Sending Our Love Down the (Not) Well

I am seated in the living room with iodined cotton fuzz on both arms, placating the dogs with rawhide chewies and not-really-all-that-eagerly awaiting LeBron's 6 PM announcement. Oh, and I'm celebrating, sort of, the ten year anniversary of the first summer I got certifiably Phish-hooked and followed their tour online on a day-by-day basis. I'm not going to full-on album review the show, but just so you get a proper environmental image, here's the setlist of a show from ten years ago today, a show that was conveniently enough immortalized - more than all of their shows have been immortalized - as Live Phish 05:

Saturday, 07/08/2000 Alpine Valley Music Theatre, East Troy, WI

Set 1: Punch You In the Eye > NICU, My Soul, Poor Heart, Wolfman's Brother, First Tube, Llama, Guyute, Run Like an Antelope

Set 2: Heavy Things, Piper -> Rock and Roll, Tweezer -> Walk Away, Twist, The Horse > Silent in the Morning, Possum

Encore: Suzy Greenberg > Tweezer Reprise

We're in the midst of the instrumental composition "First Tube" right now. This show was a weird selection for the series - there's nothing that really screamed "of your 1000+ shows, you should definitely make this one one of the first six you release officially!" - but they did, and despite the controversy at the time (dooooood, 1994!!!??!?), it's a good representative of a standard show from that summer of 2000. So it's effectively taking me back to happy times with Beck and Zil and driving to Toronto and Ohio to catch Les Boys - ah, memories. I'll give an in-depth take on the whole release at some point, probably in 2047 at the rate I've been reviewing albums recently, but for now, trust that it's a breezy pleasant soundscape on an otherwise 112 degree day.

(Interruption - it's 6:11, and I still don't know where LeBron's headed. Tres betrayal - they said it would be announced within the first 10 minutes! When will I learn?)

Back to the fuzz... as mentioned, I've been feeling intermittently energy-less lately. Well, "intermittently" became "constantly" a little over a week ago - just have been having bouts of a gasless tank at random moments in the day, with my peaks being in, I don't know, the 70% range. Not good - hard to do much of anything for more that ten minutes at a time, and on occasion I get that weird, going to fall over feeling. I'm not dizzy, not feeling faint, don't even really feel week, just feel like I'm dragging badly.

(Miami, btw. Yawn. I suppose this flagrant dis to Cleveland isn't all that yawn, but otherwise, this has been an encapsulation of everything annoying re: ESPN-esque supercoverage).

I'll cut to the chase - docs are pretty convinced I've got mono or valley fever or something of that ilk, so it's something that's more tremendously annoying than it is serious. So no reason for concern - all the appropriate values continue to be normal (after three rounds of bloodwork now), physical exam is normal, yada x 3. The recommended remedy is rest, don't take NSAIDS, and don't push myself to exhaustion in Ultimate or workouts. That last part has not been a problem lately, as this continued bout of low energy was actually somewhat well timed. With the holiday weekend, all things Ulty were canceled last weekend, which has given me a solid twelve days between events. And I've skipped three workouts in a row, too - I'll pay for that later, ugh - but mayhaps all the rest will do my fatigue some good and will have the added bonus of knee relief. This is me being positive about the situation.

Refocusing - I saw the doc for followup today, and he wanted to do a blood culture to rule out anything really strange. And blood cultures require 1, an iodine-sterilized draw, and a lot of blood. So NATCH I got Susie Rookie Phlebotomist. And despite my gigantic, ropey veins, she stuck and stuck and stuck me and hummed her favorite Neil Young tune off Harvest as she bruised the Bathsheba out of my arm. In her defense, the iodine makes skin incredibly sticky, and if the container gets stuck on the skin, the needle is that much harder to navigate. Anyways, she eventually called in Kathy Has-Done-This-Before Phlebotomist, who used another vein on the left arm, and they collaborated to draw a tube from my right arm for a blood culture as well. They put cotton and gauze over all three holes before I got up - purple gauze, so I looked like a mummified Suns player* or something - and when I tried to take it off at home, the cotton stuck all over the iodine. So here he sits, fuzzy was he, and my arms still hurt from the needle swishing. Boohoo, I know.

* - Here's to refraining from making the obvious Steve Nash and lots of bandages joke, which surely would have reminded everyone that I am from San Antonio, home of NBA Champions.

Anyways, just thought I'd give a little health update since I had casually mentioned that I'd been sickly lately. I've been pretty frustrated with this, btw, as the symptoms are all pretty vague and cause me to reflect on how energetic I'm feeling 20,000 times per day. I constantly have to convince myself that I'm not faking, and this is not just some elaborate psychosomatic ploy to get away from workouts. Speaking of, it also feels like the work I've done at the gym is being swallowed up by lethargy, and there's nothing I can really do about it. I want to get my exercise in, but I'm pretty tapped out by just walking the dogs in the morning and doing a little cooking. I've tried to do some pushups just to see if there's any chance I have something for a given day, and around #5 I get predictably woozy. So it seems that all that can be done now is to take 'er easy and try to get some work done from the prone / seated position. Walking from my car to the office has been quite a drag, so I'm going to do stuff from home if at all possible. I do have some Sprawl stuff coming up, so I'll do my best to play a limited amount and not push it too much... which, as you can probably guess, will be quite difficult for me.

Ugh. I suppose there are worse things in the world, but having your vital force sucked out kinda, um, yeah, you get it. So apologies if things have a dragging tone of late, and if I'm at all unkind, trust that it's only my body / not my mind / that is confusing things. Here's to rest and rallying; wish me luck, and hope this spell doesn't cause me to fall even farther behind in my work. It was supposed to be the summer of George, etc.

The Days Are Just Packed

Crazy WD, after a 5:30 AM, 90+ degree, 1.55 mile walk, decided to speed around the yard and hurt herself this AM. The remainder of her day has looked thusly - don't worry, she's fine; a quick exam, some Rimadyl and quality sofa time did the trick. Ah, be careful Dubsy; you look it, but you're not actually two anymore...

Houseguestapalooza MMX (Part I, it seems)

This may be premature, as Houseguestapalooza MMX is not technically over yet. The iPFam is still in Californ-aye-ay and will be swinging back through Sunny Azz in the next few days. Still, it was a solid couple weeks of much fun, so might as well get the accounting in while the accounting's good.

I'll go backwards because, well, why not. Today did not involve HGaPaMMX, but I didn't have to use my AK. I read three articles and an entire an entire book (granted, it was only 160 pages or so, and I didn't *write* it, as Beck demanded) this morning, hanging around the house so as not to give the S/W/F too long of a day. Took the D-O-Gs for a W-A-L-K, then booked it to school at about 11 for a quick weights workout (and weighed a crisp, little-sweat-loss 171 afterwards - not bad given the guests and dining outs of late). Ran a brief honors discussion section for the undergrad bio course, then finished up the grading for the midterms*. Meeting w/ Jason, meeting with Manfred, a more or less figured out thesis project (for which I still need to write a prospectus, but still, DAMN!), and a semi-interesting class on medical student ethics education, and it was a day. Drove home, warmed up some leftover pizza, and am currently blogging to the erratic spastic blasts of Ornette Coleman and what he claimed will have been the shape of jazz that came. Or something.

* - In case you're not the facebooking type, I had a crushing pile of 90+ essay midterms as part of my spring break joy. They were horrendous (average grade = a generous 73). Painful, though I did learn the invaluable lesson that "disjustice" is a verb.

Sunday was also productive, as I woke up early and got a good deal of reading / writing done that I could not catch up with while the peeps were in town. Decided I was a glutton for punishment and went to do a track workout at Rhodes *before* pickup - I got in a mile, some buildup sprints, some straightaway sprints, and tried to run a 400 before my hamstring said no. Oh, and I timed myself on 40 yard dashes, and could do no better than a five flat. Sadness. I did get myself good and tired, which was the intention, and then played pickup starting off more tired than everyone out there. Good deal - made a silly lay out grab over/around somebody at one point, met a dude named Kyle from Ohio who looks to have club potential, and hit Kaysie for some scores... on her boyfriend. Yikes. Came home to the industriously awesome Beck, who had mowed the yard after a day of work. She is, indeed, awesome. We ate leftover Chinese and watched an Eddie Izzard DVD which was so funny that I had to pause it so I wouldn't asphyxiate from laughter. Good times.

I left very early Saturday AM to head to Sprawl SLUG IV. My parents arrived on their way out of town just in time to catch a layout Nyet goal - WAHOO. We (the light team) won 12-6, 13-11, another free lunch for the good guys. Said adios to my parents - they were headed to Fort Stockton and got there quite late thanks to the two hour time change. I came home and powered through grading while watching NCAA basketball. Beck came home and, after some reading, took a nap. As you may have guessed we picked up Chinese food for the evening and made it all the way to the first skit of SNL, in which Sigourney Weaver looked a whole lot like the PGOAT. Woah!

Friday AM, my dad and I headed to the golf curse to demonstrate how not to hit golf shots. Or rather, my dad demonstrated how not to hit golf shots; I just demonstrated how to not hit golf shots (the distinction is subtle). We came back to the homestead to pick up my mom and head over to SMOCA, where we saw a couple of nice exhibits: Chuck Close prints and Rewind Remix Replay: Design, Music & Everyday Experience. Very cool trip to the museum, and we followed it up with some nachos / a margarita at Los Olivos next door. Good times, only to be outdone by the GREAT times we had at the Biltmore movie that night - we watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off over Slice of Sicily Pizza and followed that up with some off-the-hook MoJo. Very fun day to end my parents' stay in Phoenix.

Alright, I am running out of gas here, and the next days involve some pic posting, so I'll hold off until my energy comes back. Trust that they'll be great. In the meantime, NAP. And yeah, this has had surprisingly little houseguest content given the post title. My bad.

Fear Not; Like Portal...

"I'm still alive." It'd be a helluvalot better if I were like Love & Rockets and "So Alive," but we'll take what we can get these days.

