Can drink you under the table!

The pen-tailed tree shrew of Malaysia can drink you under the table.

Doubt it?

These little guys can knock back the equivalent of up to nine Guinnesses a night. Their beverage of choice? Bertram palm nectar naturally fermented to have an alcohol content up to 3.8%.

Big Boozer

You go little shubba.

Not for the Frank of Heart

Only in that he is currently reading the book and I don't want to give anything away...

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

So that was two...

The third thing is that my last day of slavery at Tutor Corps is tomorrow. Huzzah!

I kid: I would say overall that it's been an okay experience. The pay wasn't great, and there were occasional scheduling stupidities that could have been avoided - for example, I don't really think scheduling tutors for nine hours straight without a break is really a good idea. That's me. The main problem, of course, is that tutoring the same thing (SAT) over and over again gets incredibly boring, particularly when you're spending the off hours reading more philosophically oriented texts. The constant urge to shout "but truth is a social construct!" at the test wore on me.

But it was a good experience. If nothing else, hey, comedic fodder. And I'll leave the experience with this one, a quote from the last essay I graded:

"All in all, success is not a marathon, but rather a light jog."

And if you can figure out what the hell that means, you are a better tutor than I.

Neon Champ

Last Friday, Beck trekked up to Rochester for the annual Family Reunion. We made an executive decision to send one representative this year and leave the other at home for dog-caring duties. Beck won the rosham. So i was home alone, set for a weekend of dog-sitting and tutoring.

And then a student canceled on Saturday, and then another, leaving me with an open Saturday afternoon. And I had gotten an e-mail the previous week which i had pretty much opened and immediately disregarded because the event it referenced was on a work day. But i remembered it upon the second cancellation: there was a goofy Ultimate tournament down in Tucson, a mere two hours away! And so I calculated that if I ran home, walked the pups, got my stuff together and took off, I would get there just in time. And with two hours transit, maybe five hours of playing, and two hours back, the dogs would be alone for nine hours, which is pretty much what they did all the time up in Boston. So off I went.

Ahem, and a big back up, for two reasons. One, I hadn't run in about two weeks, hadn't played Ultimate, and had really only done anything vaguely athletic while tossing the disc in the park with Ben and Ali. So i was going to be out of shape for this bad boy. But I've played entire tournaments while out of shape, not just one day hat deals like this, and survived just fine. So BRING IT!!! The second problem is little more heinous: while playing for Polaroid, we had a pretty awesome team saying which simultaneously reveals the nature of Ultimate and what a bunch of jerks we could be. The saying: "Ultimate Frisbee: Love the Game, Hate the People." Yeah, we sucked. But, hey: it's a great game. And the hippie-ish, non-athlete, nerdcore vibe of it drags it down at times (just like the non-hippie, athletic, non-nerd competitive asshole vibe can drag it down). This tournament screamed more people than game; for one thing, it was starting at 4 and running until 9 on a field without lights... eh? And there was much more mention of "kegs" and "boat races" and the like than, say, what version of rules they were using, what format the tournament would be in, how many people would be there. So to extend a weirdly referenced metaphor from the previous post, this was gonna be way more Grateful Dead concert than church or baseball or Ultimate.

So it goes. The opportunities to play Ultimate in this area are few and far between, so i decided to bite the bullet and go, just put on my happy face. I've played goofball tournaments like this before that have been an absolute blast; it all depends on the people who end up on your team and how well you can strike a balance between good play and lunacy. So i jumped in the car and listened to some schwank tunes down to Tucson, getting there just in time to be placed on a team and get ready to go.

Only it turns out that fewer people showed up than the tourney organizers anticipated. So what was supposed to be a 6 team, 10 players per team tournament turned into a 6 team, 6 players per team tourney. And we played fives! FTR, I would have shifted gears and gone four teams, 9 players each and played sevens, but I was not in charge. So we were playing with one sub, and we were playing with only five on a relatively normal sized field. More running plus fewer subs. If you're smart, you can see where this is going.

