It’s a long offeseason. In an attempt to vary up the somewhat fatigued Friday rotation, we will change it up with various lab experiments, including The Digital Viking: The EDSBS Guide To Spicy Living. The five categories are Drink (obvious), Comestibles (Food/Snack), Combustible (Shit what blows up), Transit (for making you transitory) and Canon (essential films, books, and movies to understand reality as you know it.) Enjoy?

Drink.

Holly: Continuing our “This Week In Imperialist Cocktailing” subseries, I recommend the Soixante-Quinze, or French 75. Gin, sugar syrup, lemon juice, and champagne. If you happen to be lolling about in my favorite 213 backroom bar, throw a brandied cherry in the bottom.

Orson: Fat Tire. Amber beers have the shortest half-life from the tap/awesome to suck/bottle. Abita Amber remains the premiere example of this, as it’s strictly meh from the bottle but guzzleworthy from the tap. When in Baton Rouge, I will drink draft Abita Amber from a gutter filled with decaying nutria, so long as it’s just been poured, and someone promises to feed me fried meat of some sort immediately afterward to kill the resulting bacterial infections and general -itis.

Fat Tire is here somewhere in Atlanta, and by Cthulhu it will be mine tonight. I’m going to drink three of them, play Team Fortress Two, and pass out like a gangsta in a wrinkled t-shirt at 9:30. Oh, beer snob? There are better Belgian beers? Really? I’m fascinated by your opinion, and would love to hear more about it why don’t you come closer and WRENCHES YOUR COCK IN A DOORJAMB AND SLAMS UNTIL SATISFIED. My child will be baptised with Fat Tire and a vial of Tim Tebow’s blood Dan Shanoff siphoned off him for me. It is delicious and oh my yes you know a lot about beer pet hug points stroke SLAP.

Comestibles.

Orson: The Hot Brown. If five sandwiches got involved in a ghastly industrial accident with bacon, cheese, butter, and frankly whatever the hell else you want to throw in, the grisly remains would be something close to the Hot Brown. The Louisville standard is a WTF-worthy dish I’ve never even eaten–cheese smells like cow ass to me, I can’t stay in the room if someone heats up parmesan, and the idea of drinking a whole glass of milk seems as appetizing as chugging an entire glass of antifreeze.

That said, even a quesophobe has to appreciate all that glory:

The X marks the spot where your cardiac well-being died, and happiness began. The first time I smelled one of these I nearly vomited: ergo, IT’S GOT TO BE GOOD, normal, cheese-eating people of America.

Holly: Foxy’s chilaquiles, Glendale, CA. Foxy’s is an odd duck. It’s been around for about 50 years, the A-Frame structure is dark and creepy and the Alpine scene painted on one wall is menacingly confusing on a Sunday morning when you’ve only just stopped drinking. Stick to the patio if you’re of delicate constitution and be of good cheer: Foxy’s serves its mimosas in pint glasses, and trying to stay upright long enough to make a dent in one will keep you occupied until these arrive:

Combustibles.

Holly: I advise right off the bat that you ignore the haircut you are about to see and soldier through, and while you will indeed be taught to make something explode onscreen before the video ends, we are far more interested in the “How To Make A Moving Severed Hand” tutorial up front:

Orson: The Yenshui Fireworks Festival, a.k.a. The Plague Expulsion Festival:

Transit.

Orson: Power Wheels.

Fuck you, little girl I saw on a pink Barbie jeep at Piedmont Park. I hope you’re trampled a herd of raging waterbuffalo crossing the street for having one of the few toys I didn’t acquire in my absurdly spoiled childhood. Object lesson, parent-tards: don’t give your children anything because people lack gratitude and an understanding of scale, both quantities extant only in dogs, Quakers, and the well-programmed Sims.

I got all kinds of ridiculous shit, including the apogee of all childhood toy acquisition in the 1980s, the G.I. Joe Hovercraft, the greatest toy ever made that had its own homosexual pilot, Cutter. (This nickname referred to his habit of cutting male strippers’ g-strings with his dive knife.)

Yet I wanted more. Never enough to satisfy the piggish brat inside, I realized I wanted nothing more than a Power Wheels of my own too late to get one, being both too large to get a parentally-endorsed Power Wheel Bigfoot (the preferred model, natch) and incapable of making a dollar as a drug runner in Alpharetta thanks to a slow 40 time and perpetually late deliveries. Those housewives demanded their snow arrive quickly regardless of the season, and this mule was perpetually five steps behind speedier competition.

By the time I was able to scam enough money off begging relatives to purchase one of my own, I was too big to fit in one and not big enough to ride one with Jackass-style irony. Also, I started wearing Husky pants, a horrifying development in childhood cancelling all plans in favor of a good three year wallow in television-fed misery.

(I remember relatives’ deaths that had less effect on my young life than the day I had to ask:

“Mom, is that Husky like the dog?”

Mom: “Um…yes.”

Me: “Like Balto! My pants are brave and can survive a snowstorm to save sick children!”

Mom: “Exactly!”)

So, yeah. Fuck you, girl-who-has-her-own-fake-car-going-five-miles-an-hour. You’ll get a real car someday and find out what a complete bore it really is when you let the Chik-Fil-A wrappers pile up in it for a day or fifty and a homeless dude decides to brick out a window to search your glove compartment for change when you park it on the street. Savor that pleasure, child, because real cars are a total pain in the balls, and because I’m going to steal the car from you the next time I see you and escape from the scene at 5 awesome miles an hour. Catch me, bitches. You’ll have to use the heavy stuff, because I ain’t goin’ back behind the wall this time.

Holly: Our automotive sommelier recommends the 1962-72 Citroen DS:

“So far ahead of its time it wasn’t even funny. Plus it’s French and looks like a fucking UFO, so it will confuse everyone. It’s a car that says ‘I’m so badass you can’t even PRONOUNCE what I drive.’”

Canon.

Holly: La Moustache. This is sitting pretty at the top of my Netflix queue, and while I haven’t actually seen it yet, I feel entirely confident in recommending it based on the trailer alone:

Quoth our tipster: “Leave it to the French to construct an intense cinematic thriller about a man who shaves his moustache. This is why movies exist.”

Orson: Agents of Atlas. Marvel took a whole load of very moldy characters off the scrapheap, gave them to talented writers, and said “doowhatchyalike” on an editorial hunch. The resulting product is a comic book series steeped in rich retro-irony, but I read it for the revamping of Gorilla-Man, who in this series is a former millionaire-turned-cursed-gorilla who lost millions gambling at the track in the fifties, wears men’s knit shirts from the same era, and who is the subject of the only piece of art I’ve ever seriously considered getting tattooed on my body. Superb comic book peekin’ overall.