Glad My Car Has a Cupholder (Part 4): Bullets Edition

In the illustrious, keep my long-winded self concise form of bullet points, starting with self-evaluation:

• Honestly, I spent so much time worried about collapsing due to sickness combined w/altitude that it did not entirely occur to me to be really worried about how I was playing. It is no exaggeration that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and for brief moments on Friday, I felt god-awful, couldn't-lift-my-head energy-less. I was pretty resigned to the notion that I would roll out to the fields on Saturday, try to do a warm-up, and I'd have that same fade-from-the-world feeling I got in Flagstaff a couple of weeks back. So to be able to play at all, let alone well, was a pleasant surprise.
• So I was in a relatively low key mode and was aiming to conserve energy as much as I could, which meant playing fairly, appropriately enough, conservatively. If J-Ro is a prototypical conservative, disc-control handler, and Garret is a prototypical take-chances swashbuckler, my ideal contribution is to be somewhere inbetween near halfway, but I spent most of the weekend closer to the J-Ro end of the spectrum.
• This was completely fine because, as I'll note below, Griesy was in a very aggressive mode hucking-wise and took a fair number of chances for all of us. They weren't all perfect, natch, but with him picking his spots, I could "run the offense" a lot more than trying to huck left and right. Consequently, I think I put it deep fewer than five times all weekend - weird for me, but the right move given the balance of our offense.
• I also had Trant's suggestion running through my head to stay back and run the O (rather than join the fray upfield) - he's right, that's my role on Sprawl, and while I think I can spell our horses a little better by joining the fray on occasion, this weekend, I was more of an anchor than a spark. Um, that's not a metaphor. I also played the hitch position maybe 90+ percent of the time I was out there - largely because Garret was gone and BP explicitly told me at one point he didn't want to play hitch ever again, more or less - so I ended up being a really conservative quarterback of sorts. If the Ravens would like to pay me to run their Super Bowl team, I'll take it.
• Not to overstate my carefulness this weekend - I did bust out break marks when needed, specifically dissecting some zones with scoobers, getting a few wrap-arounds off to Cole for scores, and one particularly nice breakmark BH to BP who turned and flipped to Rob for an easy goal. So I'd say my impact, while nowhere near as flashy as Griesy's cannon show, was quite positive for the team. Again, I was more worried about surviving and captaining, though, so maybe I'm not the person to ask.
• I had five turns on the weekend*, all on Sunday, and three of them in the finals in ridiculous wind conditions - not to make excuses, but when you're playing hitch and picking up the disc trapped on the sideline in a 35 mph wind all the time, the occasional turn is going to happen as a matter of percentage. They were:

1. In the ITB game, a backhand semi-huck to Cole at the back left corner; he didn't get there in time and had to toe the line instead of skying to catch the disc. He missed it, giving me one of our four turns in the game and leading to the only offensive break we had. I suck.
2. In the 99 Problems game, a guy poached the BH lane, so instead of throwing to BP, I turned and fired a quick backhand to J-Ro - or where he used to be standing. He had started to cut to the middle of the field and caught me off guard. D'oh. Normally J-Ro and I are psychic, so this was a pretty weird miscue on both of our parts.
3. In the finals, I was trapped on our goal line, turned to activate, but BP fell down on the dump and J-Ro got lost behind the confusion back there. I turned on stall 8 to put a tight throw downfield to Griesy, but ended up throwing it directly into a poach. D'oh.
4. Not even worth recounting, as it was pretty much a carbon copy of the above - dumps got mixed up, very windy, and I tried to desperation put it up for Gries, but it got wind-eaten and knocked down by a defender. Boo.
5. I put up a huge backhand huck directly over/through the cup in the wind and rain to a streaking Cole for an easy goal. Only our good friend #29 (I believe) made the "you scored ergo travel" call. Aggravating. So I got the disc back and put it right back to the exact same spot - Cole skyed for it and looked like he got it but it got knocked away; he said later this may have been a strip. I'm not too bothered by this one as it was effectively a punt, and we got the turn quickly and punched the disc in for a goal. So huzzah, and seriously Flux #29, ugh. Odd how one dude can ruin a game.

* - I should always qualify this as "five for which I will take credit/blame." On Saturday, Dixon danced and danced behind the mark, and as I went to throw it to the open space on the open side, he inexplicably stopped moving. So I ended up throwing it to no one, but I'm chalking that up to wacky Dixon behavior, sorry. In the finals, I activated BP at the dump and noticed his man was playing five yards off him upfield - easy dump/swing, right? So as I went to throw the flick, BP - again, inexplicably - cut upfield toward his guy. Que? The situation was such an automatic "throw the flick out to space" that I had already started the throw by reflex, so when I tried to pull it back, I ended up spiking the disc more or less at my feet and looking like a complete idiot. So I'm not eating that one, either. These two were actually legit cross-ups, way more than the usual "always blame the receiver," and I declare them not my fault sans guilt. :)

• I had plenty of legs for the few times we did have to play D on our O-lines, and Ionly got significantly beat once on a big cross-field breakmark flick (by Rice-bud Marcus, I believe) that was a really nice throw and something I couldn't do a whole lot about. Otherwise, I actually made some pretty solid D contributions - I had a big goal line poach D in the first Flux game, a D on a huck in that same game that drew a crap foul call, but which I followed up with a shutdown mark that got us a high stall turn, a D on an iso huck in the Critical Mass game, and my personal favorite highlight of the weekend, a layout D on a predictable swing backhand at a big point in the 99 Problems game.
• This last one was especially funny because I hit the disc well after it was out of the thrower's hand, but he called foul - it was a pretty silly call; I am 99% sure I didn't touch him at all, let alone foul him, as I hit the disc before everything when it was a good foot out of his hand already. So given the silliness of the foul call, I wasn't exactly in the mood for a conversation about it - he having eliminated himself as a candidate for productive rational discourse - so I stood up and didn't even bother contesting it, just said, "No, I'm sending that to the observer." It was a breach of Ultimate code of sorts, but when an egregious call is made, it's the thing to do. Unfortunately, the observer directly behind the disc replied "I didn't see it" (which is WACK as it seems to confuse the very meaning of the verb root of her job title). Ugh. Fortunately, the other observer did and quickly called no foul; big turn, and we punched it in shortly thereafter. Huzzah!
• I had a couple of layout catches for goals on the weekend (one from Cole and one on the aforementioned windblown mess from BP) and a few jump and land in the endzone gaols, too. But really my job was to be steady, and outside the finals, I did a good job of that (and even in the finals, all things considered, I played okay and got some key breaks off - the scoober to Rob probably being my "throw of the weekend"). So a steady not spectacular performance by me, but I really think that's what Sprawl needs from their fat handler captain these days, and really, I continue to be amazed that I was able to do it at all, given my dampened energy / spirits of the previous week.

