Dead drunk, but not A dead drunk

They say you cannot put a price on freedom, but that is hooey. Freedom, the best kind too, freedom from work, costs a mere $US19.95 via the Excused Absence Network. The network has isolated a distinct need – that of goldbrickers and hungover partiers to shirk a day’s office duties while not losing pay or stepping into pink-slip lane – and has filled it admirably. For this meager fee you can purchase fake doctor’s notes, as well as funeral programs, which will come in handy if you’ve already tested the limits of your boss’ credulity by both the sheer number of aunts you have (if you’re not in a predominantly Catholic country) and how they seem to drop dead close to a long weekend.

Halloween this year falls inconveniently right in the middle of the week, making a service such as this one quite handy for those who don’t want to worry about a next-day hangover when they don their Eyes Wide Shut masks and hit the nightclubs to grope random strangers and enjoy the only day of the year when it is socially acceptable to go outside the way you secretly dress up in front of your bedroom mirror.

In The Shark Book, we covered more than one tale of the Halloween hammered, including a particular favorite of an Aussie who borrowed a friend’s policeman uniform, possibly thinking that the genuine article would up his odds of winning the giant canned ham or whatever the prize was for best costume. When he later was so drunk that he passed out on a suburban street and passersby who spotted him thought that a policeman had been taken out in the line of duty, things got a bit uncomfortable for both the cop and the partier.

And more recently in Hamburg, we came across another story of Halloween gone wrong, when Die Polizei were called to a train by frightened passengers who believed they had come across the victim of a serious assault. According to officials, "The passengers were alarmed as the man appeared to be bleeding from the face and hands [and] could also not talk”. The passengers tried to revive him and failed (not surprising for anyone who has ever tried to wake up a seriously heavy drinker once he's settled into a serious snooze) and judging by the gore concluded that he had been the victim of a terrible assault.

By the time emergency officials arrived, the clamor surrounding the man caused him to wake up and explain to everyone with a drunken slur that he had just come from a Halloween party. First responders removed the man’s make-up to prevent any further misunderstanding. [Full story here]

The Shark Guys

Go Fish! The lush, the fish and the flush

For people who live in apartment buildings where successive years of poodle crap in the elevators and the enduring smell of cat piss in closed spaces with poor air circulation has resulted in a ban on all four-legged pets, the choice for animal companionship most typically falls between a fish and a bird (or a snake if you’re a lone male with a love of tattoos and skateboarding videos).

The latter option poses a problem for those in high-rise buildings – your balcony giving the creature a head start when it chooses to fly the coop while you’re vacuuming excrement out of its cage – and, besides, despite what that wily pet store owner might have had you believe, your average cockatoo can’t be counted on to sing a few verses of “Margaritaville” to entertain dinner guests upon a snap of the fingers. And if you’re in a house when Polly croaks its last tune, it will likely be dug out of the yard by the neighbour’s cat if the thing is too big to sink down the commode.

Fish make for easier pets to maintain, partly because they require about as much interaction as your average Nevada shrubbery. What’s more, they make for ideal teaching tools for your offspring who are lower down on the Piaget development scale, giving them both a sense of responsibility and, when they utterly fail to live up to that responsibility and the fish dies of neglect in a filthy tank, a life lesson in the fleeting nature of existence, as you stand together on the side of the porcelain bowl and hum the “Ave Maria” before flushing Phil the Gill to his great reward. (That is unless it is one of the more exotic varieties and can be turned into a fillet when the kids are over at the neighbours’.)

An 18-year-old in Brisbane, Australia recently ransacked the home of a vacationing woman, and conducted just such a ritual, but prior to receiving the belly-up notice that usually precedes it. From the reports on the story, the man, who was, of course, walleyed drunk at the time of the raid, did not steal anything, smashing a Sony Playstation console and ripping out the woman’s telephone from her wall. But, in a bizarre flourish at the raid’s end reminiscent of the man who bit off a duck's head in a drunken rage last month, the man dipped into the woman’s aquarium, scooped all of her exotic fish and flushed them down the toilet.

