Florida’s largest music, art and waterfront festival, SunFest, kicked off last night in West Palm Beach and Bullz-Eye.com will be there this weekend to cover the festivities. Counting Crows kicked things off last night and an impressive lineup of acts will follow throughout the weekend.

Highlights include Snoop Dogg, who will perform on the Bank of America Stage tonight. Other notable acts include Creed, Pitbull, The Fray, Wiz Khalifa, Passion Pit, Paul Rodgers, Third Eye Blind, Girl Talk, Foreigner, Joan Jett & The Blackhearts, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Herbie Hancock, Matisyahu, Coheed & Cambria, All American Rejects, NEEDTOBREATHE, SOJA, The Marshall Tucker Band, The Outlaws and Fab Four. Check out the website for show times and more information and enjoy the music!

Ah, St. Patrick’s Day, where everyone is Irish for a day. March seems to be full of days like that, since Fat Tuesday is the day where everyone is Catholic for a day.

Since we know many of you will be getting a full-fledged drink on this St. Paddy’s Day, especially since it is also the first day of the NCAA tournament, we have provided a small list of songs about drinking, the effects of drinking, and the vow that many of you will make the following morning. Think of it as the bender that you never took; we love booze as much as the next guys, but sometimes those things are better lived vicariously.

“It’s Time to Party,” Andrew W.K.

With a whopping three songs about partying on his debut album, Andrew W.K. will forever remain our master of ceremonies when it comes to partying. Until we saw the grammar-challenged lyric video, though, we didn’t know this song made a reference to a money shot. Yikes.

“Party Hard,” Andrew W.K.

And of course, if you’re going to party, why do it by half? Come on, who parties soft? Jeesh.

“Have a Drink on Me,” AC/DC

The night is young. Everyone is flush with cash and feeling generous. Try and remember this moment when 1:30 rolls around and you’re buying Natural Light pounders. For now, though, you’re living on the top shelf.

“Cold Gin,” KISS

Gin seems to be popular among music types. Neil Hannon sang about it in “Gin Soaked Boy,” and Amy Winehouse and Panic! at the Disco have name-checked it, too. But we have to go with the original. That, and its hip-hop equivalent…

“Gin & Juice,” Snoop Dogg

Laaaaaaid back, mu’ fuckas. And now that this party has officially started, time to break out the big guns.

“Santana DVX,” The Lonely Island

“He makes his guitar weep, but his champagne cries,” indeed. Of course, now we’re getting into dangerous territory: mixing liquors. Little good will come from this, you know.

“Brass Monkey,” Beastie Boys

The girls aren’t biting like you hoped they would? Slip ‘em some Spanish fly. That’s the Beastie way. If you haven’t seen the DVD this clip comes from, “Awesome! I Shot That!,” you’re missing out.

“One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” George Thorogood and the Destroyers

That’s six different kinds of alcohol ingested, by our count. A good time is surely being had at this point, but now is not a bad time to take a break and drink some water, lest you wind up like…

“Drunk Girls,” LCD Soundsystem

We still maintain that LCD Soundsystem is one of the most overrated bands on the planet, but they fit the theme. Plus, we readily admit that this list could use some new blood, and we’re not about to put that damn Ke$ha song on here. The ‘frat boy bunnies gone wrong’ clip isn’t embeddable, but if you’re itching to see it, click here. Otherwise, enjoy the clip above, which curiously has gotten more hits than the music video. Huh.

“Tubthumping,” Chumawamba

And now we’re adding whiskey and vodka to the mix, not to mention lager and cider. No wonder the singer gets knocked down. If we’re picking favorites, though, this is the definitive version of the song.

“That Woman’s Got Me Drinking,” Shane MacGowan

You haven’t thought about her at all the whole night. And then you saw someone that looked like her, or her favorite band came on the jukebox, and now your evening’s fucked. Order a double, sit at the end of the bar, tell your friends to give you a minute. And yes, that is Johnny Depp in this video. He directed it, too.

