I had an undergrad pal who kept a little pencil mark on the wall by his dorm door. It wasn't for his height. It was for the calculation of the amount of beer he had drunk through his years of higher education based in the dorm room volume as the basic unit. I think it got to somewhere more than a foot over the course of a year. It was not a large room and he has a future in medicine so don't worry so much. I was reminded of that when I read this article about new statistics on recent Canadian booze consumption:

Canadians bought 2.3 billion litres of beer, 210.8 million litres of hard liquor, and 425.3 million litres of wine, totalling $18.8 billion worth of alcoholic beverages during the year ending March 31, 2008. This is a jump of 4.3% from the year before. When it comes to Canadians and their frosties, beer stores sold $8.6 billion worth of beer in 2007-2008, which is up 2.4% from the previous year. Of the $8.6 billion worth of beer, $2.9 billion was sold in Ontario.

So what is a billion litres of beer? Using the age old rule of applying indirectly related Australian statements of fact, I found this page for the Queensland Water Commission which stated that South East Queensland's savings of 39 billion litres is equal to 15,581 full Olympic swimming pools. By this calculation, Canadians drank 919 Olympic pools worth of beer for the year that ended just before April Fool's Day 2008. I have no comparable figures for Canada but, sadly, even the entire UK could only provide 1% of the actual pools required for such a statistic to be actually proven. I wonder if that means Canadians drink more beer than could fit into all the Olympic sized pools on the planet... I wonder... I wonder.