xtcian

mighty pleasin', pappy's corn squeezin'

3/29/07

Okay, general stuff and a Public Service Announcement on the blog... we are renting out our farmhouse in Columbia County again this summer, so if you know anyone in the New York City, Boston or New England area that would be interested in a summer getaway, by all means leave a comment on the blog, or respond to my email address. 4-5 bedrooms, a huge barn replete with fun stuff, 360-degree views of the mountains, and lots more. We'd like to have one renter for the whole summer - June 1 to Labor Day - but willing to do singular months if need be. I implicitly trust 90% of my readership, so if you guys have good leads, we'd rather do it through you friends than any other way.

As for this weekend, I have no idea who to pull for in the Final Four, as I don't like any of the teams that much. We've suffered at the hands of all of them: UCLA throughout the '60s, Florida (and Ed Cota's complete ghost 5th foul) in 2000, Ohio State in 1992 (bleh), and Georgetown not just last weekend, but that utterly demoralizing loss in what would be Doherty's last game as coach. Even so, I'll probably pull for G-town, because I basically like their team, their coach, and they're the underdog. A world where Billy Frickin' Donovan has more championship rings than Roy Williams is a world that has lost its way.

I have submitted names to the other folks in the band, and we're voting over the weekend. We each get to submit two, and then all four of us will vote for two (but not our own). I will report back as to the winner.

I am wearing a fleur-de-lis T-shirt and jeans from Lucky, and my least favorite color - and food - is olive. I am a Gemini and I hate hiking. That is all for this week.

impaled gail, lynched lyndon

3/28/07

So, our band is trying to come up with a name. We have a show in about three weeks, and lots of ideas have been thrown out, many of which sound great for about fifteen seconds, and then are met with the postmodern monosyllabic "meh." It's getting tiring, because none of them truly hit the ball out of the park, and I'm as much to blame as anybody. I always used to get some freshman city desk editor to write the headline for my newspaper columns because I hated doing it so much, and this requires the same skill set.

Here's the big problem: words are so evocative that almost any seemingly-innocuous name can alarm the hairs on the back of your neck. On Tuesday, after overhearing a lady describing her two Jack Russell terriers at a magazine rack, I thought "Broken Coat" would be a great band name. One day later, however, I realized it sounded like a lonely emo high school group.

And so we look to our childhood for names that made us feel good when we were six, but they're all copyrighted, and besides, pretty much every geological layer of our nostalgia has been ruined by excessive digging. I blame the internet for ruining our memories. Talking about the minutiae of our pasts - "hey, do you remember..." - used to be so divine, but now, it's all on YouTube and there are entire websites devoted to shit like Spirographs and Spokey Dokes.

I beseeched my band to find a name from our youth "that hasn't been through the ironic meatgrinder," and for about five minutes, they wanted to name the band Ironic Meatgrinder.

I miss the unspoken, occasional memories that flash out from our childhood. I loved it when we would sit on the porch at the Purple House and talk about bands we loved and toys we played with. There was an "undiscovered country" about those memories, and it allowed us personal access and a shared history. Now all of that crap is plastered everywhere, about two clicks away from a Google search term.

I can't talk about my childhood anymore without being paralyzingly self-conscious. Nostalgia only works when it's tenuously out of reach. And it's hell on band names.

lookin' down on creation

3/27/07

Boy, am I a shrill bastard on this Global Warming thing, or what? You'd think I'd just shut up and get back to writing heartwarming television, but this exchange has made me so furious that I simply MUST take issue. Yes, the link takes you to Salon, where you have to watch an ad for ten seconds, or you could just subscribe, because they're excellent.

Anyway, Al Gore went to the Senate last week to testify on what he calls "a planetary emergency." I recommend reading the transcript for the sake of theater: he is constantly badgered by Known Idiot™ Senator James Inhofe, the moronic Republican from Oklahoma, whose ass is roundly kicked in turn by committee chair Sen. Barbara Boxer.

At one point, Boxer has heard enough, and tells Stupid Fuckwit James Inhofe, "You're not making the rules. You used to when you did this. You don't do this anymore. Elections have consequences, so I make the rules." Applause erupted, at which point I finally decided to buy an American flag and shed a patriotic tear for my country again.

But it goes on, and you simply must read what half-wit Inhofe said in rebuttal to Gore's science. First, he thick-wristedly tried to change the subject by bringing up Al Gore's own household consumption, a favorite trick of conservative goons who have truly run out of things to say. Then he showed a picture of Buffalo's snowstorm this winter, hinting that global warming can't be happening if Buffalo is going to get this much snow.

Then he used an ancient argument tactic that is typically abandoned by every Debate Squad north of 8th grade: "Now, it seems that everything is blamed on global warming," he bloviated, "Last summer we had a heat wave, and everyone said, 'Oh, that's proof. It's global warming'."

