The hanging gardens of Croydon?
Current mood: engorged
Category: engorged Romance and Relationships

The hanging gardens of Croydon? Plan to turn 'concrete hell' into a new Barcelona

· 30-storey greenhouse part of drive to win city status
· River to be brought back to life and parks to ring town

Robert Booth
Tuesday November 13, 2007
Guardian

As one of Britain's bleakest urban jungles, it might seem an unlikely site for a green utopia of hanging gardens, flowing rivers and rolling parks. But Croydon will not be deterred.
Later tonight the much maligned town, once described as a "complete concrete hell" by David Bowie, will announce a multibillion-pound regeneration plan that will, potentially, turn it into a beacon of sustainability, drawing on ideas from other European cities including Barcelona.

The architect Will Alsop, who once tried to reinvent Barnsley as a walled Tuscan hill town, is to mastermind the transformation, which has as its centrepiece "a vertical version of the Eden Project" rising more than 30 storeys in Park Hill Park.

Effectively a giant greenhouse in the form of a skyscraper, it would become Croydon's primary visitor attraction with different species planted in "sky gardens" on each floor.

Alsop has proposed hacking back "a forest of car parks" choking the town centre, shutting eight-lane highways to through traffic and building a pedestrian-friendly "emerald necklace" of parks.

The river Wandle is also to be brought back to the surface 40 years after it was buried in culverts and Alsop hopes to revive fishing for Wandle trout.

His vision - dubbed "Third City" - is part of Croydon's attempt to persuade the government to grant it city status. Since 2000, ministers have overlooked its claim while allowing Preston, Newport, Lisburn, Newry, Inverness, Stirling, Wolverhampton and Brighton and Hove to qualify.

"Everything in our town centre demands that we are considered a city," said a spokesman for the council.

Under the plan, 20,000 new homes will be built to increase the town centre population from fewer than 5,000 residents to 50,000. Glass apartment blocks will be connected by high-level covered walkways crossing the main Wellesley Road, which will be reduced from eight lanes to two. Pod-shaped buildings will rise up on stilts and scores of public squares and miniature parks will be built throughout the town centre, inspired by the regeneration of Barcelona after the 1992 Olympics.

It will correct what Jon Rouse, chief executive of the council, described as Croydon's failed attempt to build a successful town in line with the modernist principles of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier.

"Croydon was a prosperous historic town in the 19th century and the history books show that it was a really pleasant place to come," said Rouse.

"The second world war completely blew it to bits. What grew up in the 1960s was one of the most wholehearted developments of Corbusian modernism. At the time it was seen as very exciting and pointed the way to the future. But it didn't work and it became seen as an alien structure imposed on the historic settlement. Now Will Alsop is trying to bring the historic urban pattern back."

Alsop's plan was drawn up after a series of workshops with local residents, whose ideas included creating a beach and bringing the Wandle back to the surface.

By 2010 Croydon will be hooked up to the London Underground network via the extended East London line.

"This marks a new beginning," said Alsop. "Developers are lining up their money to invest and I have faith that the people of Croydon are behind what we are planning to do. We know London is under housing pressure but rather than building new estates in the Thames Gateway area, we should be looking to build ... in places like Croydon."

The attempt to rebrand Croydon - currently best known as the headquarters of Nestlé UK and the birthplace of Kate Moss has raised eyebrows in rival cities.

"All I know about Croydon is that you go through it on the way to Gatwick and there's lots of 1960s municipal architecture there," said Peter Saville, the creative director at Manchester city council who produced a brand vision of Manchester as "the original modern city".

"When you hear they are rebranding Croydon you can't help but smile in a cynical way. I am very sceptical about the notion of rebranding places.."

Alsop's vision is largely reliant on private investment. It will be started by a £450m urban regeneration vehicle set up by the council, which is planning to develop £89m worth of council property that will be boosted with private investment and loans. Separately, around £3.5bn in private investment has already been earmarked for projects including an arena for 12,500 spectators and a 44-storey residential tower.

Slough, Reading and Basingstoke - Croydon's closest competitors for investment - have already launched city centre building projects and Gateshead, Stockport and Barnsley are also following their larger neighbours with strategies to improve their tired centres.

"This is Croydon's turn," said Rouse.

Crocus valley

· The name Croydon is thought to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon for crocus ("croh") and valley ("denu")

· Croydon is home to 342,700 people - but just 4,400 live in the town centre

· David Bowie used Croydon as an insult, as in: "God, it's so Croydon"

· In the 1960s, it became known as the Manhattan of south London, as skyscrapers, underpasses and flyovers attracted American-style corporate headquarters

· People born in Croydon include Kate Moss, Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Kingsley Amis

· Croydon aerodrome opened in 1920 and was the main airport for international flights from London. It closed in 1959

· Beanos, on Middle Street, claims to be the biggest second-hand record shop in the world

· The town gave birth to its own hairstyle - the Croydon facelift - where hair is scraped back from the face, pulled tight and tied in a pony tail or bun

· The local council is controlled by the Conservatives

www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331242083-103690,00.html

4:40 PM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Craig & George
Current mood: exanimate
Category: Pets and Animals

In "The Life of Raymond Chandler" (1976), author Frank MacShane writes: "Moving to Los Angeles from some older, more settled place, you think it's absurd. But every morning you wake up and you're still there. It's funny, but it's also your life."

