Modern Drunkards

We received a letter in our mailbag from long-time HPO field-man Bill Johnson, in which he strongly agreed with the management of this website in believing that the massive Swedish Christmas goat "is gonna get lit up like Dean Martin on a monday morning." We really liked that quote. We also really liked a link to a site that Bill sent us, which deals with trading cards of the all-time Top Drunks.

Judy liked the sauce.

Not surprisingly, many of the members of the Top Drunks trading cards deck were also, coincidentally, listed as "Real American Hot Pipes" by us here at HPO. There were, however, some glaring omissions to their deck of drunks, most notably Steve "White Lightning" Dalkowski. That man drank scotch-and-water like a mule plows a field: Doggedly, with a high threshold for pain.

Plus, you could call him a stand-up guy. Well, as long as not remembering half of your life counts as being "stand-up."

A mischievous monkey is always on the watch for a target to throw poo at.

A few months ago, we wrote a post about the growing monkey problem in Delhi. In case you can't remember back that far, basically the problem is that the city is overrun with troublemaking monkeys, and nobody knows how to get rid of them. They can't even be killed since monkeys are sacred in India.

Now, about 300 monkeys have been caught, but no other states or provinces will take them. Even relocating them to country forests is being vetoed, because rural villagers claim that the monkeys use their "hooligan habits" that they learned in the city to harass them.

If you're India, this is gotta be pretty embarrasing. OK, monkeys riding your public transportation, stealing kids' ice cream cones, and defecating everywhere isn't that bad, but when they manage to break into "very high security areas" of government buildings and begin "ripping up top-secret documents", the situation starts to get pretty close to the circus.

This makes you think of Mr. Teeny in some Indian National Security office, pulling nuclear missile codes out of cabinets and tearing them to shreds. Grow up, India. Really.