Welsh Criminals Asked: ‘Court or a Pub Ban?’ Answer: ‘Good morning your honor!’

Booze and really sloppy crime seem to go hand-in-hand. We’ve documented this heavily in “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death (and other true tales of drunken debauchery”, particularly in the section “Crime Doesn’t Pay Your Bar Tab”, and we’re presented with constant reminders of the truth of it on a regular basis. Drunk criminals, it must be said, do offer society the bonus of being easy to catch, both because they’re quick to lose their wind when chased and also because they – like the drunk in our book who left a trail of red paint running from the bank he had just robbed to the pub where he was drinking up his haul – are just really not the most formidable criminal masterminds of our times.

If you’re a proprietor of a bar, the sheer volume of drunks you have to deal with pretty much guarantees that you will come into contact with at least one arsehole a day, and if you’re really unlucky, said arsehole will have a similar outlook in like to that of Irvine Welsh’s hellish creation Franco Begbie, the violent psychopath who separated people from their teeth in both "Trainspotting" and its sequel "Porno" (he also has a walk-on role in the excellent "Glue").

According to a report in the North Wales Daily Post, it seems that pubs in North Wales might be on to something when it comes to keeping those in this latter school out of their bars. A group of publicans from 40 establishments throughout North Wales have banded together to form PubWatch. The strength of the group is in the uniform approach it takes to banning troubled customers. Get blacklisted by PubWatch and you’re out of luck at any of the bars under its preview. For your sociable drunken psychopath this is death.

The scheme has been successful, in fact from an outsider’s perspective it would seem to be embarrassingly successful as a North Wales police inspector recently went on the record as saying that the threat of a Pubwatch ban actually carries more weight than the possibility of having to face a day in court. “When they are arrested and we tell them they are off to court they shrug their shoulders, but tell them they are banned from the pubs and they start to plead with you,” he is quoted as saying in the North Wales Daily Post. Either some pretty lenient sentences are being doled out in Wales or the criminals there have a love of drinking that is more powerful than the fear of a jail-shanking.

Pub Watch systems, which are in place elsewhere in the UK, do have their detractors. A group of boozing enthusiasts in Scunthorpe have lodged a human-rights complaint against their local version of PubWatch after they received a ban from all area bars. Said one: "I well understand the ban in the pub where I was out of order - but not in 29 others where I have never done anything wrong." And he has a point. Letting a heavy ashtray fly at the head of an adversary in the midst of a spirited conversation is not exemplary behavior, but shouldn't result in you being banned from every pub if it was just an isolated incident. (But if it happens at say 12 pubs, then we can see why the local publicans might want to build a human wall to keep you off their premises).

And there is no doubt that publicans will be able to use the ban even when maintaining law and order is not the key issue, like the recent ban on Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling. We've never had a drink with the chancellor and cannot guess at his swings of temperament when under the influence, but it would appear that the ban has more to do with recent tax increases that he's implemented which directly pinch publicans.

Beer as Fuel, and not just for your drunk Uncle Lou's awkward advances

In a previous blog, we drove home the true threat posed by global warming. Several polar bears may have been set off on that great ice-floe journey from which there is no return since that posting; however, the danger that we were pointing out looms large much closer to home – as close as your basement fridge – the possibility of a global beer crisis due to a lack of barley.

The warming of the planet, combined with a supply-side crisis, has also resulted in a short supply of hops in the US. Microbreweries, faced with less available hops, a key ingredient in their product, have taken to jacking up their prices, and, unless there is a change in the situation, we may be forced to either pay through the nose or agree with those who taunt us for drinking microbrews and settle for whatever is cheap and available because, after all, beer is beer.

This is the kind of news that is best met drunk. A recent TV news report suggested that beer is recession proof, and we would tend to agree. A few years ago you may have been toasting your good fortune, wondering why in the world someone would give a walking debt machine and astronomically high credit risk like yourself a mortgage. Now, with fortunes having reversed, and gas so expensive that you’re bargaining with the neighbor’s kid for his used 10-speed, you can tilt that same bottle to keep your mind off the dark state of your financial affairs.

Beer, however, is useful for more than just pouring down your throat in an effort to escape from the crippling grim reality of the diminished financial and natural resources of you and your country, although it is quite good for that. Beer is working for a better tomorrow.

