Posted 2:37 AM by sport

SIZING UP CHAMPAGNE
Since, as I previously explained, I've begun to leave bloggish buffooneries corked up in my head, I thought I'd demonstrate why they might be better left there. I offer you a list of names given to sizes of Champagne bottles, in ascending order. A bit of history on each is included as a public service. Read and learn.

(Liters / Name of bottle and derivation)

0.375: Split or Pony - "Split" is what you gotta do, man, when the time comes, dig? It's also the battle cry of a little-known version of "Captain Marvel" circa 1966, whose body parts would fly off in different directions so that the fingers could poke guys in the eye (ala Moe Howard) while the feet were kicking other guys in the balls (ala certain Dominatrixes).
"Pony" is a role I played in Eric Bogosian's play "Suburbia" as well as a dance popular in the Hullabaloo era. All these things - beatniks who leave early, that superhero, that play, and that dance - are half-assed, so it applies to a half bottle of champagne.

0.75: Bottle - This is the least imaginative of the bottle-size names, which is why it's the most popular. "Where are you from?" "Around." "What do you listen to?" "Rock." "What will you have?" "A bottle." See what I mean?

1.50: Magnum - A large size condom. Also a role played by Tom Selleck on television. So then: big hit show, big dick sheathe. It suggests an ample amount of suckage, however you read it.

3.00: Jeroboam - Israelite king who waged bitter war with:

4.50: Rehoboam - despite (or because?) of the similarly doofy names. What a minstrel show team they could have made! But why did the "battle o' the 'boams" inspire these designations for bottles? Well, think about yourself drinking 3 liters of Korbel and your arch enemy (and if you don't have one, you're living wrong) downing 4 and a half liters of same. An inevitable brawl of biblical proportions.

6.00: Methuselah - Oldest man ever! Died at 969 years, in the year of the flood. Didn't look a day over 800. So we get two idiomatic expressions here, "he's old as Methuselah" and "Ain't seen him since the year of the flood." Two cliches plus a hell of a party. And remember Ira Gershwin's take on Methuselah's longevity: "Who calls that livin' when no gal will give in to no man what is nine hunderd years!" Sho 'nuff - drink up, pops.

9.0: Salmanazar - Assyrian king (several, really) who combined the religion of Israel with local pagan faiths, creating a notable early example of the "moral relativism" and "mix-n-match religion" that purists and orthodox sorts decry. What better way to toast your impurity and impiety than with a ridiculously huge bottle of booze?

12.0: Balthazar - This is one of the Magi of Christmas creche fame. Your 3 Wise Men. I get this quote from some exhaustive Bible "who's who" website:
"There is no mention of camels or any mode of transportation in the biblical record. There is also no mention of their names. The traditional names adopted in the West are Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. The Syrian tradition uses the names Gushnasaph, Hormisdas and Larvandad. Others use Hormizdah, Perozdh and Yazdegerd, or Basanater, Karsudan and Hor, or various other names."

So why Balthazar? As we'll see, Melchior gets a bottle named after him, but not Gaspar. How come? Lost to the mists of time. But amen that we need not order a "Larvandad" or… yikes… a "Gushnasaph" of bubbly, though, friends, a "Hor full of wine" sounds like a fine, fine idea to this scholar.

15.0: Nebuchadnezzar - probably the baddest of your ancient kings, this time reigning o'er the land of Babylon. All those non-Rastafarians would cry "Neb, you RULE!" Which should give him the jumbo-est of all bottles, but no. Instead he replaces Wiseman Gaspar ( which is fine, because a guy with that name (( Gaspar, I mean, not Wiseman, who is a guy that makes documentaries )) used to own the club "February's" in Elmont New York, and paid the Skels el-dicko for playing there ) in the "we three kings" stakes. Neb, son of your friend and mine, Nabopolassar, eventually paid for persecuting 3 upright Hebrews (in the "fiery furnace" referenced in my hangover classic "It's Definitely Sunday") by suffering "lycanthropy." A WEREWOLF!

18.0: Melchior - OK, this is the other wise man. I can only surmise that he gets pride of place for bringing the gold to baby Jesus. Obviously, that's the gift that keeps on giving, but what of frankincense and myrrh? Well consider this little nugget about myrrh that I found in my exhaustive research for this important piece:
"It has been thought to be the chestnut, mastich, stacte, balsam, turpentine, pistachio nut, or the lotus. It is probably correctly rendered by the Latin word ladanum, the Arabic ladan, an aromatic juice of a shrub called the Cistus or rock rose, which has the same qualities, though in a slight degree, of opium, whence a decoction of opium is called laudanum."

Okay, gold… opium… and INCENSE? Guess why Gaspar was excluded from the wine-tasting party! Tom brought money, Dick brought dope, and Harry brought AIR-WICK! All mysteries are answered if you dig deeply enough.

25.50: Sovereign - once the most ubiquitous gold coin in British circulation, coin collectors scorn these nickel-sized bits of change as too common. So they are worth only the value of the gold itself. You think "worth its weight in gold" is a compliment? Then you are no numismatist, and philately will get you nowhere. Now, 25-and-a-half liters of champagne is just way too much. Foster Brooks, Shane MacGowan and Boris Yeltsin couldn't put all that away with Tex Antoine's help. So really, the regal name accorded this super-size serving of the stuff is a lot of piffle. After all the obscure biblical references the other bottles boast… after all the compelling background info I've dug up for you... we end here? Yes.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.
And I don't even like champagne.