Yes, the joke was borrowed from National Lampoon, and I’m old enough to remember both, but when Tom Waits says it, wow.
Fernwood Tonight was one of those weird late-night 70’s shows that bored teenagers like me would stay up and watch, along with SCTV.
It made stars out of Martin Mull and Fred Willard, and the material still holds up.
Here’s Tom Waits signing, The Piano has been Drinking.
About 10 years ago, around SARS, a public health friend in Toronto said that hospitals were having trouble keeping sanitizer units filled in public wards and emergency rooms. Seemed that people with an alcohol dependency and little cash were stealing and drinking it. Around the same time I was told a similar story about stuff missing from a farmer’s hygiene tool storage area: When the temporary labor left the farm, so did the sanitizer. 
Last year Alberta health folks changed their policies around providing hand sanitizer following the death of a man in an RCMP cell who was suspected of ingesting some, along with anti-depressants, while at a hospital.
According to Perez Hilton, a Pennsylvania man copped to being a repeat acquirer of large amounts of free sanitizer for drinks.
A man in Pennsylvania has admitted to stealing 12 bottles of hand sanitizer from the UPMC Hospital in Altoona.
The man, 51-year-old Lee Ammerman, was caught because an employee saw him stealing a bottle in October when he tried to hide it in an arm sling AND then recognized him doing it again in December!
BUT, get this, when confronted by cops about stealing the sanitizer, Lee didn’t even deny it!
In fact, he confessed to what he was actually using it for! (why so many exclamation marks? -ben)
He said: “I mix the liquid with orange juice.”
With the increase in publicly-available alcohol-based sanitizer comes the unintended consequence of being a target for theft.
In 2006, Keith Richards fell out of a coconut tree.
The Rolling Stones guitarist was hanging in Fiji during a world tour, and subsequently had to be flown back to a New Zealand hospital for observation after suffering a concussion.
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Maybe Keith was playing possum.
According to Fairfax NZ News, possum involves a group of people drinking a 24-pack of beer while up a tree. The first one to fall out from drunkenness loses the game.
Dunedin City Council gardens and cemeteries team leader Alan Matchett said people, believed mostly to bestudents, played the game at the gardens in the afternoons and early evenings, during the week and at weekends.
Staff were fed up with the mess left behind, which included glass, food scraps and cans – and vomit.
"It’s been occurring fairly regularly for the last two or three years. We don’t usually see them, but police and Otago University campus watch staff have had to move people on from the park and told them to clean up their mess," Matchett said.
"What they drink has to come out again, so they do throw up and urinate from the trees. Obviously, it’s not nice to have that left behind."
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