Brews You Can Use
One of the more humorous drinking things I saw this week: Modern Drunkard Magazine's "Today's Reason to Drink" is now an Alexa Skill. Link.
We missed National Vodka Day. It was yesterday. I didn't even know we had such a Commie holiday in the U.S. Besides drinking, I'm not sure what one does on National Vodka Day. Perhaps sit around and think about the invention of the Moscow Mule and vodka's first inroads on these shores?
I really like this: An anti-list. Six things NOT to buy a whiskey lover. Whiskey Bottle Table Lamps: “The market for these monstrosities is clearly dudes who still use the term 'man cave' non-ironically,” jokes Goldfarb. The article, incidentally, also has a list of things a whiskey lover would enjoy.
Excellent piece: "The Lost Art of Acting Drunk: From W.C. Fields to John Belushi, the rise and fall of the comedic drunk on TV and in films." Excerpt:
The era of the comic drunk began to draw to a close in the 1970s. The decade began with the U.S. Congress passing the Comprehensive Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Prevention Treatment and Rehabilitation Act, and ended with the founding of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Alcoholism was increasingly considered a disease, and making fun of an illness was society's red line.
Public inebriates still appeared on screen–John Belushi in Animal House (1978), Dudley Moore in Arthur (1981), Kate Hudson in Almost Famous (2000)–but the drunkenness was invariably part of a more fleshed-out role. (Stoners arguably took over the job of comic walk-on relief about the same time. Think: Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke in 1978; Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982). In the 1986 Andy Griffith revival, Return to Mayberry, even Otis had sobered up and now drove an ice cream truck.
The era of the character actor drunk was over. When drunks appeared on the screen, they wore a mantle of pathos, an asterisk that conveyed the notion “Funny, but sad.”