April 2007 Archives

The Nintendo Wii came out six months ago. In November. Remind yourself of this as you read this story.

--

Monday was my 29th birthday, and as I do every year, I picked out a nice gift to buy for myself. This year, I decided to buy a Wii. Problem is, you can't just walk into a store and buy a Wii -- the things are so ridiculously popular that six months after their release, stores still cannot keep them in stock. I stopped by the Nebraska Furniture Mart on Monday night on the way to the bar, and of course, found none in stock. Upon relying this story to Dick Herculanuum, he decided to do some snooping and figure out a way to procure one for each of us.

His brother, who used to work for Gamers and knows about these things, told him if you go to the Mart for three weeks every day when they open, you will get ahold of one. You have to go every day, because you never know when they'll get a shipment of them in. Not satisfied with this, he started calling around. Gamestop told him its luck of the draw -- they never know when they're getting a shipment until they arrive. Toys R Us told him a similar story, but added they received 30-some in their last batch, and all were gone by noon the same day.

I meant to post this about six weeks ago, and just never got around to it. All I had to do was finish it -- 90% of the post was already written! -- and I forgot to do so. No matter.

I recently went to visit a college acquaintance, and as I entered her house, I noticed an atrocity. Remember how the movie "Little Nicky" starts with Jon Lovitz getting raped by a man in a bird costume -- and somehow manages to get worse over the next 85 minutes? Well, on the first wall a person sees when they enter this house, this full-size poster greets you:

The movie poster from "Top Dog". Holy crap. Finally, a worse greeting than the first five minutes of "Little Nicky"!

This poster took a skilled artisan no less than 6 minutes and no more than 8 minutes to produce. 7 minutes. Not a second more. Quick! Drop the background out! Fast! Throw a gradient over the movie title text! Stop moving, its too hard to crack a whip on a moving target! And make sure to not get too fancy when you drop the dog in behind the letters, it might affect the readability of the text, while also doubling the time you'll spend producing this poster! Hey! Typeset an awful tagline with 250% leading! Save your work! Send directly to the printer! Whew, that was close.

I challenge you to watch this :59 clip and not laugh at least twice. Hell, the mullet and the shades will have you laughing twice before he even opens his mouth to speak. So make it three times.

"Well dude its like this. I saw this guy comin', and I took the most excellent hit of my life! Next thing I knew, I was on the beach, takin' in some cosmic rays, gettin' healed by Mother Nature! Takin' a little brewsky, holdin' onto a beautiful babe, and I'm fine today! Sweet!"

I miss American Gladiators. Malibu was the greatest.

You bet.

The waitress looks on, stopwatch in hand, as The Blazin' Challenge riots on

Ah, the Blazin' Challenge. Friday night, we celebrated two birthdays -- mine and my buddy Josh's (my brother's wife's brother) -- at Buffalo Wild Wings. The previous time we'd been there, we had noticed with some degree of curiosity the "Blazin' Challenge" sign and honor wall. Unfortunately, this was on the way out. We decided the next time we went, it would be high time to give it a whirl.

Friday night was that time.

There were three of us that attempted this spicy contest -- my brother, Josh, and myself. Now, I don't usually like high-end spicy food, or at least, not to the extent of those two. Their tolerance for spice borders on masochistic. But I couldn't say no, not when it was a celebration.

The waitress immediately said, "Are you sure? You know its the Blazin' wings, right?" as though she was literally scared for our livelihood in the aftermath of the contest. We nodded and said we understood this to be true.

29 is the highest possible score in Cribbage. A Rubik's Cube can be solved in 29 moves or less. 29 is the interstate designation of a freeway running from Missouri to North Dakota. 2029 is the year when Buddy Holly's music will move into the public domain. Ray Charles released an album in 1980 named "Genius+Soul=Jazz".

I bring up these points because I am 29 on Monday. And this past Saturday night, 29+25=Awesome.

But that's not where this story begins. No, its really an inter-connected four-pronged story that is more "chapter in a book" than "short story", but more "short story" than "blog post". In other words, print it out and read it on the couch, because its long.

Last Tuesday night, in the cold and the rain, it was opening night for our sand volleyball league. It was fairly hilarious that the Cleveland Indians postponed four home games over the weekend due to similar conditions, and yet here we were in a recreational league, playing. So the team that gets paid to play sits out, and the team that pays TO play, plays. Seems about right.

