dubious.biz(ness)

Me doing my photographic duties at the bumps, the victorious Darwin M1 crew in the foreground.

Float on, originally uploaded by killermonkeys.

From my office.

June 23rd was our June Event. The culmination of a lot of hard work and effort from the whole committee. I worked very hard to get a lot of people very drunk. I was the cocktail officer. I felt like I had slumped in my duty as the website editor as I actually hadn’t edited the site since I put it up in January, continually intending to and coming into some excuse not to (exams, lack of data, etc…). But I’m certain that I made up for it in my duty as cocktail officer.

First of all the event was massive, much larger than previous events, we sold out technically several weeks before the event, a first time in the Head Porter’s rather long memory. This enabled us to buy a lot more stuff to pile into the college to entertain everyone. We ended up with laser tag, joust, a mechanical bull, a ferris wheel, dodge ‘ems (bumper cars), a bouncy castle, a live band, tons of DJs, karaoke, a casino (a fiasco ensued), foot massage, sisha pipes, chocolate fountain, food, drinks… we’re talking hours of entertainment. There is no way you were bored until dawn, and I feel totally confident in saying that. It was amazing and a real compliment to all those who participated.

As the organisers we got tickets to Pembroke’s June Event as well. There are two types of mays events: June Events, and May Balls. Ironically they both take place in the same week after bumps. May Balls are more formal, generally attempting to be more of a society event than a party. June Events are just massive high budget parties. At Pembroke’s event I can say without a doubt that I was looking for something interesting to do several times during the night and had there not been a casino I would have been bored out of my mind. This seems like a bizzarre situation considering that Pembroke is a much larger college with a much larger event in a larger space, but there were far few entertainments and they were poorly scheduled. The majority of the budget was spent on the free alcohol which was generally warm, quickly consumed and did not lead to a good time without something to do.

Wolfson’s JE is unique in that food and cocktails are not included in the price of admission. This has been used to keep the ticket prices low but it has the side effect of leaving the majority of the budget for entertainments rather than food or drinks (both are outsourced). So when we had a surplus we were able to get a ferris wheel, then chocolate fountain, then joust. It kept going until we didn’t have any money left. So our event looked like a carnival with bands and dancing and it went on all night.

That said, my experience was quite different than the typical ball-goer’s. I wanted the cocktails to be exciting and interesting so I worked pretty damned hard prepare them. I had done some research several times in the clubroom and on my own to pick some out. I ended up with some damned good cocktails. Well two of them. I knew that I had to do a martini and I had two other choices. I chose a mojito and a cocktail of essentially my own creation based on some others, a red oktober.

A mojito made properly is mint and lime muddled in a rocks glass, 2 oz white rum, 3/4 oz simple syrup and club soda to fill. It’s light, sweet and a little sour, and summery. As you can see it is a proper highball made in the glass. Our recipe was slightly modified, though not enough to serve people efficently.

The red oktober ended up being: 1 oz vodka, 1 oz cherry brandy, 1 oz triple sec, 1/2 oz galliano and club soda to fill. Also a high ball, a great sweet cherry flavor and relatively low alcohol content. Very drinkable, I’m very proud of this one as I adapted a recipe from Tikibar TV to cheaper ingredients. This one was actually quite efficent to make.

Finally the vodka martini, a fiasco if I ever saw one. Unlike the rest of these drinks this is a shaken cocktail. Martinis served properly are: 2-1/2 oz vodka, 1/2 oz vermouth in a shaker with ice, shake, strain. Garnish. I like martinis for what they are, a mundane way to drink a lot of cold vodka quickly. Further I am certainly no martini purist, I would never order one and swear no alligence to them. But the things I saw being done to martinis that night… it makes me shudder. Dear god, no one should ever abuse a cocktail that way.

So those were the drinks, now we’ll have the story. I got a shipment of limes, lemons, and mint. Both of them I far far exceeded the actual number of necessary fruit and now I have a box of lemons and limes in my room which will presumably rot as I have had my fill of citrus for a few years. The limes were for mojitos and needed to be sliced into sections, the mint was also for mojito and needed to be separated from the stems, the lemons were to be used as garnish for the martinis. So Zeynep and I sat down to do this work the day before which took about two hours and wasn’t too bad. I was feeling very prepared and ready, dropped my fruit in the cocktail bar and went about my other work.

