Monday, June 28, 2010

Quick laugh

Click here for a quick laugh if your sense of humor hasn't progressed since the third grade.

Submitted by a fabulous local Durham contributor.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

What they are watching... Episode VIII

Our look at what the teens and tweens of America are watching. You may have caught some of our earlier episodes [scroll down]. This is the latest viral video sweeping Orange County, North Carolina.

Fellas: Love your body more

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Response for Joanne Re: Carbs

Joanne recently commented on my nutritionist rant:

joanneaspinall said...

I have a stupid question out of ignorance: are all carbs equal? You said you toss on cereal and sorbet to add carbs at the end of the day. Is there a difference between sugary carbs (sorbet) and other carbs (pasta)? I've always heard to eat pasta the night before a tourney, but no one has ever said sorbet would also work. I partly ask because we (Keith and I both grew up with Italian mothers) probably eat way too much pasta.

Here's a long-winded response sans citation that broke the 4096 comment character limit. Fwiw:

I wouldn't call that a stupid question at all, and it's actually somewhat enlightening that the nutritionist herself failed to differentiate. The short answer is no, not all carbs are equal - among other things, soluble and insoluble fibers are carbs (and get counted as such in nutrition info), but you get no calories from fiber by definition. So any notion that increasing fiber alone would help you with energy is nutty on face. The distinction that you're making is the classic "simple vs. complex" (mono- or disaccharides vs. polysaccharides), and true enough, these carbs aren't the same. But the nutritionist recommended "fruit juices" as a carb supplement, and those are mainly fructose, a simple sugar. So it's a solid question regarding carbo-loading and pasta - allow me to provide a long-winded explanation.

This is one of those instances where "it depends what you mean by healthy." You can read all of this stuff in reputable online sources, but here's a quick Nyet-guide:

The story you usually get is that whole grains with complex carbohydrates are just "better for you." This is because whole grains tend to:

1. Have more fiber
2. Have more nutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc.)
3. Get absorbed by the body more slowly
4. Result in lower and less "dramatic" spikes in insulin.

For 1 and 2, if you need more fiber / nutrients, then yes, eating the complex will be better. This is largely an efficiency concern - if I'm going to eat, say, 2000 calories of carbs, and my choices are to eat them with or without the nutrients/fiber, all things being equal, I should eat them with the nutrients/fiber. You can also eat your 2000 calories in simple sugars and take supplements, but this is less efficient - you just have to do more eating/consuming - and the bioavailability of the nutrients when eaten this way can be limited (e.g., you'll just pee out a good portion of super-multivitamins).

For 3 and 4, it's really an issue of satiety. Sodas (or even fruit juice, really) will give you a rush and then make you crash, needing more sugar, and this is pretty tightly coupled to your insulin reaction. So you're hungrier again sooner. For non-athletic health purposes, you want low insulin reactions largely just so that you won't want to eat too soon - frequent hunger = frequent eating = more overall calories. And if you take in more calories than you consume of any form, you'll store a limited amount of that energy as glycogen (in the liver and muscles) , but then the rest will be converted to fat.

This last point, the inter-convertibility of all of these energy sources by your body's metabolism, is the point that gets lost. When the concern in energy, it's important to remember that these biochemicals are all being changed into one another, so the initial source is not necessarily as dramatically important. Polysaccharides take longer to digest because they have to be broken down to glucose or other mono- / di-saccharides to be absorbed into the bloodstream and generally used as a fuel. So when you eat complex carbohydrates, you have to break them into simple ones before you can use them. The classic way to teach yourself this is to chew on a saltine for a long time - it's starchy, but there are enzymes at work in your mouth that will break those starches down to monosaccharides, so eventually (if you chew long enough), it will start to taste sweet. It'll also dry out your mouth; have fun!

Anyways, simple sugars, for the general non-athletic population, are "bad" because they don't have as many nutrients (hence "empty" calories) , they tend to make you eat more calories (because you're hungrier more often), and when you eat too many of them they'll be converted to fat. So dieticians recommend complex carbs accordingly. Another issue that I'll leave out here is the processing of complex carbs - remember, the "healthiness" isn't strictly from the carbs themselves but from the associated fiber/nutrients, so if you have starchy foods that have been overly-processed, you're possibly not really getting benefits even though you are strictly speaking eating complex carbs. I'm thinking McDonald's french fries here, which are starches no doubt, but have been stripped of anything good and holy that was originally in the potatoes.

But as a carbo-loading athlete, you're generally not worried about nutrients / fiber in your "extra" carb calories as you'll be getting those in your regular diet. And eating things that fill you up too quickly or make you tend to not want to eat a lot can actually interfere with you getting enough calories - and really, eating a ton of extra fiber with your extra carb calories can mess with your digestive system; less than ideal for an endurance athletic event. So "health" in this case isn't focused on the same issue - here, it's about what will maximize my glycogen stores in my liver and my muscles to help fuel me throughout the following day. And anything you eat will eventually be converted to glucose and replenish those glycogen stores, but 1, carbs will do it more efficiently, and 2, complex or simple carbs will do the trick roughly the same.

Now, that's not to say you should just drink coke the night before a tournament - that will give you bad insulin spikes and goof you up with acute sugar rushes. You still want to eat stuff with relatively low glycemic indices like pasta. But fruits - even mango tangerine sorbet - and starchy cereals - e.g., cheerios instead of fruity pebbles - won't give you those insulin spikes because they actually consist of a fair mix of complex and simple sugars. So, for the purposes of replenishing glycogen stores, which is what health means here, the difference between simple and complex carbs is not as important. And oftentimes, it's just faster to eat a lot of cereal than to eat pasta.

That's probably enough. There's lots of stuff out there about the best ways to carbo-load. Its benefits are probably exaggerated for non-pure endurance sports like Ultimate - you can manage your glycogen stores throughout a tourney just by eating throughout the day (which you can't do as easily during a marathon). Sure, it's better to start at max capacity, so eating the night before and morning of are good ideas, but eating a lot of pasta the night before and munching on smart start throughout the day at a tourney are not going to be all that different.

Again, there are a lot more scientific-y things to read out there. And I would give myself an F on this paper for not citing any of my evidence. But this is the way I think about it, which again, makes the nutritionist's recommendation to "increase my carbs" just seem wacky - I'm eating a ton of them already, certainly more than I need to replenish my glycogen stores in both muscle and liver on a daily basis. UGH!

Hope that helps!

