Happy Birthday to Rob! Let's all have a drink -- TOGETHER.

Here's to the tiny dictator, our fearless leader, the Artist Formerly Known as Squirrel, Meat, Rob Lasso, DJ Robbie Robb, Popcorn, Batogato, the Lord of Leesburg, and whatever else the people are calling him these days. Rob will forever be born one day too early, but nonetheless, Happy Birthday, buddy.

Let's have a drink to celebrate Area 51 of his life.  Well, after reading this article published last week in The Atlantic, you might either reconsider that drink or double down.

This is one of the finer periodical pieces I've come across in some time. It tickles the fancy of an elbow-bender like me not merely because of its 90-proof content but because of exhaustive research, sheer readability, and smoothly dropped gems like "By the late 1990s, the volume of alcohol consumed annually had declined by a fifth." Heh heh. I get it.

Not only do I encourage you to read it, but I am inspired to read the brand new book from which quite a bit of data is drawn: Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland. And by that I mean I am inspired to tell Dave to read it and give me a SoD review, stat.

Drunk. A title not to be confused with the song "Wasted" by Black Flag (which you read about here). (Also covered amusingly by Camper van Beethoven.) But the title says it all, doesn't it?

A few tidbits from the article: 

• "The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly."
• Prohibition actually worked as intended.
• "About 10 million years ago, a genetic mutation left our ancestors with a souped-up enzyme that increased alcohol metabolism 40-fold."
• Göbekli Tepe was the first recorded pub -- 10,000 B.C.
• Alcohol is actually proven to do a lot of good for humans* -- both in stress relief as well as enhancing creativity and sociability.
• Those come with asterisks of not only *in moderation but also *in social situations.
• Drinking alone, despite what George Thorogood, is a really bad idea.
• "The health toll of social disconnection is estimated to be equivalent to the toll of smoking 15 cigarettes a day."
• Also, the advent of liquor took the world from pleasantly drunk on wine and beer to super hammered and not pleasant.
• There's a timeline of drunk in America, and it's trended upward a LOT of late.

And most relevantly to my life:

• The Ballmer Peak! It's "the notion, named after the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that alcohol can affect programming ability. Drink a certain amount, and it gets better. Drink too much, and it goes to hell."

At least one of you knows precisely where I'm going with this. 

Every time I play darts, especially with Dave, I start off as a middle-of-the-pack talent. Because we always drink when we play darts, I inevitably throw a few back, after which I will become preternaturally good at the game. Bullseyes grow wide. Streaks are a-plenty. Wins come easily. It's uncanny. And regular as a bran-fed bulldog.

And then... bullseyes snap shut. Darts are heaved as if the game were being played by a first-timer. Walls are damaged. It's even more uncanny. And just as routine.

This cycle has rung true for other folks but bizarrely, hyperbolically true for me. The Lester Peak is real. Know your teammate, people. (And also know the Zman Curve.)

Anyway, read the article. And have a drink with me soon. To Rob!

Ripped from the Headlines II

[To be read in the voice of either Sir David Attenborough or John Houseman.]

Long ago, in early September of 1988, the man you now know as "Rob" or "rob" was but a wee lad of 18 years. He'd traveled many miles to matriculate at the second-oldest college in these American States, and the dormitory placement system in use at the time had him bunking with not one but two mates of the room.  For our purposes here, we shall refer to them as "Weisy-D" and "P-Dog" to protect the nearly innocent.

Room 300: elsewhere a lounge, but in this residence hall commemorated to the honor of the 5th President of these American States and an alumnus of the College, it was a bedroom "suite." To you and to me, that elegant denomination belied its true differentiation from the other 25 occupied bunkrooms and boudoirs on the hall. A glorified dormitory den stuffed with overripe flesh like grape leaves in the sun by any other name would still be as un-sweet.  A slightly larger room with no closet and no sink or mirror... tag it with "suite," and its occupants shall be none the wiser.  Ah, but were they?

Speaking of which, this "suite" was, in fact, immediately and universally prefixed that autumn with "sweet" to create a trite but divertingly homonymous appellation -- one applied in a slapdash manner to mild amusement then, but one which would stand the test of reminiscent folklore time and stick for all time. Funny thing, foreshadowing.

"The Sweet Suite Blues," a gritty ballad lamenting the state of affairs on Monroe 3rd West. Certainly you recall its elevation up the local charts in the spring of '88. The band's name escapes me, something arbitrary and asinine for sure.

So there was Rob. There he was. There he was. There he was.  In... the Sweet Suite.

He, today heralded as the tiny dictator who reigns supreme in postcount and moral compass over this blogatory organization. Well, he had a fair bit less... organization... back in this day-du-hey.  "Tiny dictator," mind you. Not "tidy dictator."

Diminutive as he was and is, his slop didn't encroach too terribly on his collegial suitemates' invisible lines of demarcation.  He just had, as the kids back then were wont to say crassly, "a little pile of his crap in the corner."

And it was either one of the aforementioned mates or the other, either Weisy-D or P-dog, this old scribe cannot recall which.  But whoever it was, it was he who labeled this mess with a simile of sorts.

And in labeling that mess, he unknowingly labeled the man behind the mess with a silly sobriquet, and in doing so, he also unknowingly -- for how could he possibly have the perfect foresight to see thirty-one-and-a-half years later, far off in time in the year of our Lord 2020 -- but yes, he labeled the man behind the mess with a moniker that would attach itself to Rob forever. Like a tattoo.  But more permanent, perhaps.

"It's like his little squirrel's nest over there."

And that pithy little quip, and the synonymous wildfire that spread from it, dear friends, is how our friend Rob and our blogmate rob came to be known across the land as "Squirrel."

The tale of our Squirrel, if you will, goes on from there. But this, this here, is his origin story.

It makes one wonder what curious episodes of distant yesteryear led to other such nicknamings. Case in point. We may well never know Mr. Grimstead's backstory, but I'm confidently sure of one thing. It has simply got to be a better story than this one was.

Rest in peace, other "Squirrel."

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