Happy hump day to all of you. Hump day: What a bizarre name for a Wednesday. Don’t you think?

For the longest time, I thought it had some kind of sexual connotation. If it does, and I still don’t get it, I’ve missed almost 22 years of this Wednesday hump experience.

Or if it just means it’s the middle of the week, that’s fine too. In the end it doesn’t matter because it’s a stupid saying.

So have you seen all the bird crap on campus? It’s everywhere. Sometimes I can’t even tell if I’m walking on ice or droppings from those billions of crows that invade the campus in the evening.

Let’s move on.

Today’s topic: BEER.

Now, I think it’s safe to assume that there are a great deal of you out there who recognize this word, can use it in a sentence and can probably even spell it, even after consuming large quantities of it.

It’s the stuff you buy in cans, boxes, bigger boxes and the grand-daddy of them all: the REALLY BIG CANS.

Oh, this golden fluid caresses the palate, calms the nerves, and makes us do fun, exciting stuff like becoming mentally deranged when trying to talk with members of the opposite gender, throwing up out of your bedroom window, and best of all, waking up the day after with a marvelous taste in your mouth and a looming headache. (Great stuff, isn’t it?)

Almost every weekend there is a mad rush to the bar for FAC or a scramble to various convenient stores to get our weekly fix of the intoxicating beverage.

This last weekend was no different, except in one crucial area.

Now, there are hundreds of kinds of beer out there. You’ve got your Coors, Coor’s Light, Keystone Light, Miller, Miller Light, Old Style, Old Milwaukee and finally the standard by which all other beers should be measured: Milwaukee’s Best Light.

Oh, you know the label. Some call it “The Beast.” Others have less desirable names for it. But over my years here, it has become obvious that it is one of the most popular beers sold on college campuses.

That good ‘ole blue and white 12-ounce can promising a clean, crisp taste, bought for its price and loved for the flavor, Milwaukee’s Best Light has become a mainstay in our weekend diets.

So this last weekend I was shocked to find MBL in a fancy new can.

The old boys at Miller have made a few changes in our beloved Beast can over the course of our college careers, most of which have been easy to swallow.

The first change came in the form of a racing stripe around the top of the can — an acceptable change.

Next, came the wide-mouth, a device great for spilling more beer all over yourself and contributing to what the “experts” would call binge drinking.

But with the latest changes, Miller has overstepped its bounds. Gone is the simplistic blue and white design.

Gone is the beer certificate proudly stating the lack of health benefits in this stuff.

They have all been replaced by swirls and random lines. Maybe the folks at Miller were trying to appeal to the new MTV-Surge crowd, but in doing so, they have abandoned all of us who have come to trust in the simple elegance of “The Beast.”

There are some sacred things in this world that should not be fooled with and things that should always be held constant.

For example, when they finally do decide to cancel morning classes because of the weather, you don’t have a class until noon anyway.

You will see the one person on this campus that you are trying to impress and you will slip on the ice.

You drag yourself out of bed to get to that early morning class in a blizzard, and the professor cancels it. And then, of course, the fact that if you drink enough you will get drunk, and if you continue to drink, you will throw up and end up passed out in a sink.

And the biggest constant of them all was to see the blue and white can at some point over the weekend.

But those days are now gone.

So where do we go from here? Well, I can’t tell you because I’m just a student from Ohio—not some prognosticator or omniscient being. I’m just a student who appreciates simplicity and lives by the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

---

J.R. Grant is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Ohio.