The presiding judge in the case was aghast. "Some may find that humorous," she said, correctly, continuing “I don't. I find it a bit sick and obviously distressing to the owners". Indeed, the judge was so taken aback by the man’s actions that she felt it necessary to stick in a final jab by saying “he’s also an unattractive human being”. As we are guessing that in general the most beautiful of Australia’s people are not the ones being paraded in the courts on charges relating to drunken raids, this comment seems as unnecessary as the fatal flush itself.

The fish flusher, a father of two who have our sympathies, was said to be in no position to pay a fine and was given a year of community service and told to receive treatment for his alcohol problem. (Full story here)

Drunk at Walmart

It’s fashionable in some lefty circles to bash Wal-Mart, and since we occasionally travel in those circles ourselves and fear getting our asses kicked (although it would at least 6-7 filthy hippies to take down the two-fisted authors of The Shark Book--and that's on a good day) we figured instead of giving the Walton Family a slap down and a shiner, we’d focus on the positives they bring to a community.

One, Wal-Mart’s mass purchasing power drives down the price of hooch, helping to generate much-needed material for a Shark sequel. Two, there’s the deep sense of camaraderie when everyone works for the same company (and all those fun ’guess which month I got hired/guess my state-penitentiary like employee number' games to boost workplace morale) and finally, any whistle stop where the 900-pound retail gorilla sets up shop, has its downtown core obliterated within several months--making it less of a go-to destination for the rummy set and thereby beautifying the town (and without having to invest in the maintenance and upkeep of all those flower baskets)

Also, by having the behemoth roll in like a Panzer tank with its brakes cut, it keeps those complacent Ma & Pa operations on their toes—time to pony up for that MBA Mr and Mrs Krakowski, and fire that slow kid who mops the walk-in fridge or your corner deli is going to be boarded up more quickly than a tin shack in hurricane season.

In rural Wisconsin, a man chose to endanger his health via channels other than a shopping spree involving lead-based Chinese imports, by helping himself to seven bottles of spiked Jack Daniels Lynchburg Lemonade at a Mukwonago Wal-Mart. (Editor's note: in the interest of full disclosure, the authors were treated to a very fine tour of the Jack Daniels distillery in Lynchburg, Tennessee a few years back and had we been wandering down that same Wal-Mart aisle, there’s no doubt we would’ve steered the man in question down a better path—to a bottle of their premium Gentleman Jack)

According to police, who nabbed the man with security video, he “broke his 16-month streak and didn't know how he was going to tell his wife," when he was caught guzzling the 12 ounce bottles of the hard stuff. [read full story here]

South Africa Safari: Hey teacher, leave us kids alone!

When preparing The Shark Book, we took great care to ensure that every continent was represented except for Antarctica (although we now have our eyes on a few climate-change researchers who know how to party for the sequel). Yes, we traversed great distances via keyboard tapping and mouse clicks to bring together a collection of drunks with a truly international flavor (much like Ibiza, one would assume).

Our book featured soccer referees getting wildly drunk and directing traffic on a busy Jerusalem street, a shit-faced German who offered his friend’s identification to arresting DUI officers, forgetting one key detail—his friend had a glass eye—a tough sell to even the dimmest of cops, and a Maltese man so blotto on cheap whiskey that his flight had to be diverted because he would not be stilled in his quest to break into the cockpit so that he could tell the captain he "loved him".

We may be accused of a lot of things (libel, extremely poor taste, bad judgment, and offering our accusers hush money) but ignoring Africa isn’t one of them and like Bono, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to put the oft-ignored continent under the glaring lights of our Shark Guys roadside spot check—but unlike Bono, we’ve done it solely out of blatant self-interest and in a bid to further gas up our airplane-hangar-sized egos (read with sarcasm heavier than a fat camp welcome wagon).

