In other people-related-to-politicians-who-also-allegedly-drive-drunk news, Sen. John Kerry's daughter Alexandra was arrested for driving under the influence early this morning in Hollywood. These things come in threes, and we're counting on the Kennedy family to step up to the plate.

So says the BBC:

Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.

The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men.

Female drinkers did not benefit to the same extent, the study in Heart found.

Females lose again.

Of course the article goes on to list a million caveats and concerns from other scientists, but you know that people are only going to hear what they want to hear, which is, SCIENCE PROVES BEER WILL MAKE YOU IMMORTAL, so why even include all that other stuff?

Let's all agree that, sure, it would probably be good from a public health standpoint if alcohol ads were banned. But that would hardly erase alcoholism. Or "binge drinking," which is a catchier way to express the phenomenon in trend stories. Every party with a stake in this issue, though, must take an absolutist, laughable position. Everyone is half right and half lying.

The doctors are obligated to overstate the persuasive effects of alcohol ads in order to convince the government to consider such a drastic, money-evaporating ban. The media outlets are obligated to make tortuous mouth-noises about being concerned about the problem and everything but look we really really need that money, sweet Jesus, please lord, we need those alcohol ads (close to $300 million worth, btw), it's a god damn recession, okay? And the ad agencies—well, as Ad Age reports:

Dave Trott, creative director of London agency Chick Smith Trott, said, "People who blame advertising for binge drinking have misunderstood the whole purpose of advertising — it's about stealing market share, not persuading people to drink."

Hahahahahaha! Alcohol advertising is not about persuading people to drink. You and your crazy notions! The truth is that humans, battered by the grim fortunes of this cold world, will often turn to the soothing but destructive embrace of the bottle. Particularly the Irish.

Ciaran O'Reilly, managing director of Refresh Digital Communications in Dublin, said, "The realities are that it would be the view of a lot of informed people that advertising is not the root cause of the problem. Living in a darker and more-miserable climate seems to have a direct correlation with alcohol levels."

[Pic via]

It is the biggest Massachusetts political scandal since Boston Mayor Thomas Menino failed to call A-Rod a fag after a constituent shouted "Yankees suck" last week.

New Hampshire, as we all know, is a lawless, tax-free paradise of cheap hooch, fireworks, and loose women. It is basically the Tijuana of New England. So all Massachusetts residents who live near that porous border regularly drive across state lines, evading troopers and land mines and such, to buy their Irish whisky and bottle rockets.

That's why it is perfectly understandable that State Representative Rodrigues was spotted at a New Hampshire liquor store! Except that Rodrigues, who was driving his Crown Victoria with the Massachusetts House license plate at the time, is a member of the Massachusetts House Ways and Means Committee and he voted for the recent sales tax hike that added a brand-new 6.25% tax on alcohol. For shame, State Representative Rodrigues!

Here are the findings from a new survey of binge drinkers which makes me scoff:

The researchers focused on 14,000 "binge drinkers " - people who said that at least once month that they had five or more drinks on a single occasion. About 12 percent said they had gone driving within two hours of their last bout of heavy drinking.

Uh huh. So nearly 90% of binge drinkers went out and got drunk and then did not drive. Amazing. Instead of asking drunk to voluntarily reveal how reckless they are, try this, scientists: 100% of binge drinkers, minus the % living in big cities and likely to take mass transportation, minus the % with designated drivers, minus the % willing to call a cab and leave their own car parked at the bar, equals the drunk drivers.

So roughly 68%.
[Pic via]

Beer sales are down this year, surprisingly. Instead of going to the trouble of developing new products, beer companies have figured out that all they need to do is put their existing swill in a new package, and people will become excited! A beer bottle that turns blue to tell you when it's cold, to use one well-known, stupid example. And now: draft beer in a box:

The product, which is recyclable, is aimed at the 30% of beer drinkers who say they prefer draft beer to the bottled or canned variety, said Andy England, chief marketing officer at MillerCoors. "We're really trying to meet that occasion when you just got back from work and want to reward yourself," rather than "the party occasion," he said.

Why not "reward" yourself, with a frosty glass of beer from a box in your refrigerator, alone? The next step is death.
[WSJ. Pic: Flickr. Beer in a box costs more than an equal amount of beer in cans!]

Beer too: Sales of Heineken and other mid-market beers are down while the kind of beer you used to drink before wearing the empty cardboard 12-pack container around as a mask is flying off the shelf.

From the Times:

Growers are behind on sales of grapes, which are fetching much lower prices than last year. Sales are sluggish for wines retailing at $15 a bottle and higher. Meanwhile, distributors, restaurants and retail shops are reluctant to buy more wine, preferring to sell through what they already have.

[snip]

"People are drinking out of their cellars, the big distributors are throwing their weight around, and you add these things up, and from the winery perspective, the cash flow is brutal," said Steve Matthiason, a vineyard consultant who also grows grapes and makes small quantities of wine. "Everybody figures this is kind of a temporary thing, that when restaurants burn through their inventory they're going to have to start buying again, and distributors, too. But everybody is wondering when the levee is going to break, and you have harvest coming up."

"Drinking out of their cellars" is exactly what we like to imagine laid-off bankers are doing when they're not busy fending off $2 million-a-year offers from Citibank. But we digress. The beer industry is also seeing a flight to quantity, the Wall Street Journal reports—astonishingly, people can't even afford to buy Budweiser anymore:

Heineken sales sank 18% from the previous year in grocery, convenience and drug stores during the two-week period ended July 5, followed by Budweiser at 14%. Corona Extra sales dropped 11%, while Miller Lite declined 9% and Bud Light fell 7%. Coors Light sales held up better, falling less than 1% from a year ago.

