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.

French Happy Hour not so 'appy after all

As we've pointed out a few times here, we're Canadian and many Canadians take great pains to explain to bored foreigners who could not give two shits otherwise: we're much different from Americans. For example, the Great White North, for those of you who don't know, is an officially bilingual state, though in reality English speakers are much more well-versed in what's known as "Cereal box French". For our American friends, this refers to French language proficiency a well-fed gorilla could comfortably master in sign language, and that might lead the average tourist to a bathroom or the nearest lost and found should they be parachuted into Basse Normandie.

Colloquially, it refers to an ability to do little more in "The Language of Love that's not Italian" than read the back of a cereal box and determine its ingredients (say, if peanut products, a plastic inhalable toy or trans fats are contained therein) but would not get you off with Juliet Binoche if you met her in a bar.

For those of us who couldn't converse with an "enfant" with our "terrible" Francais, it's tempting when encountering a Frenchman to simply precede an English word with "La" or "Le" and hope not to be met with quizzical stares.

One phrase that would not be lost in translation, (like the eponymous movie starring Bill Murray should've been), is "Le Binge Drinking", so obviously adopted from the English as in the UK it's their national past-time second only to differentiating themselves from lowly continentals and not combing their hair.

Indeed, there are few countries, save for Russia or Germany, who can even begin to compete with the levels of self-ruination we've chronicled across the pond.

According to a recent report though, even France is battling the scourge of increased public drunkenness and is mulling over the banning of happy hour, that period of time between work and home life that doesn't leave you looking at your watch and wondering when it's time to punch the clock or go to bed.

Other possible measures could include restricting the sale of vodka, whiskey and other high-powered potables in discos to glasses, rather than entire bottles, that you could previously hoist above your head and swing around to the beat of 'Love in this Club' while pouring the contents into the mouth of whoever you'd like to bed that evening.

They are also considering raising the legal age to three years below that of the US, where hairlines can recede, and mortgages can be bought at the comparatively ripe age of 21. Mon dieu! Sacre bleu!

'Pub Angels' to Bring Florence Drunks Back to Earth

Cross-cultural exchanges programs allow students to gain a deeper appreciation of other cultures, to step outside the bounds of the familiar and explore… Ah, who we are kidding, student-exchange programs are mostly about getting drunk and hopefully laid in some place other than that listed on your beginner’s driver’s license. As such, the “cultural exchanges” taking place may not be what mom and pop read about in promotional literature for these programs.

Take for example the type of “cultural exchange” currently happening in Florence, Italy. Florence, along with Rome, has seen a strong influx of students from the UK and US who spend a term of their studies over there. While these students might take a recipe for a knock-out pasta fagioli with them and be able to make an Italian person feel at home by cursing them in their native tongue, the citizens in Florence get to witness their drinking culture go from one of reserved imbibing to the more violent, binge-drinking style of boozing that is favored in the UK and the US.

Florence is looking to reverse this trend by enlisting volunteers to help monitor the city’s bars and piazzas and discourage “exaggerated drinking”. These people would be called “pub angels” (serving the opposition function of the angels we covered here) wear bright-colored vests, and go around trying to “dissuade drinkers from having one too many”. This, as far as volunteer jobs go, sounds like a right crappy one, but no mention was made of any perceived difficulty in getting people to do this.

It’s also optimistic on the part of city officials to think that a program like this would meet with any success whatsoever unless the “angels” are trained in some sort of bone-breaking martial art and/or carry pepper-spray and a stungun. Brits or Americans faced with a guy sporting a bright-colored vest and engaging in an attempt to “dissuade” them from excessive drinking are unlikely to be met with a “Was I that drunk? Pardon me sir! I’ll be on my way then.” Those who have actually picked up some of the language are more likely to offer a variation of the following: “Vaffanculo a Lei, la sua moglie, e' la sua madre. Lei e' un cafone stronzo. Io non mangio in questo merdaio! Vada via in culo!” (See above link for translation and don’t try this out on your Italian roommate before you do).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

