeded to the Capilano bridge. Imagine a little wooden walking bridge in the forest. Now imagine it is just over 2 football field long and runs over a river that flows 230 feet below the bridge. Needless to say, the bridge rocks like crazy and it takes a bit of getting used to, to walk on it. On the other side of the bridge, there is a little parks area with some trails and some educational material about that particular forest.
Sameer and I got home and I started reading about it on Wikipedia. This is what I learned:

The most notable incident happened on September 22, 1999 when a mother, Nadia Hama, dropped her 18 month old child, Kaya, off the bridge. Hama claimed she stumbled accidentally and the child slipped from her grasp. Fortunately, because the child fell in an area with heavy tree cover, the baby was unharmed.

Holy. Crap. Its amazing enough someone could drop their child off the bridge, but that fact that the kid survived ... amazing. Anyways, we out drinking in Seattle with some of Sameer's friends on Sunday night. At the end of the night, as we left the bar, a car pulled up and the passenger rolled down the windows and starting blasting some techno. Four asian guys were inside and one of them yelled "Lets see you dance, white boys" in a tone that wasn't particularly friendly. Strangely enough, out of hte 5 of us, 2 weren't even white. Anyways, I thought of a few equally racially insensitive things to yell back but thankfully, I didn't. OK, on to my movie recommendations. I was taking communication training at work this past week and the instructor showed us a clip from the movie "12 angry men" as an example of persuasive speech. After seeing the clip, I immediately went out and rented the film and it is amazing. My favorite line:

Juror 7: You a Yankee fan?
Juror 5: No ... Baltimore
Juror 7: Baltimore? That's like being hit in the head with a crowbar once a day!