“Traditional Irish Folk Song,” Denis Leary

“We drink and we die and continue to drink.” It’s getting late. You didn’t take that water break back when you should have gone for some grub. And now you’re…

“Wasted,” Def Leppard

But hopefully, not as wasted as the guitarist on the far right, who thought that the long straight hair was a good idea. But you’re still mad about the girl, and your buddy gets you another round, and you are now officially…

“Trashed,” Black Sabbath

And as luck would have it, that girl that reminded you of your ex has just asked if you’ll be her partner for a game of cricket against her drunk friend and another guy. Holy shit, this can’t be happening. Grudge sex, ahoy! You try and play it cool, and it appears to be working; the bartenders have announced last call, and she looks at you and says, “So where to?” You’re feeling lucky. My place? She agrees. Lust is in the air. There is just one small problem.

“Too Drunk to Fuck,” Dead Kennedys

Between the gin, juice, bourbon, scotch, whiskey, vodka, lager, cider, brass monkey and that goddamn Santana DVX you’ve ingested over the course of the evening, you sailed past Hot Sex Boulevard and barreled down Eunuch Lane a good two hours ago. (Didn’t you see the ‘Do Not Enter’ sign?) Of course, you didn’t remember that when you first wake up, and you didn’t remember it when you realized that Doppelganger Girl is gone. Nope, it doesn’t hit you until you reach the bathroom, look in the mirror, and see LOSER written backwards on your bathroom wall, in lipstick. You sum up the evening: you’re dead broke, you blew the chance to bed a hottie, and you feel like someone replaced your blood with Drano. You make the pledge, right then and there, that…

“I Won’t Ever Go Drinking Again (?),” Squeeze

Not until the next time, anyway. Who are you kidding?

Go hit a greasy spoon, pop a five-hour energy drink, take the rest of the day off, and you’ll be fine. Better check your phone’s history, though. There’s a good chance you drunk called your ex at four in the morning.

Maybe you did. Maybe you even watched it happen at MafiaWars.com, since the event was streamed live…and if you did watch it live, then you no doubt noticed that, despite the designated start time having been established as 6 PM PST, it didn’t actually go down ’til a little bit later.

Yeah, I noticed it, too. Except I noticed it live from the Nevada desert, since I was standing right there when the whole thing went down. And it wasn’t much of a surprise to me, since I’d been watching the events unfold for the previous two hours.

First, for those of you who didn’t see it happen, here’s a video of the event:

And, now, here’s the story of what happened and how I came to be there.

On Wednesday afternoon, I received a very kind invitation by E-mail to attend Zynga’s celebration of 10 million visitors to “Mafia Wars: Las Vegas,” namely Snoop Dogg blowing up an armored car in the middle of the Nevada desert. I thought to myself, “Okay, sounds cool, but I’m in Virginia, and I can’t exactly hop on a plane and attend.”

About half an hour later, I received a phone call, following up on the E-mail, assuring me that they’d be glad to fly me out there.

I hesitated at first, since the event was the next day, but with an assurance from my ever-wonderful wife that no one should ever turn down a trip to Vegas, especially not when it’s three days before your 40th birthday, I said, “Okay, I’ll go.”

So I went.

When I first arrived at the site designated for Snoop’s big boom, I was met with an unexpected request to sign a document which essentially said, “If anything happens to you here, it ain’t our fault.”

Given the amount of dynamite involved in this situation and no idea of my proximity to the explosion, it was hard to get enthused about signing off on such a thing, but in the end, I turned into a lemming and signed it, anyway.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried: we were placed high above the detonation site, nowhere near where the actual explosion took place.

Still, I kept my eyes peeled for shrapnel the entire time…like I’d really be able to duck, right?

Upon reaching the site, the folks from Zynga couldn’t have been more cordial, offering up drinks and sandwiches, along with “Mafia Wars” hats and sunglasses. Basically, everyone was excited about the event and ready to roll, except for one small thing: Snoop Dogg was nowhere to be found.

Actually, this was a very big thing, as we’d been assured beforehand that Snoop would be doing interviews with the journalists from 4:00 – 4:30 PM. Given that I arrived at 4 PM and sat far on the outskirts of the detonation site for an extended period of time while unsuccessfully trying to sort out a way to avoid signing the aforementioned liability waiver, I was at first concerned that I was missing my window to chat with Snoop, but then I was assured that, no, he wasn’t even there yet. And once I signed my life away and got into the area where we’d be viewing the explosion, he still wasn’t there. I felt pity in my heart for the poor people of Zynga, who were – quite understandably – freaking the hell out about the fact that Snoop wasn’t yet on site. Time was ticking ever closer to 6 PM PST, the highly-promoted time of explosion, and yet no one seemed quite sure where the designated detonator was.

