Drunk History: Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison

“More Drunk History!” you said, a little too loudly and with an awful lot of slurring.

“You’ve got it,” we replied, albeit a bit reluctantly. We wish to make it clear that we do not in any way condone drinking, onscreen vomiting, or learning. But hey, what the hell, here you go anyway:

Drunk History vol. 6 w/ John C. Reilly & Crispin Glover from Drunk History

Still More Spoilers for Dopes1

The Shining (1980): Jack Nicholson’s character, Jack, starts acting a little weird. 

Dallas (1978–1991): It was all a dream.

 Psycho (1960): If you’re just now about to start watching it, Psycho is a quaint,
well-crafted, scary little movie with nothing particularly shocking in it.

  

  Apollo 13 (1995): They never land on the moon.
All those crazy websites were right!²

Batman (1989): Jack Nicholson’s character, Jack, starts acting a little weird.

 

 
Psycho (1960): If you’re just now about to start watching it in 1960,
it will blow your fucking mind.

The Shining (1980): If these girls don’t scare the crap out of you, nothing will.

 

Return of the Jedi (1983): Can you believe this is what
James Earl Jones looked like thirty years ago?
 
 
 

The Shining (1980): This was not a good era for carpet patterns.



 
Return of the Jedi (1983): This movie is going to be awesome. It’d take, like,
an entire army of savage caveman teddybears to mess it up. 

The Shining (1980): The elevator is out of order.

NOTES

1. If you have no idea what this all means, check here. Sorry, no, we meant here.
2. If this actually does give something away about Apollo 13, you should be at least slightly embarrassed. This actually happened in the real world. There are books about it and everything.

Today in Rock History: Ozzy Osbourne Updates His Diet Plan

Thirty years ago today—January 20, 1982—the shambling, incomprehensible wreck once known as Ozzy Osbourne inexplicably bit the head off of a bat that was (also inexplicably) thrown onstage during his concert in Des Moines, Iowa.

No, it wasn't this kind of bat. We just like
having fun with Photoshop.

Depending on the version of the story you hear, the bat was 100% alive, totally dead, or presumed to be fake. It’s likely that we’ll never be sure of the full story, since the odds are good that at this point even Ozzy—or perhaps especially Ozzy—is a bit hazy on the details.


Other questions that likely never will be answered include:

1. What kind of nut throws a fake bat onto a rock-concert stage?
2. What kind of nut throws a real bat—live or dead—onto a rock-concert stage?
3. What kind of maniac five-star über-nut sees a bat fly through the air (which is, in fact, how live bats generally travel) and land on his stage, assumes it’s fake, and figures the best way to test his theory is to bite its head off?

Exhibit A: maniac five-star über-nut.

. . . actually, now that we think about it, those questions aren’t actually unanswerable at all:

1. A nut.
2. at least two kinds of people would do this: (a) an only moderately-nutty Ozzy Osbourne fan, or, if we didn’t know for sure that he was onstage at the time of the incident, (b) Ozzy himself.
3. The very same kind of nut that, only a few months earlier, bit the head off an unmistakably live dove in front of a room of CBS record executives. 

Completely coincidentally, it was right around 1982 that some folks started to suspect that there was something slightly unusual about Ozzy Osbourne.

God Indifferent to Football; Satan Still Heavily Invested

Armchair philosophers have argued for years, often with nobody in particular paying attention to them, that God doesn’t care who wins or loses a football game. With a balanced mix of the devout, the disinterested, and the despicable on both sides of the ball—not to mention the long list of actually important problems on Earth to occupy God’s time—the notion that God notices, much less intervenes in, an essentially irrelevant athletic activity played by maybe 0.06% of the world’s population is a pretty silly one to a lot of folks.¹

On the other hand, though, one should probably be forgiven for believing that Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots—having won the AFC East nine times since 2001, and now being one win away from reaching their fifth Super Bowl in eleven seasons—are proof that Satan is heavily invested in the NFL, and hasn’t lost his touch.

Sherman: Brother Dickinson, New England has been fighting the devil for more than a hundred years.
Dickinson: And as of now, Brother Sherman, the devil has been winning hands down.²

NOTES
1. That doesn’t mean, of course, that plenty of folks won’t still make the argument.
2. From 1776 (1976), John Dickinson to Roger Sherman.

Drunk History: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass

We at Bowling in the Dark take some pride in our 100% semi-original content. While other bloggers may shamelessly regurgitate other people’s material, we do our best to pretend it all comes straight from us. That’s the Bowling in the Dark Guarantee.¹

Sometimes, though, our hectic work schedule gets to be too much, and we find ourselves with nothing of our own to post. Unlike other websites’ jokes, manufactured by the thousand in dismal third-world sweatshops, each one of our jokes is painstakingly hand-crafted by dedicated sub-Saharan African artisans in clean and sanitary working conditions, and while we love their work, sometimes they struggle to keep up with demand.

So while we wait for our latest shipment of attempts at humor to arrive, please enjoy this American History lesson narrated by a drunk person, courtesy of Funny or Die.

Drunk History Vol. 5 w/ Will Ferrell, Don Cheadle & Zooey Deschanel from Will Ferrell

NOTES
1. Guarantees not legally binding in this dimension.

