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.

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, and as soon as I cross the Tennessee line all I’ll be able to focus on is getting to the Flying Saucer in Nashville and getting some Hummingbird Water in my parched bloodstream.

I’m completely serious. Just let me open a vein at the bar, stick a funnel in my arm, and pour in some pear cider laced with framboise. I’ll be fine.

Orson: Champagne. Remember that hip-hop is actually the whitest, stiffest, and least imaginative music in the world in one respect and one respect only: while early rock and roll came from white kids trying to act as black as they possibly could, rappers through the 90s seemed to rapidly accrue every fixin’ of the English upper classes as possible: Burberry, Bentleys, and ultimately the swilling of cognac and champagne as the role model for hip-hop fashion slowly degenerated from a Kangol’d Rakim to a melaninized version of Bertie Wooster. Who knew that the preferred watching in black households in the late eighties was Jeeves and Wooster, and that Fry and Laurie would help define a generation of top-shelf luxury brand whoring rappers? Tip of the hat, gents. You were more influential than you realized.

Digression concluded, and bringing the camera back over here to delicious, intoxicating Champagne. Like Tequila, Champagne is one of the few alcoholic beverages possessing genuine and impressive powers. A fizzy white wine with a mineral edge, Champagne can be consumed throughout the year, and occasionally throughout the day as US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan did, often drinking a bottle he kept on ice in his desk starting around noon or so, and progressing throughout the day. It doesn’t have the tannic afterburn effect red wine has, doesn’t get you as sloshed as hard liquor will, and skirts the often crippling bloat beer brings to the party. In short: the choice of sneaky and efficient drunks for years, champagne is the child you choose for the “bring your booze to work day” prize recipient, and it sits quietly in your office admiring your collection of business cards without trashing the place like vodka or whiskey will.

It does have its costs, mind you, but the Hagman diet can work for decades before you have to actually pull the other “Hagman” and get a new liver. Hell, even then Hagman didn’t seem that disappointed over his insane champagne consumption, as it helped him get ridiculously famous, and only cost him $50K a year for four bottles a day:

He was such a happy drunk that if the booze hadn’t rotted his first liver he would still be on the stuff today.

“If there hadn’t been any side-effects on my health, I would have been happy to go on,” he admits. “I never was drunk. It just gave me that little click. My wife never minded. We were making so much money at the time that $50,000 a year on champagne really didn’t matter.”

Winston Churchill, though a whiskey and soda man, kept champagne as his mistress, and was so fond of Pol Roger the vineyard made it in pint bottles for him. The cheap stuff, particularly your Oregon labels like Domaine St. Michele, are beyond passable, and even sneak into the good if you can get them cold enough. At somewhere around 13 bucks, they won’t destroy the budget either, and will take a good 30 years to rot the liver. That’s plenty of time to become JR Ewing or the Prime Minister of England in the meantime. Now pop the Santana DVX.

Comestibles.

Orson: Burger King onion rings. These have apparently disappeared from the BK, and great moaning and wailing should result from this travesty, if only for the appearance of the single, ring of batter with a single, dessicated ribbon of onion somewhere in the middle of all that salt and crusty flour.

Holly: Trader Joe’s Thai Lime & Chili Cashews. I don’t even like nuts, leaving me to conclude that these are laced with PCP. This should not deter you from eating them by the double handful.

(Boiled peanuts are for pantywaists.)

Combustibles.

Holly: The first British hydrogen bomb.

“There may have been a problem if the aircraft crashed on takeoff and burst into flames.” You’re not kidding, sir.

Orson: Krakatoa. Yeah, there’s no video. BOOM WOODBLOCK’d

Just as well: if there had been cameras, Krakatoa would have bitch-slapped them out of the hands of anyone holding them before blasting them eight leagues to hell beneath a pyroclastic flow Satan himself called “excessive.” In 1883 it erupted in the biggest display of the earth–I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This just doesn’t look right.

IN 1883 KRAKATOA WENT FUCKING APESHIT AND DECIDED TO PUT SOME BITCHES IN PLACE. IT BLEW THE FUCK UP. PEOPLE WERE LIKE, “NAW, KRAKATOA, YOU COULDN’T BLOW UP AGAIN.” THEN IT BLEW UP AGAIN. AND AGAIN. THEN KRAKATOA WAS LIKE, “YEAH YOU THINK I’M DONE BLAAAOOOOOOWW FUCK YOU.” THEN KRAKATOA TOOK HIMSELF OUT BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT REAL GANGSTERS DO. BITCHES. YOU’RE IN THE ZONE AND I’M OUT–KRAKAMOTHERFUCKIN’TOAH.

The only volcanic explosion in the history of the world that should by law be described in all caps, Krakatoa destroyed the island around it, lowered global temperatures by a full degree, could be felt as far away as Perth, and established itself as the most badass volcano of all time. It caused a tsunami some crazy Dutch bastard in a passenger ship actually rode out in the waters surrounding it, and its shockwave circled the globe seven times before becoming the song “Angel of Death” by Slayer. Krakatoa. Respek.

Transit.

Holly: As Jack Donaghy says, the Italians have never won a war or mass-produced a decent car, but they have produced the Piaggio P.180 Avanti, a turboprop business aircraft that looks like an escape pod on the Starship Enterprise and can cruise at more than 400 miles an hour. Plus it makes a really cool noise when it flies overhead because of the way the propellers are mounted backward.

If it’s good enough for the Ferrari family, who dumped a bunch of money into the company 11 years ago and allowed their prancing-horse logo to be slapped onto new airframes, trust me, it’s good enough for you.

Orson: The Segway. I mean, they’re perfectly safe….

Canon.

Orson: The Forever War, Dexter Filkins. Perhaps you’d like to read about whether the Iraq war was a good idea or a bad idea, or better still, maybe you’d like to read a book confirming your beliefs about it. Good for you. I prefer Filkins’ read, a fully nonjudgmental account of not only his 3.5 years living like a lunatic in Baghdad covering the war for the NYT, but also his time in Afghanistant pre-9/11 and after, getting as close to the danger as he possibly could and taking ludicrous chances with his life (and in the end, unknowingly, others.) Filkins’ book is all adrenaline and observation, with little time to ruminate or contemplate the stream of absurd, bloody, and oddly human images flashing before your reading eyes: Marines blasting “Hell’s Bells” going into Fallujah, a spinal cord laying in the street next to the perfectly preserved human head, the oddly cordial dinner with the insurgent discussing the goodness of killing Americans who showed Filkins a jihadi death porn tape afterwards…it’s all too fast and intense to digest, and that’s the intended effect. He’s just there, and you’re with him, even when he leaves at the end and can’t quite fit back into the mask of being a normal human not waiting for the next bomb to drop. I mean this in the best possible way: you don’t quite feel right for a day or two after reading it.

Holly: So not only is Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus not a hoax trailer for MTV, it’s an actual movie that somehow made its way into an actual movie theater last night, and guess who got Lorenzo Lamas (yes, THAT Lorenzo Lamas, who was wearing a wallet chain to his own screening, in 2009) to sign her DVD afterwards?

You want my life. You know you want my life.

In the first ten minutes, a commercial airliner gets brought down by a leaping megalodon. Trust me, you’re in excellent hands here.

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:

Drink.

Holly: I spent some time on the central California coast recently, the parts where everything looks like a 1950s ski resort, all the time, even in the summer, and it’s got me all nostalgic for a lifestyle that died out twenty years before I was born. To that end, may I recommend the Alpine martini.

Now, the construction of this involves throwing bits of actual trees into an ice-cream maker, and the finished product is “garnished with fronds”, but please don’t let that deter you. Twigs are totes butcher than lemon twists anyway, right?

Doug: Whilst enjoying a post-Dreamland beer binge with Orson and a rowdy devil’s brigade of SEC-Media-Days-going bloggers a couple weeks ago, I was blessed to make the acquaintance of Kasteel Rouge, a Belgian beer brewed with sour cherries that smells like the happiest moments from your childhood but packs plenty of punch underneath.

