Guess which state drinks the most whiskey

I’m co-authoring an article on alcohol advertising trends for one of my jobs, so today I spent a few hours digging through industry literature to get some background information on booze consumption in the U.S. of A. Here are some fun facts I discovered:

Beer is the fifth most consumed beverage in America. Soft drinks are No. 1 with a staggering 15,045, 000, 000 (1.50 billion) gallons consumed in ‘07. Next is coffee, then bottled water, milk, and finally beer at No. 5. Americans drank 6.6 billion gallons of beer in 2007, which meant only 5% more milk was consumed than beer. And we wonder why there’s an obesity epidemic in this country?

The good news, though: 51.5 % of that beer was light beer!

Tea, juices, and powdered drinks came after beer, followed by wine, spirits, and last, hard cider. Americans drank 1.23 billion gallons of “powdered drink” in 2007. On a side note, Dave Chappelle has a hilarious stand-up routine about “grape drink” in which he tells white people he’s onto them:

“You thought I didn’t know about grape juice, didn’t you?” he says. “A lot of black people don’t have the privilege of knowing about grape juice because they have grape drink. It’s not the same formula that you get. Ain’t no vitamins in that shit.”

According to Chappelle, the ingredients of purple drink are water, sugar, and purple. And we’re giving our kids 1.23 billion gallons of it a year! But if the ‘hood has a monopoly on grape drink, middle America is whiskey land. Kentucky has more whiskey drinkers per capita than any other state, and Wyoming is second.

Also, for the record, Smirnoff is the best-selling vodka in the country with 8.5 million 9-liter cases sold in 2007. Absolut is second, Grey Goose third, Skyy fourth, Stoli fifth. I’ve been thinking I should start drinking Stoli. It seems dark, brooding, and full of secrets — kind of like the Chechnyan security guard who works the graveyard shift at my office building and videochats with guys who look like they are in the Russian mafia. Apparently Stoli’s Wild-Wild-East ad campaign — featured at the top of the page — is working on me.

Fortunately, if Stoli doesn’t deliver the intrigue the ad promises, I have hundreds of other vodkas to choose from; 186 new vodkas were introduced to the market in 2007 alone.

And now for the grand totals:

New Hampshire is the state with the most liquor drinkers per capita. Next is Washington, D.C., and Nevada is third.

California has the most liquor consumption overall, and Florida is second. My grandfather drinks 100 proof Smirnoff on the rocks, so between Spring Breakers and the retirees, I’m not surprised that Florida is pretty far ahead of the No. 3 state in total consumption: New York.

Best of all, more the alcohol industry spent more than $1.6 billion to try to convince you to buy all of these products in 2007.

- Handbook Advance 2008, the alcohol industry’s compilation of facts and figures

Diplomatic

Last Thursday, I covered a press conference at the Ferry Building in San Francisco that was hosted by President Obama’s Ocean Policy Task Force. The group is comprised of 24 officials from various government agencies, and they were given 180 days to devise a national policy on preserving and cleaning up the U.S. coasts. The press conference was held to introduce the group’s interim report, which it had 90 days to create. Now there’s a 90-day public comment period, at the end of which the group’s formal recommendation will reach the White House.

The funny thing about this press conference was that the reporters kept trying to get the officials to trash talk the Bush Administration. Fact we’ve known for decades about climate change and the role that preserving the oceans plays in mitigating it. That we’re just now getting a national ocean conservation policy is pretty pathetic, and the interim report is a big deal in coastal cities like San Francisco. So it was funny to see what soundbites the TV reporters decided they wanted and the extent to which they tried to pry them out of the presenters.

First, a TV reporter latched onto the phrase “sea change.” The administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration mentioned a “sea change” in the way Americans think about climate change and the oceans, which was just so gosh darn pun-tastic that the TV reporter not only asked her to repeat her point numerous times until he got the perfect sea-change soundbite, he also stood on the beach and began his live stand-up feed with a line about sea changes. We had the 5 o’clock news on at the office and I immediately thought, “Oh no, not the sea change guy again.” Eh TV reporters.

