That first topic is quite a bit to cover. You saw the picture from January of the Reindeer Romp Revival, so that's no big secret. But what's this really about? And what is my-sizing, really? Where did the "SLLABGOD" written across the back of Wyche come from, and what does it mean? I'm having trouble remembering everything, but let's just go through what I've got already.

The fire is from an experience of revived pyromania right at the beginning of second semester last year. I can't remember who came up with the idea, but Wahnefried, Kevin, Krishn, and I walked off campus on Sunday night with Krishn and Kevin's WRRD notes in tow. Wahnefried and I still had another semester to get through, but those two bailed early, and they wanted to burn their notes. Well, at the end of the street that forms the west border of S&M, there's a small park with one of those little outdoor public grills. We loaded it up with notes, soaked them with lighter fluid, and, after quite a few tries with a beaten-up lighter that Kevin had found, set them ablaze. We stuffed more and more notes in there, burning them as thoroughly as possible, dirtying our fingers and shirts, and sending up quite the billowing cloud of smoke. Krishn, Nick, and I had never done anything like this, and Krishn's Indian, so of course he was very concerned about getting caught. In any case, at the end of it all, Wahnefried and I scooped the ashes and partially-burned pieces of paper into a metal barrel that served as a trash can for the park. We'd been careful to stomp out the glowing bits and so forth, but soon enough the fire started itself back up in the barrel. The thing got quite big, but there wasn't much we could do about it, and besides, it was in a big metal barrel. So we grabbed our stuff and ran back to campus. We elected Krishn to be the one who had to walk by the SLI office to get inside and let the rest of us in the side door, since he smelled the least smokey and had the darkest skin, so the ashes smudged on his face didn't show up. As we walked on hall, Ryan Spielvogel passed by us and made quite a surprised noise. We smelled very strongly of smoke. In any case, after some jittery disposal of evidence and a load of laundry, everyone felt safe. Kevin laughed at us: "quit worrying! You're like a bunch of little kindergarten girls!" Krishn, Wahnefried, and I got the chance to feel like baaaaad boys. Breakin' the law! All in all, a good little venture.

Now, my-sizing. Nick (who is now studying architecture at WashU) made a rocking chair for Mini-Term last year. Last year being senior year, that is. Because I don't live at Science and Math anymore. Supposedly. Anyhow, in order to bring this great woodworking masterpiece into being, Nick had to get the hang of the school's wood lathe. So as a practice project, he decided to make a baseball bat. Now, Wahnefried's a big guy; over and over the issue is coming up that soon soon soon I'll get myself a lot more space online, so I can show more pictures to illustrate what I'm saying. For now, though, believe me that the guy's gigantic. 6-foot-6 or something stupid like that. He made his baseball bat out of a solid pine four-by-four, and the thing ended up being less a bat than a huge fuckin' club. You know how kids' toys are sometimes called my-size this or my-size that? Prepare for cleverness, me oh my: since Nick's so big, we called the bat the "my-size bat." HA! The name wasn't the fun part, though, smashing stuff was. And smash we did. It started with Nick and I standing on the sidewalk outside the west end of Hill, tossing oranges that we'd stolen from outside the SLI office to each other, one guy with this huge bat, swinging and shattering. My God, the pulp! The flying pulp! We did it nearly every night, adding apples and bananas to our repertoire... each fruit has its own special personality when impacted with a heavy hunk of wood at a hundred miles per hour or so... oranges explode, apples dissolve, bananas actually peel themselves, I kid you not. In the middle of the evening, sitting at our respective computers, one of us would look at the other with a mad gleam in his eye... "wanna go my-size?" We'd grab the bat and the fruit and head outside. We took turns washing the bat.

