Root Beer Kegger: The Beer was Fake, the Breathalysers were real.

This past weekend undoubtedly saw its share of keg parties in residential neighborhoods throughout North America. Someone's parents nip off to somewhere tropical to forget for one all-inclusive week the burdens of home, and return to wrecked furniture, raised insurance premiums and a permanently shaken faith in young squire Johnny's sense of responsibility.

On any other day, we'd be chronicling the unholy aftermath of one of those parties (which mostly ends up on Facebook), or at least lending our support to the move to see drinking ages lowered and thus spare Ma Suburbs from having to discover a pile of forgotten a few months after the last foam has been sucked out of a keg.

Today, however, we'd like to salute the actions of some Wisconsin teens (not the ones pictured here, who would indeed be arriving on a very short bus indeed if still attending high school at their ages) who threw a keg party on Saturday -- one in which 1919 Classic American Draft Root Beer was on tap. Before your midday cocktail shoots out your nose at the very thought that we would pay tribute to a non-alcoholic event (which, with the possible exception of forced parole hearings one day, we will always do our best to avoid), let us make a couple of things clear. First, this was not a gathering of the school's society for the ostracized and the "Obvious Targets for Bullying" gang, nor did this have anything to do with some sort of youthful religious-based jamboree where kids get together and don't do all the fun things proscribed in their holy book. We're saluting the root-beer kegger as it was a prank staged at the expense of the local constabulary and school officials.

The kids were miffed that fellow students had been suspended from sports because pictures had turned up showing them drinking out of red cups. Such cups are the stuff of booze parties as anyone who has ever seen an advertisement for Beer Pong will know (FYI: "Bing Bong Beer Pong" official brass has made it known that said cups are not included with the individual units). The story doesn't actually say that the school was wrong in assuming that this first group of kids was drinking beer out of these cups -- they probably were -- but regardless, the kids came up with a creative way to stick it to 'em and also keeps the cops busy so the college kids can punch one another up without any police hassle.

They gathered together in large number, cranked the tunes and parked their cars in the neighborhood in a way that would send a soccer mom peeping out her window into a frenzy, and indeed it did -- shortly thereafter police were summoned and had every reason to believe that fun of an underaged boozing variety was taking place. They went in the house, noticed that a good time was being had and quite reasonably assumed that everybody was plastered. After giving breath tests to 90 (that's right -- the first 67, say, couldn't have counted as a representative sample) they found that nobody at the party was even the slightest bit drunk, but rather that they were all coasting on that natural high one gets with pissing off the fuzz.

We would indeed have joined that, not enough to stand a night full of root beer -- that red-headed stepchild of American soft drinks that tellingly enjoyed its hey-day during the prohibition era (telling, because people without access to speakeasies back then were all mad).

Here, for extra credit, is the video these students produced detailing their root-beer escapade:



And here is why root beer has about 3% of the total soft-drink market and will never do better than that:

Top 10 'Bar' Songs of all time (Part II)

As we laid out like a nacho platter in Part One of our “Top Ten Bar Songs of All Time”, bars have contributed more to our culture than simply being a convenient place to cash your social assistance check, meet your bookie and punch out your landlord. Bars provide a setting for some choice inner faith jokes involving priests, rabbis and other assorted holy men, as well as, depending on the joke, grasshoppers, parakeets and a foul-mouthed frog that tap dances on the edge of pint glasses (we’ll tell you that one over a beer).

And more to the point of this list, they have also provided a setting for some excellent songs. We’re not talking about songs that are almost exclusively heard in bars – but rather those that specifically reference bar and pub life.

We’d like to think that each item on this list was scribbled on a cocktail napkin by a genius songwriter who was hopelessly drunk at the time of its composition. We’d also like to think that said genius then passed out in a pool of his own vomit at his table, and that a keen-eyed waiter with an eye out for the main chance spotted the napkin, recognized its artistic merit immediately, phoned the police to haul off the genius on a drunk and disorderly and sold the napkin to the following artists for a huge sum of money, while the original songwriter was dismissed as a crank in subsequent lawsuits and ended up hitting the bottle even harder. We’d like to think all of that, but it’s probably not true.

The scribbled-on-a-cocktail-napkin-while-drunk-to-the-gills part might well be true though because these tune smiths certainly knew what they were writing about. They have written songs here that evoke pub life – the good parts, as well as the terrible parts (though none of them are about the worst part of a night out at the pub – the bill) – and they have done it better than ‘em all. Here they're The Top 5 ‘Bar’ Songs of All Time:

5) After Hours by The Velvet Underground: Wrapping up, as it did, the Velvet Underground’s self-titled album, this one, along with being one of the great bar songs of all time, might also be one of the top album closers ever. It features Velvet drummer Maureen Tucker doing a rare lead vocal and focuses on the “After Hours”, places that will be familiar to the more dedicated drinkers among you. After-hour joints are the places you go to when “Last call for alcohol” turns into “Hey buddy, I could lose my license if I served you another drink. Why don’t you just go home?”

