Is it getting to the point where people will face criminal charges for using the euphemism "f-bomb"? I can't wait for something like that to happen in Boston.

Maybe he saw one of the several R/C pterodactyls that can easily be found on the market and got so distracted he drove off the road. It does seem an odd hour for someone to be flying radio-controlled reptiles, though.

Moon: Yeah, so, how's your liver? ;-)

Crash: Understood, but I'd just as soon avoid doing even long-term damage to my liver, just in case I happen to survive this weekend's bender. Part of me thinks that absorption of EtOH through the stomach is an evolutionary mechanism to give the liver a bit of a break; part of me recognizes that EtOH is just so soluble that we'd need a serious mechanism to *prevent* it from being absorbed through the stomach. And is NADH really rate-limiting? I thought alcohol dehydrogenase was the bottleneck. And "backed up" isn't really an accurate characterization; if it makes it through portal circulation, it gets diluted into the rest of the bloodstream. It's not like the EtOH is parked in the portal vein waiting for the liver to catch up.

I'm not sure coating the stomach with bismuth subsalicylate is such a great idea. If the ethanol isn't absorbed through the stomach, it's absorbed by the intestine, at which point it goes into portal circulation, straight to the liver, undiluted. I'd expect the concentrated ethanol hitting the liver to have greater hepatotoxicity. Then again, it's the acetaldehyde that's the problem, IIRC, and if the ethanol concentration in the liver is high enough to saturate your alcohol dehydrogenase, it may not matter so much.

Yes, these are the kinds of things that biochem majors discuss at college parties.

This answers Tori's question: Where's Neil when you need him? When you need him, he's there. This is so cool.

Savvy PR people know that the sure way to get posted on Boing Boing is to invoke goatse (subtly, subtly) on their product.

I'm reminded of Harry Tuttle, the vigilante heating engineer played by Robert De Niro in "Brazil".

Swell: the other fairly recent news item out of MSP was Muslim cab drivers refusing to accept fares carrying alcohol. It's something of a moot issue these days, what with alcohol being a liquid and all.

The chief difference between London and Boston appears to be that the London authorities aren't calling it a hoax and filing criminal charges.