Neccessity is a Mutha

So a buddy of mine comes over last night with a bottle of wine. (The Superbowl may have monopolized the bars, but Mythbusters marathon…I’ll drink to that!)

People keep doing this. Despite this fact, I keep not owning a corkscrew. I drink so lightly that I cannot get through a bottle of wine on my own in anything like a timely fashion. A friend of mine came over to bake cookies a few weeks back, she leaves a half-bottle of wine…I got through the cookies in short order, but the wine still remains. Fortunately, that one was a screw-top.

This bottle…wasn’t. We stared at it.

My Leatherman did not have a corkscrew. We could perhaps have sawed the bottle open, but that seemed overly messy.

We stared at the bottle a while longer.

“Wood screw?”

“I have a Dremel…”

Dremel isn’t charged. (Okay, this was probably for the best…I shudder to think at what the introduction of power tools might have done to the mix.)

We stared at the bottle some more.

I eventually located a ceiling hook for hanging plants, which included a very, very scary screw-anchor end for biting into plaster. With some coaxing, it went into the cork.

Problem now…no leverage to pull it back out. Brute strength was tried, and failed.

We stared at the bottle. In the background, Adam and Jamie fired grapeshot at a dead pig.

Said buddy was a boyscout once upon a time. Armed with clothesline–and probably inspired by Mythbusters–he ran it through the hook, around the knob on one of the cupboards, and having formed a crude sort of pulley–while Ben and I watched in mild fascination, and Angus hid under the bed–threw himself back against rope and bottle of wine.

I placed a mental bet as to whether the cupboard knob or the cork would give first. Ben positioned himself at the victim’s ankles so that in the event of catastrophe, he could act as a furry tripwire, thereby turning a simple stagger into a potentially massive concussion on the edge of the sink.*

Proving me wrong, the cork gave way! And there was wine, and much rejoicing. Unfortunately, the cork wasn’t going to ever come out of the bottle again, having been savaged by the ceiling hook, so we were forced to kill the bottle on the spot, but hey, Mythbusters ran all night, and I wasn’t driving anywhere, so life is good.

*This is part of the feline union regulations.

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