Shark-Bite Movie Review: Balls of Fury -- Paddle Power

For those of us who grew up in the West, ping-pong occupies a place somewhere below darts and above foosball and seems fit mostly for suburban basements and the rec-rooms of rehab centers. It is the kind of sport that causes us to use our hands to make air quotation marks when we use the term “sport” to refer to it.

But, of course, these perceptions are cultural. Soccer, or football, which people across huge parts of the world follow like a religion (the kind where attendance is not falling off and you can gamble on the outcome of the service) barely registers a blip on the radar in North America compared to other major league sports and is most enthusiastically enjoyed by pubescent teens, most likely because all of that endless running back and forth over a mile-long field is a needed distraction from the raging hormones that would otherwise win the day. Baseball, referred to as America’s national past-time, likewise is called rounders (or a form close enough to it is) in Britain and it really isn't taken seriously outside the schoolyard.

And so it is with ping-pong. While we in the West might think little of the game, with a ping-pong table serving as a convenient shelf for a pack-rat’s junk in a cluttered basement, it is the national sport in China and is popular throughout much of East Asia (though this popularity doesn't seem to have spread to Bangkok, where “ping-pong” carries an entirely different connotation altogether). So, “Balls of Fury” is not absurd because it treats ping-pong as a sport of consequence. In almost every other respect, however, “Balls of Fury” is completely absurd.

The central character is Randy Dayton (Dan Fogler), a table-tennis prodigy at the age of 12, who loses a showdown in the ’88 Olympics, which were actually the first games to feature ping-pong as an official sport – one nod to reality from the film-makers. He loses to Karl Wolfschtagg who, as you can no doubt ascertain from the name, is a crazed East German stereotype. (Incidentally, this character is played by the film’s co-writer Tom Lennon, making “Balls of Fury” the first movie to my knowledge to be co-written by someone playing an ethnic stereotype.)

Randy’s loss is bad news for his degenerate gambler of a father (Robert Patrick of “Terminator 2”) who bet heavily on the game with the Chinese triad, is unable to make good on the debt and is killed so quickly that neither the audience nor his own son really seems to give too much of a hoot about him after that; when Randy delivers the line “You killed my father” later in the movie, those words could have been replaced by “I was saving that doughnut” and have had the same emotional impact. The man who did the dirty on his father, a criminal mastermind called "Feng" played by Christopher Walken, is the film’s main villain and this no-expense-outlaid setup “makes it personal”.

Knowing Randy’s history with Feng, an FBI agent looking to break into a secret ping-pong tournament that Feng is holding, and also somehow disband an illegal gun-running ring, (or was it a panda-smuggling operation, or a gigolo circuit? This is the kind of movie where such details fade from memory as soon as you learn them) and of course he wants Randy to serve as his ticket into this criminal underworld by playing ping-pong till he’s so good that no underground ping-pong championship would be worth the price of the paddles without him.

When digesting this utterly ludicrous plot, it helps if you've seen “Enter the Dragon”, and recognize that all major plot points derive from that film (the title of course is a play on another Bruce Lee film “Fists of Fury”). Robert Ben Garant who wrote and directed the film, admitted as much to KungFuMagazine.com, saying film-makers “took all the kung fu out of a kung fu movie and replaced it with ping-pong”.

And whether or not “The Karate Kid” is considered by anyone to be a classic or even a part of the Kung Fu genre, it too is parodied here, with James Hong (an accomplished character actor, though I recognized him immediately as the unhelpful host in the classic “Seinfeld” Chinese restaurant episode. Cartwright! Cartwright!) in the Mister Miyagi role as “Blind Master Wong”, passing on the secrets of ping pong and acting as the foil for about five more gags involving blindness than would have been advisable.

The makers of this one seemed to have been operating on a few basics. They liked kung fu movies, rock and roll and attractive Asian women (they would, no doubt, feel at home among the ex-pat population of Bangkok). The plot and a couple of rocking interludes involving ‘80s rock band, and suspected “This is Spinal Tap” inspiration, Def Leppard, take care of the first two. Maggie Q, who plays Wong’s niece and Randy’s romantic interest in an unbelievable development that comes out of the clear blue sky, takes care of the third. She provides the movie’s main Kung Fu scene and also makes the best use out of ping-pong’s infamous short-shorts, last seen on the big screen in the opening scenes of the "Borat" movie.

And there’s a conclusion to all of this that involves a ping-pong tournament, male sex slaves, a panda and Christopher Walken in what might have been an offensive portrayal of a Chinese man, had it not been placed in this absurd context. It is the film’s sheer absurdity, and general good natured feel that puts it in the company of movies like “Death Race 2000” (thought that was a better “B”), where to critique it too heavily for its shortcomings seems to miss the entire point and spoil the fun.

Noel, Bangkok

Tossed Beer Can KOs Loud-Dressing Country Star Pat Green

From where we sit, Nascar seems like it’s all about drinking beer while screaming your head off, while agreeing during more somber moments that Dale Earnhardt was a saint who walked the earth and we’ll never see his likes again on this terrestrial sphere. It seems like good fun – apart from that last bit – and preferable to Indy Racing with its loud noise and endless confusing laps of cars whipping by while you struggle to steady your drink from the vibrations.

We’ve never attended a Nascar event, but we’re guessing that if you were to look for a beer at one, you wouldn’t have too much difficulty tracking one down. This is doubly true if you’re performing in front of a Nascar audience. Presumably you’d get a cooler full.

In a case of idiocy instantly corrected, singer Pat Green asked the crowd at a Michigan International Speedway Nascar event: “Anybody got a beer?”

Inviting projectiles from the audience at any concert ever could be suicidal – indeed, if he regularly dresses like he does in the attached photo, one can picture attending his concerts with a basket brimming with tomatoes at the ready – but to ask for beer from an audience chock full of people drinking so much that piles of tins collect at their feet, well that’s just a step beyond.

Green got his wish. One audience member tossed him a beer – the one he saw coming – and another was fired in immediately after, beaning the new country singer right between the eyes and knocking him out cold. The concert was concluded, the beer, presumably, unopened.

