Welsh Criminals Asked: ‘Court or a Pub Ban?’ Answer: ‘Good morning your honor!’

Booze and really sloppy crime seem to go hand-in-hand. We’ve documented this heavily in “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death (and other true tales of drunken debauchery”, particularly in the section “Crime Doesn’t Pay Your Bar Tab”, and we’re presented with constant reminders of the truth of it on a regular basis. Drunk criminals, it must be said, do offer society the bonus of being easy to catch, both because they’re quick to lose their wind when chased and also because they – like the drunk in our book who left a trail of red paint running from the bank he had just robbed to the pub where he was drinking up his haul – are just really not the most formidable criminal masterminds of our times.

If you’re a proprietor of a bar, the sheer volume of drunks you have to deal with pretty much guarantees that you will come into contact with at least one arsehole a day, and if you’re really unlucky, said arsehole will have a similar outlook in like to that of Irvine Welsh’s hellish creation Franco Begbie, the violent psychopath who separated people from their teeth in both "Trainspotting" and its sequel "Porno" (he also has a walk-on role in the excellent "Glue").

According to a report in the North Wales Daily Post, it seems that pubs in North Wales might be on to something when it comes to keeping those in this latter school out of their bars. A group of publicans from 40 establishments throughout North Wales have banded together to form PubWatch. The strength of the group is in the uniform approach it takes to banning troubled customers. Get blacklisted by PubWatch and you’re out of luck at any of the bars under its preview. For your sociable drunken psychopath this is death.

The scheme has been successful, in fact from an outsider’s perspective it would seem to be embarrassingly successful as a North Wales police inspector recently went on the record as saying that the threat of a Pubwatch ban actually carries more weight than the possibility of having to face a day in court. “When they are arrested and we tell them they are off to court they shrug their shoulders, but tell them they are banned from the pubs and they start to plead with you,” he is quoted as saying in the North Wales Daily Post. Either some pretty lenient sentences are being doled out in Wales or the criminals there have a love of drinking that is more powerful than the fear of a jail-shanking.

Pub Watch systems, which are in place elsewhere in the UK, do have their detractors. A group of boozing enthusiasts in Scunthorpe have lodged a human-rights complaint against their local version of PubWatch after they received a ban from all area bars. Said one: "I well understand the ban in the pub where I was out of order - but not in 29 others where I have never done anything wrong." And he has a point. Letting a heavy ashtray fly at the head of an adversary in the midst of a spirited conversation is not exemplary behavior, but shouldn't result in you being banned from every pub if it was just an isolated incident. (But if it happens at say 12 pubs, then we can see why the local publicans might want to build a human wall to keep you off their premises).

And there is no doubt that publicans will be able to use the ban even when maintaining law and order is not the key issue, like the recent ban on Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling. We've never had a drink with the chancellor and cannot guess at his swings of temperament when under the influence, but it would appear that the ban has more to do with recent tax increases that he's implemented which directly pinch publicans.

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.''

Punch Drunk in Aisle One: Barfly Picks Fight with Boxing Coach at Shop

In boxing parlance, a "tomato can" is a hand-picked schlub brought in to go a few rounds with the champ, whose odds of scoring an upset are comparable to say, Madison, Wisconsin landing the next games of the Olympiad.

While these guys are technically professional fighters, at least when they're not earning a living as roofers, drywallers and doing other jobs that don't require a background check, it's not uncommon for the town drunk to take one glassy-eyed look at one of these soft around the midriff ham 'n' eggers and think to themselves, "I could take 'em"--especially if he's facing the other way and I'm swinging a barstool. It's no accident then that "punch drunk" has become part of the lexicon as we'll see in this story.

