The Top Bouncers of All Time!

If your job description includes being able to thrash someone within an inch of their miserable lives and doing so with impunity while enjoying the odd drink on the job, you're either a cop or a bouncer.

Recently, we shone the spotlight on everyone's favorite enablers, bartenders, in our Top 10 Coolest Bartenders of All Time, but what of the guys whose job it is to look menacing and keep raging, violent drunks on the other side of the velvet rope (so they can beat up random strangers, instead of the good folks who patronize your pub)?

Bouncers, like cops, are there to maintain the status quo: ensuring that the good-looking, monied classes get preferential treatment and aren't made to shuffle their feet with the rest of the lumpenproles in line, however this isn't their sole responsibility: they're also called upon to do the kind of math long forgotten since the 5th grade: being able to calculate how old someone is, simply by looking at the date of birth on their authentic, state of Hawaii Driver's License.

Bouncers face occupational hazards that the average cop doesn't have to deal with, the "I could take that guy" delusion that drunks with superhuman Popeye strength brought on by cheap bourbon rather than leafy greens think they possess. A cop faced with a similar notion could, say, have you quickly chalk outlined on the street, whereas a bouncer has to put aside their headset and determine whether a disorderly patron can be talked down, or separated from both their dental work/teary girlfriend and sent a-packing.

You'd think a profession where there's a near constant threat of having a pinot bottle slammed off the side of your noggin like a newly christened cruise ship would land bouncers more film and TV gigs beyond the usual "Sorry sir, I don't see a 'Lindonhoffer', party of two, anywhere on the list?" roles. Generally though, it's their biceps that are called upon to wring the neck of the depressed, drunk protagonist, ignoring pleas of the leading lady as they toss them out of their favorite watering hole.

The doormen we've focused on here however, have accomplished more than simply folding burly arms and wearing suits three sizes too small, they've become pop culture icons.

So, for those who get paid to kick some gluteus max outside the confines of a ring or the auspices of an Athletic Commission, and who'd rather hold out for bribes than slave for tips, we honor the humble bouncer, with our Top Bouncers of All Time!

9) Pat Roach, "A Clockwork Orange": Roach, a Judo black-belt and former wrestler, played a red-bearded bouncer in the Stanley Kubrick classic (below), and though he didn't actually utter any lines, he impressed the director so much that he was cast in "Barry Lyndon" and then famously, as the guy who gets his ass beat twice in "Raiders of the Lost Ark", and is dispatched by propeller (right). The mute Clockwork role eventually led to parts in "Never Say Never Again", "Willow" and "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves". For making the most of being menacing, and doing security detail for one of the coolest bars around, the Korova, which serves up narcotics-laced milk rather than the use with which we're more familiar---as a tasty dairy adjunct to Kahlua, Roach lands a spot here.










8) Michael Clarke Duncan, "A Night at the Roxbury": SNL, for the better part of a decade, has brought us mirth-free Saturday nights, but prior to this, they were known to broaden eight-minute sketches into gray matter-atrophying, feature-length forgettables. "A Night at the Roxbury" bucked this trend somewhat, and did its best to derive Toyota Prius-like comic mileage from heads bopping along to the beat of What is Love? (baby don't hurt me). Michael Clarke Duncan, the hulking gawk who later starred alongside Tom Hanks in the Green Mile, is no stranger to holding onto a clipboard having held down bouncer roles in both Bulworth and Married with Children for the doorman trifecta.






7) Craig Robinson, "Knocked Up": In most movies, bouncers get about as much dialogue and have as much on-screen presence as a large cactus, but "Knocked Up" bucked that trend with its hilarious exchange between Craig Robinson, of "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story" and "The Office" fame and Lesley Mann. Striking a blow on behalf of anyone ever deemed too ugly or old to enter a club, the Mann character lays into the bouncer, "What the fuck is your problem? I'm not going anywhere, you're just some roided out freak with a fucking clipboard!" Robinson, showing that, although all appearances may at times point otherwise, bouncers are human after all admits that the system is unfair, "It's not cause you're not hot, I would love to tap that ass. I would tear that ass up. I can't let you in cause you're old as fuck. For this club, you know, not for the earth."









