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.

Local teen athletes were immediately skeptical.

Take that back before I smash your fucking face, science nerd. And bring me a beer.
RELATED: Fox News headline writers were high school jocks.

[Pic: Flickr]

• Whitney Houston showed up on a British TV talent competition where she nearly burst out of her gown and appeared out of it during an interview. Houston managed to keep her dress on after one of the straps broke, but she couldn't remember when her album comes out in the UK. Further proof that crack is indeed whack. [Daily Star]
• 
  
• Sources tell Page Six that Paris Hilton has a three-page movie set rider that includes demands for vodka and live lobsters, but her reps are denying the story. Usually celebrity spokespeople are full of it, but this time, they may be telling the truth. Paris Hilton never eats. There's no way this lobster thing is true unless crustaceans have replaced chihuahuas as the hot animal to be seen with on the red carpet. [Page Six]
• 
  
• Sara Coleman had a baby with hip hop hook specialist Akon. She's seeking child support and says the singer is hiding out from her lawyers. Akon says he doesn't understand why anyone would have trouble finding him because "I'm a celebrity.. my schedule is on the internet, you can go on my Myspace, you can go on my web site, it'll tell you where I'm at." Here is where I insert the obligatory joke about how I didn't realize anyone still had a Myspace page. [TMZ]
• 
  
• George Clooney wants you to know that making millions while sleeping with an endless array of beautiful starlets won't necessarily make you feel "happy" or "complete." Sure thing George. [Mirror]
• 
  
• John Stamos says he was smashed when he insulted a reporter on Australian TV. The living embodiment of nineties nostalgia says he "was on sleeping pills and I was jet-lagged, but I was also just plastered" during the awkward 2007 morning show appearance. [Access Hollywood]
• 
  

Stop the Custom American Wine and Tapas Bar from getting a liquor license, or there goes the neighborhood! "Opponents say the wine and tapas bar will attract binge drinking frat boys and gang violence." Really, they said that?

"We are trying to prevent gang activity in the neighborhood," said Luis Santiago, who said he was representing tenants from 232 Metropolitan Ave. "Opening this restaurant with beer and liquor, with teenagers already going crazy here, it's going to be an even bigger issue. I don't think it's a good idea for there to be tables and a cafe out on the sidewalk."

Ahaha. Yes. Wine, tapas, and outdoor cafe tables? Why not just put up a big sign that says "Free Machine Guns With Proof of Latin Kings Membership?" The landlord, though, made some good points of his own:

The hearing was frequently heated, with the owner of the building, Dobrivoye Filipovich, getting tossed after calling a staffer for Councilwoman Diana Reyna "a drug dealer" and branding [wine bar opponent] Wechter a "criminal."

There is no possible outcome of this dispute that would not make Williamsburg become slightly more annoying.
[Brooklyn Paper via Grub Street. Pic via]

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]

Smoking indoors. And everybody was so drunk! What a sad, emotionally disturbed time it must have been. Untreated depression was rampant, no doubt. The funniest part is when Gay says, "There's nothing like that today." Well.

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]

But this is scarier than you think, secretly-desperate-drunk-joke-maker, because it proves that alcoholics who don't even drink any more have already ruined their ability to tell whether that look on your face is one of muted appreciation or one of mocking me for something, you dirty lying whore. Abstinent alcoholics "register less intensity in the amygdala and hippocampus" when trying to read facial expressions than nonalcoholics do. Although scientists admit that they're not sure whether drinking makes you a flinty, suspicious bastard, or whether being a bastard drives you to drink!

Related: Old people are mad drunk.

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.

Other than his professional failures—taking big, sloppy risks and never learning from his mistakes—there were myriad personality "quirks" that just didn't bode well for a long network career in these depressed, skittish times.

First off, he was always saying dumb things. Like the time he called striking writers who refused to participate in the meaningless Golden Globes ugly nerds who were trying to ruin the cool kids' prom. Or when he basically admitted that he thinks he's the funnest guy he knows. Or hows about that time he called a bunch of his colleagues "D-Girls", the Hollywood equivalent of calling them ineffectual pussies. And who can forget when he declared himself "the perfect storm for making a television executive." (Very destructive storm being an unwittingly apt metaphor, Ben!) That he said whatever he wanted was brave! But it was also dumb.

There was also the youthfully irksome "rockstar" shtick. Silverman's partying has been called "voracious." Because, you know, he came to NBC from the relatively devil-may-care enclaves of producerdom. Those stuffy NBC suits just couldn't handle his wildin'! Wildin' like rescheduling morning meetings to the more hangover-friendly afternoon and hugging executives and signing emails, drunkenly probably, "Love U!" Or maybe they couldn't handle his gangsta freestyle? Likely, though, it was that Ben never showed up for work. He was too busy yachting and yukking it up (flirting?) with Ryan Seacrest.

Basically if you're curious about what it takes to rise from nothing, find fleeting fame and fortune, then collapse and vanish under the weight of your own expectations, just start here and keep on reading. It reads like pretty much any overly-cocky post-college narrative, only with a bunch more money involved.

He gave us so much to write about! And now, like dreams abruptly ended by alarm clocks, it's gone.

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]