Steak eating contest!

I'm not sure what to write.. Hopefully, the pictures will be self-explanatory.
It's the second annual PNL Steak Eating contest. Sadly, the contest founder, Lily, who first challenged Doug/Usman?, could not be there, but the tradition continues. Doug beat the shit out of everyone, eating 3.1 pounds of steak, while Katharina also kicked ass in terms of steak / body weight. Not to mention, she beat me by a lot even in absolute volume. So, I'm officially no good at eating steak. Anyway, it was fun and painful. Plus, I got to drink a 40 from a mas in a German household. And that's always a good thing. See below.

From PNL Steak Eat...

my raw stack. (- two steaks)

There was a referee to start and stop us. We ate for 30 minutes, but every time someone ran out of meat, we waited for more to come off the grill. So, it ended up taking quite some time. You'd think that would give us time to digest, but no.

Doug and Usman at outrageously quickly. Sorry I have no pictures of the other side of the table eating, but it was Laura taking the pictures, and she's biased.

The steak was really good.

Awesome.

Usman's a trooper. Proof that being competitive can be unhealthy.

Usman's leftovers. He shoulda cut that shit off.

Crowning Doug.

Crowning Katharina.

name that song reference

So, I just realized that a favorite song of mine refers to a Lewis Carroll poem. I'd been wondering.. Anyway, I'm going to write the German translation Hofstadter seems to like, which seems pretty cool. Maybe a particular German speaker will get the translation and catch the song that quotes it. If you want to cheat, check the Wikipedia article on the poem (linked below). Either way, the poem's awesome and the definitions of the terms (as explained by Humpty Dumpty to Alice) are also very entertaining. Here's the translation (I'm not even going to try the umlauts etc):

Es brillig war. Die schlichten Toven
Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben;
Und aller-mumsige Burggoven
Die mohmen Rath' ausgraben

>>Bewhare doch vor Jammerwoch!
Die Zahne knirschen, Krallen kratzen!
Bewahr' vor Jubjub-Vogel, vor
Frumiosen Banderschnatzchen!<<

Er griff sein vorpals Schwertchen zu,
Er suchte lang das manchsam' Ding;
Dann, stehend unterm Tumtum Baum,
Er an-zu-denken-fing.

Als stand er tief in Andacht auf,
Des Jammerwochen's Augen-feuer
Durch turgen Wald mit Wiffek kam
Ein bubelnd Ungeheuer!

Eins, Zwei! Eins, Zwei! Und durch und durch
Sein vorpals Schwet zerschnifer-schnuck,
Da blieb es todt! Er, Kopf in Hand,
Gelaumfig zog zuruck.

>>Und schlugst Du ja den Jammerwoch?
Umarme mich, mein Bohm'sches King!
O Freuden-Tag! O Halloo-Schlag!<<
Er schortelt froh-gesinnt.

(repeat first stanza)



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

vanderbilt

btw, Vanderbilt 77-44 over George Washington. pretty awesome.
and listening to Ratatat underneath basketball commentary is also pretty awesome.

Snow, my apartment, and stupid geese

I decided I'd take some pictures since it might be the last snow of the season.
The corner of my street in the snow. View of Northeastern dorms, Fens park, etc.Stupid geese sitting outside of the park. They must have crossed at least two very busy and dangerous intersections. Dumbasses.Same geese shitting on the virgin powder. Don't know why one has a tag. They're pretty, but they're sooo stupid. I'm pretty sure even the pigeons make fun of them. They must have stopped over here on the way south from Canadia and gotten too fat to keep flying. Now they're stuck in this frozen, goose-unfriendly city, staying alive only by the blubber they've built up eating trash and squirrel leftovers. Many land owners have out-smarted the stupid, fat beasts by putting ceramic coyotes on either side of say, a soccer field. This keeps the idiotic fat-asses from leaving ugly green presents all over the place. I've also seen people go out with kites that look like hawks to scare them away.The view out our front door. It's pretty sweet to have a nice stone-fired pizza place across the street. It always smells like smoked meat or bbq. The appetizers rock too. The view down the street. It's a nice row, despite the fact that half the buildings are dorms and most of the residents are students. Luckily, they've been scared into hibernation by the snow.Our building. Note the alley along the left side, which is the view from all of our windows. This is a building that will fail as condos. Stupid landlords.

From BOS_webalbum

update 2007-03-16

I'm terrible about writing anything substantive to this blog. That's probably cause I'm not too sure how much personal info I want to post on a website that everyone can see. It's ideal for talking about beer, hookah, vacations, etc., but personal stuff not so much. Anyway, I'll try to at least be interesting.

Bad news:
- I just wrote some guy a check for $2000, which will totally obliterate my bank account and any fuzzy feeling I'd had from getting a big tax return.
- I showed up outside of the club an hour and a half early for the Ratatat show last night, only to find a sign on the door saying "Ratatat show sold out!" Now I'm listening to "Classics" and dying a little inside.
- My poster for this Harvard thing sucks because A) the topic is sketchy and B) I don't care
- It's really cold. It got up to 70 on Wednesday and now it's 30 and dropping. It will snow then rain then freeze and continue to cycle, making the earth one big skating rink
- we're being forced out of the apartment so they can sell them for condoes (which won't work) and our rent is going to go up at least $100 a month
- I didn't get to see Carolyn when she was in Boston :-(.