NOVELIST CRAIG RICE DEAD IN L.A. MYSTERY
Aug. 29-30, 1957
Los Angeles
The poor thing died as hardboiled as she had lived: Renting a junky room in an old house that had been cut up into apartments. The landlord said she'd been sick for the last week. He was another writer, like her, and I wonder if he took her in because he felt sorry for her.
She got her long line of names from a long line of husbands: Georgiana Ann Randolph Fallows Ferguson Lipton De Mott Bishop. She met the last one, another writer, on her second trip to Camarillo, where her daughter put her to see if they could boil her out.
Everybody knew her as Craig Rice, author of "Having a Wonderful Crime," "Trial by Fury" and "The Lucky Stiff." Sometimes she used another pen name, Daphne Sanders.
The landlord of the house at 457 S. Serrano, R. DeWitt Miller, said she had been sick in bed for about a week and had taken a bad fall earlier in the day. She told him she was having an attack of malaria and asked him to get some quinine from the drugstore. He told her she should call a doctor, but she refused.
Two tenants found her sprawled across the bed and frothing at the mouth. James McNamara, a news editor at a radio station, and Richard Terry, an ad man, said they tried to revive her after calling an ambulance but she was dead when it arrived.
The whole place was strewn with cigarette butts and burned-out kitchen matches, and her purse was in a wicker hamper near the door, spattered with blood, The Times said. A globe of the world had fallen to the floor along with an open book: "A Family Treasury of Children's Stories."
Her pink eyeglasses were lying on a copy of her latest book, "Knocked for a Loop," next to her portable typewriter on a desk cluttered with more junk: A stuffed rabbit, Madonna and Child, and an empty vodka bottle. Beneath her ashtray were two bad checks, one for $60, the other for $410, returned for insufficient funds.
There was a wobbly pile of books on her nightstand and a painting of her mother on the wall, hanging above a fake mantel. "A somber oil portrait of a lovely woman of another era," The Times said.
She showed an early flair for drama, having been born in a carriage at Michigan Avenue and 12th Street in Chicago. She began writing poetry when she was 9 and got her first newspaper job when she was 18. Along the way, she wrote songs, publicity, a gardening column (she won a prize for her petunias), movie scenarios and had three children.
Dr. Frederick Newbarr, the medical examiner, said more tests were needed to determine the cause of death. The Times never reported on the results.
Georgiana Ann Randolph Fallows Ferguson Lipton De Mott Bishop, author of "My Kingdom for a Hearse," was 49.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2007/08/fried-rice.html

Craig Rice ghost-wrote the novel "Crime On My Hands" which starred real-life persona George Sanders (who worked with Rice on the Falcon series). In the novel, actor Sanders solves a murder on a film set.
The "Author's Dedication" of the novel she ghost-wrote for George Sanders is "For Craig Rice, without whom it would not have been possible."

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0723385/bio

George Sanders told David Niven in 1937, that he intended to commit suicide when he got older. In 1972, he fulfilled his promise, leaving this note: "Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001695/bio

1:35 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Guinness good for you - official
Current mood: Engorged
Category: Engorged Dreams and the Supernatural

The old advertising slogan "Guinness is Good for You" may be true after all, according to researchers.
A pint of the black stuff a day may work as well as an aspirin to prevent heart clots that raise the risk of heart attacks.
Drinking lager does not yield the same benefits, experts from University of Wisconsin told a conference in the US.
Guinness were told to stop using the slogan decades ago - and the firm still makes no health claims for the drink.
The Wisconsin team tested the health-giving properties of stout against lager by giving it to dogs who had narrowed arteries similar to those in heart disease.
They found that those given the Guinness had reduced clotting activity in their blood, but not those given lager.
Heart trigger
Clotting is important for patients who are at risk of a heart attack because they have hardened arteries.
A heart attack is triggered when a clot lodges in one of these arteries supplying the heart.
Many patients are prescribed low-dose aspirin as this cuts the ability of the blood to form these dangerous clots.
The researchers told a meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida, that the most benefit they saw was from 24 fluid ounces of Guinness - just over a pint - taken at mealtimes.
They believe that "antioxidant compounds" in the Guinness, similar to those found in certain fruits and vegetables, are responsible for the health benefits because they slow down the deposit of harmful cholesterol on the artery walls.
However, Diageo, the company that now manufactures Guinness, said: "We never make any medical claims for our drinks."
The company now runs advertisements that call for "responsible drinking".
A spokesman for Brewing Research International, which conducts research for the industry, said she would be "wary" of placing the health benefits of any alcohol brand above another.
She said: "We already know that most of the clotting effects are due to the alcohol itself, rather than any other ingredients.
"It is possible that there is an extra effect due to the antioxidants in Guinness - but I would like to see this research repeated."
She said that reviving the old adverts for Guinness might be problematic - at least in the EU.
Draft legislation could outlaw any health claims in adverts for alcohol in Europe, she said.
Feelgood factor
The original campaign in the 1920s stemmed from market research - when people told the company that they felt good after their pint, the slogan was born.
In England, post-operative patients used to be given Guinness, as were blood donors, because of its high iron content.
Pregnant women and nursing mothers were at one stage advised to drink Guinness - the present advice is against this.
The UK is still the largest market in the world for Guinness, although the drink does not feature in the UK's top ten beer brands according to the latest research.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3266819.stm

2:54 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Does Alcohol Slow Dementia?
Current mood: thirsty
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Monday, May. 21, 2007

Does Alcohol Slow Dementia?

By Laura Blue

Anyone who reads a daily paper could be forgiven for wondering how carbs, alcohol, fats — a whole host of things, really — can be reported as healthy one day and unhealthy the next. Of the conflicted bunch, however, alcohol just might be most enduringly confusing: scientific studies proclaim that it protects against heart attack and stroke, while others suggest it promotes violent tendencies or destroys the liver. Why the mixed messages? A new study demonstrates what can go wrong.

The latest in a long line of research on alcohol's benefits — sure to cause a stir — is a paper by geriatrics researchers at the University of Bari in Italy appearing in the May 22 issue of Neurology, revealing that the progression of dementia may be slower in people who drink moderately than in teetotalers. A survey of elderly Italians — 1,445 of whom had no cognitive impairment and 121 who suffered mild cognitive impairment (MCI) — found that, over 3.5 years, those with MCI who drank less than one drink a day progressed to dementia at a rate 85% slower than those who drank nothing. Drinking more did not seem to be better than drinking nothing. Expect big headlines to follow: "Booze boosts the brain"; "A drink a day keeps dementia away."

The problem is, of course, that that's not what the Bari scientists actually wrote in their paper. They said only that a drink a day may keep dementia away. Like so many studies of this kind, where researchers follow a large group without making any interventions of their own, it can be hard to distinguish the effects of alcohol from the effects of other lifestyle factors. As the Neurology article plainly states: "It is... possible that moderate lifestyles in general, which obviously vary according to different cultural environments, protect from cognitive impairment. Thus it may not be the direct effect of alcohol or specific substances in alcoholic drinks that provide the protection."

In other words, common sense and your own personal experience might explain just as much of the association between drinking and delayed mental decay as can be explained by neurology. Seventy-year-olds who have a regular glass of wine, for example, might well be moderate drinkers precisely because they are still physically fit, eat reasonably well, are in good enough health that don't take serious medications that prevent them from drinking, and lead active social lives — all factors that, like moderate drinking, have been linked to staying mentally sharp. Researchers who study the effects of any one of these factors will, of course, try to separate it from the others. But when it comes right down to it, that's not always easy. There are some ethical problems that get in the way of researchers force-feeding patients pre-determined quantities of alcohol. Without that kind of control over study subjects, however, scientists are limited in what they can measure.

