The Irish "Space Program" was in fact a pub crawl that went horribly right...

....and the comment down votes from the peanut gallery flow like a night of Guinness from the trotty-bottoms of pub-crawling Irishmen.

Again. Context. Perception. Personal dislikes shaping judgment, personality, and reason.

Sweet, looks like a pub crawl I went to recently - http://www.zombiepubcrawl.com/2009/

Fun fact: The Tom Waits Run is a traditional Oslo, Norway pub crawl. It is held every spring at the beginning of May, on the same date as the "Grete Waitz Run". It starts in Old Oslo, at the Medieval Park ruins, at 14:00. The participants are not required to run, nor is there any time taken - the sheer scale of the undertaking is a challenge enough in itself.

more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tom_Waits_Run

Ok, I'll pipe in with my own actual experiences drinking Absinthe...

I live in the US, but have had Czech, Spanish, and French Absinthe (quite a lot of the Spanish and French stuff). A friend brought the Czech bottle of Hills back from a trip, and I found a supplier that I could get bottles shipped from Europe for the Spanish and French brands (despite the illegality of it at the time, since the last time I imported any was over 5 years ago). I have also had friends try to brew homemade Absinthe with a ton of Wormwood.

The Czech Hills brand is FOUL. It is cheap, crappy absinthe. The French and Spanish brands were MUCH better. The home made stuff was worse than the Hills - MUCH worse. And there is a lot of variation of flavor between brands, so I highly recommend trying different labels.

Now, as far as effect? I got drunk. No hallucinations, no other effects, just DRUNK. Many of my friends would claim to feel a host of effects, often similar to a light pot buzz, but in my opinion they WANTED to feel something and so they did. But we certainly did get quite drunk quite often drinking this stuff. During this time of my life, I was putting down a fifth of vodka and plenty of beer EVERY weekend, so I had quite a tolerance for alcohol going, but I still gotta say this stuff has a kick, especially if you just start doing shots of it instead of doing the whole water and sugar routine.

But still, it was just getting drunk.

No idea what the state of American absinthe is, since I pretty much walked away from the hard drinking, pub crawling period of my life about 5 years ago.

Anyway, no concrete scientific data here, but at least some first hand accounts from someone who drank quite a bit of it from a number of different labels in a few different countries.

Damn! Watching this documentary it just kept getting better and better... Tom Metzger sings kareoke, then we find out his agent/manager used to deal coke with Escobar, corn on the cob and snooker with skinheads, a sloppy abassadorial pub-crawl in TJ... oh man, it just kept getting crazier... all in all I think the mom who is raising her girls to become skinhead teeny-boppers is the scariest... half nazi, half psycho-stage parent... totally scary.