This Week for Happy Hour: Atlas Farted

Saturday is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s birthday!  More on that later.

I’ll begin with a title-related confession: I never read Atlas Shrugged.  I couldn’t finish it.  Not just because it’s thick enough to stop a bullet, either; the damn thing’s a contrived attempt to masturbate the reader’s ego until he thinks he’s man enough to hold the world on his shoulders.  All by himself.  Don’t need no help.  Stay out of my way, everyone – I’ve got the world to prop up.  And that I can’t abide.

Thing is, we’re all (like Soylent Green) just people.  I know that sounds obvious, but it seems worth acknowledging once in a while.  We are weird, complicated, feeble, funky little mammals, reacting to the world around us and trying to make sense of things, trying to do our best.   What we aren’t is superheroes, a la Commando.  Superheroes are fun precisely for that reason: that they’re not real; it’s something to fantasize about in daydreams.  They can be found in movies and in fiction – in Ayn Rand’s books and in Arnold Schwarzenegger blockbusters.  But the Ubermench doesn’t walk off the screen or page and lift the world up all alone.  I mean that would be awesome.  But that’s fairytale stuff.  Global accomplishments don’t come at the benevolent hand of the individual.  Great things on that level take teamwork and solidarity.  A bunch of flawed humans trying to hold up the world all together might work.  But I guarantee you at least one of them farts.  Atlas’ burden is a heavy one to bear, especially for non-superheroes.

So that self-aggrandizing attitude exhibited by Ayn Rand’s characters, especially when realized to the detriment of actual human beings, gets me, you could say, a little riled up.  Reading it, I’ll inevitably end up getting frustrated, try to throw the wood brick at the wall and find myself with tennis elbow for a week and a half.  Great, stupid Ayn.

Anyway, it’s Arnold’s birthday on Saturday.  He’s getting up there.  He’ll be 64.  Holy crap, the Terminator is 64. 

Interestingly, he’s become the embodiment of the duality of man’s self-(mis)conception.  On the one hand, the superhero – the muscular, witty, can’t-fail go-getter who can take on a thousand storm troopers with a hunting knife and a grimace and come out of it with all the satisfaction of a good workout and a full belly.  That’s the movie guy.  And on the other hand, the reality: the imperfect mess, the muscles gone soft, the kidneys and liver shot from roids, the State of California left unresolved, and the wife and family alienated and angry by his infidelities.  Right now, he’s probably eating cold baked beans out of the can with a spoon under a bare bulb, the TNT version of Predator on his turn-knob RCA until he spontaneously succumbs to afternoon naptime in a seated position.  I bet the poor guy can’t even blow out all his birthday cake candles without putting on a back brace first.  Oh, the mighty and their falls.

So it got me thinking this week, about how some folks’ infatuation with individualism can be borderline unhealthy and downright unrealistic.  Let’s keep in mind how much we all depend on society, on the people we live around, whether we know them or not, want to or not.   

The human being isn’t much outside of society.  I think we’re about on the level of a fourteen-year-old Golden Retriever with bad hips named Humphrey.  All alone out there?  Trying to do it all alone?  The food, the shelter, the cold.  Sounds like a lot of work.  No, Humphrey, come on back in by the fire and have a treat.  Good boy.  What do you think we are, monsters?

So come on into the Rhino for Happy Hour, Friday 5-9.  Show a little love and a little appreciation for your Metro DC kin – all those people who keep the city alive.  Have a smile and a moment of clarity amidst the reticent symbiosis and the booty-shakin’ clamor of it all.  And a beer.  Have those other things and a beer.  It’ll be fun, I promise.

Saturday, there’ll be Arnold movies on – at least a couple of them.  Besides being awesome on their own, they should be violent enough to make it uncomfortable for that one group at the tables who didn’t know what they were getting themselves into – the away team, you might call them.  And sometimes the free entertainment is the best kind around.

Here's a little taste:

See you there!

Cheers,

Finn

This Week for Happy Hour: Last Ever Half-Price Happy Hour?

Stay calm.  It’s very likely not the last Half-Price Happy Hour at Rhino, at least not in terms of the discount on drinks.  There will be half-price Happy Hour forever and ever.  Happy Hour, like a nest of fire ants or the Black Eyed Peas, cannot be annihilated by the will of man, nor by a match to kerosene.  It’s resilient, bulletproof and flame retardant in its undeniable breadth, and far reaching through its many compartmentalized tentacles.  So shake it off, relax your posture there and unpucker your sphincter.

And, release.  There, that’s better.  But wait!...

This Friday could be your last opportunity to pay half price for your drinks – in U.S. dollars.  Stay with me.  [Warning: substantive policy issues challenge the attention span, oh the woes of information-based soft science and the blunt black-hole brutality of its innumerable counterparts.]

My concern is this: if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling and we default on our financial obligations, the value of the US Dollar plunges.  I know, I know, Happy Hour is usually the time when you get to relax and forget about the crap storm outside, but it’s relevant here, I promise.

