Magic Shoes Bring B & G out of Retirement
It was inevitable. We’ve gotten so desperate, deviant, disenfranchised, and … defyed here at B & G that we’ve decided to come out of early retirement. I know, I know. We come and go with less predictability (though more frequency) than these gosh darned 13 year magic cicadas that have plagued my neighborhood for the past month. Last time B & G disappeared and subsequently reappeared there were swashbuckling tales of the African bush, hippos, spies, and top secret clearances. This time, my only excuse is the soul crushing tedium of cubicle life. As you may or may not know, this blog has periodically been about culture, music, bourbon, reality shows and zombies. So what, you might ask, is so important, so compelling, that it has awoken the sleeping giant? One of the first rules of writing is show don’t tell. So, here you go:
I give you, the Gravity Defyer. I first saw these while thumbing through a magazine in the local supermarket. Take a good look at the logo. Yes, it looks like a sperm. I honestly thought the ad I saw in the mag was some sort of satire, but then I thought how expensive full-page real estate in glossy magazines must be and looked the company up when I got home. They’re real alright, and there’s really not much to say about this. Just peruse the Website. Please.
If you’re like me, these things open up some questions, not the least of which are: 1) Who buys this shit? 2) Who was on the logo design team? and 3) What exactly is a “versoshock reverse trampoline sole”? They’re also $139, which seems expensive at first but I suppose is a small price to pay for magic shoes with a picture of sperm on the sides.
Please tell me the ad team is aware of the joke.
Bourbon’s Old Friends
Cartoon by Mike J at Lunaphyte.
Alternative Titles for Sarah Palin’s Book
1) The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being an Idiot
Comment with your suggestions for other possible titles.
Bourbon and Ginger on the Rocks
Cartoon by Mike Johnson at Lunaphyte.
One impressive feature of the WordPress online blogging platform is that it tracks your blog’s traffic statistics. You can track how often people have visited your site, which posts have received the most traffic, the sites from which people found your blog, and words people entered into search engines that led them to you. Let’s face it, Bourbon and Ginger ain’t exactly the Huffington Post, nor does it aspire to be, but I am curious about the tiny bit of traffic the blog does get. Interestingly, few people come here looking for anything related to bourbon or ginger. What follows is a list of the search engine topics that led people to Bourbon and Ginger over the past month or so.
Brigitte Nielsen tops the list by a long shot, and when you add to that search all the variations of “Flava Flav” and “Brigitte Nielsen” — the most disturbing of which is “flava brigitte nielsen naked” — you get 45, which proves the point of the blog entry in which these two names appear, and caused me to put Marvin the Martian’s cell number on speed dial. I get, “chicken parts.” I could see myself searching those words if I happened to buy a whole chicken and needed to know how to deal with it. Another good one, “chips mud wrestling,” is an excellent business venture idea for our friends at Chip Millard’s Weblog if the whole financial services thing doesn’t work out for them. I’m not only confused but appalled that the words, “kream shows us her extreme squirting ski,” led someone here. Whoever wrote, “unconscious porn ginger,” should probably be in jail. The words, “hillbilly alliteration,” could be used to describe the poetic aesthetic at Bourbon and Ginger. And “i pulled off my wifes sweaty riding boot,” totally blows my mind. But I think my personal favorite is, “what does bourben [sic] do to your brain.” My friend, whoever you are, I think you’ve found your answer. No need to even hit “search” on that one.
