While the Frank Bruni chose to rampage the country in search of chili slaw dogs and chocolate-covered cheeseburgers, I opted for Famous Fat Dave's Five Borough Eating Taxi Tour to conduct my million-calorie march. For the uninitiated, Famous Fat Dave is a self-described "pickle man/ cheesemonger/hot-dog vendor/food writer/cabbie who has eaten it all." Driving the cab since 2001, he soon started using his yellow chariot to offer informal, unmetered, scale-tipping culinary tours of fair city.

Sensing this was not a solo mission, I enlisted comedian David Wain (Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, The State) and my wee roommate Becca Greene, of The Royal We. The last minute addition of actor/writer Ken Marino, another alum of The State and partner with David on The Ten movie, made sure we were cramped — and illegal — with a total of five passengers in the taxi.

David Wain likes pickles.

Famous Fat Dave has several specialty tours to choose from and he planned to take us on a four-hour "Midnight Munchies" loop that was guaranteed to rock our bowels. He cautioned that we would encounter a full range of emotions: anticipation ("I can't wait to slurp down the yolk of an ostrich egg; I hear it can keep you hard for hours"), excitement ("roast beef and cheese whiz, holla!), nervousness ("donde esta los banos?"), over-indulgent shame ("someday I plan to volunteer for the real meals-on-wheels program"), unrequited love ("damn you sweaty shwarma, what about my feelings?"), gutsy determination ("I will own your sweet-pickled ass"), relief ("plop plop, fizz fizz"), and satisfaction ("I am safe in bed now").

The tour started at 10th Street and Fifth Avenue, just a bit after 10 p.m. We were off to Brooklyn, and there were in-taxi appetizers for the ride — the palette cleansing duo of pickles and cheese. FFD used to work at Guss' Pickles and so knows his way around a sweet or sour barrel. He can talk for hours about pickles, but fortunately it was only minutes later when we moved on to the sweet sheep's milk of Ewephoria Gouda. A good start; our collective mood was split between "why am I here?" and "I hope I have something to write about."

Get tartar sauce in a cab and someone's bound to reference Travis Bickle and "cleaning the cum." Let's attribute that one to Mr. Wain, right after delivering the first fart of the night.

First stop was Henry Street Ale House in Brooklyn Heights for fried pickles and tartar sauce. Hot enough that you almost forget what you're eating until the fried casing slips off. Here Ken offered his simple eating philosophy: "Fry it up, I'll eat it." After deep probing of the considered possibilities, his list included asparagus, apples, cactus, and even chicken.

Wain's Sweet Math Skills: "Fried candy = doubleplusgood."

We skip straight to dessert when we arrive at the Atlantic Chip Shop to eat fried Twix and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Twix was the overwhelming favorite, mostly likely due to its cookie-center that preserved shape and crunch. Fried Reese's, on the other hand, had a gooey exoskeleton quality to it.

Famous Fat Dave: "Spumoni Gardens is the spiritual center of Bensonhurst."

Ken Marino would dip his balls in the pizza if he could.

Spumoni Gardens, a Brooklyn landmark, is the place to go for the best Sicilian thick slice and spumoni, an ice cream treat served in squeeze cups. It has a large outdoor patio (FFD: "This place is straight outta Grease") that, while mostly empty a bit after 11 p.m. on a Wednesday night, is disco magic on a weekend. By which I mean crowded, loud, and sweaty. After much communal consumption and swapped spit-takes, we concluded this was not a tour for germophobes.

We put that concept to a greater test at Sahara in Gravesend where we inadvertently made a shwarma sex tape.

Here's some dark, grainy food porn: It looks like we're performing cunniligyro on each other. We were bonding like a family unit, even if the night increasingly felt like an awkward foster-home field trip or The Surreal Life: Taxi Edition. On the emotion scale, David noted we were "just hitting our shroom groove."

This man did not order the Veggie Medley.

It was after midnight, and we were off to cruise Sheepshead Bay — which none of us joyriding passengers had visited before. Oh what a sight at night: foggy lights shimmering off the water, rows of boats, empty streets, stories of burned bridges and Andrew Dice Clay getting his start here at Pip's. Did I mention the water and boats? We half-expected Robert De Niro to be strapped to the car's undercarriage. It was a good setting for Ken to tell us about Diggers, his soon-to-released movie about clam diggers on Long Island's South Shore in 1976. Think Diner, but with clam diggers on Long Island's South Shore in 1976. And, one hopes, without Steve Guttenberg.