Most of us, however, were relatively confident of his state of mind: while not an exact quote from anyone, I think it’s fair to say that most of us approached the situation with the mindset, “Okay, we know he’s high. But where is he?”

Kiddingly, I said to one of the publicists, “You guys did actually get him to sign something saying he was going to be here, right?” I received a hollow laugh in return, which was more than I got when I suggested that, right about then, Snoop was going to be reporting in from Las Cruces, asking, “Where everybody at? Las Vegas? Aw, hell, no…” Basically, they were trying their best to keep a stiff upper lip whilst dealing with the situation, but it was clear that there was one big overriding concern: what happens if 6 PM PST arrives and Snoop Dogg still isn’t here?

A helicopter appeared overhead. It was a news crew from one of the Las Vegas network affiliates, hovering in the vicinity in hopes of capturing the explosion live for their 6 PM newscast. It was not to be. There was a great deal of sweating going on, much of it nothing to do with the 90+ degree heat of the Las Vegas desert. 6 PM came and went, but no Snoop. Still, the Zynga folks continued to monitor the number of online viewers who had come to the site to see the blessed event, and although the established time of the explosion had come and gone, the number of viewers was continuing to rise steadily.

And then Snoop arrived.

And, oh, how the Zynga folks cheered.

Quickly, the journalists were huddled together and given the lowdown of the situation: Snoop being Snoop, there was really no guarantee that we were going to get to talk to him at all at this point, but the plan of action was that we were going to be quickly hustled into a vehicle after the explosion, taken down to Snoop’s location, and hope that he could be kept around long enough for us to chat with him. We agreed, mostly because our options were limited. If this was how we were going to be able to talk to Snoop, then so be it.

So we stood idly by, waiting to find out when the explosion was going to take place, knowing that it was likely imminent now that the man of the hour was in attendance. Someone had the live feed running nearby, and we could hear the pre-event conversations taking place. Unfortunately, what we discovered far too late was that the feed was slightly less live than we had been led to believe. Oh, it was pretty damned close to live, but much as “Saturday Night Live” is often on a several-second delay, so, we learned, was Zynga’s feed of the explosion…and we learned it when someone said, “Hey, they’re getting ready to…”

Oops.

I can assure you that it was indeed a sight to behold when that armored car exploded, with flames, metal, and money (presumably of the fake variety) flying everywhere…but, alas, all you have from me are my assurances, because the lack of any forewarning meant that not a single person standing safely on the plateau was in a position to take a shot of the explosion.

I’m not going to lie to you: I was pissed.

Not at Zynga, of course, but at Snoop, whose late arrival threw the event into a complete tizzy. And I’d love to tell you that I gave him a piece of my mind, but in the end, I was kind of caught up in the surreality of the situation. Moments after the explosion, we were indeed hustled over to a vehicle with the plan of heading down to Snoop…until, naturally, it was decided that Snoop wanted to come up to where we were, since there was an air-conditioned trailer available for him to conduct the interviews. So we got out of the vehicle and stood by the trailer…and that’s where we were standing when Snoop drove right past us and over to the collection of Zynga employees, thereby forcing us to run our asses over there instead. Actually, “run” is a pretty loose description of what I did, as I’d pretty much decided that I was tired of chasing after Snoop, resulting in a speed which was far from top gear. Once I arrived, things got even more off-track, as we were abruptly informed that, instead of each of us getting three questions with Snoop, a single journalist – Arren Anderson of Las Vegas’s Fox 5 News, to be specific – would be running point, and we were to give him our questions to ask.

So much for getting an exclusive.

Still, I had my recorder out and ready to catch every word that fell from Snoop’s lips, figuring that at least I’d be able to salvage something from the conversations. First, though, I had to endure our designated spokesperson offering up a rap that would’ve felt pretty damned white even if he hadn’t delivered it while standing next to Snoop Dogg:

“When Snoop flips the switch / This armored truck went boom / Don’t switch that dial / It’s coming up on more real soon.”

Wow.

Well, give the guy credit for having serious cajones, at least…though, in retrospect, it turned out that they were even bigger than I’d first believed: when I went to the Fox 5 News website, the video of Anderson asking questions of Snoop…some of which we’d given to him…was described as an “exclusive.” Uh, yeah, to him and everyone else who was standing in the huddle!

