New Year's Shenanigans

Well another year has come and gone and that means another New Year's party at my house has also come and gone. Every year since the end of 2001 my three best friends from college have come to my house for New Year's. Two of them, RatBastard and Raste, are members of this site, and the third was my roommate in college for two years. We always have a helluva good time when we get together, and now that I live in Birmingham instead of Charleston it was an easier drive for everybody involved. Last year we had to postpone the party until March because Leia and I were moving in January and couldn't host it.

Our house here in "The Ham" is bigger and our get togethers are becoming more civilized. No more people sleeping on couches or airbeds, and we have cut back on the drinking considerably. (Well, they cut back anyway. I was forced to drink about two thirds of the liquor we bought because I wasn't getting any help from the lightweights.) Our parties may be a little bit more subdued now than they used to be, but I think that is for the best. I remember distinctly everything that happened over the 5 days that people were here and isn't that what is most important? To actually REMEMBER the good times you had? I think so.

We took it back to the "old school" days and busted out a game that I don't think we have played together in a few years: Cranium. If you haven't played this before, it really is a great party game because somebody always winds up making a fool of themselves at some point. One part of the game involves doing charades and that has provided big laughs for us in previous years. This year would not be an exception to that…

Raste and RatBastard were on the same team and at one point had to do a charades clue. RatBastard decided he would try to act it out and Raste would guess. I pulled the clue card out of the box and nearly had an aneurism when I read what it was. I couldn't help myself and I was laughing in anticipation of what I knew was sure to be a hilarious moment that would soon be added to our New Year's party "Great Moments in History". I passed the card around to my wife, my roommate and his fiancé so they could all get in on the joke. None of us could contain our laughter and Raste and RatBastard knew from our reactions that this was going to be good. I almost handed the card to RatBastard to read but then I remembered that my new digital camera that I had gotten for Christmas has a video mode (it's a Canon SD600 for those who are curious). I ran to get it and got set up to record before handing RatBastard the card. You can watch what happened next for yourself. The clue RatBastard was trying to get Raste to guess was: "Cocktail Dress" (Now, I've never added YouTube video to a blog before, so bear with me if I screw this up…)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKjb3pWaZqc[/youtube]

Sweet lord I laughed until my ribs hurt. What made this even funnier for us is that we had been making a lot of dick and cock jokes all day long. We had watched the "Dick in a Box" video from SNL on RatBastard's computer and that became a running joke around the house.

"Hey man, can you get me a coke while you are in the kitchen?"

"Nope, but I'll tell you what I can get you."

"What's that?"

"A dick in a box."

On top of that, RatBastard started doing this movie quote (I forget where it is from) : "Blank… a-doodle-doo". For whatever reason that sh!t was just cracking me up and he had been doing it while we were sitting around playing Cranium before he got the "cocktail dress" clue. So there were already plenty of cock and dick references that had permeated the whole party atmosphere for a couple of days leading up to the charades incident. I hope that you find this video to be funny. I plan on burning it to DVD so we can watch it every year when we get together. Instant classic.

Perhaps you are wondering what this video has to do with video gaming. After all this is a video game site, correct? Well, if you look closely at the shirt RatBastard is wearing you may notice that it is the shirt that PennyArcade was selling to support their Child's Play Charity this year. I gave each of my buddies one of these shirts for Christmas this year. (OK, RatBastard is actually jewish, so I gave him his for Hanukkah. Whatever. I mean, what kind of jew loves pork chops?) The purpose of the charity is to provide children in hospitals with toys, books, art supplies, and yes, video games. So there you have it, a tenuous tie-in, but a legitimate one I think. I really like what the PA guys have done with their charity, and I'm glad to see it growing and to have been a small part of it. They raised over 1 million dollars in cash and gifts this year.

Note: I want to send a special "shoutout" of thanks to Berttnick of the OMM who provided me with a link to a program that would change my raw AVI video file that was 75 MB into an MPEG4 file that was just a little over 2 MB. That made it much easier to get it uploaded to YouTube. The free software is called "Any Video Converter" and you can download it at: http://www.any-dvd-converter.com/ I don't care what anybody else says about you Bertt, I totally don't think you would blow a Clydesdale for two dollars. :)