24 Hour Party People: UK decides to keep all-night drinking law

On Monday, we covered the growing movement in the US questioning the logic of why someone who is legally able to ruin their lives in so many ways – ie get married, fight in wars, shoot off firearms, vote, star in a porno and obtain a mortgage – is not allowed the freedom to legally get drunk and bemoan the terrible choices they have made in these areas. We support the lowering of the drinking age in the US even if it means that our border towns in Canada will no longer be overflowing with American college students tearing a path of destruction through our hotels and getting to know the lap dance providers at strip clubs on a first-name basis.

The drinking situation in Britain is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Eighteen-year-olds there can belly up to the bar, order a whiskey straight up with no ice, and put up with the laughter and derision of the hardened drinkers around them as they choke it back – and it’s all perfectly legal. Beer at the supermarkets is cheaper than bottled water there and what’s more a law granting 920 supermarkets, 470 pubs, bars and nightclubs “24-hour licenses” will stay in effect following the completion of a study that says crime has lessened since the bill was enacted. Basically, the place is a paradise for youngsters looking to mature into heavy drinkers in as little time as possible.

Previously, last call had been at the ridiculously early hour of 11pm, which is usually about the time we wake up and head off to the bar. Pub crawlers forced out of the bar at 11pm would then fill the streets, and in a state of frustration brought on by the desire for more drink, they would punch one another in the face. (Editor’s Note: Not everybody behaved in this way – some went home to sip a cup of camomile, while others overturned police cars.)

It had been hoped that the 24-hour pubs would prevent drinkers from spilling out onto the streets at the same time. While the government study shows that crime has lessened with the advent of 24-hour pubs, critics say that it has instead giving drinkers a goal to attain – drinking all night long before pouring out onto the streets en masse in a state of oblivion between 3 and 6am.

It could be argued that left to his own devices in one of those Hobbesian states of nature, man shouldn’t need to consume alcoholic beverages beyond 4am. Most people, barring a spat with a loved one, getting slugged in the face, or being the victim of food poisoning, will generally go home of their own accord around two or three anyway. The key here is to get a quality drunk under your belt before that late hour so you can go home, drink and dial a loved one and upload embarrassing photos of yourself on Facebook. From that perspective, it would seem that New York and Chicago have it about right with their 4am last call.

But what about shift workers and insomniacs? Alas, when it comes to matters of booze procurement, the more freedom the better. We commend Britain for deciding to keep this enlightened policy in place and not being as tight-assed about closing times as our native Toronto, which deigns to extend bar hours only during the Toronto International Film Festival (presumably celebs can be counted on to be more sensible when blasted than the rest of us).

US states consider lowering legal drinking age: Life, liberty and a legal buzz before you're 21

When I was 17
I had some very good beer
I had some very good beer
That I purchased
With a fake ID
My name was Brian McGee
I stayed up listening to Queen
When I was 17

“When I Was 17”, Homer J. Simpson

A powerful youth movement is afoot in the USA. Young Americans are fed up with the status quo and are demanding change. Countless youngsters are shaking off apathy, signing petitions, launching online campaigns and joining forces to exercise their collective power to ensure that their voices are heard in the halls of power.

Obamamania? What would a couple of beery Canadians who only watch CNN when hangovers preclude a remote control hunt know about that? (Editor’s Note: When are the people who invented The Clapper going to come up with a TV remote equivalent [one clap to turn it on, successive claps for channel flipping]? Would-be inventers have our blessings to run with this). No, what we’re referring to is the snowballing movement south of the border to lower the drinking age.

Currently the drinking age across the USA is 21, with some states respecting this more than others. Indeed, recalling past debauchery in pre-hurricane New Orleans, we were shocked to find that out that the drinking age is officially 21 in Louisiana and that the young people hooting at us and projectile vomiting off balconies in the French quarter were actually breaking the law.