Anyway, here’s what I could make out from the short scrum. Given the wind blowing in and the near-whisper volume at which Snoop tends to speak, I suppose I’m lucky I got anything at all…

Were you as scared as we were?

Naw. You know me. I just came here to do what I had to do: to blow up the armored truck and destroy the evidence. That’s what it was all about: getting rid of the evidence so nobody could see what was in there. So I did my job.

Most people come to Vegas to blow off steam. You came here to blow something up.

Yeah. Same thing. You play and get away.

What is your role with “Mafia Wars”? How’d you get involved?

I’m a fan of the game. They reached out to my people and said they wanted me to be a part of this 10 millionth user blow-up in Vegas, so I said why not? Catch a plane out here and blow it up. Make me ready for my free copy of the game when it come out.

Why you? Why was this a job for Snoop?

‘Cause I’m Mafia. You know what I’m sayin’? I’m the perfect guy for the job.

How does this game fit into the O.G. lifestyle?

It’s so O.G.. It’s the game of the lifestyle. It’s the Mafia Wars. It’s the life that we dream of as young gangstas, growing up and watching it, looking at it and becoming fans of it. There’s no other video game that can really put you in there to really feel like you’re part of it. It’s perfect.

Who’s the biggest gangster? You’ve got Don Corleone, Tony Montana, Tony Soprano, or anybody else out there. Who’s on top?

Snoop Dogg. Yeah, the one and only.

Did you catch that bit about Snoop wanting his free copy of the game when it comes out? Given that he doesn’t seem entirely sure where one actually plays “Mafia Wars,” I think it’s probably a fair bet that his interest in participating in the event wasn’t necessarily influenced by a huge amount of fandom on his part.

Ultimately, though, does it really matter?

From my perspective, I can’t say as it does. I mean, I went to Las Vegas and I watched Snoop blow shit up, and for my trouble, I got my picture taken with the Doggfather himself (remind me to show it to you sometime) and an autographed “Mafia Wars” hat. Even though the event didn’t quite go as planned, it’s still very much a “what’s not to like?” situation, y’know? I don’t know that Zynga necessarily feels the same way, mind you, but if nothing else, they can write this off as a learning experience…and when “Mafia Wars” expands to its next city, I’ve got three words for them:

“Mafia Wars: Branson.”

The way I hear it, Andy Williams is as prompt as they come.

Snoop Dogg will blow up a four-ton armored truck to commemorate the 10 millionth visitor to “Mafia Wars: Las Vegas”, which debuted on July 21. That’s right: it was launched less than a month ago, and it’s already hitting the 10-million-visitor mark. That’s how popular this game is. The massive explosion is taking place in the Las Vegas desert, but it’ll be streamed live via the official Mafia Wars website, so everyone can watch Snoop Dogg light it up.

A handful of people, however, will be there in person to watch the event go down…and – ahem – yours truly will be one of them.

Stay tuned to your friendly neighborhood Bullz-Eye Blog for the post-event wrap-up, wherein I’ll offer my firsthand experience of the event and, if everything goes according to plan, the details on my few minutes one on one with Mr. Dogg.

Ah, I can smell the secondhand smoke already…

“The partnership between LANDY and Snoop Dogg creates the perfect platform to launch LANDY’S affordable luxury product,” says Stephen Lewin, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Spirits Division at W.J. Deutsch Spirits, LLC. “Snoop Dogg epitomizes confidence, innovation and is known to be the life of the party, making him the ideal choice to partner with LANDY Cognac – a brand that mirrors these characteristics. Snoop leads the hip, fashionable and smooth lifestyle that LANDY Cognac represents, and is sure to resonate with the strong urban following that LANDY is rapidly growing.”

Can I get an “aw, yeeeeeeeahhhhhhh“?

Mr. Dogg – who, we are led to understand, was already known to indulge in the beverage prior to striking this deal – will appear at select LANDY events and promotions, and will feature LANDY Cognac at numerous after-parties. We can only hope that he is able to find time in this busy schedule to chat with Bullz-Eye (rest assured that we have made our request), but in the meantime, you’ll want to see the photo that LANDY has released to promote the news of their new collaborator. Normally, we’d put this right out in the open, but we think you’ll agree it’s worth making the jump.

That’s what I’m talking ’bout. Can I get another “aw, yeeeeeeeahhhhhhh“?