Probably a commenter here:
Many people enjoy their birthdays by letting their hair down and having plenty to drink – but it seems one man took the celebrations a little too far.
James Taylor told police he drank an incredible 48 beers in one evening to mark his 58th birthday on Hudson Beach, Florida, this week.
The transient bizarrely told deputies it was about ten beers too many – and he also allegedly exposed his genitals and urinated in the sand.
I recommend switching to lite beer.
cathyx
The older you get, the harder it is too drink your age.
TreeBeard
Still has nothing on David Boon.
Not to mention Boon’s ‘stache.
JPL
How many beers would it take for the average person to drink before the average person did something inappropriate. If the guy drank 58 beers how could he even stand up to urin.ate?
WereBear
Sounds like he has a lot of experience drinking too many beers.
stuckinred
JPL
Depends on the definition of “evening”.
Roger Moore
I recommend drinking fewer beers. That lite shit is nasty.
Joel
Wade Boggs has been keeping up in retirement…
Citizen Alan
Did he also tell the cops that he’d seen fire and he’d seen rain? Because if my name were James Taylor, I’d work that into every conversation I ever had.
PeakVT
48 beers? That’s about 25 over what is needed for a good case of alcohol poisoning.
MikeJ
That’s more than William Hague.
cleek
$10 says anyone who has had more than 15 has lost the ability to keep track of how many they’ve actually had.
Gin & Tonic
I think it would have been worse for the arresting officers if he had urinated in the sand without exposing his genitals.
BGinCHI
It should say “he only exposed his genitals and urinated in the sand.”
That’s restraint after 48 beers.
Whiskey Screams from a Guy With No Short-Term Memory
For normal people, yeah. Alcoholics build a tolerance, same as any other drug addict.
Captain Goto
I had a frat brother, our pledge master, who asserted he would do a shot for every pledge we got one year.
The final tally was 17.
He stayed upright (sort of) just long enough to deliver the prayer before dinner, collapsed in his room, then got up three hours later and ate spaghetti. Said he felt fine. I’ll never know how he did it…from then on, I would introduce him to the rushees by saying “…and this is Mark. He has a hollow leg!”
Roger Moore
@cleek:
Unless they were “counting” by doing something simple like noticing they had drunk their way through two cases of 24 cans each. Of course that would require the ability to multiply 24 by 2, which is somewhat unlikely after having that many beers.
cleek
@Roger Moore –
and half of those were forgotten, or knocked over, or lost, after one drink.
Geeno
@JPL#3 – NO.
Also, the competition in TreeBeard#2’s comment is totally invalid. My Vodka mix that averages out to 20+ proof with mix and ice is equal to a beer of roughly the same size (12 oz) that is 12 proof? That’s just wrong.
Chukwu
He’s got Lawrence Taylor
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/video/nfl/2010/04/23/042210_lt_coorslight_beers_nfldraft.SportsIllustrated/index.html
piratedan
all of this could have been prevented if only someone had tossed the stalwart fellow a bag of spicy hot pork rinds.
Mike E
Near beer or shandies would be a better choice, tho you’d still get hammered after a case’s worth.
My roommate in college could drink a case with ease. I’d drink half for him but I’m such a light weight that I’d barely down a sixer–7 is my all time record!
CWZ
…”48 beers in one evening…”
Not too difficult if by “one evening” he means from roughly 3pm to dawn.
I’ve had one of those”evenings” in my younger days!
Loneoak
I’d bet that somewhere around 16 beers he started miscounting and/or losing most of the beers after opening them.
Barry
John Cole: ” I recommend switching to lite beer.”
And pacing yourself – break it up a little. Try a joint between beers, or some meth if you’re getting drowsy. Drop some acid after 20, just to keep your head straight. And amyl nitrate make the blood rush to your face, so that should prevent a hangover. A little cocaine after beer #30, to keep your energy up.
Then, before going to bed, drink a tall glass of water, two aspirins (or whatever white pills are around), and a big plate of shrooms, so you don’t wake up all hungry.
Any volunteers?
PurpleGirl
What sie containers were these beers? Were they 12-oz cans, bottles, or 40-oz bottles/can? I don’t hink that said anything in the article about the container size. This is important in calculating how much beer he actually drank. Inquiring minds want to know!
JPL
Barry @ 23…If this were a choice between participating again in John’s earlier post about DDay’s comments, I would have to think about it but since it is not….HELL NO…
hitchhiker
I’m turning 59 today, as it happens. Planning to share a bottle of wine with my daughters. Not planning to expose any private bits or urinate in public, but you never know. Tricky stuff, alcohol.
