Death Defying
Here is a review of my Saturday. It involved mostly things that were not sports but I’m posting it anyway, even if it does mostly look dumb. Saturday was a nice day for myself:I did some snorkeling and lost (another) fin. Don’t even ask, it’s another stupid story. If BP is ocean polluter #1 these days I am #2, every time I go out these days I lose a mask, fin, dignity, whatever. Anyway, it was a bust and the water was cloudy:I tried snapping some pics with my snorkel camera but they were basically garbage so I’m holding off on posting any review of that thing until visibility improves.
So that was the morning, whatever. The afternoon was nice though and it involved, as you can see here, the world’s gayest waterslide at Cold Springs Trail. Was the water cold? Not really! Did I risk life and limb by going on the 2-foot drop? Maybe! How exciting! Anyway the hike was nice, beautiful weather, saw a snake, avoided all the poison oak, I am basically like Bear Grylls only more manly pretty much. You do not want to mess with me because I will out man you. I even watched the hockey match game this weekend. Or part of it, really. I’m not going to lie to you I wasn’t totally into it. I am very organized and the idea of a team in Chicago being in the Western Conference just bothers me. If I had taken a proper camera I would have had some nice pics of beautiful vistas and flowers and whathaveyous but really I’m too lazy so you have to settle for this (sideways, encoding and flipping 3gp files is hard!) video of Australian roommate Josh going down the waterslide as well. Look how close he comes to dying there. Good work, Josh.
Should we talk about sports while we’re here? Yeah, we might as well. We’ve got the Lakers and the Celtics in a battle of the two most insufferable fan bases (no offense to RK who has been a die hard even when they had Cedric Ceballos and nobody else) so I have no idea who to root for. Let’s all waste ink/electrons arguing about competitive imbalance in baseball but let’s hype this as a matchup for the ages even though these teams have won more than 50% of all NBA championships combined? WHAT? Are you hearing me internets? Is this thing even on? So dumb.
The Dodgers are more fun to watch thanks mostly to John Ely who is like Jamie Moyer if Jamie Moyer wasn’t 50 years old. So it remains to be seen if he’s actually a real guy or just a kid whose started out hot but the second time through the league he’ll get crushed but for now the top 4 of Kershaw, C Bills, Kuroda, and Ely actually is surprisingly serviceable. Torre continues to treat Troncoso like a rented mule and for whatever reason the offense has disappeared (luckily disappearing vs. Arizona doesn’t equal a loss). And also how about a nice backslap for picking the Reds and Braves to contend? So what if it was 2 different years. Stop all the hating.
. This occurred to me when I had B-Slim, the editor and Beastie, the QA doctor over for Game 5 of the NBA finals between Phoenix and LA. We decided to juggle watching the game, brewing a batch of beer, drinking a batch of beer and bbqing BACON wrapped hotdogs. And yes, I am now aware that this is a bad combination. While watching Ron Artest make the horrible decision of hoisting a three with 23 seconds left on the shot clock, then completely redeem himself with a hideous last second bank shot rebound and then make Craig Sager say “Queensbridge”: say it! I nearly burned my beautiful new backyard down. So here is your safety tip, Bacon cooks off a ton of Grease. And leaving the lid down on your gas grill, on high is a recipe for disaster. With billowing smoke coming from my Weber Gas Grill, I opened it to see flames hotter than the desert surrounding Phoenix. Running to get water was my next move and I doused the grill down and quenched the flames thirst. BUT, this is NOT the correct move in a Grease Fire.
Pouring water on burning grease or oil will not extinguish the fire. It will only cause the burning oil to splash, spreading the grease fire around.” Putting the lid down and cutting the supply of oxygen to the flames would have been best along with dumping baking soda on the flames. I have a fire extinguisher but didn’t run to use it because my eyes saw flames and my brains said water. So I got lucky.
Hello Indie Rokkers,
After a wonderfully brief intermission Freelance Whales took the stage and began with “Generator ^ First Floor” and killed it. Five pieces are sometimes unwieldy on stage but with so many instruments (glockenspiel, two keyboards, banjo, squeezebox, besides the obvious and expected) and so many equipment switches between songs there’s always something fun going on. And for reals—for a bunch of white guys (and girl) there’s some serious soul. Describing a band’s sound is pretty passé with everything you’d want to know about a band available online but it’s safe to say they fall into that generally uncategorizable (apparently not a word) indie rock with electric and folk elements that all the kidz these days flip for. Stage presence is clearly not their strong suit as these New Yorkians based the majority of their stage time swapping instruments around as opposed to cracking wise, which is of course fine and all and certainly preferable to idle prater but maybe a joke or two would be nice. Or not, whatever. It’s really the only criticism I can think of. Besides the aforementioned “Generator ^ First Floor”, “Ghosting”, and especially “Starring” destroyed it. They ended the night with a rousing version of “Generator ^ Second Floor” which sent us out into the tragically foggy night and our Mazda 3s, which of course smelled like leftover Chicken Ranch.
Loading ...