To be fair, the scientists and journal publishers are almost never the ones who claim unambiguous relationships between alcohol — or anything else — and good health. But journal articles generally assume readers understand that correlation is not causation, a subtlety that may be lost on the layperson. And subtlety is often what's needed to present these studies fairly. Alcohol could offer some protection against cognitive decline, after all. Moderate alcohol consumption has been linked with reduced risk of vascular disease, and good vascular health could slow the progression of dementia. The study authors note that some experiments show that ethanol encourages the release of a brain chemical that could be responsible for improved memory; that alcohol is associated with high levels of HDL cholesterol, linked to better coronary health; and that anti-oxidants in wine, the main source of the elderly Italians' alcohol intake, might also boost cognitive performance. Or there could be an entirely different mechanism at play.

The simple thing to note is that the researchers behind this study weren't claiming to show any of these things. The paper is still valuable: it is the first to identify a relationship between alcohol consumption and the rate of progression from mild cognitive impairment to dementia, according to the study authors. It also appears consistent with other papers that suggest, over a longer time period, that moderate alcohol consumption might be linked to reduced risk of dementia. That's all a bit complicated for a headline. But on reports like this one, it's usually worth reading the fine print.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1623739,00.html

11:48 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

More bike lanes? No thanks
Current mood: pissed off
Category: Automotive

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-campbell19may19,0,6391618.story?coll=la-home-commentary

From the Los Angeles Times

More bike lanes? No thanks

L.A. should treat cyclists as motorists' equals, not as pesky afterthoughts.
By Will Campbell

WILL CAMPBELL is more than 900 miles toward his goal of bicycling 2,007 miles around Los Angeles this year. He writes at Wildbell.com and Blogging.la.

May 19, 2007

TO EXPERIENCE the full dysfunction of Los Angeles cycling, there's no better place than the Los Angeles River Bikeway.

Its northernmost four miles, from Griffith Park to Atwater Village, are a pedaling paradise: smooth pavement, lighting, a dedicated bridge over Los Feliz Boulevard. But cross Fletcher Avenue and the riding gets rough. The aged asphalt is in various stages of disrepair, and cyclists are forced to negotiate a number of rough drainage ditches. At the bike path's southern end, riders are unceremoniously dumped back onto Riverside Drive in the shadows of the Golden State and Pasadena freeways miles from downtown, Dodger Stadium or any other destination.

The Fletcher Divide, which has aged disgracefully over five years during three mayoral administrations, illustrates how glacially Los Angeles is integrating cycling into its transportation grid. L.A., which averages 329 sunny, bike-friendly days a year, should be one of the most forward-thinking cities on the subject. Instead, greater Los Angeles remains a vast patchwork of bikeways, bike lanes and bike routes that haven't coalesced — as anyone who took part in Bike to Work Day this week surely noticed.

That's not to say nothing is happening. The city has an 11-year-old Bicycle Plan, and city and county officials cite the proliferation of on-street bike lanes as an example of the great strides being made. Yet the numbers leave a lot to be desired. Of Los Angeles County's 6,400 miles of surface streets, only 481 miles have bike lanes (320 inside the city limits — five fewer miles than much smaller Tucson). In milk carton terms, if L.A.'s total street mileage equaled half a gallon, bike lanes would constitute a sip of about 4 ounces.

Whether one sees that glass as half full or half empty, I personally wish the city would just stop filling it. Quit while it's behind and not stripe another inch of bike lane. And yes, this is coming from an avid recreational and commuter cyclist who has pedaled thousands of miles over 20 years.

Here's why: By law, my bicycle is considered a vehicle with the same right to the road as your car or truck. Bike lanes provide an arguable buffer zone of safety (as well as a great place for people to put their garbage containers on trash day), but they marginalize cyclists and reinforce their status as second-class commuters who shouldn't be on the road.

Some bike lanes even put cyclists at greater risk, such as the newest lanes along Santa Monica Boulevard between Century City and the San Diego Freeway. Cars have to make quick cuts across the bike lane to get to side streets, shopping centers and parking spaces. The eastbound bike lane literally vanishes midblock, as if the Department of Transportation ran out of paint before reaching Avenue of the Stars.

L.A. Department of Transportation officials quote chapter and verse how the city's newest bike lanes safely conform to state regulations — and not counting the disappearing act I mentioned, I'm sure that's true. But it's not enough.

What will be enough? I'll never be satisfied until Silverados and Schwinns can peacefully coexist on all surface streets. But an update of the city Bicycle Plan — something the plan stipulated should have been done last year — is a good place to start. Our city and county transportation agencies should be trying out fresher bike-transit concepts, such as shared-use arrows, known as sharrows, and bicycle-priority streets, also called bike boulevards.

Already successful in San Francisco, sharrows have a bike icon topped by two chevrons painted directly on the road. Instead of creating separation, they promote awareness that the right lane is to be shared by motorists and cyclists — and they're easier and less costly to implement than bike lanes.

A network of seven bike boulevards has been used to great effect in Berkeley. All types of vehicles are allowed, but these designated roadways have been enhanced with traffic signals, signage and traffic control for bike safety and convenience. Here in Los Angeles, 4th Street is practically bike-boulevard ready from Vermont Boulevard to La Brea Avenue. Another could be Fountain Avenue between Silver Lake and West Hollywood.

A citywide grid of sharrows that complement and connect bike boulevards and off-street bikeways would go a long way toward fostering a civic culture that embraces cycling rather than treating bikes as a transportation afterthought.

12:28 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Putting 9/11 into perspective
Current mood: listless
Category: listless Life

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-bell28jan28,0,1900868.story?coll=la-home-commentary

Putting 9/11 into perspective
The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting.
By David A. Bell

January 28, 2007
IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

It also raises several questions. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies' objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the "Islamo-fascist" enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler's implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

Even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties of the war against terrorism, which brings us to about 6,500, we should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every two months in automobile accidents.

Of course, the 9/11 attacks also conjured up the possibility of far deadlier attacks to come. But then, we were hardly ignorant of these threats before, as a glance at just about any thriller from the 1990s will testify. And despite the even more nightmarish fantasies of the post-9/11 era (e.g. the TV show "24's" nuclear attack on Los Angeles), Islamist terrorists have not come close to deploying weapons other than knives, guns and conventional explosives. A war it may be, but does it really deserve comparison to World War II and its 50 million dead? Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat.

