My Anniversary

Today is the wife and I's fourth anniversary. This may not be the most inspirational clip, but it makes the both of us laugh and she's convinced deep down that this is what I am like with all my friends. I'm not saying I disagree.



Fruit is the four-year gift apparently. What a bunch of crap. When do we get to bourbon as the gift? What year is that? It should be every year. Or how about sporting event tickets? I'd like the World Cup travel package anniversary, when is that coming around? Fruit ... what a joke.

Oh, love you dear.

King of Corn

The good fellas who make up Campbler's Tooth won the 2011 Summer Cornhole League last week. We went 11-1 in the regular season and pretty much dominated the competition. It helped that half the teams featured people who had a hard time even getting the bag close to the board itself (let alone the hole), but we just stepped on necks each week. The core team was myself, Kelly, Dan, Dboy, Paxton and Mike. They "assigned" us three girls to play on our team, but those fools never bothered ever showing up, so they don't get to bask in the glory of the title.

Our main competition came from two teams, the DSLs and Cornholio. DSLs were a bunch of frat brothers from WVU who all had jobs in the DC area. They were decent against other teams but sucked mightily when facing the mighty Tooth. Cornholio was a monster team of guys who knew how to throw some corn, but their problem was that almost every week they never showed up. When they did, they crushed teams. We split the season 1-1 with them and expected to face them in the championship game, but they lost to DSLs in the semis when only two players showed up half-drunk and threw the corn like they had a Julia Roberts movie to rush off to see.

Our most stressful match was the semis as well. We faced a team we'd never played in the regular season and featured a coworker of mine who I randomly gave some playing tips to before their opening tournament match. She soaked up that knowledge faster than Neo and suddenly she was whipping my ass. Thankfully the rest of the team stepped up (Dboy especially, winning us the match in OT 13-11) and carried us into the finals, where we had another tense matchup with the DSLs but eventually wore them out and were victorious, 17-13. Dboy got a pitcher for being team captain, the rest of us got beer glasses, and we celebrated as any team should ... at a bar. No champagne or beer was poured on anyone's head, though. Kelly might have liked that, though.

What I've Read: Mayflower

The subhead for this book is: A Story of Courage, Community and War. This could not be more true when it comes to the story of those first 100 pilgrims who took a three-month boat ride from England to Plymouth.

Philbrick uses the courage, community and war as a way to divide this book into three distinct parts, but it's not a gimmick. Instead, it's literally the three phases the original Plymouth colony went through in the first 50 years of its existence. The courage it took for them to make the voyage in the first place (when things like no water, they had to subsist primarily on beer and wine alone), and then those first few months when the genius captain thought arriving just before the start of winter was a good idea (it wasn't; nearly half the population of the boat died in the first year they were on land).

The community part sums up the following 30-plus years. Meeting, interacting, trading and building relationships with the local Native Americans was not rose-colored paintings of everyone around the Thanksgiving table by any means. There were fights, peace accords and eventually a mutual understanding that two completely different races of people were going to live in close proximity to each other without knowing a damn thing about the future. They decided they were all in this together and for almost a quarter of a century the pilgrims and puritans slowly expanded but made deals with the tribes to make sure no one was overly offended.

The third act of the book is really about how this all went to shit with the passing of the original pilgrim voyagers and how it was, for all simplicity, the kids' damn fault. All the original settlers' kids grew up and decided they wanted everything to themselves, and started expanding at a freakish pace and taking whatever the hell they wanted, peace accords be damned. Eventually small decisions by tribal leaders turned out to have horrible consequences that they probably didn't realize at the time (because it was 1640 and we're talking about a time when furs and herbs were still a big deal on the trading market). What resulted was several ugly wars and the near complete decimation of native tribes in the area. Some stunning numbers are thrown at you, such as how (as a percentage of population), King Philip's War was more costly in lives for Native Americans than all of World War I and II combined for the U.S. population.

This is a really good read if you want to learn some real truths about what taking a risk and landing in a completely unknown place with unknown people must have been like 400 years ago when you were lucky to have one change of clothes. It's dense and takes a bit to get through everything, but there is never anything wrong about seeing where the roots of our current nation began. Philbrick's a great writer so I highly recommend his stuff.

Game On: Week of Sept. 23

My recent column reviewing Gears of War 3. Thanks to the Seattle Times for publishing.

What I've Read: Isaac's Storm

Prepare yourselves for some book review overload. One of the pleasures of vacations is disconnecting from the computer and reading a book. In my case, three of them.

First up, Isaac's Storm. This could not have come at a more opportune moment for me to read. About halfway through the reading this book, Washington was hit by an earthquake and a hurricane in the span of four days. It was a pretty crazy week, and when they called it HurriQuake 2011, I was quite pleased.

But reading this book about the Galveston hurricane of 1900 took the pleasure right out of that, though, since this was a massively devastating storm that killed 6,000 men, women and children. It's primarily two stories woven together: the story of how, at the turn of the century, man thought it had conquered weather and could predict/avoid/defeat anything that came its way; and the story of one man's hubris and whose decisions may have saved or lost countless number of lives depending on your viewpoint.


The look into weather predicting and bravado that the world (not just the U.S.) had toward predicting severe weather and being wholly proven wrong is a recurring theme around the turn of the century (see here (sorry, I can't find my review) and here). The Galveston storm was no different, and it's stunning to see how little has changed in predictions and how a lot comes down to luck and good fortune. I loved the way Larson closed the book, telling how today people line up at the local Walmart to buy provisions to ride out an upcoming hurricane. And on the spot where this Walmart exists, in the book the physical location once house a children's hospital where 90 kids huddled together with nuns to ride out the storm because they were located on the highest point of ground in Galveston. Yep, they all died.