Then, his stunning reversal... some towns had record cold temperatures a few weeks ago! Finally, his masterful conclusion: "Where's global warming when you need it?"

I'm sorry, but this yokel needs to have a basic math textbook nailgunned to his butter churn. He's so stupid he's dangerous.

Nobody ever said Katrina was the result of global warming. AT BEST, they said storms of Katrina's destructive power will become more commonplace. No meteorologist or climatologist worth your respect has ever looked at a month-long period of above-average temps - say, December 2006 - and said, "well, it was because of global warming." Inhofe is relying on some of the most disingenuous and gormless strawmen he can pitch together with lies and baling wire.

I may disagree with commenter Matt on issues of climate change, and I may find his sources to be biased, agenda-filled and contrary, but at least he comes at it speaking the language of science, and provides links and his own channels of research, and thus I've always respected him a lot. But for Inhofe to show the American Senate a picture of Buffalo one day in January as evidence that global warming is bunk... I mean, come ON, people, this guy is a SENATOR! HE ACTUALLY MAKES LAWS!

To paraphrase Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) in the first "Superman" movie, I'm amazed James Inhofe has enough intellect to keep his legs moving in order to walk. He's the kind of guy that would say, "The earth is flat. You know how I know? LOOK AROUND YOU." He would then present a picture of Buffalo, NY and say "Do you see the Earth curving in this picture? Neither do I."

put your mask on first, then your child's

3/26/07

at the Gardner-Webb game early last season

As many of you have read yesterday's entry have found out, Jason Ray, the 21-year-old senior who dressed as our mascot Rameses, passed away after being hit by a car near the team's hotel in New Jersey. He was walking along a busy road at night en route to a convenience store nearby, something Sean, Michelle and I had done countless times while surviving my mom's divorce in and around Morristown, NJ, staying at crappy hotels while producing various music books for kids.

Inevitably, you get hungry at midnight, the hotel's candy machine only has Funyuns and Certs left, and since this country could give a fuck about walking anywhere, you find yourself traversing a sludge-filled moat and balancing on the curb of a state route in the middle of the night. I feel like I was there, I knew what that last errand was exactly like.

Suffice to say this: this country was made for cars. Getting out of one, in any kind of road environment, is an exercise in crappy odds. If you get a flat tire, ride that goddamn rim to safety, and get your car as far from the side of the road as possible. I won't allow a tire to be changed within fifty feet of a highway, because someone, right now, is going 72 mph and reaching for a french fry caught between the cushions of the back seat, and he is damn well going to swerve onto the shoulder.

I'd like to use this entry for two purposes: one to offer our condolences to the Ray family, as we can't possibly fathom the depth of their loss. Jason was an organ donor, and apparently up to fifty patients may be saved thanks to him. I'd encourage all of you to make sure you have the same provision on your license or in your will.

The second purpose is this: what lifesaving tip do you have for the rest of us? It can be anything mundane, or obvious, or long-term, or whatever. If you've heard of any situation where someone died needlessly, or read a statistic that shocked you, leave a comment about one thing we can do to try and nudge the odds a little more in our favor.

don't get caught watchin' the paint dry

3/25/07

The brackets have come off the magnetic board, my lucky shirts have been thrown in the laundry, even my little girl came up to me after the game when she saw me collapse into my hands. She just held on to my arm with her tiny fingers, not saying anything, just being there, and I have to admit, it made this exit better than the rest.

I've been following our team closely now for twenty-two years, and every year except two has ended in bitter disappointment. You'd think you'd get used to it; you gird yourself for the possibility, and yet there's nothing you can do to prepare for your team going down. I hadn't dared whisper plans - that maybe Tessa, Lucy and I could go stay with Salem outside Atlanta next weekend - for fear of karma, but all the magical thinking in the world can't save your chosen religion when you go almost twenty minutes without making a field goal.

The rest of you may wonder what befalls true sports addicts, how they could possibly get so worked up about a game where a bunch of 19-year-olds throw around an orange piece of leather. I've tried to explain why it's more of a philosophy than a sport, but I'm sure those blog entries look as ridiculous as this one.

Dean Smith said "if you live and die by basketball games, you're going to do an awful lot of dying" and so this, too, will pass. He also said, when kids would leave early to go to the NBA: "you go to college to get a job." No doubt one or two of our players will be looking at that particular job come Monday, but as for me, I'm back to work as well. Back to hammering out stories without the occasional thought about Reyshawn's late-season heroics, or wondering if Brandan Wright has the necessary passion.

Lucy will be a little older by next season, and she'll be following the ball, knowing when a basket is made; who knows, perhaps her crush on Tyler will find another dimension. I can tell you this: tomorrow we are nailing a little hoop to her bedroom door, and we will be playing out future glories as we hibernate another eight months 'til it all comes around again. She will know backspin, she will know rebirth, she will know the long story arc of a rainbow three, and the indefatigable optimism of a season to come.

oh, snap

3/22/07

A quick word before we head out to the California desert to hang with my dad - happy Spring, everybody, and if any of you... like, say, my old friend Bridget! ... have a good topic, set us out on our weekend in style!

