I fought the law and the law won

The powers that be have spoken:
We are no longer allowed to have a ladder going from the balcony to the roof.
Why would you want a ladder to the roof?
Roof parties.
Why would you want to have roof parties?
Because we're men. It doesn't make a lot of sense, it's slightly dangerous, and apparently it's not entirely legal. But buried somewhere in the male brain, there's a little voice that shouts over the voice of reason. It's the voice of Calvin and Hobbes. It says things like 'You know what's a great idea? Try building a boat from all the empty plastic bottles you have in the garage!'

But noooo, the people in charge have said we have to take it down. I suspect they'd also put the kibosh on phase two, which was to have a slide going back down to the balcony.

Quick hits

People always complain about how they don't play music videos on MTV. That's not what the problem is. AMC used to play nothing but movies. And then a little thing called Mad Men came out. And Breaking Bad. Would you really tell AMC to play only movies, and in so doing, stop Mad Men from ever existing?
So really, the problem is that MTV branched out into broadcasting absolute shit.


We have an ant problem. However, these ants are stupid ants. The only thing they cluster around is my toothbrush. Which is weird, because I have chocolate sitting around in an opened bag. That's like running into Megan Fox at a party, and then trying to hook up with the wallpaper.

Communism is alive and slightly delicious.

Cheapness is a mixed bag. Some things are better cheap: tricks, thrills and dirty deeds, for example. Other cheap things give you that sinking feeling that you're getting even less than what you bargained for. Like surgery. Or condoms. In the cases where picking the wrong option can ruin your weekend for the next several decades, paying more means you usually get your money's worth.

There is, however, no good reason to pay more than 15 dollars for a pizza. A 7 dollar pizza can do great things. In order to be twice as good, a 15 dollar pizza should also walk your dog, complement you on your haircut and give you hints on your sudoku - but only if you ask for help.

By that same logic, a cheap pizza should have all the appeal of taking a vacation to death row. But pizza is like love, it's just not rational. When the moon hits your eye like a mixed metaphor, that's pizza. So of course I had to try the Black and Gold pizza. This has the distinction of being the cheapest pizza money can buy (At the foodworks in St. Lucia, assuming nothing else is on sale).

Looking at the box, you get the feeling it might be a holdover from the soviet union. It doesn't have decadent capitalist things like graphic design. HAM AND CHEESE PIZZA. Block letters. Yellow and black. You get the impression that eating this will give you enough calories to be able to work all day at People's glorious number one footwear factory, making boots from lead and dissidents.

Opening the box doesn't reveal any pleasant surprises either. Some swimsuits are called skimpy. This is less than that. You can clearly see the lightly tan parts through the cheese. There isn't much in the way of sauce. You'd get more from accidental cross-contamination.

I should warn you that my taste-test will not be fully objective, because I forgot about the pizza, and it turned out well done. I'm not sure if pizza can catch fire, but I certainly pushed the envelope. Taking all that into account, I'm shocked to say this:

It wasn't bad. It was like pizza-flavored bread, but the pizza flavor tasted like pizza. I would have it again.

And that isn't so much a triumph for the communists, as it is a victory for capitalism. Sure, they can make a decent pizza from nothing but dough, cheese and Marxism, but I have the freedom to eat other, tastier pizzas if I so choose.

It's like climbing everest, but with more intestinal distress

You would pay money to say you've played tennis against the world's best player. You wouldn't pay money to spar with the world's best boxer. Even if it was free, you probably wouldn't agree to it. That would be stupid.
Cut to: me trying not to visibly panic whilst having a bit of the earth's core between my teeth.

I'm referring to a pepper called the Bhut Jolokia. Guinness World Records has recognized as the hottest pepper in the world. I don't even know why civilians are allowed to have it. Bhut Jolokia is 400 times spicier than tabasco sauce. That's like showing up to a squirt-gun fight with Hurricane Andrew.

An engine's horsepower rating is a very simple number to understand: 100 is not enough; 200 will get the job done and 900 will peel your face off. The exact scale for measuring spiciness is not very useful. Peppers range from the low thousand degrees Scoville to several hundred thousand of these magic degrees. The spice seller had instead chosen to replace the degrees Scoville system with a base-10 scale.

The process was simple: you take a chip, spoon a little of the hot sauce on your chip, and then down the hatch it goes. I started with a spice blend numbered 7. I didn't care so much about what the flavor was but 7 of 10 was a bold opening salvo. It was good, I could handle it with ease. But like all men, I knew that 7 of 10 wasn't good enough.

Down towards the more menacing end of the scale was a blend with a 10+ out of 10 rating and a warning that under-18s were not allowed to sample this blend. Again, this sauce didn't put up much of a struggle. Flush with a sense of invincibility, I asked if they had anything hotter.

They did. And here, the Bhut Jolokia enters the story. The description of the sauce gave a surprisingly unhelpful 14/10 rating. If an amplifier says it goes to 11, you can understand that will be painfully loud. But 14? That number might as well be infinity. It just boggles the mind.

Like most peppers, the spiciness of the Bhut Jolokia doesn't come immediately. Your first taste is citrusy, with a bit of tomato. It seems a bit of a letdown, a bit of a joke. As if you're supposed to pretend that it is unbearably spicy to scare off anyone who hasn't tried it. And then the spiciness knocks you off your feet. And then it kicks your teeth in for good measure.

The Bhut Jolokia is over one million degrees Scoville. The runner-up clocks in at a mere 600,000 degrees. There is, simply put, no pepper which comes close. I'm trying to think of adequate ways to describe the way this pepper feels in your mouth. Napalm, perhaps. Or a blast furnace. This is not hyperbole for comedic purposes. You genuinely believe that the inside of your mouth is melting like an Edward Munch painting.
Dairy, we are told, helps soothe the burn. This is not the case. I sought out a free sample of yogurt in hopes of diminishing the lava flow. It did nothing. The yogurt vaporized on contact.

I sought out water instead. The man at the booth asked how I was doing, unaware to the unquenchable inferno contained within. I don't recall what I told him, but I recall that I was somehow using a tongue I thought had dissolved minutes ago.
"Mate," the man behind the desk said "you're shaking." So I was.

The test of intelligence is the ability to recognize and learn from your mistakes. Will I ever eat one of these again? Yes.
And with that kind of mindset, I wouldn't blame you for thinking that I'd taken a couple of knocks to the head, courtesy of the boxing world's heavyweight champion.