We chronicled a drinking contest in Tanzania, in which a man washed down a liter (two pints) of pure vodka with a couple of beers en route to "victory" (his nickname was "Shame", which you can interpret as you may) and now, the continent is represented again by a couple of high school teachers in South Africa who made the news recently when they were arrested for being drunk on the job. (Note: This might not shock the odd reader who may, in retrospect, recall the odd whiff of something other than a Fisherman's Friend lozenge emanating from the homework-checking teacher of his or her own school days)

A police official said the school had long had a problem with the students showing up looking as if they had completed their essays on Dylan Thomas by living out one of the end stages of the man's life, but that "now it's teachers themselves that get drunk at school". The policeman then went on to ask "What is this world coming to?”

We would refer him to the "Halls of drunker learning" chapter of The Shark Book, chronicling boozing antics on both sides of the chalkboard divide, for the answer to this excellent question. [full story here]

Dui arrest for shortest drive EVER. Are we there yet? Yes!

The automobile has been singled out as a major contributor to obesity in Western nations, mostly by tweedy intellectual blowhards rich enough to live exactly where they want – within an argyle-sweatered walk to the organic squash market and work – who feel the need to criticize folks who’d rather not add the misery of a long bus ride to the day’s complaints.

In Ontario, Canada, where a government monopoly on the sale of beer and liquor puts a quest for a case on a winter’s weekend somewhere near the level of one of the early polar expeditions for those without a car, a service called “Dial-a-bottle” has stepped in, offering delivery of all of the essentials – beer, cigarettes and condoms – to your front door for a nominal fee.

Such services, however, are also popular in places where liquor stores are on every corner block (in less toney neighborhoods generally) and fetching one’s hooch would involve only a short stumble down the road. In these cases, unless one is disabled or seeks to avoid social interaction with anyone outside of their inner circle of lay-about friends, using a vehicle to procure one’s booze, or having it delivered, is indeed quite slothful. If nothing else, the walk to the liquor store helps circulate the blood in your legs for a brief period, buying you more time later to laze about and get blasted without fear of muscle atrophy.

A Welshman set a new standard in sloth and quite possibly a record for the shortest DUI run ever when he decided to drive the 30 meters from his home to the suitably named “Bargain Booze” completely blotto. Staff members at the store, despite what one might infer from the name of the place, are circumspect when it comes to refusing to serve the visibly inebriated and would not sell him any more booze. When they saw the man stumble out to his car bleary-eyed, they phoned police.

The man was arrested a mere five minutes later at his home address and told police that he couldn’t be bothered walking. Whether the sentence he received was fair – three months in jail and a suspended license for three years – is debatable. Given the short distance between home and liquor store, the odds were against him doing much harm (unless little Johnny Appleseed next door happened to be out on his new two-wheeler at the time) but on the basis of sheer laziness, perhaps the sentence was fitting. (Full story here)

All the beer you can drink! (Or so you'd think...)

It’s something that every blurry-eyed soak with the wherewithal to dream wishes for: the day somebody says he will pick up every bar tab that comes before him till the day he drops dead. Paying for one’s beer-guzzling habit is undoubtedly the least appealing aspect of heavy drinking (next to the dry heaves) and the wish to drink as much as possible on as little money as possible explains why when it comes to mass producing beer, there are no standards too low if a cheap price-tag can be slapped on at the end. (This fact also explains why people say they love their home-brewed beer even when they didn’t have a clue what they were doing when they made it and resent having to drink such cheap slop).

Croucher Brewery Company in New Zealand recently drew international headlines and more free publicity than it could have hoped for* when it offered a “lifetime supply” of beer to the person who returned a laptop that someone had spirited off its premises (Full story here). The laptop contained information the young brewery deemed valuable, including its design and financial info, and, while no media outlet has suggested this and we are going on a ledge of pure conjecture here, proof that the moon landing was done on a Hollywood soundstage.

