The genius of alcohol

The Kentucky Derby (which just happened this past weekend) got me thinking about gambling and other non-sports related games. Seeing that the Kentucky Derby has an official drink (no, Budweiser did not get to smear their logo on this one), the mint julep, I made a connection. For those of you that went to college, you are undoubtedly familiar with drinking games and the extremes that drinking game rules can go to given enough time and alcohol. I think that the origins of gambling lie with inebriation. I spent many nights in college playing drinking games and making up rules that stray so far from the game's original rules that it becomes a whole new game altogether. Sometimes, all you needed was a friend, a case of beer, a couple of hours for you and your friend to consume the case of beer, and a deck of cards and you could make up your own game that no one else in the world had thought up. You became the drunken Parker Brothers. Case in point: my friend Nick and I were sitting up at my apartment one Saturday night. The rest of the company had left and my then girlfriend/now wife had gone to bed. We had consumed about the equivalent of half of the beer that the entire population of Germany consumes in a year and we were bored. I had a deck of cards and a very lazy cat to offer. Nick and I put our drunken heads together and came up with the "Cat Drinking Game" (Monopoly was already taken). OK, here's how it is played. You wait for the cat to settle. Then, armed with one half of the deck, you and your opponent take turns placing cards on the resting feline until it moves and knocks all of the cards off. The last person to place a card has to count the fallen cards and take that number of drinks. We played this game until we were both so intoxicated that we couldn't see the cat. The cat caught on after about an hour too. It would see us coming and just run away.