So when the value of the Dollar declines, goods (say, beer or whiskey) and services (say, carpentry or hand jobs), on the other hand (ha!), retain their value relative to the dollar.  All of a sudden your drinks regularly cost twice as many US dollars, and the beloved Half-Price Happy Hour is reduced to the intangible memory of yester-month’s weekday normalcy.  Oh, the horror!

Think the concept is a bit hyperbolic?  Try this one on like OJ’s black gloves: say the hypothetical default and the devaluing of the American currency triggers a domino-effect collapse not unlike the aftermath of the 2008 clustermug, when the unregulated investment banking industry leveraged itself to the hilt for short term profits, found itself – imagine – insolvent upon the inevitable first hiccup, and the economy-at-large took it on the proverbial chin on down the line.  Well, if something like that happens after the potential default on August 2nd, and the value of the dollar relative to goods and services declines further, we could all find ourselves in a make-shift barter economy when it comes to Happy Hour. 

Let’s think about that for a moment.

Unless you’re a sadist, spending $100 on a vodka tonic seems a little inappropriate.  The dollar alternative and practical currency would be the trade of goods and services.  You’d have to bring a bag of flour to Happy Hour – or a half bag, during Half-Price Happy Hour.  A hand job (not for me; I’m just pointing this out) would get you two-for-one drinks, or a single drink for a half a hand job.  Put that on a table tent: “Friday, 5-9pm: Rail Drinks Only a Half a Handy!”  With a thumbs-up decal and an Aquafresh smile.  I think we just found a loop hole to the DC ban on Ladies’ Nights.

Ultimately, none of this is relevant for the foreseeable future.  Because there is absolutely no way in holy hell – and you can quote me on this, and please do – that Congress will not raise the debt ceiling.  Anyone with the slightest understanding of the intersection between the economy and the political system understands that the Tea Partiers and the far Right are putting on a show, whether they realize it or not.  Because it’s not up to them.  And it’s not complicated: as things get closer to August 2^nd, corporate interests will turn the screws on anyone opposing the hike, because those with the most money and earning potential are those with the most to lose.  And the lobbied-for tax cuts would have to be pretty, pretty, pretty hefty to offset the losses from flogging the Dollar.

The Republican Party is the business party in this country – or at least the businessier party – and at the end of the day they will do what they’re told in order to help big business and the wealthy elites – on that, you can always count, and there are no exceptions, if incidentals.  The only question is whether Obama, the coward, can win the game of chicken that’s going on without sacrificing public interest programs and forfeiting debt-reducing tax revenue in the bluff’s wake.  I’m not so confident.  But even if he does, those stretching the debate out like this to maybe get some more short-term profits for the tiniest of minorities, again, will produce significant though less pronounced detrimental effects on the Dollar’s rating.  Which is why I find my sphincter’s all goddam puckered up again!  Am I alone?

I’ll say this: if I’m wrong, and the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised and our country defaults, I’ll buy everyone who calls me on it a whole round of free drinks.  Because if I am wrong, everybody’s gonna need the discount.  And we’re all going to want to take the edge off.

So this week’s call to Happy Hour won’t be so much a celebration of some wonderful-in-its-pithy-triviality event or D-list celeb’s birthday.  Much more, it should be the execution of financially desperate action, the coming together to enjoy a thing which might not last forever inasmuch as it exists within the confines of our own latent anticipations, the prospective cultivation of a perverse nomos at the precipice being as frightening and bleak an interactive theater as one can hope to endure without a nice, cool, refreshing cocktail.

I need a drink already. 

See you there!

Finn

P.S. Scroners are still free and will be forever.

P.P.S.  Saturday, in a normalcy retrospective, we will be celebrating David Spade’s birthday with some of the great comedies of all time: Tommy Boy, PCU, Black Sheep, and Joe Dirt(e) are all on the table.  Holler if you need one to be on.

This Week for Happy Hour: Orville Redenbacher was a Sexy Beast

Do you love popcorn?  I do.  Do you love cockporn?  Don’t answer that.  Popcorn jokes are never good.  Know why?  Because they’re always so corny.  Yikes.

Moving on…  On July 16, 1907, Orville Redenbacher entered the world, and rays of corn-yellow sunshine drew down from the heavens over the fields of Indiana.  And an angel appeared before his mother and said, "You will name him Orville."  And so it was.  One hundred and four years later, we respectfully celebrate his birthday and his contribution to snack foods of the modern age. 

Come into Rhino Bar on Friday for Happy Hour, 5-9pm for half-price drinks and food.  And as if that weren’t enough, complimentary popping corn will be provided, courtesy of Rhino and that sexy old man, Orville himself.

At the exact moment that Orville Redenbacher was blowing out the 60^th candle on his birthday cake, another genius was born.  Will Ferrell turns 44 on Saturday. 

Stoicism.

 Since Orville didn’t make any feature length films, and since Will Ferrell is among the most dynamic and preeminent comedic actors of the last twenty years (tied for first place with Reginald VelJohnson (Family Matters) and Gilbert Gottfried (Problem Child)), Rhino will be showing Will Ferrell movies on Saturday afternoon.   