The 2008 Democratic Convention will be sponsored by Molson Coors Brewing Company. The company’s Coor’s Light, which can most charitably be described as “quite quaffable”, will be on sale at convention events. Despite both he and Hilary Clinton attempting to appeal to the lumpen by palming the odd pint on TV – which we covered here – Barack Obama tied with “none of the above” on a survey asking Americans who among the presidential candidates would make a good drinking partner. To be fair, the best drinking partners we know are able to do things like put cigarettes out on their tongues and so forth, and they would not make good holders of public office.

Perhaps sensing that it would not find a future presidential candidate that was as beer-drinker friendly as Bush, Coors chose a different and innovative tack – rather than merely fueling the drunken antics of young Democrats in functions near the event itself, it will also be fueling the convention’s fleet of flex-fuel vehicles. As the “official ethanol sponsor” Coors will donate fuel made mostly out of beer waste – E85 fuel, 85 percent ethanol (beer in this case) and 15 per cent gasoline). When we speak of beer waste here, we’re not talking about spillage as a result of a shaken beer, or what results when you knock one over your keyboard while typing out a blog. The waste beer being turned into ethanol by Coors comes from beer that had been lost during packaging, or rejected for quality reasons.

Rarely, have the words of Homer J. Simpson been more appropriate: “Here's to alcohol, the cause of—and solution to—all life's problems.”

Get 'Em When They're Young: Brewery draws fire for billboard outside primary school

One of the more ghoulish sounding objectives in marketing is the drive to create cradle-to-the-grave consumers. A mind that is still in its formative stages and that does not yet have the capacity to think critically or to visit the website Snopes.com is likely to believe anything, whether it’s religious hullabaloo popularized by ancient tribesman who had yet to understand the germ theory of disease, or the idea that McDonald’s is actually selling something that might fall into one of the four food groups. Indeed, the latter knows that if you include a cheap plastic toy with a youngster’s nutrient-vacant meal, you create a positive impression in that child’s mind and – if he doesn’t’ end up reading “Fast Food Nation” and swearing off that kind of food forever – he’ll likely end up cutting out Mickey D’s coupons out of his newspaper when he’s 45 and about to become a checkmark next to the “grave” portion of the cradle-to-the-grave idea.

Then there are those companies who take matters a step further and hope to “Get ‘em young”, when, legally speaking, they are selling products that the consumer can’t buy until they reach a certain age. Joe Camel, is, of course, the standard bearer in this regard. A chain-smoking cartoon camel that dresses like a pimp might not appeal to your grandpa, but it might make a lifelong brand follower out of a pimply teen who may then later disregard those gruesome displays on cigarette advertising and to whom the threat of impotence might not seem all that important.

Booze companies are also known for occasionally blurring the line between applying to a youthful audience and wanting to replace that bottle of milk in a baby’s mouth with a Mike’s Hard Cranberry.

Tasmanian Brewery Boag may have gone a step too far in the latter direction with its choice of placement for a sign promoting its “St George Beer”: the entrance of a local primary school. As children enter the school, they are greeted with a large advertisement reading “There’s fun brewing”, and while the advert doesn’t show little Johnny tilting one in the sandbox, it does have some local residents concerned that the billboard might corrupt the minds of the youngster.

A 67-year-old grandmother of one of the tots exposed to the advertising was outraged, saying that it advocated binge drinking to impressionable minds. “It's saying, 'Drink, get drunk, it's a great way to have fun'." What the grandmother neglected to mention, however, is that this is 100% true and that getting drunk is in fact one of the best ways to have fun, though it’s the kind of lesson that’s better learned at college keg parties and the like.

24 Hour Party People: UK decides to keep all-night drinking law

On Monday, we covered the growing movement in the US questioning the logic of why someone who is legally able to ruin their lives in so many ways – ie get married, fight in wars, shoot off firearms, vote, star in a porno and obtain a mortgage – is not allowed the freedom to legally get drunk and bemoan the terrible choices they have made in these areas. We support the lowering of the drinking age in the US even if it means that our border towns in Canada will no longer be overflowing with American college students tearing a path of destruction through our hotels and getting to know the lap dance providers at strip clubs on a first-name basis.

The drinking situation in Britain is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Eighteen-year-olds there can belly up to the bar, order a whiskey straight up with no ice, and put up with the laughter and derision of the hardened drinkers around them as they choke it back – and it’s all perfectly legal. Beer at the supermarkets is cheaper than bottled water there and what’s more a law granting 920 supermarkets, 470 pubs, bars and nightclubs “24-hour licenses” will stay in effect following the completion of a study that says crime has lessened since the bill was enacted. Basically, the place is a paradise for youngsters looking to mature into heavy drinkers in as little time as possible.