Olympic Boozing: Would someone shut up that drunk? Oh, hello Mr. Sports Minister.

The Olympic Games have thus far yet to provide any really satisfying doping scandals. The major one thus far had to do with a North Korean shooter recently found to have used a banned substance. And it wasn't as if he was taking anything that would give him superhuman eyesight or the aim of Rambo in the bush -- just some drug that helped him chill out. Yawn. Next most exciting doping scandal? A Vietnamese artistic gymnast, who didn’t even make it into the top three, took something of some sort to help with whatever it is an artistic gymnastic does.

It’s as if people are no longer making the effort in the shadow of Ben Johnson, who humiliated our country by taking anabolic steroids (read: didn’t cycle the drugs out of his system in time) prior to setting a world record in the 100-metre dash in 1988.

In lieu of that and since we would rather not walk down the easily-misconstrued-comment-laden road of the age scandal surrounding female gymnasts (an over-40 part-time athlete only gymnast competition -- now that would be entertaining), and because we believe that Bob Costas was one of only about 16 people who saw the original lip-synched child folksong performance, we were pleased that amid all of this a minor scandal broke that is more up our alley (story here).

The incident occurred while Argentina and Belgium were playing a doubles tennis match. Tennis is not typically given to the type of abusive bellowing that is considered a matter of form in sports like baseball and football. But one fan was hollering for the Belgian players so loudly that at one point an Argentine player lost it and told the guy to shut the hell up.

The raucous fan turned out to be our new favorite politician, Belgian Sports Minister Michel Daerden. Holding the government sports portfolio usually means with being faced with tasks about as challenging as cutting the ribbon at the local YMCA or deciding whether or not the part of the local stadium's ceiling that fell onto the heads of spectators last weekend could stand some fixing. In a post like that you might as well enjoy yourself, and Daerden apparently has been doing just that. Not only was he also spotted drunk cheering on the Belgian hockey team, but he has reached the point of having such a rep as a drunkard, that his antics have made it onto YouTube.

Here then is the minister speaking shortly after an election of some sort or other in Belgium. Language barriers are not a problem here, as he is clearly speaking the international language of drunk:

Scientists Prove Beer-Goggles Effect is Real -- Efficacy of Spitting in the Wind Currently Under Review

In the latest revelation to come out of science’s unending quest to prove the utterly obvious, a recent UK study has shown that being drunk makes the people around you appear more attractive. This is following on from shocking research conducted in France that determined that loud music is often played in places serving alcoholic beverages. A look into whether drinking in the winter increases the likelihood that one will attempt to urinate one’s initials in a snowbank is set for the first snowfall.

The beer-goggles effect is of course commonly known to all drinkers and the sober ugly people hanging around them looking to get laid. Lowering inhibitions and standards right along with them is what alcohol is for. However, it was never proven in a controlled, scientific setting, and for some reason, some academic types at Bristol University in the UK thought it should be.

The researchers gave both a lime-flavored alcoholic drink and a similarly flavored non-alcoholic drink to 84 university students, who may or may not have shown up solely because they heard word that an egghead was giving out free booze. They were told to drink what was given to them and then shown pictures of people their own age once they were finished. The slightly tipsy students found the students in the pictures more attractive than the control group did. Hence: the beer-goggles theory formerly bandied about ignorantly is now established in fact. Interestingly, the heterosexual group of students with a drink in them also found members of their own sex more attractive, which might result in an unexpected conclusion to the evening the next time Billy and Bo Dog go out for a Friday debauch.

The study’s lead researcher said that ethical constraints prevented him from giving his subjects more than the equivalent of a few glasses of wine, something he regretted. "We can look at smaller doses and we can look at slightly higher doses," he said. What people would be rating others on HotOrNot.com after having, say, fallen down the stairs in a puke-stained drunken stupor is thus a matter of pure conjecture. In the meantime, alcohol, will continue with its sacred mission of giving hope to those battered mercilessly by the ugly stick.

Google Street Views: Big Brother is Watching You (Get Drunk and Pass out on Mom's Lawn)

We live in a confessional world, at least that is what some complete stranger whispered in our ear before the threat of a macing moved him to another seat on the bus.

And what good's a confession if there is nobody there to hear it? [Guest Editor Christopher Hitchen's aside: If God is omniscient, isn't confessing redundant?]

A confessional world could not have developed without its twin evil, the Mary-Kate Olsen to its Ashley--voyeurism.

It's one thing to read accounts of someone's seedy life on a blog, it's another thing entirely to watch it unfold, and it's probably best where the twain meet.

Google Aerial Maps, initially showed us the promise of being able to zoom in on your neighbor's hot polka dot bikini-clad wine-drunk mistress, before privacy advocates put the kibosh on it. Similar concerns however, have not been directed toward the increasingly popular Google Street Views.

We are guessing that a line is drawn, and one that is rendered quite blurry squinting at it through Aerial View, between the clearly private and the public sphere. However the following near-encroachment onto a person's private property has called this distinction into question, with some of those same privacy concerns raised.

Australia, much like it was in our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery is again at the center of drunken shenanigans, with the resigning of two Qantas flight attendants (reporters were unclear if they were on board during the recent ill-fated hole in the fuselage flight) for drunkenly pulling the fire alarm at a 5-star hotel.

However, it is a drunken Aussie fisherman who passed out on his mother's lawn and was captured on Google Street Views who has raised the ire of their Privacy Foundation.

Some make the claim that if sans Google, someone had happened by, (and rather than asking the man if he needed help, though the Samaritan issue is a different one entirely), drew lines (or put something else) on his face and taken an embarrassing photo, this would be no different, however others question how every public action, no matter how 'public', is scrutinized either by some indifferent corporation, or in the case of many downtown intersections, by more snapping pictures than backstage at the AVN Awards.

Whatever happened to the good old days of balconies and telescopes?