Second, the reporters wanted to know why a national ocean policy hadn’t been developed sooner. We were all hoping for the honest and obvious answer, which we knew we wouldn’t get, but still, it was fun to dream. My fantasy involved the White House administrator standing behind the podium and saying pleasantly, “Well President Bush was a cretin who rejected not only science, but common sense, and refused to acknowledge one of the most soundly demonstrated and widely accepted truisms of the late 20th Century. Plus preservation of anything that sits atop oil is not a priority for Texans, but now that we have a president who cares about the world — instead of just praising the God that allegedly created it – we can begin work on a long overdue national ocean policy.”

Of course things did not play out that way, but it was satisying that the oceanic administrator’s diplomatic answer was accompanied by a tone that clearly said, ”Trust me, guys, I think it’s about f-ing time too.” Previous policies, she said, were based on the mistaken world view that the oceans are boundless and infinitely resilient.  Although she didn’t explicitly say, “Because that moron pretended climate change wasn’t real for eight years,” she did say, “Americans want safe, healthy seafood, clean beaches, good jobs, abundant wildlife, vibrant coastal communities and clean energy. That’s not what we have today.” Unfortunately it was impossible for me to capture her tone in my article, so I guess the TV reporter was able to one-up me on that.

On the way back to the office from the press conference, I stumbled upon a Michael Moore rally. More on that soon.

Spades

Behold the wise words of Bill Maher, who can always be trusted to call a spade a spade:

“Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like ‘recision,’ where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you’ve been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what’s in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

If conservatives get to call universal health care ’socialized medicine,’ I get to call private health care ’soulless vampires making money off human pain.’ The problem with President Obama’s health care plan isn’t socialism, it’s capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what’s wrong with firemen? Why don’t they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!”

- From “New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit,” an essay published in the San Francisco news blog “Fog City Journal.”

Check out the rest here.

I think every school has one of these

Currently I am navigating the fifth level of hell, also called “choosing a student loan repayment option.” The process is a sick and twisted balancing act that goes like this: choose a plan whose monthly payments are low enough that you won’t default, but not so low that it takes 20 years to pay off the loan and costs an additional $20,000 in interest. Too high and you end up bankrupt, too low and you want to slit your wrists because that private college degree put you in dept even farther and longer than you anticipated. Oh and if you default, your mother slaughters you because she’s a co-signer on the loan and now her credit is in shambles too. Teeter totter, teeter totter.

As I calculated how long it will take me to buy back my soul from Sallie Mae, my mind inevitably drifted back upon my college experience. I remembered a list of quotes I wrote down from a particularly eccentric professor and decided to post them for your enjoyment:

“When I was in the Marine Corps, we went to South Korea to teach them how to fight, and they made damn fine soldiers. As good as any US Marine Corps. You know why? Because the Japanese occupied Korea for 300 years and didn’t let them be a part of the military. They didn’t develop any bad habits. When we got to Vietnam to try to teach them how to be soldiers, it was awful because the French had already gotten to them. And let me tell you, if there’s anybody who can fuck up an army, it’s La France.”

“Why do we celebrate the French Revolution? I’ll tell you why: because it’s the only war they ever won.”

“Why did the French just build a war ship with a glass bottom? So they’ll be able to see the rest of their navy.”

“Twenty five percent of you are already smart enough for grad school. Fifty percent we can prepare in the next four years. A quarter of you we just can’t help. You were born a princess in Orange County. You were raised a princess in Orange County. And you will die a princess in Orange County. If there’s a Mexican immigration influx, you won’t know where to go — unless it’s in Orange County.”

“Why are you so stupid? Have you given any thought to that?”

“It’s the clinical psychologist’s job to figure out why you’re so fucked up. It’s probably your mother’s fault. If not hers, your dad’s. If not his, your brother’s. Write that down.”

“So all the medical students are pooping and looking for blood to see if they have fatty liver, you know what I mean?”

“God has sent me to punish you because you’ve been a wicked girl.”

“I make sure to say that because if they’re a cop and you ask and they don’t say they are, they can’t arrest you.”

“These are rhetorical questions, so if I say, “How many of you put out on the first date?” I don’t expect you to raise your hand. Unless you really want to advertise it.”

