STATE OF THE UNION
Drink up, the prez just said ‘nukular’
thehill.com
By Abraham Genauer
If President Bush says “nukular” in his State of the Union Address tonight, viewers all over the country will have to take a swig from their beer. If he refers to Hamid Karzai, the Afghan leader, they will have to take two. It’s one drink for each time the camera pans to the First Lady and two more when the focus is on a beribboned warrior in uniform catching a little shut-eye.
In fact — as if he did not have enough to think about — the president should be aware that a nation, or at least the nation’s revelers, will be hanging on his every word. And if there are too many verbal gaffes and/or too many camera clichés, TV viewers will be sluicing down their cocktails at an alarming rate.
Last year they did
The State of the Union drinking game is the brainchild of two friends, Marc Melzer and Howard Deutsch, who cooked it up two years ago while they were undergrads at Princeton. “It was pretty spur of the moment,” says Melzer, now a law student at University of Pennsylvania. “We came up with the idea, developed it over a Sunday and Monday and had a website up by Tuesday.”
The pair sent the link to some friends ,and word quickly made its way around the Internet. Within three hours, the site had over 7,000 hits. “I remember that when Marc put up a hit counter on the page, we were just astounded at the number of hits the site was getting only a few hours after the game was posted,” says Deutsch. By the day after the speech, over 25,000 people had visited the site.
No one knows how many parties were hosted, but judging by the number of drunken e-mails they received, it’s apparent that many viewers played along.
Last year’s game drew even more interest, with links garnered from all over the Web and a story featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” By the day of the speech, the website was getting 13,000 hits per hour.
The general idea for the game was rooted in the long tradition of TV-based drinking games, most famously the one based on “The Bob Newhart Show” where players down a drink every time someone says “Hi, Bob.” In recent years, the Internet has proved fertile ground for those looking to make their entertainment more
interesting. So there is the “A-Team” drinking game (drink every time Mr. T [“BA”] throws someone through a window or furniture); the “Frasier” drinking game (drink every time Niles dusts off his chair); and the “Iron Chef” drinking game (take two drinks if the theme ingredient is still alive).
As for the State of the Union game, the rules for this year include old favorites and some new items relating to current events — e.g. a drink for each reference to Libya, Medicare or the planet Mars.
“We’ve watched the address more carefully the past couple of years than we had in the past, so we’ve picked up on some things that we hadn’t noticed before, [such as] President Bush’s affinity for blue ties,” says Deutsch. This year’s rules require one drink if the president wears a blue tie for what would be the third year in a row. It’s two drinks if the military official in uniform looks asleep and three drinks if the camera zooms in on a former member of the Bush administration.
To play, print out the list, invite some friends over and make sure to have an ample supply of booze. Last year’s game resulted in 160 drinks. The year before, a mere 109.
Check out this year’s game at drinkinggame.us .
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From www.drinkinggame.us
The general rules of this game are no different from any other drinking game. A drink is either a shot or a good gulp from a beer (or cider). Different events call for different numbers of drinks and all you do is watch the speech and play along. If all goes well, you'll be unconscious by the time they show the other party's response.
which can't be all bad... :o)
--fl |