When that happens you end up in an after-hours joint, a dark dingy establishment where hardened drinkers go, refusing to let the night end. The sun may be up outside and your average slobs going about their daily routines, but as the narrator of this one so correctly reminds us: “If you close the door/The night could last forever/Leave the sunshine out/And say hello to never.” Now that is someone with staying power. Bravo!

Choice Lush Lyrics: If you close the door/The night could last forever/Leave the wine-glass out/And drink a toast to never

4) “Boys Are Back in Town” by Thin Lizzy:

In this classic rock chesnut, not one, but two bars (Dino’s Bar & Grill and Johnny’s Place) are mentioned both of which are known for having more asses beat than a barn-full of intractable mules. The song covers ground familiar to anyone who spent their parents' retirement savings on Kraft Dinner and beer, otherwise known as 'your college years'. During this formative time, when your liver began approaching watermelon-like proportions, you made sure not to cross paths with 'townies'--embittered folks doomed to spend the rest of their existence in whatever college town you'd abandoned as soon as the dean's ink dried on your diploma and you'd packed up your Pulp Fiction posters and high-tailed it to the big city.

In a twist, Boys Are Back in Town is about Navy cadets, who, instead of townies, put the smack down on regular college students at the aforementioned taverns. Below you'll find a version of the song-- not the twin-guitar assault as originally conceived by the boys in Thin Lizzy, but performed on ukuleles in what looks to be a half-way house, a location that wouldn't be unfamiliar to the denizens of either Dino's or Johnny's. Rock on, gentlemen.

Friday night they'll be dressed to kill/Down at Dino's bar and grill/The drink will flow and blood will spill/And if the boys want to fight, you'd better let them/And that time over at Johnny's place/ Well this chick got up and she slapped Johnny's face/Man we just fell about the place/If that chick don't want to know, forget her

3) “O’Malley’s Bar” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Most of the bars that are the subject of the songs on this list are – Thin Lizzy’s two punch-‘em-up joints excepted – the kind of places you wouldn’t mind visiting. Surely stopping by Sally MacLennane’s pub for a pint or 10 would be enjoyable and there are duller alternatives than a night out at the rippers with Motley Crue. That said, you’d be well advised to stay a county away from “O’Malley’s Bar” in case the narrator in Nick Cave’s tune stops by for a quick one.

This song, is one of Nick Cave’s best, and also one of the maddest, and most vicious songs ever set in a bar. The narrator walks into O’Malley’s, orders a drink, and cuts a streak of murder through the place that would have had Charles Manson saying “Well, I think that was a bit much. Don’t you?” The bloodbath starts with O’Malley’s wife: “Well, you know those fish with the swollen lips/That clean the ocean floor/When I looked at poor O'Malley's wife/That's exactly what I saw/I jammed the barrel under her chin/And her face looked raw and vicious/Her head it landed in the sink.”

Yep, and then it gets violent. There are people shot, someone gets a crushed throat, and one poor slob is even dispatched via a giant ashtray to the head (see below). This is what might have happened had the “Cheers” mailman character 'Cliff' been rewritten by the fine folks who brought you HBO’s "OZ". It’s an inarguably brilliant blast of insanity, featuring all of your friendly neighborhood bar types put through the abattoir. For even conceiving of something this epic, violent and insane, we salute you Nick Cave. We don’t want to drink with you when there are loaded weapons around, but we salute you nonetheless:

Choice Lush Lyrics: Well Jerry Bellows, he hugged his stool/Closed his eyes and shrugged and laughed/And with an ashtray as big as a fucking really big brick/I split his head in half/His blood spilled across the bar/Like a steaming scarlet brook/And I knelt at it's edge on the counter/ Wiped the tears away and looked

Part One:

Part Two:

2) “Bartender’s Blues” by George Jones: If you consider a drinking song to be every song about a bar, drinking in general, relationships devastated by drinking, drinking and driving and stories so depressing that you may be driven to drink by hearing them, then at least two-thirds of the George Jones songbook comprises drinking songs. For a guy dubbed 'No Show', George has certainly shown up on our lists, whether it's this one, or our more controversial Top Ten Drinking & Driving Songs of All Time featuring his hit, 'If Drinking Don't Kill Me, Her Memory Will'. Thematically, that song could very nearly have made the cut here, except that its lyric "The bars are all closed, It’s four in the morning, Must have shut’em all down, By the shape that I’m in", disqualifies it as the establishment is clearly closed. Here's Bartender's Blues, actually penned by James Taylor, who knew a thing or two about the blues, especially causing them with his 'unique brand of bittersweet folk music'.

