Opening Day

Today’s Opening Day. Ok. Ok. Technically there were two games last week in Japan and the Nationals opened their new park last night in DC, but today is really Opening Day. Today’s the day they close down the streets and have a parade in Cincinnati to commemorate the first pro baseball team that went 2-2 in 1869. Today’s the day the Giants and the Dodgers celebrate 50 years on the west coast. Today’s the day the Cubs take the field a century after winning their last World Series back in 1908.

I am a Cubs fan.

If you know anything about baseball, that will illicit some sort of response from you, most likely one of sympathy or pity.

Inevitably I am bound to spend some time on this blog musing about the Cubs season, especially now that I’ve plunked down the change to listen to the games online. I will try to keep such musings accessible to the average reader who might not follow baseball.

I am a baseball fan.

Over the years I have introduced many skeptics to the beauty of the game. Admittedly it’s not for everyone, but if you think baseball’s boring, you’re missing the point. But I won’t go into that right now.

Opening Day is about potential, about the one day every team is in first place. That is until you lose 4-3 in extra innings and join half the league in last place heading into game 2. Ah, that’s the Cubs starting off the season in style.

The real dream ticket: Gore/Obama?

It’s come up a few times with my friends, jokingly, especially earlier in the campaign, the idea that if neither Clinton nor Obama has the nomination sown up heading into the convention that the delegates could choose to nominate someone else. Gore even.

Ha ha. It always sounded silly. Impossible. Some far fetched idea that you, well, joke about.

But as the primary process grinds itself out with little hope of either Clinton or Obama locking up the nomination, with polls showing how divided the party has become, showing how close to a third of Clinton supporters would vote for McCain over Obama, suddenly the silly far fetched idea is getting some face time.

Perhaps it’s still far fetched, but Joe Klein at Time Magazine has not only written about it but gotten interesting reactions to it from highly ranked democrats. The more fractured the party gets heading into August, the more possible the idea becomes.

21

The movie 21 opens today, the film based on the bestselling book Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrick that chronicles the true-life story of a group of MIT math students who make millions counting cards in Vegas.

A lot of people, especially Asian-Americans, already dislike this movie because the races of the main characters were all changed from Asian-Americans to Caucasians. Prince Gomolvilas does a piece in Jukebox Stories called “21 Reasons the Movie 21 Already Sucks” that highlights this point. He very amusingly illustrates how no one would have stood for changing the race of Hurricane Carter, Malcolm X, or any of the real-life African-American characters Denzel Washington has played, but apparently it’s ok to do that to real-life Asian-Americans.

I told my screenwriter friend Chris about Prince’s piece. He called Hollywood's attitude towards minorities “horrifying.” Hollywood clings to this mistaken idea that the only way for a movie to make money is for it to have broad appeal and the only way to have broad appeal is to be about white people. Truth is not everyone needs to like a movie. You just need a small group of people to love it. And who’s to say a movie about Asian-American gamblers wouldn’t have broad appeal? The book certain did.

But that’s not why I’m predisposed to dislike 21 before I’ve seen it. A number of years ago Chris was working on a screenplay based on the real-life story of Darryl, a card counter he knew who had cut his teeth in the world of professional blackjack as a kid back in the 1970’s. That’s right, the MIT group didn’t invent card counting or even team-play, as much as they like to make it seem they did. In 1981, big-time card counter Ken Uston appeared on 60 Minutes and explained pretty much everything you needed to know to team-play card count. Legend has it when the episode aired, he was on the casino floor playing when suddenly his own face appeared on all the TV screens around him.

Chris’s script was a dark comedy, Boogie Nights meets Almost Famous. I read an early version of it and gave him feedback that ultimately ended up in the final script. The script didn’t romanticize the world of professional blackjack as much as it showed the ups and downs and downright bizarre. I loved it and was thrilled by the idea that he might sell it and someday I’d go to a movie I had known from its early pupa stage.

He finished the script and went down to Hollywood to pitch it to producers. Unfortunately he got to town the same week that Lawrence Fishburn signed on to do 21, and even though every producer loved his script, they weren’t going to buy it.

Now, I’m torn. Part of me would revel in the movie being a flop, but another part hopes it has enough success to make producers in Hollywood start searching for the next big blackjack movie. Then maybe I’ll have the thrill of seeing a movie bust out of that cocoon and fly away.

Even so, the real reason I dislike 21 is the bonehead marketing decision to release it on March 28th. Release it one week sooner and 21 opens 3/21.

Photo of the Week

The "Two O'Clock Titty" on the side of St. Mary's Catherdral in San Francisco.

