SLUGgin' Time ... and the Winning's Easy

Apologies for re-using a facebook quip as this post's title, but it just came so naturally* ... anyways, the winning actually did not come easy at all, as with the newfound RSVP rules and plenty of time to set lineups beforehand, I managed to craft a sort of speed/athleticism/hucking (Garret/Griesy,Dheintime, now back in town) v. hands/smarts/work-it-up (Joe/J-Ro/Dixon) matchup that could not really have been more balanced. The latter crew, including your narrator, took the free pizza, winning 13-14, 13-11, 3-2 in one of the best SLUG-fests in recent memory. Hot (90 to 104 degrees F over the course of the morning), humid (~40%**), and windless was the day, and the 14 on 14 matchup featured few turns and a whole lot of solid play. Good times on the pitch.

* - As many folks with a late nineties pop rock upbringing and a limited handle on classic vocal jazz, the first time I actually heard this song was in this form:

When really, one should probably hear this one:

Or this one:

first.

** - "Humid" is relative.

But wait, I'm sure you're asking, wasn't Mr. Jones knock knock knockin' (let-me-hear-you-LOUD!) on purgatory's door like, two days ago? True that, but I've felt semi-decent the last two, did a little ellipticalling / very, very moderate weight-lifting the other day without incident, so I feel like I might be turning the corner. So I played a limited amount today, did my best to stick to O points, and generally hung back relative to my normal game. The effects of not having run / being run down for the past two weeks still lingered; on one of the first points of the day, BP put up a huck for me, and Paul - with whom I'm normally at least even in terms of speed - blew right by me. Ugh. I got my sea legs back after a little while and managed to contribute with some cuts and scores and such, including one semi-big layout snag of a hammer, though it was overall a quite odd day - despite primarily playing handler and hanging back, I can't remember putting up a single huck, and I really only broke the mark for big gains a handful of times. Otherwise it was just possession play and a few endzone cuts, letting some of our other dudes* step in and take the bigger chances. Probably not the ideal contribution for me to make, but it worked out, and I only had a single turn on the day - a breakmark throw intended for Ebay that got mysteriously poach-D'ed by Ken, who, um, let's just say had his man, my teammate, been properly positioned, would not have been anywhere near there. I have to take the blame, as it's my job to see Ken, but you generally don't expect the guy who's supposed to be five yards behind you to be five yards in front of you in the break lane with his defender. I'm just sayin'. None of this mattered as we got the disc back and scored - huzzah - but I'll own my gaffe, I suppose.

* - It's tough for people to figure out, I think, where they stand in the pecking order of licensed-to-thrill risk-taking rights. Garret, for example, our gunslinger who played his college days at Carleton, knows that he has full blessing to take crazy shots (within reason), as the cumulative effect of the open game and huck scores outweigh the occasional turn. And there's that key word, "occasional." We had a player-to-remain-nameless who should be just taking care of the disc conservatively make seven decidedly unoccasional turns in the first game and a half, and when you're losing games at cap by one and there are generally few turns overall, that kills. "Know thyself," FSNAD, is the lesson** here, methinks.

** - Speaking of lessons - I felt like a crappy captain today as I got frustrated with the above behavior and let the guy know it, only it clearly did nothing to help - he kept doing it - and probably pissed him off. I continue to struggle with the encourage / correct / scold aspect of things, as I don't always get who will respond best to what and what's actually called for in different situations. I especially struggle because I know e.g. back in high school football, I didn't respond well to "scolding." It didn't really help, as I already had a good grasp of what I had done wrong, so the yelling after the fact educated me zero and made me feel terrible 4,000. With Sprawl, I should do a better job of remembering those teenage feelings, lest I be (gasp) a hypocrite (not to mention it sorta requires me to be perfect with my decisions if I'm always coming down on people for every little bad one, and yeah, I'm not going to claim to be 100% with my decisions (see school comma med)). And I did make an effort today, thinly disguised as it probably was, to give people more positive feedback and not just snap at mistakes.

All of that said - one, when the same mistake happens over and over (a repeated violation of our "same-thirds" rule was one of the culprits this morning), it's not clear to me that the person knows that or how he erred. So some sort of big, emotionally impacting yelling is an attempt to grab their attention, not just an act of venting. And two, I consistently read things like this regarding on-field/court leadership:

Throughout his career, [he] has never shown much leadership. Because of his tumultuous upbringing in [city] ... his whole role in life is to appease and not make waves ... Even in high school at [school] in [city], as great as he was, he was never the leader, never the player who got in your face and told you to pick it up or get off the court. That title went to a diminutive little player named [teammate], who was tough and resilient and fearless. I don’t think it has been that much different in the pros. [He] is not the kind of player to furiously demand a new coach or general manager ... He does not get in the face of a teammate who is playing below his level, and even if he does it carries little emotional weight. In short, he does not have that assassin mentality that defined [legend] and defines [future HOFer] and translates into true greatness.

That's culled and redacted from this rather scathing article by Buzz Bissinger at Vanity Fair, and if you can't tell, it's about Glen Frey's new best friend LeBron James. The point of quoting it is this: the line between utterly pretentious "I don't make mistakes so why do you?" asshole and leader who refuses to accept less than full effort form his teammates is a fine one, and I don't know if I ever toe it correctly. It's additionally difficult to know whether it's a line worth towing - it's pretty clear that the "legend" referenced at the end, based on his HOF acceptance speech, anyways, was and is an insufferable jerk. That may be worth it for NBA rings, but we're not exactly in that stratosphere with Phoenix club Ultimate. Regardless, this kind of fire/intensity that constantly teeters on the brink of ass-hole-ay is downright glorified in sports, largely assumed to be effective, and, as noted above, necessary for "true greatness." And I'm trying to do nothing if not be great - what, would I want to be "lesser?" There's an art to this, sure, one that I fail to master often, but hopefully it's something that's overall positive I bring to Sprawl.