Now the smoke fills the air
Of this honky-tonk bar
And I'm thinkin' bout where I'd rather be
But I burned all my bridges
And I sunk all my ships
And I'm standing at the edge of the sea

1) “Closing Time” by Leonard Cohen: Some might accuse us of betraying a Canadian bias on this one, and they may well be right; after all of the trifecta of cool old-timey Montrealers – Pierre Trudeau, Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen – LC is the only one on the right side of the daisies. But giving credit where it’s due there are few songs that come close to rivaling the raucous fun of “Closing Time”, and it’s an accomplishment made all the more impressive by the fact that Cohen himself is not a boozer of great renown (he's drinking the blood of his lessers in the accompanying photo ), and he even spent years as a Zen Buddhist monk, during which time we’re sure that the odd poisonous mushroom taken for spiritual enhancement would have been the closest thing he enjoyed to a good buzz.

But with this song, he somehow managed to nail it. Things have built to a crescendo in a strange bar where “women tear their blouses off and the men they dance on the polka dots.” These people are on edge. ““Ah we're lonely, we're romantic/and the cider's laced with acid/and the Holy Spirit's crying, "Where's the beef?"/And the moon is swimming naked/and the summer night is fragrant/with a mighty expectation of relief.”

Cohen sings that “there’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops” and indeed, with cider in the acid, women whipping off their tops, and men two-stepping on polka dots, we can safely assume that after this song finished a riot broke out and the bar was burned down. Full of energy, great song-writing, and conjuring up a place that may never have existed, but damn well should have, Leonard Cohen’s “Closing Time” gets our vote as the Top Bar Song of All Time.

Unfortunately, embedding has been banned for the actual, excellent video (watch your head for flying women) for closing time (which can be found here), so we’re going to leave you with an acoustic rendition by the wonderfully named Bub Fish:

Honorable Mention: Seaside Bar (Bruce Springsteen)

Hey girl, you wanna ride in Daddy's Cadillac? 'Cause I love the way your long hair falls down your back Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley's at the Seaside Bar We'll run barefoot in the sand, listen to his guitar

Barroom Hero (Dropkick Murphys)

He's a legend in the bar with every scar fights a thousand bigger men, But now he fights and looses got all the bruises will someone please step in?

Let There be Rock ( AC/DC)

And the guitar man got famous The businessman got rich And in every bar there was a super star With a seven year itch

Hey Hey, What Can I Do? (Led Zeppelin)
In the bars, with the men who play guitars Singin', drinkin' and rememberin' the times

Closing time (Semisonic)

Closing time, time for you to go out, go out into the world. Closing time, turn the lights up over every boy and every girl. Closing time, one last call for alcohol, so finish your whiskey or beer. Closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

dishonorable mentions:

Toby Keith by the looks of him, appears that he's put away more kegs than the guy who drives the beer truck, however his song, I Love This Bar, leaves us feeling a bit queasy, like when the taps haven't been changed in a while. Similarly, the music of Jimmy Buffet including, and especially Margaritaville, leaves us similarly afflicted and consequently, we are inclined take the blow blow torch to his The Tiki Bar is Open, and make off with the insurance money.

Top 10 'Bar' Songs of All Time! (Part I)

Some songs have become bar anthems. You hear “Born in the USA” or “You Shook Me all Night Long” anywhere other than a bar and you wonder why you’re not in some reeking dive, clutching a glass of draft, while chatting up a thoroughly disinterested party and eating from a plate of peanuts containing more germs than the handles on the urinals. We recognize that these songs make an important contribution to one’s elbow-tilting atmosphere, however we reckon that enough attention has been paid to every one of them (and that they each have almost reached their limit when it comes to Internet derision). What we’d like to focus on instead are songs that are actually set in bars. The writers of these songs, for the most part, were the sort who followed the advice of “Write what you know”; they looked around, saw that they were in a bar and wrote the following classic tunes. All of these songs are either set in a bar, or make heavy reference to pub life. To actually sit down and pen a song about a bar, rather than one that you hope drunk people will sway to and later remember when sobering up at Wal-mart, is commendable, and we would like to pay tribute to these efforts here with our Top 10 'Bar' Songs of All Time!

10) Girls, Girls, Girls by Motley Crue: The members of the always dangerous band were in danger of finding themselves forgotten in hair-band oblivion until the sensational book The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band” came out and made a whole new generation of indie rockers take a good look at themselves in their mirrors and realize that more lines should be snorted off them.

This song is the only one on our list that specifically celebrates that chrome bar palace -- the place where, to quote Al Bundy “The cops are at the door, and there's a Kennedy on the floor": the nudie bar.

