Thanks for the Words

You're welcome, Aaron-man. But your "thanks for the kind words" instantly put the following in my head. It's a hidden track on one of the David Cross albums. Now, the language is entirely NSFW (that's not safe for work, to those of you over 31), but it's good stuff. I give you, transcribed, the David Cross and Scott Stapp story:

So i was in Las Vegas recently... I was. I played poker with other non-celebrities like myself. Like, when you walk in, you're like, "Did a celebrity fall out? 'Cause somebody asked me to play this game..." And I can say, now I can say, conclusively, Scott Stapp: is an asshole! Hey, here's a funny story that I've only told, like, friends who have asked about it. Here's the thing: I - it's a little brief thing, then I'll get to what I was gonna talk about - and, for those of you who don't know, I played this Celebrity Poker thing that was on Bravo, and one of the people at the table was Scott Stapp who's the lead singer of the third worst band in history. And... here's the thing, though, I knew all the other players except for him 'cause I guess there was a fallout with somebody and he didn't get there til the night before and nobody knew who the other person was gonna be - they weren't keeping it a secret, they just didn't know, and they didn't want to say anything 'til it was confirmed - so i went down there, and I was hung over, everybody was, really super hung over. And I went down there to where we were gonna start shooting this thing, and I found out about it when I was in makeup, and literally had, like, fifteen minutes to go "Oh fuck!" 'Cause I have said the most *vicious* shit about that guy... like, on stage, and in print, and just... you know, there's just so many bands to choose from that are just awful and evil sellout, bullshit, fraudulent, you know, just fucking tenth grade suburban white girl bullshit. I swear to god, that guy hangs out at a fucking junior high school locker room outside the girl's locker room just writing down poetry he overhears, like "what? I will take you higher, okay. Good." Just that simplistic fucking pseudo-spiritual bullshit and, look, anybody who fucking on purpose takes their shirt off and oils themself down... to show you "Hey man, check out my hairy nipples!" So, you know, whatever, there's a myriad of reasons to despise that guy and what he does, but anyways, so I've said these awful things, and so I'm like "oh shit, that's a - that throws me for a loop, that's weird." So I go down to the floor; I have no idea if he knows who I am or any of this stuff, I have no clue. And I go down there and I go, like I'm talking to the other people, and then he's sitting at the table and everybody else is standing so I'm like, alright, well I gotta do this sooner or later. And again, no idea if he knows who I am or anything I've said, and I say, "Hi Scott, I'm David Cross," and he did that thing where... here, stand up for a second, c'm'here... like, go to shake my hand, and he goes, "Yeah... Thanks for the words."

Yeah, well, he knows, he knows. The mystery is answered. "Thanks for the words." Yeah. And then my reaction, which I'm kinda pleased with, I thought of so many things later to say, but I also liked just the honesty of it, was:

"Thanks for the words."

"Yeah, well..."

What are you gonna do? Have you listened to your albums? Listen to your albums while you're looking at a picture of yourself as you're reading an interview of you, and you'll know what I'm talking about. You'll get it, dude, you'll get it, don't worry about it.

That is all. This post is dedicated to Dan and his love of CREED.

More Practice...

Setelah tragedi senin berdarah yang lalu, akhirnya saya jalan sendirian di PMS, dan betewe busway dan so on,, kyaa... gak nyangka keknya bakalan training ulang deh bo'
"ngomongnya blepotan!"
"tone suaramu terlalu tinggi!!!"
"saya tidak dapat apa yang mau kau sampaikan sama pendengar"
"lebih slow lagi kalo ngomong"
pyuhhhhhh,,,
kya!!! dan betewe busway lagi,, semua orang nyangka saya stress. emang iya?? mmm,, gak juga sih. soalnya udah tau dimana kekurangannya dan apa yang mereka katakan emang gak ada yang salah. dan apa yang kita lakukan sekarang hanyalah latihan lagi.

"practice makes perfect"

seems so to me...

it's gonna be a long long long journey baby!!!

TWTWA, ctd.

