Drunk News Weekly Roundup

September 5, 2012 | Lists

He could fill up that hat right now with rocket fuel and knock it back before you could pour out a shot. © Glenn Francis, www.PacificProDigital.com

The very latest from the wires on drunks and those zany, illegal things they do. Even if you won’t drink to that, they probably would:

Larry Hagman’s Andre The Giant-like capacity for alcohol

For those of you born sometime after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Andre The Giant was a professional wrestler who suffered from acromegaly, a disorder that results in an overactive pituitary gland turning what could have been a bog standard 5’6″ Frenchman into one who weighed more than most people’s first car. Andre the Giant was also one hell of a drinker, once putting away 119 12 ounce bottles of beer in a six hour sitting. Yep. A bathroom attendant with a stop watch could likely have chronicled another world record once Andre got up from that table.

Another 80s stalwart, Larry Hagman who played evil oilman JR Ewing on Dallas, was interviewed by The Independent newspaper recently to promote the show’s recent revival and while not quite Andre-standard, his ability to hit the sauce consistently throughout the working day is sure to rank in the scorecards. Hagman, who has had a liver transplant, used some classic drinker’s logic: “I never was a drunk. True, I was drinking five bottles of champagne a day [during the filming of the original series], but I was never drunk. I just took little slugs throughout the day. Nine o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock at night is 12 long hours. You can ingest a lot of alcohol in that time, but it was never too much.”

Tuna of the earth.

And Hen There were None

Animals are often the hapless victims when humans decide to get squiffy in reckless, as we detailed in the “You Animal!” chapter of our first book The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery. In that chapter we covered a story of how Siberian zookeepers were enjoying an after hours party so much that by the time they noticed a fire had broken out on zoo grounds, enough exotic birds had been roasted to populate the menus of two dozen illegal wildlife restaurants.

That story came to mind when we read another story about the horrific fate of animals left in the care of a booze-hound — a drunk killing 70,000 chickens in Maryland. Accidentally killing them, that is — the man in question did not run amok at a succession of children’s farms. Instead he attended a party at the poultry firm for which he works and afterwards stumbled into the control room and while looking for a light switch (this is the current police theory) he shut power off to three chicken houses, depriving them of food, water and cooling fans — basically a not so secret recipe for dying within 15 minutes. The sheriff’s office reported that he was “found lying in the power control shed by the circuit breakers, wearing a T-shirt and boxers.”

Said a local heavy in the poultry industry: “I have never heard of a drunkard going in and killing chickens. This is a new one on me.”

“Dude, remember that time you were caught with your pants down with those monkeys?” “Yeah man, huh.”

Lab tech hears call of the wild, but unfortunately not last call

Also on the theme of drunks and the animals who loathe them, we have a lab tech at Georgia Health Sciences University who a coworker found drunk with his pants down surrounded by two monkeys that were meant to be locked up. If you’re going to get a police record for an alcohol-related accident, at least make the effort to have “pants down” and “uncaged monkeys” in there.

What he was getting up to in there and whether he was sharing his grog with the monkeys was not clear from original reports, though he has been relieved of his duties in the lab. The monkeys were looked over by a vet and determined fit enough to be locked back up in a cage and subjected to whatever experiment was being conducted on them. So in the end, monkey win.