The Royal WEfnuk: Week X

We capped our season with a tight 15-11 win over Jesse and Marisa's team "Multiple Scoregasms." I tell you, for all the crap over "hcuk," you would think Big Brother would step in and change their team name to "Several Goals." Oh, well.

Interesting game - we had a lot of people who were out of town or couldn't play for one reason or another¹, so we ended up with five guys for the night for the five guy spots, aka no subs. Ugh. So Justin, Pat, Paul, Drew and sore quad Nyet took the field for the duration². We were a little sloppy on O - just congested on cuts, some bad decisions and the like - and couldn't get ourselves clicking. Started the game trading points³ and were actually down 4-3 before we woke up a little bit and took a 6-4 lead. Took half at 8-6, then went on a run to 11-6. And then...

Ugh. They threw a pretty decent zone, multiple people on our team had bad throw turnovers⁴, and they clawed their way back into it 11-10. We subsequently got our act together, cranked the D up another notch, took care of the disc on O and ran off 3 to 14-10. They scored, we scored, ballgame, 15-11.

Very nice to have a closer game for a change, even if it was largely due to our lack of subs. Not to take anything away from them - "Exciting" Jesse is an absolute stud⁵, Marisa smoked us deep a couple of times, Al put up some nifty hucks and Ryan (?), handler from Sprawl, put on some good moves as well. But a lot of the trouble for us at the beginning was getting outrun, and once that evened out a little bit (their 8 guys got as tired as our 5, collectively, or something)⁶, things evened out quickly.

I personally had a mixed game - definitely put up some overzealous hucks, and while I still completed the majority, they were not exactly healthy-advised. Gotta tone that down big time for next week. D was pretty solid - a handblock and at least three other Ds I can remember, in addition to doing a pretty reasonable job on the occasions where I got matched up with Jesse. Mainly I stepped up the receiving big time, making lots of deep cuts and score catches and the like. Got some nice compliments from the other team regarding my ability to read the disc - I had one supersky in particular for a score on a throw from Justin that was poster-worthy. You know, if they made posters for people with 18 inch verticals.

So, fun times, good heated game, and again, next to no calls. We've had a really clean season (with the exception of week 2, really), and my conscious effort to be nicer on the field has paid off a little. Yay self-improvement. And speaking of seasons, it's over. We finished on a nine game win streak for a 9-1 record with a +59 point differential (+66 for the streak, meaning we averaged winning our games by seven). All that is a wash now, because it's PLAYOFF TIME!!!! In another post...

¹ Ned and Nathan's wife/mom passed away earlier this week from pulmonary disease; it's been very sad and they've understandably not been at our games lately. Ned is just a primo nice guy, his son is great, and it's hard to think about such a sad, premature loss for their family. The team made a donation in her honor to the LAM Foundation, a group that does research in her particular disease, and it was the least we could do. They'll both be back this week, and I hope frisbee can be at least a little bit of a therapeutic distraction for them.
² In retrospect, we could have asked to play 4-3, but the other team only had three (maybe four?) women, so shifting the subbing burden from our men to their ladies seemed a little lame to me. But this was a screw-up on my part; I should've consulted with the other team. Unfortunately I was too stupid to realize that we only had five guys until the game started. Ugh - this is why I send out e-mails inquiring as to people's availability. Futile, futile efforts.
³ Really clunky - some bad turns, their women running deep behind us, etc. I missed Justin on a huck and we had a craptastic miscommunication at midfield, too. An unfun start to the game, but still, the worst was being down 4-3. So, whatever.
⁴ Man oh man - I had hit Justin on a big huck against their zone earlier, tried it again and the disc just did not bite back and hung up. He still had a shot at it, but couldn't get it. And on the next point, Teri called poach from across the field, so I tossed her a hammer - only I didn't see Jesse at all, who was basically standing right next to her. Bad on her part to yell poach, but that's the first time in quite a while that I just haven't seen someone on the field - he was lined up directly behind another player in my field of vision, and apparently my internal "count seven opponents" mechanism was defunct. Ugh. Not to be outdone by my ineptitude, Genevieve made a couple of overly laser-throws to Brenda in this juncture, and Pat tried to huck it to a WIDE OPEN, no one within twenty yards Paul and just absolutely barfed it. So it was a collective four points of bad, and they capitalized well.
⁵ Yeah, he's pretty much an Ultimate player prototype - tall, skinny, super fast, super jumps, very aggressive, graceful layer-outer, and just nice as can be. Doesn't have quite the throws that some other Ulti-gods have, but he's got incredible field sense and just gets open pretty much whenever he wants. Kinda amazing to watch, though not really from up close when he's skying you to grab a hammer (but I should not fail to mention that i was not actually guarding him at the time, just trying to help a teammate).
⁶ This may not sound like it makes sense - I think we were so overly worried about the no subs factor that we were conserving energy, which doesn't work too well. Once we figured out that we could just run all night and our savage^a tired would be better than their normal tired, we were good to go.
^a "Savage" in Ultimate parlance means "no subs." There are "savage seven" tournaments where you just take a team of seven and play all day, and I'm pretty sure that's where the term savage came from. If you think about it, though, at least in normal Ultimate contexts, "savage seven" is redundant.

