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According to the CDC, one in six American adults is a binge drinker:
The study — which defines binge drinking as five or more drinks in a short period of time for men and four or more for women — breaks down the nation’s 38 million binge drinkers by a variety of measures, including geography, age and income level. Wisconsin is the state with the most binge drinkers at 25 percent of the population, while Utah, home to the teetotaling Mormon church, comes in last at less than 11 percent. [...]
The CDC report noted that half of all alcohol consumed in the U.S. is consumed during binge drinking. For young people, that rate shoots up to 90 percent.
A Frenchman and an Irishman went into a bar in New Zealand, but they weren’t supposed to. And they might have gotten away with the crime if they hadn’t left their camera with shots of their escapade in it.
David Farrell, 26, of Ireland, and Nicholas Moinet, 24, of France, were among a group of travelling vineyard workers who broke into the river boat on the Opawa River, Blenheim, drank alcohol and took photos of each other having a great time, and then left the camera behind.
In the Blenheim District Court yesterday, Judge Anthony Walsh fined the pair $300 each and ordered them to pay reparation of $240 to the boat’s owner before January 20 and additional court costs.
Police prosecutor Sergeant Graham Single said the pair boarded the boat with others and took photographs of themselves on Friday, December 9.
They removed the rollers on the door before drinking three bottles of spirits and taking more than 40 bottles of beer, Single said.
“The offenders left the boat and continued drinking at a nearby campground, leaving the camera behind. Police later identified them.”
(Image credit: Wikipedia user NordNordWest)
It doesn’t take a lot of talent or imagination to come up with a new cocktail, especially if you like to sip on the strong stuff on a regular basis. Drinkers know what tastes good, what goes well together, and how to make your drink turn a pretty color in the glass, all without ever needing to crack open a Bartender’s Bible.
These recipes aren’t going to win any awards for being the most creative concoctions, but that’s not the point-the point is they are all based on geek culture, and actually apply quite well to the characters from which they draw inspiration.
So, let the Drunken Moogle pour you a delicious sounding Dirt Block (Minecraft), or blow fireballs with a Charizard (Pokemon), all while drinking in moderation, of course.
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The folks over at ComicsAlliance have come up with a fun way to celebrate the coming of 2012-superhero inspired cocktails! So, if you’re looking for ways to spice up your New Years party, check out these delicious sounding recipes and decide who’s side you’re on.
Note: these cocktails will not give the drinker super powers, nor will they make you invulnerable in any way, so enjoy them in moderation and get home safely! Happy New Years Neatoramanauts!
Comments Off A lonely cosmonaut has a very strange New Year celebration in this holiday animation by Anton Korolyuk and Artem Bizyaev. -via the Presurfer
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If you live for celebrity food and beverage lines, then you’ll love Mental Floss’s list of 10 Celebrity Refreshments.
Personally, I’d like to mix some of The Situation’s Devotion vodka mixed with some of Rush Limbaugh’s Two if by Tea. It might not be the most delicious drink, but the conflicting celebrity endorsements must give it a great kick.
This double barreled contraption can either be loads of fun, say if you fill it with punch or soda for a kid’s birthday party, or you can fill the chambers with booze and prepare for your house to become a vomitorium.
This is the kind of stupid invention you hope doesn’t fall into the wrong hands, even though I’m pretty sure the only people that are going to buy this thing were born with the wrong hands.
Link –via Geekologie
You’ve almost certainly heard of the terror stories circulating about teen girls using vodka soaked tampons to get drunk. As it turns out though, this big news story is probably pretty bunk. We know that now thanks to Huffington Post blogger Danielle Crittenden, who actually tried this technique and wrote about the outcome.
If you don’t want to read the fairly graphic article, here’s her results:
If there is any smidgen of effect, it’s notional, and probably only psychological. Overall, vodka-in-a-tampon seems a very inefficient, not to mention unpleasant, way to get drunk. I suppose the positive is that there is no danger of a second round.
Makes you wonder how many of these other “disturbing teen trends” are totally untrue too.
Continuing the tradition of making every food product ever taste like bacon, Rogue has released a beer that’s sure to be Homer Simpson approved. Called the Voodoo Doughnut, this ale is bacon maple flavored, and comes in a horrifyingly pink bottle. Getting drunk first thing in the morning never tasted so good!
