I don’t want Tiki Month to end without a quick listing of what appear to me to be the big three Tiki events of each year. None, alas, are held during Tiki Month, but each seems to sell out, so now is probably a good time to make your plans to get your pagan on.

For all my fellow classic cocktail nerds, if you don’t get enough of Jeff Berry at Tales of the Cocktail, where he is treated like a rock star, visit one of these events, where I’m pretty sure the Bum is considered the Messiah….

For West Coast Americans, there is Tiki Oasis in San Diego. The 2012 event will be held August 16-19. There aren’t a lot of details at the website for this year’s event yet, but it seems that this year’s sub-theme will be spy genre fun.
Having a sub-theme at a Tiki event is an interesting idea, and ought to help broaden the appeal and perhaps bring in a few new folks to the movement, though I think that spy fun is a better fit with Tiki than last year’s South of the Border idea. You can see, and hear, the way Tiki and spy stuff overlap and compliment each other in this audio podcast episode of The Quiet Village, which I profiled earlier this month.

Next up is Ohana, Luau at the Lake. Alas for me, even though Ohana is a production of the Fraternal Order of Moai, whose origins are right here in Ohio, Ohana is held at Lake George, NY. This year’s dates are June 21-24, 2012.
Lake George appears to be a perfect place for a retro event like a Tiki convention, as it is one of those time-capsules of the pre-Disney, honky-tonk vacation era like Niagara Falls, ON or Ober Gatlinburg, TN. The headquarters for Ohana is the The Tiki Resort (autoplay video at that link). Tickets went on sale for Ohana just a month ago, and rooms at the Tiki are already sold out. Tickets for the event, and other rooms in Lake George are still available.

In Fort Lauderdale, FL, you can attend the Hukilau. The Hukilau will be April 19-22, 2012, and while it is headquartered at the Best Western Oceanside, it is spiritually centered on the legendary Tiki palace, the Mai Kai. I’ve been to the Mai Kai, and it rocked at 6:30 on a normal Thursday. I can only imagine what it will be like during Hukilau.
The Hukilau is the first of these big fetes and if you want to go, I’d get on the stick. South Florida in April is frankly awesome, and if you go to Hukilau, you should add on a day or two so you can go to the beach. You’ll have no time to do so during the event, I’m sure.

I’ve never been to any of these, and I’d dearly love to. But I know for a fact I can’t make it to any of them this year, drat it. If any of you do go, and write about it, drop me an email. I want to read the story, and I’ll throw some Tiki supplemental linkage your way!

Here’s an interesting new study about our capacity to handle the effects of drink: You apparently can handle your liquor better in settings where you are used to drinking, than in unfamiliar settings, or even places where you don’t usually drink, says LiveScience in a profile of new research at the University of Birmingham and published in the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism (via The Daily Mail, via HotAir).

First off, I want to stress that the tolerance for alcohol the researchers were measuring was not related to motor skills or reaction times. I.e. drinking in a familiar bar does not mean that you can drink more and still drive safely home.

The “tolerance” they cite is the ability to resist doing inappropriate things when drunk.

Like either one of these two….

Fortunately, the researchers did not expose their test subjects to contact with Snooki or He Who Is Paid NOT To Wear Abercrombie and Fitch. That would be creepy.

The actual tests were pretty benign. They measured whether subjects could resist selecting inappropriate responses in a battery of questions when drunk. If the subjects had not previously drunk alcohol in a place (even if they had drunk mocktails there), they were twice as likely to let certain inhibitions slip than in a place where they were used to drinking booze.

First off, kudos to Drs. Birak, Higgs, and Terry for coming up with the brilliant excuse for using University funds to take a bunch of undergrads on a series of pub crawls and see where they do the most stupid and embarrassing things….

Of course, they actually did no such thing, but it would have been awesome had they done so, yes? It also would have probably yielded more practical results, though less reproducible, alas. I just wrote the previous paragraph because it makes good copy. The results were actually quite limited, and not all the inhibition tests they performed produced results that support the effect.

That ends my reportage of the actual science, and let us begin the broad, sweeping generalizations of what we can take away from this if we accept the study’s conclusions in a general sense right off the bat.

