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

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.)