You know what you never hear people say? “I really love the taste of whiskey, but I sure wish it didn’t get me drunk.” Yet, from the annals of incredibly stupid ideas comes ArKay, the O’Douls of whiskey.
Link Via Geekosystem
Starting December 1st, the Netherlands will be giving their drunk drivers a holiday gift. Drivers who have been pulled over with high blood alcohol content will be given “alcolocks” to install into their cars. The device acts as a breathalyzer that can keep an engine turned off.
The way the alcolock works is that the driver must first breathe into it to unlock the engine, and will have to repeat the same process at regular intervals during the journey.
If the mini-breathalyzer, which is fitted to the dashboard, indicates a blood alcohol level above the legal limit, the engine will not turn on.
The alcolocks will be installed for two years with a possible six-year extension if the driver continues to drink and drive. In the worst cases, the driver’s license will be revoked, and the driver will have to wait five years before he or she can take a new test.
About 200 people die every year because of drink-driving, Dutch media reported.
Link | Image Credit Felix Triller
by John Trinkaus, Baruch College, City University of New York
John Trinkaus was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in literature, for meticulously collecting data and publishing more than 80 detailed academic reports about things that annoyed him.
This new study is one of a series Professor Trinkaus is publishing in the Annals of Improbable Research.
(Image credit: Flickr user artnoose)
This year, 2009, the public is being advised to frequently wash their hands, or otherwise sanitize their hands, as a precaution against the flu. But to what extent do people actually follow this advice? This study examines one aspect of that question.
The hand Sanitizing Station Study
A number of organizations with high pedestrian traffic volume throughout the day in their buildings have installed hand sanitizing devices in the lobbies.
To glean some information as to the possible usage of such sanitizing stations, a study was conducted at one such facility: an ancillary building (housing faculty practice offices) of a teaching hospital located in the suburbs of a large Northeastern city. This multi-story building was used by approximately 80 physicians and related health care professionals, and their staffs, operating out of about 30 differing private practice offices. Immediately inside the entrance to the building, there was positioned a user-activated hand sanitizing station. Attached to the device was a prominently printed sign, at eye level, which read, in large clear lettering, a message to the effect that everyone entering the facility must disinfect their hands.
Using convenience sampling, 500 observations were made, during the summer of 2009, as to the number of people using the station as they entered the building.
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Christine Sismondo, author of the new book America Walks into a Bar, explains how the local tavern contributed mightily to what America is today. In colonial times, it was a place for people to discuss anything as equals.
In taverns people could mix together: you see men drinking alongside the people they work for. Early laws fixed the price that tavern-keepers could charge for a drink, so they couldn’t cater to wealthy patrons. And once you add alcohol in there, it changes the way everyone relates to each other. You end up with accelerated relationships—and occasionally cantankerous ones. People become more willing to go out and raise hell over things that they might have let go when sober.
Labor and civil rights movements started or spread in taverns, which was one reason the powers-that-be wanted to shut them down at various times in history.
Laws shutting taverns on Sunday in the 1850s are the worst example, because they targeted immigrants. Taverns were the only recreational space they had access to and Sunday was the only day they had off. But city governments, especially in Chicago, wanted to stifle the machine politics of the immigrant taverns. During Prohibition, the chasm between working-class and respectable drinking places was even clearer—the law wasn’t enforced equally.
Get the rest of the story at Smithsonian. Link
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If you love the suds but hate the difficulty and month of waiting for your tasty brew to be ready, then this self contained home brewery might be just what you need. The personal brewery combines the stages of fermentation and carbonation, which greatly accelerates the brewing process and delivers a 50 pint batch faster than you can drink what you brewed last week. For now, it can only make light ales, and it’s daunting $5000 price tag might keep it from flying off the shelves, but this shiny little wonder will definitely get better, and cheaper in the future and may make brewing at home the only way to fly.
BuzzFeed has a great list of alcoholic drinks based on the Harry Potter series. Personally, I’m intrigued by the Gryffindor:
Ingredients:
1 part Liqueur, raspberry (Chambord)
1 part cranberry juice
1 part orange juice
1 Maraschino cherry
1 twist (of peel) orange Instructions:
‘Mix juices and Chambord with ice, strain. Garnish with an orange twist wrapped around a cherry with a sword-pick through it. Serve in a hurricane glass.’