Good news:
- we just put in an application for a sweet pad on the top floor of a building on Marlborough St., which is right next to the river. It's in Back Bay, which is one of the nicest neighborhoods in Boston, and it's a really pretty, quiet street. The place is big with nice hardwood floors, a reasonably sized kitchen, and it allows kitties! sadly for the tentative kitty, there will be no mice on the 6th floor.
- heat and hot water are included. It's a gas stove.
- we're not moving until September, so we'll avoid living on the top floor with no AC during the summer
- we put in our application good and early, so we almost surely have the place
- our landlord is screwing his/her self trying to sell our current place as a condo. haha! they deserve it. bastards.
- my Suntrust CD matures today! woo hoo 15 months at 5%!
- I did very well on GREs
- I got to see Ania while she was in town
- if you've been reading the beermusic blog, you know that we got to see an amazing Of Montreal show
- we went to the Of Montreal show immediately after returning from a trip to Montreal, where we drank a lot of crappy beer, ate poutine (which isn't as dirty as it sounds, though certainly nasty), saw Notre Dame, clubbed with 16 year olds, swam in a "heated" pool, ate great brunches and some of the best eggs benedict (with asparagus!) ever, and annoyed the locals with bad French. On a side note, we found a sweet Chinese shop where I bought 35 year old Pu-Ehr tea, friends bought tea pots and sets, and I oggled the swords... We also hit a pretty sweet Vietnamese place in Chinatown where we all got pretty buzzed on MSG.
- the weekend before that I went out with T-bag and her associates to some crazy place called "Good Times Emporium". They have cheap pitchers, video games, bowling, billiards, and most importantly a go kart track, which was amazing at 2am. It was a little weird seeing entire families hanging out there and drinking till closing around 3am.

I'm not very good about taking pictures or bringing a camera with me anywhere, but I'm trying to get better!
Look forward to picture blogs on:
- montreal
- stupid geese
- crappy weather
- scary birds lurking in the reeds
- T-bag
- the coffee maker at my work (bad ass)
- my crappy bass
and more!

Happy St. Patty's

a summary of my apartment search

From BOS_webalbum

reminded that I love this show. don't judge me.

From BOS_webalbum

surprising success with tiny hookah

From BOS_webalbum

In the absence of the mother of all hookahs, as I like to call her... sometimes.. well really just now. Anyway, it's chillin at T-bag's pad. So, we dug out this $15 hookah, plugged in the old hose with the help of some electrical tape and sealed on the pyrex bowl with a shred of paper towel. To prevent burning (since this small hookah doesn't seem to filter as well and also has a shorter distance to the heat, increasing the likelihood of really feeling over-cooked shisha), I used the cheap metal faux-foil with a foil above it. I think this helps by raising the heat moderately off the tobacco, creating a large flat pad for the tobacco to sit on, and also by closing off air sources that don't pass near the coals (i.e. from the side and bottom of the cheap faux-foil). Lastly, an old shoe padded with old socks was used to stabilize the little bastard. I think that's its name - "Little Bastard," an endearing term nonetheless. By avoiding over-heating, not all of the tobacco burned through, but there was absolutely no burning. Some smoke escaped from holes in the quickly-done electrical tape job, but mostly air escaped through the ball-bearing'ed carb. The sound was no different from that of a usual bubbler. This little experience just goes to show that the hookah is just a modified bong, but it's still pretty sweet (I can't imagine that smoking tobacco through a bong would be very appealing). Or maybe it's that a bong is just a burn-y hookah... but that's neither here nor anywhere else.
Notes:
The carb with a ball bearing was a little annoying because I've gotten used to being able to blow smoke through the bowl to check burnage, etc., but it may be that the ball bearing, when fitted properly, is helpful in decreasing burnage... Is this reasonable?
A hose that has been left to sit for a while begins to taste like the synthetic lining... gross. Needs extensive cleaning.
Tiny hookah worked well, except the hose seems to get more crap in it. This could be an artifact of using the old hose, but I think that I cleaned it pretty thoroughly, and I don't know why smoking would loosen something that wasn't already released by soap and hot water.

Conundrum: Having beer with hookah is always ontologically better than just having a hookah. However, very few beers "go with" hookah, and each might actually detract from the other's enjoyability factor. It's also possible that certain hookah flavors go and don't go with certain beers.
Solution:
What beers and/or liquors match well with sweet, fruity, tobacco-y, strong, minty, and other categories of hookah flavors?
Remaining issue:
What is the threshold for hookah-beer matching at which it's better to have both rather than each separately?

Obviously, I take hedonism very seriously.

some of my friends are a lot more hardcore than I...

i like it liquid hot: magma and me: lava is pretty
Check out the 2nd and 3rd pictures. She had to buy new shoes and new pants so the synthetic materials wouldn't melt to her body. Hardcore.