The 5 Frat Guys You Can’t Avoid

1.  John Smith?

You know his face because he’s always around. He also calls you by name, asks you how you are and how that history test went the other day. You can’t be totally sure, but you may have met him during Welcome Week freshman year. Just smile and nod when he approaches because let’s be honest you don’t know his name. Was it John? Matthew? Mark? Maybe Luke? Okay now you’re just naming biblical figures. Just smile and nod.

Him? Who?

Bartistics: Quantifying the Best Northwestern Bars

The next Keg?

Sherman Ave editor Evander Jones teamed up with food blog What I’m Eating for Lunch’s curator Jameson Bulwinkle to provide a comprehensive statistical analysis—or bartistical analysis, if you will—of the Evanston and Chicago bars most frequently frequented by Northwestern undergraduates. But first, an explanation of the bartistical categories analyzed by Evander and Jameson:

Yelp Rating: How many Yelp starts the bar received, out of a maximum potential of five.
Distance from the Arch: As estimated in walking distance by Google Something Maps.
Best Weekly Special: The best available special the bar offers on a day of the week.
VORN: Value Over Replacement Night. This bartistic measures how much more valuable the bar’s weekly special night is compared to a random night at the same bar given the same blood alcohol content. A VORN of 5.4, for instance, means that the bar’s weekly special night is 5.4 times better than a random non-special average night at the same bar.
Food, Ambiance, and Drinks: All subjective scores, out of a maximum of ten points, assigned by Evander and Jameson.
OoS: Odds of Scoring. What is the percentage chance of an average Northwestern student patron hooking up with another patron from the bar?
BPT: Biddies per Townie. What is the ratio of biddies to townies at the bar?
ABP: Average beer price. ABP’s with asterisks are actual average prices, not estimates.

Culinary Dorm Corner: Cocktails!!!!!!

How else are we supposed to get our daily fruit requirement?

NOTICE: Just as the Evanston City Council assumes that all Twitter accounts are real, here at Sherman Ave we assume that all of our readers are responsible drinkers who are of legal age.

So in true Sherman Ave fashion, I’m writing this article as I’m five standard drinks in on St. Patrick’s day, which I think everyone can agree is the most heinous of holidays. Or rather, Alco-holidays. Let’s be real, I’m a drunk mess right now. I’m listening to Adele on full volume while I chug hard cider.

Did I mention I’m a ¼ Irish? No? Well, that and the 3/8 Mexican should be swag enough for me to get drunk any day of the week, you judgmental fucks.

Anyway, You wanna make some tasty c*cktails, eh? (are we Canadian now? Idk, bro)

So LET’S GET STARTED:

APPLE FUCKING PIE A LA MODE SHOOTER
This shit is so good. In the span of 24 hours I’ve made about 4 or 5, and consumed two myself. Regrets? NONE. This tasty little bitch will go down smoother than that Senior frat boy last Saturday.

½ shot apple pie liqueur (EV1 carries a brand called Anthony’s Own. It’s $16.99 a bottle, 25% alc. By volume. QUALITY PURCHASE FOLKS)
½ shot baily’s irish cream. (DOES IT MATTER HOW MUCH THIS COSTS? THIS IS GLORY IN A BOTTLE. I DRINK THIS LIKE WATER DAILY.)
Dash of cinnamon. (BECAUSE WE GET FANCY)

Try to throw it back because even though the liqueur is sweet, you don’t want the alcohol to curdle the cream.

Ruin yet another childhood memory with alcohol!

CIDER SLING
Typically a sling is citrus based, but the tartness of granny smith apple cider will totally suffice, especially if you use the gin I recommend because it doesn’t have a juniper berry base, which makes most gins spicier/more bitter.

