Mine's a pint.

Ah, Design! Technology! Solving all our problems.

Apparently, the Home Office’s 'Design and Technology Alliance Against Crime' (what?) and the Design Council have established a project called Design Out Crime. According to their excitable website, it is

"..showing how designers can get to the root of a crime problem and stop it happening"

Oh really?

And there was us, thinking that we needed more police, and a few more feral fucking hoodies behind bars. And it turns out, its all just design. Design, baby!

So what have these doubtless bespectacled, probably goateed, designers done for us then? Instant Spider-senses? Affordable Bat-mobiles? Nope.

No, what they've done is .. wait for it .. invented a new beer glass.

Yes, really.

But a beer glass with a difference. A beer glass that's a little bit like a car windscreen, in that it doesn't shatter into a million tiny pieces when broken.

So, when the traditional Saturday evening fight kicks off, there'll still be a shitload of people in casualty with broken noses, missing teeth and cracked ribs from the kickings they've received. There'll still be the odd person with stab wounds.There might even be someone with a bullet in 'em.

But what there won't be is that bloke covered in cuts because he's had a glass mashed into his face. No, instead, he'll have a broken nose, and a large round bruise.

Well hoorah! At one stroke, we've addressed binge drinking, disaffected youth and the inadequate policing of violence hotspots. Haven't we? No, we fucking haven't.

We've turned one of the many weapons at hand in a pub brawl into a slightly different - but equally useful - kind of weapon.

And of course, who do you think is going to pay for all this cutting-edge beverage-holding excitement? Well, let's see.

It could be the Home Office. In other words, us.

It could be the owners of pub chains and the vendors of booze, who will promptly increase prices to cover the costs. So again, us.

Or it could be the poor ol' landlords who serve the booze who - if they don't go bust as a result of having to replace every glass in the fucking place - will also pass on the cost in increased prices. So, once more, us.

Grand.

.

9 comments:

Captain Haddock said...

Only in "Brown's" Britain .. if it wasn't so funny, it would be tragic ..

Joe Public said...

Starbucks since they began, have used liquid containers that don't shatter.

JuliaM said...

Hmm, let's see...

I'm served a bottle of lager and a glass, when I inexplicably get the urge to maim my companion. Do I:

a) try to wrap my hand around a pint glass and club him in the face with it ( a convex objkect, remember, so not best suited) thus leaving myself open to injury when it shatters in my hand, or

b) pick up the much thicker glass bottle by it's handy, handle-shaped neck, smash the base against the bar, and instantly have a jagged edged cutting weapon?

It's a puzzle, isn't it?

manwiddicombe said...

A beer glass that's a little bit like a car windscreen, in that it doesn't shatter into a million tiny pieces when broken.

cutting-edge beverage-holding excitement?

erm .. .. I thought the point was that it wasn't?

;o)

Furor Teutonicus said...

It could be the owners of pub chains and the vendors of booze, who will promptly increase prices to cover the costs. So again, us.

Which will mean MORE pubs going out of bussiness, which is the result the Dictatorship was thinking of all along.

They could not be more obvious if the made it law that everyone going to the pub had to dress as a Bunny Girl.

sickofit said...

These wankers are grant funded by the DIUS!

The gorgon and his war crim predecessor have created a fantastically profitable merry go round where money goes in in the form of taxes, goes round the system "fixing" things that aren't broke and ends up in the pockets of the socialists and their followers who believe everyone should be equal except them!

I still cannot believe how the hell they can get away with this scam day in day out.

banned said...

I've yet to forgive pubs for wirhdrawing those pint glasses that had a bulge just below the rim, it sat so easily in ones hand.

Furor Teutonicus said...

Always preferd those with handles and like ovals set in the main body all around them.

Probably classed as "an offensive weapon" nowdays.

selsey.steve said...

@ 22 March 2010 10:37
Furor Teutonicus said...

Always preferd those with handles and like ovals set in the main body all around them.

Correct name is a "Jacobean". Best glass for a really good pint.