So why has there been such an overreaction? Unfortunately, the commentators who detect one have generally explained it in a tired, predictably ideological way: calling the United States a uniquely paranoid aggressor that always overreacts to provocation.

In a recent book, for instance, political scientist John Mueller evaluated the threat that terrorists pose to the United States and convincingly concluded that it has been, to quote his title, "Overblown." But he undercut his own argument by adding that the United States has overreacted to every threat in its recent history, including even Pearl Harbor (rather than trying to defeat Japan, he argued, we should have tried containment!).

Seeing international conflict in apocalyptic terms — viewing every threat as existential — is hardly a uniquely American habit. To a certain degree, it is a universal human one. But it is also, more specifically, a Western one, which paradoxically has its origins in one of the most optimistic periods of human history: the 18th century Enlightenment.

Until this period, most people in the West took warfare for granted as an utterly unavoidable part of the social order. Western states fought constantly and devoted most of their disposable resources to this purpose; during the 1700s, no more than six or seven years passed without at least one major European power at war.

The Enlightenment, however, popularized the notion that war was a barbaric relic of mankind's infancy, an anachronism that should soon vanish from the Earth. Human societies, wrote the influential thinkers of the time, followed a common path of historical evolution from savage beginnings toward ever-greater levels of peaceful civilization, politeness and commercial exchange.

The unexpected consequence of this change was that those who considered themselves "enlightened," but who still thought they needed to go to war, found it hard to justify war as anything other than an apocalyptic struggle for survival against an irredeemably evil enemy. In such struggles, of course, there could be no reason to practice restraint or to treat the enemy as an honorable opponent.

Ever since, the enlightened dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of modern total war have been bound closely to each other in the West. Precisely when the Enlightenment hopes glowed most brightly, wars often took on an especially hideous character.

The Enlightenment was followed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which touched every European state, sparked vicious guerrilla conflicts across the Continent and killed millions (including, probably, a higher proportion of young Frenchmen than died from 1914 to 1918).

During the hopeful early years of the 20th century, journalist Norman Angell's huge bestseller, "The Great Illusion," argued that wars had become too expensive to fight. Then came the unspeakable horrors of World War I. And the end of the Cold War, which seemed to promise the worldwide triumph of peace and democracy in a more stable unipolar world, has been followed by the wars in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf War and the present global upheaval. In each of these conflicts, the United States has justified the use of force by labeling its foe a new Hitler, not only in evil intentions but in potential capacity.

Yet as the comparison with the Soviet experience should remind us, the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars. It is a messy, difficult, long-term struggle against exceptionally dangerous criminals who actually like nothing better than being put on the same level of historical importance as Hitler — can you imagine a better recruiting tool? To fight them effectively, we need coolness, resolve and stamina. But we also need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.

David A. Bell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a contributing editor for the New Republic, is the author of "The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It."

12:10 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

10 myths -- and 10 truths -- about atheism
Current mood: optimistic
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-harris24dec24,0,2719494.story?track=mostviewed-homepage

10 myths -- and 10 truths -- about atheism
By Sam Harris

SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" and "Letter to a Christian Nation."

December 24, 2006

SEVERAL POLLS indicate that the term "atheism" has acquired such an extraordinary stigma in the United States that being an atheist is now a perfect impediment to a career in politics (in a way that being black, Muslim or homosexual is not). According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.

Atheists are often imagined to be intolerant, immoral, depressed, blind to the beauty of nature and dogmatically closed to evidence of the supernatural.

Even John Locke, one of the great patriarchs of the Enlightenment, believed that atheism was "not at all to be tolerated" because, he said, "promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist."

That was more than 300 years ago. But in the United States today, little seems to have changed. A remarkable 87% of the population claims "never to doubt" the existence of God; fewer than 10% identify themselves as atheists — and their reputation appears to be deteriorating.

Given that we know that atheists are often among the most intelligent and scientifically literate people in any society, it seems important to deflate the myths that prevent them from playing a larger role in our national discourse.

1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless.

On the contrary, religious people often worry that life is meaningless and imagine that it can only be redeemed by the promise of eternal happiness beyond the grave. Atheists tend to be quite sure that life is precious. Life is imbued with meaning by being really and fully lived. Our relationships with those we love are meaningful now; they need not last forever to be made so. Atheists tend to find this fear of meaninglessness … well … meaningless.

2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history.

People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.

3) Atheism is dogmatic.

Jews, Christians and Muslims claim that their scriptures are so prescient of humanity's needs that they could only have been written under the direction of an omniscient deity. An atheist is simply a person who has considered this claim, read the books and found the claim to be ridiculous. One doesn't have to take anything on faith, or be otherwise dogmatic, to reject unjustified religious beliefs. As the historian Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71) once said: "I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

4) Atheists think everything in the universe arose by chance.

No one knows why the universe came into being. In fact, it is not entirely clear that we can coherently speak about the "beginning" or "creation" of the universe at all, as these ideas invoke the concept of time, and here we are talking about the origin of space-time itself.

The notion that atheists believe that everything was created by chance is also regularly thrown up as a criticism of Darwinian evolution. As Richard Dawkins explains in his marvelous book, "The God Delusion," this represents an utter misunderstanding of evolutionary theory. Although we don't know precisely how the Earth's early chemistry begat biology, we know that the diversity and complexity we see in the living world is not a product of mere chance. Evolution is a combination of chance mutation and natural selection. Darwin arrived at the phrase "natural selection" by analogy to the "artificial selection" performed by breeders of livestock. In both cases, selection exerts a highly non-random effect on the development of any species.

5) Atheism has no connection to science.

Although it is possible to be a scientist and still believe in God — as some scientists seem to manage it — there is no question that an engagement with scientific thinking tends to erode, rather than support, religious faith. Taking the U.S. population as an example: Most polls show that about 90% of the general public believes in a personal God; yet 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences do not. This suggests that there are few modes of thinking less congenial to religious faith than science is.

6) Atheists are arrogant.

When scientists don't know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

7) Atheists are closed to spiritual experience.

There is nothing that prevents an atheist from experiencing love, ecstasy, rapture and awe; atheists can value these experiences and seek them regularly. What atheists don't tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences. There is no question that some Christians have transformed their lives for the better by reading the Bible and praying to Jesus. What does this prove? It proves that certain disciplines of attention and codes of conduct can have a profound effect upon the human mind. Do the positive experiences of Christians suggest that Jesus is the sole savior of humanity? Not even remotely — because Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and even atheists regularly have similar experiences.

