25 or 6 to 4

Hanging out with Pikkon will invariably leave you with a story to tell every time you do. More often than not, these stories will run the gamut from terrifying to embarrassing to horrifying.

Here I am at my house, it's eight or nine p.m., and Pikkon calls me up. "I WANT PANCAKES" he bellows. I got nothing better to do, so I accompany him to Denny's, where he finds out that pancakes aren't a main dish, but a side dish. After making the poor waitress wait a good while (he was on the phone most of the night), he finally orders a club sandwich.

So much for pancakes.

After an enlightening talk about the Military and its ranking system, and after making the waitress wait twice more (Pikkon ordered dessert, and then after the bill came, he ordered more food), we finally get up to pay. I lay down my ATM for my side of things, and Pikkon asks the cashier if he can bring his excess coins to pay with; Pikkon's had a couple of friends pay him IOUs in coins, for reasons unknown, and he wants to unload.


So, he walks out to the parking lot and walks in with a tupperware bowl full of coins. WUT.


Again, WUT.

I can only wonder what the cashier, and the dozens of people walking in and out of the restaurant thought of Pikkon's little stunt. So after 10 minutes of counting, we came to a grand total of $23.30, 3 bucks of which were pennies. WHY PIKKON WHY. As you can see from the pictures, he shows no shame in the fact that we are now probably banned from this particular Denny's. The cashier was a good sport about it, and another customer actually WANTED all of Pikkon's pennies, so she exchanged them for dollars, which just added to the lulz of it all...

Oh, and when we got back to his house...

Pikkon showed me that there was more where that came from.

orz.

Because you've been itching to see our Wiis

Yes, I know I've neglected you, my children- however, the bottle, a dead end job, or your mother is not the reason. No, daddy doesn't have a mistress, either (the position's open, ladies). No. Daddy has been playing with his Wii. If you kids behave, daddy will let you play with his Wii too.


This is the Wii that almost didn't come (Yes, visibility today is around one mile, you've been warned). I had reserved the Zelda game you see here resting against my Wii back in 2005, when it was announced for the GameCube, and before it was delayed ass amounts of times like a Final Fantasy game. When they started reserving the Wii, GameStop offered to change up GC Zelda for Wii Zelda, so I did. Now, I was expecting to have a certain amount of capital alloted already by the time the Wii came, so imagine my surprise when I realized that money is to be used for tuition and other services colleges provide.

Long story short, I totally spent a lot of the Wii money on lesser stuff like education. I know, what was I thinking? Anyways, as I prepared to do something a bit drastic by trading in my PS2 to finish paying for it, a guardian angel emerged from a house behind Rio Hondo to aid me financially. Yamil ended up helping me pay for it after Andrew very selfishly declined to trade in all his games to get me some store credit. For shame, Andrew, for shame. Anyways, it seems that, out of all of my friends, I was the only one that had actually reserved it (because hindsight is a sultry bitch), so after receiving the gift of the God (that God being Miyamoto) Sunday morning at midnight, I went and accompanied Yamil, Pikkon, and Joel as they made the line in front of Wal Mart to see if they could get it eleven hours later when the store opened.

We were ready for the long haul, having come more prepared than when we took a weekend trip to Vieques during the summer. Fortunately, the store manager came in at 2 am, took a list of all the loyal fans, and said, 'Go home and rest young ones, you'll need it, for in a few hours, you will have your Wiis in your hands, and you will play with it vigorously.'

Their Wiis secured, I followed the gang as we made our way to Joel's to wait out the 11am-opening of the store by playing with my Wii.


Here I am, taking out my Wii.


I'll use this to play with my Wii.



Left-to-right: Me, Gary, Yamil (holding Suki), Pikkon, and Javier... grabbing his junk. I dunno why. And no, I didn't photoshop that, there IS a heavenly light streaming from above, basking me. Apotheosis. Blessed are those that have the Wii, for they shall inherit the earth. Needless to say, a helluva lot of fun was had with Wii Sports, and after everybody else went to sleep, I stayed up and played Zelda, an excellent way to follow up the awesomeness that is Wind Waker, but more on that later. Morning came, and I decided to rest a bit while the guys went ahead and got their Wiis.


