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Saturday, May 17

penguinos: despite the tuxes, not as classy as they used to be

As with most sophisticated adult-type dinner parties, ours typically deteriorate throughout the course of the evening until by the end, everyone's standing around using naughty-sounding words in Spanish to create new and highly inaccurate euphemisms for parts of the human body.

Specifically man-parts, of course.

Penguino was the word of choice last night. Spanish for penguin, penguino is an extremely versatile and incomparably useful naughty-sounding word that you should immediately insert into your vocabulary.

With penguino, you can make such statements as: "I'd like you to meet my penguino. I call him Steve. It's okay to give him a little pat, if you want." or "My goodness! Look at that guy's impressive penguino!" or "Excuse me, sir, you're going to have to put your penguino away right now. We're about to come through with the beverage cart."

The classy nature of our dinner parties is apparently also conducive to the development of strange dances that involve a lot of arm-flapping and haphazard waving around of Pacificos.

Last night, a little dance we call "The Penguino" was inspired by the admittedly excessive use of the word penguino - or maybe the excessive use of the word was inspired by the dance - I can't recall. It's that whole "the penguino or the egg or possibly just the alcohol" thing. In either case, if you keep your elbows close to the sides of your body and bend your forearms up so that your hands are up towards your head right around your shoulders, hold your palms out so that they face the other dinner guests, and wave them around a bit, you're doing The Penguino.

Now just because I'm encouraging you to learn The Penguino, it doesn't mean I'm okay with flightless, black-and-white water birds waddling around the patio during the spicy tuna kebabs, cilantro coconut rice, ginger-spiked fruit salad, and fresh pineapple cake, so don't you go getting any ideas. You whip out your penguino during my next swanky dinner party, Mister, and you'll be arm-flapping your way right out the front door.

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