Ralph Lindberg
Published on 16 Jan 2010Looking for great father of the bride speech? How about this father of the bride speech from Rowan Atkinson aka Mr. Bean
April 29, 2019
Father of The Bride Speech – Rowan Atkinson
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April 24, 2019
Opponents claim Doug Ford is using booze liberalization as a distraction … if so, it’s working well
Chris Selley documents just how Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s opponents are unable to ignore the (personally teetotal) Ford’s alcohol-related proposals:
A peculiar affliction has broken out among Ontarians who think their relatively new government is devoting far too much time and attention to liberalizing alcohol laws: They can’t stop talking about it.
I don’t mean people with entirely fair public health concerns (though I think those concerns are pretty marginal, given the modest changes). And I don’t mean the pearl-clutching hordes who think allowing alcohol consumption in parks will lead to mayhem, no matter how civilized the results might demonstrably be elsewhere. (That peculiarly Ontarian crew has certainly made itself heard, though, and it seems to include a surprising number of progressive millennials.)
I mean people who didn’t have particularly strong views one way or the other about 9 a.m. mimosas, tailgate parties, drinking in parks or buying beer at the corner store, or might even have supported some legislative relaxation, but who now can’t stop railing against them even as they deplore the government’s actions on objectively more serious files.
[…]
On letters and op-ed pages, you’ll find the topic of booze popping up in all sorts of places it objectively doesn’t belong — not if one doesn’t want to be distracted, anyway. It seems to lead people down all sorts of strange blind alleys. One Toronto Star columnist noted that neither Premier Doug Ford nor Finance Minister Vic Fedeli will “touch a drop themselves,” but that “they are making it easier for you to access just in time for breakfast, happy hour, or a nightcap.” So what? Why would anyone want the premier’s or finance minister’s personal tastes and preferences influencing public policy?
Another Star columnist spent seven paragraphs sneering at the idea of tailgating in Ontario before declaring herself perfectly fine with the idea. “But,” she asked, “is tailgating what Ontario needs?” Is that the standard, then? Government shall only allow the masses such entertainments as they “need”?
Using booze as a “distraction” is not a new tactic. It became a running joke during Kathleen Wynne’s tenure that whenever things were going (especially) badly for her government, she would pop up to announce another batch of supermarkets authorized to sell beer and cider (and sometimes, though much more rarely, wine!).
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February 18, 2019
QotD: Patton and Prohibition
Observance of Prohibition in the breech was also common amongst junior officers. While commanding tank battalions and living next door to one another in renovated barracks at Camp Meade, Maryland, Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton avidly partook in the new American pastime of making their own bootleg alcohol. Eisenhower distilled gin in an unused bathtub, while Patton brewed beer, storing it in a shed outside his kitchen. One summer evening there was a sudden noise outside the Pattons’ barracks that sounded like a machine gun, followed by a series of soft booms. As their cook began screaming, Patton instinctively dove for cover. When they realized it was merely the beer bottles exploding from the heat, he rose, sheepishly explaining how much it had sounded like hostile fire. His wife Beatrice “laughed and laughed and called him ‘her hero’ and he got very red.” Omar Bradley commanded an infantry battalion in the 27th Infantry Regiment in the 1920s and took advantage of the Hawaii Division’s leisurely pace of duty to play golf several times a week. At the end of one round, the 33-year-old teetotaler drank his first glass of whiskey, which he liked enough to make “a habit of having a bourbon and water or two (but never more) before dinner” for the rest of his life.
Benjamin Runkle, “‘What a Magnificent Body of Men Never to Take Another Drink’: The U.S. Army and Prohibition”, Real Clear Defense, 2019-01-16.
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January 11, 2019
“It is profoundly stupid, so most people assume it can’t be. But that’s what the law is now”
Apparently the federal government believes that drinking and driving is such a huge, intractable problem that they’ve decided it’s worth sacrificing your right to privacy in order to combat this scourge:
It may sound unbelievable, but Canada’s revised laws on impaired driving could see police demand breath samples from people in bars, restaurants, or even at home. And if you say no, you could be arrested, face a criminal record, ordered to pay a fine, and subjected to a driving suspension.
