New Coke Vitamin Water (Bottle of snake oil not included)

Tales of Coke's ability to dissolve a set of choppers in a glass overnight or to put a sheen on a rust-stained kitchen sink might be urban legends (we ended up eating the T-bone we had soaking in a vat of the stuff, so we can't comment conclusively on that one, but don't recommend this method of preparation to diabetics), there is no doubt that the soft drink has ruined many alcoholic beverages. As far as we're concerned, Coke is the sine qua non wimp-additive for those who can't handle their liquor, and responsible for ruining otherwise perfectly good rum. You can distinguish the coke-base drunk from your typical drunk by the rotten teeth that accompany his pickled liver in his golden years.

The "Cuba Libre", (or Rum & Coke) as it's known in countries, such as Canada, where freedom of mobility rights extend to actually visiting there whenever you choose, is the world's most popular highball though the "Coke" part is usually abandoned for straight rum by the time the taste-buds warm to it, or when someone turns 17---whatever comes first.

Now, Coke, which was a lot more fun when it was being hawked in the sticks as a coca-leaf infused patent medicine, is returning to its old-timey hucksterism glory days with the introduction of a "vitamin drink" to compete with Gatorade, because when you think "vitamins", your neurons automatically fire "malty, high-caloric, brown sugar beverage".

This drink, Vitaminwater, counts among its high-profile endorsers, fast-break fornicator Kobe Bryant, and a bunch of NBA ballers, who if they were compensated well-enough, would even smack their lips at the prospect of a root vegetable turnip-based libation.

Back in our day, its competitor Gatorade came in a packet not unlike the cheese in Kraft Dinner and was mixed with several parts water on the soccer field , and would've been dumped on the coach in victory had we not lost or forfeited every game.

Apparently, according to reports, this saccharine soylent green currently occupies 80% of the sports drink market, and Coke is looking to get in on the action. Shockingly, according to the website Scienceline, Coke is not putting out the healthiest product on the market. First, some vitamins are water-soluble -- ie they can pass into your bloodstream easily via water, and others are fat-soluble which means you can gulp back as much Vitaminwater as you like, but unless you're washing back a meal, you're unlikely to enjoy any benefits whatsoever. (And if you are washing back a meal with vitamin water, we don't want to have dinner with you.) Moreover, the two heaping tablespoons of sugar that are dumped into every bottle of Vitaminwater will ensure that while you are deluding yourself about the health benefits of this sugary drink, your dentist will be out in his driveway patting down his new Mercedes with a baby's diaper and thanking the heavens for the arrival of Vitaminwater.

Vitamins in the B-complex group are water-soluble, and if you're a heavy drinker, then it's likely that you will develop a vitamin-B deficiency over time. While its claims to producing the "Gatorade of Beers" might be a stretch, at least Stampede, the Texas brewer of a Vitamin-B-infused beer, has got its vitamin basics down.

Bear Stern: Ursa Major Mauls Mashed Mom and Have A Shark Sandwich on Us: The Shark Guys Mark 100 Blog Entries!

When a tiger nearly made an “uno” out of the duo Siegfried & Roy, the effete conjurer Siegfried did not heed this clear warning that wild animals do not belong in the world of men in sequined jumpsuits, but rather insisted that the tiger that mauled his sidekick was "protecting rather than attacking him".

A similarly baffling disconnect from reality guided the life of the sad lunatic Timothy Treadwell, subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary “Grizzly Man”, who took Winnie The Pooh as cinema verite and decided to spend his summers among grizzly bears. He didn’t survive his final trip, because, having been lulled into a false sense of security by previous trips when bears had not packed their lunchboxes with his innards, he didn’t bring along the arsenal that we would assume mandatory for such a camp-out: a portable drum of bear spray, sticks of dynamite to light and throw behind you when a bear doesn’t buy your “play dead” routine, a tank etc.

What makes these stories truly puzzling is that they cannot be blamed squarely on the drink – Siegfried and Roy have been performing for decades and heck even Charles Bukowski was known to sober up from time to time. Treadwell, although a recovering alcoholic (who might well still be alive today if he had just kept on boozing) at the time of his death, would have had to have had Budweiser air-dropped in to reach him at his remote Alaskan camps.

In our book, the first-ever published compendium of blue-ribbon drunk stories taken from newspapers around the world “The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery, we covered feats that were just as gallingly dangerous as the above, but at least those featured in the chapter “Man Bites Dog and Dog Bites Back” were plastered at the time.

One of the stories in that chapter, “Bear-ly Legal”, chronicles the exploits of a drunken Ukrainian man who thought himself so strong that no human could best him, and decided to seek out suitable competition in the bear cage of his local zoo – only alert zookeepers kept him from a Treadwell-ian-like fate.

