A funny thing happened on the way to the fake cocktail

An odd thing just happened on my way home.

I stopped at the grocery store to pick up lunch fixin's for the rest of the workweek, and on my way to the checkstand I passed the Adult Beverages aisle. I spied with my little eye a single bottle of Mike's Hard Cranberry Lemonade sitting forlornly by itself, next to all the full sixpacks.

Normally I wouldn't touch these faux malt beverage-based cocktails with a ten meter cattleprod, but it was hot (still is as I write this), and I was thirsty (ibid.). So I slipped it into my sustainable canvas shopping bag.

When the clerk rang up the Mike's, the register started bleeping at her. "Uh oh," she said. "The Rules don't let us sell just one of these. I have to put this back," she explained.

Great, a rule to discourage drinking and prevent impulse-boozing. A bureaucratic end to a long day. Another example of Washington's out of control, irrelevant, Temperance-inspired liquor laws.

The situation lets us expose absurdities of these rules:

1) The rules allow the sale of 5/6 of a sixpack;
2) The rules force the clerk to put back a single so that she then can't sell it to someone else;
3) The rules assume that buying 5/6 of a sixpack is not an impulse-buy and doesn't encourage drinking.

Someone please explain.

Maybe I'm just sensitive, as I was in California over the weekend, where they sell liquor in grocery stores and civilization has not collapsed, the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger notwithstanding.

Next time I'll try buying two bottles, as an experiment. Maybe the State doesn't want the bottles to get lonely.