At the risk of betraying an editorial bias in our headline, we do side with the privacy advocates in this case but only marginally so, as without public shaming our tome of drunken exploits could not have come about (and we are equally aware of the irony of holding this position when we've decided to disseminate the poor bastard's photo all over the blogosphere). Hey, it's a gray issue.

R.I.P. Isaac Hayes, Soul Man

This week, we mourn the passing of a soul legend, whose output in the early 60s alone, would've been enough to launch him into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

I'd go a step further and say "I Thank You" is enough to put him in the Hall. Hell, if Bon Jovi memorabilia is good enough to collect dust, (and with any luck get eaten by species of Tineola bisselliella), I.H. deserves his own damn wing, can you dig it?

[Editor's note, for those of you interested in hearing Bon Jovi debasing Hayes' Stax Records legacy, check out Cover Your Ears: The Worst Bon Jovi Cover Versions of all Time.]

The Hayes-penned hit, "I Thank You", as performed by Sam & Dave and later given a Jeffrey Dahmer-like treatment by ZZ Top (as well as those dollar-store Jersey Rockers), starts off with a sick drum pattern, eighth notes accented on every third beat, before this pulpit requisition:

"I want everybody to get up off your seat
And get your arms together, and your hands together
And give me some of that o-o-old soul clapping," followed by a leering octave bass run punctuated by glorious horns.

[see below]



Hold On! I'm a Comin', rather than referring to anything sexually suggestive, was co-written by Hayes when writing partner Dave Porter was taking an inordinate length of time in the bathroom. Thankfully, for the history of soul music, Porter didn't call out "Man, I think I ate something funny" instead. In my estimation, the opening horns in this tune are rivaled only by Knock on Wood or In the Midnight Hour, by Wilson Pickett as some of the greatest horn riffs of all time. Here they are back to back.





We've all heard Soul Man, so here's another 'Soul' classic, Soul Sister, Brown Sugar, another S&D hit from this period, with a propulsive bass line similar to 'I Thank You' with start & stop horns and luscious high harmonies.



Finally, here's the wah-guitar funk-tastic 'Shaft', which life (or God, take your pick) gave to Hayes, taking him from us far too young.



RIP Soul Man.

Top 10 Most Violent National Anthems, Part II

For those of you who have missed your Amnesty International “urgent-action” mailings for the past eight years, the Olympics are now underway in Beijing. Athletes from around the world have come to demonstrate their athletic superiority over millions – that is in the case of sports that people actually give a damn about like basketball or foot-racing. The same cannot be said for sports kept alive by Olympic amateur athletic life-support and played with any level of dedication only by the 61 people who receive such funding, like, say, badminton or synchronized swimming. [This number diminishes significantly for Winter Olympics events, particularly the luge. Only about 18 people are involved in this; they use figures carved out of balsa wood and stuffed in winter jackets to pull off the illusion of more].

Of all the events on the Olympic roster, these two might just take the cake for the most ridiculous. Synchronized swimming could give out points to the competitor whose eyes show the greatest tolerance to chlorinated water and be just as legitimate a sport as it is now, and badminton is tennis minus the skill or athleticism played primarily by drunks at cottages who have tired of pelting beer cans with rocks. It’s a mystery why these events have survived, when others that are also better suited to the beer-cooler crowd have been cut, like the tug of war, or the motorized water sports event of 1908, an Olympian feat in sloth that couldn’t be topped unless go-karting making it onto the Olympic program.

But regardless of the sport and whether an international gathering of its devotees could be held in a phone-booth, all winners get to hear their national tune when they’re up on the podium and receiving a medal that they may or may not pawn in the lean years to follow. Canada, our home country, has quite possibly the most namby-pamby anthem around (though it's a toss-up between that and “Advance Australia Fair”).

Far more evocative and interesting, if also jingoistic and violent, are the songs on this list, those primarily born out of revolution and bloodshed, that nonetheless give the people something to be fired up and shake their fists for during international sporting competitions.

Here then are the Top Five Most Violent National Anthems of All Time!

5) Turkey: This one beseeches each faithful citizen of Turkey to: "Render your chest as armor and your body as a trench!" Ouch! Why? The anthem goes on to explain: "For soon shall come the joyous days of divine promise... Who knows? Perhaps tomorrow? Perhaps even sooner!" Perhaps even sooner! You never know! Maybe next Wednesday... Possibly Labor Day.

This one wins the prize for pure intensity with one of its closing quatrains, describing a citizen so full of love for his nation that HIS TOMBSTONE prostrates a thousand times in ecstasy because things are going right in Turkey.

Choice Lyrics (Full anthem here)

For only then, shall my fatigued tombstone,
if there is one, prostrate a thousand times in ecstasy,
And tears of fiery blood shall flow out of my every wound,
And my lifeless body shall gush out from the earth like an eternal spirit

And now, a child singing the full version of the anthem. Actually, we're just guessing on that. She might just be reciting the traditional couple of quatrains typically saved for public performance, and the rest is a rant on the declining quality of Turkish Saturday morning cartoons, we're not sure.

4) Mexico: Latin America has more than its fair share of bloody national anthems -- see Uruguay and its national tune featuring the catchy refrain "Nation or the grave!" -- but Mexico's gets a place here for its Rambo-like obsession with blood -- blood in the fields, blood on the flag, bloody noses that don't stop when you pinch your nostrils and tilt your head backward... Well most of that anyway. This is another one with extra verses that are never sung in public. That's for the best as we're guessing it would be enough to frighten those with less violent anthems from daring to compete.

Choice Lyrics: (Full anthem) War, war! Let the national banners
be soaked in waves of blood.

Oh Fatherland, ere your children, defenseless
bend their neck beneath the yoke,
may your fields be watered with blood,
may they leave their footprints in blood.







3) Vietnam: A country that has overcome so much in the past half century, not the least of which was having its name associated with an obnoxious Robin Williams movie of the 1980s, to become one of Southeast Asia's fastest growing economies. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In this anthem we learn that the road to prosperity is paved with the corpses of the enemy, and also that gunfire provides a nice backbeat:

Choice Lyrics: (Full anthem)
Our hurried steps resound on the long and arduous road.
Our flag, red with the blood of victory, bears the spirit of the country.
The distant rumbling of the guns mingles with our marching song.
The path to glory is built by the bodies of our foes.