Previously, last call had been at the ridiculously early hour of 11pm, which is usually about the time we wake up and head off to the bar. Pub crawlers forced out of the bar at 11pm would then fill the streets, and in a state of frustration brought on by the desire for more drink, they would punch one another in the face. (Editor’s Note: Not everybody behaved in this way – some went home to sip a cup of camomile, while others overturned police cars.)

It had been hoped that the 24-hour pubs would prevent drinkers from spilling out onto the streets at the same time. While the government study shows that crime has lessened with the advent of 24-hour pubs, critics say that it has instead giving drinkers a goal to attain – drinking all night long before pouring out onto the streets en masse in a state of oblivion between 3 and 6am.

It could be argued that left to his own devices in one of those Hobbesian states of nature, man shouldn’t need to consume alcoholic beverages beyond 4am. Most people, barring a spat with a loved one, getting slugged in the face, or being the victim of food poisoning, will generally go home of their own accord around two or three anyway. The key here is to get a quality drunk under your belt before that late hour so you can go home, drink and dial a loved one and upload embarrassing photos of yourself on Facebook. From that perspective, it would seem that New York and Chicago have it about right with their 4am last call.

But what about shift workers and insomniacs? Alas, when it comes to matters of booze procurement, the more freedom the better. We commend Britain for deciding to keep this enlightened policy in place and not being as tight-assed about closing times as our native Toronto, which deigns to extend bar hours only during the Toronto International Film Festival (presumably celebs can be counted on to be more sensible when blasted than the rest of us).

US states consider lowering legal drinking age: Life, liberty and a legal buzz before you're 21

When I was 17
I had some very good beer
I had some very good beer
That I purchased
With a fake ID
My name was Brian McGee
I stayed up listening to Queen
When I was 17

“When I Was 17”, Homer J. Simpson

A powerful youth movement is afoot in the USA. Young Americans are fed up with the status quo and are demanding change. Countless youngsters are shaking off apathy, signing petitions, launching online campaigns and joining forces to exercise their collective power to ensure that their voices are heard in the halls of power.

Obamamania? What would a couple of beery Canadians who only watch CNN when hangovers preclude a remote control hunt know about that? (Editor’s Note: When are the people who invented The Clapper going to come up with a TV remote equivalent [one clap to turn it on, successive claps for channel flipping]? Would-be inventers have our blessings to run with this). No, what we’re referring to is the snowballing movement south of the border to lower the drinking age.

Currently the drinking age across the USA is 21, with some states respecting this more than others. Indeed, recalling past debauchery in pre-hurricane New Orleans, we were shocked to find that out that the drinking age is officially 21 in Louisiana and that the young people hooting at us and projectile vomiting off balconies in the French quarter were actually breaking the law.

The nationwide drinking age has been on the books since 1984 when the National Minimum Drinking Age Act went into effect. This act was basically federal blackmail forcing states to raise their minimum drinking age to 21 or be denied transportation money.

Recently, however, lawmakers in Vermont, South Dakota, South Carolina and Wisconsin have all, to varying degrees proposed lowering or allowing special exceptions the drinking age requirement, and in Missouri, Facebook is being used to collect signatures to get a measure on the ballot there to lower the drinking age to 18 (click here for that group's page). One group, with the less than headband worthy name of "Choose Responsibility", has even went so far as to suggest that young people be made to undergo an education alcohol program before being allowed to drink. Having written a potential textbook for this class, we fully support that idea.

The transportation-funding catch is likely to prevent any of these efforts from succeeding -- good news for fake ID providers, establishments that turn a blind eye to such matters (and generally to standards of hygiene) and that one creepy older guy in every circle of teenage friends who has no peers his own age but enjoys a special status among teens for his ability to procure booze.

Beer cheaper than water – And that's a bad thing?

The UK’s Daily Mail, fast becoming The Shark Guys newspaper of choice in terms of rich source material, recently ran a lengthy double-byline investigative piece (full story here) into the rising trend of supermarkets selling their own brands of beer for less than their bottled water. This came hot on the high-heels of an earlier exposé into another alcoholic scourge: those midriff and visible panty-line revealing Facebook girls gone wild, (a story we covered here).

The Daily Mail reports that supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda are selling their own brands of beer at 22p (US$0.46) a can, which is less per litre than it costs to buy the stores’ mineral water and cola, and, in what would seem to be pure hyperbole given the alcohol content of the beer is between 2 and 3 percent, “cheap enough to allow someone to get drunk for just £1” (more on how they sent a reporter out in order to prove that claim later).

