Shaken, not stirred.

December 24, 2013 10:55 AM

The BMJ analysis of 007's alcohol consumption.
posted by pjern (57 comments total)

Kinda explains why he dialed down to Heineken over the past few decades.
posted by Smart Dalek at 11:03 AM on December 24, 2013

No, see, it's okay as the speed helps even him out.
posted by Artw at 11:03 AM on December 24, 2013 [8 favorites]

Anyway, you'd drink too if you had to murder that many people...
posted by Artw at 11:07 AM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

So that's why he always says "Mish Moneypenny"!
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 11:08 AM on December 24, 2013 [10 favorites]

As well, 80 cigarettes a day.
posted by parki at 11:08 AM on December 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

It's worth noting that a standard unit of alcohol in the UK, where this was published, is 10 mL (as opposed to ~18 mL in the US). For a second my mind was boggling at the fact that the "recommended" daily alcohol intake in the UK was three drinks.
posted by invitapriore at 11:09 AM on December 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

A fictional character acts like a fictional character? You don't say! No doubt they'll be analyzing Archer next....
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:11 AM on December 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

Bond has nothing on Nick and Nora Charles. Hell, their dog Asta could probably drink Bond under the table.
posted by dortmunder at 11:13 AM on December 24, 2013 [23 favorites]

Greg_Ace: "A fictional character acts like a fictional character? You don't say! No doubt they'll be analyzing Archer next...."

Hey, sorry, the point was just here, you must have just missed it. In fact, I'm surprised you didn't see it on the way in. Do you want its number? I've got its number right here.
posted by invitapriore at 11:14 AM on December 24, 2013 [4 favorites]

Presumably he got transplant surgery in 'You Only Liver Twice.'
posted by colie at 11:21 AM on December 24, 2013 [7 favorites]

Hey, sorry, the point was just here, you must have just missed it.

well, order me another then - guinness, remember?
posted by pyramid termite at 11:25 AM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

they'll be analyzing Archer next....

APA reports he has mother issues and extreme herpetophobia.
posted by arcticseal at 11:26 AM on December 24, 2013 [3 favorites]

A fictional character acts like a fictional character? You don't say!

Bond's drinking and smoking lifestyle are probably pretty close to his creator's. The article says as much: "In fact, the author Ian Fleming died aged 56 of heart disease after a life notable for alcohol and tobacco excess. We suspect that Bond’s life expectancy would be similar."
posted by linux at 11:42 AM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

There's a good reason why Bond orders his vodka martinis "shaken, not stirred"...
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 12:13 PM on December 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

Presumably he got transplant surgery in 'You Only Liver Twice.'

Was that the one one after the all "on the rocks" adventure For Your Ice Only?
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:25 PM on December 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Ugh, I feel like crap. Do I have cancer again?"

"No, you drank too much!"

"That's a thing?"
posted by The Whelk at 12:35 PM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

Naw, That one came much later. You Only Liver Twice was the one after Goldschläger and Highball.
posted by radwolf76 at 12:42 PM on December 24, 2013 [6 favorites]

He hit rock bottom in the Moore era with OctoPouilly-Fuissé
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:48 PM on December 24, 2013 [3 favorites]

Is a carafe in British English somehow larger than a bottle of wine? Based on the chart it is 1/3 more than a bottle. Also the methodology for assigning alcohol units is a slight bit suspect, coming from some years of bartending experience.
posted by efalk at 1:06 PM on December 24, 2013

no, bond really hit bottom in a view to a swill
posted by pyramid termite at 1:08 PM on December 24, 2013 [6 favorites]

It makes sense with the hangover scene in Live and Let Lie Down a Bit Longer.
posted by perhapses at 1:19 PM on December 24, 2013 [9 favorites]

There was a good doc about Bond a while back - the presenter ate one of the meals mentioned in one of the books along with all the booze and said he really needed to go for a lie down rather than get on with some hard core spying / shagging.

Then again
his weekly alcohol consumption was 92 units a week
would make him a bit of a lightweight at the uni I went to
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:36 PM on December 24, 2013

Meh, forget the boozing. What I've always wondered is how Bond doesn't have all the STDs.

Kinda explains why he dialed down to Heineken over the past few decades.

Daniel Craig has allegedly balked at saying the usual "shaken, not stirred" line because he felt it was tired at this point. I wonder if he's now balking at the excessive boozing in general and this is advanced PR?
posted by fuse theorem at 1:37 PM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

Hey, sorry, the point was just here, you must have just missed it. In fact, I'm surprised you didn't see it on the way in. Do you want its number? I've got its number right here.

Well, one of us missed the point, certainly.

I think it gave you a fake number, too
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:52 PM on December 24, 2013

License to Swill
Goldschlager
From Russia with Vodka
Thunderbird
Cirrhosis is Forever
SkyyFall
A View To a Tequila
In Her Majesty's Secret Liquor Cabinet
BlueMoonRaker
A Quantum of Shiraz
Casino Rye-Ale
Liver and Let Die
posted by Renoroc at 2:02 PM on December 24, 2013 [18 favorites]

dortmunder: "Bond has nothing on Nick and Nora Charles. Hell, their dog Asta could probably drink Bond under the table."