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Food-Bloggin' / The Perils of Nutrition(ists)

First thing's first: crack open your last book of the New Testament and take ye some notes, because moons are blood red and horsemen are saddling up: The Beck has started a blog. It's called Cooking For Elaine and is based on a simple yet awesome premise - our L.A.-homed Rice friend Elaine wanted to know how to eat well and variously, and Beck knows exactly how to do that sort of thing with aplomb. So Beck was posting her recipes on facebook after cooking each night, and Elaine was living a sort of Nyetverse, time-lag existence, copying our meals a day later. And after about the fourth post, the Beck asked,"wouldn't it be nice to keep this separate from my daily activities / wouldn't it be nice to have a record of the things I cook for those days when I am not as inspired?" So she started up the blog, and voila. I'm encouraging her to backpost some recipes from the previous weeks and hopefully also some "greatest hits" sorts of meals from the past, which I suppose violates the exact spirit of things, but I think would be a great resource. All of this is to say check out Beck's blog* and comment away; should be a good time and a fun resource.

* - As soon as I am done writing this, he wrote self-referentially, I will put a link to CFE up to the right. Beck has a perma-link to my blog under the subsection "Fun Blogs" (to distinguish it from "Food Blogs!"), which puts a lot more pressure on me to be a fun individual with cool, engaging content, rather than the snarling / spiking negative-nellie yang of the two-headed Sprawl captainship I've been of late. So much pressure! I'll do my best...

My initial temptation was to parody a CFE post here and have just a picture of a lean pocket or something*, but my culinary adventure this afternoon steered me away. Allow me to explain... they say people don't change, but maybe Beck will back me up here - I really have been making a concerted effort to eat new things and in more variety of late. We tried to figure out the other night from what this stemmed - whether it was one night where Beck inspired me to try the tart froyo, or whether two solid months of the same breakfast / lunch combo finally drove me to seek out some spice-of-life. But lately, I've been eating hot sauces, pepper, yogurts, pineapple, strawberry-shakes, etc., all kinds of things you never would have guessed in the past. I've always had an "I'll try anything once" attitude - again, Beck can attest - but more of them have been sticking lately. I even ate some onions (begrudgingly) out of a tortilla soup (another thing I probably would not have tried in the past) recently, and did not die. So hooray for making changes in my middle age; whether it was weight-loss-inspired** or no, I've been living with gustatory gusto lately, and I'll take it.

* - I'll cut Frank off here by reiterating that I just love me some Lean Pocket; they served me really well in my weight-loss program, and they're tasty, protein-rich meals that couldn't be easier to prepare / savor. I'm not under any pretense that they're great food - they could certainly use less sodium, among other things - but for what they are, they mos def*** get the job done. I actually wrote my friends at LP inc. recently and thanked them for their effective product, and they rewarded me with what ended up being coupons for three free boxes of LPs. Woohoo! And I've rediscovered my love of the Mexican-Style Chicken & Cheese LP (not to be confused with the Ween-style Chocolate & Cheese LP). Even on sale at 2 for $1.99, it's not quite as good of a deal as the 12 pepperoni LPs for $9.99, but I'll take the sixteen cent hit for the, hey, whaddyaknow, variety.

** - Some things I neglected to mention in the recent self-congratulatory narci-fest post on weight-loss. Skip this if you're tired of hearing / thinking about this topic, which I am pretty sure I am thinking about too much (more on that below):

1. Substitution helped, too - I know I noted that I "ate the same stuff," but upon reflection, I did make some significant changes. I put sorbet and frozen yogurt strictly in place of ice cream, burrito bowls in place of burritos, egg whites in place of eggs, turkey in place of beef, cheese pizza in place of pepperoni, low-sugar oatmeal in place of regular,etc. It took some doing, but I relatively quickly got to the point where my tastes were oriented towards the substitute. I.e., regular oatmeal tasted very sugary; ice cream seemed too thick. (I've had a couple of milkshakes at zinburger lately that, while extraordinarily delicious, just struck me as indulgent - I enjoy my homemade protein shakes at home almost as much, and they have to be half the calories). I bring this up here because the "trying new things" phase as has been brought about in part by my efforts to substitute, which I suppose makes sense. And it really does seem like once one thing fell - hey, vanilla yogurt isn't bad at all! - lots of other "exotic" things that I would not necessarily have been drawn to previously started making headway, too. Like mango tangerine sorbet. Who am I anymore?

2. I mentioned this, but "do not self-deny" served as a good guide, too. Paul asked me recently something to the effect of "didn't you get hungry?," and the short answer is yes, originally, but I got past that by just controlling the situation. If I got hungry, I could eat chips or whatever, I just had to dole them out in rationed fashion beforehand and be careful. And again, the routine breakfast / lunch combos left me plenty of margin for error in the afternoons, so even if I got hungry, I could play the "just wait until you get home game" and then dive into a caloric snack.

3. Speaking of chips... don't eat chips. No, really, nonchalant munching was a habit I just had to break - those free chips and salsa at the Mexican joints add up quickly. It is very hard to count tortilla chips, so this was one thing I just had to outlaw. And oddly enough, I haven't really had the heart to go back to them... sadness.

4. I'll shut up about this - but I used the word "discipline," and that probably only gets at part of what I mean. Adhere to a set of rules and be disciplined about it, sure. But also have the self-knowledge that you will undoubtedly screw up at times, too. So make the dietary attack an all-out attack - do little things in almost every aspect of eating / exercising. More exactly, try to, because you will goof on occasion. It's better to goof on 10% of the mutlitude of things you are trying than to goof 10% of the time on the singular change, as the latter - it seems to me - can devolve into a relapse, whereas the former is just one mistake against a background throng of improved behaviors.

Example - a player who will remain nameless was talking to me about weight-loss before the scrimmage the other morning, asking for advice and strategies. And I mentioned all of this, including this last point - make the changes broadly, in everything that you're doing, particularly when you can control it. Fast forward... we're at pizza later, and said player skips on the cheese pizza in favor of the meaty "man" pizza. Not to indict him, but the difference between a cheese slice and a fully loaded meat-lover's slice is not insignificant, and it's an easy change to make relative to some of the other ones. This little event just re-emphasized the need to be holistic in approach - details will get dropped, but if you embrace the "reduce calories" mantra in all aspects, your disciplined moments will more tightly compensate your lapses.

