I just want to state—for the record—that I recognize Luther Magnussen as my superior. If I ever pass within a mile of him, I will immediately and without hesitation buy him a glass of whiskey and a pint of beer.

I was on the plane from Dallas yesterday, listlessly leafing through the July issue of Harpers, when I stumbled across this excerpt (paywall!) from Magnussen’s Work and Industry in the Northern Midwest from the July 2008 issue of the Yale Review.

Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reach the summit only to discover that George Kilroy has been bringing his drinking buddies up here every weekend.

_{Image CC-BY-NC-ND by Kongstein}

I just finished reading a taped-up, yellowed paperback copy of Forfeit by Dick Francis. The setup for the climactic chase sequence starts with the antagonist threatening to kill the protagonist’s wife and ends with his forcing him to chug twelve ounces of whiskey. The point of the whiskey is explicitly ambiguous:

I didn’t know whether Vjoesterod had made me drink for any special purpose or just from bloody-mindedness. I did know that it was a horrible complication to what I had planned to do.

Exactly! It’s a sack race: an arbitrary handicap to make the sequence more interesting. Diabolus ex machina. Does for the third act what a MacGuffin does for the first. An excellent device! Stowing it in my tackle box now…