Spent last Wednesday through Friday in Seattle, doing a little bit of an anthropologist job with a research group in Bioethics at UW. Interesting "conference" of sorts (more like an extended lab meeting) - they were coordinating a grant-approved project on genomics, translation and health disparities, but trying to frame it using discourse analysis, a methodology developed by ASU grad (and communications PhD) Marianne DeGreco. My job was basically to get a grasp of the research going on (to some extent in fly-on-the-wall mode) and see if the methodology being employed would be of use to, say, me, and student-colleagues like me. Discourse analysis is essentially a qualitative method for tracking sometimes literal conversations but also "cultural dialogs;" the idea is to have a rigorous way of tracking ideas across people, locales, popular culture, within academic/political/whatever domains, etc. I'm not entirely convinced that the methodology will prove to be useful for me*, but it was certainly a fun week to spend hanging out with a bunch of very anthropologically and post-structurally-oriented academicians who are all kinds of successful.

* - The main problem, as I see it, is that I'm interested in popular cultural narratives, but if I want to be able to declare something to be something of a dominant narrative, I need some methodology for picking, say, text A over text B. The responses I got were largely of the "as long as you can justify it" variety, but given that I'm interested in having a rigorous take on exactly what counts as "justified," that advice was not entirely helpful. Oh, well.

Otherwise, it's just the usual school deluge that's keeping me off the streets / interwebs. I graded ~80 essays from the intro bioethics course over the weekend; they were largely not good, though I just calculated my average grade, and it was 78. And I've been doing a lot of reading. I'm still terrible at balancing school / TA / research work, but I'm certainly being kept busy. We've also been having candidates visit every week in February for a new bioethicist position in our department, each of whom has grabbed at minimum five hours out of our schedules (between lunch meeting, lab meetings, job talks, etc.). It's been an interesting experience - nothing like seeing a job talk bomb to motivate you away from the "what not to do" direction - but the missing time adds up quickly, as your grading time replaces your reading for class time, your reading for class time replaces your research reading time, and your pleasure reading gets shot to hell. Anyways, things were particularly busy the last week, which is why the Ballad rested.

My left knee is still bugging me, and I've been going to PT on a weekly basis for it, plus doing exercises constantly and getting a little more serious about my weight-lifting regimen. And doing a lot more non-Ultimate exercising lately, generally. I'm down to 179 as of this morning's weigh-in (WOOHOO!), though it's hard to tell how much of that is water-weight, blah blah blah etc. None of it is helping out with the knee thus far - I played Sprawl SLUG this weekend (AND WON!), and my jumping was still incredibly suspect (though I was able to cut pretty decently on O, and my D is still lagging). Anyways, the goal is still to get down to 170 by tryout time (May), which allows me to eat light but not drive myself insane by depriving myself all the time (note that MoJo is still in my diet). I think it's doable, and in combo with weight-lifting / ab-work, should leave me as a rather more-in-shape Sprawl captain. We'll see...

Have been utterly LOVING Olympic hockey - caught the USA - Canada game Sunday night, and am currently enjoying Canada-Germany. So much passion and skill on the ice simultaneously, and the games themselves have little tweaks that are quite nice - no-touch icing, a lack of fighting, few commercial breaks - just very fact-paced competition, and in some of the games, it's effectively All-Star squads battling it out, and everyone cares. Couldn't recommend it more if you've been missing it in favor of, say, ice-dancing (which is great in its own right).

3BK got crushed 15-7 in Beck's and my absence. JD just killed us, by all reports. We'll try to right the ship soon - we've got J-Ro and the "Pasty Gangstas" tomorrow, featuring Paul and Trant amongst others. Should be exciting.

Running out of gas here - I'll try to get the album reviews back on track*, but in all honesty, I'm gettign that crush of a feeling that every second should be spent on something else. I'm going to pass on fantasy baseball this year for this reason - GASP - and try to, as they say, GET SOME THINKING DONE. It's incredibly sad, but I need to re-orient my mind to how important I think the research is to get myself *really* going on it, and if that can be facilitated by not spending 40 hours reviewing draft magazines, then so be it.

* - Interlude - I throw down reviews on a couple of requested albums and reveal a desert island disc that was released in 2009 (!!!) and no one comments? Man. I was pretty sure we were all tragically alone before; now I am convinced.

Out of gas here. The beat is generally rolling on, with S / W / F doign just fine, and the day-to-day not getting us down too much. I really wish I could do more "pleasure" reading, but I find myself collapsing into sofas at day's end these past few. It's just way too tempting to watch the Olympics with my brain in a state of nothing. I can't even bring myself to comment on Tiger right now, other than to say that the very concept of "Billionaire Buddhist" is rife with absurdity. Anyways, big game tomorrow; I'll play and try to do something awesome so I can write about it. Wish us luck. This has been a boring life-review / diary entry kind of blog post that did not go into a level of detail adequate to render it interesting...

100000

I've let this run far too long without acknowledging the awesomeness that was ye olde - and I do mean olde - 32nd birthday. Last Wednesday, I attended my office hours (no one attended) and a couple of meetings and then came home to spend a great day with the Beck. We had DeLux Burgers for lunch, grabbed some MoJo, and narrowly missed rooking ourselves out of mad cash by getting some new cell phones - we still have a couple of months left on our contracts, apparently, each of which carries a $200 termination fee*. So, glad we didn't do that! Came home briefly to play with the S/W/F, then went over to Scottsdale to catch Crazy Heart, a movie Beck concisely reviewed as another "Slutty Gumby Saggy Maggie" piece. Beck's review was accompanied by an unbelievable interpretive dance, ftr. We followed that up with a thoroughly healthy dinner at TexAz, a slice of home, if you will, where we got Texas Country Fried Steak and a Shiner Boch. As though the day's caloric onslaught had not been enough, we came home to five mini birthday cakes - "cakelets," let's call them - and I got to eat and open presents. Thanks to everyone for the books (Deb, Nyetfam!) and the iTunes gifts (iPJ/iPMM!) and the amazon gift (Aaron!) and magazine subscriptions (Ellis-fam!) and money for yet to be determined purposes (Grandpa!). Beck also got me some great gifts including a stylish wicking shirt and some cool books. I am a lucky dude! Gracias everybody!

* - What vaguely puzzles is me is how they can get away with a termination fee that is higher than the actual amount of money left on the contract. That doesn't seem to make any sense...

Anyhoo, fun day, fun times, and glad the rain conspired to allow me to spend it with Beck. Oh, I also had the following funny conversation with my brother:

A: Happy birthday! I remember, 31 years ago today...
N: 31 years?
A: Yeah, 31. 2010 minus 1978 is ... oh wait!
N: Ha!
A: Okay, let's try that again. Welcome to your 32nd year!
N: Actually, it's technically my 33rd year...
A: Shut up.

I don't know if that will make anyone laugh as much as I did, but it was pretty solid in the A/N comedy tradition. What else? Facebook, it turns out, is a cheap way to get lots of people to wish you happy birthday. This is cool, but if you at all are feeling slightly aged because you woke up that morning with locked arthritic knees, that little red bubble just keeps popping up over and over with more stabs to your decrepit body. Yeah, I'm 32, but as Sprawl pal EBay noted, I am not master's eligible just yet.

Speaking of Sprawl, things have been busy. We made the calls for the two teams at NYF, electing to go with an A- team and a B+ team instead of a strict A / B split. (Meaning that we made A and B teams and then overlapped some players each way to get people experience on both sides - some of our A players more PT and opportunities to try things out, some of our new guys a chance to run in teh tournament's A bracket and see if they could hang). This caused a perhaps predictable amount of strife with people "on the bubble" - sometimes it's not fun to be in charge, but it's been a good experience learning to smooth out the vagaries of sensitive behaviors. Or maybe I haven't learned it and have solely managed to piss off 36 dudes. Hope not.

That's right, 36 - 17 going A-, 19 going B+. Big squads, lots of rest, my favorite way to play Ultimate. Practice was crackling with energy tonight; I hope we can drive that through to the weekend and make a good showing with both teams. On Damon / Paul's suggestion, we ran a scrimmage where the stall count was capped at 6 instead of the usual 10; this basically made play very bang bang and got us better about getting rid of the disc. Lots of fun, and it bled over into the next normal stall 10 scrimmage. Fast-paced action! People are pretty excited for this weekend; should be intense.

I, of course, managed to fall on my knee tonight - I've got an inflamed patellar bursa in my left knee, and every time I bang it, it swells up. So my left kneecap has a nice jelly protrusion. Awesome. Am currently icing, for something new and different.

ASU continues to roll along. I'm trying to get really focused on particular aspects of the project, and it's slowly coming together. As always, we'll see ... I have to go into office hours early tomorrow, so staying up until 1 AM is probably not the most productive thing I can do. But here I am, Fred in lap, ice on knees ...

Oh, and just to give the entry some symmetry with the caloric explosion at the top, I've resolved - perhaps three and a half weeks too late - to shed some of this winter weight (not bad, I'm still in the 190 ballpark, but I think dropping down to 170-75 might help the knee pain). So in pointless self-congratulatory mode...

2 oatmeal packets = 280 calories
1 Dollop of milk in coffee = 10?
1/8 bottle powerade = 25
2 Lean pockets (lunch / dinner) = 560
1 Clif Bar before practice = 260
1 Powerade after practice = 200
--------------------------------------
Total = 1335. And I didn't have to go to a Taco Bell Drive Thru or ANYTHING.

And yes, I recognize this is a horrible diet. Long day at school plus practice afterwards kinda messes things up. Underachiever, please try harder.

Fred Is the New Focusin / MMX

In case you were wondering, this is pretty much what Sparkle is up to these days. Unpictured, because of, you know, the properties of light and solid objects, is Winifred the Ubertalkative, our house "guest" cat, who is sitting behind the door in her very own bedroom and taunting poor Ess Dog. Sparkle is *fixated* - any ADHD tendencies are absolutely gone of late as she whiles away hours in a zen-like trance, eyes / nose / ego focused on the door-neath shadows. Every once in a while this trance is disrupted by Sparkle-splosion - apparently if Winifred meows too boldly or sticks a paw beneath the doorway, this is decidedly NOT OKAY, and Sparkle alerts the surrounding counties, capped by a MMA-style door-headbutt. Beck thinks this is all great, as Sparkle has newfound purpose in life and seems truly invigorated. I am not so sure, as on the few occasions in which Beck has carried Fred out into the living room, Sparkle has noticeably smacked her lips. And today, she tried to eat Winifred's tail. Sparkle's intentions do not seem pure. I will keep you updated.

