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.

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Today’s Patron Saint of Spicy Living: Fela Kuti. The Nigerian musician who founded the Afro-funk movement, Kuti did everything you’ve hoped and dreamed of doing, but were simply too chickenshit to try. He dropped out of med school to pursue music, declared his own independent country called the Kalakuta republic, turned 25 minute long jams into hit singles, often performed only in his underwear, married 27 women in one year alone but only keeping 12 on a regular rotation, and pissed off the military dictatorship of Nigeria so badly they burned down his mini-republic, beat him to a pulp, threw his grandmother out a window, and later charged him with currency smuggling.

Throw in a lifelong habit of being constantly high, fathering a veritable Afro-orchestra sized passel of children, renaming himself Anikulapo (”he who carries death in his pouch,”) and the occasional time spent running from the law before a premature death (falling dick-first into HIV,) and Fela Kuti was Ol’ Dirty Bastard before ODB was so much as a ranting glint in his father’s eye, but with a much bigger backup band, a saxophone, and a convenient and extremely nasty villain to rant against in the Nigerian government. Not many are spicy enough to go into battle clad only in a pair of bikini briefs and carrying only a microphone and a joint the size of a baseball bat, but Fela was peppery enough for several lifetimes. Cheers, Fela.

Drink.

Holly: I’m making a triumphant return to civilization in a couple weeks, (more…)

A goodly number of our past Patron Saints have been hard-drinkin’, poon-houndin’ actors who have played bank robbers or secret agents or what have you. This week’s Saint, Ian Fleming, has the added cred of having been a secret agent: Years before he commenced the writing of the James Bond novel series, Fleming was handpicked by the Royal Navy’s director of intelligence to be his personal assistant, and spent much of World War II planning covert operations before taking control of the elite 30 Assault Unit commando force in 1944. According to Wikipedia, “30AU” specialized in

targeting enemy headquarters to secure documentation and items of equipment with an intelligence value that the ordinary Allied soldier, or even commando, might ignore or even destroy. They trained in lock picking, safe cracking, unarmed combat, and general techniques and skills for collecting intelligence. The unit contained some of the most “gung-ho” operatives in the commandos. . . . [B]ecause of their successes in Sicily and Italy, 30AU (based at the The Marine Hotel Littlehampton, West Sussex, now a public house and venue for the annual reunion of the 30AU veterans) became greatly trusted by naval intelligence. Having seen the scope of its achievements and its potential, with the right support and the right direction, to deliver even more, the unit was much enlarged and it was given direct tasks: specific items and documents to acquire. Fleming was the man who would give these specific directives.

After the war, Fleming spun his experiences with 30AU and naval intelligence into the Bond series, which him earned enough money to retire to his Jamaican estate in the late 1950s. At “Goldeneye,” named after one of the operations he’d planned with the Royal Navy, Fleming engaged in pretty much the same behavior you would if you’d written an incredibly famous series of spy novels and had carved out a little slice of Jamaica all for yourself:

“I have always smoked and drunk and loved too much. In fact I have lived not too long but too much. One day the Iron Crab will get me. Then I shall have died of living too much.”

The “Iron Crab,” whatever the hell that is, did get him at the age of 54, but not before he’d married the widow of a baron, achieved the rank of Commander in the Royal Navy, and written 14 Bond novels and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” One hundred cocktails at Boodle’s to you, sir, wherever you are.

Onward:

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The Patron Saint of Spicy Livin’ This Week: Robert Clay Allison. There is very little to actually recommend Allison as a human being: a violent, intemperate man, he suffered drastic mood swings as the result of an early life head injury, had to go West after killing a Union officer in post-Civil War Tennessee, earned a reputation as a horrifically angry person with a fast gun, once carried a man’s head in a sack for 29 miles to prove a point, and once went to dinner with a man he killed in a gunfight afterward. As to why? “Because I didn’t want to send a man to hell on an empty stomach.”

Allison died when he fell under a wagon wheel and had his neck broken, and thus ended the life of a very mean man. However, he does earn a spot in Spicy Livin’s annals for the following headstone, among the greatest ever chiseled from the granite of our fine nation:

So, gunfighting, drinking and violence aside, he has a headstone reading “I AM THE BIGGEST BUT FAIREST BADASS TO EVER WALK THE EARTH.” Prost!

Drink.

