Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

A backlash of titanic proportions is growing against the professional sports leagues of America, all of which have canceled some games in protest against cops killing black people on video.
 
This has disturbed any number of backwoods peckerheads who think that millionaire athletes who have far better jobs, incomes and opportunities for sex than they do have no business being social justice warriors, and need to shut up and play so the Billy Bobs of this country have something to watch while they crack that eleventh Natural Light on their day off.
 
A movement to boycott pro sports is being fomented out there in Murica, and the burning question is, what is going to replace numbly sitting in front of the tube after getting shellacked on medical marijuana when you don’t have the Dallas Cowboys to drop passes for your entertainment anymore? Got some suggestions for you here:
 
COLLEGE SPORTS: Sure, but they’re not really having them this year. Even when they resume, the only real college sport is football, and they only play that for a few months out of the year. You think Bobby Joe Dumdickey is going to get excited about lacrosse or crew or any of that other ESPN3 stuff? Naw. He’d rather be…
 
HUNTING: Yep. That’s the ticket. Nothing like being out in nature, killing a few of God’s perfect creatures. Except that hunting has seasons too, and at some point, you’re too old to be trudging through the woods, wearing holes in your  diabetes socks. Or you’re just sick of freezing your ass off before dawn in some soggy duck blind. Then it’s time to go…
 
FISHING: Again, not a year-round entertainment opportunity. Sure, summer’s a great time to snag your lures on the branches overhead trying to catch trout, which are edible, even though they taste faintly of mud, or bait up for catfish, which are not, because they taste entirely like mud. There’s deep sea fishing, too, where you can spend a shit-ton of money finding out how good the fishing was yesterday. Then there’s ice-fishing, which is what you can plan to do instead of watching the next Super Bowl. So maybe you should try…
 
BASHING MAILBOXES WITH BASEBALL BATS: Just kidding. You had your fill of that when you were a kid. Even though it keeps Democrats from voting, you’re not going back to that. You’d rather…
 
DRINK BEER AND PLAY POOL IN SOME HIDEOUS REDNECK DIVE BAR: That’s the ticket. You know your spot. They don’t serve any bottled brew that doesn’t come in a longneck, four of their six draught taps dispense a beer that ends in “Light,” and if you don’t ask for a shot of whiskey with your suds, your friends ask you if you’re feeling all right. The trouble with this place is that there is a TV crammed into every corner and hanging from every nook in the ceiling, and they're all tuned into a game, so you’re going to find yourself watching those hateful professional athletes again, just like a common libtard, especially when there’s two minutes left in the game and it’s tied. So, there’s hardly anything left, except for…
 
PORN: Hey, your wife just left for the supermarket and you’re on the Internet anyway. Why not quit reading this and…

​Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh clarified the remarks he made in his grilling by Fox News a few nights ago by saying that while he might have lost his virginity in high school, college, or any weekend or vacation in between, he doesn’t actually recall doing so, so it didn't count.
 
“It’s what I call ‘sober virginity,’ he explained. “I didn’t lose mine until I was on Ken Starr’s team in ’95, trying to link Hillary to murders the wingnuts still think she did. We were staying at a hotel that Vince Foster once stayed at, looking in the trash bins for discarded napkins on which he might have written, “Hey, I think the Clintons are trying to kill me,” when Ken—he could be such a card, we called him “the Joker” behind his back—sent a professional entertainer named Sugar Melons to my room before I had even started drinking the mini-bar dry.

“Ken thought I would freeze up at confronting my personal demon—sex with a woman when I wasn’t drunk myself—but I was ready to lose my sober cherry. I made some pleasant small talk—I remember asking her ‘Sugar Melons—is that your real name?’ but she wasn’t much of a talker. She was already squeezing me through my tighty-whities and muttering, ‘Honey I hope the tip you leave me is bigger than this one.’
 
“After that, of course, I had sex with my wife sober many times. Not on our honeymoon, of course—that was such an epic binge I was still hung over when our oldest was born. Or our first Halloween together, when I was so wasted I thought it would be funny to cut a little hole in the back of our jack-o-lantern and have sex with it on the front porch. Which my wife forgave me for, even though she pointed out that a normal-sized man would have burnt his tip on the candle. I just have to remember never to address her as ‘Pumpkin’ again.
 
“So, I hope that clears everything up and you’re ready to put me on the Supreme Court, because I’m ready to go. Ruth Bader Ginsburg told me they have super crunk Happy Hours.”