| brigitte nielsen | 26 |
| chicken parts | 6 |
| flavor flav and brigitte nielsen | 6 |
| chris feasel | 4 |
| what does bourben do to your brain | 3 |
| brigitte nielsen flavor flav | 3 |
| brigitte nielsen and flava flav | 3 |
| lunaphyte.wordpress | 2 |
| bourbonandginger | 2 |
| chips mud wrestling | 2 |
| kream shows us her extreme squirting ski | 2 |
| parts of chicken | 2 |
| hut in east timor | 2 |
| flavor flav brigitte nielsen | 2 |
| bourbon ginger | 1 |
| parts of a chicken | 1 |
| example of description of chicken | 1 |
| comebacks to ginger insults | 1 |
| top secret security clearance | 1 |
| ginger weizenbier | 1 |
| hillbilly alliteration | 1 |
| chiken part | 1 |
| chicken parts illustration | 1 |
| enter my octagon | 1 |
| bourbonandginger.wordpress.com | 1 |
| brigitte nielsen kill | 1 |
| backyard chicken killing | 1 |
| brigette nielsen young photos | 1 |
| flava brigitte nielsen naked | 1 |
| the parts of a chicken | 1 |
| exercise in mozambique | 1 |
| unconscious porn ginger | 1 |
| risky real chance of love | 1 |
| britt uzzell | 1 |
| “rocky iv” “flat cap” | 1 |
| parts of chicken w/ definition | 1 |
| flavor flav and brigitte nielsen ap imag | 1 |
| bridget nielsen flavor flav | 1 |
| wife harper ben | 1 |
| “famous writers” “bourbon” | 1 |
| bourban and ginger | 1 |
| brigette nielsen | 1 |
| “restless leg syndrome” | 1 |
| anais nin long hair | 1 |
| i pulled off my wifes sweaty riding boot | 1 |
| brigitte nielsen flava | 1 |
| chicken part | 1 |
| parts and functions of chicken | 1 |
| coyote acme franzen | 1 |
Bourbon and Ginger Does McSweeney’s
Sincerity is so 30 years ago. In our post-postmodern world, we are so cool that we make fun of ourselves for making fun of everything. You ask yourself, “What the hinges of Hades are you going on about, Jonny?” Just the fact that Bourbon and Ginger is gracing the virtual pages of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. I admit that the publication is a bit uppity, but it’s also pretty funny. I recommend perusing it when you have a chance.
A Complicated Tribute
About ten years ago I was at the height of my vagabond existence. I’d been in a constant state of motion for several years and had just returned to North Carolina after working my way around Alaska and Oregon. During this brief stint in NC I road-tripped from the Triangle to the coast with one of my closest friends, the Doctor (he makes people feel good), and a young woman named Ally whom I would later marry. We didn’t get together on that trip or make any sort of romantic connection. This isn’t a love story; I’m sorry. This is a story about a guy named Chris Feasel who was found dead on a municipal bus in San Francisco a few weeks ago. What’s odd is that the last time I saw him I was in a bar in Wrightsville Beach that I went into with this woman I barely knew but who is now asleep a few feet from me.
When I saw Feasel in that beach bar, it had been five years since I’d seen him before that, when we were both students at UNCW. We’d been friends at the university, not the closest of friends, but we hung out. So when we ran into each other after five years, we fell into conversation easily, though I can’t recall what he said brought him back to North Carolina from San Francisco, where he’d been living for several years. We were, as I’ve noted, in a bar, and prior to that I’d been to an oyster roast, whuppin it up since early afternoon, so my memory is shaky. What I do remember is that Feasel had a newish tattoo, some word I don’t remember in gothic lettering wrapping the entirety of his throat, and I recall thinking that a tattoo like that limited one’s job prospects to tattoo artist or musician. Feasel was neither, which explained his lack of legal tender that night.
We approached the bar together and Chris placed a handful of nickels and dimes on the bar, asking for a Budweiser while assuring the visibly annoyed bartender that it was all there and that she didn’t have to count it. I was embarrassed for him even though he didn’t seem embarrassed at all. I told them both that I’d get it for him, that it was on me, and when this registered with him he said, “OK then. Make it a Guinness.”
I grew tired of buying him beer for nothing, so at some point that night he decided to work for his beer. The least he could do, I thought, was entertain me. We got onto the subject of the infamous Whiskey snowboarding videos in which snowboarders were shown breaking bottles over their own heads. Things are fuzzy here, and I believe the idea was Feasel’s, but we somehow negotiated a verbal agreement stating that I would provide Feasel with a fresh beer if he could break a bottle over his head. He tried unsuccessfully several times, making a noticable “dinking” sound, then smiling and rubbing his head. They made it look so easy in the videos, but this was the only time I’d witnessed an attempt like this in person. This is what I learned: It’s all about commitment.
In one of those situations that made perfect sense after-the-fact, I found myself apologizing to an employee of the bar and agreeing with him that, yes, something like that should probably get us thrown out. I promised that we would stop causing trouble and bought Feasel a beer for his effort.
I felt bad later for making an old friend do tricks for beer. Aside from the fact that he had no money, I distinctly remember feeling a total lack of optimism after that encounter. On some level I knew that Feasel would not be alright. I did not know at the time that he was already struggling with serious addiction, or that he had begun to build a lengthy record of petty crimes related to his addiction. The article about his death — which was apparently newsworthy due to the fact that a bus driver may or may not have locked up his bus and left for the evening without noticing a dead or dying man still on the bus — noted that Feasel had not had a fixed address for several years. So my hunch is that entertaining me for free beer ranked low on the list of abasements he suffered during the past decade.
