I pimped the Perry Bible Fellowship once before but they’ve since updated quite a few times and I have a much larger readership now. You must read it, it updates every Sunday. It is the best comic strip out right now, period. Also, one of the DC Conspiracy’s own, Matt Dembicki, represented at SPACE this past weekend and put some photo’s up on his site. Besides being the man behind Wasp comics, he’s a member of the United Fanzine Organization and was sitting in at their table. Matt does some awesome stuff and if you’re ever in the DC area during one of our get-togethers you should come by and meet him and the rest of the crew. Our next one is scheduled for May 1st at Dr. Dremos. Pictures from our last get together can be viewed here.

Two things before the story. There will be an update this Saturday, this is a six story week. I can’t do my 423 story on April 22nd, it just wouldn’t make sense. However, I am preparing a pictorial retrospective for April 22nd since I get a fair amount of emails from people asking for pictures. If you don’t want your picture up due to embarrassing stories about you, please let me know now via email. Also, you might want to check out a disturbing but funny conversation going on since Thursday in my comments section about Rocco Siffredi porn. Apparently one of my reader’s friend’s sister has gotten ravished by the man himself and, well, I’ve seen her.

What to do on a Saturday night? Amidst the drinking, doping, sexing and pranking we occasionally had moments were we had sober, nondestructive fun. One of those moments was sophomore year when we underwent our “First Annual Straw Challenge”.

It started simple enough, a bunch of us were studying in the lobby for finals and we decided to take a break, go downstairs to Late Night Café and get us some food and some of that syrupy goodness known as fountain soda. All-in-all, a typical study night.

When we get back to our floor, we continue studying. Getting restless, I combine two straws into a super-straw and struggle to drink my soda. And then I get challenged. “Bet you can’t do three,” Max tells me as he looks up from his textbook.

“Whatever, give me a straw.” I can’t do three, Max wins. “It would be easier if I duck taped them together.”

“You still can’t do it.” So I duck tape them together and suck up my soda with ease. “Let me try,” he asks me. He gets it the soda up easily. “How far do you think we could go?”

Fast-forward about three hours and you have this:

You see, that’s just the top of a straw that was over a story tall. Max and I's little game attracted a lot of attention, soon everyone on the floor was playing. The rule, suck up some soda through the straw in one breath. (EDIT: The more I think about this, the more I start to believe that we changed the rule to "can't take your mouth off of the straw" as it got longer, so you can tongue block. I think we also put a time limit on it.) The soda has to reach your mouth and you have to spit it out to prove it made it. If you don’t get any soda, you’re eliminated from the tournament. Every round we added a new straw and duck taped it up.

As you can see by the picture, I’m still alive at this point. That’s Eric behind me. If I remember correctly, Eric, Keyo, Corey and I were the final four and Corey ended up winning.

Now, the tournament went very late and we were yelling in the stairwell extremely loud. Eventually two of the RAs on-call showed up to break us up. They wanted to know what we were doing and I told them. They asked, “What are you drinking?” and I said, “Root beer.”

“Just root beer?”

“Yup, just root beer.”

They tested it, it was just root beer. Now, the funny part was seeing these two RAs trying not to laugh because at this moment, we were getting written up for the dorkiest thing imaginable. Not knowing how to handle this, they get our RA, who comes into the stairwell. His eyes bug out as we tell him what happened and he points to the straw and asks, “You actually drank from that?”

Now the two RAs on call are cracking up, they gave up trying to hold it in. Our RA grabs the straw and tries it out but can’t even get the soda half way up. Corey shows him how it’s done and he’s awestruck.

We all get written up on a noise violation and apparently we were the laughing stock of the next RA meeting. The following year I was RA of the floor and since we had some repeat residents, we actually made the straw tournament an official floor event, the “Second Annual Straw Challenge.” It wasn’t as fun, it lost its spontaneity.

it is physically possible, fanboy: Elementary Fluid Dynamics