Scientists hate it when the public just goes ahead and accepts a study right off and starts taking action on it because:

1. The results are initial, unsupported by other studies, and incompletely understood.
2. If everyone goes ahead and acts, there will be no need to fund additional studies on the subject.

“See that girl over there? I’ll bet the three of us could….”
The tragic effects of drinking too much in an unfamiliar bar.

First off, what might be the mechanism that accounts for this? I have read only the abstract, not the entire paper, but they seem to be leaning toward some sort of Pavlovian, behavioralist mechanism. My drinking instincts and experience aren’t really buying that. I have two, not necessarily competing theories.

The first is motivation. We tend to like places where we drink regularly. Sure, in this case, the drinkers didn’t choose to drink in a certain location repeatedly, but so what? I happen to really like the lobby bar of the Atlanta Airport Westin Hotel. Why on Earth? Because I’ve had a lot of drinks there over the years with family, friends, business rivals, and enemies. (In my family, the Venn diagram of those sets would be pretty much a single circle.) Many times, they were good times. But the location was chosen for me and the only reason I like it is because of the familiarity. Nevertheless, if I were to do something, um, uninhibited there, I might not be able to go back, either due to embarrassment or due to being barred. I wouldn’t like that, so I have added motivation in a familiar setting to behave myself. It could be as simple that a certain amount of booze disinhibits a drinker by, say, 30%. But if the familiarity of the setting increases his natural inhibitions by 30% to begin with….

I’ll employ a kind of techie metaphor for the second, even better idea I have. Let’s say that the brain has a certain (if prodigious) amount of bandwidth. We use that bandwidth all the time for lots of functions, such as look for threats, scan for hot members of the opposite (or indeed, our own) sex, figure what and how to eat, talk, keep in mind how to get to the toilet, talk to hot members of the opposite (or indeed, our own) sex, argue with the bartender about why he felt impelled to shake our damn Manhattan, figure out how to get our hands on the body of some selected hot member of the opposite (or indeed, our own) sex, and above all, for the purposes of this discussion, resist the temptation to actually just place our grubby mitts on said HMotO(oIOO)S, or even just blurt our intention or desire to do same.

Drinking narrows your bandwidth, full stop. Size, experience, etc. may reduce the narrowing, but all booze narrows everyone’s bandwidth.
However, in a familiar location, you know where the can is. You know who is likely to be a threat, or know there is likely to be none at all. You know that the bartender knows he better not shake your damn Manhattan.
You might think that you also would be comfortable being yourself and thus be less inhibited. But see Theory One above.
Instead, in most situations, I suggest that the brain saves on bandwidth by not worrying about such threats as bad guys, unknown bathrooms, and shaken Manhattans. It uses the bandwidth saved to try to maintain full function in its remaining tasks, such as keeping you from making an ass of yourself with that blonde paralegal.

Or…
successfully making an ass of yourself with her!

Unless you are married.
In which case you’d best be using all the inhibitions you got, Mister!

Gulp.
Of course, dear!

“I fail to see how any of this explains Cliff Clavin.”

It doesn’t, Norm. Science has no explanation for Cliffy. It does, however, pretty much explain you.

Liquor can teach us a lot about the human condition. I’m not talking here about the wisdom occasionally to be found at the bottom of a glass of scotch upon a lonely evening. I mean that we can gain insight into where a society is and where it is going from the way it deals with alcohol. And in the modern world, this relationship is distilled (har!) in the form of its laws on the subject. One of the things we do as a race is organize, regulate, and restrict ourselves. Sometimes for the better, often for the worse. And the small subsection of this societal control that deals with alcohol is a very useful canary in a coal mine for the health of a people’s political environment.

Up until early in the twentieth century, miners carries caged canaries under ground with them. The birds sang constantly for the miners to hear. Of course, this wasn’t some primitive earbudless iPod setup to entertain them. As they delved deeper and deeper into the Earth, the miners wrapped themselves in an ever more restricted environment. It is hard for a human to detect when his or her air is failing, especially when it may be due to their own exertions.
The canaries were even more sensitive than the miners to the quality of the environment they were making. If the miners dug too deep or too narrowly, if they failed to ventilate their works well enough, the canaries would die and the music would stop. The miners would realize that they were endangering both themselves as individual and their collective enterprise. They’d leave immediately and rethink what they were doing.
Another warning that you have delved too deeply is if you release a Balrog, but I’ll leave that discussion to the patrons of this place.