In college he was nothing if not aggressively opposed to mainstream mediocrity, to bourgeois hypocrisy, and it probably would have annoyed him that I (along with many others) found out about his death through Facebook. There’s a tendency with this type of life and death to say that it could have been us. A few bad breaks, a few wrong turns, and a cleaning crew could be finding my body on a city bus after hours. We seek the discomfort that these thoughts provide. They keep us honest, humble, wary. We tell ourselves that we have to be careful. But in reality, only a few of my old acquaintances didn’t make it. The jury is still out on a few more, but what these people have in common is addiction. And there’s no easy solution. In a string of comments attached to the article I was sent about Chris, someone noted that Chris’s death was evidence that social services and access to various drug treatment programs in San Francisco were flawed. Perhaps this is true, but the picture of who does and doesn’t make it through addiction is not a simple one. I knew a guy who overdosed a few years ago in his childhood bedroom, with his parents at home, just a few days after completing a treatment program. It seems he had plenty of support and supervision, yet still managed to die from his addiction.
Chris Feasel was a complicated guy, and you won’t find a syrupy tribute here. In college I came to know him as a raucous anti-establishment skate punk who made fun of most everyone and heckled frat boys and beach tourists. But when he gave me a ride home from class one day in the car his parents bought him, he was polite, soft-spoken and thoughtful. Here I could embark on some lengthy sermon about unrealized potential, but we all know that story. I’ll just say that he was intelligent, often hilarious and had a lot to offer, and it saddens me that he died young in such an undignified setting.
Comic Masterpiece Saves Man’s Life
Last week I was driving back from Raleigh after taking the GRE. I had mixed emotions about the outcome: pretty good score on the verbal, bombed the math compared to the time I took the test 5 years ago (reviewing=helpful), and the writing section felt fine, although I won’t have that score for a few weeks. It’s a tiring test, exhausting really, and I started feeling bluesy on the ride home. The day was overcast and drizzly. I started thinking about my grandmother, whom I grew up with, quickly degenerating from inoperable cancer. I was also sulking about the fact that I am anchored by family and circumstance to a geographic region that has essentially zero professional prospects for my chosen career path. With all this negativity percolating in the coffee pot of my mind, I had a brief, though significant, bout of something my lovely wife likes to call a pity party.
After stopping into a gas station and standing in line behind a desperate-looking laborer buying malt liquor on his way home from work, I decided a good podcast might help take my mind off things. I settled on one called “Extreme Writing,” two humor selections from the New Yorker read by Jonathan Franzen: Veronica Geng’s, “Love Trouble is My Business,” and Ian Frazier’s, “Coyote v. Acme.” Veronica Geng’s piece was like a jazz fusion guitar solo: impressive but self indulgent. On the other hand, “Coyote v. Acme,” was pure joy. ”Coyote,” was first published in the New Yorker in 1990, and I’m not sure how I missed it through the years. The concept is simple and flawlessly executed: Wile E. Coyote’s attorney makes his opening statement in a civil suit against the Acme company. Brilliant. Thematically it does little more than take a gentle stab at litigiousness in our society. But who cares? It’s not necessary for every single act of literature to be a political manifesto.
Listening to Franzen read this, I laughed my tuckus off and momentarily forgot about my worries. Surely, a sense of humor must be an evolutionary adaptation. I can imagine that at times it prevented our ancestors from going on homicidal or suicidal rampages in neighboring caves. So if you’re feeling like going over to your neighbor’s cave to raise holy hell, I recommend reading “Coyote v. Acme,” or listening to the podcast. Don’t risk having a “complete sense of humor failure,” which is a phrase I’ll explain another time.
5 Beverages You Should Never Drink
In my endless quest to come up with useless lists for my useless twists, and because this blog ostensibly has something to do with alcohol, and because I often give suggestions on what to drink, I decided to come up with a list of things not to drink. Hopefully this ridiculous waste of your time is an antidote to the seriousness of the previous post. I’ll try not to make a habit of either extreme.