6) Max Baer, "The Prizefighter and the Lady": Boxer Baer famously got Hitler's mustache in a twist by dispatching Max Schmeling at Yankee stadium, while sporting Star of David trunks. "Madcap Maxie" also laid out 6'6 Italian strongman Primo "The Ambling Alp" Carnera, who, along with former heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey make appearances in the 1933 flick, "The Prizefighter and the Lady", about a bouncer-turned boxer who tries to not let fame, fortune and loose women get to his punching bag rattled head. Baer also famously killed a man in the ring, an achievement he appears to relish if we're to take the Ron Howard movie "Cinderella Man" at its word. With that kind of resume, he's the exact kind of guy you'd want to be standing at your door if you're a bar owner to pound a hippy into the dust if need be.








5) Steve Collins and Lenny 'Gov-nor' Mclean, "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels": More former boxers to add to the list, same flick: one legit (well, as 'legit' as the current state of boxing could ever be), The "Celtic Warrior" Steve Collins, who once said of pound-for-pound champ Roy Jones after a deal fell through that he'd "fight him in a phone box in front of two men and a dog". The other bouncer pugilist, famous in the less than legit London East End bare-knuckle scene, was a 500 lb bench-presser, who tossed enough toothless yobs out the front door of enough taverns to be crowed 'King of Bouncers' in the city's pub scene. Though technically not portraying a bouncer in this film, The Guv-nor gets kudos here for his Barry the Baptist portrayal as well as for his scene stealing appearance in Bounce: Behind the Velvet Rope


"No one in here but card-players tonight and I do mean no one!'





4) Ray Winstone, "Bouncer". The “Don’t forget to carry a big fuck off stick” and "This is the biggest irony. The ones that like you the least, normally those who have a degree in philosophy under their pacifist belts, and absolutely no fuckin' idea about the reality of life outside the college campus, they are the ones that need you most when shit and fan meet." bits of counsel, lands Winstone a spot here. Another former boxer, but more interestingly, another Indiana Jones connection here in that Winstone is to appear in the forthcoming flick Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, alongside Hollywood A-listers John Hurt, Cate Blanchett and the increasingly creaky piece of archeology that is Harrison Ford. Winstone, the actor, is a fan of the east London soccer team West Ham United, which neatly segues into our third position.





3) Ricki Harnett, "Rise of the Footsoldier" This Brit flick chronicles the rise of Carlton Leach, a West Ham soccer hooligan whose exploits randomly beating the crap out of opposing team supporters, were exactly the tools of the trade required to bounce in some of east London's dive bars before becoming an enforcer for the local neighborhood heroin dealers.
"Everybody got what they came for. If you came in looking for a drink and a couple of birds, that’s what you got. But if you came in for anything else, you’d end up with my fist in your face. And if you came back with your little army wrapped around ya, well, I’d just have to get my metal bar out."



2. Chow Yun Fat in "Full Contact" Chow Yun Fat plays a club bouncer in the seedy back streets of Bangkok, Thailand, where instead of laying the smack down on pudgy middle aged Dutch pedophiles, runs afoul of a sleazy underworld boss and has to flee with his dancer girlfriend, a fellow bouncer, and his best buddy. Shown here in full on switchblade, ass-beating glory, here's some 'Fat' camp.

Hallelujah! Now Pass the Beer Nuts: Ministry to Open in Bar

Barring getting lost on the way back from an after-hours bar and popping into one to grab a nap on the way home, it is unlikely that you will see either of the Shark Guys occupying church pew space on a Sunday morning. That said, this story did nearly cause a religious conversion of Paul on the Road to Damascus-like power. It was later determined that the bright lights we thought we saw and errantly attributed to a beacon from a celestial lighthouse were caused by a combination of dehydration and standing up too fast.

Pope Benedict XVI (Return of the Robed One) is currently on his first visit to the US, which has the third-largest Catholic population in the world – this is a fact made most clear in Mafia movies in which gangsters, despite being pimps, killers and thieves of the worst order, can still be counted on to put on a clean shirt for little Antoinette’s baptism. The pope’s goal this time round is to inject a little enthusiasm into a faith knocked sideways by the scandals of various touchy-feely fathers (of the spurned “Russian hands and Roman fingers” sect) and the fact that even Mother Teresa was recently found to have been a closet atheist.

