Sadcox over at Hear It From Us recently posted on old Rugby T-Shirt ideas. This post sparked off some memories of rugby and the culture that surrounded it. For those of us who have played rugby in college (or previously) and then in the Men’s/Women’s leagues afterwards, rugby is often a dominant part of your day-to-day life. In fact, personally, rugby was a defining characteristic of mine while I was playing along with student, asshole, and guy-who-was-trying-to-figure-out-what-to-do-with-his-life. Now my defining characteristics are husband, father, provider, asshole, and guy-who-is-trying-to-figure-out-what-to-do-with-his-life.

Short of a post describing the intricate details of how to play rugby, let’s start with how you score (this will be important in a minute so bear with me). In rugby there are basically two ways to score, 1) Score a try. Scoring a try is analogous to scoring a touchdown in American Football, the biggest difference is in Rugby, the player actually has to place the ball on the ground while the ball is in control, this is worth 5 points. The second way to score, kick the ball between the goal-posts, much like a field goal in American Football, this is worth 3 points unless it is a conversion kick after a try and then it is worth 2 points.

Why is this important you ask? Well in rugby, it is a tradition that you perform a “zulu” after you score your first try. What’s a zulu? Do you mean this?

Well, not exactly. A zulu or “zulu warrior” is a little dance or act that you must perform at the post game drink-up (another rugby tradition), while naked. Typically, the team will starting chanting “zulu” or “hey, zulu warrior” while you disrobe and then run around like a maniac while they toss beer on you. Fun tradition right? I’ve seen countless variations on the zulu over the years, from a guy immediately taking off his clothes on the pitch (field) after the score to guys running naked in inner city Philly to order a big mac and fries from a very surprised, and pissed-off, McDonald’s employee (the best quote from this was “the sign doesn’t say anything about wearing pants”).

My personal zulu came after I scored a try in my rookie season against a small liberal arts college in Eastern Pennsylvania. I’m not naming the college to spare them embarrassment, they are a college full of pussies who were too scared to even party with us after the match (the only time I can remember this happening in rugby). At any rate, I was playing in the second side match and was able to block a kick with my right hand, catch the ball when it came down, and score the try. The only problem was when I dove to place the ball on the ground, I dove directly into the knee of an opposing player. The knee was in my eye, and the fucker blew up like Rocky. At any rate, because of the lack of a party after the match, I was spared my zulu until later that month. The only problem here was my zulu occurred at the next big rugby event, our date party.

I was hoping the guys forgot that I owed a zulu, but alas, they did not. The good news, there were a good 7 or 8 other savages already naked at the party (another common tradition, at least with the guys at my university) running around. My zulu was highlighted by my date following me around, slapping me on the ass, and yelling “woooo-whooo!!!”. Ahhh, memories.

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It’s Friday….  Photo caption contest, winner will receive a big stinking fat pile of nuthin.  My entry is in the comments, please add yours.

Have fun!

 

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I have started a new feature on my site, “Stories from the road”.  There have been several stupid, funny, sad, ridiculous, or just plain fucktarded things that have happened to, by, or near me while travelling around the US or internationally.  I just have to share, mostly because I want to, so shut and read.  First up:  Basel Switzerland, and the night I almost met my wife.

It was the year 2000, Halloween, I had just flown into Zurich Switzerland and taken the train over to Basel for a business trip.  At this point in my life I was an Oracle DBA and was working on a new system implementation contract in Basel for my company.  This was my first trip across the pond in quite some time and I had forgotten how terrible the jet-lag was (i.e., I was a gaping pussy and was tired).  I had two friends and colleagues working on the project and were already on-site, let’s call them R and T.  R and T met me at the train station and escorted me to the corporate apartments we were staying in.  Now these apartments were, what’s the word?  Oh yeah, fucking shitty.  In fact, we referred to them lovingly as the crack-house.  It was a five floor tenement with paper thin walls and the tiniest elevator in existence.  If you farted on the fifth floor, they could hear it on the first.  The elevator could fit 2 maybe 3 people tops, and most guys had to cram themselves in the corner so they wouldn’t touch anybody else who happened to be in the elevator.  At any rate, I arrived and my hole in the crack-house wasn’t going to be ready until the next day so I would have to stay in one of the currently occupied apartments for the night as one of the guys on the team was back in the states for a couple of weeks.

So all I wanted to do was sleep, again, the pussy thing.  And all my friends wanted to do was go out and rip it up.  My arm was appropriately bent, peer pressure is a bitch, and we went out.  I was nursing a couple of beers and feeling sorry for my tired-self when I had a moment of clarity around the fourth or fifth beer.  The more beer I drank, the better I felt.  Looking back, it was surprisingly (and scarily) close to the moment in Old School where Frank the Tank (Will Farrell) did his first beer bong at the party :

Once it hits your lips, its so good!!

Now it was on.  Five beers turned into 15 or 16 and then it was time for the shots.  Remember this was Halloween, and the weirdest thing was that it was more popular in Switzerland than in the states for adults.  All of the bars were decorated to the nines and a lot of people were dressed up in costumes.  I was dressed-up as a drunken American asshole, I almost won some costume contests.  The most memorable shot was the “devils blood”, I haven’t the foggiest fucking idea what it was except it was red, strong, on fire, burning hot, and you had to suck it through a straw that was poked through the flames.

