It's a long offseason. The Digital Viking: The EDSBS Guide To Spicy Living is our antidote to long weekends without sweet, sweet football. The five categories are Drink, Comestibles (snack), Combustible (shit what blows up), Transit (gettin' by) and Canon (essential cultural inputs), watched over by a patron saint invoked for inspiration. Enjoy?
PATRON SAINT: Very briefly, due to time constraints this week...Spike Jones, for worrying about just what, precisely, the exact and appropriate note of gunshot to put into a song.
DRINK.
Holly: Sanpellegrino Limonata And Anything. For those poor Lenten saps like me who're stuck without alcohol or caffeine for the next fortysomething days, grab a bottle of this tart sparkling lemonade for a spiky picker-upper. For the heathens, it mixes fabulously with gin or vodka.
And for tailgate season, it now comes in cans, making it look like you're tossing back fancy imported swill from a distance when you're really trying to stay sober long enough to see whether your team beat can Georgia with a first-year head coach for the second straight year. (Spoiler! They totally can!)
ORSON
Suckers. For those happily guzzling away while your Lenten brethren stare enviously at your delicious beverage, we recommend taking their ass on a punch-drunk wall-wobbly trip down Memory Lane. Not the posh boojie part of memory lane, either, but the broken glass-strewn Hooker Hollow where the residents crave only crime, your blood, and one beverage:
GET STUNG. Malt liquor drinking remains the Himalayan Mountaineering of drinking, an endeavor reserved for those interested in oxygen deprivation and pushing their endurance to the far edge of human endurance. Drinking a 40 of Mickey's parallels a long, siege-style climb most accurately: a long slog in several stages, beginning in the bitter cold of the ascent's first stage, a long slog through the soul-crushing middle, and finally the desperate finish at the end when you have to climb the Hillary Step of beverage experiences, the shit-sip at the end, a move whose completion is for professionals and the professionally foolhardy alone.
Many have fallen off the icy slopes of a malt liquor evening to their deaths. TRUTH BOMB! More people piss themselves in embarrassing fashion drinking malt liquor than doing any other activity in the world. So, um...thumbs up, Mickey's? I fear you and respect you, Drunky Stingy Kill Bee, both for your formidable skill at unraveling the human spirit for pennies on the ounce, and because your tiny barrel bottles and huge 40s look like ordnance in a long war against living past forty.
COMESTIBLE.
Orson: Lobster. Male lobsters woo lady lobsters by blasting them in the face with piss, making them the R. Kellys of the crustacean world and ensuring that you'll feel no guilt about ripping them asunder after boiling them alive. Don't worry about whether they're feeling pain; while they don't scream, putting anything living into boiling water probably hurts them immensely, so worry's kind of pointless considering you're BOILING THEM ALIVE.
Then again, you get so few chances to insert yourself in the chain of cruelty called the food chain, you should take advantage, and know that lobsters, while amazing creatures, are urolagniac cannibals who rule by violence in their own kingdom, would eat your corpse happily if it floated their way, and never, ever send thank you notes on time for anything. The assholes of the sea-basement who totally deserve that delicious coating of butter you apply just before devouring them like a ravenous otter.
I like to eat mine laying on my back on the floor with a good-sized rock on my chest, pounding the shell on the stone and making otter noises.
Holly: Caffeinated Maple-Bacon Lollipops.
Brace yourselves: "The bacon-y equivalent of an energy drink, adding two cups worth of caffeine to the already time-tested wonder of organic, sustainably farmed bacon and delicious Vermont maple syrup." Along with all the bacon blogs comes bacon backlash, but count us firmly out of the idea that bacon will ever be "over", for the simple reason that It's Bacon.
COMBUSTIBLE.
Holly: The Shotgun Revolver.
What do you do if you want the stopping power of a shotgun, but also want the convenient of shoving said shotgun down the front (or back) of your pants? Shotgun revolver. Boom.
Orson: DEMON CORE
The scary-as-all-hell plutonium core that killed two scientists working on the Manhattan Project, including Louis Slotin, a physicist who was testing criticality by spinning the halved sphere of A FUCKING NUCLEAR BOMB and separating the hemispheres with A GODDAMN SCREWDRIVER with only blocks of tungsten carbide to protect him. It's depicted in the dramatization above, a scene from Fat Man and Little Boy where John Cusack plays a composite of the two men who fucked with Demon Core and lost. Demon Core, as you can clearly see, is played by an aging but still very intense Klaus Kinski, who went critical himself during the film and killed three, injured seven, and impregnated two 15 year old girls on the set who later gave birth to baby wolf-men.
If it hadn't been detonated in an atomic test and and wouldn't slowly kill us with radiation poisoning, we'd love to keep it around as a pair of fascinating conversation pieces and ashtrays.
TRANSIT.
Orson: "Hey, Delmar. Nice day on the lake. Quiet. Good fishin'"
"Yup, Ed. Quiet as a church on Wednesday. Hey, what's thaaaaa----
{THEY ARE DESTROYED BY THE AWESOMENESS OF A SWCC BOAT SPLITTING THEIR UNIVERSE IN HALF]
We rode on the civilian equivalent of one of these when SCUBA diving, and it was enough whip your head back like an open PEZ dispenser. To take one of these wide open on a lake full of fishermen at 5 in the morning in Tennessee remains one of our life's great ambitions.
Holly: Whether you're bringing hay to your stable of English thoroughbreds, hauling bushel baskets of Sangiovese grapes to your winery, or just looking to bring home some particularly nice Colonial pieces from the estate sale, there's really only one suitably classy choice: the Rolls-Royce pickup truck.
Be forewarned, though -- once you get a pickup, everybody down at the country club is going to ask you to help them move. It's inescapable.
CANON.
Holly: Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. The undead: Another genre fast-tracked for "played out" over and over again, only to be re-revived every few years by fare like Shaun of the Dead or Zombieland, and one I'm confident will never outlive its usefulness.
Witness its utility here as it kills off all those characters you hated raw in high school English Lit.
Orson: Animalympics.
In keeping with this week's Olympic theme, we salute Animalympics, which ran on a near-constant loop on HBO in the early days of cable and thus burned a groove of anthropomorphized animal/athletic heroism in our head. The story of the movie itself is interesting: commissioned by NBC to air in two parts around the 1980 Olympic Games, the film suddenly became an orphan when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the USA boycotted the games in protest, and thus ended up running on basic cable all day. 10cc does the soundtrack, the animation is by Brad Bird (who later did The Incredibles,) and the whole thing is simultaneously a piss take on the Olympics and a tribute to it.
Sportsmanship may many things to you, but your definition should--nay, must include Rene Fromage and Kit Mambo crossing the finish line together as two competitors who decide love is its own victory, even if it means a goat fucking a lioness in some post-production horrorshow of a love scene.