Gear Patrol

This weekend, director Todd Phillips, who’s already set a new model for comedy success in many respects, will gain another distinction when his most popular film series joins a rare — and terrible — group of humor franchises that make it to a third outing. He hopes The Hangover: Part III avoids the doomed flight path flown by the others. I’m praying he fails.

Maybe you’ve heard about them — there’s no way you haven’t — but Google is pushing a new eyewear gadget poised to revolutionize(!) how we interact with technology. It’s called Google Glass, and its current form makes even the those Rec Specs wearers from your youth soccer days look like Steve McQueen. The internet backhanders have already made a Tumblr about it, god bless ‘em. But as awkward as they are today, chances are that tech’d up eyewear is here to stay. It’s up to us to deal with it. So we decided to show some initiative by drafting a few ground rules. And we’re counting on you to buy in.

More and more, men and women are looking online — not just for books and flat-screen TVs — for companionship. Much like they’re shopping online, these guys and gals scroll through page after page of potential partners. But we’re not talking about straightforward online dating here. On the sites we’re talking about, users are looking specifically for who’s rich, who’s hot and who’s able to keep a secret. In this special report, we decrypt the pay-to-play world of digital get-downs.

Malted Madness is a celebration of beer. Largely, we’ve glorified suds through our favorite medium: bloodthirsty head-to-head competition. Now, though, we pay homage to the most foundational of beer’s values… enjoyment. We asked our staff to remember the most memorable water, malt and hops they’d ever had and recorded their misty-eyed reminiscences. What we found — unsurprisingly — was that the true measure of beer is often when and where it’s enjoyed, and who with.

Editor’s Note: Malted Madness is a celebration of America’s craft beer. But what about the rest? Brandon Chuang feels… strongly about the everyman beer. We haven’t forgotten the good ole’ standbys either, so we let him vent.

By now, just a few short days into Malted Madness, you’ve taken in about as much as you can when it comes to beer. You’ve studied the bracket — our curated list of 64 of the best craft beers in the country — and you’re drunk with emotion. Why isn’t my beer in the tournament? How could that beer make it past the first round? Nothing brings out our passions more than competition, and nothing clouds our judgment more than the wants and desires of our own hearts. And in this boozy, passion-soaked attempt to find the best of the best, we’ve forgotten what “the best” truly means.

We’ve begun a coronation while the king still lives.

There’s an assumption, fed by movies and a romanticized view of war, that every American military member is an e-lite hand-to-hand ninja, martial artist, and/or dynamo in the Octagon. While there are many men and women in the military with particular skill in close combat, that is a fact of prior interest, and rarely a result of training received in the military. It will strike many as odd, but the vast majority of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines possess no exceptional skill at close combat, despite Hollywood’s glamorized portrayals to the contrary.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps have each struggled over the years to develop close range combative skills, both armed and unarmed, within their ranks. We’ll focus on the ground combat oriented services, specifically the Marine Corps, in our case study.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to put on a 64 beer, single elimination, NCAA-style tournament. One minute you’re dreaming of all that hoppy, malty, chocolatey, fruity goodness in one place and the next… well, you’re trying desperately to get all that hoppy, malty chocolately, fruity goodness — in one place.

To be clear, this tournament isn’t about bitching. It’s about gathering 64 of the best beers in America together, matching them up, tasting them blindly (removing the pretense that so often surrounds our entrenched beery beliefs), and crowning a champion. It’s GP’s swing at a new way to enjoy, explore and appreciate damn good beer. It’s about one of the biggest movements in our country. It’s about a shared passion. It’s also about personal taste, the barroom argument you’ve had with your buddies many times: which beer is better?

If I were to drink caffeine my torso would explode. My cardiologist, who I can only assume double majored in pre-med and “buzzkill” as an undergrad, told me if I didn’t avoid nicotine use (not an issue), moderate my alcohol intake (I had to look up what that meant) and completely curb caffeine intake, I’d end up re-staging the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique scene in “Kill Bill”, in which I would play both Uma Thurman and David Caradine. What I’m saying is it’d be coronary suicide to caffeinate myself.

I was in the back room bagging up some breakfast blend when I heard shouting from the café. At that same moment, I smelled smoke and knew that my batch of Sumatran had caught on fire. I dashed to the roaster, flicked off the gas burners and closed the vent. I knew the routine. This had happened before. The cloth and rubber belt had broken, the drum stopped rotating and the beans ignited inside, fanned by the air being sucked in through the vents. Now my hope was that the flames didn’t make it into the chimney and light up the chaff that had no doubt built up inside. If that happened, we’d have to evacuate the café and call the fire department.

Is Zero Dark Thirty the year’s best movie or misleading sensationalism that advocates torture? The film’s recent Oscar snub has raised the debate. Now, GP’s own Scott Packard and Ben Bowers present intriguing discussion on morality in film, artistic license and “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Read on for point and counterpoint on these divisive issues.

While we don’t expect the world to end this Friday, the possibility does make us think about how we’d want to face it.

As social animals entangled in our web of formal and informal, obligatory and optional, pleasant and painful, the question of who’s brain would we like to crack open (not in the zombie way) just before we’re done for good is a complicated one. Each of our proposed companions offers something in the face of terminal adversity — perspective, redemption, reflection, levity, pathos.