There is, in fact, not a Christian on this Earth who can be certain that Jesus even wore a beard, much less that he was born of a virgin or rose from the dead. These are just not the sort of claims that spiritual experience can authenticate.

8) Atheists believe that there is nothing beyond human life and human understanding.

Atheists are free to admit the limits of human understanding in a way that religious people are not. It is obvious that we do not fully understand the universe; but it is even more obvious that neither the Bible nor the Koran reflects our best understanding of it. We do not know whether there is complex life elsewhere in the cosmos, but there might be. If there is, such beings could have developed an understanding of nature's laws that vastly exceeds our own. Atheists can freely entertain such possibilities. They also can admit that if brilliant extraterrestrials exist, the contents of the Bible and the Koran will be even less impressive to them than they are to human atheists.

From the atheist point of view, the world's religions utterly trivialize the real beauty and immensity of the universe. One doesn't have to accept anything on insufficient evidence to make such an observation.

9) Atheists ignore the fact that religion is extremely beneficial to society.

Those who emphasize the good effects of religion never seem to realize that such effects fail to demonstrate the truth of any religious doctrine. This is why we have terms such as "wishful thinking" and "self-deception." There is a profound distinction between a consoling delusion and the truth.

In any case, the good effects of religion can surely be disputed. In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

10) Atheism provides no basis for morality.

If a person doesn't already understand that cruelty is wrong, he won't discover this by reading the Bible or the Koran — as these books are bursting with celebrations of cruelty, both human and divine. We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.

We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn't make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery — and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in scripture — like the golden rule — can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe.

4:10 PM - 2 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Flirting with the Forbidden
Current mood: full
Category: Food and Restaurants

Renegade epicures across the country are flouting the P.C. police—and sometimes the law—by embracing controversial pleasures, from foie gras to absinthe to raw-milk cheese. Gastronomic standard-bearers, or amoral gluttons? The debate is served.