** - Why yes, we are watching The Wire, why do you ask?

These things come with a price, of course. I just tried to cook corn on the stovetop. I put a smattering of olive oil on the top to avoid singing the corn too badly, but I got distracted by a Sparkle, and next thing I knew I had burned the olive oil onto the pan. D'oh. The corn eventually turned out okay, but there's a Cajun style frying pan in our sink that I have thus far failed to clean. So, um... the adventure has its consequences, good and bad. Sorry to the Cooking For Elaine webmaster.

Sticking with the food motif, I continue to struggle to recalibrate my diet in the maintenance phase - I feel like I'm going up and down a lot, and probably not eating enough during big periods of exercise. So there's more work to be done. But a line that was kinda buried in the weight-loss post stands out to me now:

"I do have lots of energy most of the time, though I definitely crash now and then."

This crashing has been worse and more frequent than usual over the past month or so. Before I go on, don't get all alarmed - nothing all that serious can possibly be going on, as I'm still routinely playing lots and lots of frisbee, and running long distances, and even attending tournaments at 7,000+ feet in Flagstaff with absolutely no energy problems whatsoever. So this can't be something globally or even generally wrong with the Nyet-machine. It's just that some days - including today, actually (I tried to rally and get to school today, but just couldn't do it - I'll see how I feel in a bit and perhaps head back to the doctor if some food and drinks don't make me feel better) - I feel drained, get to the gym and am not just tired but can't even get a workout going at all - just nothing in the tank. Given the shape I'm in, that I feel like I am eating enough, etc., this was a little worrisome, so I checked in with the docs on campus, had blood work, blah blah blah, etc. Predictably, nothing is wrong. Actually:

My resting pulse is back down at 41.
My BP is a nice 108/68.
My cholesterol is 168 (HDL: 79, LDL: 81).

All of the obvious stuff - anemia and relateds (rbc's, reticulocytes, hemoglobin, hematocrit, iron, b12, folate), thyroid, hydration, etc., was normal. Again, as expected; you can't exactly be crazy anemic and suddenly perform better at altitude. So the docs had little to help me. In their defense, the problem seems 1, weird, and 2, difficult to isolate: I probably haven't been getting enough sleep, drink too much caffeine, don't eat enough / the right things, have been stressing about things school and Sprawl, and am maybe working out too much. Any or all of these could be contributing, so it's probably just a situation where I need to improve things across the board and will hopefully see improvements. Which is good, because, you know, autoimmune anemia would have been annoying.

The biggest, most obvious thing, just to keep rambling about the same topic, is my food - I've lost weight and have started having a problem that I didn't have before. I relayed all of this, and the recommendation was to see a nutritionist. So, begrudgingly - you've seen a bit of my thoughts on popular notions of "health" as well as the seemingly always changing recommendations of professional dietitians - I adopted a good attitude and yesterday went in to see if a nutritionist could help.

She could not.

I'll cut this would-be rant* short - she showed me the same charts and formulas for calculating calories that I've seen online, told me things about glucose and glycogen that aren't entirely true, and recommended a GPS / heart monitor if I wanted to get detailed about calorie counting. (The one she rec'ed retails at roughly $350 - SOLID!). She recommended more fruits and veggies, and when asked what they would provide that I was missing in my currently detailed diet, she had nothing other than that they were "natural." She also recommended organic products as they "don't have so many chemicals in them." I.e., she pulled off an extraordinarily stereotypical nutritionist act and spoke in effective platitudes throughout. This was hella frustrating, and did not enlighten me in any way. UGH.

* - Okay, okay - as the Beck noted, I've got to cut her some slack, as I am perhaps in the 99th percentile of knowledgeable = annoying patients. I came in with this to cut off talk of a food journal or such:

Overall Bar Graphs

Loss Phase Graphs

Maintenance Phase Graphs

AND I showed her the e-mails of food records, gave her examples of protein / fat / carb breakdowns, fiber intake, etc. Like I've noted a thousand times, Nyet = big nerd, so I gave her a ton of detailed data to work with. And this is on the one hand good, as it gives her an opportunity to get past the usual first-stages data-gathering process of deciphering a problem because all of the info is already there. On the other hand, it completely put her on the spot - she thought she was doing an initial consult, but I came in with five months worth of data for her to analyze and devise a responsive plan to on the spot. So I was probably unfair. Still... see below.

What *killed* me, though, was the final recommendation. She gave me this story about my glycogen stores being overly-depleted (when I asked her why the same routine didn't give me any trouble when I was carrying more weight and eating fewer calories than now, speculating that my lack of fat now leaves me with less reserves, she replied that "fat doesn't matter for working out." Right...). So the $300 (probably) consultation got me the advice to "eat more carbs." Note my quote from the previous weight-loss post:

"Of course, 3000 calories is now WAY more than I'm accustomed to eating, so I find myself just tossing on cereal and sorbet at the end of the day to compensate for my now-screwed sense of pace."

You'll note that cereal and sorbet are almost entirely carbs. Or you could just note the food diary entry which I showed her (breakdowns are calories (fat/non-fiber carbs/protein)):

oats - 220 (2/44/6)
foc - 120 (2/50/4)
milk - 135 (0/20/12)
ewpc - 60 (0/3/10)
pbg - 190 (7/28/5)
g2 mini - 45 (0/12/0)
clif (p) - 270 (8/30/20)
choc mousse - 60 (3/9/1)
lp - 260 (8/35/12)
MoJo - 675 (2/160/19)
lemonade - 30 (0/1/0)
Dinner - 575 (9/76/54)
Corn x 2 - 250 (4/54/9)
Broc - 30 (0/6/2)
Chicken - 230 (5/0/43)
Pineapple - 65 (0/16/0)
mango tangerine - 200 (0/53/8)
hnc + milk - 400 (5/76/15)
popsicle - 15 (0/4/0)
------------------------
total - 3230 (46/601/166) - (414/2404/664:3482) - (12/69/19)

And note that on this fairly typical day, I got 69% of my calories from carbohydrates. 69%! I'll spare you the chore of digging through the internet to learn that the recommended diet for a full-time athlete is, yep, 70% carbs. I'm not a full-time athlete!

So really, she told me nothing. Or she told me something weird: to add carbs onto an already carb-intensive diet. So I suppose I'll try it, but the visit was disappointing at best. The thing that offends is the pretense of expertise which, as far as I could gather, turned out to be familiarity with a series of quips, all of which are either easily accessible "knowledge" or things that don't necessarily seem to apply to my particular situation. She was plenty nice and eager to help, and I shouldn't really blame her if it's nutrition science that's lacking and/or my weird symptoms that are defying an easy dietary fix. My well-ingrained skepticism gives me an itchy trigger finger in these domains, I suppose.