The night of the event, we started with dinner. Dinner ended up being nuts. The meal itself was incredible and far better than any other formal I’ve had and certainly worth the 25 pounds I didn’t pay to eat it. The veggie dish was a well prepared eggplant (aubergine in the UK) stuffed with a spicy rice and chickpeas. Precisely the sort of thing I would never imagine the crap ass chef could make. The party was, as I’m sure you know, James Bond themed and the dining hall was themed in gold and black and some of the table decorations were gold painted guns and cars. Someone quickly discovered that we had bought and spraypainted water pistols and those someones all seemed to be at our table. Madness and hilarity ensued as we were slightly inebriated and soaked with water in our tuxedos and dresses. I participated.

We ended up dining until about 9:45 and this was an hour into the event (which non-diners were already enjoying). I then had to run from place to place trying to set up the first round of the game, which shall be discussed later. I also was required to work the bar. This was essentially nonnegotiable as I was bar staff in addition to being the cocktail officer. When I arrived they had already mixed and gone through nearly a pitcher of mojitos, as I expected. I tried the other pitchers and every single one of them was terrible, not at all to mix and worst of all, the mojitos were lacking a key ingredient: rum. That’s right, for nearly an hour we were selling virgin mojitos by the dozen.

This started the most annoying part of my day. I wasn’t scheduled to work in the bar until 12:30 but I started mixing right then. The queue was massive, all the pitchers were low, so I started mixing pitcher after pitcher of cocktails. Beyond the nastiness of the mojitos was the nastiness of the martini. It was indescribable. 1.5 litres of warm vodka in a pitcher with a bit of vermouth. Amazing. It was being served in martini glasses on the rocks. This was corrected summarily and martinis were again being served properly but often without garnish. Who cares. The only problem is that a lot of girls were asking for them and then asking for lemonade because at the end of the day it’s just cold vodka.

My shift started, I hadn’t done anything in the event, and I stayed in the damned cocktail bar mixing continuously. It seemed as soon as I had made one pitcher another had run out. I slaved for hours over these damned things. I had a 30 minute break which evaporated with a short Céilidh and a ride on the dodge ‘ems and was then at the wine bar for an hour where I was yelled at continuously by annoying drunk customers. Then I went back to the cocktail bar. Again things were a mess, all the pitchers tasted terrible and I was making new ones, this time unpaid. Beyond that while I was there, I saw martinis being served with soda, with lemonade (british for sprite/7up… but honestly it sounds better than calling it lemon-lime soda doesn’t it), in various sizes of glasses including half pint (that’s about 5 oz of vodka kids, you want to talk about a good deal…), and with and without ice. And very rarely with a lemon twist.

I should mention that I was a naughty bartender. Every pitcher I made was by eye as I didn’t have time for measurements and they were all in terms of bottles (1 bottle rum, 1/5 bottle galliano, etc). So to get the taste right I ended up testing them all, particularly the mojitos as they had this concentrated lime juice which was damned strong along with concentrated simple syrup which was damned sweet. So by this point I had made perhaps 20 pitchers and had taste of them all. I was… happy. I made myself a final mojito with double rum as we had actually ran out of simple syrup and left the bar, vowing not to return at about 2am.

At this point most of the people have been partying for 4 hours and I haven’t even started, and the party only goes until about 5am. So cocktails turned my night of fun into a typical 3 hour wolfson party. So I wanted to make the most of it. I ended up on the ferris wheel several times, dancing, in the casino, on the dodge ‘ems. It was basically a mad dash between every sort of fun I could fit in.

The ferris wheel sounds really mundane. In fact I thought it would be the perfect chill out entertainment that people could ride when they were feeling a bit drunk and tired. But this was no ordinary ferris wheel, it was the xtreme ferris wheel from carny hell which had drop-down lap harnesses, spun very fast, and best of all, had a locking handle. If you pulled the handle, the car locked in position and would invert as the ferris wheel went around. Proper control of the handle caused the car to swing violently or hang in mock weightlessness as gravity and centripetal force took turns trampling on your tummy. No I didn’t not reemit any of my meal.

We ended up, as is appropriate for a Wolfson party, on the dance floor listening to cheesy music and dancing with our friends. After that there was a no-so-great breakfast which I would have much preferred to have been hot and delicious. Instead it looked like the pastry and donut aisle of sainsbury’s had been ransacked and its contents scattered among the tables. Then there was a survivor’s photo outside. I left with someone else’s jacket which contained a nice digital camera.