Remember Miho, the little Japanese assassin from “Sin City” who looked all cute and unassuming right up until she busted out her shuriken and mutilated Benicio del Toro’s character eight ways from Sunday? Kasteel Rouge is kind of like Miho’s malt-beverage equivalent: smells like cherries, tastes a little bit like the late, lamented Snapple cherry soda, but has an 8.5-percent alcohol content you don’t really notice until you’ve had three or four of them and are wondering why you can’t walk in a straight line anymore. Works equally well as a barbecue companion or a base for one of those ice-cream floats Holly mentioned last time. (Now that I think about it, you know what would go great in a glass of this stuff? A scoop of Cherry Garcia. Hold on, I’ll be right back.)

Comestibles.

Doug: Blue Diamond smokehouse almonds. A long time ago, back before airline deregulation allowed commercial aviation to turn completely into the equivalent of flying Greyhounds, Piedmont Airlines gave out bags of smokehouse almonds even on flights as short as Roanoke-to-Washington; these days, you’re lucky if the flight attendants shoot you a packet of pretzels out of one of those air cannons they use to launch T-shirts into the crowd at basketball games. (And sure enough, US Airways, which swallowed up Piedmont in ‘89, charged me two bucks for a fucking can of Coke when I flew out to L.A. last fall.)

But Blue Diamond’s resealable bags of smoky almond goodness are still available at better grocery stores everywhere, whether you’re looking for a gameday nosh or simply trying to recapture the wide-eyed days of your youth when it was still possible to get excited about something other than football upsets or getting to see a new pair of boobs. Not that I’ve been bitter about that lately or anything.

Holly: The fried dill pickle. You’d think in a sprawling metropolis with this many sports franchises there would be one bar that knows how to fry a goddamn pickle, but you would be gravely wrong.

It’s not hard, Viking campers. Pickles. Cornmeal. Buttermilk. Salt. Pepper. A little garlic or curry powder if you’re feeling real adventurous. Fry, drain, inhale. And for fuck’s sake, cut them into spears. No one wants to eat pickle pennies. When this entire state breaks off and slides into the Pacific, this travesty will be largely to blame.

Combustibles.

Holly: Bless you, YouTube title search. You give, and you give. Today, you give “Acetylene experiment goes badly wrong!”, and you are not lying.

Doug: “Going to the game on Saturday, Bob?”

“Man, I’d love to, but the wife’s been bugging me for six months straight to clean out the garage, and I promised her I’d finally do it this weekend. Problem is I’ve got this old F-4 Phantom jet that’s been sitting in there for ages, and I don’t have the first clue what to do with it. You got any ideas?”

“I think I might be able to help you dispose of that, yes.”

Transit.

Holly: In my recent copious free time, I’ve had far too many hours to spend honing my Wii skills. My beat is Mario Kart. My weapon, the Booster Seat.

It doesn’t look like much, but there’s something eminently satisfying on a spiritual level about throwing lightning bolts at giant killer apes and lizards from the comfort of a cartoon pram.

Doug: Keep your Royal Caribbean megaliners and the floating shopping malls Carnival tries to pass off as ships; nobody’s going to be intimidated by a vessel with a mini golf course on the lido deck (or, for that matter, by anything that has a “lido deck” to begin with). No, if you really want to be the king of the seas, you’re gonna want a Russian Typhoon-class nuclear submarine, which packs both enough supplies and amenities for a six-month cruise and twenty 200-kiloton ballistic missiles in its two-football-field length.

You want mini golf that bad, you sail this thing to Myrtle Beach and indulge yourself on shore, capitalist running dog.

Canon.

Holly: The BBC’s goofy-assed, completely inappropriate adaptation of Robin Hood. I knew they had something special when its arrival on American television three years ago was advertised as “A Different Kind Of Hood”. Though it’s ostensibly a period piece set during the Crusades, they’ll do things like stage a casino night in Nottingham Castle. The stunts defy credulity and are so poorly staged with such good humor you can’t help but howl. And each new scene is announced with the sound of an arrow thwacking into a target, like a “turn the page” tone for those read-along books . The whole undertaking is as anachronistic and derivative as it is completely fucking delightful.

The third and final season just wrapped up across the pond, and should be making its way to the States soon, but it’s the first year you want, before they started killing off characters who wanted to have movie careers and things got all serious. Pick it up and pop one in after the Saturday night WAC games this fall when you’re too drunk to move.

(This video did not appear in the actual show, but it would not be a bit out of place, if that tells you anything.)

Doug: As the first Connery-less Bond film, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” has been criticized by fair-weather 007 fans as a lightweight entry in the series: It starred an Australian fashion model (George Lazenby) as our man Bond, and featured an extended sequence with Bond going undercover as a foppish genealogist wearing a kilt and a puffy shirt even Seinfeld wouldn’t be caught dead in. But if you’re actually paying attention, OHMSS is about as dark and cynical as it gets in the 007 oeuvre, at least until you get around to the brooding Daniel Craig era: Bond contemplates leaving MI6 for good; the villain gets away; and Bond finally finds a woman he wants to settle down and spend the rest of his life with, only to lose her to a Blofeld-masterminded drive-by on their fricking wedding day. Tell me that even the world’s suavest, most iron-willed secret agent wouldn’t be reduced to quivering Spam by a suckerpunch like this:

It’s made all the more tragic by the fact that the woman Bond snagged and then lost was expert-skiing, stunt-driving, shit-hot Corsican mafia heiress Teresa “Tracy” di Vicenzo, played by ex-Avenger Diana Rigg. Strike me down right now if she doesn’t rank as one of the top five Bond girls in history, even without a leather catsuit at her disposal. At any rate, for showing that even the great James Bond is not immune to nihilism-inducing, faith-in-a-benevolent-God-ending misery, OHMSS is an indispensible part of any Digital Viking’s film library.

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! We used these to get good and stumbly on the 4th (cherry stout with vanilla bean, for the record, and highly recommended), but the other day I heard it touted as a hangover cure, and — sweet, bubbly, carby, alcoholic — I can’t argue with this logic.

If you’re in the L.A. area, there’s a beer float contest this Sunday, and what do you know! They’re looking for judges! Make us proud, West Campers. (Don’t preach, now; it’s for CHARITY, which makes it practically an obligation, no?)

Orson: The Halemint, available at Leon’s in Decatur, where one menu item is “Bacon in a Glass” that you may order with optional peanut butter. Ginger Beer as a mixer is far more magical than one might think:

1 shot vodka

1 oz. mint infused pomegranate syrup (read: grenadine in a pinch, and not much of it.)

1 oz. fresh lemon juice

crushed mint leaves

Top off with ginger beer, serve in Collins glass with big fat icecubes

The ginger beer is what morphs this from one of a zillion sugary drinks designed to get women into compliance mode, adding a bite that simultaneously covers the vodka while also validating the last shreds of masculinity you’re clinging to while drinking a mostly pinkish drink by shocking your tastebuds in just the right way. Commenters will note that the choice of ginger beer matters, too. You are correct, and to alleviate that you should get your hand on some Reed’s unless you’re a crafty dick who likes to brag about making your own, in which case you go, you effete urban survivalist, you.

Comestibles.

Orson: Whether it even qualifies as food or not, I don’t know. The devil played his greatest trick not when he convinced people he didn’t exist, but when he took human form, bought a shitload of animal hooves, sugar, artificial flavoring, and then concocted the candy/compulsion known as Mike ‘n Ikes.

I don’t even buy these anymore, I’m not to be trusted around them, capable of inhaling an entire box of them in seconds. What size box, you ask? Any of them at any time, though the evil fucking people who make these sell them in three inconvenient sizes:

Small: Contains enough to piss you of at their scarcity, a sum total of around 15-20 candies.

Diabetes-size: A box the size of a Claymore mine, and just as deadly for your bloodsugar. Contains 2,500 candies per box. Consumed just as quickly as Small box.

Suitcase: Consumption time stays steady. Resulting physical affects include seizures, driving from Atlanta to Baton Rouge in 5 hours, and THE FEAR. Number uncertain, as unit of measure is “roughly equivalent to one good sized toddler.”

