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