Alright, player by player review, with stats in the form of Name (Offensive +/-, Defensive +/-, Total +/-, O-points, D-points, Total playing time percentage)

• Nyet the Lesser (47, -1, 46, 61, 3, 37%) - You've read enough about this jerk above, so I'll just comment on the captaining - I stayed remarkably level this weekend and kept people's heads in, gave feedback, etc., without making it negative. There's a lot to keep track of when you're captaining alone - again, sucked to miss Dheintime this weekend - but I think I game/team-managed pretty well. And I really like how last night's practice went, too. Props also the line-callers who helped a ton, and to the other Sprawl leaders who kept suggestions / thoughts coming.
• J-Ro (40, 3, 43, 52, 9, 35%) - Rock-steady per usual - I probably should have had him play Hitch more, but our offensive formula clicked so well that changing it seemed silly. His role at this point is very well defined, and he nails it time and again - great cog for our O, and he's a key guy even though he's not necessarily making big hucks or splashy plays.
• Joe K (3, 13, 16, 7, 61, 39%) - Great job by Joe - he's really an O-line player who plays some great D, so it was really nice to have him on the field for when we got turns; he uses his breakmark throws exceptionally well. I don't remember him hucking a whole lot, though he did pull very effectively all weekend long. had those two weird, unforced turns in the first Flux game that put us in a hole early, but otherwise had a very solid weekend.
• Aaron (11, 4, 15, 11, 34, 26%) - Probably the one guy who didn't get enough PT this weekend - he played very steady this weekend, nothing huge on either side, but no mistakes to speak of, either, and his handles kept things moving on both lines. AND he was one of the few guys routinely containing breaks and swings - again, little things that don't stand out like, say, hand blacks, but integral to success. Another cog guy who did his job very well. He is probably more O-line than D-line but can fill in at either spot - but with our O playing fewer points than usual, most of the PT there was given to O-only guys. He of course, is a stand up dude and didn't even mention this - great to know we've got him ready to step up when needed but happy to play his part, too. Plus, he chugs a mean ICE.
• Jim (1,8,9, 5, 32, 21%) - Jim played great this weekend - had one hiccupy series with a couple of goal line turns, but he brought a lot of energy to the D and filled in on D-line hands nicely. Still needs to get the quick snap decisions / throws going on O - he ended up playing hitch / ratchet on a few D lines, and he was a little hesitant to break the mark which stalled out our O at moments. But that is probably more a matter of matching skills to position - he did a great job at the catch, and really, in terms of team role, the occasionally psychotic energy he brought to the sidelines was hella fun. And as mentioned, extraordinarily helpful to have his help calling lines.
• Paul (3, 11, 14, 5, 27, 18%) - Paul also really brought it this weekend - I thought his times as hitch were a little more successful when we had the disc, and he generally adopted a good, sweet spot approach w/r/t aggression at caution on the O side. He did have that one ridiculously silly push pass attempt - it ended up flipping end over end - but I think the ballcap was only flung in disgust that one time all weekend, a great sign. Lots of hustle, and again, great help on the line-calling - he really took the reins with it. Homes really stepped it up this weekend and demonstrated he belonged.
• BP (32, -4, 28, 44, 30 , 43%) - huge D and O play from BP; he continues to be a playmaker, grabbing us D's (layout handblock? Skies on deep shots? YES) and being an integral Man on the O. He was oddly uncomfortably playing the Hitch at points and goofed some long hucks here and there, but his laid-back buttery yet somehow aggressive game was on full display this weekend.
• Ian (8, 1, 9, 8, 49, 33%) - dude was coming off an MCL sprain and four weeks of no sprinting, and it unfortunately showed - he was just rusty and dragging on the field way more than usual, uncharacteristically biting on in-fakes and getting beat deep. Once we figured out that we just needed to scale back his PT a little bit, he bounced back excellently and made some big D plays - really psyched that he could start having a "bad tournament" and not let it get to him, just rallied and contributed, both on D and with the disc. I am completely unconcerned that he'll get his sea legs back, and again, he struggled but adjusted quite well to it.
• Ebay (30, 0 , 30, 36, 28, 37%) - The career Ulty path of Ebay is surely upward trending, and it is dope to see him at this height - hombre was *great* all around, gave us handling, mid play, defense, skies, you name it. His rundown of Cole's huck in the finals was a tournament Top Play, and he generally brought it big time. Still needs to up the speed for when we face the big boys - just to give him some kind of criticism - but damn, hombre played really well.
• Studer (7, 6, 13, 7, 50, 33%) - Another role player who just flat out brought it - hustle D all weekend, threw a Mr. Wobblesworth Special huck to Ebay for a score and hooked up with Big Nate on a hammer, and caught the winning goal in the finals taboot. Tom also continues to upward trend, and while we'd like to see him be able to grab some D hands now and then, his fill play this weekend was key.
• Josh (11, 11, 22, 13, 53, 38%) - Rookie baller Josh fulfilled all expectation in his first tournament, getting who knows how many D's of the layout, sky and handblock variety. Absolute gem of a game, and he was really consistent with his decisions on top of that. Only 22, just graduated from UW, and really just outside teh BP/Griesy range of all-around dominant games. great addition to the team.
• Dixon (19, 4, 23, 23, 56, 46%) - Another big tournament from the guy who never stops running - Dixon only had one or two turnovers for the whole weekend and gave us a ton of shutdown D and energetic filling on O. A little less overt than his play from last year's CO Cup, but only because everyone else stepped it up, too - he didn't need to do as much.
• Rob (5, 6, 11, 9, 52, 35%) - homes routinely puts in huge tournaments that don't make a lot of noise - he takes on other teams big cutters and shuts them down (so he's not necessarily getting huge D's, just preventing his guy from touching the disc), makes who know how many key midfield cuts, and really makes no mistakes. Tis one was par for the course - great play, *great* popping against the zone, and the veteran masters-eligible speedster continues to blow my mind.
• Trant (21, 3 ,24, 23, 41, 37%) - Jason battled hamstring issues all weekend and had to sit a bit at times, but provided his stellar D and up-and-coming O throughout the tournament. Trant is sneakily one of Sprawl's most improved palyers - and he was already good - so to have him stepping it up and making, e.g., some huge deep cuts and poach reads, is helping a ton.
• Skunk (3, 17, 20, 3, 45, 28%) - Skunker continues to baffle with his occasional drifting concentration, but he kept it together and really stuck to his role of energetic defender this weekend. Most importantly, he was the guy who took off full sprint style on people when our opponents turned it, and got himself a few quick transition goals for his troubles. A big question mark before the tourney, Skunk showed that he can focus it in when he wants to. He still needs to eliminate the lapses when e.g. guarding the dump, and still makes weird decisions with poaches and giving his guy too much cushion - so there's plenty to work on - but I really appreicated the solid attitude and the willignness to play his role.
• Kyle (2, 12, 14, 4, 46, 29%) - repeatedly people said "that guy is fast," "he gets D's." Kyle did exactly what he needed to, which is run all over the field and knock stuff down. He got a little winded at one point and suffered accordingly, but he bounced back and made numerous plays in the air - I think people challenge him because of his height, but he was up to the task. On the O side, he took a chance down a sideline that someone (Skunk?) toed in, and immediately recognized that making that sort of throw wasn't his job. We'll unfortunately be missing him for regionals - something about an anniversary trip to Hawaii - but for now , Kyle amply demonstrated the value of his making the Sprawl cut.
• Griesy (43, 13, 56, 51, 29, 46%) - with Dhein out, even more weight than usual fell on Griesy to be the guy, and dios mio did he pull it off. I've already alluded to this repeatedly, so suffice it to say that he was a beast - umpteen hucks for goals, breaks, sweet cuts, etc. He keyed our offense, and the only thing I can think to say is that he didn't go deep enough - with skies like the one he had in the finals (over EVERYONE, it was an all-timer), you know he could be hauling things in downfield. But really, he played insanely well this weekend - took chances so the handlers didn't have to, and was absolutely feeling it with his Cole connection. Perfectly aggressive and able to keep it up consistently through the weekend in which he played 46% of points and cut hard on all of them, Griesy was the obvious tourney MVP.
• Vince (3, 4, 7, 3, 64, 39%) - Vince was huge on D - his numbers are a little deceptive as he sat out once we got ahead in games - i.e., he was really only playing against other teams starters and in our two tight games. But he patrolled the deep game very well, baited more than a few throws, and took out the other teams' deep threat repeatedly. He also wore a preposterous mustache throughout - no indication whether this hurt or helped - and only had a few of his trademark way overly aggressive deep chucks. He fell in love a bit with playing VOTS style and throwing it to Will all the time, but otherwise put ina stellar weekend - a little harder to see since it happened nearly 100% on D, but Vince was a top player for this tourney, too.
• Cole (46, -1, 45, 60, 9, 40%) - Dominant deep threat who scored a ton. That doesn't even capture it. Wait, here:

