Crocodile Tears in your Beer: Aussie barflies get visit from baby croc

Those of us who grew up watching professional wrestling had, at one point or another, to come to terms with the fact that the stereotypes represented in the rasslin’ ring were a few metal folding-chair head-shots apart from reality. So when the wrestling world told us that Australia was comprised of a mix of people that were halfway between Outback Jack – a “Let’s capitalize on Crocodile Dundee’s popularity” 80s wrestler who lost more matches than he was in – and the Bushwackers, two toothless stereotypes, who marched around the ring, swinging their arms above their heads (see below -- it's a bit like power-walking, but with a lot more arm-swinging and cretinous head bobbing) in a fashion not encountered since one of us observed it replicated by a very drunk English football fan on the streets of Amsterdam.

(The Bushwackers, it should be noted for the sake of people who would lose sleep tonight if this correction were not made, were actually from New Zealand. The best way to upset a Kiwi? Tell them, “I love New Zealand. They filmed the Lord of the Rings movies there. It really is the most scenic part of Australia.” Australia is to New Zealand as the United States is to Canada and such jibes do not go down well as an American telling a Canadian in a foreign land, “Ah, what a relief to hear an American accent.”)

But surely this was all stuff and nonsense and actual life in Australia does not bear any actual resemblance to a bunch of people living out in the bush and making lasting friendships with the koala bears? Well, actually, no, the Bushwackers or their like might actually have been holding fort in the bar where the following took place.

Drinkers were enjoying an afternoon’s tipple at the Noonamah Tavern, located 25 miles (40 km) from the Northern Territory capital of Darwin, basically a point on the map marked with the label “Middle of Nowhere.”, when a baby salt-water crocodile, or “salty” in the local parlance, walked into a bar. No it wasn’t accompanied by a nun and a circus dwarf. Rather than being frightened by the site of this creature, that likes to when it’s full grown sink its chompers into anything from water buffaloes to humans, the drinkers taped its jaws shut and brought it inside for a photos.

The woman who tends bar said that having the wild kingdom stroll in for a jar of the good stuff wasn’t an unusual occurrence. “We've had a lot of horses pop up. We've had cane toads, which are yukky," she said. "We have had a big buffalo come in, wander around. There's a photo of him with a beer."

Since the creature is at home in saltwater and would have had to travel pretty far to reach the pub from such a habitat, the bartender reckons it was either dropped off there accidentally by a fisherman or as a practical joke. Regardless, the carousing croc escaped his brush with bush-country pub life and is now among his fellows at a local crocodile farm. (Full story here). (For more on crocs and the boozers who love them, check out this story from our archives).

Nanny State in an Uproar Over Generous Jagermeister 'Spirit Dwarf'

Bars and booze companies have all sorts of ways to facilitate that all important transition between bottle and gut. Liquor companies quite often engage the services of good looking people stuck in that gray middle world between legitimate modeling work and chrome pole duty at the local Gawk and Whistle to hand out samples of their product, while refusing requests for phone numbers as politely as they can. For some reason, these sorts of promotions don’t make headline news or inspire the wrath of politicians, but you put just one muscular dwarf in a tophat and…

A pub in Melbourne Australia called “The Saint” caused a hubbub recently when it hired a dwarf to walk up and down the length of the bar with a bottle of Jagermeister from which he'd pour shots into the expectant gobs of pub-goers. Two possible causes of concern with this would be, first the lawsuit that would likely result if the unnamed dwarf in the photos slipped on the bar and injured himself. (Editor's On-A-Tangent Note: For an excellent film in which a drunken dwarf stands up on a bar and curses out an entire pub full of backwoods hicks, we recommend The Station Agent, starring Peter Dinklage). That said, the man in the photos appears to be having a good time, and we can assume that he was paid damn well to don a top-hat and march along a bar half-naked. Had someone fell asleep drunk at the bar earlier and awoke to the site of a bare-chested dwarf in a tophat proffering a bottle of booze, this might have had a disquieting on the person, but that didn't happen as far as we know.

But of course in the world of the nanny state this bizarre method of getting people to drink the sickening-when-served-warm concoction that is Jagermeister – which is not, to our shock and surprise made from the blood of the newly dead – became a matter of such national import that Australian lawmakers were going on the record about it, and comment was even sought from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (though he has yet to issue a public statement on the matter, presumably weighing the significance of the top hat with his key advisers).

