After the fire storms of the apocalypse choke the life out of our planet the cockroaches will rule as kings from thrones made of Twinkies. Everybody knows that. And yeah, sure, it’s frustrating to know they are just waiting us out. But to add insult to injury it now appears that those bumbling Blattaria might just have our whiskey to drink as well. Sigh. We can all agree that cockroaches are deplorable little bastards, but long live a good, strong drink.

Five crates of whiskey and brandy that belonged to explorer Ernest Shackleton proved the true meaning of ‘endurance’ Friday when they were recovered after being buried for more than 100 years under the Antarctic ice.

The spirits were excavated from beneath Shackleton’s Antarctic hut which was built in 1908.

Al Fastier of the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust was surprised at the find, having previously believed there were only two crates. He said:

“The unexpected find of the brandy crates, one labelled Chas Mackinlay & Co and the other labelled The Hunter Valley Distillery Limited Allandale are a real bonus.”

Apparently the surrounding ice still reeked of whiskey and liquid could be heard when the crates were moved, convincing Fastier that the crates still contain intact alcohol – great news for whiskey lovers and even better news for whoever is rich enough to pay for a pull.

Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte and Mackay, whose company supplied the Mackinlay’s whisky for Shackleton, described the find as “a gift from the heavens” for whisky lovers.

“If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analysed, the original blend may be able to be replicated,” he said.

“Given the original recipe no longer exists this may open a door into history.”

[Via: AFP]

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Image courtesy of Kevin Friesen

This photo, which I came across via a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook, was snapped about three weeks ago at Jan Thiel Beach in Curacao, Netherlands. If I was Benjamin Button this is something I would make sure to do before I got too young.

Here’s what the photographer had to say about the event:

I saw this kid chugging at the bar, with no clothes on and thought it was so funny that nobody else seemed to notice or care…they were all probably hammered themselves…maybe the poor kid was just crying out for attention.

[Via: Kevin Friesen]

Drunk Animals – For more of the funniest videos, click here

This ‘Drunk Animals’ clip, which has over a million views on YouTube, is one of the highlights of the 1974 nature documentary, Animals are Beautiful People. But a study published in the March/April 2006 issue of the journal Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, a publication most people probably don’t reference after watching the short clip, asserts that claims of elephants getting drunk off rotting fruit from marula trees in Africa are, and always have been, untrue.

It was a sad, sad moment when I first read the 2005 National Geographic article, Elephants Drunk in the Wild? Scientists Put the Myth to Rest, which highlighted the 2006 study. But now that the ‘Drunk Animals’ clip is becoming an internet sensation I thought it would be right mention that though elephants may resemble beautiful people when you get drunk enough, they might not be as likely to pick up the next round as this clip leads you to believe.

“People just want to believe in drunken elephants,” Steve Morris, a biologist at the University of Bristol in England and a co-author of the study, told NatGeo, adding that anecdotes of elephants found drunk in the wild go back more than a century.

Here are a few claims researches say debunk the drunken elephant theory:

1. Elephants are picky. They regularly push trees over just to be able to get the ripest fruit. It’s unlikely that an elephant would eat any fruit if it were rotten.

2. Elephants are too fond of marula fruit to let it sit and rot before eating it.

3. Animals flock, fly, or run to ripe marulas to take part in the gorging, leaving few fruits lying around long enough to ferment.

4. Elephants regularly visit and revisit the same marula trees, checking the fruits and the bark for palatability and devour the fruits when they are ripe.

5. Food takes between 12 and 46 hours to pass through an elephant’s digestive system, which is not enough time for the fruit to ferment in their stomachs (a claim put forward by some believers).

6. It would take about a half gallon (1.9 liters) of ethanol to make an elephant tipsy. Assuming that fermenting marula fruit would have an alcohol content of 7 percent, it would require 7.1 gallons (27 liters) of marula juice to come up with that half-gallon of alcohol. Producing a liter of marula wine requires 200 fruits. So an elephant would have to ingest more than 1,400 well-fermented fruits to start to get drunk.

But if you were hoping to rationalize your binge drinking with the ‘it’s only natural’ argument, not all hope is lost. The study only deals with elephants, who, as we all know, are the prudish geniuses of the animal kingdom and therefore aren’t as likely to require booze as other animals such as monkeys, which are also featured in the clip and are small enough to become plenty drunk off the marula fruit.

[Via: National Geographic]