“When do you get the effects of that nicotine? Or THC, depending on what you’re smoking? That’s right, it’s immediate. It makes you feel good — like when that nerd finally stops following you around campus. It’s a sense of relief.”

“This chalk is sticking to the roof of my mouth.”

“I have Alzheimer’s disease; when I walk from here to there I forget what I said over there. Plus if it’s after 3 I’ll be drunk anyway.”

***

That list segued into thoughts about one of my eccentric high school teachers, who provided us with these gems of wisdom:

“I don’t feel the need to apologize for history. The Indians: they lost.”

“You all have been coddled for far too long. This is the austerity program to toughen up the youth.”

“Of course I have my own meat dehydrator.”

“Once you shoot the deer you can’t put it on the hood of your car like they do in the movies. That’ll burn the insides and ruin the meat.”

“If this were a war you would have all stepped on landmines by now.” Said to the class, apparently oblivious to the fact that one student lost his leg when he stepped on a landmine during the civil war in Somalia.

Sign on the wall: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

***

Although my USC professor joked about being drunk, the only educator who ever showed up to class intoxicated, that I know of, was at Indiana University. I took French and Italian classes there when I was in high school, and one time a professor was so drunk he couldn’t conjugate “to be”— the most common verb in the Italian language — in present tense, even though he lived in Rome until he was 10 and was pursuing an advanced Italian degree. In his defense, he had broken his wrist the night before, and since this was the first time he had forgotten the different forms of “essere,” the class surmised that he was only drunk because he was self medicating.

I guess what I take away from all this is that however contact-averse, computer-obsessed, or celebrity-stalking we may be, Millennials are not any crazier than previous generations.

The wool may have just been lifted from my eyes!

I’ve wondered for years why so many conservative Christians advocate abstinence-only sex education in America’s public schools. Abstinence-only education leads to unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted pregnancies lead to every conservative Christian’s worst nightmare: abortions. If fundamentalist Christians really want to minimize/ eliminate abortions, why are they working so hard to insure that we will always have unwanted teen pregnancies? My former, uneducated self would shrug and say, “Highly deficient logical thinking skills? Hypocrites?”

But after all this time of only sort of having a grasp on this highly contradictory situation, someone came along and made an interesting point on nytimes.com. Gail Collins has a hilarious column in the May 7 Times about what a terrible idea it is to make Bristol Palin an abstinence-only spokesperson. One reader, Susan in Los Angeles, posted the following in the online comments section:

It seems to me the “abstinence only” movement is fueled by Fundamentalist Christians who believe sex before marriage is a sin, therefore if you violate this rule and have sex before you’re married, you should be punished. (With a child or a disease.) At its core, “safe” sex threatens these people’s belief systems by giving people a reasonable and responsible alternative to sex only within the boundaries of marriage….

I think Susan in Los Angeles might be on to something. If she’s right, fundamentalists have chosen — consciously or sub-consciously — to sacrifice zygotes in the name of punishing those who engage in pre-marital sex. That’s an interesting interpretation of being “pro life.” Check out the Gail Collins article here.

For the record

The USC Daily Trojan student newspaper reported last week that the people involved in the Budlong and Adams shooting were:

• Driver Cesar Osbaldo Ramirez, 25, who died.
• Passengers Walter Puga, 20; Jose Alcanar, 31; and a minor whose name has not been released

LAPD Officer Ruben DelCastillo shot Ramirez in what the DT describes as a “possible narcotics investigation.” All is still quiet on the L.A. Times front, but the LAPD posted the following on its blog on March 19:

On March 11, 2009 at about 8:30 p.m., Southwest Area Patrol Officers conducted an investigative stop of possible narcotics suspects in a car in the 1500 block of West Adams Boulevard. They saw a pedestrian standing in the street leaning into the vehicle talking with the four male occupants inside.  Officers directed the pedestrian onto the sidewalk and Officer Ruben DelCastillo approached the vehicle’s driver.  The driver suddenly pointed a handgun at Officer DelCastillo, resulting in DelCastillo shooting at the suspect. The suspect accelerated and drove the vehicle, eastbound on Adams Boulevard.  The involved officers stayed with the pedestrian, requested help from other units and broadcast the direction of travel and vehicle description.