Nanny-state politicos were up in arms about the promotion, with the Victorian Minister for Consumer Affairs (the Victorian being a reference to the Australian province of Victoria not the time period, though he would have fit in well then) going as far as to say that "Patrons accepting these free drinks will have no idea how much alcohol they have consumed."

While patronizing government officials believe that a promotion like this will somehow bring bar patrons to ruin -- it's not like the dwarf was forcefeeding them the Jag, even though he does appear to be doing so in the second photo here -- the drinkers themselves have a clear message for politicos: Get lost. "It's just a bit of fun," said one patron. "Why politicise it?"

Soon to be Dancing Behind Bars: Drunk Dancer Does a Backflip onto a Police Car

For those of us who are not secretly pining to shimmy beneath the bright lights of Broadway, dancing in public is something that requires a considerable amount of inhibition-killing liquid courage to even consider. Before you can respond to an invitation to dance, you must first ensure that you are sufficiently drunk – i.e. that you have reached the point where you can hit the dance floor fully confident that you will not sober up and realize what you’re doing mid-boogaloo.

Drinking and dancing has its benefits though; providing you don’t slip on a puddle of beer, strutting your stuff on the dance floor slightly lowers your odds of going home alone. Slightly. However, there are some times when drunk dancing really only benefits the kind of people who chronicle and laugh at feats of drunken stupidity – namely, well, us.

A 25-year-old man in Australia’s Northern Territory was drunk in a casino parking lot at 3am and felt the need to keep the party going. A paddy wagon and police car were stationed at the casino to corral drunks just like him. Our drunken friend did not take the presence of the paddy wagon as a hint to walk as quickly and as upright as he possibly could in the opposite direction to avoid a night of having Barfy Ben whisper the secrets of life in his ear at the local drunk tank. Instead, he decided, he must dance, and thought that the top of the paddy wagon’s cage would be just the place to do that.

He hopped up first on the bonnet of the paddy wagon and then this lush Lord of the Dance did a little of the ole’ soft-shoe shuffle on top of the wagon’s cage. Clearly a showman, the man knew that every truly memorable dance performance needs a spectacular finish and decided to cap his act off with a backflip onto the police car behind the paddy wagon.

According to a local sergeant, the two cops sitting in the patrol car “got quite a surprise”, when the drunken dancer came hurtling toward them, crashing through the car’s windshield and severely damaging the hood. The officers weren’t hurt and neither was the dancer, the sergeant said: "He was very, very intoxicated -- maybe that's why he didn't get too hurt from the fall.''

Man Streaking at Horse Race: And it's 'Drunk Idiot' by a nose!

As we noted in 'The Shark Book', horses once served man as a primary mode of transport and then were thanked for their years of service with new posts in society as fodder for glue and rendering plants and as a key ingredient in the nation's dog food.

Another popular use for horses has been to gather them at tracks, put lilliputian men atop them and force them to race one another while the audience bring ruination upon themselves through gambling, softening the blow of every lost dollar with a fortifying drink.

Occasionally, this spectacle of soaking up hooch like a dish rag, cursing and haggling with hookers is undertaken with pretension, as is the case with the running of the Royal Ascot. There, in '94 as we chronicled in the book, a drunk galoot, aiming to get a closer look at the 'gorgeous' (source newspaper's quotation marks) women in the Royal Enclosure, nearly got trampled to death in front of Her Majesty, the Queen Mother and the Duke of Edinburgh.

This recent example from NSW, Australia, though less benign (unless you count all the angry punters willing to put this man's life in danger for having nullified the race results) involved a man celebrating a stag party with his closest mates, who decided to strip down and offer up a photo finish [seen here]

Taxi Cab Confession: Cab driver backs over drunk guy

In many respects, big city drunks have it easy over their blotto backwoods brethren. There's no need to blow a sizable portion of your paycheck--the remainder of what's been left in the jukebox of a local saloon--on a cab fare into the hinterlands, if cabs even service those back roads at all. At least you're occasionally able to stumble home if you remember such details as your address (which you distinctly recall scribbling on a napkin and stuffing into a stranger's purse) or that the shortest distance between two points is the straight line you cannot walk.

Sure you might wander into an alley inhabited by a tire iron-wielding maniac (who doesn't look like they drive but who take out their bus-pass related frustrations on the noggins of unwitting passersby), but you're at greater risk of having your reasonable facsimile of 'home' be a yellowing mattress hauled out on garbage day.

