The World's Worst-Sounding Booze Brand Names (Part Two)

For Part One of the World's Worst-Sounding Booze Brand Names click here.

(This is the second part of a blog that originally appeared on Cracked.com this past weekend. Since Cracked has space considerations, and we most definitely do not, here is the remainder of the full list. To see the list as it appeared on Cracked, click here This version contains a few horrendous booze-branding choices that didn't make it into the final entry. To sip your favorite fermented beverage while enjoying part two, don't click anything; just manipulate the down arrow on the keyboard as appropriate.)

Arnold Palmer Cabernet Sauvignon

Golf, to say the least, is lacking in youthful verve. It’s one of a handful of sports whose physical demands are so minimal it can be played while attached to an IV drip, which can be hauled around in your golf cart, if you don’t take any sharp curves. And here’s a wine that won’t appeal to anybody other than the old duffer whose handicap is possibly dropping stone dead on the 9th green.

What the Company Might Have Intended: Celebrity endorsements can be lucrative, especially if product and pitchman are well-paired, like Donald Trump and his vodka, which like all vodkas is transparent and tasteless. It works best though, if the median age of the fan base isn’t older than jokes about how old people are, material more well-tread than the starting line of the Boston Marathon and more tired than the finish.

Why This Marketing Ploy is Heading Toward the Bunker: Arnold Palmer is not named Tiger Woods, and the differences don’t even begin to end there: for one thing, they are clearly two different people (we confirmed this by looking at them). If you break a bottle of Palmer out at the dinner table, your date will think you wrested away a family heirloom by posing as a distant relative, www.deadoraliveinfo.com will be consulted and a generation gap will appear wider than that between The Big Bopper and 50 Cent—if you’re old enough to remember the Big Bopper, your parents hand-forged their own clubs and were Palmer fan club members during the Dust Bowl years.

Goats Do Roam Wine

Just the right touch for any intimate gathering with friends, an oddly named wine that reminds you of a garbage-eating oversexed animal with a poor disposition.

What the Company Might Have Intended: Goats have been associated with virility since ancient times, well, not so much goats but whoever first decided to cross that interspecies divide and mate with one and spawn a Satyr. While perversions that would shame the mayor of Amsterdam have been etched into Grecian urns since antiquity, the Goats Do Roam label is decidedly quaint, and details some legend or another involving a Yemeni herder that we cannot make out even by squinting. We imagine such a fable involves a goat say, wandering off the edge of a precipice, at which point a wizened herder remarks to his young upstart, ‘See, goats DO roam’.

Why We’re not Ordering Another Round: Lumbering ruminants such as water buffalo, antelope, bison or anything else that could be pot-shotted from the comfort of a passing train are not to be associated with the liquid portion of any meal.

Bürgerbräu Bad Reichenhall Suffikator

From the land of euphonious-sounding beer names, Germany, comes Bürgerbräu Bad Reichenhall Suffikator, a premium doppelbock beer, or a hasty confession to a murder charge, we’re not quite sure which.

What the Company Might Have Intended: For the most part we avoided including beers with foreign names just because they had an icepick-like effect on our ears, such as the Belgian Affligem Paters Vat (shiver), or even English names that just somehow nauseate by their very sound – like “Norfolk Nog”. Germany is home to some of the best beer in the world – maybe the best and they also like to drink it in giant steins with food that’ll kill you before you leave the table, so the country’s boozing credentials are solid. Deutschland is also home to the highest concentration of booze brand names that sound like biblical plagues – reference the many ‘Hell’ beers, ala Bock Hell (hell means “light” in German). The first part of this one is the name of the brewer and using our German acquired from a week of Teutonic swimming lessons, we can guess that it means something like “Richard’s Castle Natural Springwater” or something like that. Suffikator is the actual name of the beer.

Why They Failed: Suffikator is the actual name of the beer. Taken as a whole, this beer’s name has one too many umlauts for comfort and sounds like some period in the Middle Ages when people laid around dying from pestilence while bleeding from the eyes. But given how often German is similar to English – (Maus = mouse, Bier = beer, Katze = Cat, Hund = dog/hound) – the Suffikator part, for which we could not find a translation, makes it just that bit more mercenary-sounding. This might well be a terrific beer – and doppelbock does mean double-strength so it’s certainly got some fire power – but we’re guessing this will not make much of a splash on American store shelves until its name is changed to something that does not conjure up the image of a nutcase going around with plastic bags and bad intentions.

