40 Drunkest Cities in America

Are you hungover on New Years Day, 2011? Lord knows I am. It's the one day of the year where binge drinking is socially acceptable, at least according to the Good Book - but what do they know, really?

Whenever I've traveled and gone out in different cities, I've always wondered whether the city I'm in is particular drunker (or more full of drunks?) than any other.

In the Bay Area, for instance, drinking is the most popular local sport - friends from there can invariably drink me under the table. Levels of drunkenness regularly approached the worst of my Fratterdays.

When I lived in Spain, however, blacking out was deeply frowned upon by the local people. Having a drink or two with your lunch on a Tuesday, however, was completely normal. This, of course, does not include Cadiz Carnaval, where the whole city shuts down so entire families can get debauched together for a solid week.

Drinking in Israel was a big disappointment. Not only is it the custom to nurse a beer or two for your entire evening, there's also a slight possibility the club you're in will be blown up by Palestinian terrorists.

So....is your city among the drunkest in the US? The study linked below measured the percentage of adults who are "binge drinkers" (more than four drinks in two hours) and the percent suffering from alcoholic liver disease.

Let's have a look at the rankings:

1. Milwaukee, WI - colddddd
2. Fargo, ND - even colder!
3. San Francisco, CA - gays + sunshine = party people
4. Austin, TX - live music, go figure
5. Reno, NV - gambling :) sinners
6. Burlington, VT - do they drink a lot of maple syrup, or what?
7. Omaha, NE - BOW DOWN TO WASHINGTON, BITCHES!!! That should do something to their alcohol consumption, dontcha think?
8. Boston, MA - let's get drunk in hahvahd yahd
9. Anchorage, AK - is there a sarah palin shot up there?
10. San Diego, CA - German for "whale's vagina"

Rounding out the list:

21. Spokane, WA - I would drink myself to sleep, too, if I were from here

24. St. Louis, MO - How my Dad manages to not do so is nothing short of a miracle

29. Chicago, IL - you have to drink if you're gonna eat a Chicago dog, those things are huge!

30. Seattle, WA - Goooo 206!

32. Portland, OR - microbrews are yummy :)

Via: The Daily Beast

Beer - Not Just a Wonderful Drink, but the Origin of Civilization

Beer might not be the answer for the ultimate question, of life, the universe, and everything (sorry, I'm a geek!). But many anthropologists believe it may be responsible for the origins of agriculture and civilization itself.

Their argument is that Stone Age farmers were domesticating cereals not so much to fill their stomachs but to lighten their heads, by turning the grains into beer. That has been their take for more than 50 years, and now one archaeologist says the evidence is getting stronger.

Signs that people went to great lengths to obtain grains despite the hard work needed to make them edible, plus the knowledge that feasts were important community-building gatherings, support the idea that cereal grains were being turned into beer, said archaeologist Brian Hayden at Simon Fraser University in Canada.

Archaeological evidence suggests that until the Neolithic, cereals such as barley and rice constituted only a minor element of diets, most likely because they require so much labor to get anything edible from them — one typically has to gather, winnow, husk and grind them, all very time-consuming tasks.

However, sites in Syria suggest that people nevertheless went to unusual lengths at times just to procure cereal grains — up to 40 to 60 miles (60 to 100 km). One might speculate, Hayden said, that the labor associated with grains could have made them attractive in feasts in which guests would be offered foods that were difficult or expensive to prepare, and beer could have been a key reason to procure the grains used to make them.

"It's not that drinking and brewing by itself helped start cultivation, it's this context of feasts that links beer and the emergence of complex societies," Hayden said.

"In traditional feasts throughout the world, there are three ingredients that are almost universally present," he said. "One is meat. The second is some kind of cereal grain, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, in the form of breads or porridge or the like. The third is alcohol, and because you need surplus grain to put into it, as well as time and effort, it's produced almost only in traditional societies for special occasions to impress guests, make them happy, and alter their attitudes favorably toward hosts."

Via: Live Science