You could be in violation of the impaired driving laws even two hours after you’ve been driving. Now, the onus is on drivers to prove they weren’t impaired when they were on the road.
This isn’t a simple change of rules, it’s a wholesale abandonment of common sense.
“If you start to drink after you get home, the police show up at your door, they can arrest you, detain you, take you back to the (police station) and you can be convicted because your blood alcohol concentration was over 80 milligrams (per 100 millilitres of blood) in the two hours after you drove.”
Changes to Section 253 of the Criminal Code of Canada took effect in December giving police greater powers to seek breath samples from drivers who might be driving while impaired.
Under the new law, police officers no longer need to have a “reasonable suspicion” the driver had consumed alcohol. Now, an officer can demand a sample from drivers for any reason at any time.
But there’s no possible way this could be abused, right?
“It’s a serious erosion of civil liberties,” said Toronto criminal defence lawyer Michael Engel, whose practice focuses almost exclusively on impaired driving cases.
Engel said someone could be unjustly prosecuted. If a disgruntled business associate or spouse called police with a complaint and an officer went to investigate at the persons’ home or place of business, police could demand a breath sample.
“Husbands or wives in the course of separations would drop the dime on their partner,” Engel said, describing the potential for the law’s abuse by those calling police out of spite, for example.
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December 29, 2018
QotD: Booze, smokes, and heroin
It is now impolite to refer to habitual drunkards. They are “alcoholics,” supposedly suffering from a complaint that is not their fault. The curious variable ambiguity of Alcoholics Anonymous on this point has added to the confusion. AA, to begin with, asked its adherents to admit they had no control over themselves, as a preliminary to giving that power to God. Somehow I suspect that God plays less of a part in modern AA doctrine, but the idea of powerlessness remains. Members of the organization quietly moved from calling alcoholism an “illness” or a “malady” to describing it as a “disease,” round about the time that the medical profession began to do the same thing.
We are ceaselessly told that cigarettes are “addictive.” Most powerfully, most of us believe that the abusers of the illegal drug heroin are “addicted” to it. Once again, the public, the government, and the legal and medical systems are more or less ordered to believe that users of these things are involuntary sufferers. A British celebrity and alleged comedian, Russell Brand, wrote recently, “The mentality and behaviour of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless [my emphasis] over their addiction and, unless they have structured help, they have no hope.”
Brand is a former heroin abuser who has by now rather famously given up the drug. But how can that be, if what he says about addiction is true? The phrase “wholly irrational” simply cannot withstand the facts of Brand’s own life. It will have to be replaced by something much less emphatic — let us say, “partly irrational.” The same thing happens to the phrase “completely powerless.” Neither the adverb nor the adjective can survive. Nor can the word “addiction” itself, which is visibly evaporating. We have to say “they struggle over their compulsion.”
Peter Hitchens, “The Fantasy of Addiction”, First Things, 2017-02.
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December 10, 2018
One Million Subscriber Special! The French 75 – Guns, Drinks, and Shirts!
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 9 Dec 2018Holy cow, a million subscribers! When I started Forgotten Weapons, I never for a moment suspected it would end up this popular. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed! I think this required a celebratory cocktail … specifically, a French 75. So let’s talk about the French 75 the gun – the Canon de 75 modèle 1897 – as well as the cocktail named after it.
In celebration of the milestone, we have a two-day sale on some of the merchandise at the Forgotten Weapons store – which you should check out:
http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
I would also like to mention that you can now find lots of Forgotten Weapons content on Amazon Prime, where videos have been compiled into 1-2 hour themed series:
And last but certainly not least, a huge thanks to everyone who supports Forgotten Weapons on Patreon! Your support is what has made this possible, and what will keep it here for years to come.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
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November 20, 2018
QotD: Why do we drink?