Their fruity seduction keeps us from walking down the candy aisle period. If you need to hide valuable information from me or never want to encounter me in person, simply stay there and our paths will never cross.

Holly: Look, I can’t really think straight right now, let alone form a coherent paragraph (so what else is new?), let alone care that this will make the second time I’ve gone to the Alabama barbecue-centric well for your weekly Comestible, because about as soon as I finish typing this sentence, Fearless Leader Swindle and I and a bunch of no-account foobaw writerly types are all making a fast break for Dreamland and ZOMG OK BYE

Combustibles.

Holly: Presented without comment, and with much guffawing laughter, The Perils Of The Flaming Shot.

Orson: The Lego Flamethrower, ladies and gentlemen. Now with added trance music.

Transit.

Holly: The Italdesign Columbus, designed by Giugiaro for the 1992 Turin auto show to celebrate the 500th anniversary of whatever it was Christopher Columbus did.

Up in the forward bubble, the driver sits in the center, flanked by a seat on either side that will presumably be occupied by someone who will navigate or read the driver stories. In the rear compartment, you’ve got swiveling leather seats and presumably enough space for your Scrabble game or liquor stash or whatever it is you’re going to be entertaining yourself with back there. So never mind the fact that it looks like a Toyota minivan getting rear-ended by a Volvo station wagon; this car is the ultimate tailgating vehicle, with loads of cargo space and a massive tailgate upon which to mount your satellite TV, and it’s lounge-on-wheels comfortable for the 500-mile drive to Lexington, Fayetteville, or whichever shithole your team is being forced to play in in any given week. Italian-designed, BMW V12-powered, and America-sized for people who don’t own the road but want to take up as much of it as possible.

Orson: The Jeepney, the Filipino hooptie/mass transit mule showing that in all places influenced by both American and Spanish culture, people will inevitably begin slapping chrome, lights, outrageous paint jobs, Catholic icons, horns, and sculpted chrome animals onto their vehicles.

Jeepneys roll everywhere across the Philippine Islands, and would probably drop you off in the middle of your living room provided they could pick up someone along the way, you paid the proper fare, and if you didn’t mind the owner stopping to pick up a little bit of San Miguel on the way. You can flag them down anywhere at any time, and can leave at any point by slapping the roof, yelling “BAYAN!!!” (payment) at the top of your lungs, and then figuring out what you owe. Built on extended Jeep frames with benches installed in the covered bed, equipped with blaring mariachi horns, and endowed with the ability to survive the rutted rigors of even the most whorish tropical roadways, the Jeepney is a marvel to behold, even when a huge bump sends you skull into the ceiling and you come to in a Manila garbage heap without any ID or pants. (The Jeepney had nothing to do with that part, and you wouldn’t be alone in this situation, anyway. Plenty of people end up without ID and pantsless in Manila.)

Canon.

Holly: Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, an evolutionary biology book (SHUT IT) presented as a series of sex advice columns for bugs. To wit:

Dear Dr. Tatiana,
My boyfriend is the handsomest golden potto I ever saw. He’s got beautiful golden fur on his back, creamy white fur on his belly, he smells delicious, and he has ever such dainty hands and feet. There’s just one thing. Please, Dr. Tatiana, why is his penis covered with enormous spines?

And we’ve all been there, right?

Orson: Unsolved Mysteries. The most terrifying show of my childhood by far, Robert Stack in a trenchcoat remains the man who narrates my nightmares (the ones inevitably shot with a soft-focus filter over the lens at dusk and with bendy synths spooking me out in the back.)

Shot on a budget of fifteen dollars an episode, the crew made do with any story by shooting it in places where people might conceivably be found dead, go missing, or be killed in mysterious, painful ways. They made even the most mundane things terrifying by shooting segments in a vacant lot you half-remembered seeing off the interstate and thinking, “Well, that’s probably where someone got shot on a cold, dark night with plenty of ominous bendy synths in the back.”

They did DB Cooper, satanic ritual murder in Central Park, and other glamour cases, sure, but Unsolved Mysteries took special joy in making even clear cases of sheer stupidity seem terrifying. Once they did an entire segment about a man who pulled off the road in Utah and was never seen again. It was winter, and I’m thinking, “Well, he probably was just tired, and pulled off the road, and then went to pee and got lost.” Yet the segment had these eerie shots that–I shit you not–made it appear that at any moment, the Goat With A Thousand Eyes was going to take this poor actor playing the unlucky dumbass of the segment and rend his body and soul into screaming shreds. For a kid watching this, it led to you suddenly hearing Robert Stack narrating something as simple as your walk home: “11 year old Orson Swindle was walking home from school when he vanished,” a statement that in Robert Stack’s horrifically sinister voice all but included the phrase “because he was kidnapped and raped by Barbary Pirates until he exploded.”

The X-Files learned all of their tricks–the flashlights, the mist, the continual spookification of ordinary spaces–from Unsolved Mysteries, and even then it still wasn’t as scary. (Except for “Home.” You ruined Johnny Mathis for us forever, you bastards.)

–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. Best served just cold enough to take the ethyl edge off it, tequila probably is the liquor inspiring the greatest instant gag reflex for anyone reading this, and that is because at one point you disrespected her, and she shot you dead and left you die vomiting in the desert somewhere around 4 a.m. for the offence.

Shame on you: when balanced properly with the right mixers, attitude, and a enough food in the belly, tequila really will turn you into a more brilliant lunatic than you ever imagined yourself being. Normal alcohol: swimming naked. Tequila: swimming Lake Nantahala naked with the company of ten total strangers you talked into joining you. That’s what tequila has done for me, and it can do the same for you, provided you show the proper respect for the drink with the highest risk/reward ratio of any of the major alcohols in the canon. It worked for Ty Webb, after all, and he never made a single mistake in his life.

It’s not just for shots, and if you’re drinking the cheap, formaldehyde-laced shit, it’s most definitely not for shots. (Don’t bother with the salt and lime if you don’t have to if you’re shelling out for Patron or its compatriots: it goes down smooth enough, especially if chilled, and all that squirting and tossing can get confusing, especially after a shot or five.) You could go Tequila Sunrise, but the outlaw TNT is a pleasant surprise: Tequila and tonic mixed in the proportions of your choosing, garnished with lime, and consumed slooooooowly, lest the slow infusion of genius overwhelm your mainframe.

Comestibles.

Holly: The Chicago Style Hot Dog.

I have not a drop of Chicago extraction in my blood, but I do like what they do with their street food and admire their violent eschewing of ketchup. I have been informed that this is a reliable recipe for its proper construction. Should you disagree, please say so in the comments, calling into question as many of your fellow readers’ relationships with their mothers as is convenient.

Orson: Runny Eggs. The French were being devoured by wolves on the streets of Paris as recently as the 13th century, according to the papers of Thomas of Aquinas. They have as a result spent a lot of effort getting their revenge on the world, becoming the foremost practitioners of a brand of cooking demanding maximum animal cruelty with a flair for shoving the carnivorous in your face whether you like it or not, stuffing animals inside of animals, grinding their innards into tasty sausages, and overfeeding geese until they cannot walk in order to feed on a paste made from their swollen livers.

Runny eggs would be low on the cruelty scale, French-wise, but the practice of cooking just enough of the egg to ensure that when you cut into them a yellow goo oozes all over the plate is inspired, indeed. You take something as simple as an egg, and yet still prepare it in a manner reminding you that even when you’re eating an egg, you’re taking a potential life, covering it with hot sauce, and greedily vacuuming it up with a fork. Nevermind that it is delicious, as well, especially when you start sopping up the yellow gold with toast to clean the plate. It’s a bit diabolical when you get down to it, and if you can have diabolical for breakfast, then by all means, devil my plate up a bit, chef.

Combustibles.

Holly: Previously on Spicy Livin’, we learned the many entertaining dangers of airbags. Here’s a refresher course, and please, do try this at home:

Orson: My, this is far more disturbing than we thought it would be.

