Inventing this "game" is a dubious claim to fame

This was buried deep in a story recently published by the New York Times:

“While its exact origins are murky – some say Vermont, others St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. – the game gained early traction among fraternity brothers in the South.”

The story was referring to a drinking game.

Here's how the game goes: You hand someone a Smirnoff Ice – which is a malt beverage that tastes like a cross between a fruity soda and kerosene – and they have to get down on one knee and chug it. But if you hand the sickly sweet beverage to someone who already has one, you have to chug-a-lug both of the bottles.

This is hard to understand for a guy who went to college during simpler times. We didn't need silly games to get drunk enough to dance with a table lamp or confuse a candy dish with a toilet. We bought beer and drank it until we ran out, it was time to skip our 8 a.m. Non-Western World course, or someone was making out with a lightbulb while hosing down a bowl of Hersey kisses. Whichever came first.

Nowadays, on any given sunny day in a college town, you will find students out in their front yards throwing ping pong balls into cups of beer or bouncing quarters into shot glasses on a quest to win a game and force the losers to get drunk.

The “losers” have to drink. This is counter-intuitive to everything I know. Like I said, these drinking games are confusing.

And Icing may be the most incomprehensible of them all. First, you buy a drink that a wino in hallucinogenic withdrawal would turn down if you offered it to him. Then you give the drink away. You pay for a drink and then give it away. Why not just pass out dollar bills?

Also puzzling is the idea that you may end up having to drink a beverage you bought but don't want to drink. You could avoid this risk by not buying the beverage in the first place, but if you already made this mistake, the pretty obvious choice would be to give it to someone who didn't already have one of the bottles in his hand.

But my crack research team looked into this and told me it is not that simple.

Apparently, this game is not played at parties where it's obvious to see what someone is drinking. You might get iced while walking to class, standing at a bus stop, or sitting at a desk analyzing Elizabethan sonnets. So unless you have an Ice stashed in your backpack to thwart your “attacker,” you might find yourself drinking on the way to catch a bus for your Poetry 401 class.

Can I say this strongly enough: I DON'T GET IT. Games need to have some element of fun. This one sounds about as fun as analyzing Elizabethan sonnets.

I don't know where the big city reporter heard someone suggest that this inane drinking game might have started at SLU, but I am guessing it didn't come from the school's public relations department. I am sure everyone at the university is happy to give someone else credit for this dubious claim to fame.

Editor's note: You can read the complete New York Times article about Icing in the Money Matters section of the Times on June 27.