I am ashamed that I didn't know that Frank and Sadie Doyle from Thrilling Adventure Hour was based on Nick and Nora Charles.
posted by lazaruslong at 2:06 PM on December 24, 2013

The Man With The Golden Rum
posted by radwolf76 at 2:29 PM on December 24, 2013 [6 favorites]

For reasons that are not entirely sensible (thanks, Amazon, for putting all the Bond books on sale), I've been reading through the series. And the interesting things I've noticed are (a) Bond doesn't drink more than any other character in the books, and (b) he often doesn't actually get the girl. Everyone is drinking CONSTANTLY. Even the guy who had an arm and a leg bitten off by a shark.
posted by me & my monkey at 2:39 PM on December 24, 2013 [6 favorites]

Is a carafe in British English somehow larger than a bottle of wine? Based on the chart it is 1/3 more than a bottle. Also the methodology for assigning alcohol units is a slight bit suspect, coming from some years of bartending experience.

While a carafe isn't a unit a measurement (but a type of container) I've almost always seen it sold in bars and restaurants as a liter of wine while a bottle is 750ml, so that would be a 1/3 more.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 2:55 PM on December 24, 2013

Thanks to Bond my first cocktail was flavorless and prepared poorly, at my request. Well done, 007.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:13 PM on December 24, 2013 [4 favorites]

The ingredients aren't right anymore, apparently.
posted by Artw at 3:18 PM on December 24, 2013

The 2006 update may be worth a look.
posted by Artw at 3:21 PM on December 24, 2013

Apparently there may have been other factors at work, but I've always considered that his (poor) choice of cocktail preparation methods is due to the writerly trope of giving the protagonist one trait against character.
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:01 PM on December 24, 2013

Bond drinks a lot and I have no doubt it's to excess, but the books also date from a time when people drank a lot more. IIRC that was one of the things people talked about in the early seasons of Mad Men, as well: people drank (and smoked) all the time.

(It's also one of the reasons the stories don't age well. Bond as a period piece, please.)
posted by immlass at 4:21 PM on December 24, 2013

Last night I could not get to sleep and I dug around in the boxes of books deemed unworthy of the shelf, coming up with "Casino Royale". The first scene shows us Bond retiring for the night from gambling, because he can tell he's getting tired. Fleming explains how he is always sure to respond to any signals from his body or mind that indicate that he is at less than peak condition. So he goes back to his room, and: "....Bond lit his seventieth cigarette of the day..."
posted by thelonius at 4:42 PM on December 24, 2013

Dr. Sure, I'll Have Another
The Spy Who Passed Out on Me
posted by gimli at 5:15 PM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

(It's also one of the reasons the stories don't age well. Bond as a period piece, please.)

I loved Casino Royal but it would have been great if they'd set it back in the post war fifties that the books were set in.
posted by octothorpe at 6:28 PM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

The bits of Casino Royale that are the book are excellent... I care a lot less about the rest.
posted by Artw at 6:41 PM on December 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

Bond as a period piece, please.

One of the greatest disappointments of the new Bond "reboot" has been that they felt it necessary to set it in the current day and not do it as a period piece a la Mad Men. Everything makes so much more sense then: the boozing, the retrograde attitudes to women, the lack of diversity, the clothes, the cars, the bad guys, etc. Bond just works better in a slightly-blurred (perhaps slightly blotto) version of the postwar / early Cold War era than the modern one. It would allow the directors to portray Bond's behavior without falling over themselves to justify it; he would be free to be a far more ambiguous Cold War character, a sort of violent, amoral Don Draper.

That would be something worth watching.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:50 PM on December 24, 2013 [6 favorites]

What If James Bond had fought Batman's villains?
posted by The Whelk at 7:09 PM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

It's strange - most of the doctors I know drink (or otherwise) like fish, but their professional associations and journals are such bloody wowsers. It's like they let the public health people fill all the editorial roles, except I'd expect public health people to know better than use odds ratio like that without presenting some sort of baseline mortality/morbidity.
posted by memetoclast at 7:43 PM on December 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

I can't find it now, but it was during some Metafilter discussion on Avacados, where someone linked to an article showing how Flemming's popular novels introduced a lot of post War Britons to exciting and novel cuisine like Spagetti Avongale and Avacado desserts and that the first few books aren't nearly as exotic and glam as we'd expect, just exotic and glamourous for immediately post-war Britian.

Besides if you feel sleepy after your huge meal of carbs and gin you just take some uppers. Problem solved.
posted by The Whelk at 8:25 PM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

From Russia with Love is always my recommendation - its just a good solid spy story.
posted by Artw at 9:26 PM on December 24, 2013

I would love, love, love a properly-period set movie of the Travis McGee books, since I'm in the middle of rereading them as I do every so often.* In a world where Bond is a viable and still beloved character, is there any room for one of my favorite characters and his adventuring, which tends to stay (if just a hair) on the more believable side of the boozing, womanizing, taking out the bad guys stuff. It's been a while since I've read the Bond books, but I remember them being...wow. And yet I'm tempted to pick up a few of them for my Kindle and see if they match up to my memory. Not sure which one to start with, it's been so long.