Still, good to have Dheintime back in town to balance it out...

So yeah, I survived, played reasonably well, and actually have felt no ill effects since. Not from the sickness, anyways - one of the things my doc recommended to absolutely prevent any anemia-related energy problems was not to take NSAIDs. So I didn't engage in my habitual Ultimate-associated "Vitamin I*" pill-popping, and wow, the knee-swelling, um, swelled accordingly. Between that and a bruise on my hip from the aforementioned hammer-grab-layout, I've been hobbling even more than usual today. Good to know that two weeks off doesn't help the joints very much...

* - Ulty slang for ibuprofen. It's fair to say that Ultimate players generally abuse ibuprofen, and I'd be curious to see if we were all running around with more ulcers than the standard population because of it. I try to keep it to a minimum and only use it to combat inflammation, not to mask pain, but given my proclivity for inflammation, that's added up to quite a few bottles over the years. I've never had any overt Vitamin-I associated GI troubles or anything, though the doc's probably right and cutting back won't hurt. Still, cold turkey has got me not running very well, so I'll have to come up with a better solution for the upcoming weeks...

But yeah, great, great SLUG, good to be back on the field with the peeps after a little time off. After the sweat-fest, we hit up Venezia's per usual and caught part of the 3rd place game in the World Cup. Pizza and loud cheers for shots/goals and debates over whether intentional handballs constitute cheating. Good laid back lunch end to a great morning, and on the personal level, good to know that I'm still operating on something of a reasonable athletic level despite the recent viral unpleasantness. I was definitely not 100% - you could I was feeling - no, don't bother - but hopefully things are on the up and up. We shall, as always, see.

OH, and - how about the first redesign of The Ballad in what, four years? I have to retract that Beck said my blog was ugly - apparently, I asked her if she thought it was ugly, and she replied, "well, it's not what I would do." So correction: she merely strongly *implied* that it was ugly. But the real push came when Ulty friend and graphic designer Lisa heckled the blog's look. We can't have experts disapproving, so I changed the scheme entirely. Hope you dig.

Ugly Blog: Errata

Beck and I went through a few iterations to get the layout / design of her new blog, Cooking For Elaine, just right. Somewhere in there it became clear that The Ballad is "ugly." Comment then withdrawn, modified to "it's not what I would do." Eventually translated to "there's too much block text," then further translated to "your paragraphs are too long." Ah, I see where this is going.

In the interest of placating Beck, here's a little experiment. I have several blog posts in the works, all of which are undeveloped ideas that deserve big treatments that, really, it just seems I don't actually have the time to write. So in the interest of appealing to Beck's low-text, short paragraph aesthetic sensibilities*, here are several full posts that will never be, condensed to max-of-five-sentence paragraph form.

* - And this from a person who doesn't tweet!

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The Authenticity of The BS Report

I listen to Bill Simmons's podcasts regularly. In them, he interviews sports personalities, talks shop with various other ESPN personalities, phones his buddies to discuss the latest games, etc., all with a casual tone that gives off the impression that, aside from the occasionally bleeped swear word - this is an ESPN-ABC-Disney production, after all - the listener is experiencing what it would be like to just hang out with Bill. Given the usual gloss / subterfuge / simulacra that pervades most modern media*, the podcast feels like a last refuge, or maybe really a tech-enabled return, to authenticity: the real personality, the unfettered dialogue between these honest to earth, real people, who just happen to live high-profile lives. But then you realize they're recordings, undoubtedly edited and censored, and Simmons himself is giving near-constant indications that he is watching what he is saying due to the powers that be. So even the ostensible casual conversation requires the holding of tongues with quiet reservation, and even while e.g. listening to Seth Myers detail the behind the scenes of SNL skit-writing, the crushing clench of the postmodern spin forces me to wonder, per usual: what's crafted, and what's just crafted by casual tone so as to appear uncrafted?

* - Lame, vague term, I know. Hey, five sentences. It wasn't my idea.

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Jazz, Not Classical

Sprawl players, Hashem help them, cannot remember or successfully run plays to save their lives, yet they want and want plays with specific instructions for precisely what to do in this or that situation. It's borderline absurd, given that there's been no real indication that the plays would be followed even if people knew them, but the bigger problem is that the assumption that there is an exact thing-to-do in every given situation is fundamentally flawed. The expression we've come up for when players keep asking "what do I do when X" type questions is "Jazz Not Classical" - we've got a framework, and yes, sometimes there are definite cuts to make / notes to play, but a lot of it is creative improvisation from within the framework, following certain principles but having the freedom to adjust on the fly, in the moment. Cool metaphor, but it also uncovers a larger problem: we've got some players who don't, um, know their scales just yet. This is time number 42,376 in a teaching context where I've re-realized that my experience set does not match others, and we've got to make sure that a whole ton of fundamentals and background are in place before we can jam.