Also, for those who care, this is Paul McCartney’s birthday, too. He’s 69.
Loneoak
@PurpleGirl: Pretty damned sure they weren’t 40s. That would be more than a keg worth of beer. A transient drinking that much beer is definitely knocking back your traditional 12oz cans.
Martin
Yep. I put back maybe half a dozen drinks a month on average and I’m quite certain I could drop a beer an hour and stay right around the legal blood-alcohol level, particularly with eating and some activity mixed in. Wouldn’t be good for me in any way, but I think even a normal person could swing 18+ drinks in a day without too much impairment. A steady alcoholic should be able to double that easily.
We’d have a party in the dorm every year – only 5 guys on this hall (it was just a little sub next to the basement) and we’d get two kegs, a few bushes of cooked crab (one guy’s dad was a fisherman in the Chesapeake, and the campus chef loved to cook seafood), invite the girls over, and have a hell of weekend. Two kegs is about 300 or so beers and there’d be 10-15 of us, and we’d finish both in a weekend and still be ready for class on Monday. A little practice goes a long way.
Linda Featheringill
Don’t think this guy will live to collect on Medicare. Think of what he’s doing for the country. He’s a patriot!
jinxtigr
Sweet dreams and flying machines all pissing on the ground? :)
jeffreyw
I recommend switching to fried pies.
Amir_Khalid
Let’s see … Suppose he was drinking from 330ml cans of beer. That’s 3 cans to a liter, so 48 cans would come to about 16 liters, or 4.3 gallons. The fluid consumed would weigh some 16kg — 35lbs. I have trouble believing it is physically possible to consume that much beer at one drinking session, even disregarding the likelihood of alcohol poisoning, even with a pee break at some point.
I’m a teetotaler, so of course I could be wrong about this.
John Cole
Wouldn’t you get tired of the physical activity of swallowing just to get 58 beers down? On another note, I will never drink more than two beers before switching to something else or just stopping because I don’t want to be going to the bathroom all night.
wmd
You’re estimate on the mass of 48 cans of beer is roughly correct. Over the course of drinking that many beers one would urinate a lot, same as one would from drinking that much water.
Alcohol poisoning is possible from drinking beer, but as others have pointed out alcohol tolerance increases with training. Someone that didn’t regularly drink a case of beer a day would be in much worse condition than James Taylor.
Yutsano
@jeffreyw: Are you just gonna go through the entire Alton Brown recipe collection? NOM!
Corner Stone
@Martin #29
I will bet any amount of money you want to match you can’t do this.
jeffreyw
@Yutsano:
Oh? Did Alton go to home ec class in high school with Mrs J? She hasn’t mentioned him. LOL The recipe she used to make the pastry was on a mimeographed sheet.
Yutsano
@jeffreyw: Hee. He does a whole segment on fried pies like that. And you mentioned him as a culinary inspiration before. I put two and two together and got the wrong conclusion. Oh well. The food is still delicious though.
John Puma
A guy who drinks 48 beers will have to urinate.
Now we may pontificate endlessly whether this binge was appropriate.
BUT why get into a snit that he “exposed his genitals”?
Is he supposed to piss his pants as self-administered punishment for the drinking?
eemom
@ hitchhiker
happy birthday to you!
As for Sir Paul, meh. Wish John and George had lived to that birthday.
Amir_Khalid
@wmd:
Does alcohol tolerance delay the onset of poisoning, or just the onset of noticeable intoxication?
gnomedad
@hitchhiker:
I’ll be damned! Happy birthday! I’m 58 today myself. Amazing! At least we’re doing better than this guy.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
i think you can go the opposite way here, if you can drink 48 beers, its time to grow out of the kiddie coolers.
unless they were 7 ounce beers.
the story doesn’t suggest that there was cocaine or other stimulant involved which, can dramatically speed up your metabolism. most times i have seen such epic binges, there have been performance enhancing drugs involved.
even the basic beer math doesn’t support drinking that many beers. 2 cases of even the cheapest beer, is more than the cost of a cheap litre or more of liquor. if he can’t handle liquor even with mixers or chasers, that is why bum wine exists. anyone who drinks frequently enough to try it, should know basic beer math.
perhaps, rather than being a poster here, he shares his genes and innumeracy with megan mccardle.
gbear
The cops stopped believing him when he said he was the walking man.
Lavocat
It really all depends on the kind of beer. Back in the day, we could knock back a case of Coors Light each – and then we’d be ready for a serious Friday night of drinking.
Still, 48 beers is a bit of a stretch for ONE person.
Ab_Normal
@ Citizen Alan Dang it, you almost made me sporfle good scotch.