Like many of our Canadian compatriots we are pretty ambivalent toward the British Royal Family. Sure, most Canadians have a soft spot for Queen Elizabeth, but that has more to do with her being on the currency and how good it feels to find a forgotten 20 in a pair of jeans you just washed.
We included only one tale involving royalty in our who’s who of drunks, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery, and that concerned a footman who was adding whiskey to the water bowls of the royal corgis – an offense which, although funny, resulted in his demotion (and terrible canine hangovers during which the corgis wrote some of their best stuff).
Since then, when any royal is in the news we get all misty-eyed and almost regret the fact that this colorful family is no longer cracking the colonial whip and sending the degenerate misfits among their nobility to oversee our affairs.
Prince Harry, the third in line to the throne (the one the kings sit on, not where you can be found the morning after a night at Uncle Chili’s House of Hot), has long impressed us.
Unlike his elder brother, who has of late made a half-hearted effort to paint himself a fun loving guy by piloting RAF helicopters to private functions, Prince Harry has delivered time and again with drunken partying antics that, had they taken place in the 70s, would have caused someone to go wake up Rod Stewart and tell him all about it.
Prince Harry has partied with strippers, been involved in drunken scuffles with paparazzi, snorted vodka (for those interested in substances more traditionally snorted, check out our Top 10 Cocaine Songs of All Time) and… well… dressed up like a Nazi for a bit of a Halloween laugh.
And just now, when royal watchers figured the young man had his Windsor House in order, he’s befriended celebrity product endorser and star of cinema verite Paris Hilton, who recently took a shine to the prince’s girlfriend Chelsy.
According to reports they ‘talked for ages’, a doubtful prospect indeed as the heiress has a vocabulary less than what an adult gorilla can sign.
Recently, the prince’s old man Chuck was the subject of a 60th birthday roast during which Robin Williams regaled the crowd with jokes about Monica Lewinsky which would not have been out of place if it were 1998 and a “Yo, yo, whassup Wales? House of Windsor, keep it real” introduction that no doubt kept the coat check girls busy with a bottleneck to the exit.
As the keenly observant among you have noticed, we Shark Guys have elected to include Google ads on this site (we recommend clicking on them, repeatedly if you have to, as every 500th clicker wins a trip to Hawaii) and we’ve included this form of free enterprise ‘above the fold’ as it were (a phrase was used back when people were still reading newspapers)
Interesting, online ad competitors like Text Link Ads are completely buried by Google and unsearchable there, with no page ranking. This is understandable, as if we were a railroad we wouldn’t want someone else hauling freight on our rails and it seems T-L-A is that smelly hobo turfed between stops.
Consider our ad placements the cyber-equivalent of that guy at a spoken-word performance who comes around at the end with a hat, forcing you to feign distraction so that you can hold on to your small change and lower-denomination currency and thus be able to tip that attractive bartender consistently throughout the night.
Google AdSense works on some sort of mysterious computer-language-based Voodoo that we don’t have a clue about, however it seems to base what ads are displayed on the text that appears on a given page.
Thus, when we posted a blog in tribute to the drinking prowess of a certain young prince among drinkers, all sorts of advertisements began to pop up that were somehow based on his name and title – gossip sites, genealogy services offering to trace your heritage back to the big Kahunas of various medieval fiefdoms, and travel offers to places with royal sounding names like… [Editor's note: we won’t mention the town's name here, but let’s just say that it is the westernmost point on the TransCanada highway, which makes matters convenient once you’ve soaked up a bit of the sad local life and are ready to jump in the ocean]
However, given the nature of this blog, and The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Debauchery, the drunk compendium from which it sprung, ads more related to drinking, drunkenness, and the various accouterments that can spruce up this lifestyle do thankfully appear (including ones that are a little too appropriate, such as the ads that ask if you drink too much wine or another that wonders if you could stand to lose some beer-fat).
Of these, our absolute favorite thus far is from the Frankfurt-based “Rocket Packs Getränke-Rucksack-Systeme”, a company that sells “Beer rocket-packs”. This is a huge step up from the beer drinking hat popularized by fans of American sporting events who don’t want to get up to get a drink (and who presumably wear diapers to deal with the natural corollary of that kind of beer consumption).