Would you try any of these magically tasty treats?
I can’t vouch for the quality or the safety of this recipe, since I haven’t tried it (and probably never will), but English Russia has a how-post on making your own absinthe. There are a lot of herbs involved.
Wormwood: 100 g
Fennel (fruit): 50 g
Anise: 50 g
Mint: 15 g
Melissa: 8 g
Chamomile: 3 g
Cumin: 10 g
Angelica: 10 g
It would be nice to add 5-10 g of hyssop, but it is difficult to find.
And then later another round of herbs.
Melissa: 8 g
Licorice: 10 g
Mint: 15 g
Chamomile: 2 g
Angelica: 2 g
One of the steps is to put the concoction away for two weeks, presumably to give you time to ponder the wisdom of the whole enterprise. Link -via Dangerous Minds
I love cupcakes and I like vodka as much as the next person. But I have no desire to mix the two. Apparently Cupcake Vodka feels differently, because they’ve recently come out with a sweet spirit in four flavors: Original, Frosting, Devil’s Food and Chiffon. Has the cupcake trend officially jumped the shark?
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has a contraption that will automatically pour six, count ‘em, six liquid ingredients into a cocktail glass for the geekiest mixed drink ever! Drink Making Unit 2.0 is a few steps up from the three-liquid unit they’d previously produced. Microcontrollers, LEDs, tubing, and the kind of equipment all evil mad scientists have around come together to make a machine that Rube Goldberg would be proud of. It looks good, too! Link
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For the first time in history, beer, currently classified as food, is set to be reclassified as an alcoholic drink in Russia. The move is a part of the Kremlin’s war on alcoholism, as beer consumption is rising in the country.
“Normalising the beer production market and classifying it as alcohol is totally the right thing to do and will boost the health of our population,” Yevgeny Bryun, the ministry of health’s chief specialist on alcohol and drug abuse, said.
“We have been talking about and have wanted such a measure for ages. I take my hat off to the parliament.”
The new law would restrict beer sales at night, ban its sale in or close to many public places such as schools, and limit cans and bottles to a maximum size of 0.33 litres.
Many Russians consider beer to be a soft drink. Link -via Arbroath
Add this to yet another benefit of intoxication: it can save you from freezing to death!
A drunk man found lying on a frozen park bench in his underwear survived because of the amount of alcohol in his blood.
Aleksander Andrzej, 32, was spotted in the Warsaw park – where the temperature was -5C – and taken to hospital by police, reports Metro.
A breath test showed he had 1,024 micrograms per 100ml, nearly 30 times the legal limit for driving, which doctors say helped him live.
They believe alcohol in his blood acted like anti-freeze …
Link (Photo: Shutterstock)
It’s common knowledge that drinking alcohol can impair your memory but what about simply suggesting that you’ve drunk alcohol?
Turns out, alcohol placebos can also impair your memory and judgment:
Subjects drank plain tonic water, but half were told it was a vodka and tonic; then all subjects took part in an eyewitness memory experiment.
Subjects who were told they drank alcohol were more swayed by misleading postevent information than were those who were told they drank tonic water, and were also more confident about the accuracy of their responses.
Our results show that the mere suggestion of alcohol consumption may make subjects more susceptible to misleading information and inappropriately confident. These results also provide additional confirmation that eyewitness memory is influenced by both nonsocial and social factors.
The Alcowebizer is a generator that simulates what a website would look like if you were under the influence of alcohol. Enter the address of a website, then you can adjust the look according to your blood-alcohol level. At the first level, Neatorama just looks like it has a few typos -which is not at all surprising. Set it further along, and colors and strange fonts appear. The screenshot here (of this post) is only about half as far as you can take the Alcowebizer. Beware -if you set it far enough, there will be music. Link -via Nag on the Lake
The “best” hangovers are, of course, fictional, since there are really no good hangovers. But witnessing the misery in this list may make you more cautious about overdoing the New Year partying and give you a laugh besides. Here’s how Tom Wolfe described a hangover in Bonfire of the Vanities:
“The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple… If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.” The fictional British journalist is reputed to be based on Christopher Hitchens
The slide show from The Guardian has more hangovers described poetically and painfully. Link -via Nag on the Lake
A Danish urban myth alleges that it is possible to get drunk by submerging one’s feet in alcohol. Three physicians at Hillerød Hospital in Denmark tested this hypothesis on themselves in their office.
