Complex Numbers

Is There Anything It Can't Do?

More reasons why Prohibition was a bad idea, from Cracked:

    4 Times People Had to Party to Survive  

Admittedly, the headline turns out to be a bit misleading, but at least it's not from some other shameless clickbait site.

My first clue that the article wouldn't match the headline was the opening image which, if you don't feel like clicking, features a pool upon which floats a life saver ring, and inside the ring is nestled a can of Bud Light. So, water floating in water.

A deep love of partying is generally not the path to a longer life.

No, just a more fulfilling one.

Alcohol is a poison, but one that offers some good stories and a possibility to meet your future spouse at some karaoke bar.

Too much of anything is poison, and I still follow my ironclad rule, scraped from experience, to never pick up women in a bar. No matter how much I've indulged.

But what if drinking could save your life?

That would be known as a coincidence.

That said, there are a couple people throughout history who have somehow caught a lucky break off a usually harmful substance.

Okay, okay, we get it: you're badmouthing booze so you're not responsible if someone walks away from the article with "I should drink more." Enough with the moralizing.

4. Mark Wahlberg

Mark Wahlberg, or Marky Mark, was a bona fide rock star back in the day.

As I did not know, until reading this article, that these were the same dude, I reject the label "bona fide."

When an opportunity to go party at the Toronto Film Festival presented itself, he canceled his earlier plans, bailing on a flight he’d already booked for the next morning from Boston to L.A.

In short, the flight he missed was on the morning of 9/11/01. The article implies that Wahlberg wanting to party saved his life. A bit of a stretch. You know what would be really weird? If something like this didn't happen. There's probably at least one cancellation on every commercial flight; this one just happened to be someone moderately famous, and the flight he missed became more than moderately famous.

If he'd been a "bona fide rock star," what was he doing flying commercial?

3. Clifton Vial

Not even Warhol-famous, this time.

Essentially, dude drove around Nome (not exactly known for its tropical climate, lying as it does just a few miles south of the Arctic Circle) with nothing but a 12-pack of Coors Light.

He had decided to drive out on the roads to, and I am not joking here, see how bad the roads were. They were bad.

I've done that, admittedly. But I live in a well-populated area.

When his car got lodged in a snow bank where it, and he, remained for three days, he turned to the 12 Silver Bullets in his trunk for sustenance.

Might as well have just melted some of the snow...

Not a bad idea, given that any beer drinker can tell you that Coors Light is basically water anyways.

See?

2. Moe Berg

The amount of alcohol involved in this story isn’t as well documented... a dinner party where the guest of honor was famous physicist Werner Heisenberg...

One might say the amount of alcohol was... uncertain.  

You could be forgiven for thinking that I linked and commented on this article because of the drinking bits. But you'd be wrong. No, I'm highlighting this article because it gave me an opportunity to make that pun.

The guest we’re talking about, however, was a man named Moe Berg, who was a major league baseball catcher, a polyglot and an American spy.

I bet he got all the chicks.

Seriously, though, read about this guy. As the article notes, he really did fucking rule.

In summary, Berg's mission was to essentially butter up Heisenberg to see how close the Germans were to making a working fission bomb. If the answer was "close," Berg (in his profession as spy, not catcher) was meant to assassinate the scientist.

I do have to wonder why he didn't just do the dirty deed anyway, considering that Heisenberg was, at the time, working for the Nazis, and Berg (despite having part of the physicist's name) was the son of Jewish Ukrainian immigrants to the US.

According to some interpretations of quantum theory (of which Heisenberg was a pioneer), there's another universe where he did just that. Probably one where no one at the dinner party had been drinking.

1. People with Antifreeze Poisoning

After that last one, this is a bit anticlimactic. Antifreezeactic? Whatever.

If someone finds themselves in a situation where they’ve ingested antifreeze or another substance containing ethylene glycol, a drink even more dangerous than rail tequila, alcohol can be used to save their life.

Now, look. I don't usually do disclaimers here. But don't take medical advice from a dick joke site. Or from me. Even the article is aware of this:

Of course, don’t read this and think if you accidentally chug some car juice, you can head for the liquor cabinet instead of the hospital and sleep it off. Anytime you drink poison, it’s best to have a doctor involved.

...unless that poison is ethanol, naturally.