Getranke’s website itself is not text-heavy, and most of it is in German, however the pictures seem to tell the story: the company sells packs that can keep a two or three liter tower of beer cool so that drinkers can be served on the move. A serving person straps on the jetpack-looking like device (at times while wearing a ball gown, which may or may not be offset by a pair of gigantic, devil-swooping-in-on-a-bad-dream pair of black wings) and offers freshly-tapped beer for thirsty patrons. In terms of venues where this sort of thing might be popular, it seems from their publicity material (see above photo) that no place is too toney to have a lady in high-heels squirt beer into your glass from a hose attached to a backpack.
We here www.thesharkguys.com thank all of our inadvertent advertisers and commend Getranke especially for coming up with a product that makes shameless shilling fun.
Remember that sociopath in elementary school — the overgrown mutant who would enjoy hanging you and the rest of your pre-pubescent buddies up by your underwear on the nearest fencepost or tossing you into a suitable hedge?
Well, according to a recent study making the news, that future Esso gas jockey was not behaving in this way simply to scar your memories of childhood or to encourage you to take Jiu-Jitsu lessons; he did these things because they gave him pleasure.
Presumably not wanting to pollute their results with an over-large sample, scientists rounded up eight teens between 16-18 years old with a history of being the school asshole and eight others with no such tendencies — those recovering from the wedgies doled out by the first group as it were.
They hooked all of them up to some neural-imaging equipment and, Clockwork Orange-style, showed them a series of violent images, some of them accidental, like a hammer dropping on a toe, and some of them deliberately violent, like someone slamming the lid down on a piano player’s fingers. The bullies’ brains lit up like a pinball machine whenever they saw someone in pain. (Admittedly, the thought of a piano lid being slammed down on the fingers of some wannabe Mozart tickling the ivories did give at least one of us a quiet giggle). The control group showed no such reaction.
That pain and pleasure are often connected comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever visited a fetish club, read a Chuck Palahniuk novel, or enjoyed the rush that accompanies rapping somebody on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. That bullies enjoy inflicting pain comes as no surprise to anyone who remembers the belly laughs that would echo throughout the school yard mid-recess torture session.
Still though, this study, with its test group of eight, has received major play on the Net, and the suggestion has been made that it could be used to help development better ways of dealing with bullying. It might just do that, but cages — placed at the backs of classrooms and with long poking sticks available for the use of other students — are a far cheaper and more permanent solution.
Generally, more ear pleasing noises can be heard at a hog-calling contest for the hearing impaired than your average karaoke bar.
Now, there are some songs that take a certain amount of panache to bring down the house and avoid being drowned out by some depressed drunk firing coins into the jukebox to hear the real thing. The sonic heights of Bohemian Rhapsody, for one, are best attempted in the confines of the shower provided you close the bathroom window first and don’t own any jittery pets.
With this in mind, if you you are someone given to making more ears bleed than a peckish Mike Tyson, it’s best to call for backup to double the odds that a member of your twosome, even if they ordinarily might not be able to carry a tune without one being strapped to their chest with an explosive device, can handle the sonic load. (With the added benefit of having a partner in crime against musicality, free to refresh your drink during alternating verses)
With four or five pitchers of stale beer often a performance prerequisite (the equivalent of warm-up stretching for the average warbler), it’s even that much more important if you’re going to climb that karaoke mountain, to have a Sonny to your Cher (and ensuring proper safety precautions as you scale back down it) so that fewer words are missed scrolling by on the monitor–a level of skill that might be a precursor to some of the sobriety tests that might have to be passed later on in the evening. [Editor's note: See The Top 10 Bar Songs of All Time and Top 10 Drinking & Driving Songs of All Time]
Given people’s election fatigue, we figured we’d lighten it up a bit and present the followingTop 10 Karaoke Song Duets of All Time, so that 12 scotch and sodas into your next bachelor party, if you’re able to convince someone else to share your bad decision-making, you won’t have to be both Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond for ‘You Don’t Bring me Flowers’.
10. Picture by Kid Rock & Sheryl Crow. There are some people who’d say that Kid Rock is a multi-talented instrumentalist and songwriter and these people would be in attendance at his family reunion. Generally speaking, someone with migraines, their head in a vice and getting squash balls shot off their ass cheeks makes sounds more pleasant to the ear than anything Mr Rock has ever put out, but the man should be given his due as he’s sporadically capable of rendering something decent, sort of like when a con grinds out a license plate.
Paired with Crow, who was once ridden by Lance Armstrong in between Tour de Frances, the lyric “I was off to drink you awaaaaaayy!” will be met with rousing cheers and much stale ale wiped down off the tables.