5) Wine coolers
You probably won’t have to worry about this one. I don’t think they’re sold anymore, but if you happen to stumble into a time machine set to 1988, you’ll need this advice. Remember Matilda Bay? I don’t. Nothing says, “I’m putting on my Hammer pants, mounting my rice rocket, and heading down to the strip in Myrtle Beach,” quite like this stomach-turning sugar-fest.
4) Icehouse
Or any ice beer for that matter. Pay a $2 cover at your local cheese bar, order some pitchers of Icehouse, throw in a few hot wings, and get ready for a date with a higher-than-recommended dosage of Ibuprofen and a quest to find the world’s softest toilet paper.
3) Boone’s Farm
See number 5.
2) King Cobra
With close runners up: Private Stock, Olde English 800, and St. Ides. Drink a 40 of the Cobra and consider yourself bitten. Simultaneously induces an overwhelming desire to kick other people’s asses while drastically increasing the probability that other people will have an overwhelming desire to kick your ass.
1) Cisco
aka “Liquid Crack.” The makers of this evil fortified wine, who also bring us Wild Irish Rose and aggressively market this swill in impoverished neighborhoods, were forced in 1991 by the Federal Trade Commission to drop the slogan, “Takes you by surprise,” from the product. Additionally, Cisco now comes with a warning on the label: “This is not a wine cooler.”
The effects of this stuff are legendary. I was standing next to a guy who was drinking this at a bonfire party some years ago. When he started casually sipping from the bottle, he was standing there quietly minding his own business and staring thoughtfully at the fire. Without warning, he developed an uncontrollable double restless leg syndrome, dancing in place like he had fire ants crawling up his legs. After a few minutes of the fire ants dance, he screamed like a howler monkey, and walked through the fire. Repeatedly. Entertaining? Yes. Dangerous? Absolutely.
10 Famous Dead People at a Party
I was bored this evening and started a thought experiment (in that I was experimenting with trying to think), imagining famous dead people I’d like to meet. Then I started thinking that it might be fun to get all of the famous dead people I’d like to meet together at a party. Then I started thinking it might be fun to throw in some not-so-famous dead people: my father, for example. Then I thought it would be selfish to be the only living schmo at this shindig, so I started inviting some of my living friends.
All this did was show me that thought experiments quickly degenerate when you are: a) a little drunk b) not much of a thinker or c) ADD. I won’t say which of these best describes my current state, though it could be said that I am exhibiting a variety of symptoms.
The list of living people and not-so-famous dead people wouldn’t be much of a problem. The list of famous dead people is tougher. Because of my interests, many of them would be writers and musicians, most of whom are troublemakers. Also, there are famous people you just feel that you probably should meet, but who would only distract you from the people you’d actually want to talk to. And there would be a language barrier. I mean, lets forget about outlandish requests such as Cleopatra. She may have been hot and horny by ancient standards, but I’m guessing we wouldn’t get each other even if we could communicate. Even someone like our old pal Shakespeare would be tough to talk to. He would speak English, but so can people from the NC Outer Banks, and I don’t understand them a bit. We’ll also leave out people like Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, etc… I have questions, but again, there’d be the language barrier. I suppose if we could resurrect the dead for a soiree, we could have some magic language decoders, or at least plenty of interpreters. But these guys probably wouldn’t be that much fun at a party, and besides, parties with too many dudes are, you know, sword fights. Also, if the list gets too long, you couldn’t possibly talk to everyone. See how difficult this is?
Anais Nin
Even when I start narrowing it down a bit, it’s problematic. Elvis would be out because my wife would disappear with him, which would lead to the hurtful joke: Elvis has left the building … with Jonny’s wife! My dad would probably end up in a group thing with Anais Nin, Heather from One Spicy Meatball, and whoever else was game, preferably someone who’s been in Jack Nicholson’s hot tub. KP from My Blog Ate Your Blog would get all messed up with Hunter S. Thompson, which would lead to guns and explosives. Chip would take embarrassing photos of the whole thing and post them on Chip Millard’s Weblog. Mikey J. of Lunaphyte would pass out early before getting a chance to talk to Twain, Faulkner, or Eudora Welty. Skinny would corner MLK Jr. for hours, talking his ear off, and monopolizing his time. Dave would be bumming cigarettes off Kurt Vonnegut, which would totally piss Maria off. Alex would get punched in the face by Joe Strummer. God knows what would happen if Stuart and Erica and Sarah and Kevin were there: I assume mud wrestling with Bettie Page. And me? Well, who knows. I would barely remember it.