So talking to people in a car makes you a narcotics suspect? Nice.  If that’s what really happened, though, I’m glad Officer DelCastillo is okay. Check out the full entry here.

I get that newspapers are dying and all, but come on

After publishing just three paragraphs on the Adams and Budlong shooting — part of which I witnessed and described here — last week, the L.A. Times still has not bothered to mention that someone died during the incident. Their one and only mention of the story:

10:55 PM | March 11, 2009

Los Angeles police shot and injured a suspect they were chasing on foot in a neighborhood around the USC campus Wednesday night. The gunfire prompted a campus-wide emergency notification that warned students to remain indoors.

Officers in the University Park area saw four men, one with a gun, and began chasing them about 8:30 p.m. During the pursuit, officers shot one suspect, according to Ana Aguirre of the Los Angeles Police Department. The man was taken to a hospital and his condition was not known. The other suspects remained at large and police searched the area with dogs, Aguirre said.

Reports of the gunfire apparently alerted USC authorities, who activated the “Trojan Alert,” a system that text messages or e-mails students to inform them of an emergency. Police said the incident occurred near but not on the USC campus.

– Julie Cart

I called LAPD to get some more information, and here’s what the L.A. Times left out:

Two LAPD members stopped a car with four Hispanic males at the corner of Budlong and Adams boulevards at about 8:30 p.m. on March 11. The officers were on foot, and there was another man standing near the car on the street curb. Lt. John Romero of LAPD media relations told me it was an “investigative stop,” but the nature of the investigation has not been released.

The driver produced a handgun, and an officer shot him.

“We’re not saying whether he pointed [the gun], raised it, did any of that,” Romero said of the driver. “That has not been released.” He would only elaborate that the handgun was produced in a “threatening manner.”

The driver headed east on Adams Blvd, although it’s not clear whether he left before or after he was shot. He turned right onto Menlo Ave, where he hit a USC tram shortly after turning onto the street. He kept going on Menlo, striking a trailer and an office pod before crashing into a pick-up truck and coming to a stop. The driver slouched over the wheel, unconscious and bleeding, and the three passengers fled the scene.

A group of people gathered outside. By the time the police arrived a few minutes later, I was able to come out, see what had happened, go back inside for my cell phone, call 9-1-1, request an ambulance, hang up, have the operator call me back, and try to see the driver’s injuries better. LAPD came and told us there were armed suspects who had fled the vehicle, and they set up a perimeter because the passengers were still at large. Four hours later, all three had been caught. One was found in a tree and one was at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting posing as a member. The man who had been standing on the curb at the original investigative stop was also taken into custody.

The driver died, but I don’t know if it happened before or after the ambulance came. Romero said the coroner’s office has released his name and cause of death, but their information officer has not returned my calls yet.

According to the felony murder rule, if you commit a crime and anybody dies as a result, you can be charged with murder. Romero said the three passengers and the man on the street were arrested for murder, but the D.A. did not file those charges against them. I’m not sure what crime they could have committed that led to the driver’s death, considering he’s the one who produced a gun and fled the “investigative stop,” unless he was still alive when they ran from the crash scene. He looked like he could have been dead — he was completely unresponsive, and there was blood everywhere.

I will update the identity, cause of death, and charges filed as soon as possible, since the L.A. Times is either so gutted or so negligent that they don’t think this is worth following up on. I will also do my best to figure out if the man had a criminal record and if the people involved were gang-affiliated.

This didn’t even make the nightly news

My car after a parked truck was pushed into it. The pick-up was hit by a man driving an Impala after he fled a shooting a few blocks away. After the crash, the street was blocked off for hours while police searched for three armed suspects.

LOS ANGELES, 2:30 a.m.  —

The most ironic moment of my life  — literally, the most ironic — happened tonight after three friends came over to check out my apartment. They are considering moving in when I leave in June, and just as I was telling them I had never experienced any problems with street parking, we heard a loud crash — and then another, and then another. Then a car alarm began to shriek. We ran outside to see what had happened, and I realized people were congregating near where I had parked my car earlier this evening. I silently groaned as we walked toward the wreck, and sure enough, there was my car — completely smashed from behind by a pick-up truck, and possibly totaled.

