Because jello-shots just aren’t stupid enough.
Do you remember when we taught you how to get really drunk off Gummi Bears? Of course you do. Kind of. And surely you recall our recipe for Faux Loko: The DIY Four Loko we shouldn’t have told anyone about?
Both were unforgettable, classic episodes of Happy Hour. Now, we just found a way to combine them: Faux Loko Gummi Bears, people. Faux freakin’ Loko Gummi Bears.
The Labour Party will make a last-ditch attempt to introduce strict limits on the sale of sweetened alcoholic drinks after the National-led Government backed down on its plan to ban high-strength alcopops.
MP Phil Goff has proposed changing alcohol laws to make it illegal to sell RTD (ready to drink) products with more than 5 per cent alcohol content or more than 1.5 standard drinks per bottle.
Bad news for pietistic Christians, Mormons, and Muslims; good news for non-pietistic Christians like me.
A newly released study shows that regular drinkers are less likely to die prematurely than people who have never indulged in alcohol. You read that right: Time reports that abstaining from alcohol altogether can lead to a shorter life than consistent, moderate drinking.
Surprised? The tightly controlled study, which looked at individuals between ages 55 and 65, spanned a 20-year period and accounted for variables ranging from socioeconomic status to level of physical activity. Led by psychologist Charles Holahan of the University of Texas at Austin, it found that mortality rates were highest for those who had never had a sip, lower for heavy drinkers, and lowest for moderate drinkers who enjoyed one to three drinks per day.
Of the 1,824 study participants, only 41 percent of the moderate drinkers died prematurely compared to a whopping 69 percent of the nondrinkers. Meanwhile, the heavy drinkers fared better than those who abstained, with a 60 percent mortality rate. Despite the increased risks for cirrhosis and several types of cancer, not to mention dependency, accidents and poor judgment associated with heavy drinking, those who imbibe are less likely to die than people who stay dry.
Bangalore, the Indian city built on booze.
Long before information technology made Bangalore famous, alcohol was the city’s defining industry—shaping its identity for outsiders as well as residents. Though Bangalore is often called India’s “Pub Capital”, the pubs are just the frothy head on the pour.
Alcohol printed the city’s newspapers, produced its movies, put down hospitals and schools and sports teams—and ruled the men who ruled its people. It caused the worst medical emergencies, sweetened the long evenings and created the brands to which Bangaloreans feel truest loyalty. Yet Bangalore’s identity as a liquor city has always stayed in the realm of folklore. It has never been recognised in urban histories, only in jokes and in its hazy self-image as a town of “guzzlers”.
The city of Bangalore was born divided, as a colonial Cantonment and a native city, white and black twins. From the start, they had a divided drinking culture, of “foreign” and “country” liquor; alcohol has helped define the city’s split identity ever since. After the British left, the two halves of Bangalore were merged. They came together like two strangers with their backs to each other, not knowing whether to embrace or wrestle. As the two cities grappled, so did the two liquor industries.
This is the story of how beer, arrack, rum and whiskey—and the companies that made them—irrigated the growth of Bangalore from a quaint colonial outpost to a regional capital, and onwards to the promised land of the globalisation era. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, country liquor reigned, and its profits patronised a surge of cultural pride in the capital of a newly unified linguistic state. In the 1980s, beer and foreign liquor broke the ranks of country liquor, pouring out across the city from the former Cantonment. As a new consumer economy arose in the 1990s, foreign liquor seized the chance to name and claim city institutions. The battle of booze made the city, and today we drink inside the victor’s castle.
