Admiral. David. Farragut. Any Civil War enthusiasts/nerds in the house?
Most DC natives know the name Farragut from the downtown Metro stops, Farragut North and Farragut West, and the neighboring Farragut Square. But Civil War buffs will tell you about Admiral David Farragut, who sailed the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, pre-Deepwater Horizon.
On this day, April 29th, in 1862, Farragut captured the port city of New Orleans, pre-Katrina (wow, it’s been a rough decade for the Gulf, no?) from the Confederates – a decisive event in the War.
Two years later, Farragut and the Union Navy had gained control of the Gulf and the Mississippi River. Only Mobile remained as the Confederacy’s last major port in the Gulf. It was then that Admiral Farragut ordered his ships to attack through Mobile Bay. The lunatic tethered himself to the mast of his flagship, the USS Hartford, and pointed the way.
But then, kaboom!
It turned out the waters were laced with sub-surface mines, or as they were called in Civil War parlance, torpedoes. One of the lead ships was struck and sunk, and then others began turning back to avoid the underwater explosives.
“What’s the trouble?” shouted Farragut, still strapped to the mast.
“Torpedoes!” the crew shouted back.
“Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.”
The pair of brass balls on that guy, right? The Union forces would go on to take Mobile, assume complete control of the Gulf, and ultimately prevail in the War Between the States. And Farragut’s famous words would live on in the annals of history.
Right now, if you’re like me, you’re thinking one of the following things:
1)What an inspiring story! But what’s it got to do with Happy Hour?
2)What can I do to get my words to live on in annals?
3) Farragut Square – is that where all the homeless people sleep?
The answers, in reverse order, are:
3)Yes.
2) If Ms. South Carolina can do it, I’m sure you’ll think of something.
1) It has EVERYTHING to do with Happy Hour!
Damn the torpedoes. His words inspire headstrong self-sacrificial perseverance in the face of danger and disorientation – the perfect attitude to wear when pulling your bar stool up to the speckled marble.
So let the spirit of Admiral Farragut possess your heart when you order your drinks this weekend.
Car bombs, Jager bombs, and Kamikaze shots. Damn them too, and drink the torpedoes. They can’t sink us all.
Today, the third Thursday in April, is National High Five Day! High five!
Don't be shy. I moisturize.
Let's face it: high fives are a guilty pleasure. They feel so good and right sometimes, expressing a mutual feeling with another in a split second, an instant symbol of positive empathy. But at the same time we know that they constitute a dumbed-down type of communication that's within the intellectual grasp of babies, Labradors, and even these guys:
So there are often mixed feelings associated with the the high five - a phenomenon that's more generally referred to as a "guilty pleasure." And that's the topic of today's call to Happy Hour.
He feels guilt, but desire for pleasure drew him in.
Oh, guilty pleasures. You strange beasts, you. You make us laugh and smile. Yet you make our stomachs knot and our minds revolt - just not quite enough to make us give you up. That's why everyone has at least a few guilty pleasures.
I'll tell you right now (with some smiling shame) that the songs of The Bee Gees and Wham! make me want to dance like a toddler with a belly full of grocery store sheet cake. Problem is, I know I'll suffer the same physiological and emotional crash after the high - same as the little kid.
Cake Drunk
And I'd be a bold-faced liar if I said that I don't give a heavy fist pump and a "woo!" when I see a bull fighter or a rodeo contestant open his mouth at just the wrong moment and find him himself scratching that itch at the back of his throat with the bony point of a bull horn - instant tonsillectomy service for the cost of some simple horn sucking. Texas Health Care-style.
But then I think about the guys' families, and how they were probably just some ignorant saps who grew up in the wrong environment, or were maybe just compensating for their tragically small willies, or vying for attention from their neglectful fathers who were likewise emotionally inconsiderate of others because of the baby carrot-sized schwanz genes that run in their family. Or something.
But this is what I'm talking about, people: these mixed emotions. The guilty pleasure in a nutshell. Just like how you feel a little guilty right now for smirking at some poor cowboy/matador's zipper pinky.
And we come full circle back to high fives. (Oddly enough, they are the second least subtle form of communication ever - second only to screaming into a bullhorn.) Bit of a guilty pleasure, you'll admit. But they don't have to be. All I'm saying is, if you're gonna high five, don't just go through the motions like some cliche caricature of a high school jock. First down, routine high five. So played, yo. Instead, do it with some gusto and creativity and heart.