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Phish and the World Cup

When you listen to Phish jams, Trey is almost always way out front, wailing* o'er the top with incendiary melody lines on his Languedoc guitar, and it's very, very easy to fixate so much on that sound that the remainder of the band sounds like vamping. In soccer... someone has the ball. A way to experience both in a different, perhaps more enlightening light, is to do everything it takes to fixate on the whole instead - in the jam, you can aid yourself by making a concerted** effort to listen to bass and piano and the experience of the whole will just click; on the pitch, try paying attention to the shapes the defenses and offenses make rather than watching the players as individual entities. In short, feel the ball and the guitar more than observing them directly, and both art forms will breathe in a new way. I am becoming increasingly convinced that mainstream popular American sports and music taste are fixated on the former approach, locking in on the lead, and as this vantage gets its kicks from searing notes and goals, it doesn't seem very likely that low-scoring soccer or jam/jazz will overtake football or Taylor Swift anytime soon.

* - "Wailing," not "whaling," for you Mr. Miner readers out there.

** - "Concerted." I kill me.

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The Existential Bench-Press

My favorite memory of high school football, or rather my memory of the best feeling I had during my four years playing high school football, is one that occurred repeatedly - the five minute walk to my car away from the locker room at 6:30 after practice each day. That little five minute window put the maximum amount of time between me and the next time I would have to be back at the locker room, hunkering down, putting on pads and inexplicably putting myself through the nastiness of another day of physically and psychologically torturous CHS football. I bring it up because sometimes at the gym, after that last rep on the bench, or after the forty-fifth (or sixtieth or thirtieth, depending on the day) minute on the elliptical, I catch a brief whiff of that same feeling - I've put maximum time between myself and the next grueling workout. This is a weird thought to have, in particular, leading up to those last few bench presses; hard to keep moving that maximum weight for the day when your orientation is completely towards not doing it any more. All of this points to the necessity of constant renewed goal-setting lest your routine become Sisyphean, but it also points to the following section - if every action is oriented towards other goals, be they Ultimate or pleasure or health or whatever, wherein lies the "real" value?

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Zeal & Anosmia

Whence the drive to do things? Zeal for particular pursuits, like the locus of love or the origin of creative ideas, seems to be one of those mysterious rooted-in-nothing things that nonetheless explains everything. I have been kicking around the idea of a very, very loose framework of a novel entitled Anosmia in which a character goes into surgery to get his sense of smell repaired with the intention of enhancing his worldly experience only to inadvertently destroy whatever the fount of zeal is. This is clearly Smelltardian kinds of autobiographical, as I both can't smell and sometimes (like more people than will admit, I suspect) my zeal drops out - I look at the expanse and just don't have an inkling, an inherent "calling" or whathaveyou, of what to pursue. I kinda feel like the Anosmic lead has limited options in the achieve enlightenment, give up entirely or press-through-in-a-constant-state-of-frustration trichotomy, and I'm definitely leaning toward the latter. In the meantime, fear not, I dig Ultimate, music, and school and philosophy and all kinds of things - I suppose *I* can still smell a bit*, though that probably doesn't make for very interesting reading.

* - Beck would agree - ZING ME!

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The Wire Has a Fat Detective, You May Have Noticed

The Wire is, by all reports, the height of television quality, and it is for many reasons excellent - tight story lines ("too tight?" asks Beck), stellar performances, and an avoidance of expository dialog that evokes an attitude of respect for the brainspace of the viewing audience. Still, it's rife with preposterous elements - the constant eating / porn-mag reading of the fat detective, the overt greying of the stressed-out mayoral candidate's hair, the exaggerated "Omar lives by a CODE!" emphasis, the McNultian "I've cleaned up my act!" smirks - that force me to ask WHY DO THAT? I recognize my tendency to nitpick, I suppose the things that sore-thumb here are more indicative of the relative health of the rest of this excellent show, and we admittedly are only partway through season 4, so maybe the best is yet to come. But for all The Wire's composition and refined, near-Shakespearean air, there are still these cringe-worthy moments that jar the experience. So much is smartly left unsaid, why say these obvious things?

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Frustration, Aggravation Is Getting to You

I fight on a daily basis not to have my selfhood defined by frustration; I lose often. Beck called me on one of my WHY DO THAT? rants the other day regarding the healthcare provided on campus - the details are unimportant, but I was irked that they were basing so much of their thinking on a test with obviously confounding variables - and she's right, I get aggravated at these little mistakes and it dictates the remainder of the experience for me. So I can watch that and try to acc-entuate the positive. But what do you do about e.g. the intractable problem of trying to teach undergrads that are missing their second grade skills? I am meta-frustrated at how I am supposed to deal with pursuing a career that seems to involve a lot of farce on its educational side; that is all.

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The Data-Driven Life / The Reframing Capacity of Obsession

In the midst of all my calorie-counting, food diary-keeping adventures, Jenny pointed me in the direction of this article about, as it's called, "The Data-Driven Life." This little sub-post is really just a link, as it's an interesting little article. But I'm struck by the article's blase dismissal of the shift in framing that occurs when one alters one lifestyle so as to accommodate all that number-crunching. True, the effectiveness of all that data tracking is remarkable, but that tracking alters the way you experience the world, and it's unclear to me how you even begin to weigh that as a benefit v. cost - seems like you would need to, not to use the idea twice in two paragraphs, develop tracking for the tracking. I just know that I spend some non-zero amount of time each day looking at nutrition labels, and more important than the time lost is the way it has reframed my everyday experience - I don't know how to begin to evaluate whether the "health" I've gained is worth the unquantifiable alteration in my subjective experience of food and meals.