IT TICKLES!

Transit.

Orson: The New City Nobleman, aka the Honda 135i Motorcyle, Asian Edition. A mere 135 cc due to Taiwanese import restrictions, and for good reason: the Taiwanese drive with such reckless and creative negligence that their lawmakers instinctively recognized putting their subjects in anything more powerful than 175 cc would be akin to handing out automatic weapons and PCP at high schools and hoping nothing bad happened.

Thus my faithful steed topped out at 70 mph or so, even though it looked enough like a real motorcycle:

It also had the words “New City Nobleman” painted on the gas tank, an elegant choice when you survey the other possibilities offered by Taiwanese scooters and motorcyles: “Jog, The Happiest Scooter on Earth,” or “Century 150: Made for Cutting Wind.” (Both are actual names and slogans.) I did everything possible to kill this motorcycle. I dropped it drunk coming home from a long night of drinking at the fish stand down the road. I neglected it mightily, sometimes to the point of hearing parts scraping against parts. I hammered its overtaxed engine up roads with people on the back of it.

I even crashed it into the side of a car outside the Clinton Karaoke bar, bending the handlebars at a 90 degree angle, knocking the headlight cockeyed, and putting it halfway under a sedan driven by a drunk man who blocked the road by essentially parking across a busy two lane road. He paid me $450 to go away without calling the police, I agreed, and a day later I not only had a new tailpipe scar the exact shape of Taiwan, I had a $200 dollar surplus from the accident. You know you have a special vehicle when even the scars it gives you are memorable, and its accidents profitable.

Holly: In honor of the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, the Saturn V rocket.

363 feet tall. 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Big Damn Contraption that shoots people into space. Your argument is irrelevant.

If you’d like to kill the rest of your workday, check out the live simulations of the Apollo 11 mission at We Choose The Moon. And if you’re a real space nerd, check out the frequently updated public photo archives NASA has published here. I could wallpaper my house with these. (Saaayy….)

Canon.

Holly: Shark Week is a mere two weeks away. If you just can’t wait that long, pick up the 20th Anniversary DVD collection, featuring an awesome hologram of an attacking Great White on the cover, or the just-released Great Bites Collection on blu-ray.

(NB: The Discovery Channel does not pay me to endorse Shark Week or Shark Week products, but if they decided to start I think I could live with myself.)

Orson: Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). It’s a like a bunch of oddball kids who would be playing D ‘n D and hanging out in marching band were instead set loose in the barren projects of Staten Island, given a dazzling array of cheap narcotics and crates full of old records, and set to simmer on a steady diet of B-rate kung-fu flicks. T.S. Eliot once said that Ezra Pound was particularly amazing because he had, on his own, become a Modernist on his own, and had no mentors. Wu-Tang appeared out of nowhere in similar fashion, making the track-for-track classic out of a cloud of weed smoke, inhalants, and dogeared comic books.

The hair on the back of my neck still stands back when Ghostface flies in on that first track, if only because he raps himself into incomprehensible ribbons. So does everyone else for that matter, going free-association without fear or hesitation, dropping verses and stop-starting phrases whenever it suits them, including Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who drops the refrain on “Shame on a N****” to scream “I’LL FUCK YO’ SHIT UP!!!” just to let you know that this will be unpredictable business from start to finish. Spooky, inventive, and contains the only recorded instance of someone plausibly rhyming the word “style” with “cloud.” Therefore: completely essential.

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:

And despite being referrred to as “funkhouse ale” on the label, it turned out to be really good beer, America the beautiful, the end.

Orson: Cape Fear Punch. America, at one point in its increasingly awesome history, had to resort to pooling resources to get trashed. This was called punch, a drink so evil and subtly powerful it comes from the Hindi word “panch,” meaning five. A name of such simplicity can only exist as testimony to how completely drunk someone can get guzzling tasty, sneakily strong booze from a bucket all night, since in the morning, all one could really do was open one bloodshot eye and answer the query “What happened to you?” with the words “RGHHHRGHGHHH FIVE HARKHHDGHHHH.” Then, you’d have to go plow a field all day, or wander through excrement-filled streets where you could be killed by simply stepping on a rusty piece of metal. (Living now is awesome and do not forget it.)

Cape Fear Punch is the most face-melting of the punch family. Read the recipe if you dare: it involves no less than 4 whole bottles of various hooches thrown into a mixing bowl, though if you’re real classy you’ll just mix it up in a sink like we do. (Or better still, in a bright yellow janitor’s bucket. Class is an aerosol that seeps from our pores like Axe Body Spray.)

Most punch recipes suggest you keep a sort of premixed refresher on hand so that you don’t end up pouring straight booze into half booze, and that you serve this at a party for 20 people or so. We say you pour the booze right in and split between five or six people. You’ve never lived out the orgy scene from Caligula, anyway. (Hint: buy a mop.)

Comestibles.

Holly: All right, next offseason we’re all taking a field trip to Dorset and throwing down at the world stinging nettle eating championships. What could possibly go wrong?

Not surprisingly, the rules are tight for this level of competitive nettle eating.

Only nettles provided by the organisers can be eaten, competitors are not allowed to bring their own, no mouth numbing substances are permitted – although a swig of beer in between mouthfuls is always encouraged.

And for spectators, it makes for a bemusing sight. Competitors have described their unusual bar meal as tasting like anything from “rancid salad with no dressing” to “a mixture of spinach and cow-pat”.

(Oh, and it’s attached to something called a “charity beer festival”. Bangarang.)

Orson: The Chik-Fil-A sandwich. We don’t live in America…yet. The more perfect union spoken of by our forefathers will not exist in full until each and every one of you can drive, walk, crawl, stagger, or autogyro down to a conveniently located Chik-Fil-A, order a number one, and open the sturdy white insulating bag of happiness to find this bundle of joy and two carefully nestled dill pickles staring back at you like a wide-eyed newborn:

There was a point in your youth when, as an elementary schooler living in an exurb, you’d get crackhead excited over the opening of a new restaurant. OMFG MOM!! IT’S AN ARBY’S!!! HAVE YOU HEARD?!?!? THEY SERVE SHAVED HORSEMEAT!!! I WANT SHAVED HORSEMEAT AND A DRY TURNOVER OR I’LL DIE?!?!?!?!?!!!! This is still how I react to the news of a Chick-Fil-A opening, even if it is in fact a huge Chick-Fil-A announcing the construction of a smaller, miniature Chick-Fil-A inside the larger Chick-Fil-A, or if they are in fact across the street from one another. The American flag should be flown upside down until each of you can enjoy this in your neighborhoods, where you can taste the only sandwich really worth holding a bus full of screaming, terrified children hostage over.

Combustibles.

Orson: Exploding hammers. Watch until the end. Once, in Las Vegas, we saw a guy lean out of a window and yell at a rowdy SUV limo full of insanely drunken men, “Y’all doin’ it like a motherfucker! Like a real motherfucker, ya hear?”

The guy at the end is doing exploding sledgehammers, and he is indeed doing it like a motherfucker.

Holly: I don’t know anything about this girl except that I want her to be my best friend. We can braid each other’s hair and make necklaces out of shell casings.

Transit.

Holly: If James Bond had been not British but a German super-spy looking to help his nation shed its Nazi past by aligning with the West and halting the advance of the Soviet menace, Q would’ve assigned him a Mercedes-Benz 300SL, the fastest street-legal production car on the planet when it was introduced in 1954. The 300SL didn’t have gullwing doors because they were cool or because Mercedes was crossing their fingers and hoping against hope it’d get included in a potential Michael J. Fox/Christopher Lloyd movie franchise 30 years later; the doors were needed to accommodate the structure of the car beneath, which was basically lifted intact from the Le Mans-winning W194 race car. The Gullwing could go from 0 to 60 in right around seven seconds and keep going past 150 miles per hour, and while it cost nearly $90,000 in 2009 dollars, that was just the price you’d have to pay if you wanted to impress the likes of Sophia Loren (who replaced her boring old luxury sedan with a Gullwing in 1955, not that she needed to look any sexier):

Keep your Maseratis and your Beemers: A 300SL driver is someone who appreciates the finer things in life, tips well, and exudes more cool sitting on the john than most of us do in our very best moments. And the valets always park his car right out front.