It's a great book and Larson is a writer whose work I have devoured. He has a new book out about the first U.S. Ambassador to Nazi Germany, and you can be guaranteed that I will be reading that one.

Friday Funnies

A bonus edition of Friday Funnies for you, where I'm showing more movie bloopers that I find funny. This time, it's from Star Wars, where George Lucas apparently didn't digitally redo everything in the movies because he forgot about his too-tall storm trooper. If you don't think it's funny on first view, just hit replay about 10 times and it starts getting funnier the more you rewatch him bang his head. Good stuff.

Friday Funnies

This is nothing new, but I'm a big Apple fan. And when someone shared with me this video talking about how Microsoft would have completely screwed up the iPod marketing, I had to share. This is just a microcosm of what it's also like to be a graphic designer. We often make beauty and the end product sometimes rarely resembles what we had initially envisioned.

My Disconnection

Will quickly apologize to all my (few but proud) readers for being away from the blog for a couple weeks. I was uber-stressed at work with a lot of projects bearing down on me right before my vacation. I had hoped to spend some time while on Maui doing some blogging and catching up on old posts that I needed to write, but the day after I arrived I came to a decision to disconnect. I wanted to get away from Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, UK, NY Times, Wash Post, movie news and all the other things that keep my attention from being in the here and now and just relaxing and enjoying the things in front of me and around me. Sure, I checked my email once a day to make sure the office didn't need for me for something urgent (which they actually did a couple times, so at least I was able to help), but beyond that I kept the iPhone and the laptop closed. Felt really good. I missed some things (news, my fantasy football teams going into early season free fall, etc.) but in the long term the time was needed to just chill and get my mind thinking about different stuff and remind myself to keep things fresh and new. Hopefully I'll carry that stuff on now that I am back and make a few changes to the lifestyle so I don't return to creature comforts of the past. They weren't bad comforts, but it's always good to try some new things and approaches.

Game On: Week of Sept. 9

My recent column, reviewing Dead Island and Bodycount. Thanks to the Ventura County Star and ABC Action News for publishing. I think this is the first time I've seen a TV station publish my column, which is great to see, so big hat tip to them.

Game On: Week of Sept. 2

My recent column, reviewing Deux Ex: Human Revolution and Madden NFL 12. Thanks to the TC Palm and Honolulu Star Advertiser for publishing. This is the first mention I've seen in Honolulu, so that is great to see, so big hat tip to them.

Friday Funnies

It's not quite the holiday season yet, but Alec Baldwin would love for you to try his balls.

My Pet Peeve

While I love living in Takoma Park, there is one aspect to Maryland life that I just cannot get over. It's the incessant need for everyone to back into parking spaces. This ludicrous practice is based on the notion that by backing into the space, you can depart faster from the hell that is the Whole Foods parking lot. Of course, this holds the same logic structure as the movie "Speed." It takes these fools nearly three times as long to navigate the reverse-parking act as it would to just back out of the space in the first place. In reality this practice is a time loser, but these jagoffs don't know any better so they create more traffic and waste more time. Drives me nuts. I hate it. What a bunch of idiots.

What I've Read: Sew Your Own

This book is all about my sister. She likes to pick on me for reading bizarre books about singular topics like Milk, Salt or obscure historical moments (like a whaling boat that sunk or how the radio was invented. Look, I'm a weird guy. But I love these books and I know I get more life enjoyment from them than, say, some Twilight crap.

Point of the story is that my sister decided to fuel the fire by buying this book at a discount bookstore, or maybe she found it next to a dead guy, there's really no telling. I make that joke because this book was not the bill of goods she probably thought it was when she bought it (I'm really hoping someone once used this book to support an off-kilter table, because it's got about that much usefulness to it).

Actually, I shouldn't be so cruel, it's certainly not the worst book I've read. It's mainly about a British guy who decides that his way to fight global warming is to learn to make his own clothes. Sadly, about half the book has little to do with his quest to make his own clothes and fight global warming. Instead, it's his journey to find a religion or faith that works for him. It was a little bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing kind of tale. No surprise, he doesn't have much luck in the religion department, though he comes awfully damn close taking solace in the open arms of buddhism.

In the end the book made me doubt my abilities to sew and survive if acquiring proper clothing became and issue. I might have to rely on the old loin cloth/caveman look. Or when the zombie apocalypse comes, I'll just be going for the 9-layer Cormac McCarthy ensemble.

This doesn't doubt my sister's abilities to choose a good book for me, since I have to credit her for trying in the first place and over time I'm betting she can hit a home run. At least she didn't try to convince me to read some fiction-romance crap. The biggest benefit this book gave me was the belief that I could actually write a book of my own. I've had three books in my head for a couple years but the lack of confidence/time/skill/whatnot to follow through. But damn if this guy can make it happen, there's nothing to say I couldn't. Let's just call that the Backhanded Compliment of the Month to Flintoff for his book.

Friday Funnies

Honey Badger don't care. Honey badger don't give a shit. Honey Badger is naaaaaassty. Damn I wish I had thought of Honey Badger Don't Care as my fantasy football team name. Kelly's brother was smart and nabbed that one up quick.