Kitkowskiland!

First, before I forget: Here’s the link to the names book, Beth: The Story Games Name Project.

Anyway, last night Jeremie bought the board game The Fury of Dracula, a revised version of the game that he played a lot as a kid in France.  The new version is pretty complicated at first, but very very pretty.  In any case, Jeremie was Dracula, and we miraculously managed to track him down and kill him by about halfway through the second day.
During this time, the Milk Challenge went down. Alan agreed to the terms (1 gallon of 1% milk in one hour, then no getting sick/throwing up for one more hour). Despite the odds, and some fairly close calls, he beat us. He won the bet. He gets a free dinner at an Indian restaurant and bragging rights.  He didn’t even get sick after the second hour (he was totally fine at that point), in fact, declaring “Just to show you fuckers”, he ate a bowl of ice cream afterwords.

The only thing is that he ended up going to the bathroom a lot (#2). I’ll spare the descriptions, but let’s just say that most of the liquid made it to his intestines, forcing all other liquids out. That’s what got him through the challenge.

So, after seeing all the attempts online that ended in failure, I will present some various facts about the event that will help the Next Person out there:

==For the DRINKER of the Milk==

* Alan reports:
“I do not recommend this to anyone”
“I’m never going to do that again”
“I think in the end it was my intestines that saved me”
“I had to go in the other room and lay down to not get sick from your taunting” (see below on Taunting

* Alan’s strategy:

Last time (when he failed) he had eaten pasta that day. He also paced himself. This time, Alan pretty much skipped food the entire day.

His strategy was “drink as much as possible quickly, until you can not drink any more”. He made it through 1/2 gallon in the first sitting, glass after glass after glass. Note that both half-gallons were in the fridge until right before he started, as he didn’t want to drink warm/room temp milk. The first half-gallon was done in the first 5 minutes or so.

Then he simply waited for the milk to pass through. Then started drinking from the second half-gallon about 20-30 minutes into the hour.

He almost gave up, almost didn’t make it. But he managed the last glass and a half in the last four minutes. We encouraged him on, but only because we thought our encouragement would cause him to fail. We were surprised when it did not.

And don’t forget the aforementioned bathroom trips. Alan’s an honest guy (too honest, maybe!) and between his honesty and the lack of sounds of heaving, he did not cheat. However, he was completely annihilated gastrointestinally for that period of time, the milk draining through him.

==For the People Betting against the Drinker==

*  If you add to the terms of the bet that *they can not go to the bathroom*, then you *will win*. However, in my opinion that’s just not a fair bet. Do what you must to make sure they’re not covering up getting sick (especially if there is a lot of money riding on it: At work last year, one of the coworkers tried and failed, and the prize pool was close to $200.00), but let them go to the bathroom. Else ready a bucket. Perhaps two buckets for simultaneous use.

* I saw on the internet that someone did the bet with Skim Milk. Skim Milk is practically water**, don’t plan on that bet. We thought we could get Alan with 1%. 1% was not effective enough. Make the terms of the bet 2% (or whole milk, but that’s probably too much). **BTW, with milk there’s no acidosis/water poisoning. With skim milk, dunno. But you’d probably have to drink a lot more than a gallon to get to the levels like that person who died in the Radio contest for the Wii.

* Be earnest with your taunting and jibing. However, do not bring out the big guns in taunting until the person is physically uncomfortable (for max effect).  We had some real big guns, but unfortunately we think we used them too soon.

* Find the weak spots in the armor.  Alan’s was GRAVY. He almost lost it when we started talking about gravy (incl “gravy milkshakes”, and washing one down with “glasses of warm butter”).

* This taunt was great, but unfortunately we used it too early. It only works if there’s a bucket. It almost worked, though.

(with a straight face) “Hey, (NAME), I’ll tell you what. If you throw up in the bucket, but then drink your milk-puke in the time limit, you’ll still be in; We won’t disqualify you.”

The above almost set off the rest of us. It could be the WMD in your bet, if dropped well, with a straight (almost “concerned”) tone of voice, and at the right time.
That’s it!  Alan proved the better of us, will NEVER do that bet again, and got a free dinner out of it. Plus, while that was going on the rest of us played The Fury of Dracula, which again is a seemingly fun game, but has tons of rules that are complicated your first time through. If you get it, I suggest trying to download a few extra copies of the rules from Boardgamegeek.com so that you don’t have to stop up the game if more than one person needs to read them, especially on your first game.

-Andy

So my friend Alan, not daunted by the last horribly failed attempt (”I ate earlier that day”), and the fact that it’s humanly impossible, decided that he is going to try it again:

Drink one gallon of 1% milk in one hour, and not throw up for one more hour.

The battle goes down at my house on Thursday. We’re postponing gaming that week to make room for the mess. The rest of us will either watch movies or play board games as Alan makes himself sick.

I’ve researched it on the internet, and the only reference I could find for someone who did it was a guy who did it with skim milk, and he got horribly sick after winning the bet.

We’ve warned Alan at least a dozen times each time he said he was going to do it, but his stubbornness is supreme. Either we get a “Forever I Told You So” certificate, or he will totally show us up and get a free meal at his favorite Indian restaurant (on another night, of course).

What movies go good with stupid milk attempt?  I’m thinking Bubble Boy or Brain Donors.

I met him once at a lecture at my college, and loved the way he thought, taught and lived.  Coming from the philosophical tradition, he basically spent the 70s and 80s (and, well, the rest of his career) giving traditional “stump the freshman” philosophy a big fat middle finger, while at the same time used academic rigor and and open heart to follow in the footsteps of great American “doing real shit to help the real world” philosophers like Dewey and James, in basically creating a moral, right-thinking, good-deed doing society based on principles of humanity, entirely divorced from religion and “objective morality” thinking.

He was an a great thinker and an awesome, awesome human being.

Farewell, Richard Rorty.

The above is an awesome obituary which I’d urge people interested in him to give a look at. My highlights, which really summarize where he came from and what he stood for:

“Raised in a home where “The Case for Leon Trotsky” was viewed with the same reverence as the Bible might be elsewhere, Mr. Rorty pondered the nature of reality as well as its everyday struggles. “At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice,” he wrote in an autobiographical sketch.

Russell A. Berman, the chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, who worked with Mr. Rorty for more than a decade, said, “He rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints” and returned it “to core concerns of how we as a people, a country and humanity live in a political community.”

…

“The widespread notion that the philosopher’s primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing.”

-Andy