Competition between the three supermarket chains led to the low price, with the stores taking on up to an 8p per can loss just to keep up with one another. All three chains now offer the cheapest beer on their rosters for 50p a litre, while mineral water costs between 56p and 92p a litre depending on the store. (The latter price is of course the real scandal, but we'll leave the great bottled-water debate [your wallet and good ole' mother earth are better off with the tap] to blogs such as this one).

Many readers, especially those from Ontario, Canada where a government monopoly necessitates a drive out to the hinterlands for beer restocking, will see all silver-lining and no cloud when it comes to having such easily accessible and cheap booze at the ready. The Mail, however, did not write this one as a feel-good piece, but rather took the occasion to sound several alarm bells.

The main concern was that the youth would put down their alcopops and rush for the cheap lager, which, we presume, is typically the purview of your older recreational drunk. One public health advocate whose comments were included by the Mail in an attempt to strengthen this point came out with an interesting bit of armchair teenage psychology when he ventured that teens would "think that if it's so cheap, it must be OK". The reported low to which Finland has sunk (who knew!) following a 40% cut in its alcohol taxes was also thrown in for extra points.

The Mail even went to the trouble of sending out one of its reporters to drink the cheap beer and report back on its effects in an accompanying piece entitled"How I - a twenty-something woman - got drunk on £1 worth of the 22p lager" (that story here). The reporter, a 27-year-old woman who stands 5 feet tall (and is not as wide as she is tall), might have seemed an odd choice for this test, but here were some selected observations from her afternoon on Asda's own-brand three percent lager (on which she spent £1 hence the headline):

"The first taste is disgusting - a mouthful of gassy, foul-tasting liquid. I don't drink lager often, but even I can tell this is scraping the barrel. The first can is hard to drink but I don't notice too much of a change in myself."

Later, she's loosened up a bit but appears somewhat self-conscious...

"Two cans down and I realise that I am wittering, getting more talkative and, I fear, slightly boring."

Ah, the glorious third can, now things are rocking:

"Into the third can I start feeling more affectionate and my inhibitions are lowered - swinging my legs over my chair, I find myself telling the photographer what a fabulous chap he is and how much I love working with him."

However, those who would be thanking their lucky stars for this, the cheapest of cheap dates, might be put off by the likes of the following:

"The gassiness is getting to me and I keep emitting rather unladylike burps."

And it all goes to pot on the last can and a half:

"On my fourth can, I am getting a bit aggressive - pointing at the photographer as I make another "fascinating" comment and swearing more than I ever would in polite company. By the last half, I have definitely had enough. My voice is heavy and slurred, my limbs feel floppy, my eyes have gone droopy and I have lost the ability to concentrate on anything for longer than a couple of minutes. Worryingly, the lager tastes OK, even nice, and I feel as though I could carry on drinking it if asked."

And, with that, comes a moral to the story of the type that is slightly subtler than a jackhammer in the ear:

"I am a 27-year-old woman and, although only 5ft, am used to drinking alcohol and can deal with the changes it causes. But take each of the physical and emotional side-effects that I felt - and imagine the effect they would have on a teenager."

The Shark Guys

Drunk Girls on Facebook: The Sh*t-Faced Femmes of Facebook

The Internet has long been a blessing for creeps and stalkers the world over and arguably the greatest gift it has given them has been Facebook, which is at the forefront of “social-networking sites” (anti-social networking having fallen off the typical MBA syllabus in the mid-80s). Facebook, in which Microsoft recently invested millions (a move that this Guardian columnist puts somewhere on the level of going to the racetrack and betting on the horse with the nicest eyes), allows you to stalk comfortably from your home, without having to jump into a thorn-filled bush to avoid being spotted, or ruining your favorite slacks by getting garbage-juice on them whilst sifting through the neighbor’s green bin.

Information that in years past would have required a private detective of Magnum PI-like skills to unearth is now visible to all of a person’s most far-fetched connections (at least those who haven’t been relegated to the shameful “limited-profile” status). While you might have one day expected to cross paths with that guy in elementary school who beat you up because you carried a briefcase to school, you would likely have expected this chance meeting to occur while he was pumping your gas and you were wild-eyed and chain-smoking – not via a Facebook message in which he reminisces on your school days as “such a larf!”.

Despite the privacy concerns it raises, and the doors to one’s troubled past it opens, Facebook has become hugely popular and most users do not fret a bit about keeping their Facebook fold informed of the yawning minutiae of their daily lives – events that, in the past, it would have seemed exceedingly arrogant to detail in a greeting card.