Now before all of your tongues drop to the floor in one Homer-Simpson-like thud, consider what this brewery considers a “lifetime supply”: 12 beers a month for the rest of the recipient’s natural life.

Twelve a month! We here at TheSharkBook are frankly insulted by that stingy offering on behalf of the petty thieves of New Zealand, as between the two of us we use about that amount in the various beer-based stews and beer-battered dishes consumed on a monthly basis. The twelver is known throughout the drinking world as woefully inadequate for the purposes of serious drinking on a good night and the brewery’s offer makes one wonder if they truly know their target demographic (for anecdotes related to the backbone of their industry we refer them to The Shark Book).

*Editor's Note: For the price of one case of its promising looking beer sent to each of us, we hear at TheSharkBook.com are willing to discuss changing every 10^th noun we use in blogs to the name of the brewery’s favorite label.

Kentucky Derby of another kind! Scooter Lippy

Unless you’re Italian, romancing a woman on the French Riviera, a woman, or in the best-case daydream scenario, all of the above, it’s hard to pull off "scooter cool". If you dug out a Ouija board to buzz Jimmy Dean, he’d refer you to George Clooney’s personal stylist so that you could be slapped bitchily upside the noggin for the mere suggestion of such a thing.

Scooters, often called "Vespas" by people whose self-loathing is so profound they can’t come to terms with the fact they’re driving scooters, are quite possibly the most uncool conveyance this side of a Segway scooter helmed by a black-stockinged, sandal-wearer whose comb-over isn’t even messed up by the lack of a breeze kicked up by his lame ride.

A Kentucky man piloting a scooter, likely worried that he’d have to suffer justifiable raillery from his buddies, did his very best approximation of cool—licking his fingers and pulling out a wad of cash and counting it—undoubtedly among the coolest of maneuvers, especially at the craps table—were it not that he was attempting to bribe an arresting DUI officer with a line of crap.

The suspect, according to officials, "flipped money open to reveal $100 bills," and, in a move reminiscent of The Shark Book authors when the tab is about to be settled, promised more $$$ at a later date, saying “I will give you $3,500 to make sure that warrant doesn’t go through that jail”. The guy had an outstanding warrant for a probation violation of a felony theft, so we can speculate as to how he came by the $500 in his wallet, (how he arrived at the $3,500 figure we can't hope to guess), but in a very bald-faced act, he did offer the arresting officer a number to call to collect the rest.

Crocodile Hunter: After my smile, crocodile?

Excessive alcohol in one’s system can, like the very best cocaine, result in a sense of fearlessness and a Friday night that is a damn sight more entertaining than it would have otherwise been. However, it can also prove dangerous if this lack of fear results in you, say, saying making an ass of yourself at a charity luncheon that was supposed to be alcohol free, or, in the case of the Aussie guy whose horrific drunken night out is currently making the rounds, having a crocodile chomp down on your face.

News sources did not mention if the man had been tilting a few at the travel agent’s office; his motivations are unclear for having chosen to spend part of his camping his holiday in Cow Bay, in Northern Australia, along a strip of beach later described by a local doctor as “crocodile highway”. This is not the kind of place where you’d want to be out backstroking in the moonlight since, as far as crocodiles are concerned, the night time is indeed the right time for munching on careless travelers.

The man in question jumped in the water for a late-night swim and when a wave rolled in he dove headfirst into it – not the right move. He thought at first that he had hit rocks, but with all the movement he quickly realized this was not so, and, in what you would have thought would have been one of those instantly-sobering moments of life, he realized just how wrong he was when the upset crocodile bit him in the face.

Had this story gone the predictable route and the man ended up an intestine-sandwich on the floor of the bay, this would be one for the good people at the Darwin Awards. As it played out, it is a story the authors of The Shark Book gladly add to their compendium of remarkable drunken feats. The drunken vacationer managed to escape to safe ground – remarkable in itself (source story suggests that the crocodile was small, but still) but what merits this guy the gold star in our book (or the “Purple Liver”) is that he was so drunk that he didn’t immediately realize the extent of his injuries, returned to his tent and fell asleep.