As we got closer, we realized it was a three-car wreck. A man driving an Impala had smashed head-first into a pick-up truck that was parked right behind my car. The pick-up truck was then rammed into the back of my car. We approached the Impala and discovered the driver unconscious and slumped over the steering wheel, bleeding all over the deployed air bag. Bystanders called out to him and asked if he was okay, but there was no response. Someone wondered aloud if he should shake the driver to try to wake him up, but others quickly said the man should be left alone until paramedics arrived. Someone else said we should get back because he might have a gun.

About four different people, myself included, called 9-1-1 and told them we were at 2701 Menlo Ave., half-way between 29th Street and Adams Blvd. After I was told the fire department was on its way, I hung up the phone and squatted down by the car to try to get a better view of the driver’s injuries. I debated running inside to get my camera, but just then the 9-1-1 dispatcher called me back and asked if this was the same crime scene where people had fled a wrecked car. I said I wasn’t sure and that only the driver was there by the time arrived. Everyone was discussing what they had seen, and someone said they thought the Impala had hit a tram before it ran into the truck.

Skid marks and broken glass left by the Impala the next morning.

Within minutes the police arrived and cleared the area. The wreck happened in front of my next-door neighbor’s house, and we stalled long enough in front of my building to see an officer in a bullet-proof vest point his gun at the wrecked car and yell at the driver to put his hands up. He yelled at the man over and over again to show a weapon if he had one and to put his hands up, and I wondered if he thought the driver was faking his injuries. I thought to myself, “Trust me, officer, that guy’s not faking anything.” Police officers began yelling at us to get inside because there was an armed suspect at large. An officer told me the suspect had run towards the backyard next to my building and that nobody was allowed to come outside. This was at about 8:30 p.m.

After that, LAPD established a perimeter that shut down four streets in the West Adams neighborhood. Seven people were stranded at my apartment, including two who had exams the next day. It was too loud to study with the search helicopters circling the building and shining lights in our windows, and only the two of us who lived there had our books anyway. We opened a bottle of wine and turned on the news, but there was no mention of the armed suspects at large. I looked at the Los Angeles Times website, where the top story about Manny Ramirez and No. 2 was on Twitter. No suspect updates there.

We put on a movie and spent the next hour calling people and trying to figure out what had happened, formulating theories that were essentially based upon hearsay.  We still weren’t sure if the Impala had hit a USC Tram or just swerved around it. There were also rumors about a gang shooting, but we hadn’t heard any shots fired on our street before the wreck. The helicopters made it hard to hear anything that happened after the crash, though. One of my friends also overheard an officer say that a police car had sped the opposite direction of the Impala, away from where it ultimately crashed, shortly before the accident. None of us knew what to make of that.

At 9:33, we received a text message from the TrojansAlert emergency message system. It said shots had been fired at the corner of Budlong and Adams, which is a few blocks northwest of my apartment. It also said that one suspect and one weapon were in custody while three suspects were at large. So the man driving the Impala was fleeing the Budlong shooting when he crashed his car. The police cars must have been driving towards that crime scene when they passed the Impala going the other direction.

We kept watching and waiting while the police searched for the other three suspects. Anytime we looked out the door to see what was going on, flashlights hit us in the face and voices yelled at us to get back inside. We watched a SWAT team storm the house two doors down, and another moved silently through the backyard next door. Eventually a SWAT team member banged on our door and yelled, “Open up! Police!” They asked if we had seen see the suspects who were at large, and we said no.

We switched back and forth between “Shrek 2″ and the local news. Finally it was 10 o’clock, and we were hopeful there would be a package about the search. No such luck, though; the top story was a car chase in San Clemente, and most of the news show was devoted to replaying tapes of the police shooting out the wheel of the other car and spinning it off the road.

