In the professional world, a work day never ends at 5. For the few times you have left before 5:30, I can only imagine the sheer guilt consuming you. Leaving before projects have been completed to provide the body with sustenance* will add to your unhappiness. Why are the old popular happy hour joints suddenly shortening their hours to 4-6? We can blame this decrease on the general popularity of happy hour, Californians, or point our finger at the Oregon Restaurant Association.

Preach on, brother! Yeah, I’d love to hit more happy hours. The 4-6 thing makes it nearly impossible for us, though.

A beer a day could keep brittle bones at bay. That’s because beer is rich in silicon, an element that has been linked to bone health. But what type of beer should you drink?

Previous studies have shown that silicon can aid bone growth, and that moderate beer drinking is linked to increased bone density. Now Charles Bamforth and Troy Casey at the University of California, Davis, have discovered how much silicon each type of beer contains.

They analysed 100 beers from around the world and found that the brews contained between 6.4 and 56 milligrams of silicon per litre, with an average of 29 milligrams per litre. Looking at the silicon levels in beer’s ingredients, they found that most of it comes from the husks of malted barley.

The pair found that lighter-coloured beers made from pale malted barley and hops, such as pale ales, are richest in silicon, while low-alcohol beers contain the least, along with stouts, porters and wheat beers.

Maybe I’ll up my light/dark ratio a bit. You know, for my health. You can never start too early to keep your bones nice and strong! Thanks to Instapundit for the news filtering for the day.

For cultural reasons, however, the Vodka Belt has been losing ground to the Beer Belt. Scandinavians tend to drink more beer than before (although possibly this doesn’t mean they drink less wodka). Maybe this is due to the perception of beer correlating more with ‘core European’ behaviour (as it is the preferred alcoholic beverage of Britain, Germany and other influential and centrally positioned countries). That might explain the emergence in Poland, some years ago, of a Beer-Lovers’ Party (which actually won seats in the Polish Parliament in the early 1990s). Beer has since surpassed wodka as the most consumed type of alcohol in Poland.

That’s what we need in the USA! A Beer-Lover’s Party! It does sound much more fun that the Tea Party, doesn’t it?