Was in the kitchen pouring the previously mentioned glass of wine when I looked at the clock, which said 11:30. “Crap, I thought, a mere half an hour until I have to close the word count on today.”
Then I wrote that post (procrastination!) and afterwards, looked at the computer’s clock which said 10:34.
I gained an hour!
….not that he wore one.
It’s just around the corner, November is, and as of now, I’m going to be trying NANO2008. I’ve got what I think is a good, self-sustainable idea that I’m interested in exploring… And I’m excited, but nervous. So….here goes. Expect excerpts, photos, twists, and turns, of course.
I realize that we beat them but and there really is no point to this, but I’m surprised that the NFL hasn’t adopted a model similar to the MLB’s for their websites where all content goes through a central filter.
This is some of the worst sports writing ever:
“New Orleans Saints QB Drew Brees’ 88-yard touchdown pass to Reggie Bush in the third quarter to put the Saints within two points at 16-14, is exemplary of the abilities of the Black and Gold’s top ranked offense during the 2006 season.
The play on second and five marked the longest play in NFL history in a conference championship contest. It also continued to show the big play abilities of Brees and Bush. In 2006, the Saints QB led the NFL with 41 completions of 25 yards or more. Bush also showed his proficiency in the passing game in the regular season as he set an NFL record for receptions for a rookie running back with 88 during the regular season. This also marked the longest play of the year for Bush and the longest touchdown connection of Brees’ career.”
just a sidenote — yesterday morning, i checked out neworleanssaints.com just to see what that site was saying about the bears-saints game and was surprised to see that there hadn’t yet been an update about the game. i understand that the team, the fans, and the city were all heartbroken, but the official site of the team hadn’t bothered to post anything about it. if, for some reason, you were unaware of the outcome of the game, you would be forced to check some other place for the information.
and today — i check it again. there’s still no readily-apparent recap of the game, but there is this incredibly poorly-written article about saints fans greeting the team upon their return to new orleans. it’s filled with the kind of typos, grammatical errors and poor formatting that make me shocked and surprised that someone got paid to write it….
I wrote this piece for “The Fifth Column”, an underground paper that my brother and a friend of his were going to publish way back in the late 80s. No joke. I don’t think we ever put out an issue, but I wrote a lot of ridiculous pieces for it:
My Bike
by thugz(Worth)
One day, a young man was riding along on his bicycle when he suddenly realized he had been riding the wrong way for at least 20 minutes.
“Oh no,” he thought. “What a serious bummer.”
Thus, he quickly turned around and rode back for 20 minutes and realized that again, he had been going in the wrong direction.
“Fuck. I’ll just keep going this way.”
So he did. And he rode on, for miles and miles.
Had to get a new Network Interface Card for a computer at Morseland. Here is the dialogue I had with Bob, a 50-60-year-old Radio Shack drone.
me: I need a network card.
bob: (holding up a PC-card [formerly PCMCIA] notebook wireless adapter) Here’s one.
me: Oh, sorry, not a wireless one.
bob: oh, okay — not a wireless one. let’s see…. (he holds up a USB wireless adapter) here’s one.
me: That’s a wireless card.
bob: Oh, right. Oh, (he holds up another USB wireless adapter) here’s one.
me: That’s also a wireless card.
bob: Oh, right. Let’s see. Joe? Do we have a network card that’s -not- wireless?
Joe, the manager, or assistant manager, or whatever, is in his 40s and has the same strangely gruff voice and mannerisms as Bob does. He’s looking at a woman’s iMac. He has Bob come over to pull the iMac out of its box and hold it up so that the woman can point to something on the back of the machine. She is asking about “the plug that goes into this hole.” Joe says, “Oh that? That looks like ethernet.” Except he pronounces ‘ether’ as ‘eth-er’ instead of ‘ee-ther’. Like Beth. Or death. The woman says that the cable company is coming to install “a cable modem or something.” Joe assures her that the cable company will bring the proper cable for the eth-ernet.
Finally, another dude goes into the back and gets their last remaining PCI non-wireless ethernet card. Bob says, “I don’t know how much it costs.” I say, “I’m guessing it’s going to be $20.”
Then their pin-pad dies as I swipe my credit card. It just goes all dark and Spanish. I tap it a couple times, but get no response. Bob looks at me like I’ve broken it. Finally he figures out how to ‘wipe the card’ himself, all the while, Joe is there heckling him. When he finally succeeds, Joe says, “Nice job, Bob!”
And I decided that Radio Shack is…well, unsurprisingly, a little outlet of hell and even though I promised Bob that I’d come back soon, I don’t think I’m going to visit again, if I can help it.
“Let’s just get tacos and watch cartoons.”
Can you believe it? No you can’t. Because I couldn’t either, and I was there. Who knew?
Episodes of Home Movies, South Park, The Tick and chicken tacos and quesadillas and guacamole. It don’t get much better than that. Trust me.
A few months ago, in a “let’s look up old friends” mode, I searched on Google for some various names and found out a lot about one of the first people I met while at Northwestern. He and I were two of the three original members of the Performance Studies class of ’97 (Perf Studies attracts many more people after the theatre kids have gotten their acting teachers). Adam and I did some cool stuff together, performance wise, during our years at NU, including a ridiculously surreal and esoteric dance where I dressed in a trench coat, wrapped my face in an Ace bandage and taped a mirror to my chest. How was Adam costumed? He wore a gorilla mask. I don’t remember exactly the meaning behind our antics, but I’m pretty sure we convinced the rest of the class (it was a student organized seminar filled with not perf studies people but actors who were into issues of ‘identity’ which somehow translated into sketches about daytime talk shows….) that it was pertinent. I’m also pretty sure that he and I conspired to make our bits as off-the-wall and zany in order to balance out the more obvious and less-inspired bits as well. I don’t remember a whole lot at all except for one moment where Adam taught me an important lesson:
We were going through a tech rehearsal, probably our only tech rehearsal, and Adam and I did our piece on stage for the very first time. I remember after finishing the scene being incredibly self-conscious and standing there waiting for the lights to drop. It was supposed to immediately go to black when we were done. The lighting people were undoubtedly writing down cues, taking notes, basically doing the things they needed to do in order to make it all work when the show actually happened. But I wanted to be in the dark. I was no performer, and I was certainly no abstract-mummified-dancing performer. So, I shouted, “Lights!” or “Lights, please!” or something.
I don’t remember exactly what Adam said, but it was something to the effect of “They know, let them do their job, don’t be a dick.” And I immediately felt like a dick. And so I said something like, “Sorry. Thank you!” And I learned not to be an asshole to the people who were helping you out. And hopefully they heard my apology and knew what I meant, but they probably thought I was being a stuck up actor and not just a scared amateur.
I got over my fear during the shows — I think we did two performances of it — and thoroughly enjoyed doing them, especially after seeing the rest of the show and knowing that we were doing something that, even with its purported bits of meaning of identity and ‘self’ and ‘mirror’ and ‘other’ and all that crap, meant just as little as the rest of the stuff on stage.
Actually, I’m not sure if that’s what Adam was going for. Or even if that’s what I was going for. But in my memory, that’s what we achieved, and that’s good enough for me.
(By the way, Adam is still actually using his performance studies degree in direct relation to things that he does and thinks about. I merely use mine to impress people with words like “Brechtian” and thoughts like “the narrator of a story is actually a character and can be performed like any other” and stuff like that. Real helpful.)