This will be this year’s final installment of Spicy Livin’, as real, actual, smashy football returns in several short days and will occupy our every thought and action. Also, to help give ourselves a proper extended sendoff, we welcome guest Viking Doug Gillett.

Today’s patron saint is Hugh Millais, who died earlier this month at the age of 79.

For why you should care, we refer to his Telegraph obituary:

The great-grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, Hugh Geoffroy Millais was born on December 23 1929. Bereft of artistic talent, as a small boy he was taken ferreting by his father, and was going to shoots throughout the country with his .410 shotgun at the age of eight.
[...]
His Irish-Canadian mother next sent him off to gain some discipline as a Mountie. Instead he obtained a job covering the city’s mortuaries for the Montreal Star and took in a lodger, the singer Josh White, who offered no rent but taught him to play the calypso guitar. When they parted company Millais, like many an Englishman in wintry Montreal before and since, longed for warmth; so he hitchhiked to South America. In Mexico he contracted a brief first marriage and enrolled in a philosophy course conducted in Latin while earning extra money driving two bullfighters around in their Hispano-Suiza.

Back in New York after inheriting $100,000 from his mother, Millais paid $15,000 for a dilapidated 60ft yacht, and competed in races while touring the Caribbean islands with musicians such as Lord Melody, Mighty Sparrow and Cowboy Jack; they regarded him as a “token whitey” and called him “Lord Bamboo” because of his great height. On entering Havana harbour, he was shot in the arm by some troops, but met Ernest Hemingway, a friend of his grandfather, who took him to a doctor and invited him to stay.
[...]
On moving to Spain, he recalled building a house for Salvador Dali, who changed the floor arrangement half a dozen times but did not once pay for the work. Millais then took in Orson Welles as a lodger, who also failed to settle his bill, and persuaded the architect Philip Jebb to build homes near Algeciras.
[...]
Hugh Millais summed up his recipe for life: “75 years, 0 hours of labour, 40,000 bottles of wine, a pinch of Song, Women (to taste). Sizzle gently over a low lifestyle, leave to marinade slowly, bring to fruition. Garnish the whole thing wildly in the telling.”

Raise your glasses. This gentleman’s passing requires no lesser tribute.

Drink.

Holly: My hillbilly heritage asks: Is it close enough to fall yet to suggest moonshine and get away with it?

Moonshine properly made is not a sippin’ drink, and anyone who tells you otherwise is doing it wrong. Shoot it fast and try and keep your feet. Or, for Saturdays, try stuffing a jar full of cut-up fruit or berries and filling it to the top with ’shine and letting it sit for a couple days. Skim out the big pieces to snack on at the tailgate without fear of reprisal from dry-campus cops, and save the infused liquid for a knockout nightcap during the WAC game.

Doug: Far be it from me to take credit for things beyond my meager abilities, but I invented the vodka float over Christmas last year. Take a couple shots of Stoli Blakberi, add a dash of Chambord, dump in a scoop of premium vanilla ice cream, stir until nice and smooth, and garnish with a couple fresh blackberries on top.

OK, it’s really more like a shake than a float, but after a couple sips you won’t be concerned with such semantics.

Orson:  Pina Colada. You must do this correctly, and I am not talking about the recipe. A pina colada may have been invented by the bartender at the Caribe Hilton Beachcomber in Puerto Rico in 1954, but you, Michael McDonald, and God know you don’t associate it with gentle breezes on a Caribbean beach that will, at any second, be rent to pieces by a parade of flag-toting Puerto Ricans celebrating their heritage by blowing loud whistles and wearing sleeveless sports jerseys.

The Pina Colada is for hanging out in a contemporary house with octagonal windows, driving drunk in your Audi wearing a Lacoste golf shirt, and playing backgammon all night while wearing a hole in Steely Dan’s Aja on the turntables. It’s for cooling off after this new thing called “jogging.” It is the beverage for quaffing after a hard day skiing on the slopes in Aspen, and just before rolling through an eight ball and an all-nighter with Hunter and Jack. It is the drink you get drink when you want to get wasted with James Ingram and make smooth music.