Holly: From Dessert What Gets You Drunk, the finest of all food groups: Beer floats! (more…)

This week’s Patron Saint of Spicy Living: Mario Batali.

–Grew weed on his roof during college

–Spent most of a key internship in London under Marco Pierre-White allegedly fired up on cocaine while attending Joy Division concerts.

–Would polish off a case of wine at a time with his business partner Joe Bastianich during a single meal.

–Was, in his day, a highly successful ladies’ man despite his girth.

–Quoted from Heat about his tenure at the pizza cafe Stuff Yer face: “I don’t want to come off as a big druggy, but when a guy comes into the kitchen with a pizza pan turned upside down, covered with lines of crack, how can you say no?”

–Banned noted chef and dick Gordon Ramsay from his restaurants.

–Fond of hog jowl, offal, parts, and other delicious entrails and discard meats.

–From Wikipedia: “Often, the chef’s mouth and drinking habits get him into trouble, like when at the 2009 South Beach Food & Wine Festival, as the MC for a $1,000-a-plate dinner honoring the King & Queen of Spain the Miami Herald reported Batali releasing a string of profanities while on stage introducing Spanish chef Jose Andreas, and then proceeding to dry-hump Andreas. ”

For all of these and his shameless self-promotion–plus the fact that he’s on our list of people to get completely trashed one day with, if only for the food–we salute you, Mario Batali, and all the fatty goodness you stand for. Chin-chin.

Drink.

Holly: Campers, it’s time to start your interior conditioning programs for tailgating season. Without proper summer workouts, your systems will balk at the first combined assault of hot wings, molten cheese, and mimosas mixed in a plastic bucket. To that end, our sommelier recommends: Pizza beer. Why? Because it apparently exists, and that’s reason enough for a Friday.

The Spicy Living Test Kitchen has never actually tasted this alleged concoction, but The Onion AV Club did a while back, with reviews ranging from “It’s not nearly as bad as it sounds” to “I’d rather just have a beer-flavored beer.”

Orson: Tequila. Silvery-tongued bandita with perfect tits heaving under the sole cover of a bandolier of ammunition, borne aloft by angel’s wings and a jet pack, soaring naked just out of reach…oh, tequila, you turn me into a lovestruck mad scientist. (more…)

Your Patron Saint of Spicy Living: Oliver Reed.

Don’t even bother searching Youtube for “Oliver Reed drunk.” You don’t have enough time in your day. Oliver Reed completes the Four Horseman of the Mid-20th Century Alcoholcalypse along with Richard Harris (who discovered Hawaiian tropical drinks and wandered into traffic punching cars,) Richard Burton (two bottles of vodka a day,) and Peter O’Toole, who only avoided making the atrocious movies the others made by staying in the bar even longer than the others did.

Reed was fond of rugby, fighting, arm wrestling, and had a tattoo of an eagle’s claw on his genitals. A journalist once asked him if he drank 104 pints during his second bachelor party, to which he responded, “No, that was in Guernsey a few years ago.” He outdrank Lee Marvin. He appeared constantly drunk on not one, but on a series of British talk shows toward the end of his life, including one where he performed “Wild Thing” with Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. He realized he had a drinking problem where all of us realize these things: when he was lying prone on the baggage conveyor at Galway Airport. He vomited on Steve McQueen after a marathon bender in 1973. He was once pulled naked from a giant goldfish tank while ranting “You can’t touch me! I’m one of the Four Musketeers!”

Whether his life was an accomplishment, a warning in the form of one long incredible bender, or something else entirely, we can’t really say. But instead, let’s just say that it certainly happened, and happened with great vigor. At the very least, stand back and gape in awe at it, especially when you consider the final salvo Reed fired over the bow of good sense in his death:

Reed died of a sudden heart attack[1] during a break from filming Gladiator in Valletta, Malta on 2 May 1999. He was 61 years old and was reported to be heavily intoxicated at the time of his death. Racking up an $866 alcohol bill, Reed had reportedly drunk three bottles of Captain Morgan’s rum, eight bottles of beer and numerous doubles of Famous Grouse whisky. He also beat five much younger Royal Navy sailors at arm wrestling at a bar called “The Pub.” (The owners have since added “Ollie’s Last Pub” to the sign.

We salute you, Oliver Reed. If you hear something stumble, punch a wall, and laugh before vomiting, stumbling, and laughing again in a Wimbledon pub one day, it’s him.

Drink.