Sunday, the Beck and I woke up early - GASP - and headed down to Aunt Chilada's for the Co-opted Pagan Spring Fertility Ritual* Brunch. Ay dios mio. THAT was an excellent brunch. Huevos rancheros, omelettes, chile con carne, Mexican rice, brown-sugar crusted bacon**, sausages, cinnamon-coated fried dough, AND fruits and pastries under a chocolate fountain. I'm having "I ate too much" pains just reminiscing. Another tremendous meal. WA-friggin-hoo.

(* So maybe I just noticed this for the first time because I'm, you know, a self-absorbed moron, but EVERYONE, from co-workers to cashiers to Walmart greeters to waitresses, wished me "Happy Easter" this weekend. I'm not offended, but I do find it interesting that with so much hoopla over the "Happy Holidays / Merry Christmas" pseudo-scandal that people would so blatantly ignore any sense of PC-ness when speaking of a holiday so drenched in overtones. In my mind, Easter is tied much closer to Christianity in terms of direct reference to beliefs than Christmas. Not to mention the whole Jews-as-crucifiers subtext in the passion narrative. So you would think that wishing a "happy easter" would be vastly more potentially antagonistic that "Merry Christmas." But it was done completely brazenly, at least in this Southwestern neck of the woods. I scared Beck by telling her that I would respond "and a happy co-opted pagan spring fertility ritual to you, too," to the next person who happy easter'ed me, but I didn't. I am, it turns out, an academic punk in spirit only. Or, you could say, the spirit is punk, but the flesh is adult contemporary non-offensive pop. Or something. )

** - Really - who looks at bacon and says, "Joe, we've GOT to improve this!"

The flowers were so pretty when I took my parents to the Phoenix Desert Botanical Garden that I wanted Beck to see them. And woah, they were out in even fuller bloom than before. Watch out - it's flower time AGAIN:

AHA! Join us next week on "The Ballad Frilly." Seriously, though, the garden is beautiful, and we picked a great day to traipse around with the other tourists. Fun times.

I capped off the Sunday with some pickup Ultimate that, for whatever, reason, was even more fun than usual. I managed to make the throw of my life, too - an inside out thumber, which in normal play would be a ridiculous stupid thing to throw, but on Sunday pickup hit Tricky in stride for a score perfect-style. Crazy. Got home for some delicious Sunday night dinner with the Beck. So yes, all in all, a spectacular weekend.

I will get back on the "recounting the visit" game at some point. But as I mentioned, Craig of Tufts fame is in town, so when he is not drinking it up with those other kooky rocket scientists, we will be getting into our own adventures. Which will probably involve, you know, hiking and Ultimate. CRAZY.

(And hear this: I pulled off my first fantasy trade of the new season in my Tufts league. McCann / Francoeur for Sheets / Hunter, and I got Ben and Torii. Whadya think?

A One-Act Interlude

More weekend to follow, but first (and Chris, you'll probably throw up a little upon reading this, be forewarned), just want to acknowledge that my brother Aaron, drama teacher extraordinaire in Austin, got dumped on a bit by The Fates this week. His high school performed at a UIL One Act competition, put on the performance of their lives and then got DQ'd for going *FOUR SECONDS* over the time limit. Just a crushing blow - all of that time spent rehearsing, all of that effort and dedication, and poof, dead and gone just like that. By being DQ'd. they are not permitted to go on to Regionals or State or any of the other competitions, AND all of their actors were eliminated for consideration for awards. This kind of thing has far-reaching circumstances beyond the immediate disillusionment- none of those kids can put any of these accomplishments on college resumes, so there may be some lost scholarship offers or what have you in addition to the pain of disappointment. So it feels terrible on the personal and theatric / artistic level and, on a practical level, additionally could be terrible for all kinds of practical reasons. UGH.

I don't bring this up for its "hey, look at the train wreck" aspects - I wanted to give props to my bro because he is doing a great job controlling a pretty disastrous situation. There are all kinds of potential blame games, ostracizing and ill-will that could come from this, but Mr. Aaron Wright is doing a fantastic job of creating a learning experience, trying to discern what happened as a teaching tool, and making sure everyone takes responsibility for their own actions, however they contributed to the screw-up. I.e., Aaron is being a teacher, and that is just super solid work.

