Want to build a legacy and found a business for the ages? Brewing and distilling appear to be solid choices: The oldest company still in business in every (well, almost every) country. My own home is currently supporting the entrepreneurial traditions of Finland (Fiskars axe), Barbados (Mount Gay rum) and Trinidad and Tobago (Angostura bitters).

Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrews subsist on "a diet roughly equivalent to 100 percent beer".

Och, science!

Scottish scientists recreate Shackleton's whisky

Make a laser out of a gin-and-tonic: very cool in theory, though the gin-and0tonic may have even more inspirational applications.

As Cactus Ed said, a drink a day keeps the shrink away. And the doctor. And also the collection agent, apparently.

The data show that average income rises with alcohol consumption up to a point and then falls off as one moves into the range of heavy drinking. Income peaks at 2.6 drinks per day for men and 1.5 per women.

This also comes as no surprise:

In 2008, 89% of people who drank two drinks per day or less reported giving charitably. Compare this with 84% of teetotalers

To Hell with energy prices: they were pretty predictable and might eventually drive some real innovation. My issue is one which the candidates seem shamefully unwilling to address: the outrageous, skyrocketing price of beer.

Hops independence now! Brew, baby, brew!

...the philosopher Wang Ji wrote about a journey he claimed to have made to the Land of the Drunk, one of those fantasy places the medieval Chinese loved to invent, and ended up half-believing in. There, he said, citizens "sip the wind and drink the dew, and abstain from the five cereals."

John Derbyshire on Chinese inebriaty.

Some good Mongoliana to be had: both Ulaana and The Regal Vizsla describe their February visit to Hovsgol and the Tsataan reindeer people. But what I really want to point out is this vodka bottle in the shape of a Kalashnikov. I want one!

Update: Here we go. Or there's this. I'll stick with the Russians myself.