These are the saddest of possible words

Jones to Griesy to Cole

Trio of Sprawlers, fleeter than birds

Jones to Griesy to Cole

Ruthlessly picking on your trailing deep

Making a giant get skyed and weep,

This was the play that made you say, "Bleep!"

Jones to Griesy to Cole

• Cole scored 27+ goals on the weekend, and I swear 90% of them happened in the above fashion. Ridiculous and a perfect playing of his part - he adopted his role with aplomb. He definitely started to get frustrated with teammates and lose his cool on a couple of occasions - memorably spiking it at an opponent after a rough foul - but he responded very well to being calmed by the Nyet Zen-master. Great play, and we really need him to continue to make huge plays for us once the competition gets stiffer.
• Will (0, -2, -2, 0, 32, 18%) - gave us big energy when we needed it on D and gave us another stellar rookie performance. Also, ho hum, had the play of the weekend - someone sent it deep for Griesy but threw it was too lasery hard and flat. It was a sure turn at a big point in the first Flux game. But out of nowhere comes a screamingly streaking Will to catch up to the disc, lay out and grab the goal. In. cred. i. ble. Will maintained a great attitde all weekend, helped out with the line-calling, and filled in with a spark when we needed it. Obviously lots of skill-areas to work on in his game, but he's already made a contribution.
• Big Nate (1, -2, -1, 9, 28, 21%) - A running joke was that I kept inadvertently insulting Nate all weekend - said he couldn't handle, made fun of old players, made fun of Ogden(ville) where he happens to have been born - so I'll refrain from that here. Big Nate did a great job on O, never turning it over and making a few big grabs in the endzone over shorter defenders. He struggled to stop deep cuts on D a little bit, but that's a minor complaint; yet another case of filling his role well and putting the team first. Plus a tremendously fun and helpful guy to have on our sidelines - did a nice job staying on people about running down on the pull and letting me know what he was seeing. Nice work.

Oy. So I know I said I would throw in some general highlights, too, but I'm a bit tired, and I've pretty much hit the bulk of the big ones already. Just picture a ton of Josh layouts, Griesy gunning it, a near greatest from Big Nate to Cole... and you'll get enough of an idea of the nice play that went down. I'll post videos and/or more pics as I see / get them, but that should do it for CO Cup 200. On to the next thing - thanks for reading, and pave the world. Sprawl.

Glad My Car Has a Cupholder (Part 3)

I'm always wary of the Sunday start; walking the fine line of serious/not too serious is challenging, and so you end up saying things like "be sure to have a water with every beer" rather than, say, "Limit yourself to one beer with a big dinner, jerkfaces." So you never know what people are going to do, but thankfully, Sprawl was fairly reasonable, and most of the crew was down in the lobby again by 6:30 or so to get breakfast. I got up extra early to pack all of my stuff in the car; Beck was going on a trail run at some point that morning, but not about to get up at 6 AM for no reason (actually, I think she ended up getting up by 7 or so, so what do I know?). Ever the creature of routine, I got my stuff down in the car, then I sun-blocked up in a stupor and rolled downstairs for another Quaker Oatmeal breakfast. We figured that we had gotten to the fields the day before a hair early, and everyone needed to pack completely, so this morning we aimed for 7:30 and hit 7:40. All part of the plan!

First game Sunday was against Interesting Tummy Birds, a shall-we-say tempestuous squad that we had seen make some shall-we-say subjective calls the previous year. We were ready for a battle, but eerily confident - it helped that our team was up, cleated and running about by 8:20 or so, whereas they were stumbling on to the field at 8:45 in an actual, legitimate stupor. What really really helped was that GRUB was running an observer training weekend, and Sprawl would be playing with observers for the first time in its history (that I know of). Ultimate is normally self-refereed, but as I am sure you will shocked to learn, as things get more competitive, things get more competitive, and things get shall-we-say subjective. Heated. Chippy. Unruly, even. So observers showing up for a game that probably would have been chirpy if not chippy was great, plus it gave us a chance to play in a stringent "don't be offsides" type environment. Sprawl looked forward to the challenge, and we looked across at our barely awake opponents and got ready to see if the Saturday flow was still in order.