You can imagine our surprise then when we came across an international news item involving yet another drunk mauled by a bear in the Ukraine. The woman reportedly wandered into the bear enclosure at a local farm, an intrusion which upset one of its occupants – the kind of upset that animals of that species tend to externalize by mauling to death the intruder. The next time you feel bad for opening a door on two lovers at a party thinking it’s the bathroom, just think of how much it might have been.

Along with making sure that our record of chronicling ursine-related drunk stories remains in tact, we also have an announcement to make: this is our 100th blog! It’s been quite the ride, with quite the number of DUI convictions along the way. While not as remarkable an accomplishment as, say, having lived 100 years and being first on your block to get a letter shuffled out by the lowly aid of a high-ranking government official (click here for an example of how to do it up right should you live to 100), we did want to mention it and thank everyone who has stopped by and had a round with us. We're enjoying the party and are glad to have made the acquaintance of a few new drinking buddies to add to our ever-expanding circle, among them the good folks at CollegeDrinker.com where we regularly contribute Shark material.

We'll continue to belly up to the bar three times a week to bring you the best drunk stories, drinking trends and all matter of alcohol-soaked news.

Salut!

The Shark Guys

Digging that Bronze Age Booze Find

If Darwin were alive today, he’d be 200 years old and fielding questions about how he cheated death, perhaps on the daytime talk circuit. He would've also born witness to the 'my great aunt was Irish and now I'm going to sport a fatuous plastic hat that I can later vomit into' that passes for St Patrick's Day on these shores.

Observing such debauchery would leave little doubt in anyone's mind (unless you’re Mike Huckabee) that humans are basically just like other animals.

One of us actually witnessed a trail of vomit that spanned the entire length of a subway car, and though we’re not gastroenterologists, judging by the puke’s fluid state, whoever did that should likely see one—or at least supplement their diet with a bit of fiber, perhaps all-bran.

By archaeological accounts, humans, prior to sullying mass transit and other public places with their innards, have been getting blotto for nearly 6000 years. The Bronze Age was a time, not only of unheeded dermatological warnings and the rise of George Hamilton, but when our forebears started using fancier tools to fell giant woolly mammoths (or dinosaurs, again if you're the aforementioned Mike Huckabee). Along with this increasing level of sophistication, the likes of which not seen either on New Year's or St Patty's Day, came the domestication of the grapevine.

The world's oldest bottle of wine, if you're interested, though it's not for sale and doesn't make for a nice table vintage even if it's given a few months to breathe, was unearthed during excavation near in a vineyard near the town of Speyer, Germany. It was inside one of two Roman stone sarcophaguses that were dug up, before it could be used by some dirty centurion to get some young maiden out of her toga. The bottle dates from approximately 325 A.D.

Recently, in Kent, UK another discovery corroborates the notion that we naked apes have been getting sh*t-faced and putting considerable effort into it, for several thousand millennia.

A 4000-year old Bronze Age skeleton with a pottery vessel placed at its feet was discovered, that researchers suggest was likely ‘a type of beer mug’. The body was in a "crouched" position, which is not only typical of the period, with knees drawn up to the chest, but typical of anyone who spent the morning of the 18th, genuflecting before the Porcelain God.

Drunk bank robbery busted minutes later

This morning, rather than remark on last night's goings on, Oscar-wise and the obviously amazing adhesive properties of the primer used to affix John Travolta's hair to his bald noggin, or the nearly comatose presenter Harrison Ford (indistinguishable from the best performances he's ever given, minus the leather vests), we decided to focus on 'Best Drunk Performance During Commission of a Federal Felony', courtesy of a Chicago bank robber. [Editor's Note: Of course, in the event any of our seat filler insiders aren't shaken down and tossed out onto Hollywood Blvd and beaten, we'll give you updates on whichever drunken celebrity does something worthy of noting here.]

In the Shark Book, we chronicled a blotto bank heist that ended inauspiciously when the 'robbin' hood' headed to the nearest bar (and we're not speaking euphemistically here as it was two blocks over) and tried to buy rounds with his security ink-stained loot.

A Windy City brigand, following in that guy's shuffling foot-steps, made the unorthodox move of showing his identification prior to tipping off the teller that he was half in the bag, while instructing them to fill it.

“I’m drunk, lower the money, give me $2,000 right now in one hundred dollar bills. Right now, I don’t want to hurt anyone!” he drawled, reaching over and attempting to grab loot from the drawer.

A witness directed Chicago's finest to a restaurant one and a half blocks from the bank, where they found a man who fit the description of the robber just 15 minutes after the robbery.

Apparently, in the interceding 14 minutes, he had outstanding debts to pay as a bank audit reported $213 missing, and $18 was found on the suspect at the time of his arrest.

