Booze

The fight to save one of America’s last lesbian bars: ‘We’re like an endangered species’

You don’t have to fight to save a bar. You go there, have a drink or three, give them the cash and they’re saved. Well, if enough people do that they do.

As to the deeper point. So, lesbian bars are in decline. This being excellent. Being lesbian is no longer something tucked away in one of society’s backstreets. It’s now just one of those variations of being human. At which point special places for specific outcasts aren’t required – because of not being those specific outcasts from the rest of society.

Sure, a lesbian bar makes chance lesbian hook ups easier but then the same would be true of a bar that caters to redheads making redhead hook ups easier.

It’s even possible to use this as predictive. When the specific social subgroup no longer does cluster in special places but is dispersed across the normal range of social outlets then that subgroup is being perceived, societally, as being simply part of the norm, right?

DEAR DOLLY: ‘MY GIRLFRIEND HAS GIVEN UP DRINKING AND NOW JUDGES ME WHENEVER I HAVE A BEER’

George knew the answer:

“Sobriety just ain’t my way o’ life, if you don’t start drinking I’m gonna leave…….”

The row over the origins of champagne is about who invented the method of making the French wine sparkling, and popularised the effervescent drink.

Dom Perignon, a French Benedictine monk, is credited with champagne production in 1697, although his story is shrouded in myth. The claim that he called to his fellow monks: “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!” was invented for a late-19th century marketing campaign.

Bolstering the English case, it has also been claimed that Christopher Merrett, a West Country scientist, invented the second fermentation technique required to produce champagne, and the bottles to contain it, documenting his discoveries in 1662.

It’s the bottle that’s the crucial invention, not the second fermentation. Anyone familiar even with beer would know about second fermentations. It’s having a bottle that’s sound enough to be used to store something under pressure that’s important. Further, being able to make that regularly – that is, mass production of the bottle strong enough to contain the pressure.

That’s definitely an English invention. And yes, the bottles used to be exported from England to be filled and then returned.

This is all well known. Well, well known enough that I’ve read about it in some popular history or other so it must be pretty well known.

It’s even entirely logical – you can’t have bottled fizz until you’ve a bottle that can withstand fizz now, can you? So it’s got to be the bottle that’s the crucial invention.

Oxfordshire has unveiled plans to become the first place in England to ban smoking outside restaurants and offices.

In a bid to become “smoke free” by 2025, the county hopes to create more spaces where people feel “empowered” not to smoke.

Mirror meets Keir Starmer in pub as Labour leader battles Tories on Red Wall front line

Somewhere in the country there’s a landlord that will let ‘im in.

British study links alcohol with lower risk of developing cataracts
Research finds lower risk among those who drink up to 14 units a week – especially if they drink red wine

This being different from in veritas of course. The second is that people reveal themselves, the new finding is that the increased acuity enables us to see with greater clarity.

Wetherspoons to open 18 new pubs creating 2,000 jobs

111 jobs per pub?

Coronavirus vaccine certificates could be introduced by pubs when they reopen later this year, Boris Johnson indicated on Wednesday.

People may have to prove that they have had a Covid jab or tested negative for the virus before entering a pub, and Mr Johnson said: “I think that that’s the kind of thing – it may be up to individual publicans, it may be up to the landlord.”

His lack of opposition suggests the Government will not intervene if pubs – and potentially other private companies – decide to require proof of Covid status.

The position is a stark departure from two months ago, when Government ministers were arguing that making people reveal such information within the UK was “discriminatory” and against British values.

Inaction is simply support for the current legal status. A landlord may refuse service to anyone on no grounds at all. It’s an absolute right.

True, if every tinted – or gammon – gets denied then we’d think there’s rather a pattern developing but that right still exists. Service is at the discretion of the landlord.

So, demanding proof of vaccination, why not? If it’s by the landlord then that’s just how the law currently works.

We, of course, get to show our view on such by drinking there or elsewhere….just as with a pub that allows or does not children. A pub may, these days, allow, but it does not have to.

My generation (X), and the Boomers directly above me, have a unique relationship with alcohol. Maybe that’s because we developed an early and voracious taste for it. As a 2018 Washington Post story reveals, teen drinking peaked in the late seventies and early eighties. In 1982, nearly half of all male high school seniors, and 31 percent of females, reported consuming five or more drinks in a row in the previous two weeks. In 2015, that figure had dipped to 30% of males and 20% of females. It may not be surprising, then, that my peers associate youth with an alcoholic excess our children don’t quite share.