By the way, Bridget isn't an "old" friend, she's an "old friend". And a fantastic photographer. So is Lars. And Susan. And so many of my pals; an embarrassment of riches.

alberto v08

3/21/07

One of the most deeply satisfying things to come of the last year has been the constant horrorshow of the Republican party; as a progressive American, the only antidote for the years 2000 through 2005 has been watching the G.O.P. wheels fly off their body politic.

I don't know how many of you have been following the Alberto Gonzales scandal, but Republicans are hoping it's slightly too complicated for you to have an opinion one way or another. It's really quite simple: Bush, Cheney, Rove and Attorney General Gonzales fired eight U.S. Attorneys for not being loyal to the neo-conservative playbook and/or not going after Democrats enough. At least six of them had previous glowing reports from the Justice Department, and it's a clear "duh" to everybody (except die-hard Republicans, of course) that the firings were politically motivated.

At worst, it's illegal, and at best, it's stunningly unethical. The female statue of Justice always holds a set of of scales and has a blindfold covering her eyes, but the Bush Administration's version has the blindfold covering her nipples, and her eyes wide open with rage at Democrats. When we no longer have impartial judges and are left with a bunch of conservative ideologues, we have... well, the Supreme Court.

But all of this is beside the point. Here's what fascinates me: in this era of advanced focus group testing, spin control and "conventional wisdom" experts, why are the Republicans doing every wrong thing in the book? Imagine George W. Bush calling a press conference tomorrow and saying "You know what? We screwed up. I apologize for Alberto Gonzales' behavior. I'm firing him, I'm firing everybody involved, and we're starting over." His popularity would shoot from 29% to about 53% in one day.

Look at the cavalcade of shit heaped upon Dook and Koach K in the aftermath of Gerald Henderson's intentional foul on Tyler Hansbrough. If K and G had simply marched over to the UNC locker room after the game and said "We're sorry. It may not have been intentional, but it was obviously painful and scary, and we apologize" then K might have emerged as the leader he claims he is.

Instead, it was a week of "well, Tyler shouldn't have been in the game" and "Duke University isn't that kind of school" and "The person I feel most bad for is Gerald" and wham! Cue every pundit on ESPN, all the major newspapers, and all sports radio announcers calling Koach K an asshole. And somewhere, there is a 12-year-old future hoops phenom who suddenly decided he wanted to go to Carolina instead.

Why? Why are these institutions being so stupid? All you have to do is swallow your pride for about forty-five seconds, and you're rewarded with weeks - years - of good will. Hell, it happens in marriages too. Just choose a different path, the one where you say "Yeah, I kinda screwed up," and avoid hours of recrimination and defensive posturing.

As for BushCo., I'm happy they're being such fools. GWB's complete inability to show nuance and admit mistakes was bound to emasculate his Presidency sooner or later; I just wish it had been sooner. I'm not asking for much, just the perfect leader: someone who is binary in some instances (national security) and nuanced in basically everything else. Calling our President a cowboy is an insult to real cowboys. It takes a real man to say he's sorry.

three short followed by three long klaxons

3/20/07

The Queen Mary, New York Harbor, circa 1938

Due to circumstances too bizarre to recount here, I found myself spending the last two nights on the Queen Mary. Built in the early 1930s in Scotland, it pretty much defined luxury transatlantic passage for Rockefellers too rich to be touched by the Great Depression. Pictures of the ship in its heyday are stunningly opulent, usually including the greatest statesmen and movie stars of the time.

Now it sits dry-docked in Long Beach, California, and it's sorta like the Empire State Building: if you live there, you've probably gotten really good at ignoring it.

Most of the ship has been transformed into a hotel, accessible by ramps on various levels, and I have to say, it's an abject lesson in missed opportunities. There are still many details left over from its days as working ship - well, I'll post a few:

the view from my porthole window

the vents that control hot/cold air over the bed

faucets promising a hot salt bath (welded shut)

my favorite: the toilet handle with a roaring flush

But here's the deal - like most things in America, the Queen Mary was ruined by disastrous home decoration decisions made in the early 1960s. It was like our farm in Columbia County: built in 1818 yet completely covered in yellow naugahyde and fake wood veneer siding. What were these people thinking?

The Queen Mary was two things - art deco and luxurious - and neither of those took kindly to plastic. And thus you have this ship that was synonymous with world travel and sumptuousness, moored forever in Long Beach and decorated by my grandmother.