So word, homes. Head up and all that, but I just wanted the readers - both of them - to know what a stand-up job you're doing as the temporary mayor of Craptown. Keep up the excellence.

Dan The Comedian and the Weekend That Was... AWESOME!

Just got this in my inbox from Dan, and it cracked me the hell up:

"Sometimes I just like to, you know, chill with my baseball. Lookin' all smoldery."

GG y'all, click that link.

Last weekend was fantastic. I worked a short shift Saturday morning, changed into shorts, t-shirt, tevas and Cubs hat after my last student left and waited for the Beck to pick me up. We headed down to a great Cubs-White Sox spring training game - even though we didn't leave north Scottsdale until 12:15 or so, we found a good parking spot and made it into HoHoKam park with plenty of time to spare. We sun-tan-lotioned up and took our seats in the left-field foul bleachers - it was a crispy 88 degrees or so, just a gorgeous day for baseball. Here's a shot of the opening lineups as posted before the game:

So we were getting to see more or less the real live starting lineups, not the usual crew of # 73s and 98s. Good deal. UNFORTUNATELY, Ted Lilly was pitching about 72 mph. You know how it's a little tough to follow major league pitchers fastballs and sliders? Not so much with Lilly. I had to check the ticket stub a couple of times to make sure we hadn't accidentally gone to the Cubs slow pitch softball extravaganza. As you can imagine, the White Sox roughed Teddy up quite a bit, and jumped out to a big lead. It didn't help that Soriano is supremely incompetent in left field. It probably won't show up in his fielding stats, but note that if there were a category for " outs turned into doubles and triples," Soriano could lead everyone. Egads. Vazquez was pitching for the South-siders, and he kept us in check for the first five innings. Here's Mike Fontenot getting something of a "what the hell was that?" hug from the third base coach after he just barely stole third with the heart of the Cubs order coming up:

I also noticed for the first time - how did I miss this last year? - that Fontenot is wearing Fatty Fat Grace's number! What??!?!? No love for the Mark. Next thing you know they'll let some "basketball player" wear Ryno's 23 in Chicago. For shame.

So Vazquez's luck ran out, and his relievers helped him not at all. The Cubs tied it up in the sixth with a slew of extra base hits - finally! Neato times were had in the seventh, when Kerry "the singular form of the noun is" Wood blew away the Sox. He's gonna close for the Cubbies this year, so we may get to party like it's 1998. Sweet. The rest of the game lagged a bit and fell into sloppiness, and ended in a 10 inning kiss your sister-fest, 8-8. But just an excellent game.

EXCEPT: for the row of dingleberries sitting in front of us. It was a fairly typical "pay money for tickets but then don't watch the game" type group, and they just drank 100 dollars worth of beer and gabbed and gabbed about anything and everything for the duration. The highlights came when they debated how they were going to get to both the bar and the church on Easter Sunday and, when informed of the Cubs' new right fielder Kosuke Fukudome, one of the girls asked, "is he related to that Matsui guy?" (To the group's credit, she was justly chided for that remark with the usual hyper-ironic "yes, they all look alike and they're all related" sarcasm). They were highly distracting. So boo on them.

Beck rather brilliantly packed our hiking gear, so we left the park and headed straight for the Superstition mountains. Just a gorgeous hike - we should go back there with in-town-for-a-rocket-conference friend Craig this weekend - and we got to come back down the mountain at sunset. Picture page, it's picture page:

If you check that bottom right pic, you'll get a sense of why the Phx Suns' colors are what they are. Oh, and yes - what post would be complete sans superhero?

So we hiked back through dusk and drove home, nabbing some Nello's pizza on the way. So Saturday was great -a little work, a little baseball, a beautiful hike and some pizza. We even watched a bit of the Darjeeling Limited, which beck predictable despised and I... review withheld.

This has been a gigantic post, so I will continue with Sunday in another.

(And yes, you've been waiting for this - *THIS* post is POST #300!!! Official, blogger post 300, 363 if you count those on the old site. SO huzzah - two years of blogging, and almost a post every other day. My mundane is your world!)

("My mundane is your world." I fine myself 30 pun points).