A London man, on the back end of a two-day drink and cocaine-fueled bender, “weekends” as Keith Richards calls ‘em, walked up to a fellow shopper, 23, and accused him of "gie' in evils” to him. The shopper tried to ignore him (having no clue what “gie’ in evils” means, we would have done the same, though we assume the language barrier didn’t apply here), but the drunk would not quit. He got in the man’s face and punched him before pulling out a sharpened key and slashing the man across the chest. He then challenged the man to “Gie us your best shot”. What the cocaine-addled thug didn’t know about the man in the grocery store buying baby-wipes was that he coached boxing for a living, and a bare-knuckled punch from him is not something that most people would willingly invite.

The boxer laid out the drunk with one almighty shot that smashed his jaw and left him in hospital for two days. The judge took the accused’s having to stick to liquids for a long while into account when accepting his guilty plea to a charge of assault, rather than the attempted murder charge he had been brought in on. The judge gave our binging friend three years in prison, where he will no doubt have people “gie’in” him their best shot, invited or otherwise.

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

The Hooch-Drinker's Guide to The Galaxy

There are those out there, largely tin-foil-hat-wearing asylum types (Editor’s Note: For more of this sort of thing, we suggest you check out this captivating investigative piece on little Green Men on a Mission entitled “Cattle Mutilations - Senseless Mutilation or High-Tech Examinations?”), who believe that extra-terrestrials have visited Earth – presumably swooping in on our planet to see the sights and probe the orifices of a few yokels before hitting the next stop on a celestial package-tour.

Neither of us would rule out the possibility that life forms from other planets have visited us (heck we’ve partied with some likely suspects), but one wonders why, like the Blessed Virgin who chooses to reveal her face in the more delectable pastries of the faithful, these sightings usually occur under wholly discreditable circumstances. Even the most popular of all flying-saucer myths, the Roswell incident, has been more or less discredited, with all but ardent New Mexico T-shirt sellers likely to tell you that it was really just a weather balloon.

Most UFO sightings do not get nearly the attention of Roswell or inspire as much debate because of one common attribute that its witnesses share: the fact that they were stumbling wild-eyed from a backwoods still at the time of the sighting (or, in more cosmopolitan areas, just plain drunk).

The Daily Mail, covered such an incident in July, where pub-goers assembled outside their local to witness a starry-happening (that was not the unrelated and more common mooning), and, just yesterday, as the world rang in 2008, SignsonSanDiego.com reported that locals there had also seen UFOs.

Three groups of friends, all partying on New Year’s Eve in the San Diego area, saw a combination of flashing orange-yellow lights in the sky about 30 minutes after midnight. One witness sought to curb speculation that his powers of observation had been impaired by the drink – the newspaper’s exact explanation reading, “Keegan said he and his friends had been drinking, ‘but we weren’t drunk being that it was Near [sic] Year’s”, which suggests the opposite is true, or that the reporter might want a bracing cup of coffee before typing her next story.

Another “amateur astronomer” said he and a dozen friends, who were welcoming in ’08 in his backyard, saw nine red dots that traveled across the sky slowly, followed by four red dots. He was quoted as saying, in hippy parlance : “It was really crazy. It wasn't fireworks."

Our guess? Fireworks.

Then again, who are we to question the National UFO Reporting Center, which said on Tuesday, that it had enough “similar reports from across the country [country, mind you, not county] to warrant an investigation”. Other folks celebrating the most firework-happy day of the year also reported seeing strange bright things in the sky in Santa Monica, the San Francisco Bay area and Canada.

Yes Virginia, Santa is sh*t-faced

“T’was the day after Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, for fear of waking papa, the drunken louse.”

We here at TheSharkBook.com having neglected to wish you, our loyal readers, a happy holiday season would like to at least wish you a happy Boxing Day: may the bargains you meet be plentiful, and the exchange policies on some of the crappier gifts you received lenient.

For our final X-mas-related blog of this year, we wanted to touch on a trend that our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death (and other true tales of drunken debauchery), was, to our knowledge, the first to chronicle: the seeming appeal of donning a Santa Claus outfit and making a sorry-ass drunken public nuisance of oneself. (Editor’s Note: For more on this theme we recommend the excellent Billy Bob Thornton film “Bad Santa”, one of the very best boozing comedies ever made).