It reminded me of the panther in Rilke's poem, or the sad, old lions caged at the zoo in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Ships want to be in the water, undulating. The windows should be sprayed with Nordic ice, and the passengers should be barfing. The silent Queen Mary still longs for the waved hankies from the harbor in Cherbourg.

If not that, somebody needs to fix all the restaurants (except for the delightful Sir Winston's) and bring the rooms back to their original splendor. The miserable tours need to be shitcanned, the shops need to stay open all night, and the land all around it needs to be razed and re-landscaped. It needs to be run by someone who can provide peerless service clicking at 100% efficiency with scads of excitement, bringing in huge amounts of money to one of the great pieces of world history sitting right here in America.

In short, it needs to be run by Salem Suber.

the importance of your opposite

3/18/07

Yeah, yeah, I'll go back to other topics tomorrow, but ESPN's NCAA bracket software is driving me bonkers. Not only does it randomly decide you don't exist for a day, it loads more slowly than a teenager's MySpace page. Dan Kois actually migrated his entire pool to CBS, although I'm not sure how he did it - I thought it was past the deadline. Either way, can somebody get some trained chimps to write us some code?

Not to say I told you so, but Tessa is thrashing me for the fourth year in a row. This is getting really boring, darling. Here's the thing: I actually watch a lot of college basketball, even the occasional team that isn't playing us. I'm up on SportsCenter, I follow a little bit of recruiting, and I have a pretty good working memory of a team once I've seen them.

And yet Tessa has this system where she determines how much sleep a team gets, along with some other theory or two, and she crushes me yearly. I'd also like to mention that currently, four of the top six players on our bracket site are women (five if you count Jon Vaden, who owns a Pure Prairie League album). What can it all mean? Cathie's a priest, so she's divinely inspired, but how about the rest of you?

The Heels made it past a gritty Michigan State team (sorry, Sean M., although I have to say I really like Tom Izzo) and now our team is off to NYC next weekend for the regionals. I have half a mind to fly back for the game, but apparently I'd be single-handedly responsible for the carbon emissions from the plane, so I guess by not going, the airline will no doubt cancel the flight. Or is that not how it works? I'm confused.

By the way, back in the Dark Ages, they used to say the ACC spent so much time beating the shit out of each other that they had nothing left for the NCAA tournament. Fortunately, that stopped being true about Carolina around 1991, but for the rest of the league, it seems so. Frankly, I don't understand - and my bracket doesn't either - how Virginia Tech, Virginia, Boston College and even Georgia Tech can show such brilliance throughout the regular season and then lay such an egg in the tournament?

And Dook, who managed to get 22 wins this year with 6 McDonald's All-Americans, and gets beat by Virginia Commonwealth in the first round? Sure, it's always nice to see them collapse into a immolating pyre of self-recrimination, but there's something truly pathetic about their death spiral. Sure, they might rebound next year (or the year after) and we'd be back to quaking our fists with rage, but you have to be careful what you wish for, or else there might be nobody left to loathe.

and the Colonels have seen enough

3/15/07

I have fallen way behind on my newly-refurbished sleep schedule, and thus will leave you this week with Friday's CODE WORD: my brother Sean (who just wrote one of the better blogs of his era) has specifically requested shit-talking on our ESPN page, so get over there and click on our message board. Oh yeah, you have to sign in for any of those links to work. [ed. note: forget about it, ESPN's bulletin board software is TERRIBLE. Simply use the comments below]

Already we have one player, the overmodestly-named Just Andrew, who is tied for 1st in the entire country! Sure, he's tied with a few thousand others, but tonight he sleeps a winner.

And I'm not quite sure how the computer ate Shannon's picks, but I'm sure they were formidable. The ESPN software already booted DB off the group, and tried to heisman Tessa before I intervened. Our own Dan Kois lamented the death of the human Bracketmaster, but I have to add: what's the point of having robots do it if they're going to screw it up?

Okay, start shit-talking! I expect it to be OFFENSIVE and FUNNY.

go commonwealth rams!

3/14/07

Okay, you crazy kids. You have until noon (eastern time) and 9am (pacific) to get your picks into ESPN's xtcian-4GNNB tournament pool, so git' movin'! If you are just now realizing we were doing it, put a comment below ASAP using your real email address in the "we won't show it" field, and I'll try to get you an invite in time!

pleasure twice, butt once

3/13/07

My Fascinating Home Improvement Projects

or

What Happens When Daddo Gets a New Miter Saw

Even before I started taking Mother's Little Helper to improve energy and focus, I've always had at least one project going at any given moment. This has been true since I was about eight years old. In fact, I can't imagine not having some sisyphean task in your house that has nothing to do with your career; what a crappy world that'd be. If I'm not buying the wrong size hex bit, I'm not psyched.

