Category Archives: Booze

A typo in comments, “shotgnus”.

So, what actually are they?

Deer that drink Jaegermeister?

Antelope with guns?

Steve?

‘Mass brawl’ breaks out on P&O cruise ship Britannia

??

He said one witness “explained to staff that things kicked off when another passenger appeared dressed as a clown. This upset one of their party because they’d specifically booked a cruise with no fancy dress. It led to a violent confrontation.”

Royal shock: The Queen should NEVER be served wine for one surprising reason
QUEEN ELIZABETH II shouldn’t be served wine but does drink other alcoholic beverages.

Well, maybe we shouldn’t serve it to her because she’s got a decent cellar?

No, not the reason:

“I told her that the official wine for the Oxford and Cambridge boat race was English sparkling rather than French champagne and that English wine was becoming more popular and much better.

“And she said, ‘I don’t actually drink wine myself, but I hear it’s very good.’”

OK, fair enough. She is Brenda after all, can do what she damn well wants.

Before lunch, the Queen enjoys a gin and Dubonnet with a slice of lemon and lots of ice, according to Darren McGrady, a former royal chef.

During lunch, she likes a dry gin martini, according to her cousin, Margaret Rhodes.

The Queen finished off her day with a glass of champagne before bed.

Umm, doesn’t drink wine?

After drugs and booze, an ultramarathon taught me how to love the mile I’m in
Breaking the cycle of my addictions was tough, but then I found inner strength by pushing myself to complete a 50-mile race

To a certain extent it appears to be a replacement of the addiction.

Physical activity does stimulate endorphin production after all.

One in ten people in NHS hospitals is alcohol dependent, according to a major study which calls for all patients to be quizzed on their drinking habits.

The study of more than 1.6 million admissions found that one in five people admitted for any reason was drinking at harmful levels.

And one in ten was classed as being dependent on alcohol, the research by Kings College London found.

I assume “harmful levels” is more than 14 units a week. The new and even more made up than the last limit. But what’s dependent?

Finally, a story that, while strictly speaking has nothing to do with language, deserves repeating. It comes from an obituary of long-time Daily Mirror journalist John Knight, a noted bon vivant of Fleet Street.

He once went on a three-day lunch and on his return to the office was asked where he had been. “On the piss,” he replied. “Oh thank goodness for that,” said his editor. “We were worried in case you were ill.” Ah, truly those were halcyon days.

Not on Fleet Street but in some work I did for a few advertising agencies. Monumental lunches where no food was eaten….

Drinking a bottle of wine increases women’s cancer risk as much as smoking 10 cigarettes, research suggests.

The British study says that for men, drinking a bottle of wine a week increases the absolute lifetime risk of cancer equivalent to smoking five cigarettes weekly.

This is due to the risk of cancer in parts of the body such as the bowel, liver and oesophagus,

For women, it has a similar impact to 10 cigarettes a week, mostly due to an increased risk of breast cancer caused by alcohol, researchers from the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Bangor University and University of Southampton found.

The thing we’d really like to know here. The booze in those quantities increases lifespan on average because of the protective effects upon other things that might kill us. So, is that true of the cigarettes too?

Man Tips Servers $22K in Hotel Bar, Gets Arrested

Joel Boyers was removed from the JW Marriot bar in Nashville on Monday and charged with public intoxication

I don’t think I could be drunk enough to tip that much.

No, not an ad, just an observation:

NOW is your chance to book a bargain break to the Algarve for less than £100 per person.

The amazing deal includes flights and accommodation in the sunny Portuguese resort.

£100 for flights and hotel for nine days? That’s a significant bargain really. How they’re doing it, it’s marginal revenue upon fixed costs. The apartment hotel exists, the flights will be running anyway. Why not gain some cash?

This is for March as well, weather could be good down here. Not a bad part of town either.

The bit that catches my eye. £10 a day? The difference in prices means that someone on a pack of tabs and two pub drinks a day would find it cheaper to be here – including the cost of the holiday – than in the UK Actually, forget the tabs, three drinks a day would do it. More a measure of the overtaxation of such things in the UK than anything else….

We would not expect a pub landlord to charge people different prices based on income, with a pint of beer costing some 20p and others £20. Even if such a system might be theoretically perfectly fair, we would recognise the almighty mess it would cause in practice.

They do and always have. Saloon bar was always more expensive than the public. And that’s before we even get to the difference in prices across pubs, some being expensive precisely to keep the riff raff out.

What would these people do if The Guardian wasn’t willing to pay them, eh?

Rather than viewing Dry January as a threat to their business, the alcohol industry views it as a neat distraction from an inconvenient truth. Although alcohol consumption is declining overall, 4.4% of the population account for more than 30% of all the alcohol sold in the UK. But Dry January is not aimed at high-risk drinkers, as Alcohol Change UK makes clear. It would be potentially life-threatening for people in this group to suddenly stop drinking. They need specialist support to reduce their alcohol intake if they are to avoid harming their health or, worse, dying.

Abrupt alcohol withdrawal can kill. So there is a real danger that these campaigns play well with the alcohol industry as they distract attention from a group of people who are at the greatest risk of dying prematurely due to alcohol.

You’ve got to be really caning it – couple of bottles of spirits a day level – for going cold turkey on booze to kill you. So, nice rhetorical trick there but no cigar really.