And here we have further proof of a universal truth concerning national anthems: they sound better when sung by a bunch of drunk people in a bar.

2) Romania: One of the few songs we can ever recall hearing that manages to work in a mention of the "knout", a leather (though often adorned with metal, particularly hooks) whip popular in czarist Russia for strapping serfs. And then it gets violent.

Choice Lyrics: (Full Anthem)
Priests, lead with your crucifixes! Because our army is Christian,
The motto is Liberty and its goal is holy,
Better to die in battle, in full glory,
Than to once again be slaves upon our ancient ground!

1) France: Home to Paris, the city of love, and Le Marseilles, a Valentine to violence disguised as a national anthem. Composed in revolutionary France, this ditty doubles as a nice all-purpose theme-song for the guillotining of noblemen, and the expelling of the foreign hordes.

Choice Lyrics: In the countryside, do you hear
The roaring of these fierce soldiers?
They come right to our arms
To slit the throats of our sons, our friends!

And the best anthem sung in a movie scene ever:



CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF THE TOP 10 MOST VIOLENT NATIONAL ANTHEMS!

Olympics 101: Top 10 Most Violent National Anthems, Part I

Despite sinking more coins into our Olympic coffers than a virgin at Lucky Fountain, Toronto has been repeatedly denied the chance to host the games and as a result, we won't get to see if the shot-put can, after 2500 years of failing to do so, finally ignite the public's imagination.

By not landing the Games of the Olympiad, we'll not only miss out on yelling 'Geronimo' off a 10 meter springboard, but also the aesthetic thumb in the eye that is the opening ceremonies, which distill a nation's character down to a few silly gesticulations, which in our case would be break-dancing Mounties, some sort of giant papier-mâché leaf and a chorus line of lumberjacks.

However, the Olympics are about more than just cheap showmanship, like your uncle who can balance a cane on the end of his toe while whistling "Chevy Van". They're a chance for countries to atone for past sins, march together in a show of togetherness twice a decade and see whose athletes can pump themselves more full of pharmaceuticals than an Amy Winehouse pot luck.

There are some countries, such as those whose main export is a variety of tart nectarine, that you never really get to hear from in non-Olympic years unless an extradition treaty is violated or some autocrat is ousted and replaced by an antelope as the interim head of state.

The odd time though, one of these nations will unhinge the masturbatory grip on the podium held by Russia, Germany or the United States and you'll get to hear an off-key warbling of some country's national anthem and bear witness to a moment of pride that'll last for generations to come, if you define "generations" as however long it takes for the urine sample to come back positive, the sportsman in question to defect, or when the next commercial break will air.

But what exactly are they singing about as banners are raised to the rafters and the eyes of the world (or at least the eyes of the world that aren't glazed over by a less than rousing game of handball) are upon them?

Not surprisingly, most anthems are a call to arms, mostly partisan hymns that are a soundtrack to bayoneting your nearest geographical neighbor and a tune you can tap your jackboot to as you proclaim the superiority of your culture, mountain ranges and comely women (the seldom heard fifth stanza in Slovenia's national anthem: "To you, our pride past measure, Our girls! Your beauty, charm and grace!")

There are some ditties sung that are much more ominous than any ‘Bombs bursting in air', you might've whistled while relieving yourself after a heavy lunch, and that would make a scout troupe cower in fear more than a scoutmaster's invite to a midnight swim.

Of course, officials quickly noted that when performed at certain epochal functions, some of these stanzas were better left out altogether, like in the case of Italy, where if something of import were to be held in Warsaw, for example, it might be prudent to omit the bit about "the Polish blood they drank, along with the Cossack."

We thought we’d share a few choice verses, unearth a few national secrets, and perhaps create a diplomatic shit-storm with this, our list of the Top 10 Most Violent National Anthems!

10) Algeria: Being that Algeria's national hymn was written not long after the North African nation broke free from France, thus ending one of the most violent and oppressive periods in European colonial history, we're not surprised that their national anthem makes scant reference to daisy-picking and the value of complacency. Of course, as you'll learn during the course of our bloody world tour of national anthems, nothing ups the carnage in a national anthem like a good throwing off of the yoke of an oppressor. However, this one gets bonus points for the fact that amidst all bloodshed and overthrowing of oppressors, it never forgot the importance of the beat:

Choice Lyrics:
"When we spoke, nobody listened to us,
So we have taken the noise of gunpowder as our rhythm
And the sound of machine guns as our melody"
(click here for full anthem)








9) Tunisia / Haiti: Continuing on with our theme of countries breaking free from French colonial rule and celebrating their independence in violent verse, here are two nations that preferred death over French rule, much as we'd prefer such a fate over say, a screening and subsequent discussion of the Sex & the City movie.

Choice Lyrics:

"The blood surges in our veins,
We die for the sake of our land."

"For the flag, For our country
To die is a fine thing! Our past cries out to us:
Have a disciplined soul! To die is a fine thing!"
(Full anthem: Tunisia, Haiti)

8) Albania: It is impossible to enter into a discussion about Albania, without in some way referencing Mother Teresa. That should suffice. For a far more eyeball-rewarding look at a native of that country, turn your peepers to the left. Saints preserve us!

And in its national anthem we have a recurrent theme in many such ditties: the glory of having your ass shot off in a war.

Choice Lyrics:

"From war abstains only he,
Who a traitor is born,
For he who is a man is never frightened,
But falls, but falls a martyr to the cause!" (Full anthem)




7) Hungary: The Magyar Himnuz, based on a poem of such emotional intensity, that some interpreters apparently see it as an example of the nation's deeply-rooted pessimism. We would agree, but what does it matter anyway?
Choice Lyrics:

"But no freedom's flowers return
From the spilled blood of the dead,
And the tears of slavery burn,
Which the eyes of orphans shed."

