Quote of the Day (David Sedaris, on a Past January Train Ride)

“[T]here was a smoking car on the Amtrak I took from Raleigh to Chicago in 1984, but seven years later it was gone. By then if you wanted a cigarette your only option was to head for the bar. It sounds all right in passing, romantic even—'the bar on the Lake Shore Limited’—but in fact it was rather depressing. Too bright, too loud, and full of alcoholics who commandeered the seats immediately after boarding and remained there, marinating like cheap kebabs, until they reached their destinations. At first, their voices might strike you as jolly: the warm tones of strangers becoming friends. Then the drinkers would get sloppy and repetitive, settling, finally, on that cross-eyed mush that passes for alcoholic sincerity.” —Comic essayist David Sedaris, on a January 1991 train ride, in “Reflections:Guy Walks into a Bar,” The New Yorker, Apr. 20, 2009

Quote of the Day (Samuel Steward, on What Many Will Experience New Year’s Eve)

“There are six stages in getting drunk. Jocose, amorous, bellicose, morose, lachrymose, and comatose.” —Samuel Steward (1909-1993), Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist, edited by Jeremy Mulderig (2015)

(The image accompanying this post is from Jack Lemmon’s famous drunk scene from the classic 1960 film, The Apartment.)

Quote of the Day (Orson Welles, on ‘Intimate Dinners for Four’)

“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people with me.” —Actor-director-writer-gourmand Orson Welles (1915-1985), quoted in Simon Callow, “The Glutton Who Gorged Himself on Women,” The Daily Mail (U.K.), Dec. 4, 2015

Quote of the Day (Scott Adams, on Beer and Snails)

“I noticed that the neighborhood snails were massing their forces near my garden and I needed to defend my territory. My friend with Midwestern roots assures me that I can solve this problem by putting a plate of beer in the garden. Apparently snails like beer, but it kills them. Interestingly, it's the only thing snails do quickly. I've been trying to kill myself with beer for decades. I am literally slower than a snail.”— Scott Adams, “Diary of a Cartoonist: Dilbert Creator Scott Adams,” The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2014

Quote of the Day (Winston Churchill, on an American Watering Hole)

“I must confess that on one occasion I was taken to a speakeasy. I went, of course, in my capacity as a Social Investigator."—Winston Churchill, 1932, quoted in The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill, edited by Richard M. Langworth (2009)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, with a Thought to Ponder After Seasonal Revelries)

“Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with, that it's compounding a felony.”--Humorist Robert Benchley, quoted in The New Speaker's Treasury of Wit and Wisdom (1958), by Herbert Victor Prochnow

TV Quote of the Day (“Rumpole of the Bailey,” on An Englishman’s Castle)

“An Englishman's gin bottle is his castle.”-- Barrister Horace Rumpole (played by Leo McKern) to wife Hilda (played by Peggy Thorpe-Bates), a.k.a. “She Who Must Be Obeyed,” in “Rumpole and the Married Lady,” from Season One of Rumpole of the Bailey, directed by Graham Evans, written by John Mortimer, air date April 24, 1978