9. The Girl is Mine, by Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney. For those of you favoring affirmative action, this ‘up with people’ crowd pleaser (depending on exactly what kind of bar you’re singing in) lends itself to bi-racial performance as Michael Jackson was technically still black when this was performed and you can haul your own black friend out to bring the house down. ['Girl' can even be substituted for 'boy' during the Jacko parts to great applause]
8.Crazy in Love, by Jay-Z and Beyonce Knowles It’s a cliche to say that people have more money than God, but in this case, the power couple can underwrite the man upstairs, bail out Lehman Brothers and still have something left over to take each other somewhere nice. [Caveat: Jay-Z's rap comes at the 2 minute mark of this 4 minute song, leaving the male half in a performance in the unenviable position of having to chose whether to either dance awkwardly on the spot or keep their hands in their pockets throughout]
7. Broken by Seether and Amy Lee ‘Cause I’m broken when I’m lonesome’, a bit of emo redundancy from Seether and Amy Lee. A ’seether’ for those who were wondering, is a cooking pot and all things considered it’s a much better band name than ‘Cutting Board’.
6. Up Where We Belong Joe Cocker Jennifer Warnes
Joe Cocker, a guy who bears a superficial resemblance to Charlie Manson (see our Top 10 Horniest Cult Leaders of All Time) has a voice that sounds like he gargles with Lysol and whose taser-inspired gyrations are legendary, pairs up with the sweet alto of Jennifer Warnes for this Buffy St Marie penned ballad. Producer Don Simpson, apparently claimed “The song is no good. It isn’t a hit” and he was half-right, as anyone in the crowd when a couple of drunken lovebirds take to the stage to belt this one out.
5. I’ve Had the Time of My Life Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes: Ms. Warnes back again, this time teaming up with arguably the more righteous of the Righteous Brothers, Bill Medley. Her collaborations with Leonard Cohen are unlikely to be found in all but the most depressing bars on the planet. This song, guaranteed to thrill a crowd of people whose clocks stopped in the 1980s, featured prominently in the hit movie Dirty Dancing. On ‘Cheers’, Sam Malone in an attempt to bed Rebecca, has Bill Medley serenade her with ‘You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’. Not coincidentally, Dirty Dancing does this to every guy from the waist down.
4. Under Pressure David Bowie and Queen. This one, a good theme song for the workaday world, is an inexplicably popular choice on karaoke night. Bowie shows more range as an actor than as a singer and even though he and Freddy Mercury are both technically baritones, this will demand consummate karaoke professionalism. Most of the time it is a karaoke disaster, as is anything by either of these performers.
3. Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart Elton John and Kiki Dee Elton John may have put Kiki Dee on the map but a GPS is required to find her now. This was back in the days when Elton John’s music was fun to listen to — before he became a Sir and before he changed a few of the lyrics to his lamentable Marilyn Munroe-inspired piano dirge “Candle in the Wind” for Princess Diana — a song that will invite violence upon you if you attempt to subject an audience of antsy drunks to it. For this one, you and your chanteuse partner will need to be quite peppy. For added effect, move around a lot and swing your arms to and fro.
2. I Got You Babe Sonny and Cher: In the 1960s Sonny and Cher were a popular act, also known as “Who’s that nebbish with that foxy chick?” Sonny, despite being one uncool looking hippy, did pen some memorable tunes — and at the very top of that list is “I Got You Babe,” which is a popular karaoke choice for couples to sing to each other right before their relationships collapse and they go to war over who gets to look after Fido every second Sunday in March. It’s always the drunkest and loudest couple in the bar who gets up to out-shout each other with this one. That they “got each other babe” is not in dispute and neither is the fact that nobody else in the bar would ever want to claim them.
1. Islands in the Stream Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton: Kenny Rogers, subject of arguably the funniest impersonation in the history of MadTV, can outcroon anyone within a 10-mile radius. While other country stars have had an artistic rebirth in their declining years — see George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash — Kenny has had pretty much the opposite, his most frequent gig being the late-night infomercial salesman hawking a “Best of Country” compilation that features, surprise surprise, a whole bunch of Kenny Rogers tunes. Still though, Islands in the Stream is the coup de grace of karaoke duets, a staple of veterans of the bar mic, and a sure sign that you’re in a place where you’d be hygenically better off drinking from the bottle.
Like many of our Canadian compatriots we are pretty ambivalent toward the British Royal Family. Sure, most Canadians have a soft spot for Queen Elizabeth, but that has more to do with her being on the currency and how good it feels to find a forgotten 20 in a pair of jeans you just washed. 
