February 13th, 2024
Managing the Wasted at the Waste Management Golf Tournament

Sports writers are outdoing themselves, describing the merdique behavior last week.

 At 1:28 pm, the stadium’s more sober patrons were already about seven drinks deep. They or their employers had paid good money — in some cases down-payment-on-a-house money — to see something depraved. A streaker who was still wearing pants wasn’t going to cut it… [In] the haze of Topo Chico strawberry guavas, Miller Lites and vodka sodas, the weed, the rain and the mud, the hooting, howling, and the grabassing, no one could be sure they were at a professional sports event. Every other data point suggested that, in reality, they had slipped into exactly where they wanted to be: a black hole of feral manhood… [T]he 10-drink cutoff was a very gentle suggestion. Bartender after bartender told group after group, “If you take care of me, I’ll take care of you.” I watched several men in their 40s and 50s tip hundred-dollar-bills after each round, and their wristbands were never scanned. For many, 10 soon became 20, which became face-planting into a urinal… To visit the toilets was to realize fully that no sporting event embodies its name as cosmically as the Waste Management Open. They stood in an unlit room at the end of a long, wet, musty, unlit hall. By 2:00, the plastic urinals — a green, eight-foot-tall structure where four men at a time pee toward each other — were overflowing, urine spilling onto mud-soaked All Birds. Nearly every Porta Potty around the perimeter was filled with cans of hard seltzers. 

What to do? Hm. Hm.

The PGA Tour has continually turned a blind eye toward drinking to excess at golf events, but after this week it no longer can... And if you’re wondering how important beer and alcohol sponsorship is to the tournament, the title sponsor of the Birds Nest, the off-course drinking and concert establishment, is Coors Light and the non-title sponsor is Jamison.’

On it, sir. Right on it.

***********************

But hey. That’s nothin.

October 28th, 2023
His final years were marked by a dignified and fully honest assessment of his physical and moral collapse.

He leaves behind a book and a set of interviews in which he graphically and eloquently describes/analyzes the death spiral of drug and alcohol addiction.

“The world might be shocked at his untimely death, but Perry knew that his addiction was going to kill him.”

The fatal extremity of dependency has rarely been put before us with more power.

January 13th, 2023
Carrie Fisher came to mind when…

... I read about Lisa Marie Presley‘s death. Both born and bred to LA madness, where scads of family and friends drugged and drank madly… You often read these days of uber-LA celebs moving everyone out of there (Australia seems the go-to spot) to avoid a culture where so many are pickling in chemicals.

Fisher made it to 60; Presley died at 54. Both hopelessly drugged up their hearts.

***********************

As a university-chronicler, UD sometimes wonders about the almost-total absence of university education in Mad LA, something Ricky Gervais cruelly pointed out at an awards speech (“You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than [17 year old] Greta Thunberg.”). It’s not that you can’t become a walloping addict and have gone to Cambridge (see Stephen Fry), but it is possible that temporary removal from mad LA to a location of some discipline and reflection (note the title of B. Giamatti’s book on universities: A Free and Ordered Space) would have helped some of LA’s victims.

November 9th, 2022
We can always get drunk.

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy had been expected to take the stage of his election-night party at a D.C. hotel as early as 10 p.m.

September 16th, 2022
Montgomery County, MD: Always Raising the Bar!

Montgomery County Planning Board Chairman Casey Anderson had “over 32 bottles of hard liquor in his office where he routinely create[d] mixed drinks and distribute[d] them on a significant scale.” 

May 3rd, 2022
Let’s take our eyes off of Heard/Depp for a moment and recall the Yeardley Love murder in 2010 at U Va.

UD covered it on this blog; Love’s drunk jealous on and off boyfriend kicked in her locked (to keep him out) off campus house door and bloodily beat her to death, for which he’s currently serving a 23-year sentence. And now Love’s mother has won a $15 million damages case against him.

Okay, back to the current legal drama coming out of an arrogant gin-soaked world…

March 22nd, 2021
Gradually, over the decades, spring break…

… which this blog has long covered, has morphed into a military-grade assault on American municipalities. Even the grossest, most self-serving of locations – places like Myrtle Beach and Panama City Beach – have begun wondering whether it’s ultimately… advantageous to them to be associated in the public mind with open-air rape, open-air drug dealing, street riots, and incessant gunfire. A lot of people seem to think these conditions aren’t family friendly. A lot of people in these localities are trying to unload real estate.

Throw in covid and you get Miami Beach, another notorious spring break location, and one that in recent years has really struggled with epically disgusting behavior. Unable to cope with this year’s fusillades, the city has imposed severe, weeks-long, curfews.

“I believe it’s a lot of pent-up demand from the pandemic and people wanting to get out,” David Richardson, a member of the Miami Beach City Commission, said on Sunday. “And our state has been publicly advertised as being open, so that’s contributing to the issue.”

March 17th, 2021
Close to half the fraternities at Penn State are Under Suspension.

But that leaves plenty still available to kill your kid.

March 7th, 2021
A cult is a cult is a cult.

When the frats kill a particularly young one, I post this variant of Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into State U.
And I drank in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Miles from home, loosed from my parents’ love,
I woke to black vodka and the nightmare brothers.
When I died I was .495 booze.

November 18th, 2020
Headline of the Day

Giuliani’s court bid to overturn Biden victory turns to farce as he forgets judge’s name, calls other lawyer ‘that angry man,’ claims the 11 biggest cities are conspiring to steal election, then gets directions to the nearest martini bar.

