J Mill presented me with an amazing gift the other day:
A Scorpions Live Tour Double Album...on vinyl! The only way it could be more butt rock is if it came with some sleazy groupies and some sort of STD.
Oh, wait. There's a back?!
The crowd-point (left guitarist) and fist-pump (right guitarist)...Amazing.
But you want to know who's most excited to be in the band? This guy:
Happy Monday. It's gonna be a good week.
Don't ask me how I forgot this one:
-Via Gchat with Casey, when I asked him if he likes DC Highlights From the Week:
love itTo answer your question: Yes, Casey is the most competitive person that I know. Read more...
good stuff
except i keep trying to think of funny things to correspond to you w/ in order to make the cut
-Via Email from Nartker.
Again. Never NOT funny.
-Via Email with Boyer, J2K, and Jay Z:
This is a screen capture from my Inbox. These are three high school friends with whom all common interests were superceded by our mutual love for the lyrical genius of the Beastie Boys. Boyer and I were discussing the Beasties' greatest songs last week; next thing I know he has unleashed a gargantuan, March Madness-style bracket with 64 Beastie Boys' songs to determine a decisive winner. The four of us vote on a song-versus-song matchup; if there is a tie we enter discussions advocating our picks, and the cycle continues. So far we have 48 emails going back and forth, and we have barely entered the second round.
*In scary UFC Announcer-like voice* There can only be ONE.
-Via TXT from DJA on Tuesday:
Four days late. Just spotted at the giant.
Last Friday we tried to have a bonfire, but after driving around to four separate grocery stores we were unable to find a single bundle of firewood. We settled on one of those superlog thingies -- the composition of which I can only surmise is asbestos, napalm taken from decommissioned weapons' stores, and some sort of animal manure.In two and a 1/2 weeks time I am going up against a few people in an eating contest... I need any type of information that will enable me to eat large quantities of food in a 45 minute time period. I need your assistance gathering said information...
Thanks
Summer is over, and while I will NOT miss the stifling humidity and resultant SwampA**, or large women wearing disproportionately small clothing (OMG MY EYES ARE BURNING I AM SCARRED FOR LIFE), there is a huge list of things I will miss about summer.
Some fun activities that are essential to every summer? Here's a short list: BBQs; swimming; disappointment in more overhyped blockbusters movies (ahem... Wolverine, Terminator); watching Wipeout!; watching the "will he /won't he?" fiasco that is Brett Favre's (non)retirement; eating ice cream and other flavored frozen goods; reading outside in my double-wide fat-person camping chair; wrestling grizzly bears, only in my case I get the bear to submit with an armbar, and I do it shirtless; you know, standard summer stuff.
The new love I discovered this summer: Wiffleball. It's simple. Anyone can play. You don't need a lot of people to play. You try to hit people with a ball. Very rewarding.
More important to me, though, is that wiffleball has helped me reconcile with a long lost friend: baseball. My complaints with baseball are well-documented. It's boring. It's slow. These dudes aren't athletic. Baseball slang is just a bunch of thinly-veiled innuendos. Whine whine whine. I actually loved baseball growing up, but somewhere along the way we had a falling out (partially due to his solid decade and a half of heavy steroid usage).
Wiffleball helped me remember why I enjoyed baseball in the first place by taking me back to being a kid. It reminded me of playing catch with my pops. Of smelling freshly cut grass, watching The Sandlot, and especially of playing Little League baseball.
In Little League, just like every other kid, I imitated the batting stances and the mannerisms of the famous players. I tried to swing my bat like Griffey, tried to crouch in fielding position like Ozzie Smith, and itched my crotch like Cal Ripken Jr. Did I know what I was doing at 9-years of age? No. But hell, these guys were my heroes, and somewhere in the back of my head I thought emulating the greats would help me be great. This thinking, of course, pre-dated my knowledge of things like natural talent, work ethic, syringes, and the Dominican Republic's baseball farm system. So if Cal was going to go to town on his cup region, I would, too.
I write this because when I played wiffleball for the first time this summer, 18 years after having played in Little League, I picked up right where I left off. I looked at my bat contemplatively before stepping into the batter's box, dug in my feet with my non-existent cleats, took a wide stance and tilted my bat slightly back, just like Albert Pujols.