Anyway, I thought I'd bore you into a senseless, limp sack of barely-warm meat by sharing four projects I've done over the last six months or so. As always, my disclaimer: nobody is making you read this. If you have a cancer vaccine you're working on, by all means get back to it.

click any of these pics for bigger versions

1. The Magnetic Kitchen Chalkboard - Speaking of seemingly cancerous things to drink, there's this awesome paint made by MagnaMagic that, once applied, becomes both a chalkboard and a magnetic surface. I warn you, it's the heaviest gallon of paint I've ever held; it feels like you're carrying the collapsed nucleus of an imploded supernova.

We wanted this wall in the kitchen to be a general "leave notes and let Lucy play with it" kind of space. The house we rent is an old Craftsman from the 1940s, so it has that quaint Happy Housewife feel, with a fair amount of pink in the kitchen. I found an old electric wall clock (top left) and painted the trim pink to match.

The magnetic chalkboard paint has the consistency of hot fudge, and takes some getting used to. After two coats, the magnetic properties weren't all that great, so I put on a third coat and sanded it as smooth as I could. While drying, it cracked a little bit, so I'd definitely stick with two and just use strong magnets. Either way, Lulu and Tessa were pretty psyched with the results, and both started doodling the minute it was dry.

2. The Great Attic Handrail Caper - We have an attic space that was converted into an office before we moved in, but it still has the somewhat-nightmarish folding attic staircase, and getting up (and down) was a drag. I thought about putting a straight vertical bar at the top, but the mental image seemed too much like those things in a handicapped bathroom.

Not that there's anything wrong with a handicapped bathroom. They're frequently much cleaner and more private, as any guy can tell you.

So I decided to calculate the angle of the staircase and existing handrail, and add a "crook" to my horizontal bar that would make it seem to be a visual extension of the original. I'm here to tell you that taking a handrail and adding a 28-degree crook is no laughing matter. It had to be shaved down, sanded, whittled, taunted and humiliated before it looked pretty.

Add three coats of high-gloss linen paint, attach via studs and butterfly screws, and voila! At the end of this project, I asked myself "what the fuck was THAT all about?"

3. The Odd Notch Map of Scotland - One of my first "blog hits" was an ancient rime I wrote about bizarre U.S. state shapes, and when we were in London last year, I came across this map. It has a notch at the top for no reason, other than to include part of the Cairngorms mountain range in Scotland. Weirdly enough, that notch was where Tessa hiked as a young girl, so I had to get it.

Taking it to a framing shop, however, was out of the question. I don't know if you've ever been to a frame shop, even a chain like Aaron Brothers, but they charge you $50 just to walk in. So I found some cool wood trim, stained it red mahogany, and then went batshit with the miter saw. Putting that thing together took the whole week before Christmas, and it didn't help that I had strep the whole time.

I finished it on Christmas Eve and got it to Tessa before collapsing. Now it hangs in our bedroom, and it's oddly compelling in a way that only asymmetrical things can be.

The Picture That Went On Forever - Back in 2003, I posted a stitched-together panorama of the hill by our farm, taken while the leaves were changing. I'd always wondered what it would look like as a printed picture, and once I figured out that our Epson had a paper-roll feature, I wanted to push it to its breaking point. Turns out that the Epson 2200 can actually print something six feet long, but my silly panorama was actually longer than that.

So I fixed up the image, strung it together into the biggest Photoshop file this side of Lars Lucier, and divided it into three long rolls. Target had some of those long frames on sale, so I painstakingly mounted the three pictures in the frames with some white foamboard and a matte knife. In the end, the hardest thing was getting them to line up on the wall correctly.

But now that it's there, we can come back after a crazy day of meetings and L.A. traffic, lie on the side of the bed, and imagine what it's like on that hill right now.

8 degrees, with a wind chill of negative-20. mmmmmm, yummy.

¡Ay, caramba!

3/12/07

Is it okay that my daughter laughs like Bart Simpson?

mormons take xavier by 8

3/11/07

First off, a big congratulations to my beloved North Carolina Tar Heels for winning the ACC Championship! N.C. State had a miracle run - and I'm sure won the hearts of many casual fans - but I'm incredibly happy for Roy and our boys. If you look at the last ten years of winners, it seems like nobody but Dook was playing, and I'm glad I outlived that despondency. And for all you Reyshawn haters out there, you can suck it. He was an assassin.

So now it's truly March Madness, and in that spirit, I'd like propose a first: our own tournament challenge right here on the blog. We used to just do it with the four of us from college, with me, Jon, Chip and Bud making up the Four Guys Not Named Biff. Our selections were made by fax, phone message, semaphore, Morse code and smoke signals. Now we have the internet, and it's a little easier.

So I cordially invite each of you regular (and irregular readers) to do two things:

1) Comment below, saying why you're awesome. In the "email" field, please leave your actual email (if you don't do so normally). Nobody but me ever sees those addresses, and I'll email you the special invite with the password.