And how's this for a man who means business when it comes to his night at the peeler's?:“Friday night and I need a fight/My motorcycle and a switchblade knife/Handful of grease in my hair feels right/But what I need to make me tight are…” Why, girls, girls, girls of course!

It’s unlikely that Tommy Lee or any of the Crue ever went switchblade crazy in a strip club, which are almost exclusively the domain of the mafia and biker gangs throughout North America. Had they done so, it's unlikely that they would have gone on to do things like star in cinema verite with Pam Anderson, be featured alongside a dwarf in a reality television show and the assorted other accomplishments that have distinguished their post-band days.

Choice Lush Lyrics: Girls, Girls, Girls/At the Dollhouse in Ft. Lauderdale/Girls, Girls. Girls/Rocking in Atlanta at Tattletails/Girls, Girls, Girls/Raising Hell at the 7th Veil

9) "At The Bar" by T.I.: The self-proclaimed Rubberband Man, Atlantic rapper TI's rhymes are certainly elastic like a spastic and couplets fire out of his mouth like a pill-popping Truman Capote giving the keynote address at an auctioneer's convention. The "King of the South's" "At the Bar" gets kudos here.

Choice Lush Lyrics: "I got cash money. I got 5 bottles of Hennessy. You mean I can just hit the club and everything's for free?"

8) "Alabama Song" by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill: The Doors, a band that hasn't aged well (and not just because one of them is helping to make the fleur grow in France), helped repopularize this one when they covered it. Most will be pretty familiar with the refrain “Well, show me the way to the next whiskey bar/Oh don’t ask why/Oh’ don’t ask why”… as well as its creepy follow-up “Well show me the way to the next little girl, oh don’t ask why…” That second bit started out in the Brecht-written original as “Show me the way to the next pretty boy”, which was appropriate given that it was meant to be sung by a female prostitute in the Brecht/Weill opera “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny”.

When the “Lizard King” and his associates chose to cover it though, they realized that asking mainstream America to show them the way to the next “pretty boy” might not go over so well, and they changed the lyric to “little girl”. It still sounds like a theme song for some pervert in a van with tinted windows, but it managed to find mainstream acceptance and remains one of their most recognizable songs. We salute this song for the uncomfortable ambiguity surrounding that one line and for speaking to the universal need that we've all felt at one time or another to be shown the way to the "next whiskey bar", without having to explain why.

Choice Lush Lyrics: Oh, moon of Alabama/We now must say say good-bye/We've lost our good old mamma/And must have whisky/Oh, you know why.

7) "Thrown Out of the Bar" by Hank Williams III: It seems to be a genetic rule that musical talent skips a generation. Think Jacob Dylan, Alex Orbison, Wolfgang Van Halen, Sean Lennon, Frank Sinatra Jr., Tal Bachman, and of course, Hank Williams Jr. In the case of the latter though, there's some hope offered by the fact that talent may well skip a generation as it did in the case of Hank Williams III, who has foregone the old man's cornball style of country for something that ole grandpa could raise the moonshine jug too.

These days you can get tossed out of a bar for lighting up a cigarette, but we’re guessing the kind of drunk that Hank III is writing about in “Thrown Out of the Bar” has done far worse. As overzealous as some bouncers might be, getting the crap kicked out of you regularly at every bar in town points to the possibility that you might be a "problem drinker".

Choice Lush Lyrics: I been beat up bad, I been kicked around,/I been thrown out of every damn bar in this old town, /In this old town./I guess you don't like the way we like to have our fun/'Cause I'm always out there an' I'm on the run

6) Sally MacLennane by The Pogues: If you've ever wondered what you might look and sound like if you drank heavily during every waking hour of the day and abandoned all matters of dental hygiene, may we recommend "If I Should Fall From Grace: The Shane MacGowan Story.” Shane MacGowan, the Pogues main songwriter and lead singer, wrote what he knew very, very well, but surprisingly few of these were about pubs or bar life. One exception to that is this fine song, which starts "Well Jimmy played harmonica in the pub where I was born". In the pub where he was born! The prize for greatest drunk ever goes to this guy.

As with many of The Pogues best songs ("Fairytale of New York" for example) this one tells a story, specifically a young man's life growing up in a pub, eventually become the barman of "the greatest little boozer", home of Sally MacLennane. This is the sort of song so immersed in bar culture that you could get beer breath just listening to it.

Choice Lush Lyrics: I played the pump and took the hump and watered whiskey down/I talked of whores and horses to the men who drank the brown/I heard them say that jimmys making money far away/And some people left for heaven without warning

CLICK HERE FOR THE TOP FIVE BAR SONGS OF ALL TIME!

