Scientists Prove Beer-Goggles Effect is Real -- Efficacy of Spitting in the Wind Currently Under Review

In the latest revelation to come out of science’s unending quest to prove the utterly obvious, a recent UK study has shown that being drunk makes the people around you appear more attractive. This is following on from shocking research conducted in France that determined that loud music is often played in places serving alcoholic beverages. A look into whether drinking in the winter increases the likelihood that one will attempt to urinate one’s initials in a snowbank is set for the first snowfall.

The beer-goggles effect is of course commonly known to all drinkers and the sober ugly people hanging around them looking to get laid. Lowering inhibitions and standards right along with them is what alcohol is for. However, it was never proven in a controlled, scientific setting, and for some reason, some academic types at Bristol University in the UK thought it should be.

The researchers gave both a lime-flavored alcoholic drink and a similarly flavored non-alcoholic drink to 84 university students, who may or may not have shown up solely because they heard word that an egghead was giving out free booze. They were told to drink what was given to them and then shown pictures of people their own age once they were finished. The slightly tipsy students found the students in the pictures more attractive than the control group did. Hence: the beer-goggles theory formerly bandied about ignorantly is now established in fact. Interestingly, the heterosexual group of students with a drink in them also found members of their own sex more attractive, which might result in an unexpected conclusion to the evening the next time Billy and Bo Dog go out for a Friday debauch.

The study’s lead researcher said that ethical constraints prevented him from giving his subjects more than the equivalent of a few glasses of wine, something he regretted. "We can look at smaller doses and we can look at slightly higher doses," he said. What people would be rating others on HotOrNot.com after having, say, fallen down the stairs in a puke-stained drunken stupor is thus a matter of pure conjecture. In the meantime, alcohol, will continue with its sacred mission of giving hope to those battered mercilessly by the ugly stick.

Coffee & Health: This week, it's good for you

This next topic is one with which we're intimately familiar, having written each and every post you've seen here under its influence: but we're not going to discuss absinthe or Haldol today. We'll save those twin joys for another morning. Instead, we're going to talk coffee.

In previous posts, we've examined mixing caffeinated beverages (so-called, 'energy drinks') with alcohol. It's coffee though, as anyone who's ever had to battle a crippling hangover to prep for that morning board meeting knows, that is the original energy drink.

[Editor's note: if you're determined to mix caffeinated beverages with alcohol, try a dollop of Sambuca in your morning espresso, Italian-style, rather than ruining perfectly good rum with some Coke---not that we'd endorse this for breakfast---we're speaking in general terms. However, having a Sambuca in your coffee for that aforementioned board meeting is highly recommended]

If you want to make your heart race, palms sweat and lose all faculties of speech, your best option is either falling in love, or, if a vacation to Amsterdam's red light district exceeds your allotted travel budget, downing a cup of $4 dollar Starbucks coffee.

Studies looking at the health benefits of coffee are equivocal, to say the least, but as with any study, if you're determined not to change your lifestyle/behavior in light of mounting, glacier-like evidence, it's best to simply ignore all the negative outcomes and instead focus on the positive: for example, decreasing one's risk for Parkinson's by smoking cigarettes (despite increasing your risk for just about every other possible affliction you can think of). Of course, not being named Michael J Fox or Muhammad Ali, not becoming a professional boxer, or not slamming your head repeatedly into drywall is also linked with decreasing one's risk of Parkinson's.

In a Spanish study involving nearly 85,000 participants, long-term health effects of the stuff that makes the prospect of 8:00AM classes and a dull cubicle job less gloomy, were examined.

The people who took part in the research completed questionnaires on how frequently they drank coffee, other diet habits, smoking and medical conditions, and hopefully didn't pose too many questions to researchers about any hypotheses, of the 'you mean you guys suspected that drinking carrot juice every week would kill me quickly and didn't TELL me about it?' variety.