Alcoholic beverages, like agriculture, were invented independently many different times, likely on every continent save Antarctica. Over the millennia nearly every plant with some sugar or starch has been pressed into service for fermentation: agave and apples, birch tree sap and bananas, cocoa and cassavas, corn and cacti, molle berries, rice, sweet potatoes, peach palms, pineapples, pumpkins, persimmons, and wild grapes. As if to prove that the desire for alcohol knows no bounds, the nomads of Central Asia make up for the lack of fruit and grain on their steppes by fermenting horse milk. The result, koumiss, is a tangy drink with the alcohol content of a weak beer.
Alcohol may afford psychic pleasures and spiritual insight, but that’s not enough to explain its universality in the ancient world. People drank the stuff for the same reason primates ate fermented fruit: because it was good for them. Yeasts produce ethanol as a form of chemical warfare — it’s toxic to other microbes that compete with them for sugar inside a fruit. That antimicrobial effect benefits the drinker. It explains why beer, wine, and other fermented beverages were, at least until the rise of modern sanitation, often healthier to drink than water.
What’s more, in fermenting sugar, yeasts make more than ethanol. They produce all kinds of nutrients, including such B vitamins as folic acid, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin. Those nutrients would have been more present in ancient brews than in our modern filtered and pasteurized varieties. In the ancient Near East at least, beer was a sort of enriched liquid bread, providing calories, hydration, and essential vitamins.
[…]
Indirectly, we may have the nutritional benefits of beer to thank for the invention of writing, and some of the world’s earliest cities — for the dawn of history, in other words. Adelheid Otto, an archaeologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich who co-directs excavations at Tall Bazi, thinks the nutrients that fermenting added to early grain made Mesopotamian civilization viable, providing basic vitamins missing from what was otherwise a depressingly bad diet. “They had bread and barley porridge, plus maybe some meat at feasts. Nutrition was very bad,” she says. “But as soon as you have beer, you have everything you need to develop really well. I’m convinced this is why the first high culture arose in the Near East.”
Andrew Curry, “Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze”, National Geographic, 2017-02.
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July 11, 2018
QotD: Measuring consumer surplus
Consumer surplus is one of those things which is really, really, difficult to measure. This paper is one of the few that’s able to give us a hard number. But what it is is, really, “how much I would have been willing to pay but didn’t have to?” Say that we’re out and you’re thirsty and I’m not very. You suggest we have a Coke. You’re really interested in this, you’d pay $2 for one, I’m, well, meh, I’d only pay $1 for one. Obviously, the Coke seller (no, not the coke one, that’s different) doesn’t know this so he charges us the same price – $1 each. I’ve gained no consumer surplus I paid a buck for something I value at a buck, you gain $1 of surplus because you would have paid $2 but only paid that buck.
In one manner the consumer surplus is a result of mass manufacturing and marketing. We’re pumping out millions of whatever it is, we’ve got to have a “market price” and some people will value it, whatever it is, at more than that. That greater valuation is that consumer surplus. Without a producer knowing what your individual demand curve is they cannot charge you the full value you ascribe to it.
Of course, they try as hard as they can to do so. This is what brands and product differentiation are all about. VW and car brands for example – there’re SUV models built on roughly the same platform in the Skoda, VW, Audi and Bentley ranges. Oh yes, they’re different cars alright. But perhaps not $300,000 different, which is the price gap between the top and bottom there. Some of this (but please note, only some of this) is because there are people who will pay a fortune to swank around in a Bentley and there are many more who will not, thinking a Skoda is just fine (I do a little work for the company and the new Skoda SUV is indeed very fine but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?). That’s product differentiation.
Another example is what used to happen in old fashioned English pubs – in the public bar and the saloon. The latter had carpets and comfy chairs, the former very definitely not. Beer was 10% more expensive if you wanted the comfy chair experience – very simple and remarkably successful product differentiation. Being able to charge different prices to different groups for much the same thing. Or as it often used to work out, different prices to the same person on different occasions. Dates were in the saloon bar….