Even if it was only for a few hours, I was a kid again, imitating the greats. And while the sound of the plastic wifflebat hitting a ball doesn't have quite the same ring that metal on cork does, it still made me smile like a 9-year old as I ran the bases.
Man. Now I want to go watch Field of Dreams.
Walked out of Best Buy with this beauty, and thank goodness for that -- it was the only thing to console me after the BYU game on Saturday. Past experience with rewatching cartoons from the childhood had me fearing that it would disappoint, but I was pleasantly surprised.
See, a few years ago I came upon Thundercats while flipping channels. I loved the show as a kid, so was excited to watch it. I immediately regretted that decision. Dialogue was horrendous; the voices were unbearable; the plot line had no connection with what we call "coherence" or "quality." The cartoon was a confused, jumbled mass of storytelling crap -- basically cast in the Battlefield Earth mold before that mold even existed.
At that moment, I was like Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo when he found out that Fernand had betrayed him. Thundercats and I had been friends since childhood; I thought it was upstanding and good quality. But no. Like Fernand, Thundercats sucked. And it betrayed and demoralized me with the severity of its suckiness. (I will concede, however, that Dantes may have gotten the shorter end of the Betrayed By Childhood Friend Stick. In a lucky turn of events for me, I was not extrajudicially sentenced to an island-prison to be annually tortured by a deranged prison warden and left to do nothing but stew in my own human waste and vindictive thoughts. Hey, I'm just trying to be optimistic here.)
That experience turned how I viewed my childhood upside down. Was pulling girls' hair really as enjoyable as I remember it being? Was kickball even fun? The Book Fair was worth all of the time I put into circling the books I wanted in the catalogs they gave us, wasn't it? All of my past experiences were under evaluation.
And so I purchased X-Men with some trepidation on Friday and went home to watch it. I attempted to re-create an atmosphere similar to my X-men-viewing from childhood, just so I could get the most out of it: I may have put on some MC Hammer pants, set a Super Soaker next to me on the couch, and poured myself a large bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Something like that. And after watching a fair amount of episodes, I will admit that while the cartoon is not better than what I remember, there certainly isn't the precipitous dropoff between expectations and reality that there was with Thundercats. It's pretty decent.
The lesson: Tread carefully when revisiting pleasant childhood memories. At worst, it will be devastatingly disappointing; at best, mildly gratifying.
Happy Monday, everyone. You'll have this song stuck in your head the rest of the day:
Some of these aren't technically from last week, but I was clearing out my inbox/phone, and found some highlight-worthy items.
-Via TXT from Banker, after I told him that I saw an exact look alike of him in the newest Harry Potter movie:
Hopefully im a death eater at least. Wizard or not, I'll kill someone.
-Via email from BiLB Ben, after I asked a group of friends last year to submit nominations for an All-Ugly NBA Team, Ben and Casey began campaigning for Sam Cassell and Andrew Bogut, respectively:Ben needs to be a more frequent guest-blogger, no? I need to start a petition.Sam Cassell makes Andrew Bogut look like George Clooney. There is no way Sam is not team captain. He should be the coach or president of the ugly league. All ugly team players should worship Sam Cassell as deity.
My only reason for nominating him is that he is the ugliest human being ever.
A SWORDWhat did I say last week? "Simpler times. Simpler solutions." I suppose there's no Deadliest Warrior highlighting College Student v. Amateur Robber, but they may consider it after this incident.
HE KILLED THE GUY WITH A SWORD
You might think this is an ordinary picture of an ordinary mirror, but you'd be wrong.
I took this picture to remember the most awkward solitary 45 seconds of my life. It is an eye-level mirror directly above the urinals of the men's restroom at a restaurant.
Waiting to finish urinating while staring at a reflection of your own face that is four inches from you is just a strange experience.
Happy Monday. I wish you all the luck in avoiding awkward bathroom situations this week, if possible.
Just moved to a new place. My new fridge has a water-filter pitcher, just like my old place. Purified water is a good thing.
