how the fuck did they get all the greeks in there?

I went to see Batman Begins last night, a movie which not only manages to pleasantly surprise after hearing innumerable good reviews, but also aims to and succeeds in breathing new life back into the hitherto retrogressive Batman series, which series has been suffering greatly after the outrageously bad Batman & Robin in 2000, whose incarnation of the Dark Knight, George Clooney, himself readily admits to “possibly sinking the entire ‘Batman’ franchise.” Christian Bale appears to have single-handedly avoided that particular iceberg, and I and my two friends Casey and Maurice approve. The latter has always enjoyed Batman for its colorful villains, and the archnemesis in this one is the Scarecrow, who is played by the vaguely effete Cillian Murphy, making him (the character) seem like something of a pussy. But then, Mr Murphy originally auditioned for the role of Bruce Wayne, so at least the casting director got that right. Alfred Pennyworth is now played by Michael Caine; the first four Batmans had only two characters continuingly in common: Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, played by Michael Gough and Pat Hingle, respectively. They've both been replaced now, so it's a blank slate for the Caped Crusader. On a side note, only one of the four escalators at the Loews 42d Street Theater works. You'd think when they were raking it $12.75 per ticket, they could afford working escalators.

After the film, Casey and I walk back to Maurice's place, as neither of us has seen it yet, and it's just a couple blocks away. We're having fortified mimosæ (one part vodka to one part orange juice to two parts champagne), which taste almost exactly like the standard version but packs a nice little kick, when Maurice gets a call, evidently from a girl. He asks if we'd be interested in playing some beirut at the new apartment of a girl he knows. Does the Pope shit in the woods? (Answer: Yes.) So we head down to Chelsea, where she lives, pick up an eighteen-pack of Budweiser (because it was the only 18 in the bloody Gristedes), and head up to the fifth-floor walkup. The impetus for the beirutery is evidently the successful transfer of the girl's beirut table to this new apartment. The table is covered in graffiti, most indicating some tallied number under an amusing name, eg “Guinness Puss” and “Captain Sinkit”. The provenance of these inscriptions is uncertain, though it seems likely they're the scorekeeping of beiruters of ages past, since the table itself was stolen from Colby College.

If this is all beginning to sound very fraternitial (drinking games, property stolen from small New England liberal arts colleges), you wouldn't be wrong. We discover, to our great surprise, that eveyrone in the room is greek: a couple SDTs, a Pike, and us three Zetes. It's comparable to suddenly realizing that everyone in the room is a smoker. Probably even less common, since about one-fifth of Americans (over eighteen) smoke, but only about one-thirtieth of Americans (ditto) are in a fraternity or sorority. I think of the Trojan Horse, and wonder idly, how did they fit enough Greeks (capital G) to take over the city into a wooden horse? This has got to be a myth. But it's good to be among your fellow greeks. You know how their minds work. I'll take this moment to observe that, to their eternal and enormous discredit, the source of our most excellent table (Colby) outlawed fraternal organizations back in the 1980s, that decade when political correctness was first rearing its flagitiously ugly head. Eheu, students of Colby, for you know not what you miss.

Casey and I go back uptown to the Zetehaus at around 1:30 AM, and find Tre, Aneel, and three other guys playing Kings. Ironically, the deck has only fifty-one cards, and the one missing card is the suicidal king; until we realize this, the games are rather long, since they can't end without all four kings being drawn. Dawn and crunkenness arrive as one. Finis.