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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 
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
In the Star Trek universe, synthehol is a substance that simulates the taste of alcohol without its inebriating effects. Three and a half years ago, Alex mentioned that a British pharmacologist named David Nutt claimed that such a substance was hypothetically possible. Now Nutt is leading a research team at Imperial College London to develop this drug:
Prof Nutt and his team are concentrating their efforts on benzodiazepines, of which diazepam, the chief ingredient of Valium is one.
Thousands of candidate benzos are already known to science. He said it is just a matter of identifying the closest match and then, if necessary, tailoring it to fit society’s needs.[...]
“I’ve been in experiments where I’ve taken benzos,” said Professor Nutt. “One minute I was sedated and nearly asleep, five minutes later I was giving a lecture.
“No one’s ever tried targeting this before, possibly because it will be so hard to get it past the regulators.
“Most of the benzos are controlled under the Medicines Act. The law gives a privileged position to alcohol, which has been around for 3,000 years. But why not use advances in pharmacology to find something safer and better?”
Link via io9 | Image: Paramount
Can you imagine losing $1 million to the casinos? No? How about $127 million? In one year. That’s how much Terrance Watanabe lost, making it one of the biggest – if not the biggest – losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history.
The run is believed to be one of the biggest losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history. It devoured much of Mr. Watanabe’s personal fortune, he says, which he built up over more than two decades running his family’s party-favor import business in Omaha, Neb. It also benefitted the two casinos’ parent company, Harrah’s Entertainment Inc., which derived about 5.6% of its Las Vegas gambling revenue from Mr. Watanabe that year.
Today, Mr. Watanabe and Harrah’s are fighting over another issue: whether the casino company bears some of the responsibility for his losses.
In a civil suit filed in Clark County District Court last month, Mr. Watanabe, 52 years old, says casino staff routinely plied him with liquor and pain medication as part of a systematic plan to keep him gambling.
Like the motto says, apparently your cash really does stay in Vegas. Alexandra Berzon from The Wall Street Journal reports: Link
(Photo: Peter McCollough for the Wall Streer Journal)
Web Urbanist has a great post of case mods on their recent post. The most awesome is disputably this beer dispenser mod. Even non-beer drinkers (like myself) can still appreciate the genius behind this creation.
Mary Strey called police in Clark County, Wisconsin to report a drunk driver. What made this call so unusual was that she was reporting on herself!
“Somebody’s really drunk driving down Granton Road,” she told the 911 dispatcher.
The dispatcher asked if the Strey was behind the drunk driver, to which she replied “No, I am them.”
The dispatcher asked, “Okay, so you’re calling to report you’re driving drunk?”
“Yes,” Strey said.
Strey pulled over and waited for the responding officer, who gave her a Breathalyzer test which showed her blood alcohol level was .19. Strey is due in court over the matter in December. Link -via Arbroath
Ever noticed that drunk people who cause accidents that kill others escape harm? Well, the secret of their luck may actually be the alcohol itself. Dr. Ali Salim and colleagues from the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles found that head injury patients who were drunk were significantly less likely to die than sober ones:
The amount of alcohol consumed appears to be important – too little and there is no effect, too much and the beneficial effects are lost, studies on animals suggest.
Experts believe the right dose of alcohol, however, stops the cascade of swelling, inflammation and further destruction of brain cells, known as secondary brain injury.
The latest work, based on more than 38,000 moderate-to-severe head trauma patients, is the largest yet to look at the effects of alcohol on brain injury survival.
This led to an intriguing proposal of giving alcohol to those who just suffered brain injury – call it “booze therapy,” if you will: Link
Sure, teenagers everywhere try to sneak in a beer or two. It’s practically a rite of passage, but the city of Milan, Italy is cracking down on teenage drinking because they have a bad problem of underage drinking.
How bad? Let’s put it this way: a third of 11-year-olds in the city have alcohol-related problems!
… the authorities are deeply concerned about the increase in consumption of alcohol by children as young as 11 in the country’s industrial and financial capital.
So as an experiment, supplying alcohol – either wine or spirits – to youths under the age of 16 in bars, restaurants, pizza shops and liquor stores will be banned. [...]
Some people are pessimistic that the city-wide ban will ever work:
A national law banning the sale of alcohol to under-16s is only loosely enforced, as Italian families are used to sometimes giving young children a teaspoon of wine as a family party treat.
In past centuries, Italian children would sometimes even be given wine to drink in preference to water which was often polluted.
Texting and walking is bad for you, but drinking is no slouch either when it comes to the danger department. Here’s what happened to one intoxicated guy who fell into a drain and got himself wedged:
A motorist raised the alarm after he went to move a car parked next to the drain and spotted the trapped man.
He said: "I heard a voice saying help and at first I didn’t see him.
"Then I tried to pull him out but he was wedged tight. He didn’t see that jokers had removed the drain cover as he staggered home."
Firemen spent an hour removing part of the drain before they could pull the man free.
The Vervet Monkeys of St. kitts are known to raid local bars for a drink or two. Studies have found that the percentage of alcoholism in these monkeys matches the percentage of the human population – most drink in moderation, 12% are steady drinkers, 5% drink to the last drop and some are even teetotalers!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by dradell.
The Art of Manliness has a wonderful post on 5 classic cocktails that all men should be familiar with and how to mix them for maximum effect.