Speaking of the cat-who-wouldn't-shut-up, we've let the little demon hang out in the living room while we sleep with the dogs / the bedroom door closed, and she has repaid us by consistently yelling at us at 3 AM each morning. MMX thus far has been a delirious dream of sleep-deprivation, which has been okay so far, but I wonder if we'll be able to maintain this setup once school starts back up. We'll see.

The past few days have been solid - I played lunchtime frisbee on Wednesday and in a silly game of five on five, managed to get two handblocks, throw two greatests, get four ridiculous skies, lay out over a dude for a goal and more or less put together a camera-less highlight reel. Wahoo boasting about pickup! Seriously, though, it was a up-pumping session, and I had called Aaron immediately before and told him that I was going to lay out over someone for a goal - it happened and then some. Yee-ha for good frisbee.

Beck and I had a fantastic NYE - some nachos for appetizers round one, then some king crab's (crabs'?) legs for round two, and then pork tenderloin, broccoli au gratin and mashed potatoes for the meal. De-friggin'-licious, and the annual Beck-makes-an-incredible-meal-for-NYE tradition was upheld. We tried to get dessert at a downtown French restaurant, but they were running New Year's Eve dinner full service for a single price deal, and we couldn't just drop in for cheesecake. So we went to the Cheesecake Factory instead, but the wait was a little long, and Beck decided it was silly to pretend that CF was a special occasion kinda place. So we hit up Mojo just before closing time instead, and grabbed some of the best yogurt concoctions of 2009. A great MMIX of yogurts and toppings, if you will. Headed home about 10, and Beck made it to approximately 10:30 before caving on the couch. I watched VH1's recap of the year to take me to the brink of 2010 and then checked out the Seacrest / Clark horror show on ABC to ring in the new year. Party times, I know.

Spent NYD at the 6th Annual New Year's Day Hangover Hat Tournament here in Tempe - had a blast hanging out with the frisbee folk. The play was a little lackluster - typical VOTS fare, I suppose - but good times running around and having fun in the sun. Our team went 2-1, effectively losing in the "finals" to Keith and Jeff Grobe in an ugly (by our team) game. Keith was nice enough to comment that my "kinder, gentler Nyet" project is working to at least some extent, and people have noted that I've been a nicer fella on the field the last few months. I really appreciated that - people aren't always forthcoming with that sort of comment, so it was good to hear. And reminds me to re-resolve to keep it up in MMX - I'm well aware that the captain title requires a touch more reining it in than before. Will try to do it while maintaining my tenacity.

Speaking of Sprawling, we start practice on Monday. The people to whom I've talked are amped, as am I. Should be great.

Beck and I have had a pleasant Jan. 2, too - drank some coffee, bought some running shoes for Beck, took in a parade, you know, the usual. Eh? We were headed to Practical Art to pick up a piece that Beck had bought, and our way was interrupted by the Fiesta Bowl parade. In the five minutes we were there, we saw the Boise State cheerleaders, their marching band, the Budweiser Clydesdales, and a huge inflatable American flag. Sadly enough, I did not have the camera with me. Headed to the bookstore to use our Xmas gift cards (that Kristin!) and then came home for some painting and house chores and leftover NYE food. Great tunes playing all day, too - Royksopp's Junior, the just-reviewed Big Star album, Jenny Lewis's Acid Tongue (review pending) and now, some Elvis, including his cover of "From a Jack to a King." Oh, and now, Miles Davis's Walkin', which, ftr, is yet another example of 12-bar blues genius.

Good times. More reviews and Ulty stories on the way. Stay tuned, and if I haven't talked to you yet, happy new year. MMX!

In Light of Evolution, or Pinkə at Sacklə

So big disclaimer - I have to be relatively careful here, unlike my normal shoot-from-the-hip express thyself with impunity style, because I'm guessing that if Christastrophe can track me down using google analytics, these high power science types can probably do the same and squash me like the academic piss-ant that I am. So take the following commentary as you will.

This past weekend I traveled* to the OC to attend the Sackler Colloquium sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences entitled "In the Light of Evolution IV: The Human Condition."** It's a rather prestigious conference with a number of big deal speakers and a bit of an odd format. There's only one lecture hall, all of the speakers talk in it in succession, and you spend a serious amount of time listening to said talks: eighteen 50 minute talks over two days, with some coffee breaks and lunches and dinners sprinkled inbetween. The topics are all over the map, though at least in principle centered around evolution and the human condition. Long days and a ton of interesting information, though there are some interesting dynamics going on that I'll try to capture here.

* - You will recall that I had a flight delayed by three plus hours and was inserted into a dream world of gorillas, Suns girls and Grant Hill. I wasn't lying:

See? I *told* you the cheer outfits were absurd. Though, as Beck will tell you, nowhere near as absurd as the one we witnessed on lovely 24th street in Phoenix lately. Sheesh. That one is definitely NOT making an appearance in the Ballad.

** - "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" is a rather famous and oft-referenced quote / series of essays by Theodosius Dobzhansky, a sort of grandfather of evolutionary biology and the "modern synthesis" aka neo-Darwinism (or whatever the least offensive term is these days). He's known as "Doby" to his close friends and/or the kind of people who casually drop such tidbits in their lectures. I, ftr, do not know him as "Doby." Having read a whole lot of biology over the last few years, though, I'm going to have to agree. :) I mean, seriously, your genome is something like 30% mobile elements, pointless little sequences that do nothing much more than wreck other genes. Something like 1.2 million of them have been copied and copied and copied over the millenia. And your genome is also largely composed of remnant pseudogenes, no longer functioning sequences with all components of genes that are rendered inactive by accumulated mutations / errors / etc. So, um, show me a car that has a ton of the same random part strewn about it occasionally causing other parts to break, show me a bunch of other parts that would have worked in older models but no longer do, explain to me why an engineer would do that, and then we can start talking about intelligent design. Sound good?

The most obvious thing is that it's a non-specialty conference - you've got paleontologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, biochemists, primatologists, evolutionary psychologists, geneticists, and the list goes on and on, all as speakers, let alone the variety of people in the audience (see, um, biology-based ethicists aka Nyet Jones). So you've got power player speakers, all of whom come from decidedly different backgrounds, some disciplines which have beefs with one another - most notably evo bio and evo psych, but also social scientists and "hard" scientists generally. But you've also got decorated experts in all of the fields sprinkled throughout the audience. The overall effect? First, there was an extreme air of deference. I'd venture that 95% of the questions that were actually asked* were of the softball variety. No serious challenges to claims, concepts, underlying methodology, none of the stuff I hear on a daily basis at talks at school. This was cool, on the one hand, because the oneupsmanship that goes on elsewhere can get a little tired. But on the other, it seemed that a lot of ideas went down completely unchecked - I would have enjoyed some interdepartmental wrestling, though I can understand why they perhaps did not want to foster that. I also saw a whole lotta hat-tipping and cultish lust for all things science. I get that it's a science conference and I shouldn't really be surprised, but I could have a used a bit more articulation with humanistic notions of "The Human Condition" subtitle.

* - This was a problem - speakers were given 50 minutes, and while the conference as a whole was run exactly and admirably on time, most of the speakers ran over by a minute or so and permitted little to no time for questions. I don't know if this was by design (i.e. people didn't want to have to answer a lot of q's in that environment; that seems unlikely, though, as these were all dynamic speakers at ease in front of the crowd and see the above notes on deference) or if people were just taking the long talk format to riff as much as they wanted. It definitely did not foster a whole lot of give and take - I asked no questions, but I probably would have chimed in on two of the talks in particular had there been more opportunity. Anyways, weird format, not to mention a little long-winded at times, and I would have preferred maybe 35 minute talks with fifteen minutes for Q & A or extended jamming or something. As it was, you had to try to grab people in coffee breaks or at dinner, and especially with some of the big-time guys (e.g., Ayala), it's hard to break into a crowd of ten people to have a real conversation over a ten minute coffee break.

The second effect, though, was a bit more disappointing. For the most part, the talks stuck to pretty surface level, survey course style accounts of research. I think people knew they were delivering talks to a broad audience - which they were - but as a consequence, some of the stuff presented amounted to summaries of a disciplinary approach or a life's body of work, and if you were familiar with the speaker's work already, it came off as a whole lot of stuff you already knew. Which, if you've flown far, spent several days alone in a hotel room etc. to hear, can be a bit irksome. Not that this held back the conference - I heard a lot of really cool stuff and learned a lot from the people I didn't know - but the people I specifically went to hear largely failed to deliver something that I hadn't already gleaned from reading their publications. Ah, well.

So, aside from my usual negative Nelly intro - long talks, surface talks, too much nicety to really hear what's going with scientific takes on the human condition, too much sitting in a single room* - the conference was quite nice. I had to cab it to and from the hotel, but otherwise, all transportation was taken care of - buses to and from the hotel (which was the shwanky Newport Beach Marriott) to the very posh Beckman center. We were served two excellent breakfasts and dinners and a wine-drenched banquet dinner as well as lots of gourmet coffee and snacks throughout both days. No complaints at all about the amenities; they were quite ridiculously good.

* - Holy footnotes Batman - but it's worth noting that I had Vietnam-style flashbacks to med school this past weekend, what with the single lecture hall, the power points, the fifty minute lectures, the occasional nodding off at a too-monotone discussion ...

