February 2008 Archives

Wednesday, I was at Hy-Vee picking up some hamburger for the grill, because anytime it gets above 40 degrees I'm grilling and that's all there is to it. Actually, as long as there isn't snow on the deck, I'll be out there. I even installed a light above my grill so that I can grill at night! You bet.

Anyway, I'm browsing through the cheese aisle, when I see someone who looks exactly like Cliff Glypha. I mean EXACTLY like him. And they live right down the street, so it was entirely feasible for him to be in there. And the stuff in his basket, well, it looked like the kind of stuff Cliff Glypha would buy.

Rather than walk up and say what's up, I decided to mess with him. I walked behind him and started whispering his name. Glypha. No response. Again. No response.

I dropped a plastic jar from four feet above the floor right behind him, thinking it might scare the bejeezus out of him. Well, it did...except it wasn't Cliff Glypha. Just some random dude who looked a lot like him from behind. Try explaining that one to a stranger and not come off looking like the biggest weirdo ever!

You bet.

From time to time, I like looking at my webstats to see what people search for when they arrive at this site. Here's some of my favorite searches this month.

Showbiz Pizza
SI Swimsuit Issue
Lando Calrissian
Rudy Washington Rebounding Book
Cloud City
Lohan nude photo shoot
Mr. Tarkanian the boss from hell
over the top stallone
steve francis dunk

I mean, that's some weird stuff. I'm pretty sure I've never written about HALF of that stuff, especially #2 on the list. As for Rudy Washington, its news to me that the former Drake basketball coach has a book on rebounding...so if you came here looking for it, sorry. The, uh, #6 on that list...Dick Herculanum would butcher me with a battle axe if I hosted that kind of stuff here. Like I say, bizarre stuff. Entertaining to look at though. The list! What did you think I meant? You bet.

So here's something crazy. No, not that this is the 875th post in the long and illustrious history of this blog. Although that is pretty crazy.

I had someone send me an email about six months ago asking me if I would be willing to sell my domain name to them. Yeah, someone -- we'll call him "Lars Moronica" for the sake of confidentiality -- actually wanted to buy polyfro.com from me. Go to Google sometime and search for Polyfro -- do the results look like something anyone would want to buy? Usually when spammers or domain hustlers look to buy names, they want popular, common words that will drive traffic to their spyware-infested dungeons of horror. Polyfro?

Its shocking because, well, how do I say this...ITS A MADE UP WORD. I invented it one day, out of nothing. That's why when you search Google, the end-all-be-all of all data in the entire UNIVERSE, you can go tens of pages deep before finding anything not somehow related to this site or to me personally. Because I invented the word. Come to think of it, there's lots of words I'm responsible for.

(Technically, that DJ at that techno club where I once wore the Afro Wig to originally coined the term. But I don't think he remembers that, and besides, I don't know who that dude is even if I wanted to thank him.)

People say that professional sports aren't the same as they used to be. I mean, can you imagine a team recording the Super Bowl Shuffle now? At the time, it was actually in the rotation on MTV and was somewhat taken seriously (although everyone pretty much knew how ridiculous it was). When you consider it was recorded before they had won the NFC Championship, though, it seems a bit presumptuous. Hell, its perhaps the greatest single piece of smack talk ever. I'm sorry Dick, but yes, its better than your boy Shannon Sharpe calling in the National Guard as the Broncos beat up on the Patriots in 1996.

Granted, that was pretty good. Caught by NFL Films yelling into a sideline phone to, presumably, no one, their microphones picked up on this:

"Mr. President, call in the National Guard! Send as many men as you can spare! Because we are killing the Patriots! They need emergency help!"

Hey, everybody makes mistakes. I made one driving down West Maple Monday night, underestimating the ice on the roads. I was heading to the grocery store to get a bucket of fried chicken, because fried chicken is tasty, and because I never keep more than a days' worth of food in the house, so I had no choice.

I was rolling down the street, rockin' out to Interpol, and to be honest I believed I was driving a prudent speed. I wasn't driving the limit, I can tell you that. But as the light changed quickly, I applied the brakes...and nothing. My car started skidding out, the intersection was approaching, and there was no time to think. Just time to react.

Lucky thing I'm so dominant. I turned the wheel in the direction of the skid, just like I learned in Drivers Ed the one day I didn't sleep through class 12 years ago, and straightened the car out. Problem was, I was only marginally slowing down. So I made a rash decision.

