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!

Russian Drunk Forgets Small Fortune on Train : Six reasons why the attendant should have kept it

Many Canadian children will recall having their mittens sewn onto the sleeves of their jackets in the winter. This was a practical measure on the part of parents, as mittens would otherwise be lost when a youngster drops them in a rushed attempt to fire a snowball at a moving target – like, say, a school bus or a police car – the kind of throw that requires nimble fingers unencumbered by mittens. We sometimes wish there were something similar for drunk adults, but we have yet to come up with a way of tying one’s mobile phone, wallet and house keys to one’s person without looking like the guy who gets the rubber hook at the institution’s yearly fishing trip.

What most of us lose while we’re out on the piss though rarely amounts to more than can fall out of a person’s pocket while horizontal in the back of a taxi. A drunk passenger on a train in Volgograd, Russia, however, forgot more than just a box of Chiclets and his membership card to the meat of the month club when he disembarked.

An attendant inspecting the train after he left found a bag containing eight million roubles, or about US$340,000, in one of the train’s expensive cabins. The attendant remembered that a cheerful passenger had been in there sucking back the vodka – three bottles (!) – and figured that he must have forgotten it when he left.

Here is where she made her terrible mistake. To quote the source: “While many would have been tempted to hang on to the money, Alla had no such ideas. She says other people’s money can’t bring you happiness, so she called the police.”

Six Reasons why she should have kept the money:

1) Other people’s money can bring you happiness. First, all money was probably at some point or another someone else’s money. Secondly, when money comes without you having had to toil and sacrifice leisure time in order to attain it, the pleasure of having it just goes right off the charts. This is why they have lotteries.

2) It would have taught this idiot a lesson. As mentioned earlier, every drunk misplaces things from time to time, but $340,000? If you lose that, it’s time for a wakeup call, and what better way to give somebody a valuable life lesson than doing it in a way that enriches you significantly.

3) It could have been drug money. While the original report specifically rules this possibility out by saying that the man in question did produce documents to show how he legally obtained such a small fortune, perhaps he was just a really good forger and he got this money after having some poor slob traffic drugs in a body cavity. Do you really want to reward that sort of behavior? Neither do we. Keep the money and buy your own drugs.

4) If he drank three bottles of vodka, he’s probably dead. The story does not mention the size of the bottles, but assuming that the man was drinking regular-sized bottles of vodka, three might be enough to have induced fatal alcohol poisoning. This didn’t happen, but the stewardess could have comforted herself with believing that it did and that she was just sparing his family a lot of painful bickering over his funds.

5) By returning the money you are implicitly encouraging other rich drunks to repeat this sort of behavior. Now that rich people know they can party on the train and be reckless with their money, they are sure to abuse this knowledge and become a public nuisance. Thanks, on behalf of the union.

6) You might not get a reward. We can understand that one’s moral compunction might result in giving back the money with the implicit understanding that a nice fat slice will later be cut out and given as a reward for honesty. What’s alarming in this case though is that according to the source story, there was no mention of the attendant receiving a reward for her honesty from the drunkard. Giving the money back and not getting a reward for doing so would result in such unspeakable bitterness that you would likely lose 10 years of your life due to the stress of it.

Champions League Beer Shortage: Brits Drink Moscow Dry

A common complaint leveled against soccer is that it's boring. Meanwhile, nobody bothers issuing the same critique about baseball, where the guys hawking Amstel get more of a workout running up and down the aisles plying semi-conscious onlookers with cheap suds than the various mesomorphs manning the field and where the play -- which is about as frenetic as a Van Gogh still life -- is interrupted so that a pitcher can practice.

No other sport we're aware of, save for highly competitive mobster bocce ball, allows the flow of action to grind to a halt so that one of the participants can get in a proper warm up while eyelids flutter. Basketball players don't stand around while play stops as a guy who previously temperature-controlled the bench with his arse hoists a few shots at the hoop and soccer players don't lounge about so a substitute, who's just finished wowing middle-aged housewives with sideline calisthenics, can come onto the pitch and take a few practice kicks.

[Editor's note: baseball is also one of the few sports where the manager, even though he's older than fossil fuel, suits up like the players as if a septuagenarian is going to be called in to pinch hit. It's also one of the few outdoor sports in which play is suspended for an amount of rainfall that would not put a halt to the average wedding]

One thing for certain is that for soccer or baseball, whether it's the heaps of abuse screamed at the mascot, impromptu cheap seat 'bat day' beatings, or flares resembling a Hezbollah missile attack fired off in the stands, the real action is either in the crowd, or in the case of British football, the 18 hours prior to kick-off when the heavy drinking commences.

