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New Years Eve held the Coke/Pepsi 3-shot challenge pitting the discerning palettes of my guests against a gauntlet of samples.  The preponderance of guests stated they’d be able to tell them apart at a statistically significant level.

Purpose: Determine if a tester can accurately identify samples of Coke or Pepsi when presented in lots of three.  Success will be defined as properly identifying all samples in six of nine lots of three.

Protocol:

  1. A pseudorandom sequence of ones and zeros were generated as the seed data.  Zeros were Coke samples and ones were Pepsi samples.
  2. Cups were numbered sequentially and filled with approximately 1-2 oz of the appropriate beverage as listed.
  3. Testers were allowed to take calibration samples of each beverage from a control bottle.
  4. Each tester received 3 sequential cups and after sampling, received a data sheet requesting the cup number and the corresponding observation.
  5. To be statistically significant, each tester had to consume 9 sets, but after much bitching and complaining, we stopped at 7.

Results: After 108 samples tested, approximately 50 samples were properly identified breaking the Colobus Barrier.  Of the 36 lots tested, only 3 went 3 for 3 correctly identifying samples, once again doing worse than chance.  No tester was able to identify samples at a level above chance.

Considerations/Stuff People Bitched About: The soda was flat; each specimen was poured from a bottle that had been open within the previous 30 minutes.  The soda was warm; this was done specifically at the request of Pat Toye and may have partially caused the previous accusation of flatness.

Interlab Repeatability: If anyone would like to stage a repeat under similar conditions with a changed variable of temperature, brands, specimen (cup) size, participants or tester, please contact me.

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I don’t want to say the staff reunion was a disappointment, Joe, Dan, Dave, Ed, Marc and myself could have just eaten pizza at CFS and I would have been happy but more people would have been enjoyable.   After two hours of volleyball involving feets of fat-crobatics like Chris Rinelli mocking somone then eating volleyball or Joe Naylor, Pat Toye and I making it appear that Bob Fosse was fielding a corpulent volleyball/dance troupe.

Later we played Scrabble and after staring at ACEILLH and thinking “ACHILLES” isn’t legal, like in a dream HELICAL came to me.  I did a word check found CHALLIE to exist and BAM 78 points.  Maybe I should give up Scrabble so soon.

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I don’t want to say the staff reunion was a disappointment, Joe, Dan, Dave, Ed, Marc and myself could have just eaten pizza at CFS and I would have been happy but more people would have been enjoyable.   After two hours of volleyball involving feets of fat-crobatics like Chris Rinelli mocking somone then eating volleyball or Joe Naylor, Pat Toye and I making it appear that Bob Fosse was fielding a corpulent volleyball/dance troupe.

Later we played Scrabble and after staring at ACEILLH and thinking “ACHILLES” isn’t legal, like in a dream HELICAL came to me.  I did a word check found CHALLIE to exist and BAM 78 points.  Maybe I should give up Scrabble so soon.

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An age old Robinson family condition is that my brother gets plastered and then challenges me to a flexibility contest.  We once broke the door off of a microwave when we needed something between countertop and window sill.  I have brought this tradition to camp and yesterday we engaged in one using a staircase.

It was epic with critical moments like realizing that Scout pants aren’t up to the job, Bill Schilling learning that it’s cheating to have someone lift you while stretching and Joe Naylor learning there were some places the human foot was not meant to go and especially ways it shouldn’t get there.  Everytime someone walked in they looked at us strangely but eventually began cheering as Pat and Joe went into a kind of obese limber man’s game of PIG eventually resulting in Joe nearly destroying a telephone while using his right hand to pull his foot above his head.  In the course of this, we made a bit of noise and today one of the upstairs inhabitants talked to me about what happened.

Pool Director:  I was about to come down and chew you out until I heard you say “That table wasn’t mean to hold that kind of weight” and “Joe, don’t do it, your foot wasn’t meant to do that” followed by Tom’s belly laugh.  I figured I’d probably get involved too.

How cool would that have been?  A 55 year old aquatics director challenging a bunch of young turks to a foot lifting competition.  I think my instigation single-handedly decimated four separate crotches the next day, ironically, one was the health officer’s.

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Egyptian Rat Screw is a fast-slapping playing card game I’ve loved for years.  I played it at first in elementary school but not until I had hours to kill as a Scout volunteer did I really develop retarded skill at the game.  My current streak is 74 games most against Joe Naylor.  Some of the persons present when Joe an I were player weren’t familiar with my preternatural slapping speed.

Pat: How are you so stupidly fast at this?
Me:  I think it’s a combination of spending my youth summing house numbers on my way to school and screwing with my cat.
Pat: How did the cat help?
Me: He was never declawed.

This last part came back and bit me when I was screwing with Joe’s cat, and in an attempt to avoid getting scratched I pulled my hand away whiping like 9 drinks off the table.  I later found out it was declawed and getting pawed by it was like being a attacked by a handful of Q-tips.

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New Year’s Eve was spent at the Rimmer household where Joe, Kendra, Pat and myself spent most of our time avoiding Clara’s sister and her friends. One fellow was nice and looked suspiciously like David Krumholtz from Addams Family Values and was continually assaulted by his daughter that thought there was no such thing as having too many blankets. Pat made a vague attempt at introducing me to a women that “wasn’t interested in men” at the time which joined the long line of lesbians and pregnant women at which I’ve made passes.

We then moved to a 110 minute game of Taboo. Mr. Rimmer went through 13 cards in one round, mostly by ignoring the timer and counting clues he didn’t like. Genius.

Finally, during the ball drop the little clock disappeared from the screen so we all depended on inaccurate watches to guess when 2008 began. Joe won by realizing his watch was off by 23 minutes making me realize why he always missed most of each episode of MASH.

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Pat and Clara doubted the glory of the atlatl and I was on a mission to prove the supremacy of meso-American weapons. We (that’s Pat, Clara, me and the dog Tipsy, a border collie) went to a park in King of Prussia and my heart sank as I saw there were no lights by which to find the dart.  Pat cast a dart hoping the ambient light of King of Prussia would be enough, and the projectile disappeared into oblivion.  After about 30 seconds of scanning the field for the missing when a black and white splotch approached us.  It was Tipsy, the border collie, with the dart in it’s mouth.  For the next hour we cast slobber-covered darts into the darkness only to have them returned by an over-enthusiastic border collie.  It’s doubtful that I will ever be able to train Max to do the same.