Yes, that’s right, he had pumped himself so full of the amber anesthetic that he didn’t see the pressing need to visit the hospital so that the giant bite that a crocodile took out of his face – a wound that later required 40 stitches to close – could be treated. (Full story here).

Drunk mom picks up DUI son: That's NOT Alright, Mama

The following story proves that a maternal bond...er... can’t always be... posted.

Allow us to explain.

A precocious young’un in Hilltown, Pennsylvania, precocious not because he could solve cubic polynomials in his head or compose didactic sonnets but because he drove drunk at a middle-aged level-- was nabbed by cops engaging in the type of driving that would even cause road rage on the bumper car circuit.

The cops, sensing that the 16-year old had recently gotten his swerve on, administered a breathalyzer to the toasted young helmsman in the wee hours of the morning. Registering top marks on the device, the fuzz contacted the ruffian’s mom to come and pick up the blasted DUI valedictorian.

His mom, who we’ll call ‘stupid’ here to protect her identity, herself engaging in the ‘how the hell else am I supposed to get there, walk?’ school of drunk driving, failed the field sobriety tests at the police station upon arrival. Mama was promptly arrested on DUI charges as well.

“If she had admitted to us in the beginning she was drinking, we would have made other arrangements to get the (teen) home,” noted the police chief, who probably sprung for a cab just in case pops would've happened by for the blotto trifecta.

Middle Class Values Boozing

Some wag once remarked, “I’d smoke while I sleep, if I could only find someone to hold my cigarette’. Express such a sentiment these days and you'll get not only a raising of a fire marshal’s scorched eyebrow but a wag of the finger by the growing glee club of killjoys hell-bent on having you mirror their chaste, dull lives. Now while your rejoinder might include a different finger, you can’t help but notice flipping through the channels that the phrase ‘hazardous to your health’ is increasingly cropping up in the evening news—likely referencing some snack or indulgence you’ve been shoving into your gullet for years that will be soon be handled solely with tongs and a biohazard suit-- and'll
shave more months off your life than that cul de sac condo with a power lines panorama.

A health agency in the UK who we’ve chosen not to name here, not because we think it’s bad form to take swipes at some do-gooder NPO, but because its acronym wasn’t nearly catchy enough to pot shot from our humor cannon—has set ‘hazardous drinking’ guidelines defined as “the equivalent of between 9.5 and 21 pints a week of normal strength lager.” Or, to put it another way— ‘a pretty damn good weekend’.

While in some circles, these guidelines are more difficult to accomplish than 9.5 seconds in the 100 meter, it’s not newsworthy in of itself. What IS newsworthy though, is that this same group ranks the middle class the biggest abusers of alcohol, and say that it’s these folk with their SUVs, fat retirement savings and Autistic-like devotion to lawn maintenance, unwinding after work with a bottle of plonk who are most at risk.

The health agency advocates a “substantial” increase in the price of hooch to curb the problem, which is, arguably, just a measure of wealth redistribution you commie buggers.

The Portable Beer Cooler: And now, a word from our sponsors...

As the observant among you will have already noticed, we here at TheSharkBook.com have elected to include Google ads to go with our drunken chronicles. Consider it the cyber-equivalent of that guy at a spoken-word performance who comes around at the end with a hat, forcing you to feign distraction so that you can hold on to your small change and lower-denomination currency and thus be able to tip that attractive bartender consistently throughout the night.