Like digging a mine, building a good civilization (one that nourishes the bodies, minds, and souls of its inhabitants) is hard, dirty, and very dangerous work. And as we build the grand and beautiful edifice of our societies we often can lose sight of the ways that we are simultaneously suffocating what made building the structure worthwhile to begin with, and eventually endangering the entire thing.

Booze makes a good canary for the the citizens who undertake this work for a bunch of reasons. First, we have had alcohol as long as we’ve had civilization. In fact, the argument can convincingly be made that making alcohol is responsible for civilization’s rise to begin with.
Secondly, I’m sure we’ve been debating alcohol’s merits since at least the Thursday after its introduction. Probably after the first time a man came home too drunk to start the fire, or perhaps unable to perform, um, other duties around the home…. Even for those of us who are proponents of drink, it must be clear that it has its dangers.
Third, the dangers of drink are clear, and easily identified in individual data, while its benefits and the harms of its absence are less direct or obvious.

The builders who concern themselves with production, be they capitalists or especially socialists, hate booze for the loss of productivity it supposedly brings. Those who are fixated upon the general health of the people hate booze for the terrible effects of its irresponsible use. Those whose concern is the strength of governing institutions love booze… for the money they can harvest from those who make, sell, and consume it. The list goes on.

In short, alcohol is an easy target. Like the canary, it is more vulnerable to the ambient danger in question than others. And by keeping an eye on its treatment, you can see dangers that you might not be able otherwise to see. Or, and this is crucial, that you might not be otherwise inclined to see.

The analogy is not exact, of course. Canaries die easily. That’s why they were used. Conversely, booze would be next to impossible to kill, no matter the heavy-handed methods of its opponents.
I get a lot of hits from the Islamic Republic of Iran on this blog. Why? Because people there want to know about building secret bars in their basements where they can drink. They flog people in Iran, just for drinking….
But while you won’t see a total death of drink, you can infer a lot about a society from what its elites want to “do about” the “problem” of alcohol. And you can tell a lot about that society by what its citizenry is willing to accept from said elites.

The impetus for all this musing is a post written by Bruce Bawer, an American expatriot who lives in Norway. His post, Cheap Spirits and the Spirit of Freedom, discusses the profound, almost painful, culture shock he encountered when visiting the US recently in the simple act of picking up a bottle of Smirnoff. You should read the post for yourself, as it goes far beyond the culture shock, but I’ll summarize the Norwegian world he had unwittingly become accustomed to before coming home and noticing the canary:

• All wine and spirits are sold by a government agency whose name is literally “The Wine Monopoly“.
• These stores close at six on weekdays and three on Saturdays.
• 1.75 liters of Smirnoff will cost you right at One Hundred and Twenty Five Dollars at current exchange rates.
• Every political body, Left and Right, in Norway thinks this is a swell way of doing things. (Except for those virtual anarchists in the Progress Party who think the stores should stay open until 8 on weekdays.)

All this mayhem comes from the first item in Maetenloch’s Overnight Open Thread at Moron HQ.

The 10 Manliest Alcoholic Drinks of All Time. For certain values of “Manly” approximating “Jackass 3D”…. OK, 10, 5, maybe 6. Otherwise, not a chance.

Kara Newman, author of Spice & Ice, posts a her list of 11 Cocktail & Spirit Trends for 2001.

I doubt #2 (At least in 2011). I fully expect #5. I hope for #9. And I’m afraid she may be right with #8.

Go read.

It’s hard to have a “Bar Scene” unless you have a scene for your bars. The lesson not really being learned here is that the market will find ways to punish you for attempting to impose your will upon it.

Britain and Ireland argue over which is the Capital of Binge Drinking. Can’t these crazy kids just get along?