Of course, this bring us back to the beginning - Beck, Cooking For Elaine crafter, foodie, perpetual voice of more optimistic reason, SLF-extraordinaire - urged me to forgive the nutritionist, just take her advice on face, and try to eat more generally, and more carbs in particular. Fair enough; I'll give it a go. Beck also notes that nutritionists are probably like psychiatrists in that it's more important than with, say, a surgeon, to find one that shares your worldview. Solid point. In the meantime, I'll continue to play with my diet AND benefit from Beck's awesome cooking. SCORE. Actually, the plan is to eat at the local, recently-opened Two Hippies Pizza tonight, so I'll ask for extra crust or something. Sorry, Elaine; unless you're coming to PHX, apparently you're on your own for food for Thursday night... :)

Monday, June 21, 2010

Salt on a SLUG Streak / Sprawl-outs

SLUG before the game

That's a shot of the cleanly set fields before our more-or-less-weekly Saturday morning Scrimmage for Lunch Ultimate Gauntlet, aka SLUG. It's an attempt at having a consistently competitive game for the top players in the Valley of Sunny Azz, though it rarely turns out that way. We all come out, bring five dollars each, try to set the teams as evenly as possible, and the losers end up effectively buying the winners lunch. It's two games to thirteen, and if we're tied after two, we play a straight up game to three overtime. By force of severe luck*, my record at these games has been WICKED streaky - five wins in a row, four losses in a row, ten wins in a row (all the games, incidentally, in 2010 thus far). SO that's 15-4 over the past year-or-so, revealing that 1, this game is perhaps not as weekly as I thought, and 2, that people should mayhaps not let me set the teams so often. :)

* - I'm pretty sure I've already tread this ground on the Ballad, but the consensus is that I'm a weird matchup - not fast enough to square off against the speedsters, but faster / squirlier / generally more impact-ful than the other handlers. I don't know. Whatever it is, I've dutifully churned the excess money back into the Sprawl bin and / or charity hat tournament funds and / or Sunday pickup incentives, so I don't feel too bad about it. Regardless, as Justin Griesy Gries recently insisted, one person can't change the course of a game on his own, so I'm sure it's an aberration, and regression to the mean is impending. Maybe. :)

All of which is just to note that the most recent streak came crashing to a halt this last Saturday, allowing me to return to more-comfortable non-DiMaggian levels of streakless stress. Phew. This involved, prominently, a big choke job by my team, blowing a 2-0 lead in overtime via a dropped pull and a bizarre double game throw-away by a veteran, which only means that these things are close and it's a bit of a minor miracle that the chips fell correctly so many weeks in a row - we more often than not play very close games and go to overtime, so a big part of this was just Rosencrantzian absurd fortune. That said, if the pattern is indeed a pattern, then I am due for a consecutive loss streak over the coming days, so don't hesitate to bet against Nyet in the ensuing weeks.

There's something quite serene about getting to any fields early to warm-up, a habit I developed early on and can probably be traced back to the ridiculous amount of pregame prep we did in high school football. Hence the above picture - just a sunny, quiet field, cones set nicely (effectively reserved) with just me to put on braces and cleats and jog and sprint and get ready for the upcoming melee. It's a nice weekly crescendo - players slowly roll in, and eventually we've got 28 guys tossing discs and joking and heckling and generally being 18-40 year old males. It's ritual in a simple sense, and as much as I would, cough cough, appreciate it if people would show up on time so we could get the game going at the actual start time of 8 AM, the rhythm of it is fairly established and brings a reliable sequence to the recently harried Nyetian Ultimate life.

Why so harried? Well, first there's this left knee thing that just won't resolve. I've done all the stretches, all the icing, all the weights and exercises... and it still reliably blows up after I play, sometimes during a second or third or fourth game of a day / weekend. Definitely if I try to play three days in a row (which has a tendency to happen with SLUG Saturdays, pickup Sundays, and Sprawl practices Mondays). Argh - I have, on the plus side, managed to wean myself off of the brace on my right knee, so maybe that's the step that's in order here - I'm still not sure how much I believe the sports doc's assertion about the brace causing my patella to grind, but hey, I'll try it at this point. Anyways, this is frustrating, as I can't do a whole lot more than Ulty on the weekends and elliptical during the week. Hard to get in a track workout here or there with the unseemly genu-flation, so despite the svelteness, I still feel slow out there.

So it goes, I suppose.

The second thing, though: we're in the midst of Sprawl tryouts. This is, arguably, the lamest part of the captainship - as exciting as it is to put together a traveling roster, to get amped over the talent we have, the felt tension of making those last few cuts, the uncomfortable joking with teammates about their place on the team, the general feeling that you're about to directly contribute to the dejection of friends - these are lame. I'll save the world a detailed account of the behind the scenes thoughts and perceptions, largely to spare the feelings of the folks involved. I'll surely post what we end up with and some of the positive, encouraging rationale that went into determining the squad. But for now, it's the predictable stress of having to pick between friends and *really* "inseparable" players, having way more quality players than spots available for them, etc. Good problems to have, I guess, but they're not exactly helping me sleep.

DT's out of town, too, so I'm trying to be observant as possible and recruiting some of the other veteran players' help. I guess I'm not really worried, as we're effectively like the kid choosing between elite colleges - all choices will work just fine - but being fair is a big concern, and it's not obvious how to do that. I'll reveal the probably obvious - there's a clear cut top group, and a few of the last spaces that are up for grabs. Weighing past demonstrated dedication v. skill v. athleticism v. personality fit and all of that? The philo'er in me knows it's not really possible and silly to pretend as much. hardly a novel observation, but that lack of novelty fails to make it feel less crappy.

Ah, well, the last tryout practice is tonight, and then one more SLUG session next weekend as a tryout, and then the ball really gets rolling. I remain, "ultimately," unfazed. Looking forward to the noise we will make...