Fifth verse, same as the fourth, second and first - in probably our best all around game of the weekend, we turned it over a mere four times (three on D, one on O) en route to a 15-6 beatdown. Hell, we didn't turn the disc over until it was 10-4! This was by far our best job of maintaining focus through to the end, and playing with the observers worked just fine - we learned quickly to toe the line (literally! HA!) on O points and time our run-up on pulls, plus we got used to the time restrictions and called our lines quickly, too. Sweet. Great start to the Sunday, and a great sign of things to come.

Game two was 99 Problems, a local (Boulder, I think) pickup team featuring pretty much the guys who don't make Bravo (again, as far I know). We had scraped by 99 Problems in the fourth pool play game the previous year by a score of 13-11, and I'm pretty sure that was another one of those games that had some, um, disagreements. So again, when observers came up and informed us the game would be observed, things changed...* for the better. No, really, it's good to have observers if only because that entire "bad calls" aspect of the game becomes a non-factor; you don't have to worry about ridiculous tit-for-tat fests as hopefully good observers will stamp it out before it starts. We were psyched to have them, and again, even more practice at following the letter of the 11th edition law.

* - This is not the first quantum physics joke I will make, nor will it be the last.

We traded with 99 a bit, getting a break to go up 2-1, but alternating out to 4-3. We were repeating our work it up routine, they were utilizing some hucks to challenge our overly aggressive under D. But in the middle of the game, things once again cracked - our D got some turns, and though they did it with more than a few turns of their own, managed to punch in a string of breaks in a row to take half 8-3. I played a D point in this game out of boredom (and got a D, no less!) as rinse-repeat-ditto-echo-coda-etc.'ed our act from the whole weekend - a work it up offense that didn't turn it over, and a D that had too many legs and too much energy for our opponents to deal with comfortably. If I recall correctly, this bunch ran out a man to zone transition - a little bit of a wrinkle, but zone is a gift, and we ripped it up fairly easily th few times they tried it. A 15-5 win was over in short fashion AND secured us a place in the finals, though we didn't exactly know it at the time.

One thing I repeated all weekend, though, was that we didn't particularly care about this tournament except in how it affected our team as we progressed towards regionals. Taking this to heart, we could have sat our starters for our seventh game, but as that luxury will probably not be available to us when push comes to shove, we elected instead to play it straight. Game 7 was against Critical Mass, a masters team that Big Nate had just played a few weekends back at Grand Masters Nationals. This team also started out trading with us by pretty much the same formula - dink dink long huck - but once we dissected their offense (and thanks in large part to our O that again just wouldn't lose the disc - we had two turns this game (six for the O and D combined) and scored on all eight offensive possessions), we pulled away and left it no doubt to help with good Rockies revival. 15-7 was the final, and our pool play was finished at a perfect 7-0.

Somewhere around the end of the 99 Problems game, some clouds started gathering over the mountains in the fields' backdrop. The classic thought occurred to me - we're going to play in perfect weather all weekend long only to play the finals in a windstorm - and lo, etc. Flux, the team from Austin starring my Rice pal Marcus, only had their one loss to us, so the finals was going to be a rematch. When we headed over to the scheduled field 3, though, there was a women's third place game going on that had started at 2, and the scored was 5-2. Seeing that we were scheduled to play at 3... there had been a screw up. I walked over to frisbee central to figure out the deal, only to find Marcus and Flux's captain vaguely implying that they wanted to bag the finals and head home early. That didn't sound ideal to me - didn't want to walk out of Colorado Cup with a sort of ceded championship, wanted to win in legitimately - so I half-talked them into playing a game starting pronto. They offered to play a shortened game to 11, I said I would ask my team about it, but we agreed to grab one of the now vacated Elite fields and get the finals in. Of course, given that their team was exhausted, the shortened game would only help them, and the coming storm - and all the zone game / not-running that would entailed - pointed to their advantage, too.

Interlude: Les Sprawl Boys relaxing while waiting for the finals:

Note the surprisingly happy-seeming Nyet in the background...

I consulted very briefly with Rob about the game-to-11 angle, and we decided this was dumb - why give them an advantage when we had a deeper squad that was more suited to a fifteen point game? So maybe that was a bit of chicanery on our part, as right as they walked up I rescinded our game-to-11 offer (that I, for the record, had never officially signed off on). They seemed a bit miffed, but said, "Okay, we'll play a lower quality game." It's just the rules, folks, though of course I'll admit to taking the competitive advantage angle on that one. Chalk it up to reading a nerdy baseball book en route to Denver, I suppose. :)

So the game went on, and we got in maybe three points before the wind howled in. And they were three ugly-ass points. I'd guess wind in the high 20s to mid 30s, erratic, a light drizzle* and generally the type of weather that turns Ultimate frisbee into something a little stupider than regular frisbee. We got a break early and went up 3-1, but the wind wrecked us, and we gave the break back to make it 3-3. They were running a pretty effective trap zone on us, we responded in kind... and the tension of the bad weather, some tight play, the fact that it was the FINALS!!!!! cranked up the chippy factor. In our defense, they started it with a couple of ticky tacky travel calls on yours truly - I didn't respond with any travel calls, but other Sprawlers most certainly did start the tit-for-tat session. Some of the calls, on both sides, were legit; many were technically correct but unnecessary in that no one was gaining any particular advantage by sliding two inches on the wet grass, and some were in the atrocious zone, the sort of "oh, you threw a huck to an open guy in the endzone? Well that's a travel." Pretty annoying...

* - Oddly enough, I have much more trouble throwing flicks in a light drizzle than in a downpour. A slick disc as opposed to a soaked one makes it harder for me, I suppose. So very windy and lightly drizzling - aka Boston comma Mass every spring - is pretty much bad news for Nyet.

But wait! OBSERVERS!!! We called the TD over and requested observers to clean up the muck, and they did a pretty good job of tidying up the game and speeding things along. And either they liked us a whole lot or we, you know, weren't making lame-ass travel calls, because nearly everything we sent to the observer was called in our favor (I think we were about five for six on the day). This helped a bit, but this game was really marred in all ways - calls, chippiness, and just crappy, crappy weather. Beck had shown up to watch the finals (and post updates to facebook for the benefit of Keith), but she wisely took to the car once the drizzle started. Not an ideal end to the tourney, but shouldn't we talk about the government...