Meanwhile, sales of "subpremium" beers including Busch, Natural Light and Keystone posted "substantial gains", according to Ad Age, which didn't provide the specifics.

Subprime borrowers drink subpremium beer. Of course, the rich will always be with us, so when it's not busy writing about how the wretched poors are mopping up the floor with rags at bartime and squeezing foul remnants into their mouths for a few moments of relief, it's writing about rich people drinking from ostentatiously oversized bottles of precious wine:

Frank DeSalvo's dinner guests have come to expect a bit of spectacle when their host serves wine. The process sometimes involves a wooden cradle, holding an exquisitely blown glass vessel containing the equivalent of 24 bottles of wine, being lifted by several men onto the table.

After dinner, they go out and light bums on fire for kicks.

The Lancet's publishing a study this weekend that says just that, as well as:

Russia's mortality rate in people aged 15-54 years was more than five times higher for men and three times higher for women than in Western Europe...Alcohol is responsible for about three quarters of the deaths of all Russian men aged 15-54 and about half of all deaths of Russian women of the same age, the data showed.

That is astounding and incredible and not really funny at all. That means the majority of Russians who die in their prime drink themselves to death, one way or another. Thirty thousand Russians die from alcohol poisoning alone, every year. Christ. Hot chocolate, guys. Is good.
[Reuters. Pic: Getty]

For some scientists, the question will not go away. No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death - only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.

I'd say this makes about 100% common sense, in the same way it makes sense that having the last name "Tyson" does not make you a good boxer. Just ask Cicely. Then put down the likker, Roscoe.
[NYT]

Compared to the average beer ad with a porn angle, this is Citizen Kane. [via Adrants]

If you're like "I would only throw up and punch people and scream and start riots and fuck strangers and pass out when I'm drunk and that's the whole point," well, that's not REALLY HARDCORE, is it?
[via Adrants]

Sellers of all types of shit used to claim their products were "Redefining Luxury." Implied: "Redefining Luxury Upwards." Now, we redefine luxury to mean "Items other than bread and water."

Like chocolate. Not an entire chocolate bar; just a few "pea-sized chocolate balls," costing four cents. This is luxury, in India, where workers would be thrilled to enjoy a few of these pea-sized Cadbury confections, had they not been recently laid off from the Cadbury factory.

In New York, our standards of luxury are higher. Free drinks! Even rich people will do anything for free drinks, scientists have proven. And bars in New York have gotten so desperate that they are indeed offering free drinks for an hour a day, just to bring in some customers who might get drunk enough to later purchase a drink. This could work, except that most citizens—unable to purchase chocolate for sustenance—are too weak to make their way "out on the town," and too broke to hire a porter to drag them there.

But, look: balloon vendors in Central Park are threatening to break each others' legs. Or maybe just giving away free balloons to undersell each other? Either way, we can agree that things have gone too far. This new world of luxury—with its chocolate peas and Everclear punch and balloon mafias—is really a new gilded cage of hell.

Except compared to that bloody Acapulco drug war. Then it's not so bad.
[Pic via]

Scientists used to think that coffee was bad for you, but now they say, woops, that was just because so many people who drink coffee are smokers, too. It was the cigarettes, not the coffee! Which is no great comfort for you, our intoxicated target demographic. But this is:

Coffee seems to protect the liver against cirrhosis, especially that caused by alcoholism. It's not clear, either for cancer or cirrhosis, whether it's coffee or caffeine that may be protective.

So just to be safe, drink lots of coffee and take a few handfuls of Vivarin whenever you're "out on the town"—or just sitting home alone in your darkened apartment draining the last of a bottle of Popov Discount Vodka! But don't smoke cigarettes. But your medical marijuana's still safe!
[LAT]

If the beloved and ever-so-slightly over-exposed MSNBC host was going to give in and buy a TV, this was the way to do it without losing too much cred: According to an interview in an upcoming issue of Dossier, Maddow got wasted on classic cocktails (see, don't you just want to hang out with her?) and made one of those regrettable weeknight drunk trips to Amazon.com.

Cole: On a lighter note, people love to talk about the fact that you are on television and yet don't actually own a television.

Rachel: Oh no, I got drunk last Thursday and ordered one on Amazon! (Laughs) Susan and I ordered take-out Chinese and I made cocktails and then somehow it just happened. I mean, it wasn't like we were on some total bender or something—it was a weeknight—but I woke up the next morning and there was the confirmation email stating that we had indeed bought a $400 television. Of course, since we were drunk, we had it shipped to the wrong place, so now we have to get this giant box all the way to NYC from our place up in Massachusetts and figure out how to install it. Neither of us have had a TV in years and years. The last time I lived in a house with the TV was in 1990, when I moved out of my parent's house to go to college. Now there's a giant box with a TV sitting in Susan's art studio waiting for us.

Yeah, Rachel, that's how we ended up with the 2-disc unrated edition of Live Free or Die Hard and NFL Football Follies. And you know what? We regret nothing.

But now someone has to ask her if she's actually getting cable. It's nothing but American Idol and Hell's Kitchen out there otherwise. Of course, if she wants to borrow some DVDs, you know, we have a lot of good stuff.

[Dossier]