Bitching and moaning, carping and groaning; these are the least interesting verses. But these annoying gnats have been weighing lately, and in the interest of plain-faced Nyetian disclosure, I thought I'd throw them down here. More, and more from the positive side of things, in posts to come. For now, enjoy the mild redesign at the right, and look forward to yet another potential sign of apocalypse: the Beck may be creating a blog AS. I. TYPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Teenage Mohini Ninja Turtles

When both Dheintime AND Keith are ragging me for the lack of Nyetting lately, I suppose it's time to get back to the blogging game. Last weekend, I joined eBay and a bunch of local Phoenix players for a trip up to Flagstaff to play in the annual "Mohini" tournament. There are serious Ultimate tournaments where you bring your all and treat everything seriously with warm-ups, drills, the whole nine. There are less serious tournaments where you dress up like birds and bees and have a goofy fun time, but you've still got an air of trying to play well to win. And then there's Mohini... or at least there's the approach we took to Mohini. :) We were looking to have a good time first, play well second, and dress up like comic book / cartoon / childhood movie characters zeroeth. Wait, what? Yeah, we played an Ultimate tournament decked out in full costume as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And regardless of how well we played, we definitely went all out in the style regard, following through with our entire-day snack food being pizza and our sports drink of choice being "green ooze," which may or may not have had an entirely un-sports-drink-like vodka to jello ratio*. I'd say we easily won the "spirit" component of the tourney, even if we only came in 3rd/4th of eight teams. The goal was to have a great time, and we pulled it off and then some; big props to eBay for organizing.

* For the record, it was 7 to 5 vodka plus peppermint schnapps to water, and it tasted a bit like toxic mouthwash. I had one obligatory shot early in the day, but then reverted to actual normal Ultimate style eating and drinking for the remainder of the day. Well, kinda normal - I did eat way more pizza than usual for an Ultimate tournament (including dinner, probably a full 10" pizza on the day, in true TMNT fashion), and I had brought a chocolate-butterscotch-cashews-and-almonds bark that I had made that had nothing to do with turtles but was friggin' delicious. At some point I'll post the running graph I've been keeping of my aforementioned new calorie-counting dietary habits, and you'll see one hell of a spike for June 12th - good habit for an Ultimate tourney, as I felt energetically fantastic all weekend, despite playing in Flagstaff which, incidentally, is at 8,000+ feet.

I think the picture captures the good times well. I'm not going to pretend to be able to name the characters involved here - I'll leave that job to Aaron - but I'll throw the names of the super-fun Phoenix contingent that lit up the weekend. Without further ado, your Phoenix Mohini Ninja Turtles:

TMNT!

Kelly, Dheintime (or is it?), Big Nate, Cisco, Clint, Tricky, Cole, eBay, Russ*, Emily, Nyet
Rebecca, Skunk, Jenga, Lindsey**, Kaetlynn

* - Russ is obscured here, but more importantly, he's wearing a green shirt and grey shorts or something. I.e., not exactly a TMNT costume. Which is fine, because sometimes it's annoying to have to run to Goodwill and ask, "Hey, do you have any red satin bathrobes that could double as a sensei outfit?" Russ was supposed to be Shredder, and finding a big purple cape was not in his time budget for the week. But fear not; we adjusted the narrative. At some point, Russ and I decided that he was "Avid TMNT Blogger Guy," a lesser-known character from the series, so his costume was just that - normal looking dude, invariably living in his his mom's basement, with an inordinate amount of TMNT knowledge. I think it worked.

** - Lindsey is also not in costume, but her excuse is "better" - or worse, I suppose - my 3BK captain slipped a disc in her back during the week and was hobbling around dilapidated-grandma style all weekend. Sadness - she did come though for the team spirit with pizza runs. Props! Get better soon, co-cap'n-my-co-cap'n.

I went dressed as Splinter, btw, the mutant rat sensei of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Pretty sure I got this as the oldest (wisest? Nah...) of the bunch, which is not entirely true, as both Big Nate and Cisco are older than I. But whatever, it was fun playing Ulty in a bath robe and a black belt. Here's what these goofballs look like in action on the line - note the nice intermingling of enemies here:

TMNT on the Line

The easy costume-related highlight of the weekend was committed by this guy:

Dhein the Foot Clan

That's Dheintime in the foreground and Tricky-as-one-of-the-turtles in the background. Dheintime played an early point in full regalia, including a hood/mask and tinted swim goggles. Seems said goggles were designed for seeing the lane in front of you and not a periphery fulls of discs - Dhein poached off on a deep throw to one of the Barrio women, got in perfect position to D it, and ... swing and a miss. Goal, hilarity, it was that kinda tournament. Of course, DT was completely incognito, what with the head-to-toe black and tucked in blond locks and all, so the line of the day was delivered by opponent / good guy Jon Miller: "Man, I would have laughed even harder if I had known it was you!" Funny times.

I suppose some mention of the gameplay is in order. We shockingly, despite our costumes and pregame radioactive ooze shots and general goofy attitude, ran off 8 points in a loss to routinely-nationals-qualifying co-ed team Barrio*. Granted, it was a Barrio tryout team, so a number of their peeps were not really representative. Barrio is one of those teams recruiting free agents from around the country, toeing the line of the number of roster players who need to live in the actual section / region. It's completely legit - everyone else is doing it, too - but it results in situations like this, where "Barrio" isn't Barrio. (Some of their players who are actually from Tucson were playing for other teams at this tourney, further complicating matters). Still, fun to play okay if not well against a team of studs - I actually scored a goal with Grobe guarding me, which I will go ahead and record in my diary**. Some of their tryout guys were trying to do WAY TOO MUCH, and they consequently had tons of turns. We were well outmatched, but we gave them at least something of a run. So an opening loss, but one that was well-expected.

* - Hmmmm. A bunch of white people from Tucson, AZ, naming their club Ultimate (a notoriously white sport) team "Barrio." Hard to get too gripey in a country where the NHL champions are the "Blackhawks," where the Cleveland Indians still have a "Chief Wahoo" logo that smacks of 19th century caricature, but still ... this sentiment is only amplified by one of their cheers, "I just got paid in the Barrio, I just got laid in the Barrio," etc., devolving into more and more illegal indiscretions. I don't want to drop a '90s PC liberal jackass commentary here, but as I've noted before, "I don't exactly think they're celebrating Hispanic heritage over there." Ugh. Then again, I've got some eskimos and prostitutes pissed off at me, so comments withdrawn.

** - Hells yeah I will - I'll also remember my first throw of the day, no prior warm-up backhand huck to Dheintime, my nasty IO flick huck to Dhein past Miller, and totally forget about my OI backhand huck to Tricky that missed the back left corner about a yard wide. I.e., a good throwing game por moi, and an oddly appropriate sensei title achieved for the day.