Sidney Crosby's Mustache Demoted to AHL

An already difficult season for Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby took a turn for the worse this afternoon when the team announced that his mustache (left), after struggling for the better part of seven seasons, will be sent down to the organization’s farm team, the AHL’s Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins.

Although long expected, the demotion of Crosby’s mustache, Patchie, is another radical turn of events for the star center in a year filled with thrilling and troubling turnabouts. Sidelined by a concussion for sixty-one games over a span of two seasons, Crosby and Patchie made a dramatic return to the ice against the New York Islanders on November 21, 2011, tallying two goals and two assists in a 5-0 victory.

Crosby proceeded to register eight assists in the next seven games, and appeared to be picking up right where he left off before his injury. But his concussion-like symptoms¹ returned after playing the Boston Bruins on December 5, 2011, and has not skated in a game since.

Even before Crosby’s latest absence, concern had arisen than his facial hair was not pulling its weight at the NHL level. His defenders point out that while Crosby is twenty-four years old and—concussion symptoms aside—arguably at the top of his game, his mustache is perhaps as young as two and a half, and has many years left to blossom. The team decided, however, that with the prospect of facing first-class playoff beards only a few months away, Patchie leStache was better off moving down to the AHL.

“We definitely don’t see this demotion as a punishment,” says Penguins coach Dan Bylsma. “This is an opportunity for Patchie to grow, thicken up, and expand his game at his own rate, in a less intense and stressful environment.”

“Sid’s one of the best players in the game,” says Ray Shero, Pittsburgh’s general manager. “He’s got great strength, hands, and vision, and he has a drive to succeed like I’ve never seen. But let’s face it, beardsmanship really isn’t one of his strengths at the moment. We’re committed to changing that.”

Your mustache will never
look this great. Don’t even
bother trying.

Shero has backed that commitment by arranging for Crosby’s mustache to receive exclusive one-on-one coaching from the legendary Lanny McDonald (right), the first (and, to date, only) athlete inducted into both the Hockey Hall of Fame and the Mustache Hall of Fame. At his 1991 MHoF induction ceremony, McDonald stated that scoring 500 career goals was his “twelfth greatest achievement,” and that “the other eleven are all whiskers.”

“The Pittsburgh Penguins firmly believe that Sid’s mustache will play a big part in the future of his face,” Shero adds. “Sure, ‘Sid the Kid’ has a great ring to it, but we look forward to the day when we can start calling him, say, ‘Sid the Growing Boy’ or even ‘Sid the Pubescent.’ ”

Sid and Patchie leStache
in happier times.

Crosby’s teammates have been characteristically supportive of their captain during this trying time, according to Coach Bylsma. “A bunch of the guys felt bad for Sid, so they tried to cheer him up by giving away things that were about the same size as his mustache. Kind of a symbolic thing, you know. Jordan [Staal] pulled a button off of one of his dress shirts, and Geno [Evgeni Malkin] shaved off about a third of one of his eyebrows.”

Bylsma laughs fondly. “Steve Sullivan—what a great guy—gave away 20% of his height for Sid. Turns out that’s almost nine and a half inches. And Matt Cooke threw away the rest of his reputation as a clean player, which surprised a lot of guys who didn’t know he had any of it left. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but Aaron [Asham] handed over two of his jocks. This is the kind of thing that brings teams together.”

As if to demonstrate hockey players’ good nature and sportsmanship, even at this most intense of levels, several of Crosby’s opponents have also passed along messages of support.

“Sid just needs to understand that it’s okay, everybody has places on their faces where hair doesn’t grow,” says Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas (right).

“I like to call mine ‘eyelids.’ ”


Patchie leStache is expected to be in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins’s lineup within a week, likely as a second-line center between Brian Engblom’s carefully sculpted, windswept mullet and Mike Commodore’s colossal orange afro. To make room for Patchie on the roster, Barry Melrose’s hair—known only as “The Melrose”—has finally been cut.

Crosby has taken Patchie’s demotion with the mature and grounded perspective expected from a superstar and team captain. “Hey, I won an Art Ross Trophy when I was still a teenager, and was barely old enough to drink when I won the Stanley Cup,” says Crosby.

“I have almost 600 points already, and I have another 10 or 15 years to get even better at hockey. If laughing at my crappy mustache lets some fat, aging, alcoholic rec-leaguer feel good about himself, that’s cool with me.”

---

About the Author: Some Guy is a fat, aging, alcoholic rec-league hockey player. He routinely gets hurt by players half his size, and his slap shot is widely viewed as a tragic punchline to a particularly embarrassing joke. On the other hand, his full, luxurious mustache and his willingness to mock others make him feel good about himself.

NOTE

1. News sources are now required by law to refer to concussions as “concussion-like symptoms.” Apparently they’re being paid by the word, just like weather forecasters who long ago replaced thunderstorms with “thunderstorm activity.”

Today in Science History: Physicist and Animal Lover Erwin Schrödinger Pronounced Dead, Alive1

     

NOTE
1. Don’t feel bad—we don’t actually get it either. We’re just trying to impress all the ladies out there that love physics.²
2. Hello, ladies.

Mangled English

Part 3 of a Potentially Infinite Series

We’re pleased to see that these good folks are willing to look after their premise, and hope they’re just as willing to protect their conclusion.