Wednesday 23 December 2009

Drink Driving Santa


Right. I've watched my first Scrooge film of the season, followed by the Great Escape yet again, after having hit Tesco very early this morning** to get the fridge stocked for the 25th. The office is officially in skeletal mode and the darts is on the telly. It really is beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Remember, though, that while we all kick back and relax at this time of year, for the righteous, it's a finger-wagging extravaganza.

Here are some Canucks being a right yuletide pain in the ass earlier this month.

Santa may be trading in his plates of cookies and glasses of milk and sucking back cold ones this Christmas.

That's the message Labatt is sending after ads surfaced at Mac's Convenience Stores across Ontario saying, "Leave one out for Santa. He's driving," and show a bottle of Labatt's Blue de-alcoholized beer.

But some consumers say it sends the wrong message. "I don't think that's quite appropriate," said Kathleen Clifford, 65, who saw the ad at a Mac's at Gerrard and Mutual Sts. yesterday.

"Children see that and they think we'd better leave beer for Santa instead of cookies and milk." she said. "I have grandchildren and great-granchildren and I don't approve of it. Maybe I'm an old fuddy-duddy."

Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University said the ad breaks the "golden rule" to never associate drinking with driving in a sales pitch.

"They're positioning that you can have a beer and you're still safe to drive, but they can't control how many of those 0.5% beers people consume," Middleton said.

"They thought being this lower alcohol would get them off the hook, but I don't think it does. This is a silly ad and if they've got a decent product, it should be powerful enough."

To précis, I think this means that there should be no 'merry' in Christmas.

** Ice on the inside of the windscreen - that global warming's a bastard.

UPDATE: Via the Curmudgeon, more miserable Christmas wishes and Chris Huhne hopefully quoted out of context (if not, he is a bit of an idiot).




7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Breaking News

Happy Winterval from Sarajevo

Court slams Bosnia for barring Jews, Roma from office.

Well ,if we can spoil Christmas for
smokers and drinkers we might as well make a start on the next
"undesirables"

No ban in Banya Luca

Curmudgeon said...

for the righteous, it's a finger-wagging extravaganza.

Absolutely!

And would it actually be physically possible for a fat middle-aged bloke to drink enough bottles of 0.5% lager in a short enough time to put himself over the drink-drive limit?

I bet the stuff tastes like a blend of piss and cardboard anyway.

Northampton Saint said...

Merry christmas all.. and i mean MERRY in all its alcohol soaked meaning. Tanglefoot, strongbow and Pinot Grigio in the fridge, Red and Jamesons in the cupboard, off work till the 4th... i see an alcoholic haze in the near horizon.

Oh and 2 pint glasses of Guiness at Worcester v Northampton Saints on Saturday

Leg-iron said...

Let's see...

If you were to drink the equivalent of a 300ml bottle of a typical 5% lager, that would be three litres of Labatt's.

That is some serious bladder exercise but not enough to get you plastered unless you're a lifelong teetotaler with liver dysfunction.

If Santa is having one of these at every house, it would mean at least every other house having yellow snow on the roof.

He'd get home sober, too, which will just put him in a bad mood and make life hell for the elves for the rest of the year.

Besides, as everyone knows, Rudolph is driving. Santa just flobs out on the back seat and laughs to himself.

Then again, if the slightest whiff of electrofag steam will cause a non-smoker to spontaneously die of a heart attack, then those trace-alcohol beers must be deadly too.

banned said...

Having listened with care to the Alcohol Alarmists I have concluded that this Christmas will only be fulfilled and appropriate if spent in an alcohol fuelled frenzy.

Merry Christmas Dick and best wishes for blogging in 2010

Dick Puddlecote said...

Same to you, Banned, and everyone else who chats here from time to time, as also expressed above.

Antipholus Papps said...

To give Canadians their credit, they are law-abiding and polite, to the point of distress to an angry anarchist like me, but they will still utterly ignore measures that make no sense. Stephen Harper - and I really don't want to bless him, but I will for this - recently spurned a UN Climate Change (tm) meeting to open a branch of Tim Hortons! A true Canadian!

In America, they say: just say no to drugs!

In Canada we say: no, thank you!