We had the option of taking a bye in the 2nd round in order to head to a bar to watch the "biggest match in American futbol history" USA v. England World Cup first round, first game match. I thought it would be *awesome* to roll into a Flagstaff bar in full ninja regalia to root on the USA, but apparently my teammates are a bunch of commies and wanted to stay and play the game at the appropriate hour. (A solid decision, it would turn out - not only did it allow us to play a game with the sun out and things at a balmy 55 degrees instead of the 40 or lower later that evening, but the tournament dinner pizza came at the end of our last game, giving us a leg up on grabbing food over the other six teams that were still mixing it up. More on that later). So we played the Flagstaff pick-up team and pretty much ran over them - actually, we let them stay in it a lot longer than they should have, but won easily 13-8. Another fun one that featured a half-time "the foot clan kidnaps April O'Neil" narrative, and yes, we behaved like five year olds and played TMNT. I think I got my best heckle line of the day when the turtles consulted their sensei before engaging the enemy: "I question whether she is worth it." And if you've seen the series and the gratuitous amount of trouble April got the turtles into, this would surely strike you as the wisest thing you've heard.

The rest of the day, ugh. We stumbled over to new fields to play the New Mexico club co-ed team, and they spanked the ever-living crap out of us. We still had some fun in this one, but our women were fairly badly outmatched in this one, their Z tripped up both genders of our inexperienced players, and before we knew it, things were 13-3 bad guys. That one was really forgettable. Our malaise traipsed into the next game, too, against another New Mexico team featuring Jamaal (from Le Tigre, a good buddy of mine*) and others. We, um, blurped, and were down 4-0 before we blinked. Played them pretty evenly from that point on and lost 13-8, but the damage was done - my clearest memory from this one was sitting on the sideline, sharing a sideways glance from Dheintime**, and grabbing a Coors Light for each of us. We dubbed these drinks "mental insulation" to save us from, er, let's just say "frustration." Again, good to have a weekend of fun rather than serious Ulty now and then.

* - Jamaal is a bit of an elder statesman of Southwest Ultimate a great guy. He also made a great play on me in this game - he was cutting in, and I got a good read on the throw that was aboutto come to him on the under. I sprinted as hard as I could, went to lay out around him for the D ... only he felt me coming and jutted his last step right into my path to block me off the disc. Totally legit, veteran move, resulting in a sort of hip check that prevented the D and unfortunately sent us both tumbling. But even that was cool - we both came up saying "are you alright?," both recognizing that despite the violence of the collision, it was a clean and good, aggressive play on both sides. No foul, no harm, and we played on - having witnessed many a snarling near-brawl in the wrestling match aka NBA finals this past week, I really appreciated this cool moment on the field.

** - The Ballad is nothing if not littered with praise of DT, but it warrants mentioning that we rode up to Flag together and had a good opp to chat about Sprawl, tryouts, and the good life in general. Turns out we share a hatred of 1980s-90s popular country music, further cementing my notions that he is a quality individual. He also instructed me in the car to at some point during the weekend throw it out in front of him as far as I could to see if he could catch up to it. So at some point on Sunday, I did - threw an upwind IO backhand as absolutely far out in front of him as I could. His guy gave up, saying, "no way," only to watch Dhein not only catch up to the disc but coast under a floating throw for the score. Given that the play was called about 28 hours in advance, this was pretty cool and emblematic of the sort of sparks of highlights we teamed up for on the weekend. More to come on this in the ensuing months, I hope.

As mentioned, our day ended after that game, but the others were still going on, so we snagged our pizza dinner and chilled for a bit. Our "pizza dinner" there should have been rendered in quotes, as each team was allotted 2.5 pizzas for an evening meal. That's 20 slices*, with most teams having 19-21 players. That's 20 slices, with a friggin' $325+ entry fee. This, despite the fact that the fields were cheap as all get out, the tournament director opted for free, amenity-less campgrounds for lodging, and bought the absolute bare minimum for snacks / supplies for the day. This tourney lacked any kind of bracket or white board to show us where and when to play. It lacked WATER, for insert-your-deity's-name-here's sake. I only bring this up because the TD - Trent, or whoever he was - is kinda a mercenary tournament organizer who is doing this to turn a profit. That's lame on face, without arguing too much - but if you're going to try to swing that, I would hope you would make it a SICK tourney. And 'twas not. So boo on you, homes, and that's not even counting for the fact that you almost double-booked the fields with a soccer tourney on Sunday. Hexta lame all around.

*Over my singular slice of pizza, I watched a Flagstaff player named Andy Wade play in a tense game against Barrio. This is worth mentioning because one A Wade showed up Monday for Sprawl tryouts. More on this in posts to come, but dude is a SWEET pickup for the Phoenix squad. It naturally makes our selection process that much more difficult, but again, we'll save that noise for another post. Good to have an overabundance of riches, methinks...

Okay, good to get that out. We had fun, so maybe the prolonged gripefest is not in order; in dude's defense, he recognized the error of his limited pizza-ordering ways and got a little more later. But it wasn't enough, and seriously, "professional tournament director?" Well, be professional, then. Anyhoo, we rendezvoused at Aaron's place for shower's and then headed to Alpine for a late night pizza meal - yes, we ate yet MORE pizza, being TMNTs and all. Dhein and I were lucky enough to score a place to stay at Skunk's dad's cabin in the Flagstaff woods, so when we got zapped at around 10:00, we went to grab Skunker, Lindsey and Big Nate and head out to the woodlands. We grabbed them at a Flag eatery where Tricky had just attempted to eat 10 "Ghost Chili" wings in thirty minutes - the Ghost Chili is that weaponized pepper I heard about on NPR once, something along 10^6 times hotter than tabasco - and failed badly. Glad we missed that, as "badly" involved some updog*. We headed out, drove about 25 minutes through the wow-I-forgot-about-that starlit night, and stayed at one of the best free tournament lodgings I've ever had the pleasure of occupying.

* - What's "updog," you ask? Not much, man, what's up with you? No, really, he vomited, that's all. Then recounted the event repeatedly in exquisite detail. Tricky likes the attention.

Here's the view from Skunk's dad's back porch:

View from Skunk's

Tres bien. It's a gorgeous, self-contained and sustaining (energy-wise) log cabin in the middle of nowhere. Fantastic. Skunk's dad was also kind enough to fix us pancakes and bacon in the morning, bringing our pizza-for-meals streak to a grinding halt. Those, too, were tres bien. I loved this, as you can tell, because I cannot camp to save my life - I've tried at a few Ulty tourneys, and ended up so stiff-backed for Sunday that I couldn't play. So thanks again, Skunk and dad, for a bed and a great night's sleep.

