You ever plug up your nose, close your mouth and try to blow out and make that weird elephant noise due to the air escaping from your ears? That feeling right before the noise is made is all I can feel in my head right now, compounded a few times. I’m not sure what I’m sick with, but while I’m writing this, I’m drinking something with 1900 percent of my daily vitamin C in attempt to assassinate whatever bug has lodged itself in my sinuses. Unfortunately, I won’t be Bogart-ing this illness, but I thought I’d tell you all the funny story from my high school days where a few friends and I came up with a most irresponsible way of denaturing any foreign invaders in your system.

Humphrey Bogart was a fantastic actor and most of you reading this probably know him from the movie, Casablanca. Also in his career, he played a major role in The African Queen, the only role to ever give the man an Oscar, and a movie that was filmed on location in the continent of Africa. Most everyone, the cast and crew, was either infected with dysentery or Malaria, except for Bogart and the director of the picture, John Huston. This is attributed to the fact that Huston and Bogart, instead of drinking a healthy amount of water, drank a ridiculous amount of Scotch whiskey during the shooting. Supposedly, their blood was so toxic that the pathogens could not survive in their bloodstream. An actual quote from Bogart on the matter: “All I ate was baked beans, canned asparagus, and Scotch whiskey. Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead.”

Now, if that’s not a good story to tell while drinking with a couple of buddies, I don’t know what is. It’s a fun little tale to repeat with a little bit of exaggeration each time but in all likelihood, might not be the best if you are trying to recover from some sort of awful sickness. Then again, I get horribly ill every time I’ve ever gotten a flu shot, and a man from New York City lived from the age of seventy to 105 on a diet of nothing but “bread fried in fatback and Thunderbird wine,” so what really is the field of medical science? To all my readers, stay healthy, drink water and eat your vegetables.