Researchers then studied the mortality risk over the period of the study among people with different coffee-drinking habits, and not the 'cream and sugar' versus just 'just black thanks', variety, but the people (whoever they are) who don't indulge. Women who reported drinking two to three cups of caffeinated coffee per day had a 25 percent lower risk of death from heart disease than women who abstained.

It's possible that coffee drinking is linked to a go-getter attitude, of the type that doesn't involve sleeping until noon, and that people who get up much earlier in the day are more likely to exercise or that it's entirely difficult to be slothful when one is jittery, but that is just speculation.

Digging that Bronze Age Booze Find

If Darwin were alive today, he’d be 200 years old and fielding questions about how he cheated death, perhaps on the daytime talk circuit. He would've also born witness to the 'my great aunt was Irish and now I'm going to sport a fatuous plastic hat that I can later vomit into' that passes for St Patrick's Day on these shores.

Observing such debauchery would leave little doubt in anyone's mind (unless you’re Mike Huckabee) that humans are basically just like other animals.

One of us actually witnessed a trail of vomit that spanned the entire length of a subway car, and though we’re not gastroenterologists, judging by the puke’s fluid state, whoever did that should likely see one—or at least supplement their diet with a bit of fiber, perhaps all-bran.

By archaeological accounts, humans, prior to sullying mass transit and other public places with their innards, have been getting blotto for nearly 6000 years. The Bronze Age was a time, not only of unheeded dermatological warnings and the rise of George Hamilton, but when our forebears started using fancier tools to fell giant woolly mammoths (or dinosaurs, again if you're the aforementioned Mike Huckabee). Along with this increasing level of sophistication, the likes of which not seen either on New Year's or St Patty's Day, came the domestication of the grapevine.

The world's oldest bottle of wine, if you're interested, though it's not for sale and doesn't make for a nice table vintage even if it's given a few months to breathe, was unearthed during excavation near in a vineyard near the town of Speyer, Germany. It was inside one of two Roman stone sarcophaguses that were dug up, before it could be used by some dirty centurion to get some young maiden out of her toga. The bottle dates from approximately 325 A.D.

Recently, in Kent, UK another discovery corroborates the notion that we naked apes have been getting sh*t-faced and putting considerable effort into it, for several thousand millennia.

A 4000-year old Bronze Age skeleton with a pottery vessel placed at its feet was discovered, that researchers suggest was likely ‘a type of beer mug’. The body was in a "crouched" position, which is not only typical of the period, with knees drawn up to the chest, but typical of anyone who spent the morning of the 18th, genuflecting before the Porcelain God.

Teen Smoking: Smoke 'em if you got 'em kids

Already weary of the human genome and having unraveled the mysteries of restless foot disorder (currently, amputation is the only treatment option other than open-toed sandals), the white coat set have solved another of life’s little inscrutabilities: Astonishingly, adolescents (14 to 18 years of age) who work, are more likely to take up smoking—proof that the savants authoring this study, have all but lost touch with their gangly-limbed cheese burger flipping/call center salad days and become resolutely ensconced in their ivory towers.

As we noted in The Shark Book, kids are often forcibly shunted off to children’s camp and coerced into constructing crappy folk art out of elbow macaroni—a prospect bleak enough to send the youth of tomorrow hurling newspapers through your front window or otherwise joining the dismal rigors of the workaday world.

The ‘study’ results corroborate prior ones concerning our specialty, heavy boozing, and suggest ‘adolescents seek out the rewarding aspects of adulthood ahead of their counterparts by assuming social roles and adult-like behaviors’. This phenomenon was first identified by researcher Biggie Smalls as the ‘Mo Money, Mo Problems’ theory, or more simply: kids with more disposable income, party more ‘cause they can.

According to egg heads, ‘more research is needed to systematically evaluate what features about the workplace, or about working, are most closely linked with adolescent smoking’, at which point a thesaurus can be consulted for synonyms of ‘ennui’.

The one lesson that can be gleaned from this study is: For the sake of your health, kids, you're better off not working.