Are there other "men's adventure" heroes besides Bond and McGee that have managed to last and are still viable?

*I have heard vague and disturbing rumors of a Leonardo Di Caprio take on Travis McGee but do not choose to acknowledge them.
posted by PussKillian at 9:30 PM on December 24, 2013 [2 favorites]

MacDonald has his charms, but inventing a whole character (Meyer) to serve as a a voice for the author's rants about economics and society is maybe not one of them
posted by thelonius at 12:07 AM on December 25, 2013

Ack no I love Meyer
posted by PussKillian at 8:02 AM on December 25, 2013

oh, everyone does, I do too..... I'm just saying......he's kind of transparently there to Declaim the Truth every now and then. I guess he also functions as a Dr. Watson though.
posted by thelonius at 9:24 AM on December 25, 2013

Are there other "men's adventure" heroes besides Bond and McGee that have managed to last and are still viable?

I tried rereading the Horatio Hornblower books and found that they had been visited by the Suck Fairy; the various characters' motivations just didn't seem believable (too much naval navel-gazing on the nature of duty, etc.). Very disappointing as I loved them when I was younger. Perhaps my fondness for them colored my rereading as an adult, others might enjoy them more if approaching fresh.

However, I've heard that the Aubrey-Maturin series, which begins with Master and Commander, and is sort of in the same historical-fiction "men's adventure" genre and set in a similar period, holds up better. They are more modern books though so it's arguably not a fair comparison; the first A-M book was written at about the time the last HH one was.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:10 PM on December 25, 2013

I read the first two books in the A-M series like, this summer and didn't think they had any troublesome or weird stuff outside of the general Men's Adventure stuff, and a really great slice of life picture of a time and place. I learned so much about ships! And grog!
posted by The Whelk at 2:32 PM on December 25, 2013

The Aubrey - Maturin books, though, are actually really well written; they're literature as much if not more than they are adventure novels. As I remember Ian Fleming that was not so much an issue, ugh. I don't think I ever got all the way through a James Bond book and it wasn't because he drank too much. Now I have read all the Travis McGees and they're great (if you can overlook the unbelievable amount of sexism, my god, when I think about how I read them as a young teen it kind of explains a lot, badly) but not perhaps additions to the literary canon. And the Hornblower books I think were always YA, weren't they? I read them as a kid, anyway.
posted by mygothlaundry at 3:45 PM on December 25, 2013

The A-M books are excellent, although I think not quite what I would call men's adventure type stuff - I suppose I was thinking pulpier stuff that managed to transcend their pulp origins. For example, Spencer might work? Mike Hammer, maybe? I'm not sure if Spencer is pulpy enough.

The sexism in the McGees is definitely present, although not to any sort of crazy James Bond levels. And I think there is a growth in that regard through the books as they enter the eighties. I don't know about the literary canon, but although I read my fair share of lit, I'm a genre defender in a lot of ways.

I haven't read any of the Hornblowers, but that will be corrected someday.
posted by PussKillian at 4:28 PM on December 25, 2013

One interesting thing that I've noticed about detective genre fiction: it almost always is obsessed with the aging and physical decay of the detective's body. Why that is, I do not know. In the Parker books, this takes the form of detailed catalogs of everything that Spenser eats or drinks. I was grateful, after reading a few of them, that I didn't also have to read about what kind of a dump he took.
posted by thelonius at 6:58 PM on December 25, 2013

I guess we're lucky that Dark Knight Returns didn't feature a bat-poop.
posted by Artw at 7:08 PM on December 25, 2013

The Prisoner still holds up extremely well as a masculine spy type character. He is more or less asexual and teetotal, so the lifestyle issues and sexism don't apply often. Plus, he is in a surreal government panopticon, which if anything has become more believable over time.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 8:58 AM on December 26, 2013

He is more or less asexual and teetotal

The absence of booze is more of a being controlled issue than an absence of want, there where at least two or three episodes where me manages to drink. And, asexual, only in the sense there are no sex scenes, Number 6 spends a lot of time around women, and is even (strangely, kind of retoconned imo) engaged in one episode.

But I was going to mention Danger Man, which is another Patrick Mcgoohan endeavor. Lot of drinking and smoking there. But that's not surprising as Danger Man and James Bond kind of fed off one another. Mcgoohan wasn't having any of the amoral, wantonly womanizing aspect though.
posted by edgeways at 6:20 AM on December 27, 2013

there were at least two or three episodes where he manages to drink

The speakeasy cave in Free For All, for one.

Number 6 spends a lot of time around women

And he does use romance as a tool for manipulation; and has it used against him.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:15 AM on December 27, 2013 [2 favorites]

You Have Just Been Poisoned

and thinking about it just a little, that two or three, is more like four or five, albeit most of them are in the ... er... stranger episodes.
posted by edgeways at 1:09 PM on December 27, 2013