It had been five months since we last played -- wait, has it been that long? (counting to self...November, December, January, February, March...good lord!) so it would be totally understandable that we'd be rusty.

But we picked right back up where we left off, which is not a good thing. We jumped out to a 12-4 lead in the first game, and then proceeded to lose 15-13. Yep, that's right where we left off alright. Good to know we didn't lose any skills over the offseason.

That bad weather last week was rewarded with great weather this week. 68 degrees, sunny, no wind. 3 more losses, too.

Last summer while we were on the Minneapolis leg of the Vosstag World Tour (with special guest "Batman"), I was looking through a t-shirt store for some new hilarious shirts to wear. An "Appetite For Destruction"-era GNR shirt caught my eye, and I picked it up with the intent of purchasing it.

Well, Glypha was hysterical over the prospect of me buying this shirt. His bemused hatred for Guns N Roses is well-documented on this site and elsewhere, and he always tries to convince us that we ought to hate them too.

Personally, I dig any pre-Spaghetti Incident GNR. My buddy Continental believes they have only 2 albums: Appetite For Destruction, and a single-disc version of Use Your Illusion (because the two-disc UYI is proof of their excess and symptomatic of their demise). Dick Herculanuum agrees they have just 2 albums: "Appetite For Destruction" and "Not Appetite For Destruction". Gilby is partial to GNR Live Era and The Spaghetti Incident, for obvious reasons.

Back in the day, I was a fairly decent Beer Pong player. Not spectacular, not great, merely decent. There was one guy I would often see at parties who was not only a dominant Beer Pong player, he insisted on calling the game "Beirut". His name: Bones Jackson.

Not his real name, mind you. I called him "Bones Jackson" because he stole a lot of bones, or dollars, from us in poker. He called Beer Pong "Beirut" because he was from out east and claimed "everyone on the East Coast calls it Beirut -- you stupid Midwesterners are so far behind us you still call this game Beer Pong."

I still maintain to this day he was making that up. It is, and always has been, Beer Pong. Beirut? The fact he would use the catchphrase, "I'm droppin' bombs on you, sucka!" after every made shot only served to further bolster my claim that he was making up the Beirut business.

That was 2000, and there was very little one could do to either prove/disprove a silly thing such as this. But this is 2007, or "The Wikipedia Era" as I call it, so I consulted that bastion of knowledge to get to the bottom of this chestnut. A search for "Beirut" obviously displays the capital city of Lebanon by default. But search for the disambiguation, and "Beer Pong" displays.

Back in November, I wrote about my displeasure with the University of Wisconsin for suing high schools that used a similarly-styled "W" as the Badgers. I'll reiterate my position that common sense should overrule black-and-white interpretation of the law in cases like this.

Wisconsin's argument is that high schools using a variation of their logo endangers their trademark, and costs them merchandising money. Because, you know, a high school sells lots and lots of merchandise to people who would otherwise buy Wisconsin merchandise. That's a stretch, but for the sake of argument, I'll agree with them. Explain this to me, then, Wisconsin:

The Chicago Bears of the NFL, the Cincinnati Reds of MLB, and the Creighton Bluejays of the NCAA all have an almost identical "C" on their hats. And particularly in the case of the first two, they sell an unbelievable amount of merchandise -- and yet, for almost 100 years, they seem to have been able to co-exist. But a university can't do likewise with a HIGH SCHOOL?

Someone explain this to me, because I'm confused.

Last week, during the Twins first game -- which was on in HD thanks to ESPN2 -- I was watching the game with my brother. Their oft-injured and impossibly-stiff Left Fielder, Rondell White, had just let loose another of his weak-armed throws into the infield, when I yelled out, "Nice throw, Knees!"

My brother's wife looked on quizzically. "Knees"? I refused to explain.

On the other hand, my brother knew exactly what I was referring to. The worst movie ever made -- as consistently voted by IMDB, and also named as such by Entertainment Weekly -- "Manos: The Hands of Fate". One of the main characters is a half-human half-goat named Torgo, who had HUGE knees and cow feet. The cloven feet and giant knees caused him to walk with an awkwardness that has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

Rondell does not have huge knees, but he does run the outfield rather awkwardly and has seriously injured his knees on numerous occasions -- a big portion of his injury-riddled career can be blamed on injured knees.