Transit:

Orson: Sing along! AMERICAAAA!!!

The only thing funnier than watching someone actually drive this would be watching someone drive it while attempting a drive-by flamethrower attack on a Rose Bowl float full of clowns, because fuck a clown. No technical specifics are listed in the description of the Burger Trike, but my keen automotive eye is pretty sure that looks like a vehicle capable of achieving speeds of up to eleven million miles an hour, give or take wind resistance.

Canon.

Holly: In 1963, Walt Disney ingested some weapons-grade hallucinogens and thought it might be a fine idea to construct a thatched hut full of robotic singing birds to terrify children with. The result was Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room. The Florida version has since undergone a series of unneeded upgrades, but down in Anaheim that’s all it is to this day — a cool dark room full of feathery animatronics that breathe, croon, and insult each other for ten minutes at a stretch. They’re getting up there in years and for parts of the show you can barely hear the songs over the clacking of metal beaks, but it’s all part of the Tiki Room’s sinister, vaguely horrifying charm:

Canon: Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes.

The Sam Raimi of the 16th century, Caravaggio was fond of street-brawling and paintings they don’t show you in Art class because Art class, for one reason or another, doesn’t appreciate jets of blood quite like you do. The expressions here are what merit praise:

Holofernes: Um, this hurts.

Judith: Are you sure this is how it’s done?

Old woman and beheading expert: Oh, yes. Cut on the diagonal and apply more pressure.

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:

Fill a pint glass with ice. Add vodka, and just enough Hypnotiq to turn the drink blue. Wedge a full can of Red Bull upside down in the ice, and serve with a straw and copious admonitions not to dislodge the can. As you grip & sip, the Red Bull will flow down, turning your drink a pleasant swampy green. The effects of consuming a full glass of vodka chased with a full can of Red Bull are most readily compared to Super Mario in the throes of an invincibility star. Those sparkles on your skin? Totally real. Go right ahead and run through that door, gentle reader, whether it’s open or not. Trust me, you won’t feel a thing.

Matt: The Transcontinental. Never heard of a Transcontinental, eh? Probably because it didn’t exist until I requested it from the unrivaled J.R. at Sidecar. And I’m going to share it with you, and you will make it for people, and they will be impressed, and you won’t give me credit, because who gets drink recipes off the Internet?

• 1.5 oz rye (or bourbon – something with more of an edge like Knob Creek works well)
• 1 oz grapefruit juice (NOTE: REAL grapefruit juice. Pink grapefruit juice is too sweet, unless you’re making it for a girl or a Tennessee fan)
• ½ oz St. Germaine elderflower liqueur
• 2 dashes bitters
• Fresh sage

Muddle three sprigs of sage in a shaker, add ice and ingredients, shake, serve neat. HOLY LIVING FUCK this drink is good. It’s a bunch of aggressive, powerful flavors residing together warily in a delicious détente. It’s like drinking a meadow made of whiskey.

Comestibles.

Holly:

The Nickel Diner’s Maple Bacon Donut, which is exactly what you think it is.

Matt: Bananas. Wanna make your co-workers uncomfortable? Unpeel a banana, and jam as much of it as possible into your mouth. I mean really just take it. Channel Jenna Haze. (This works whether you are a man or a woman, although in different ways.)

Also: high in potassium. Helps prevent muscle cramping. That’s nice.

Combustibles.

Holly: Video tagline for this reads, “In case you have always wanted to see a massive underwater explosion.” You’re too kind:

Matt: 120mm sabot round meeting a T-72 combat load.

The T-72 main battle tank was developed by the Soviets in the 1970s and subsequently sold to all the countries who aren’t friends with NATO. Its combat load consists of 39 125-millimeter cannon rounds (weighing about 50 pounds apiece), 2000 7.62mm rounds, and 300 12.7mm rounds, and it has a fuel capacity of 1200 liters (about 320 gallons). That’s what we in the business call “a lot of shit that can blow up.”

Enter an M1A1 tank opposed to said T-72. Being in the first tank to cross a partially blown-up bridge over the Diyala River into Baghdad under fire can be stressing even on the best of days, and seeing a T-72 in a dug-in defensive position as you hit the far shore immediately ratchets up that stress a couple thousand percent. So yeah, the fire command to your gunner is maybe a little rushed, but when he fires off that round and you see see the orange spark of depleted uranium-on-steel, that feels pretty fucking sweet.

And then the secondary explosions. A geyser of flame from the turret. Muffler-sized chunks of hot steel landing hundreds of yards away as fuel and propellant and gunpowder cook off like roman candles tossed into a bonfire. A half hour later, fire and smoke the color of night still spew readily from the remains, and the heat singes eyebrows from a football field away. And you think: that was my JOB today. I fucking destroyed shit.

Transit.

Holly: The Sukhoi Su-34. It’s a fighter/attack aircraft that can carry nearly nine tons of missiles and ammo (in addition to its cannon and wingtip missile mounts), but the really interesting thing is it has a large, fully equipped flight deck with both a restroom and a small galley. So after you’ve flown in and blown The Bad Guys to hell and back, you can be all, “Hey, who wants pancakes?”

As a variant of the Su-27 family, it is presumably capable of pulling the “Pugachev’s Cobra” maneuver, in which the pilot yanks back on the stick and more or less stalls the airplane, which still remains in straight forward-moving flight even though its angle of attack is between 90 and 120 degrees. Plus its NATO code name is “Fullback,” which somehow seems appropriate.

Matt: The M1A1 Main Battle Tank.

Seventy tons of turbine engine-powered hate and discontent, designed for and excellent at the following: blowing up other tanks (see above); gunning down people with a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun that for all intents and purposes is an automatic sniper rifle; delivering .50 caliber machine gun rounds to the gas tank of Republican Guard trucks, engulfing them in the billowing black smoke of a diesel fire; flattening cars that stand in your way on a narrow canal road; and generally feeling like a badass. Downside: poor gas mileage.

Canon.

Matt: Y: The Last Man. Yes, a comic book. But listen: every male mammal on the planet dies except for one man (Yorick) and his pet monkey. Sweet! Non-stop poon party, right? Well, not quite: with all the men go most of the world’s commercial airline pilots, the international shipping industry, and all the good stand-up comics. It’s the apocalypse. Yorick’s global quest to find his girlfriend and save humanity is beautifully drawn and expertly told – the best use of the genre since Watchmen.

Holly: Captain fucking EO. Don’t argue, assholes; IT’S IN SPACE.

(Part 2 hyah.)

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:

Klaus Kinski, for being so spicy his co-stars offered to kill him for the director, makes our list of Spicy Livin’ patron saints this week, and ascends to a special tier for having so many inspired tantrum videos of him totally freaking the fuck out that we couldn’t choose just one. Prost, you madman, you.

Drink.

Holly: Bourbon and ginger. It’s summer, and that means slowing your brown liquor roll to stave off starting any barfights until the sun goes down and you can brawl without getting your scalp sunburnt. To that end, I cut this with a little (just a little! We’re not on sorority row anymore, campers!) of this and go on my stabby way. (Until it’s dark out, then watch your ass.)

Orson: Rose. Oh, pink wine. So sexy, so trashy, so not White Zinfindel, a mistake by Gallo vintner that caught on when someone drank it and noticed it tasted just like jolly ranchers after you threw them up and reingested a few times. (Notice, we capitalized White Zinfindel, but not like you capitalize “Washington,” or “The Renaissance,” but like you capitalize “Evil” and “Chlamydia.”)

Rose is hot weather wine, and it comes from a quick dip in the tank with the skins and then a tank fermentation without them, resulting in a light, slightly fruity and tart wine you can drink on the surface of the sun (or in Columbia, South Carolina in a windowless van with shag carpeting in July, which we know some of our readers are wont to do.) You also get to have this fun conversation with your friends when you drink it at a barbecue:

Friend: “Pink wine? Wanted something that went with barbecued cock, homosexual?”