The UK newspaper The Daily Mail recently ran a finger-wagging piece on one group of Facebook members who truly could not give less of a sh*te about traditional public/private boundaries called 30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night – 80 reasons fewer than the 110 signposts offered by the tour guides for the recreationally drunk, The Shark Guys, in the seminal “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery”. (All the reasons referred to in the group's name, including “You find yourself peeing behind random buildings”, can be found here). Postings from this group comprise in part pics of women on the back-end of benders, passed out, exposing themselves, falling into bushes, or, in other words, behaving like 90% of the men their age who go out on Saturday nights.

The Daily Mail's story, the word count of which seems to have been padded by the headline “The ladettes who glorify their shameful drunken antics on Facebook”, achieves a tabloid double-whammy both by striking a conservative pose and churlishly criticizing these girls’ drunken antics, while at the same time finding an excuse to run large photos of young women with knickers in plain sight (the two we've run here being preferable in case nosy-bastard coworkers are a problem where you are).

We speak from experience when we say that journalism is largely the domain of those whose first choice of job, professional alcoholic, was unavailable, and as such we're guessing that the latter reason – Rule 141 of the Tabloid Handbook: When in doubt, think “Girls Gone Wild” and work from there – factored far more heavily into the decision to run the story. (Click here for full article)

The Shark Guys

Middle Class Values Boozing

Some wag once remarked, “I’d smoke while I sleep, if I could only find someone to hold my cigarette’. Express such a sentiment these days and you'll get not only a raising of a fire marshal’s scorched eyebrow but a wag of the finger by the growing glee club of killjoys hell-bent on having you mirror their chaste, dull lives. Now while your rejoinder might include a different finger, you can’t help but notice flipping through the channels that the phrase ‘hazardous to your health’ is increasingly cropping up in the evening news—likely referencing some snack or indulgence you’ve been shoving into your gullet for years that will be soon be handled solely with tongs and a biohazard suit-- and'll
shave more months off your life than that cul de sac condo with a power lines panorama.

A health agency in the UK who we’ve chosen not to name here, not because we think it’s bad form to take swipes at some do-gooder NPO, but because its acronym wasn’t nearly catchy enough to pot shot from our humor cannon—has set ‘hazardous drinking’ guidelines defined as “the equivalent of between 9.5 and 21 pints a week of normal strength lager.” Or, to put it another way— ‘a pretty damn good weekend’.

While in some circles, these guidelines are more difficult to accomplish than 9.5 seconds in the 100 meter, it’s not newsworthy in of itself. What IS newsworthy though, is that this same group ranks the middle class the biggest abusers of alcohol, and say that it’s these folk with their SUVs, fat retirement savings and Autistic-like devotion to lawn maintenance, unwinding after work with a bottle of plonk who are most at risk.

The health agency advocates a “substantial” increase in the price of hooch to curb the problem, which is, arguably, just a measure of wealth redistribution you commie buggers.

Teen Smoking: Smoke 'em if you got 'em kids

Already weary of the human genome and having unraveled the mysteries of restless foot disorder (currently, amputation is the only treatment option other than open-toed sandals), the white coat set have solved another of life’s little inscrutabilities: Astonishingly, adolescents (14 to 18 years of age) who work, are more likely to take up smoking—proof that the savants authoring this study, have all but lost touch with their gangly-limbed cheese burger flipping/call center salad days and become resolutely ensconced in their ivory towers.

As we noted in The Shark Book, kids are often forcibly shunted off to children’s camp and coerced into constructing crappy folk art out of elbow macaroni—a prospect bleak enough to send the youth of tomorrow hurling newspapers through your front window or otherwise joining the dismal rigors of the workaday world.

The ‘study’ results corroborate prior ones concerning our specialty, heavy boozing, and suggest ‘adolescents seek out the rewarding aspects of adulthood ahead of their counterparts by assuming social roles and adult-like behaviors’. This phenomenon was first identified by researcher Biggie Smalls as the ‘Mo Money, Mo Problems’ theory, or more simply: kids with more disposable income, party more ‘cause they can.

According to egg heads, ‘more research is needed to systematically evaluate what features about the workplace, or about working, are most closely linked with adolescent smoking’, at which point a thesaurus can be consulted for synonyms of ‘ennui’.

The one lesson that can be gleaned from this study is: For the sake of your health, kids, you're better off not working.