(and later) Grief and sorrow all the same
Underneath a sea of blood (Full anthem)

CLICK HERE FOR THE TOP FIVE MOST VIOLENT NATIONAL ANTHEMS!

The World's Worst-Sounding Booze Brand Names (Part Two)

For Part One of the World's Worst-Sounding Booze Brand Names click here.

(This is the second part of a blog that originally appeared on Cracked.com this past weekend. Since Cracked has space considerations, and we most definitely do not, here is the remainder of the full list. To see the list as it appeared on Cracked, click here This version contains a few horrendous booze-branding choices that didn't make it into the final entry. To sip your favorite fermented beverage while enjoying part two, don't click anything; just manipulate the down arrow on the keyboard as appropriate.)

Arnold Palmer Cabernet Sauvignon

Golf, to say the least, is lacking in youthful verve. It’s one of a handful of sports whose physical demands are so minimal it can be played while attached to an IV drip, which can be hauled around in your golf cart, if you don’t take any sharp curves. And here’s a wine that won’t appeal to anybody other than the old duffer whose handicap is possibly dropping stone dead on the 9th green.

What the Company Might Have Intended: Celebrity endorsements can be lucrative, especially if product and pitchman are well-paired, like Donald Trump and his vodka, which like all vodkas is transparent and tasteless. It works best though, if the median age of the fan base isn’t older than jokes about how old people are, material more well-tread than the starting line of the Boston Marathon and more tired than the finish.

Why This Marketing Ploy is Heading Toward the Bunker: Arnold Palmer is not named Tiger Woods, and the differences don’t even begin to end there: for one thing, they are clearly two different people (we confirmed this by looking at them). If you break a bottle of Palmer out at the dinner table, your date will think you wrested away a family heirloom by posing as a distant relative, www.deadoraliveinfo.com will be consulted and a generation gap will appear wider than that between The Big Bopper and 50 Cent—if you’re old enough to remember the Big Bopper, your parents hand-forged their own clubs and were Palmer fan club members during the Dust Bowl years.

Goats Do Roam Wine

Just the right touch for any intimate gathering with friends, an oddly named wine that reminds you of a garbage-eating oversexed animal with a poor disposition.

What the Company Might Have Intended: Goats have been associated with virility since ancient times, well, not so much goats but whoever first decided to cross that interspecies divide and mate with one and spawn a Satyr. While perversions that would shame the mayor of Amsterdam have been etched into Grecian urns since antiquity, the Goats Do Roam label is decidedly quaint, and details some legend or another involving a Yemeni herder that we cannot make out even by squinting. We imagine such a fable involves a goat say, wandering off the edge of a precipice, at which point a wizened herder remarks to his young upstart, ‘See, goats DO roam’.

Why We’re not Ordering Another Round: Lumbering ruminants such as water buffalo, antelope, bison or anything else that could be pot-shotted from the comfort of a passing train are not to be associated with the liquid portion of any meal.

Bürgerbräu Bad Reichenhall Suffikator

From the land of euphonious-sounding beer names, Germany, comes Bürgerbräu Bad Reichenhall Suffikator, a premium doppelbock beer, or a hasty confession to a murder charge, we’re not quite sure which.

What the Company Might Have Intended: For the most part we avoided including beers with foreign names just because they had an icepick-like effect on our ears, such as the Belgian Affligem Paters Vat (shiver), or even English names that just somehow nauseate by their very sound – like “Norfolk Nog”. Germany is home to some of the best beer in the world – maybe the best and they also like to drink it in giant steins with food that’ll kill you before you leave the table, so the country’s boozing credentials are solid. Deutschland is also home to the highest concentration of booze brand names that sound like biblical plagues – reference the many ‘Hell’ beers, ala Bock Hell (hell means “light” in German). The first part of this one is the name of the brewer and using our German acquired from a week of Teutonic swimming lessons, we can guess that it means something like “Richard’s Castle Natural Springwater” or something like that. Suffikator is the actual name of the beer.

Why They Failed: Suffikator is the actual name of the beer. Taken as a whole, this beer’s name has one too many umlauts for comfort and sounds like some period in the Middle Ages when people laid around dying from pestilence while bleeding from the eyes. But given how often German is similar to English – (Maus = mouse, Bier = beer, Katze = Cat, Hund = dog/hound) – the Suffikator part, for which we could not find a translation, makes it just that bit more mercenary-sounding. This might well be a terrific beer – and doppelbock does mean double-strength so it’s certainly got some fire power – but we’re guessing this will not make much of a splash on American store shelves until its name is changed to something that does not conjure up the image of a nutcase going around with plastic bags and bad intentions.

Zodiac Vodka / Nostradamus Beer

When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will rule the planet, and yet this will still go unsold in bars.

If a conversation with the opposite sex drifts, like medical waste onto a Jersey beach, to the topic of the various phases of the moon and how they really do affect a person’s menstrual cycle and Nostradamus’s thoughts on the sub-prime mortgage crisis, it’s best to back away slowly, and fake an impromptu exit — citing a dry cleaner who closes early for the afternoons. This is unless, of course, your last sexual experience was long enough ago to have exceeded at least 3 zones of celestial longitude.

What the Company Might Have Intended: Tapping into superstition and supposed divination of either ancient firmamental noodlings or the gout-addled ramblings of a 16th century French druggist is niche marketing of sorts, even if this niche is narrower than Nicole Richie in profile.

Why They Failed and, Apropos of Nothing, How the Moon in Venus’ Sign Means you Should Cease Mortgage Payments Immediately: Approaching a woman and slurring ‘hey baby, what’s your sign?’ is questionable behavior at the best of times, let alone inviting mockery by using a prop (in the event that your state’s liquor laws enable you to order a jug to have all to yourself). If not, you’ll have to simply invite her to share a belt of Zodiac Vodka with you, mention “I’m a Taurus’ by way of introduction, at which point any objections we’ve raised here will drift through her mind in less time than it takes to make a quick dash to the powder room for reasons undisclosed. We prophesize diminishing market share for these products.