Tim Worstall, “Freakonomics’ Steven Levitt On How Inefficient Uber Really Is”, Forbes, 2016-09-20.
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May 31, 2018
QotD: Difficulties in using self-reported data
Nick Cohen, over in the Guardian, is busy telling us all that we must drink less and that Scotland raising the minimum price of alcohol (hitting poor people’s cheap cider and bargain booze, but not directly affecting craft lagers, appellation d’origine contrôlée wines and artisan gin) is a Good Thing because the industry makes its profits by exploiting addicts who are drinking themselves to death en masse.
It is a truth universally unacknowledged that, like drugs cartels, the drink industry makes most of its money from addicts. It thrives on hooked customers, who put boosting the brewers’ profits before their and their families’ health and happiness. Sixty per cent of alcohol sales – worth £27bn a year in England – are to “increasing risk” drinkers taking more than 21 units of alcohol a week, in the case of men (about 10 pints or two bottles of wine), and “harmful” drinkers taking more than 50… Twenty one units (14 for women) does not sound much in my world of journalism, but it is a sign of people who cannot go a day without a shot of their drug, which is as good a definition of an addiction as any.
Now, there’s a question there about who decided what that “risk” was and how large it was. Cohen gets into the Salvation Army-style temperance-league apocalyptic warnings about the horrors of heavy drinking and warns that by the time you’re knocking back fifty units a week (for men, thirty-five for women) you’re undergoing “full degeneration”.
But is that based on any firm evidence? One interesting study, reassuring to the toper, can be found here, which among other things makes the gentle point that since we either under-report what we consume, or we pour away half of the booze we buy undrunk, planning policy on what we admit to consuming may not be accurate.
Jason Lynch, “How Much Is ‘Too Much’?”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-05-08.
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May 13, 2018
Title IX complaints as a form of Prisoner’s Dilemma
The more I read about Title IX, the more I wonder why university students dare risk mingling with the opposite sex under any circumstances outside class:
The University of Cincinnati suspended a female student for allegedly engaging in nonconsensual sex with a male student who claimed he was too drunk at the time to approve the encounter.
The fact that this case involves a male accuser (“John Doe”) and a female aggressor (“Jane Roe”) makes it unusual among Title IX complaints. (Title IX is the federal statute that forbids sex discrimination in schools.) But the female student’s lawsuit against Cincinnati — which accuses the university of violating her due process rights — reveals something even odder: Roe had previously filed a sexual misconduct complaint against one of Doe’s friends.
Roe’s lawsuit, then, suggests that Doe filed the complaint against Roe as a kind of revenge for getting his friend in trouble. (I have an alternative theory, but I’ll save that for the end.)
“On information and belief, John Doe was motivated to file a Title IX Complaint in retaliation for a prior Title X Complaint Jane Roe had filed against his friend,” according to the suit.
Roe also contends that it was ridiculous to find her guilty of nonconsensual sex because of Doe’s drunkenness, but not find Doe guilty too: Roe was also drunk at the time, so under the rules she was just as unable to consent to sex as he was. While this might seem like a paradox — how can two young people rape each other? — it would actually be a straightforward application of affirmative consent, which requires all participants in a sexual encounter to proactively obtain freely given and unambiguous consent before proceeding.
[…]
According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, Roe said that she was being punished for “engaging in the same sexual freedoms that men on the campus enjoy.” It might be more accurate to say she is being held to the same standard — a standard that is, for many reasons, horrible.
Roe’s theory that Doe’s complaint was a form of revenge is interesting, and it could be true. Perhaps the whole thing was a setup — he lured her to his bedroom, feigned drunkenness, and initiated sexual contact, fully intending to race to the Title IX office the next day, no-one-wounds-me-with-impunity style.
Here’s an alternative theory: Doe woke up, realized they had engaged in sexual activity while they were both drunk, and feared that she would file a complaint against him, as she had done to his friend. Panic-stricken, he felt he had no choice but to beat her to the punch.