Zodiac Vodka / Nostradamus Beer

When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will rule the planet, and yet this will still go unsold in bars.

If a conversation with the opposite sex drifts, like medical waste onto a Jersey beach, to the topic of the various phases of the moon and how they really do affect a person’s menstrual cycle and Nostradamus’s thoughts on the sub-prime mortgage crisis, it’s best to back away slowly, and fake an impromptu exit — citing a dry cleaner who closes early for the afternoons. This is unless, of course, your last sexual experience was long enough ago to have exceeded at least 3 zones of celestial longitude.

What the Company Might Have Intended: Tapping into superstition and supposed divination of either ancient firmamental noodlings or the gout-addled ramblings of a 16th century French druggist is niche marketing of sorts, even if this niche is narrower than Nicole Richie in profile.

Why They Failed and, Apropos of Nothing, How the Moon in Venus’ Sign Means you Should Cease Mortgage Payments Immediately: Approaching a woman and slurring ‘hey baby, what’s your sign?’ is questionable behavior at the best of times, let alone inviting mockery by using a prop (in the event that your state’s liquor laws enable you to order a jug to have all to yourself). If not, you’ll have to simply invite her to share a belt of Zodiac Vodka with you, mention “I’m a Taurus’ by way of introduction, at which point any objections we’ve raised here will drift through her mind in less time than it takes to make a quick dash to the powder room for reasons undisclosed. We prophesize diminishing market share for these products.

Essex Boys Bitter/The Bishop’s Finger

We’ve opted for prudence and to refrain from commenting on this pair of UK beers out of a fear of reprisals from the Catholic Church. Suffice it to say it’s advisable to knock twice before entering any confessional within a one-mile radius of a pub with these two on tap.

Cloudy Bay Chardonnay

If you’re making plonk in an abandoned garage, and planning on having a great unveiling of the saran wrap at the neighborhood flophouse, you’d be forgiven for having a product that looks like something that would bubble up from a bog as you swat away the flies. We’re not saying this product looks like that, but with a name like this one would not want to risk one’s eyesight by sampling a glass.

What the Company Might Have Intended: This product was produce in a place called Cloudy Bay, New Zealand. But if I’m a maker of frozen seafood products and I hail from Botulism Springs, Manitoba, would I feel the need to give a shout out to the home town? Unless you skipped marketing 101 and the guy whose notes you borrowed dropped dead mid-semester, you’d realize that “cloudy” is not going to attract any intended demographic. The adjective, whether it refers to urine and the need for a hasty a referral to a specialist, inclement weather that ruins an otherwise perfectly good day at the beach, (or for that matter one's judgment when it comes to naming your product) never connotes anything positive.

Why They Failed and Why Breweries Learned Long Ago that No Matter how Flat the Countryside, it’s Best not to Draw Attention to It as this Can Be Misconstrued: In day one of sommelier school, after thorough instructions on how best to condescend to the customer, and how to scrub Chianti out of a silk tie using nothing but the hem of a waitress’ skirt and a blob of saliva, it is noted that clarity rather than cloudiness is much-sought after in a dinner wine. As a general rule, you don’t want to be gazing across the table through glassware that looks like an aquarium someone’s put out on the curb.

Shingleback Shiraz

Awaiting test results from the lab on this Aussie oddity.

What the Company Might Have Intended: It's well known that there are as many beaver shots in Canadian tourism materials as there are in those forwards you get from the guy in IT, and Canada is not alone as a country that likes to celebrate its indigenous creatures. Australians too take pride in their wildlife, as evidenced by Steve Irwin before he uttered his last “Crikey!”. Like grungy backpackers, shingleback lizards roam large parts of Australia, especially Bondi beach, whereas shingles of the variety not installed on your roof by ex-cons, is the common name of the nervous disorder Herpes Zoster, and it can be found roaming many more beaches than this lizard. You can see why they changed the name as a casual mention of ‘Shingles’ rather than ‘Herpes’ in polite conversation implies to the casual eavesdropper that you might’ve had some home reno done, rather than having slept your way through the entire baritone section of the varsity glee club.

Why We’re Getting a Doctor’s Second Opinion Instead of Ordering Another Round: Ordering a bottle of a skin condition that commonly presents itself as red marks on your back that aren’t caused by fingernails having dug into it in the throes of passion might result in a goodnight peck on the cheek and a round of antivirals on the house if the more positive connotation, in this case a disgustingly slimy lizard, isn’t the first thing that springs to mind.