* - You could raise a similar point about blogging a life vis a vis living it. You *could.*

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Flags of Our Fathers

Requires a pic:

We have an Arizona flag hanging off the newly mounted flagpole on the front of our house. Now, some of you know what this is about: CBS Southwest is just carrying on the vexillological traditions of one iPJ, no further meaning intended, other than perhaps a generalized appreciation for our now home-state. But if you're not one of those in the know - more specifically, if you're a Phoenician passerby - you may be tempted to see this as some kind of ardent support of Arizona. And, you know, its laws. Outside of onomatopoeia, acontextual words are pretty meaningless; what about flags?

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Phew. There you go. Hope you found that interesting and/or more aesthetically pleasing. Now it's time to reorient myself to another value backing a goal worth pursuing. Until next time...

Root, Root-Root For Something...

Great Tuesday - Beck wasn't working, I got a minor reprieve from work as the first summer session ended, and we took big advantage of the shared day off. The lackluster Cubbies were in town to play the lacklusterer Diamondbacks, so I spent a portion of my morning hunting down tickets for the evening game. The Diamondbacks box office proper sells their tickets to Chase Field at INSANE prices - I really couldn't find a decent seat for under 35 dollars, with the definition of decent being "not in the second deck or bleachers" - so I scoured craigslist and the like in search of a better deal. After much hand-wringing and internal speculation as to the actual rules of craigslist etiquette, I scored! I tracked down a broker clearly trying to cut losses and selling some shwank 60 dollar season ticket seats for a relatively scant 25 bucks per. The seats were about 2/3 of the way between 3rd base / home and 24 rows back, not bad at all. This was freaking GREAT, as the original discouraging seat prices had almost resigned me to skipping a Cubs game. Que? Instead, Beck and I disrupted our nightly behavior of post-work grilling and Wire-watching for an evening taking in an ol' ballgame.

Before that, though, the business at hand - I sent out 40-ish e-mails yesterday (and a few lingering ones this morning) of personalized feedback for the Sprawl tryouts. This takes much longer than you might think. I tried to walk the fine line of letting people know the rationale behind our decisions, relaying the things we'd like to see them work on, and avoiding the general abject off-pissing of those cut with condescending thoughts of how they can maybe next time meet our approval. (The plural first person here, incidentally, is not royal but represents Dheintime and me - again, he has been out of town the last three weeks, so a lot of this has fallen on me, but we have maintained close contact w/r/t decision-making and such, and hopefully everything has gone smoothly). And I, you know, tried to write something authentic, meaningful and helpful, as opposed to a "hey, great job, better luck next time." Anyhoo, this ate up a fair bit of the afternoon, but hopefully was well worth it - if nothing else, people have gotten direct feedback, and no one can claim that we have not been forthcoming with our decision process.

Side note - I also found out yesterday that one of our new recruits, Andy, can't play with Sprawl. This is classic agony and ecstasy type stuff, as two weeks ago it came out that he wanted to play with Sprawl, and we were elated; a star had just fallen in our laps. Por supuesto, as is often the case with hippie Ultimate players, it turns out he's *actually* looking for jobs all over the U.S., contiguous and otherwise, and didn't really feel like he could commit. Things come up, sure, but this was more than a tad annoying, and more than that disappointing; I had been looking forward to playing with the homey. It also further complicated our team status, as we've now had two guys drop and another who can't attend one of the few tournaments to which we will travel. So I also spent part of the day scrambling and consulting with other veteran players as to which alternates should fill in and why. Hopefully we've got everything figured out, but to repeat a sentiment, no doubt that this aspect of things is the least appetizing part of being a Sprawl captain.

Getting back to the drill - I otherwise had one plan for the day, which was to watch the Uruguay - Netherlands World Cup semi-final. GREAT match, and yes, I, too, am caught up in the tetra-annual fever. Or something. The Netherlands won 3-2, if you're out of the loop, and there was all kinds of drama with potential off-sides calls missed, etc. (I've got more to write - not a lot - about the WC, but that is probably best for a different post). Karmically speaking, an intentional handball did NOT lead to a World Cup Finals berth*, so all is okay with the universe.

* - I don't link to the guy enough, especially since I ripped off his asterisk in-text footnote trick some time ago: Joe Posnanski has a post about the intentional handball that nails it quite well. The only thing I would add is that Joe P. doesn't really discuss the "it feels wrong" aspect of the story, which seems like the most interesting aspect of it. I'm trying not to give away too much here; read the story and send me an e-mail if you're interested in chatting about it. And bookmark Joe's blog while you're there; he is undoubtedly one of the best sportswriters out there (Nyet said, echoing a sentiment that has been echoed some gerbillion times).

I enjoyed a delicious barbecue pulled chicken / Mexican casserole for lunch while watching futbol on the laptop, and Beck backed up that spot-hitting meal with an early dinner featuring tuna steaks, yams, and the spinach cakes I made the other day. She rushed to finish it and got it done just in time; we ate at 5:30 and got out of the house by 5:55 to head down for a 6:40 start. Living in central Sunny Azz has its privileges: after a quick drive, parking and walking a block to the stadium, we were in our posh seats at 6:25 and ready to watch two former world champions square off. Here was the view from our seats:

Speaking of that view, and speaking of that 6:40 start, you'll notice the bevy of empty seats there. This was not some accident of our location:

That is a seriously empty ballpark, particularly for a WGN-fan-based Cubs game. I don't know how much of this is explained by the 6:40 start time, nor do I have a clue why the DBacks start the games at that time - it definitely seems to prevent the commuters from getting to their seats by the first pitch, as the park did fill up more by the 3rd inning. I assume it has something to do with television rights or dodging the start times of the other West Coast games. Regardless of the explanation, it doesn't explain Tuesday evening's paltry showing. The stadium-broadcast and official box-score attendance, which can generally be assumed to be hyperbole if not an outright lie, was only 20,067. For a Cubs game! What the hey-hey?