January 2007

By Peter Jon Lindberg
travelandleisure.com

It felt like an extremely weird Masonic ceremony," the guest recalls. "We all wore black cloths over our heads. This is partly to capture the aroma of the dish as it wafts up into the hood. But the original reason was so that God wouldn't see you devouring this helpless little bird."
The ortolan, a rare, sparrow-size songbird, is one of the world's most celebrated delicacies. Among French gourmands, eating ortolan is a centuries-old rite of passage; its subtle flavor is said to embody "the soul of France." Tradition calls for the captured bird to be fattened on a diet of figs and oats before being drowned alive in Armagnac. It is then roasted and consumed whole in a single, delirious mouthful. Since the 1970's, however, the ortolan has been highly endangered; in France, hunting the bird is punishable by a $10,000 fine. Allegedly, this did not stop a dying François Mitterrand, in 1996, from eating ortolan for his last meal—thereby burnishing his legend as either a fearless gourmand or a cynical, heartless bird murderer.
If you chose "bird murderer," you might want to stop reading now. Last year, a chef in New York hosted a top-secret dinner party for 20 of America's most famous chefs and served ortolan as the main event. Food writer Jonathan Reynolds was among the guests.
"It was a game dinner—woodcock and the like—but we were all there for the ortolan. They'd been smuggled over from France in empty coffee cans," Rey-nolds says. The ancient ortolan ritual was followed to the letter, down to those mysterious black shrouds. "The bird arrives in a cocotte, and you put the entire thing in your mouth and chew— bones and organs and all," Reynolds continues. "And it's absolutely delicious—a sweet, subtle, evanescent flavor. The room goes silent for ten minutes, except for these gentle crunching sounds. You try to keep it in your mouth as long as possible, and then suddenly it's gone, and you think, Oh, I want much more of that. But, of course, you can't have it."
The fact that the chef was able to obtain a couple of dozen extremely rare and protected songbirds from France and smuggle them past U.S. Customs in coffee cans is perhaps less remarkable than his ease in finding two dozen intrepid souls willing—no, ecstatically clamoring—to dine on them. "It was one of the great moments of my life," Reynolds says. "It certainly didn't feel wrong."
The allure of the forbidden is age-old, of course, but it has intensified of late—partly out of necessity. In an era marked by fear, loathing, and countless taboos, how is one to eat with a clear conscience? At every link in the food chain, a dizzying number of things are being declared "wrong" by somebody.
In April 2006, Chicago's city council voted, 49 to 1, to outlaw the sale of foie gras; New Jersey (home of D'Artagnan, a leading foie gras distributor) is considering a statewide ban. And by 2012, the production and sale of foie gras will be illegal throughout California.
In March 2005, in a "proactive" move—i.e., there'd been no reports of anyone getting sick—Los Angeles County health officials abruptly clamped down on the sale of wild mushrooms. Apparently, they were surprised to learn that the mushrooms were actually wild and that foragers were mostly unpoliced. Stricter controls are being devised as we speak.
Last June, Whole Foods stopped selling live lobsters at its stores across America, citing concern for the lobsters' "health and well-being" as they journey through the supply chain to supermarket tanks. The company is searching for new distribution methods that guarantee lobsters "quality of life" and is also reviewing the living conditions of -mussels and oysters.
Sigh. What's a Sancerre-sipping, goose-and-crustacean–torturing gastronome to do? It's hard enough not being allowed to get Brie de Meaux from France, or mouthwatering jamon ibérico from Spain, or luscious mangosteens from Thailand. Now there's even a UN-mandated trade freeze on wild beluga caviar.
And it isn't just about fancy foods. Do you know how hard it is to find a proper, rare-cooked hamburger in this country? (Many local health codes require ground beef to be cooked to above 160 degrees.) Ever count how many towns across America still prohibit the sale of beer? And did you know that in 28 states, a farmer can be fined for selling his neighbors fresh, unpasteurized milk?
We Americans have always wrapped a great deal of guilt and worry into what we eat. Perhaps this derives from an inherited Puritan worldview that condemns gluttony as sin; maybe it's because we're all so damn fat. Whatever the cause, our collective anxieties have led us to an increasingly defensive posture vis-à-vis food and drink. Every week, it seems, another menu item—from foie gras to Chilean sea bass, trans fats to organic spinach—is ostracized as unhealthy, environmentally destructive, morally shameful, or downright lethal. Some concerns are legitimate, some exaggerated, some just paranoiac hokum. So which to believe, and which to ignore?
Amid the confusion and contention, a small but determined underground has emerged. It's hardly an organized movement—at least, not yet. But a growing number of dauntless food- lovers are ignoring the more draconian restrictions, defying U.S. Customs and the FDA, and seeking out a taste of the forbidden.
You might be one of them. Remember the Spanish chorizo you "forgot to declare"? The South African biltong jerky you smuggled home in your knapsack? It seemed so harmless and surprisingly easy: around the globe, there's a whole cottage industry set up to help you breach American health codes. Buy a round of genuine raw-milk Camembert at the Paris cheese shop Alléosse and tell them you're headed aux États-Unis; the fromager will triple–vacuum-seal it and send you off with a wink and a smile. Traditional, wormwood-based absinthe—the favorite drink of Paul Verlaine and Oscar Wilde—has been banned stateside since 1912, due to (widely refuted) reports that it causes convulsions. But log on to U.K.-based site eAbsinthe.com, peruse an array of gorgeous, green-glowing bottles, and within days you can have absinthe delivered, miraculously, to your door. The company will even refund your money if the bottle is intercepted.
Perhaps I associate with a dissolute crowd, but I know hardly anyone who hasn't sneaked some culinary contraband across the border. A bartender friend returned from China with a Dopp kit full of Sichuan peppercorns, the spicy red berries that are an essential ingredient in Sichuan cuisine and, more relevant to his purposes, in dark-and-stormy cocktails. Because of infestation risks, they're banned for import unless they've been heat-processed—but, of course, the untreated ones taste better.
Me, I smuggle home mangosteens. These cue ball–sized fruits, native to Southeast Asia, have a hard purple shell and a snowy-white, segmented interior—imagine a lychee crossed with a clementine. The taste is sweet, tart, and drop-dead delicious. But since the mangosteen is a potential fruit-fly carrier, it hangs tantalizingly out of reach for Americans: a true forbidden fruit. Would I crave it so intensely if it weren't one? Probably, but the pining sure is part of it.
Thanfully, there are a handful of iconoclastic chefs, farmers, entrepreneurs and sybarites working to expose misguided food laws in America. They see our eating habits being increasingly dictated by craven fusspots, killjoys, and moral alarmists, and they're determined to stop the madness. This isn't just a contrarian impulse, a case of eating-to-be-bad. No. The lure of "forbidden foods" is not necessarily in opposition to health, purity, or rectitude. Indeed, with some foods, an illicit version can be healthier than the FDA-approved one.
Consider Spain's legendary ibérico ham, long blocked for export to the United States (the USDA had no system in place for approving Spanish slaughterhouses). It was our loss: with its intense, nutty flavor, jamon ibérico is shockingly good. Roaming freely in the cork forests of southern Spain, Iberian pigs eat a natural diet of mushrooms, roots, and acorns that's high in beneficial vegetable fat, which makes for a healthier animal—and, ironically, a much healthier product—than most ham sold stateside. But take heart: one Spanish company has finally won approval to produce ibérico for the U.S. market. The first shipments of lomo, salchichón, and chorizo, sold under the "Fermin USA" label, began showing up here last summer. (Whole legs of ibérico de bellota, the most coveted variety, are expected by summer 2008. The price per leg? $2,000.)
"We need to get back to some simpli-city and common sense," Steven -Jenkins, one of America's leading cheese experts, insists. "Unfortunately, it's 2006, every-thing's regulated, everyone's under scrutiny—it doesn't bode well. All these bureaucrats are going to ruin all the food in favor of nobody ever getting sick."
Jenkins is a champion of traditional farmstead cheeses—"serious cheeses, made by people rather than machines," and, just as important, made from unpasteurized milk. This poses a problem. Since 1950, the FDA has required all raw-milk cheeses, imported and domestic, to be aged at least 60 days, by which point the lifespan of all pathogens will have theoretically run its course. Otherwise (in the case of younger cheeses, like Camembert or Epoisses), the milk must be pasteurized.
To Jenkins, this is anathema to good cheese making. "Pasteurization kills most of the flavor molecules," he says. "Besides, many health incidents blamed on raw-milk cheeses were subsequently found to be the fault of pasteurized cheese from a factory."
It was through Jenkins that I learned of a dairy farmer who's cleverly showing up the law: Mary Falk, owner of Love Tree Farm in Grantsburg, -Wisconsin. Falk is crafting a soft, chalky specimen from the raw milk of a Jersey cow and aging it for just six weeks, 18 days fewer than the legal requirement. Ergo, this cheese—about which Jenkins raves, "I've never tasted anything so good in my whole life"—is illegal to sell for human consumption. Which is why Falk sells it under the label Fishbait.
As long as customers are warned that this beautiful wheel of creamy goodness is for catching trout, not eating (nudge-nudge, wink-wink), Fishbait is legal. But is it safe? Consider that the FDA allows store-bought milk to have a maximum bacteria "plate count" of 20,000. Love Tree Farm's milk averages fewer than 5,000—and it retains all its natural vitamin content. Yet raw milk is illegal in almost half of the country.
As always, loopholes exist. There's now a growing trend toward "cow-share" collectives, set up by dairy farms, that, in exchange for a modest buy-in, provide members with raw milk and yogurt. Like Fishbait cheese, this is quasi-legal: most state laws prohibit only the sale of unpasteurized milk. But the cow's owners—in this case, all 417 of them—are perfectly entitled to consume it.
Certain restrictions are essential, obviously. One can't argue with the UN's caviar-trade embargo: Caspian and Black Sea sturgeon are being drastically overfished, and the survival of the species is at stake (though there is some irony in keeping the beluga alive so we can kill it later without remorse).
The wave of pending legislation against trans fats (hydrogenated fats that elevate bad cholesterol) is equally well-intended—and, for lawmakers, surprisingly audacious, considering the average voter's affection for doughnuts. Last September, New York became the first city in the nation to set forth a virtual ban: soon every restaurant item will be held to no more than a half-gram of trans fat per serving.
This could only be a good thing, right? "Banning trans fats isn't an inherently bad idea," Jenkins says. "But once you open that window, you open too many others—and if they take that away, next they're gonna come for our ice cream and potato chips." The problem with legislating eating habits isn't just that the rules are often arbitrary. It's that there's no obvious place to stop. Food is intrinsically dangerous—for God's sake, you put it in your mouth. This is the risk one assumes with the blessing and burden of having an appetite. It's why we have warning labels on shrink-wrapped sirloin, oyster menus, and Caesar salads. And unless you're a sprout-munching vegan, eating is cruel by definition. Let's be honest here: we're killing things to consume them, and anyone who's visited a farm—even a sweet, happy little farm—can confirm that it's often not pretty.
So where's the sensible end point? I won't defend foie gras by denying its production is unsavory; I suppose it is. But for every lavaged goose whose photo appears on an anti–foie gras Web site, another 10,000 faceless battery chickens and factory cows are raised in similarly unsettling conditions. Who's picketing all the supermarkets and restaurants that are enabling that? (This forces questions of tolerance: if foie gras is inhumane, what do we say about halal and kosher butchery, which some believe are unacceptably cruel?) And while it's all well and good to consider the lobster, it seems duplicitous to talk about its happiness en route from ocean to market, when the ultimate intention is for it to be taken home and boiled to death.
There's no question we could use a little more temperance in this country. But does it have to be imposed from above? The fact is, if we outlawed every food that's potentially lethal (spinach, pufferfish, rhubarb), or whose origins somebody somewhere might find disturbing, we'd have nothing left on the table-—at least nothing worth eating.