The nationwide drinking age has been on the books since 1984 when the National Minimum Drinking Age Act went into effect. This act was basically federal blackmail forcing states to raise their minimum drinking age to 21 or be denied transportation money.

Recently, however, lawmakers in Vermont, South Dakota, South Carolina and Wisconsin have all, to varying degrees proposed lowering or allowing special exceptions the drinking age requirement, and in Missouri, Facebook is being used to collect signatures to get a measure on the ballot there to lower the drinking age to 18 (click here for that group's page). One group, with the less than headband worthy name of "Choose Responsibility", has even went so far as to suggest that young people be made to undergo an education alcohol program before being allowed to drink. Having written a potential textbook for this class, we fully support that idea.

The transportation-funding catch is likely to prevent any of these efforts from succeeding -- good news for fake ID providers, establishments that turn a blind eye to such matters (and generally to standards of hygiene) and that one creepy older guy in every circle of teenage friends who has no peers his own age but enjoys a special status among teens for his ability to procure booze.

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.

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."

Man drinks two pints of vodka to avoid confiscation!

We live in a post 9/11 era and will continue to do so barring the apocalypse or a patent on a time machine. Ne’er-do-well terrorists with frequent-flyer miles (entry into the mile-high club being forsaken in this life for an attractive consolation prize in the next) have caused security at airports to tighten like the circle of police officers around a public demonstration for the poor. Restrictions on liquids being brought on board airplanes mean that one can no longer stroll on board with booze, cologne, hair gel and all the other accouterments a gentleman needs to have on hand to be able to properly flirt with flight attendants once in the air.

In Nuremberg Germany, a man getting ready to board a plane to his hometown of Dresden on the final leg of a return trip from a holiday in Egypt was told that he would have to either pour out the two bottles of vodka he had in tow or pay a fee to have the bag containing them checked in with the rest of his luggage.

Now, vodka is the world’s most popular distilled beverage and apparently so entrenched in popular culture that the insane think it a viable Halloween costume (pictured here) and the bathtub version is said to be so strong that copious amounts of it consumed at an ashram luau are rumored to have once resulted in swami Sai Baba being struck temporarily blind in his third eye.

We enjoy vodka as much as that demonstrative bearded fellow at the corner pub who strikes the surface of the bar loudly when ordering up the next round. It’s been described as tasteless, as has our brand of humor, and that’s why we drink it to excess when there’s an oversupply of orange juice lying around that needs to be put to good use. But as much as we enjoy a glass of the hard stuff to toast victory and curse defeat, had we been in the German man’s position, we probably would have just paid the bloody fine.

The man in question chose instead to unscrew the cap and chug the entire two pints worth right there. Now, as we’ve noted in The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death, that kind of vodka consumption is not recommended, although to be fair the downing of one litre of the stuff did, according to medical officials, limber up a Russian gentleman and help him survive a 40-foot fall from his balcony after a misstep while he was out enjoying some much needed fresh air to go along with the equivalent of the 22 ½ shots he had just downed.

The German vodka-lover in this case quickly lost the ability to walk or do much else as the alcohol ran hell over his innards. Acute alcohol poisoning nearly killed the man, however he was taken for treatment to a hospital in Nuremberg where he was expected to make a full recovery and no doubt be stuck with a hellish hangover that will serve as a more than adequate reminder to shove his booze into his suitcase next time.

Yuletide Cheers: How to spot a Christmas drunk – Shark style

Earlier this month, the British Home Office (the government body, not where you say you work in order to keep the tax man’s grubby paws out of your pockets) issued undercover police officers looking to fine bartenders serving the already inebriated – basically every bar patron during the holidays – a field manual telling them how to spot drunks during the holiday season.

The manual, given to 90 police teams countrywide taking part in the pre-Christmas Responsible Sales of Alcohol Campaign (Operation Killjoy by our lights), did British taxpayers proud, coming up with such startling observations as “[drunks tend to be] careless with money”, and they also cuss, bump into one another and, on a related note, engage in inappropriate sexual behavior, as well as slur their speech and have difficulty following any conversation that goes beyond: “Fancy a pint?” “Too right. Your round.”