My team consisted of Jack, Jorge, Lilly, Sam, Ana and me. Ana was just learning how to play, but otherwise we had a pretty experienced team (these things are called "hat" tournaments b/c they mix your names in a hat to pick teams, but they do make people rank themselves in an effort to balance the teams). We started play at 4, and it was hot hot hot. Not 114, but still, 95+. Ran ourselves a bit ragged and won game one, 11-6. Things cooled down for game two, and we eeked out a tight win, 10-8. By then it was 7, though... and quite dark.

Bust out the glow-in-the-dark apparel! Every player got four gitd rings to place on their body, and the standard issue Ultimate discs were replaced with slightly heavier discs with a light source affixed to the bottom. And each team got different colored glo-rings. Somewhat ludicrous, but quite cool, too. We were neon orange (nice and bright) and played our third game of the day against a team wearing neon blue (not so good against the duck light). One of the teams wore neon green rings and looked pretty much straight up Tron.

SO, playing in the dark is quite tough. As you can imagine, people drop passes a lot more frequently, and it's difficult to gauge depth perception with any reliability. So the games were pretty sloppy, but we pressed on. I actually made several (5+) layout catches in the dark, a weird experience for sure. Anyways, after a few points of adjustment and figuring out how to deal with the weird conditions, we ran away with game three. The easy highlight was when a huck went up and the light source on the bottom went out. 'Twas like a saucer vanishing into the night.

So 3-0 on the day got us a ticket to the finals and a bit more no-subs, lotsa running play. And that point everyone else stopped just to heckle and watch the finals, though it's hard to heckle what you can't see - I had a rather nutzoid trailing edge lay out hammer grab in the game, but it happened at the other side of the field so pretty much no one saw it. The people on the sideline got progressively drunker as the game went on, and all the usual stupid Ultimate hippie side of things - "Play a no pants point!," etc. - went on in Spades. I, frankly, reserve my right to keep my pants on. That's what makes me American (the right, not the pants).

So we won, big time. Huzzah. I won a tournament, something I can remember happening in... let's see, sectionals '00, regionals '02, random tourney with Polaroid, random good cause tourney... and that's about it. So this was the fifth. So apparently this is a rare event, or I suck. Hmmm...

Anyways, a fun tournament, but it prompted a ton of questions. One - I knew nobody there. A couple of guys made the trek down from Phoenix as well, but they aren't really guys I know all that well. So there were two people I recognized, and a ton I didn't. On the one hand, it's cool that anyone can jump in and have a good time with a bunch of people that they don't know - I met a couple of the U of A players and some other folks who were reasonably cool. On the other hand... weird to be in such a big mix and feel entirely a stranger. I also had to drive home, making me much less inclined to partake of the beer-based funniness. So there's that. I guess the second question is, then, why do that? For every part that is fun - playing well, hanging out with new folks - there's a long drive, potential for injury, the guaranteed soreness afterwards, the recurring "why do I do this again?" questions...

Oh, and I should have mentioned the soreness a little more prominently. Here we are, six days later, and i STILL have sore hamstrings. Turns out that sprinting for five hours is not good if you haven't even jogged in a couple of weeks. Dumb, dumb me. On the plus side, ankle held up quite nicely.

Rewinding, after the day wrapped up and we took team pictures and such, I booked it for home and dogs. I intelligently grabbed some Wendy's Fries on the way out of town, a delicacy I don't partake of all that often but one which was highly called for in this case of salt deprivation. And they hit the spot - man, best fries ever. I highly recommend running for five hours just so you can taste fries afterwards. It may be worth a week of awkward walking.

Another note - the key to late night driving is Erasure, specifically the compilation "Pop!." I guarantee that it is impossible to fall asleep with that perfection of 80s synth pop resounding in your ears. Who? You. You need love like that.

So overall I would say the experience was a good one. At this exact second in time, I'd say I'm unlikely to go back next year - playing in the dark is kinda dumb and dangerous, even if fun, and the peripheral shenanigans were pretty annoying. Then again, I say that now, and I 'm sure next summer I'll be itching to get in any playing I can. So, per usual, we shall see. But you read it here from a glow in the dark champ - it's fun, but it ain't that awesome. And ow.