As a last hurrah it was great. There is a lot more turnover at this college because of all the one-year degree students. Particularly the Americans who are all leaving soon. The decor was incredible, the ents were amazing, the band was, I understand, very good (wasn’t there) and it kicked the ass of Pembroke. I think everyone felt the same way and everyone was really happy, we gave them their money’s worth.

Now I wil tell you about the game fiasco….

As you may have noticed I have been posting a lot of photos to the blog lately. I bought a new phone a few days ago. It’s a Sony Ericsson K800i. It replaces my old HP h6315 . I am completely enamored with it as it is my new toy. It’s main feature is a fairly good camera, 3.2 megapixels. It also has a flash, autofocus, and it functions as a phone a hell of a lot better than my iPaq ever did. Thus far it hasn’t crashed either. It has a “blog this” feature which can post to flickr and a blog. Hence the photos. The only time so far that I’ve caught a real moment and I was really glad I had it was downtown when I saw some pirates carrying around a dead man’s chest promoting the Pirates of the Carribbean movie. That’s precisely the sort of thing that little cameras are good for, and now I have a camera in my pocket that I’m not embarassed to take photos with.

That said it suffers from most of the typical problems of a small camera: bad white balancing, bad contrast, a flash that either over fills or under fills, and fisheye on closeups. Basically having a small lens is going to cause fisheye, the rest of it has to do with stupid electronics, but it reminds you that you are actually paying for something when you buy an expensive camera. So this camera is not going to replace my Canon, but it fills a huge gap. Basically I’ve gone from feeling like I never have my camera around to always having it around. And it’s a new gadget I’ve been lusting after for a long time.

As a nice bonus it has bluetooth, as does my laptop and my iPaq so I can connect them all together happily and they can trade photos and such. If there was a bluetooth photo syncronizer I’d be in heaven, unfortunately the photos must be synced from the camera unless I use USB :-( I’m not going to work too hard to try to hack that for a while, I’m happy enough with it as it is.

So the good side is that the site will have more interesting things going on and you will see more content from me, perhaps even on a daily basis as I had once envisioned.

Emily’s birthday, originally uploaded by killermonkeys.

Emily’s birthday at the thai.

Everybody’s got something to hide, originally uploaded by killermonkeys.

Except for richard and his monkey. From the forth of july pool party.

I’m obviously a bit behind, so I’m going to try to go chronological-like. Bumps come twice a year, once in Lent term and once in May term. While Lents are really hardcore rowing and only dedicated rowers are aware of what’s going on, Mays is bigger, more public, and more exciting. This is entirely due to the weather, it’s not actually any different, although several of the crews are drastically different from the Lent crew, Wolfson’s included.

I dropped down to the second boat, ostensibly to focus on studies, though it’s honestly unclear whether I would have been able to hang with the guys on the first boat this term. A lot of experienced rowers came back and tried very hard to get Wolfson into the first division. They nearly made it, bumping up three times and we are now at the top of Div 2. With any luck next year we will be in the first division.

Unfortunately the top of a division is a difficult place to be, because you must row twice in a day, first in your divison as the lead boat, with no chance of bumping (your best possible result is a row-over, meaning you have to row the full course), and then almost immediately again as the bottom boat in the next division, where you have to get your bump to move up into the next division. But fortunately that’s not to worry about until next year.

As for my boat, I had an exam the first day of bumps. In retrospect, I could actually have rowed and been ok, but 20/20 hindsight. I ended up with an exam, then an interview, then I cycled over to bumps just in time to see my team coasting across the finish. Without greenery. As in they had been bumped. To see your own crew gutted is really painful. When you’re not on the boat, you feel obligated. I had just finished exams and had a fairly good interview so I was happy, but seeing the members of the crew dead killed all enthusiasm. I wanted to take some photos since I didn’t think I’d get the opportunity later in the week, particularly of my own crew. Unfortunately they weren’t exactly in smile-and-be-happy mode, but I took the photos anyway.

So the next day I was a little apprehensive. I had a hard time being sad with the team because I hadn’t actually been bumped, they had. And that made me feel really guilty in itself. So I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. I was also a bit unsure as to how the row had gone and what the problems might be. Changing a member of the crew coming off the loss wouldn’t necessarily be the best thing for the crew.