Mike Dacey is a young guy, but sadly a member of a dying breed. Mike’s a Press Man in the truest sense. That’s a job that has slowly faded away in the face of faster, cheaper printing alternatives, leaving artisans like Mike to keep this soulful art form alive. In a warehouse in Somerville, MA,…

With New Year’s nigh, one can’t help but notice the general relief in the air. There seems to be a general feeling that the pending year is chock-a-block with tones of hope and opportunities anew. 2009 has certainly been a memorable year, one filled with its fair share of ups and downs… perhaps more downs…

Beyond being a product review site, we at Gear Patrol have been striving to create a community of men that (for lack of a better term) help men. We don’t draw the line at simply hashing out the best insights into the products we cover, but we extend that mantra to life in general. We’ve…

Esquire recently announced their annual Sexiest Woman Alive (and magazine cover) and we couldn’t agree more with this year’s choice. It’s no secret Kate Beckinsale is frustratingly gorgeous. The Brit instantly melted the minds of men the second she stepped foot in her glorious leather-clad-burn-your-face-off outfit on Underworld, but unlike so many hollywood stars, Beckinsale…

In the hoopla of yesterday (September 22), we somehow failed to recognize the first day of Fall, a season that this particular editor considers his favorite. There isn’t a lot to say besides the fact that the third season brings much to be loved: layering and bundling, Fall golf, Oktoberfest beers, football, changing foliage, sweaters,…

By Guest Writer and Outdoor Enthusiast Roger Dawkins There’s a guy that I occasionally bump into in the street who finishes every sentence by saying, “…you know what I mean?” It drives me crazy. I find myself thinking, “No, I don’t know what you mean and asking me if I know what you mean doesn’t…

Incorporating a fitness routine into your weekly schedule is never a bad thing. In fact, it might be the best thing you do for yourself, period. That being said, there are some pitfalls to avoid lest your workouts actually cause you harm. This is by no means an exhaustive list, however, its often the simplest…

Recently, I found myself reading the latest issue of one of my favorite men’s magazines and scratching my head. It’s not often that I disagree with many of its suggestions, but in this matter, I cannot comply. In a (popular) section where the magazine offers ideas for filling out your business wardrobe, it states that…

In way of full disclosure, I’ll start by saying that I harbor a mild Twitter addiction.  I’m a fairly new user to the service, and I joined up under relentless pressure encouragement from a friend. Before signing up, I peppered him with questions like, “What is Twitter?” and “Why should I care?” He didn’t have…

Quick, when was the last time you heard a CEO admit to making a mistake, absent a snarling Congressional investigative committee? The events of the global financial crisis are a reminder of the paucity of business leaders who accept responsibility for their decisions. Indeed, one might be downright shocked to hear a CEO say, “I…

By Jonathan Sohn – Men tend to fear very little. Even if they do secretly fear things, they’ll usually do their best not to show it. Although this is the case, there is one thing that men tend to fear (justifiably or not) no matter their ethnicity, employment or social status: becoming a minivan dad.

I’ve recently been reminded that no matter how reputable a dry cleaner may be, the people to whom you drop off your shirts simply don’t love your clothes as much as you do. Men, that’s why I’ve decided to fire my dry-cleaners.

Despite hearsay, I’ve been endeavoring to live a simpler life – relishing in what I feel are the basics. Good friends, good food, and good fun. Not the ever-prevalent desires to buy or impress that have held siege to many victims men this past decade. Somewhere, in the back of our minds, we all knew…

Sad Variations on a Theme By Ben Bowers: The end of one year and the begining of the next is often a time rightly used for reflection. So, considering the kind of year 2008 has been, I felt this fleeting moment should be used to comb for lessons that we can all learn from by…

2008 will be immortalized as the year I saw grown men fall to their knees as portfolios crumbled and 401k’s vanished. 2008 will be recalled as the year I saw America show the world we were a country of people that could be fooled once, falter twice, yet still demonstrate resiliency and innovation through a…

Vote. For Mankind. Whether your political pinnings reside with Obama or McCain you should know that tomorrow will be a watershed moment. This year’s election has been such an extraordinary series of unique instances and unprecedented occurences that I think most people have come to take that for granted. Don’t. Honestly, I can tell you…

One might argue this is more important than an electoral map… and oddly similar. As a former Southerner (Tennessee) living amongst Yankees (New York), I’ve had to encounter the revelation that people in New York don’t call their soft drinks, “Coke”. They call it “Soda”. What the hell? In the South you order a Coke,…

Public Policy Isn’t Their Only Point Of Contention A man’s taste in music says a lot about them, even if you’re Barack Obama or John McCain. Round out your knowledge of the two candidates on a more personal level by checking out their top ten songs list compiled by Blender Magazine. No, you won’t have…

The Argument for Diesel Powered Vehicles 2009 BMW 335d By Bradley Hasemeyer & Eric Yang: With the arrival of the 2009 BMW 3-Series Diesel, quite possibly the most ubiquitous of the German cars, it goes without saying that diesel cars are coming to America. Moreover they’re coming for the long haul. Taking aside the fact…