Google’s AdSense works on some sort of mysterious computer-language-based voodoo that we don’t have a clue about, however it seems to base what ads are displayed on the text that appears on a given page. Thus, when we posted a blog in tribute to the drinking prowess of a certain young prince among drinkers (we will withhold his name for fear of those irrelevant ads popping up again), all sorts of advertisements began to pop up that were somehow based on his name and title – gossip sites, genealogy services offering to trace your heritage back to the big Kahunas of various medieval fiefdoms, and travel offers to places with royal sounding names like… (Again, we won’t mention the town's name here, but let’s just say that it is the westernmost point on the TransCanada highway, which makes matters convenient once you’ve soaked up a bit of the sad local life and are ready to jump in the ocean.)

However, given the nature of this blog, and the drunk-compendium from which it sprung, ads more related to drinking, drunkenness, and the various accouterments that can spruce up this lifestyle do thankfully appear (including ones that are a little too appropriate, such as the ad that asks if you drink too much wine or another that wonders if you could stand to lose some beer-fat). Editor’s note: While we normally would include links here, we have opted not to in the hopes that you’ll refresh your screen a thousand times until the relevant ad comes up and then click on it. Danke!

Of these, our absolute favourite thus far is from the Frankfurt-based “Rocket Packs Getränke-Rucksack-Systeme”, a company that sells “Beer rocket-packs”. This is a huge step up from the beer drinking hat popularized by fans of American sporting events who don’t want to get up to get a drink (and who presumably wear diapers to deal with the natural corollary of that kind of beer consumption).

Getranke’s website itself is not text-heavy, and most of it is in German, however the pictures seem to tell the story: the company sells packs that can keep a two or three liter tower of beer cool so that drinkers can be served on the move. A serving person straps on the jetpack-looking like device (at times while wearing a ball gown, which may or may not be offset by a pair of gigantic, devil-swooping-in-on-a-bad-dream pair of black wings) and offers freshly-tapped beer for thirsty patrons. In terms of venues where this sort of thing might be popular, it seems from their publicity material (see above photo) that no place is too toney to have a lady in high-heels squirt beer into your glass from a hose attached to a backpack.

We here at TheSharkBook thank all of our inadvertent advertisers and commend Getranke especially for coming up with a product that makes shameless shilling fun.

The Hurricane, and the Man the Authorities Came to Blame

Carny folk like the guy pictured here (from whom we feel no need whatsoever to dissociate ourselves, as anyone who goes to work with white knee-length socks and a personal fan is unlikely to consult legal advice on matters relating to libel) like firemen, police officers, bus drivers and rodeo clowns, are placed in positions of trust, and are counted upon daily to take good care to properly bolt down the Vomit Coasters and tilt-a-whirls of this world (keen-eyed readers will note an unprecedented, back to back referencing of tilt-a-whirls, in our estimation, a blogosphere first).

While we appreciate that the repeated exposure to objects going around and around in circles represents a rather obvious metaphor for the cards you've been dealt by the great blackjack dealer in the sky (an allegory Pat Sajak would flatly deny), that's no reason whatsoever to be asked to 'step, right up, don't be shy' to a Breathalyzer like the operator of a 'the Hurricane' ride was at a South Carolina county fairground. The carny, who might have made a double entendre out of the phrase 'ring toss' was found 'wobbling on his feet and yelling belligerently', and promptly fired and charged with public intoxication.

This was apparently not the first time the particular fair has come under fire, as the week prior, a 3-year old riding 'The Spider', a 'teacup ride' not nearly as genteel as the name might suggest, passed out--and the operator ignored repeated, frantic calls by the mother to stop the ride.

Heroes and knuckle sandwiches. Boozers beat back thugs from bar

With Marion Jones and company using more chemicals than your average factory farm, and the reputation of the Olympic Games more soiled than a pair of underpants after a ride on the tilt-a-whirl— your average sports fan clearly has to look further afield than the Citius, Altius, Fortius set for a sofa-sprawling and cheese doodle vicarious existence.

