A lesson I should've learned a long time ago... We were in the booze emporium this evening, having just finished a nice meal with my family. →[More:]We'd had Thai food at the best place in Dallas - which is right around the corner from my house - in celebration of my birthday. We ended up at Boozeville because Unicorn on the cob wanted to get some cheap bubbly and I wanted to pick up a six or twelve of Mexican beer.

She found her champagne & some sweet cherry juice to mix it with just as I was discovering the store's 'discount cart' - a shopping cart filled to the brim with single 12 oz bottles of Negra Modelo, Corona, and a few other third world beer treats - and all for $0.75 a bottle. Something told me to back off, that this was too good to be true, that these beers had fallen off the back of a truck, rolled down a mountainside, and ended up at the bottom of an industrial swamp where they'd sat for a good half decade before being discovered, rinsed off, and placed in the discount cart at Centennial Liquors.

Still, the call of seventy-five cents each for beers that I pay full price on a regular basis was just too much for me to handle. I bought 4 Negra Modellos and 4 Coronas, allowing them to cool as Unicorn on the cob and I shared a halfway decent bottle of champagne.

I opened one of the Coronas, took a cautious sip, and gagged like I'd just done a shot of Dick Cheney's morning self-release. Lesson learned. I am hapy to say that I'm on my third of the Negra Modellos and no ill effects, tastewise or other, have been observed. Guess the Corona just went rotten, which makes sense as Corona's a half-rotten beer to begin with. Still... 75 cents...

I'll probably go back tomorrow to pick up the remaining Modelos - and a few Coronas for when 'friends' come over after the bars close at 2 a.m.