Tuesday night, the Creighton Bluejays hosted Missouri State, and as I am for every game, I was there, 12 rows up from the court in the same seats I've had since the Qwest Center opened five years ago. You can read my entire thoughts on the game elsewhere, but here's three absolutely classic stories that don't actually involve the game. Enjoy.

What's 4'1" and wears glasses?
a) a really smart fourth grader
b) Barry Hinson

Barry Hinson is the Missouri State coach, and he's kinda short. Its clever, see?

Anyway, Sign Guy was in rare form at Tuesday night's game. For those of you who aren't familiar with Sign Guy, he sits about 20 rows behind the visiting bench, and frequently brings blank 20"x30" poster board to the games and then scribbles out signs during the game to hold up during timeouts. From time to time, the fuddy duddies who sit around him complain to the Qwest Center Police -- a band of rogue, glorified mall cops derisively nicknamed the Qwestapo -- and his signs are confiscated.

I came to a most uncomfortable realization while I was watching the new "Knight Rider" on Sunday night: the show was clearly terrible, yet I was enjoying it. How is that possible? At every turn, the characters were wooden. With every sentence, the dialog got more and more ridiculous. And yet I enjoyed it thoroughly.

One reviewer wrote "Was anyone really clamoring for a new Knight Rider series? I surely wasn't." Well, I wasn't necessarily asking for it, but the movie was the highest rated show of the night, and the highest rated network movie in three years. So maybe I wasn't the only one curious to watch it.

Bad as it was, I enjoyed it, particularly when David Hasselhoff makes a cameo as Michael Knight, long-lost father of the kid who will become the new Knight Rider. The sad realization, though, was not that the show was bad. I knew it would be bad; the original was bad. That didn't stop me from dressing up as Michael Knight for Halloween a couple of years ago. No, the sad realization is that even Knight Rider is no match for the inevitability of time. Technology has surpassed what once passed for science fiction.

Saturday morning, I was out running some errands when I got a text from Gilby Clarke. "I have an xtra ticket for the UNO game tonight. Interested?"

A ticket to a college hockey game? Sounded dominant to me, so I replied, "Sure!"

Because of the state wrestling tournament at the Qwest Center, UNO had to play the weekend series against Bowling Green at the venerable Omaha Civic Auditorium. I hadn't set foot inside the Civic since March of 2003, when the nationally ranked Kyle Korver-led Bluejays played their final home game ever in that building. A then-single Cliff Glypha and I sat in nosebleed seats and watched the Jays beat the crap out of Wichita State on Senior Night. Good times.

Well, I did the only sensible thing, and went back on another date with The Girl Who Gave Me The Flu. When your advisors are in near-universal agreement -- something which rarely happens, by the way -- you almost have to follow their suggested behavior.

I'm not so happy to report that things did not go too well. Call it the Seinfeld Syndrome.

I didn't sit at dinner and try to make her feel guilty, which is something Jerry might have done. And I didn't accuse her of doing it on purpose like Costanza might have. No, I just couldn't do that thing that people do before they say goodnight after a nice date. All I could think about was germs.

Two things. One, clearly I am insane. Two, I need to burn all my copies of Seinfeld on DVD and never watch it in syndication again.

Since there's about a zero percent chance of either of those things happening, I just need to suck it up and stop being such an incredible douchebag.

I was born in the late 70s, and for kids like me who grew up during the 80s, Thriller was a big part of the music that defined our generation. Just like the Beatles, the Stones, Motown, and the Beach Boys defined the 60s, Michael Jackson helped define the 80s. And what a time for such an album! The music industry was slumping, disco was over, the economy was in the toilet, and American pop culture needed a monster hit. Thriller was just that album. And now 25 years later, the music industry is slumping, hip-hop is over, the economy is in the toilet...and Jacko re-releases Thriller.

My affinity for the album is obvious. It was one of the first cassettes I ever owned, and the first I listened to through headphones when I was six years old. I could sing every word, pull off most of the dance moves from Beat It, and wished the sidewalk panels would light up when I walked on them like they did for Jacko in Billie Jean. My best friend and I even teamed up to sing the duet "The Girl Is Mine" in school.