On St. Patrick's Day Even the Crack is Green

On Monday, we presented our Tips on How to Put Some Irish into Your St. Patrick’s Day. Number five on that list was: “Don’t just stop at green beer: On St. Patrick’s Day, not only should your beer be dyed green, but so should your infant’s milk, your pets, your elderly relations and your shrubbery (any exotic species you may have that is not already green by nature).”

What follows may be sheer coincidence or it may point to the fact that we hold sway with a group not often considered a target demographic by any legitimate businesspeople: crack dealers.

Police in Marietta, Georgia arrested five suspects for “peddling green crack on St. Patrick’s Day”. We normally don’t cover the goings-on in the wide wild world of hard drugs, mainly because the book we wrote focused on tales of drunken excess and pound-for-pound tales of crack-rock-induced derring-do just aren’t as funny, however in this case we've decided to make an exception in honor of this festive time of year.

Undercover police officers made two purchases of the holiday-themed crack before arresting those involved in the selling and another pair whose St. Patty's day was ruined due to outstanding warrants.

As to why the dealers dyed the crack green, we can only guess. We would like to think it was Monday's blog, but something tells us that guys hanging around in a van with the back door open for crack selling might not be RSS subscribers. Presumably it was not a customer--service measure either; t'would be unlikely indeed for a would-be purchaser to be handed a standard baggie of the product on March 17 and object: "What is this! It's St. Patrick's Day for chrissakes! Would it have killed you to use a little green food coloring -- to make that tiny bit of extra effort?! I mean it's like you're not even trying more. I have half a mind to take my business to Itchy Elmo next door."

Still though, police did note in the source story that "seasonal crack" has been found in the past -- red crack at Christmastime for example (if you get that in your stocking Christmas day, "Santa" might soon be in for a felony). A more likely explanation is that the crack was meant to pass for candy during a police search. It was a ruse that failed though and the judge is unlikely to give any of the five accused points for creativity or sticking to holiday theme when sentencing time approaches.

Digging that Bronze Age Booze Find

If Darwin were alive today, he’d be 200 years old and fielding questions about how he cheated death, perhaps on the daytime talk circuit. He would've also born witness to the 'my great aunt was Irish and now I'm going to sport a fatuous plastic hat that I can later vomit into' that passes for St Patrick's Day on these shores.

Observing such debauchery would leave little doubt in anyone's mind (unless you’re Mike Huckabee) that humans are basically just like other animals.

One of us actually witnessed a trail of vomit that spanned the entire length of a subway car, and though we’re not gastroenterologists, judging by the puke’s fluid state, whoever did that should likely see one—or at least supplement their diet with a bit of fiber, perhaps all-bran.

By archaeological accounts, humans, prior to sullying mass transit and other public places with their innards, have been getting blotto for nearly 6000 years. The Bronze Age was a time, not only of unheeded dermatological warnings and the rise of George Hamilton, but when our forebears started using fancier tools to fell giant woolly mammoths (or dinosaurs, again if you're the aforementioned Mike Huckabee). Along with this increasing level of sophistication, the likes of which not seen either on New Year's or St Patty's Day, came the domestication of the grapevine.

The world's oldest bottle of wine, if you're interested, though it's not for sale and doesn't make for a nice table vintage even if it's given a few months to breathe, was unearthed during excavation near in a vineyard near the town of Speyer, Germany. It was inside one of two Roman stone sarcophaguses that were dug up, before it could be used by some dirty centurion to get some young maiden out of her toga. The bottle dates from approximately 325 A.D.

Recently, in Kent, UK another discovery corroborates the notion that we naked apes have been getting sh*t-faced and putting considerable effort into it, for several thousand millennia.

A 4000-year old Bronze Age skeleton with a pottery vessel placed at its feet was discovered, that researchers suggest was likely ‘a type of beer mug’. The body was in a "crouched" position, which is not only typical of the period, with knees drawn up to the chest, but typical of anyone who spent the morning of the 18th, genuflecting before the Porcelain God.

The Shark Guys’ Tips on How to Put Some "Irish" into Your St. Patrick's Day

To drinkers, St. Patrick's Day is an occasion that holds an almost religious significance. In fact, some drunk in a bar many St. Patrick's Days ago once told us that the occasion was rooted in some sort of Catholic tradition. He described a highly improbable scenario involving snakes having infested Ireland, and a saint named Patrick coming along to drive them out like some sort of pest control superman. Being that this entire business reminded us of an awful Jon Voight movie out of theaters by then that we had hoped to put out of our minds as well, we proceeded to move to the other end of the bar. Guinness brewery has been pushing the idea of making St. Paddy's an official holiday, and we are all for it, but even if they're not successful, to us St. Patrick's Day still has a special status -- we call it "Drunk's Easter" -- and it would be a disservice to our readers and a slight on the Irish ancestry of one of the authors if we did not pay tribute to this day by stopping on our way to the bar to offer some suggestions on how you can put the "Irish" back into your St. Patrick's Day celebration:

