My Biggest Regret from College

I was watching Revenge of the Nerds the other day and it just occurred to me that I missed out on one of the greatest thrills of a college education: the time honored tradition of the Panty Raid.

When I was in high school, I was under the distinct impression that co-eds sat around their living quarters in perpetual fear that at any given moment, a pack of exuberant frat boys could come storming in and steal their undergarments. This would be horrific at first but deep down they secretly enjoyed being the victim of a sophomoric prank and would eventually cave in and have sex with said frat boys. I had no reason to think otherwise, after all, most of my ideas about college came from watching B movies on USA Up (insert annoying high squealing weird chick here) All Night.

I think Elvira used to host that show too. In any case, it was the closest thing to porn I had at the time, so I thought it was pretty awesome.

Well, five years have gone by and I haven’t stolen NEARLY as many thongs as I would have liked to. The women these days are so PC, it’s ridiculous. Why can’t you let us men invade your privacy like the good Lord intended?

All this talk is bringing up other painful memories of stuff I never got to do in college. For instance, I will always regret:

1. Never having an arch-nemesis dean/rival fraternity to wreck havoc upon
2. Dressing up as a woman to infiltrate a female dormitory, sorority house, cheerleader locker room, etc.
3. Using my ability to turn into a werewolf for academic purposes instead of winning a championship boxing title for my school

Dudes! It’s time for us to unite for a panty raid to end all panty raids. We need to act now. The line between youthful hijinks and second degree sexual assault is growing ever thinner. We’re going to need dark clothes, flashlights, ladders, and probably wonder joints. Liz Waters won’t know what hit her! After THAT we’ll get even with those damn Alpha Betas once and for all.

This is going to be a great semester!



My cousin, Michael J. Fox, showing off his other talent besides car surfing.
I, unfortunately, chose more scholarly pursuits.

People that look like Things and other People

Below is a picture of Eric Dingeldein. He has been one of my best friends since High School and I love him to death. That’s why I feel I can get away with embarrassing the hell out of him to the entire Internet universe.



The first person that Ding looks like is Wide Receiver #86 from the Green Bay Packers, Antonio Freemen, sans the dirty moustache.



My roommates and myself last Wednesday made the revelation that Ding also looks like Turk from the hit show Scrubs on NBC. He's the one on the right.



It’s really a travesty that I don't have his picture but Ding looks the most like this dude I sat next to in my English class Freshmen year. They actually bumped into each other at this crazy Halloween party that semester but for some reason, they didn’t want to acknowledge to each other that they’re basically identical twins separated at birth. I think it’s because they were both drunk at the time. Typical!


Finally, this last person or should I say, recently animated fictional inanimate CGI object, is described by Dingeldein himself to be something that he thinks he looks like. He even gives himself the moniker “Archer” from the movie Small Soldiers because he’s weird like that. Personally, I think the similarities are negligible at best.




Well, that pretty much does it for Dingeldein. He looks like a lot of people and things apparently. We should all be so lucky. If you can think of people that look like other people or things or just want to make fun of Dingeldein, please feel free to drop a comment.

You know, it just occurred to me while I was writing this that there is another obvious similarity between two people that I know very well:



It’s almost scary how much we both share the same looks AND quarterback abilities.

Mildly Great Moments in Competitive Eating

An interesting proposition came across me the other day at work. Some company gave our company a solid brick of Hershey chocolate with their corporate logo on it as a Christmas, err I mean "Holiday" present. Anyways, this monstrosity has been sitting in the break room for about a month now because nobody in the office knows what the hell to do with it.

That is until one of the vice president’s threw down the challenge that he would give 50 bones to anyone who could eat the whole thing in under 2 hours. As an aspiring athlete in the sport of competitive eating, this immediate piqued my interest.

Even though I toil day to day as a real estate analyst, I know my true calling is to become a world champion eater of something. I still haven’t decided if I want to eat a lot of something the fastest or eat the largest quantity of something in a single sitting. All I know is that I want to be on the same pedestal as that little Asian kid that can eat 30 hot dogs in 5 minutes or whatever his crazy record is. People love that kid. I heard he can’t walk the streets of Asia without getting mobbed by fans. How sweet would that be?

My foray into competitive eating has been less than stellar up to this point. I’ve tried drinking a gallon of milk in one hour without throwing up but everyone knows that’s impossible. I’ve also eaten 2 slices of bread in a minute but that shit is BORING! Any hack can do that. It’s so amateurish.

My first real challenge was posed by a roommate after he heard my frozen pizza hypothesis. My frozen pizza theory is simply that 100% of all men have the capacity to eat an entire frozen pizza at any given time. I don’t care if the dude just got done stuffing himself at Thanksgiving, if presented a frozen pizza, the guy could somehow still eat the whole thing with little to no trouble. It’s just one of the many idiosyncrasies of the male appetite. I can’t explain it, it’s just true.

