Dream Team -- Photo of the Week 25 Aug 2008

Title: "The Original Dream Team"
Year: 1991-1992?

This was my absolute favorite t-shirt in 4th or 5th grade: The 1992 "Dream Team," the very first time the US was allowed to field professional athletes in the games. If you overlook the fact that Malone and Stockton played for the Jazz, Ewing was overrated his entire career, Pippen was a wife-beater, and Magic was forced to retire because he acquired an STD (due to his Wilt Chamberlain-like off-the-court escapades),¹ these guys were exciting to watch, killing teams by 60+ points.

Just felt like posting this one because of the Olympics just ending, and us taking gold for the first time since 2000. Go USA!

Maybe I should start buying and collecting more of these caricature shirts. I had Magic Johnson, Shaq, and Steve Largent ones growing up.

1 - The players on this year's "Redeem Team" that filled the same roles: Williams and Boozer on the Jazz, Anthony has been overrated his entire career so far, Kidd as the wife-beater. There was no equivalent to Magic...yet.

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My The Dark Knight Anxiety

Let's talk neuroses. And instead of me being a jerk and targeting someone else, let's talk about mine.

The things I'm going to talk about may make me seem more dysfunctional as an individual than the entire Bluth family on "Arrested Development" combined, but it's all good. We all have our eccentricities. Mine just happen to manifest themselves in trivial things like movies and sports.

I'm a movie guy. Love them. But I've experienced so many colossal disappointments when it comes to sequels, usually due to my own elevated expectations being combined with horrible screenwriting (some notable disappointments: The Land Before Time II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, and XII, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3, the aforementioned X-Men 3, etc), that I knew in order to survive my heightened anxiety leading up to the premier of The Dark Knight, I needed to seriously manage expectations. It was the only way I was going to walk out of the movie and not slit my guts open in order to preserve what little honor I would have left.

I've spent multiple blog entries singing the praises of Batman Begins, so I need you to realize that as 18 July 2008 crept closer, I felt like I was doing alternating emotional shots of anxiety and excitement and chasing them down with sleeping pills. I guess so you can empathize with me a bit, try to recall your feelings before each of the following experiences that each of us have:

1. First job interview
2. First public speaking assignment

3. First prison yard fight¹
4. First date

They are all feelings of the "I hope I'm not overwhelmingly humiliated / disappointed after this is over"-variety, right? (I guess with example 3, there is the added "I hope I don't end up with a prison shank in my back" aspect to the feelings. But whatever). Those emotions are what I was feeling about seeing The Dark Knight.

So like I said before, in order to avoid disappointment, I needed to manage expectations. How did I do in the leadup? Well, judge for yourself...

*****

---"I'm going black"---
As I sent out an email to my group of friends, checking on who wanted to go with me on opening night, I ended the email with a request that went something like this: "From here on out, I'm going black.² I ask that no one send me links to reviews, trailers, or anything related to this movie. I'm experiencing some anxiety for the first time in my life and don't need to have unrealistic expectations for how good it's going to be."

That's right. I went on complete radio silence from the media machine that was promoting the movie. Even those stupid Dominoes Pizza commercials warranted me quickly changing the channel. I didn't want to see any of it.

---Inexplicable Hayden Christensen Fear?---
About a week and a half before the movie came out, this crazy fear of mine started to develop that The Dark Knight would open with this sick action scene, the camera would move in on Batman, and then he would take the helmet off to reveal... Hayden Christensen. That's right. The whiny kid from Star Wars who's got that "I listen to Nirvana all day, why the hell do you think I'm always depressed?" face. It's probably because I had seen Jumper earlier this year (the absolute dregs of 2008 cinema), which solidified Christensen's Paul Walker status as a horrible actor. It would have been a perfect way for the movie to be ruined for me.

This fear of a horrible, horrible movie was only perpetuated when, on the night of the 17th, TNT was having a Batman marathon in anticipation of the premiere. Which movie happened to be on? Batman & Robin. It MAY -- and I don't use this classification lightly, so please realize the gravity of what I'm saying here -- have been on the same level as Battlefield Earth. I started thinking to myself: What if Christopher Nolan has gone nuts since Batman Begins, and decided to model The Dark Knight after Batman & Robin?? Did he request nipple-suits for the actors? Did he hire 5-year olds to draft his screenplay?

Needless to say, I didn't sleep well that night.

Again. Me. Crazy.

---"What Are You Doing?"---
I usually don't do too well at work on Fridays. I have a short enough attention span as it is, and when the weekend is almost there, I get antsy. Pile on top of that everything I just rambled about, and I was getting fidgety come Friday afternoon of the 18th. I needed to blow some extra energy so I unwittingly started shadow-boxing in my cubicle.

"What are you doing?" One of my coworkers asked from my cubicle entrance.
"Shadow-boxing."
"Yeah. But why?" He looked at me like I was crazy.
I looked back at him like he was crazy: "Don't you know? The Dark Knight opens tonight."

*****

The good news is that The Dark Knight was amazing, I am going to see it in IMAX soon, and my life has returned to normal.

Bad news is that with college football just around the corner, the anxiety is likely to return.

1 - My agent said I should expand my readership by appealing to a "wider demographic." He suggested I begin with the incarcerated segment of our population.

2 - Anybody on this email chain can easily go back and see that I didn't type "I'm going black," but I wish I had. It just sounds better.

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Bumper Sticker Alert -- Photo of the Week 18 Aug 2008

Title: "Southern Logic"
Location: Roanoke, VA
Year: Nov 2007

A beauty of a bumper sticker I found in southern Virginia.