The primary end point was the concentration of plasma ethanol… measured every 30 minutes for three hours while feet were submerged in a washing-up bowl containing the contents of three 700 mL bottles of vodka. The secondary outcome was self assessment of intoxication related symptoms (self confidence, urge to speak, and number of spontaneous hugs), scored on a scale of 0 to 10.
They concluded that their feet were impermeable to alcohol.
Link.
Addendum: A hat tip to Gauldar for finding a use for the leftover vodka: Sourtoe Cocktails.
Would you be willing to put all your possessions in storage, except your laptop, a few clothes and your dog, and say adiós to the idea of having a home? That’s just what Michael Powell and Juergen Horn have done. Armed with just the internet and a spirit of adventure, they’ve become digital nomads, roaming the earth in three-month stints.
Over a long lunch and a bottle of red wine, the idea formed. They’d been making their living online for awhile, running websites like Criticker and Random Good Stuff, and promoting Juergen’s photography. Traveling is their shared passion and, as long as they had high-speed internet, they figured they could do it on a permanent basis. For three months, or about 91 days, they could fully explore a new city or country and, before they had time to get weary of it, would be off to the next spot.
Their first leg was in Oviedo, in Northern Spain and about two weeks ago they touched down in Savannah, GA. On their blog For 91 Days, Juergen and Mike document their exploration of the history, sights, culture, and the bizarre and wonderful customs of their new temporary homes.
That’s Juergen sportin’ an open container of alcohol in public. Posing near a cop, no less. Now, for most of us, this is an illegal act – but not in Savannah, Georgia. Thanks to the "To-Go Cup" – the alcoholic equivalent of the Open Carry law – you can walk around the Historic District and enjoy your favorite beer in broad daylight. No need for sipping furtively out of a brown bag. Link
If you’re throwing a geek party, you’ve got to have geeky refreshments, like these ten Star Trek-themed drinks, with recipes included.
With names like “Beam Me Up Scotchie” and “Phasers on Stun Punch”, there’s no possible way to go wrong if you mix these at your next “Trekker” party… unless the borgs decide to show up of course. Then having a “successful” party is probably the last thing you’ll care about.
I don’t know which tastes best, but I love the name “Vulcan Death Grip” for a cocktail! Link
My Jello Americans is a blog dedicated to the art of the Jello shot. And I do mean art, as these shots can look like anything from an ear of corn to ice cream to fossil insects encased in amber! The flavor combinations are amazing as well, like shots that resemble bonbons flavored with absinthe and Black Sambuca. Link -via Breakfast Links
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While Obama laments the slow economic recovery here in the United States, Russian’s finance minister has got his own idea on the perfect stimulus deal:
Russia’s finance minister has urged his countrymen and women to support the country – by drinking and smoking more.
Alexei Kudrin called for increased consumption of tobacco and alcohol in a bid to boost the state’s revenues, reports Metro.
"If you smoke a pack of cigarettes, that means you are giving more to help solve social problems," commented Kudrin.
"People should understand: Those who drink, those who smoke are doing more to help the state."
An article from Slate looks at a forgotten chapter of Prohibition history: the government program to poison alcohol in an attempt to keep people from converting industrial alcohol into liquor —even though they knew that it would kill many, particularly those who were too poor to afford good-quality illegal liquor.
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by boschv.
Butch Bakery offers manly cupcakes for manly men who love cupcakes. Each cupcake is covered in a chocolate disk decorated in manly styles, like wood grain or camouflage. The flavors are manly as well, like the Driller: maple cake with chocolate ganache and bacon bits. Or the Old Fashioned, which is orange-soaked whisky cake with a lemon curd filling. Or the B52, which is a Kahlua-soaked vanilla cake with Bailey’s bavarian filling. Twelve manly flavors are offered. Link -via Gorilla Mask