There was time to chat over meals with various people, though as noted, with all the people there who already knew one another, it was sometimes a little tough to grab a table with a person you might want to talk to. I definitely would like to go to the next conference with someone I know - I was all by my lonesome, and while I'm okay at striking up conversations with strangers, it's a lot easier to join conversations in progress. The best chats I had were with groups of other students / professors at meals who all knew one another - I tracked down some of the interesting philosophy people in attendance, and it helped a ton to have them already engaged in various conversations and just slide in with a comment rather than doing the usual game of I'm so-and-so and what do you study? So that was cool - I met some UC Irvine people doing various things with monkeys and morality, people I might be interested in thinking back and forth with over the coming years. But man, in the other conversations - there were a whole lot of highly specialized scientists there, and let's just say that there isn't a whole hell of a lot for a guppy biogeographer and an ethicist to talk about. At one point I listened to a twenty-plus minute speech on a student's beetle dispersion statistical analysis, and while it was highly impassioned and clearly the awesomest thing in the world to that guy, I felt very out of place. Like a guppy out of appropriate biogeographical evolutionary niche, if you will. Still, I said "ethics" and generally got enthusiastic responses - seems a conference on the human condition grabbed people who were at least seemingly interested in how biology and evolution can speak to ethics. On occasion, of course, I said ethicist and either got sort of "Oh, a philosopher" type reactions or people who felt ready to comment on the entirety of my discipline based on a book they had read one time. I always find that wacky - like I would challenge a genomics expert on his area of study because I took a genetics course once? Seriously, somebody was trying to tell me, "well, morality is all based on fulfilling hardwired desires, so that's really already figured out." Oh, okay. Thanks. I'll go tell the postmodernists. Vague insults aside (one prof tried to ask me what my experimental design was going to be, and I'm still not sure if he badly understood me explanation of my interests or if he was being a colossal empiricist dick), people were generally welcoming and friendly. A good time, despite my inherent distaste for those type of "let's network" environs.

The last thing to add before jotting down a bullet summary of the talks is to note that I do not like traveling by myself. Most people probably don't, but there's something quite lonely about the empty dark hotel room, no matter how Marriottish it is. There was a mall nearby, so I walked around there quite a bit (in the pouring rain - 50 degrees and wet all weekend, thanks a lot southern cali!) during the little down time that I had (Thursday night and after 4 on Saturday), but otherwise it was a lot of hotel room hanging out, reading and watching TV / DVDs. (I did catch the ESPN 30 for 30 on "The U," which was quite awesome. I now realize why I spike on the Ultimate field - I'm a 'Cane at heart!). Anyhoo, I was very glad to be back with the Beck and the dogs come Sunday. We (minus the S/W) grabbed some dinner and football with D/C and had a great time - good to be home.

Okay, point by point, lecture by lecture - I can't believe you're still reading!

• E.O. Wilson - who is as rock star evo biologist as they get - gave a talk called The Four Great Books of Darwin. I've heard so much of this stuff in my HPS course lately that I wasn't thrilled at the topic, but he did an admirable job. He did give a little dig - told this joke about how mathematicians achieve their peak in their teens, physicists in the 20s, chemists in their 30s, biologists in their 40s-50s and philosophers never. Well, Mr. Wilson, I believe after all these years, you're still all wet. So there. Phbbbt. :)
• All of you high power scientist career breakers, that previous comment was a light-hearted joke. Please don't end me.
• Bernard Wood, paleontologist, gave a great talk on the evolution of hominids. The primary point was that it is very difficult to take a fossil specimen and place it in the evolutionary tree appropriately - it's hard to be sure if any given species is in direct human lineage or is an offshoot of one of the branches.
• Kristen Hawkes, anthropologist, talked about human longevity and the evolution of post-menopausal life. It's 1, not a recent development, and 2, something we don't share at all with the apes.
• Juan Luis Arsuaga spoke on human ape-relatedness and effective uniformity in the fossil record
• Douglas Wallace gave an interesting talk about energy as the fundamental concept of human life, talking extensively on the evolution of mitochondria and how, among other things. lack of mitochondrial ox-phos uncoupling for thermal purposes accounts partially for why Kenyans are so good at marathons. Lively speaker.
• Anna DiRienzo spoke on genetic variation and its service to evolution in the presence of local environmental factors.
• Sarah Tishkoff gave a very cool talk on tracking human genomic lineage in Africa.
• Mark Baxter spoke on the above-mentioned mobile elements and their historical dynamics in the human genome.
• Carlos Bustamante gave a statistically technical talk on personalized medicine and the human genome - lots of cool stuff on being able to track human migration over the millenia via genomes.
• Morris Goodman, another rock star, gave a general talk on evolutionary evidence in human lineage
• John Avise gave the banquet lecture entitled Non-intelligent Design: Inside the Human Genome. 'Twas a general refutation of the notion of the design (also referenced above) in the human genome given all the mayhem and utter failure that is evident within it. His argument was well-supported, but I wonder about his audience - who's going to be swayed by this who isn't already swayed by, say, back pain? He also closed with a rather wacky notion (shared by Ayala, I gather) that evolutionary theory is actually a gift to religion, as now reli doesn't have to account for many forms of human misery as it falls under the domain of science. "They" can focus on meaning and spirituality and morality/ethics and all that stuff. I have alluded before to the chapter 7 phenomenon - where the science writer delivers a perfectly cogent argument and that tacks on some bizarre, ungrounded humanities oriented commentary at the end. This was it par excellence - it implies that you could completely undermine the metaphysics of a religion and leave it largely intact for those "types of things science can't do." Which is, in a word, dubious - you're basically asking for a tacit admission of a God of the gaps who can only cover non-empirical ground. I think that's a bit dismissive of the role of religious narratives in the belief structure - anyways, not to go all hypercritical on this, but I just thought that was a weird tag on to an otherwise finely put point, that the genome is riddled with evolutionary evidence that makes no sense if viewed from an intelligent design perspective.
• Saturday morning opened with a fantastic talk from Nina Jablonski called The Skin That Makes Us Human, an account of melanin evolution in different climates. This was probably up there for the best talks of the weekend (for me) - just really drove home the point that skin tone is a magnificently malleable trait, and the interplay between UV protection and Vitamin D synthesis dictates not just skin color but hair color, distribution, etc. The *malleable* point was huge - there have been numerous independent evolutionary events that have changed population's skin colors, which indicates that relative to a lot of traits, skin color, aka one of the primary determinants of race, is actually one of the more fleeting characteristics of peoples when considered on evolutionary time scales. If one were to start with an ethical premise that treatment of others not be arbitrary - and then note based on scientific evidence that one of the main things we use to differentiate peoples is that highly "temporary" trait - I think one has something resembling an logico-empirical stance that racism is idiotic. I'll need to come up with a more eloquent way of phrasing that at some point, but it was quite a lovely point in a conference that occasionally wandered off the "Human Condition" topic.
• Ajit Varki gave a very detailed, fascinating talk on unique patterns of sialic acid biology (i.e. cell surface sugars / potential antigens) and the evo histories of certain ones that appear in humans but not other species (and their impact on disease). Science-detail heavy, but quite sharp stuff.
• Peter Richerson gave a largely apologetic talk on how culture evolution studies are some 75 years behind bio ones. He alleged that variable climate seemed to spark human cultural development. Dubious? Maybe. This was essentially a claim that cultures follow Darwinian rules, which always treads a bit in meme territory for me - is it the cultures undergoing evolution, or the people who practice them? Unclear.
• Francisco Ayala, another fretboard burner rockstar biologist, gave the weirdest talk of the weekend (again, for me). It was called The Difference of Being Human, but focused entirely on the biology of ethics. The claim was that ethics can be split into two concepts - the capacity / proclivity to judge right and wrong, and the actual instantiation of what determines to be right and wrong. Ayala claimed the former is biologically / evolutionarily determined (the capacity for abstract thought, anticipation of action outcomes, the ability to contemplate and choose possible alternatives) and the latter, the particularities of what is right and wrong, is largely culturally determined. It's a distinction between capacity and code. (Ayala further claimed that he could make a similarly structured argument for many human cultural practices - aesthetics, religion, etc.). To be honest, the first part was unremarkable - it was supported by top notch biology, to be sure, but it was just a typical "humans are unique animals" type argument that alleged that this was key to our moral foundations. He also alleged that our bipedal gait permits tool development which drives brain development which drives more tool development, etc., which results in our big, abstract thought conceiving brains. The second part was simply bizarre - after a brief run through the history of ethics, he alleged that our ethical beliefs are largely cultural, and that the successful ones are determined by natural selection. This was essentially an argument that moral peoples will be more evolutionarily successful than non-moral ones (or maybe cooperative groups will outdo non cooperative ones) without a specification of what being moral means. The obvious question here is how this articulates with an endorsement of moral relativism, since it seems to boil down to a rule that survival will trump other concerns. I wanted to ask this, but didn't get a chance as some other grad student made an ill-advised challenge to Ayala's criteria for moral capacity (the student made a fair point, but got shot down in front of everyone for being unable to properly articulate it). Anyways, I'd be interested in reading Ayala's books - he is a former Dominican priest, so one imagines he has some moral philosophy / theological chops, even if it didn't come across in this lecture too much. In short, I found this very superficial and reeking of chapter 7-ness, though I am also confident that Ayala has probably outlined the idea better in other venues.
• Leda Cosmides gave an utterly boring talk called Whence Intelligence that didn't seem to have much to do with intelligence but rather a "mental module" of cheater detection. I should qualify that - it was boring because it was a *survey* on cheater detection, the literature of which I am already profoundly familiar and find problematic for a whole truckload of reasons. So perhaps for people unfamiliar with her work it was interesting; I can't speak to that, because all I heard were arguments and evidence that have been in play for some fifteen years. She was one of the people I was most excited to see because I am fairly familiar with the back and forth that she and anti-evo psychologists have undergone, so I wanted to hear something of a response to the challenges or a take on how this affects our conception of the human condition. I got neither, so her talk was something of a letdown.
• Terrence Deacon gave an overly long talk called Whence Language, and I will pay you handsomely if you can explain how this said much about human language. It was a lot of stuff on birdsong, to be sure, but again missed the larger point of things for me.
• And finally, Steve Pinker closed with a talk on the Evolution of the Mind. Pinker was the show closer, the guy I had come to see, and he gave a somewhat demure performance and more or less rehashed some of the things from his popular works on language and the blank slate of the mind. He was stunningly non-assertive - of all the people there, he seemed the most keenly aware of the differing theories from his own present in the room that afternoon. I doubt he was nervous, but he was a lot less lively than in, say, his Colbert Report appearances. The talk included thoughts on the intelligence measure G and our lack of ability to pinpoint its genetic underpinnings and our pervasive use of metaphor in language which he points at as evidence of a generalized preference for abstraction. He specifically made a point that though a large percentage of our mental association is sensory driven a la Proust, there is a certain percentage that comes about via this metaphoric, structural brain associations. He also argued that while skin colorations and other specific biological traits are important for explaining our multiple niche compatibilities, our mind is largely the thing that permits our varied dominance of earth's nooks and crannies. He made a slew of other Pinker-typical, interesting points, too. It was odd that he read his lecture from notes and again, gave a very soft-spoken presentation of ideas. He was also the only person who got challenged (really) in the Q&A afterwards - people griped with the specifics of his notions of intelligence inheritance. All in all good stuff, but again, the survey nature of the talk was disappointing - I'm glad I got the chance to hear such a pop scientist celebrity talk, but I was genuinely surprised by the low key feel of it.