Back to the game - key point happened at 4-4, with some horrendous turns by our O (and by me) at a potential turning point in the game. We had by far our most turns in this game (15 in all), understandable because of the conditions. But after three turns by our O lines on this point, I'm pretty sure this is the point where BP threw an IO forehand that got blown across half the width of the endzone - it was headed for the front left cone, and ended up at the back right cone. I got a good read and rescued it with a back corner trailing edge layout to make it 5-4. Wining that hell point pushed us over the top in the proverbial war of attrition - our D line came through with a break shortly thereafter, and then came through with a big endzone stand that turned into a length of the field huck from Cole to a sprinting, sprinting, laying out clap-catching Ebay for the 7-4 lead*. That gap sustained us a bit - O-points and D-points became interchangeable with a lot of turns coming from both sides, so our O got "broken" again at one point, but really this was a who can leg it out better situation, and the answer was Sprawl. We took half 8-6, then scored another D-line break right out of half to go up 9-6, then grabbed another a couple of points later for an 11-7 lead. Flux more or less started going through the motions at this point, and when we broke their Z with an IO scoober from your narrator to Rob - that's right, I'll throw that shizza in the wind! - to go up 12-8, and when Studer caught a quick goal to make it 13-8... well, lightning in the distance provided a good excuse for their captain to call the game. We shook hands, acknowledged the quality of our two matches despite the heatedness that had arisen during the finals, and Sprawl, the club team from Phoenix, was your 2010 Colorado Cup Open Division champion.

* - I'm having trouble remembering when it happened, but Griesy also had a HUGE play in here, going way up over a crowd of about eight people to snag a goal. This is probably a fair time to mention that Griesy clearly elevated his game this weekend - again, I'll do more of a player by player thing in the following post, but homes was the obvious playing and statistical MVP. Nice!

The TD grabbed us and quickly informed us that the rumor Trant had heard was correct, and we did win VC Ultimate "Colorado Cup Champions 2010" shorts for our troubles (predictably, quite a few ballers were wearing those bad boys at practice tonight. I, hoping not to be "that guy," left them at home... though it's probably telling that I have them on right now). We jogged through the drizzle to the truck to get our hard won shwag, the mood jubilant as ever. Cole in particular was beaming, and while it wasn't part of our goal, demonstrating the distance we've come in this emphatic fashion was quite sweet.

Beck pulled the car around, happy to have been able to see the game from the comfort of our Nissan hatchback, and I grabbed a change of clothes for the road home. One carload of Sprawlers had to split quickly as they had 6:30-ish flights to make back in Denver (the finals ended at 4:35 or so), so we said goodbyes, I canceled Monday night's practice, and the remaining folks agreed to meet at the Baker Street Brewery for celebratory fun times. I had a couple of local ales, another bowl of tomato bisque and an order of fish and chips - my third for time for the vacation, btw - and had a blast recounting with the dudes, among other things, Ian's story about how he tried to defuse a conflict between Cole and an opponent and "accidentally called the player on the other team a douchebag." Ian: not a diplomat.

Back to the airport, waited a bit in the terminal while Ebay used a whiteboard to flirt with pretty ladies, and before long we were back en route to Phoenix on an uneventful flight* after a long stay away from Fred and the pups. Aaron was kind enough to give us a ride home, and we capital-C Crashed back into our own bed for the first time in ten days.

* - Uneventful if Beck's rented movie not playing because there is no iTunes internet connection at 10,000 feet is to be considered a non-event. Again, we are talking straight-up IRE. I can't even begin...

So the last part of our vacation - Colorado Cup - was about as successful as possible from a team standpoint. As a postlude, I'll drop that tonight I pulled a classic dick Texas high school football coach move tonight and made us run our butts off after the big victory - we only had 20 or 21 people there tonight, but we worked hard on sprinting down on the pull, containing swings, stopping hucks, transitioning from a huck to endzone offense, and transitioning from flow to non-iso endzone calls. 'Twas a hard, wear-you-down style practice, and I think people got the message that beating the likes of our CO Cup opponents is not enough. Good to see everybody respond positively, and good to hear the Sprawl buzz catching on - it was really, really fun to see all of the facebook messages and congratulations flying around minutes after we won the final game. But again, it's just a step, and not to be negative nelly per usual, but there's more work to do...

So that hopefully meets the Keith-imposed Wednesday night at midnight deadline for reviewing the weekend. I am, of course, not really done - in the next post, which will be written precisely when I get around to it, I'll give 1, the self review, 2, individual Sprawler notes, 3, some generalized highlights from the weekend, and 4, of course, the nerdy stats. So to be continued, again.

Boulder:Paved. Next stop, hopefully Flagstaff.

Glad My Car Has a Cupholder (Part 2)

For something new and different, I snapped awake in the Louisville, CO, hotel room at 5:30 (4:30 Sunny Azz time - why?). Everything was good to go; I sun-blocked up in a stupor and rolled downstairs for breakfast. The fellow Sprawlers all slowly accompanied me in the lobby, and it soon became clear that Cole and EBay had been pranking me - Cole was fine*. Ian decided to give his knee a go, and though I still wasn't positive, I thought I could give it a go, too. So in a few short hours and over an oh-so-familiar of Quaker Maple and Brown Sugar Instant Oatmeal, things had turned a hair brighter. The gameplan was to get people out of the hotel and headed toward the fields by 7:15 or so, and it more or less worked out that people left by 7:30, which, let's all admit, was the goal all along. Beck had plans to go running at altitude with one of her friends from Boulder and plans to go to coffee / lunch after that. So we parted ways for the day, and I headed down to the fields, catching a ride with Ian and BP. We were among the first teams at the field, but there's no harm in that, methinks.

* - What was wacky was not that they had fooled me or anything, but that I had such a non-reaction to it - my first thought at the news of Cole's broken leg was "well, that figures," not "Oh no!" Pessimism has its regulatory advantages when things turn out badly. Or... are joked about turning out badly, I guess.