from the Hunchback of Notre Dame

Word is Victor Hugo wanted to name The Hunchback of Notre Dame, simply Notre Dame. Upon review that makes perfect sense because ostensibly Hugo saw the cathedral itself as the central character of the story, a very modern angle for his time. One can see how the cast of other characters is an ensemble not a lead and supporting roles, nor simply a hero and a villian. Rather than spoil the story for you, and if you have only seen the movie you haven't gotten the half of it, we will instead offer...

Word pearls from Victor Hugo's masterpiece


"Pride always has ruin and shame close at its heels."


"'And love?' proceeded Gringoire.
'Oh! love!' said she, and her voice trembled, and her eye sparkled. 'It is to be two and yet be one- it is a man and a woman blending into an angel-it is heaven itself.'"


"It was the abuse of impunity going hand in hand with the abuse of punishment-two bad things, which strove for one another."


"The King never grants any boon but what is wrung from him by the people."


"In order to live one must get a livelihood."


"Life without love is but a dry wheel, creaking and grating as it revolves."


"Memory is the tormentor of the jealous."


"which imparted to her profile that ideal sweetness which Raphael subsequently found at the mystic point of intersection of virginity, maternity, and divinity."


"Oh, how hollow science sounds when you dash against it in despair [against] a head filled with passions."


"the blinder that passion the more tenacious it is. Never is it stronger than when it is most unreasonable."


"Montmarte, which had then almost as many churches as windmills, but has retained the mills only; for the material bread is nowadays more in request than the spiritual."

Country Music Awards

Carrie Underwood


Reese Witherspoon

When two of the five most beautiful women in the world are at the same party, you know it is a good one. Congratulations to the 42nd annual Country Music Awards held last night in Nashville, Tennessee. They had Carrie Underwood and Reese Witherspoon in attendance. It doesn't get much better than that, and don't let the people from Cannes tell you any different. A couple of big CMA red carpet surprises last night, at least to the Clarion Content's editorial staff. One, Miley Cyrus? What is Disney mega-pop star Miley Cyrus doing at the CMA's? Just accompanying daddy, Billy Ray? Or is she about to do a country album? Hmmm, something that bears watching. Surprise two, Kid Rock walked the red carpet alone! We don't think we have ever seen that before. Follow this link to 334 red carpet pictures from last night's Country Music Awards. Incidentally, inside the big winners were Kenny Chesney, Carrie Underwood, and Rascal Flatts. George Strait broke the record for most CMA awards lifetime when he won his 22nd for album of the year, Troubadour.

Third biggest Salmon in CA history

hint...way bigger than this guy!

If you have ever fished for salmon you are not going to believe the pictures at this link in the LA Times. The third biggest Chinook salmon in California history was discovered yesterday in Battle Creek in Tehama County, CA. This fish is positively huge! Even better it lived out its natural life and was not killed by a fishermen. As the biologist who found him, Doug Killam, said in the LA Times, "Hopefully, this fish was entirely successful in passing on its superior genetic potential."

Giant handbags

Ladies, one more reason to defend your giant handbags and purses. The Clarion Content has quite a few female friends who feel compelled to sport a large purse or bag to lug all their necessaries around in. Many of these females take shit from folks about just how big their purses are. Little do the critics recall how handy it is to know someone who always has a tissue, an umbrella, a band-aid, an aspirin and a stick of gum, not too mention, their own stuff.