Newspapers and pub trade publications (slur that three times fast while touching your nose with your big toe), like The Publican, mocked the Home Office’s effort, condemning it as “absolute nonsense”, and suggesting that the government would be better off focusing its efforts on the supermarkets, which are selling beer cheaper than water (a delightful trend for your bargain boozehound that we covered here).

Of course, the Home Office’s report deserved all the derision it received, and if we’ve added to that here then all the better, but being able to spot a true Christmas drunk as opposed to your average red-nosed holiday boozer is nonetheless important, and not just for police – it could save you and your loved ones from injury, or, possibly worse, having to pony up bail money for someone near and dear. In that spirit we present you with:

The Shark Guys’ Tips for Spotting a Christmas Drunk

Times when you can be sure that you are in the presence of an authentic Christmas drunk:

• Ambulances arrive early Christmas morning to attend to some drunk in a Santa suit who slid off an icy roof in an attempt to give Little Johnny an authentic Christmas experience.


• Little Johnny, earlier in the holiday season, gets a contact high from a mall Santa who has been drinking boxed wine all day (See “Mommy, Santa smells funny”, in the “Holiday Cheers” chapter of “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death”, for a story of a mall Santa who did just that, crashed through the store’s front window, and, call it a holiday miracle if you will, still managed to keep his job).
  


• The person in question is spotted peeing Frosty The Snowman to an early grave.


• The serenity of a hymn at your Christmas Eve religious celebration is ruined by the off-key caterwauling of some drunk who’s just woken up and thinks it’s about time that “Waltzing Matilda” be given a proper airing.


• The person in question has rambled outside of your holiday party and is now on your front lawn simulating acts with your plastic reindeer that might forever corrupt poor Rudolph.


• The person in question is Kiefer Sutherland:
  
  

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.

Eat Shit! Book archives

As we mentioned in our initial blog, certain stories that we collected for "The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death (and other true tales of drunken debauchery)" did not make the final cut due to length concerns, or, in the case of this particular story, because of an overall consensus between the writers and the publisher that it was just too disgusting.

However, in the interests of completeness -- the star of this one deserves a spot among the world's most notable drunks, even if his story is far more nauseating than the others -- we have decided to post the unpublished parts of the book here on occasion.

We included many stories of drunks trying to beat the law, however few of our protagonists took matters as far as the gentleman in this following story, and hopefully very few have since.

Coprophagia, the consumption of faeces, from the Greek copro (faeces) and phagy (eat) is practiced by several animals due to limitations of their digestive systems or diets. The makers of Binaca breathspray however have yet to engineer a product potent enough to quell the mouth odour brought on by such a diet and as such eating one’s own merde is something of a societal taboo.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the re-ingestion of soft faeces captures vitamins that would otherwise be wasted in certain animals. Perhaps then the 57-year-old man who stuffed his mouth full of his own excrement was doing so not to beat a breathalyser test, as was the assumption of police at the time, but rather in hopes of replenishing vital nutrients after a night of heavy drinking.

Found driving erratically on a lonely stretch of Ontario road, the man was shoved into a patrol car and, in what would assume was a nightmare the next day for a car cleaner, he went on to vomit, urinate and defecate in the backseat. Once at the cop shop the man scooped up some of what he had recently expelled and put it in his mouth before he had to submit to a breathalyser test.

A police inspector speculating as to the motivations behind the man’s spur of the moment feast said he did not think that the man’s level of intoxication could have been solely responsible for making him do something as “disgusting as that”.

The man, alas, had nary a “shit-eating grin” to crack as sadly, he was unsuccessful in this innovative bid at cheating medical science. The breathalyser clocked him at twice the legal alcohol limit, and no doubt, he did not receive an offer that night to share the cellblock’s communal string of dental floss. (Source: The Toronto Sun, November 2005)

Beer cheaper than water – And that's a bad thing?