Of course, when engaging in such blissfully destructive activities in a public setting, you can't help but gain an audience. Soon Mort joined us, then Phil, Tommy, and I can't even remember who all else... suffice to say, though, that within a couple weeks we had a crew of at least seven or so regulars, and my-sizing was by no means any longer limited to fruit. We moved out behind Hunt and smashed foodstuffs, spoiled or fresh, textbooks, bottles, cans, computer equipment, shaving cream, shampoo, plastic figurines... pretty much anything. The technique was always the same, though: underhand toss followed by a quick duck on the pitcher's part, a straining swing, and sudden cathartic destruction. As you may have read, Casey and I incurred a bit of damage after a while, but despite the shattering of all manner of dangerous materials, people generally didn't get hurt. To protect those still living under Boarman's tyrranical rule, I can't name names, but a certain faculty member got involved as well. An unnamed junior broke the bat while beating a can of shaving cream, but luckily it split down the middle and became the my-slice: its cross-section now a semicircle, it provided three horrific surfaces with which to decimate our targets. Another unnamed junior now has the my-slice in his possession and is carrying on the tradition. Nick even wrote a script for a my-size parody of Fight Club. Oh, sweet memories...

As for the big "SLLABGOD" on the back of Wyche, I put it there. Wahnefried and I (notice how much he's coming up... such a great roommate, the damn bastard. Had to go to architecture school! Had to march off and become rich and successful!) were up late talking and Pylosing when the conversation wandered to the topic of both of us, basically, being goody-goodies. We both loved how the world feels at night, we discovered, but neither of us had had many chances to experience it. We decided, therefore, that before the year was out, we'd sneak out of Hill in the middle of the night and wander around. No need to leave campus, we wanted nothing more than to be outside. So, after a couple months of delaying, the end of the year loomed close, and we made our move. We skulked out the front door of the building (such audacity!) and kept in the shadows, eventually circumnavigating the campus twice. We climbed up onto the roof over the Bryan entrance, I climbed a couple trees and onto the little bridge that connects the walkway above the amphitheatre to Bryan lobby, and in fact subsequently strutted straight through said lobby, in one unlocked door and out another at five in the morning. Again, such audacity! No goody-two-shoes, he! We slipped through and jumped over the fence around the practice field and tread dangerously near the outer limits of campus, to end up at the Wyche renovation/construction site. Hop a railing and a low windowledge, and we were inside. We wandered around for a bit... Nick noticed that the halls are very narrow; he felt sorry for any future students living in that building. We wandered up another floor, and while exploring, we encountered a can of gold spraypaint. After a fair bit of debate, it was decided: I walked out to the open porch on the back of the building and sprayed "SLLABGOD" ("dogballs" backwards... that one's a long story too) as large as I could across the wall. Then we booked.

The final chapter of our adventure came when we tried to watch the sunrise from the top of the outside stairs at the north end of Watts. There are doors into the building itself on the second and third landings, and I'd been trying every door we passed all night, to see if there was anywhere interesting we could sneak into. I tried the handle on the second floor, and to my amazement, it turned... this door was usually locked, even during the day, much less at 5:30 in the morning. I'd neglected to check the window first, though, and when I did I was confronted with Lurch, the big scary-looking security guard, reacting to a rather noisily rattling door handle. I spun and shouted to Nick, "Run run run!" Wahnefried hopped a few steps and then vaulted over the railing... I followed his drop down a floor and we raced down the length of Watts and Reynolds, crossed Bryan lawn, and hid down in a recessed corner next to Barber's office. We'd gotten pretty sweaty running that distance, and the morning was heating up, so we took off our windbreakers and just relaxed there until the security guard threat seemed to have passed. When we left, we for some reason decided not to take the windbreakers with us, and when we returned a couple days later to retrieve them, they'd been picked up and probably given to Lost & Found, never to be seen again. A good night, though.

We repeated the adventure, with the exception of security guard interaction and the addition of some flagpole swinging (ooh, something else I wasn't supposed to be doing... explanation forthcoming), about a week later. Toward the end of the year I'd started talking to Kati again (if that's the right word... started talking to Kati at all, really), and she was really interested in Nick's and my nocturnal sojourn, so I invited her to come with us this time. We met out by the Ass Hall at 4 am the morning before the WRRD final exam; Wahnefried had finished his essay and had been napping for about an hour when the scheduled time arrived for me to take a break from my own essay. We skulked around, I climbed stuff again, we snuck onto every bus in the parking lot and left all the doors open, and we ended up out on Watts lawn with plenty of time to spare before sunrise. We threw rocks at Annafrancesca's window; she too was up late working on the WRRD essay. She was a little unresponsive to our attempts to get her to join us outside, but we had a good time anyhow.

