Downtown Iowa City, circa bar close
I don’t mean to intimidate you, dear reader, but I am a graduate of the top party school in the United States. When it comes to binge drinking, I am like a doctor who went to Harvard, whereas you are like a doctor who went to Hollywood Upstairs Medical College. While you were wasting your time with the dead ideas of losers in books, I was learning to drink a malted milk—the whiskey drink, not the ice cream confection—without gagging. While you were mired in cosines or whatever, I was learning valuable lessons about social dynamics and personal equilibrium. The best part is that tuition was cheap, at least monetarily. Otherwise the cost was terrible, and even now I can feel a Jaeger shot rattling around somewhere loose in my intestines. Today is Friday, and we are all products of our alma maters. Won’t you throw a few back and then throw them back forward with me?
If you’re wondering what Iowa City looks like, you can pretty much tell by this map of drug and alcohol arrests in 2013. That round cluster of red dots is Kinnick Stadium. The square cluster of public intox busts is downtown, and the rectangles of drug offenses are the dorms. Basically, drug and alcohol enforcement in Iowa City looks like the casualty map from a neutron bomb, vaporizing the people and leaving the shapes of buildings intact. Also, who knew Mayflower was so druggy? When I lived there, I was primarily addicted to Magic: The Gathering. I mean partying! Summa cum laude under Captain Morgan.
Of course, no amount of formal education can eclipse the talent of a natural. Miracle Mike Sebba sent me this tale of heroism from Gawker, in which a teen raver tears off his finger pulling down a fire alarm, then continues to party for another 90 minutes. I suppose that once you’ve heard acid house, getting a phalange pulled off isn’t so bad. It’s also cool that Gawker is covering stuff that happened at parties in London to teenagers without last names. Welcome to the future of internet journalism, folks: a world where party accidents are not just news, but also aggregated at the end of the week by me.
No matter the strength of your adrenaline high, though, every party must eventually come to an end. Ask Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who has been accused of participating in a “criminal scheme” to coordinate with super PACs and nonprofit political groups during the 2012 recall election. In a statement, Walker called the allegations “categorically false.” In an email to Karl Rove, however, he bragged about his campaign’s close relationship with the outside groups, which he claimed to “own.” God love Scott Walker, from his dopey facial expression to his just-smart-enough-to-get-caught ambitions. Richard Hansen, an election law specialist at UC Irvine, described Walker’s decision to email about coordination with outside groups as “mind-boggling.”
Remember how I said nothing lasts forever? I had forgotten about Henry and Glenn Forever, the timeless classic in which Glenn Danzig and Henry Rollins are in a loving, committed relationship. Even if you aren’t in arm’s reach of my personal coffee table, you can now enjoy Henry and Glenn Forever in a new collection, wisely titled Henry and Glenn Forever and Ever. For a hundred bucks, you can even get an autographed copy that comes with a customized drawing. “Henry teaches Glenn to ride a bicycle” is my idea, and you cannot have it.
Also this happened. You’d think that I would be all over former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer saying that Eric Cantor seems kind of gay, and you’d be right. But I am recently all over it for Vice, so we’re going to let it pass unremarked here. If you want to know what I think, you’ll just have to keep going back to Vice today and clicking on random stories until you see my byline. They won’t mind. Update: Here it is. And while we both compulsively refresh their site searching for my precious name, how about you keep one tab open to remember what matters?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etfIdtm-OC8