We’ll sing Happy Birthday to William, then watch Anchorman, Stepbrothers, maybe Old School.  Take a shot of flavored vodka every time Ferrell’s character throws a hilariously desperate temper tantrum until your urine smells like fruit punch.  Seems somehow appropriate.  Don’t know why, just does.

"We're going streaking, across the quad and into Rhino Bar!"

See you there!

Cheers,

Finnegan

This Week for Happy Hour: On Swag and Swagger

This week’s call to the white marble is really more story time than the usual shameless pro-beer propaganda.  A little change never hurt anybody, badly.  After all, variety is the spice of life; though if spice is the whole meal, you’ll be sick.  So I promise only a brief diversion from the norm.

Also, before I get started with the soy-meat and potatoes, I’d like to point out that the second week in July is Nude Recreation Week.  So do with that what you will, keeping in mind that almost everything is more fun in the nude.  There are a few exceptions: opening stubborn pickle jars, those roller coasters where your legs dangle, and any activity which calls for safety goggles.  If there are more exceptions than that, they escape me.  Those poor, poor never-nudes don’t know what they’re missing.

Okay, story time:

On this day, July 7, 1965, this limey bloke named Ronnie Biggs escaped from HM Prison Wandsworth in Britain by scaling the exterior wall by rope ladder.  To this day, Biggs’ rope ladder remains among the most impressive and influential popsicle-stick arts and crafts class creations in this history of the British prison system.  Cherry popsicles remain popular at Wandsworth Prison, but arts and crafts class, unfortunately, was canceled thereafter. 

In any case, Biggs fled by night to France, where he acquired new ID papers and underwent plastic surgery.  He would evade authority for decades, living in France, Australia, and Brazil before finally offering to turn himself in upon arrival in England.  Some say that he did so in order to secure payment for exclusive publishing rights for his account of the robbery.  Biggs however, stated otherwise: all he wanted was to "walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint of bitter.”  (You knew I’d get that beer propaganda in somehow.)

So, cool guy, right?  Yeah, but the real story is why he ended up in the clink in the first place.  

Two years prior, Biggs was part of the Great Train Robbery of 1963, which is exactly what it sounds like.  A gang of armed men from London hijacked the Royal Mail Train and absconded with approximately 2.6 million in British pounds – about $67 million US in today’s dollar amount.  Not too shabby.  You could pay two or three economy-crushing derivatives traders their Christmas bonuses with that, as long as the US Treasury checks don’t bounce.

Shake it off. 

So the bandits initially stopped the train by covering up the green go-ahead light with a bag, and hooked up the red light to a battery.  And the train just stopped, just like that.  The gang boarded, drove the train a few hundred yards (the metric system has no place in Nude Recreation Week) to a small bridge, and unloaded the loot into two trucks waiting below.  No one was hurt except a train driver who gave some sass and needed a little scalp love with a lead pipe.  He was fine, just a little bump on the noggin’ which he apparently wasn’t using anyway.

It makes you think, the old days were pretty cool.  For all the rad shit that the internet, wireless doodads, and electronic fiddle faddle bring us, they have really made it tough on criminal masterminds and their storytellers.  These days, it seems that the baddest criminals on the planet are nerds drinking Mountain Dew Code Red in their mother’s basement hacking into our email accounts and pretending to be Mail Order Brides and Nigerian Princes.  Just doesn’t have the same panache, you ask me.

In the end, I realize that I truly appreciate the drama of a well orchestrated heist.  For whatever reason, there’s something about it that captures the human interest: from Robin Hood to The Great Muppet Caper, the underdog who refuses to play by the rules and still outsmarts the system to make out big is a story we want to hear.  Maybe that’s because the underdog who wins gives us hope that everything’s not set in stone to one degree or another – that the human dream’s not dead, despite the state of the American Dream.  Theodore Roosevelt said, “A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.”  Teddy recognized both actions as theft.  The distinction is one of legality alone.  And when the universal rightness of action is at odds with the powers that be, you’ve got yourself a good underdog story.  

Similarly, the Marquis de Sade (not that I'm endorsing the guy, exactly, but he had an interesting and relevant point here) said, "It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own.  Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality?  Plainly, the answer is no."

Not that every train robbery is to be celebrated.  Most criminals, in fact, are just assholes.  But at the very least, heists are sure fun to watch.  So, in addition to the usual Rhino half-priced Happy Hour, 5-9pm on Friday, there will be heist movies playing on Saturday afternoon.  Should be pretty, pretty, pretty sweet.  Below is a list of some great ones.  Some are funny, some not, but they’re all a good time.  No official decision has been made as of yet; I’ll put it to you, the Rhino Reader, to add suggestions or to vote on these and we’ll have a time of it on Saturday, 12-6ish.  See you there!

-Heat

-Heist

-Snatch

-Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels

-Ocean’s Eleven

-The Italian Job

-The Bank Job

-Sneakers

-Out of Sight

-Point Break

Let me know!

Cheers,

Finn