1) Spike your Morning Starbucks’: When ordering your ultra-venti sized iced raspberry frozen frappucino chai cum latte on the morning of St. Patrick’s Day be sure to dump half of it on the floor and top up the remainder with delicious Bailey’s Irish Crème – the perfect coffee companion (Irish Whiskey is also acceptable, although it might be a bit hard on the stomach first thing in the morning -- remember you only want to approach stomach-pump drunk by night's end, so you need to pace yourself). While on most days this would raise the ire of more than one Starbucks “partner”, on St. Patrick’s Day it shows them that you know how to enjoy yourself. Another option, recently suggested by LAist, is doing the same to liven up a bit of the tasteless spearmint-flavored concoction known at McDonald's as "The Shamrock Shake".





2) Speak in a think Irish brogue: The Irish accent is undoubtedly the world’s easiest to mimic and the secret to perfecting it lies simply in drinking more; the drunker you are, the better your accent will be -- that's just a fact. Go throughout your entire day as if you were Brad Pitt using method-acting techniques in preparation for his role as an IRA terrorist in "The Devil's Own". Adopting an Irish accent is all the more effective if you choose an offensive Irish stereotype, such as Paddy the no-nonsense red-headed cop, loony Father Feeny who flashes the congregation at holy communion or Sister Mary the maniacal nun. The movie "Boondock Saints" was hugely popular both among lovers of Irish immigrant tales and also those in favor of Bernie Goetz-style justice. Here is an outtake of an actor in that one perfecting his Irish accent. Can you tell the difference from the real thing?





3) Deny that Ireland has modernized: Refuse to believe that Ireland is now one of the world's leaders in IT and software and that companies as important as Apple would even think about putting their European headquarters in the country. Ignore any mention of Ireland leading the world in quality of life and of Dublin being a prohibitively expensive place to live, to you it's all potatoes and four leaf clovers over there and that’s how it should be on St. Patty’s Day.

4) Learn Gaelic: What's taking the excruciating time and effort needed to learn a near-dead language between friends? You'll be able to not only finally understand why someone named Shawn would spell it "Sean", and why "Sinn Fein" is not a misspelling that people are too afraid to correct, but you'll also wow Irish and Scottish folks who had this language crammed down their throats in school. Since you probably won't have time to learn the entire language today, a few handy phrases will do, such as learning how to order a beer etc, which can be found here.

5) Don’t just stop at green beer: On St. Patrick’s Day, not only should your beer be dyed green, but so should your infant’s milk, your pets, your elderly relations and your shrubbery (any exotic species you may have that is not already green by nature).

6) Tell ridiculous lies about how much worse you had it in the ‘old country’: Even if you're not that old and do not have a drop of Irish blood in your veins, spend the day clipping your younger relations behind the ear and reminding them of the various struggles you and yours had to go through – eating the family pets, having to shoe wild stallions and boil rocks for soup etc – in the old country so that they could enjoy such shameless luxury now.

7) Pretend you enjoy Irish cuisine: Slap a smile on your face as you labor through a bowl of hearty Irish stew. You may not fully digest it until April Fool’s Day, but today is St. Patrick’s Day and this is the greatest cuisine in the world.

8) Sing something maudlin and depressing at a karaoke joint: A proprietor of a New York bar recently banned the singing of "Danny Boy" at his establishment, saying it was too depressing and wasn't even Irish to begin with (someone in the story linked here referred to it as "The Irish 'Freebird'"). Banning a depressing song is in itself an act that flies in the face of Irish tradition, because most good Irish traditional music consists of either jigs or downright jump-off-a-bridge-after-the-last-verse bummer songs. Danny Boy is the most popular of those and if you can find a karaoke spot that hasn't banned this song or that only permits it once a night, then may we suggest that you let it rip. Barring that, there are countless mournful tunes that you can favor the crowd with after an excess of Guinness. We'll leave you on that note, with the best, Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers showing why the Irish do the mournful ballad better than 'em all:



Now go get drunk!

John Daly Brings Balls to Golf

Golf is a unique sport. Its playing surface to goal/hole/end-zone ratio is ENORMOUS. If soccer were golf, and its goal kept in proportion, one team would have to hail a cab to get the ball anywhere near the opposition's net.

A cup diameter of a golf hole is the size of a billiards pocket, yet its playing surface requires geography of Neverland Ranch proportions. If billiards were like that, Minnesota Fats wouldn't be.

Golfing is also unlike any other sport in that motorized vehicles are used outside the context of, say, racing them. Let's suppose a rugby player didn't much feel like running between scrums. If rugby were golf, he'd simply hop in a cart and lazily putter around the pitch.

