shockingly friendly and trusting

Long tough day. Worked non-stop on an appeal that had to be filed by 5:00. Thanks to some last second editing by the boss, the thing was not done until 4:45. And then I had to quite literally run the thing over to the EEOC office at 18th and L.

During all this, I never had time to grab something to eat. So after a rough day and no eats, I stopped by the street vendor on the corner by the metro to grab a Snickers bar. I tried to pay with a ten, but the guy was packing up and didn't have change for me. But instead of telling me to get lost with my $10 bill, he smiled and said "go ahead, pay me tomorrow."

Wow. That's one of those things you just don't expect on a downtown city street. And its not like I'm a regular that he might have recognized. Perhaps he could see in my bleary over-worked eyes that I actually needed that Snickers bar to deal with the Metro backup I was about to get myself into? Anyway, the encounter really was a nice capper to a long stretch of insanity over the past five days.

THIS JUST IN

WordPerfect sucks. I hate WordPerfect. I have always hated WordPerfect. I hated WordPerfect even before I ever used MS Word... like back in 1990 when I was running WP on my 12mhz 80286.

I think I have found the first criteria for firms or organizations in my post-graduation job search. NO WP!

(it does bother me to be so tied to Microsoft, but let's face it, their product is just better)

some fairly obvious observations from the weekend

A) sunny is good

The weather was so effing perfect all weekend in Cleveland. Basically, it was 68 degrees and mostly clear with no humidity the whole time we were there. It makes such a big difference. We could've lost to a U.S.U.H.S. reunion team and it would've been fun when it was that beautiful (and we actually did fairly well).

As for me, for various reasons, I got like three hours of sleep on Friday night. If we had got to the fields Saturday morning in the midst of a rain storm, I would have literally been ruined given my sleep-deprived state. As things were this weekend, though, I was able to forget about being tired until around dinner time. Then I caught myself in the hotel room watching The Mummy and thinking "this movie is AWESOME" - and I finally realized I was pretty screwed up.

B) the PA turnpike is the crappiest road on Earth, by far (and this is coming from someone who once did a 2,200 mile road trip through rural Turkey)

First of all, traffic resulting from late night construction was one of the factors which contributed to my state of severe sleep deprivation on Saturday. And beyond that, there's the fact that I am approaching my 27th birthday and I cannot remember a time when significant portions of the stretch from Pittsburgh to Breezewood did not resemble the lunar surface. The "improving" never ends.

Besides the actual construction sites, there also seems to be a PA Department of Placing Cones and Barrels on Random Stretches of Highway For No Reason Whatsoever. I can stomach traffic related to work. But when you get held up for an hour and then reach the sign that says "end of road work" without ever seeing road work... well... you're pissed off.

ps - i just ate a bunch of grapes. and then i looked in the tupperware container and realized that some of the grapes in the thing were moldy. so if i die tonight, this blog entry may be of assistance to the coroner

The Fix is On

The last couple days, I've been getting home around 7:15 or so, and each night when I come in, the TV has been left on after the local news and I end up watching a minute or two of Jeopardy. I started noticing that the same guy was mauling the competition every night.

Tonight, I flip the thing on just as they're just heading into Final Jeopardy. One person has $2,000, one person has $4,500, and Ken Jennings has $32,400. They reveal the first person's answer to the final question. Her answer comes up on the screen: "whatever Ken wrote."

This dude is AUTOMATIC. When you watch the show, you can't help but think the show is rigged. Check out the story. (he's now up to 11 straight wins and like $350,000)

Meanwhile, the Lakers looked pretty much the opposite of Mr. Jennings. Not calm, quite lethargic, and generally weak all around. I'm not too big on professional basketball compared to college, but this finals was a spectacle to behold - the seemingly all-mighty Lakers getting their asses handed to them night after night.

Michael Wilbon put it best in today's Post when he compared the Lakers whipping to the 1990 Tyson shocker. I'll never forget that night in Japan 14 years ago when Tyson -- the then undefeated emperor of boxing -- got floored by Buster Douglas to the complete shock of the sporting world. (Buster Douglas collected his big payday, ate 37,000 cheeseburgers, and then promptly got pummelled into retirement in his very next fight.)

MADNESS

I am so awesome when it comes to overdoing summer. In the last few days, I've been juggling various commitment levels to a job and three internships, two club teams, planning a wedding, and preparing for travel and/or tournaments on like every weekend of the summer. My brain is barely handling this.

Hopefully things are settled now at least. After blowing off a couple summer internships, one of which I felt really guilty about, I settled on a small firm in DC that specializes in employment and civil rights law and especially employment discrimination.

So I will be working around Farragut North on Tues/Wed/Thurs and will be working at the deli out in Darnestown (northwest of Gaithersburg near the Potomac) on Monday/Friday and probably the few weekend days I haven't already booked up.

And wedding planning is starting to move forward again. Mary and I had a nice meeting this morning with a priest in Rockville and I had a good phone call with a rabbi in Hagerstown who might actually officiate our wedding if we really do it out at Rocky Gap State Park.

