Welcome to the Digital Viking: The EDSBS Guide to Spicy Living. Published every Friday, the Digital Viking embraces zesty living with a six-part review of the essentials:
--A patron saint invoked for inspiration
--Drink
--Comestibles
--Combustibles
--Transit
--Canon
Diligent study of the Digital Viking's recommendations will increase spiritual happiness and liver circumference. Apply weekly and live daily for best results.
Golf would not make the hallowed halls of the Digital Viking under normal circumstances: overly patrician, exclusive, and so far removed from its flinty Scottish roots that toothless men named Angus and Craig teleported in from the 18th century would clutch their sheep fat-clogged arteries in horror at what the pretentious colonials have done to their game of economy played on the windy links of Scotland, golf for the Digital Viking is merely now an excuse to drink, beg for jobs while drinking, and to drink. Drinky drink drink.
(Occasionally you get to demolish a golf car. When it happens to you, please, make it count. Aim for the water hazards and have no regrets.)
The lone exception to this ban on golf: John Daly, proof that the elite namby-pamby prep school neutering of a University of Arkansas education can not only be overcome, but indeed left in the dust on a twenty year rip through seas of alcohol, dyed blondes of dubious morals, and a stay at the tables that would have left Croesus broke three times over.
His resume is substantial and not to be trifled with despite his choice of profession, a trifling one ranking somewhere below pastry chefs in terms of toughness. (We've met some nasty pastry chefs in our day.) Daly claims to have consumed a bottle of Jack Daniels every day during his 23rd year, was once sponsored by Hooters (and passed out in one of their flowerbeds after a particularly memorable bender), has posed topless with topless women to solidify his solid feminist stance in life, and wears pants that scorch the eyes of the blind while he makes his living on the golf course.
Shirts, as with all true gentlemen, are optional:
He smokes like a Russian microwave loaded with forks and tin foil. He has had three marriages all end in flaming chaos, including one that dissolved after he found out the woman was ten years older than she claimed to be, but continues to land attractive women at a rate exceeding the degree associated with man of his modest wealth. (Reports of his gigantic penis may contribute to this lifelong hot streak. Given his cuddly hobo look, we hope this part is true since cash comes and goes, the brain fails, but a hung man is never alone in life.)
The happy capper to all of this--and the $50 to $60 million he lost gambling in Vegas over the years--is that Daly has managed to ride the white whale of fate, execute a fairly successful dismount, and have something of an adulthood left to live after losing 90 pounds after lap band surgery, ceasing his Herculean alcohol consumption, and still making money as a golfer. He's in the hunt for the British Open this weekend, and if God is the bus station craps player we suspect he is, he'll roll some bones for Daly and make them sing.
We salute ye, Pants King of the Ozarks. Now: to the menu.
DRINK.
Holly: It's so effing hot I don't care if my drinks are adulterated. Via the ever-indispensable Garden & Gun magazine, please consume, in punchbowl-sized quantities, this recipe for Bourbon Slush:
6 cups water
2 cups strong tea
2 cups bourbon
1 cup sugar
One 6-ounce container frozen orange juice concentrate, thawed
One 6-ounce container frozen lemon juice concentrate, thawed
Garnish: Mint sprigs or lemon slices (optional) Combine the water, tea, bourbon, sugar, orange and lemon juice concentrate in a large container or bowl, and mix until sugar dissolves. Pour into two gallon-size freezer bags. Freeze until an hour before serving. Place the frozen punch in a large bowl and let thaw, breaking up every 15 minutes. When punch is melted, add more ice or water as desired. Serve in punch cups. Garnish, if desired.
Orson: We do care if our drinks are adulterated, so irony my cravat and let's go a-tippling, ladies and gentlemen. BOROKUNG! BRING ME MY HENDRICKS'!