Here are some tips, when you're ready to take your high five to the next level:
We can better reach the stars, when we stand on the shoulders of giants:
Puddy:
The Todd:
Barney:
Rhino is celebrating National High Five Day all weekend, starting tonight. Here's the deal: anybody who comes in and impresses Nick or Matt tonight with a crisp, fresh high five gets a free shooter. But you gotta shine. Come in and let's see what you got. Offer continues during Friday at Happy Hour, 5-9pm. See you there!
This week's celebration is really more a memorial than a reason to cheer, depending, I guess, on the morbidity of your sense of humor. Friday, April 15th marks the 99th anniversary of the day the unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg and sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
"Harold, are those masts? Not a good sign."
In the aftermath, thousands of the world’s ultra-rich drowned in the icy waters and were subsequently eaten by sea animals. And from that moment on, the wealthy elites have waged war on any ice known to be floating in water.
But that's really neither here nor there. This story is about a dog - a Pomeranian. He was a real dog, but I don’t know his name. Let’s call him Tafferton.
"Ruff! ...just the way your mother likes it."
This particular Pomeranian was owned by Mrs. Elizabeth Rothschild, wife of the leather magnate Martin Rothschild (seen below) and was aboard the maiden voyage of the Titanic in 1912. In spite of animal boarding policies, Mrs. Rothschild insisted that she be able to tote the little fur ball with her onto the great ship. "It's a show dog," she allegedly said. “It has papers. You can't board it. It gets upset. Its hair falls out."
"I bet you play with the iron or the wheelbarrow. Sheesh."
And so Martin, Elizabeth, and Tafferton boarded the ship, not knowing that only two of them would ever safely reach New York.
Let's back up a little. Now, it's a well known fact, Sonny Jim, that there's a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as the Pentavrite, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and who meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado known as The Meadows. "Who's in this Pentavrite?" your skeptical office mate asks you. The Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tits up. (That addictive chemical he put in his “chicken” finally got the better of him.)
Well, Martin Rothschild – of the same Rothschild family – for all his wealth and power and expertise in the field of catching and skinning the wily and elusive domesticated cow, could not escape the clutches of the frigid Atlantic on that starlit morning 99 years ago. By the time he realized what had happened, it was too late. He drowned and, ironically, was eventually skinned, albeit underwater and by fish. And not in a cool way, like death-by-piranha. But slowly, like picking paint chips off a park bench in Flint, Michigan. What a way to go.
"Get in my belly!"
But do you know who did survive the Titanic disaster? Tafferton. You knew he would, the spunky little bugger. Apparently, when the crew started yelling, "Women and children first!" Tafferton decided he didn't care much for that order of things, and he and the rich old bag were off to the life boats. To hell with Martin and Leo DiCaprio and all the other suckers who didn't have the good sense and foresight to bail and doggy paddle like mad when their titan ship was heading for the center of the Earth.
Which got me thinking, what a smart, lucky dog. And what can be learned by the story of Tafferton?
Stay with me. Ok, Epicurus, the 3rd century Greek philosopher, said that ambition was at odds with finding pleasure in life. That's not something you hear too often these days, in the nation's capitol no less - that only to the extent that ambition is forsaken, can one discover life's true pleasures. He believed these pleasures included such things as delicious libations, skilled lovers, good jokes and interesting conversations, among other things. (Sound familiar, Happy Hour goers?) He said that institutional ambition (as contrasted with the necessity of occasionally getting up off your lazy rump) was fundamentally a distraction from those pleasurable end goals. I think the general message was like when old people tell you to spend more time with your family and friends, to enjoy the little things in life - stuff like that.
So where does Tafferton fit into all this? Well, he lived on. He lived his little life and got to lick himself a few more times before he went the way of the dodo. He went home, ate some good food, and got cozy in his woman's embrace while Martin sank to the bottom of the ocean to the tune of “Mo Money, Mo Problems,” by the Notorious B.I.G.
"If you don't know, now you know, ninja."
I guess what I'm trying to say is this: we are all a bunch of animals. People, I mean (and dogs, too) are a bunch of animals, plain and simple. Obviously, we aren’t dogs, and dogs aren’t cows, and cows aren’t fish. But we’ve got a few common threads.
Epicurus understood this, to some extent or another. He advocated maximizing the sensory feedback that evolution made possible to facilitate survival. It feels good to eat and drink, so we do it happily and don’t accidentally starve to death. It feels good to diddle, so we do it happily and pass our genes along down the line. It feels good to laugh and think because those of our forefathers who laughed a lot and thought a lot also got to eat and diddle more frequently, and so those genes were passed along too. Generally speaking.