Problem one: the aforementioned ridiculous seat prices. They're idiotic; you can't charge that much for 1/162nd of the season, folks. Problem two: "the economy," or what have you. Scapegoat explanation, but in combo with problem one, I am sure it's having an effect. Problem three: the Diamondbacks are GOD AWFUL this year. They're 32-52 and 17 games out of first place in a tight division, so their season is effectively already over. They just fired their coach and replaced him with the fist-pumpin' Kirk Gibson, but all the limping theatrics are not going to help a team with the 30th best (AKA 1st worst) runs allowed rate that can't be overcome by a free-swinging-and-missing offense that sits at #16 in runs scored. The bullpen is silly bad with a 6.90 ERA, and the starters aren't exactly smoking either (4.70). It's worse because they've got a slew of young talent that just keeps not turning the corner, so Phoenix is left with a poorly performing team that strikes out a ton. There are some homers to go along with those big whiffs, sure, but it's effectively a terrible season of people who are *just* short. People are disinterested / disheartened - it's tough backing the 'backs these days.

But STILL - the Cubbies are in town! Which brings me to problem four: the Cubs are terrible in a whole different way. They aren't overmatched, they have the talent... they just can't play baseball this year. They've got a stacked, expensive lineup... that is 26th in the league in runs scored! Up and down the roster, well-compensated, historically good performers are having bad years. Case in point - rock solid reliable 3rd baseman Aramis Ramirez is batting .184/.247/.327, which is just unbearable to watch; for a star of his caliber to have those numbers at this point in the season is cripplingly embarrassing. The Cubs pitching / defense has been mediocre, too, at around 18th in the league in runs allowed, so it's unsurprising that they are 37-47 and 10.5 games back. In short, a huge letdown of a Cubs team was visiting a god-forsaken DBack team, and neither club's fans bothered coming out.

So Chase Field was dead. From the first pitch,

an utter lack of joy peppered the closed-roof room. It didn't help that both pitchers cruised through the first three innings in 38 minutes - Silva gave up a run to the DBacks, but the game started off largely offense-free, forcing everyone to draw their entertainment from the usual sequence of t-shirt cannons and hot dog races. Somewhere around the 4th inning, as the limited crowd trickled in to completion, things picked up a little, and toward the end, the game got downright exciting - tying runs at the plate late, the whole nine. I'll skip a recap; the Cubs won 6-4 (actually, they just completed the series sweep as I write this on Wednesday night) by fending off a late rally and getting some runs by severely unexpected spots. Some points of note:

Kosuke Fukudome went 1-5 with a solo HR and 3 Ks. The HR was his 2nd in as many days, not something you should bet on too often with KF, but the strikeouts stood out to me more. He had 36 Ks in about 244 PAs before the game, and is generally a slap hitter who doesn't miss terribly often. Sometimes the patterns clump, I guess. The other thing that a performance like this compels me to do is imagine what you would think of a player who did this routinely - someone who batted .200 with a .200 OBP and an .800 SLG, who struck out constantly but was good for a homerun per game. That's a skewed 1.000 OPS, the type of stat that would command top dollars... anyways, that would be a strange player, but ever since those years (e.g., 1989) when McGwire would bat .230 with 30+ HRs, I've thought about what it would be like to have someone actually just churn out those kinds of days. With sabermetric type thinking, natch, we realize that those guys are more valuable than you think in some ways and less in others... I digress.

The aforementioned slumping A-Ram hit 2 HRs! They were near carbon copy shots to the LF power alley and definitely made the difference for the win. If you couldn't tell above, I feel for the guy - he just looks lost and depressed at moments - so seeing him play baseball competently was a treat.

Woah, wait... backing up a paragraph... speaking of guys who hit .200 and only hit homeruns, Mark Reynolds! Seeing the guy who smoked his own single season strikeout record in person was fun. Wacky to look up at a guy's stats before the all-star break and see 113 in the Ks column. At the end of the game, he came up against the Cubs masterful strikeout artist - we're talking a ludicrous 17 Ks per 9 innings pitched here - Carlos Marmol. I turned to Beck and surmised that given this irresistible force and incredibly moveable object combo, we were extraordinarily likely to see a strikeout. Both parties did not disappoint.

Speaking of the K machine, Marmol pitched 1 and 2/3 innings and struck out five. He almost added a sixth by coming close to striking out four in the ninth, a rare feat that would have been fun to see in person, but one that was disrupted by a nicked pop out by Snyder instead of the K. Ah, well. This afforded me the opp to explain the dropped third strike rule to Beck, so that was nice. She as infield-fly rule knowledge away from marriage material.

That's really all I've got for gameplay; you can check out the boxscore for the nitty gritty. It was a great game in many ways, though; somewhere along the way I heard that the best baseball games are 5-4 wins by the home team - a good combination of hitting, pitching and defense is likely in those games - so a 6-4 Cubs win worked just fine. Plus it was over in a quick 2:43, so a nice pace taboot.

Oh, I should not fail to mention the "Racing Gracies" or the "D-Backs Legends Race." Somebody decided that the best way to honor DBacks greats was to engage their likenesses in a theater of the grotesque. It's a standard issue wannabe Sausage race, but with the hideous bonus of... well, this:

Yeah, I know. But let's go closer for even more un-ease:

That's the gigantic-headed semblance of Matt Williams, Randy Johnson, and Luis Gonzalez (I missed Gracey, who was well out in front by this point). The tacky here is just sublime. I really can't fathom who signed off on this - it seems to wedge the DBacks into a particular rut to knowingly do something this goofy as a tribute to their cherished players that lord knows the e.g. Yankees would never deign to do. It's not the induced nightmares that are bad so much as the induced humiliation.

