My Darling B and I went to the Silver Eagle yesterday afternoon. It’s the closest neighborhood bar to our house and we went there because we’d like to have a place we could walk to for a beer and a quiet corner to sit and chat. Even at five o’clock in the afternoon, this does not seem to be that place.

For starters, it’s a sports bar, the kind that decorates by nailing the hoods of Nascar race cars to the ceiling. That doesn’t bother me, but the dozen flat-screen TVs mounted high on the walls, each one of them displaying a different sports event, do. I repeat I’ve got nothing against sports, I really don’t. My immediate family is disgusted by my fascination for watching golf. It bugs me, though, that there don’t seem to be any taverns left we can go into where we’re not surrounded by several huge television screens. I could ignore one television set with a fifteen inch screen, but when they hang at least one screen, each as big as a tennis court, on every wall, and more often two or three, that’s just torture.

I’m not going to complain about the sad lack of variety in the six beers on tap, but I am going to piss and moan about being served beer in a plastic cup. Plastic? Really? I gave up plastic cups back when I was, oh, I don’t know, twelve years old? When I stopped drinking Kool-Aide, anyway. If I’m going to hand over four dollars for a beer, which I will gladly do under the right circumstances, I think the least the management could do is serve it in a glass. Everything tastes better in a glass, even weak-kneed American lager. Oops, I went there, didn’t I? Sorry.

Noise is a given in a bar. When you get so many people together in a big, open room and they’re all talking at once, there’s going to be a lot of noise. And I don’t mind if they play music or the television either (okay, I mind the television a little bit), but what, I ask you, is the point of cranking up the sound on the television or the juke box to the point where I have to yell to be heard by the pretty girl sitting right next to me? Who in the world thinks that’s any way to meet friends and sweethearts? I was relieved I didn’t see anyone to say hello to while we were there because I wouldn’t have known what to say after that, just smile and nod when they stopped talking and hope they wouldn’t use the “I want to have sex with your wife” joke on me.

If I had to rate this place, I’d give it just one beer. Two, if you’re buying.