So after checking out the scene for a few minutes and confirming our first field, I cleated up, braced up, and got ready to go. Got the team rolling into our pregame routine and jogged over to the captain's meeting at 8:15. Pretty low key affair - unlike recent tourneys which lacked basic Ultimate necessities like water and oxygen, the folks in charge of Colorado Cup (Boulder's GRUB) know what's going on and had all the gears in place. Food, trainer, water, massages, you name it. Beautiful fields taboot. (Actually, other than double booking us on a field on Sunday, the weekend could not have gone smoother from a tourney perspective - props to those guys). (Wait, withdrawn - the pizzas they got us on Saturday were wack. Four larges per team - that's 32 slices for the 21 guys on Sprawl, if you're into math - and the breakdown was one meat, one cheese and two veggie. I am confident a treehugging Boulderite was in charge of the 75% vegetarian-friendly call). Everything was in order; games to fifteen all day long with no unusual rules in place. We were in the open division, just like last year, where we had gone 3-4 (and 2-4 three years ago, 2-5 four years ago); CO Cup also has an elite division, featuring the likes of Johnny Bravo and GOAT and Furious George and such over the years, but we are not quite there yet. The pools were a little odd - there were 9 other open teams, so instead of the usual pool play on Saturday, elimination play on Sunday setup, we were to do a faux round robin and play seven of the other teams between Saturday and Sunday. The top two finishing teams then square off in the finals. On the plus side, everybody gets seven games at minimum; on the minus, it seems a little susceptible to luck of the draw in the who-you-don't-play department. Good deal nonetheless, as avoiding the two pools of five setup meant no byes throughout the day - no fun to travel that far to spend two hours of the day sitting around.

I got back to the team after the captain's meeting to find Sprawl fully in gear and getting ready to scrimmage; I took a couple of laps on my own and sprinted a bit to test things out. I didn't feel great at all - seemed to be topping at out at, oh, 80% energy, but I thought that could probably get me through a day of O-line only play. Came back, ran a few points in our scrimmage and couldn't really keep up with people on D but felt just fine on O, so I gave myself an amber-shade-of-green light for the day.

First game was against long-time rival Sweet Roll. Word on the street (field?) is that the boys from New Mexico are increasing their chances for a nationals appearance by teaming up with the girls from new Mexico and going co-ed - we ran into the co-ed version of New Mexico at Mohini, and indeedily, they look quite good as a two-gender unit. This is sort of unfortunate from an Ultimate drama standpoint - Sweet Roll was established well before Sprawl, and the two teams have always been very friendly with one another. They are, in short, great guys with whom we get along swimmingly. But they are also guys who have beaten Sprawl every time the two teams have squared off. So it's long been a goal of Sprawl's to "beat Sweet Roll," regardless of how warm-fuzzy we feel about them. We took them to double game point (or something close) last year at sectionals and couldn't convert, so now with Sweet Roll disassembling, Sprawl will not really get the chance to beat them in the club series and get the torch passed or what have you. Sad.

But that's okay, because enough of Sweet Roll came to Colorado Cup that game one of Saturday represented a sort of last chance to break through the Sweet Roll barrier, and Sprawl did not disappoint. Both days were very mild wind-wise, a factor that played sharply in Sprawl's windless-Valley-of-the-Sun hometown favor. The D-lines came out swinging, putting the Phoenix crew up 3-0 before NM knew what had hit them. And with turnover-free play from Sprawl's offense in the first half, the good guys were up 8-3 in a blink. More of the same with a little less focus in the second half, and this epic turning of the tides was anything but - Sprawl won in a 15-7 relative no contest.

Before I get crazy rolling with this, I should just throw out who was there. Your 2010 Colorado Cup Sprawl Traveling Squad:

Trant, Joe K, Dixon, Jim, Vince, Cole, BP, Josh, Griesy, Skunk, Ebay, Big Nate, Will

Paul, Kyle, Nyet, J-Ro, Aaron "32 Ounces of Ice" H., Rob, Studer, Ian

Great group, and what we figured out really quickly was yes, we have the studs to run with anyone, but we also have an exceptionally deep team - when people fall into their roles properly, having 21 guys that you can just send in waves at the opponent is downright oppressive. Sweet! I'll throw in some individual play commentary at some point here, but good enough for now to have those pretty guys' pictures upfront so you can visualize the goodness.

Really, I'm afraid that this writeup is going to be somewhat boring - the Sweet Roll game was pretty indicative of what was to come all weekend. Our O was, for the most part, downright clinical - we scored on 89% of our O points, 67% of our possessions, and 68% of the time we received the pull, we marched it down and scored sans turnover*. A team that is hardly giving up any breaks to speak of like that is going to be tough to beat, and on top of that, our D lines were pressuring opponents like crazy, forcing mistakes and scoring at a 57% clip themselves. The D-line play occasionally failed to differentiate their hot D from their chilly O - i.e., sometimes overly aggressive, chancy O attempts followed aggressive D play, and we turned it over unnecessarily - but as a squad, we stayed positive didn't get down on any mistakes, and continued to ramp it up. Just a pretty weekend - better teams will not make it so easy on us, but we took care of bidness, as they say, and were remarkably efficient.

* - My memory of all the games this weekend will look like this: J-Ro or EBay catches the pull, flips it to me. Griesy or BP's man is playing behind them by five yards, so BP/Griesy takes the easy fifteen yard gain. If it's BP, he flips to Griesy who then hucks it to Cole for a goal; if it's BP, he hits Dixon, who flips it back to J-Ro, who swings it to me, who breaks the mark to Griesy, who hucks it to Cole. Rinse, repeat. I can't emphasize enough that I spent a good deal of my weekend jogging behind the play; not to say that I didn't have to run and play hard on occasion, but I have no doubt that the smoothness of our O was the only thing that got me and my low tank of energy through the weekend.

On to game 2 against a somewhat older crew from Tucson, Monsoon. Same story - D-lines got us off to a great start, O-lines refused to turn it over - the whole team only turned it over four times this game, sheesh - and things rolled to a quick 15-5 rout. Time and again, teams stopped against us this weekend - even if things were contested at first, Sprawl effectively convinced opponents that there was no real point to running hard. So there was a general pattern of man defense for the first half followed by a few half-hearted attempts at zone that got diced, and then a fair bit of seemingly going through the motions. At times, it was hard to keep Sprawl's focus - we definitely sputtered more often in the last few points of games while up big, and given our capacity to let teams back into it (see Daweena), that's a tendency we'll want to kill.

Things changed quite a bit for game 3 against Flux, an Austin team featuring none other than my Rice teammate Marcus "Cuse!" Gavin. Again, Flux couldn't stop our offense, but we had some trouble stopping theirs, too - they ran a vertical stack, the first one we've seen in a while, and ran some nice plays where they dinked it around until they could huck to a good matchup. It confused us effectively, and after they came down in Z got a couple of extremely uncharacteristic turns from Joe K, they took half 8-6, up by two (!) breaks. Impressively, we did not sweat it at all, instead trying to figure out how to crack their O - we ended up running some hybrid D's with a lot of switching / last-backing, and with a break right after half another shortly thereafter, our D pulled it back to 10-10. They continued to Z us, we continued to be exceptionally calm with the disc on the O side, and eventually our deeper squad caught up with them: another break at 11-11 to put us ahead, and another break at 13-12 to put us out in front by two for good. This was a fantastic game - only 8 turns on our side, and just 9 by them, with an extraordinarily clean second half from our team. And it was great to play against a former teammate who was definitely their team's *guy* - seems the Rice factory continues to produce. I'm sorry, make that The Rice University.