Having a first baby in your thirties raises your risk of breast cancer for more than two decades, an overview of research has concluded.

Five years after giving birth mothers are 80 per cent more likely to get breast cancer than childless women of the same age and the risk is higher for those who start families later, it found. They have urged doctors to be alert to the problem in those with young children.

While delaying motherhood appears to increase the short-term risk, mothers still have a lower lifetime risk of breast cancer because childbirth becomes protective against the disease by the ages when most cases occur. The study found that 35 years after giving birth, mothers were 23 per cent less likely to get breast cancer than childless women of the same age.

Childbirth has previously been found to have contradictory effects on breast cancer risk, raising it initially while lowering it in the longer term, but the point where these effects cancelled each other out had been unclear.

Not drinking is dangerous, drinking is dangerous to a different degree, where’s the sweet spot, where’s the lowest total risk?

Babbies work the same way. Actually, near all of life works this way……

Alcohol-related deaths among women are at their highest ever level, new figures have revealed.

Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that last year there were 8 female deaths from alcohol for every 100,000 people in the UK – the greatest number since records began in 2001. This was being driven by an overall rise in alcohol deaths among 55 to 74-year-olds in recent years.

Super. Now correct for demographic change, for the fat that the portion of the population which is 55 to 74 year old females has risen.

Our result is?

That is, has the rate among 55 to 74 year old females risen, thereby skewing the population rates, or has the rate among that subset risen thereby doing so?

Sometimes we see pieces about pilots being “over the limit” without there being clear explanation of the manner in which this is over the limit to fly, not to drive. The flying limit being about a half pint of standard beer or so. A proper dalliance with the stewardesses the night before sorta level.

But this?

A pilot has admitted being almost 10 times over the alcohol limit shortly before a flight from Heathrow, police said.

Katsutoshi Jitsukawa was arrested at the airport after failing a breath test just 50 minutes before Japan Airlines (JAL) flight JL44 to Tokyo was due to take off with him in the cockpit.

The Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that the driver of a crew bus alerted police after smelling alcohol on the pilot. The flight was operated by a Boeing 777 aircraft, which holds up to 244 passengers.

A Metropolitan police spokesman said Jitsukawa pleaded guilty to exceeding the alcohol limit at Uxbridge magistrates court on Thursday.

Tests revealed he had 189mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood in his system, almost 10 times the 20mg limit for a pilot. The drink-drive limit in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is 80mg.

Yes, that’s too drunk to fly.

The Welsh government is proposing to set a minimum price per unit of alcohol at 50p in an attempt to combat problem drinking.

Flagons of wife beater cider at English prices a specialty.

Might even be worth looking at a ferry line from Minehead to Barry…..

So, we ICO Scrumpycoin to make it happen, yes?

This is actually serious as well, if anyone knows how to ICO an ERC 20 token say……

Middle aged drinking may reduce dementia risk, new study finds

Analysis of more than 9,000 people found those who never touched a drop were around 50 per cent more likely to develop the degenerative condition compared to those who drink moderately.

Published in the British Medical Journal, the results challenge formal NHS advice, which recommends going teetotal to reduce dementia risk.

How unlike government advice to be wrong…..

Support is vital: from families and friends, health professionals and organisations. Drug and alcohol support groups are proved to help people stay sober and clean. And yet these preventive healthcare schemes are being slashed because of council budget cuts. In Warwickshire, for instance, the public health budget has been cut by £40 a head since 2014.

Do we actually have any proof that drug and alcohol support groups do this? And if so, are they a cost effective manner of doing so?

Genuine question.

Whisky shops in Berwick and Carlisle are preparing for Scottish drinkers on booze cruises after the introduction of minimum pricing.

Industry experts have warned the new rules will mean drinkers may cross the border in search of cheaper alcohol.

What sort of expertise, other than sentience, do you need to predict that?

Bordeaux wine production plummeted 40 per cent in 2017 due to frost – but will prices rise?

Depends upon substitution.

If people demand Bourdeaux and only Bourdeaux then yes, a reduction in supply will lead to a rise in price. If people are willing to substitute across a wider variety of drinks then, well, difficult to tell. Depends how much they’re willing to substitute.

At that point, with substitution, the question is wide open. If the same problems which led to the fall in supply also mean that what remains tastes like rat piss then substitution could be greater than the fall in supply, leading to falling prices.

Children given alcohol by parents in the belief it will foster responsible drinking are more likely to become binge drinkers, a major new study has found.

The six-year analysis of nearly 2,000 12 to 18-year-olds revealed there were “no benefits” to introducing alcohol to teenagers at home and that doing so only encouraged them to seek it elsewhere.

Writing in The Lancet, the researchers say that despite a widespread folk belief that a parentally-supplied glass of wine over Sunday lunch or a quiet beer in the evening promotes a stable attitude to drinking, there is in fact no reliable evidence to back this up.

Instead, they show that the chances of binge drinking, alcohol-related harm or displaying symptoms of alcohol use disorder are all higher in children provided alcohol by parents.

Bit difficult, really.

The analysis found that, on average, 62 per cent of teenagers who were not given alcohol by their parents went on to binge drink – described as four or more drinks in one session – compared to 81 per cent who were.

Ah, that’;s where the problem is then. The definition of binge. What we want to know is which training system leads to more people harming themselves, not the number who get drunk once in their lives.