UnNews:Government Unveils Shatter-proof Pint
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| Government Unveils Shatter-proof Pint | 
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4 February 2010
LONDON, ENGLAND -- In a glass-shattering break with the norm, the Government of the United Kingdom has surprised the world by actually doing something useful and introducing a pint glass that pub customers cannot break on a corner of the bar. Officials believe that the country could save billions in health care reductions by coming up with a glass that doesn't double as a lethal weapon. There are about 87,000 alcohol-related glass attacks each year, with many resulting in hospital visits. Drinkers in Newcastle have threatened to strike as a result of the new legislation, but Home Secretary Alan Johnson said: "We are trying to move further to a Britain in which injury and mayhem are rendered physically impossible."
The government has for years wrestled with increasing costs of the National Health Service, with reformers agreeing on reforming the citizenry. Previously, they had confiscated all firearms and briefly studied how utensils might be removed from British dinner tables. Her Majesty's Government viewed changing the technology of pub glassware as a more promising approach than eliminating garden tools, removing the javelin, discus, and shot from track-and-field competitions, and restricting the use of motorways to golf carts and wheelbarrows, to name three areas currently under study by working groups.
The culture of binge drinking, which may underlie the use of shards of pint glasses as makeshift weapons, was left un-addressed; as was staying at the pub until it closes at two in the morning, and maintaining a system of regional dialects that renders unintelligible anyone who grew up more than twenty miles away.
Two types of shatterproof technologies are in the works: one has a thin layer of crud on the interior, resulting from poor washing after two dozen uses. The other involves heating and bending shatterproof windshield glass into pint-glass shape. It is thought that the first idea may improve the taste of the product, and the discolouration will be noticed less and less as regional brews gain favor with the drinking public. By comparison, bending windshield glass often left leaky seams in the pint glass, although Johnson was sanguine about this. "We believe that having beer leak out of the glass may further reduce the tendency to start fights at the nation's pubs," he said.
Johnson was consulted by the Prime Minister during a recent Question Period after a Conservative M.P. charged that the reformulation of pub glassware could "surreptitiously" introduce a campaign to reduce the serving size, another Labour priority. In the United Kingdom, all pubs are jointly owned by the brewing companies and the Crown, which itself has sharp points and could conceivably be used as a weapon when Her Majesty steps out for a half pint of Bitters with the common man.
The design based on windshield glass, besides being shatterproof, could have a hidden benefit for drinkers everywhere. "The glass could keep the beer colder for longer," said a government engineer. By implication, persistently cold beer could be offensive to Britons and reduce the allure of the pub entirely.
A spokesman for the Campaign for Real Ale said he has never seen pint glasses used in a malicious way. "I must frequent the wrong pubs," he said. The spokesman went on to remark that he had never seen any beer drinker throw up or slur his speech.
Sources[edit]
- Gregory Katz "Cheers! Brits toast new shatterproof pint glass". Associated Press, February 4, 2010