Back in 1958, high-school sophomore Diana McGee chose as her biology project an experiment "to make a hamster an alcoholic, then to cure it of the disease." She named the hamster "Alchy". The hamster consumed about a pint of bourbon a month and reportedly "seems to love it." Unfortunately, the news report never followed up on whether McGee was able to cure her hamster of his habit. Nor did it reveal what grade McGee got for her project.
Source: The Salina Journal (Salina, Kansas).
Update: I actually spoke too soon about the lack of a follow-up. Another search revealed that the Salina Journal did report on Apr 25, 1958 that Alchy eventually refused to drink any more of the bourbon-water mixture, leading the paper to comment that "the animal has more sense than some people."
They call it butt chugging actually it is an alcohol enema. Without passing through the stomach the alcohol gets absorbed faster so the effects are felt sooner. The person's blood alcohol level increases faster also and that can be dangerous because they are unaware of how much they have 'consumed'. At a recent frat party in Tennessee a young man was hospitalized with a BAC of 0.448 from butt chugging. I'd rather drink my booze thank you.
Ad campaign voted most likely to result in scatological jokes.
Also: see the "person" in the Persian Siamese cat "costume" in the top panel? Note how the shape of the cat head does not conform to the shapes of the human heads on display. The unnatural angle of the neck. And the cat is looking with its living "costume" eyes!
Plainly, this is a encoded warning against aliens among us!
Talk about a mammoth appetite, when most of the world’s large mammals went extinct roughly 10,000 years ago, the vast majority of the vanished species were herbivores. This of course meant that they were no longer around to eat the plants they otherwise would have, and - according to Christophers Doughty and Field from Oxford and Stanford Universities respectively – this freed up an extra 1.4 trillion kilos of food, roughly 2.5% of the net product of all Earth’s dry land. However, the researchers add, this excess had been ‘used up’ by burgeoning human numbers by around 1700 and today we consume six times as much as the Pleistocene critters ever did while simultaneously driving down land productivity by 10% (Nature)(PDF).
That’s not to say that our massive consumption doesn’t have it’s upside, As Vangelis Kapatos of Manhattan discovered when he attempted suicide by jumping from his ninth floor flat, only to survive when his fall was broken by a pile of uncollected garbage. Mr. Kapatos’ timing, from his perspective, couldn’t have been worse, the unusually large garbage pile was due to collections being suspended because of snow. They were due to resume the day after his impromptu dumpster dive (Today Online).
Mind you, we’re not the only animals prone to excess. After finding the bodies of dozens of starlings near the city of Constanta in Romania, locals were concerned that the cause might be bird flu, instead post-mortems of the birds have revealed that they in fact died of alcohol poisoning, having ‘drunk’ themselves to death on the discarded leftovers of the local winemaking industry. A least they died happy (BBC News).
Better than dying happy, though, is living happy, and the secret of that, says the UK’s Office for National Statistics, is having a job. But it’s not the pay but the job security that counts, say the government statisticians, which ironically are facing staff cuts themselves due to the economic downturn. Other key happiness factors, according to the preliminary report, are good personal health and a decent family life. What will we do without these people (Telegraph)?
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.