Welcome to the Digital Viking: The EDSBS Guide to Spicy Living. Published every offseason 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.
There's people we admire for their inner strength, and then there are the motherfuckers we are worried about being right behind you, you know, right there over your left shoulder, or maybe your right, and OH GOD IT'S JONAH LOMU. Don't run: he could at 275 run 100 m in 10.8 seconds, so flight is not an option even in his post-retirement career. Please don't fight, either. Lomu squatted 880 pounds in a strength session once, benched over 500 pounds, and appeared in Peter Jackson's Return of the King dressed in foam rubber to play the Mumakil, the mythical war elephants. CGI can only do so much; for real power, you need to dress up Jonah Lomu in an elephant outfit and have him step on real people (as he does many, many times in that video.)
Lomu earns even more credit or playing a good chunk of his career on one good kidney, sporting the tiny Cabbage Patch Kid hair no matter how ridiculous it looked, and for being the most terrifying ghost of mid-90s late night ESPN viewing not named Charley Steiner. Seriously, he's right behind you, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Don't scream! Maybe he'll just lose interest and move on. That happens sometimes okay this never happens.
Holly is tied up with Wimbledon this week, and sends her regrets along with Pimm's Cups for all. Dolla Bill Doug is our guest Viking for this week.
Doug: I'm of the opinion that there's drinkin', and then there's dessert, and you've got to be very careful cross-breeding the two, lest you wind up getting your man card suspended. Tiramisu? Mmmm, delicious. But a "buttery nipple" (or any other drink whose name makes a cutesy reference to a body part)? Save that shit for your bachelorette party, sweetpea.
But Praline pecan liqueur . . . oh, that stuff blurs the line in diabolically delicious fashion, by which I mean I had one sip and wanted to take a bath in it. Sweet as its namesake, yet without the creamy thickness that makes you think someone gave you eggnog by mistake, it'll rival Firefly sweet tea vodka in terms of sheer teenage-pregnancy-causin' potential if too many people find out about it. We made White Russians with Praline replacing the Kahlua the other night and were taken to a plane of drankin' bliss The Dude could've only dreamed about; the bottle said this was called a "Nutty Russian," but we dubbed it "Pralines and Dick" before hitting fifth gear and pointing ourselves on a direct course to Hangover Gulch.
Orson: It being "Switzer Family Vineyards" is enough to get us to buy a bottle or three, but the description on each bottle should seal the deal.
"My rural home in Arkansas was a shotgun house built in 1893. You could shoot a shotgun through the front door, out the back, not hit a thing. Hallway down the middle with three rooms on each side. No electricity, no plumbing, heat from a wood stove, light from coal oil lamps. There was something special about that old house, and I think there is something special about our wine. I know, since I happen to be a bootlegger’s boy. Enjoy! Barry Switzer."
"My estate growing up was the very embodiment of miserable poverty. And I hope my wine is just as powerful and inescapable on the palate as the suffocating poverty of my childhood. Enjoy?" Well, now that you've compared it to a hovel, coach, how could I resist its deep flavors and hints of pellagra and old gunpowder.
Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer both point to some unopened beer on the floor that someone just left there.
COMESTIBLE
Orson: I don't want to further complicate this, Ms. Uncomfortably Attractive Barista. I've already got an emotionally dishonest relationship with you since you are cute, perhaps cuter than I want service people to be. know this fleeting attraction is a mirage because I'm attracted to you mostly because you bring coffee to me, though that nice Japanese nautical piece you have on your right arm and your hipster glasses certainly aren't hurting. You bring me coffee, and frankly that's answering half of my emotional needs already. Pardon me if I'm already making assumptions and canceling them out in my head, but it's for a reason: when someone brings me a drink of any sort, coffee or otherwise, I'm already halfway toward falling in love with you.
But now you're just asking me to lie to the world. "Would you like a cake pop to go with your coffee today?" If I say yes, I'm not going to get one, and then I'm a liar by action, and I'm totally not getting one unless it's cheat day, and today is by the numbers probably not cheat day. And if I say "no," then now I've lied by word, and suddenly I'm in a David Mamet play and ARE YOU A SORCERESS SORT OF CUTE BARISTA? (Cake pops are the tits. That is all.)
