Tuesday

Sunshine arrived in Greensboro tonight just in time for the annual State of the Union drinking game at Café Europa. Though many different forms of the rules are available online, most of the available games are very involved and hard to remember during actual game play. So we made up our own. There were certain terms (like "no child left behind") and phenomena (like the camera singling out uniformed soldiers in the audience) that called for the group as a whole to drink, but most of the action centered around sets of words we each suggested for ourselves so it would be easy to determine a clear-cut winner by the end of the hour. My set: science, exit, forward, coalition, and nuclear (with any pronunciation), tied for first place ranked by percentage used (four out of five), but came in last based on repetition. Sunshine's list, including many diplomatic and immigration terms (but, luckily, not the word "border") came in first. Notable specially called drinks included Sunshine's spotting of politicos she's met, John McCain's psychedelic wink to stage left, and our toast of the new Madam Speaker. Keep in mind that tonight's contest was so skewed toward the concept of continual game play that we were using "sips of beer" as the definition of "drinking." That said, and tallied with the total number of community drinks, specially called drinks (mention of Sunshine's home state, say, or that one time when it looked like President Bush was taking the community drink with us), the score ranking developed as follows: Cavin 61, Dan 64, Ellie 65, and Sunshine 72. It was my crazy inclusion of a drink every time the president used a five-syllable word that seemed to advance the score the most, with stutters and verbal flubs weighing-in second. [Cavin]