We covered more than one such case in The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death – the most disgraceful of all likely being a drunken riot that broke out at the finish line of a charity marathon where the participants were dressed as ole Saint Nick himself and some of the more well-oiled elfs had to be beaten and pepper-sprayed into submission.

There seems to be something about donning the garb of Santa Claus – the best collaborative effort between Coca Cola and the Roman Catholic Church since Holy Water Soda – that appeals to drunks, and this year was no exception.

First, in Christchurch New Zealand, where a gang of about 50 drunken Santas broke into a cinema, shoving families aside, tearing down posters and kicking things over while shouting the unorthodox holiday greeting “Ho f*cking ho!”

One woman who was waiting in line to see the movie “Enchanted” with her two ankle-biters in tow was sickened by this less than enchanting display and her kids were puzzled as to why these Santas were acting like their soccer hooligan older brothers: "They asked me, 'are they Santa's helpers gone crazy?' and I said `no, they are just idiots'.

As sorry a scene as that no doubt was, it is outdone in terms of sheer vile mental imagery by the goings-on of one crocked Kris Kringle in Hollywood on Christmas Eve. The man in question parked his car in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater and was shortly thereafter stopped by police and asked to submit to a Breathalyser. What tipped off the flat feet? The 6-foot-4, 280-pound man’s chosen ensemble for the evening: a red Santa hat, blond wig, red lace camisole, purple G-string, black leg warmers (hey, it gets chilly at night!) and black shoes.

The man clocked in at slightly over the legal limit and admitted having had a couple rum and cokes before setting out to give the crowd at Grauman’s a mentally scarring holiday sight. Police impounded the man’s Chevy Impala, but later released him on $5,000 bail. The arresting officer said that “There was no Mel Gibson” treatment for him, which might mean that the man was not given the floor and asked to voice his opinions on the secret Zionist cabal that is taking over the world. "He had to sober up and find his own reindeer,” the officer said.

New York Jets Fans: Keeping up with the Jets set

Considering all of the potential exposés that it could have chosen to break – like once and for all bringing those blasted all-nude RV and boat shows into the open – it seems strange that the New York Times would instead choose to shake the earth by revealing that men who attend NFL games like to get drunk and hoot at women. That same conclusion, no doubt drawn before the reporter strapped on his visor and went to work, could have been borne out with far less effort by just popping over to the house of any Sunday football loving Joe Lunchbox with a case of beer and a copy of Lusty Luanne’s Lunar Calendar 2007/2008 in tow.

A Times reporter did go to a New York Jets game a little over a week ago and when it came to half-time and most of the crowd had gathered on the pedestrian ramps of Giants Stadium’s Gate D, cruelly ignoring the lifetime achievement award or some-such being given to one “Curtis Martin”, he went to see what all the fuss was about. He found hundreds of men gathered on the ramps, whooping it up and looking not unlike rows of lifers out of a prison movie lustily welcoming the weak-looking thin guy who has just sauntered into their lives.

The Times reporter catalogued the jeering bunch’s requests that each passing woman oblige the crowd by giving them a gander at her Mardi Gras finest, which, to the hooting delight of the hordes, some did. One such obliging lassie managed to take the starch out of this “exposé” somewhat when she told the Times reporter, “I don’t care… I love my body and I like what I have, so let everybody share it.”

The President of the New Jersey Senate, Richard J. Codey, showing that he keeps in touch with the needs of his people, in that he reads the New York Times and circles anything apropos, was quick to promise action and heap condemnation on the unruly goings-on at Jets games, even throwing out a witticism that media outlets could repeat until their audiences vomited in unison: “It seems like for some Jet fans, that Gate D stands for drunk and disgusting.”

Well, according to this more recent column, the party over at “Gate Drunk and Disgusting” has quieted down of late, with more than 50 security guards in yellow jackets and 25 state troopers assigned there and no arrests made during the Jets last home game.