In The Shark Book, we chronicled sporting endeavors that were truly heroic, such as a member of the Russian Airforce who made a drunken wager that his head could withstand the force of a brick—in exchange for, off all things, a ‘box of vodka’ and when said brick could not be found, tested his cranium’s density (as if such proof was really required) by smashing successive beer bottles against it. Suffice it to say, physics won out (but only after a protracted battle, and 23 bottles shattered against the man's skull by 'friends'), leaving the party guests to utter ‘oh, my, it’s getting late’, vamoosing before the cops could arrive to find the guy sprawled out unconscious.

In a South West London pub, a team of barflies, all ‘heroes who should deserve an award’, according to the landlord, beat back a group of masked thugs who tried to rob them at gunpoint (full story here). Using whatever tools they had at their disposal—a lingering bitterness at their miserable existence, ashtrays, glasses, chairs and even bottles of champagne, the regulars sent the brigands packing. “The gang tried to intimidate us”, noted the landlord, “but the regulars said this was their place and they just weren’t having it.” One drinker, who did not want to be named, noted “They got what was coming to them."

Call 911! DWI is really 'Dialing while intoxicated'

Before he began to resemble a manatee carrying twins, a lean Marlon Brando once remarked ‘What you got’ when asked ‘What are you rebelling against?’

Later in his career, when he began rebelling against dynamism and a high fiber diet (he famously bared his fat arse to 100 extras between takes during the filming of the Godfather's wedding scene, causing more than one cast member to upchuck into their tiramisu), he literally became a larger than life icon.

Still, he's remembered more for delivering lines that became catchphrases than being unable to refuse an offer of an all-you can-eat buffet.

An Atlanta teen, exhibiting some Brando-esque bellicoseness of his own, mouthed off at cops with a ballsy ‘Yeah, what of it?’ when asked if he’d been drinking---an admirable retort if it were not the the end result of having drunk dialed 911. (a parting shot worthy of a free copy of The Shark Book too, incidentally, if its authors weren't the stingiest of buggers). The teen had been arguing with his dad about, appropriately enough, underage drinking when the old man threatened to call the cops on his pie-eyed scion. The son interrupted, saying he’d do it himself. He was promptly arrested. (full story here).

As a second public service announcement, (don't say we didn't already warn you about the perils of drunk dialing) it's best to leave such ripostes to the imagination of Elmore Leonard.

Prince Harry: The Boozing Artist Formally Known as Prince

We here at TheSharkBook.com, like many of our Canadian compatriots are pretty ambivalent toward the British Royal Family. Sure, most Canadians have a soft spot for Queen Elizabeth, but that has more to do with her being on the currency and how good it feels to find a forgotten 20 in a pair of jeans you just washed. We included only one tale involving royalty in our who's who of drunks, The Shark Book, and that concerned a footman who was adding whiskey to the water bowls of the royal corgis – an offense which, although funny, resulted in his demotion (and terrible canine hangovers during which the corgis wrote some of their best stuff). However, when a story like the following breaks, we get all misty-eyed and almost regret the fact that this colorful family is no longer cracking the colonial whip and sending the degenerate misfits among their nobility to oversee our affairs.

Prince Harry, the third in line to the throne (the one the kings sit on, not where you can be found the morning after a night at Uncle Chili’s House of Hot), has long impressed us. Unlike his elder brother, who has of late made a half-hearted effort to paint himself a drink-loving fun guy, Prince Harry has delivered time and again with drunken partying antics that, had they taken place in the 70s, would have caused someone to go wake up Rod Stewart, tell him all about it, and no doubt have him remark after a stunned silence: “Bloody ‘ell!”

Prince Harry has partied with strippers, been involved in drunken scuffles with paparazzi and… well… dressed up like a Nazi for a bit of a Halloween laugh. (Editor’s Note: In his defense, he’s not alone when it comes to good taste and not having any at dress-up time: In The Shark Book we covered the tale of another British drunkard who caused a full-scare terror panic by outfitting himself in a suicide bombers’ “outfit” [complete with wires and candles made to look like explosives] for a costume party taking place near a British army base.)

