Tuesday, January 23, 2007

The Beer Interview Proposition

At the Radical Beer Tribune, we hate staged campaign debates. They're slow, painful, and boring; and as former candidates, we know that the audience at debates is almost entirely composed of the other candidates waiting for their turn.

We also hate newspapers, largely because reading is for elitist academic snobs.

So we came up with the Beer Interview: We put each candidate in front of the camera, feed him or her a beer, and record what happens for your viewing pleasure. We have invited all your election hopefuls with the following email:

Dear Candidate,

We would like to interview you for our "Beer with the Candidates" series. The format is simple and informal: We buy you a beer (or reasonable substitute). The interview lasts as long as it takes you to finish your drink. We post the results on our blog.

You can choose what, how, where and how fast you drink. Have a Molson, have a Guinness, a Keith's, a cider, a nice cabernet sauvignon, some fancy champy, heck you can even drink coffee, root beer, or shotgun a pitcher of pilsner if that's your thing. We don't care. (Okay, so maybe we care a *little* bit.)

We can talk about whatever you like, you can tell us about the time you woke up naked on the seabus; you can answer a few softball questions we throw at you; you can pontificate about the great things you'll do when you come into power; or you can tell us about the time you downed 17 Smurf Cum shooters and your puke came out blue. It's up to you.

We'll provide an interviewer, or you can bring your own if you prefer. (Or you can interview your opponent if s/he agrees.) Let us know when this week you want to be interviewed and we'll come to you anywhere this side of Commercial. Yes, we'll really go to all this effort just to buy you a drink!

Looking forward to hearing from you soon,

Your neighbourly Voter-Funded-Media, The Radical Beer Tribune.
We hope they'll all take us up on our offer and display their love for beer. As the saying goes, never trust a (wo)man who doesn't drink.

We'll post the videos as we record them throughout the election...

The Radical Beer Faction

Once upon a time, there was a UBC political party named the Radical Beer Faction. It was originally created in January 1991 to protest candidate slates and to drink and make a general mockery of the elections. Every year, the RBF tried to get the magical 10% required for the AMS to subsidize campaign expenses. Whatever money the RBF recieved, it gave back to the students as beer.

“UBC’s oldest joke party, the Radical Beer Faction (RBF), first participated in an AMS election in 1988 [see comments]. Until last year, when slates were banned in the AMS election, the RBF ran a full slate of candidates in the election, united by their zeal not only for subverting the student political machine but for the good fizzy stuff. Over those 16 happy (add “and very drunk”) years, candidates included Toby the Amazing Fighting Fish, a zombie overlord, an orange pylon and a fire hydrant."

--The Ubyssey, January 2006

The bottle dried up for RBF after 2005, though we did manage to give away hundreds of free beers that year in 30 glorious minutes at buck-a-beaker.

So this year, when the AMS, in their infinite wisdom, announced the Voter Funded Media initiative with $8,000 in the honey pot, we jumped the offer and re-christened ourselves the Radical Beer Tribune. Like a handful of the other media groups, we promise to take whatever money we win, and give it away at a beer garden.