Phew. So that's it. Definitely a good experience, but also definitely one that good use some tweaking. I was probably most fascinated by the meta-anthropology at play - scientists talking to scientists, wheeling and dealing, trying not to stick foot in mouth and some wielding their cachet like 50 Cent at da club. Fascinating. Hopefully next time I will be a bit more of a participant observer and not just an observer - I feel like a did a good job socializing and as mentioned met a few people who might be interesting to work with, but I can definitely work on shmoozing profs and figuring out a way to convince them that an ethicist / non-strict scientist is worth their time. Things to work on. Until next time, that's the lyrical tale of the past weekend with Nyet and the OC. Looking forward to more interesting conferences to come.

Happy Holidays from Sparks and Wrigs

And as long as you're enjoying this endearing, longtime torture of children/animals who have no idea who the hey that bearded guy is, you might as well check out Sketchy Santas.

In other news, to celebrate this 5th night of miracles, Fred got her ovaries excised today. Rumor has it she tried to walk off the operating table, entrails hanging out and still under anesthesia. That crazy cat, I tell you what...

P.S. Please note that these Santa pictures were taken while I was out of town. I would *never* permit such activities. Besides, S & W only celebrate Chrismukkah and Festivus, not this Santa Claus business.

Surreality of the PHX Airport

So I have photo evidence of all of this, but for now just trust that my flight to Orange County got delayed by three hours, but the airport boredom was replaced by an all out Phoenix Suns festival. The first sign that something wacky was going on was the security line featuring a quartet of scantily purple-clad dancers / cheerleaders / solar flares or whatever the hey they're called. I could understand that cheerleaders need to fly, but I couldn't fathom why they would be decked out in uniform aside from some bizarre Suns corporate policy. Turns out they were arriving to welcome the Phoenix Suns to the airport, and they had the famed, child-terrifying gorilla in tow. Oh, goodness. Oh, and let's clarify, it wasn't "the Phoenix Suns," it was "some Phoenix Suns" - Grant Hill, Louis Amundson, Robin Lopez, and a couple of guys I didn't know. I.e. no Nash or Stoudemire, who apparently have better things to do. They welcomed them off the plane as though it were an announcement of a starting lineup at a game - blaring music, PA guy, the whole nine yards (or maybe eight, as there were no smoke machines and a decided lack of laser graphics). People got autographs, posters, calendars, free t-shirts, and mugged by the gorilla. There were decidedly disparate reactions from the obvious business travelers in the audience, who just glared over their Blackberries at the mid day disturbance, and the rest of us idiots, who were enthralled by the entirety of the meaningless spectacle. All of the players / people were exceptionally gracious, took pics with the fans and even ran a mini-trivia game with ticket handouts. The whole time Grant Hill smiled brightly, though I am pretty sure his internal dialogue had a whole lot of "Don't you know who I am? I'm Grant effing Hill! I won national championships! I don't appear at lame-ass 12th man Southwest Airlines promotional stunts! WTF!!?!?"

Of course, the absurdity of the over-exuberant cheerleaders were what really grasped attention. I mentioned elsewhere that they were about a square yard of clothing north of stripper apparel, and while I am sure they are talented in the cheering / dancing department, this particular event required little more that their standing around and showing off eighteen inch waists and ample, too-tight-top-enhanced cleavage. Seriously, it was freaky, and a few steps past family friendly. I got a little entranced by the slew of middle aged men and eight year old girls lining up to get their pictures taken with the cheer-squad. "You are HOT, I must document that I saw you!" "I want to be confined to roles as a sexual object when I grow up!" Or something. Anyways, the cycle continues. You may at this point be wondering why I led this with Dr. Frankenfurter; well, I learned my flight was delayed and turned around to see a Gorilla milling about with exotic dancers and Grant Hill. Don't dream it. Be it.

I noticed that I've been pulling my usual end of semester trick and popping up for air once a week to post here. So I should probably fill you in on what's been going on. Last week I presented my prospectus project for that class; it was more than a little stressful but was pulled off adequately. Immediately went from that to a grading fest of Bio 311 assignments and exams; that course and its 200-some-odd students have had a way for grabbing all of time for stretches. I also had to wrap up some reading assignments for Jason, present an article in lab group, write my final paper for the applied ethics course, and wrap up / respond to the complaints about grades from the aforementioned course. Got kinda nutty and sleep-depriving, but as far as I can tell, I came out unscathed.

I am currently waiting for a plane to take me to Orange County where I am TOTALLY going to hang with Seth and Ryan. Sorry, couldn't resist, and I maintain that the first half of season one is among the best TV ever. No, I am going to the Sackler Colloqium on In Light of Evolution: The Human Condition. I am psyched for the program, as it features some cool talks and some heavy hitters, some of whom I aim to interview down the road as part of my project, so hopefully I'll get a chance to meet them. On the other hand, I am not entirely psyched about the networking aspect of this stuff that I "should" be doing. I am a crappy careerist. I will try to meet some folks and be sociable, but I don't see myself going out til all hours, partying and cavorting with Steve Pinker or anything. Though you never know. This is probably something I should work on, but I think the main thing is that as a lowly grad student, I don't feel very comfortable asserting my knowledge with all these people who have specializing in the area for years. I'm sure I 'm having a fairly standard issue reaction, but I feel like I know squat next to the crowd that's going to be there. I suppose I'll find out how much of a fraud I am at breakfast. "Professor, could you pass the eggs?" "Oh, how cute, the grad student thinks we still call them eggs!" ARRRRGGGGHHH.

So anyways, the conference is for the next two days and then I'm back home on Sunday. I feel bad abandoning Beck / S&W / Fred for the weekend, but I also think that when the Nyet's away, the cat and/or Beck gets sushi. So that's good. I'm somewhat relieved to be for all practical purposes done with my assignments for the semester, but also anxious that there's a stack of more work waiting on Monday. Hopefully it will be work that lends itself to breaks for blogging, though, and I'll be better able to keep you appraised of goings on. Until then...


California... California... here we come!!!

(Oh, and my final ethics paper was on phenomenological / embodiment approaches to the abortion debate and whether they could possibly resolve issues of selective trisomy-21 abortion. Fascinating I know. I won't post it here, but if you want to see someone try to cram too many ideas into a fifteen page paper on a topic that's notoriously clumsy to write about (phenomenology, I mean, though I suppose you could say the same for abortion), I'm happy to share the doc with you. YEEHA).

Desert Turkey

Beck and I more or less survived our first Thanksgiving weekend sans travel in our collective history. Beck had to work Wed-Fri-Sat-Sun, so booking it over to Texas or up to Rochester for a single day was out of the picture. We ended up having the meal proper with Beck's internet friend (now real life, brunch-going friend) Lorena and her family/friends which ended up being a nice little pot-luck affair. Beck made some ridiculously good sweet potatoes, one dish sweet and one savory, which received an onslaught of compliments. Unsurprising. No turkey-dancing, no potato-peeling, so it obviously suffered by comparison, but we managed to have an okay time. Football was not on, which struck me as sacrilegious / bizarre - what easier conversation-lull filler between people who don't really know one another than the pleasant drone of Turkey day football cheers? Ah, well.

Spent the bulk of the vacation grading essays, the final set of position papers for the Bio 311 Biology & Society course. I've got a collection of gems once again; maybe later they'll find the webs, but for now, here's the winning introductory sentence:

"Along with satisfying our desires and needs as humans, there comes the burden of its consequences."

Truer words, etc.

Last weekend brought a merciful end to VOTS Fall League. Justin's team May Cause Dizziness beat Cole's Huck My Life in the finals for the championship, so congrats to Dheintime again; we got nowhere near either spot. We had some attendance problems for the final weekend - we were pretty much eliminated already with the received shellacking the prior Tuesday, but on Saturday people came late, got injured, and didn't do a whole ton of running in the game besides. 'Twas a fairly exhausting couple games of effectively-savage for me; we tried to keep things close but couldn't do a whole lot. Beck played well - threw a forehand for a score despite a girl mugging her pretty significantly, so that was cool - but by the end of the day, I think she was just as tired of this fall season as I was. We had some good times, had a good run in the middle there, and the lesson is thoroughly learned - always draft your own team.

Between those three losses, a scrimmage loss last weekend and a scrimmage loss Friday, I've had a bad string of late. Pickup this afternoon, and men's league (which started last week, but we had a bye), so hopefully things will turn around before long.

A presentation and two papers due in the next week and a half. Shwank. I got quite a bit done yesterday by planting myself in a coffee house for six hours straight, and when I came outside to Phopenix rain, I was quite thoroughly disoriented. Beck and I have made the most of the time we've had this weekend - watched a few movies (Capote, Living in Oblivion), done some crosswords, eaten great food (including MoJo!) and dipped our head in the occasional can on paint. I am also told our banter on facebook is "quite funny." Go us.

Oh, and we have a little guest staying with us.


She's a super cute cat named "Sophie" (her old name was "Found," but Beck thinks that's lame). Incredibly social and having a grand ol' time locked away in our guest bedroom where Sparkles can't eat her. AND she hasn't made me explode with allergies yet, so that's nice. She does occasionally meow and cause World War III in our living room as S/W scamper to investigate, but otherwise no major issues. Anyways, if you'd like a great cat, she's hanging out in our pad for the time being.

Alright, enough breaking, more presentation preparing. Catch y'all soon, hopefully with more entertaining posts.