Essex Boys Bitter/The Bishop’s Finger

We’ve opted for prudence and to refrain from commenting on this pair of UK beers out of a fear of reprisals from the Catholic Church. Suffice it to say it’s advisable to knock twice before entering any confessional within a one-mile radius of a pub with these two on tap.

Cloudy Bay Chardonnay

If you’re making plonk in an abandoned garage, and planning on having a great unveiling of the saran wrap at the neighborhood flophouse, you’d be forgiven for having a product that looks like something that would bubble up from a bog as you swat away the flies. We’re not saying this product looks like that, but with a name like this one would not want to risk one’s eyesight by sampling a glass.

What the Company Might Have Intended: This product was produce in a place called Cloudy Bay, New Zealand. But if I’m a maker of frozen seafood products and I hail from Botulism Springs, Manitoba, would I feel the need to give a shout out to the home town? Unless you skipped marketing 101 and the guy whose notes you borrowed dropped dead mid-semester, you’d realize that “cloudy” is not going to attract any intended demographic. The adjective, whether it refers to urine and the need for a hasty a referral to a specialist, inclement weather that ruins an otherwise perfectly good day at the beach, (or for that matter one's judgment when it comes to naming your product) never connotes anything positive.

Why They Failed and Why Breweries Learned Long Ago that No Matter how Flat the Countryside, it’s Best not to Draw Attention to It as this Can Be Misconstrued: In day one of sommelier school, after thorough instructions on how best to condescend to the customer, and how to scrub Chianti out of a silk tie using nothing but the hem of a waitress’ skirt and a blob of saliva, it is noted that clarity rather than cloudiness is much-sought after in a dinner wine. As a general rule, you don’t want to be gazing across the table through glassware that looks like an aquarium someone’s put out on the curb.

Shingleback Shiraz

Awaiting test results from the lab on this Aussie oddity.

What the Company Might Have Intended: It's well known that there are as many beaver shots in Canadian tourism materials as there are in those forwards you get from the guy in IT, and Canada is not alone as a country that likes to celebrate its indigenous creatures. Australians too take pride in their wildlife, as evidenced by Steve Irwin before he uttered his last “Crikey!”. Like grungy backpackers, shingleback lizards roam large parts of Australia, especially Bondi beach, whereas shingles of the variety not installed on your roof by ex-cons, is the common name of the nervous disorder Herpes Zoster, and it can be found roaming many more beaches than this lizard. You can see why they changed the name as a casual mention of ‘Shingles’ rather than ‘Herpes’ in polite conversation implies to the casual eavesdropper that you might’ve had some home reno done, rather than having slept your way through the entire baritone section of the varsity glee club.

Why We’re Getting a Doctor’s Second Opinion Instead of Ordering Another Round: Ordering a bottle of a skin condition that commonly presents itself as red marks on your back that aren’t caused by fingernails having dug into it in the throes of passion might result in a goodnight peck on the cheek and a round of antivirals on the house if the more positive connotation, in this case a disgustingly slimy lizard, isn’t the first thing that springs to mind.

Special Mention:

Pruno

Did you make it through today’s recreation period without getting shanked by Phil the Fish? Looking to celebrate? Pour yourself a glass of Pruno!

What the “Company” Might Have Intended: Alas there is no CEO of Pruno Industries, and chances are that you would not want to sit on the board if there were, as a hostile takeover would likely mean being attacked by a guy who spent the previous night fashioning a deadly weapon out of his toothbrush. “Pruno” is the term given to prison wine and Jarvis Masters, a man sitting on death row in San Quentin Penitentiary, is credited with popularizing the term “Pruno”, in a 1992 poem entitled, “The Wine of My Youth Was Pruno”… actually it was called, “Recipe for Prison Pruno”. The poem coupled bits of the verdict that was read out on the day that Masters was sent up the river with practical tips on how to make prison Pruno: “Take ten peeled oranges/Jarvis Masters, it is the judgment and sentence of this court.” Since penning that little ditty, Masters has had plenty of time to perfect his Pruno-making abilities as he remains on death row to this day.

While most modern-day recipes for Pruno do not specifically call for prunes, and one would suspect that this is not the most popular fruit for prisoners, we would assume that at one point it contained prunes and was thus dubbed “Pruno”.

Why We’re Going to Be Good, Law-Abiding Citizens: Pruno is a sickening-sounding name as is anything derived or related to prunes, a fruit typically employed to keep the elderly regular. Then again it would be hard to come up with an attractive-sounding name for the kind of booze that can be made by anyone using only fruit, ketchup, sugar, a plastic bag, hot running water, and a sock. Whereas the worst aftereffects of a bender on the outside would be the unwelcome sight of someone only passable with beer goggles asking you how you like your eggs the following morning, the aftereffects of Pruno include blindness, death, irresistible urge to instigate a riot, and death in a prison riot. In a trend that must just tickle every poor slob who has had to drink the stuff in jail, Pruno is now being “enjoyed” outside of prison. In 2004, at the American Homebrewer's Association's National Homebrew Conference in Las Vegas, a “Make Your Own Pruno” competition was held. The winner was dragged out of his hotel room in the middle of the night by security guards and beaten with bars of soap tied up in pillow cases.

CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF THE WORLD'S WORST-SOUNDING BOOZE BRAND NAMES!

Notre Dame QB Drinks Beer! Life of as we know it is irrevocably altered

What do the US, Oman, Indonesia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates have in common?

Well, nothing, apart from a legal drinking age of 21, the highest in the world.

To put it another way, the US is the only non-Muslim country we're aware of (though in some parts of the Ukraine, they enforce the age of 21 though by all accounts it's roundly ignored) where to consume a beer, you must be old enough to earn a college degree.

Since many so-called 'student athletes' don't, we figure they just enjoy the college experience (the aspects unrelated to the taking of actual courses), in the limited time that they have.

Members of the Notre Dame football team (seen here) were cutting loose in a rousing game of Beer Pong, a time-honored college tradition, and for some reason, this non-event made its way into the pages of the Chicago Tribune, among others.

