Feb 05, 2008, 4:05pm

You may think from my recent (not so recent?) posts that I'm all about the booze.

Actually, I'm all about the culinary cocktail. And just as with coffee and how I wish it didn't have caffeine in it so I could drink more of it, with cocktails, sometimes I wish you could get the culinary aspects of a fine scotch, whiskey, cognac, port, hell, even vodka, without the alcohol hit. I can appreciate the beautiful perfect mix of sweet and sour in the Sidecar, or the bittersweet orange hit in a negroni to the ends of the earth, but I usually limit my take to one or two of these drinks, and maybe once or twice a week, mostly with friends or while chillin' the evening away having a conversation with Beata.

Basically, there's a big difference between having a couple of cocktails on a Friday night with friends because you're socializing, and having a bunch of beers or spirits on a Friday night because that's what you do.

Lately, I've been noticing a lot of alcohol fueled postings and such on the Interwebs - I think I've gotten better lately at recognizing them. I see them on my favourite photography site, DP Review, as an example. They tend to cycle so every Friday and Saturday there's more weird posts - more combative posts, more stupid posts, more name calling posts.

It's just a lot of stupidity.

In the coffee world, I've seen the trend as well. There's this vendor who rumour has it has a bit of a drinking problem, and sure enough, he saves his most stupid posts on various forums for Fridays and Saturdays. Most people won't see them because various moderators around (including us over at CoffeeGeek in the past) will delete the posts before anyone really reads them. Sometimes I think the posts should be left online so people see how crazy this person is; but then again, he tends to attack and lie a lot in his posts, so maybe not.

On CoffeeGeek, we've seen other examples of this. We run a pretty tight ship in the forums over there thanks to the amazing help of all the moderators, and any kind of flame war or personal insult in a post is quickly dealt with. But I always check the forums late Friday night, late Saturday night, and sure enough, I find a few posts that you just know are fueled by a bit of the spirits and well, if you delete the post (as a moderator), chances are the postee won't even know they made the post the next day. Sometimes they aren't combative or insulting - but just really, really, REALLY bad posts - a trainwreck of disconnected thoughts and word patterns.

And then there's the Portafilter podcasts. Now maybe I'm in the minority here, but they've done a few podcasts (maybe two or three) where the hosts are enjoying the liquor, including one of the most recent ones, and I have to say, those are pretty bad - I don't enjoy listening to them. I usually listen to the PF podcasts start to finish, but the most recent one? I couldn't get through 30 minutes of it.

Liquor's this strange thing. Have enough of it (but not way too much) and you have this sense inside of you that you have this clarity of thought - I know, I've been there. But you don't have clarity of thought. You also get this sense that what you're saying is either funny as all hell, or super accurate, or whatever. I know, I've been there. But what you're saying is not funny at all, or terribly inaccurate, or whatever.

Liquoring up with friends on occasion is great, because your incredibly unfunny ramblings that you think are actually funny - well your liquored up friends think they're funny too. It's self fulfilling in that time and space. But once you record the funny, bright, smart, insightful, truthful thoughts onto the Internets through audio, video, photos or words, it becomes downright scary to realise how unfunny, dull, stupid, lacking, or not-so-truthful thoughts they are when you read them the next day.

The Internets and booze - they don't mix.

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Mixelania

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