At 10:30 p.m. we got an emergency alert e-mail that confirmed the Impala had hit the tram. It also said the suspect who was taken into custody had a gun shot wound, but we didn’t know if he had been shot at Budlong or by police. At 10:47, we got another text message that said two suspects were at large and two were in custody. At 10:55, latimes.com ran a news brief that reported that police had shot a suspect they were pursuing on foot near USC’s campus. About that time I heard that the Impala’s driver had died on the way to the hospital, but I can’t verify that. That’s what the police told a friend of a friend, so who knows.

After the second suspect was caught, the street got much quieter. The helicopters had apparently fanned out more, and the police cars parked out front turned their headlights off. Three of the people in my apartment decided to see if they could leave the area with an LAPD escort. I told them to knock if they weren’t allowed to leave, and locked the door behind them as they walked out into the hallway. They began descending the steps as I shut the door, but I had barely crossed the room when I heard them pounding to be let back in. I thought it was a joke, but they rushed in past me when I opened the door.

“They wouldn’t let you leave?”

“We didn’t ask. There’s a guy standing outside the door with a rifle pointed at the backyard next door…”

“Seriously?”

” Yeah. We looked around the corner and he was just standing there with this huge gun. And he looked like he was concentrating really hard. Like life and death hard. So we didn’t want to say anything and interrupt him— it just seemed like a bad idea.”

We sat down to watch some “Family Guy” episodes.

Around midnight, one of my stranded friends went back out to see when he could leave. He was told all four suspects had been apprehended, but that LAPD still hadn’t decided what to do with the students on Menlo. Finally, at 12:28 p.m., an LAPD officer agreed to escort people out of the area. I asked him if I could take pictures of my car, and he said no. “Don’t leave your property,” he said. “We shot somebody; this is a crime scene.”

We spent hours trying to put the pieces together and re-create that evening’s events based upon text messages, rumors, an e-mail, and a three-paragraph L.A. Times story, and we still don’t know how any of the shootings happened. “So much for the information age,” I thought earlier tonight. At first I was just frustrated the local news didn’t cover the story because I wanted to know what was going on, but soon I realize the implications were bigger than that. If this wasn’t on the news, it’s probably because armed suspect chases in South L.A. aren’t news. Quarantined blocks aren’t unusual; SWAT teams, canine units, and searchlights do not turn heads.  They call those search helicopters “ghettobirds” for a reason. If you are a resident of South L.A., this is your life. This is the broken system in which you live.

The next morning, a Spanish language newscaster came out to ask construction workers about the crash. We wondered if the red streak on the ground is dried blood.

So true

Last week, one of my anthropology professors gave a lecture about how the sexism that exists in street gangs is a magnified version of the sexism that exists in society as a whole. Any sexual double standard in a college student’s life is present in a street gang, but multiplied by ten: walking the fine line between being a slut and a prude, being expected to be tough enough to get respect but “feminine” enough to be attractive, etc. Just like in society as a whole, gang girls perpetuate many of these double standards just as much as the males  do.

There’s one phenomenon in which I think men deserve most of the blame, though. In gangs, there’s a “no dating the enemy” rule, but men can usually date members of rival gangs without reproach. Female gang members, however, are often beaten up or killed for it because they’re supposedly giving away their gang’s secrets, either on purpose or by accident. If a man dates a member of a rival gang, he’s the one masterfully sucking information and secrets from the enemy. Because men always think with the big head in these situations. They never get played by women. Right.

Anyway, my (male) professor was apparently contemplating society at large when he  added:

“On a side note, if men gave birth, abortions would be sacrament. It’s only controversial because women have them.”

I thought to myself, You know  what? He is so right.

Suddenly the GOP cares about generational theft? Ha.

Sadly, the letter to the editor I submitted to the New York Times last week was not published. I figured I would at least post it here to make myself feel better:

Re: Maine Senators Break With Republican Party on Stimulus
Feb. 11, 2009

To the Editor:

I hope John McCain and the other members of the GOP don’t honestly expect us to believe they suddenly care about “generational theft” after nearly a decade of denying the existence of global warming. Where was this concern when the Bush Administration refused to take action to protect our ecosystems, or when it implemented numerous policies that preferred corporations to the environment?

I would like to keep our natural resources, thanks. You can have some of my future tax dollars — let’s get those green collar jobs rolling.

Sincerely,

Janna Brancolini