John Walsh: BTW (03/12/10)
It's enough to push drinkers over the limit
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Your support makes all the difference.* A drink-driving report from the House of Commons Transport Committee says the current legal limit of alcohol in your bloodstream – 80mg per 100ml – is too high and should be reduced to 20mg. Confusingly, it then says the public would never stand for such a drastic step, and they recommend trying for 50mg. But what does this mean for the drink-loving driver who wants to avoid a 12-month disqualification if caught? 80mg means just over a pint of bitter or two glasses of wine. 50mg means three quarters of a pint (you'll need a measuring jug in the pub) or one glass of wine and a sip of someone else's. 20mg means 0.625 of a unit, or two liqueur chocolates, or one mouthful of Baileys, or one packet of wine gums. Clear now? Cheers!
* Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well and living on Carmarthenshire district council. They've taken exception to the exploits of an eccentric philanthropist who calls himself the Woodland Santa, steals into Pembrey country park (near Llanelli) under cover of darkness and leaves gift-wrapped presents for children dangling from the branches of fir trees. Muttering darkly about "littering issues," park rangers have solemnly removed a Mickey Mouse soft toy, a Winnie-the-Pooh puppet and a Teletubbies annual from the trees and consigned them to the custody of local charity shops, but the Woodland Santa persists with his rambunctious generosity. The council warns that if he's nabbed they'll take him to court for "fly-tipping". And the fat bloke who parked his sleigh illegally on the roof of No 23 Acacia Avenue, Cheam, had better watch his step too.
* It's not surprising that Angelina Jolie is having trouble finding a title for her directorial debut. Her film, a love story about a Serbian man and a Bosnian woman on the eve of the 1992-5 war, has drawn complaints from female war victims who object to the plot. Was the working title A Serbian Romance? The last thing she wants is for her tender story to be confused with A Serbian Film, the already-notorious shocker directed by Srdjan Spasojevic in which a retired porn star is lured into making a video nasty. In one scene, he beheads a woman while making love to her, and goes on humping her headless corpse. Angelina has told objectors that in her film "there are many twists in the plot that address the sensitive nature of the relationship between the main characters". She doesn't want them thinking one of the twists is decapitation, does she?
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