Shooting the Hooch… and here’s hoping the clerk behind the counter is named The Hooch

While it sounds like it could be a lot of fun, if anyone ever suggests Shooting the Hooch, you shouldn't think twice before absolutely refusing to go under any circumstances. If you make the unfortunate decision to do it "because we've never done it before and it sounds like so much fun," you should know that there are many ways to spend a day that would result in more fun. Among them: using your feet to judge a contest to see who can drop an anvil the hardest, eating a bushel of bananas right before paying a naked visit to a hungry mosquito farm (which incidentally seems to be my back yard), or having open heart surgery.

The Hooch refers to the Chattahoochee River, a 430-mile river that flows through Georgia, Alabama and Florida. Shooting refers to yet another preferable activity you should consider, as long as you’re doing it to yourself.

Nonetheless, we chose to make a go of it. Our second mistake, and one that I as a Jew should have known to avoid, was departing from Helen, Georgia, a Bavarian-themed town that you’d swear was right out of a Krofft brothers television show. As we were getting ready to pay the three dollar fee at Helen Tubing, the clerk recommended that we purchase a stick, which was, for all intents and purposes, a stick. She told us that we’d “probably find it useful to push off if you get stuck on any rocks.” I reluctantly forked over another five bucks for the stick and we were on our way.

We boarded a school bus and began to make our way to ‘the start,’ or as we Yankees call it, ‘the dry riverbed.’ Ten minutes later we got off the bus (mistake number three), we each took a heavy duty water tube – hot pink – and we set off for a three hour tour that didn’t result in the kind of comedy we’ve all come to expect from such a tour.

Judging solely by the river’s average depth during our tubing trip, the Hooch contains, in total, approximately six gallons of water. It also contains about the same number of rocks as the moon, the Kuiper Belt and Snooki’s head combined. The five dollar stick did come in handy, but only as a weapon I used to beat out my aggression on the river, the rocks, the pink tube with which I was saddled, and anything else I could find that didn’t start its day alive. On at least one occasion, I also thought about how I could have used it to beat the clerk who had the temerity to use the word “if” when explaining the likelihood of our getting stuck on rocks.

In any case, I feel it’s my civic duty to provide all my readers with the mother of all public service announcements. Here’s a brief, but complete, synopsis of what you can expect when taking part in this barbaric activity:

Step 1) Float for 20 feet, get stuck on rocks,
Step 2) Climb out of tube,
Step 3) Pull tube for 300 yards, slip and fall often, jabbing yourself in the ribs with the end of the five dollar stick, all the while scraping major bodily joints on sharpest possible rocks,
Step 4) Climb back on tube, flip over backward, repeat step three twice, then skip to step five,
Step 5) Carefully climb back on tube, float for 20 feet, get stuck on rocks, hopelessly try to push off rocks with five dollar stick,
Step 6) Curse whosever stupid idea this was, climb out of tube, spend no less than 60 seconds beating tube with five dollar stick,
Step 7) Pull tube for 300 yards, slip and fall often, jabbing yourself in the ribs with the end of the five dollar stick while issuing expletive-filled diatribe to all within earshot,
Step 8) Climb back on tube, flip over backward again, ask rhetorical question about who would ever think this was a good idea,
Step 9) Climb back on tube, float for 20 feet…

Repeat steps 1-9 for approximately three hours.

In spite of a few dozen scrapes and sprained joints we did manage to make it to the end of the run. In retrospect, spending three hours splashing ourselves in the face with ice cold water and systematically dropping to our knees and elbows on sharp gravel would have achieved the same result in a cheaper and more pleasurable way.

After gladly surrendering our tubes, I thought about the lessons I learned. First and foremost, never participate in any activity whose name suggests something so exquisitely awesome and fun that you just have to do it no matter what (cruising the Inside Passage also makes this list). Second, if you do choose to ever Shoot the Hooch, make sure to bring a psychiatrist, a stick and 50 million gallons of water. And third, if you happen to see me there, beat me with the stick before I pay my three dollars.

My Late Night Meal With Kelvin

New York may be the city that never sleeps, but I don’t recommend arriving there hungry after 1:00 a.m. On a recent trip to my former hometown, I made that mistake and found myself foraging for food in all the wrong places.