Sunday, to bring this thing to an end, was a little more promising on the play side. We came in seeded low thanks to our 1-3 Saturday, but upset the higher seed to make it to the semis. Didn't hurt at all to have Dixon and Marisa in tow for Sunday. We generally played more crisply, created more space, and had a bit better what-do-you-call-it FLOW that day. Nice to remember how to play. It also perhaps did not hurt that most of us, your narrator included, elected to go without costume and without minty ooze shots and just play some disc in normal style clothes. It didn't stop us from having fun, natch:

Turtle Dance

Despite how Monkees-esque that may look, this is indeed the final step to a TMNT movie dance. Or so I hear. Anyways, we brought the same fighting spirit to a tense semis game featuring some of our good, hot-headed friends from Utah (see Daweena) - we gave them a fight, but again succumbed to some superior talent. Fun but tough times, and we finished 3rd/4th, which was right about where we were seeded. So I suppose we kissed our sister, but what with the World Cup being all the craze lately, that seems just fine.

Dhein and I booked it out of there pronto, electing to skip the finals in favor of early returns to our SLFs. Beck was sick all weekend, so I did my best to get home qickly and take care of her. This largely involved bringing her fluids while she slept through an NBA finals game. Party! So there it is; a fun, goofy weekend in Flagstaff, written up rushedly, but hopefully now Dheintime and Keith will ease up for a bit. Sheesh!

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Nine Times (Entirely Untimely Version)

Editor's note: I started this two weeks ago, and it is as such now horrendously out of date. So it goes. It was originally just titled "Nine Times."

Q: Does that post title refer to Buellerian absences, or a multiplier for That Same Song?

A: Neither. It refers to this:

DSCF6506

Beck and I caught ASU's opening game against Milwaukee-Wisconsin in the Round-of-64 regional playoffs. ASU, in the grand Nyetian-attended-Div-I-school tradition, is ranked #1 in the country and boasts a RIDICULOUS, all-around lineup of super-studs. They won their first 24 games of the season, have top-notch starting pitching, slick fielding, and batting stats to die for - granted, college numbers are often gaudier than their wooden bat-gained MLB counterparts, but check out this lineup. The salient points:

1. They are batting .338 / .436 / .539 *as a team.* Yowsers.
2. Their opponents, for reference, have batted .239 / .324 / .331.
3. They have scored 8.3 runs per game while giving up 3.8-ish.
4. They draw 6 walks per nine innings while giving up 2.3.
5. Their pitching staff K's 9 per game.
6. They hit over one homerun per game, playing in a quite spacious home stadium.

The numbers are all there; I could go on, but let's just "suffice it" - this is a dominant, nearly perfectly constructed baseball team. In person, it's even bigger - they take the Bill Jamesian approach and take lots and lots of pitches at the plate; they foul off two strike pitches like nobody's business; they hit TONS of line drives. It's a juggernaut - granted, there are some "ASU 26, Northern Illinois 1" games in there that undoubtedly inflate things a bit, but this team has easily achieved "helluva" status.

Which takes us, however obliquely, back to the post title. This is arguably the best team in the country and is ranked as such. And in the game that Beck and I watched, against a vastly inferior opponent - theoretically the 64th seed in the tourney - ASU made no fewer than 9 mistakes. In order:

1. In the first inning, after one MW player had closed his eyes and tapped a seeing-eye single to left, the next batter hit a grounder about three feet to the right of the ASU shortstop. He kicked it, blowing a sure double play. Sounds like a physical error... but the SS did not hustle to get in front of the ball, he took a half-step and attempted the needlessly more difficult backhanded play. Mental error, in that he skipped the higher percentage play. Instead of the end of the inning, there were then runners on 1st and 2nd with one out.

2. The next batter hits a shot right back to the pitcher, who, instead of turning and setting his feet, whirls and fires the ball into left center. The SS snagged it , but with a dive off the bag, killing the easy double play. So instead of the end of the inning, again, bases are loaded with one out. MW scores on a sac fly a few pitches later.

3. Slugger Kole Calhoun gets hit with a pitch in the bottom of the 1st. With one strike on clean-up hitter Riccio Torrez, Calhoun gets picked off of first by the catcher. Inning over. Why was Calhoun that far off the base, w/ 2 outs and the cleanup hitter up? Ugh.

4. In the bottom of the 2nd, with 2 outs and runners on 2nd and 3rd, ASU drills a single to center field. One run scores, and the ball is thrown into the middle of the infield. The runner on 2nd failed to get a secondary lead on the 2 out pitch, and so is just rounding third as the CF catches the ball... the third base coach stops him. Meanwhile, the MW firstbaseman forgets to come to the middle of the diamond to cut off the throw - so no one catches it, and the ball bounces around the middle of the infield. This runner would have scored easily with a secondary lead, and would have scored anyways if the third base coach had noticed the absent first baseman and sent the runner afterwards. So this is almost two mistakes, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

5. But we won't give the single hitter the benefit of the doubt, as he did not aggressively round first. There's no first baseman in the middle of the diamond, so someone - the 1b coach? - should have noticed this; that ball is either going through to the plate, or it's going to bounce around the infield. Either way, an extra base is there for the taking, and it goes untaken. And natch, the next batter hits a shot into the hole b/w 3rd and short... the SS makes a great play to dive and stop it, and his only play is to 2nd to end the inning and prevent the run that already should have scored. And that's a play that should not have been available, because that forced out runner should have been at second, not first. Another run lost.

6. Later in the game, with the bases loaded and 2 outs, the Sun Devil at 2nd gets over-zealous... and gets picked off by the catcher. Another rally killed.

7. Just to round things out, another Sun Devil missed a sign and got picked off at third. If the catcher could have picked off someone at home, he could have completed the rare pick-off cycle. Alas... just another rally-killing mistake. And this one is perhaps, say, three times as bad, as there's ample evidence at this point that the hombre behind the plate has a runner-picking-off hose.

8. Later, a killer - with runners on 1st and 2nd and no outs, playing with a team that has no one with an OBP under .350, the coach orders a bunt. This is stupid enough in its own right, but the bunt is perfectly placed down the third base line, and the pitcher can't get to it in time... except that the runner on first either missed the sign or thought the ball would be caught in the air (a bizarre thought), because even though the batter is through the first base bag already, the runner on first is only half-way to second. He's gunned out, and what would have been bases loaded no outs becomes 1st and 3rd with one. The next batter hits a run-scoring single that quite overtly does not score a second run...