Well carriers of the large bag, there is one more reason to defend it today, from Kristen Seymour of StyleList Blog. In a post titled, "Giant Purses Save Lives," she reports, "Twenty-two year-old college student, Elizabeth Pittenger, was carrying half her life in her bag when a man stopped her, demanding her laptop, purse, and cell phone. She refused and fought him off, but before she could get away, he fired a shot."

It was stopped by the purse. She was unharmed and "nearby police heard the gunshot and were able to apprehend the shooter almost immediately."

You think a handbag with just her id, credit card, and cash, stops that shot? Yeah, not so much...

Week Eleven of the Philosophing

We'll week-in-reverse this bad boy:

Sunday - put the final touches on a first draft for my law paper. A lot of time, probably way more than would indicate any efficiency on my part, was put into that beast, so it was nice to have it done.

Saturday - Wrote the arguments and conclusion for the paper. This took pretty much all day. Blar.

Friday - Great day. Came in early and polished off the "cultural arguments" section of the law paper. Went to my seminar class on Gender, Race & Technology and just had a great discussion, a lot of which was prompted by me and my impatience with people who don't talk. We were missing a few of the Bio & Society people due to conferences, so here was a high potential for some sitting and staring. I threw out some controversial ideas just to wake people up, and it completely worked, got people heated and bantering and all that. We talked about sexual language "inherent" in nuclear war, the appropriateness of fictional work as an academic tool, and different concepts in racial genetics. Cool stuff. A couple of professors were visiting, and though the tendency for them is to sit back and observe, they jumped right in. Awesome.

Followed this up with lunch with the HSD crew, then went to a presentation on nanotechnology and 4th amendment rights by Alan Rubel. He was one of the visiting professors from class, and in his presentation he essentially argued that nanotechnology will actually serve to improve privacy concerns. Tres cool. Ran back from that to the lab for about five minutes, then had a quick meeting with Dr. Steve Hoffman about his neuroimmunophilsophy course. Which sounds excellent - he's interested in concepts of self and mind as understood via immunological processes / pathologies. I'll probably take it.

And capped that day off by running home to take care of the dogs and then jetting over to Scottsdale to play some softball. We won both games big (20-1, 16-3), and then Beck and I grabbed dinner at Los Olivos. Yay for a fun end to the week.

Thursday - Spent the bulk of the day doing the reading for Friday's seminar course, though I also managed to get in a bit of preliminary work on the cultural arguments section of the paper. I also had a fun pizza lunch with Mark and Melissa and then met a bio student named Jake for coffee at 1. He is interested in collaborating on a cool sounding bio-philosophy project on the conscious experience as limited / defined by biological factors - exactly the sort of "informed existentialism" stuff I might be interested in. So a good, productive meeting, and I'm glad I'm not the only yahoo who thinks in this way - even a bona fide scientist type has noticed the problem! Yeah!

Wednesday - An entire day devoted to finishing up the legal arguments in the evolution controversy. I also went to a law class on "forbidden science" where we essentially learned that we're all going to die from bioterrorist attacks, and how! A sort of a bummerish day.

Tuesday - A day spent entirely writing and citing legal papers. I think I took a 20 minute break to toss the frisbee, but otherwise it was nose to grindstone from 7:15 - about 7 at night. Argh.

Monday - A morning spent on the aforementioned Alan Rubel's paper and a presentation on it from John in HSD. Law class featured discussions of democratic decision making and jury competence, focusing a little bit on genetically modifed foods. Otherwise I polished the outline for the law paper.

There you have it. A busy, productive week. There's alot of reading and meetings and whatnot that I glossed over in there, too. And lawn-mowing, Ultimate, and watching two (Beck-chosen!) movies, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and You Don't Mess with the Zohan, which were entertaining (the former much more so than the latter) when they weren't abjectly stupid (the latter, period). As a redemption, Beck also grabbed Pushing Daisies, a nice macabre show whose first two episodes were very solid.

More later. Time to get back to work...

Wa. Friggin. Hoo.

After what feels like hundreds of hours of reading, outlining, writing, citing, etc., I just finished the first draft of my first grad school paper. Yay. Mailed it off to the professor for notes and everything. Phew. It's the paper that I posted the abstract for here about the evolution debates. If you are hexta-bored and want to give it a look, well here you go:

Cultural / Legal Incongruence in the Evolution Controversy

Fun times. And I get to beathe again at least for a few seconds until I have to read a landslide slew of more articles. But it's good to have something tangible done.

Alrighty then. Breakfast now, reading in a bit, more blogging later.