Karl's Weird News

Drunk for £1: Anger as leading supermarkets sell lager for 22p a can

Supermarkets are selling beer at a cheaper price than water, fuelling concern over their role in Britain’s binge-drinking crisis.

Despite repeated public health warnings, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda now offer lager at just 22p a can – less per litre than their ownbrand-mineral water and cola, and cheap enough to allow someone to get drunk for just £1.

Breakdowns: A drunk employee kills all of the websites you care about

365 Main, a datacenter on the edge of San Francisco’s Financial District, is popular with Soma startups for its proximity and its state-of-the-art facilities. Or it used to be, anyway, until a power outage took down sites including Craigslist, Six Apart’s TypePad and LiveJournal blogging sites, local listings site Yelp, and blog search engine Technorati. The cause? You won’t believe it.

A source close to the company says:

Someone came in shitfaced drunk, got angry, went berserk, and fucked up a lot of stuff. There’s an outage on 40 or so racks at minimum.

Whoever it is, while we like how you roll in theory, in practice, we’d appreciate it if you laid off the servers running websites we actually use.

Man mistakes straw bale for stricken woman, gives it CPR

A Hilton Head Island man confused bales of pine straw with a dead woman, and tried to resuscitate them early Tuesday morning, according to a sheriff’s report.

The 39-year-old called deputies to the parking lot of Hilton Head Cabanas, 32 South Forest Beach Drive, at 1:49 a.m., saying he had just tried to perform CPR on a dead woman, according to the sheriff’s report.

They arrived to find him talking to a large bale of pine straw.

One in six adults classed as a ‘problem drinker’

More than eight million people in Britain are considered problem drinkers, according to figures released yesterday by the Department of Health.

The startling statistic – equivalent to one adult in six – comes as the Government makes its latest attempt to challenge booze culture.

People also do not know they are drinking too much.

According to figures from the Office of National Statistics and HM Revenue & Customs, people drink twice as much alcohol as they think they do.

Brewer must pay alcoholic beer taster

A Brazilian court has ordered local brewer Ambev to pay 100,000 reals (US$49,400; euro36,400) to an alcoholic beer taster who drank about a liter and a half (3.2 pints) of beer each day.

The unidentified employee alleged that the company did not provide the health measures needed to keep him from developing alcoholism, a labor court in the Rio Grande do Sul state said in a statement Friday.

The employee said in his lawsuit that for more than a decade, he drank between 16 and 25 small glasses of beer during his eight-hour shifts at the company

The employee said he also received a bottle of beer after each shift.

Drunk groom’s brother takes his place

Villagers at a wedding in eastern India decided the groom had arrived too drunk to get married, and so the bride married the groom’s more sober brother instead, police said Monday. “The groom was drunk and had reportedly misbehaved with guests when the bride’s family and local villagers chased him away,” Madho Singh, a senior police officer told Reuters after Sunday’s marriage in a village in Bihar state’s Arwal district.

Drunk deposits horse in bank for night

A German man called on his bank for an unusual service when he was too tired and drunk to go home — he bedded down there for the night with his horse.

The man, identified as Wolfgang H. by German media, went to sleep next to cash machines in the local branch of the Mittelbrandenburgische Sparkasse in Wiesenburg southwest of Berlin after unsaddling his horse Sammy and closing the door.

A spokeswoman for the bank said that aside from an undesirable deposit made by his horse inside the building, the 40-year-old account holder had not breached any house rules.

Woman registers a .47 blood-alcohol content, possibly a Washington state record:

A woman arrested following two car crashes last week registered a .47 blood-alcohol content on a breath test – nearly six times the legal intoxication threshold and possibly a state record. Deana F. Jarrett, 54, was taken to Evergreen Hospital as a precaution following her arrest April 11, the Washington State Patrol said Wednesday. No one was injured in the accidents.

Coast Guard: 2 Recovered Alive After Falling From Cruise Ship

A man and woman fell overboard from the cruise ship into the Gulf of Mexico but were recovered alive after a four-hour search, a Coast Guard spokeswoman in New Orleans said. It wasn’t clear how the two fell overboard. Their ship, Princess Cruise’s Grand Princess, had left Galveston, Texas, and was headed toward Mexico.

After 8 hours, overboard cruise ship passenger rescued

A man who jumped from a cruise ship off Florida’s coast early Friday was rescued about eight hours later by the Coast Guard, officials said.

Michael Mankamyer, 35, waved his arms at crews when he was found at about 8:45 a.m., Coast Guard Petty Officer Jennifer Johnson said. He was airlifted to a hospital and the Coast Guard reported that he suffered from mild hypothermia but was otherwise in good condition.

The ship reported that Mankamyer had jumped from the balcony in his room and into the water around 12:45 a.m., a Coast Guard statement said.

Drunk fisherman wrestles with shark

A fisherman fuelled by vodka caught a 4-foot shark and wrestled it onto a jetty on Australia’s south coast, suffering only small tear marks in his trousers, media reports said on Friday.Phillip Kerkhof, 41, caught the bronze whaler shark by hand on Monday after he spotted it chasing squid lures near the jetty at the tiny seaside town of Louth Bay in the South Australia state.

Minister: Britons Enjoy Getting Drunk

New 24-hour alcohol licensing laws have failed to help Britons adopt a more relaxed attitude toward drinking, a Cabinet minister said, according to a Sunday newspaper. Most Britons enjoy drinking too much to emulate the cafe culture of continental Europe, said Hazel Blears, chairman the governing Labour Party and a member of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet.

Thirsty German sells beagle to buy beer

A thirsty German sold his 6-year-old step-daughter’s pet beagle to the owner of a bar to pay for beer, the Bild newspaper reported on Friday.

How to Pop a Cork With a Sword:

The clock’s counting down good riddance to 2006, and a crowd of thirsty revelers encircles you, the designated popper of the cork. But how will you free the bubbly from its bottle to greet the new year? You can always go manual, or geek out with a gadget like the single-squeeze Descorjet. But perhaps you want to start 2007 feeling a little more jaunty than usual. Maybe you feel like living life on the edge — the edge of a saber. If so, it might be time to try champagne sabering, the delicate art of decapitating bottles of champagne.

Vodka will get you every time!

A drunk company director was in court today after passing out on a railway track in the afternoon rush hour. Kevin Craswell, 48, consumed a “lethal” amount of vodka and was seen by passengers at 3.30pm crawling along the railway at Epsom. Astonishing pictures show him asleep and using the rail as a pillow. Witnesses even said they could hear him snoring from the platform.

If you are like me, you LOVE to drink on long flights, but are annoyed by the cheapo, awkwardly shaped, crappy plastic cups used to serve it. Thank God for this: an Aussie vintner uncorks bottle-cup combo:

“Wine connoisseurs have long had a reputation of being a bit snooty. But apparently many of them are also incredibly lazy, as an Australian winemaker has developed a single-serving bottle that comes with its own glass.

The all-in-one plastic wine bottle and cup has been produced by Australia’s Hardy Wine Company, the country’s largest vintner.”