Taxi Cab Confession: Cab driver backs over drunk guy

In many respects, big city drunks have it easy over their blotto backwoods brethren. There's no need to blow a sizable portion of your paycheck--the remainder of what's been left in the jukebox of a local saloon--on a cab fare into the hinterlands, if cabs even service those back roads at all. At least you're occasionally able to stumble home if you remember such details as your address (which you distinctly recall scribbling on a napkin and stuffing into a stranger's purse) or that the shortest distance between two points is the straight line you cannot walk.

Sure you might wander into an alley inhabited by a tire iron-wielding maniac (who doesn't look like they drive but who take out their bus-pass related frustrations on the noggins of unwitting passersby), but you're at greater risk of having your reasonable facsimile of 'home' be a yellowing mattress hauled out on garbage day.

A Sydney man after a night on the town and eschewing public transit (a good move generally, as we've shown here) found out that navigating home in an urban milieu is fraught with peril even if you're taking what should be the safest route. According to the Daily Telegraph, a cabbie was arrested after allegedly reversing over the man, who he thought was trying to abscond without paying the meter fare---cab drivers being second only to bartenders on the service industry's 'most often stiffed when it comes to paying the bill' hierarchy.

The Aussie partier, whose drunkenness cannot be called into dispute as he would only give his name as 'Columbus', claimed he was 'smacked to the footpath', by the cab driver, not once, but twice. In keeping with the 'seeing double' sensory experiences often occurring in these situations, police investigators later confirmed that the cab had only reversed once.

According to reports, the cab driver had looked bewildered as he was lead away in handcuffs, asking why they had arrested him and not the man who'd recently painted the town fire engine red and didn't have the good sense to get off the road. He was later released without charge.
It's unknown how 'Columbus' fared the rest of his voyage.

Low Rider: Man Arrested for drunk driving a lawn mower

Hustler, the company that makes lawnmowers, not the magazine known for more beaver shots than Canadian tourism literature, claims its 'Super Z' riding mower is the fastest production zero turn mower on the market.

Given that our subscription to Popular Mechanics has expired, we're going to have to take their word for it, not to mention the fact that we both live in high rise apartment buildings and require binoculars to see actual grass.

We imagine that you wouldn't necessarily want to go off roadin' with the missus on one of these bad boys, but for a mower it can certainly scorch rubber with nearly 30 horsepower. And with a top speed of 15 miles an hour, it's just powerful enough so that you can drag race a Segway scooter and leave it in the dust too, provided there is a mighty tail wind kicking up.

Riding mowers may be getting faster, but manufacturers may want to think twice about making cup holders standard, following the wasted antics of a New Zealander, who was stopped by police for generating not exactly G-forces at a whopping 5 miles an hour.

The man, who'd already had his real license suspended, had been using his riding mower to get around---which he won't any longer, as police impounded it for a month.

The blade runner defended himself, saying even bicycles went faster than his unorthodox chariot: "I've watched them go past me."

On a somewhat related note, Memphis-based Tiger Time Lawn care has been doing booming business with their low-cut bikini clad maintenance service since its inception last year.

For a 'slightly higher fee than a normal grass cut' the company will send over a woman hopefully not unlike those pictured in their promotional material so you can enjoy a beverage in the comfort of your lawn-chair, and not risk becoming another tragic, one man statistic.

Drunk 'Grim Reaper' Arrested: Death Warmed Over Slightly

Unfortunately, the online Christmas shopping season has come and gone so you might be forced to defer your philanthropy in the form of some promissory gift note indicating that "the George Foreman grill is on its way, I swear". Sadly, at this late juncture, no warp-speed-porn downloading internet service provider or benevolent FedEx guy is going to save your yuletide bacon and ensure your gift arrives in its intended hands by the 25th. At best, you’re resigned to rummaging through the garage for a suitable gift that hasn't been soiled by raccoons or packing a can of bear repellent for a last ditch trip to a big box outlet.

Of course, there are those people for whom a holiday gift is a priority hovering slightly above poinsettias for an off-hours plumber, and for whom you can shop worry-free as your paths aren’t likely to cross until well after the Christmas eggnog spills have been mopped up. For these folk and loved ones alike--whose stockings once hung by the chimney with care, and by February are likely to be in a moldy basement in a box alongside defective Christmas lights---may we suggest the delightful compendium, The Man who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery, available for the first time in the lower 49 states and possibly Alaska.

In The Shark Book and in previous posts, we've warned of the dangers of drinking while in costume, not recommended either for lay-folk or those taking part in dog park productions of The Tempest, as while it would appear they would make your drunken exploits less conspicuous by virtue of anonymity, it does just the opposite.