I realize there are dining establishments that stay open all night, but I had the added bonus of arriving in town just in time to greet the next ice age, global warming be damned. Setting off on my sustenance-seeking adventure, I quickly realize that the distance I was willing to travel by foot from the front entrance to the hotel was directly proportional to the integer following the minus sign in the wind chill factor.

Just under the wire a mere ten feet from the hotel’s doors, I found a typical New York convenience store, and by typical I mean one whose dining options were limited to Top Ramen, some weird vacuum packed Lebanese meat product, canned Chef Boyaredee macaroni and cheese and an assortment of breath mints.

Thinking of my health, I opted for the $3.49 can of mac and cheese. On the walk back to my room (which I expected would be enough exercise to work off the humiliating, sodium-laden can of shame I was about to eat), I mentally prepared for what was to be the most disappointing and depressing mac and cheese experience of my life. Unfortunately I had no idea just how disappointing... the room, while nice, was not furnished with a can opener, a bowl or a working microwave oven. Chef Boyardee’s smiling face on the label began to mock me as I suited up to continue the most dismal gastronomic adventure in New York City history.

Dispensing with the walking distance equation to which I initially held myself, I saw that salvation for my hunger lay just two blocks away in the form of a meximelt, a soft taco and a crunchwrap supreme. Taco Bell was a marginally better option (measured in units NASA had to invent because atomic units weren’t small enough) than the unopened can of despair still sitting in the room. Since temperature could now only be properly measured in degrees Kelvin, I literally ran for the border.

As I waited to order, the combination of hunger, cold, exhaustion and self-loathing somehow worked in concert to open my eyes to the secret of Taco Bell’s success. This is an empire built around a menu where virtually every item is identical, with the exception of the order in which the ingredients are arranged. My personal thanks go out to whoever saw fit to invent a whole new ‘fourth’ meal, one that I’d be enjoying in the hotel in a few short, freezing minutes. I’m not ignorant to the damage that can be done by eating this kind of food (for that matter, neither is anyone within a 50-foot radius of me in the hours immediately following a bean burrito experience), but I do have an affinity for any food involving cheese, beef, sour cream, and sometimes bacon.

Unable to run back to the hotel due to the cryogenic freezing of my body’s tissues as I made my way through the ice-covered tundra of New York, I thought about the amount of things that happen outside in the city with reckless disregard for the weather. In fact, worse than the hosts of Today Show, who are protected from the elements by Al Roker and his mighty Doppler weather radar weight loss machine, are the legions of crazy tourists who populate the Today Show plaza on a daily basis.

These people, who clearly are nuts, stand outside for hours, often in oppressive weather, just for the promise of getting a second of airtime during which they instantaneously transform from a miserable, tired tourist into a raving lunatic frantically waving at scores of viewers who will make fun of them for being there in the first place. Invariably someone goes home bummed when Al delivers the weather from directly in front of them, causing that person’s lifelong dream of waving at a camera to go up in smoke.

Upon my arrival back at the hotel, I broke into my faux-Mexican feast, only to find out that I was short-changed by one meximelt. My Jewish side complained that not going back to resolve this catastrophic infraction would be a sin; my logical side, which threatened to beat the Jewish side to a pulp, won – despite the fact that a meximelt, in all its gooey, melted delight would have been worth the trouble.

The quest was over. I may not be MacGyver, but I found a way to feed myself. Which reminds me… If you know of a food drive, I have a non-perishable canned food item that I need to donate. As long as you don’t mind that it’s frozen solid.

Headline Hogs: Atlanta Edition

Every city has something special it’s known for: Seattle has the Space Needle, Starbucks and grunge rock; Chicago has deep dish pizza and Al Capone; New York has celebrities like Regis and the Naked Cowboy; and Atlanta gets stuck with all the social misfit headline hogs.

You name the crazy headline, I guarantee someone from Atlanta is involved – most likely Ted Turner. Ted is one crazy old coot – and Atlanta’s most successful businessman. He is both wealthy beyond imagination and certifiably insane. He has a habit of saying downright ludicrous things such as “Jimmy Carter was a great President”; he launched a campaign to get rid of some harmless fish in a Montana lake just because he wanted different fish in it; and he casually donated $1 billion to the United Nations because “They do good stuff.” But perhaps the most telling insane character trait he possesses is the fact that, according to Wikipedia, he has always had a special place in his heart for professional wrestling.