Even among Wiis mine is unique.


These are the Fates. They weave our destiny. The quilt they've woven indicates that Zelda'll make me a college drop-out.

Anyways, I'll try to return to the internets this week to pick up on on my blogging.

If, Zelda'll let me.

Andrew, the Speedy Speed Boy

Today, Jessica, the sweet, sweet girl that blogs Jessbait, had a pic-a-nic at her house, and so she dragged me from my bed and to her house. We spent the day just hanging around, and photoshopping. Oh did we photoshop. Double chins, buck teeth and facial hair was added to otherwise unblemished faces. Gravity's effects on the female body were lessened to a good degree. A lot of pictures were taken and edited, much to the pleasure of the sometimes (always) nihilistic Jessie.

Andrew came in, 20 hours late, as usual, and then it became a party. Raquel and I watched with glee as they got into the jacuzzi and Jessica proceeded to predate sexually on poor Andrew. Fun stuff. They managed to soak us completely in the process, and we took pictures of Jessica's boobs in her swimsuit. It seems hard for her (Raquel and Andrew as well), to grasp the nuances of night-photographing. They made damn sure to ruin every picture by moving the second they saw the red-eye laser, as if the camera had finished taking a picture, even though I told them many times that night-shots take longer. But hey, nobody ever listens to the black guy.

Anyways, time came to leave, and I hitched a ride with Andrew. Now, you gotta understand, Jessica's urbanization is pretty much an enclosed megalopolis. The time it takes you to get from the next town to her urbanization is the same time it takes you to travel from the gate of the urbanization to her house. It's absurd. Now, knowing this, as we left, Andrew somehow believed that the first left turn he saw was the exit to the urbanization. Not so. Now, this wouldn't be a problem, everybody can make that mistake.

The problem was we were doing 60 when he realized in his head that maybe he should make that left turn. And like something out of Initial D, Andrew turned full left, skidding the car over the moss and gravel that covered the road.

Now, Puerto Rican roads are built with the drainage exposed, not under the road or covered with grates, which means that at intersections the road will dip some 20 feet down and up abruptly.

We still had excellent forward momentum as the car nose-dived into the drainage ditch (canyon), slamming the fairings and left wheel with hearty, crunchy sounds, like how your cereal should sound if you're not a PuDS. Then he realized that the exit is still 8 hours away, and so we had to turn back over the same drainage ditch, just to make sure that the car is messed up evenly on both sides underneath.

I went ahead and recreated the planview of Jessica's suburb from city records. The red line represents Andrew and me's journey.

This is a simple diagram of the incident. I'm certain we left a good chunk of tire on the road, as well as a good chunk of Andrew's soul.

The Brio didn't deserve that, Andrew.

Thinking Inside the Bowl

I just came back from a DS LAN party we had at a friend's house. As expected, there was much fun to be had, and personal scores to settle- I finally completely destroyed Raquel's score on Whack-a-Monty, a mini-game in the New Super Mario Bros. game, thus ending a long struggle of dominance between the two of us... In the end, I finally was able to get to 96 moles, leaving her score of 95 a distant memory of times gone by.

Top that, Raquel!

Andrew and Meli also had a grudge match in the Bob-omb sorting mini-game, the results of which I presently do not know. All I know is they're this close to drawing blood.

However, the real highlight of the night was Joel's performance. Joel, the Apox in the Apoxware link, had brought home pizzas and a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi (ugh...). Through reasons unexplained, said bottle fell from the desk it was resting on, detonating on impact. Closest to ground zero was Andrew, being his usual text placeholder self, so he was instantly sprayed as the soda Claymore mine's concussive blast caused him to lactate in sheer terror. Joel, next-closest to ground zero, went ahead and picked up the still-erupting bottle, parading it around the room like some Catholics do with a weird smoky bong thing that they swing during New Year's. He ran out of the room and into the bathroom...



















The trail begins here.


















Andrew took the brunt of the first shockwave, and the aftershocks as the bottle kept spraying indiscriminately.



















Into the bathroom...

































And right into the toilet. Yes, the toilet. Not the bathtub, not the sink. He dunked it into the toilet.

What compels a man to this kind of reasoning? What drives him? What is his mission, his purpose; what is the goal of his journey?

