Thursday 4 March 2010

Towards synthehol?

Slashdot points to a Korean study showing that oxygenated alcoholic beverages (tiny oxygen bubbles dissolved in the drink) show quicker sobering up and reduced hangovers. They used Soju as the base drink for experimentation.
Maybe this is the first step towards synthahol, the intoxicating drink on Star Trek that people can sober up from instantly.
Let's hope not. Synthehol epitomized the decline in the Federation from TOS to TNG. Zephram Cochrane loved Scotch and refused to fly without it [Sue very early ruled out Zephram as a boy's name, thereby precluding Ira from becoming the inventor of the Warp Drive]. Scotty properly refused the synthetic abomination; Picard and Riker, emissaries of the Nannyfied federation, preferred it. Modern Drunkard nicely surveyed things a couple of years ago.

Soju may well be the first step towards synthehol. At a restaurant in Seoul a couple of years back, we asked the waiter for a bottle of what everybody else was drinking...a green bottle of Soju. We asked him afterwards from what it was distilled - rice, wheat, corn? He came back shortly with a Korean-English dictionary, pointing to the word "chemistry".

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