“Annnother rounds. And don’t make itsh all foam thithh time, you asssssssttthole.”

The bartender gives Eric Puligny a look up and down, considers tossing him out for the third time this week, but decides to take a little pity on the man. “Whatever you say, boss. Just don’t be drivin’ home from here, now.”

“Motherfucker, I’ll drive anywhere. I’ve got Garmin Geee-Peeee-Etttthhhhh on my iPhone. Fuckin’ triangulates me all the way home. Tri-anggg-youu-lates. You heard of that? I don’t need no front-facin’ camera to figure out how to get my ass back home.”

“How many times are you gonna name-drop that front-facing camera, Eric?”

“Until I find ssthome motherfucker dumb enough to drop their iPhone 4G right on my lap, so I can make mythelf 10 grand.”

He takes a long swig of his beer, then falls backwards off his barstool. When he lands on the floor, he quickly shouts, “I’m not drunk! I’m jussst lookin’ to see if anyone dropped their iPhone 4G down here! Looks like… Nope, nope, not yet. Barkeep, you wanna top this one off? Looks like stthomebody sthpilled a bit.”

Ever since Engadget and Gizmodo published the first details of the iPhone 4G this weekend, along with the caveat that they had “found the phone in a Silicon Valley bar,” most nights have been playing out like this for Eric. Not willing to let a scoop go unchased, he took the first flight out to Cupertino, where he booked himself a room at an airport Marriott, purchased an economy-sized bottle of aspirin, and began a pub crawl – in the name of serious electronics journalism.

So far, the luck hasn’t been on Eric’s side. His nights tend to start and end with him alone at the end of a bar, greedily eying everyone whose iPhone briefly sits on the bar, or is checked to settle an IMDB bet. Once, he thought he had a suspect cornered – a guy with a suspiciously customized iPhone case and an Apple T-shirt, who set his phone down briefly to play a round of darts. When the man returned to find Eric attempting to guess his passcode, Eric got his first black eye of this adventure in Silicon Valley.

Attempts by Hardcasual’s editors to dissuade Eric from his mission have so far been unsuccessful. When we told him what he was doing was, at the very least, immoral, and most likely highly illegal, he sent us back a terse email:

“How the fuck do you ever think you’re going to be the next Gizmodo if you don’t go around stealing phones? No wonder you guys can’t get a scoop to save your life – start thinking like Nick Denton. I’m gonna come back with a iPhone 4G in one hand, and maybe a wallet or two if I start running low on beer money, and you’ll thank me. You’ll thank me, dammit!”

At the time this article was published, he was sleeping off a hangover, but later today he planned on visiting the Apple campus, in the hopes of rifling through employees’ bags while they played frisbee on their lunch breaks.