Anyhoo... the early game end gave us time to book it to MoJo just before closing to enjoy their Tuesday half-off deal. Fantastic call by the Beck, and a solid cap on a fun evening. Tonight (Wednesday), instead of heading downtown again, I just watched the hapless Cubs beat up on the DBacks again from the comfort of my living room. It's the way of baseball-viewing that I think I just need to admit I prefer - still, it was good to get out of the casa Tuesday for an evening and sit outside inside an AC'ed stadium for a few hours watching my favorite team suffer through a small part of yet another insufferable season. Thanks per usual to Beck for putting up with me at a baseball game, and here's hoping both these franchises turn it around soon ... lest next year the crowd feature only 10,000 fans, half of whom are youthful, cheerleading DBacks employees who annoy more than enrich.

(Yeah, I don't like D-girls, Baxter, or the rattle noises. I don't think I'm alone...).

Teenage Mohini Ninja Turtles

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

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

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

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

Rebecca, Skunk, Jenga, Lindsey**, Kaetlynn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's Been a Long, Long ... Long Time

That angelic humming you hear? The sweet chorus that fills the ether every time an inbox empties. Note, of course, that the second I showed this to Beck she surreptitiously sent me an e-mail with the subject "hi" and the content "ha!" Let's all remember this when the spousal harassment suit comes up, okay?

Feel a little better about last night, though I am eager to get a chance to right the Ulti-verse*. Fortunately the Elizabeth Lambert** Scrimmage-for-Lunch Ultimate Gauntlet II (EL-SLUG II!) is happening tomorrow morning, so I'll be able to restore balance AND win some free pizza. Huzzah! Looking forward to it. For now, though, it's off to attack Friday with some straight up WORK. Yeah!

* - As Beck would say, "Hilarious Nate is hilarious."

** - Just in case you're unfamiliar:

Now With 4.4% Less Nyet!!!

Skidding our way into July here, only six weeks until I re-re-restart my real life at grad school. I am completely typical in my balance of anticipation and anxiety - and beyond that, I am thoroughly eager to stop tutoring for a while. I don't know why - maybe it's just a bad string of kids - but work has been particularly torturous lately. Oh, well, nothing I can't tolerate for another month or so. A month that, according to the computer here, is going to feature highs of 109 every day until the apocalypse. So we have that going for us.

Beck has recovered from an unpleasant week - after the cat bite to the hand and the antibiotic / tetanus shots, she was sore and had some weird reactions that gave her achy joints. Better now - her hand's still sore, but she's walking / running normally, much better. We've been keeping things pretty low key of late - haven't been hiking because we like not dying of dehydration - and generally sticking to A/C-laden destinations or cooling off in the pool. Sometimes I feel I am not living the world's most exciting life. Ah.... well. No, seriously, we've been having fun times keeping it chill of late - finished the Deadwood series, have generally eaten like kings, watched a slew of terrible number-based movies - the hits just keep on coming.

Saturday we enjoyed the flesh-fest that is Ra Sushi - met up with Dan and Christina in North Scottsdale to observe the habits Peoplicus Beautifulis up close. The helium-voiced plasticine hostesses balked and then actually showed us to our tables, the low red light atmosphere of the joint reflecting just so off their artificiality. I openly questioned if we were pretty enough to eat at such a restaurant; perhaps coincidentally, we were put in a booth in the back. Dan openly questioned whether they were Russian Lit or Communications majors; he's judgmental, that one. We eventually enjoyed a delicious if stupidly expensive meal - I am admittedly not a sushi man and resorted to chicken teriyaki, so when I say "we" I mean "they," and when I say "stupidly expensive" I mean "stupidly expensive." Try to keep up. To cap things off, the waitress nickel and dimed us over some coupons that we had brought - turns out the definition of "free glass of wine" is up for debate, and rather than placate a customer, the management decided to debate the finer points of the fine print and charge us. Really? Let me tell you how much I love conversations with waitresses that involve pointing at tiny, coupon-sized pieces of paper and saying, "It says here..."

Barf. Screw you Ra and the rip-off horse you rode in on. Next time I want to see the pretties, I'll read People.

I had heard via Christastrophe that NBC was re-airing the original episode of Saturday Night Live (hosted by, RIP, George Carlin), so we came back to the condo to sip on beers and watch a comedic legend. And... hmmm. Decidedly unfunny, actually, or at least super campy. I mean, this is one of the best things EVER:

But the rest of the skits were pretty low-energy, one-joke numbers. And Carlin's contributions were little segments of his stand-up routine which largely involved a lot of mugging and trite observations. I appreciate historical comedy with the best of them - you can see that Carlin is setting the roots for the bulk of standup to come, and maybe this was just a bad sample of material - but wow, I felt pretty dumb for suggesting this as the night's activity. Oh, well. We did also get to see Billy Preston doing "Nothing From Nothing" (note: that's not the actual performance, SNL being the copyright-protecting jerks they are) and Janis Ian singing "At Seventeen." Solid 70s fare.

D&C left so they could go get the new Guitar Hero at midnight. You know, with all of the other 14 year olds in Phoenix. Use that information as you will.

