Recently in Alcohol Category
"All Guinness sold in Ireland, the U.K., and North America is made in Dublin -- so the time it takes for a keg to cross the Atlantic puts it at an immediate disadvantage. What's more, since your average Irish watering hole probably sells more Guinness than its American counterpart, the chances are much higher that a patron there will get a pour from a fresh keg."
In honor of President Obama reconnecting with his Irish ancestry in Moneygall, Slate's Maura Kelly explains why Guinness tastes better in Eire. Hey, it tastes pretty good here too.
As seen on Twitter and speaking of gifts from God: Surely this discovery has some sort of cosmic and spiritual significance, no? (Let's see the robots pull this one off.)
"Drinking alcohol was 'unintentional, accidental, and haphazard until about 10,000 years ago,' says Satoshi Kanazawaat at Psychology Today. Smart people are generally early adopters and, in the context of human history, 'the substance [alcohol] and the method of consumption are both evolutionarily novel.'
Two new studies find a correlation between intelligence and a thirst for alcohol. Hey, I buy it - Thank you, science, for lending support to my vices! And, as Bogey said, "The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind."
"The company is celebrating the decision by Arthur Guinness, the son of a land steward, to sign a 9,000-year lease on a run-down brewery in Dublin's St James's Gate in 1759." Granted, this whole "Arthur's Day" business today has the strong whiff of a brazen marketing ploy. Still, I don't need much of an excuse to raise a glass to my favorite drink (this side of Red Bull and the occasional Jamesons.)
So happy 250th, and Sláinte to you and yours. May you all have warm words on a cold evening, a full moon on a dark night, and a road downhill all the way to home.
"Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America's seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes--to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave...In fact none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40, Faulkner's prose seizing up with sclerosis, Hemingway sinking into unbudgeable mawkishness."
By way of Dangerous Meta, The Economist's Tom Shone considers the artistic merits of novelists sobering up. "The radiance of late Carver is so marked as to make you wonder how much the imperturbable gloom of late Faulkner, or the unyielding nihilism of late Beckett -- like the cramped black canvases with which Rothko ended his career -- were dictated by their creators' vision, and how much they were simply symptoms of late-stage alcoholism. This suspicion is open to the counter-charge: this contentment and bliss is all very well, but readers may simply prefer the earlier, messed-up work."
"With Perlow's Mail Goggles, users can specify which hours they would like to enable the feature. If a user tries to send an e-mail during the self-selected time -- say, midnight to 3 a.m. -- a screen pops up forcing the user to solve a series of simple math problems before the message can be sent." Thinking outside the box for new and useful apps, Gmail engineers try to tackle the thorny problem of drailing (drunk e-mailing.) "Perlow created the function last fall when he found himself sending messages to an ex-girlfriend -- late at night -- asking to get back together." I feel you, brother.
A(n Irish) marriage grown stale and lovelorn. A woman (Eileen Walsh) chafing under the suffocating, sexless domestication of suburban motherhood. A man (Aidan Kelly) emotionally checking out and casting a guilt-ridden, wandering eye at the nubile flesh around town. And a doomed plan (in this case, a tenth anniversary date, not a move to Paris) that will theoretically resuscitate all the feelings this couple once shared... Yes, Declan Recks' Eden, a 2008 adaptation of a Eugene O'Brien play and the second movie I caught as part of the local Film Forum sunday series, is for all intent and purposes, Revolutionary Road with brogues. And yet, in the end I enjoyed Eden a good deal more than the Kate-&-Leo-gone-sour show.
It helps that Eden is a low-key, naturalistic affair, and -- a few gamy symbols and some late-film Catholic flourishes aside -- it isn't burdened with the stilted pretentiousness that marked Mendes' movie. But I also found the depiction of marital purgatory here considerably more realistic than the histrionics of those Revolutionary Wheelers. Rather than rage against the dying of the light, Breda and Billy, the two (former) lovers here, have just grown physically and emotionally distant. Breda the bored housewife now spends her days indulging in bodice-ripper-type sexual reveries that even she knows to be a little sad, while Billy -- like no small number of Irishmen before him -- has basically just disappeared into the bottle. And rather than engage in knock-down, drag-out fights as per the Wheelers, it is awkward silences, pleasantries exchanged around the (more intrusive and realistic) children, and the solace of the local pub that are the symptoms of Billy and Breda's decay.
Nothing surprising happens in Eden, and, trust me, it's probably not the best movie to rush out and rent for Valentine's Day regardless. But, as a portrait of two well-meaning people drowning in quiet desperation, I found it worthwhile nonetheless.
"But even those who hailed absinthe saw unsettling shadows. Wilde explained: 'After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.'" In the NYT, critic Edward Rothstein sings the praises and surveys the notoriety of "the green muse," absinthe, which is apparently making a legal comeback both here and in the EU. "Absinthe was the premier bohemian drink, as inseparable from the avant-garde of mid-19th-century Paris as was scorn the bourgeoisie. It played the role well; absinthe helped overturn that bourgeois world with seductive visions of another."
Beer for dogs. Glad we finally got that one sorted out.
More Foleygate fallout: As the representative in question heads to rehab for alcoholism (I always thought alcoholism meant you drank too much...never knew about the whole IM'ing underage folks about their masturbation habits part of it), the House GOP leaders' story keeps changing about what they knew and when they knew it (apparently, warning signs of Foley's shadiness go back to 2001), and the Republicans as a whole wonder if this might be the straw that broke their electoral back... Update: As Foley's story continues to get creepier, his attorney adds childhood abuse by a Catholic clergyman to the explanatory alcoholism. Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion?
In a happy collusion of one of my favorite sports and one of my favorite drinks, the New York Metrostars are now Red Bull New York. Mmm, Red Bull. I'm not usually one for blatant corporate sponsorship, but I think I may have to buy some RBNY paraphernalia close to immediately. Now if only we can get Guinness to buy the Revolution...
"More alarming were Richard Nixon's last years at the White House. After a good many evening martinis, he would call Henry Kissinger, and the secretary of state would grin silently as he passed around the telephone so that others could listen to their commander in chief's unbalanced ramblings. Since Nixon was in a position to blow us all up, this suggests a somewhat esoteric sense of humor on Kissinger's part." With the fall of Britain's Charles Kennedy, Slate's Geoffrey Wheatcroft very briefly surveys the sordid history of alcoholism in politics. (He could, I think, have done more with The Alcoholic Republic.)
