The New York Times published an article on the whole Power Hour idiocy I wrote about earlier. To save you the clicking, freshly minted 21-year-olds try to down 21 shots in the hour between midnight on their 21st birthday and 1 a.m. when the bars close. The solution that the North Dakota legislature has dreamed up is to raise the drinking age to 21 +8 hours. Given my doubts about the efficacy of that, I proposed a counter-solution to have the bars limit the number of shots they would serve anyone, regardless of age, in an hour.
Apparently, we can kiss that idea goodbye. I'm pretty sure that when the bars are providing barf buckets to the 21-year-olds, we can pretty much forget about enlisting their aid in curbing the practice. When they're supplying the drinks and the vomitorium and not stepping in when a patron tells his friends "no more," I'd say we can count the bars firmly as part of the problem, not part of the solution. Of course, as the drinkers in the New York Times article see it, the problem is that there is nothing to do in North Dakota except get blind drunk and puke in the middle of a bar. That, I must say, is the absolute WEAKEST excuse I have ever heard for anything. If there is nothing to do, have they considered learning a foreign language or taking up knitting? If there is so little to do in Fargo (and they do have a movie theater with live pipe organ music), here's an idea: when the hangover wears off, pack up whatever brain cells aren't pickled, call some movers, and leave North Dakota. But then they'd have to grow up and become responsible adults, so that won't work, either.
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