My Life with the Thrill-Kill Cubs

Thanks to the beneficence of both Tuftsbud Elliott and the inimitable Beck, we had tickets for both Monday and Wednesday night's Cubs games v. the Diamondbacks. Elliott and gotten us (read: ME) the tickets as a wedding present, and an awesome one it was: seats about 20 rows back down the first base line at the back edge of the infield. SWEET! I, being a supreme baseball nerd, looked at the 6:40 first pitch time and said, "that means I should get there at 4:30."

Why? To take laps and stretch before the game? Obviously you aren't a golfer. About 2.5 hours before the game, the home team takes batting practice, aka BP. SO the DBacks start this about 4 when the game starts at 6:40, but being the colossal idiots that they be, do not open the doors to the stadium until 4:30. So the best you can hope for is catching the second half of DBacks BP and the whole of the Cubs. Which, given the DBacks "ability" to hit a baseball, is just fine with me thanks. Actually, it's not fine, and here's why: in BP, the batters take turns in groups of 4. So traditionally, the first guys to go are the top 4 guys in the batting order, then the second 4 guys (the 5-8 hitters). So by the time the doors opened and I was able to take a fieldside seat, it's 9-12 guys. And yeah, there are only 8 starting batters, so you get to watch the DScrubs take BP. Boo-urns. Seriously, if you thought Stephen Drew was inept, take a look at his backup.

I kid, I kid. But it's true, really, that rushing to get there and watching backups take BP makes the whole thing feel a bit dumb. Ah, well. Of course, the main point of all of this is to see the Cubs, in all of their centennial glory, take BP. And you get to see THOSE GUYS 1-8, and that is sweet enough.

BP is holy. That's coming from a dude who had the wonderful, if somewhat synthetic, experience of seeing Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire (on separate occasions, obviously) take BP in the Astrodome. In that time, it was holy on a level of spectacle. I did not try to get as close to those behemoths as possible; like any addle-brained American obsessed with the idea of risking life and limb to catch a 7 dollar commodity, I positioned myself in the second deck of the left field bleacher to catch a home run from one of those then-god-now-vandals. And woah, was I ever disappointed, because the vast majority of their stupid hits landed in the friggin' third and fourth decks. Sheesh. Two clear memories: first, I was watching Sosa BP with a little kid whose brain was exploding with joy. Just great, but I don't remember what the kid looked like or whether he was a Cubs or Astros fan or anything, I just remember the clean-cut thought that should I be lucky enough to catch a ball, there was a special place in hell reserved for me if I didn't immediately hand it to the tyke. It didn't happen, but nice to know that some sort of baseball sense of right and wrong is firmly ingrained in my being. The second memory: not a BP memory, but a memory of Mark McGwire hitting a ball to the back row of the Astrodome. The idiotic "tale of the tape" said 450 feet, but A, that spot is at least 480 feet away from home plate, and B, physics be damned, that ball was still on its way up when it hit the seat. So I feel comfortable estimating that bad boy at 783 feet. Inauthentic? Maybe. Majestic? Surely.

But the superhuman supershots of BP are their own thing: impressive, sure, but to some degree a kind of circus side show. The real meat of watching BP is the artistry of men who are so unbelievably good at a skill that is so intricate and complex. Artistry has a wealth of definitions, as does genius; I'm sure that a fairly profound intersection of those concepts occurs in the man who aligns eyes brain nerves muscles hands arms bat swing to flick a flying object to a precise location in the opposite field. And during BP, you can, irrespective of the presence / absence of 400 dollars in your pocket, grab those seats twenty feet away from the batters and watch them practice their trade. I'm sure there's a pretty prevalent golf-watching effect going on here: watching golf is insanely boring, UNLESS you realize just how difficult those shots actually are. Well, yeah, thirteen years on diamonds spent slamming the ball with a metal stick gave me a special appreciation of how hard it would be to do samesaid thing with a piece of wood. So, to turn the experience of a Grateful Dead concert on its head, the experience of watching BP can be part baseball game, part church. There's mysticism and beauty in the line drive. And it's even better when the Cubs hit them.

