Blame the Liquor, Randy
Ethanol is a clear colourless liquid, with a pleasant smell. By itself, pure ethanol has a boiling point of 78.4°C. In normal distillation, you’ll never get it just by itself, because at 95.6% by volume it forms an Azeotrope with water, and cannot be further purified by boiling it off.
So if your mate tells you he drank some ‘Polish liquor’ that was 100% alcohol, he’s a moron, and was probably talking about spirytus. Because if he really did drink something that was 100% ethanol, it would also have contained a small amount of Benzene. And that would mean his brain now has the consistency of mashed potato.
At the molecular level, Ethanol looks like this:
H H
| |
H-C-C-OH
| |
H H
The hydroxyl (OH) group on the end makes it polar, because Oxygen is incredibly electronegative. What this means is that an electron in the molecule’s electron cloud will spend more of its time hanging around the Oxygen than anywhere else.
This makes ethanol a solvent, and solvents are particularly good for dissolving things. Things like nail polish, grease, or paint. Or your brain cells.
And it’s this brain cells part that is currently causing such a big kerfuffle in the media. The problem is that too many people between the ages of 14 and death are drinking too much, then going out and stabbing each other in the face with beer glasses.
This might sound acceptable if you’re in a Glasgow pub or on a football team, but it’s not how the Government would like us to behave. So Nathan Rees has decided to crackdown on dangerous licensed venues by stopping entry after 2am, serving beer in plastic cups, and providing a ‘drinks limit’.
The ‘drinks limit’ strikes me as interesting, because this is something that it is different for everyone. It’s different if you’re a man or woman, short or tall, skinny or fat, it’s different if you haven’t eaten all day, or had two pides and a felafel for breakfast. This means that any drinks limit might be low enough to stop the BAC of a regular person shooting through the roof, but still high enough to get a midget wasted.
So there will still be violent drunk people, but now they will all be short and skinny. Which is good, if you’re a bouncer, or bad, if you’re Grant Denyer.
It comes as no surprise that the Glasshouse Tavern is on the list of clubs to be affected by the new rules, because this is exactly the type of venue filled with the type of wankers the government wants to eliminate. I can count on one finger the number of times I have been there and not seen a fight erupt. But will it work?
The 2am entry limit will be nothing new because as far as I know, at the Glassy it has always been like that. Nothing will change. Beer in plastic cups is nothing new either. Cooney’s has been doing it for ages. People still engage in fisticuffs on the street.
So as far as I can see, you’re turning one set of problems into another, by treating everyone like small children. Taking away our glass privileges and setting a drink limit won’t work, because small children still like to throw tantrums, shit in the sandbox, and pull each others’ hair.
What, then, is the solution? As engineers, we are taught to look at the ‘real design problem’ and the ‘apparent design problem’. The real design problem is the most obvious problem, in this case, that people are drinking too much and causing trouble. The apparent design problem is the actual problem that needs solving. This one is less obvious, but will ultimately provide a better solution.
The apparent problem here is the culture. Drinking, especially drinking too much, is deeply imbued in the Australian way of life. After all, it’s how strangers become mates, coworkers become friends, and how bogans, wankers and the ugly pick up chicks. It is not something you can change easily, nor are peoples’ attitudes to drinking something you can change instantly.
One night I went out for a drink with some German friends in Cologne. We’d just had our second round of fruity beverages and I was gearing up for numbers 3, 5 and 7 but it seemed I was alone in my enthusiasm. I was a bit taken aback because this would not happen at home. When I pointed this difference out to my friend, she said that it was because people there liked to remain ‘in control’, and that she had noticed a similar attitude in Italy, where losing too much face is a social faux pas.
Unlike Australia, in many of the European countries I visited, alcohol was readily available anywhere and any time. In Germany, you could buy a beer at the station and drink it on the train or walking down the street. Often you would see people doing this. Normal people drinking beer, just like you’d drink a coke. When I tried this back home, I felt guilty, because here the only sorts you see on the street with booze are the homeless, or people with rat’s tails who will want to fight you.
That, then, is the biggest reason these problems exist. It’s the culture here, it’s the attitudes towards boozing that are the problem. Save for prohibition, no amount of ridiculous little laws are going to change things with this generation. People still want to go out and get stupidly drunk because it is fun and because there are few social repercussions. It’s the next generation whose attitudes the government should be trying to change.
What do we do in the meantime? Well, putting a cutoff time on clubs won’t help. It will make people angry, and send them onto the streets, where they will encounter other angry people with whom to engage in warfare.
This exactly the reason why London did the opposite to Sydney, and introduced 24-hour trading licenses. But that didn’t work there either, because their culture is very similar to ours, and people are still idiots.
Throughout eastern europe though, there were literally hundreds of 24-hour watering holes. Warsaw’s Zachodnia train station had three of them, and it was a bomb shelter. Hradec Kralove had one, I was in it until the sun came up. But nobody tried to fight me, and none of my friends were murdered.
As for plastic cups for beer, well that has one positive. Happily, it will stop people losing their eyesight on an inebriated fool’s whim. But there is a better way, and of course, it was developed by the Germans.
It’s so good, they even have their own word for it, “pfand”. This means deposit, because each time you buy a drink you leave a small amount of money for the glass it comes in. Bring the glass back unbroken, and you get your money back. Break it, and you’re down a few bucks. It’s efficient, pays for breakages, there’s less mess for them to clean up, and nobody gets glassed in the face. Why?
Because if it’s going to cost you five bucks, why bother?
Brilliant sir. Just brilliant. I didn’t even know you had a blog