The Greatest Drunk on Earth: Andre the Giant

Richard English

Zen of Drinking Alone

The Zen of Drinking Alone

Frank Kelly Rich

The Fire Inside: The Great Drunkards and What They Drank

Frank Kelly Rich

What’s the Word? Thunderbird!

The Lost Art of the Bender

Back Issues

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Community and Freedom

The Future of Boozing

Frank Kelly Rich

Tipping Points

The 86 Rules of Boozing

Frank Kelly Rich

The United Altered States

Did You Know? #64

Frank Kelly Rich

Jail House Hooch

Adventures with Alcohol

Adventures with Alcohol: Genetically Predisposed

Bradford Grant Boyle

Wino Wisdom

Wino Wisdom: Issue 64

Guns and Tequila: The Life and Times of Sam Peckinpah

Richard English

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May 11: Baron Munchhausen’s Birthday
It's Baron Munchhausen's Birthday. Now, if you've read the books or watched the movie, you probably think Munchhausen is a fictional character, especially considering the highly improbable adventures he got up to. In fact, the real Baron Von Munchhausen, upon whose stories the fiction was based, was born on this day in 1720. He was a German cavalry officer who served in the Russian Imperial Army against the Turks. Upon retirement, he spent the next 30 years getting drunk at aristocrat dinner parties and reciting highly-exaggerated tales of his adventures in Russia. He became so well known for his drinking stories that writer Rudolf Erich Raspe gathered and further exaggerated his adventures in a series of books, which quickly went viral, partly because Raspe placed this encouragement on the front cover, "Humbly dedicated and recommended to Country Gentlemen; and, if they please, to be repeated as their own . . . in Watering Places, and other such polite Assemblies, around the bottle and fireside." They were not the first viral tavern tales in human history, but they are among the best.