Let the good times Roll-n-Roaster.

We pull into the famous Roll-n-Roaster parking lot right as The Cars' "Let the Good Times Roll" begins on the radio and the magic moment wasn't lost at any of us. Ken farted. We came here for one reason: roast beef-and-Cheez Wiz sandwiches. We were not disappointed. Can I say "party in your mouth" with a straight face? No, I cannot, but that was the general consensus as we mainly moaned and gutturally groaned with gluttonous glee. Too bad the locals mocked us. They could smell the Manhattan in our hair and clothes.

Here, a retro Roll-n-Roaster commercial.

Things get a little hazy from this point. Next on the a la carte menu was fried cigarette, an Eastern delicacy flavored with oregano, which was supposed to hold us over during the ride to Flushing. Did it? Tough to tell with the other distractions. Fog is an occupational hazard to be expected. And late-night construction, we all realize, can lead to traffic snarls. But unfettered flatulence and getting lost are not, I thought, usually part of the bargain. We hit all four. Hell was breaking loose and to make matters worse, every radio station played Van Halen. Text messages and calls to loved ones increased.

Here's Famous Fat Dave with a street map at a gas station. So psyched.

On the emotion scale, we were at "I hope my dead body doesn't end up in the trunk."

Flushing, 1:40 a.m.

Miraculously, we arrived safe and subdued at San Hai Jin Mi to sample Korean beef bulgogi. FFD swears by this place and engages in spirited, if untranslated, conversations with the staff. While the rest of us slowly picked at the beef, his enthusiasm refused to die and he suggested we extend the tour to another part of Queens for a "pork truck" and the "worst part of New York" for broccoli rabe. This prompted Ken to wonder if we could go to LeperTown for knishes, a clear sign the better course was to head back to the city.

H&H Bagels, Broadway and 80th, 2:30 a.m.

On the home stretch with Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" running through our minds, we held a celebratory shoeless dance-off and split hot bagels before the staff lectured us about their photo-snapping and shoes policy. It was a bittersweet end to a truly weird night.

Weird, I said. Yes. But also recommended, highly. Final emotion: "Mama, I'm coming home." To take a big dump.

Famous Fat Dave blogs as The Hungry Cabbie and recently joined Gothamist as a food contributor. The Stella DVD will be out in September and The State's is slated for "soon."

Nothing brings out the drunken college kids like the first vaguely warmer days of spring. (We drunken out-of-college kids drink proudly and consistently, heedless of weather.) So suddenly, here they are. And they're confusing us. To help us understand the folkways of this exotic tribe, we asked Gawker Mascot and amateur anthropologist Andrew Krucoff to don his trusty pith helmet, enlist earnest documentarian Nikola Tamindzic, and head to the remotest depths of the Central Village — the native habitat of this unusual people — to investigate. After the jump, his reports of beer pong, fake IDs, and the dreaded Look of Shame.

The month of March can be a rough one for college students — there's a cruelly calculated collision of midterms, formals, St Patrick's Day, thawing temperatures, Spring Break, and the NCAA basketball tournament. It's the time of year that fungus grows wildly on bedrock advice like, "You can always re-take a class but you can't re-live a party." Madness, thy name is earned.

To re-enter that world I left so many half-baked moons ago, I enlisted Streeter Seidell, co-author of CollegeHumor.com's soon-to-be released Guide to College, to organize a pleasant, nocturnal walking tour (OK, "bar crawl"), blogger Manhattan Transfer who knows a thing or two about local drinking establishments, and Dodgeball Maps to track our activity through the evening. Please join us and watch your step on the NYU Vomit Trail.

After a brief warm-up at College Humor's Tribeca HQ (#1, 9:16PM) for ping-pong and The Warriors stand-up arcade style (basically an XBox shoved into a branded console cabinet) we were led by an NYU sophomore to Lafayette Hall (#2, 9:55PM). If we are to believe the Hong Kong Student Association's Guide to NYU, then "Lafayette is located in Chinatown and is known as the party dorm." These are two facts which we will not dispute.

Entry past security was tougher than boarding Air Force One, and I expected a psychological evaluation before entering. When we eventually got to the gate and wiggled our way back to coach, we were rewarded with miles of (drum and joint roll)... COLLEGE!!!