Doug: Head down East Lake Drive in Decatur, Georgia's Oakhurst neighborhood and you'll stumble upon an old Sinclair gas station that has been colored a post-nuclear-apocalyptic shade of orange and converted into a pub. When they throw open the garage door on nice days, the former service bay is a fine place to kick back with a beer and enjoy a buffalo chicken quesadilla, which the U-Joint claims to have invented when they first opened up back in 2000. That could be one of those apocryphal claims like "George Washington slept here" that falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, but you'll have to find someone else to do the investigating for you, because I'd never spend my own time and energy questioning anything so delicious.
COMBUSTIBLE
Doug: Want a sneak preview of one of the new characters from this summer's third installment in Michael Bay's "Transformers" trilogy? Fast-forward to about the 1:45 mark and you can watch Decepticon warrior Stealthblazer cunningly transform from B-2 bomber mode into, uh, the world's biggest and most villainous barbecue grill:
What you've actually witnessed is the functional equivalent of someone collecting a billion dollars in a big pile and lighting it on fire. But since both pilots ejected safely, it's OK to shake your head and laugh at the fact that the crash was caused by rain that collected in the plane's air-data sensors after a heavy rainstorm. (Mother Nature: "What, seriously? Not even a typhoon or a volcanic eruption? A thunderstorm isn't even close to my 'A' game, guys.")
Orson: It's a rule of universal law that if you say something deadly cannot be built, then someone with a German accent will come forward and build that very thing. Say, I bet someone has never been able to shoot sawblades with a slingshot!
YOUUU SPOHHKE TOO SOON, MEIN FRIEND. (via DHiWaG)
TRANSIT
Orson: The Ford MA finally gives me everything I've ever wanted in a car: splinters.
Critics dubbed this "The IKEA car," a totally inaccurate statement due to its lack of meatballs, delicious lingonberry sauce, or tubes of herring paste. Upside: totally recyclable, green, fitted with an electric motor, and may make you the king of Decatur, Georgia. (Suck it, gas-whoring Prius swine!) Downside: your car might break down due to termites, and SHIT WHERE DID ALL THESE CARPENTER BEES COME FROM.
Doug: The Boeing 307 Stratoliner is still one of the most elegant airliners ever to take to the skies. Howard Hughes thought enough of it to buy the first one off the assembly line and use it as his own personal plane, though that was more than 70 years ago. Now there are only two of them left, Hughes' plane being one of them, though it's been converted into a houseboat in Fort Lauderdale. I was fixing to get upset about that, but it turns out the new owner gave it a super-swank interior and named it the "Cosmic Muffin," so . . . there are worse fates, I suppose.
CANON
Doug: I've frankly got no use for the majority of the humans out there, but I do consider myself a friend to the animals. I've got two adorable Boston terriers I'd gladly take a bullet for -- seriously, I had a nightmare the other night about some unspeakable circumstances that involved having to euthanize one of them, and I nearly woke up quivering in a puddle of my own tears. But love and cuteness aside, let's get real here: Sometimes, animals can be total cocksuckers. My Bostons lay Chernobyl-sized farts on the regular and then have the nerve to look offended when you kick them out of the room. Holly's two trollish kittens steal my Legos and bat them all over the house at night while I'm trying to get some goddamn sleep. They're like Skynet -- they know they've insinuated themselves into our lives to a point where we can't get rid of them, and now they're asserting their dominance. Sometimes all over our nice hardwood floors.
Fortunately, someone has mustered the courage to expose this plot. I give you animalsbeingdicks.com.
Oh, I know, some of these animals are merely responding to various threatening or otherwise unfamiliar stimuli the only way their beastly instinct knows how. But you can't tell me some of them -- like that little terrier berserker above -- haven't mustered a near-human level of brain function and decided to troll the fuck out of someone (or something) as gratuitously as possible. Sure, that terrier's just blasting a little girl off her ride-on fire truck now, but give that breed a few more generations' worth of meticulous evolution and they'll be getting strapped and jacking people out of their Range Rovers at stoplights.
Orson:
I don't know how it ever got on the air or why, but there is not a day that goes by that I don't think about this scene. (Of course he presses the button. You would, too.) They're on DVD, they're just as grating and unreal as you remember them to be, and there's still loads of fart jokes that somehow made it on to Nickelodeon, and seriously just Ren saying STEEEEEMPY is enough to justify a viewing (albeit not a sober one, but we're certainly not recommending that.)