10:30 AM - Today's my 23rd Birthday! Temperature about 50 or so. Rainy and misty; much like all those cool pictures of the highlands and such. I went outside and hopped on the bike and read more from Stewart Lee Allen's The Devil's Cup. Today's 70+ pages I read were really interesting. They centered on the Islamic World and the Christendom during the 15th-17th centuries and the various rules and laws enacted with regards to coffee drinking. There was an interesting passage about Murad IV, an Islamic ruler in the early 1600s that actually went out at night in disguise to the various cafes in Istanbul to root out enemies. He was chronically driven by a fear of being killed and targeted (as any ruler probably would be, eh?) and in the process of going to cafes and taverns he found that most of the people in taverns were simply drunk off their butts and talking incoherently or about nothing of importance. On the other hand, the cafes were frequented by intellectuals that he feared were plotting the undoing of government. He went so far to make it punishable by death and beheading of anyone visiting a cafe, drinking coffee, growing a coffee plant, or found with coffee beans on their person. In addition, no coffee was allowed to be exported from the Turkish Empire. Up until the early 1700s, the Islamic World maintained its monopoly on the yummy stimulant.
Total Time: 1:00:30 Total Distance: 20 miles
"Since hot beverages were rare and water unsafe, workers took midmorning beer breaks. Beer for breakfast, ale for lunch, stout with dinner, and a few mugs in between. The average Northern European, including women and children, drank three liters of beer a day. That's almost two six-packs, but often the beer had a much higher alcoholic content. People in positions of power, like police, drank much more. Finnish soldiers were given a ration of five liters of strong ale a day (as much alcohol as about seven six-packs, or about forty cans)."
"Almost everything had some liqor in it, especially medicines. Anything that wasn't deliberately fermented went off in the summer heat. In the winter, the beer froze, causing the alcohol to separate into high-proof liquor. We can be sure the resulting moonshine did not go to waste. To make matters worse, the main nonalcoholic source of nutrition, bread, is now believed to have been plagued with the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, the base ingredient for LSD. Drunk doctors, tipsy politicians, hungover generals: the plague, famine, and war. Add a pope on acid, and medieval Christianity starts to make a whole lot of sense."
- pp. 128-129 from The Devil's Cup, by Stewart Lee Allen | 
