Four days after an earthquake struck DC and the great east coast, a damn hurricane showed up. The hurricane made landfall on DC at the same time that our fantasy football draft was taking place. Did 50 mph winds, heavy rains and a general sense of areawide panic stop me from grilling a dozen pork chops (including making another batch of homemade delicious mustard BBQ sauce) for the guys who came to the draft? Hell, no. Because I'm a man, dammit. Those are some classy crosshatched grill marks on those chops, if I do say so myself.
I know I'm probably alone when I ask if anyone else who reads this blog has played Portal and Portal 2. The sequel is one of the best games to be made this year, and director Dan Trachtenberg has gone the extra mile and made a faux movie based on the game. This is a similar concept that was a huge success when a brief Mortal Kombat movie was made. This is just a test film to show how cool the idea could be, and nothing more will probably come of it, but in a world where they fuck up film adaptations of popular video games (see: Super Mario Bros., Mortal Kombat '90s flicks, Max Payne, Street Fighter, etc.) it's cool to see a director give a video game the proper treatment.
Because even though I was too young to remember the last time UK ever beat Tennessee in football, but at least I can hope that we could properly put some signage up to motivate the players instead of sending them into the abyss of nothingness.
This one is all for the wife. I could not be more truthful when I say that the wife cannot even think about George Bush without thinking of Will Ferrell first. We have watch probably a dozen or so documentaries in the last month where someone flashes quotes or video of Bush talking and she just looks at me and says some variation of, "I'm sorry, but this guy was the president of our nation for 8 years, and yet all I can think about it the fact that he was more like this (see video below) than anything worth taking seriously."
I give you The Only Presidential Thing My Wife Thinks Bush Did: Talk About Muff.
No, not this Ace of Spades (though that is a rockin tune). This is Spades of the card playing kind.
And I rocked it.
After thoroughly dominating the Hearts game and then the Bejeweled game on my iPhone, I figured the next game was Spades. It didn't take me long to start dominating, but as more updates and versions of the game were released, the developers started adding new features, new game modes and harder AI competition.
My first goal was to crush the AI opponents. The game had tiers, and so my goal was to pair up with the weakest-level partners and then beat the players with the highest skill rankings. Once I had that done, the more challenging effort began: winning at all the various Spades modes of play the game offered.
The game had traditional, which was easy enough to conquer. Next was Suicide, a mode where one player has to go nil each hand. This was by far the most difficult to win at because the way the hands play out there is almost zero skill involved, which means you're just following the cards. Next was Mirror, where a player has to bid as many trump cards as he holds. Finally was Wiz, which meant you had to choose between going nil or mirroring your trump.
After a month or so of playing, and winning pretty handily, I decided to have a little Spades Olympics, where I would play four rounds of all four modes and play them all from the start until I went undefeated in all of them in one setting. It took almost two weeks of off-and-on playing because that damned Suicide mode would be the biggest pain in the ass. But once I finally nailed that one, I blew through the others with relative ease. Shit, just check out some of those stats. I won 35 nil bids, that takes skill, folks.
Now that I've slated the Spades beast, I've moved on to Euchere, another fantastic card game that all my Cincinnati friends taught me. The app version doesn't have as many options for me to track good competition, so don't hold your breath for a post on this one.
One more time, because it rocks, and Kelly and I tore this song up on Rock Band (because we're dorks).
Ok, it's been a shit week at work, so you the reader get two for the price of one this week. First up, a hilarious article from The Onion that Kelly shared with me. We nearly cried laughing, if for nothing else than the quotes and way this story is written is almost exactly like how Kelly and I talk to each other. Which probably means we're actually 11 years old. No matter, it was funny and worth the read.
This next one is a show that Dan has been bitching at me for not watching yet, Eastbound and Down on HBO. It's got Danny McBride in it, so I don't know why I haven't seen it yet, but he won't stop nagging me so I promise to vanquish this show soon.
Once the Summer of Klosterman ended, I had a chance to catch up on one of the few fiction writers I read regularly. I've written about Richard North Patterson books before (trust me, you can find the reviews on the blog). I had gotten it originally as an audiobook to listen to on the drive to a from New Jersey for my aunt's wedding, but it was way longer than I thought it would be so I held off. Was going to listen to it when I took my long flight to Hawaii next month, but figured why not just get it over with now.
This book didn't do it for me at all. It's premise is pretty simple: Osama bin Laden devises a plan to steal a nuclear weapon and detonate it above Tel Aviv. Spies from the CIA and Mossad try to thwart said plan. Sounds interesting, but it just wasn't, and for a number of reasons. Part is bad luck for Patterson; bin Laden is dead, and that reality just sucks the wind from the book. The plot is still fascinating and eerily plausible it seems (the bomb is stolen from Pakistan, which has the stability and security of a wet paper towel).
Besides the whole bin Laden thing, the book also reads almost exactly like a book I listened to when we drove back to Kentucky for the holidays last year. So reading the same kind of stuff twice in 8 months is a little bland for me. Further, this is a far departure from the novels Patterson got me hooked on in the first place. I got sucked in by all his in-depth courtroom thrillers centered on political topics. Now his recent books have been more military-themed novels that I feel are already done ad nauseum. Everyone seems to had written the "bin Laden nuclear bomb" plot so I just feel bummed that he's treading into well-worn territory and not taking a unique viewpoint.