We wish him all the best, but really if he wants to see those collection plates filling up like they did in the good old days when the church owned everything and had the business end of a bayonet ready for naysayers, we suggest he pay attention to the moves made recently by a reverend in Sidney, Ohio. The senior pastor of Sidney First United Methodist Church decided to move his ministry, saying, “We want to minister to them where they are”. If you’ve been reading this blog regularly, you’ll know exactly where they are: at the bar. Thus the reverend has decided to open the Country Rock Church in the Pub Lounge, a typical bar located off the interstate.

The worship sessions will feature “food, fun, and faith”, and those lacking in the third category might just end up converted if the integral fourth “F” – free-flowing booze – is also on offer.

Blue Jays Fans Balk at Beer Ban

The typical baseball game lasts about as long as The Godfather parts I and II, with long periods of inactivity punctuated by short bursts to the bathrooms to piss out all the suds used to down all the peanuts in the gallery. In these cheap seats, especially during a "pitcher's duel" (baseball parlance for when even less than the nothing that usually happens, happens) the combination of heat stroke and freely flowing beer results in normally staid Toronto fans turning into warring savages in the upper deck.

Before the Jays moved into their cozy, retractable domed-roof confines, they occupied an outdoor stadium situated right by the lake, and on a typical opening day the "Boys of Summer" would be fielding ground balls in a snowdrift. During these lean years, it was nearly impossible to bear those temperatures without ingesting a Great Lake's worth of booze (picture the loogan in the accompanying photo clutching a stubby bottle of an aged Molson product and you'll get an idea of how 90 percent of the cheap seats looked in those days).

This season, in a bid to one-up church in the competition for the place with the fewest number of empty seats on a Sunday, the Blue Jays have started a $2 promotion for nosebleed seating. This drew the kind of crowd that is not overly interested in whether inter-league play truly was the most exciting development in baseball in the last 50 years, but rather those who enjoy punching in the head people who take opposing stands on such mundane issues. Some 100 people were ejected during the Jays' home opener, a development that president Paul Godfrey links to booze: "“It’s really unfortunate when some of them feel it’s a night club here." It should be noted that if the Rogers Dome were a nightclub, it would be the worst nightclub on the planet.

Regardless, sports fans who want to support their home team for $2 bucks, get drunk, and knee their fellow sports fans in the face hopefully got enough of that in during the home opener because the organization plans to ban beer sales in the ultra cheap $2 upper deck seats, and is even considering ending the two-buck promotion due to the drunken brawling . Violent though it was, the cheap seat punch-ups marked the first time that Jays fans have enjoyed themselves at a baseball game since the team's back-to-back World Series wins.

Since getting faced in the cheap seats was one of the few fun things remaining about baseball, expect the tumbleweed to be blowing through the upper deck of the Rogers Dome and for the unruly fans to be exhibiting their Labatt lunacy in the comfort of their own homes.

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.

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)

College Party Crackdown: UK gets serious about freshman drinking

We can't speak for the US, where drinking laws are such that when you're finally legal you have a hairline receding more than a North Atlantic tide, but in Canada and the UK, you're able to drink, drive and vote all under the age of 20 (perhaps even in the same day if you have lots of errands to run)

In the UK, "freshers", ("frosh" in Canada, "freshmen" in the US) such as the girl seen here, taking a much needed study break, have been known to dull the rigors of those stressful first two weeks of class registration and receipt of more than three course syllabuses, by tilting the wrist. Now, the UK government is threatening a freshman orientation crackdown worse than when your Visa's declined at the corner bar and you've donned a hairnet and helped with the dishes.

According to a Sunday Times report, however, hypocrisy abounds as Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, as a drunk teen (hencforce known for his dry wit), purportedly set fire to a greenhouse full of award-winning (?) cacti and PM Gordon Brown, while in student government fought against a proposal to cut student grants because recipients were spending too much money on hooch.

At Durham College, one social group called the "The Diced Carrot Club", (not a gathering celebrating the Vegan lifestyle and comcomitant hairy legs), is reputed to encourage members to drink until they are sick, not surprising really when you consider how prevalent boozing culture is across the pond and how during your formative years you need to get up speed--- it's the UK afterall, which gave us 'Bog Snorkeling', (whose genesis can only be explained as a result of the drink) as well as sports that take place in a pub rather than on a field.