Now, to be fair, The Fighting Irish (a bizarre name for a team whose college name translates to 'Our Lady' in French, but to be more fair, being French is not typically associated with fighting anything successfully) have a graduation rate near 80%. This is substantially higher than the coin flip figures elsewhere in the country, some of which are as low as 30% and the team is known for hitting the books at least as hard as those across the line of scrimmage.

Of course, when the rest of us were busy say, studying, we weren't cut admission breaks for being able to run a 40 in under 5 seconds, common practice so that, well, dumb kids can practice.

A Notre Dame football spokesman said Monday there was no comment from the team for the time being, apart from 'Chug, chug, chug, chug!'

The World's Worst-Sounding Booze Brand Names (Part One)

(Editor's Note: The following blog appeared this weekend on Cracked.com. To see it there, complete with welcome jab at Dr. Phil, click here. Below is the first part of the original submission. Part Two will run on Wednesday. Reader feedback on brands that we may have missed is as welcome as a free round... almost) :

For a booze-maker, giving your hooch the right name can mean success, even if you are hustling a product that could be put to better use in the gas tanks of a fuel-hungry nation. Malt liquors like Wild Irish Rose, Night Flight, and Schlitz fall into this category, but their respective names hearken to the splendor of the Irish countryside (or a prostitute in the Irish countryside named Rose, which is still not so bad), getting high in the evening/the adrenaline that comes from sprinting away from a crime scene, and, well, Schlitz doesn’t really signify anything but it seems like it would be a fine name to give one’s first-born son – “The proud parents are thrilled to welcome little Schlitz Rasmussen into the world”. Like putting a silk hat on a pig, it’s a way of sprucing up your product and fostering a loyalty that is completely divorced from product quality – in other words, the kind of loyalty that lasts.

Just as a catchy name with positive connotations can mean success for a product with “optimal serving conditions” listed as “best served in the general proximity of someone who drinks fast”, so too can a bad name sink the fortunes of a quality product. Many of the booze brand names below have been slapped onto products that judging by reports from beer and liquor snobs on the Internet sound pretty good, but we are not going to find out just how good because their names send us dangerously close to wanting to walk the line of sobriety.

It has become trendy among booze purveyors, particularly brewers and wineries these days to give their products deliberately jokey names like “Arrogant Bastard Ale” and “Wasatch Polygamy Porter” etc., but here we’ve stuck to those that sicken or repel consumers unintentionally for the most part (passing on Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout, however, was not an option). In some cases, these names sound terrible due to language or cultural differences; in others it’s a name that started off as perfectly acceptable but later become increasingly risible as the years passed and people looked for more words with which to form double entendres; and, in the majority of cases, it was a bad name to begin with and shit doesn’t turn to gold with age.

It’s last-call, the bar has been drained of all other brands, these names are presented to us on a menu, and we opt instead to do the unthinkable and flag down a taxi. There ought to be a law.

Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout

From Sweetwater Brewery in Atlanta, Georgia comes a beer that attempts to bottle the exotic allure of getting a five-fingered shuffle from someone who may or may not have found her way into her present place of employment as part of a barter deal for a Chevrolet.

What the Company Might Have Intended: The cartoon of the winking, cleavage-bearing sexpot masseuse on the label means this wasn't a case of someone having failed to check out the urban dictionary before naming the beer. But the description on the label, "A huge, dry hopped stiffy, for a full figured beer, resulting in an explosive finish!" suggests that perhaps this was an attempt to celebrate the defining qualities of a good stout – full-bodied, satisfying with a pleasant aftertaste etc – in a way that would stand out on the shelves. That this quotation makes no grammatical sense may have been a play on the language difficulties that confront rub and tug patrons, or point to the need for a copy-checker at Sweetwater Breweries.

Why They Failed and Why We Want to Vomit: Beer companies often get a bum rap for glorifying alcohol abuse by producing commercials that show good looking young people having the time of their lives while in the general proximity of a crapload of their product. Someone living in a converted garage, drinking Miller Genuine Draft and spraying his shirts with deodorant so he doesn't have to do a wash, might look at those Greek statues come to life in the Miller commercials, who seem to be preparing for a cabin orgy with the Swedish Bikini Natural 10 Extra-Beautiful Club, and think that he's a few six-packs away from joining them. That same slob would have far less mental jogging to do to make the image that Sweetwater Happy Ending Massage conjures up a reality. Even more unappealing-sounding than "Hummer", also put out by this same brewer, this one brings to mind the altogether unpleasant image of some naked horny fat guy in a towel overcoming a language barrier by counting off sums of money using his fingers and waving a stack of greasy low-denomination bills.

Deerstalker Scotch

From Scotland comes the perfect complement to a day spent skulking around a tranquil forest dressed up like a bush in the hopes of bagging Bambi.

What the Company Might Have Intended: A deerstalker is the kind of jaunty cap that Sherlock Holmes wears, and one that has also graced the fictitious heads of cynical low-life Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye”, and portly truculent hotdog vendor Ignatius J. Reilly of “A Confederacy of Dunces”—lit personae you’d least like to emulate behaviorally or sartorially. In real life, most people who are able to tie their own shoes and for whom strangling by shoelaces is not a danger, don’t wear these hats. The exception, of course, are those for whom the hat is named – hunters out for a day’s drinking and shooting in the best tradition of American vice-presidents. They are presumably the target market for this whiskey.

Why They Failed and Why We Are Untying our Deerstalker Hats: This is not the whiskey to break out on a first date. First, it promotes headwear favored by those in cold climates who have severed all ties with mankind. Second, any reference to the slaughter of deer is unlikely to impress. Paired with the term “stalker”, showing up with a bottle of this falls between having BO and casually mentioning that you have a family of 10 “out there, somewhere” as a sure way to kill a date.

Dr Loosen Riesling

From along the banks of the German Rhine comes this medical malpractice suit in a bottle.

