Drink & Drive Your Way Through Grand Theft Auto!

Researching our book, we chronicled four separate, er, pastoral DUI incidences in which suspects slowly trundled away from authorities on lawn mowers or tractors at speeds that wouldn't test the warranty fine-print of even the cheapest, Chinese-made pacemakers. Most recently, a Michigan man with a bellyful of wine braved a snowstorm on his John Deere, and was busted en route to a nearby store.

Today's focus though, is on a related scourge afflicting rural and urban culture alike-- violent video games, in particular the popular series Grand Theft Auto.

Since youth culture emerged like so much acne, many a finger has been pointed at everything from the bikini and drag racing, to the broad chest of the guy who kicks sand in your face at the beach, and lately Facebook as the cause of whatever prevailing social ill. Now, the very latest calamity befalling youth culture appears to be the deviant, action adventure, role-playing game.
[Editor's Note: We acknowledge, given the age of a typical gamer is somewhere in the early 30s-- many of the same demographic having recently hung up their skateboards due to chronic lower back problems-- the term 'youth' might be a bit of a misnomer.]

The latest entry in the Grand Theft Auto video game series has many critics wondering how many more banana peels line that already slippery slope toward social upheaval.

Its maker, Rockstar Games---rather than showing greater social awareness and allowing users to jack up more green-friendly modes of transport like diesel buses or perhaps a bicycle---is instead allowing gamers to engage in, well, degenerate 'rock star'-like shenanigans. These include driving drunk, going to a strip club, flying a helicopter and fleeing from the cops--in short, recreating Motley Crue's 1987 world tour, ideally, during the course of one game.

According to Canadian Press, one of the game's characters, an Eastern European thug named 'Niko Bellic', has already become an icon to millions of viewers who've watched official trailers over 40 million times online. As Bellic, you can engage in a relatively benign mission, such as whacking a rival laid up in hospital, in addition to the usual fair: killing innocent bystanders, cops, hookers, etc as a latter-day couch-bound, cheese-doodle noshing Travis Bickle. The game, available for the first time on both Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, also contains 'sex secret scenes', which aren't too secret anymore (Sorry).

Rockstar's vice president notes, rather un-ironically: "We felt we owed it to the [fans] to have a game that was really amazing and really pushed the limit. It would've been foolish to rush something out and disrespectful to the audience."

Molson Beer ad campaign fizzles

University administrators, you know, the guys who kept you out of the top three colleges of your choice, relegating you to an institution unfit to grace the bumper of your parents’ Volvo, are slamming a new ad campaign by Canada’s foremost purveyor of bland suds, Molson Beer.

In a Globe & Mail report, critics blasted the brewer's latest marketing initiative as at least as tasteless as the product itself, saying that it is "harmful for students seeking jobs if a potential employer discovered their raucous partying poses on Facebook." Now, as we’ve documented in the Sh*t Faced Femmes of Facebook, the boundaries separating the public and private are often as blurred as your vision after you’ve drank 11 or so cans of Molson's "finest", as people are rarely red-faced when posting compromising pictures online.

The Molson campaign asks college students to post such pictures so that the "top party school in Canada" can be crowned. We Shark Guys, several years removed from dancing a two-step back and forth over that academic probation line, and decidedly bitter over not yet being granted honorary degrees from our respective alma maters, are sadly ineligible for the prize—a public pool urinating, Mexican jail, wake-up-face-down-in-the-surf spring-break Bacchanalia to Cancun for five.

The dean of students at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, a school whose engineering students are known for, among other things, calculating the trajectory and force required to dent a forehead with a can (and vice versa), is "disgusted" by the Facebook ad campaign’s "dangerous disregard for the way it promotes an abusive use of alcohol.”

From what we gather, to put it in standardized test terms, "The Campus Challenge" is to "30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night", what "jejune" is to "lurid", although stomachs will be tested by the odd broad-shouldered frat guy in a less than supportive bra.

The national director of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations, said the Molson campaign is "unfortunate" because it stereotypes young people as being interested only in partying, rather than something closer to the truth—partying AND getting laid.

Beer cheaper than water – And that's a bad thing?

The UK’s Daily Mail, fast becoming The Shark Guys newspaper of choice in terms of rich source material, recently ran a lengthy double-byline investigative piece (full story here) into the rising trend of supermarkets selling their own brands of beer for less than their bottled water. This came hot on the high-heels of an earlier exposé into another alcoholic scourge: those midriff and visible panty-line revealing Facebook girls gone wild, (a story we covered here).

The Daily Mail reports that supermarket chains Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda are selling their own brands of beer at 22p (US$0.46) a can, which is less per litre than it costs to buy the stores’ mineral water and cola, and, in what would seem to be pure hyperbole given the alcohol content of the beer is between 2 and 3 percent, “cheap enough to allow someone to get drunk for just £1” (more on how they sent a reporter out in order to prove that claim later).

Competition between the three supermarket chains led to the low price, with the stores taking on up to an 8p per can loss just to keep up with one another. All three chains now offer the cheapest beer on their rosters for 50p a litre, while mineral water costs between 56p and 92p a litre depending on the store. (The latter price is of course the real scandal, but we'll leave the great bottled-water debate [your wallet and good ole' mother earth are better off with the tap] to blogs such as this one).