If loving foie gras is wrong, Peter Jon Lindberg doesn't want to be right.

www.travelandleisure.com/articles/flirting-with-the-forbidden

11:38 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Trying to Clear Absinthe’s Reputation
Current mood: numb
Category: Religion and Philosophy

January 3, 2007
The Curious Cook
Trying to Clear Absinthe's Reputation
By HAROLD McGEE

READERS of Ernest Hemingway know "Death in the Afternoon" as a book about bullfighting. But to drinkers with a taste for obscure booze, it is also a cocktail that Hemingway contributed to a 1935 collection of celebrity recipes. His directions: "Pour one jigger absinthe into a Champagne glass. Add iced Champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly."

When I heard about this concoction last week and wondered how Champagne bubbles would fare in the milkiness, I couldn't just go to my local liquor store and buy absinthe. I had to substitute one of the anise-flavored alcohols that took absinthe's place when it was banned in France and in the United States about a century ago.

Today absinthe is legal again throughout Europe, and while it is still banned in this country, it is easy to buy over the Internet. Its reputation, however, remains as cloudy as the cocktails that are made with it. Some welcome clarification has now arrived in the form of a new study by a team of German chemists and physicians.

Absinthe is a distilled spirit flavored with a variety of herbs and spices, primarily wormwood, an aromatic, bitter shrub. The key constituent of wormwood is a chemical called thujone, which gives it — and absinthe — a penetrating evergreen aroma. (Thujone is also a major component of the herb sage.) Thujone and the other aromatic compounds are what cause absinthe to become milky when it's diluted. The aromatics are more soluble in alcohol than in water, so when the concentrated spirit is cut with wine or water, they cluster together in tiny droplets that reflect light from their surfaces. Instantly, what was a clear liquid clouds over.

Absinthe became tremendously popular throughout Europe in the 19th century. It was blamed for causing hallucinations, mental instability and criminal behavior, which medical authorities attributed to thujone. This belief helped get absinthe banned. But according to the new study, by Dirk W. Lachenmeier and colleagues, the modern medical consensus is that absinthism was either simple alcohol poisoning — some absinthes were 70 percent alcohol, nearly double the strength of most distilled drinks — or caused by methanol and other toxic adulterants found in some cheap absinthes.

Thujone is true to its reputation in one respect: it does turn out to have unusual pharmacological properties. It interacts with several neurotransmitter systems in the brain, including one that is also activated by the cannabinoids in marijuana. But while absinthe will get you drunk, it won't make you stoned. In one experiment, a dose of thujone equivalent to a pint of absinthe lowered the subjects' performance on attention tests and made them more anxious. Very large doses are toxic, but moderate consumption appears to be safe.

But buyer beware: Europe currently has no regulations on how absinthe is made or what it can be made from. The German chemists think some rules are a good idea: some Czech brands they sampled were tinted turquoise, were flavored with mint instead of wormwood, tasted sweet instead of bitter and were so dilute that they didn't grow cloudy when mixed with water.

Which brings me back to my Death in the Afternoon cocktail. When I poured the Champagne into my absinthe substitute, Pernod, a good milkiness developed, but after the initial whoosh there were only a couple of lonely bubble clusters on the surface, slowly and invisibly replenished from the murky depths. I felt only a slight prickle on the tongue. It seemed a waste of effervescence, especially after what I've been learning from the world expert on the subject.

Gérard Liger-Belair is a physicist at the University of Reims, where he trains a high-speed digital camera through a microscope onto glasses of wine from local cellars. His 2004 book, "Uncorked: The Science of Champagne," revealed that most Champagne bubbles arise from something you might be tempted to scour from your flutes: dust.

Kitchen towels and the ambient air deposit tiny hollow cellulose fibers from cotton, paper and other plant products on the surface of a clean glass. The air pockets in those hollow fibers allow dissolved carbon dioxide molecules in the wine to collect and pop off in a bubble, which leaves a remnant behind to start the process all over again. As they rise in the glass, the bubbles gather more carbon dioxide, so they expand and accelerate. When they burst at the surface, they shoot tiny jets of liquid as much as an inch into the air, tickling the nose and delivering aroma.

In more recent work Professor Liger-Belair has shown just how lucky we are in the quality of our plant dust. It turns out that the cellulose fiber hollows are of just the right size — about a tenth the diameter of a human hair — to produce small, regularly spaced bubbles that keep coming for a long time. If they were much narrower, then the bubbles would be released faster and closer together, and the gas would be exhausted from the glass much sooner. If the fiber interior were as wide as a hair, then the bubbles would be more coarse, and we wouldn't get as many of them.

Because the fibers and the gas pockets are scattered across the glass surface, each bubble train rises in undisturbed isolation. The result is a clockwork release of bubbles, evenly spaced and pleasing to the eye.

Champagne flutes are sometimes scratched or engraved to encourage more predictable bubbling, but the research shows that this produces a microscopic trench in which gas pockets grow into one another and coalesce, so the bubble size and release are irregular and chaotic. Help may be on the way, though. "We are working hard with glassmakers to produce artificial nucleation sites with the same properties as cellulose fibers," Professor Liger-Belair wrote in an e-mail message. "This is a nice little challenge for nanotechnology!"

Another challenge: With all Professor Liger-Belair has discovered about the birth and life of Champagne bubbles, is there a way to make "Death in the Afternoon" a bit more lively?