We ended day one with a four turnover, same-as-it-ever-was win against Inception (a team who, by contemporariness of team name alone, you can tell had to be a local pickup squad). We ran off to a 5-0 lead and never really looked back - again, just too much athleticism and too many pairs of legs carrying it. 15-4 was the final, and we did a much better job of keeping the whole team locked in during this one. The early finish gave us great seats for the showcase game, a Universe point showdown between local favorites Johnny Bravo and the Canadian GOAT; the Canucks took it in an upset, and we enjoyed that mightily over all 32 pieces of our pizza.

Beck had a great day and joined us for the first half of the showcase game; she and I left at halftime and considered going to a divey-ish Boulder bar called the Dark Horse but thought better of their limited menu and headed back to the hotel and downtown Louisville. We ended up settling on a place called Waterloo for dinner, and yes, Austinites, that is the same Waterloo as Waterloo Records - the place was decked out in music label gear and had some Texas fare on the menu, too. Despite spending much of the day jogging on the field and watching Griesy huck it to Cole, I was starving, so I engaged in my usual mid-tourney caloric absurdity - bread, Guinness, asparagus cheese dip, a bowl of tomato bisque, mini-grilled cheese sandwiches, more bread, a potato burger* w/ cheese and a big plate-ful of fries replaced whatever I burned on the field during the day. Very, very good. We made it back to the hotel relatively early - 10-ish - and I packed our week-plus worth of stuff to put it in the car the next morning and set my Ulty clothes out for championship Sunday.

* - Ground beef w/ mixed shredded potato that maintains the moisture of the burger (supposedly). 'Twas excellent.

TBC...

Glad My Car Has a Cupholder (Part 1)

'Cause I gots to put this Colorado Cup somewhere... :)

Okay, technically speaking, I suppose my car needs a shortsholder:

With all apologies to fans of pre-modern linear narrative, popular demand* dictates that I cover the last part of our excellent vacation first. But I have to start with our second trip to Colorado, so that means starting the tale west of Vancouver on Salt Spring Island at 5 AM PDT.

* - Then again, perhaps this is a bad idea, as popular demand - read, a request from Sprawl-baller Aaron H. - also dictated that I include another sexy "half-naked pic" of your balladeer. This order is by-letter filled by the shorts pic above - I am indeed shirtless up there, it being a cool 102 degrees at the time of photo-shooting - but I am sure that is not what he had in mind, so here's a zoom-out to fulfill Harczynskian desires. FYI, this is what a one-fifth naked Harczynskian looks like when chugging a 32 ounce girly beverage:

The bed and breakfast where we stayed, Blackberry Glen, was easily a five star experience, but one question stood between the establishment and the coveted fifth and a half star - how would they handle breakfast on Friday morning? For flight-out-of-Seattle-at-3:45 and ill-timed-ferry-schedule reasons, we had to leave at about 5:30 that A.M. This meant not only an ugly 5 A.M wake up, but also that that we would not be getting our last breakfast, rendering the last night a mere bed-and. Jason and John, our excellent hosts, came through in the clutch with a quasi-picnic breakfast of sandwiches and fruit, pushing the stay into exalted territory. Seriously, I cannot recommend Salt Spring or Blackberry Glen enough, though I suppose we'll get into that in another post.

So Beck and I lumbered downstairs in the dawn-dark with our week's worth of luggage to begin a Friday-ful of travel, being careful not to make noise so as not to disturb our hosts nor the friendly neighborhood deer. We managed to successfully not take a detour into America en route to the Canadian ferry this time,* as thankfully it was just about a one mile - sorry, 1.6 km - ride to the ferry port from the B&B. We waited about twenty minutes before pulling up onto the ferry, parking the car and heading to the passenger deck. We used the boat cafeteria's microwave to heat up our breakfasts-to-go. And they were SO GOOD, on all kinds of aesthetic levels:

* - We were in a huge rush on Tuesday, leaving from Vancouver to get to the ferry in Tsawwassen - our boat left at 7:10, we were supposed to be there half an hour early, and our ETA after hitting traffic in Vancouver was approximately 6:38. Our directions said "take 17 South to the ferry," but as we're heading down that road, Beck sees a sign that says "next left: Tsawwassen." So, reasonably enough, she turns left. And after speeding through downtown Tsawwassen in approximately two minutes, we see signs welcoming us to America. I'll spare you the goofy details of Port Roberts, other than to note that yes, U.S.A. has perhaps the most pointless patch of territory in the world up there on a little peninsular offshoot of Canada, and the border guards on that patch are not really huge fans of the border U-turn. We technically left Canada for a microsecond, so we had to re-present passports, re-answer all of the questions about cargo and weapons, and restate our purpose in Canada. The guard waved us through with all the passion of someone who has heard "which way back to the ferry?" a thousand times, and we made it at 6:50, the last people in line to be let on the boats. Phew.

You'll notice, in addition to the sandwiches and fruit and breakfast chocolates, the chocolate-chip-oatmeal-and-raisin cookies that made it into the mix there. Those were definitely a highlight of the Blackberry Glen experience, and no, how dare you accuse us, we did not eat all two dozen of the ones baked for us. That's preposterous!

The ferry ride was relatively uneventful, other than fog and boat-rocking that made us a little queasy, but nothing crazy. I spent the boat trip (inbetween five minute naps, anyways) reading Tango et al.'s The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, at which Beck gave a cursory glance and asked, "Is that a book for nerds?" Yes. Really, really cool nerds. I did, though, just to stay remotely on topic, give quite a bit of thought to leveraging situations with playing time and how it applied to Ultimate. So that sort of reset my bar for assigning PT for the weekend, and I think resulted in a more even, more successful distribution. So the nerdiness occasionally pays off.

We couldn't take the subtle indoor boat-rocking after a bit, so we got up and walked laps around the boat-deck for the last fifteen minutes of the ride. This is more challenging than perhaps it sounds - being exhausted and walking across a rocking boat effectively makes you look very drunk, so that was good exercise for the day. We pulled in to Tsawwassen at 9:30-ish with way more than enough time to make the 2 hour drive to Seattle and catch our plane. We started making plans to hit a good eatery somewhere en route accordingly. Which would have been great...

