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.

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!

Man drinks two pints of vodka to avoid confiscation!

We live in a post 9/11 era and will continue to do so barring the apocalypse or a patent on a time machine. Ne’er-do-well terrorists with frequent-flyer miles (entry into the mile-high club being forsaken in this life for an attractive consolation prize in the next) have caused security at airports to tighten like the circle of police officers around a public demonstration for the poor. Restrictions on liquids being brought on board airplanes mean that one can no longer stroll on board with booze, cologne, hair gel and all the other accouterments a gentleman needs to have on hand to be able to properly flirt with flight attendants once in the air.

In Nuremberg Germany, a man getting ready to board a plane to his hometown of Dresden on the final leg of a return trip from a holiday in Egypt was told that he would have to either pour out the two bottles of vodka he had in tow or pay a fee to have the bag containing them checked in with the rest of his luggage.

Now, vodka is the world’s most popular distilled beverage and apparently so entrenched in popular culture that the insane think it a viable Halloween costume (pictured here) and the bathtub version is said to be so strong that copious amounts of it consumed at an ashram luau are rumored to have once resulted in swami Sai Baba being struck temporarily blind in his third eye.

We enjoy vodka as much as that demonstrative bearded fellow at the corner pub who strikes the surface of the bar loudly when ordering up the next round. It’s been described as tasteless, as has our brand of humor, and that’s why we drink it to excess when there’s an oversupply of orange juice lying around that needs to be put to good use. But as much as we enjoy a glass of the hard stuff to toast victory and curse defeat, had we been in the German man’s position, we probably would have just paid the bloody fine.

The man in question chose instead to unscrew the cap and chug the entire two pints worth right there. Now, as we’ve noted in The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death, that kind of vodka consumption is not recommended, although to be fair the downing of one litre of the stuff did, according to medical officials, limber up a Russian gentleman and help him survive a 40-foot fall from his balcony after a misstep while he was out enjoying some much needed fresh air to go along with the equivalent of the 22 ½ shots he had just downed.

The German vodka-lover in this case quickly lost the ability to walk or do much else as the alcohol ran hell over his innards. Acute alcohol poisoning nearly killed the man, however he was taken for treatment to a hospital in Nuremberg where he was expected to make a full recovery and no doubt be stuck with a hellish hangover that will serve as a more than adequate reminder to shove his booze into his suitcase next time.