And while we would never condone the use of verbal pressure and liquor to convince a woman to bear her breasts outside of the state of Louisiana and/or a Girls Gone Wild video, we are saddened to think that these new security precautions may also mean the end of another Jets half-time tradition “Da Money”. In this far funnier ritual, those on the upper level of Gate D throw dollar bills down to ground level. Sooner or later someone passes by, spots the cash and goes to pick it up – but before the little money grubber can thank his stars for this unexpected good fortune, a shower of beer and garbage, as well as taunts and verbal abuse, reigns down on him from above. Now that is the kind of sport we could enjoy.

Molson Beer ad campaign fizzles

University administrators, you know, the guys who kept you out of the top three colleges of your choice, relegating you to an institution unfit to grace the bumper of your parents’ Volvo, are slamming a new ad campaign by Canada’s foremost purveyor of bland suds, Molson Beer.

In a Globe & Mail report, critics blasted the brewer's latest marketing initiative as at least as tasteless as the product itself, saying that it is "harmful for students seeking jobs if a potential employer discovered their raucous partying poses on Facebook." Now, as we’ve documented in the Sh*t Faced Femmes of Facebook, the boundaries separating the public and private are often as blurred as your vision after you’ve drank 11 or so cans of Molson's "finest", as people are rarely red-faced when posting compromising pictures online.

The Molson campaign asks college students to post such pictures so that the "top party school in Canada" can be crowned. We Shark Guys, several years removed from dancing a two-step back and forth over that academic probation line, and decidedly bitter over not yet being granted honorary degrees from our respective alma maters, are sadly ineligible for the prize—a public pool urinating, Mexican jail, wake-up-face-down-in-the-surf spring-break Bacchanalia to Cancun for five.

The dean of students at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, a school whose engineering students are known for, among other things, calculating the trajectory and force required to dent a forehead with a can (and vice versa), is "disgusted" by the Facebook ad campaign’s "dangerous disregard for the way it promotes an abusive use of alcohol.”

From what we gather, to put it in standardized test terms, "The Campus Challenge" is to "30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night", what "jejune" is to "lurid", although stomachs will be tested by the odd broad-shouldered frat guy in a less than supportive bra.

The national director of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, said the Molson campaign is "unfortunate" because it stereotypes young people as being interested only in partying, rather than something closer to the truth—partying AND getting laid.

Drunks for Thanksgiving-Day Weekend

Both of the Shark Book authors hail from Canada, a country where Thanksgiving is celebrated a month earlier than it is in the US (the sincere thanks being given around Canadian dinner tables at that time of year usually has to do with it not yet being winter). However, we don’t see a problem with breaking out another turkey – one that has hopefully been pumped up with steroids to delectably plump, juicy proportions – a month later and celebrating the holiday once again in solidarity with our neighbours to the South. Also, phoning in sick to work and taking an undue Thanksgiving-weekend rest is quite appealing.

In the turkey-time tryptophan and bourbon-inspired mood of the season, we have decided to step back from our regular efforts of focusing on drunk-related news and tales of world-class drunks to focus on two smaller stories from our drunk police blotter that, if you ever thought otherwise, confirm the link between dedicated boozing efforts and the increased likelihood that a person who is already not the brightest light on the Christmas tree will go one can of malt liquor beyond all reason and commit a crime.

In The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death (and other true tales of drunken debauchery), we devoted an entire chapter to such tales entitled “Crime Doesn’t’ Pay (Your Bar Tab)”, however owing to space limitations here we suggest that for more depth on the subject you pick up Shark at one of your better local bookstores, insist on paying the full jacket price and then test the seller’s reaction when you casual mention that you know us personally. (It’s worth a shot, but unlikely to raise an eyebrow of the cashier who’s just returned from a smoke break—if it does, check as discreetly as possible to make sure it’s not some botched plastic surgery forehead asymmetry).

We are not suggesting here a link between drinking and crime to support condemnable efforts to wrest a pint out of the hand of your average, misdemeanor-at-worst sort of drunk, but rather to point out the cases in which those already given to criminal predilections tend to become emboldened from a bit of extra liquid courage.

