Alcoholic blackouts

Blackouts? My mum and her friends lived through those: nights of living in a city with no light. No street lamps, cars with muffled headlights, windows blanketed so that no light may leak. The city all dark and anonymous, a more elusive target for the German Luftwaffe bombers.
But there is another kind of blackout: alcoholic blackout. I'd never heard of that until I met some sober alcoholics.
Hang on, just hold on a second... the term 'sober alcoholics', isn't that an oxymoron? Perhaps it is, but that is what they call themselves. If the term helps to keep them sober, more power to them, eh?
Anyway, there's a useful article about alcoholic blackouts published in the weekend edition of the [Hong Kong] Standard: blank tapes.