Last week, at least as far as we know, was Shakespeare's birthday (April 23rd, or at least we suspect so, since he was baptised on the 26th and typically it was a three day delay). If he were a vampire, he'd be 444 years old now, which would be weird on a number of levels. Putting aside for the moment any images of Shakespeare roaming the streets at night, marauding for flesh, I thought I might put my expertise in the English Renaissance to use and offer a number of things you might do over the next few days to help celebrate the bard's birthday, things that will help you relive those glorious days of Elizabethan and Jacobean London in which Shakespeare thrived:
1) Blame all venereal disease on the French, specifically syphilis, which you should simply call "The French Disease."
2) Use a silken handkerchief for a prophylactic. You might be historically rigorous and use some sort of silken bow or tie to cinch your "little gentleman's cloak," or acknowledge the unbridgeable divide between then and now by slapping a couple of rubber bands on for good measure.
3) Relieve yourself into a bucket or bedpan for as long as you can stand the stench, and then casually toss your "night soil" out a second-story window into the street below. Bonus points if at least some of your filth lands on a passerby.
4) Draw your sword on a stranger for an imagined slight. Here's a good one: "taking the wall" of someone meant walking alongside the wall when coming against someone walking the opposite direction, thereby forcing the stranger to take the far side and thereby inevitably walk closer to, or in, the gutter and all the delicious filth that entailed (see #3). So, the next time someone coming against you politely cheats towards a building/wall, quickly stab him or her in the stomach with your shank.
5) Accuse a neighborhood woman of witchcraft. One sure-fire way of identifying a witch, according to common practice, was to burn a piece of thatch from her roof. If she came running, that meant she was a witch. And honestly, and poor son of a bitch still living under a thatch roof nowadays needs that kind of excitement in their poverty-stricken life anyway. Ha. Poor people.
6) Torture and execute Jesuit priests for sneaking into your country and covertly saying Mass. Alternately, if you want to play at being from the continent, declare the Queen of England the Antichrist and try to assassinate her. So long as your religious fervor burns bright, either choice is alright!
7) Die by 35.
8) Make jokes at the expense of the Irish and the Scots. Excellent options include jabs about their barbarity, quips about their ignorance, or simply oppressing them as a people ruthlessly for hundreds of years. To Hell or Connaught, right, you limey pricks?
9) Attend an execution during your free time. While hangings and beheadings are, obviously, your best bet, a close second would be pelting people in the stocks with rotten produce, rocks, or any leftover night soil from #3. Either way, make sure to shout and gesture wildly as if you were hammered drunk at a baseball game.
10) Become a candy-striper at your local hospital. Should you, in your expert opinion, decide the patient has 'bad blood,' simply apply leeches or just cut them open at the inside of the elbow--you know, where your heroin goes. If you find an amputee immediately post op, help close the wound by shoving a red-hot poker against it, or if you've got a small cauldron handy, pour boiling oil over it. The tingles, and the screams of inhuman agony, let you know it's working!
Isn't being a modern boring? If only we could be Early Modern all the time. Now that's how I want to live...at least until I hit 35.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Still Waiting on Those Diplomatic Plates
This April marks my two year anniversary as a Marker's Mark Ambassador. Yes, you read that correctly. Yes, Maker's Mark, as in the whiskey. Don't pretend that you're surprised; I like to think that I'm on everyone's short list for likely candidates to represent the political interests of smooth, fine, and delicious Kentucky bourbon whiskey. Did I forget to mention it is also hand crafted? They actually make the whiskey out of human hands. Yeah, I couldn't believe that shit, either. Does it still count if said severed hands are clutching barley and wheat as they're hucked in the vat? I'll have to take this up with my dark masters in Kentucky.