And no, man, we're NOT drinking out of that after you alley-ooped it into the crapper.




















Shameful.

Ok guys, this has got to stop

There’s really something wrong with Puerto Ricans, I swear. Today is definitive proof of that, but I’ll get to that in a bit. Look, as I mentioned before, I don’t drink- that doesn’t mean I have a problem with drinking- most my friends drink, and I don’t think any less of them. Hell, every few years or so, you might even catch me sipping on a beer or something, and I certainly enjoy wine if the chance appears. The problem I have with drinking, is that most people do it to knock themselves out and lose all feeling and physical connection to this plane of existence.

There’s a bar pretty much across the street from my university. For reasons beyond me, it seems to be open by six, seven in the morning (or maybe it just doesn’t close at all). I know this, because I’ve got friends that drop by at eight a.m., staggering in alcohol-induced giddiness. I KNOW it’s alcohol-induced because I can SMELL them across the campus. These are students of the university, they’ve got class, and some have work. Who in their right mind comes to class reeking of rum?

Tell me, you, reader, being aware of how alcohol impairs you, being aware of what your limits are, being aware how intoxication changes you, how do you convince yourself that boozing up at day-break is a good thing to do? I’d like to know how the thought process that goes through the head of such a person progresses. You can’t possibly tell me that such a person doesn’t realize how obnoxious, belligerent, and unaware of their surroundings they can become when drunk. It’s incredibly annoying and rather disappointing how a person can be proud and happy about the fact that they were drunk in time for class. It speaks volumes about people.

“Dude, you’re being a wet blanket.”

“Oh c’mon, it’s just a few drinks.”

“C’mon man, that was pretty funny!”

I feel very strongly about this, but those that I confront disregard this completely. What’s so fun about being impaired and losing touch with reality? Puerto Rican culture seems to encourage reckless partying (among other things that I’ll certainly rant about in later posts). People brag about how drunk they managed to get- it’s almost like bragging about how many cartons a day you smoke. They re-tell their stories about how the drove off a cliff or woke up with the car wrapped around a tree- but they’re uninjured, so hey, nothing happened, let’s keep drinking! Does everybody really need a bad reality-check before they can step back and say, ‘Hmm, you know, this probably isn’t the best way to start the day…’ ?

In aviation, there are five attitudes which we are taught can be the downfall of any pilot… They’re very universal, actually.

Anti-authority- I tell you, ‘Fifteen bottles of rum in the morning is not good.’, to which I get a ‘who made you the drink police?’. Telling people that their drinking is stupid will usually encourage them to drink more out of spite.

Macho attitude- You’re not awesome unless your liver collapses.

Resignation- ‘Lol, so I’m drunk… What’s done is done :D ’

Invulnerability- ‘So that dude crashed because he was drunk… I *know* how to drive drunk, it won’t happen to me :D ’

Impulsivity- ‘Damn… I’m so drunk out of my mind… Let’s go drink some more! ’

I believe this describes the Puerto Rican hard drinker perfectly.

Now, this is what convinced me that Puerto Rican society has reached rock-bottom- here I was with a friend of mine at a gas station where his mom works at. He comes at me with a ‘You’re not gonna believe this’ grin on his face. He puts in my hand the newest drink product that’s gonna come out to the market. Do you know those aluminum Capri Sun drink pouches? The ones that come with a little straw?

It’s called Gasolina. Yes, Gasolina, like that godforsaken reggaeton bullshit.

The packet says that it’s made of rum, tequila, and fruit juice. That’s right, people- it’s a fucking shot pouch. Its alcohol content is 11%, and the pouch bigger than the aforementioned Capri Sun pouches.

Am I the ONLY person that thinks this is fucking ridiculous?! It has a fucking little straw like the juice pouches! It’s called Gasolina. What. The. Fuck. It has ‘Puerto Rican ’ plastered all over. Basically, Puerto Ricans needed to make alcohol somehow MORE accessible and storable. Geez.

Sometimes, I wonder about the people that surround me.

