Hey, the HuffPo typed it up!

Caller: I'm a student of print journalism, and I just wanted to know: what advice do you have for young people coming up into the field? Like, a lot of our professors are telling us how hard it is to get into the field at first. I'd just like to know, since you're in the field, if you have any advice on that.

[silence]

Caller: For instance, experience: is that important?
Larry King: Uh huh, sure.
Caller: Is that probably the most important?
Larry King: Well, it's way up there.
Caller: It's way up there...anything else?
Larry King: Pressure under fire, done this before, I don't want this to be his first surgery.
Caller: Okay...
Larry King: Applied himself well. These are the things that I'd have confidence in a young M.D.
Caller: Okay...I'm talking about the journalism field.
Larry King: I'm lost, what do you mean?
Caller: Journalism...I'm a student of journalism at a college and I was just wondering the most important aspect of getting into journalism. Not the medical field. I think you're exhausted from 30 nights.
Larry King: I am exhausted from 30 nights. No person, even those of us who are superhuman, those of us with Herculean appetites for the diverse and the bizarre, even those of us who have shown an aptitude to fight the good fight and stay the good long battle...even those of us can get tired. And your boy is tired after 30 consecutive nights. I have a half hour to go and I'm gonna do that half hour because I'm a pro, and that's what pros do. I'm a pro-fessional. Look it up in the book.
Caller: Okay...
Larry King: That's what we do, we're pros. We're never rude and we don't cop out. We don't tell you that we're ill or that we're looking for the farmhouse in the middle of the desert. Or that we're parched. We don't tell you that maybe the check didn't come through this month, and where the hell does it go anyway if you're a guy who's left 16 forwarding addresses?
Caller: Okay...
Larry King: So what do you do? What is the answer? Yeah, you're a little perturbed now. Kinda worried about the club.
Caller: The club?
Larry King: Don't worry about the club. Worry about, maybe, Jackie, my...haha, nah, don't worry. Okay, just cool it. Life is a breeze. Of course, some breezes as you know at 110 mph and get promoted up to hurricanes...I just thought I'd pass that along. Speaking of pass along, we're gonna pass along now to the newsroom, the Mutual Newsroom high atop the overlooking downtown, beautiful downtown studios of [slurred, Arlington?] Virginia, Washington DC. The Mutual Newsroom will get us up to date on the news headlines and we'll come back with more Open Phone America and we'll have our salute to my man Duke [?] by taking him to one of his favorite places, one of mine too: the town of Cooperstown, New York. This is the Larry King Show in Washington, and we'll be right back.

[via the Gallery of Graphic Design]

Alcohol

The president has always denied being an acoholic, though he's copped to "drinking too much" back in his callow youth (which lasted until his 40s, by the way, when he had his convenient religious reawakening). The alcohol provided a convenient excuse for his being a no-good fuckup for his entire 20s and 30s, and the religious awakening and supposed sobering up helped him gain forgiveness for youthful indiscretions like his disorderly conduct arrest and his 1976 DUI.

Anyway. Billy Graham showed up in 1985. In July of 1986, according to the lies he told in 2000, Bush quit drinking for good.

Here is a video of George W. Bush at a wedding that supposedly took place in 1992:

When the president "choked on a pretzel" in 2002, the White House took the step of having the White House physician announce to the press that "There was absolutely, positively, no suggestion on physical examination that any alcohol was involved." He just choked on a pretzel, during a football game, and lost consciousness.

Graydon Carter sez he knows a guy who sez Bush's blood alcohol level was quite high when he was hospitalized after the pretzel incident.

(Around the same time, a number of nuttier lefty sites began blowing up and enhancing photos of the president's face to point out all the burst capillaries that proved his continued reliance on booze.)

Cocaine

The rumors made the rounds in 1999: George W. Bush did coke! This was before 9/11, when everyone started doing coke again, so it was a big deal. If it was true! Proving it became quite difficult when the person with the most damning-sounding "proof" of drug use turned out to be an unreliable criminal (much like how the people with the best proof that Bush went AWOL from the national guard were using questionable documents, FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS). So. Here are some of the rumors:

• Bush was arrested for drug use in the "late '60s or early '70s" but the arrest was expunged from his record after he performed community service. That community service may have been his stint at Houston's Project P.U.L.L. in 1972.
• But that charge comes from the book by J.H. Hatfield. Hatfield was a convicted felon. The book was pulled from shelves. Hatfield turned up dead of an apparent suicide in 2001. He claimed all along that his sources for the cocaine story included Karl Rove, who's known to talk off the record to journalists of all stripes.
• In 2004, Eric Boehlert floated the theory that Bush ditched the air force because they were instituting random drug tests. This seems like grasping at straws (lol) to us, but whatevs. It's out there.
• Bush has simply never denied using cocaine.
• If you take Scott McClellan's diagnosis at face value, Bush probably did plenty of drugs in his college days and beyond, and then more or less convinced himself that he can't even remember if he did or not. Because he's turned into a simple-minded fool.