Dutch fans have been known to whiz on automobiles with German plates, fans of some Italian squads to do fascist salutes, Argentinian fans to knife one another pre-match, however these supporters show Salvation Army-like gentility compared with their British counterparts.

That being said, British fans gave a better than usual accounting of themselves recently, when according to the Daily Star, the 80,000 yobs who descended on Moscow for the Champions league final between Man U and Chelsea, didn't kill or maim anyone, but instead, completely depleted the local beer supply.

A United fan noted, “We were all on good form and the drinks were flowing in this little place we had found near the Kremlin. “But suddenly the barmaid threw up her hands and said: ‘No more!’

Fans complained bitterly as the lager ran out and they were told, 'no beer, just vodka'.

For more on beer shortages of a more serious, global nature, click here.

French Happy Hour not so 'appy after all

As we've pointed out a few times here, we're Canadian and many Canadians take great pains to explain to bored foreigners who could not give two shits otherwise: we're much different from Americans. For example, the Great White North, for those of you who don't know, is an officially bilingual state, though in reality English speakers are much more well-versed in what's known as "Cereal box French". For our American friends, this refers to French language proficiency a well-fed gorilla could comfortably master in sign language, and that might lead the average tourist to a bathroom or the nearest lost and found should they be parachuted into Basse Normandie.

Colloquially, it refers to an ability to do little more in "The Language of Love that's not Italian" than read the back of a cereal box and determine its ingredients (say, if peanut products, a plastic inhalable toy or trans fats are contained therein) but would not get you off with Juliet Binoche if you met her in a bar.

For those of us who couldn't converse with an "enfant" with our "terrible" Francais, it's tempting when encountering a Frenchman to simply precede an English word with "La" or "Le" and hope not to be met with quizzical stares.

One phrase that would not be lost in translation, (like the eponymous movie starring Bill Murray should've been), is "Le Binge Drinking", so obviously adopted from the English as in the UK it's their national past-time second only to differentiating themselves from lowly continentals and not combing their hair.

Indeed, there are few countries, save for Russia or Germany, who can even begin to compete with the levels of self-ruination we've chronicled across the pond.

According to a recent report though, even France is battling the scourge of increased public drunkenness and is mulling over the banning of happy hour, that period of time between work and home life that doesn't leave you looking at your watch and wondering when it's time to punch the clock or go to bed.

Other possible measures could include restricting the sale of vodka, whiskey and other high-powered potables in discos to glasses, rather than entire bottles, that you could previously hoist above your head and swing around to the beat of 'Love in this Club' while pouring the contents into the mouth of whoever you'd like to bed that evening.

They are also considering raising the legal age to three years below that of the US, where hairlines can recede, and mortgages can be bought at the comparatively ripe age of 21. Mon dieu! Sacre bleu!

Drunk Tank-Driver Smashes House in Vodka Run

In The Shark Book, we devoted an entire chapter, “Hard Corps Drunks: The Few, The Brave, The Blotto” to the exploits in liquid form of those in uniform – among them a young recruit nearly blinded while playing a boozy game of “fireball hockey” [it’s aptly named] at an Army base, and a navy man whose fecal foray onto shore left a bad impression, and a bad smell in town.

But possibly the most shocking of all of these, or at least the one that you would expect the firing squad to start tuning up for, was the sale of a tank by Russian army forces to their Chechen enemies for around 8,000 bucks after the two opposing sides voted for peace by laying down their weapons and drinking their faces off together for an afternoon. That story and another about a Russian soldier who stole a dinghy from the merchant ship he was on and nearly perished at sea in violent weather just to procure some vodka on land are both instructive preludes to the following.

The cold Russian winters no doubt gave the soldiers manning a tank in the Ural mountains a hankering for some liquid warmth, and they stopped off in a nearby village to procure a couple of bottles of vodka for the journey. Fortunately, some quick-thinking citizen had his mobile phone at the ready to catch the aftermath: after picking up the booze, the apparently drunk driver then got back into the tank and proceeded to crash it into a nearby house.

A lenient Army colonel made the following comment on the incident: "Of course, there were violations but the crew acted in good faith to catch up with its unit." That the crew stopped off in this village to fuel up in such a manner was something he did not touch upon in his statement.

The video is below, and while neither of us, unless the hour is late and we’re drinking the good stuff, can speak much Russian, here is what we guess was said at the start of it:

Driver: I got it! Couple of bottles of the cheap stuff. Bootleggers eh! (Laughs and drunkenly fishes through his pocket for his keys).

Other soldier: Say, are you alright to drive? Maybe I should take over while you get some sleep.

Driver: Nonsense! I'm fine! You’re such a worry wort! I barely had anything to drink, besides, I had a heavy lunch. No problem!

Other soldier: Wait! Too fast!

(Screams from the person whose house has just underwent impromptu renovations)