grylliade.org Free minds. Free markets. Free beer.

1 in the afternoon is a bit early, even on a holiday weekend.

Hmph. Well, you are the arbiter of taste. ;)

Do what I did when I was forced to take my daughter to such cinematic leaps forward as the remake of The Shaggy Dog starring that horrible guy from Home Improvement, sleep.

It may be uncomfortable, and the children will make noise, but one's mind longs for the sweet bliss of slumber when confronted with that kind of trauma.

If that doesn't work, try going to your happy place.

Also, here's something I call Mumbai Drift

I find it diificult to wrap my mind around the concept of any lover of mine wishing to see such drivel. Still, my first wife managed to drag me to a David Copperfield performance, so I guess it's possibe. I went with the be a man and suck it up option.

i'm simply not that irish.

also i meant like "drunk" not "happy"

I'm not that Irish either. Hell, I'm largely English and Dutch, so I should be wearing Orange on St. Patrick's Day...

Here's the breakdown: half my ancestry is Lithuanian and arrived here about 100 years ago. The other half is English and Dutch and maybe a little Welsh, and they've been here since before the Revolution, probably mostly in the Pennsylvania area.

Not as far as I know, but my knowledge of the family history that far back is pretty scant. A family tree written in an old family Bible, one or two old wills, that kind of thing. At least one branch of the family did own slaves (or _a_ slave, at any rate) so I doubt they were Quakers, eh?

The throat punch was the only answer that solved your problem while appealing to my sense of philanthropy, so there you are.

I should note that, Northern Puritans and such aside, the English Southern colonists had nothing against getting liquored up, themselves; they merely disapproved of their servants doing so.

I'll return to the thread topic and note that I've seen all sorts of bad movies for love, though not for my wife, who generally dislikes movies of any sort, but for my kids. I don't know how bad Away We Go really is, but it can't be worse than Pokemon or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies, both of which raised the existential questions why did I ever have children? and why did I ever stop taking drugs? while I sat there in the Stygian darkness.

On the marital front, I admit to being no fan of opera (one of the many things Groucho and I have in common) and could endure it for my wife's sake only when the Met played at Wolftrap Farm Park and we could sit on the lawn and I could eat fried chicken and drink jug wine until I passed out, usually no later than the third or forth recitativo.

As I understand it. Colonial America lacked for water treatment facilities, and the water was infested with all manner of bacteria, parasites, and other bugs. Drinking anything less than 5% ABV was a health hazard and the whole population was half crocked from noontime on.

Actually, no. One of the things that is said to have prompted North American* prohibitionism was the fact that unlike those in the foul crowded cities of Europe people on this continent had boundless supplies of pure water.

It's going away now, but time was that the first thing that happened in an American restaurant was that glasses of water would appear on the table as if by magic. This did not happen anywhere else in the world, or even in the universe.

*believe it or not, the Canadians caught it just as bad as we did.

What do you mean the Canadians caught it just as bad as we did? Smuggling from Canada was highly profitable all through prohibition. When did Canada go dry?

My guess is that there is research suggesting that making water available only on request increased beverage sales.

From the infallible WIKI.

My ex-wife's father used to make a big deal of showing his 1930s Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) passbook which allowed him to purchase 1(one) fifth of spirits a month. In the 1960s patrons of the LCBO had to read a board showing the inventory and fill out a form showing the item number and their name and address which they would then present at the counter and then wait until someone would come out with their filled order. This procedure was slightly more restrictive than the one in effect in Utah at the same time where you didn't have to give them your name and address.

Until about 1972 all licensed premises in Ontario had two sections. One was the "Men's Room" which was, as the name suggests open to men. The other was the "Ladies and Escorts Room" which was open to "ladies" accompanied by men. It was not open to unaccompanied women nor was it open to unaccompanied men. Of course, this may say more about Canadian attitudes towards sex, than it does about their attitudes towards alcohol.

Those little loopholes in Canadian law and the fact that full prohibition died a little earlier in Canada than the US helped found the Bronfman fortune. (And the Kennedy fortune on the US side._

The colonists, north and south drank a lot. And even if the water was clean enough to drink, nobody thought drinking water was healthy (that'd have to wait til the germ theory). (There's a quote, and it may be from Franklin, about a young man disembarking from England and rushing to a water pump, whereat he drank in the cold water and promptly died. The morale of the story was to be sure to drink w"warming" drinks in the New World, i. e. alcohol.)

There are whole book-length treatments of the subject. It became rather hip a few years ago, but here is a nice summary, with an extract:

In 1790, United States government figures showed that annual per-capita alcohol consumption for everybody over fifteen amounted to thirty-four gallons of beer and cider, five gallons of distilled spirits, and one gallon of wine.

Note: the 1790 survey, as advanced as it was for it's time is riddled with errors and undercounting. The prolification of non-market, and non-reported alcohol likely pushes those estimates up. The estimates for New England are about a pint o'rum per day, per person over 15.

J sub D,
I saw on TV (so it must be true) that the Purple Gang were actually the ones behind the St. Valentines Day massacre.

Warren's Jewish and in the Purple Gang?

Why am I always the last to know?

dang. they sure don't build em like they used to.