...except that we did not anticipate that it was the Friday before "BC Day." Apparently Canada has a "civic holiday," which seems to mean that someone along the line decided screw it, the whole country's going to take a day off the first weekend in August. How very uncapitalist of them. The result was that we were not the only ones making the trip from Vancouver to Seattle that afternoon, and our leisurely stroll to Seattle turned into a tight-scheduled pain in the arse. We spent an hour and fifteen minutes in a traffic stall at the U.S.-Canada border, and the most challenging aspect of crossing the border this time was when the guard asked "What's new from Canada?" and Beck thought he was asking about Vancouver news and not, say, the bottle of port we bought on Salt Spring Island. "Nothing much... what's new with you?" didn't really suffice as an answer. But we didn't mention the Sky Tower or going to a Phish concert*, so they let us through just fine.

* - This has been a Zil shoutout. Liz: the only person who's U.S. - Canadian border crossings are more eventful than Beck's.

Another idiotic feature of your narrator is that he completely neglected to comprehend that Canada is, indeed, a foreign country, and as such data and texting and phone calls in such a place are, however technically, international. Meaning 15 bucks per megabyte and such. So we made it a solid three days without using our iPhones, and thank goodness we got them back when we did. The primary effect was that we could use the Yelp! app to find a non-McDonalds eatery for the ride back - despite the newfound tightness of our schedule, we thought it'd be a great idea to stop just off the highway in Everett for another nice vacation lunch*. We tried to stop at a place called The Majestic Cafe only to find it closed, but that sent us across the street to The Prohibition Grille... and next time someone asks you, "Do they have good soul food in Everett, WA?," you can answer, "Yes, yes they do." If I recall correctly, Beck got a bisque and a salad, and I got a big-as-my-head order of cornbread followed by a plate of Andouille sausage and cajun shrimp over jalapeno cheese grits and spinach. Dios mio - probably didn't exactly qualify as pre-Ultimate carbo-loading, but it certainly fulfilled my pre-tourney "dripping with oily flavor goodness" quota. The food came out fast and got us back on the road in a split; if you're ever north of Seattle, that place will not disappoint.

* - We ate quite well this vacation, I tell you what. I am pretty sure Beck broke a mussels-meal record - special thanks to Meghan and Greg for sneaky funding part of our trip! The Salt Spring Island bucks were great.

So we slugged it down through Seattle Friday afternoon traffic and our flight hour got closer and closer. Much to Beck's chagrin, the signs for rental car return at the airport left out one significant fact - that Thrifty's rental car location was five miles south of all the others. ARGH! All told, it all worked out, but it injected the end of an already too long 10 hour day with an added drama that we didn't need. A ten hour day, and we hadn't even taken the trip back to Denver yet. Ugh. So a tired Nyet* and Beck boarded the plane to Colorado, pretty much wanting a bed to crash into at that moment but needing another four or five hours to realize it. Beck fortunately had rented Sherlock Holmes for her iPad - her ire for Steve Jobs being worth a discussion on its own - and I had my nerd book to tide me over, so we made it through the flight okay.

* - I should note - the fatigue thing certainly did not get any better over the vacation. I was up and down all week - e.g., danced like a maniac at Elliot's wedding, did elliptical workouts twice in Denver the previous weekend and went running twice at the island, but at other times couldn't walk around downtown Vancouver without feeling faint, had to eat every five seconds to feel remotely okay, etc. I continue to not be able to get it. I was at my nadir around Wednesday or so and had absolutely no designs on playing at Colorado Cup ... but as we'll see, the best laid plans of Nyet and men are, you know, not life. Or something.

Oh, somewhere in there, EBay and Cole each texted me that Cole had broken his leg. And Ian wrote to tell me that his knee felt terrible. And I already knew that Dheintime wasn't going to be making the weekend. And with myself being questionable, it certainly seemed like we were in for a rough time. I was sub-enthused.

We had to circle Denver a few times in the plane thanks to thunderstorms - so at that point, I was having a "fatigue attack," for lack of a better term, and envisioning a weekend in the rain watching a depleted Sprawl squad play in nasty conditions. Not exactly the height of my optimism. We landed and it seemed every plane in the place had been delayed - tons of people were already in line at Hertz; thankfully we had reserved the car (priceline HEYO - 50 bucks total for the weekend!) and could just use the kiosk. We eschewed dinner in favor of a stop at a Safeway and ended up grabbing turkey and some fruit; we drove to the hotel (located partway between Denver and Boulder) and got ready to crash. I talked to Ian for approximately five seconds to get the keycard to our room and otherwise saw no Sprawlers that night. I got my stuff ready for the morning, briefly watched part of a Cubs-Rockies game which the local-to-Denver teaming won 17-2, and headed to bed.

So Friday night was a low - tired after daylong travel, wondering how in hell I was going to rally to play for the weekend, and generally not feeling great about the cap to our vacation. I would be pleasantly surprised in the ensuing 48 hours.

How to...

How to? Ask Google, of course.

We always love a fascinating sociological query here at the Clarion Content's editorial desk. We thought we might clue you into one we check on, for shits and grins, fairly regularly. As you probably already know the Google search box autoprompts responses to what you are typing in, that is to say, it makes suggestions. So if you type, "Harry Pott" Google is already guessing ahead to "Harry Potter" and "Harry Potter and the deathly hallows," as things you might be searching for.

One of our favorite little sociological games is to type the phrase "How to" into the Google search box and check out the autoprompts for what kind of stuff folks are trying to figure out how to do. We gave it a whirl today and as always the answers were amusing, if not particularly illuminating.

From Google, the top ten "How to" autoprompts...

1. How to tie a tie
2. How to train a dragon
3. How to
4. How to kiss
5. How to remove a tick
6. How to destroy angels
7. How to lose weight fast
8. How to get a passport
9. How to grill corn
10. How to draw

Almost as amusing from Google, the top ten "How do" autoprompts...

1. How do magnets work
2. How do I love thee
3. How do I get a passport
4. How do websites use cookies
5. How do I find my IP address
6. How do clouds form
7. How do you get pregnant
8. How do pirates dress
9. How do you get pink eye
10. How do you like me now

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Bad Ass Merle Haggard pic

This bad ass picture of Merle Haggard came from here...

Durham City Council rejects billboards

Billboards avoided...

The Durham City Council rejected a two year campaign by Fairway Outdoor Advertising to relocate some of its billboards, upgrade some others and convert still other billboards to digital operation. The council was unanimous in its vote, 7-0 against. The Raleigh News & Observer quoted Councilman Mike Woodard, who reported receiving more than 1,000 e-mails in opposition to Fairway's request and seven in favor of it, "This issue has united Durham like none other." The City/County Planning Department also recommended against the change, "No substantial positive effect has been identified for Durham's economic development," by changing the ordinance.