On a recent excursion to an arty-farty festival, an experience comparable to a lobotomy, we bumped into this lovely Brit who looked like something straight out of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and we were sure he'd been sent to our rescue. He wasn't. He did however provide some much needed entertainment as we were stuck at a dreadful four hour long experimental brass performance at a horseracing track in the middle of nowhere outside of Bergen, Norway. He introduced himself as Inter Inter Inter David and claimed that the box he was carrying around was actually a computer.
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Inter Inter David: The way I understand it a computer files things onto a hard drive. It doesn't have to be in a logical order, so you can cross-reference the information and access it randomly. This box is like a hard drive. It's a simple version of a highly advanced filing system that was used in Germany in the 70s and lead to the development of some of the first computers. They were basically digitized versions of this.So… does your "computer" have Internet?
Well, sort of. It's a physical search engine in itself. I've been walking around the festival gathering information by having random conversations with people and then file it. The way you find information is by looking at the headings at the top of the cards which all have holes. Before each card goes into the box we clip out the irrelevant holes so the search is accurate. All you have to do is push a needle through your topic hole and lift the cards. It's like google, try it out! What do you want to search for?
Let's search "booze" or "getting shitfaced", I really need a drink.
Let's see… here we have something about Norwegian alcohol legislation. You can't buy beer after 8 PM on weekdays and 6 PM on Saturdays. For wine and spirits it's after 5 PM on weekdays and 3 PM on Saturdays and on Sundays it's all closed.That sucks.
Yes. It's like they decided to cut down on binge drinking and made a system that will only allow the well-organized people to binge drink as they plan ahead. So the well-organized ones become the drunks and the drunks become sober. Then you're left with just a third of the people who drink too much. I mean no drunks wear watches so they can't make it to the shop in time. It's the contrary in the UK. We market beer specifically for drunks, or street drinkers as they call them. It's called special brew, they're dirt-cheap and twice as strong. Apparently in the different parts of the UK, the decider on which beer you want to drink if you are a street drinker is if the can is in the national colours. Scottish people drink a particular brand because its blue and white and English people drink a red and white brand. They don't even advertise it as it's for bums. Sean Lock calls it "six cans of angry tied up with a swan strangler." Drunks sweat the stuff.
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Here are more ways to get shitfaced. A girl I spoke to the other day told me that you get a nicotine rush if you continuingly flick ash into your beer, let it settle and then down it.Gross, why would you do that?
I don't know. She also told me that some people put homemade alcohol on cotton wool and place it under their armpits. Apparently it gets absorbed into the bloodstream and gets you drunk. Oh, and UK bums have been going to hospitals to get drunk on alcoholic hand cleaning cream. It's basically ethanol so all the dispensers are now in lockable cabinets so the bums can't eat it. They trap it in their mouth and the vapours go up to your head. There's quite a big risk of going blind from this though.
I don't think so, but there's a blind basketball game. You draw two players and a hoop. Then you try to draw a line from your player to the hoop with your eyes closed. It's pretty hard to score.MILENE LARSSON(photos by Ronnie Plague)
