September 2, 2008
In The Bucket List, Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson get out the blue box which has been attracting flies and recycle every character the duo have ever played in the last twenty years: the kindly, patriarchal, advice-dispensing gentleman and the cantankerous, wise-cracking cacker.
When diagnosed with terminal cancer, the twosome, sensing the scythed one is pulling into the driveway, decide to fulfill an ultimate ‘to do’ list. This appalling film, which might’ve put the careers of these two gentlemen into the earth as well, luckily, failed to make a dent in people’s enjoyment of lists of all stripes (the old advice-dispensing patriarchal black gentleman would certainly fit into a Top 20 Movie Clichés list). This is a good thing, as we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time writing Top This and That lists and would hate to think all that hard work might have been better spent doing something more socially constructive-organizing a parade or signing a petition to curb parade noise.
Since launching The Shark Guys in October of 2007, hot on the heels of our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery, we’ve arranged a good number of these hierarchies for your reading pleasure. These initially adhered to our book’s theme, drinking, such as our Top 10 ‘Bar’ Songs of All Time, but gradually branched into other areas as well. For those of you who haven’t suffered some kind of left-hemisphere trauma, you’ll note that some of these lists are reproduced in our site’s right column, but not all, so we figured we’d remedy that here. Now, as luck would have it, as of August 08, we’ve done 10 lists such lists. So here are our Top 10 List.
Top 10 ‘Bar’ Songs
We recognize that these songs played in bars make an important contribution to one’s elbow-tilting atmosphere, however, we reckon that enough attention has been paid to every one of them. What we’d like to focus on instead are songs that are actually set in bars. The writers of these songs, for the most part, were the sort who followed the advice of “Write what you know”; they looked around, saw that they were in a bar and wrote the following. [click here for more]
Top 10 Coolest Bartenders of All Time
Hollywood, not surprisingly, has introduced us to some truly memorable drunks – think Billy Bob Thornton in “Bad Santa”, or, far creepier and more likely to cause you to wake yourself up screaming, Gary Busey in “Carny”. But what of the men and women on the other side of the bar, patiently stomaching the hero’s bravado and slinging the drinks that fuel his adventures? [click here for more]
Top 10 Jesus Sightings of All Time
An English pub drinker had a religious experience of sorts recently. The Daily Mail reported on how a taxi driver ordered a bottle of cider and “got goose pimples” when the waitress opened it and staring back at him from the foil on the neck was the face of Christ himself. “His appearance at the British pub was only the latest stop on an unorthodox tour; the Nazarene has popped in for a visit via some unlikely, and occasionally delicious, places over the past few decades. [click here for more]
25 Horrible Bands Named after Places
Much like hypertension or obesity are predictors for cardiovascular disease, geography is a measure for determining whether a band’s music will make you want to cover your ears. Before you pen a terse letter to your city councillor, we’re not referring specifically to where a band might be from, but one whose name is geographic in origin. [click here for more]
Top 10 Actors Whose Crappy Movies are Guaranteed to Ruin the In-flight Experience
As a captive audience for PS I Love You, and not the kind of captive audience that could at least interrupt the proceedings by shanking the warden, it seems there are certain actors whose films are more likely to be shown on commercial flights than others. [click here for more]
Top 10 Bouncers of All Time
If your job description includes being able to thrash someone within an inch of their miserable lives and doing so with impunity while enjoying the odd drink on the job, you’re either a cop or a bouncer. Recently, we shone the spotlight on everyone’s favorite enablers, bartenders, in our Top 10 Coolest Bartenders of All Time, but what of the guys whose job it is to look menacing and keep raging, violent drunks on the other side of the velvet rope (so they can beat up random strangers, instead of the good folks who patronize your pub)? [click here for more]
Top 10 Cocaine Songs
Cocaine of course, has had a significant impact on popular music. While booze is far more likely to result in sloppy work and an unsightly beer gut in middle age, coke leaves you wired enough to ensure that you will produce a whole lot of something, and thus ups the odds that you will actually produce something good. A sober Eric Clapton was quoted as saying, “I hate listening to my old records, which I did stoned or drunk’, he’s alone in that camp as most fans of his music hate listening to anything that he’s done straight. [click here for more]
Top NFL Names
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. [click here for more]
Top 10 Most Unappealing Booze Brands
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. [click here for more]
20 Worst City Names in North America: You can’t beat a Dead Horse Alaska
At the risk of never being given the keys to the city of Crapo Maryland, where you might not to want to open anything anyway, namely a business, there are some places that are just plain unappealing to the ear-as opposed to say, the state of Indiana*, which is unappealing to each of the other senses as well. [click here for more]
Top 10 Most Violent National Anthems
Most anthems are a call to arms, mostly partisan hymns that are a soundtrack to bayoneting your nearest geographical neighbor and a tune you can tap your jackboot to as you proclaim the superiority of your culture, mountain ranges and comely women (the seldom heard fifth stanza in Slovenia’s national anthem: “To you, our pride past measure, Our girls! Your beauty, charm and grace!”). There are some ditties sung that are much more ominous than any ‘Bombs bursting in air‘, you might’ve whistled while relieving yourself after a heavy lunch, and that would make a scout troupe cower in fear more than a scoutmaster’s invite to a midnight swim. [click here for more]
FOR EVEN MORE TOP 10 LISTS CLICK HERE!!!!
September 3rd, 2008 at 12:13 am
Surely putting up a post like this is like one of those sitcom episodes where they reminisce about the old days as an excuse to re-run some of the best bits of the last few series (and because Ted Danson’s put his back out and can’t film for a week).
September 3rd, 2008 at 1:32 am
Guilty as charged. We were looking for a way to have one of us scratching our chins and saying “Remember when…” and then wavy lines appearing on the screen before dissolving to the Top 10 lists, but our html skills aren’t up to that.