Special Mention:

Pruno

Did you make it through today’s recreation period without getting shanked by Phil the Fish? Looking to celebrate? Pour yourself a glass of Pruno!

What the “Company” Might Have Intended: Alas there is no CEO of Pruno Industries, and chances are that you would not want to sit on the board if there were, as a hostile takeover would likely mean being attacked by a guy who spent the previous night fashioning a deadly weapon out of his toothbrush. “Pruno” is the term given to prison wine and Jarvis Masters, a man sitting on death row in San Quentin Penitentiary, is credited with popularizing the term “Pruno”, in a 1992 poem entitled, “The Wine of My Youth Was Pruno”… actually it was called, “Recipe for Prison Pruno”. The poem coupled bits of the verdict that was read out on the day that Masters was sent up the river with practical tips on how to make prison Pruno: “Take ten peeled oranges/Jarvis Masters, it is the judgment and sentence of this court.” Since penning that little ditty, Masters has had plenty of time to perfect his Pruno-making abilities as he remains on death row to this day.

While most modern-day recipes for Pruno do not specifically call for prunes, and one would suspect that this is not the most popular fruit for prisoners, we would assume that at one point it contained prunes and was thus dubbed “Pruno”.

Why We’re Going to Be Good, Law-Abiding Citizens: Pruno is a sickening-sounding name as is anything derived or related to prunes, a fruit typically employed to keep the elderly regular. Then again it would be hard to come up with an attractive-sounding name for the kind of booze that can be made by anyone using only fruit, ketchup, sugar, a plastic bag, hot running water, and a sock. Whereas the worst aftereffects of a bender on the outside would be the unwelcome sight of someone only passable with beer goggles asking you how you like your eggs the following morning, the aftereffects of Pruno include blindness, death, irresistible urge to instigate a riot, and death in a prison riot. In a trend that must just tickle every poor slob who has had to drink the stuff in jail, Pruno is now being “enjoyed” outside of prison. In 2004, at the American Homebrewer's Association's National Homebrew Conference in Las Vegas, a “Make Your Own Pruno” competition was held. The winner was dragged out of his hotel room in the middle of the night by security guards and beaten with bars of soap tied up in pillow cases.

CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF THE WORLD'S WORST-SOUNDING BOOZE BRAND NAMES!

Notre Dame QB Drinks Beer! Life of as we know it is irrevocably altered

What do the US, Oman, Indonesia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates have in common?

Well, nothing, apart from a legal drinking age of 21, the highest in the world.

To put it another way, the US is the only non-Muslim country we're aware of (though in some parts of the Ukraine, they enforce the age of 21 though by all accounts it's roundly ignored) where to consume a beer, you must be old enough to earn a college degree.

Since many so-called 'student athletes' don't, we figure they just enjoy the college experience (the aspects unrelated to the taking of actual courses), in the limited time that they have.

Members of the Notre Dame football team (seen here) were cutting loose in a rousing game of Beer Pong, a time-honored college tradition, and for some reason, this non-event made its way into the pages of the Chicago Tribune, among others.

Now, to be fair, The Fighting Irish (a bizarre name for a team whose college name translates to 'Our Lady' in French, but to be more fair, being French is not typically associated with fighting anything successfully) have a graduation rate near 80%. This is substantially higher than the coin flip figures elsewhere in the country, some of which are as low as 30% and the team is known for hitting the books at least as hard as those across the line of scrimmage.

Of course, when the rest of us were busy say, studying, we weren't cut admission breaks for being able to run a 40 in under 5 seconds, common practice so that, well, dumb kids can practice.

A Notre Dame football spokesman said Monday there was no comment from the team for the time being, apart from 'Chug, chug, chug, chug!'

The World's Worst-Sounding Booze Brand Names (Part One)

(Editor's Note: The following blog appeared this weekend on Cracked.com. To see it there, complete with welcome jab at Dr. Phil, click here. Below is the first part of the original submission. Part Two will run on Wednesday. Reader feedback on brands that we may have missed is as welcome as a free round... almost) :

For a booze-maker, giving your hooch the right name can mean success, even if you are hustling a product that could be put to better use in the gas tanks of a fuel-hungry nation. Malt liquors like Wild Irish Rose, Night Flight, and Schlitz fall into this category, but their respective names hearken to the splendor of the Irish countryside (or a prostitute in the Irish countryside named Rose, which is still not so bad), getting high in the evening/the adrenaline that comes from sprinting away from a crime scene, and, well, Schlitz doesn’t really signify anything but it seems like it would be a fine name to give one’s first-born son – “The proud parents are thrilled to welcome little Schlitz Rasmussen into the world”. Like putting a silk hat on a pig, it’s a way of sprucing up your product and fostering a loyalty that is completely divorced from product quality – in other words, the kind of loyalty that lasts.