Depression is a Blue State

Sorry, that title has nothing to do with anything; I just read it in Elegant Complexity (a study guide to IJ) and the now-double-meaning of "Blue State" made me laugh. Liberals of the world unite... in your futile mission to spread compassion. A paraphrased quote from The Colbert Report from a couple of weeks back: "Now convince me why I should be in favor of Public Health option, given that I'm fabulously wealthy, have top-notch health insurance, am very healthy, and don't care about other people." Ha-ha, Stephen, but only kind of.

Back on topic: the week/weekend that was/were. Working backwards, am currently sitting on the couch watching the Cardinals trail the Colts. Steak tonight for dinner, as it's still summer-grillin' weather 'round these parts. Dogs are doing well; both got "chewies" today, which is kinda like crack-laced heroin cheeseburgers. Happy times. Beck and I chilled for most of the afternoon in front of the football, hit the grocery store, hung out at a coffee shop doing the Sunday puzzle, and walked the dogs in the opposite of that order. Sparkle / Wrigley were kind enough to wake up at 5:30 this morning, so our Sunday was extended in time if not in wakefulness.

Our neighbors spun the wheel for "how do we decorate for Halloween this year" and the roulette ball landed in "grotesquely / tackily." I'll have to snap a picture of this surreptitiously, but trust that it involves a life-sized headless skeleton bride and groom. To each his or her own, but preferably not when I'm going to spend the next month looking over and saying hello to what I mistake for people only to be scared out of my gourd.

Fell asleep last night early after an evening of Dexter and delicious pizza (from A Slice of Sicily, check it out Phoenicians!) thanks to the nine hours I spent in the blazing Sunny Azz yesterday. The latter five hours were spent golfing with Beck's cooking internet friend Eva and her husband Che; we hit up Papago golf course where I managed to shoot a 105 using my modified golf rules. (My goal was 2 over par for every hole, or 108, so that's cool; and only five balls lost between Beck and me, three of those coming on one hole in which Beck investigated the acoustics of the sound "Splash!"). Fun times, though long, and my one round every five months plan has not exactly paid off with Tiger-like adroitness. Beck was fantastic, just got better and better as the day rolled on, getting really consistent with solid contact by the end. She claims that getting to the green is really the point of the game, not sinking the ball, which actually makes for a much more enjoyable experience. Fun times, though it's still possibly a little too hot for comfortable golf starting at 12:40.

The initial four hours of sun were spent at Sprawl's next-to-last practice before Regionals next weekend. I am getting psyched because 1, after a summer-ful of injuries, I am finally getting somewhat back to form, and 2, some big-time Ultimate 2.0 style concepts - drop passes to huck, attack the breakside for easy scores, play position defense - are finally taking hold. Though it's a long shot based on any objective measure, at-least-shooting for Nationals is starting to look less thoroughly impossible. We've had some great practices of late, and hopefully this will carry over to a solid performance this coming weekend. PrimetimeDheintime Deion Sanders Justin and I finally got to play some points together for the first time in what feels like forever these past few weeks, and the huck-let-him-run-it-down-strategy continues to serve us well. Props to homes for running some great drills / practices in the past few weeks. Props to all of the Sprawl leadership - BP, Justin G,, Dixon, Vince - a lot of people are starting to fall into roles, which is step one-A of getting to that next Ulty plateau.

I can't reiterate this enough - I'm excited about getting back on the field just because of the stupid duration of this most recent injury, but really I'm just amped that we're getting some gelling going on. I shared with the team recently the idea of Ultimate heroin - those rare games when you go out and it clicks, the other team blinks and it's 13-2 because you're swarming them on D and can offensively do no wrong - and I've seen a couple of glimpses of a capacity in Sprawl to achieve that. We'll see this weekend, I suppose, but I am ITCHING to get on the field with Les Boys Phoenice. YES. I will be sure to keep the excitement-meter rolling through the week. Practice Saturday started at 7 AM, started with a lot of deep throwing and ended with some pretty intense scrimmaging. All told that (plus the golf) was a loooooong day in the sun. I'm appropriately bronze and pretty.

Friday night was fun times, too - Beck and I had butter garlic shrimp for dinner and saw 9, a post-apocalyptic movie about life-force-endowed burlap sacks. It's an animated film with a distinct, thrillingly dark / steampunk look. Beck and I agreed that though it was a gorgeous film, but the plot seemed somewhat tacked on - like they had a great idea for a movie setting and vibe, but lacked anything concrete for them to do. This was entirely instantiated in some pretty terrible, stock dialog (e.g. "I started this; I've got to finish it"). Plus the ending made no sense, always a killer. PLUS we endured some annoying teenagers through the previews - I tell you, every day, my lawn (and the accompanying desire that people get off it) grows a little larger. We did however beat them ... to Mojo after the movie (let's hear it for jokes recycled from Facebook, yeah!). One of the better chocolate and peanut butter-based topping concoctions I've had there in a while, incidentally.

Friday day worked - I had a more-successful-than-they-have-been discussion session with the Bio & Society honors students / Bio & Soc majors in which they finally asked some questions. I still feel like it's too much of a binary discussion - student asks question, Nyet answers it - and I'd rather that something resembling an organic discussion develop. Problem is that even the honors students are operating from a very limited knowledge base - so a lot of the questions are honest "what the heck is going on with bio phenomenon X," and I'm really the only person in the room that has access to the fact foundation in order to be able to address it. Still, getting better, students getting more confident, and it's cool, because it's exactly the kind of thing for which I'm into this business in the firs place. I've got a few with whom I'm making good interpersonal contacts and who have told me that they've really enjoyed the lectures and the discussion class, which gives me all kinds of warm-fuzzies.

Ah, yes, the follow up lecture on Cancer: Genes & Environment. It went well - a little less audience-pleasing than the last detailed account of the horrors of various diseases - but I got a good amount of info across in an engaging way. My big problem was a couple of students who kept asking and asking tangential questions - they ranged from the word association ("Telomerase? I read an article on that once...") to the absurdly complicated ("how does cancer staging work?") to the repeating-what-the-lecturer-said-just-twenty-seconds-ago ("Doesn't the spleen clear red blood cells?"). It's hard to keep momentum when curious peoples keep derailing you, and I tried as best I could to keep things on task. I did, unfortch, have to resort to "why don't we talk about that after class" more than once, which always strikes me as taky because you're all but pointing out the stupidity, or at least inappropriate-for-context-ness, of the question. Ah, well. I was also observed by the Center for Bio & Society director Jane, and she was complimentary afterwards, so hopefully 'twas a good job. Again, I'm psyched that these lectures went well, as this is pretty much my motivation for teaching - you know, moldy minds - though I'd be lying if I'm glad I can focus on my other work and not speak to 200 people audiences for a few weeks.

That's taking it back far enough, I suppose. The only other persistent thing going on is a silly debate from our Applied Ethics class on the existence of timeless, acontextual, universal morality. It's fun to work on developing points of view if a little frustrating to have to backtrack to argue such a naive-take - I don't entirely feel like getting into it, but the general problem with such a stance (a definitive end-all be-all notion of right and wrong) is that it's essentially impossible to articulate how such a thing would be articulated without being subjectively filtered and therefore subject to question of political dynamics, blah blah blah etc. I'm kinda tired of the topic at this point.

Okay, so get psyched for a fun week - one more practice with Sprawl (tomorrow), a league game on Tuesday, the usual slew of classes and reading, and it all comes together in the super-exciting regional tourney in which I should really be working on writing but will instead work on my forehand hucks. Wish us luck...

The Sadness & The Happiness

Should We Talk About the Government?

Hi Hi ... Hi Hi.

Just took the dogs for a walk at 6 in the morning... and it's only 91 degrees. I couldn't bring myself to go to pickup yesterday, my elbow was still sore (feels better today, thanksforasking) and the computothermometer read 117 (!!) at 5:00. I seriously doubt we would have had more than 6 people there anyways, and to drive 20+ miles to play box and die of heat exhaustion is just... well, let's just say you're welcome mother earth.

The plan for today, written here to hold me to it - do some serious damage on Wimsatt's Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. It's general claim is that reductionism introduces biases into our thinking and that we need to reconceive our understanding of the world as being a heuristic enterprise, not one that pins down TRUTH; i.e., every method of learning about the world is going to have built in strengths and weaknesses, biases and focuses that give you a limited glimpse. Interesting and promising so far; hopefully by the end of the day I'll have conquered it.

Beck and I finished season 2 of Burn Notice last night, a glitzy, Miami-boobed-up spy version of MacGyver, which sits entirely in the "entertaining" portion of the entertainment spectrum. There are funny, cool characters, a reasonable over-arching plot, and plenty of action and bad-assness, but we'd be the first to admit that it's a ridiculous, dumb show. Ah, well; we finished Season 4.0 of Battlestar Galactica and are just waiting for the final season 4.5 to come out; in the meantime, I think we are entitled to our goofy pleasures. Plus, the characters, while somewhat static and one dimensional, are FUNNY, and you can't pass up listening to Ash* crack wise on a nightly basis. We missed finishing season 2 in time to catch the first ep of season 3 on Hulu, so we may be forced to buy an ep or two if we're too impatient to wait for the DVDs...

* - Shop Smart - S-Mart.

Got froyo (I am so hip, yo) with D & C and D's parents on Friday - good times, but by far the craziest news of the night was that D's parents unexpectedly put an offer on a house right around the corner from all of us. Dan's ability to not crack Everybody Loves Raymond jokes in this circumstance impressed. I don't think they'll be coming down for a few years, but when the reality show starts filming in 2012, remember that the seeds were laid here.

Alright, work-time. Here goes. YEAH!

Speaking of Blogging About Dogs

The Dog Tails, all in one post. I expect approximately no one to read this:

Sparkle Conquers the Stairs

SD: I used to have a problem. I used to not be able to walk down stairs. I was terrified; Beck and Nate had to carry me down from the 2nd floor at our apartment in Austin so I could visit "Poop Island" at the complex.

WD: Poop Island ruled.

SD: So yeah, then Nate tried to train me, he would put me on the first step and have me come down, then put me on the second step and come down, then the third, etc.

WD: Whatever happened to poop island?

SD: I got all the way to the next to stop stair, but I couldn't get over the mental block - I couldn't move past the top stair. Nate would lift me and put me on the second to top stair, and then I could go down, but I just couldn't get off of that top stair. I would yap and yap and all the neighbors thought I was being kicked or something. That was kinda funny, actually.