In a South Salt Lake City bar, a soused pool shark absconded with another man’s car keys and vamoosed, only to realize he’d left his credit card at the crime scene. This sort of oversight is standard in cases of drunken crime, as is the brilliant plan he devised to recover the incriminating piece of identification. According to the bartender, “he came back here, tried to change his appearance by taking his hat off [and] changing his coat." This bit of subterfuge didn’t work and his 8-ball was sunk. [to see the video news report on this one click here]

Meanwhile at a Santa Barbara California, Carls Jr burger joint (west coast sibling to restaurant chain Hardee's—for purposes of mental imagery picture the obese twins riding the motorbikes in the Guinness Book of Records, and incidentally, the restaurant whose national ad campaign featured a lubed up Paris Hilton provocatively washing a car) a teen was charged with a B&E after breaking into the eatery after hours, not to steal or vandalize, as would have been more acceptable, but rather because he was hungry and was looking to cook up a gratis pre-Thanksgiving Day feast for himself. Police stopped him before he could give himself botulism. [video news report here]

Drunk Girls on Facebook: The Sh*t-Faced Femmes of Facebook

The Internet has long been a blessing for creeps and stalkers the world over and arguably the greatest gift it has given them has been Facebook, which is at the forefront of “social-networking sites” (anti-social networking having fallen off the typical MBA syllabus in the mid-80s). Facebook, in which Microsoft recently invested millions (a move that this Guardian columnist puts somewhere on the level of going to the racetrack and betting on the horse with the nicest eyes), allows you to stalk comfortably from your home, without having to jump into a thorn-filled bush to avoid being spotted, or ruining your favorite slacks by getting garbage-juice on them whilst sifting through the neighbor’s green bin.

Information that in years past would have required a private detective of Magnum PI-like skills to unearth is now visible to all of a person’s most far-fetched connections (at least those who haven’t been relegated to the shameful “limited-profile” status). While you might have one day expected to cross paths with that guy in elementary school who beat you up because you carried a briefcase to school, you would likely have expected this chance meeting to occur while he was pumping your gas and you were wild-eyed and chain-smoking – not via a Facebook message in which he reminisces on your school days as “such a larf!”.

Despite the privacy concerns it raises, and the doors to one’s troubled past it opens, Facebook has become hugely popular and most users do not fret a bit about keeping their Facebook fold informed of the yawning minutiae of their daily lives – events that, in the past, it would have seemed exceedingly arrogant to detail in a greeting card.

The UK newspaper The Daily Mail recently ran a finger-wagging piece on one group of Facebook members who truly could not give less of a sh*te about traditional public/private boundaries called 30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night – 80 reasons fewer than the 110 signposts offered by the tour guides for the recreationally drunk, The Shark Guys, in the seminal “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery”. (All the reasons referred to in the group's name, including “You find yourself peeing behind random buildings”, can be found here). Postings from this group comprise in part pics of women on the back-end of benders, passed out, exposing themselves, falling into bushes, or, in other words, behaving like 90% of the men their age who go out on Saturday nights.

The Daily Mail's story, the word count of which seems to have been padded by the headline “The ladettes who glorify their shameful drunken antics on Facebook”, achieves a tabloid double-whammy both by striking a conservative pose and churlishly criticizing these girls’ drunken antics, while at the same time finding an excuse to run large photos of young women with knickers in plain sight (the two we've run here being preferable in case nosy-bastard coworkers are a problem where you are).

We speak from experience when we say that journalism is largely the domain of those whose first choice of job, professional alcoholic, was unavailable, and as such we're guessing that the latter reason – Rule 141 of the Tabloid Handbook: When in doubt, think “Girls Gone Wild” and work from there – factored far more heavily into the decision to run the story. (Click here for full article)

The Shark Guys

Dead drunk, but not A dead drunk

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

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

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

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

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

The Shark Guys

Go Fish! The lush, the fish and the flush

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drunk at Walmart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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