Woman, 110, credits her longevity to whiskey...For a taste of her whiskey, we'll give you some advice.

The life of London's Minnie Smith's has spanned the Spanish American War to the recent Vegas debut of the world's largest TV and New Hampshire primaries. In order to experience such a rich lifetime's worth of accumulated experience you'd have to either switch to a Soylent green exclusive diet, sleep upside down or develop a time machine.

Naturally, anyone traveling back in time will have to sign a release form guaranteeing they won't pervert the natural course of history and disrupt the future development of a time machine by say, telling Kennedy to duck or thwarting the Titanic ice-berg collision. The latter, for example, would excise the calamitous event from history books, add a few hundred souls who otherwise wouldn't have been conceived (if this vessel's a rockin', don't bother knockin') and remove any and all future references to the Titanic from the obits of very old people.

Minnie Smith, it should be said, is not dead yet, but 110 years young--her namesake on the tombstone pictured above an unfortunate coincidence and oversight we blame on a guest editor---we wish her many happy returns on her recent B-Day. According to the Independent, she was 14 when the Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage and her life spanned six monarchs, 21 prime ministers, nearly every Stanley Cup, the invention of the flashlight and annexation of the island of Hawaii (it should be noted at this point, that the relevance of each particular cultural touchstone varies according to region--though who doesn't like Hawaii?)

Smith, according to reports, credits her Grim Reaper-defying existence to regular drops of whiskey and boiled onions (not together).

The authors of The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death first noted the healing properties of whiskey while on a tour of the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee and credit going an entire year without a head cold to a 'walk slow, and breathe deep' injunction while ambling through the oak barrel storehouse where the hard stuff ages, so you don't have to, apparently.

[Editor's note: The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery is available in the United States on Amazon.com, today, January 9th, the birthday of Joan Baez, Jimmy Page, and Richard Nixon]