#363 Margarita-burg

I was contemplating a can of beer the other night. I was watching a movie based on a book by an author named Carl Hiassen. The movie was about a group of kids fighting a development that threatened to kill a cluster of rare burrowing owls. The movie was also set in the place where Hiassen sets a lot of his works, South Florida. One of the producers of the movie, and for that reason I guess, one of the actors in it, was Jimmy Buffet. You know, Mr. Margaritaville. Not the other Buffet, Mr. Everything Else. As I heard him on screen and gazed down at the can of beer my son had left on the coffee table, the line “blew out a flip flop, stepped on a pop-top” flittered across my mind. Yeah, I said to myself, no more removable pop-tops. That song is dated. Today’s kids have no idea what that kind of pop-top is. Or why there’s a pointy end on church keys. Or what a church key is for that matter. In this day of twist off bottle caps and pop-top cans, who needs that tool anymore? Being as how it was a slow place in the movie, I picked up the beer can in question and gave it some study. It was a far cry from the beer cans of my Jack and Diane days. First off, it’s about 40% lighter. Crushing a can against your forehead Animal House style is no longer the feat of machismo it once was. Crushing with your feet even less. Today’s cans are only slightly heaver than aluminum foil. The upper curvature of the can has also undergone some ergonomic refinements—or mouth-o-nomic or lip-o-nomic. In any event, the lip of the can is there just enough to form a closed seal with your own lips, inhibiting slosh dribble, and reducing the chance an overzealous chug-a-lug will end up damaging the rec-room leather recliner. Yet there is still enough of a recess around the perimeter to prevent spillover should the beer be slammed down on the coffee table preparatory to jumping up and hollering “touchdown!” The flimsiness of the can however, does little to prevent involuntary grip-crushing should an official be as blind to our team’s needs as is their wont. The hole has also changed. Today’s hole is a big oval. Back in the old days when we had to hike a block through the driving sunshine to school and had to poke orifices in our own cans after the Friday night game, the hole that resulted was roughly triangular. The first pop-tops left a similar opening. Today’s pop-top stays attached and folds inward in a triumph of modern industrial engineering. The first pop-tops were more like pull-tops or pull-tabs. The pull off pop-top is the missing link in the evolution from church key to modern can. You lifted a ring and pulled the whole thing back and off, leaving your finger dangling a vicious razor-edged mini weapon, which would be banned from current airplanes. It was also the pop-top Jimmy Buffet famously stepped on in his plaintive narration of a life wasted by tequila smoothies...
America, ya gotta love it.