Holly: Ommegeddon. Like any real patriot, I was hanging out at Green’s on Ponce over the holiday weekend, and Doug threw this bottle in our basket because it had a mushroom cloud on it: (more…)

This week’s installment of the Digital Viking: The EDSBS Guide to Spicy Living salutes a real American hero, Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin. Aldrin’s badass resume needs no full recap, as he was the second man to walk on the moon, which is clearly the best position ever since you’re not stupid enough to take the first step and therefore tramp right into the mouth of a waiting lunar sandworm. No, heroes go second, and suckers go first.

Aldrin also flew 66 missions over Korea, got a Ph.D. in Astronautics from MIT, took communion on the moon, appeared both and the Simpsons and on Punky Brewster, and has sick, sick flow on the mike. He also knows how to punch a bitch if he has to:

As the Prince of Astronauts, we salute you, Buzz Aldrin, and gulp floating orbs of martini in your honor. Cheers.

Our guest this week: Matt “Ufflepuff” Ufford of Warming Glow. Bon appetit.

Drink.

Holly: As previously honored on other, lesser websites, a nod to being on vacation for the next two weeks in 95 degree heat and 99% humidity — The Bull Gator: (more…)

Our patron saint of Spicy Living this week is Klaus Kinski. Slightly schizophrenic according to medical records, prone to great rages, an inveterate womanizer of immense appetite and zero shame, and a brilliant actor prone to getting into fistfights with his directors who demanded payment not in checks, but in “Clean, new dollars, because old money smells like shit.” Accept as evidence the following:

This picture:

This quote:

We first meet Kinski on one of his theatrical tours, right before the filming of Aguire. The year was 1970, and audiences throughout West Germany were packing houses to see Klaus Kinski in blue jeans and stringy blonde hair give “Jesus speeches.” These speeches mainly consisted of long and articulate rants about pestilence and animal waste.

And this quote:

“One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.”

And this video: (more…)

Today’s patron saint of Spicy Living: David Niven, who slept with Marilyn Monroe, was jailed for insubordination for asking a boring military lecturer “Could you tell me the time, sir? I have to catch a train,” once shared a house with Errol Flynn they dubbed “Cirrhosis-by-the-Sea,” was the original pick to play James Bond, left Hollywood to fight in World War Two, was among the first outsiders to actually see a concentration camp, told his men during battle “Look, you chaps only have to do this once. But I’ll have to do it all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!”, and one slick, debonair bastard all the while. Cheers.

Drink.
Holly: Viva Pacifico, a fine cerveza that can and shall be drunk in ill-advised quantities for days on end in the summer months with no visible effects.

It’s that watery, limey kind of Mexican good without the attendant twatwaffle factor of Corona. It has recently been packaged in travel-sized form for easy smuggling. Most crucially, it doesn’t rhyme with many other words, rendering it safe from Jimmy Buffett encroachment.

Orson: Since Holly has the summer swillin’ beer taken, I’ll be a good American and recommend one of our red-blooded American beers to counter her outsourcing of drinking choice across the border WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA? (Pacifico is delicious and we could drink a six pack in an hour on a hot day if we stopped counting, which would all end in tears when you try to hop over the fence to use a neighbor’s trampoline, and then gash your leg open and bleed all over a stranger’s trampoline, who happens to be sitting on the deck the whole time watching you do this, and let’s just move on.) (more…)

Your patron saint of spicy living this week: Michael Caine, who when asked about starring in the abominable Jaws: The Revenge said: “I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” He also slept with Bianca Jagger in her prime, made Albert the Butler into a former Burmese guerilla-killing badass in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, said the best “bloody whore” in all of cinema in Get Carter,, and uttered the line “She’s in fine condition” while groping a young lovely in Alfie, and will beat your ass in a staring contest. Cheers, sir. To the living spicy-style…

Drink.

Holly: The Dark and Stormy. It’s summertime, and that means hurricane season for your poor livers. Batten down your hatches with this sweet-but-deadly combination of dark rum, ginger beer, and lime over ice. Make it with black Gosling rum or not at all. (And that’s ginger beer, not ginger ale. What are we, savages?)

Orson: The Rusty Nail.I know. It’s high blasphemy to actually tell scotch fans what you’re actually tasting when they pour you a tumbler full of something expensive that still tastes like fried badger assholes.

“Mmm, can’t you taste the peat? And the hints of caramel?” (more…)