A liver specialist at Newcastle U, confided to the PM over ginseng tea that "Students are being positively encouraged to go out and get blind drunk", which is the order of the day on this side of the Atlantic as spring break is rapidly upon us.

For our UK readers, 'Spring Break' is the time when NAFTA trade restrictions are violated by an influx of cheap women across the Mexican border, looking to bathe in tequila and take advantage of the lax drinking laws before returning to their studies.

According to a Downing Street responsible drinking advocate (read: buzzkill) "Many young people are away from home for the first time and are impressionable."

Nicolas Cage Suing Kathleen Turner: Cage Meet his Match?

Call it 'low talker' versus 'slow talker'. Tranny-voiced has-been Kathleen Turner has apparently got actor Nicolas Cage, (who speaks slower than a phone sex operator with a thyroid condition), in her cross hairs.

"That stupid voice of his and the fake teeth! Honestly, I cringe to think about it. He caused so many problems."

Such invectives could just as easily be tossed Paul Anka's way, but it's 'problem-generator' Cage who doesn't come off too 'Super' in Turner's forthcoming autobiography, 'Send Yourself Roses', which also notes, while we're on the subject of physical appearance, teeth, etc:

"I was no great beauty. I was a skinny woman with long legs, almost no boobs, good hair and bad teeth . . . the studio had a fake cover made for them, which was awkward. It changed my lips and the way I spoke. It was uncomfortable, too."

In the soon-to-be-released tome, (which has nothing whatsoever to do with 'View' drunkard and War of the Roses co-star Danny Devito despite its similarly efflorescent title), Turner refers to working with Burt Reynolds as 'nasty' and she even accuses the aforementioned (and fellow hairpiece aficionado) Nicolas Cage of being in trouble with the law, and being arrested twice for drunk driving. And now, it seems, Mr cage is taking the matter to the courts.

Turner herself admits a fondness for the drink, and admits to using it to dull the pain of arthritis, which in retrospect was probably a better treatment option than Vioxx.

"I discovered that vodka killed it quite wonderfully. I didn't want to take painkillers because I didn't like the way they mucked up my mind, so I used alcohol instead", notes the star of Body Heat and Baby Geniuses.

We Shark Guys have covered comparably asymmetric celebrity squabbles here (no lawsuits yet) while Cage and Clooney's status is without question A-level, the jury's out as to whether a more powerful telescope is required to detect either a Turner or a Fabio's star power, at least until the Italian loses and/or cuts his locks or the former stops appearing nude on stage and getting sued by Supermen.

Drunk bus fight, Toronto, or next stop Haymaker Street

By joining our womens drug rehab program, you'll be able to overcome addictions like alcohol abuse today! Our womens alcohol rehab center has been rated the best womens drug treatment center available!


We Shark Guys hold two Canadian passports, which we’d be more than willing to part with if the right offer came along. Of course we kid and proudly fly the flag wherever we go, expressing our patriotism through the most underhanded of means—on the backpacks of our seeing stars and stripes comrades to the south to tourist hot-spots around the globe.

In addition to these important documents, (for which official photos now require that the applicant no longer smile, somewhat undermining our outwardly friendly and polite, if dull global image) we also hold two bus passes. Though only one of us resides in Toronto year round, (while the other stops by occasionally for an orthotic in-sole fitting, or to load up on airport souvenirs), we're both familiar with hopping a turnsti, er, paying full fare and experiencing those heady subterranean smells or brushing elbows with the great unwashed on a bus.

The Toronto Transit Commission, or TTC, which as youngsters we dubbed ‘Take the Car’, is responsible for ferrying around a million or so residents daily by subway or bus who cannot afford cars, all over the fair city, minimizing gridlock and ensuring that we do our part for Al Gore.

‘Drunk Bus Fight on the Vomit Comet’ (shown here) is pretty self-explanatory if you possess basic reading and comprehension skills and is one of a slew of videos showcasing the worst public transit has to offer, a cautionary tale of what happens when a surfeit of stinking drunk passengers is squeezed into a tight, enclosed space and why the authors, funds permitting, will hop in a cab and risk depositing an all day Mexican breakfast repast in the backseat.