We went to Alaska this summer. It was my Significant Other’s idea. We had cruised Alaska before, but this time we decided to go it alone, not wanting to be herded down the gangplanks again with a horde of other tourists so stuffed with cruise ship food that they were barely able to walk to the bar on the dock. We wanted to see the real Alaska.

Real Alaska is really beautiful, but Alaska is really serious about three things: 1. Prices for stuff that border on the whimsical. 2. Booze. 3. Bears.

I saw a sign at Exit Glacier, which, summarized, said “If you are attacked by a black bear, fight back. If you are attacked by a grizzly bear, play dead, unless the bear starts to eat you, then fight back.”

That’s a lot of stuff to remember in those trenchant moments when you are being attacked by a bear, in my opinion. First off, you have to decide what species the angry mass of teeth and claws that is rushing out of the pines to devour you belongs to. Second, if you are being attacked by a grizzly bear, you have to be sensitive to the moment when it decides you are not just an intruder that needs to be pulped, but a tasty treat that happened to be wandering in the woods, at which point you need to become the snack that fights back.

How you “fight” a thousand-pound animal is left deliberately vague, in my opinion, by bear warning signs. You are left to your own martial arts preferences in a bear fight. Possibly you have MME caliber skills. Conversely, maybe you are just barely capable of looking for an opening to kick your opponent in the genitals. Fortunately for you, the attackee, your personal fighting skills are not likely to have much effect on the decision, which is always made by the bear.

If you are worried about bears attacking you to the point of anxiety, there is always alcohol to ease your dread, provided you don’t give any to minors. The penalty for doing so on the Last Frontier is 5 years in state prison. So, for giving a can of beer to a twenty-year-old in Alaska, you can serve a prison term that many states would regard as adequate for manslaughter.

Fortunately, we didn’t know any minors in Alaska, but I still got in trouble buying beer. First, no matter how old you appear to be, anytime you buy alcohol there, you get carded. I can assure you that liquor store clerks in Anchorage do not appreciate it if you respond “You’re shitting me, right?” when they ask for ID.  Also, there is a special counter where you must purchase your beer, due to the hushed, sinful nature of the transaction. Simply dumping your sixer on the regular counter where you buy jerky and Doritos will earn you some stinkeye from the convenience store worker.

All this is because Alaska has a problem with Native Alaskans drinking too much because they have an inherited disposition toward severe alcoholism. How carding people nearly old enough for Medicare, and putting guys who give wine coolers to their underaged dates in the slam for five years, solves this problem is something you’ll have to ask Juneau.

I thought I was ready for Alaska prices, because I lived in Hawaii for nine years, where gouging tourists is how we made our living, but the price of stuff in Alaska is even more random. If you are not fully awake by the time you finish your bacon and eggs in Alaska, you will be jolted to full alertness when you realize you are going to pay fifty bucks for them. Alaskans only have about four months a year to clean out tourist’s wallets, whereas in Hawaii we had all year round. Alaskans have to be more serious about it. And they are.

In Hawaii, if you live there, you are considered kama’aina, which is a beautiful old Hawaiian word which means “Fuck the tourists,” and you get lower prices on everything than malahinis, or visitors. As far as I could tell, Alaska does not have a similar practice. If it does, the locals kept it on the down-low from me.
​
Looks like I’ve reached my word limit for the day, and I haven’t even gotten out of Anchorage, so this column will have to have a Part II.

​*Not to be confused with the Final Frontier. That's Star Trek.

One of the things they like to do on a cruise ship is play little games so you can socialize with the other passengers instead of merely being appalled by them. My favorite ship's bar to stay continuously inebriated in hosted a trivia competition every day. 

At first I was enthusiastic about this competition, since my brain is crammed with useless knowledge that no one will ever pay me a dime for acquiring. However, the trivia competitions consisted solely of a Power Point presentation of various images you needed to identify. There was a Superhero competition, where you had to write down the character name of the movie superhero as he or she appeared on the screen. Answers like "Jessica Alba," even when the image is quite clearly Jessica Alba's, or  "The guy with the way stretchy arms and legs" were not permitted, otherwise I would have done better.

But the worst was the cheese test. The cruise guests were overwhelmingly American, and the cruise employees, who concocted the tests, were overwhelmingly not, and this particular test was designed to show the guests they knew nothing about cheese, which apparently Americans don't, even though they melt or sprinkle it over every meal.

It consisted of pictures of cheeses, which we were expected to name. Perhaps you have never noticed this, but many cheeses look alike. Furthermore, the smarmy little Latvian woman who tested us had failed to include any cheeses that Americans could immediately identify, such as cake, nacho, steak, burger or Velveeta. 