Lots more low-keying on Sunday - I got up early to shoot some baskets and watch some pretty high quality pickup soccer down at the park, then came home and watched some of the highest-in-the-world quality soccer, the European Championship Finals. I watched a lot of the tournament, so it was good to see a fantastic end - and now Beck is in love with this guy:

How can a Nyet compete?

My athletic exploits of late: 7 miles on Thursday, 4 miles on Friday, 7 on Saturday, bringing me to 32 miles for week 2, 62 for the past two weeks. I also played Ultimate Sunday night and did another 5 miles on the treadmill Monday. WOOHA. Some other significant stats: Two weeks ago I weighed myself before and after running at the gym, and it was 204 and 198. This week it was 195 and 190. So things are headed in the right direction!

AS mandated by Beck, though, today i am doing NOTHING athletic for the first time in 15 days. So hopefully I'll come back rejuvenated for Wednesday. We'll see. Now it's off to Tutor Corps for a few hours and then back to hang out with the beck, who has today off - sweet!

Video killed the Nyet Blog Star.

Site or Gossip?

The Messiah of Morris Avenue

Alright, stepping directly into the YouTube World of Video Embedding - let's see if this bad boy works...



Wowsers. In case you live in a cave and/or America, that's Zinedine Zidane, French captain and one of the best soccer, sorry football, sorry, soccer players of modern times. Dude is a complete wizard with ball control, shots, clutch plays, and, apparently, headers. That "play" occurred with 10 minutes left in the second OT of the World Cup Finals... let's all let that sink in for a second, really. World Cup... Final game, double OT, about to go penalty kicks, you're the dude who takes all in-game penalty kicks for your team... and you do that? It doesn't matter what the Italian defender said about his mom, girlfriend, family dog, his children, whatever - that's *ridiculous*!!! Not to mention assault. And really, kinda awesome - you don't see someone decleated with a header every day. Also if you live in a cave, Italy went on to win the shootout and the World Cup after France dominated them for the last 60 minutes of the game. So on several levels, Zidane blew it, and that Italian guy, whatever he said, just played the ultimate head game. Ha.

So we got that pleasantry out of the Finals yesterday. Jill came over yesterday morning and Beck, Jill and I took the Wrigster to Upton State Forest for some fun and mudbaths. Nothing quite as crazy as last time, mainly because Wrigley also jumped in some cleansing lakes. We got back just before kickoff and grabbed some pizza and beer for the big game - Ben made his way over to watch the most popular sport on earth, and we had a great afternoon up until that thuggery took place. Capped the PM with a little Robot Chicken, which as suspected is right up Ben's Ali. Couldn't resist. Great stuff, had a great time with Jill, too, who's doing excellently between dates and rotations. Everyone left for showers at about 5:30.

At 6:30 Beck and I met the Wolf-Sprechers and headed to Green Bamboo for some great Vietnamese food, decent Vietnamese service and lousy Vietnamese drinks. But a good cheap find by the Beck. Capped that meal with some Shoops and Skirts, involving copious amounts of ice cream and some sailor-speak from the Ali. Ben was rather appalled by all accounts. Nutzo.

We came back, fun times per usual. Beck headed into school this AM, so I read, attempted running (heel felt great while running, not so much right now) and all in all had a chilly day with the dogs. Chilly as in "we chilled out," groggy as in temperature. But 'twas all good.

Alright - more writing! More reviews! More awesomeness! It's the Summer of George!!!

The fog has lifted.

Cloud Atlas
Thumbsucker
St. Elmo's Fire
Over the Hedge
Shopgirl
Being There

Just picture me blowing the collected dust off the keyboard right now, cracking knuckles and preparing for a triumphant return to the blogverse. Not really. Things have been pretty low key at Rancho Graftonero lately, and I've been sub-inspired to log the events, or the lack of them. A number of contributing factors exist - but here is a slipshod, out of order, top of my head style recollection:

Yesterday I went to the wedding of Dave Wu (a good friend and teammate of mine from Polaroid) and Mary Tibbetts (the sister of another Former Polaroid teammate of mine, Mike Tibbetts, who has been sucked away from the world of Ultimate by the more demanding and legally required world of fathering). Rather I went to the reception, as I got there late because of work at the Nut. In typical me fashion, as I walked up to the church and saw Dave, I walked up and said hey, congratulations. Then I noticed the long line leading up to Dave. Yep, my wedding entrance involved cutting in the receiving line. I rock. I took my respective place among the Roid brethren and sisthren, and said my proper congrats a few minutes later. The wedding, incidentally, was in Arlington, a couple of blocks from our old house, and the reception was over by the Arlington library. Nice little trip down 2001-03 memory lane. I miss Arlington fiercely, seriously. Anyhoo, nice touches of Asian and Aryan culture at the reception, complete with Asian tea ceremonies and cheesy DJs. Jerrel, in a shocking move, dominated the dance floor. He also dominated the open bar, ordering everything from mojitos to tequila sunrises to something he claimed was called a "Wu-wu." Fun times