Just as a catchy name with positive connotations can mean success for a product with “optimal serving conditions” listed as “best served in the general proximity of someone who drinks fast”, so too can a bad name sink the fortunes of a quality product. Many of the booze brand names below have been slapped onto products that judging by reports from beer and liquor snobs on the Internet sound pretty good, but we are not going to find out just how good because their names send us dangerously close to wanting to walk the line of sobriety.

It has become trendy among booze purveyors, particularly brewers and wineries these days to give their products deliberately jokey names like “Arrogant Bastard Ale” and “Wasatch Polygamy Porter” etc., but here we’ve stuck to those that sicken or repel consumers unintentionally for the most part (passing on Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout, however, was not an option). In some cases, these names sound terrible due to language or cultural differences; in others it’s a name that started off as perfectly acceptable but later become increasingly risible as the years passed and people looked for more words with which to form double entendres; and, in the majority of cases, it was a bad name to begin with and shit doesn’t turn to gold with age.

It’s last-call, the bar has been drained of all other brands, these names are presented to us on a menu, and we opt instead to do the unthinkable and flag down a taxi. There ought to be a law.

Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout

From Sweetwater Brewery in Atlanta, Georgia comes a beer that attempts to bottle the exotic allure of getting a five-fingered shuffle from someone who may or may not have found her way into her present place of employment as part of a barter deal for a Chevrolet.

What the Company Might Have Intended: The cartoon of the winking, cleavage-bearing sexpot masseuse on the label means this wasn't a case of someone having failed to check out the urban dictionary before naming the beer. But the description on the label, "A huge, dry hopped stiffy, for a full figured beer, resulting in an explosive finish!" suggests that perhaps this was an attempt to celebrate the defining qualities of a good stout – full-bodied, satisfying with a pleasant aftertaste etc – in a way that would stand out on the shelves. That this quotation makes no grammatical sense may have been a play on the language difficulties that confront rub and tug patrons, or point to the need for a copy-checker at Sweetwater Breweries.

Why They Failed and Why We Want to Vomit: Beer companies often get a bum rap for glorifying alcohol abuse by producing commercials that show good looking young people having the time of their lives while in the general proximity of a crapload of their product. Someone living in a converted garage, drinking Miller Genuine Draft and spraying his shirts with deodorant so he doesn't have to do a wash, might look at those Greek statues come to life in the Miller commercials, who seem to be preparing for a cabin orgy with the Swedish Bikini Natural 10 Extra-Beautiful Club, and think that he's a few six-packs away from joining them. That same slob would have far less mental jogging to do to make the image that Sweetwater Happy Ending Massage conjures up a reality. Even more unappealing-sounding than "Hummer", also put out by this same brewer, this one brings to mind the altogether unpleasant image of some naked horny fat guy in a towel overcoming a language barrier by counting off sums of money using his fingers and waving a stack of greasy low-denomination bills.

Deerstalker Scotch

From Scotland comes the perfect complement to a day spent skulking around a tranquil forest dressed up like a bush in the hopes of bagging Bambi.

What the Company Might Have Intended: A deerstalker is the kind of jaunty cap that Sherlock Holmes wears, and one that has also graced the fictitious heads of cynical low-life Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye”, and portly truculent hotdog vendor Ignatius J. Reilly of “A Confederacy of Dunces”—lit personae you’d least like to emulate behaviorally or sartorially. In real life, most people who are able to tie their own shoes and for whom strangling by shoelaces is not a danger, don’t wear these hats. The exception, of course, are those for whom the hat is named – hunters out for a day’s drinking and shooting in the best tradition of American vice-presidents. They are presumably the target market for this whiskey.

Why They Failed and Why We Are Untying our Deerstalker Hats: This is not the whiskey to break out on a first date. First, it promotes headwear favored by those in cold climates who have severed all ties with mankind. Second, any reference to the slaughter of deer is unlikely to impress. Paired with the term “stalker”, showing up with a bottle of this falls between having BO and casually mentioning that you have a family of 10 “out there, somewhere” as a sure way to kill a date.

Dr Loosen Riesling

From along the banks of the German Rhine comes this medical malpractice suit in a bottle.

What the Company Might Have Intended: The eponymous Dr. Loosen started this winery nearly 200 years ago and the German vintner has been run by assorted Loosens since then. The founder was not, as far as we could determine, the kind of doctor who spent his off-days rambling about the German countryside and snatching women’s underwear from clotheslines. It would appear that the makers of this one never really thought too much about why their English friends were snickering under their kerchiefs, and once their export market expanded and the name of “Doc Loosen” came into hands such as ours, they were already too rich to give a Scheiße.

Why They Failed and Why The Officer Would Like to Have a Word With You Downtown: This sounds like the kind of booze you’d need to warn your teenage daughter about before she agrees to go out alone with the highschool quarterback. Booze has been helping ugly people get laid since the first caveman realized that it had its advantages over the club in terms of taking the relationship to the next level. But these days the inside of a prison cell and a standing engagement with someone who or may not want to tattoo you as his own property has lessened the acceptability of booze’s “liquid panty-removing” qualities. “Loosen up”, is of course, the most oft-heard entreaty of a teenager looking to get laid – right before the open palm of the girl he’s trying to woo hits his face. Adding the modifier “Doctor” doesn’t help. Doctor Loosen Reisling sounds like a moustache-twirling creep in a grungy white coat with breath that reeks of yesterday’s after-dinner bender and a special getting-to-know-you rate for all the young mothers in town.

Kelpie Organic Seaweed Ale

From the Argyll coast in Scotland comes a beer that will take you back to the times when you stepped in something squishy at the beach and hoped it wasn’t a turd.

What the Company Might Have Intended: According to Celtic legend, kelpies are child-killing shape-shifting water horses that can be found murdering innocents along lochs and rivers in Scotland and Ireland. The legend has it that a kelpie will appear as a lost pony on land and somehow BS a child into taking a ride on its back. The kelpie then makes a mad dash straight for the bottom of the nearest body of water, the child is unable to get off due to the creature’s skin suddenly becoming adhesive, and… we have one less citizen on the village census rolls. This all sounds like a tale concocted to cover up the baptismal boo-boos of “Dunker” Father Fred, or possibly further proof that those closest to the water drink booze in greater quantities and packing a higher punch than do their land-locked brethren. This beer is actually brewed using seaweed, a particularly disgusting-sounding strain of the stuff called “bladder rack”, harvested off the Argyll Coast. And presumably it’s organic, rather than that chemical shit that McDonald’s try to sell you.

Why They Failed and Why We Want to Puke in the Ocean: In a word: Blech! Aside from naming the beer after a children’s myth that has undoubtedly traumatized generation of kids, we cannot conceive of the appeal of advertising the fact that a beer is brewed using the stuff that you need to wash off your boat with a high-powered hose every time you take it in for the season. Seaweed, for all its purported ecological benefit, is one of nature’s more repulsive creations, and there’s no reason Zebra Mussel Barnacle Stout or Man-o-war Jellyfish Wheat won’t be joining Kelpie Organic in the brewery’s seasonal gift basket. As a kid, there were few things as fun to at the beach as getting a handful of the stuff and chucking it at the bald head of your favorite hectoring uncle, but drink it? No thanks Bucko, we’ll keep to the dry land.

British Navy Pusser's Rum

From England comes a brand of rum that takes you back to the days when the British Navy were earning their reputation for being adept at nothing other than “rum, sodomy, and the lash”. This rum celebrates the rum part of that naval “to-do” list.

What the Company Might Have Intended: Members of the British navy, back when they were out sailing into mysterious foreign ports to bayonet the locals and open post offices, were kept from mutiny largely by a daily allotment – a “tot” – of rum. Sure there was the scurvy, the filthy living conditions and, if you were the cabin boy, the constant fear of being raped and/or eaten, but none of that would seem as terrible if you were out of your gourd on rum at the time. What’s more, the daily pint of rum also helped contribute to turning sailors’ skin cirrhosis-of-the-liver yellow, which made for a pleasant effect in combination with the sun shining off their faces as they were tipped into the ocean during at-sea burials. On the ships of old, the daily tot of rum was doled out by a purser and “pusser” is how you pronounce “purser” after you’ve had your daily tot. The practice of giving sailors a pint of rum a day was discontinued in 1970 – or perhaps the stress there should be it actually went on until 1970 – and British Navy Pusser’s Rum then is an attempt to carry on in that manly tradition of iron boats and hard men with even harder livers.

Why They Failed and Why, Yo-ho-ho, A Pirate’s Life is Not For Us: Another contender for this list was Sailor Jerry Spiced Navy Rum, but Pusser’s won out because nobody without an encyclopedia of tedious naval trivia at their side – or Google – would guess that Pusser’s is a derivation of Purser. Not only does it call to mind unpleasant images of Sheriff Buford Pusser kicking a Texas drunk to death, but it also sounds like the kind of wound you would not want to get while on board one of those hygienically-defunct ships of yore.

Entire Butt Porter

From the UK comes this porter that gives you a retort to have at the ready the next time someone tells you your favorite malt liquor “tastes like ass”. This stuff is called Entire Butt Porter and by all accounts it tastes pretty damn good.

What the Company Might Have Intended: What initially appears to be an entreaty not to give preference to one cheek over the other, but rather to embrace the “entire butt” – commendable as that might have been – actually seems to be one of those quirks of American versus UK English (like how in the US they call that thing that soccer moms carry their mace in a fanny pack, whereas in the UK it’s presumably known as a vagina mace-carrier). Butt, it turns out, is an old English term for barrel, so “entire butt” means “the entire barrel”, and has nothing whatever to do with asses.

Why They Failed and Why We Won’t Be Saying “Bottoms-up!” with this stuff: All meaning-of-word nonsense aside, there’s no getting around the fact that this is ass beer. If you order this one, you’ll be left to the mercies of your howling friends who can inquire quite justifiably, “Tell me, just how does ASS taste?” This also goes for Butcombe Bitter, all of the beers put out by Butts Brewery (particularly our favorite “Le Butts Biere”) and, of course, king of the ass beers, AASS Bock out of Belgium.

CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO OF THE WORLD'S WORST-SOUNDING BOOZE BRAND NAMES!

The Top 10 Best NFL Names: Dick Butkus Would Approve

Being the kind of guys who would ask the bartender in a sports bar if he wouldn't mind changing the channel because "I think 'Wheel of Fortune' might be on, and tonight's Caribbean-themed," we are likely not the ones most NFL fans would turn to for commentary or analysis as the preseason gets underway this weekend. And that's for the best, because we aren't about to offer anything of the sort.

We can appreciate football's importance to gamblers; after all, without this sport to bet on, there might be a major-sports-less gap in the year that could see attendance at dog tracks overwhelm capacity. But for us, the NFL is just the XFL stripped of all its glorious theatrics slick production values, and unorthodox rules that breathed new life into the sport (Reference the decision to let players put whatever they wanted to on their jerseys, [see left. That is unfortunately not his given name, though we're not sure if "he" still hate him or whether he has had a change of heart, and now he "likey" him]).

So rather than combing through football rosters for information relevant to a player's on-field performance, or using said info for any useful purpose whatsoever, we've instead gone through the ranks to highlight something over which players had absolutely no control: their names. The NFL has given us people with nicknames like William "The Refrigerator" Perry, so called because of his frequent visits to one and also because he looked as close as a human could to one without being robbed of the ability of forward movement and others with names like Man Mountain, which also wasn't in any way ironic.

Here, however, is a list of gridiron athletes whose given names are so stellar that they do not need nicknames. Compiled from current NFL rolls and barring any exploding kneecaps or other assorted football injuries over the weekend, here, in no particular order, are the best damn legal names currently on a National Football League roster. That's currently, people, so no waxing poetic about Blood Mcnally tearing up City Stadium in the days before helmets.


10) Ritchie Incognito, St Louis Rams: With a name that makes him sound like the guy who runs the panini shop in a Danny Aiello movie, Ritchie Incognito of the St. Louis Rams gets the first slot here. After being suspended indefinitely from two colleges (one wonders if anything short of tearing off another human's head could warrant the indefinite suspension of a star athlete from one American college let alone too), Incognito has since gone on to become a well paid NFL star, driving around in a BMW 750 with "23 television screens... including one in his gas cap door." Alright, it's only a surname, but come on.

9) Guy Whimper, New York Giants: This one works even better if you choose to pronounce his first name the French way. "Monsieur Guy Whimper", table for deux!" While this guy tips the scales at over 300 pounds, and we can imagine few things more frightening than a guy half the size of a pickup truck looking to knock us down, one wonders of the psychological effects on an offensive tackle of having a surname that calls to mind the sound a cockerspaniel makes when it's been left out in the rain and wants to come back inside.


8) Coy Wire, Buffalo Bills: Nothing screams tenacious, frothing at the mouth, NFL linebacker like "Coy", defined as "coquettish, or artful playfulness and showing reluctance to make a definite commitment." This also describes the way the Buffalo Bills consistently like to play in the post-season. Well, he has it better than the "Demure" Dan Jenkinses of the world whose football careers never left the playground. He's pictured here, and if your name is 'wire' you better damn-well hit the weights.



7) D'Brickashaw Ferguson, New York Jets: In parlance common among people commenting on the gargantuan size of another, the phrase "Yeah, he's built like a brick shithouse" is not uncommon. And here's a guy who is not only built like said durable outdoor commode, but whose given name actually includes "brick" in it. This would of course give him the credentials for having the coolest name in the NFL entirely were it not for the truth behind the origins of his name. It seems that D'Brickashaw is a take on the surname of Father Ralph de Bricassart, the Roman Catholic priest played by Richard Chamberlain in the television miniseries "The Thorn Birds."

6. Clevan "Tank" Williams, Minnesota Vikings:If your parents name you 'tank', they're either Wehrmacht war buffs or have Body Mass Indexes that are so off the charts, they figure their chip off the old block is more likely to look like the block itself. Tank is an exception to our rule of including actual given names since in his case, his little sister dubbed him tank as an infant. He thus effectively went through life with the name "Tank" rather than being given it while already a professional football player. Anybody who was known around the house as "Tank", even while stuffing crayons up their nose and screeching at Big Bird, probably couldn't have made many career choices other than football and certainly deserves a spot here.

5. John McCargo, Buffalo Bills: John McCargo: a name that sounds like a cross between a cut-rate company that will take care of all your industrial shipping needs and what the McDonald's menu would sound like if they were forced to be honest. While slightly easier on the ear than "John McLoad," this is another weight-themed family name that leads one to suspect that the person bearing it is unlikely to excel at synchronized swimming or trampolining.


4) Quentin T. Jammer, San Diego Chargers:: Quentin T. Jammer is either a cornerback for the San Diego Chargers, a core member of the comic-book superhero team "Max Gravity and his Galactic Spectaculars," or the villain in a future installment of the Matrix series. We're not quit sure which. Regardless, with a name that screams to be put on a comic book or turned into a new dance craze, Quentin T. Jammer definitely lucked out in the surname sweepstakes.





3) King Dunlap, Philly Eagles: Striking a blow for the everyman, Dunlap's parents eschewed heredity and decided that their youngster was just as kingly as anybody who gets the title the old-fashioned way. While we have no clue whether Dunlap's play on the field can be deemed majestic, he does seem to strike a "I just plundered this kingdom" regal pose when it's picture time (as shown in the photo to the right


2) Atari Bigby, Green Bay Packers: Before anyone gets too excited, Atari Bigby was not named after the 1970s video-game pioneer, so anyone thinking of naming their offspring Gamecube Calhoun as a tribute should reconsider. His grandmother named him "Atari" because of the word's Japanese meaning: attack. Coincidentally, we're guessing that's what Atari had to do every time someone jibed him as being named after the ancient video-game maker. "Bigby" is an added bonus, sounding as it does like the name of an octogenarian Rolls Royce chauffeur who taxis you to your country estate in Wales.


1) Melvin Bullitt, Indy Colts: Quite simply, regardless of how well or how horribly this guy plays, nobody can take away the fact that he has THE baddest name in the NFL. He could be his own blaxploitation 'let me pass, or they be takin' these mother-f*ckin' hush-puppies out yo ass', film star. And, yes, he is number one with a bullet.

Cups Runneth Over: The War Against Beer Pong in Time Magazine

Interestingly, Time Magazine posted an article recently, about the 'War Against Beer Pong'.

Now, we're no strangers to the game, having played it at our book launch, and we're certainly no strangers to writing about it:

For those of you who missed it, click here and here.




Cheers,

The Beer Pong Champions of the Greater Toronto Area,

The Shark Guys