October 28th, 2020
Rudy Apparently Drinks Too Much Again

He figured Fox would be a friendly place for him to try to get it up (it being the Hunter Biden thing) but the interviewer challenged him and … you know… I mean… it’s a désinhibiteur after all…

‘Some can say that you’re acting like Christopher Steele, that you were abstracting information.’ 

‘You better apologize for that. I mean I’ve been a United States attorney, associate attorney general, mayor of New York City and a member of the bar for 50 years. I’ve never been accused of anything, and you’re accusing me of being Christopher Steele. What you’re saying is an outrageous defamation of me, of my reputation… I came on your show in good faith to give you evidence that is being withheld from the American people, and I get defamed. This may be the last time we’ll be on camera because I don’t let people call me Christopher Steele.’

April 16th, 2020
‘Plane Stunts on Meth’

Recall the 2008 case of Stanford University med school faculty member John Borchers (scroll down), a long-term addict of many drugs, who continued to the very end of his life (massively drugged, he piloted a plane into a mountain) to see patients. To this day, Stanford has said not a word about why it felt okay retaining this wreck of a man in a position of enormous responsibility.

Then there’s hero-pitcher Roy Halladay.

Philadelphia Phillies Hall of Famer Roy Halladay was doing acrobatic stunts in his plane before his fatal crash in 2017… Halladay had 10 times the acceptable levels of amphetamines in his system as well as morphine and an unnamed antidepressant that can impair judgment. Just before he died, the NTSB found, Halladay had performed a series of dangerous maneuvers like high-speed climbs and dives as well as turns just five feet above the waters of Tampa Bay. One sequence of climbs and dives ended with his plane hitting the water, killing him, according to the report.

The Daily Beast calls this a “fatal joyride,” but you and I know that in both cases, these rides were precisely the opposite of joyful. These were suicides, just as if they’d gone the cheaper traditional route — accelerating hyperdrunk into trees.

October 29th, 2018
Witches’ Brew U.

When your university’s long-term president, in his valedictory speech, prominently cites as one of the institution’s pressing future needs closing certain bars, you have a problem. When his ultimate-aspiration summation alludes to mayhem at the hospitals, rage among the neighbors, shootings into crowds, and appalling tailgate conditions, you really do need to ask yourself if the University of South Carolina is a university, or is instead what UD calls a unibrewery.

It’s truly a witches’ brew: Capitalists in the bars hauling in the cash from students; unibreweries afraid to do much because they’re in competition for students with other unibreweries; a larger culture of massive alcohol addiction; guns guns guns guns guns. Mix briskly and stand back.

***************

UD thanks Professor Mondo.

August 15th, 2018
Deconstructing this Year’s Party School List

1 University of Delaware
2 West Virginia University
3 Tulane University
4 Syracuse University
5 Bucknell University
6 Lehigh University
7 University of California – Santa Barbara
8 University of Wisconsin – Madison
9 Colgate University
10 University of Rhode Island

See, you think they’re all gonna be big dumb state schools with military industrial football programs. And that is certainly one category (West Virginia). But there are other categories:

WHEN IN ROME: Tulane, Wisconsin-Madison

MAROONED, NOTHING ELSE TO DO: Delaware, Colgate, Bucknell, Syracuse

LONG, CHERISHED, TRADITION OF ADMITTING MAINLY DRUNKEN ASSHOLE BULLIES: Rhode Island

FRATERNITIES R US: Lehigh

HIGH AS A KITE IN LALA LAND: UC Santa Barbara

July 3rd, 2018
“Death, and parking issues.”

This blog has long chronicled the special thirst of university students in Wisconsin, America’s #2 drunkest state. The University of Wisconsin Stout is an alcoholic standout even by Wisconsin standards, and, in an effort to reduce the carnage, the school has attempted to shut down some particularly grotesque local bars.

UW-Stout seems to have started with the hilariously named Rehab Bar, featuring an all-day Intervention Fest, and routinely offering all the booze in the house for a few bucks. Pretty much everyone in there seems to be drinking illegally, etc. etc.

The understandably pissed off owner, faced with a chancellor and a city council determined to put him out of business, agreed to be shuttered on the condition that his liquor license be transferred to his buddy Elizabeth Hart, another bar owner.

So the council looked into Hart’s business practices, and it turns out… Well, it turns out that a lot of bars are pretty disreputable joints…

Based on [a] five-page background report … Menomonie Police Chief Eric Atkinson recommended that the council deny [Hart’s] application, a recommendation that was echoed by UW-Stout Chancellor Bob Meyer.

In a memo, Meyer expressed his concerns about the proposed transfer to an Eau Claire group he said is “associated with establishments that target college students with drink specials [and] would perpetuate the current high-risk drinking culture that exists at the Rehab.”

Although Hart had only one traffic contact on her record, her husband, Jared (Jed) Hart — who has also been known by more than two dozen other names — was charged and federally convicted in 2014 of tax fraud that took place in from 2008 to 2011 in regard to The Pickle [one of the Harts’ bars] of Eau Claire.

Eau Claire police provided a list of complaints associated with The Pickle and the Pioneer, most of them reported or witnessed by Jed Hart. Included in the violations were battery, drugs, disorderly conduct, counterfeit money, theft, check person, death, and parking issues.

Janessa Stromberger, assistant city attorney for Eau Claire, told [the investigator] that in the past few years since Jared Hart was released from prison, “his establishments had been more cooperative and easier to deal with.”

He’s a real pussycat now! Nothing like time in the federal pen to turn you all soft and nice… Real good role model for the kiddies, too… I ain’t goin’ back there and I don’t want to see you get in no trouble either…

Despite the many advantages of turning Rehab over to the Harts, the council rejected their application.

Next Page »

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories