NBS BIF #12 Sign Up Thread

I have to respectfully decline this round. My car has officially become undrivable. I'm going to have to figure out in the next week or so if I'm going to sink more money into it to eek out another year or so out of an already old car or walk away from it and put down money on a replacement. Oh, and it's also become painfully obvious that some dental surgery I've been putting off can't be put off much longer (it never rains but it pours).

 

Not gonna lie. That was epic. Epic enough that perhaps a future NBS BIF should be named after it (hopefully one I'll be able to join in on).

 

Don't pour more money down the old hole. Put it towards a new hole.


Remember the old saying: If it has tits (or testicles) or tires, you're gonna have problems with it.

Go for the new-to-you option.

 

Thanks for the tag, I think I'm going to pass this round. September is looking pretty busy for me.

 

Thanks for the tag, with the whole Covid thing and being over 2 hours from beer I would ship I would not be comfortable saying I could send a top notch box I would be proud of. Keep me in mind for the next round hopefully i will be traveling more and will be able to jump in.

 

Thanks for the tag! My job isn't a sure thing at the moment and I'm in the midst of prepping my house to sell - wish I could join, but I'll have to pass this round. Maybe next time. Cheers, fellas - hope you're all doing well!

 

Yes, I'm responding to my own post. So far, a visual of this LIF would look something like this....

In other words, it's a full crash & burn. As such, rules have hereby been amended. Share a funny story by end of day Friday, and I'll assign a number to each person who has done so in the order they were submitted. I'll use a random number generator to pick the winner (so @ovaltine you don't have to worry about anybody outside BA seeing it, including my wife & daughter)...or I might just send beer to everybody who submits a story. If almost nobody has a funny story to share, then A) this group is more boring or shy than I would have expected, B) I'll send beer to @Roguer because between rocket balls and the story he shared a couple days ago, he deserves it, C) I'll start another LIF based on something that doesn't involve stories.

 

None of your friends have done anything really stupid / funny in your presence? You don't have to be the primary character in the story. Broad latitude here. For example, (short version of the story) when I lived in Des Moines, as part of an epic day of drinking that started with an outdoor mini golf tourney in the middle of the winter called the "Blue Balls Open", three of my friends "lost me" even though I was the only one who didn't go anywhere. They left the bar we were in and were so drunk they couldn't remember where they left me. After half an hour of stumbling around downtown looking for me, they finally called my wife to ask where I was (thus freaking her out). When they finally found me, they wondered where I went, and I had to remind them that I was the only one who didn't go anywhere in the first place. (I wasn't there the following year for the encore Blue Balls Open performance, but one of the guys was arrested for attacking a parking booth.....not the operator, the actual physical booth the lot attendant sits in. What brought that about, I have no idea)

Side note, if you are ever in Des Moines and find yourself at the Hessen Haus (great German restaurant / bar), if you buy a boot, you will be popular. I had a blast with complete strangers that night thanks to the boot.

 

Statutes of Limitations bro, Statutes of Limiitations.

 

I am more worried about scaring your daughter about toga parties. That was a brutally fun toga party.

I’m at dinner with Mrs O and Little O. I’ll submit the unabridged story tonight.

You’ve all been warned.

 

If I end up joining in, I could share my story about the time I was worried about the look of my son’s circumcision, figured researching the way it was supposed to look by searching for photos on the internet was a good idea, and, after a little reflection, ended up contacting a relative in the RCMP to see if my future as a youth baseball coach was no longer likely.

 

I went to Indiana University in Bloomington from August 1981 through May of 1985. I got a Marketing degree in that time, made some really great lifelong friends, watched a lotta great basketball (thank you, Coach Knight, who coached the team that beat Michael Jordan in his last college basketball game in the spring of ‘84), a lotta not so great football (hi, Lee Corso!), and generally lived the life of a college student to the hilt - I wrung every ounce of fun out of college life that Bloomington had to offer.

of course, that included a lotta parties lots and LOTS of parties. Though I had not embarked on my beer nerd journey yet, beer was my beverage of choice. There was lots of Old Milwaukee Light, a little Budweiser, some questionable choices (Wiedemann anyone), Blatz - generally, anything we could nab for $4 a case.

But it was a challenge at times. In the spring of 1981, IU won the national championship in basketball, courtesy of Isiah Thomas and the great 1981 team. When IU won that championship, Bloomington erupted - the partying was truly legendary, to the point that the IU admins felt that they had to bring the hammer down.

So, when I showed up as a freshman at IU in the fall of 1981 and moved into Teter Quad, the party scene had changed dramatically. The frats could get away with kegs, but the dorms were on lockdown. You could sneak in cases, but it took troop deployments not seen since Normandy to secure a few cases of beer.

That was fine for our almost all freshman dorm floor in 1981-82. We were happy having parties involving a bunch of cases of cheap beer, quarters (we could all BOUNCE the quarter by the end of that freshman year), euchre, and general shenanigans that involved some girls, but overall we were pretty harmless. We had a blast.

When we came back for our sophomore year, we were ready to step things up a notch. Oh, and I brought a bar. Not just a little bar, a 6’ x 6’ x 4’ bar that my Dad and I preassembled (RIP, Chief!) and moved down to Bloomington that fall of 1982. It was a behemoth of a bar that took up 70% of that little dorm room. It quickly became the gathering spot for the floor and was always in use for cards (again with euchre and also a LOT of Hearts), eating loads of Domino’s pizza, and of course drinking (some epic quarters games took place around that bar).

With a natural draw like the bar, we had to have a party commensurate with its size, so naturally we chose to have a Toga Party and bring in a keg. The dorm rooms at IU were “suites” where two rooms shared a common phone in a box between the rooms that allowed both rooms to utilize the phone, which swiveled back and forth. So the plan was to put the keg in our suitemate’s room and run the tapper through the phone box into our room. Easy peasy.

Not so easy - getting the keg into the dorm. We started with the best time to run it into the dorm. Easy - early afternoon, right after lunch. The IU police department didn’t start to patrol the dorms until late afternoon, so we put the keg in a packing trunk, stationed a dozen guys at the various doors to keep watch, and literally ran the thing in the front door on to the elevator and up to our room on the 1st floor (actually the 2nd floor, with the ground floor ..... on the ground).

It worked perfectly. We had the keg on ice by 2 pm, and waited for 8 pm.

You know, when the girls would arrive. Specifically the girls floor we invited. In their togas.

Giddyup.

So we toga’d up, the girls arrived, also toga’d up, and the party commenced. Oh, how it commenced. There were probably 30 people crammed in our room, and anther 50 dispersed in the hall around our room. And it was HOT - like tropically hot.

NOTE: sweat makes togas ..... slip. There was a lotta slippage going on. You get the picture.

And the “tapper” through the phone box worked magnificently. The beer was flowing, the togas were ..... slipping, and a great time was had by all - including our Resident Assistant, who snuck out of his room to grab a couple of pitchers to share with his girlfriend, who was holed up in his room down the hall.

But when you stick 80 people on a dorm floor getting plastered whilst wearing togas, you may attract some attention. Specifically, law enforcement attention.

That, unfortunately was not par of our very precise calculations in planning this soirée.

So when the IUPD showed up, they quickly found “Ground Zero” (our room). What they didn’t find was the keg. The plan is still intact. Alas, we didn’t figure that they’d logically deduce pretty quickly that with gallons of beer flowing from our room, it was coming from somewhere.

The phone box.

On to our suitemates room they marched, and banged on the door.

“Who’s there?”

“IUPD. Open up.”

So one of our suitemates did. But not the door.

Nope, he did what any intelligent, hammered college student would do with the police banging on his door. He went to the window, opened it, knocked out the screen, and jumped out, falling 10 feet or so.

And landing amongst a half dozen IUPD, standing at ground level, wondering what the hell he was doing.

Fortunately, he didn’t get hurt, other than a sprained ankle. And the cops on our floor got our RA to open the door the door, where they found the keg.

Game over.

So they made us dump the keg in the shower (our RA was BY FAR more upset than anyone - he was Jonesin’ for one last pitcher), a bunch of us were written up, and that was that. No more kegs, no more toga particular (in the dorm).

There are a dozen or so of us that still get together fairly regularly, and we ALWAYS reminisce about the bar, the toga party, and the jumper.

That’s all I got, my beer nerd friends.

 

Premature “Post Reply” on my part. It’s completed now.

You, sir, are correct - I am old. And Euchre rocks.