Debate Drinking Game, New Yorker, Burlington Vermont

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I am currently at the tail end of the Debate Drinking Game, wherein you take a drink every time McCain says “my friends” and Obama starts a response with “Look,”.   Since both candidates had their verbal tics under control, I just took a drink every time someone said a pronoun.  I am not in a good state.  Fortunately Google’s sobriety test has not yet extended to the WordPress default implementation.   Why would you ask for the arctan of pi/2?  Maybe it will make sense when I’m sober.

I did an interview with the New Yorker Cartoon Blog.  It’s available here.

I will be in Burlington, Vermont tomorrow, to try kite photography.  Thanks to the excellent (albeit poorly-organized) CHDK project, I’ve picked up a cheap Canon Powershot A720 and modified it to do time-lapse photography.  This makes kite photography much simpler than it’s been in the past.

If there are any readers in the Burlington area who are interested in kite flying and know of a good location, email me at xkcd@xkcd.com.  I will send out an email containing plans to anyone who contacts me, sometime soon after noon.  If you know someone in Burlington (e.g. at UVm,) let them know!  Thanks.

220 thoughts on “Debate Drinking Game, New Yorker, Burlington Vermont”

  1. There’s no way this is the first post.

    Did the Cartoon-Off actually happen? I’m guessing it was just a literary conceit but I can’t risk missing out.

  6. Just read the New Yorker article. I cannot begin to describe how amazing that 1999 comic is. It’s simultaneously hilarious for its pointlessness yet awesome for the achievement. You just dissed these guys in the *New Yorker*, man. Geeks everywhere envy you.

  10. No, you’re right. The arctan of pi/2 is a silly thing to ask for. You can get the answer using (of course) Google, or any other calculator, and it turns out to be just slightly more than 1. But the only way you would get even close just by thinking about it is to realize that pi/2 is about 3/2, then picture a right triangle that… oh nevermind. It’s a weird question. Presumably the idea is that if you’re drunk, you’ll give the answer to tan(pi/2).

    Whatever.

  12. hmm my school’s email wouldn’t let me email you.
    damn you!
    (the email. not you)
    i’ll try from a diff. one.

  13. haha okay so email got sent twice. sorry i’m irritating like that. i’ll stop bothering this now.

  16. The second question on the sobriety test is actually a good test of sobriety. The sum is from n=1 to 89pi, but there is no n in the equation. So the answer is just going to be 89pi(x(x^3+4)(x^{-3/2} ln(x)))!.

  20. I tried this last weekend in an experiment with my spouse but instead of asking about arctan, she asked me what was the tangent of pi/2 when I was absolutely soused. I must have slurred my words, because she wrote down “undefined” as the answer.

    Damn, I’m good!

  22. I enjoyed the cartoon-off. I think you won, but hovering TITLE text would have sealed the deal.

  24. I ended up with Joe the Plumber in the debate drinking game. I’m really hungover.

    The cartoon-off was really fun.

  26. Excellent cartoon-off. Your 1999 seemed to be quite a bit like my 1999, except for the part about getting cartoon-related revenge. I would love to go kite-flying in Vermont, but I am very far away.

  29. If you’re looking for a good place in Burlington, go to Waterfront Park. It should be sunny, but cool here tomorrow. Just, um, don’t drift too far east from the lake. Power lines + kite = hospital. Just head down Main Street in Burlington until you hit the lake.

    There are some other places that aren’t quite as scenic, but a little harder to find.

  32. Pingback: rand() » Blog Archive » New Yorker - XKCD “Comic-Off”

  34. I missed out on the debates, so instead I’m drinking now and posting on the Internet.

    I liked the New Yorker cartoons, but I do have a question. In the last panel, is that a horse at a weird angle or an immature unicorn with a stubby horn? And what did the squirrel do that was so awesome that he deserves two hats? (OK, two questions…)

  36. I’m horribly frustrated that you come to my home state (which is small enough that I can call any area in Chittenden county roughly my hometown), while I’m away to school in NYC.

    I would agree with the Waterfront, it would be absolutely amazing if you could maybe get on a parking garage roof near Church street and take photos of the main part of Burlington, over the buildings and what not (since none of them go up very high.)

    Alternatively if you’re feeling adventurous, you could head up to Essex Jct, and maybe go to the Inn at Essex, where there are some fields outside of the inn. From there you could get images over the Inn itself, some of the golf course across the road, potentially some of the forests surrounding the whole area and maybe the Lang Farms little suburb area (which is nicer than the normal flat and samely suburbs you see everywhere else because the topography is very active as well as being much more densely enshrouded in trees.)

    Though I feel like I may be a day late in these recommendations, (and that there might be enough construction around the Inn by now that those fields would be inaccesible.) Good luck with the photos though, I’d love to see some images of home during my dire stay in the dismal urban jungle.

  37. Remember kids, don’t drink and debate. It’s hard to see the issues when you can’t see straight.

    Of course, you can watch a debate hammered all you want.

  39. When I saw the cartoon-off, I looked for alt-text and was seriously surprised not to find any. Then I remembered…

  41. I might suggest Mad River Glen, the ski resort. I’m not from Vermont, but I go skiing up there numerous times every winter, and while it may be a little out of the way from where you were thinking, it’s completely open to wander around in the off-season, and the beauty of it is unmatched by anywhere else I’ve seen in VT.

    Just a tip… I’ll be interested to hear where you went.

  42. How can you be asking for a recommendation of a location in Vermont when you’re the inventor of the xkcd geohash?

  45. Yeah, Randall, I bet a bunch of people would be mailing you $20 except your address isn’t anywhere! I’d ask for it except now the creep-you-out factor is gone. Also I don’t have any large cats.

  46. Waterfront park is nice, though there’s a chance if the camera winds up facing west you’ll see nothing but water. (How much control over that do you have with the kite?) You could also go up the hill and try flying the kite somewhere on campus at UVM. There’s got to be a decent sized plot of tree-free, powerline-free land around there somewhere. It’d be cool to see pictures taken over Church St., but it’s probably too built up to fly a kite, though the suggestion of flying a kite on top of a parking garage could be interesting.

  48. I’m about an hour and fifteen from Burlington on the NY side, sadly. But if you can somehow manage it, getting your kite up and flying over the street mall (whose name escapes me at the moment, but it’s right on the main road into town, past Fletcher Allen) might give you some fascinating shots.

  50. My friends and I were planning on having a drinking game to go along with the debate, but forgot to make up rules until it actually started. So we just drank anytime either of them looked funny or made us laugh. Needless to say, the post-debate debate amongst friends turned out better than the one on TV

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