WD: I mean, one day you're on poop island, the next you're in some place where it snows? What's up with that?

SD: Then one day when Nate came home, Wrigley ran out the front door at full speed. She knocked the lamp into the doorway, so when Nate went running after her and slammed the door shut, he hit the lamp and the door stayed open. Curious, I meandered outside and saw Nate catch Wrigley in the parking lot (we were little then; nowadays Wrigley can run WAY faster than Nate)

WD: Yeah, I'm pretty seriously fast now, I'm all ziggity zaggity.

SD: So then I thought, wouldn't it be funny if now was the time I picked to conquer my fear of the top stair? So I did, I ran down the stairs. it turned out to be pretty easy. And FUNNY! Nate was running around like a crazy man, trying to hold Wrigley like a football and catch me at the same time.

WD: Touchdown!

SD: Yeah, so eventually he caught me. But man was that hilarious. And I never had trouble with that top step again. Now, garbage bags, I still have some problems with those...

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The Time Wrigley Caught a Squirrel

WD: One time I caught a squirrel. It was at our place in Arlington, the one with the treasure chest of shoes in the basement and the yard I always tore up. And it had a sweet widescreen TV, and a guy who came and put papers in one box and then gave us cookies. That place ruled. Anyways, yeah, I was hanging out by the bushes, I mean I was hunting by the bushes, when Sparkle scared the squirrel out of the bushes, and it was all bam, pow, and I was all, yeah, you can't get away from me, and it was all yeah I can, and then I pounced it, and then it tried to get away but I pounced it, it was sweet.

SD: Yeah, it was pretty sweet. So I was all grrrrr, yo, Wrigley, let me have that squirrel, I want it, and Wrigley was all no you can't have it, but then I was all grrrr, so Wrigley let go of the squirrel, and the squirrel ran away. So I was all damn, man, now no one gets a squirrel, and I really wanted a squirrel, but then Nate said "inside" so we went inside. Then we got cookies. It was sweet.

WD: Yeah, those were good times. I haven't been able to catch one since. But I caught one once. It was sweet. I mean, catching it was sweet. I didn't taste the squirrel, I just pounced it. Peanut Butter?

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The Staite of Dog

WD: Stardate... stardate... um, Sparkle, what's the star date?

SD: The star to date is Jewel Staite. No doubt. She's cute, and she can fix an engine. I don't know what Simon was thinking.

WD: What are you talking about?

SD: What are yooooooouuuuu talking about?

WD: Um, anyways... stardate something or other, being a dog I really have no frame of reference here, but it sure does seem like a long time since we saw Poop Island.

SD: RIP Poop Island.

WD: Oh, Sparkle, don't say that!!! Anyways, every once in a while, we like to take a step back and note the status of things. You know, check out how everything's going. The State of Dog. It's not all eating, sleeping, walking, lounging on the couches and doing nose art on the windows, you know.

SD: Right - it's only 98% that.

WD: How true. Anyways, you may have noticed that I am doing most of the talking here. That is because after our fight in March, the owner-types decided that I am the dominant one.

SD: Grrrr...

WD: Quiet, you. The new arrangement is working nicely for me, as I get food and greetings and such first. Sparkle finally realizes that she is shorter and not as awesome as I am, which is also nice.

SD: Yo. It's not all about the dominance thing. The owners also started giving me extra magical peanut butter or hot dogs or wet dog food with dinner every night. It's awesome stuff; it has chilled me out to the MAX! I am low key and do not constantly walk around with that wigged out look on my face. Look how calm I am!!!

On the downside, my appetite is a little suppressed from all the magic - so I have lost some weight off my legendary tough-girl figure. But it's okay; nothing a little wet food and / or olive oil can't fix.

WD: Yes, I have to agree. Life is much nicer - we can sleep in bed together, hang out on the couch, play with the owner-types - and nothing even close to a fight in almost 3 months! Hooray! Wait, what? Did you say squirrel?

SD: No I did not. In other news, a dog AND a 2 year old moved in upstairs, but we barely even see them. And sometimes that dog barks (I hear he is a boy dog who still has his balls! Is that crazy or what, Wriggs?) but we just ignore him. We're much too classy for barking.

WD: Amen. In more other news, I almost got lost in the woods the other day. But I am such a good dog that I went back to the car and Beck did not realize this for 15 minutes! Ha! It was actually not that funny; I got in trouble. And Beck made Nyet sad because she called him and told him and he was sad. I will never run off by myself again.

SD: (Uncontrollable giggling).

WD: Oh yeah - I had a bad time the last time I went to the woods, too. The time before that, I mean. I stuck my face in something CRAZY - like a seven headed wasp robot - and it bited me on my nose. Be forewarned - this is kinda gross - but this is what I looked like two days after it happened, and it got worse and worse and worse! I had to eat extra magical peanut butter for like three weeks! And I had to wear the hat of shame!!!

(Picture removed because it was NASTY).

It's all better now, for the most part - but man, those were some rough days. But seriously, look how happy I am!!!

SD: So there you have it - the State of Dog. Better living through magic, I always say. We'll try and share some more Dog Tails soon.

Owners leave and re-enter the room. SD & WD pick up shoes, socks, and whatever else is available. Brains are reset.

WD: Stardate... stardate... um...

----------------------------------

The Scarist Halloween Costume Ever

WD: Today I decided to do a fun experiment! Halloween is almost upon us (Note: Dogs cannot tell time, let alone read calendars) and I need a really scary costume this year because people are always like "Wow, Sparkle is so Scary!" and "Wrigley is so Cute!" and I want to be scary.

SD: Dude, you are so not scary.

WD: I know. Anyways, what's scarier than dressing up as Sparkle's arch-nemesis, "Elkraps?"

SD: WHAT?!?! Where is Elkraps?!?!

WD: Dude, take a chill pill. No seriously, it's almost dinner time (Note: Again, this was written at 7:15 A.M.). I am just pretending to be Elkraps; don't try to kill me.

SD: Okay. This time.

WD: Anyways, so Beck took us to the woods, and I wanted to be Elkraps for Halloween so I thought now's my chance so I jumped into a big black mud puddle. And I writhed around in it. And now I look awesome! I look just like her!

SD: You so do not:


WD: Whatever dude, I am wicked scary.

SD: "Wicked?" We're from Texas, goofball!

WD: Anyways, our owners are WAY lame, and they wouldn't let me stay dressed as Elkraps. I had to get in the tub and take a bath which, just in case you're not a dog and you don't understand, is pretty much the worst thing ever.

SD: Amen.

WD: "Some" men, "a" man. Geez, Sparkle, where'd you go to school? Yeah, so we got baths, Sparkle did too 'cause she was kinda muddy, too, so then we looked like this:


SD: The moral of the story is man, stay away from the bath, it makes you look stoooooopid.

WD: And don't try to dress like Elkraps, because they'll just make you take a bath, and then you'll look stooooopid.

SD: Oh, but if they do make you take a bath, shake all over their clothes and get them all wet, because that is freaking hilarious!

WD: Some men to that, my sister.

------------------------------------

The State of Dog: January 2007 (Not that They Know That)

WTD: So yeah, I was hanging out with Nyet in the study and he was listening to the radio on his Command Control Station and the guy on the radio the guy on the radio was saying "tonight, W will deliver the State of the Union Adress" and I was like what's a union but then I was like oh no W that's me and I don't even have a speech written yet so I called my friend Sparkle and she agreed to help me.

STD: Dude, Breathe. And Punctutate. Seriously.

WTD: So yeah, first we read some online polls about what dogs wanted to hear about, but when we...

STD: You mean when I...

WTD: When Sparkle typed "State of Union opinions," all we got was a bunch of hits on ending partisan politics.

STD: (Wrigs, don't forget to start everything with my fellow dogs!)

WTD: Right, sorry. My fellow dogs, I am pleased to report that we have already got that ending partisan politics under control. Even though I am officially Alpha Dog and Sparkle knows her place..

STD: Dude, that is not on the prompter...

WTD: We have officially decided to get over our black and tan, our skinny and short differences...

STD: Mmmm, black and tan...

WTD: and work together to make a better house for us dogs. It is time to see past our differences and look to our goals, and as you may have noticed, we have not fought for over 10 months!

(Insert Thundering Standing Ovation Here)

WTD: My fellow dogs, once we came together and discussed the issues, we discovered that we actually both often take the same position! For example, on the heated issues of bed, sofa and futon, Sparkle and I are both in favor of the position of "lying on." When it comes to the issue of dog labor laws, we both agree on the idea of a 4 hour wake day! Sparkle, what is your position on Broccoli?

STD: I'm for it!

WTD: Me, too! And how about your position regarding snow and ice on the ground?

STD: It makes my butt cold when I pee! I'm against!

WTD: We're together on that one as well! Which is why we started the Global Warming Initiative. More like, "A Convenient Poop," Mr. Gore! HA! So Sparks, how about your position on Wrigley getting into the bed first?

STD: Grrrrrr...

WTD: Okay, bad example. But as you can see, my fellow dogs, our similarities far outweigh our differences. In fact, we were so excited about my leadership ability that we thought we may put our hat in the ring for the next human election in 2008!

STD: Yeah, not everybody knows that since Wrigley and I are sisters, WTD is technically half-black.

WTD: And I've been spayed, so I'm a bitch but not really completely a woman. So we thought I could run under the name...

Both: "Hilary Obama!"

WTD: Um, Sparkle? I don't get it.

STD: Wait... Hill Airy Oh Bama? Nope. Neither do I.

WTD: Anyways, the State of Dog is obviously doing just fine. We are pretty much lounging around and enjoying the occasional jaunt through the cold neighborhood. There is still no word on Poop Island, but we keep hoping that someday we may find our way home. Anything else, Sparks?

STD: From the Department of Apartmentland Security, we learn that there is still a dead skunk on the road, so we continue to sniff it every 11th day. We are also still at a greyish-black threat level regarding bicycles and other things on wheels entering the apartment, though we have deterred 100% of such attacks thus far. Oh, and squirrels are still annoying.

WTD: How about the DoSSSRS?