You: “It’s GOOD DAMMIT.”

When this happens, just remember that you can drink a boatload of the stuff without a serious hangover, it matches just about anything summery on the menu this summer, and it’s usually tres cheap. And gay. Fine, it’s gay. IT’S GAY AND DELICIOUS. Like a Queen album or using Lush products with open enthusiasm, you can take it from my cold dead hands, which are bent at a slight angle from our wrists.

Comestibles.

Orson: Sweetbreads. I’m not a complete and loyal gut-meat enthusiast. When you put tripe into the steaming broth of pho, guess what? It still tastes like tripe, but now it’s in the middle of my otherwise delicious Vietnamese productivity gruel. (The thin slices of ligament, though, are choice: they add a silkiness to the broth that even non part-lovers have to admit is delicious.)

Sweetbreads, however, should enjoy their own kind of special categorical exemption for anyone so squeamish about meat that they like to think it comes in whole slices pre-wrapped. The sweetbread is the thymus gland of a cow located in the neck, meaning not only are you eating something that’s not only organ meat, but could conceivably be ripped directly from the throat of the cow if you were properly possessed by the spirit of demonic carnivorous hunger. (KALI-MAAAAAH!!!)

Surprisingly, it’s one of the most succulent, tender meats you’ll ever destroy on a plate, and if you get a chance to once in your miserable, short, and brutish life, go to Babbo in New York and get theirs. They take the heart section of the sweetbread, roll it in some kind of magical fennel batter, fry it for a bit, then serve it with a glaze of balsamic vinegar presumably aged by putting it in bottles, and then storing it beneath the flawless and protuberant buttocks of a hundred sleeping naked Italian virgins. They top it with an afro wig of flash-fried orange zest cut into tiny ribbons, and OH FUCK IS THAT BACON ON THE BOTTOM. (It was.)

I was drunk out of my mind at that point, and probably rubbing the remainder of the dish behind my ears in the middle of the restaurant, but no amount of Primitivo can erase the splendor of this dish.

Holly: Doner kebab.

Specifically, street food doner kebab, the kind you find families of Turkish immigrants selling from open-air market stands in Berlin, in sandwich form with pita and tomatoes and lettuce and onions and tzatziki and [falls over dead].  High in vegetable content, yet deliriously tasty owing to presence of delicious baby sheep meat. (Yes, lambs are adorable. ON SANDWICHES.)  This just means you can eat more of them before suffering any lasting arterial damage.

Combustibles.

Holly: Tsar Bomba. Detonated by the USSR over Novaya Zemlya in October 1961, yielding 50 megatons, the largest explosion ever conducted by mankind. The fireball was five miles wide; the mushroom cloud was 40 miles high; and the shock wave was measurable even on its third circumnavigation of the earth. Game over.

Orson: Let the man explain, and wait for the shockwave:

Transit.

Orson: Continuing my streak of “automobiles that are seconds from destruction, death, or calamity at any second:” the 1972 Bond Bug.

It has three wheels. Holly thinks I’m joking, and that it’s really an electric shaver on wheels. You have to enter it like one enters an airplane, and in its initial production run it was only offered in one color, the ever-subtle tangerine orange. It cost more than the actual semi-logical Mini, and only ran for a short spell in the early 70s until some British car executive got out of AA, got back to his gin-bottle filled office, and then realized he’d approved an unprofitable hell-tricycle of a car for four years in his drunken stupor.

It is, of course, a cult favorite complete with its own site and animated flash video game. I’ll have one by next week.

Holly: This is the concept floor plan for the private-jet version of the 787 that has a “cinema lounge” in it:

You’ll also note that the bar area has a plexiglass floor through which you can view whatever it is you’ve got in the cargo bay — your collection of mink coats, your Bentley Flying Spur, dozen trained Burmese pythons, what have you.

Canon.

Holly: Out of Sight. Stockholm Syndrome was never so romantically plausible.  This caper flick came out eleven years ago and remains one of the sexiest pieces of celluloid ever to leave the viewing audience wanting a cigarette and a cold shower.  You know the cast: Clooney, J-Lo (who can ACT in this thing. Like, ACT ACT. We’re as shocked as you are), Dennis Farina, Luis Guzman,  Isaiah Washington, Catherine Keener, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, and Steve Zahn in a role that curiously does not make you want to throttle him. It’s Soderbergh at his stylistic shot-in-the-dark peak, never equaled by him before or since. (Although he’s tapped for the Moneyball movie in 2011, but that seems considerably less likely to involve heavy petting in a car trunk.)

Orson: Let us salute the neglected and possibly dying art form of the music video for a moment by saluting Chris Milk. You may recognize his work from the video for “All Falls Down,” where Kanye West spends a futile 4:19 chasing Stacey Dash through an airport.

You’re not catching that plane. Ever.

West gets his fresh white tee soiled by a kid with a tube of Mustard, washes the shirt out in a bathroom, chases Dash for a bit more, raps this way through a metal detector (where you can see the metal plates in his jaw,) and gets blocked from following Dash on board by a security guard played by Common. It’s an obvious metaphor for the song’s material–chasing an illusory and unattainable happiness through wealth–but it’s all so playfully done you don’t really care. Also, Stacey Dash–who is forty plus, mind you–is in it running and bouncing a lot in a lovely enough way to make me suspicious of my own critical instincts here.

Fortunately, Milk is plenty good all on his own without Ms. Illegally Hot and Improbably Over 40. He also directed a bunch of Nike commercials, and had Cee-Lo singing as an animated heart walking around a diner counter laying down in people’s lunch plates. Singing animated hearts and Gnarls Barkley collaborations are enough to make me suspect mad genius and salute in its general direction.

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.)

You know an old friend beer-wise when the experience of power-vomiting eight of these and burnt dormroom chili doesn’t ruin the splendor of a beverage for you. Oh, Miller High Life, you fake-tittied 42 year old waitress beckoning from across the bar with a lit Virginia Slim in hand who won’t ask any questions, and won’t be blinded by the light as long as you call her Angel of the Morning, you trashy lovable whore of a beer, you.

To taste a Miller High Life is to taste your misspent youth in a single, bubbly, weakass-wheat soda shiver. It’s called the Champagne of Beers because it is very bubbly, will get you in a superb mood provided you drink multiple units of it, and like champagne sets in innocuously enough to make overconsumption a near dead certainty. It also only costs $3.69 for a six pack, which is in itself a valuation placing Miller High Life somewhere between the categories of “Alcoholic’s Miracle” and “Public Health Scandal in Convenient Cardboard Carrying Case.”

Comestibles.

Orson: I’ve always thought the term “hog jowl” was too bowdlerized for my tastes. It’s dishonest for my tastes, and I’d much rather just point to a menu, look the waitron in the eye, and say “I’ll take the mini-pizza garnished with flash-fried pigface, please.

Holman and Finch insists on using the popular term for this, but what makes them cool is you suspect they really want to tell their customers “And tonight, we have pigface, chicken assholes, and you will love both even if you don’t want to.” The only full-bore, Grand Guignol St. John style offal-house in Atlanta, Holman and Finch is the kind of place where the staff might have to point to a spot on their body to identify exactly what you’re eating, and then reassure you that it’s delicious, and the watch as you cram pigface/sliced raw lard/sweetbreads/brains into your maw like the input end of a sausage grinder.

Their cocktails are also admirable damage, come in big fat tumblers, and are served with big globular ice cubes that make a drink three thousand times better for reasons unknown to you, me, and science. The Harrier (Spicy Livin’, week one Drink of Choice) came from here, but the Blood Be Damned and Swedish Pinch are just as quaffable. (Miller High Life is involved in the Swedish Pinch; it works, I swear. IT HAS TO OR THE SAD COMES IN.)