Reminds me of those SAT analogy questions. Remember these?

1) Bird : Nest ::
a. dog : doghouse
b. squirrel : tree
c. beaver : dam
d. cat : litter box
e. book : library

I can see my aptitude being tested in order to gain my NRA Membership right now...

1) Guns : Crime ::
a. clouds : rain
b. burning couch : riot
c. clowns : indescribable fear
d. flies : garbage
e. Kanye West at an awards show : Kanye West rambling / complaining about nothing

Too easy. I'd ace that thing.

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My Sister Juli

I'm horrible; this is more than a week late and I completely spaced it.

My sister Juli had a birthday this past week. I know you love reading about my family, so here's a little bit about her...

Juju is the middle child. I heard there are some bad stigmas that come with that label, but she seems to have avoided all of them. She's a great sister.

Some background behind calling her "Juju." When I was little and my speech was limited (ie incomprehensible), I had trouble with "Juli," so settled on "Juju." Sometimes I just call her "Ju" (sounds the same as "Jew," but contrary to what people around me think when I'm talking to her on the phone, there is no racial undertone here).

Juli is three years older than me, so she was fortunate enough to have me there when I was hitting all of those transitional phases: first year of high school, first year of college, first year on the east coast and starting a real job. And she has always been more than generous about feeding me, letting me crash at her place, and making me feel like I had a home to stay at. I pretty much have mooched off of her for the longest time.

One funny story I remember is from the morning of her wedding. Between spoonfuls of cereal she was putting in her mouth, she kept saying "I can't eat, I can't eat...I'm so nervous." "Then why are you shoving cereal in your mouth?" "Because if I don't, my stomach will growl." It did anyway. Really loud. Loud enough to interrupt the ceremony and draw some looks. Hilarious.

She picked up running a few years ago and has turned into an absolutely beast. She qualified for the Boston Marathon and ran it this past April, doing really well, despite a leg injury that hindered her from training like she would have liked. We were all proud of her for fighting through it. She always takes the time for her two kids, constantly teaching and being patient when they're crawling all over her. She loves cooking, laughing, and (she'll never admit it) blogging about her family.

Happy birthday, Ju!

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The Dora Incident -- Photo(s) of the Week 11 Aug 2008

Title: "The Massacre at Durham"
Location: Durham, NC
Year: Aug 2008

Took a much needed vacation this past week with the family. Young children are hilarious to me; it's always amusing to me how short kids' attention spans are, while they simultaneously retain so much.

One of my nieces, Elise, is absolutely obsessed with "Dora the Explorer" (I'm convinced that no one, since the Nazis in the 30s and 40s, has conducted a more successful brainwashing and propaganda campaign than the creators of this show.¹ Children are infatuated with this cartoon character who, in my opinion, lacks the complexity needed to be a lead character for a successful TV series), to the point that she has her cousin, Alice, saying "Dora, Dora" when I'm pretty sure Alice has no idea who Dora is. I'm telling you: Propaganda.

Fascist conspiracy theories aside, Elise got rewarded with five crayons shaped like Dora for doing something right.


Five minutes into playing with them, she accidentally handled one of the Dora crayons too roughly and snapped its head off. "We have to fix Dora. We have to fix Dora" she kept imploring me. "Get scissors, get scissors. We have to fix Dora."

I didn't know what scissors had to do with piecing Dora back together, but I convinced Elise to cut (hah!) her losses and play with the remaining four Doras that remained intact.

30 minutes later, this scene greeted me:


The carnage was harrowing.

So much so that I expected Elise to look at me with contempt like Russell Crowe does at the crowd in Gladiator after that one fight scene where he killed like six guys, and then yell "Are you not entertained?! Are You Not Entertained?!" and then spit disgustedly and throw her sword to the ground. Something like that.

Instead, she moved on to playing with something else.

(Green Dora will walk again, albeit with a limp. The other four weren't so fortunate)

1 - That's RIGHT. I made that analogy. Hyperbole strikes again. If I don't post within a week, the Dora Gestapo found me.

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Futile Attempts at Conservation -- Photo of the Week - 4 Aug 2008

Location: Northern Virginia
Year: 2008

Short story from work.

So we got new napkin dispensers at our work cafeteria, like the one pictured above. Standing ones. Fancy, right? The first day they were there, I noticed they had signs on them that read: "These will help save 25-40% on waste." Seemed like an arbirtary and unmeasurable number to me, but they are keeping the tree-huggers happy. I'm okay with that. (So long as they reciprocate with a similar gesture. Like showering and other basic hygiene -- honestly, you can even use the expensive, non-animal tested shampoo!)

As I'm reading the sign, a lumbering, middle-aged man in front of me proceeds to take no less than 10 napkins out of the dispenser, one after another, after another...after another.

What could he possibly have been eating that day that required a quantity of napkins with the total square footage of a large beach towel? Or did he just say to himself, "No one tells me when to / when not to conserve on waste. Conservation my a**!" and make his point by taking more than he normally would have? It seemed almost Johnny Vranes-esque¹ to me.

So much for conserving on waste.


1 - Johnny was an old roommate from college who had an inexplicable and innate drive to do the opposite of what you said he could or could not do. Just seemingly out of spite. It was uncanny. On more than one occasion, I weighed the consequences of saying to him: "I bet you couldn't streak across I-15 naked at nighttime," but my conscience always got to me. I think the only reason he hasn't been mentioned in previous posts is because I was afraid of offending him if he reads the blog. Don't ask me why I decided to start now.²
2 - Apologies, Johnny. You know I love you.

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