Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for February 28, 2025

This PSA brought to you by me, an expert on the subject!

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Tea seems to be a very evil substance. It is much more dangerous than beer.

I discovered this last night. I drank 15 beers up until 3 a.m. at the local bar while my wife was at home just drinking her tea.

You should have seen how mad and violent she was when I got home. She threw the chair at me and kept screaming at the top of her lungs.

On the other hand, I was quiet and peaceful and silently made my way to bed. But she kept cursing and shouting through the night and well into the next morning.

Please friends, if you can’t handle your tea, you should not be drinking it. Please, for the sake of your poor husband, avoid drinking tea.

A saint for beer…..

Four year or so after WW2 my parents visited Yugoslavia. Mom drank the water and got quite sick. My Dad only drank beer and whisky with water. He did not get sick. Blessed by Saint Arnold.

The Hungarians planned for celebrating the new millennium.

Those Hungarians must had partied like it was 1999!

In early America, it was widely known that questionable water could make you sick or worse, and that alcoholic beverages were a safe alternative. Beer and hard cider were consumed instead of water in those circumstances. Even children drank a low-alcohol beverage called “small beer”.

Which meant they could party like it was 1999.

Que “1999” by Prince. :-)

But.. but, the world is flat. How can there be “global” shipments?

1087 the year of St Arnold of Soissons

Time’s up, they can clink glasses again!

Wine sales in general are way down.

Drinking water might give you cholera, or maybe even a few other things but plague isn’t spread that way. But they probably didn’t know that back then.

Notice the losing Hungarians did not give up drinking beer. They weren’t stupid.

Imagine living in a setting where toddlers where regularly fed beer.

before the invention of modern water treatment alcohol was really the only way to sterilize a drink, wine or beer was the best way to hydrate without worrying about having the runs the next day

Austria and Hungary have had a turbulent relationship over the course of three hundred years ending in the aftermath of WW2. That war pretty much was the beginning of the end of Western Imperialism.

I’m reminded of an old Andy Capp strip (not the new rubbish that GoComics post) where Andy tells a barman how he can sell more beer.

“How?”, asks the landlord.

“PUT LESS WATER IN IT!”

Ironically it wasn’t the water they drank that spread the plague, but the magical holy water that everyone dipped their nasty little fingers into that helped spread the disease.

As Major Hochstetter might ask, “What is this clink!?!”

I don’t see how drinking beer, prevented plague, granted it has been several decades since I quit drinking. but the last time i checked, water was still the main ingredient, and beer needed to be cool fermented

How about a saint who urged people to drink coffee? Heating the water ought to kill the bacteria, particularly if you bring it to a full boil and then let it cool down a little.

Okay, I looked up St. Arnie, and he lived from 1040 to 1087 A.D., before Europeans had coffee or even tea (yes, I saw the tea post above). Man, life was rough back then. Arnie worked with what he had.

Agreed