What the Company Might Have Intended: The eponymous Dr. Loosen started this winery nearly 200 years ago and the German vintner has been run by assorted Loosens since then. The founder was not, as far as we could determine, the kind of doctor who spent his off-days rambling about the German countryside and snatching women’s underwear from clotheslines. It would appear that the makers of this one never really thought too much about why their English friends were snickering under their kerchiefs, and once their export market expanded and the name of “Doc Loosen” came into hands such as ours, they were already too rich to give a Scheiße.

Why They Failed and Why The Officer Would Like to Have a Word With You Downtown: This sounds like the kind of booze you’d need to warn your teenage daughter about before she agrees to go out alone with the highschool quarterback. Booze has been helping ugly people get laid since the first caveman realized that it had its advantages over the club in terms of taking the relationship to the next level. But these days the inside of a prison cell and a standing engagement with someone who or may not want to tattoo you as his own property has lessened the acceptability of booze’s “liquid panty-removing” qualities. “Loosen up”, is of course, the most oft-heard entreaty of a teenager looking to get laid – right before the open palm of the girl he’s trying to woo hits his face. Adding the modifier “Doctor” doesn’t help. Doctor Loosen Reisling sounds like a moustache-twirling creep in a grungy white coat with breath that reeks of yesterday’s after-dinner bender and a special getting-to-know-you rate for all the young mothers in town.

Kelpie Organic Seaweed Ale

From the Argyll coast in Scotland comes a beer that will take you back to the times when you stepped in something squishy at the beach and hoped it wasn’t a turd.

What the Company Might Have Intended: According to Celtic legend, kelpies are child-killing shape-shifting water horses that can be found murdering innocents along lochs and rivers in Scotland and Ireland. The legend has it that a kelpie will appear as a lost pony on land and somehow BS a child into taking a ride on its back. The kelpie then makes a mad dash straight for the bottom of the nearest body of water, the child is unable to get off due to the creature’s skin suddenly becoming adhesive, and… we have one less citizen on the village census rolls. This all sounds like a tale concocted to cover up the baptismal boo-boos of “Dunker” Father Fred, or possibly further proof that those closest to the water drink booze in greater quantities and packing a higher punch than do their land-locked brethren. This beer is actually brewed using seaweed, a particularly disgusting-sounding strain of the stuff called “bladder rack”, harvested off the Argyll Coast. And presumably it’s organic, rather than that chemical shit that McDonald’s try to sell you.

Why They Failed and Why We Want to Puke in the Ocean: In a word: Blech! Aside from naming the beer after a children’s myth that has undoubtedly traumatized generation of kids, we cannot conceive of the appeal of advertising the fact that a beer is brewed using the stuff that you need to wash off your boat with a high-powered hose every time you take it in for the season. Seaweed, for all its purported ecological benefit, is one of nature’s more repulsive creations, and there’s no reason Zebra Mussel Barnacle Stout or Man-o-war Jellyfish Wheat won’t be joining Kelpie Organic in the brewery’s seasonal gift basket. As a kid, there were few things as fun to at the beach as getting a handful of the stuff and chucking it at the bald head of your favorite hectoring uncle, but drink it? No thanks Bucko, we’ll keep to the dry land.

British Navy Pusser's Rum

From England comes a brand of rum that takes you back to the days when the British Navy were earning their reputation for being adept at nothing other than “rum, sodomy, and the lash”. This rum celebrates the rum part of that naval “to-do” list.

What the Company Might Have Intended: Members of the British navy, back when they were out sailing into mysterious foreign ports to bayonet the locals and open post offices, were kept from mutiny largely by a daily allotment – a “tot” – of rum. Sure there was the scurvy, the filthy living conditions and, if you were the cabin boy, the constant fear of being raped and/or eaten, but none of that would seem as terrible if you were out of your gourd on rum at the time. What’s more, the daily pint of rum also helped contribute to turning sailors’ skin cirrhosis-of-the-liver yellow, which made for a pleasant effect in combination with the sun shining off their faces as they were tipped into the ocean during at-sea burials. On the ships of old, the daily tot of rum was doled out by a purser and “pusser” is how you pronounce “purser” after you’ve had your daily tot. The practice of giving sailors a pint of rum a day was discontinued in 1970 – or perhaps the stress there should be it actually went on until 1970 – and British Navy Pusser’s Rum then is an attempt to carry on in that manly tradition of iron boats and hard men with even harder livers.

Why They Failed and Why, Yo-ho-ho, A Pirate’s Life is Not For Us: Another contender for this list was Sailor Jerry Spiced Navy Rum, but Pusser’s won out because nobody without an encyclopedia of tedious naval trivia at their side – or Google – would guess that Pusser’s is a derivation of Purser. Not only does it call to mind unpleasant images of Sheriff Buford Pusser kicking a Texas drunk to death, but it also sounds like the kind of wound you would not want to get while on board one of those hygienically-defunct ships of yore.

Entire Butt Porter

From the UK comes this porter that gives you a retort to have at the ready the next time someone tells you your favorite malt liquor “tastes like ass”. This stuff is called Entire Butt Porter and by all accounts it tastes pretty damn good.

What the Company Might Have Intended: What initially appears to be an entreaty not to give preference to one cheek over the other, but rather to embrace the “entire butt” – commendable as that might have been – actually seems to be one of those quirks of American versus UK English (like how in the US they call that thing that soccer moms carry their mace in a fanny pack, whereas in the UK it’s presumably known as a vagina mace-carrier). Butt, it turns out, is an old English term for barrel, so “entire butt” means “the entire barrel”, and has nothing whatever to do with asses.

Why They Failed and Why We Won’t Be Saying “Bottoms-up!” with this stuff: All meaning-of-word nonsense aside, there’s no getting around the fact that this is ass beer. If you order this one, you’ll be left to the mercies of your howling friends who can inquire quite justifiably, “Tell me, just how does ASS taste?” This also goes for Butcombe Bitter, all of the beers put out by Butts Brewery (particularly our favorite “Le Butts Biere”) and, of course, king of the ass beers, AASS Bock out of Belgium.

CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO OF THE WORLD'S WORST-SOUNDING BOOZE BRAND NAMES!