½ shot New Amsterdam gin, or other gin if you like sticking it to the man (ME)
1 shot apple/apple pie liqueur
6 oz (half bottle) hard cider (I like Kelly’s a lot, but Woodchuck is sold by EV1, so it’s what I’m using)
1 or 2 oz ginger ale

This shit is a good drink if you want to get drunk but don’t want to be forced into getting a new drink every second. It’s tasty, it’s apple-y and that’s all that counts for me right now. I AM DRINKING ONE OF THESE RIGHT NOW, THAT SHOULD TELL YOU HOW GOOD IT IS.

CHERRY WHISKEY
I don’t even know if there’s some nasty cherry whiskey out there, considering we’ve got cherry liqueur, brandy, vodka, etc, but this’ll fit the bill and go down really smooth. Enough of these and you’ll break whatever holiday it is. Believe me, Sherman Ave broke MLK Day on these.

1 shot of HONEY whiskey (it has to be honey, and I prefer Jack Daniels)
Splash of gold rum
2 maraschino cherries
A bigger splash of the juice from the cherry jar
5 to 6 oz. coke

Be careful with these, please. The last time I imbibed these bad boys my roommate was not happy with their contents being deposited on my bed while I slept on the floor. Then I stole a friend’s camera and had an 11 image photo shoot by myself with a fire extinguisher. This shit is dangerous.

Goes great with skiing, family vacations, and the existential coldness of winter quarter.

CHOCOLATE SURPRISE
The surprise is how drunk you get, you fuck. HAPPY HOLIDAYS? Anyway, this is gonna be a great thing to sip on and get progressively more slutty. I hold no responsibility for your hookups.

1 shot crème de cacao
1 shot bailey’s
1 shot Kahlua
5 oz. rosemary simple syrup (boil 1 cup sugar and 1 cup water, take off heat and throw in a bunch of rosemary and let cool. Take out rosemary and then voila! syrup)
1 shot cream/whole milk.

Pour this over ice. Nothing is better than this, I swear. I’m sorry I can type so well when I’m drunk guys, but really. I made this based on an ice cream flavor at the Bent Spoon in Princeton, NJ, and that shit was really tasty so yeah… This happened.

ANYWAY, I hope you guys enjoy these drinks. Please for the love of all that is holy, do NOT do all of these drinks at once, because you’ll will end up flatter than a opossum crossing I-95. #southernjoke. OH WELL. HAPPY SPRING BREAK!

Things That Suck: Coffee

Coffee: Sir Twattingworth's anti-heroin

Fuck coffee.

I feel like a stranger in a strange land. Not because I’m the protagonist of a Robert Heinlein novel, but because I don’t drink caffeine. I’ll pause a moment to let your mouths fall agape as you shout “WAIT WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTT.”

True story. I’ve never drunk coffee in my life. Okay, wait, there was that one time when I was a curious young four-year-old and my dad let me taste his coffee and I was so horrified that I jerked violently and spilled it all over my Charlie Brown pajama pants. But other than that I have usually abstained from the black stuff. And from Red Bull. And Monster, too. Fuck that shit.

Final exams may be over at Northwestern, but I know there are a bunch of other poor unfortunate souls out there who still have to cram months’ worth of learning into their skulls before exams. As a result they may, in all their mortal vulnerability, be tempted to turn to the evil that is caffeinated beverages. I am here to hold up my hand and say the same thing I would say to anyone planning to read Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666: Don’t do it!

My body is like this temple, in that it is a temple.

That’s a picture of a temple. I included it in this article because, like the Baha’i Temple, my body is a temple. When I stay up till four in the morning writing a six page essay about what Henry David Thoreau would think about the Weather Underground, I do so simply on the sober strength of my own fucking willpower. I understand that if you start thinking about this metaphor, some obvious contradictions might jump out at you like the T-Rex face in my old dinosaur pop-up book. But I’ll remind you that most temples have alcohol in them. You can put wine into a temple without damaging it, and Christians have done so for ages. But something tells me that if you shot lightning at a temple to “give it energy,” you would really just blow up the temple. That’s my visualization of inserting caffeine into a human system.