A Sydney man after a night on the town and eschewing public transit (a good move generally, as we've shown here) found out that navigating home in an urban milieu is fraught with peril even if you're taking what should be the safest route. According to the Daily Telegraph, a cabbie was arrested after allegedly reversing over the man, who he thought was trying to abscond without paying the meter fare---cab drivers being second only to bartenders on the service industry's 'most often stiffed when it comes to paying the bill' hierarchy.

The Aussie partier, whose drunkenness cannot be called into dispute as he would only give his name as 'Columbus', claimed he was 'smacked to the footpath', by the cab driver, not once, but twice. In keeping with the 'seeing double' sensory experiences often occurring in these situations, police investigators later confirmed that the cab had only reversed once.

According to reports, the cab driver had looked bewildered as he was lead away in handcuffs, asking why they had arrested him and not the man who'd recently painted the town fire engine red and didn't have the good sense to get off the road. He was later released without charge.
It's unknown how 'Columbus' fared the rest of his voyage.

Drunk graffiti artist all washed up... and The Joker's Wild Life: Heath Ledger

[From the recently spit-shined, mahogany editor's desk:


This morning, we figured we'd steer clear of commenting on the early demise of the talented Heath Ledger as revelling in the morbid is more the province of the folks over at The Darwin Awards. So, we figured we'd focus on a different Australian-themed story, a 'near death' one in this case.



Hip hop is universal and responsible for much of the pop culture we do our best to shield our eyes from on a daily basis, ideally, with a ball cap pulled way down and a hoodie.

It's given us, among other things: over-sized duds for fat and non-fat alike, athletic footwear thrown onto overhead wires to mark drug territory (a stern warning against crack dealers bold enough to ply their trade in penny loafers) and seizure inducing ditties.

Purists often cite the four pillars that prop up the Temple of Hip Hop, which include DJing (of the type not done at your cousin's Bar Mitzvah when a drunk uncle yells out for 'Hotel California'), emceeing, breakin' (not advisable beyond, let's say, the age of 25, or for anyone with lower back problems) and of course-- graffiti.

A piss drunk Australian graffiti artist who might've been overcome by the fumes of his art or vandalism, depending on your aesthetic sensibilities, and inside a storm water drain no less (presumably so that the surf could wash out his aerosol handiwork, Etch-a-Sketch-style) was rescued when he himself was swept out into the bay and nearly drowned.

In eastern Sydney, teens with a nose for trouble and one that's apparently lost its olfactory powers too, have been known to body board, or "sewer-slide", inside the drain when there is no surf.

According to a local witness, "The young kids from the area are always in the drain every weekend. I don't understand what the fascination is."

Drink and exercise your way to a longer life: study.

Like a bird feeding its young, news media regurgitate press releases before flying off to crap on other stories (such as wild parties thrown by Aussie teens that necessite a police helicopter response). We Shark Guys, however, offer the kind of sober analysis typically seen just prior to pitchers of stale beer arriving at your table.

So, instead of focusing on that story, or some drunk who stumbled his way onto the property of English footballer Michael Owen and was chased by security personnel all over the finely manicured manor grounds of his 17^th century estate, we decided to spotlight physical activity of a different sort.

If the only exercise you get in a week is the mad dash to your PC when you’re instant messaged, you’re going to want to stamp out that cigarette (preferably on your tongue, just like in the movies), crack open a window a touch, breathe deep and take note as Danish researchers recently asked, “If you don't want to exercise too much, can you trade it for one to two drinks per day and be fine?” (a fine question indeed, replacing the one that was on our noggins this morning, "What did Amy Winehouse do with all the hair from her bee-hive?)

In the latest issue of the European Heart Journal, researchers looked at nearly 12,000 Danes in a 20-year study and we’ve distilled the results for you like a fine cognac which coincidentally, we're sipping this morning to go along with our breakfast oatmeal (the cheap stuff goes IN it).

First, the bad news, the 'something rotten in the state of Denmark' if you will: you still have to exercise, and according to the lead researcher, "there's absolutely no proof of a preventative and protective effect [of alcohol] before age 45."

The good news is though, that if you actually make it to this advanced age and aren't killed by the drink or a sedentary lifestyle, you can exercise and imbibe in moderation, extending your mortality to Keith Richards like proportions while at the same time lowering heart disease risk. There's even an added benefit: you can even outlive all those finger-wagging abstainers as study participants who didn't drink and didn't exercise (and who are likely contacting their lawyers right now to launch a lawsuit against the Danish researchers) had double the risk for heart disease as those who did exercise and drink moderately.

You know what they say, "abstinence makes the heart a goner".

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)

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).