This time round though, Prince Harry gets the prize for making headlines by participating in a drinking game that even had the authors, themselves not unacquainted with boozing that could collapse a fair-sized mule, remarking to each other: “His nose? What a wildman!”

The British tabloid The News of the World broke the story of a video its editors obtained of the young prince’s holiday last November in Namibia where he partied with a bunch of his nipple-tweaking army buddies (See strange pics – I just don’t trust that guy being so close to the royal nipple – and full story here). In the video (no mention of how this 'weekend in Namibia' tape made it into the hands of the paper's editors), the prince is shown drinking a capful of vodka, swishing it around his mouth, spitting it back into the cap and then hoovering it all up his nose.

We’re not certain if this is a convention with this newspaper, but note the dramatic ending to the first sentence of The News story: “THESE are the shocking pictures that show Prince Harry inhaling vodka through his nose in a drinking game medical experts warn could KILL.” Fear not though News of the World faithful: Death is pretty unlikely, unless all that talk you hear about incest and the royal family is true, and Harry is a delicate hemophiliac for whom a nosebleed could mean the end.

Prince Harry’s vodka snort took place in November of last year, which was around the same time as the BBC issued a report saying that bartenders were becoming concerned about people snorting vodka and then immediately keeling over, not dead mind you, but stunned drunk from the alcohol hitting their bloodstreams far faster than it otherwise would have. More "traditional" methods of snorting vodka up one's nose (does this work just as well for whiskey or other drinks? A quick sampling of a Bacardi Breezer via this method did not bring the desired results) involve the use of straws and tubes for a cleaner, more efficient snort.

And no doubt Prince Harry will need a strong drink up both nostrils and possibly a splash of something in the eye once he sees the sculpture that an American artist is planning to unveil in London next Thursday. The artist’s work, part of a display on the Iraq War, depicts a dead Harry laid out on a slab with his ears cut off and pennies covering his eyes and to cap it all a vulture standing by ready to feast on the corpse (Full story here).

Who keeps the metric system down? The EU, the EU...

The metric/imperial debate has largely been decided: most countries of the world with the exception of the US, and, you guessed it, Burma and Liberia, officially use the metric system of weights and measures. Being raised in Canada, where the metric system has been in place since the days of The Great Trudeau, The Shark Book authors grew accustomed to being struck with a meter-stick for misbehaving at school rather than the yard-stick, which was the weapon of preference for the homeroom teachers of their parents’ generation.

However, if you were to ask a random person on a Toronto street how much he or she weighed, the response (if you were to get one that didn’t consist of a finger to your eye, or a curt “Drop dead creep”) would probably be in pounds. Somehow, the metric system just isn’t a comfortable fit when discussing weight or the length of certain appendages of import – those spammers sending out emails on how different a gentleman's life might be with 12 inches never boast of how impressed the ladies would be with 30.48 centimeters. And of course, when you go to a bar, you order a pint – and if the bartender were to give you any lip about 0.473176475 liters, well his quarter tip might stay firmly clenched in your fist when it comes time to pay.

Drinkers’ familiarity with pints, while maybe not reversing the trend toward metrication, is at least slowing it down. A recent ruling in the European Union’s Court of Justice came down in favor of the imperial measure when it granted Diageo, the maker of girl-drink drunk favorite Baileys Irish Cream, permission to sell mini-bottles of the liqueur in Germany.

Bailey minis are sold in individual units, each one containing an eighth of a pint (0.071), which while allowed in imperial-friendly Britain and Ireland, is a non-standard measure in Germany and therefore technically illegal. The German drinking public, the distillers argued, would not know what to make of the little bottles and the non-standard amount of sweet liquid it contains. The EU, further proving that it has given up all hope of ever trying to force the British or Irish to order anything other than a pint at a bar, disagreed and interpreted the relevant laws in such a way that they gave Diageo permission to sell the wee bottles throughout Europe. (Full story here)