March Madness, Friday Badness, and Sunday Evening Sadness

Well the weekend that was is slowly winding down here Sunday evening, and the last three games of Round 2 are just reaching the halfway point. And I am filled with a tremendous sadness. It's going to be a full year before I get to experience the marathon joy-orgy that is the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament again. Sure there are four more days of basketball next weekend, and two more the weekend after, but there is just no substitute for the experience of the first 96 hours of The Tourney. Unfortunately, I didn't get the the chamber pot or the IV McDonald's drip set up this year, so I was forced to leave the comfort of my basement, 51" HDTV, and dueling laptops featuring March Madness On Demand at least twice during that time.

the set-up

The morning started with the world famous Yosemite Sandwich, first created in our very own kitchen (Yosemite is the name of the street we live on) in response to the treacherous lack of fried meat products, eggs, butter, and garlic we had recently experienced at that time. It was a veritable Atkins Famine around our house, actually. The first version featured bacon, fried prosciutto, onion rings, sauted mushrooms and onions, fried egg, and melted american cheese ("mmmm...64 slices of american cheese...mmmm...63 slices of american cheese") interred between two slices of garlic buttered Texas Toast. First Friday's version was slightly more amiable, starring chorizo, onion and pepper, and egg, topped with machego cheese, and delicately draped across slices of garlic clove flushed french bread. It was atherosclor-iscious.

chef hops cooking

ummm, hello?...can you say yum?

13,450 calories = priceless

As I mentioned before, the main goal of the day is to attain a state of Buddist-like oneness with one's uninhibited self. And what better way to achieve that than by drinking a beer every 30ish minutes for as long as possible? I'll tell you how -- with a special Sam Adams sherry-like brew concotion called Utopia -- 25% alcohol by volume.

evil, thy name is Utopia

It was delicious. Nutritous too. So, if you haven't been keeping track, the recipe for Disaster (Food & Wine magazine, April issue, 2006) is 24 12oz beers, several shots of Utopia, a million calorie sandwich, 16 hours of sitting on a couch, a White Castle Crave case, and a dash of bowling for good measure. All in all, I deemed it all a roaring success, and I have done a LOT of deeming in my day.

So anyway, we kept stats for the day, and here are the final numbers:
Number of Guiness consumed by me on Friday in honor of the kismetic coincidence of St. Pat's and Case Day occuring together: 24
Hours it took me to complete said idiocy: 13
Placement of finish: 1 (not that there's anything wrong with that)
Other finishers of the Case Race: 2
Other attemptors of the Case Race: Countless millions, but maybe 5 serious ones that were in our basement
Number of times that Big Bucking Chicken commercial is funny: All of them
Number of innane Billy Packer comments: Infinity plus two
Size of my hangover headache on an arbitrary headache scale that I've just created called The Headache Scale where 1 is normal and 10 is Dick Cheney please shoot me in the gut with a shotgun so I can feel something yes anything but this right now: 1, bitches -- that's right, I didn't even learn my lesson the hard way

But the moment of the day had to be Chicks trying to tell a joke that he's told a million times. Quite unsucessfully, I might add. He had a bit to drink. First of all, here's the joke as it's supposed to be told, although usually by Chicks and not by me:

I'm working on embedding this shizz, so click here in the meantime per favore.

But what happens when you try to tell this joke after 20-odd beers? This, my friends, is your brain on beer:

Chicks, ladies and gentlemen.

I can't wait for next year.