But Teddy isn’t the only headline hog in Atlanta. Just this week, 44-year-old Atlanta resident Richard Jewell made headlines for his untimely death. Jewell, for those of you who don’t remember, was wrongly accused of planting a bomb in Atlanta’s Olympic park in 1996. Unfortunately for Jewell, Ted Turner’s CNN led the media charge in eviscerating him.

Fortunately, when he was cleared, Turner extended an olive branch to Jewell in the form of two obstructed-view, upper reserved level tickets for any Atlanta Braves weekend day game, played on a Wednesday night, where the starting pitcher is knuckleballer Phil Neikro, who won a team record 23 games in 1967.

Another of our headline hogs stole the spotlight from Julia Roberts to become the first one Americans think of when they hear the term ‘runaway bride.’ Proud Georgian Jennifer Wilbanks is the perennially surprised-looking woman who faked her own disappearance in 2005 just so she wouldn’t have to marry her fiancé, John Mason. Wilbanks said she was “scared to marry John Mason because she is afraid of an imperfect world” - which she would see really, really vividly. Incidentally, Wilbanks was also cast as an understudy in the Gwinnett County Players’ production of ‘The King and I.’ (Zing!)

While no Richard Gere, Mason’s less-than-ravishing Southern looks and questionable sensibilities make you wonder whether her eyes are bigger than his brain. He vowed that he would remain with Wilbanks even after she made national headlines for running from him. Even the Dalai Lama would take a spot in line to beat some sense into this idiot.

Last year, Wilbanks and Mason officially broke up, after which she promptly sued him for $500,000, which includes a share of royalties from a book deal he never would have gotten without her story. If she wins, I just hope she uses the money wisely and hires a plastic surgeon to take her ‘surprised’ facial expression down a few notches to something like ‘really interested.’ As a side note, Ted Turner sued her for “not staying on the lam long enough” and for “robbing CNN of valuable redundant news reports.”

If there’s anything we’ve learned from TV programming over the years, it’s that a good medical thriller sells. Andrew Speaker, a.k.a. the TB guy, is another headline hog that calls Atlanta home. He’s also the target of a smear campaign by Ted Turner for drawing more attention to TB in Atlanta than he ever did with Turner Broadcasting. Speaker, as you may recall, is the newlywed who honeymooned in Europe Jason Bourne-style. He then flew back under the radar and crossed the U.S. border - all the while being infected with tuberculosis (which is widely known to be fairly harmless if you’re already dead).

When he found out about the severity of his illness, Speaker did what any rational person would do: he boarded a pressurized airplane full of people and pretended to be healthy for six hours. He did this because, as he claimed later, he had been fearful of dying if he didn’t return to America. Apparently, Speaker thought that ‘the Al Qaida method’ was infinitely better: Take out a whole airplane full of people instead of just dealing with your insanity by yourself.

After all this drama, it was later discovered that the tuberculosis strain Speaker actually had was just MDR, not XDR, which begs the question: Which satellite radio provider really is the best? I mean, one has Howard Stern, but the other has all the baseball programming. Decisions, decisions….

Now that I have first-hand experience with living and working in Atlanta and dealing with the locals on a regular basis, I’m beginning to understand why this town is such a hotbed of controversial headline hogs. Things are usually so slow and polite here that people, sooner or later, are bound to lose their minds - in the spirit of Michael Douglas in the movie ‘Falling Down.’ Case in point: it took precisely 7 hours and 43 minutes of living here before this transplanted New Yorker dropped his first F-bomb at a four-way stop sign where every polite participant insisted someone else go first. It’s no wonder why Atlanta needs some headline hogs to shake things up a bit.

Clearly, Atlanta is rife with insanity of all sorts. There are plenty of people doing plenty of stupid things here, and there’s no telling who the next big headline hog will be, or when their story will break. But a word of advice to those looking for the notoriety: No matter what you do, be prepared for Ted Turner to be crazier.