Hot on the heels of the unofficial anti-stabbing knife, the Home Office plans to introduce a pint glass made of shatter-proof plastic (via Bruce Schneier).
Future British innovations are likely to include the rubber sidewalk (because people keep falling down!) and a ban on rivers (because people keep drowning!).
Those would actually be more useful. If people couldn’t hit people with glasses, they’d just use something else, like a chair or whatnot. Are the British going to turn bars into giant rubber rooms?
They have also started this in Australia in some “high risk” pubs.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,25527146-3102,00.html
The plastic reducing the quality does make it a bit dumb, yes. Why not just mandate them to be Pyrex, if they’re that concerned?
Hopefully you can still club someone to death with shatterproof plastic.
I hope so, that would be wicked!
For the easy, quasi-scientific answer to this question, grab a small Pyrex mixing bowl and clonk yourself in the head with it. When (if) you recover, do the same with a plastic one.
That said, it seems to me be treating the symptom rather than the cause. The plastic pint glasses I’ve had at festivals and stuff are irritatingly flexible and tend to split and spill everywhere too, which is pretty bloody irritating.
I’m not so sure about the rubber pavements, the advantage of concrete is that vomit can flow between the cracks and generally seep away. Rubber pavements would yield a similar effect to a paella on a bouncy castle.
Plastic pint glasses will be much better though. Put one inside the other, melt them together using a lighter and carve/sharpen the bottom into some sort of nasty shape. Voila, one pyrex fist weapon!
There are thicker multiuse models that hardly bend and are durable. The feel is different to glass, though, they’re not as cold to the touch.
Taking your jest seriously, they’re probably targeting impulsive, drunken violence, “hit someone with what’s in your hand now”-related injuries.
All right. Nobody move. The girl got glassed and no cnt leaves here until we find out which cnt did it.
Obviously, coming from Bavaria where the worst bar altercation involves the raising of voices, followed by profuse apologies, this would appear strange.
However, being a regular drinker in British pubs, and having narrowly avoided a glassing on at least one occasion, and witnessed many more, this seems pretty sensible.
Dodgy bars and clubs with sensible owners already use floppy plastic glasses to avoid this, which is less than perfect, and probably a sin for a Bavarian beer drinker, but such is life in Britain.
Whilst they are already used in chav infested town pubs and bars, I can’t see any point in enforcing this in literally thousands of quiet pubs full of old geezers drinking real ale. I suspect someone in Home Office has a brother that imports them from China sits on the same committee as the nanny staters. The percentage of injuries compared with the millions of drinks served in glasses in the UK is utterly neglible so this is another example of those control freak bureaucrat vermin fiddling in the most mundane aspects of British life.
Clearly the answer is the ASBO the chavs until the only pubs they can go into are the geezer ones, thereby justifying the mandate!
Technically North America has already been through this in 60’s and 70’s. Stubby beer bottles were our attempt to keep people from glassing each other.
I remember an episode of Dan Dare where he was able to survive a leap from a London high-rise because he remembered the government had been experimenting with rubber paving just before he left/died/was thrown into the timestream.
Glasses are particularly handy, and particularly dangerous. There’s nothing stopping individual pubs switching to the durable kind already (AFAIK bizarre beerglass quality byelaws are possbile I supposed). The fact they haven’t may mean something. Or it might not.
I can’t see a frosted plastic beer mug ever replacing a nice, frosted glass beer mug. It just wouldn’t be the same.
I’m sure plenty of places will switch to these, but not because of glassings, but because of health and safety. Loads of places in my city switch to plastic glasses once it gets busy or late. It means the staff only have to throw sawdust on spillages (not that they do this anyway) and don’t have to clean up the broken glass.
It will be in only the somewhat classier places, though. The other places will just stick with the cheap plastic glasses.
The UK should simply ban football on the pub TV, problem solved. ;)
When I was in college, I worked at a nightclub that had 32oz glass mugs for draft beer. The number of these that would be broken nightly (some in fights, but most simply by drunken girls and boys dropping them on the floor) was staggering. I’d bring up half a dozen cases of new mugs every Wednesday ($1 draft beer night). Eventually the ownership switched to plastic mugs, which made my life much easier and made zero difference to the customers who were drinking shit beer from shit taps anyway.
If I paid good money for a good beer though, and they served it in a plastic mug/glass, I’d be unlikely to return to that establishment.
Well sure it’ll still be a nasty weapon, but I thought they were worrying about shattering/stabbing, not clonking.
Jesus Christ, I never expected to be reminded of that. That was the exceedingly crap and unsuccessful relaunch of The Eagle in the eighties, not the proper 50’s/60’s Eagle, which was awesome (much like Begbie).