One thing I've noticed about this particular pitcher, however, is that the water inside of it acquires the flavor of whatever else happens to be in the refrigerator with it (usually the strongest-flavored item). It's uncanny. The pitcher is like a Flavor Chameleon.
So far I have downed large, almost-refreshing glasses of cold Kimchee-water and Ham-water. Neither are what I would call pleasant. Not sure what the solution is, but I'm hard-pressed to think of too many flavors of water that I would be okay with.
I can tell you varieties I will not be okay with, just off the top of my head: Mayonnaise-water, Hummus-water, and Garlic-water. Even as a Bacon Purist, and an advocate of a Bacon Perfume, I would probably veto Bacon-water. (As a man who has eaten cornbread-batter-fried bacon, and who ate a bacon chocolate cupcake last week, I can't believe I just rejected the idea of bacon-flavored anything, but it's the truth.)
Sometimes you just want to keep things nice and simple.
Continuing...
-Via TXT from AM:
O mighty samurai, i beseech thy help in going to battle once more against the daft swedes
Remember, I assembled a chest of drawers back in March for AM, enduring a "battle of wits" with the Swedes and IKEA furniture with nothing as weapons except for my own literacy and patience -- both of which are suspect at best. It seems AM has made another IKEA trip, and I've been commissioned into service.A testament to the superiority of our peopleSeriously, though. Well worth the watch (I wasn't able to embed the clip)
-Via Facebook, Email, and other digital mediums, I have received three separate recommendations this past week from friends to this website: www.peopleofwalmart.com. One recommendation:If you don't appreciate this, no one will.Not sure what that means, but I'll try not to read into it.
Went to the NJ shore and stayed in a beautiful Victorian house with some friends. Most people -- myself included -- would not associate the words "nice" or "beautiful" with New Jersey, but I'm glad to say I was pleasantly surprised.
Banker and I were walking out to our spot on the beach when he said, without even pointing at the guy: "This is you in five years, P.S."
People express anxiety about the the unknowns of the future, but given Banker's predictive abilities I would say this is as good as done. Sure, I'll have an enormous gut-- but I take comfort in the fact that I will be sporting large gold chains at the beach, as this man was.
And of course I took this picture in the "I'm acting like I'm texting on my phone, but really pointing my camera phone at you"-move. Oldest trick in the texting book.
Happy TUESDAY, everyone. PotW was delayed due to vacation. Now-- back to work.
DC Highlights. As always, no editorial intervention:
--Via Facebook from Chunk. Remember his roommate situation that was doomed to fail like Crystal Pepsi? I got an update with a few details. Not much, really -- but perhaps it's better that way:
it's on my wall Josh D. Let's just say I wasn't keen on the idea of sleeping in the same bed or sharing clothes. Oh yeah, remember that pic I showed you? Turns out what we thought was a glass-eye was just a terrible lazy-eye--Via Chat with Josh M.
Me: So, question for you. What do you do when someone you don't know that well introduces you to a third person with: "I think you two should be good friends" ?Josh M's affinity for all things groin-shot related continues. But again, who can blame him? Like I said: Never not funny. Sidenote: The preferred fallback violent act in my book is always the headbutt or throwing the person through a window.
Josh M: You punch them in the nards and tell them that it will never happen again.
Well, now I'm strangely attracted to Bryan Adams. Your fault. I hate frilly blouses more than ever. Your fault---and Rod's. And I still have only apathetic feeling directed towards Sting.To each their own, I say, but the mutual consensus on the east coast here is that Sting is the least stupid of the three. If you watch the video closely, Sting is trying to distance himself physically from the other two. Too bad he didn't do that prior to making the video...
i don't know what's worse, the actual video or the fact that i did, indeed, sit here and watch the whole thing
<--- ashamed
I dislike Mr. Bayless for many of the same reasons that I dislike Carville -- he's condescending to his fellow analysts and focuses more on insults and elementary school bully-ness than actually providing, you know, some sort of insight.
I haven't really thought about it too much, but the ideal scenario I have floating around in my head is this: Some sort of fur-clad Mongol warrior-looking type walking onto the ESPN set with a large club and/or sword, and Bayless cowering in the fetal position while pleading for mercy. Something like that.
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