The Drink Wheel

About the Drink Wheel

The Intoximeters Inc. “Drink Wheel”¹ is a form that you can fill out. Upon completion we will instantly compute your estimated blood/breath alcohol concentration (”BAC”) based on the information that you have provided and return that estimate to you. It is presented as a public service to Intoximeters web site visitors. Its primary purpose is to provide useful information about the responsible use of alcohol.

Why is it called a “Drink Wheel”?

We call it the “Drink Wheel” because it is based on various paper and cardboard BAC calculators that are given out in alcohol awareness programs, some of which are in the form of a wheel that you can spin around to calculate your estimated BAC based on what and how much you have had to drink.

Disclaimer

It would be extremely foolish for us to pretend that our “Drink Wheel” can tell you what your BAC actually is, first because it would open us up to an incredible amount of potential liability and second if it really did work accurately there would be no need for anyone to buy the instruments that we make and sell.

A person’s actual BAC is dependent on many complex factors, including their physical condition (body composition, health etc…) and what they have recently ingested (including food, water, medications and other drugs). This site includes a more detailed discussion of the Pharmacology and Disposition of alcohol in humans.

The results that are generated are rough estimates of an average healthy person’s BAC assuming typical beverage sizes, recipes and alcohol content.

The BAC estimates generated by the Drink Wheel should not be used to infer anyone’s fitness to work, drive or perform any other task or duty.

Press release from the National Crime Prevention Council:

Holiday Shopping at the Stores

• Enjoy the decorations and merchandise, but stay alert.   Always be aware of what is going on around you.
• Don’t leave packages visible through car windows; lock them in the trunk or if possible take them directly home.
• When carrying your purchases, don’t overburden yourself so that you would not be able to react quickly and easily if you need to.
• Take only what you need in purse or wallet, and keep a tight hold on it. Carry purse closed and snugly against your body; carry your wallet in a front pocket or coat pocket.
• File receipts in your wallet immediately; identity thieves can get important personal information from them.

When Shopping Online

• Beware of “bargains” from companies you are unfamiliar with—if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

• Shop with companies you know; make sure the site uses a secure connection for purchases.
• Keep your personal information private and your password secure.   Do not respond to requests to “verify” your password or credit card information unless you ask for it—credible retailers should already have that information!

An Arkansas couple is suing McDonald’s for $3 million after the husband left his cell phone – containing nude photos of his wife – in one of their restaurants. He called the restaurant manager and was assured the phone would be held for him until he could come and get it, later to discover that the photos had been posted (along with the couple’s names, address and phone number) on the Internet.

The wife began receiving offensive phone calls and text messages, and the couple eventually had to move. The lawsuit claims they suffered emotional distress, embarrassment and damage to their reputations, and they also contend that McDonald’s should pay for their moving expenses.

Every newspaper account I’ve seen includes the couple’s full names and town. I’m of two minds about this: On one hand, this moves their embarrassment to a national level. On the other hand, they made the decision to sue McDonald’s over a situation for which they were primarily at fault, and that’s what made teh story newsworthy.

The photos were removed from the web site but, because of the nature of the Internet, they have already spread to countless other sites and will likely remain available forever.

“I don’t know which way to go, so I’m holding a poll,” the British juror posted on her Facebook page, adding the details of the child abduction and sexual assault case she had been sworn in to help adjudicate. There was also the “do not discuss this case with anybody” rule she’d agreed to adhere to, of course…

She was dropped from the jury (the trial continued with 11 jurors) after the judge was informed of her Internet indiscretion. She was, remarkably enough, not cited for contempt of court.

Okay, so it’s your wedding day and you suddenly realize you just can’t go through with it. The fact that you already have a wife is a big factor here. so what to do…?

If you’re Tatsuhiko Kawata, about to be married last weekend at a resort hotel just outside of Tokyo, the solution’s obvious: burn down the hotel.

(All the guests were safely evacuated and, well, there wasn’t any wedding)

From this week’s Time magazine:

As Election Day nears, dirty tricks surface. Fliers are left on cars telling Democrats that they should vote on Wednesday, not Tuesday. Anonymous automated phone calls warn people that they will be arrested at the polls or that their poling places have moved… In an increasing number of states, such tricks are punishable by law.

Okay maybe I’m missing something here… but why is this being classified as mischief, rather than as voter fraud and interfering with people’s right to vote, and prosecuted as a federal crime?

(Press release, October 28, 2008) Responding to reporters’ inquiries seeking comment on the one year anniversary of Stacy Peterson’s disappearance, Drew Peterson released the following statement:

“There is not a single day that goes by that I don’t think about Stacy, so to me Tuesday is just another day of her being away. I realize this may be a significant event for the media, but it is not for me or my family. I won’t be participating in any vigils. Instead, I am giving one interview and then I will be far from the media spotlight spending quality time with my kids who need their dad now more than ever.