Anyways, my buddy challenged me to eat 4 frozen pizzas in 1 hour with the prize being the cost of the pizzas. It was an interesting proposal but I felt the stakes were too low to jeopardize my frozen pizza hypothesis. Can you imagine what the world would be like today if Einstein gambled away his theory of relativity because some other scientist bet him he couldn’t eat six Whoppers in one sitting or some stupid shit like that? Not on my watch.

Back to the mammoth brick of chocolate, I did some prep work to test the feasibility of the challenge. I weighed the chocolate on the postage meter minus the packaging and it came out to 2 lbs and 5 ounces. I then checked Hershey’s website for nutritional information, made some metric to English conversions, and deduced that the block had approximately 5170 calories and 685 grams of fat.

After about an hour of deliberation, I ultimately decided to back off from the challenge. I weighed the benefit of being the office hero for the rest of the afternoon versus having the runs for the next 8 weeks. It was THAT and the fact that I didn’t want to be the youngest person to ever need a triple bypass heart transplant. I think I chose wisely.

Maybe I’ll never be a grand master in the art of gorging myself, but I do have a back up plan in case things don’t pan out. I also happen to be extremely awesome at rock-paper-scissors. My rock strategy never fails…



Charles Lindbergh, Lou Gehring, Chuck Yaeger, Indiana Jones, and now Takeru Kobayashi: The short list of greatest American Heros grows ever longer.

What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas, My ASS!

We survived.

Barely.

One more day in that crazy city and we would have been goners. Not because of the excessive gambling, not because of the double 7&7’s that the casino’s are all but willing to supply for free, not even from the sheer exhaustion of getting only 6 hours of sleep over the course of a three day weekend.

What almost did us in was the stench of our hotel room.

When you get four dudes shacking up in a tiny ass hotel room, you know it’s going to be bad, but our room took top honors for all time worse smells ever. The room was littered with smoky sweaty clubbing clothes and leftover McDonald’s wrappers (I realize we could have eaten better in a city known to offer every type of buffet known to mankind, but, hey, that would have been one less red chip to throw down on the blackjack table) for as far as the eye can see. If I had to guess, I would stay the overall smell would be equivalent to sasquatch taking a dump between two McGriddle paddies and then letting it bake in the sun for eight days. It was bad.

But that odor was compounded exponentially due to certain people on the trip whom I won’t mention but their names start with Pete Noreberg and Cody Langeness, thought it would be a good idea to wake Comrade Dmitry up by picking up the mattress he was sleeping on and then slamming him into a wall. This was, of course, very humorous to everyone. Unfortunately, the giant picture on the wall broke, so that meant we could not get room service until we were property evacuated from the premises and the credit card that our room was paid for on was reported stolen so as to avoid paying for said giant picture frame.

I almost feel guilty about the whole incident and the mess we left behind, but then I calculated my gambling losses for the weekend and realized that the Stardust made out like a goddamn bandit. Now I see it as a fair trade: They break my wallet, we break their picture. We probably could have broken a few lamps too and they still would have come out ahead. Bastards.

The weekend was not ENTIRELY jam packed with debauchery, though. We did manage to have a little honest fun. We did see a few shows. Well, I guess eROCKtica does not qualify as wholesome entertainment. Let’s see here then, there’s the few hours we spent at Gameworks. Wait, crap, that afternoon too was filled with gratuitous gambling on 3 puck air hockey and arcade basketball. I guess the 30 second freefall from when we went sky diving Friday morning was about the only time one of us wasn’t gambling, drinking, smoking, cursing, grinding, or breaking objects. I KNEW I had a reason to feel good about myself when I got home.

Oh I forgot to mention one more vice. Chalk one up for Comrade Dmitry, for shattering the record on gross misconduct for the state of Nevada’s stringent usury laws. He wanted a $10 dollar juice on a $50 loan for ONE night. By my calculation, that equates to a 7200% APR. He made all the loan sharks in Vegas look like goldfish that night. It must be all that Russian mafia blood flowing through his veins. I love that kid.

Getting on the plane home, I had nothing left in my pockets but 60 cents and a handful of ATM receipts. Do I have any regrets? Hell, no. There were so many definitive moments that made the losses all the worthwhile. Between Cody yelling “I fold!” right before passing out at the blackjack table at the Wynn, or Pete’s charity on Sunday night with the presentation of his McDonald’s gift card to me with 30 cents on it, or simply the glance I got from this hottie at Body English at the Hard Rock as her boyfriend dragged her off the dance floor (must have been my eyebrows!); there was just too much fun had last weekend. There is only ONE thing I did not understand:

How did the Patriots AND the Colts lose on Sunday? It was a lock I tell you, a lock!

The four of us, still maintaining our dignity. It was only a few hours later when we discovered Craps.