For the epicurean, it's akin to getting drunk in a Belle Epoque garden party: cucumber, elderberry, rose, and then the pants come off and everyone explfores the mysterious pleasures only found between the pages of Sir Richard Burton's filthy writings from India. For the dude who wants to drink gin and smell like "old gentleman" instead of "old drunk," it's got a cleaner burn than racing fuel and as much kick. Drink straight, or with tonic, or at the most dollied up in something like a Harrier. Anything further removed would be making hamburger with filet mignon (which can be a good idea, but excess must have its moderations.)
Orson: LOBSTAH ROLL. Simple as hell, or Maine style: hot dog bun, a shitload of crab meat, and maybe a smear of mayo on the inside of the bun. Wrap it in saran wrap, put it in with a bag of chips, and gooooooo.
via williamthecoroner.files.wordpress.com
It helps if you ask for one in your worst Mayor Quimby voice, too, and then scream "LET'S GO SAWWWWWX." Instant camouflage! Soon the locals will be asking you to share bear steaks, compare snowblowers, and otherwise adopting you as one of their own. It's just that easy! <---brought to you by a CIA Directorate of Operations Reject.
Holly: It's not edible in itself, but I don't think I could ever live without The Big Green Egg. Smooth retro looks. Soothing avocado design. I've been barbecuing about since I could walk, and I've never had anything like what we cooked in this thing over the holiday weekend, which consisted of: A chicken, rubbed with olive oil, and thrown inside.
YOU GUYS. THIS CHICKEN. I don't even LIKE chicken. I made fun of my dad for weeks when he wouldn't stop waxing poetic about the damn chicken, and now I understand. These things are heavy as all get-out and wouldn't make good tailgating ride-alongs unless you've got a trailer, but as back-porch stalwarts they are entirely without peer.
Holly: Bastille Day (this past Wednesday) is my favorite summer holiday to throw a party for because there's lots of champagne involved and fireworks go on sale at the highway superstores after the Fourth. Haters, please enjoy this footage of the Eiffel Tower being singed.
Orson: In some foreshadowing of an Amateur piece for next week, we present the classic crash of two FIATs in an Argentine rally. In this case, it stands for Flying Italian-Argentine Terrorcoffins.
Holly: If you've never heard of the Trabant, do not be surprised to find that your life has carried on in perfect normalcy and happiness despite this lack of knowledge.
Buoyed by its sheer weirdness and cameo appearances in U2's "Zoo TV" tour, the Trabant built a minor cult following, and though most people acquired them mainly as kitschy souvenirs, a few still drive 'em, and they've proven that any ride, no matter how purely utilitarian, can still be pimped. A wheezing symbol of Marx's workers' utopia gone wrong, forcibly shoehorned into the Western ideal of bourgeois excess for excess' sake? That, friends, is irony -- like carmaking, another thing the commies never quite got the hang of.
Orson: The Honda Unibox
It's the GI Joe Hovercraft (the Hope Diamond of 1980s children's toys) crossed with a Taiwanese betel nut stand, and was the eye-popper in 2001 on first sight. Jaws dropped lower when you found out it really was the GI Joe hovercraft because:
a.) You could switch out the polycarbonate panels to mix and match different colors.
b). IT HAD TWO TINY MOTORCYCLES THAT CAME WITH IT. Oh, how we have longed to own a vehicle that spat out other little tadpole-vehicles, much less the kind you could put extremely obese twins in cowboy hats on and take pictures of them. THE MERRIMENT WOULD BE UNCEASING.
c.) A wooden floor
d.) Piloted by joystick.
e.) From Cracked.com:
f you want an idea of what kind of doubts they have about the maneuverability of this thing, it comes with an airbag on the outside of the car for if--or when--you hit a pedestrian.
It's like they made it for me! A car so futuristic that rolling up to a tailgate at South Carolina in it would probably get you burned as a witch? Endorsed thoroughly and completely in these quarters.
Holly: Roadrunner/Coyote, which might go under Combustible as well:
Love you forever, you bastard bird.