In boxing parlance, a fight that takes place ‘in a phone booth’ (for younger readers, a box that used to enclose a phone attached to the ground) is one in which the combatants (as seen here) wail away on one another in the tightest of confines, with no room for movement and little or no fancy footwork. Though not exactly conjuring up the 'Louisville Lip', Ali in his prime (or even Will Smith's punch drunk mimicry in the eponymous film), the fellow with his back to the camera undermining our national reputation as peacekeepers and not heeding his girlfriend's piercing screams, seems to be getting the better of the two combatants down below.

Prison Chocolate Ban No Laugh Riot

We were initially delighted when the phrase "Swedish prison" came across the news wires, given the vast storehouse of research material at our disposal— shop keeps who archive a Smithsonian-like collection of similarly themed films, as well as a steady inventory of single cigarettes so we could get a sense of what prison life is all about without all those communal shower come ons.

Unfortunately, without a working knowledge of the Nordic language, and the Ikea warehouse not returning our harassing phone calls (not to mention being indisposed to Googling the phrase “Swedish prison” for fear of incurring some librarian's bifocaled stink-eye) we were unable to figure out exactly what kind of penal institution ‘Brinkebergsanstalten’ is, the mouthful of a prison at the center of the following story. So, with no English language reports specifying the gender of those incarcerated, we decided to eschew modern crime statistics and 200 years' worth of temple-probing criminology and assume it’s a massive minimum security facility for women with daily sheer tube top workouts for the prison volleyball team and unscheduled conjugal visitations for inquisitive bloggers.

According to reports, Swedish inmates have been banned from putting their kitchen detail/extortion savings (that would otherwise be put toward shanking the least popular guard), toward the purchase of holiday boxed chocolates amid concerns over alcohol content. This measure resulted in the warden-undermining spokesperson for Kraft Foods, the provider of the crowbar motel confectionery to note, “In order to consume the equivalent of one shot of schnapps, you have to eat some 32 pieces of confectionery. Gosh, what effort." No less effort than what cell block 2D's finest distiller of Ziploc hooch has to expend, who could certainly make good use of such a sweetener to take the toxic edge off the soggy bread and rotten fruit whiff of ‘Orange Jack.’

In related news, a California school district suspended a 12-year-old for having a piece of chocolate candy filled with a half-ounce of booze. The 7th grade scofflaw received a suspension notice that would not look out of place in the type of institution mentioned above, for having "possession, used, sold, furnished or been under the influence of any controlled substance, alcohol or intoxicant."

Make it a double – she's drinking for two

Authors of a recent study published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health offered some good news to pregnant women who may want to continue on in the lifestyle that got them in that condition in the first place when they said that it might be ok for expectant mothers to binge drink on occasion without harming their unborn. This goes against orthodox thinking on the subject and will come as a surprise to those who have lost major points with the missus when suggesting during a lull in Lamaze class that everybody repair to the local bar because “this is all just a big money-grab anyway”.

But before you and your mates and a yummy mummy of your acquaintance toast the baby by gently tapping the outside of the womb with your can of Michelob Light and rubbing it for luck, keep in mind that the study was limited to the effects of the occasional binge enjoyed by someone who was not a chronic alcoholic. A number of studies have linked heavy drinking during pregnancy to stunted growth, birth defects and abnormal neural development – in short, the conditions that plague the starting line-up of your company’s softball team.

After an examination of thousands of research papers and more brow-furrowing than goes on at the cue-card prepping session at the Miss World pageant, the study’s authors concluded that there was almost no conclusive evidence linking binge drinking, which they pegged at five drinks in one session (low, but we’ll let it pass given the context), and such birth maladies as fetal alcohol syndrome.

The study did find a minor connection between a mother binge drinking and the issue of her loins ending up with a lower verbal IQ, learning problems, a predilection towards delinquency, and – pure speculation on our part here – an increased likelihood that PTA mailings concerning the child’s schooling will need to be delivered to the neighborhood pub.

For those of you who take your medical advice from us – not recommended, though we will gladly dispense with recommendations on patent medicines that can treat all sorts of ailments – the study was inconclusive and its authors recommended that women not binge drink “just to be safe”. That said, the authors also say that those who do go out to tilt the odd half-dozen in celebration of the blessed event, or to drown their sorrows as they bemoan how unreliable birth control is, should not feel too bad because as of right now the evidence is minimal that it will do any harm.

The Shark Guys