9. And our favorite - conference player of the year Zack McPhee laces a shot down the right field line in the bottom of the 8th, in a 6-2 game that is being played with aluminum bats, and tries to stretch it to a triple. Dude has 14 triples in 60 games this year, so he has the wheels / bat for this sort of thing, but you guessed it, he is gunned down, making the first out at third. And yes, this was followed by a single that would have scored him and his wheels anyways. I, predictably, made a lot of fun of him when this happened. This may or may not have had something to do with my pregame beverage:

DSCF6504

Total aside - that is a four dollar 22 oz. Guinness from my friends at Cornish Pasty Company, a FRIGGIN' AWESOME dining establishment that Beck and I discovered that evening. A Cornish pasty is effectively a gourmet British-style hot pocket, with more flavors / combinations than you can imagine. SO GOOD! There were at least 25 varieties that I could have tried - we elected to split the sausage, cheese and potatoes version - so we will be going back soon and often.

But seriously, as you may be able to imagine, I spent the bulk of this game giving a running commentary on these mistakes and other plays on the field, and special thanks to Beck who, per usual, put up with my nonsense. Despite the mistakes, it was a fun game, and capped by some delicioso Yogurtland concoctions (their Pecan and Pralines flavor is a local winner, imho).

But back to those mistakes - what gives? This is how the #1 team in the country operates? That's *nine* mistakes in a post-season, elimination-is-at-least-close-by here game. In baseball, a sport notorious for happenstance, where the best teams ever only win 75% of the time. You're going to hand runs away in a situation like this? With the continuous rhetoric of "champion teams are like X" that gets ballyhooed all over the place, you would think at least one of those X's is "does the little things right." None of this mattered in the acute sense, of course - they relied on their dominant pitching (some of the MW batters were blatantly overmatched) to win 6-2, beat up on Hawaii the next day, and beat up on Hawaii again to advance to the super-regional (which, now that I'm finishing this two weeks late, we know they won; they're in the college world series and starting things in Omaha tomorrow (Sunday)). So these mistakes get buried, or just noted as "gaffes" in the course of the narrative, and things move on. But I've got to wonder:

1. Do they just exhibit some kind of reckless attitude that benefits them overall via aggression but just results in these sorts of goof-ups?

2. Are they "playing down to the competition" - is there some kind of measurable effect that their concentration is down when they play against the likes of MW?

3. Are they just so good in other aspects of the game that handing away runs like that never really catches up with them? So the carrot works for their hitting and pitch-taking and all of that - those pay off - but the stick is stickless, as they can routinely get away with these mistakes because they are so badly going to outplay opponents in those other respects.

It's that last one that interests me - I am sure those players get yelled at after the game for these mistakes, but is there maybe some underlying sentiment of "yeah, but whatever" coming from everyone involved that makes that yelling lack the teeth to compel correction? The outcomes are not guaranteed, of course - it could catch up with them and cause them to get upset, or it could never catch up with them, and they could waltz on to the world series title despite habitually handing runs away on both sides of the ball (note misused football metaphor there :) ). One would *think* that the better opponents would make these things matter more, and maybe ASU amps its little-things concentration up for the bigger opponents. Still, the habit of letting these things go against weaker competition exposes the team to unnecessary risk, and whether the risk manifests itself in a disastrous upset or not in the next few weeks (note - it didn't, or at least hasn't yet), I still like to think that it's important to note that it's there.

And yeah, because this is the all things Ultimate blog, I've got to think about this w/r/t Sprawl. We've got more talent this year than in years past, I think, but it's a given that we are going to run into the ASU-esque super-stud teams. And they'll likely outmatch us. But unlike ASU, we're going to have to maximize our chances via every available avenue. I.e., we can't afford to have three runners picked off in a game, as those runs are going to get us those 15-13 victories. Or, um, something.

All of this is to point out the perhaps obvious, but reinforced-by-direct-observation point - it's not necessarily the championship teams that do all the little things right. Sometimes they just don't have to. But it might be the teams that are looking to grab upsets that have to. Good thing to keep in mind in the coming months...

Friday, June 11, 2010

Latest fad, Silly Bandz, banned


Sea shaped Silly Bandz
There are literally hundreds of other shapes...

You may not have even had an opportunity to hear about the latest craze of the tweens and their younger siblings, Silly Bandz, and already these fantastically shaped, stretchy, colorful bracelets are being banned from schools. Silly Bandz are rubber band–like silicone bracelets, which sell for about $5 bucks per pack of twenty-four. [Imagine the killing they are making on those?!?] Elementary schools in Raleigh, NC have already started to ban the latest craze as a distraction to kids' learning, which, of course, only insures their popularity will continue to increase.

According to Yahoo, BCP Import, a small business in Toledo, Ohio, is behind the bracelets. It was hardly prepared for the fad frenzy. It has increased its team from twenty employees to 200 during the past year and added twenty-two phone lines to keep up with inquiries. Yahoo also reports that Macy's is considering a Silly Bandz float in this year's Thanksgiving parade. Although Silly Bandz have been available for two years, Yahoo estimates the tipping point was only about a year ago.

What they are watching... Episode VII

Our look at what the teens and tweens of America are watching. You may have caught our first couple of episodes. This is less of a what are they watching and more of a what are they listening to, in this case Asher Roth.




Kind of a catchy tune.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Caught on Main Street



We walked by this beauty on Main Street in Durham, NC out in front of the Federal. It was in a great shape. Pity our photog didn't have a better camera with them.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Musicians to boycott Arizona


de la Rocha

The Clarion Content is vehemently opposed to the new Arizona law, allowing the state to demand papers at simply traffic stops. It is entirely to Soviet for our liking. As such we were glad to read in the BBC that a group of musicians called The Sound Strike led by Los Angeles rockers Rage Against The Machine and including Cypress Hill, Massive Attack and System Of A Down's Serj Tankian, are boycotting performing shows in Arizona until law SB 1070 is amended.

The BBC quoted Rage Against The Machine's lead singer Zacarías Manuel de la Rocha, "Some of us grew up dealing with racial profiling, but this law takes it to a whole new low."

Glad to hear the artists speaking out and using what financial clout that they have.