You could have given me a test on quadratic equations and I would not have flunked it nearly as miserably as I did the cheese test. You'll note I wrote both "Swiss" and "Brie" down three times. "Brie" was correct once, even though all three pics showed a white wedge of cheese covered by that nasty brie crust. 

"Swiss" was never correct, even though on number 17 our East European torturer showed us a pic of a light yellow cheese triangle with characteristic Swiss holes in it. When she corrected our work, she told us the true name of the cheese, which elicited loud boos from the audience, every single one of whom had written down "Swiss."

"The Swiss make many different cheeses with holes in them," she replied aloofly. At this, the booing only got louder, and someone shouted "Go back to Latvia!" at her.  I am sorry to have to admit that was me.

But a careful observer of my answer sheet will see that I had lost hope in the test as early as #3, to which I answered "Some fucking cheese."  Answer #15, "Wad o' cheese" and #18 "Something cheesy" were scribbled down in a similar, beaten frame of mind, while #6 "Goat" and #10 "Pig" were more of a tribute to our animal friends than an actual effort to be accurate. #13 "Brown cheese with little squares" was a nice description of the cheese depicted, although I knew it was unlikely to be called that. By #12 "Barbecued" I meant cheese that looked like it had slipped between the grates of a propane grill and had been burnt to a smoky crisp. I can't imagine anyone eating that stuff.

#19 looked like a puffy, self-important cheese, so I called it Donald Trump cheese.

Besides the one Brie, I only got #7, "Edam" right, and that was because while the red waxy coating of the cheese had been hacked into, the letters "D," "A" and "M" could still be clearly seen on its surface.

Fortunately, the next day the test was on beer, and consisted of naming the country of origin of pics of beer bottles as they Power Pointed by, and while the beers were obscure and so were some of the nations, I got ten out of twenty and finished second.

I'm back in the game.

BTW, "Cujo" is the name of our Chihuahua

The successful completion of a scientific experiment that proved that whiskey aged in space tastes different than whiskey aged on Earth was recently announced by Ardberg Distillery  in Scotland, which sent the hooch into orbit back in 2011.

This is a very modest first step forward in advancing the cause of drinking in space, which up to this point only Russians have been allowed to do, and that only because Russians will not go anywhere they are not allowed to drink.  As more and more humans populate space, however, inevitably some of them will turn out to be alcoholics of the first order and these people won't want to be spinning around in the ionosphere sober. Indeed, life in space, with cosmic rays zapping you frequently enough that you are constantly reminded that the universe is really just one truly gigantic microwave oven, and meteorites and leftover bolts from your slob neighbor's space station whizzing around looking to pop a hole in your living room and let all the air out without prior notice at any time, might lead any space guy or gal to regard alcohol as a necessity.

Efforts so far to explore the universe drunk have been distinctly underwhelming. The first zero-gravity bender has yet to be attempted, along with the accompanying first zero-g hangover. When a person gets blacked-out drunk in the blackness of space, can anybody hear them giggle pointlessly? When an individual has over-imbibed so much that he or she gets the "whirlies," will whirling around the Earth exacerbate the condition?

These are questions that need to be answered before some pioneering distillery changes its slogan from "Made in Tennessee for 120 Years" to "Made While Orbiting over Tennessee 120 Times a Week." I see no lack of volunteers. Many of us will fail the physical, having been drunk too many times on Earth to subject our tender livers to life in the celestial sphere, but it is certain that there are enough sturdy young boozehounds in this great thirsty nation of ours willing to be lofted into orbit for the first zero-g Happy Hour in order to start settling some of these scientific dilemmas.

Inevitably, among those will be a pioneering couple who will meet at some hundred-mile high watering hole and get so drunk  that they wake up naked the next day in a weightless embrace, barely able to remember each other's names. He'll lie about the quality of his performance to all his friends at work on Monday, while she will be left to do the first  Spacewalk of Shame back to her own capsule in the morning.

To them we say "Bottoms up!"

It saddens us to report that the Ardberg experiment did not even rate a mention in the recently announced 2015 Ig Noble Awards. The big winner there was a guy who let a bee sting him on his penis in order to determine whether that was extraordinarily painful.

It was, but that was hardly unexpected. In fact, penile bee stings were probably what set early man to wishing somebody would invent trousers. But we congratulate this brave researcher anyway who, in the tradition of the Igs, was awarded a cash prize of a 10 trillion dollar Zimbabwean bill, which is worth about three bucks US.

Hope he spends it on beer.