In Canada, where the ground is frozen solid for at least nine months a year, players risk frostbite on the links if they can't jump-start their carts. In fact, the weather is so uninhabitable generally, that during the winter months, the most infirm, out of shape, and elderly segment of the population, that is to say golfers, head down to sunnier climes to hone their craft.

Now, unsurprisingly, neither of us golfs -- not for any of the reasons cited above, but mostly out of deference to proper male attire and not enjoying the prospect of any aspect of the game save the possibility of a free round at the clubhouse afterward.

One man who knows all about this is John Daly, the Faulkner of golf, a two-fisted boozer whose cavorting about when he's not on the links has no doubt compromised his game but unlike his more staid peers, allows him to be seen swinging with the likes of women like this one (NSFW -- unless you work somewhere good)

Daly, powered by the hooch, is known to smack the ball further than most of his peers, leading us to conclude (though we're not doctors) that his Samson-like strength is somehow related to his copious booze intake. Correlation equals causation if you're drinking the right stuff.

His "swing coach" (nothing to do with the embarrassing swing-dancing craze of the 1990s that led to one of the worst dance movies of all time) dropped Daly, because, he said: "The most important thing in his life is getting drunk, " as if that's really a problem.

According to recent reports, Daly spent Saturday working on his other game, "at the Hooters 'Owl's Nest' drinking beer, mingling with fans and signing autographs, including one on the back of a woman's pants". For proving that golf too can have competitors who don't mind being photographed in the presence of the topless while downing a regiment's worth of booze, we salute you John Daly.



And we would also like to offer a salute to the far more charming Miss Charming, a friend of The Shark Guys, who will be holding her Tales of the Cocktail Film Fest next Friday and Saturday (March 21 and 22) in New Orleans. We won't be able to attend unfortunately, but it's a can't miss for lovers of film, fun and four-in-the-morning closing times (we're not sure about the last part, but hey it is New Orleans we're talking about!). Click here for details

Teen Girl DUI: Drunk driver, 14, with mom in car

Whether it’s wowing Guitar Hero’s aging demographic with one’s innate ability to shred, making the competition look like dunderheads in a spelling bee or doing complex mathematical equations on the back of a Hello Kitty lunchbox, we live in a society where precociousness, however smug-seeming and nauseating it is for those without kids, is celebrated.

This sort of admiration carries over to a certain extent in manners of drinking. We all admired the kind of guy who was capable of out-drinking our parents when he was 15, and, years later, we’re happy to tip him for giving the windshield a good scrub when we go in for a fill-up. But this respect does not extend to youthful drunk drivers. If there is an upside to drunk-driving, or, as we call it, the orange pylon obstacle course home from the bar, it’s that most of the time those committing this offence are older, and thus benefit somewhat from more experience behind the wheel – this to be judged in proportion with the fact that they may well be seeing two of everything through one squinting eye while peering out over a steering wheel.

When alcohol levels are high and driving experience at a minimum, all hell can and often does break loose. When the following story came across the wires, we recalled the chapter in The Shark Book dedicated to youthful alcoholic indiscretions “The Halls of Drunker Learning: Grade A Boozing”, particularly the case of the young hellion who the source newspaper claimed was then “The UK’s youngest ever drunk driver” first arrested for taking the wheel after getting soused at Christmas dinner. At 14, she was still unrepentant and made a flashy showing at a court hearing by showing up in a gold-chain plus all-white ensemble to cuss out the judge, throw eggs at reporters and clock the crown prosecutor.

Alas, this story does not involve such entertaining theatrics, but it could very well end up as at least an honorable mention when this year’s “You Deserve Another Mother” awards are handed out. The 14-year-old in this story earned her DUI stripes while out for a drive with ma. Momsy was passed out in the passenger’s seat sleeping one off while her drunken daughter veered wildly around on the road, eventually rolling the Dodge Caravan in a ditch. According to reports it took Department of Transportation officials “considerable time” to clean up all of the beer bottles and malt liquor containers that flew out of the vehicle.

"I can't even wrap my brain around how you would let your 14-year-old daughter drive drunk, let alone drive with her," said one local cop. Efforts to solve this mystery were not helped by the drunken babbling responses of the mother who went on to deny criminal wrongdoing in the case.

Drunk Tank-Driver Smashes House in Vodka Run

In The Shark Book, we devoted an entire chapter, “Hard Corps Drunks: The Few, The Brave, The Blotto” to the exploits in liquid form of those in uniform – among them a young recruit nearly blinded while playing a boozy game of “fireball hockey” [it’s aptly named] at an Army base, and a navy man whose fecal foray onto shore left a bad impression, and a bad smell in town.

