What’s All This Fuss About Beer at Sea World?

Forgive me, but I am not bothered by beer being splashed at Sea World.

You may remember that there was much wailing this spring when it was learned that the park’s owner, Anheuser-Busch, planned a hospitality/tippling center where Budweiser would flow freely.

The anti-beer-quick-hide-the-children crowd protested with pickets and indignant letters. Being averse to confrontation and high emotions, I lay low.

But now I am recently back from an (incognito) visit to Sea World accompanied by my wife and two sons. At the park, I decide to conduct a test to see if the hard sell is being applied to push Bud.

I ask every Sea World employee I encounter where I can locate “this beer I’ve been hearing so much about.” I do this in a loud and thirsty voice.

Not a single employee importunes me to consume. Not a single one says to be sure to take my boys and force-feed them some brew and turn them into elbow artists.

A woman at the Shark Encounter looks at me like I am daft. An individual in a Penny Penguin outfit just nods.

I figure: The average San Diego family unit visits Sea World once or twice a year, for, what, maybe eight or 10 hours total? If that low level of indirect exposure to beer turns a kid into Homer Simpson, things are worse than we know, family values-wise.

Beer is sold outside the Old Globe Theatre. Beer is sold inside San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.

If beer enhances one’s appreciation of Shakespeare and Sheffield, who’s to say what it can do for Shamu?

This is not to say I am totally at peace with Sea World. Things are not ducky when we go to Cap’n Kid’s World.

The 5-year-old wants to play Pirate’s Whack-a-Mole, where you hit things with a rubber hammer and maybe win a Shamu toy. The operator says it has to be a contest between two or more.

OK, I pony up an additional $1 so the 2-year-old can play. The operator calls out for more contestants.

That’s OK too, until I notice that one of the contestants is in his mid-20s. This lout easily triumphs over my 5-year-old, my 2-year-old and the other kids and walks away with the Shamu toy.

I ask you: Why isn’t this lout off doing something more adult at Sea World, like drinking beer?

The Grinch That Stole Seuss

Seen and heard.

* Dr. Seuss is taking a (poetic) battering.

First, Seuss imitators were at work on the state budget mess (“ I will not sign a budget soon/I will not sign a budget in June ... “)

Now, something called Publish-or-Perish Press is (anonymously) circulating “How The Grinch Stole Tenure” regarding the Tom Day versus faculty flap at San Diego State.

Yes, the Grinch HATED tenure ...

Issued Pink Slips left and right.

He fired profs by the dozens--

Thought they’d go without a fight.

He used money as the reason,

Said, “The budget made me do it.”

“Got to make this college smaller.”

“Got to cut the fat and suet.”

* There’s always a local angle.

Albert Gore, whose environmental ideas are being hooted at by Republicans, got much of his environmental thinking from the late UC San Diego founder Roger Revelle, when Revelle was teaching at Harvard.

* Discount politics.

The Libertarian Party has a booth at the Kobey’s Swapmeet weekends in the Sports Arena parking lot.

* Bob Davidson of La Jolla hears the Democrats are so confident they have a new slogan: “Four More Months.”

* San Diego supporters of Ross Perot are finding ways to express their disappointment in their bumper stickers.

Including PEROT NOT , PEROT with the PE ripped off, and PEROT turned upside down (international distress-style).

Oh, Sensitive One . . .

Macho watch.

Rancho Bernardo male chauvinist Evan Keliher (National Organization of Real Men) is doing a reading of his play “Witte’s End” at the Patio Playhouse Community Theatre in Escondido, Sept. 14-15.

A grim/jolly tale of a failed playwright and would-be suicide. Keliher says it proves real men can be sensitive:

“Even lumberjacks can wax poetic if sufficiently moved while felling the world’s last redwood or denuding a forest to provide pulp for TV Guide.”