On Fri, 18 Nov 2011, Ryan Coleman wrote: > Bars are not pubs. ... > And you don't have to drink beer. My roommate who is 17 years sober > comes down with me on a regular basis. A few years ago I spent a couple weeks in Ireland. Most of that time was spent being intentionally lost, in small village kind of situations. When asked where one might find some food, the ONLY answer was "Down the pub". Ok, occasionally the answer included "We have two restaurants but they're only open between May and October". And don't get me started on the answer to "Any place I can get WiFi around here?" My point is, I know what a pub is. I know how it differs from a "bar", which, granted, my sample-size for is very small. Now, I've been dragged to what were described as "Irish Pubs" in the twin cities. They are nothing at all like pubs in Ireland. For one thing, nobody was particularly friendly. Second, there were no children. There were also no people who brought their mandolins from home and were having a go and didn't mind letting a foreigner have a go even though he defiled their mandolin by playing guns'n'roses songs on it, but I digress. Pubs in Ireland have atmosphere. And frankly if I never go back to one of THOSE, I'm good. You say your roommate is 17 years sober? I've been sober for 37 years. As in, my entire life. I've never had a drink, and I've never wanted one. Drinkers (and ex-drinkers), you guys just don't realise that for some people, being around people who are drinking is just absolutely not fun. Now, to be clear, I am not trying to convert the TCLUG to the Twin Cities Teetotalers & Temperamce Users Group. I think it's great that the tclug has social gatherings and they should definitely continue to happen, and I'm sorry I went off on a rant on this. The only way I can even begin to describe the perspective I have on this is imagine you used a very uncommon operating system, and everyone else used Windows, and people would all get together and talk about Windows all day and you just couldn't understand why people were even doing that to themselves. That's what it's like for me to hang out with people who drink. -Yaron -- /and yet I consider posting rants at 5am to be perfectly normal.