New sport?
So then can we expect to see drunken boxing go from rarely practiced Kung Fu style to full fledged combat sport?
Top boffins in Texas believe they will soon provide solid proof of an astonishingly useful biological fact: that if you drink eight bottles of red wine you can be punched in the head by a professional heavyweight boxer and it will do you no harm at all. We're paraphrasing slightly, of course. The researchers, based at the UT …
I reckon that if I drank 8 bottles of red wine in one go I wouldn't notice if I was hit by an articulated truck, never mind Mike Tyson.
As for the aftereffects, well, both terminal alcohol poisoning and being briefly passed over by 40 tonnes of crap on regroovable tyres have the same effect here.
your insides would probably explode with the 6 litres of liquid imbibed in one go, and you would probably suffer from alcohol poisoning, and be in an alcohol induced coma. Being punched by Mike Tyson won't make much of a difference after that.
But then again, after the 7th bottle, would you even be physically capable of drinking the 8th?
Never estimate the power of a good set of kidneys.
The liquid will not explode you. I have done 22 half a liter bottles of lager (weak one - under 5%) for a bet in high school (to lose it as the bet was set at 24). That is 11 liters in one afternoon (a few hours).
However, the amount of alcohol in 8+ bottles of wine should be lethal even for someone with a liver of steel and good kidneys. That is 750ml of alcohol which is several times the lethal dose and wine does put your kidneys in an overdrive the way beer does.
Absolutely correct regarding the weak lager.
Many years back, a mate and I proved conclusively that it is impossible to get drunk on Hofmeister. Drinking Hofmeister continuously for a 48 hour period we found that once a certain level[1] of mild inebriation is reached, equilibrium is achieved. The alcohol is metabolised as rapidly as it is physically possible to process the liquid content via the kidneys to make room for more crap lager.
We did toy with the idea of a secondary experiment involving drinking the Hofmeister, waiting a while for the alcohol to take effect and then forcing regurgitation to see if this improved matters. Unfortunately for scientific method, the requisite drinking of more Hofmeister put us off this one and we just got hammered on Thunderbird instead.
[1] By sheer coincidence, the level that allows you to sit and chat about nothing of importance for 48hrs while drinking Hofmeister.
All depends on how you're, ehem, "drinking" it...
: /
"Investigators say a woman caused her husband's death by giving him a sherry enema, leading to alcohol poisoning.
The enema caused his blood alcohol level to soar to 0.47 percent -- almost six times the legal intoxication limit in Texas, a toxicology report showed.
..."We're not talking about little bottles here," Turner said, "These were at least 1.5-liter bottles.""
http://www.seattlepi.com/default/article/Woman-accused-of-giving-husband-lethal-sherry-1165596.php
In the local city centre, outside the Weatherspoons pub, the majority of patrons on a Saturday night think they're Mike Tyson anyway with 8 pints of Stella in them.
Don't encourage them with science!
Is this in anyway connected with the theory that drunk drivers suffer less injury after massive accidents because the drink impairs their muscle reflexes, such that on impact their muscles aren't tensed up?
I know two guys, who in college rolled their car up into a little ball, and the got out, walked down the road to a gas station, bought a case of beer to get change for the phone, and then called to report the accident.
If they'd been sober (not withstanding that they wouldn't have crashed the car) they'd have been killed.
Years ago, following a VW Beetle along a country road. Blotoo bloke came crashing out of the undergrowth right into the path of the VW. He ramped the bonnet, his head hitting the windscreen with such force it shattered (the windscreen, not his head) and he sailed clean over the Beetle, ending up literally spinning like a top in the road in front of us. VW driver stopped, mainly because his girlfriend got a piece of glass in her eye, which was worse damage than skunk-like matey who was discharged from hospital the following day with a few stitched in his head.
Pint, for obvious reasons.
misread this boffin's name?
"The boxers will have their brains assessed using MRI scans and other boffinry tools, allowing Gatson and his colleagues to quantify the protective benefit of the grape."
Surely it must be Gaston who is measuring the benefits of the grape, non?
(pint icon as there is no oenological equivalent available)
... on the smouldering radioactive pit of "triumph" that they're now proposing the best thing to do is turn it into a never-go-back-there-for-ten-thousand-years radioactive waste-dump?
ObTopic: It's easy to think that was a triumph if you've drunk eight bottles of wine or been concussed by a weighty blow to the head. Well, you've made your own sarcophagus, you can lie in it...
Am I the only one who thinks this is genuinely great news? I hope the research turns out well. I fear brain damage a good bit more than, say, losing a leg, because I'd rather be suddenly rendered immobile than suddenly rendered stupid(er). For that matter, other people don't need less-functional brains either.
It's nice to think that if the drug works as expected, It will save some number of people from such a fate. Possibly including me.
I;m not going to even try to guess how this stuff works, but it's not hard to imagine it could affect more than the brain, and the mechanisms which reduce the effects of concussion might make other things worse, especially in conjunction with other prescription drugs.
I've been lucky, able to talk to the doctors after my major accidents.
(Incidentally, depending on just what this does, it might be useful for spinal injuries too.)
Based on the proven alcoholic's limit of 2 to 3 bottles of spirit/day, let's take a small bottle of Beefeater vs an export strength bottle of Absolute to determine the approximate "Safe" alcohol blood level for our trained athlete.
2 x 0.75l @ 37.5% = 562.5ml of pure alcohol/day*
3 x 1.00l @ 50% = 1500ml of pure alcohol/day
To err on the side of caution let's assume an alcoholic's day lasts the full 24 hours.
That gives us a conservative intake of 1litre/day or 41.666666667ml/hr
...So, 8 bottles (that's 10 and a half Imperial Pints) of Red:
8 x 0.75ml @ 12.5% (Piss weak Rioja) = 750ml of pure alcohol
8 x 0.75ml @ 14.5% (Aussie Shiraz) = 870ml of pure alcohol
So for any self respecting functioning alcoholic this presents no problem**
*For our American cousins these figures are by volume, not proof which is just double up macho bullshit. Seriously, can anyone explain the logic behind "110% proof"?
**Any self respecting alco-fiend has a repeat script*** for a generic branded proton-pump inhibiter for ulcer prevention. (Especially a financially astute wine taster who prefers a daily 6 litre carton of gut-rot-de-rhone). Re: volume i.e. 6000ml, any medical student will tell you that 10 1/2 pints is an embarrassingly low amount).
***Health Warning: Long term use of PPI may cause hair loss, B Vitamin deficiency and loss of bone density. This may be solved by wearing a corked hat and eating lots of cheese after your daily BBQ
Paris - because she can treat my ulcer any time.