But possibly the most shocking of all of these, or at least the one that you would expect the firing squad to start tuning up for, was the sale of a tank by Russian army forces to their Chechen enemies for around 8,000 bucks after the two opposing sides voted for peace by laying down their weapons and drinking their faces off together for an afternoon. That story and another about a Russian soldier who stole a dinghy from the merchant ship he was on and nearly perished at sea in violent weather just to procure some vodka on land are both instructive preludes to the following.

The cold Russian winters no doubt gave the soldiers manning a tank in the Ural mountains a hankering for some liquid warmth, and they stopped off in a nearby village to procure a couple of bottles of vodka for the journey. Fortunately, some quick-thinking citizen had his mobile phone at the ready to catch the aftermath: after picking up the booze, the apparently drunk driver then got back into the tank and proceeded to crash it into a nearby house.

A lenient Army colonel made the following comment on the incident: "Of course, there were violations but the crew acted in good faith to catch up with its unit." That the crew stopped off in this village to fuel up in such a manner was something he did not touch upon in his statement.

The video is below, and while neither of us, unless the hour is late and we’re drinking the good stuff, can speak much Russian, here is what we guess was said at the start of it:

Driver: I got it! Couple of bottles of the cheap stuff. Bootleggers eh! (Laughs and drunkenly fishes through his pocket for his keys).

Other soldier: Say, are you alright to drive? Maybe I should take over while you get some sleep.

Driver: Nonsense! I'm fine! You’re such a worry wort! I barely had anything to drink, besides, I had a heavy lunch. No problem!

Other soldier: Wait! Too fast!

(Screams from the person whose house has just underwent impromptu renovations)

Drunk Elvis Impersonator 'All Shook Up' in court

A few years back, we found a rental car company that didn’t charge extra for mileage and proceeded to make them rethink that policy by striking out on an impromptu 1300 mile trip from Toronto to New Orleans with a couple of buddies. En route, we took in the best of what the southern US has to offer: happily clogging arteries with their delicious early-grave food, spending more than one late night boozing it up on Nashville’s main strip, and also doing the tourist guidebook stuff that involved sites near and dear to our hearts like the Jack Daniels distillery and Johnny Cash’s house in Hendersonville Tennessee.

We were disappointed to see that the latter was closed to the public upon our arrival, but heartened when we saw a sign across the street for something called “Trinity Music City, USA”. Alas, this enthusiasm was premature. “Trinity Music City, USA” is what Conway Twitty's Xanadu-like compound “Twitty City” was renamed when the Christian Trinity Broadcasting Company overtook it following the death of the great man – known for southern Lolita favorites like “I can tell you’ve never been this far before” – on a tour bus in 1993.

The resulting renovations to the compound are the stuff that nightmares are made of with Christian movies like "The Omega Code" ("Not just a movie, a miracle") playing on a continual loop, giant statues of winged angels throughout and souvenirs available at a place called the “Gold, Frankincense & Myrrh Bible Book Store”. (We confess to having purchased multiple “Bible Bars”, chocolate-bar shaped concoctions with the dubious claim of having been based on a recipe from the bible). Conway Twitty’s legacy is not lost here; cardboard cutouts of him and the missus smiling at intervals throughout his mansion are sure to give you the creeps long after you’ve sped out of the parking lot.

Leaving there and with the Dollywood Pigeon Forge city limits too far away, we decided to further indulge our appetites for all things garish and unsettling east of Las Vegas with a stop at Graceland, where on the back-end of a 2600 mile sojourn we found the idea of coughing up an extra $20 to see Elvis’s collection of cars anticlimactic to say the least after having literally breathed in the 1970s thanks to the shag carpet dust from the walls of his “Jungle Room”. The conclusion to the tour, with a stop at the King’s grave, was worth the price of admission though; giving us as it did the chance to quote from “This is Spinal Tap” by humming a few bars of “Heartbreak Hotel” and saying that this “Puts it all into perspective… Too much f*cking perspective!”

Alas, the King’s legend lives on in places outside of Graceland with his impersonators keeping the dream alive around the world. Just across the border in Kentucky, a 64-year-old Elvis impersonator, sadly not the one pictured here, was recently in court on pretrial motions regarding misdemeanor charges of stalking and violating a protective order (Editor’s Note: One hopes the judge keeps in mind the sheer creep-out factor of being stalked by an Elvis impersonator when deciding on this one).

“Elvis” showed up in court drunk wearing sunglasses and decked out in a rhinestone-studded shirt and scarf, the kind of fashion decision that should be grounds for arrest regardless of the circumstance, but which the judge found particularly unacceptable given the circumstances. The judge had the man tested for alcohol, and the result was nearly twice the .08 level at which a person is considered legally drunk in Kentucky, which should be twice that given the state's predilection for high-powered whiskey. This pretender to the throne’s excuse that he had a few drinks the night before didn’t fly with the suspiciously-minded judge who sent him to the clink for three days.