The Caribe’s Recipe for the Pina Colada is as follows:

• 8 oz. light rum
• 5 oz. coconut cream
• 2 oz. dark rum
• 2 oz. heavy cream
• 10 oz. pineapple juice
Pineapple spears

Mix all ingredients with crushed ice in a blender for 10 seconds. Serve in chilled Hurricane glasses. Garnish with pineapple spears.

Oh, but the calories! Fuck you, this is the ’70s. Taking your shirt off without shame required little more than step one: remove shirt, and step two: shine like the sexy diamond you are. Afterwards, retreat to a pool, begin a smooth-ish activity, don a captain’s cap, or run immediately to the nearest waiting sailboat. Otherwise, it’s just candy with booze in it, and you should just be drinking the delicious, suntan-scented Malibu straight from the shotglass like Fake James Ingram (aka Wyatt Cenac) is doing in the scene above.

Comestibles.

Doug: Notice how everyone’s doing sliders these days? Where’d that come from? I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t Krystal. Krystal’d been doing their thing for decades before sliders went from novelty to Thing That Every Restaurant On Earth Is Doing. No, the thing that took the slider big-time was Ruby Minis.

Four little burgers, each with cheese, a dollop of ketchup, a pickle, and its own little fried onion straw. And each one is like its own little ray of comfort-food sunshine, perfect for consumption either while you’re watching your team engage on the field of battle or for consoling yourself after they’ve lost said engagement. (And yes, I just about ate my weight in these last season.) Like Chili’s Southwestern Egg Rolls, Ruby Minis are a reminder that, every once in a while, even the most ubiquitous of chain restaurants can take a perfectly ridiculous idea and make it sublime.

Orson: The KFC Double Down Sandwich. If you like sandwiches, but tire of that bothersome bread, but aren’t really going for a “low-carb” slim look but instead aim to be covered by the fine panic oil seeping from the pores of the soon-to-be deceased due to cardiac arrest:

I’m not even sure this is even really a recommendation, and is instead more of a dare/warning. Eat two, run a mile as hard as you can, and then see what happens! It’s called science, and if none of you tries it, we will never know for certain, and then the Dark Ages win.

Holly: Perky Jerky. The lion lies down with the lamb. Glass houses sink ships. A skinned cat gathers no moss. This all makes perfect sense to me, because I’ve just discovered Perky Jerky. (This is also the reason it took me three tries to type the word “sense”.) I’ve never personally sampled this creation, but the mere fact of its existence, which does not appear to be a joke is enough. Truly, brothers, we live in an age of wonder

You mean “BUY YESTERDAY.”

Combustibles.

Holly: Here is Criss Angel being set on fire, posted not because Criss Angel is in any way entertaining, but because I like watching this and imagining he’s in excruciating pain:

Aww, and it’s his mom’s birthday! Doesn’t she look like she’s having a good time! Good night, Criss Angel is a twat.

Orson: Cool guys don’t look at explosions, no matter how cool the explosions may be.

Doug: The Boeing 737 is the most successful family of commercial airliners in history, having sold more than 6,000 copies since its maiden flight in 1967; they have carried more than 12 billion passengers in that time. In certain circumstances, it is also great for making s’mores.

¡Ay díos mio! Before anyone accuses me of being needlessly callous, note that everyone got off the plane safely. (Guess the captain must’ve turned off the No Smoking sign, am I right, people? UP TOP!)

Transit.

Orson: Go-kart. Not just any go-kart, either. We want the fast one, and don’t be coy with us, pimple-faced teen running this shitty beachstrip go-kart track. Give us the one that plays the Kill Bill theme when it hits your eyes. Give us the one capable of sliding around corners like a well-buttered crumpet sliding off Satan’s very giant hell-griddle. Give us the one that goes DAH-DAH-DAAAHHHHHHHH, you little punk, or we will punch you in the cock when you escort us off the track for bumping.

The judge will understand. He or she is a gentleperson of means, and will understand the essential joys of kicking someone’s ass in at go-karting, or as we like to call it, “competitive gentlemen’s contact micro-motoring.” It is taught in all of the finest academies, sanctioned by all but the most disreputable houses of worship, and admired by beautiful children, noble dogs, and women with thighs tasting of dark chocolate and success. Fuck a bitch who doesn’t respect the kart.