2) The link will take you to our ESPN page where you can sign up and submit your picks. Feel free to ignore the goddamn Pontiac ads.

The winner of this contest gets a blog day all to themselves, where they get to write whatever they want. They'll also get a special treat mailed from wherever we are living that week.

I warn you now - Tessa keeps winning these things. It's embarrassing. She has some rule about geography, and time zones, and sleep, and god knows what, but it works. You'll be trying to out-pick her, and I haven't been able to do it for three years.

So research Withrop and Creighton and find out where the Purple Eagles are from! You don't have to know anything about basketball to be good at this, just willing to place your bets on a ragtag team of kids from the Niagara Falls area!

lower shoulders, tighten adductors

3-8-07

You know I like to endorse products that truly work for me, like those outrageously expensive boxer briefs I touted last year, along with my usual hosannas for Afrin, Excedrin, Celexa and Mother's Little Helper. Well, I've given it seven months, and I'm here to tellsya that the Super Slow Workout kicks all sorts of ass.

I know it sounds like a fad, or a reason to stop eating yellow food, or Oprah's "secret" or something like that, but a good friend had just been certified, so Tessa and I decided to try it out. The sell? It's half an hour, once a week. And research shows that it does as much, or more, than working out 3-4 times. If you're the sort that needs cardio, then you can run once (or play hoops) at some other point during the week, but seriously, the base requirement is thirty minutes of your time.

One drawback is that it can be a little expensive, but the price gets you a personal trainer catering to your specific issues, and it costs less than a gym membership where you occasionally catch horrifying glimpses of fat white guys' testicles. SS uses special weight machines that are specially calibrated, and instead of doing intense reps, you go verrrrrrrryyyyyyy SSSSLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWW.

The trainer coaches you through every move, and after thirty minutes on 6-7 different machines, you are done - the aftermath is palpable, intense, and satisfying. One of the best things is its asceticism: there is no music, no distractions, and usually, no other people around at all. I've never been one for privacy and seclusion, but I swear it makes it almost soul-divining.

But whatever. I can tell you this: neither Tessa nor I was going to go to a gym three times a week. But we could certainly do a half an hour. In the interim, I have lost two pants sizes and gone down a shirt size. My left knee, which had been hurting for two years, suddenly felt fine. My neck has stopped being a bloated mass, and is now just vaguely annoying.

Back in the early '90s, the Sex Police and Dillon Fence guys had a name for "doing things differently" or a "stylish shortcut en route to your goal". They called it "Hobex style," as in "let's go to Durham via Erwin Road hobex style" or "Chip took it to the rack hobex style". Greg, of course, named his second band after it.

Most Americans spend a lot of time looking for their quick fix, a magic pill that will shave precious corners on the way to everything they always wanted. Most of the time, it ends in fizzled epiphanies and margarine. Super Slow, at least for me, is the hobex style, an unexpected, less arduous alternative that accidentally happened to fix my body. Not bad for a lark.

smug harbor

3/7/07

WARNING: I AM ABOUT TO BE THE BIGGEST ASSHOLE EVER.

I just have to harken back to 2001, which was a pretty terrible year for reasons I don't need to repeat here. It was notable, however, for two things that served to make me gray with despair: Dook won the national championship, and George W. Bush shredded the American Constitution.

Sure, it's a mix of high and low vernaculars. Bush is responsible for the war in Iraq, and Dook basketball isn't even responsible for Nixon. But the two are related on some pretty base levels, even if it's in the back of my own brain.

Perhaps because I've hated both Bush and Dook since the first seconds I encountered either. It doesn't help that Koach K spends the offseason raising money for Republicans, but when you think about the character of both, it makes sense. Like Blythe says, K has always been primarily about his Business and winning at all costs despite his resources - and neocons are eerily similar.

And I'm no fool. I know John Edwards got boos when they showed him on the Dean Dome Jumbotron during a Heels game. Democrats have a ways to go before making inroads into the NASCAR subset of Carolina fans. And hell, some of my beloved commenters are K-bashing conservatives.

But I just can't help feeling vindicated these days. I've spent damn near twenty years spewing vitriol about Dook (except for Scotty and Lars, natch), and the last week has seen the fake Gothic façade crumble. Just look at any coverage, and you'll see stuff like this:
Greg Doyel slams K
or
Wisconsin coach tells it like it is
or
Media wonders why nobody apologized to Hansbrough
or, my favorite,
the guys from "Around the Horn" shred Dook apart.
You can't swing a dead East German transsexual swimmer around the Web without hitting some pundit willing to sell Durham Clown College's unique brand of smug thuggery up the river, and that means the planets are finally lining up in harmony.

Likewise, George W. Bush's approval rating is clanking around 29, with only 20% believing we can "win in Iraq" and 58% wishing he'd just Not Be President Anymore Already. His legacy is all but moribund, his old friends are all going (or gone) to jail, and he has become a tragic punchline.

