How not to drink vodka

My stepmother Elaine, who is from Texas, told me once about how, when she was a college student in the DFW area, she and two friends were off at a hotel once. They had a room and were talking about classes and drinking shots of vodka and getting quietly blasted.

This had been going on for a while when one of the guys said "Hey, let's drink vodka like the Russians do." How's that? the other two wanted to know. "We float cracked black pepper on the surface of the vodka shot." Well, that seemed like a good idea, so they start sprinkling pepper liberally on the surface of the vodka shot and knocking it down and, yes, it was really quite tasty.

Elaine woke up the next morning with a really rare hangover. As some of us know, the hangover you get from, say, a dozen shots of vodka is really quite spectacular by itself, but the... unpleasantness of the vodka hangover is actually secondary compared to the nuclear glow of Cerenkov radiation coming from the scant quarter cup of black pepper sitting in a pool of acid in one's stomach. And as Elaine lay there with her stomach glowing with pain, wishing she could just die and get it over with, she swore a mighty oath that if she ever saw this yahoo again, she would kill him on the spot for suggesting this idea in the first place.

When Elaine told me this story perhaps 35 years after the occurrence, a thought occurred to me and I asked if she had, in fact, ever seen this guy since. "No," she replied, "and that's a damn good thing, because an oath like that doesn't grow dim over time."

How not to drink vodka

The Omega Code drinking game

I caught up with my old friend Delta's blog today for the first time in weeks. She posted a drinking game for the movie, The Omega Code, which she was somehow talked into seeing again (Again? Delta, sweetie, I knew it was shit as soon as I heard about it... but you must like experiencing truly awful movies just for the value of wallowing in the horror of them.)

For those of you who have forgotten or who have successfully suppressed the memory, this movie from 1999 is one of the worst made in a decade, rivalling Battlefield Earth for sheer suckiness. It's the first movie made from Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series of novels written for the hard-of-thinking and terminally gullible, so it's an excellent model of "garbage in, garbage out."

Anyway, here's the Omega Code Drinking Game:

1) Drink until the movie is good.

2) Go to a hospital, because you're about to die of alcohol poisoning.

BTW, when I was getting the link for the movie from IMDB, I wanted to pass on the following great comment from one of the many people who spent a few moments to describe how awful the movie was:

Do not see this movie. If you are ever forced to at gunpoint, take your chances, if you live the bullet, will be far less painful than watching this piece of garbage. If you die, you can die never having seen the Omega Code, a feat I only wish I will be able to claim on my death bed.

The Omega Code drinking game