“For those who are concerned about my children, I thank you. But there’s no need for worry. I am taking good care of them though I have to admit acting as both dad and mom takes a lot of work and patience. My son Thomas is first in his class at one of the largest and finest high schools in Illinois. His brother Chris is also doing exceptionally well in school and is involved in wrestling and other activities. My youngest kids, Anthony and Lacy are too young to be in school but both are happy and healthy and adjusting normally.

“I have consistently and steadfastly maintained that I had nothing to do with Stacy’s disappearance and the death of Kathy Savio, my third wife. I hope that Stacy returns home or reveals herself, and that I am one day cleared of any wrongdoing in both cases. Until then, I remain strong thanks in no small part to my family and especially my kids who believe in their dad.”

Media Note: Drew Peterson is not available for further comment. He is scheduled to make only one media appearance on Tuesday on NBC’s Today show with Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira.

• Related Crimeweek articles and additional information

According to a statement Will County (Illinois) State’s Attorney James Glasgow gave to local media this week, investigations into the disappearance of Stacy Peterson (Drew Peterson’s fourth wife) and the apparent murder of Kathleen Savio (Peterson’s third wife) have been “highly productive,” and he expects “a resolution in at least one of these investigations in the near future.”

So far, almost a year after Stacy Peterson’s disappearance (she’s been missing since October 28 of last year), this is what the investigations seem to have produced: Nobody knows what happened to Stacy Peterson, and nobody has been charged in either her disappearance (though Drew has been named “a suspect”) or Savio’s murder.

There are two possibilities here: The first has Drew Peterson, whom just about everybody is convinced is guilty, cheerfully flaunting the fact that he’s gotten away with two murders. He’s being treated by the media as more a celebrity than a suspect, he has a publicity agent handling his new-found fame, and at one point a local radio station staged a “Win a Date With Drew” contest.

The second possibility is that Drew Peterson is innocent; and investigators have been spending a year trying to find evidence against  him, to the exclusion of seriously exploring any other leads.

• Related Crimeweek articles and additional information

• Michigan Man Arrested for “Receiving Sexual Favors from Car Wash Vacuum”

An update to last week’s story about Nebraska’s Safe Haven law: Yesterday (October 20), the governor and members of the state legislature announced that when the legislature reconvenes in January, they will revise the law to conform to other states’ versions, setting the age limit at three days. Currently, Nebraska’s law allows parents to legally abandon any “child,” effectively setting the age limit at “under 18,” leading to several older children (including two teenagers from out-of-state) being turned over to state custody.

• Earlier story

(Press release) Even before he did a single interview for the new book Drew Peterson Exposed, author Derek Armstrong insisted that Drew Peterson take a polygraph. He was not the first person to make that request, but he was the only one able to convince Peterson to take one.

That polygraph, which has become the latest twist in the case of Peterson, a former Chicago-area police sergeant accused in the disappearance of his fourth wife Stacy, has been referenced on NBC’s Today show, CBS’ The Early Show, Nancy Grace and many others.

Now Armstrong, who tape-recorded his exclusive conversations with Peterson, is available to talk about the lie detector test, discuss his observations of Peterson and will even release audio excerpts from never-before-heard broadcast quality recordings.

In unguarded moments, in grueling 12-hour sessions, Peterson is heard to say things such as “…post-mortem depression” relating to Stacy and “…She comes up dead or something, they’re going to be looking at me.”

Author Armstrong says, “I had Drew Peterson’s full cooperation in writing this book—unprecedented access he and his lawyer now regret—and spent more time with him than anyone outside his inner circle,” says Armstrong. “Polygraphs, timelines and now audio tapes of unguarded moments with a suspect in a sensational crime allowed me to form an opinion on some important questions. Is he a killer? A sociopath? Can he fool a polygraph?

“The discrepancies in the timeline, the deceptive answers in the polygraph and these audio clips are compelling reasons for him to remain the main suspect.

“I was sort of a fly on the wall and now I’m buzzing.”

• Additional Crimeweek coverage of this case

A Nebraska judge has throw out State Senator Ernie Chambers’s lawsuit against God. Chambers had sought a permanent injunction against Him, charging that God had made terroristic threats against his constituents, as well a causing “widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants.”

The judge’s grounds for throwing out the suit: God wasn’t properly served because of His unlisted address.

Chambers sees ground for appeal, though: “The court itself acknowledges the existence of God. A consequence of that acknowledgment is a recognition of God’s omniscience.” Therefore, “God knows everything. God has notice of this lawsuit.”

How’s this for an alternate idea – the rest of us file a lawsuit against Senator Chambers an everybody else who wastes the court’s time and taxpayers’ money filing ridiculous lawsuits?