So I hope he goes back to what I liked about his first 10 or so novels because I'd hate to dismiss him from my reading list. One book doesn't ruin it for me, but I'm actually going to pay more attention this time to the plot instead of just buying it without even needing to read previews.
About two weeks ago my Summer of Klosterman came to an end. It was a great ride, but it had to end since I ran out of books. And there was no better way to end the journey than starting at the beginning with Chuck's first book.
Fargo Rock City is mainly his autobiography of growing up in the '80s in North Dakota. More specifically, it's about his unabashed love for metal music that sustained him while growing up in the '80s in North Dakota. This is book is definitely geared toward a certain crowd. You have to have grown up and loved Motley Crue, Poison, Ratt, Warrant, Skid Row and various other
one-hit wonder bands. Also means you have to appreciate the godfather of them all, Guns n Roses. All of these bands, and many more, bring back memories of my childhood.
Listening to Mr. Brownstone for the first time in Ben's basement and having no idea what Axl was so excited about (apparently it was 8,000 pounds of cocaine).
Hanging out at Scott's listening to the Misfits and Danzig and the first time I was coerced into holding a snake on my arm and promptly wanting to piss my pants and vomit.
Watching Headbanger's Ball on MTV on weekends at Aaron's place, then watching late-night ECW wrestling and nearly breaking everyone's backs with poorly executed wrestling moves.
Smoking our first cigarettes at the ridiculously stupid age of 11 down at The Creek and listening to AC/DC.
Being in the 8th grade and having the my graduating class vote for Skid Row's "I'll Remember You" to be our graduation song. This was an annual tradition at St. Raphael and ours was the first year in memory that the school overrode our vote. The principal chose for us and picked some shitty Kenny Rogers song. It sure as hell wasn't The Gambler, which would have rocked. We pseudo-protested by everyone not singing the song at the end of graduation per tradition, and when we had the party afterward we rocked Skid Row and GnR and everything else all night, and also cheered when our pregnant classmate arrived (oh yeah, she was 14 and pregnant and barred from being in the graduation ceremony in the church). Classy times.
This was just a skimming of the times I had growing up listening to metal. It was the mid-80s that first introduced me to Aerosmith, my favorite band of all time, and that Klosterman lavishes praise on for influencing every metal band that arrived in the 80s. Nice to see my choice in music validated.
It's a great book, and any guy (or girl) who was born in the '70s should read it because there will definitely be a chapter (or five) that resonate strongly with you. It's great stuff, and it definitely made me start re-listening to some of these bands again, for better or worse.
I've never watched any of the Final Destination movies, because the premise just doesn't appeal to me at all. But I gotta say, this marketing pitch for FD5 is pretty unique and a good way to get us older folk who grew up watching Saved by the Bell and think watching spoofs of this is good stuff. Anything that involves Saved by the Bell is something I'll watch.
At the very least, it's hilarious that they have found all the exact costumes those characters wore. If I ever gave a crap about Halloween, I'd find that Zack Morris outfit for sure.
When I was growing up my mom and I watched Wildcats and I'm certain that I was too damn young to understand half the racially tinged jokes and social commentary that lurked in that movie. A well-to-do white woman goes and coaches an inner city high school football team (whose principal is Nipsy Russell for pete's sake)? Yeah, I'm guessing it was unsuitable viewing for my age. But hey, I turned out OK.
Anyway, I've watched that movie. A lot. A lot a lot. And how I missed one of the biggest cinematic bloopers in the history of cinema is beyond me. Watch and be amazed.
Oh holy shit. They hit him so hard they knocked the black off him! How in the name of Orson Welles did the director or editor or studio head or anyone before now discover this? They turned a dude white! That is some stunning cinema right there, people.
I recently stumbled across this photo on my phone. Upon first glance, you'd assume this was taken in a bathroom from a hotel. More specifically, a Hampton Inn. That's what it says right there on the towel, right?
Well you'd be wrong. That towel is in my bathroom back home in Louisville. And it's not alone. There's probably 10 or so more towels exactly like that, from hotels all over this great land of ours (more specifically, the route between Louisville and New Jersey).
I don't know how to describe it other than to say my family loved taking mementos from our vacations. My father's favorite thing was taking hotel towels. I'm not saying we were the Bonnie and Clyde family of Kentucky. No gunplay or violence. For one damn reason or another, we ended up with a whole washroom filled with towels from vacation hotels. There's no better explanation than that.
Once on a trip to Florida my dad convinced me to steal a dinner plate from a restaurant just because it was shaped like a fish and I thought it was cool. I don't think I have that plate anymore, but I'll always remember how funny it was to be talked into stealing dinnerware from a seafood restaurant when I was 20 years old. That's the weird things we did on our family vacations. Malice or ill will was never part of it, and we didn't go into vacations thinking we'd snatch a towel.
It'd just happen. You're a family of five crammed into a hotel room and when you wake up to leave everything just gets thrown into luggage and the occasional towel made it in. It started happening so often that we all got a chuckle out of it, and I'll always be secretly convinced my dad did it on purpose as a joke. That was the kind of guy he was, teasing my mom when we returned home, "Don't throw away that towel that's a remembrance of our trip!" Mom would roll her eyes, fold it up and toss it on the basement shelf with the 15 other ones. Good times.
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