Sunday, April 17, 2005

Who Aspiring Drunks Want to Be

Meet Henry Earl. Henry has been arrested over 900 times for alcohol-related offenses. There are several Henry Earl fansites, but this one goes a step further and offers real time updates on Henry's incarceration status via RSS feed and even a Firefox extention.

Henry's exactly the right balance between extremely pitiful and incredibly amusing. You feel bad for him on one hand, but then the guy looks so strangely happy in (most of) his mugshots. And if you read the stories about him, you'll see that he's got an awful lot of personality. Certainly more than your basic town drunk. Henry is an icon, a work of performance art. He's like an Otis Campbell for the 21st century. He's our schadenfreudic touchstone of intoxication.

In case you haven't gotten enough of Henry, there are Henry oil paintings, mugshot galleries, a calendar, a webstore, and even a band named for him (which is pretty flair-worthy in itself).