The Violet Femmes of NYU were cradling 40s of Coors Light. Always classy, sometimes gassy.

The ubiquitous rounds of beer pong. I never quite figured out if they were playing NYU Rules or North Jersey Style.

But in any variation of the game, girl-on-girl boob licking is highly encouraged as a means to distract your opponent and enthrall the crowd.

Or, if you ask nicely and promise not to touch, free peeks might be available. Also, if you couldn't tell by now, that's a Slip-n-Slide tacked to the wall.

The Patron Saint of College Binge Drinking, John 'Bluto' Blutarsky, hangs on the wall as a subtle reminder that it's OK to fondle breasts when wearing a Lance Armstrong wristband.

SOCIALLLLL (!!!) networking is cool, apparently. Facebook.com has facilitated over 1,000,000 sexual acts by consensually drunk students.

Now for a brief interruption to tell you about two new classes from the Gawker Course Catalog:

Applied Drunkenomics: The Bong Tail Theory
The era of the "blockbuster" party is over and the price elasticity of the Pleasure Principle has been stretched and snapped into the millions of niche gatherings at the shallow end of humanity. Guest speakers include Wired's Chris Anderson and Drink Club's Mykel Board

Card Game Theory for Dormies
Studies the competitive and (mostly un-) cooperative behavior that results when several parties with opposing interests must work together to avoid cock-blockage and debt collectors. Learn how to use card game theory to analyze situations of potential conflict for maximum exploitation. Final exam involves throwing a card through a watermelon rind.

So the pre-game portion of the evening was over and it was time to hit the mean streets. Have 20 people in tow? Leave the pros at home and stink-up the 6 train from Canal to Astor Place.

We became "those people" when Mr. Freshman decided to show off his monkey bar skills and spilled the beer deftly hiding in his coat. Even a homeless man moved away from us.

We arrived safely, if not entirely dry, and after the requisite good luck spinning of the Astor Place cube for better lays, we headed to Roll-n-Roaster (#3, 11:47PM). Neighborhood blogs like Gothamist and Curbed don't write about it, but the Sheepshead Bay institution has an admirable outpost in the East Village. It may become our new home. Why?

Answer: $3.75 pitchers of beer!! (I mean, iced tea, dear NYU officials.) Plus, food fit for the intestinal fortitude of Tony Soprano. This picture is obviously the evening's money shot. Three points, all fishnet. It reeks sweetly of college on every level.

Next we headed to Euro-football hangout Nevada Smith's (#4, 12:26AM), Man U-obsessed by day but NYU-infested at night, where we were greeted by a bouncer who was stingier than Petr Cech in goal. All but a few of us were booted by the legal ID test so we took our red-faced cards to Cooper 35 Asian Pub (#5, 12:35AM) where the barrier to entry was considerably lower.

As was the talent, but we made creepy, crawly friends.

Cleavy ones, too.

This breast thing is nearly impossible to escape. Unfortunately the too polite faux-lesbo vibe to this picture would even make their parents approve.

We gave one last salute to Asian Pub and a toast to the girl who made me order her a "woo-woo" but then refused to drink it. Note: this is poor form no matter how young or old you are. D minus.

Last stop of the evening was at Josie Woods Pub (#6, 1:21AM), the Rheingold-standard in underaged undergrad NYU bars. A basement level place described here as "Probably the worst bar I've ever been to, but NYU youngsters and guys huntin' illegal tail seem to love it here. But for anyone with an ounce of class or the desire to not be ogled like you're in a porno, go somewhere else." In other words, this place was awesome.

These guys were with us all night and talked a good game of how easy it is to hook up. "Dude, NYU is the best college for guys. 60/40 girl/guy ratio and 30 percent of the guys are gay. Do the math." Hold on to your abacus, fellas. The interlocking chug of brotherhood solves another equation. Better known as the "the null set."

On the other hand, if you really want to impress a girl, the best make-out sessions are usually held in locations with high sanitation standards. Like bathrooms.

And the subway.

As for the rest of us, who knows. I can only speak for myself — I passed out on my couch nuzzling with a doner kebab sandwich. Got the Look of Shame from my roommate the next morning.

Just like college.

Earlier:
Gawker Walker Tour: The Horror of the Meatpacking District
Gawker Walker Tour: Michael Musto's Gay Chelsea