Happy Birthday to Rob! Let's all have a drink -- TOGETHER.

Here's to the tiny dictator, our fearless leader, the Artist Formerly Known as Squirrel, Meat, Rob Lasso, DJ Robbie Robb, Popcorn, Batogato, the Lord of Leesburg, and whatever else the people are calling him these days. Rob will forever be born one day too early, but nonetheless, Happy Birthday, buddy.

Let's have a drink to celebrate Area 51 of his life.  Well, after reading this article published last week in The Atlantic, you might either reconsider that drink or double down.

This is one of the finer periodical pieces I've come across in some time. It tickles the fancy of an elbow-bender like me not merely because of its 90-proof content but because of exhaustive research, sheer readability, and smoothly dropped gems like "By the late 1990s, the volume of alcohol consumed annually had declined by a fifth." Heh heh. I get it.

Not only do I encourage you to read it, but I am inspired to read the brand new book from which quite a bit of data is drawn: Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland. And by that I mean I am inspired to tell Dave to read it and give me a SoD review, stat.

Drunk. A title not to be confused with the song "Wasted" by Black Flag (which you read about here). (Also covered amusingly by Camper van Beethoven.) But the title says it all, doesn't it?

A few tidbits from the article: 

• "The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly."
• Prohibition actually worked as intended.
• "About 10 million years ago, a genetic mutation left our ancestors with a souped-up enzyme that increased alcohol metabolism 40-fold."
• Göbekli Tepe was the first recorded pub -- 10,000 B.C.
• Alcohol is actually proven to do a lot of good for humans* -- both in stress relief as well as enhancing creativity and sociability.
• Those come with asterisks of not only *in moderation but also *in social situations.
• Drinking alone, despite what George Thorogood, is a really bad idea.
• "The health toll of social disconnection is estimated to be equivalent to the toll of smoking 15 cigarettes a day."
• Also, the advent of liquor took the world from pleasantly drunk on wine and beer to super hammered and not pleasant.
• There's a timeline of drunk in America, and it's trended upward a LOT of late.

And most relevantly to my life:

• The Ballmer Peak! It's "the notion, named after the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that alcohol can affect programming ability. Drink a certain amount, and it gets better. Drink too much, and it goes to hell."

At least one of you knows precisely where I'm going with this. 

Every time I play darts, especially with Dave, I start off as a middle-of-the-pack talent. Because we always drink when we play darts, I inevitably throw a few back, after which I will become preternaturally good at the game. Bullseyes grow wide. Streaks are a-plenty. Wins come easily. It's uncanny. And regular as a bran-fed bulldog.

And then... bullseyes snap shut. Darts are heaved as if the game were being played by a first-timer. Walls are damaged. It's even more uncanny. And just as routine.

This cycle has rung true for other folks but bizarrely, hyperbolically true for me. The Lester Peak is real. Know your teammate, people. (And also know the Zman Curve.)

Anyway, read the article. And have a drink with me soon. To Rob!