Shoot a temple with lightning and it will never be intact again. Give me Red Bull and I will never sleep again. I have enough trouble as it is. The first time I stayed up past midnight on a day that wasn’t New Year’s Eve, it was all over for me. Once I crossed that threshold, it became impossible for me to ever fall asleep before midnight again. At night my productivity goes up, and I suddenly remember all the Grantland articles I wanted to read and all the episodes of Dragon Ball Z that I wanted to watch that I somehow forgot about during the daytime. Before I know it, it’s 2:30 and somehow the knowledge that I have to telemarket for three hours the next day doesn’t stop me from looking up YouTube clips of old Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches until my eyelids finally take executive action and shut themselves, only to be jarred awake hours later by an alarm just in time to swallow a mouthful of Cocoa Puffs before huffing it to my French class with all possible speed. No rest for the weary, and I am nothing if not weary.

I am not alone here. I have friends who drink coffee like it’s water. As a result, they go to bed at midnight and wake up at six every day. They think they’re fully functioning modern human beings. I think they’re more like zombie robots in danger of falling apart at any second. I don’t want to see that happen, so I’m finally coming out against the horrid black stuff.

She is hot. Coffee is awful.

That’s a subjective take on the general suckiness of caffeinated drinks, so I’ll throw in an objective approach as well. I feel like I shouldn’t have to mention this, since it is as inherently obvious as the blueness of the sky or the hotness of Kate Middleton, but caffeine is gross. Coffee is gross, and everybody secretly knows it. I’m not just talking about the people who pour mounds of sugar into their mugs to deaden their sorry souls to the fact that they’re drinking liquid poop. I’m talking about everyone. We all seem to have agreed to forget that coffee is disgusting, the way we all agreed to forget that George W. Bush was appointed President by the Supreme Court.

And not just coffee. Red Bull is gross too. I admit, I’ve tasted it a few times, and I’d sooner hang out with Michele Bachmann for a few hours than repeat the experience. But even if I hadn’t been capable of offering this personal testimony of awfulness, surely the list of ingredients – which looks like something Walter White might cook up in his basement to pay for chemotherapy – would probably be convincing enough. 4Loko actually tastes kind of good, but it’s illegal, so that’s a given. I won’t even talk about 5 hour energy drinks until they make better commercials. If my RTVF roommate could make a better commercial than the one you put on TV, you probably don’t deserve to exist, let alone be talked about in the valuable Internet real estate that is this website.

Would you rather drink coffee or eat poop?

I realize that this anti-caffeine argument is difficult. Sometimes the AP curriculum makes it seem as if the College Board just assumes that every AP student is injecting caffeine into their eyeballs (Either that or no one told them about the existence of time-consuming extracurriculars, but either way they’re a bunch of douchemuffins who gave me too much homework in high school). Then there’s the necessity of being a hipster in order to have any social currency in this hyper media-literate world. That means you need to read Pitchfork regularly and wear clothes originally designed for girls Europeans, but it mainly means that you need to spend a majority of your time in darkly lit indie cafes sipping black energy so you’re wide awake and prepared to unleash a shitstorm of ironic Tweets the next time Bon Iver releases a workout video. Caffeine has been so prevalent in our society for so long that we just accept it as a given fact of life. But the fact that people in the Eighties were accustomed to the idea of nuclear Armageddon didn’t make it okay. Nuclear holocaust is never okay, and neither is coffee, and don’t let Henry Kissinger tell you any different.

Society seems to have ordered its priorities like this:
1. Work
2. Sleep

But that is so, so wrong. Our society has forgotten the value of sleep. Let me tell you, there was one Saturday earlier this quarter when I slept until 3 pm. It was the greatest day of my life. We all need sleep to recuperate from the horrid heinousness of everyday life, and coffee prevents that. It sucks. Finals suck. Life sucks too. But you just need to get over it. Do it all natural or not at all, that’s my motto. Sleep well, my friends.

(And for those of you wondering about the fate of my aforementioned Charlie Brown pajama pants: They did not survive their encounter with coffee, and were promptly retired to the dustbin of history. The world is a worse place for it).