Indeed, if you suspect you are going to become the subject of a Title IX investigation, the optimal strategy may very well be to file the first complaint. For reasons not completely clear to me, Title IX administrators often appear biased in favor of the initial complainant, and presume the other party is the wrongdoer.
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April 14, 2018
Alcohol and health – if you torture the data long enough, it will give you the answer you want
Tim Worstall isn’t convinced that a recent study summarized in The Lancet is either honest or useful:
We have a new study out, in the Lancet no less, telling us that the new, lower, limits for reasonable alcohol consumption are just right. Well, of course the report says that, right? The problem being that it’s entirely contrary to the more general experience we’ve got of booze consumption. For, yes indeedy, there’s a level of drinking which will – as always, on average – shorten life. But our experience to date is that it’s several times what is the current measure of safe consumption. This basic understanding of ours being that no booze lowers lifespan, too much lowers it, a modicum increases it. The argument being the definition of modicum of course.
Observation of large populations being that modicum is anything from some up to perhaps 40 or even 50 units a week. This isn’t what the current study shows at all […]
I’m not in any manner a medical expert but that does look odd. 5 million observation years on half a million people, looks like 10 years on average per person. They’re using this to predict lifespan at age 40? When lifespan at 40 is, these days, a further 40 to 50 years or so? OK, maybe there’s some sekkrit decoder ring for epidemiologists here but anyone want to try and explain it?
Ah:
We focused our study on current alcohol drinkers
So the comparison doesn’t include those who don’t drink. We’re not therefore getting a baseline of no alcohol consumption to compare with. That is, by design, the study excludes the known to be higher death rates (or lower lifespans) of the temperance types. No, really:
Third, never-drinkers might differ systematically from drinkers in ways that are difficult to measure, but which might be relevant to disease causation.
Our more general stats do indeed say that heavy drinkers (that 40 to 50 unit level perhaps) and never drinkers have about the same lifespans. Quick, gotta exclude that information, eh?
As far as we’re concerned that’s probably enough. We’ll see what Snowdon has to say about it, shall we? Because this finding is contrary to pretty much everything else we know about booze consumption. Explaining why it is will be important.
Update, 15 April: It’s no wonder that people are confused about the benefits and/or drawbacks of drinking…
What you end up with when drawing strong conclusions based on non-experimental data with selection bias, lots of measurement error and dodgy comparison groups. (h/t: @RadaWilinofsky) pic.twitter.com/iUZQbTh6sB
— Amir Sariaslan (@AmirSariaslan) April 14, 2018
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March 12, 2018
How to Make Mead at Home
This Old House
Published on 22 Jan 2017Ask This Old House host Kevin O’Connor learns about the centuries-old art of making mead.
Time: A few hours of work, 1 year of aging
Cost: under $100
Tools:
FunnelShopping List:
Yeast
2x One-gallon jug
3 pounds of honey
Air lock cap
Marbles
Siphon tube
Home brewing sanitizerSteps:
1. Before beginning the home brew process, ensure the gallon jug, funnel, and siphon tube have been properly sanitized.
2. Fill up the gallon jug about a third of the way up with either tap or bottled water (don’t use distilled water).
3. Add 3 pounds of honey, then cap the solution and mix it up by shaking the jug.
4. Heat up water to 104 degrees in a pan and add yeast to dissolve it.
5. While the yeast is dissolving, you can add optional yeast nutrients to get a cleaner ferment.
6. Once the yeast is dissolved, use a funnel to pour the yeast solution into the jug.
7. Pour more water into the jug and top it off until you reach the neck of the jug.
8. Place air lock cap on top of the jug and pour a little bit of water into it to form a seal. This will prevent oxygen from getting in but will allow carbon dioxide to escape.
9. After a several weeks, once carbon dioxide has stopped releasing from the jug and fermentation is complete, it’s time to siphon the solution into a new, clean jug.
10. Ensure the siphon tub and second jug have been properly sanitized, then place the older jug higher than the new jug. Fill the siphon tube with water and gravity will pull the mead from one jug to the next. Ensure you only siphon liquid, leaving behind any solids at the bottom of the jug.