The Puked Diarrhea Scabs Eaters

[EDIT: The HTML for this is killing me- I'll fix this ASAP]

[[EDIT: The HTML has utterly defeated me, at least for now. I've been trying to get a post breaker so that this incredibly long post would appear on its own page instead of the front page, but Blogger is being a total, complete whore. I'm considering moving to Wordpress, where all this would just be a simple button click, but nothing ever goes my way. I'll expand on this in my next post.]]

Some people....


So I've been running a word-of-mouth poll on that deep wound of a subject that Puked Diarrhea Scabs (hereon after PuDS) is to me. As I've explained to my friends, there's not that many things that make me gag, but PuDS and most any oatmeal (for its similar consistency to PuDS) will nauseate me. How something so vile could be ingested by otherwise seemingly normal people, I'll never know.

Anyways, I've talked about this with a number of my friends, most found the suggestion of letting cereal age in milk to be ludicrous. What saddened me was that there was more than one other person that actually liked consuming PuDS orally- I was too disgusted to actually pursue the reasoning behind such atrocious behavior...

Oh, and not only that, I got into this argument with Armando, the second of my so-called friends to reveal to me his sickening lifestyle choice-

Armando J Doval: You will never convince me that soggy cereal is anything less than awesome, no matter how hard you try.
GKeepah: I'm sorry dude, but that's the most horrible thing you could inflict orally to a human being. I'm 110% certain that the Geneva Conventions have banned soggy cereal since at the very least 1864. I bet the real horrors of the Battle of Solferino was soggy cereal
Armando J Doval: Some things just get better the more you let 'em break down. Sorta like ice cream. Who doesn't like periodically drinking the ice cream that melts in your cup?
Armando J Doval: It's like cooking in reverse.
GKeepah: Er... I prefer it in its original state, actually. In liquid form, it feels a bit loaded
Armando J Doval: Well, coming from someone who doesn't like soggy cereal, I guess I can't say I'm surprised. D:
GKeepah: And... Cooking really doesn't have a reverse now, does it?
Armando J Doval: Sure it does!
GKeepah: No, not really.
Armando J Doval: Yeah, it does D:
GKeepah: Dude. Will you think about this for a second?
Armando J Doval: Usually, cooking involves heating food to make it more fit for eating/more delicious.
Armando J Doval: So, it's opposite would be...letting it go back to room temperature to make it more delicious?
GKeepah: When you heat food, it changes physically and chemically. You can't really return to uncooked state something that was cooked, in other words, you can't reverse cooking.
Armando J Doval: You can reverse folding, even if the paper doesn't go back to its original (unwrinkled) state.
Armando J Doval: I mean, sure, it won't be perfectly flat anymore, but it won't be folded either.
GKeepah: Folding is not a chemical change through heat, now is it? That arguement is a logical fallacy.
Armando J Doval: No, but it's a process that can be reversed, yet doesn't result in the object returning to its original state.
GKeepah: One thing being true for something doesn't make it true for everything
Armando J Doval: You're missing the point. You can't define a process as not having an opposite just because its opposite doesn't return to object to its original state.
GKeepah: That's what the opposite is!
Armando J Doval: So you're saying unfold is not the opposite of fold?
GKeepah: I'd love to know what the hell that un' prefix is there for, then
Armando J Doval: Well, then, if it is, then it's alright for the paper to be wrinkled, right?
GKeepah: A buh?
GKeepah: Dude, where are you going with this?
GKeepah: Please establish for me how this paper arguement is relevant
Armando J Doval: Your argument is that cooking can't have an opposite because you can't return food to its original state, right?
GKeepah: Yes.
GKeepah: I said you can't reverse cooking, yes.
Armando J Doval: Then, folding can't have an opposite unless you can perfectly flatten the paper so that it returns to its original (i.e. smooth, unwrinkled) state.
Armando J Doval: But if you acknowledge the act of unfolding as the opposite of the act of folding, even if the paper doesn't return to the exact state as it once was...
Armando J Doval: Then cooking can have an opposite action, even if the food doesn't return exactly to its original state.
GKeepah: You can so return a paper to flatness.
Armando J Doval: The creases of the fold will remain. Unless you're a) some sort of Japanese origami master, or b) Noriko Readman, I kinda doubt that >.>