Amusingly (to us, perhaps, and probably no one else), we now have a major candidate who's admitted to cocaine use... but that admission itself is suspect. Barack Obama famously admitted to experimenting with coke in his first memoir, Dreams From My Father. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though," Obama wrote in the more-than-decade-old book. The New York Times spent god knows how long trying to find anyone from Obama's adolescence who remembered him doing drugs but they came up short. Everyone remembered him as basically a square. He smoked a little weed.

We're forced to ask if Obama didn't exaggerate his drug use for the sake of a compelling narrative!

(We've come so far.)

"The researchers found that booze completely changed the way the brain reacted to the images. Without alcohol, the amygdala - which is involved in processing emotional reactions - lit up in response to the frightened faces, but with alcohol, it was less active, reacting equally to neutral and fearful faces. This may help explain why drunkenness makes people both more outgoing and more aggressive: it impairs the amygdala's ability to detect threats.

"The researchers also confirmed that alcohol activates reward circuits, such as the nucleus accumbens, just as other drugs of abuse do - resulting in pleasurable feelings."

Now you know. [NewScientist]

"Getting some of the benefits of a sports drink without all the 'physical activity' is something a lot of bloggers at the MacBook are looking for," said Alex Balk, the diet and nutrition editor at Radar, a magazine for bloggers. Alex Pareene, the day editor at Gawker.com and an alcoholic, tested three drinks while typing nonsense about Nicole Richie's baby, banning commenters and obsessively checking traffic stats. He found them suitable for a range of activities, but mostly for moderate-intensity Denton-ignoring.

COFFEE $1 for a large cup at the bodega across the street, Bed-Stuy. This hot beverage carries a decent-sized dose of the stimulant caffeine, and "allows me to become alert enough to finally trawl through and occasionally respond to the hundreds of typo-corrections, emails from flacks, student loan reminders, and obscenity-filled tirades from former Gawker employees that accumulate and are ignored each afternoon as the previous morning's buzz wears off," Mr. Pareene said. "Then I break for lunch."

TECATE $9 for six 12 oz. cans, same bodega. This refreshing Mexican beer (or "cerveza") is "cheaper and better than that Corona shit," Mr. Pareene said. He recommends placing the one mug you haven't drunkenly broken yet in the freezer before use, and enjoying your beer ice cold and frosty, as your landlord fucking refuses to find any medium in the building's heat between "just not on at all" and "Turkish bath" and you can't open the windows because the cats will run away. Best at "lunch," spent while staring with dead eyes at 1,000+ unread headlines in Google Reader, wondering what percentage of them are from certain Tumblrs.

OLD OVERHOLT STRAIGHT RYE WHISKEY $16 for a 1 ltr bottle, the liquor store. An excellent source of alcohol.

I'll Have What She's Having [NYT]

When you're hosting:

1. Never Assume Don't say, "Can I get you a cocktail?" Instead, just hand them a drink when they walk in the door. It's cold out! That's hospitality.

2. Tap That Know the early signs of drunkenness, such as slurred words, obscenities or unusual confessions. Now your party is really getting good. If you see insobriety, we suggest pouring 'em stronger and turning up the music. As Lizzie Post says, "Cork it, and put the wine away for the night." It's rye time.

3. Be Subtle Don't announce "Please, no booze" on a written invitation. "Invitations are supposed to be inviting," Post says. "It's not polite. You don't put 'No smoking' on an invitation or little signs around the house." No, you man up and let people drink and smoke. Because it's a "party." Not a damned stupid 12 step meeting—which, we might add, you can certainly light up during.

What about when you're the guest? First, congrats; you've made the right decision. No cleanup and you can leave when you get bored! But there are still some etiquette tips you should keep in mind.

1. Considerate Gifting Don't bring a bottle of wine or Scotch to a party unless you're asked to. It's their job to get you drunk. Grab a sixpack on the way up if you're worried they'll run out of the good stuff. Then hide it!

2. Don't ask "Never ask anyone why they're not drinking, even indirectly. It can seem like a harmless ice-breaker, but in fact it's downright rude to hand a woman a Coke and say, 'Expecting?'" We have nothing to add to this tip. It is totally inappropriate to hand people virgin Cokes or invite pregnant ladies.

3. Don't tell You're not obliged to explain why you're drinking. No one needs to know the extent of your pain. And you'll tell them when you've had enough, goddammit.

Six Ways to Avoid Holiday Booze Blunders [Newsweek]