Case in point, in Lancaster, England, a man celebrating his mate's birthday and getting tighter than a pawn shop handshake on excess lager and vodka, got separated from his drinking buddies and ended up wandering around lost and nearly naked on a beach. The man, cold and wet decided to seek shelter posthaste as Northwest England is not in the Rolodex of location scouts as a suitable substitute for Malibu. He climbed through a window of a local town hall, where according to newspaper reports he "soiled his underwear and threw them into a black bin-bag. " Stark naked, he happened upon what looked to be the Grim Reaper. Not compelled to shake hands or engage in an interminable chess match, he soon realized that it was just a costume, which he put on before wandering over to a local police station, where he unsurprisingly had to wait for several hours as this isn't the type of garment that gets you top drawer customer service.

The case, which had one probation officer leaving the courtroom in a fit of laughter, and dubbed "strange but serious," by the defense counsel, resulted in a conditional discharge for burglary and trespassing.

Make it a double – she's drinking for two

Authors of a recent study published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health offered some good news to pregnant women who may want to continue on in the lifestyle that got them in that condition in the first place when they said that it might be ok for expectant mothers to binge drink on occasion without harming their unborn. This goes against orthodox thinking on the subject and will come as a surprise to those who have lost major points with the missus when suggesting during a lull in Lamaze class that everybody repair to the local bar because “this is all just a big money-grab anyway”.

But before you and your mates and a yummy mummy of your acquaintance toast the baby by gently tapping the outside of the womb with your can of Michelob Light and rubbing it for luck, keep in mind that the study was limited to the effects of the occasional binge enjoyed by someone who was not a chronic alcoholic. A number of studies have linked heavy drinking during pregnancy to stunted growth, birth defects and abnormal neural development – in short, the conditions that plague the starting line-up of your company’s softball team.

After an examination of thousands of research papers and more brow-furrowing than goes on at the cue-card prepping session at the Miss World pageant, the study’s authors concluded that there was almost no conclusive evidence linking binge drinking, which they pegged at five drinks in one session (low, but we’ll let it pass given the context), and such birth maladies as fetal alcohol syndrome.

The study did find a minor connection between a mother binge drinking and the issue of her loins ending up with a lower verbal IQ, learning problems, a predilection towards delinquency, and – pure speculation on our part here – an increased likelihood that PTA mailings concerning the child’s schooling will need to be delivered to the neighborhood pub.

For those of you who take your medical advice from us – not recommended, though we will gladly dispense with recommendations on patent medicines that can treat all sorts of ailments – the study was inconclusive and its authors recommended that women not binge drink “just to be safe”. That said, the authors also say that those who do go out to tilt the odd half-dozen in celebration of the blessed event, or to drown their sorrows as they bemoan how unreliable birth control is, should not feel too bad because as of right now the evidence is minimal that it will do any harm.

The Shark Guys

Energy Drinks: A lot of (Red) Bull?

We first took notice of Red Bull in a Thai red-light district. Okay, let’s rephrase that so it appears less sordid. We first took notice of Red Bull in a Thai red-light district where a bloody kick-boxing card was being held. Better. Alright, never mind. We were in attendance, VIP section, when the ref was conveniently looking the other way and one of the combatants took one for the team, right smack in the Red Bull logo where one hopes the Muay Thai tomato can in question was sporting a protective cup. (Said logo was placed nearer to home base than it is in the accompanying photo).

Speaking of cups, and in tribute of segues that hit you like a Muay Thai roundhouse to the head, we Shark Guys drink our coffee black -- you know, like real men. None of this foam that looks like it would line the mouth of that German Shepherd that guards the lumberyard. As coffee purists we’d never really taken notice of any other caffeinated beverages like Red Bull and generally steered clear of those who’d consume it, thinking them the type of people with far too much energy --and much of it misguided-- to begin with anyway.

Doing some investigative work though, which may or may not have included an ill-advised downing of a can of it during an amphetamine bender (for research purposes only you understand, and for safety reasons we may or may not have had a guy in tow who claimed to have done a year of med school in the Caribbean), we tentatively concluded that it could indeed be described as "an energy drink". However, given we’re pretty energetic already and known to fire off a few daybreak rounds from a rooftop balcony after being up for the duration of the night, we were indisposed to blaming the drink for this particularly animated state.

If you don't already know this (perhaps you were the last graduate of that nunnery before it got shuttered), mixing caffeinated beverages with alcohol makes many a delightful tonic. (Indeed, several Shark Book blogs have been written with the authors using dizzying centrifugal force to get just the right Cuba Libre mix in one hand and typing with the other) It's also the conduit for getting cheap whiskey down many a gullet as well as getting the irredeemably unattractive the sexual attention they don't usually garner—but now that the Coke or Pepsi in a highball has been replaced by something researchers have described as (like pretty much everything else a human can ingest) "dangerous to your health" and as potent as three cups of coffee at once.

Apparently the top watchdog, or monger of fear depending on who you ask, the FDA, does not subject dietary supplements to safety and efficacy testing prior to approval, meaning that the full slate of ingredients in energy drinks, much like hep A at your favorite lunch spot, are not fully screened.

The Shark Guys