Then there's also flagpole swinging. This started a fair bit earlier; I was introduced to it by my friends in Hunt (also the originators of SLLABGOD and Gnomon-walking, another topic to be covered). To put it simply, all you do is find an abandoned flagpole at night, untie the line, pull it out as far as you can, reach up high, and run around the pole in a circle with the rope held tight. Once you're going fast enough, jump outward, and you sail up in the air. Not much to it, but good, illegal fun. We did this quite often.

Gnomon-walking is another simple pleasure that my friends and I indulged in quite a bit. If you've seen Typical, in fact, there's a bit of it in there. The Gnomon is a big concrete sundial, about forty feet tall, with three wings on it that stands near the bio-pond on NCSSM's campus, west of Hill. Each wing is a big flat triangular slab, and the outer two are at tilted downward from vertical by a slight angle. Gnomon-walking starts with a run at about a 45-degree angle to the surface of one of these outer wings (having the surface on the right is preferable for most people) directly toward the wing, a jump up onto the surface, and a continuation of the run as far up the structure as you can manage. Chris Hardwick, as far as I know, not only claims the S&M saxophone and Rubik's cube crowns, but also the best man at Gnomon- and wall-walking - he put a hole in the wall up on 3E walking on it.

I also mentioned Ultimate Racquetball quite a while back. We only got to play a few games; the first official tournament was broken up pretty quickly by the Man, and the next game after that ended in prosecutions by the same. Consequently, Abhineet, Phil, Casey, myself, and a few other guys ended up having to get up early on graduation morning and help set up. I have a feeling I've posted this fact before, but I can't find it in the archives, so there it is. Seeing as how the SLIs for some reason didn't like us playing in the basement breezeway (despite the fact that we weren't breaking any actual rules), we'd been trying for a long time to adapt the rules for play on an actual racquetball court. For the end-of-year yearbook-signing lock-in, we decided to go ahead and give it a try. Now, recall that a traditional, corridor-based game of UR is played with about seven people, two of whom have racquets. Well, on a racquetball court, things just get stupid: four people with racquets, all firing a single ball as hard as they can into a group of about twenty people. It was utter chaos and just about the best time I think anyone in that room had likely ever had. Nobody got particularly injured until Phil fired a shot straight into my left eye (I think it was the left) that nearly knocked me to the floor. I rushed out of there, got some ice for it, and was back in the game pretty quickly. By the time I got back, though, it had more or less dissolved. We decided, then, to try out Ultimate Soccer, the rules of which had not yet been developed (and still stand, in fact, in the development stage). After a little while at that, I got a direct kick from a player on the soccer team, sending the ball straight into my right eye. I'm fairly used to getting hit with soccer balls, so it wasn't too much of a problem; I went back out, iced my other eye this time, and everything was fine. The only thing I was particularly worried about was having a bruise for graduation that my parents would notice, but even with a racquetball right into my eye socket, I was unscathed for Saturday morning.

I guess that's everything for this post. Sorry to simultaneously indulge in more-or-less worthless storytelling and to do it with such obviously lacking flair. I haven't been having a great time lately (more on this, and why it's a surprise, in the next post) but please take my word that second semester last year, when all of this stuff I've just related happened, was the greatest five months of my life. I feel very strongly about the sort of stupid crap (a.k.a. Bad Ideas�) that my friends and I pulled last year.

Yeah, so thanks for indulging me. More stuff about what I'm doing and what I've been intending to tell you all along (that is, the list I set out for myself at the top of this post), plus specs on CVII (it's here! It's working! It's getting a starter hard drive Saturday!) in the next post, complete with pictures. I've been taking oh so many pictures.