This comes under the category of Bad Ideas From Science We Really Could Have Done Without, like weaponized anthrax, human cloning, and those little microphone headsets that let Madonna and Britney Spears perform. Russian scientists (who else?) have allegedly perfected a method for turning alcohol into a powder.
No. Just, no.
I just can’t stop thinking of ways for this product to be used for ill, and I haven’t really come up with a good use for it yet. Simply put, speed is the enemy of responsible alcohol use. Yes, the world already has shots, chugging, and the simple directive that “a cocktail should be drunk quickly, while it is still laughing”. But the idea that you could pop a couple of gelcaps and get drunk does not bear thinking on.
Now, be of good cheer. I don’t think that this is real.
First off, it comes from The Times of India (where I’ve encountered other less than credible articles), in an piece so badly written that I about pulled a muscle restraining myself from red-penning my own computer screen. The second and third paragraphs both have one or more sentences that repeat themselves verbatim.
Second, their source is “a web portal”, presumably from Russia. An unnamed Russian web portal? Dan Rather has higher standards of proof than that! Have you seen what passes for web journalism in Russia these days?
I unleashed my Google-fu on this. Why? Because I could.

You are drunk-blogging,
aren’t you?

No I am not.
Anyway, there is a St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University. On-line search function returns no faculty named Moskalev. There is a guy named Evgeny Moskalev from Russia who is on Facebook, who looks like the sort of joker who would perpetrate this sort of thing on the the poor Times of India, though.
For now, I’m going to file this threat to civilization under the heading of “Hoax”. Good on you Evgeny, if it is a hoax. and what the Hell have you done, if it isn’t.
By the way, I got this story from the HotAir Headlines, where AP finds this stuff for me, so I don’t have to, so that I can find it for you, so you don’t have to…

I’ve gotten a few good comments already, so more thoughts (and a layout-breaking video) below the fold… (more…)

My snarky comments in my last post about scientific studies came back to me this afternoon, as I perused my iPhone at the park.
A week ago I read (and I bet a lot of you did too) an article in the New York Times, entitled Alcohol’s Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It. The article addresses controversy over a recent discovered, but uncontested statistical fact: Moderate drinkers live longer than heavy drinkers, but they also live longer than Teetotalers.
If no one contests the fact, why is it controversial?
You don’t follow politics much, do you?
Here is what lots of scientists are saying to argue that the obvious advice that arises from this fact should not be given:

“The bottom line is there has not been a single study done on moderate alcohol consumption and mortality outcomes that is a ‘gold standard’ kind of study — the kind of randomized controlled clinical trial that we would be required to have in order to approve a new pharmaceutical agent in this country,” said Dr. Tim Naimi, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This a completely valid scientific point, but also a terrible basis for debate. How’s it both? Well, the central assertion that correlation is not causation is critical to good science. And that critical rule is the most often ignored best practice in science, by both lay people and scientists themselves. So it certainly is reasonable to say that you should not take this statistical fact alone as advising moderate drinking.
But there are numerous other studies that show more direct causation between alcohol consumption and a variety of specific health benefits and risks. How do we balance them? Dr. Naimi’s suggestion that we employ a process similar to the FDA’s approval process for new drugs is flawed for various reasons. First, as the article notes, the only sponsor for such a test that might allow the results to be trusted by both sides would be the Feds. And they won’t pay for such a process because whichever side comes out behind will hate them. Further, I would suggest that using a process that would reject Aspirin or Penicillin as possessing too many risk factors to be allowed, would certainly find against alcohol. Which is more an indictment of the government’s process of approving drugs than it is of alcohol. The fact is, like everything else on Earth, alcohol has benefits and risks. If we want to know how those sides tend to balance, I’d suggest that we have a study already done, to the goldest of standards, about how those risks tend to balance. The sample size is humanity….
To be fair, the argument Dr. Naimi and some others (don’t you just love when reporters use the phrase some scientists say…?) make against my last point is this:

…the two groups are so different that they simply cannot be compared. Moderate drinkers are healthier, wealthier and more educated, and they get better health care, even though they are more likely to smoke. They are even more likely to have all of their teeth, a marker of well-being.

The problem I see with this distinction is that the scientists seem determined to believe that these sociological differences could have no causative relationship with alcohol consumption. This is of course ridiculous. No one claims that alcohol use can and does change people’s life circumstances, at least in the case of heavy use or abuse. Why should we reject out of hand the notion that moderate alcohol use might actually promote some of those social advantages the researchers say distinguish moderate drinkers?
I’m not saying this is certain, but I contend that the differences they are discussing can’t legitimately be used as control factors since income and education may also be affected by alcohol use. In fact, a Forbes article by Arthur Brooks cites a study that purports to show such a relationship.