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Richard Cooey’s appeal (he’d claimed that his execution could be “agonizing or excruciatingly painful” because his weight might make it difficult for the execution team to find a suitable vein, and that his migraine medication might interfere with the anaesthetic), and Cooey was put to death about half an hour later. A prison spokesperson said “he did not look like he suffered.”

Cooey was convicted in the rape, beating and strangulation murders of two Ohio women in 1986.

• Additional information

Many states have Safe Haven laws, allowing parents to leave their infants at hospitals or police or fire stations without fear of prosecution. The concept is, to put it bluntly, it’s better for newborns to be legally abandoned and turned over to the foster care system than to be left to die in a dumpster.

Nebraska’s version of the law wasn’t worded as carefully as the other, and specifies “children” rather than “infants” or “newborns,” and doesn’t set an upper age limit – which made the news recently when a Nebraska widower, who said he was “overwhelmed,” abandoned nine of his ten children, whose ages ranged up to 17 years.

Since then, two other teenagers, both of them from out of state, have been legally abandoned.

The Nebraska legislature plans to close this “loophole” when their new session begins in January – but personally, I disagree: Abandoning a child in this manner is an act of extreme desperation, and not something any parent is going to choose lightly. If a domestic situation is so bad that the parent is willing to permanently give up custody, then the alternative to being allowed to do so will likely be far worse.

Last week, according to a headline carried in newspapers around the world, a Wiconsin man was sentenced to six years in prison for taking $20 from a little girl’s piggy bank.

This was less a miscarriage of justice, though, than a misleading headline: He’d broken into the home before being caught in the girl’s room stealing her money, so the sentence was actually for the felony crime of breaking and entering.

At a hearing today, Judge Roger Beauchesne set a May 27, 2009 date for the civil lawsuit against Scott Peterson for the wrongful death of his wife Laci, brought by Laci’s biological parents (a distinction worth mentioning because Dennis Rocha apparently was a minor paternal figure in her life at best; that role was filled by Ron Grantski, though he and Laci’s mother Sharon are not married). The trial is expected to take about 5 weeks.

When the lawsuit was originally filed, the Rochas were asking for $25 million. The amount they’re asking for now is undisclosed, but their attorney has said Scott Peterson can settle the lawsuit by admitting his guilt and agreeing to a payment of $10 million.

This is hardly likely, especially since Peterson has no money anyway: ten million, twenty-five million, it’s pretty much all the same to him. The Rochas admit that the lawsuit is largely symbolic, mostly to make sure Peterson never sells his story.

Though this is something anybody is likely to confirm, I would imagine that the Rochas’ attorney is being paid an hourly rate: There doesn’t seem to be much profit in earning one-third of a symbolic award.

In an interview televised today on CBS’s The Morning Show, Drew Peterson said he had no idea why three of the questions he answered during a recent polygraph test (taken at the request of Derek Armstrong, author of the upcoming Drew Peterson Exposed) registered as “deceptive”:

• When he was asked whether the last time he saw his wife Stacy was before he went to bed the night before she went missing
• When he was asked whether he knows where she is
• When he said Stacy phoned him after her disappearance to tell him she was leaving her

Analysis of other polygraph questions supported Peterson’s claim of innocence.

• More about this morning’s interview (CBS News article)
• Earlier updates

Okay, starting today I’m putting a moratorium on “robbing a store right after filling out an employment application there” stories: It just seems to be happening way too often lately. Same way I stopped mentioning all the people who rob banks writing their demands on the backs of their own checks, or electric bills, or parole cards.

Sometimes it seems as though nobody’s handing tellers notes written on anything that doesn’t have their own name printed on it.

Maybe it’s not so much a “stupid criminal” thing as a compulsion, the same way the Riddler is psychologically incapable of committing a crime without giving Batman a clue first.

In this morning’s case, it was a Dunkin’ Donuts in downtown Philadelphia robbed (allegedly) by three men, one of whom had just filled out an employment application (another of the three was wearing a Dunkin’ Donuts t-shirt, which could mean he is or was already an employee).

Police expect to make an arrest shortly.

Casey Aldridge, the boyfriend of Britney Spears’s 17-year-old sister Jamie Lynn (a television actress in her own right), took digital photos of Jamie Lynn breast-feeding their baby, and took them to Wal-Mart to have prints made. In one or more of the photos, Jamie Lynn’s left breast is completely exposed.

It has come to the family’s attention that somebody, presumably a Wal-Mart employee, made additional copies of the photos and is attempting to sell them. Because Jamie Lynn is under the age of 18, law enforcement is treating this as a child pornography case, warning that both the sellers and the buyers could be prosecuted under federal law.