So after destroying my liver and most of my brain-cells, we began to stumble back to the crack-house around 2 or 3 AM.  The crack-house was located in the Muslim slums of Basel known as the Gundeli (pronounced Goon-doo-lee) and the road to it was a cavernous cut through buildings that echoed for blocks.  I come to find out later, from other accounts, that we were heard for blocks carrying on and yelling walking down the middle of the road in our wonderful drunken bliss.  On the way into the building, T started to hit all of the apartment call buttons and yelling into the intercoms.  A super nice woman we’ll call S was working on the project as well and trying to sleep at this point in the crack-house. 

We finally stumble up to the fourth floor where I am trying to figure out how the weirdest key in existence worked when T asked me: “Hey, have you met S yet?  “Nope”, I replied.  R replied, “OK!” and turned to S’s room, which was directly across the hall from the room I was trying to get into, slammed on the door loudly, and yelled “HEY S, WAKE UP AND MEET BILLYMAC!”  And then R and T sprinted to the tiny elevator.  I was stunned, I didn’t know what the fuck to do, I still couldn’t figure out how to get into the room and I could hear what I could only imagine a very pissed off S coming toward the door.  So I ran.  I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, so fast in fact, that I beat the elevator down.  At this point, it is worth noting that in the year 2000, I was only around 1 or 2 years away from retiring from playing rugby, and I’m a pretty big guy.  When the elevator opened, I pounced like a coiled lion.  I dove into the elevator with my arms spread in front of me and gripped the outside shoulders of both T and R, and then slammed the both of them into the back of the little elevator.  I was trying to put them through the back of it, let’s face it I was pretty pissed, and very drunk (and the look of pure terror on their faces was priceless).  Well it turns out that this was too much for our tiny little elevator to take, and it made the most incredible screeching metal on metal sound and lurched completely off it’s track, waking up the entire building.  Thinking fast, we got the fuck out of there muttering “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” and booked out the front door.  My annoyance not completely sated, I slapped T on the back and said “thanks a fucking lot”.  This was too much for good ‘ole T to take as well, he went flying off of the front stoop of the crack-house and into the bushes severely twisting his ankle.

The aftermath.  The elevator was destroyed, it didn’t work for weeks, which pretty much fried everyone’s ass that lived in the crack-house.  We never got pinned with the crime, but karmic retribution was the saviour of the day as T and his sprained ankle had to hobble up 5 floors to his room every day.  I finally met the infamous S the next day at work while nursing a 5 alarm hang-over.  Her first words to me “So you’re the asshole who was pounding on my door last night”  (ok, so she may have not said asshole, please allow a bit of poetic license).  All’s well that end’s well though, 4 or 5 months later we were dating, moved in together in late 2001, got engaged in 2002, and then married in 2003.  Who’d have thunk it the night I almost met her.

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If you haven’t seen Superbad yet, get to the store today because it was just released on DVD, don’t stop on go or for any children or old people (and you’re an incredible loser).  But, don’t just take my word for it (even though it is impeccable), check out the link below.  My favorite quote from the clip:

Yeah, while you guys are at Dartmouth, I’ll be over at State where the girls are half as smart and thus twice as likely to felate me.

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Hungry Mother  posted today about “5 things I would pick that no one in the US could do”.  It wasn’t a meme, however I’m fairly unoriginal so I’m posting about it anyway.  One quick note on HM’s post, he had as number 4, no wife can deviate from the dicta of Ephesians 5.  This is the passage that he was referring to.

 22Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

That fucking rules!  I’m throwing mad props at the bible for this one… oh, yeah, let’s be clear on one thing, there is no fucking way this would fly in my house.

I’m changing it slightly to: 5 things I would pick that no one (anywhere) can do around me.

1. Whine about shit, nothing pisses me off more than a whiner, if you don’t like something, do something about it or let it off your chest, just don’t fucking whine about it loser.
2. Drive slow in the fast lane, or drive fast in the slow lane, hell, just don’t drive anywhere near me at any speed because whatever you do on the road is probably going to piss me off.
3. Preach to me.  Nothing gets the old blood-pressure up more than an uppity preaching prick or bitch.  Don’t you understand that I don’t give a hot shit about your god or whatever-the-fuck you are preaching to me?
4. Talk shit.  Walk the walk, don’t talk big about something and then not follow-through.  This is scalable to everything in life, down to kicking somebody’s ass all the way up to important stuff like raising your kids and choosing what brand of beer to drink.
5. Be too sensitive.  Don’t you hate it when somebody starts crying after you yell at them or chastise them?  Fucking shit makes me almost feel bad about it afterwards.

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Not to be confused with Snakes on a Plane(”I’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”), but in general, there is a very weird “something’s off” thing going on while viewing movies on a plane.  While I was returning from a business trip in California yesterday, the movie Arctic Tale was playing and it made me think of a story my sister told me.  When she was travelling quite a bit for work she viewed a hilarious movie on a plane, it was so funny that she told everybody she knew how good it was, including her family members.   Guess what the movie was?

That’s right, Big Mamma’s House.  After much feedback from her friends and family, my sister realized that this movie was not the genius piece of work she originally took it for.  This was the first tangible observation of what I refer to as the Plane Movie Space-Time Continuum.  This theory posits that any piece of drivel that is shown on a plane, to its very captive audience, will automatically be perceived more positively by an order of magnitude.  In other words, really shitty movies are tolerable or even good when you watch it on a plane.  In my own experience Miss Congeniality, Arctic Tale, The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Wedding Date, Dance With Me, and many other pieces of shit were actually enjoyed by myself on planes (full disclosure, I may have been wasted for some trans-Atlantic flights but whatever).

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