The question is, are the new remixes any good? In a word, no. They're crap. Billie Jean 2008 Featuring Kanye West? Beat It 2008 Featuring Fergie? Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' 2008 Featuring Akon? PYT 2008 Featuring Will.i.am? And perhaps the worst offender of them all, The Girl Is Mine 2008 Featuring Will.i.am. Really? All of these artists are better than this, and should be ashamed of these desperately lame attempts at remaking classic hits for a new generation.

I know its hard to believe from someone who seemingly is as sure of himself as I am, but I am a registered Independent. Well, I was. There was never much reason to pick a side in Nebraska before, besides the obvious benefit of receiving lots of junk mail (sic). After I opted to stay in this state after college, I'd been led to believe that the registered voter numbers skewed six-to-one Elephant. For someone who's way more moderate than your average Elephant, what's the point?

Nonetheless, I picked a side on Saturday, by virtue of showing up at the Democratic Caucus and filling out the requisite forms. Turns out the numbers don't skew as askew as the pundits want you to believe, and depending on the district, they don't skew at all. Now, I'm in District 18, which encompasses North Omaha from about 60th street west and north of Maple. And its the prototypical Elephant dominated district:

Quite a while ago, I helped to launch a podcast with my good buddies Cliff Glypha and Dick Herculanum. After the first season, I departed, but have occasionally lent my rather insignificant talents to the show since then. For this week's show, they asked me to come on as a guest -- and to host their annual Super Bowl Extravaganza. I agreed, with one caveat:

I get to run the show, and do whatever I want. They said "sure", and this is what the result wound up being. It turned into a broadcasted frat party, the result of which is hilarious...and probably makes Cliff and Dick happy I only get to wreak such havoc on their show once a year!

As if there was ever a doubt, let the record show that Van Halen, when fronted by Diamond Dave, still kicks monumental amounts of ass all of the time. Two-plus hours of good ol' fashioned American rock and roll on Monday in Omaha provided all the proof one needs to prove that statement.

That's right, two hours. Actually, that's underselling them; they played 26 songs in a concert that lasted 2:15. Pretty impressive stuff, especially when you consider that the David Lee Roth-era VH catalog "only" consists of 57 songs. Six albums (VH1, VH2, Women and Children First, Diver Down, Fair Warning, 1984) and two songs from a greatest hits album. 57 tracks, and they played 26 of them on Monday night. Seriously, when you practically play HALF of your catalog in a show, only the hardest of hard core fans would be disappointed by the set list.

Sure, I wish they'd played a couple of album tracks that happen to be personal favorites, but you can't argue with this list.

Sunday for the Super Bowl, we headed out to Buffalo Wild Wings. Gilby is a huge Giants fan, and because they had won three playoff games in a row with us watching the games at that fine establishment, we had to go back for the biggest game. Actually, Dick Herculanum put the question to him this way: "Since you're the only one of us with a team playing, you pick the place."

Superstition being what it is, we went to Buffalo Wild Wings. Now, I'd never been to a restaurant or bar for the Super Bowl, so I honestly had no idea whether it would be busy or not. Figured there was a 50/50 shot of it being a zoo or being a ghost town. But I told Gilby I'd meet him there a couple of hours before kickoff so that if we couldn't get a table, we'd have time to formulate a Plan B.

At 3 pm when we got there, it wasn't busy, so we got a good table. It was a good thing too; as kickoff neared the place became packed. Also as kickoff neared, Cliff Glypha showed up, and then Dick Herculanum, Jack Bauhaus and his wife, and a bunch of other people I never really got to meet. We had our own little private party goin' on. Good times.

I'm a pretty healthy guy. Hell, I can count on one finger the number of times I've missed a day of work due to illness over the years. For the record, I've been at my job for EIGHT years now. So one day is a pretty good record.

Well, that's pretty much gone to hell now. This latest bout with the flu left me on the couch for four straight days, and I went through so much Ny-Quil that the nasty taste stopped bothering me. Ah, the Liquid Sledgehammer.

Along the way, I missed Continental Fruitger's open house for his new studio, a party on Saturday and a chance to see a friend who was in town from Las Vegas. And the drugs nearly made me sleep through Creighton's biggest game of the year (televised in HDTV!), with ESPN College Gameday there for the pregame, too. So my timing was impeccable, to say the least.

How in the hell did I get so sick? Quite a story. Join me after the jump, won't you?