5:29 PM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Have we become a nation of accidental drunks?
Current mood: drunk
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Campaigners say that super-size wine glasses help create 'unwitting alcoholics'. Can it be true? Patrick Barkham spends a lunch hour knocking a few back

Patrick Barkham
Tuesday June 6, 2006
Guardian

Blah, blur, ahh. Ahem. Sorry about that. Mouth a bit dry. Hands typing this are weirdly disconnected from the brain. But, when not putting CAPS LOCK on by accident, I want to tell you what happens when you order four glasses of wine over lunchtime. In the traditional scheme of things this would be a modest four units. Four small glasses of, say, a light German Riesling, comfortably meets the amount a man can drink in one day on his way to the government's recommended limit of 28 units a week. But now the world of wine has gone extra large. These days four glasses of wine at lunch can equal quatre monster tumblers bearing in excess of 250ml each. Add that to today's increased alchohol levels - 14% wine is no longer seen as strong - and, four glasses later, you could have downed a colossal 14 units. That's the weekly recommended maximum for a woman, according to the British Heart Foundation, and all in one lunch hour.

Director of addiction services to the stars, Nick Gully of the Priory Clinic in Roehampton, has this week issued the latest in a series of warnings about the growing size of wine glasses. The extra-large glasses we are now routinely handed in pubs, bars and restaurants is creating a nation of "unwitting" alcoholics, according to Gully. The ordinary drinker, he says, has learned to feel cheated if she or he goes into a pub and is served up the once standard 125ml thimble of chardonnay. Punters have developed a physical and psychological (try spelling that after four extra-large glasses of sauvignon blanc) dependency on extra-large helpings of booze - and have learned that drowning themselves in wine is entirely acceptable.

This is Super-Size Me for the chardonnay-quaffing classes. But is he right? Are we really becoming a nation of accidental drunks? Or are we savvy enough to work out for ourselves how much we're drinking, even if the glasses are getting bigger? As the saying goes, it's a tough job but ...

I begin in the Apple Tree in north London at 15 minutes past wine'o'clock on a Monday afternoon, with an empty stomach and no particular thirst for the devil. Could I have a glass of white wine please? "Chardonnay or sauvignon blanc?" says the barman. "... large?" The way he says it leaves little choice. The common-sense choice is clearly large. And for a while, it is. Chilled sauvignon blanc at 11.5% slips down rather more easily than I expected at a loss to my wallet of £4.40.

"I always ask large or small but we serve more people with large glasses," says the barman. "It looks nicer, swilling around in a large goblet-type thing." He argues that drinkers actually relax and take it easier holding a veritable vat of wine. "People drink more when they have a small glass. You don't swig a large glass like a pint."

Four swigs later, I'm leaving the Apple Tree. Over at the Red Lion, punter Chris Williams is a firm believer in the healing power of an oversized vessel of plonk: "I drink wine when I'm detoxing, because it's got fruit in it." Williams, a barber who swears by the steadying hand of a lunchtime draught, says he has proper wine glasses at home: they hold half a bottle each. "I drink large glasses of wine because it saves me asking at the bar for a drink so often. In this pub they are known as goldfish bowls." Halfway into my second glass, there is a noticeable two-second beat between my brain instructing my hand to raise the goldfish bowl and it appearing in my hand. Pork scratchings. Yum.

I am unfit to drive anywhere but, in my hazy theory, I have had just over one unit of alcohol. "People are aware that glasses are bigger and wine is more alcoholic but no one seems to be aware that the idea that a glass of wine equates to a single unit is completely out-of-date," says Victoria Moore, a wine critic for this paper. One unit, she points out, would be a 125ml glass of 8% dry German Riesling, which no one drinks any more. Most new world wines clock 14%. A large bar measure is three-and-a-half units in one glass.

"The whole heinous thing about it is wine is really revolting served in a big glass," says Moore. "It gets warm so fast, it's disgusting. By the time you get halfway down, your glass is all smeary."

Moore is firmly in favour of less. "People always look at me a bit funny when I give them a puddle of wine in the bottom of the glass. In restaurants you think it is good service when they refill your glass from the bottle, but they will fill your wine to the brim and it gets through the bottle really fast. I'm always shouting at waiters in restaurants, saying I only want my glass filled halfway."

Shouting at waiters. Hmmm. One in five young men has ended up in a police cell after drinking to excess, according to a recent study funded by the drinks industry. The Drinkaware Trust found that a third of young men said they felt "aggressive" after downing large quantities of alcohol, a figure that rose to almost half in London. This statistic comes to mind after my third large glass in the Bleeding Heart, a glassy, er, classy, French bistro-style bar.

According to Moore, continental drinkers are not seduced by 250ml culture. "If you go to France or Italy or Spain they either serve those delightful little beakers or they will never pour your glass more than half-full - it's considered vulgar." The view from Britain is somewhat different: "When we went to Paris and ordered a glass of wine it was like a thimble," says Jason Elder, a punter. "I don't think people are complaining about the measures here."

The Bleeding Heart is about as continental as it gets in our capital. "I like to think that wine by the glass comes in small, medium and serieux," says one businessman. "It's up to the individual to decide whether they want a large glass or not," says Tom Jansz. "There's all this thing at the moment about McDonald's but it is people's responsibility to look after their health. You don't have to buy them. I don't like the small glasses of wine but it's more of an aesthetic thing than anything." But aesthetics exert a powerful social pressure when it comes to buying drinks. As Elder points out: "You go to the bar and they say 'Small or large?' and you don't want to seem mean or cheap so you get the large."

Three glasses in, however, and the world takes a perplexing turn. Not content with supplying me with a white wine somewhat smaller than the red tulip-style glasses being knocked back by the businessmen, the French waiter takes exception to presence. "Can you stop disturbing my customers, pay your bill and go please," he says, in a magnificently snotty tone.

I saunter, slightly tearily, to the Crown, a pub offering 15 types of white wine and 16 of red. I am served up a large glass of Soft Banks from New Zealand, kicking in at 13%. The barmaid reckons two-thirds of her customers plump for the small option at lunchtime, but this statistic is reversed in the evenings.

It is a trend picked up on by Patrick Barker (no relation). "When I was your age we'd have a bottle of Bull's Blood and a bottle of port and go back to the office and write a report," he says, sharing a bottle of red with his drinking companion. Barker does not consume wine by the glass. "I think young people drink a hell of a lot more but they don't drink at lunchtimes. When they go out of an evening, Christ. I'm nearly 60 but when I was a kid the only alcohol in our house was some cherry brandy or sherry left over from Christmas. There was no question of wine with your meal. Drinking has increased because the opportunities for drinking for longer have increased."

That may well be true, but four glasses in, albeit three unfinished, I am no longer in a position to judge. Time to head back to the office for a snooze. Cheers.

www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1791054,00.html

1:12 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment