June 4, 2008
Bars and booze companies have all sorts of ways to facilitate that all important transition between bottle and gut. Liquor companies quite often engage the services of good looking people stuck in that gray middle world between legitimate modeling work and chrome pole duty at the local Gawk and Whistle to hand out samples of their product, while refusing requests for phone numbers as politely as they can. For some reason, these sorts of promotions don’t make headline news or inspire the wrath of politicians, but you put just one muscular dwarf in a tophat and…
A pub in Melbourne Australia called “The Saint” caused a hubbub recently when it hired a dwarf to walk up and down the length of the bar with a bottle of Jagermeister from which he’d pour shots into the expectant gobs of pub-goers. Two possible causes of concern with this would be, first the lawsuit that would likely result if the unnamed dwarf in the photos slipped on the bar and injured himself. (Editor’s On-A-Tangent Note: For an excellent film in which a drunken dwarf stands up on a bar and curses out an entire pub full of backwoods hicks, we recommend The Station Agent, starring Peter Dinklage). That said, the man in the photos appears to be having a good time, and we can assume that he was paid damn well to don a top-hat and march along a bar half-naked. Had someone fell asleep drunk at the bar earlier and awoke to the site of a bare-chested dwarf in a tophat proffering a bottle of booze, this might have had a disquieting on the person, but that didn’t happen as far as we know.
But of course in the world of the nanny state this bizarre method of getting people to drink the sickening-when-served-warm concoction that is Jagermeister – which is not, to our shock and surprise made from the blood of the newly dead – became a matter of such national import that Australian lawmakers were going on the record about it, and comment was even sought from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (though he has yet to issue a public statement on the matter, presumably weighing the significance of the top hat with his key advisers).
Nanny-state politicos were up in arms about the promotion, with the Victorian Minister for Consumer Affairs (the Victorian being a reference to the Australian province of Victoria not the time period, though he would have fit in well then) going as far as to say that “Patrons accepting these free drinks will have no idea how much alcohol they have consumed.”
While patronizing government officials believe that a promotion like this will somehow bring bar patrons to ruin — it’s not like the dwarf was forcefeeding them the Jag, even though he does appear to be doing so in the second photo here — the drinkers themselves have a clear message for politicos: Get lost. “It’s just a bit of fun,” said one patron. “Why politicise it?”