Holly: I had dinner the other night with a high school girlfriend who’s now a faincy lawyer type, and as we sat on the 30-somethingth floor terrace overlooking the city and guzzled $17 martinis, the only thing we really wanted was a molten-hot slice from Big Ed’s. If your favorite uncle who taught you to smoke and drive stick-shift on his Trans Am ran a pizza joint, it would look something like this. It’s pitch-dark, smoky, and crowded inside. The entire menu consists of pizza, soda, and beer. That’s it. The local kids serving you will bring your pie with tiny paper plates too small to accommodate even the narrowest of slices and flimsy plastic forks that buckle under the slightest pressure. It should go without saying that the pizza itself will make you see God. [Commentburo pizza style flame war, engage: NY SLICE 4 LYFE, SON]

Combustibles.
Holly: Even wind turbines get the blues.

Orson: We belatedly salute the fourth Anniversary of Killdozer.

This and the BTK case are further proof that being overly concerned with city zoning codes is a sure sign that you are a raving fucking lunatic waiting to kill or destroy something or someone.

Transit.

Orson: The hydrocephalic pickup truck of your worst nightmares, the Mercedes-Benz Unimog.

I love it when otherwise competent entities are asked to produce something totally out of their comfort zone. The results are usually something like the rolling abortion you see above in the Unimog, which when seen in your rear view mirror looks like a gigantic accelerating Storm Trooper head on offroad tires screaming toward you, craving revenge against the world and all in it for bringing it into its miserable existence. It was commonly used by the military for offroad duty, and if you saw this thing bellowing its hell-sow’s horn and smashing trees in a beeline for your ass, you’d shit yourself three times and pray for death.

In other words: it’s everything I admire in a vehicle, or in anything at all really. Bravo, gimme two.

Holly: The JR-Maglev MLX01, designed and built by Japan Railways Group, a magnetic-levitation train that makes both the TGV and the current Shinkansen trains look like rusty mid-’80s Datsuns by comparison. Five years ago the MLX01 set a Guinness-certified absolute speed record for railed vehicles by hitting 361 miles per hour, which is almost twice as fast as today’s TGV trains typically run, and four times as fast as most Amtraks ever get up to. Most badassly, it accomplishes this without actually touching the rail.

(To put this into perspective, at that speed Kiffykins would only need 45 minutes to get from SEC Media Days back to the friendly confines of Knoxville — with enough time to condescendingly ruffle the hair of the Pahokee high school principal on the way.)

Canon.

Holly: El Orfanato, released too briefly in the States as The Orphanage. Another here-and-gone treasure flick from ‘07. Like so many horror imports, it draws its power from genuine creepiness where an American counterpart would resort to loud violin screeches and overturned vases that turn out to be the work of mysterious cats. That creepshow little boy in the mask, standing alone in the center of the frame with nothing else going on, is enough to induce night terrors with his mere presence. And ignore the weird marketing that makes it look like a Donnie Darko knockoff. In short: Spookay! Check it. (Yes, it’s in Spanish. Yes, it’s subtitled. No, you really don’t have to read the subtitles if you’re that much of a lazy-ass; The Orphanage will obligingly scare the daylights out of you anyway.)

Orson: The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn. A baseball book? Don’t be shocked. It’s not really about death, death, and more death, and about how life is really just one long slide toward being really confused, slightly successful if you’re lucky, and then how everything you love will be destroyed and you should really just lay back and accept it. It’s really a mean prank of a book–begins as baseball tome, and then left turns into bleak existential family drama and meditation on time and loss–but it is an exceptionally well-written mean prank, so much so that it overcome my dislike for the game and the miasma of crap mythmaking surrounding it.

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?”

“No. All I taste is the reek of stagnant ditchwater and a hint of cheap bubblegum, actually.”

“Oh, come on. You have to let the flavors soak in.”

“Okay.” (waits 30 seconds)

“So?”

“Wow, you’re right. Now it tastes like old stagnant ditchwater.”

Along with not liking jazz and Woody Allen films, my complete inability to taste anything other than moldy cooked animal rectum when drinking scotch is one of the three things keeping me from being a really hip 58 year old man in 1980. I cry myself to sleep over it nightly or never. I forget which one.

Like Joseph Heller and Catch-22, sometimes you get lucky and catch lightning in a bottle-or in this case, in a sturdy tumbler with perfectly globe-shaped ice cubes. The Rusty Nail involves Scotch, which I hate, and Drambuie, a scotch-based liqueur that judging from its flavor was brewed as a pranky that no one got. It even has lemon, a flavor in my universe customarily referred to as “lime’s bitch.”

I hate all three, and yet…mix them in the same glass in a 1.5 oz/0.5 oz/twist ratio, and you’re quaffing the nectar of angry and awesome gods. This is why I only passed chemistry by turning in homework, because I have no idea how it happens, but I don’t care and don’t want to know.

Rusty Nails, when consumed slowly, will make you feel three steps from walking onto the Mad Men set, spanking a random secretary’s ass, and winning the big Magnavox account with an emotional and entirely improvised pitch involving a picture of Donna Reed, your penis, and an allusion to the Odyssey. Drink them. Often.

Comestibles.

Orson: Orson: Masala Dosa. Oh, Masala Dosa, I feel more than confident you are the tastiest food shaped like an anti-tank rocket on the planet.

When they’re done right they look like insurmountable piles of calories wrought into the shape of a pipebomb, and can in variation come filled with the Indian goo/food of your choice: potatoes, lentils, coconut, vegetables, meat curries, whatever. You’ll be hungry an hour later, but that’s fine: reapply rocket launcher to mouth until you achieve desired results.

I can eat three of these without blinking and then immediately launch myself into a colorful dance number where I get dangerously close to kissing my wife, but then instead rub my nose to hers, wink, and fall into perfect sync with my backup dancers while wearing a Members’ Only jacket and jeans pulled up to my navel.

Holly: The other day, thanks to the vagaries of Twitter, I became acquainted with a marketing rep for Revved Up Dip. If you can’t sit through the flash intro screen long enough to find out for yourself, Revved Up Dip appears to be…caffeinated smokeless tobacco. Let us be perfectly clear: I do not recommend this product. I am having a hard time thinking of anything more vile to ingest. But I’m also betting one of you lot is willing to give this stuff a whirl, so let us know how that goes.

Combustibles.

Holly: Destroyed In Seconds, je t’adore:

Orson: Holy crapazoid: The explosive power of a 1990 Ford airbag:

The inspirational power of Steve Winwood’s “When You See a Chance” only heightens the grandeur of it.

Transit.

Orson: Wingsuit. Because if I’m going to shatter any more bones in my back, I want it to happen all at once without a shred of hope for survival:

Holly: The A-10 Warthog.

Basically, the A-10 is a Gatling cannon that just happens to have an airplane built around it. The GAU-8 fires depleted-uranium rounds the size of Coke bottles at a rate of 65 rounds per second, and the recoil is such that it actually slows the plane down in flight. But that doesn’t matter, since the point of the A-10 is not to go fast, it’s just to sort of lope along and then dive-bomb tanks on the battlefield. It is the ugliest, baddest-assest airplane the Army has, and if you have one of these you will never need to worry about anyone taking your parking space, because stuff like this tends to happen.

Canon.

Holly: Sunshine. You know Danny Boyle? Long before your girlfriend dragged you to see Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle was making movies like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, and right before he ran off to India he made this little gem of a movie. It’s a bleak, gorgeous scifi meditation that turns into an action flick about halfway through, and it won a whole mess of British film awards before being completely shut out of the Oscars, which is why you’ve never heard of it. Let’s fix that, shall we?

Canon. Video games can go here, right? Because the Orange Box might be the most addictive and durable video game ever, as well as the most bang for buck per pixel of any video game ever published. I haven’t even touched what was allegedly the main attraction on the disc–Half-Lifes 1 and 2– and am instead just playing Portal and Team Fortress 2 over and over again.

Just taste the pride of the sniper at work, and feel the pain and strain the job puts on his family life:

Portal is one of those video games you can actually recommend to non-gamers because of the mind-blowingly simple but maddening gameplay, while Team Fortress 2 is just one loving variation after another of ways to blow other poor souls to pieces. If you don’t fall in love with a game where the Demoman speaks with a Scottish brogue and clubs people to death with a bottle of whisky, I don’t even know who you are anymore.

