Sobriety -- now there's your social awkwardness.

I needed a drink just to read this piece of health fascist propaganda below).

After all, it's after 12  ... okay, it's almost noon.

Yesterday it was time to purchase a replacement bottle of gin, so after loading in for Rock the Rocks, I steered the car toward Pearl Street and the oasis known hereabouts as Keg Liquors, only to remember that the street was being blocked off for a car show -- which I take it was an officially-sanctioned white bread Bicentennial event, or else Emperor Caesar would have self-immolated.

I went home instead, but later, me and the missus went on a long walk, and following restorative espresso at Quills, we strolled over to Keg for the necessary larder. It was helpfully brown paper bagged, and we set out for Spring Street and the route home, where we'd be walking in the same direction as cars should be traveling if not for the ceaseless Luddite resistance to human rationality.

Before reaching the turn, we encountered selected city officials. Pleasantries were exchanged, and afterwards, my wife speculated as to whether they think we're alcoholics.

No, I replied. In all likelihood, and speaking only for myself, they KNOW it. But it's just as Winston Churchill once said: "I've gotten more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me."

These are words for living and coping, especially in this benumbed and often quite stupid place, and that's why a small scientific sampling hardly deters me.

Alcohol can make you socially awkward, by Kimberly Gillan (MSN)

You might reach for a schooner or a glass of sparkling to take the edge off an awkward social situation, but a new study shows that too much alcohol renders you incapable of reading social cues.

US researchers recruited 12 college students and gave half of them an alcoholic drink and the other half a non-alcoholic drink.

They were asked to match images of happy, angry, fearful and neutral faces with faces with the same facial expression while their brains were being scanned ...