Let me tell you this: many of us spent the years 2000 through 2005 shrieking in horror at what this man has wrought, and many of us contemplated moving out of the country in November 2004. At the same time, I was watching my beloved Tar Heels tank in general and lose to Dook over and over and over; I believe we were something like 4-15 during that period.

Now the country has come to its senses and the sports world has too. Men were exposed for being what they are. Sure, GWB and Dook have several tricks left up their sleeves and perhaps it's way too early to be etching tombstones. Koach K could pull off a stunning tournament upset, and Bush may still fuck us all yet. And believe me, I know what I sound like when I equate a college basketball rivalry with the future of the free world.

But for right now, I'm going to GLOAT.

Tyler Hansbrough leaving for the ACC Tournament today

you just haven't earned it yet, baby

3/6/07

Today's CODE WORD question is a good one: my nephew Sam is applying to UNC, and amongst the usual application stuff, they started asking short-answer questions a couple of years ago. One of the questions was this: Who, over the last 50 years, do you hate the most?

At the end of the questionnaire, the admissions board revealed the most popular responses. Sam came back to the hotel and told us the number one most hated person amongst all applicants, apparently, by a wide margin.

So I put it to you... who do you think it was?

big bertha was the first to go

3/5/07

Tomorrow's our last full day in Chapel Hill, and though I hate to bust out superlatives, this was damn near a perfect visit to the Southern Part of Heaven™. In terms of work, I got the beginning of a new script written, and Tessa firmed up an hour-long pilot we've been finishing. In terms of everything else, well... what else can you ask for?

1) I got to play two hours of hoops with Chip and a few of the old crew at Carrboro Elementary while it was 70 degrees outside.

2) We ate at Bullocks, Dip's, Crook's and the new Pepper's, in that order. Barbecue, barbecue, shrimp & grits, and the spinach calzone.

3) We got to meet a host of new students through Peter's class, and gossiped with several. I even went by the Daily Tar Heel and talked shit with pals old and new. Katie from the DTH Front Desk is wonderfully nice, and Kevin Schwartz has not aged a day since 1990. Shout out to the Jessicas Scism and Schonberg; one is the editorial page editor, and the other is a current Pink House resident. One cannot get much cooler than either.

4) We witnessed a Dook game that accomplished many things: extended our streak, continued their misery, and exposed their program for what it really is.

5) Our nephew Sam came to visit the campus, as he is in 11th grade and taking his tours. Great weather and great kids to lead him around. We're not pressuring him, and hope the place sells itself, but wouldn't it be awesome? Dear Carolina: give this young man a full ride; you won't be disappointed.

6) Lucy got to meet everyone and their kids, as well as further adventures with her godmothers and godfather!

As for the rest, I'll just post some pictures. Here's me, Tessa and Peter before class:

Lucy and Godfather Chip:

GFWD and Annie hooping during the lunar eclipse:

Lucy plays with Meg at the Weaver Street "no kids allowed" fountain!

The crowd growing restless after Hansbrough was assaulted:

Here's a detail of the same picture: note Roy vs. Krzyhwersjyi staredown:

And here's an even cooler detail of the same pic: I took my nephew to the game and scalped separate tickets for Tessa and Chip. I was experimenting with high quality definition on the camera, figuring I might be able to spot some friends in the crowd later in Photoshop. I went to the upper right corner of the image, and lo and behold, there's Chip and Tessa! I had to do some wonky brightness and contrast filters, but it's still pretty awesome:

For fans of mob mentality and social anthropology, you can download the original 3.2MB file by right-clicking (PC), option-clicking (Mac) or just plain clicking on this link. Note how every Dook player stands with their hands on hips, in the traditional "defiance" stance, whereas the Heels (except for a couple) are loose, perhaps due to shock, righteous indignation, or an attempt to quell anger. Note several people in the stands describing their take on Tyler's nose, and the managers being summoned to clean up blood in the tunnel.

Even more interesting: note the number of people in the stadium - thousands - following the lead of both alpha males Roy Williams and Koach K, with their arms folded in a combination of impatience, disbelief and worry. Even my wife is doing it. I dunno, I find this stuff fascinating.

indelible images etched

3/4/07

Wow. This was my 22nd consecutive home Dook game in a row, and just as I think I'm approaching "I've seen it all" territory, along comes a finish to a brilliant game that is so ugly that it bears remarking, even here, where 60% of my audience can't tell a moving pick from a ice pick. Suffice to say my beloved Tar Heels won an amazing defensive battle, fought off several Dook surges, and were up twelve points with less than a minute left.

Tyler Hansbrough got an offensive rebound and was fouled by That Moronic Hunk of White Meat Otherwise Known as Josh McRoberts. Thus Tyler is in the game, late, shooting foul shots. He misses - but then, because he is made of fantasticness, got his own rebound.