Besides the multiple installments of the NCAA Football series, this remains the only game where I can safely say I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth out of it. That’s a good thing, especially because I paid for the game by keeping it too long from Hollywood Video and never returning it.

Peter Beard, the real Most Interesting Man In the World, is your Patron Saint of Spicy Living this week. You have to read the whole 1996 article in Esquire to get an inkling of just how spicy a life he’s truly had, but this should give you a good taste:

The first day of my visit to Hog Ranch, Beard finally ambles out of his tent in early afternoon to begin the day. He is clad only in his usual kikoi, a colorful sarong-like loincloth. His torso is sinewy and nut-brown, with not an ounce of extra flesh, and he looks surprisingly fresh for someone who stayed out until five a.m. Apparently, after I begged off at two a.m. to get some sleep, Beard stopped in at the Carnivore, a local hangout whose menu features zebra and ostrich and crocodile as well as a diverse array of Nairobi night crawlers. It isn’t until the Ethiopian girls begin to wander out of his tent that I realize he didn’t come home alone.

As more girls appear, I finally ask, “How many of them are there?”

Beard shrugs. “Four or five.”

“Did they all sleep in your bed?”

Beard nods, grinning.

“Wasn’t it crowded?”

“We were very cozy.”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“It’s such a waste, sleep,” he says dismissively. “You’re just lying there.”

He also survived being trampled by an elephant, is the heir to a dwindling fortune he has misspent extravagantly, and once held his breath for four minutes to win a dare with Aristotle Onassis. He also once had an awkward moment just to see what it felt like.

Drink.

Holly: The Log Flume. What’s in it? Doesn’t matter, as long as it’s blue. Take all the leftover alcohol in your bar, mix in pitcher, and add a splash of orange juice plus enough curacao to turn the liquid the color of the log flume water at Dollywood. I solemnly swear this is a real thing, and that looking at it is not nearly as traumatizing as consuming it, which itself pales in comparison to what follows.

Orson: Please bear in mind that any descriptions we type this week will be accompanied by the obfuscating haze of longing, since technically we are not supposed to have any alcohol while loaded on the heavy dose of painkillers currently coarsing through our system. (They go down so much easier with vodka.)

This week’s cocktail of choice is The Sidecar. Formerly reserved for choicer slices of the VFW crowd and select bridge parties, the old-man appeal of the Sidecar is only part of its Sansabelted charisma.

The Sidecar will educate you, as you did not know that there is both a French school of Sidecardom (equal parts Cognac/Brandy, Cointreau, and lemon juice) and an English school of manufacture (twice the ‘yak and brandy, natch.) It will wobble your senses in a particularly satisfying way, as the brown liquor/sugar combo tends to do, generating a rubbery drunk ideal for socializing and breaking delicate furniture in an entertaining manner. It will prove useful as a social tool, as it is not only a way to find refined company (those who actually know what the drink is,) but also helps when you’re out drinking with black dudes who are sticking to cognac for the evening, and don’t want to be the lameass white guy who begs off of the French Kerosene in favor of Miller 64.

It will also also give you a hangover leaving your brain feeling like a horde of locusts has taken up residence in your frontal lobes, so go easy. Vary if you like with the Balalaika, a mutation of the Sidecar done with vodka, for a slightly less evil hangover.

Comestibles.

Orson: Sriracha Hot Sauce. The best condiment in the universe. Think of it as Thai Tussin, a kind of fix-all wonder paste used to enliven eggs, soups, stir-fries, sandwiches, and to heal broken limbs. I’m rubbing some right now on my broken back, and expect to be squatting heavy in a matter of days.

Also serves as a quality industrial paint stripper, a painful but effective disinfectant and antibacterial, and a fine catalyst for pipe bombs when combined with enough fertilizer and a well-charged car battery. According to Wikipedia, this Tony Jaa of sauces is sometimes referred to as “cock sauce” by Americans because of the rooster on the label. According to Wikipedia, Tony Jaa is going to fly off a helicopter knee first and turn shitbags like these into piles of so much human pad thai.

Holly: Back to the barbecue well, but for a noble cause: to encourage the immediate patronizing of Territory BBQ & Records, which is exactly what it sounds like, which is a barbecue joint inside a record store. While this is the sort of endeavor that would not be out of place in Austin, it is entirely out of place here, and ought to be celebrated. (Also, you can get vinegar sauce here, none of that tomato-based swill.) Quoth the proprietor: “Eating barbecue out here breaks the bank. Everywhere you go it’s like fifty dollars, and then the potato salad is weird.” For breaking that cycle, and for serving Cheerwine, we offer him our thanks, and all our disposable income.

Combustibles.

Holly: In honor of the forthcoming holiday, and the grand American tradition of Blowing Shit Up Rill Purty, here is (allegedly) the last 24-inch firework shell in the States, doing what it do:

Orson: Danger, danger: high voltage in Nevada.

Texas will have eight of those mounted on the top of the Godzillatron in six months time if that state has not turned into a bunch of long-haired weenie-kissin commies.

Transit.

Orson: The Volkswagen Thing.

The doors come off, the windshield folds down, and in the event of an accident the composite parts of the VW 181 would fly off in all directions, generating a hellish whirlwind of flying angular metal sure to decapitate nearby bystanders and anyone unlucky enough to actually sit inside this wheezing shitbox of an automobile. Naturally, I want three of them, each preloaded with confetti and explosives to make the final scene both festive and gory.

I saw one once with my attorney when I was in Florida. It was parked near a beach; the front side passenger’s seat had been turned around so they faced backwards, and the headrest practically sat on the windshield. The car had no roof, and was festooned with survivalist bumper stickers like “GO HARD OR GO HOME” and “OFF THE GRID, ON TRACK.”

My attorney asked: “Why is the passenger seat facing backwards?”

Me: “So you can stab someone and drive at the same time.”

Clearly the greatest vehicle ever designed, the “Thing” will be mine one fine day, and for one fine day only, because it is a total fucking deathtrap even before you throw in the bonus of VW’s complimentary flammable wiring.

Holly: Jeep Renegade, the scaled-up answer to Orson’s childhood Power Wheels longing at 110 mpg. In my misspent years of gainful employment, I made a lot of car commercials for television, web, and auto shows. Of all the freaky concept cars I ever worked on, and they were legion, I kept coming back to this one, and for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why:

…right.

Canon.

Holly: Danger Mouse. British cartoon running from 1981-1992 that was imported by Nickelodeon back in the days when that sort of thing was still possible, since released in entirety on DVD, and mercifully never remade. (You may recall his nemesis, Baron Silas von Greenback, from his guest appearances here and here.) Might have been better listed under “Combustibles”:

One of those shows you need to return to post-adolescence to pick up all the Bond and Dr. Who in-jokes you missed the first time around, and sure to engender a lifelong fixation on shiny things that blow up in the minds of your more impressionably-aged offspring.

Orson: True Blood. Vampires, romance, whatever. True Blood is 12 episodes of non-stop fucking, drinking, drug abuse, violence, and more fucking from Alan Ball, who finally ditches all of the morbid American Beauty/Six Feet Under schtick to loosen up, have some fun, and set a show about depravity and animal behavior in the middle of a perfect environment for said behavior: rural Louisiana. Sense be damned: every time I turn around on this show someone’s drunk and hitting someone with a bottle, getting bitten in gory, close-up fashion by a vampire, having violent trashy sex, screaming at someone, staking someone through the heart, or making guffaw-worthy puns only excused by whatever dramatic act of sex or violence immediately follows it.

A worthy trashy addition to the canon if only for the scene where two characters, fucking violently in the open, are caught, covered in a pile of trash thrown by an angry woman, and then continue fucking in the pile of garbage without a blink. If there weren’t so many vampires in the series, I’d be convinced it was a documentary. (Note: “so many.” If there were only one or two, it would be indistinguishable from the actual Louisiana.)