Now, all of that said, the mystic was missing that Monday afternoon. The usual screaming line drives were not flying from D-Lee's bat. Or Aramis's, or Fukudome's, or Soto's, or Edmonds's, or Theriot's... on and on. There was something dead about the affair, partly due to the synthetic can that is The Bob or Chase Field or whatever the hell they're calling the DBacks ballpark these days. The Cubs looked tired... a bad omen.

Of course, that didn't stop Kosuke or Daryl Ward from adopting their chillaxed stances:

But something wicked had that way came, and the game betrayed it. A deadlocked pitcher's duel for most of six innings, Harden finally let go of his no-hit bid and gave up a homer to a DBacks rookie. D'oh. Stephen Drew added a run scoring double/triple later, the only other DBacks hit of the evening. The Cubs came up with nothing - they threatened in the 8th and ninth, but nice double plays killed both efforts. A sad day for Cubdom - who, incidentally, overran the crowd - but also a quick one, as the whole thing took 2 hours and 17 minutes. Crazy.

A nice moment in the post-game crowd walkback to cars: DBack fan talks trash, Cubs fan yells "How does it feel to be almost .500?" in response, DBacks fan responds "How does it feel to lose to a team that isn't even .500?" Necessitating all kinds of "yeah, well, you got us there" shrugs. Classic baseball banter.

The Tuesday game was viewed at home, but the Cubs fared similarly: another loss. So at the risk of broom-fueled embarrassment, I got ready to head downtown for the Wednesday game. Beck got off of work early, and she was wonderful enough to head to the game early with me to watch BP again. A different affair - the Cubs were poppin', so things looked great. And the game did not disappoint: homeruns, grand slams, triples, a wealth of stolen bases, and a Cubs rout. We sat along the third base line this time, again a grand view of the game. Fun times.

Since then, the Cubs have notably swept the Brewers in Milwaukee and grabbed a five game lead over the Brewers. We all know how this sort of thing tends to end up, so we won't get too excited... still, there's something cool in the air re: this 100 year anniversary. The Cubs embody so much for me, and not just the typical sentimental attachemnts. It's the weird sensation of knowing for a fact how stupid it is to root for, essentially, a uniform, worn by a bunch of ridiculous millionaires who couldn't care less (and when you stand twenty feet from them, the absurdity of them and their overblown image becomes that much more apparent. I'm talking to you, Alfonso), and yet still caring, still gtting nervous when the game gets tight, elated when they win and wanting to vomit when they don't. I probably hold on to that more out of habit than anything else, but with all the other pitfalls of truth-pursuit, it's good to know that a little illogical fandom can keep things churning. Go Cubs Go.

Three-Hundred... Sixty Five Degrees! Bruning Down the Nyet!

Sheebus McSheebus!!! Last night as I pulled into the complex at 7:15, I thought things felt unnaturally oven-like. And they were: it was still 111. Um, thanks Sunny, Azz, but no thanks; I will spend my evening indoors, thankyouverymuch.

Primary purpose: I'm gonna get back on the blogging horse here. Not that anything has happened lately, or that anything didn't happen since Ali and Ben left us with nothing save memories and shoes; just that I think the world needs a Ballad, and vice versa. Actually, at least four things have happened / are happening in the past couple of weeks, and I will record them shortly on this fine first day of the month of Majestic.

In the meantime, here are two reviews:

Fortress of Solitude

The Dark Knight

And now on to new posts to cover other things.

Tax Holiday

A quick reminder, for our dear local readers, there is a sales tax holiday this weekend in North Carolina. That's right! You can spend your hard earned dollars without the governor taking the state's usual cut. Items on the tax exempt list include clothing, footwear, and school supplies of $100 or less (per,) sports equipment of $50 or less (per,) computers of $3,500 or less, and computer supplies of $250 or less (per item.)

The relative price of computers (of the non Mac variety) is very low right now. Top of the line PC desktops and laptops can be had for under $650. Take advantage? It is certainly worth thinking about, especially if you know you are going to be in the market for a computer any time soon. The tax holiday runs from midnight Friday until midnight Sunday.