Creative agency Wieden+Kennedy NY developed this wide-mouth cup that enables NASCAR fans to take a sip without taking their eyes off the racetrack. I'd say that The Cup -- a 2009 promotional item for NASCAR and ESPN -- was quite an improvement over beer guzzler helmets worn by dedicated sports fans in prior decades.
(Jalopnik)
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Open Concept is a new bar in St. Louis, Missouri where patrons make an appointment to visit and then pay by the hour to drink as much (or as little) as you'd like. The per-hour price is $10 but if you want top shelf booze, it jumps to $20/hour.
"At our bar we don't sell drinks, we sell time," states their website.
From St. Louis magazine:
Proprietor Michael Butler, the city's current recorder of deeds, got the idea from fundraising parties while running for office. “I would hold events where we charged by the hour for admission and have an open bar,” he recalls. “We got a lot of presale tickets online, and we created large-batch drinks in order to cut costs.” After a series of successful events, he imagined the same model could be applied to a business. He believes the price is "what the market can afford and will feel is a good value...."
When patrons book their time at Open Concept, they create a profile and are assigned a confirmation code, which is used to place drink orders at the bar. Bartenders will only serve one drink per person at a time, and a proprietary point-of-sale system will track consumption. Butler says the system will scan driver’s licenses and use a patron’s height and weight to assign a number of drinks per hour to keep the bar in compliance with legal limits.
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Plain water isn't the most hydrating drink around, according to a new study from health researchers at the UK's Loughborough University. Better are beverages with some fat, protein, or sugar. But not TOO much sugar. From CNN:
For example, milk was found to be even more hydrating than plain water because it contains the sugar lactose, some protein and some fat, all of which help to slow the emptying of fluid from the stomach and keep hydration happening over a longer period of time.
Milk also has sodium, which acts like a sponge and holds onto water in the body and results in less urine produced.
The same can be said for oral rehydration solutions that are used to treat diarrhea. Those contain small amounts of sugar, as well as sodium and potassium, which can also help promote water retention in the body.
"A randomized trial to assess the potential of different beverages to affect hydration status: development of a beverage hydration index" (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition) Read the rest
The City of Victoria, British Columbia rolls out public "peeosks," essentially urinal-shaped garbage cans, on weekend nights near downtown bars. From
CHEK:
The six “peeosk” urinals are part of the City of Victoria’s Late Night Program to help ensure “that everyone has a safe and enjoyable night out....”
(Kyle Massey, owner of a new vape shop,) worries the open-air urinal not far from the store’s entrance will hurt his business.
“If they’re going to do it, maybe they should have an enclosed outhouse instead of a urinal like that,” he said.
The City also seems to be unaware that women urinate. Read the rest
We left Claresholm after eating a continental breakfast of terrible coffee and decent muffins. The hotel’s owner chatted lazily with us as we noshed. He had been a manager of Woolworth's department stores, from Toronto, Ontario to Terrence, British Columbia. He served the chain loyally for decades of his life, never questioning when they sent him north, east or west. They fired him after 27 years of service. He’d become redundant.
I told him that I remembered eating grilled cheese sandwiches at the Woolworth’s lunch counter where I grew up. There was pride in his voice as he told me that, before McDonald's came along, the department store’s lunch counters were the biggest restaurant chain in the world.
The sun was high for it being so early in the day. We heated the RV’s engine for a half hour before wheeling south.
It’s a strange time to write for a living. Where normally I expect to raise an eyebrow when I tell folks what I do, my vocation of late has roused opinions and suspicions. I wasn’t sure if I would stand up to questioning at the border. I needn’t have worried: the border guard was more concerned about where we were going, how long we’d be there and whether we had any contraband onboard. In her rear view mirror, my wife saw our border guard staggering through a pee-pee dance from her booth to the border patrol facility a few feet away as we drove off.
Montana.
The mountains are different here than they are in Alberta. Read the rest
As a wise man once said, "It's funny cause it's true."
(r/funny) Read the rest
The legendary cup, designed to punish greedy drinkers, explained masterfully by Salad Fingers' dad Sir Martyn Poliakoff. His YouTube channel is packed with similarly excellent videos wherein lab assistant Neil is persuaded to execute unnerving experiments. (previously.) Read the rest
University of California San Diego nanoengineers developed a flexible, wearable sensor that measures the blood alcohol level of its wearer and transmits the info to a mobile device. From UCSD News:
The device consists of a temporary tattoo—which sticks to the skin, induces sweat and electrochemically detects the alcohol level—and a portable flexible electronic circuit board, which is connected to the tattoo by a magnet and can communicate the information to a mobile device via Bluetooth.
The device could be integrated with a car’s alcohol ignition interlocks, or friends could use it to check up on each other before handing over the car keys, he added.
“When you’re out at a party or at a bar, this sensor could send alerts to your phone to let you know how much you’ve been drinking,” said Jayoung Kim, a materials science and engineering PhD student.
"Noninvasive Alcohol Monitoring Using a Wearable Tattoo-Based Iontophoretic-Biosensing System" (ACS Sensors)
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The headline sounds like a prime candidate for Betteridge's Law, but a neurologist and his cocktail-bar creative director daughter are on it.
Nathan Mattise reports from the annual Tales of the Cocktail gathering in New Orleans, "a drinking conference with a science problem."
Perhaps the average barkeep doesn't need to know that the body contains more than 350 receptor proteins solely to process smell (detecting more than half a million odorants, any of which may bind to these proteins for all of a millisecond). But that knowledge coincided nicely with Pamela Wiznitzer's recommendations to carefully consider the aroma of your garnishes. When possible, use scents that intentionally clash with a drink's ultimate flavor (thus creating an alluring complexity).
Among the insights: don't use liquid nitrogen to cool drinks, you might kill someone. Read the rest
Sure, we all know what a drinking game is: a game designed to get you trashed. But what does it look like from the perspective of a game designer? How does it work?
Wigle Whiskey, a new distillery a short walk from home here in Pittsburgh, is a symbol of the city's comeback. But it's not just hip, even if, with its contemporary sans-serif branding, it is certainly that. It makes great liquor, too, and is now producing a range of tasty year-old whiskies, an unusual gin, honey rum and bitters. I took a tour of the city's first legal still in decades--and bought a few bottles to take home. Read the rest
