with the ground-breaking research that discovered that the wheels on the bus go round and round and that the mums on the bus go chatter, chatter, chatter.

That heterosexual men are likely to get aroused when looking at pictures of scantily clad women and that Spurs flatter to deceive nearly every season.

Common sense and rigorous scientific testing has proven beyond reasonable doubt that David Bowie is, usually, the answer.

I saw this and was struck by

For a person thinking they were drinking 7.5 units a week, the extra measures would equate to 17 units.

Who on earth thinks they drink '7.5 units a week'?
The whole units business has obviously failed if it was intended to make people drink less. Surely, if you want to set 'safe' limits it would be better to say 'two bottles of wine a week for a man'? (I think that's about 20 units of wine at about 13% alcohol, but the units red herring is so confusing it's impossible to tell without opening up Excel.)
Incidentally, a friend gave me a bottle of rather nice port for Christmas and as I was enjoying a glass last night, and I find that just the one really will do with port, I read up on port in a wine guide, where I discovered that Pitt the Younger had to drink a bottle of port a day on doctor's orders. He was 14 years old at the time.

Oh, man... I'm glad I read that article.
I thought it was three to four bottles a day... Which reminds me, there's a nice Rioja in the rack. It is 11 a.m. yet?
Got to dry out soon... back to work Monday.
Happy New Year, hic...

story are fundamentally flawed .
The basic facts about alcohol in Britain is that most people are moderate drinkers and in fact the per capita amounts are falling year on year. So we need a series of targeted message about sensible alcohol "use" and not this broad brush "binge booze Britain sozzled geordies lasses mooning at cameras" moral panic headlines.
I'm sure many of the Massive like a drink but probably not many of you have mooned at BBC 3 film crew in a long while. So we need to look at the issue of drinking in a complex way similar to complex view society has of drink in the first place. This means targeting people who clearly do have problems with but avoiding nonsense like this that just hacks off moderate drinkers and passes those in serious need of help by in their haze of denial.

not because of what they actually say (which is stupidly obvious as pointed out above) but because dwelling on them for anything more than a few seconds puts me in great danger of turning into Daily Mail Man ("why oh why, broken Britain", etc etc).

Yet another reason to use the Word website as the fount of all knowledge, and ignore traditional news sources.

You can tell it's a quiet news day, can't you?

I only pretend I drink modestly when completing insurance declarations!

I think a large part of the problem with pouring a nip for home consuption is the size of the glass. Yes the glass is too big.

When I was a child a nip glass only contained 25ml of whisky or whatever your tipple was. But as tastes changed and people wanted mixers with their drink there became a requirement for larger glasses/tumblers to be used. Now when you pour in a 25ml measure into one of these glasses it can sometimes barely scrape up the side of the glass. Now you don't want to appear mean spirited (boom boom!) so you add more spirits until you get what you consider to be a fair amount in the glass. Hey presto, you are pouring a double or even a triple nip on occasions.

Anyway, it's new year. Pay no attention to the 'experts' and enjoy the festivities.

baby, hands up. give me your heart, gimmie gimmie

*dances into Xmas tree with huge cigar and generous tumbler of glenfiddich*

was precisely that you can pour yourself a decent measure and not one of the under-sized, over-priced 'shots' you get in a pub.

No problems if you drink the whisky straight from the bottle...

One present I did not expect at Christmas was a bottle of iichiko Shochu. As it is less than an hour to 2010 in Japan I shall prepare myself to toast in the new year and then dine on a traditional stew currently being prepared downstairs by a Japanese friend.

http://www.iichiko.co.jp/en/product/silhouette.html Kampai!

is roughly a quadruple in anyone else's.

The biggest surprise for me is that there was an article on the BBC web site that appeared to get quotes from more than one source. If you really want a example of the BBC just making up a story go here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8435887.stm
I'm confused about what I'm supposed to be confused about! The VAT rate rises at midnight but retailers will still be able to set their own prices - isn't that what happens all year round?

has the correct take on the story..
http://newsarse.com/2009/12/31/publicans-pour-significantly-smaller-meas...

how much of the damn thing I've glugged, so measures don't come into it. All one needs is a back up flask in the glove box of the Landie just in case. As long as I can still focus on the safety catch once I've got both barrels loaded, there's no problem. Mind you, I seem to get through an awful lot of clays these days without hitting too many.

Without looking it up on Google, does anyone know what a unit of alcohol is in plain terms? Few do.

It is 10ml of pure ethanol. So a litre of 13.5% wine contains 13.5 units of alcohol. And a standard 75cl bottle contains 13.5 x 0.75 = 10.125 units of alcohol.

So the 440ml can of 5% lager in front of me should contain 2.2 units.. checks..

Phew.

Do I win any smartarse points?