Few feelings exceed the sensation of passing a rival in a slower go-cart. It’s like your superior moral character, better looks, and sharper intellect have led you this logical confluence of the universe’s reward of AN ASS-TEARING GO-CART. Passing them is like farting in your nemesis’ grandmother’s face. When she’s dying of cancer. On the moon. On Christmas.

I watched my brother spin out in the middle of a track in a particularly zippy kart once. He sat in classic broadside position, motionless, his engine off and waiting for the worst. My sister, who had been forced to drive a burly, slow two-seater, roared over the bump and beheld my brother’s drifting wreck of a machine sitting in the middle of the track like a lion regards a fat child in a wheelchair left in the middle of the Serengeti. Her eyes lit up with the kerosene fire of battle. She flexed in her seat, obviously leaning as hard on the gas pedal as she could. My brother stared her down, powerless to do anything, but stunned at how the improbable was becoming the real.

The impact knocked my brother’s tightly fitted baseball cap clean off his head, and whipped his head around like a tennis ball speared on a cb whip. Fuck off if you don’t like style, Destin go-kart track in 1993. It’s not my fault my sister recognized a once in a lifetime opportunity when she saw one. Teenaged security guards come and go, but glory and go-karting live forever, Philistines.

Holly: The Airstream trailer, and make one of the old relics left over from the Atomic Years. (If you must have your transport shiny and spanking-new, they’re still making vaguely vintage-looking models today.

Trailer it may be, but trashy it most certainly is not.

Doug: I’m sure most of y’all have the impression of French automobiles, like the French people who make them, as small, weird-looking, and wimpy. But just as France was once a world power, a tiny corner of their auto industry briefly dabbled in chromed-up, big-block-V8-powered behemoths that looked like Al Capone’s personal town car, and for a brief period in the late ’50s and early ’60s produced the Facel Vega Excellence.

With its tailfins, billboard-sized chrome grille, and Chrysler-sourced Hemi V8, the Excellence was a force to be reckoned with on French autoroutes and American superhighways alike, and is gangsta to a degree that you petit-bourgeois wankers in your Hummer H2s and Fast-and-Furious’d Civics can only pretend at.

Canon.

Holly: Preacher. From 1995 to the summer of 2000, Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon set the world on fire with their tale of a Texas preacher possessed by a half-angel, half-demon celestial hellspawn. With his trusty assassin girlfriend and Irish vampire bestie by his side, Jesse Custer sets out to pick a gunfight with God. This goes about as swimmingly as you’d expect it would, and the whole bloody saga is available in nine shiny graphic novel installments.

Never mind having a favorite comic book, Preacher stands on its own as a work of literature, in any medium. There’s been a hot-potato game with the film rights going on for about ten years now, and like any comics contrarian I’ve got every available body part crossed praying it never gets made. (When HBO passes on material for being “too dark”, it’ll never get the treatment it deserves.)

Doug: As long as I’ve paid props to an unexpectedly badass French car, why not pay tribute to an unexpectedly badass French movie: “La Haine” (Hate), a 1995 film about three friends — a black guy, an Arab guy, and a wannabe-gangsta Jew — navigating the riot-ridden housing projects of exurban Paris.

The first revelation from this film is that Paris even has projects; the second is the superb acting performances from each of the three leads; the third is the remix of a French-language recording of “Fuck Tha Police” played about halfway through the film, which is more awesome than your mind can possibly comprehend. (The fourth is that Vincent Cassel, who portrays the aforementioned wannabe-gangsta white guy — is now married to Monica Bellucci. I don’t know why I even mentioned that except to make myself feel bad, but as long as a few of you feel bad also, my work is done.)

Orson: The Critic. Say the words “Family Guy” and I will rip your your eyeballs with a bullwhip: The Critic took two of the writers from The Simpsons, set up a simple framework to digress and return their actual, real, and not detestable sham-characters, and let the madness rip. Jon Lovitz’s and Park Overall’s voicework was superb, the writing rolled along at the speed of Aderall in a good way, and peppered the series with ancillary characters like the immortal mad drunken WASP Franklin Sherman. Take that, Guernica!

As with all good things, time’s tide smothered it after two seasons, but no matter. The Easter Island Kid will forever live in our hearts as the one running gag capable of reducing us to tittering hysteria every time. If you’ll excuse us, we have a bottle of Blotto Bros. Wine to attend to, as it’s reasonably priced at a dollar a jug.