Okay, this is technically valid… but if they’re going to go there, shouldn’t Aldridge be prosecuted as well, the same as anybody else who brings child pornography to Wal-Mart to have prints made (which in fact happens alarmingly often)?

“Playing blackjack, roulette or the slots bears no likeness to dumping toxic waste… She spent money on the bona fide chance that she might win more money. In short, she gambled.” U.S. District Court Judge Renee Bumb, in a ruling issued Friday, dismissing Arelia Taveras’s $20 million lawsuit against seven casinos (six in Atlantic City and one in Las Vegas)

Taveras, at the time a New York attorney, lost almost one million dollars over a two-year period and claimed that gambling is a “hazardous endeavor worthy of special protections” and that the casinos, aware of her obsessive gambling, had a duty to stop her.

Teveras had “borrowed” from her clients’ escrow accounts to help support her gambling habit, for which she was disbarred last year and still faces criminal charges.

Teveras plans to appeal Friday’s ruling: Like her fellow litigious officer of the court, former judge Roy Pearson of the $54 million lost-pants lawsuit, she might as well keep fighting, because she has little left to lose.

• Casinos Had a Duty to Take Care of Me: Previous update

In response to last week’s decision by a Florida judge that a law against wearing pants low enough to show underwear was unconstitutional, David Dicks, the police chief in Flint, Michigan, where a similar law is in effect, promised that his officers will continue to arrest offenders (since a Florida judge’s opinion that a law is unconstitutional has no standing in another state).

A spokesperson for the Flint chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union promised that the organization would file a lawsuit challenging the law, saying “You can’t arrest people because of their style of dress” – which of course is not true, or else you’d have naked people walking down Main Street.

Nobody knows what happened to Drew Peterson’s fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, who disappeared the last week in October last year. Peterson hasn’t been charged either this case or for the apparent 2004 murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio (see earlier updates). Nonetheless, a second book about Peterson and his wives, Drew Peterson Exposed (by thriller-author Derek Armstrong), hits the bookstores on October 1 (preceded on September 1 by Joseph Hosey’s Fatal Vows: The Tragic Wives of Sergeant Drew Peterson).

According to a press release from the publisher, Kunati Inc., “we’ve guarded the contents of Drew Peterson Exposed, working under strict non-disclosure agreements …The facts and testimony assembled here presents new evidence, sheds new light on the details of the existing police investigations, the possible timelines, and the motives ascribed to Peterson. Conflicting witness accounts, false leads, widespread rumors, and red herrings that have dogged the case are analyzed and 140 photographs and documents (including many private family photos published here for the first time) go beyond the headlines to the heart of this sensational story.”

Peterson gave Armstrong “many hours of exclusive interviews;” and according to the press release, Peterson reveals for the first time his complete timeline for October 28, 2007, the day he says Stacy disappeared.

“Wearing of pants below waist” charges against a 17-year-old Riviera Beach, Florida boy were dropped this week after a judge ruled that the town’s “baggy pants law,” which calls for a $150 fine or community service (and up to 30 days in prison for repeat offenders) for the offense of wearing pants low enough to expose underwear, is unconstitutional.

I agree that this is a ridiculous law, but I’m really curious about how it’s “unconstitutional”: Is this a First Amendment free speech issue? A Second Amendment right to bare butts?

I’ve often (most recently yesterday) written about how some people, even after their 15 minutes of fame should be over, remain under the media’s gaze for the rest of their lives. This is why we know that Amber Frey might be losing her home.

You might remember Frey as the girlfriend of Scott Peterson, the Modesto, California man convicted of killing his wife, Laci.

Frey is $16,000 behind in payments on a house she paid $538,000 for in 2005. and a notice of default was issued on September 4. The house could be put up for auction as early as this week.

I could give you more details. It’s all there in the local newspapers. But I won’t.

John Mark Karr, according to his father, has left the United States, destination withheld.

What’s interesting about this is not the fact that Karr has left the country, but rather the fact that every major American news agency is reporting the story.

Karr is, of course, famous for having claimed, in 2006, to have been involved in the 1996 death of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey. Which he wasn’t. So he is newsworthy because… actually, he did nothing at all other than deceive a media that was perfectly willing to believe his vague and disjointed story as long as it meant more newspapers sold and more televisions turned to the 11 o’clock news.

According to Karr’s father, he left the country because he felt “unwanted” — and because he’d been “treated like a criminal” which, given his history of pedophilia and his arrests for possession of child pornography, and of course his insistence that he played some role in one of the most high-profile murders of the 1990s (when a reporter asked him whether he was an innocent man, he replied, simply, “no”), was not entirely unreasonable.

• Famous For Life
• John Mark Karr No Longer Engaged
• All John Mark Karr, All the Time