The drinking age was moved up in the early years of the Reagan presidency…..

The UK rate of hospital admissions because of alcohol was higher than among users of any other drug cited in the report apart from heroin, and consumption of alcohol was much more widespread, with 94% of people in UK saying they had drunk alcohol in the last year, compared with 2.3% who had used heroin.

Err, 50 times safer than heroin at least.

He the government to stand up to the alcohol lobby and introduce mandatory health warning labels and minimum pricing, and lowering the drink-drive limit.

Winstock said: “These are all incredibly sensible things that have been recommended by several commissions, but have been ignored in the face of resistance from the alcohol lobby.”

Fuck off matey.

No, it’s not actually a propensity for consuming large amounts of Guinness:

Men should be screened for the “Celtic gene”, scientists urge, as a landmark study finds it increases liver cancer risk tenfold.

It’s about excessive iron. Which does actually provide that link to Guinness as the old, bottled, stuff used to be prescribed as a treatment for anaemia, the opposite problem.

So, you can distill anything that contains alcohol. Do it to wine, you get brandy. Do it to cider, calvados.

OK, so what about beer?

Hmm, not really thought about it before. And this search engine stuff, fun:

Whiskey is distilled fermented malted grain. So basically beer without the hops addition.

Suppose so, really. Whiskey is distilled ale. Discuss.

Whiskey is famously made by distilling beer, but any distiller will tell you that the “beer” that goes into the still bears little resemblance to the commercial stuff you sip on game day. While it won’t kill ya, those who drink the fermented wash before it is distilled hold little respect in the eyes of the distilling community.

The answer, it appears, is yes.

Drivers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are limited to 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath, the highest limit in Europe, while drivers in Scotland are limited to 22.
A zero-alcohol limit for new drivers would reduce the risk of people driving home after one drink, after which they usually remain under the legal limit.

You’re over a zero limit if you used mouthwash two hours ago.

Idiot stupidity.

“Women do not lose their right to medical confidentiality simply because they are pregnant. Most women report drinking very little alcohol in pregnancy, if any at all, even if they may have drunk before a positive pregnancy test.”

Given the part alcohol plays in the existence of pregnancy all too often…..

The bars around here sell “balloons”. Which are nitrous oxide I think? A quick high etc.

A “balloon” looks to be a couple of litres.

A tank of 18,000 litres seems to be € 400 or so, mebbe €500. Dunno local prices and BOC might not be the cheapest etc.

A balloon is €5.

€45,000 revenue from a €500 tank?

No, I’ve got something wrong there. And it’s not just that most of it seems to be consumed by the staff.

I’ve got the wrong gas? Volumes are different? What? Because if this is right I’m thinking about a chain of mobile selling stations based upon a basic hot dog cart design…..

‘No social distancing’: US college towns close bars as Covid-19 cases surge

Having lived in a US college town college students gonna college student.

Tom Meighan has announced that he is leaving Kasabian, the Leicester rock band he co-founded as a student in the late 90s. The band shared a brief statement on Meighan’s departure, describing the decision as one taken by mutual consent.

Meighan had “struggled with personal issues that have affected his behaviour for quite some time and now wants to concentrate all his energies on getting his life back on track,” said the statement. The group said it would not comment further.

a) booze

b) drugs

‘Crystal clear’ drunk people can’t socially distance, say police in England

Given that the English have traditionally used alcohol to get over that social inhibition and personal space thing perhaps this is olds, not news?

I think we’re rather past it now too:

The Treasury has been accused of taking an irresponsible approach to the coronavirus epidemic after a backlash to a post on its official Twitter account that hailed Saturday’s scheduled reopening of England’s pubs.

“Grab a drink and raise a glass, pubs are reopening their doors from 4 July,” the tweet read, while a graphic carried the message: “Pubs are back”.

Many of those condemning the post, which was soon deleted, accused its celebratory tone of being in poor taste given that the virus has killed at least 43,000 people in the UK.

Sod off might not be enough. Can we shoot them?

There are, roughly, 550k deaths a year in the UK. We often enough gather in small groups in pubs to remember one or more of them.

Yes, shoot ’em

Lockdown easing is not an invitation to ‘run to people’s houses and drink beer’ says First Minister

After all, the pubs are still closed aren’t they?