Armando J Doval: Ok, I'll give you a concrete example.
GKeepah: Make a fold on a piece of paper. Unfold it. Put it between two heavy books for a period of time. Lol flat. You're using semantics and an unrelated arguement to try to detract from an arguement you can't debate directly
Armando J Doval: Dude, you will NEVER get rid of that fold.
Armando J Doval: It's always going to stay there. It's a small change, and yes, you can iron it out quite a bit, but it's still not like a brand new sheet of paper.
Armando J Doval: I'll give you a concrete example.
GKeepah: Please do
Armando J Doval: When you cook a pizza, the cheese melts, and you could say it's in a liquid (or near-liquid state.)
Armando J Doval: If you let the pizza cool, the cheese will return to a mostly solid state, although it'll all have fused together.
Armando J Doval: You've returned the cheese to its solid state, and if you were to reheat the pizza, that would be considered cooking it once again, for you would be making it more fit for consumption through heating.
Armando J Doval: Of course, that cheese won't look exactly the same as it did in the beginning, but it's not hot nor liquid anymore, so you've undone the cooking process.
GKeepah: Cooking the cheese has changed its chemical composition. Cheese is a bad example BECAUSE of how much cheese changes. Take mozzarella cheese from the fridge. Heat half of it to melting point in a microwave, then put it back in the fridge until it is as cool as the uncooked half. Taste it. If you can't tell the difference in texture, taste and consistency, then you're inserting it in the wrong orifice in your person
Armando J Doval: Alright. So it's not perfectly analogous since it involves a physical change. However, that's a matter of the degree to which you want to submit it to change.
Armando J Doval: I could argue that if you were to fold the paper, say, 100 times, and then unfold it, the paper would be that much more different from its original state.
GKeepah: Which is why I bothered to mention the chemical change that occurs, instead of just the physical one
Armando J Doval: Hm. Are you sure melting cheese consitutes a chemical change (assuming you don't burn it,) though?
GKeepah: Yes, I'm 100% certain
Armando J Doval: Ok. It WAS a bad analogy. But surely there are things that undergo chemical change if you freeze them, as well?
GKeepah: That's right. And you can't reverse what happened to them either. Unfreezing will cool it down, but the damage is done
Armando J Doval: But defrosting/unfreezing can still be considered the opposite of freezing.
GKeepah: Yes, but it's not the truly a reverse, because you've permanently changed it
GKeepah: It's why cryogenesis is not yet workable
GKeepah: You freeze a dude, and when you unfreeze him, he kinda... cracks and chips, like ice usually does
Armando J Doval: lol
Armando J Doval: Alright, I won't argue that it's a complete reverse.
Armando J Doval: But it's still the opposite action, even though you failed to reverse it totally.
GKeepah: I know. But I was arguing for reversing cooking, which was the word you used
Armando J Doval: Your initial argument was that it couldn't have an opposite, not that it couldn't be reversed, though.
GKeepah: Well, you brought in the paper thing and started using opposite as synonym to reverse
Armando J Doval: Nah, I was trying to use the paper as an example of an action whose opposite doesn't completely reverse its effects (i.e. unfolded paper stays wrinkled.) I was trying to argue that they don't have to be synonymous.
GKeepah: It had the total opposite effect, no pun intended
Armando J Doval: Yeah, I noticed ^^;


And the sad part is, this is one of our lighter, shorter arguments. Now, let's tally things up among people I've asked-

The Sexy Side of Good and Justice

Yamil, Tammy, Raquel, Andrew, Zeraphil, Bruno, and me.
Blessed are those that eat their cereal crunchy, for they shall inherit the Earth.

The PuDS Ingesters

Their ringleader, Lola; Armando (possibly worse, as he also likes melted ice cream. Ugh.), Apox, Melissa... And Pikkon says he likes it 'semi-soggy'- smells like a cop-out to me.


There, just like Stephen Colbert would do, I have called out the offending parties. I'm hurt, as I thought these people could do no wrong (well, ok, I'm 100% certain that Armando, Apox and Pikkon most certainly could, have, and will do), but then they go and drop this bomb on me. I've known Apox for 16 years! How would you feel if your brother stabbed you in the back and killed your family, at least symbolically through PuDS?

This issue is far from settled- which side are YOU on?

PS: Armando, it's YOMIKO Readman. Noriko is from Gunbuster.