Food Game

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The crew we have here this year is extra special; and I mean "special" in the worst possible way. We all seem particularly fond of the silly. We often act like a gaggle of kids in adult wrappers. Of course, we have plenty of inside jokes that go around and around, but we've also adopted several peculiarly childish games and odd gags. Actually, there are so many that I'm not sure where to begin. Maybe I should begin by warning you that our sense of humor has no bounds, and in general, the dirtier, the better-er. But maybe the warning will be unnecessary. Maybe I should just start at the beginning...

In the beginning, there was Nandi. Nandi is a mild-mannered gentleman with a heart of gold and a "childlike sense of wonder", as Carolyn would say. He seems incapable of wrongdoing, so much so that we often ask ourselves, "What would Nandi do?" Well, I'll tell you what Nandi would do. Nandi would steal your plate while you're not looking, shine a laser pointer in your eye, ambush you with snowballs at every opportunity. He's started a new tradition for the Gould departures: while they're raising the gangplank and spooling up the engines to leave, Nandi starts a snowball fight between the station and the passengers. When the Gould returned last time, Chance radioed in, "I hope you're ready, because it's going to be a bloodbath!" Poor Lily thought he was referring to the amount of work that would need to be done when they arrived. But no, the bloodbath was in the form of a crowd of throwers around a large cardboard box on the oh-one deck. In the box: snowballs collected from a squall the day before. Nandi also started a snowball fight with the Chilean Navy. I'm not even kidding. After a barbecue on the deck of the Chilean Navy vessel Lautaro, we pulled away in our meager Zodiac, and Nandi cleared a swath of snow from the bow and chucked it. The spat with our Chilean friends was short-lived, due to lack of ammunition, but when we returned to station an all-out, every-man-for-himself war was waged for the next hour and a half. Best snowball fight I've ever been in; adults don't cry when they get pegged repeatedly in the face. Fifteen of us, give or take, and no one went home dry, mostly because Kelsey likes to tackle.

I'm sure it's rugby withdrawal. Many of us have had some bruising and rug burn on account of Kelsey, and she's instigated more than one dogpile. These usually occur in the bar, and can be rather sticky. Sticky because the floor is covered in spilled beer from another game you may have played in college. You know the one, where you smack the top of someone's beer bottle with the bottom of your own so their beer froths madly over and they have to quickly get their lips over the damn thing. I hadn't seen it in a while, but many of these scientists are still college students. I specifically told Kelsey that I better not catch her smacking any of our homebrews. An hour later I asked her,
"Is that a homebrew?"
"No."
Smack.
It was a sweet revenge for that steaming hot, saucy pizza I took on the chin and neck.

Normally, you would choose to enter the food game by applying it to someone who is already in the game. The rules got a little blurred, though, and I was thrown headlong into the fray without getting that precious first sneak-attack. Though, I'm sure no one had any doubt that I would join. Food game was passed to us by the winter-over crew, who brought it from Pole. The idea is simple, but there are some rules in place to keep it gentlemanly. At the bare bones, it's like this: finger food is to be knocked out of hand whenever possible. The food must be held directly in hand, as flying utensils may be hazardous. The winter-overs insisted that you say "food game" while sending it, but we've decided that it's pretty obvious what's happening without the announcement. Messy foods are preferred, but not required; splashing a ketchup-doused fry into your neighbor's face is much more satisfying than dry toast. You must be careful, though, not to accidentally splatter a non-food-gamer, as they can get quite nasty. Food-gamers, by the rules, are not allowed to get angry (though I'm impressed PQ held it together after having to change shirts twice in one day). An advanced food-gamer can splatter several food-gamers in one shot. A master food-gamer would splatter everyone with a clean shot (a shot is considered "clean" if you don't actually touch the person's hand, only their food) and land the gamed food such that it is still edible (generally, on the plate or table). But don't be discouraged, this gentlemanly side of the game isn't for everyone, and it is pretty satisfying to send a buttered scone into a parabolic arc across the entire galley, or a marinara-sopped slice of bread blasting off into the ceiling. Oh yeah, one last thing, very important: freshies and chocolate eclairs are off limits.

But let's get back to Nandi, and the game that is his namesake. To be "Nandi'd" is to have your dirty plate swiped from you while you're off your guard (perhaps you've just been food gamed). It started as a courteous thing; to do someone's dishes for them. But now there are mad dashes to steal plates, and often the victim immediately becomes the thief to a nearby gaper, or to the same person who just "Nandi'd" them. Utensils have flown in this game. The odd thing is that the winner is the loser, and you don't want to be behind them in the scullery line.

Nandi will also apologize profusely for the most trifling of things. I think when I attempted to break him of this habit, we were playing cards and he apologized for taking a trick. I suggested that the next time he felt the urge to say, "I'm sorry", instead he should say "In your face!" It worked to such brilliant effect that everyone on station adopted it, making us even more irreverent than we already were.

Other popular phrases...
"get awesome": from a dirty joke that I won't tell here.
"the siffness": a South African term for "griminess" that was immediately mistaken for "the syphilis"; surely you can imagine the ensuing hilarity.
"your mom's?": if you find a misplaced item and put it next to the white board, you don't write "lost" or "found", you write "your mom's?"
"in my pants": just a fun thing to say after every sentence while drinking, or sober.
"darn't bar ar parsar!": um...

The birders like to speak pirate. Mark is scary good at it. We're pretty sure he's a Canadian Pirate (another phrase with special meaning here - you might have one in your pants). It's pretty simple, really; you just replace all vowels with "arr". Understanding it is the hard part. So now I'm sometimes "Rarx." But Lily trumps us all with "Larlar!"

I could go on forever about our communal idiosyncrasies, but I have to pee (in my pants). I'll just stop here and leave you with one reminder; the next time you sit down for a meal, you may find yourself allured by a stray dot of red light. This is likely coming from Nandi's laser pointer, but try not to be distracted, because someone else will be, and this is an ideal time to "Nandi" their dishes, or better yet, to food game them.

Good Luck! (in my pants)