Many readers, especially those from Ontario, Canada where a government monopoly necessitates a drive out to the hinterlands for beer restocking, will see all silver-lining and no cloud when it comes to having such easily accessible and cheap booze at the ready. The Mail, however, did not write this one as a feel-good piece, but rather took the occasion to sound several alarm bells.

The main concern was that the youth would put down their alcopops and rush for the cheap lager, which, we presume, is typically the purview of your older recreational drunk. One public health advocate whose comments were included by the Mail in an attempt to strengthen this point came out with an interesting bit of armchair teenage psychology when he ventured that teens would "think that if it's so cheap, it must be OK". The reported low to which Finland has sunk (who knew!) following a 40% cut in its alcohol taxes was also thrown in for extra points.

The Mail even went to the trouble of sending out one of its reporters to drink the cheap beer and report back on its effects in an accompanying piece entitled"How I - a twenty-something woman - got drunk on £1 worth of the 22p lager" (that story here). The reporter, a 27-year-old woman who stands 5 feet tall (and is not as wide as she is tall), might have seemed an odd choice for this test, but here were some selected observations from her afternoon on Asda's own-brand three percent lager (on which she spent £1 hence the headline):

"The first taste is disgusting - a mouthful of gassy, foul-tasting liquid. I don't drink lager often, but even I can tell this is scraping the barrel. The first can is hard to drink but I don't notice too much of a change in myself."

Later, she's loosened up a bit but appears somewhat self-conscious...

"Two cans down and I realise that I am wittering, getting more talkative and, I fear, slightly boring."

Ah, the glorious third can, now things are rocking:

"Into the third can I start feeling more affectionate and my inhibitions are lowered - swinging my legs over my chair, I find myself telling the photographer what a fabulous chap he is and how much I love working with him."

However, those who would be thanking their lucky stars for this, the cheapest of cheap dates, might be put off by the likes of the following:

"The gassiness is getting to me and I keep emitting rather unladylike burps."

And it all goes to pot on the last can and a half:

"On my fourth can, I am getting a bit aggressive - pointing at the photographer as I make another "fascinating" comment and swearing more than I ever would in polite company. By the last half, I have definitely had enough. My voice is heavy and slurred, my limbs feel floppy, my eyes have gone droopy and I have lost the ability to concentrate on anything for longer than a couple of minutes. Worryingly, the lager tastes OK, even nice, and I feel as though I could carry on drinking it if asked."

And, with that, comes a moral to the story of the type that is slightly subtler than a jackhammer in the ear:

"I am a 27-year-old woman and, although only 5ft, am used to drinking alcohol and can deal with the changes it causes. But take each of the physical and emotional side-effects that I felt - and imagine the effect they would have on a teenager."

The Shark Guys

Drunk Girls on Facebook: The Sh*t-Faced Femmes of Facebook

The Internet has long been a blessing for creeps and stalkers the world over and arguably the greatest gift it has given them has been Facebook, which is at the forefront of “social-networking sites” (anti-social networking having fallen off the typical MBA syllabus in the mid-80s). Facebook, in which Microsoft recently invested millions (a move that this Guardian columnist puts somewhere on the level of going to the racetrack and betting on the horse with the nicest eyes), allows you to stalk comfortably from your home, without having to jump into a thorn-filled bush to avoid being spotted, or ruining your favorite slacks by getting garbage-juice on them whilst sifting through the neighbor’s green bin.

Information that in years past would have required a private detective of Magnum PI-like skills to unearth is now visible to all of a person’s most far-fetched connections (at least those who haven’t been relegated to the shameful “limited-profile” status). While you might have one day expected to cross paths with that guy in elementary school who beat you up because you carried a briefcase to school, you would likely have expected this chance meeting to occur while he was pumping your gas and you were wild-eyed and chain-smoking – not via a Facebook message in which he reminisces on your school days as “such a larf!”.

Despite the privacy concerns it raises, and the doors to one’s troubled past it opens, Facebook has become hugely popular and most users do not fret a bit about keeping their Facebook fold informed of the yawning minutiae of their daily lives – events that, in the past, it would have seemed exceedingly arrogant to detail in a greeting card.

The UK newspaper The Daily Mail recently ran a finger-wagging piece on one group of Facebook members who truly could not give less of a sh*te about traditional public/private boundaries called 30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night – 80 reasons fewer than the 110 signposts offered by the tour guides for the recreationally drunk, The Shark Guys, in the seminal “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery”. (All the reasons referred to in the group's name, including “You find yourself peeing behind random buildings”, can be found here). Postings from this group comprise in part pics of women on the back-end of benders, passed out, exposing themselves, falling into bushes, or, in other words, behaving like 90% of the men their age who go out on Saturday nights.

The Daily Mail's story, the word count of which seems to have been padded by the headline “The ladettes who glorify their shameful drunken antics on Facebook”, achieves a tabloid double-whammy both by striking a conservative pose and churlishly criticizing these girls’ drunken antics, while at the same time finding an excuse to run large photos of young women with knickers in plain sight (the two we've run here being preferable in case nosy-bastard coworkers are a problem where you are).

We speak from experience when we say that journalism is largely the domain of those whose first choice of job, professional alcoholic, was unavailable, and as such we're guessing that the latter reason – Rule 141 of the Tabloid Handbook: When in doubt, think “Girls Gone Wild” and work from there – factored far more heavily into the decision to run the story. (Click here for full article)

The Shark Guys