STD: Oh, the Department of Shoe, Slipper and Sock Relocation Services? Doing Just Fine.

WTD: True that. Okay, my fellow dogs: Good night, Dog bless, and remember, if you want your owners to feed you at 5:30 instead of 6:00, just be really annoying at 5:15 every single day. Thank You.

STD: Rub my belly.

Update: Wrigley

It's110 degrees outside right now. Farenheit, natch, seeing as my skin is not boiling and melting off my face like I'd looked into the Ark of the Covenant or something. So the W.D., being the COMPLETE and UTTER MORON that she is, picked NOW to go SPRINTING across the yard and into the house and back into the yard and around the living room and crouch position on couch and bark bark bark rinse repeat. She's closing on nine years old at this point, but damn if she doesn't still get up the nerve and embody this every now and then:


Now's as good a time as any to repost my dogs' various aliases. The above would be

Wrigley, aka Wriggs, WTD, WD, Dubya-D, Dubs, Wrigglicious, Wigwee, Wigs, Wrigglinator, Wrigor-Mortis, Wriggle-Butt, Wriziggle, Wrigglesby, My Dog/Your Dog, *^,**, Your Sister**, Piggley, Pigs, Pigface, Pig-leaf, Tweedles, Wriggery, Moron**, Goofball**, Idiot**, Other Dog**, Blondie, Barbie, The Good-Looking One

Throughout this adventure, Sparkle stood on high alert - if high alert consists of sleeping on two stacked dog beds. Behold, th eopposite of Parkles' alert status right now:

Sparkle, aka Sparks, Spah-Kull, Spackle, SD, STD, Parkle, Arkle, Farkle, Spizzarkle, Smokey, Sparklicious, Sparklehead, Speelarkle, My Dog/Your Dog, *^,**, Your Sister**, Moron**, Goofball**, Idiot**, Other Dog**, The Muscle

* E.g., "Look at how cute My Dog is!" Interchangeable with "Your Dog," e.g., "Your Dog won't stop trying to eat off the counter; do something about it."

** - Applicable to both dogs, particularly in cases of "Where's Your Sister" or "Other Dog, come join Your Sister."

I may be reaching some sort of apex of lameness by blogging about my dogs. So it goes.

In the Money / The Fourth

Had our second "Competitive Scrimmage for Money" yesterday on a very hot, muggy Fourth of July. A lot of players were out of town for Potlatch (a big fun times tournament up in Seattle) and others were simply out of town for the Fourth, so confirming attendance was a colossal hassle. Actually, it would not have been a colossal hassle if the people who were going to attend had just replied to my initial invite earlier in the week (Tuesday), but this is not exactly surprising as 1, they are Ultimate players and 2, they are human beings. So as of sometime Thursday, I only had 10 confirmed people coming including myself - so I made the game co-ed and invited out a few PHXation players and then just generally expanded the invite to the Ultimate-wide community. The PHXation players were just fine, I mean, they made it a co-ed game which is inherently different from a club men's game, but they can all still throw / catch / know what's going on. The VOTS-wide community component, though, probably knocked it down from "Competitive scrimmage" to "scrimmage" to "mmage." We had about 30 people come out total - some of the extra show-ups were just Sprawl-ish players who just either didn't confirm or confirmed way late, but some of whom were just VOTS-ish players. And no offense to them, but the whole thing dropped several notches of intensity as a consequence - and even some of the Sprawl-ish types did not stay entirely focused on playing "real" Ultimate. So the game suffered to some extent, though we all had a good time. Still, I feel bad that Josiah felt compelled to say, "I feel like i just lost five dollars playing pickup."

The teams:

Dark: BP, Tricky, Josiah, Jack, Ken, Jose, Brayden (aka Kid), Volo, Jeremy, Tim, Nipar, Derek (12 year old Connole), Joanne, Sarah, Monika, Lexi (for the first and third parts of the time).

White: Justin, Nyet, Russ, Craig, Chris (rando tall guy from out of town), Josh (VOTS guy), Jason (VOTS guy), Ben (VOTS guy), Kevin "Dad" Connole, Patrik, Sean C., Emily, Liz, Kaetlynn, Lexi (for the second third of the time).

So, a good turnout, but a lot of non-clubbers out there, plus a 12 year old and a 14 year old running around the field. Oh, well, like I said, good, if not entirely crispy, times. White came out storming the first game, hitting a couple of deep shots and capitalizing on a ton of bad, bad throws by dark. This game was a bit of a laugher, something lie 1-0, 2-0, 2-1, 3-1, ,3-2, 4-2, 5-2, 6-2, 6-3, 7-3, 8,9,10,11,12,13-3. Yowsers. Like I said, just lots of bad throws and drops from dark; we played okay, but certainly not so emphatically well that we should have run away with it like that. Bunch of good highlights - Liz caught the opening two goals of the game on hit-the-deck grabs; I hit Russ for some big deep scores; Kaetlynn made some excellent grabs; we were overall very chilly witht he disc, though, as admitted, a lot of this was helped by the fact that we were constantly playing on a ten yard field. Dark threw a hospital pass for J-RO at one pont, and I charged across the field to D it, realizing a little late that I just wasn't gonna get there in time despite the floatiness. I tried to stop and just caught J-Ro instead of running through him, but I efectively wrapped-up tackled him without driving him to the ground. Ouch - sorry, J-Ro, and I hope you were kidding about cracked ribs. Game one goes easily to white, though, and we were halfway to a free lunch.

By far the lowlight of the day happened early in the second game - Katelynn cut hard for a disc, Joanne on her heels, the throw was little behind K so she stepped sharply back to get the disc and ran right into Joanne. Joanne had been slowing down to get to the disc, but the overall effect of going for the thrown-behind disc was that sudden stop and get hit with your legs planted phenomenon. She twisted her knee and went down in a heap; I really hope it wasn't an ACL injury, but it certainly looked like it was possible. Ugh. Feel better, Joanne.

In non-devastating knee-injury news, we lost Justin for the second game - he had places to be - and it had a big impact. This game was much tighter - 0-1, 0-2, 1-2, 1-3, 2-3, 3-3, 3-4, 3-5, 4-5, 4-6, 5-6, 6-6, 7-6, 7-7, 7-8, 7-9, 8-9, 8-10, 8-11, 8-12, 9-12, 10-12... 10-13. This game was also sloppier, especially on our end - lotsa newbie bad throws. The mysterious Chris (who is not from here but is just here for the summer) had two throws to me, one was a laser flick at the corner of the endzone - we were playing on the baseball field at Rhodes, which is inevitably confusing because of the infield jutting into the field and the curved fence running along the sideline - anyways, the disc looked out of bounds when it was actually just over the sideline, so I tried a rather crazy toe-it-in layout to catch it when I probably just could have gone with a conventional layout. I miseed it, bah. And a point later, Chris launched a forehand deep for me - it looked like it was going to sail up, so while running after it I started looking for my defender (Kid) to see where he was going to be coming from so I could figure out a good route to take to the disc. The throw was inside out instead of outside in, so it dropped and tailed away from me instead of curving back to the field - I should have noticed this and run more directly after it, but by the time I figured out that it was a less-than-ideal throw, I had to lay out for the disc and missed the trailing edge catch. Bah. I also missed Craig with a huck in this game; that was pretty much it for my egregious errors on the day (if you don't count getting faked out by Craig's handler cut earlier and getting confused by Emily's start-stop cutting action). And, I suppose, if you don't count having Kid run around on me like crazy for a couple of points - dude is fast, and I just got very out of synch with him for a bit. I completely couldn't keep up. Sadness. Anyways, I had that bad stretch in the middle of the second game, but otherwise was solid. Yay - I am solid in a pseudo competitive game. i should be sure to put that on a blog or something. No really, I played well, had some good heads up play with BP whom I consider to be one of the best players (top five, easily) in the area, I was a little chumpy on D, but good on O and I took over a little bit toward the tail end. So overall, yay.

So tied at 1 after two games, necessitating a sudden death game to three. We won the flip, so we received, and despite our best efforts to tank it, we scored the first point. They responded by hucking it straight to Tim (Ha, I didn't even mean to do that - his last name is "Streit," FTR) off the pull and tying it 1-1. I got a huck off to Craig to make it 2-1, we got a turn, and Craig put a big forehand to me against Tricky. I got position on him, he clocked me in the back of the head as we both jumped, but I still grabbed the disc and fell in the endzone. And 1!!! And game. We won 3-1, which is nice because it also dispels griping about just winning because we won the flip. Free burgers, YEAH. I am now 2 for 2 in competitive money scrimmages and free lunches. YEAH.

So, as stated, fun if less than ideal times. Losers paid Liz, who ran to the grocery store and met us back at Jose's for a quick bbq. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of people came by to cash in - Liz and I were actually the only white team people who won the free lunch (the rest of the attendees were dark team LOSERS), so the proceeds really just went to Jose's general bbq fund. Ah, well. Good times relaxing with Ultimate peeps after the scrimmage, something I really don't do enough of. The over-the-top, gratuitous highlight: Monika and I were talking about breaking the mark, when someone who will remain nameless said, "Oh, I don't even notice where the mark is. I just throw it wherever I want." This is absurd generally, but given the speaker, symptomatic of delusions. Ay caramba.

Drove home from Chandler to find a sleeping Beck. Went to the grocery store and got some 4th of July gluttony supplies, and we spent the afternoon hanging out in the pool, reading, relaxing, and trying to train Wrigley (with the use of little smokey sausages) to jump in the pool (we failed; she will put her front two paws in, which is a major step - HA - but no jumping in quite yet). Beck marinated and cooked some steaks for dinner, we watched a little Burn Notice (a terrible but highly entertaining spy show) and I made us root beer floats for dessert. We can see (and unfortunately, hear) the downtown fireworks from our backyard, so we watched those for a bit and watched Sparkle cower in the house for the rest of the time. (There was a rather infamous incident up at the iPLakehouse one year on July 3rd, where we thought we had lost Sparkle but it turned out she was hiding under the bed from fireworks. Super sad).

Fun day, afternoon, and night - hope everyone else's Fourth was as grand as ours. Though I also hope everyone else's was not 107 degrees and humid like ours...