Demon rum

Sobering report: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that abuse of alcohol cost the American economy $249 billion in 2010, and $90 billion of that was in absenteeism and lost productivity on the job.

The CDC would have had reports for the years after 2010, but, well, there was this party the other night after work and the team was deep into its “research,” and they’ve all got this splitting headache.

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Worse yet, I have to scan “War and Peace”: A U.S. appeals court says Google can go ahead with its effort to scan pages from millions of books and put them on the Internet because it qualifies as fair use under copyright law.

Scanning page after page of millions of books? That would be a horrible job for somebody with a hangover.

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Don’t know much about history: On this day in 1814, the London Beer Flood inundated a neighborhood of the British capital when vats of beer ruptured and spilled 320,000 gallons into the streets.

The CDC would have been there to measure the drop in productivity the next day, but the research team pitched in with the clean up and did what they could a pint at a time.

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