The funny thing--apart from the fact that I'm an ambassador for an alcoholic beverage--is that I have no idea how I came to receive this auspicious post. None whatsoever. About a year and a half ago when I mysteriously received a box of plastic cocktail straws and napkins from Marker's Mark, I just assumed it was some randomized promotion. Perhaps my regimen of persistent liver abuse had caught the eye of some Uncle Jesse-esque (Dukes of Hazzard Jesse, not that delicious manwich from Full House) hick in the moonshine business. But as the gifts got increasingly noteworthy, I realized I had somehow been inducted into a secret cabal, one whose firm grasp on power I could manipulate for my own ends. And while the term "secret cabal" isn't always seen in the most favorable of lights, let me assure you that we're dealing with some classy gentlemen here. First of all, they make Maker's Mark bourbon whiskey, which is easily the finest bourbon whiskey to be made on this planet or any planet for all time. And did I mention it was hand crafted? And smooth? Yeah, that too. More importantly, though, said cabal started sending me devices so clearly anachronistic that my fingers twitched spasmodically at the thought of implementing them in this, our age of futuristic plastic polymers and interwebs. For instance, some months back I was sent a stick of sealing wax and a Maker's Mark seal, so that I can seal envelopes closed with my new lords' mark as kings of yore did:
Clearly, the ascot-wearing sophisticates at the Maker's Mark compound know their ambassadors' twisted predilections intimately, as I understood the seal and wax as not a gimmick but an actual tool to be implemented immediately. So fervent was this belief that I used a photocopy of a 1608 letter to Nathaniel Bacon, folded in the fashion of Renaissance correspondence, upon which to test this gift (I'm not kidding; that's a photocopy from the Huntington of a 400 year old manuscript). Behold the glorious results, and in so doing transport yourself to a gilded age of chivalry and savage venereal disease:
The funny thing--apart from the fact that I'm an ambassador for an alcoholic beverage--is that I have no idea how I came to receive this auspicious post. None whatsoever. About a year and a half ago when I mysteriously received a box of plastic cocktail straws and napkins from Marker's Mark, I just assumed it was some randomized promotion. Perhaps my regimen of persistent liver abuse had caught the eye of some Uncle Jesse-esque (Dukes of Hazzard Jesse, not that delicious manwich from Full House) hick in the moonshine business. But as the gifts got increasingly noteworthy, I realized I had somehow been inducted into a secret cabal, one whose firm grasp on power I could manipulate for my own ends. And while the term "secret cabal" isn't always seen in the most favorable of lights, let me assure you that we're dealing with some classy gentlemen here. First of all, they make Maker's Mark bourbon whiskey, which is easily the finest bourbon whiskey to be made on this planet or any planet for all time. And did I mention it was hand crafted? And smooth? Yeah, that too. More importantly, though, said cabal started sending me devices so clearly anachronistic that my fingers twitched spasmodically at the thought of implementing them in this, our age of futuristic plastic polymers and interwebs. For instance, some months back I was sent a stick of sealing wax and a Maker's Mark seal, so that I can seal envelopes closed with my new lords' mark as kings of yore did:
Clearly, the ascot-wearing sophisticates at the Maker's Mark compound know their ambassadors' twisted predilections intimately, as I understood the seal and wax as not a gimmick but an actual tool to be implemented immediately. So fervent was this belief that I used a photocopy of a 1608 letter to Nathaniel Bacon, folded in the fashion of Renaissance correspondence, upon which to test this gift (I'm not kidding; that's a photocopy from the Huntington of a 400 year old manuscript). Behold the glorious results, and in so doing transport yourself to a gilded age of chivalry and savage venereal disease:
Much like a foreign prince lavishes gifts upon his heart's desire, so too did Maker's Mark continue to heap bounty upon me. The final nail in my bourbon-soaked (and thus even more flammable) coffin was the delivery of official Maker's Mark business cards, complete with my name, Ambassador number, and the serial number of my own cask.
Yes, my own cask. Squirreled away under the bluegrass hills of Kentucky, much like the hobbit holes of the Shire, squats a white oak barrel filled with delicious, smooth Maker's Mark bourbon whiskey with my name on it. Literally. Indeed, I almost like to think of it as my child, if you could split open your baby and fine whiskey would pour out. Of course, were that the case, we Irish probably would have died out a long time ago in feats of Swiftian barbarism. Ah, but we'd have died pissed out of our tree and happy.
And in the end, that's why I'm so proud to be a Maker's Mark ambassador, despite the fact that, in all honesty, I have no idea how I came to be one. I've polled the usual suspects and have been met with only confused, blank stares, as if a penis had started to grow from my forehead and staring at it was the only way to uncover the sacred mystery of its beginnings. Ironically, I've come to believe I was hammered drunk one night on the internet and signed myself up for it. I can't be sure, as the brain cells responsible perished in a chemical fire of sorts that very night. Nevertheless, I feel this sordid truth actually makes me qualified for the position. So while I continue to spread the good word about the smooth, sophisticated, almost white-oaky taste of Maker's Mark bourbon whiskey, sit back and enjoy a glass of delicious, fine, brownish Maker's Mark Kentucky bourbon whiskey. I'll be out killing a hobo to see if this office comes with diplomatic immunity.
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