But I got in, we went down (actually we went UP and then down, for some reason Jo and Matt had decided to make a long run of it and take us to Jesus Lock and then down the river to the end). On the way I started to get back a bit of confidence and then ended up feeling good about it. We started nearly at the bottom of the river, and if we got bumped today we would be the sandwich boat and drop a division. This is sort of pride motivates you and is also scary, particularly since the boat chasing us had yesterday been 5 boats ahead. A boat behind ours had gotten a double overbump (that is catching the boat 5 places ahead and going up 5). Presumably they were a stronger crew by order and being so far from the bottom of the river and so far from the end of the race, you start to wonder if you can make it.

We got off to an OK start and had very rough water, but we did make it. We pushed away the crew behind us, but never quite found a crew ahead of us to bump. At one point we were rowing for an overbump but it didn’t ever seem to put itself together, and we ended up rowing over. This is the first time I’ve rowed the entire bumps course and it wasn’t actually as bad as it could have been. The result was OK, we had held our place and hadn’t fallen again, and it looked like it just wasn’t in our cards to bump as the crew ahead had bumped out very early.

The next day everyone was more upbeat, wanting to build on the success of Thursday. I was really ready to catch a boat, having now remembered how good it felt to bump and how shitty it felt to row over (and having seen how shitty everyone else felt getting bumped). We pushed hard this time, too hard in fact and kept falling out of time but we ended up gaining on the crew above us, and got very close several times. Each time Jo called for push after push which seemed to clog the gears up and we lost on them. Fortunately we got tired which, it turns out, forces you to row properly and on perhaps the 8th push in a row, we did catch them. I also caught a tree growing out of the river and was nearly ejected. Glory had returned and everyone was very happy to have done it.

Finally Saturday. Saturday in Mays is crazy. Cambridge really only has this one sport and it seems like everyone is forced to participate, whether they like it or not. I saw several friends at the river who loathed the near daily mention of rowing at meals. They cheered like the rest though, even if they were weary of the bizarre event and perhaps intoxicated enough not to care. The route is basically rural, with some sparse developments away from the river along the way, but for the most part it is commons. The reason is probably flood control but it lends a bit of wildness to the river and when you have rowed it every day and suddenly see throngs of people drinking, barbequing, and eating ice cream you are taken aback. Probably most amazing were the punts which had been somehow transported all the way down the river and were ferrying people between the plough and the commons. More on that later.

So on Saturday we headed down the river again, saw all these people and you start to realize that you are actually participating in a college sport that people care about. Of course I’m not in the first boat thus a bit of a warmup for the main event. Either way when we passed the Wolfson contingent we heard cheers and again in a number of other places along the way. The pressure actually gets to you on your second practice start on Plough reach. Plough reach is so named because of a beautiful pub, the Plough which large garden that backs up to the river. The garden is filled with empty chairs and tables, which to my knowledge are only filled at one time during the year: Mays. In Mays it is the center of action as the only source of alcohol for some distance. On the way down to the race you do two practice starts, one at the railway bridge in the middle of nowhere where no one is watching and one at the Plough where you are on center stage and everyone comments on your performance. That said our practice start was good and we seemed to avoid any stage fright.

When the cannon went off at the start we went through our start sequence, which is complicated and somewhat of a mental exercise in itself and started our first push. No sooner had we entered what I would consider to be the first meaty portion of the race than we had bumped. No one is quite sure of what actually happened, but we were breathing down the neck of the boat ahead very soon after the cannon and suddenly their cox told them to hold it up. She claims she heard it from the bank. While it was a proper bump, it was a bit of a disappointment as we bumped just about 500m into the course and before any of us had started to get tired or even into our peak output. If I had known we would only be rowing 500m I would have probably broken my ribs trying to get the power down. Either way we got the bump and we got to row up all the way from the bottom of the course nice and slow with greenery. No flag this time and no blades, but bumps is a really cruel form of racing and the much-deserving 1st men didn’t get blades either.

To summarize the rest because this entry is getting far too long: later that night champagne and wine and beer and another boatclub dinner. A final party and I ended up doing a few stupid things which I may tell later, but not today. My ass and my side were sore for several days later, maybe that’s enough.

More posts coming, kids, sorry of the backlog.