Nature had a lot of time to develop these solutions ™ for life. And then the industrialized age came along and turned everything on its head. In some places, abundance became perpetual. In many places, the boring and stupid began breeding quite successfully. And for some reason, a whole bunch of us humans started wanting things that evolution didn’t see coming – like riding in gigantic steel mansion-boats across the Atlantic.
So then Martin Rothschild industrializes the leather industry, and uses the profits to buy a ticket on one of those big boats – an opulently industrialized unsinkable cruise liner – and it sinks, and he drowns. What an idiot. Too nearsighted to figure out what his wife’s pet Pomeranian was always too stupid to doubt: that life’s best pleasures are all around us, regardless of whether we’re beneath a chandelier inside a cruise liner in the middle of the Atlantic, or beneath a papier mache rhinoceros bust at your local corner bar. We can spin our wheels striving for something we think we want, or just open our eyes and notice all the sweetness that’s already here.
I’m not advocating laziness, mind you. There are plenty of problems that need fixin’, and anyway, hell if it’s an easy task to live everyday like Kevin Nealon in Happy Gilmore, or Kevin Nealon in Grandma’s Boy (weird). All I’m saying is, maybe the Titanic symbolized a shift in Darwinian thought: the survival of the fittest may now be the survival of the Epicurean. Keep your self-indulgence more natural than industrial, more doggy-paddle (or, -style) than cruise-ship-propeller, and you win. Nobody sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Nobody gets eaten – at least not by fish. And you get to be always happy and live a life of at-will spontaneous pleasure.
Hmm. Just a theory, really. And I doubt if it would do great things for the economy. But all this talk about the Titanic and Epicurus and that incorrigible Pomeranian sure makes me want to celebrate at a reasonably low-tech venue where there is little risk of drowning and great opportunity for enjoyment.
Where, oh, where . . . .
Oh! Almost forgot: half-priced Happy Hour at the Rhino Bar, this Friday from 5-9. Best deal in DC. See you there!
Most would agree that FDR was one of the greatest Presidents to grace the oval office. He did some wonderful things, no doubt. Accomplished more than most men, and without the use of his legs. I heard some Chinaman (I know, Asian-American, please) took them away from him in Korea:
But if any doubt remains in your mind as to the man’s grandeur, consider this: when Roosevelt took office, alcohol was an illegal substance, and when he left, it was legal again. What a lawmaker!
It’s true. And the anniversary of the re-legalization of alcohol is upon us. On April 7th, 1933, the Cullen-Harrison Act, signed into law by FDR, became effective. Simultaneously, the Volstead Act, which initiated prohibition (grrr), became another regretful page in our nation’s history books. Just look at Andrew Volstead, what with that sinister, smug expression:
Jeezy Creezy. He looks like if Gargamel from the Smurfs banged Joseph Stalin, and then their child developed an eating disorder and joined the SS. Not coincidentally, less than a decade after Volstead and his cohorts of small-phalliced teetotalers were ejected from Washington, FDR would go on to begin stomping the doo out of another group of similarly hateful pointy-nosed reactionaries across the pond. (Hint: their leader’s name rhymed with Hitler.)
So on the eve of April 7th, 1933, people lined up outside all of America’s bars and taverns, in grinning solidarity, to once again enjoy a frosty cold brew-dog and sing, dance, and toast. They called it, “New Beer’s Eve,” or at least that’s what I’m going with.
The government didn’t make it easy for them to get a good buzz on, though. The still-weary legislature set a proof limit of 6.4, or 3.2% alcohol, since becoming intoxicated from such a weak beer would be next to impossible, they naively thought. Instead, American night life became the drinking Olympics for the next hundred years or so.
Come celebrate the anniversary of this momentous occasion at the Rhino Bar! Three dollar Miller Lites Wednesday (New Beer’s Eve), Three dollar Coronas Thursday (New Beer’s Day), and half-priced Happy Hour on Friday from 5-9 (like any holiday, there’s gonna be leftovers).
Hopefully we’ll see you Wednesday night, with a toast at the stroke of midnight: “Here’s to liberty, democracy, and drunken paraplegics doing murderball-style spinsie moves over the graves of Nazis and Andrew Volstead! Yeah!”
Can't make that toast just anywhere. See you there!