Moderate drinkers are richer than teetotalers, too. In 2001 the University of Michigan’s Panel Study of Income Dynamics found that light drinkers (one to two drinks a day) had a mean income of $49,000, versus $36,000 among teetotalers. This is a nuanced statistic; drinking may be associated with other variables (like education) that influence income. So the researchers did their best to strip these other causes out. If two adults were identical with respect to education, age, family status, race and religion, except that the first had one or two drinks each night after work while the second was a teetotaler, the drinker would tend to enjoy a “drinker’s bonus” of about 10% higher income.

Is this correlation or causation? Again, who knows? Especially since in this area we are leaving medical science and entering sociology. And sociology ain’t science, guys. Sorry, but it isn’t.
Finally, another article in Forbes (the one I was reading in the park while my kids played on the swings) makes a logical argument that in many ways trumps the entire debate. The article, by Jeff Stier is entitled I Choose Risk. And no, the fact that the term bikini waxing is found in the subtitle is not why I was reading it. Stier’s article is a general condemnation of how we are becoming increasingly, riskily, adverse to… well… risk.
Most of his article is devoted to the fish pedicures, video games, and the aforementioned bikini waxing, but he ends with linking the Brooks article and saying this about the correlation/causation question.

I believe that moderate drinkers have the ability to accept risk (unlike teetotalers) and manage it (as opposed to alcoholics). This is a discipline that they can deploy both at the bar and at the office. The ability to engage judiciously with risk in all facets of life may be a predictor of success–whether it’s part of a career, daily routine or society in general.

So let’s wrap up this rambling post. It is a fact that moderate drinkers happen to live longer than those who drink more or less. There are specific, well established health benefits from alcohol consumption, with more being found all the time. The are specific risks associated with alcohol use as well. In addition to living longer, moderate drinkers make more money, are healthier, and are better educated. Moderate drinking is a skill, employing talents that are valuable for success in all walks of life. And I’ll add that drinking is enjoyable and can improve our quality of life.

I’ll close with a famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that apparently was not quite what is usually reported:

Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.

Via my favorite Guy Oriented Website You (probably) Won’t Get Busted For Browsing, Asylum.com, comes an article from the Telegraph. It proves once again that Britain is the land of interesting alcohol research. (All booze studies in the US come to either or usually both of the following conclusions: Alcohol is the Debbil, or We were unable to prove that alcohol is the Debbil, so we need more funding study to get the goods on it.) The valuable information recovered from this study is: Alcohol goes to the head in six minutes.
Here are the money grafs:

Scientists set out to test the well-known saying that just one drink can quickly go to your head.
Only six minutes after consuming an amount of alcohol equivalent to three glasses of beer or two glasses of wine, leading to a blood alcohol level of 0.05 to 0.06 percent, changes had already taken place in brain cells.

I’ll leave it to you to spot all the peripheral silliness in these two one sentence paragraphs. To me the big question I popped from this was, drinking three beers through a straw while lying on your back in an MRI only leads to a 0.05 BAC?!?!?
Really?
I can think of only three explanations for this:

1. Brits drink really low alcohol beer. Verdict: Not bloody likely.
2. Brits have a different metabolic process from Americans. Verdict: Even less likely.
3. Brits drink small beers. Verdict: Ummm, I dunno.
4. MRI machines inhibit drunkenness. Verdict: Who cares?

Any readers from across the Pond want to help me out on this?

Image does not depict BAC of 0.05.

Anyway, I am aware that the actual study probably was aimed at those chemical changes in the brain, not how fast you get your buzz on, but the scientists’ PR people clearly know how to craft a press release to attract the attention of newspapers (and your humble blogger, apparently).
But what are we to take from this information? What can we do with it? I’m not sure. But the first fact I can think of is that when you slam a shot of tequila or chilled vodka, the wobbly feeling you get instantly is not intoxication, it’s just shock to your tissues. Also, while there is a delay between intake and effect, it’s probably not long enough to accomplish anything useful, so don’t try.
When you combine this the first rule of cocktail wisdom, A cocktail should be drunk quickly, while it is still laughing at you, I think it means you need to wait a while between drinks if you want any meaningful gauge of where you are, drunkenness-wise. Beyond that, does anyone else have a use for this, beyond being a basis for a cool James Bond scene?