11. To fill up the void left behind from one jug to the next and limit exposure to oxygen, place a number of sanitized marbles into the new jug.
12. Place the air lock on the new jug. Leave that on for about a month and then place a regular cap onto the jug once bubbles no longer appear.
13. Leave the solution in a dark spot, like the basement for about a year for the mead to age properly.
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January 29, 2018
QotD: Churchill’s drinking habits
In the not so distant past around the sodden precincts of Westminster you were as likely to spot a yeti as a sober politician. The level of drinking that went on among MPs and their leeches for most of the last century was prodigious and was by and large expected. It was, as Ben Wright describes in his breezy, anecdote-rich and instructive survey of booze and politics, part of a culture which was tolerated and, to a degree, encouraged.
It was not without justification, for instance, that Adolf Hitler, who might have been a nicer fellow had he not been a teetotaller, described Winston Churchill as an “insane drunkard”, a “garrulous drunkard”, and “whisky-happy”.
If Order, Order! has a star it is undoubtedly Churchill who rarely let a day go by able to pass a breathalyser test. On occasion he would have a glass of wine at breakfast followed by a liquid lunch which invariably included Champagne and brandy. At tea-time he would progress to whisky. Then he would wash down dinner with more Champagne and brandy after which he had at least another whisky. According to one loyal aide who may have been sight impaired he was never the worse for wear for this intake and he “never felt the slightest ill-effects in the morning”.
Alan Taylor, “Lush tales of our political classes’ drinking exploits”, The National, 2016-06-20.
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January 26, 2018
QotD: Britain’s boozy parliamentarians
It is Wright’s contention [in his book Order! Order!] that alcohol has as many benefits as it does drawbacks. Not only does it help loosen ties and tongues it also boosts confidence and dilutes stress. Most prime ministers drank, many to excess. Herbert Asquith went by the nickname “Squiffy Asquith” and regularly appeared in the Commons three sheets to the wind. Margaret Thatcher did her best to promote the whisky industry, the uncapping of a bottle of Bell’s marking the end of the working day. She believed that whisky rather than gin was good for you because “it will give you energy”, which I fear could be a hard fact to prove scientifically.
Tony Blair, whose reign ushered in an era of 24-hour drinking, thought his relatively modest drinking was getting out of control because he calculated it exceeded the government’s weekly recommended limit. This did not impress Dr John Reid, Bellshill’s finest, who once drank like a navvy. “Where I come from,” Reid told GMTV, “a gin and tonic, two glasses of wine, you wouldn’t give that to a budgie.” Blair, of course, did not have to look further than next door to find an explanation why his consumption increased over the years. Gordon Brown, his nemesis, was fond of Champagne – Möet & Chandon no less – which he did not nurse but washed down in a gulp. “He was like the cookie monster,” recalled one aide. “Down in one, whoosh!” Drinking is of course one of those areas in which we Scots have long punched above our weight and Wright’s pages are replete with examples of intoxicated Jocks carousing nights away and causing mayhem. Former Labour leader John Smith was one such. Occasionally I encountered him on the overnight train that carried Scottish MPs home from Westminster on a Thursday night. Known as “the sleeper of death”, it was a mobile pub that never closed until it reached Waverley, whereupon politicians were disgorged red-eyed and pie-eyed among bemused early morning commuters.
Alan Taylor, “Lush tales of our political classes’ drinking exploits”, The National, 2016-06-20.
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January 9, 2018
QotD: Moderation
Three kraters [bowls used for wine] do I mix for the temperate: one to health, which they empty first, the second to love and pleasure, the third to sleep. When this bowl is drunk up, wise guests go home. The fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to hubris, the fifth to uproar, the sixth to prancing about, the seventh to black eyes, the eighth brings the police, the ninth belongs to vomiting, and the tenth to insanity and the hurling of furniture.
Eubulus, attributing the words to the god Dionysus
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