Don't Drink and Blog

Drinking and blogging. It's probably right up there with calling ex-girlfriends or anybody after bar time for that matter. It’s something you know is wrong but you do anyway. Well I had one too many Jager bombs tonight and do not anticipate going to bed anytime soon and there are only reruns of Entourage on the tube right now so here I am. Thank God I have a spell checker right now to make this mess even possible.

Let’s talk about my weekend. In particular, I would like to talk about Friday night.

There is nothing better than kicking back on a Friday after a long hard day of work. I was in a pretty chill mood so when an old friend asked me to meet up with her and some of her friends at the Blue Velvet, I was really excited. Get dressed up a little, sip a few martinis, engage in some sophisticated conversation; I couldn’t have asked for a better way to start the weekend.

Well after about 10 minutes of exchanging pleasantries, the conversation quickly turned for the worse. Apparently, the people in this group wanted to talk about new vibrator technology. I am almost positive that I was NOT the one that brought this up. In any case, I got a crash course on the finer points of what’s cool and not cool in the world of battery operated man parts. It was awkward. I never want to hear the following sentences ever again:

“The rabbit has a nub now instead of ears!”

and

“It’s like a bullet only a lot bigger!”

I’m pretty sure the girl who said that last statement has never seen a real bullet in her entire life. That’s fine, though. I was actually starting to think to myself, Damn! I can compete with that!” But then I got to thinking, what if she was referring to can of Coors Light. Once again, my logic has placed me into an uncomfortable situation. Curse the man that first filtered the majestic streams of the Rocky Mountains to give us the crisp, refreshing banquet of beer known as Coors Light. Those Silver Bullets are tasty but now I’m going to have to add them to my on-going list of things that really intimidate me.

I jest that the conversation was weird but it pales in comparison to what transpired later. I can only describe the precarious situation I got myself into football terms because that’s how my thought process works. THAT and Simpsons analogies, but’s that’s neither here nor there. So let’s make this easy for everyone and pretend that every man is a running back and messing around is scoring a touchdown. In this universe, I am a strong runner and know a few moves, but I tend to fumble. A lot. Kind of like Ahman Green.

But Ahman Green never fumbled in a Super Bowl which is what happened last night only worse. I was making steady gains throughout the game, a few setbacks here and there, and some bad play calling in the fourth quarter, but nevertheless still in the game. I think I was wearing the defense down though because towards the end of the night, I had a clear shot at the endzone. But I ran out of bounds near the goal line! It does not matter how good of a player you are, ANYBODY can fumble at ANY given time, but it takes a true DUFUS to run out of bounds with no time on the clock. I wish I could remember what I was thinking at the time. Did I think I had time for another play? Did I actually WANT to lose on purpose, thinking the chase for another Super Bowl was more important than actually winning? Or did I simply just run out of steam? I honestly don’t know and I am really pissed at myself. I think the opposing team is pissed at me too or more likely, just really confused. I don’t blame her.

And just like the Super Bowl, a crack at the title only comes around about once a year for me so that really blows too. Well, at least I have my Vegas trip coming up next weekend. I’m sure there will plenty of opportunities for me to bumble an exhibition game or two…

2006: Where are the Hoverboards?

Well, 2005 is over and what a disappointment it was. In a year marked by an amazing European trip, a balls-to-wall Spring Break in Cancun, my college graduation, and the start of a full time career, a question in the back of my head still lingers: Where the hell are the goddamn hoverboards?

I know I am not the sole individual having this same thought. Like most children, we were all raised to believe that the by the year 2000, we were going to be traveling in flying cars, people would be living in colonies on the moon, video games where you had to use your hands would be considered childish, and more importantly, every kid would have their own recreational hoverboard.

Sure, fine, okay, maybe I have seen the 1989 smash hit Back to the Future II one too many times. But in my mind, that was just wishful thinking. My REAL vision of the future was actually inspired on that crappy Disney ride at the Epcot Center that I was forced to ride on because Space Mountain was under repair. I was as bitter then as I am now about this whole situation.

I daresay the status of our current hoverboard technology is no where close to where it needs to be for mass production. When I was kid, I thought by 2006 we would be rolling out 5th or 6th generational hoverboards that were FINALLY capable of going over water. Now we’ll be lucky to even see a working prototype by the next decade. This is completely unacceptable.

I propose that we restore the former Soviet Union in all of its Communist glory and then challenge them to a new arms race to create the most awesome hoverboard known to man. A worthy cause like this will no doubt unite even the most jaded Republicans and Democrats, which will in turn, inspire confidence in the American people and jumpstart the economy once and for all. It’s win win for everybody because even if you are not totally gung ho for creating the ultimate hoverboard, then surely you can get behind fighting the communists again.

Plus we’ll get to beat the Commies again at Hockey in the 2010 Winter Olympics. Who doesn’t want to see that?



Waiting for my very own hoverboard would be a lot easier if I could get a pair of those Nikes.