Okay. Time to get down to DC for my first day at the firm. I'm kind of worried about whether I can really do the work that's about to get dumped on me. We'll see...

A real asshole thing to say... but I'm saying it anyway

Ray Charles was both a musical genius and a giant in American music history, but please please please let this be the end of those annoying as hell, image-tarnishing Powerball commercials. They're almost as bad as that brief BB King/Burger King campaign of a couple years ago.

"It's America's game, the one and only Powerball!"

The Super Mega Awesome Transit of Venus as chronicled by me

Monday night, I stayed up late rigging up elaborate preparations for the chance on early Tuesday morning to catch Venus in front of the sun for the first time since 1882.

With due astro-nerd diligence, I constructed a shield for my mounted binoculars with holes cut out for the eyepieces and I found a large white surface for projection. I also charged up the camera battery so I could record the event. And for naked-eye viewing, I borrowed a welder's helmet with No. 13 rated goggles from Mary's dad (btw - its pretty cool that my future father-in-law is the kind of guy that you can turn to when you need to find something like that!)

Then everything fell apart. First, just before getting to bed, I realized that I left my adapter clamp in Pittsburgh. Thus, my binocs could not be mounted on the tripod. And then, I both overslept and found out that even had I woken up, clouds had rolled in over Montgomery
County by yesterday morning anyway.

So my Tuesday morning observation consisted of only the insides of my eyelids. Damn. Guess I'll try again in 2012. But at least I wasn't the only one to have a Monday night/Tuesday morning fuckup.

Darling of the Press

This past Sunday (May 30), Kelvin made the front of the Washington Post Sunday Source section. He and Henry were featured in a picture tied to a story about where to find pickup games. Upon seeing the picture at the 7-11 while buying the paper, I first thought "that can't be Kelvin- he wouldn't risk killing himself playing pickup." But it actually is him:


Kelvin apparently skying Henry

So here's my question - how does Kelvin manage to look cool when the newspapers' cameras are on him? Here's another example from the Atlantic City Press from a few years ago when we played at Wildwood together:


"Kelvin Hoo" ready to fire

Meanwhile when I end up in the paper, I either look like I'm performing some horrible dance move or like I am on the verge of losing my lunch. What's your secret, K?

What the hell?

I know all of you read about the breaking news of the National Spelling Bee Champion.

Gripe Number 1: What the hell are they doing to these kids that a 13-year-old collapsed on stage from lightheadedness? I don't understand the madness.

Gripe Number 2: "The spellers range in age from nine to 15, and from grades four to eight." What the hell is a 15 year old doing in 8th grade??? Shouldn't he/she be a sophomore in high school???

Iraq is EXACTLY like World War II (except for...)

Yesterday our leader compared the fight against terrorism to World War II. Could our administration possibly come up with a more outrageous or fear-inducing and alarmist way to buoy support for its Iraq policy??? I think not.

Sure, the war on terror is a long-term, on-going battle for the safety of democracy which might be compared to WWII by a stretch. Sometimes its a real war -- Afghanistan -- and sometimes its a clandestine battle between our operatives and al Qaeda. Yet I fail to see how Iraq fits into this comparison.

Iraq did not invade and overrun all of its neighbors as Germany did in 1939 and 1940. Iraq did not have a military alliance or even friendly relations with the Taliban/al Qaeda when the modern day Pearl Harbor was carried out in New York and DC. And as far as our government can tell us now, Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction which might threaten our soil.

Additionally, as far as our government can tell us now, Iraq did not harbor or export terrorists which might have threatened our soil. The foreign fighters which have given us so much trouble in the past year are not evidence of a pre-war al Qaeda-infested Iraq. These foreign fighters by and large came to Iraq for the purposes of testing themselves against and causing trouble for American invaders.

And what kind of message should Iraqis take from this World War II comparison? I doubt anyone could be too thrilled with a comparison that impliedly paints their country as a present-day version of Nazi Germany. Similarly, should we as Americans take this to mean that our troops will be occupying Iraq for years to come, much like Germany in the post WWII years??

As a recap: First we were invading Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction (which still was unjustifiable considering the lack of any actual threat and considering that WE are the only nation that ever used a weapon of mass destruction on another nation). Then when all that fell through, the Iraq war suddenly had something to do with freedom for Iraqis from a ruthless dictator. And now when that has failed to satisfy the American electorate, the Bush administration tries to swing the whole thing back to a protecting America theme.

I'm proud to say I never bought this administration's mountain of rubbish from day one.

PS - If we are supposed to take over and rebuild countries with ruthless dictators, shouldn't we be invading half of central Africa right now? Or at least talking about the sad state of affairs. There a lot of dead folks over there. Enough inexplicably dead folks to make Saddam look like a small-time street thug -- who happened to have a lot of oil.

Could someone out there suggest a good low carb ISP?

I'm really into this Atkins thing, but I've decided that to really "take it to the next level," I need to move beyond food. I'm hoping to drop some weight around the fingertip and eyeball areas. So maybe a low carb dial-up internet option is the answer?? I hear AOL 9.0 is Atkins- friendly.