I raced home from the wedding in an effort to get Beck to a dinner with her Vet school "friends" who lamely neglected to give her a ride. I was too late, so we went out to dinner in Worcester at the Rhino Cafe where I may have had the best cheesesteak sandwich I've ever had. My arteries actually arranged their fatty deposits in smiley faces; it was that good. We also got to hang out with an older couple that may or my not have been on a date at the next table, and we got to see a lot of locals who were drunk and/or on motorcycles. Plus there were a couple of scantily clad womenfolk who were either being stood up by dates or streetwalking; I did not perform a litmus test. Love me the Worcester, yes. We headed home after a great meal and watched a little Robot Chicken, a rather LSD-influenced stop-animation show by Buffy-vet (or maybe the Buffy cast member who required a vet) Seth Green. The episodes are 11 minute blitzes perfectly attuned to modern attention spans, and among the highlight jokes was a PSA by Optimus Prime of Transformers fame about prostate cancer (we transformers are robots and therefore have no organic inner organs, so we cannot get cancer. But you do, and you can, so get your ass checked!). I also have to give, I don't know if "props" is the ride word, maybe, stunned adulation, to the "Zombie Idol" parody of American Idol where dead rock stars performed as Zombies. In the end, the zombies went eat-brains crazy, and Ving Rhames showed up with a shotgun to finish them off appropriately, which any zombie fan knows is only accomplished by destroying their head. The transcendentally tasteless joke involved Rhames deciding not to shoot Kurt Cobain, but rather just handing him the shotgun and watching him shoot himself in the head. This was approximately 1000 times less morbid when displayed in claymation.

So yeah, on that note, we went to bed, ending a day that started at 5 AM for me. I've been driving vans for the Walnut Hill camps this summer, a job that only makes me feel moderately pointless, so that's nice. Kids are nice for the most part, but I've spent more time at Logan than I ever thought I would like to. Yesterday wasn't too bad: two trips, but then things like last weekend involved 7 trips to and from starting at 6 AM and ending at 9:30 PM. It passes the time, and the camp director Charlie and the RAs (Rachel, Becca, Jon, Anna, Lillian) are all cool people, so it's been a reasonable way to spend a few hours out of each week this summer.

What else have I been doing, damn? Well, I couldn't resist the new deal on the Tacoma DM-10 at Mr. C's Music. So I effectively traded up from my Sigma, which was a little bit of a bummer because I just had a pickup put in it - but they were nice enough to give me a break on transferring the pickup over to the Tacoma, so that was cool. Sad to see MyFirstAcoustic (TM) go, but happy to have an American handmade gorgeous acoustic guitar in my possession. Sounds magnificent, plays excellently - they don't actually make this guitar any more, and it's in mint condition despite being a few years used. Acoustic guitars theoretically sound better and better as they age, and this one is starting from a very, very high point. Pscyhed, and don't worry sportsfans, eventually there will be some sound files put up here.

So I've been running my way through some guitar basics books lately in an effort to re-establish a more technically correct foundation for whatever it is that I'm setting out to do here. I'm making slow progress, and I get frustrated very easily, which is lame - I've found that relaxing myself before I play and only going in 45 minute spurts or so has been more effective than tension-building hours-long marathons. So I've been doing a lot of play for 45, read for 30, play for 45, watch part of a movie, etc. It's working. Again, recorded results on the horizon. (Speaking of, I have finally gotten my computer rigged for recording and for some electronic music-making. I have truckloads to keep me busy through the next year out here in the South Grafton barren wasteland).

Oh, the ol' SG isn't that barren - we went out to eat at Vinny T's with Ben & Ali the other night, and headed back to their place for scrabble and cobbler. And we actually hit the Post Office Pub the other night with some of the vet-friends for some beers and ear-piercing karaoke. And on July 4th we went to Jessica's (aka, the Brooke Shields Denise Richards love-child) for a rainy, moist, mosquito-laden barbeque, complete with s'mores and sparklers. And we watched Italy qualify for the World Cup finals in true patriotic fashion. So yeah, some solid socializing going down - and this morning, Jill (of med school fame) is headed out our way and we've got dinner scheduled with our terrorist friends the Ben Alis. Nothing's gonna stop us, now.

World Cup - tres exciting. Finals today. I've probably mentioned this, but the soothing crowd chants, the hours of tension, the monumental effort for the chance at something that will likely prove futile - there's a lot going on that's drastically romantic and beyond American general comprehension. The flopping is, por supuesto, total crap, and if it weren't for that I'd be completely sold. It's too bad American pro soccer is effectively the minor leagues of the world - otherwise, I might tune in, a lot.

Time to tune out? Okay, yeah. But I'll pick up the entry level here. More blogging, more reviews, try to get my head wrapped around some writing. Should have some fuel for the fire after the Jill Ben Ali experience. We'll see. Until then, get your prostates checked. If you have them.

Lazier Summers Days

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Fun weekend of sorts - spent most of Friday and Saturday deliverin' the chilluns to Walnut Hill from Logan, and Beck and the AJ watched King Kong and Click in my absence. Work also unfortunately forced me to miss Greg's 40th birthday party on Saturday, bummer. Aaron and I did get in an excellent dinner at Agostino's in Natick on Saturday, and we successfully whiled Sunday away, watching England beat Ecuador on a nasty goal by David Beckham (that, incidentally, a well-positioned goaltender would have stopped), playing some guitar, and then some Yahtzee and poker and maybe a couple of episodes of Buffy sprinkled in there. It's rainy again in New England, making for nasty humidity and nothing days, plus my heel is still killing and... well, we're really just lazy. So it goes.

One more day with the A-dogg and then it's back to a productive life - just kidding. He leaves tomorrow at 7 AM which translates to leaving Grafton ~5 or so; we may need to try to get some sleep tonight. But today we will come up with something fun to do, I swear, and hopefully something that does not involve sitting around the humid house all day.

Beck started ambulatory today so I gave her a ride to school this AM so she could get head out to the farms. Work will be intermittent this week, so the big goal is to get something done. HA!!! No really, I have been loading up the computer with the software for my MBox, so hopefully some creativity will start flowing. We shall see...

Enjoy your late June festivities, peeps.