Miserable Dookie Gerald Henderson runs clear across from the other side of the court, flies into the mix, then crushes Tyler's nose with the kind of uncontrolled vengeance usually reserved for the bad guys in "Die Hard" movies.

Tyler hits the floor with blood spurting everywhere, then is escorted off the court, lest he actually eat Gerald Henderson. In the training room, surrounded by his dad, the doctor and a dentist, his jersey is now crimson with blood. He says what you'd expect him to say: "I want to go back out there. Like this."

Do you know who would be the first to clean him up? Yes, that's right:

As the evening progressed, the revisionist historians (led by notorious UNC-hater Billy Packer) have tried to say it was an unintentional foul. Having been at the game, where it all happened so quickly, I was ready to believe them. But the video shows Henderson lunging across court, jacked up, pissed off, and ready to "send a message." Anyone who has ever played hoops in an emotional game will tell you two things:

1) revenge is only served boiling hot
2) you don't have to be looking at someone to intentionally break their nose.

Koach K, for his own part, played the part of Disingenuous Hypocritical Coward:

"The game was over before that. The outcome of the game. That was unfortunate that those people were in the game in that way. But that's what happens. You know, I mean it's 20 seconds left. What I'm saying, I'm not blaming anybody, it's unfortunate, we should have both probably had our walk-ons on....I'm not blaming anybody. You know, I'm not blaming anybody..."

There are so many things wrong with this statement that I must again resort to numbering them:

1) It doesn't matter who's in the game, you twisted pair of fuckpants. NOBODY SHOULD SLUG ANYONE IN THE FACE, EVER.

2) Tyler had a sub waiting at the scorer's table, and was only in the game BECAUSE ONE OF YOUR FUCKING PLAYERS FOULED HIM.

3) Koach K, you are NOTORIOUS for playing five players for 40 minutes each, and running up the score for fifty-five point beatdowns on the likes of St. Agnes Girl School For The Blind, you callous twit.

4) We were up 12 points. In the era of the 3-pointer, anything is possible. Dean Smith kicked your predecessor's ass by making up eight points in seventeen seconds before the 3-pointer existed.

5) ALL YOUR STARTERS WERE IN TOO, YOU FRICKIN' SALTED NUT SNACK!!!

Thus, in the course of one sniveling rat-packed moment, Koach K managed to blame Hansbrough and Roy Williams for lacerating Tyler's nose. Look, this is no joke, as my brother Sean can tell you: a blow like that can shatter your occipital bone and permanently disfigure your face, destroy your teeth, even blind you in one eye. Sean saw it happen in 1990 (in choir practice, no less). Let's just call this what it was: unthinkably bad sportsmanship from a program whose era is beginning a long, inexorable slide towards sunset.

Me? I'm with these chicks:

our guys!

if there's something you want to say

3/1/07

Had a great time tonight watching the Carolina game... wait, strike that. Had a terrible time watching the Carolina game, had a great time seeing a bunch of my oldest friends at various spots on a rainswept Franklin Street. For those of you in blogland, we got to hang with Neva at the Wine Bar, someone I last saw at a Johnny Quest show in 1990. As a doctor, she has helped me through my innumerable whines over email, and she is just as awesome in person.

Together with Annie and Tessa, we watched Greg Humphreys play an acoustic set at the front of the bar, and he even threw in two songs for me: "You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby" by the Smiths, and "Lisa Marie" from his Outside In album. "LM" is probably my favorite song of Greg's, part of the seemingly unlimited gems he's able to pull out of what a rock critic once called "Humphreys' cosmic jukebox".

Outside In, released in 1993, is a lost classic from the last decade, and deserves another go-round on your iPod for those of you lucky enough to own it. "Collapsis" made the hard-hearted Julianna Hatfield cry, and "Black-Eyed Susan" is perfect rock confectionery. When Greg first played it for me in my car a few days after we won the '93 National Championship, I was sure they'd join the ranks of Dave Matthews and bust open a huge hit, but such is the cruel randomness of the music industry.

While recovering from that debacle otherwise known as UNC vs. Ga. Tech, Greg and Ann and I sat at Millhouse in Carrboro long after our waitress stopped working and began drinking at the bar. In an era of quick fixes and miracle cures, there's still no substitute for shared history, the kind of pleasure you find in people you've known across the decades.

Pounding rain on a chilly night in Chapel Hill, alone in the living room in a house on Purefoy Street, I'm reminded of the many intense dreams we had while we were here, and as amazing as we all turned out, there's always a little sadness about coming back to a place where so many schemes were hatched. Listening to the water cascade over the gutters, I think about the lyrics of "Lisa Marie" and fight off an old melancholy:

She looked at me and smiled
For a moment I thought I... had a chance
Stop and say hello
For a moment I thought I... had it easy
For a moment, I...
I...