booze news

Let's put this in perspective: the legal limit for driving while intoxicated is a BAC of 0.08, meaning this guy had eight times the legal limit in his system. Furthermore, in Iowa state police academy curriculum, officers are taught that a person with a BAC of 0.40 are likely to be in a coma. This guy has 1.5 times the amount needed to kill a person, and he was still driving. Talk about holding your liquor!

In case you've been living under a rock for the past week or simply don't enjoy wildly depressing news stories, the man pictured at the top is Luka Magnotta, 29, a Canadian self-professed gay adult film star who murdered a Chinese student in his apartment, uploaded a video of it to the internet, decapitated the body, and sent various body parts to, among other places, the Canadian Conservative and Liberal Party headquarters.

On June 4, Magnotta was arrested in Berlin, but not before the Montreal Gazette posted a picture of the deranged killer on its website drinking a Labatt Blue.

Harmless? Not according to Labatt, who subsequently threatened to sue the Gazette if they did not remove the image. Labatt associate general counsel Karen Sullivan had this to say to the newspaper:

"As I am sure you can understand, this image is highly denigrating to our brand, and we are disturbed that this image remains on your site despite repeated requests and the many images available of this person."

Labatt later dropped the case, but not before the internet got a hold of the story. The result? A Twitter tag called #newlabattcampaign. Some of the finer examples of slogan suggestions are pictured above. Just another example of when you're dealing with the internet, it's best to just let sleeping dogs lie.

Apparently, the man was rather small in stature to begin with (which means he probably can't hold his liquor, which explains why he passed out on train tracks). Because of this, he fit in the gap between the track surface and the train cars. After the train stopped, Canadian Pacific railway personnel found him under one of the rear train cars, after which he promptly got up and just continued on his merry way. Miraculous, eh?

"The bottom line is that we think being too focused can blind you to novel possibilities, and a broader, more flexible state of attention is needed for creative solutions to emerge," says Professor Jennifer Wiley of the University of Illinois.