October 17, 2007
Some wag once remarked, “I’d smoke while I sleep, if I could only find someone to hold my cigarette’. Express such a sentiment these days and you’ll get not only a raising of a fire marshal’s scorched eyebrow but a wag of the finger by the growing glee club of killjoys hell-bent on having you mirror their chaste, dull lives. Now while your rejoinder might include a different finger, you can’t help but notice flipping through the channels that the phrase ‘hazardous to your health’ is increasingly cropping up in the evening news—likely referencing some snack or indulgence you’ve been shoving into your gullet for years that will be soon be handled solely with tongs and a biohazard suit– and’ll
shave more months off your life than that cul de sac condo with a power lines panorama.
A health agency in the UK who we’ve chosen not to name here, not because we think it’s bad form to take swipes at some do-gooder NPO, but because its acronym wasn’t nearly catchy enough to pot shot from our humor cannon—has set ‘hazardous drinking’ guidelines defined as “the equivalent of between 9.5 and 21 pints a week of normal strength lager.” Or, to put it another way— ‘a pretty damn good weekend’.
While in some circles, these guidelines are more difficult to accomplish than 9.5 seconds in the 100 meter, it’s not newsworthy in of itself. What IS newsworthy though, is that this same group ranks the middle class the biggest abusers of alcohol, and say that it’s these folk with their SUVs, fat retirement savings and Autistic-like devotion to lawn maintenance, unwinding after work with a bottle of plonk who are most at risk.
The health agency advocates a “substantial” increase in the price of hooch to curb the problem, which is, arguably, just a measure of wealth redistribution you commie buggers.
