Ramblings & ephemera
From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):
Elizabethan England had a pub for every 187 people. (By 2004, the country was down to one for every 529 people.) The Pilgrims’ Mayflower was actually “a claret ship from the Bordeaux wine [...]
Posted on August 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
From Sam Anderson’s “A History of Hooch“, a review of Iain Gately’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol (6 July 2008):
Aztecs liked fermented sap, but had a legal drinking age (52) higher than their average life expectancy - although every four years they’d hold a New Year’s festival called “Drunkenness of Children,” at [...]
Posted on August 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | No Comments »
From Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (184):
Commodore Andrew H. Foote was a Connecticut Yankee, a small man with burning eyes, a jutting gray chin-beard, and a long, naked upper lip. … he was deeply, puritanically religious, and conducted a Bible school for his crew every Sunday, afloat or ashore. Twenty years [...]
Posted on April 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Language & Literature, history | Comments Off
From ABC News:
For the past seven years Terrifica has been patrolling New York’s party and bar scene, looking out for women who have had a little too much to drink and are in danger of being taken advantage of by men. She says she has saved several women from both themselves and predators who would [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, weird | Comments Off
From The New York Times:
Perhaps it was the bottle of 1947 Château Pétrus for £12,300 ($17,500). Or maybe it was the 1945 vintage from the same vineyard for £11,600 ($16,500). During dinner at a fashionable restaurant here, six investment bankers lapped up £44,000 ($62,700) in fine wines, and now they are suffering from a huge [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, business | Comments Off
From "Peter Smalley - HMS Expedient", at Books and Writing:
Peter Smalley: … In the 18th century, each seaman was given half a pint of rum a day…in our terms (because of the strength of the rum), a pint of rum a day. So they were permanently drunk, more or less. Well, they led terribly rigorous [...]
Posted on October 2nd, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history | Comments Off
Warning: this will mean nothing unless you know the two parties involved.
David H. was drunk and for some reason we asked him if he found Jans attractive. His reply:
No! He’s Scottish! And brutish! I feel like he’d take over my country and invade my netherlands!
Related posts
Jans clarifies it for us
Why so many [...]
Posted on May 15th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: overheard | Comments Off