There’s been a trend lately to get back to the old way of doing things, especially when it comes to things we ingest. This trend has also entered the world of libations. Drink menus around the country are starting to have more of the old classics included on them. Many mixologists are using these cocktails as starting points for newer versions that take advantage of the plethora of products out there today. Recipe books from classic bars such as the Old Waldorf-Astoria, The Savoy, and the Stork Club are available in reprint editions for the new generation to use. And who can forget Old Mr. Boston? They’ve been printings those books since 1935 and still do to this day.
But you don’t need a recipe book to get started mixing up some of the classic cocktails men have been drinking for decades (and in some cases, more than a century). Here’s how to create the 5 classic cocktails every man should know.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by msaleem.
In this short and sweet Serbian video clip, cops stopped a grandpa and administered a breathalyzer test … they didn’t even have to turn the thing on to bust him for drinking.
See what happened: Link [embedded YouTube clip]
From Bloomberg News:
Half a glass of wine a day may add five years to your life, a new study suggests. Drink beer, and you’ll live only 2 1/2 years longer.
Dutch researchers followed 1,373 men for more than four decades, noting their eating and drinking habits. Men who had about 20 grams of alcohol daily — equivalent to a half a glass of wine — had 2 1/2 years added to their life expectancy at age 50, compared with men who didn’t drink at all, according to the research published today in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Men who consumed only wine had twice as much added longevity.
Your assignment: in the comments, devise rules for a Neatorama-themed drinking game.
Image via flickr user rpeschetz
You probably already heard you can turn gummi bears into alcoholic delights by soaking them in vodka for a few days. If you want more details than that, or you’ve already tried this experiment and it didn’t work so well, this site tested a method that worked and posted a how-to with lots of pictures. (Turns out you can do this with sugar-free gummis, too!)
The how-to part of this is pretty simple, so I decided to make things a little more interesting. In addition to regular vodka gummi bears, I made vodka sugar-free gummi bears, vodka gummi worms (purely to see if they turned out any cooler looking than the bears) and vodka Red Fish (these were disgusting, but in the interest of science I will share my mistakes as well as my triumphs).
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by peacefulexplorer.
Here’s a tutorial that shows you how to infuse vodka with Skittles. There are a number of tutorials about this on the net, but this particular one is pretty detailed about the process (including mistakes the author made and later fixed) and also includes many helpful pictures. The end result is five bottles of vodka, one in each Skittles flavor.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by hobver.
Have to take a breathalyzer test? Whatever you do, don’t eat ice cream beforehand. Here’s what one Australian man found out the hard way: Bubble O’ Bill ice cream treat will cause the test to come up positive for alcohol!
Prosecutors inquired why the machine had registered a "fail," which prevents the car from starting, despite the man’s claims that he had not been drinking.
The man claimed the alcohol reading was the result of eating a Bubble O’ Bill ice cream treat and Magistrate Rod Crisp ordered a test to be performed to back up the claim. Police recorded the man’s blood alcohol content as 0.00 and performed the test a second time after he took a few bites of Bubble O’ Bill, yielding a 0.018 reading.
Link – Thanks Denita!
College students (why doesn’t this surprise me) Cary Silverman combined two party favorites to create a new snack: alcohol-flavored popcorn.
The popcorn, which doesn’t actually have any alcohol content, comes in beer, pina colada and Irish cream flavors. Link – via Unique Daily
I know next to nothing about champagne or sparkling wine, but I do know I’d like to have a bottle that costs more than $3.99 for my little gathering. But not much more than that. Luckily, Slashfood has my back. They have rated eight brands of bubbly of varying tastes and low price points, so if you are as clueless as I am, you should find this helpful. They even have a bottle of champagne sparkling wine that tastes decent and costs, yes, $4.
Photos: Rebecca Hale, NG Staff, Cathy Smith
National Geographic has an interesting article about some of the strangest hangover cures from around the world. Perhaps they mean "cure" in a way that you’ll never touch alcohol again if you’re forced to take these the morning after:
Germany: Pickled Herring
Pickled or marinated herring is the main ingredient in a sour snack Germans call Rollmops. Considered an excellent way to ward off a bad hangover, they’re made by wrapping fillets of the tiny white fish around bits of onion and gherkin. Rollmops can be a welcome part of what Germans call katerfrühstück, or the hangover breakfast.Romania: Tripe Soup
Tripe – aka cow stomach – is the go-to ingredient for many Romanians suffering from a hangover. It’s also a common "cure" in Mexico and Turkey, and no doubt many other countries as well. But in Romania, the edible offal is boiled in a greasy, salty soup of root vegetables, garlic vinegar, and cream.Poland: Sour pickle juice
Polish hangover remedies are all about the sour. Some say that soured milk (which is unpasteurized and has been left at room temperature for a day or tow) does the trick. Others favor sour – very sour – pickle juice, heavy on the vinegar.
Catherine L. Barker has the story: Link to interactive Flash page – Thanks Marilyn!
If you’ve woken up after a wild New Year’s Eve party with a nasty hangover, Angela Epstein of the Daily Mail has written this handy guide on (some strange) ways to minimize the symptoms and cure the headache, nausea and body aches:
RUB YOUR ARMPITS WITH LEMON
Puerto Ricans apparently swear by this holistic cure. The lemon juice supposedly stops you sweating and so helps you retain fluid and prevent the dehydration that contributes to hangover headaches. [...]
SNACK ON A BANANA
Bananas contain a lot of potassium, a mineral lost when we drink alcohol and a lack of which contributes to the dehydration symptoms of hangover, says Tom MacDonald, professor of immunology at Bart’s and The London School of Medicine.
Bananas are also a source of carbohydrates and eating one will raise blood sugar levels and so stave off nausea.
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