The UK’s Daily Mail, fast becoming The Shark Guys newspaper of choice in terms of rich source material, recently ran a lengthy double-byline investigative piece (full story here) into the rising trend of supermarkets selling their own brands of beer for less than their bottled water. This came hot on the high-heels of an earlier exposé into another alcoholic scourge: those midriff and visible panty-line revealing Facebook girls gone wild, (a story we covered here).

The Daily Mail reports that supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda are selling their own brands of beer at 22p (US$0.46) a can, which is less per litre than it costs to buy the stores’ mineral water and cola, and, in what would seem to be pure hyperbole given the alcohol content of the beer is between 2 and 3 percent, “cheap enough to allow someone to get drunk for just £1” (more on how they sent a reporter out in order to prove that claim later).

Competition between the three supermarket chains led to the low price, with the stores taking on up to an 8p per can loss just to keep up with one another. All three chains now offer the cheapest beer on their rosters for 50p a litre, while mineral water costs between 56p and 92p a litre depending on the store. (The latter price is of course the real scandal, but we'll leave the great bottled-water debate [your wallet and good ole' mother earth are better off with the tap] to blogs such as this one).

Many readers, especially those from Ontario, Canada where a government monopoly necessitates a drive out to the hinterlands for beer restocking, will see all silver-lining and no cloud when it comes to having such easily accessible and cheap booze at the ready. The Mail, however, did not write this one as a feel-good piece, but rather took the occasion to sound several alarm bells.

The main concern was that the youth would put down their alcopops and rush for the cheap lager, which, we presume, is typically the purview of your older recreational drunk. One public health advocate whose comments were included by the Mail in an attempt to strengthen this point came out with an interesting bit of armchair teenage psychology when he ventured that teens would "think that if it's so cheap, it must be OK". The reported low to which Finland has sunk (who knew!) following a 40% cut in its alcohol taxes was also thrown in for extra points.

The Mail even went to the trouble of sending out one of its reporters to drink the cheap beer and report back on its effects in an accompanying piece entitled"How I - a twenty-something woman - got drunk on £1 worth of the 22p lager" (that story here). The reporter, a 27-year-old woman who stands 5 feet tall (and is not as wide as she is tall), might have seemed an odd choice for this test, but here were some selected observations from her afternoon on Asda's own-brand three percent lager (on which she spent £1 hence the headline):

"The first taste is disgusting - a mouthful of gassy, foul-tasting liquid. I don't drink lager often, but even I can tell this is scraping the barrel. The first can is hard to drink but I don't notice too much of a change in myself."

Later, she's loosened up a bit but appears somewhat self-conscious...

"Two cans down and I realise that I am wittering, getting more talkative and, I fear, slightly boring."

Ah, the glorious third can, now things are rocking:

"Into the third can I start feeling more affectionate and my inhibitions are lowered - swinging my legs over my chair, I find myself telling the photographer what a fabulous chap he is and how much I love working with him."

However, those who would be thanking their lucky stars for this, the cheapest of cheap dates, might be put off by the likes of the following:

"The gassiness is getting to me and I keep emitting rather unladylike burps."

And it all goes to pot on the last can and a half:

"On my fourth can, I am getting a bit aggressive - pointing at the photographer as I make another "fascinating" comment and swearing more than I ever would in polite company. By the last half, I have definitely had enough. My voice is heavy and slurred, my limbs feel floppy, my eyes have gone droopy and I have lost the ability to concentrate on anything for longer than a couple of minutes. Worryingly, the lager tastes OK, even nice, and I feel as though I could carry on drinking it if asked."

And, with that, comes a moral to the story of the type that is slightly subtler than a jackhammer in the ear:

"I am a 27-year-old woman and, although only 5ft, am used to drinking alcohol and can deal with the changes it causes. But take each of the physical and emotional side-effects that I felt - and imagine the effect they would have on a teenager."

The Shark Guys

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

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

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

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

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