I found it on www.sfist.com
Original photo credit: artlog

Rickrolling

Everybody else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I?

Follow the link below before reading the rest of this post:

The Best Website Ever!!!

What just happened to you? You were “rickrolled” or tricked into following a link that unexpectedly lead you to the Rick Astley video “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Of course, I choose to send you to the more informative Pop-Up Video version rather than the more traditional one at www.yougotrickrolled.com.

Why? Because that’s the kind of thing that happens on this whacky thing we call the internet. I find it highly amusing, especially since I like that song to begin with. My sister was really into Rick Astley.

For more information on “rickrolling” check out the following articles:
New York Times
USA Today

3 Days Later: Jesus Christ Zombie Lord

Years ago my friend Dave Dyson had a startling realization. Three days after his crucifixion, Jesus Christ rose from the dead. What else rises from the dead to walk the Earth? That’s right: zombies. Creative inspiration suddenly bitch slapped Dave like a 2-dollar hooker, and the idea to spoof Jesus Christ Superstar as Jesus Christ Zombie Lord was born.

Dave set about the long process of outlining the story and rewriting the songs. Most people who learned about the idea, love it, but the dream of making it a reality seemed a long-shot at best.

Well, those long-shot odds have gotten minusculey shorter. With the combined strength of creative producer and generally funny guy Clay Robeson and the musical girth of David Norlfeet, a teaser trailer has been cut and unleashed upon the web.

View it. Share it. Donate money to them, and someday you might be plunking down $10 at the multiplex to see the full-length feature. Heck, if they can make Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Undead, this seems the next logical progression!

www.3dayslater.net

A New Phone

I got this new phone last Sunday. It’s a Samsung slider phone. When I first talked to the woman at the store she said “oh, you have a Motorola. You should probably get another Motorola then. They’re the most user-friendly.”

I thought, can there really be that big of a difference? Besides, all the Samsung phones were “free” while the Motorola’s would have cost me money. So, after taking into consideration my own tastes, and the opinions of my girlfriend, I got a Katalyst. “Free” turned out to cost me $80, about $50 of which I will get back in rebate form, but still not too bad. They switched my SIM card around and I was off and running with my brand new phone!

I so miss my Motorola. It’s not just that the menus are different. It’s that the menus are retarded, and I can’t customize the buttons to go directly to the functions I use the most. The “predictive” text message feature isn’t actually predictive at all, and the dictionary didn’t recognize the word “good”. “Good!” Let me say that again: the dictionary didn’t recognize the word “good.” That is not a sign of a good phone.

None of the ring-tone options sound anything remotely like a phone ringing either. Call me a traditionalist, but I like my phone to ring, not play some company branded chime. No matter which of the 4 text message alerts I choose, I never seem to hear them, except last night. At 3:30am I get a text message. A spam text message. WTF??

I must admit the slider is taking some getting used to as well. I keep feeling like the phone’s going to slide closed while I’m talking on it. The camera is nice though. Everything I find online says the Motorola’s have terrible camera’s. And yet, I think… That’s why I have a digital camera.

I’m thinking of taking it back and getting a Motorola. If only I could afford an iPhone.

Another Allergy Medicine Induced Ramble

Today I’m on pseudophedrine. Not the wimpy phenylephrine stuff that comes in Sudafed these days, but the full-on, you can make Meth out of me, pseudophedrine. This stuff is supposed to make you wired, unlike Claritin which makes me wired anyway. Why have I opted for the distracting rush of a near illegal decongestant?

Because the phenlephrine I took this morning did a sum total of nothing for my clogged ears. Whereas the pseudophedrine cleared them up exactly 12 minutes after I took it. 12 minutes! Which leads me to my next logical point:

I had to eat dinner at Piraat last night instead of the Theater Too Café. The Theater Too Café is downstairs and up the block from the theater where I spend a lot of my time either in shows or in rehearsals for said shows. A year or so ago, I went there and got a chicken wrap with humus and a little hot sauce. I immediately dubbed this the “Chicken Sandwich of God”. The name pretty much sums up my feelings on the sandwich.

Having not had one in a while, I salivated the long walk form the Embarcadero BART stop whereat I had left my sweetie to the Theater Too Café wherein I had planned to partake in the said religious experience that commoners call a wrap, but it was closed! Instead I wandered up the street to Piraat for pizza only to order rotisserie chicken, vegetables and rice. Good. Edible, but the heavens did not open up and shine a beam of light on my taste buds.

I need to go buy more pseudophed.

Photo courtesy PDPhoto.org

Protest for its Own Sake

People protesting the Iraq War are laying down in the middle of the intersection outside my building right now. While I admire their commitment, I have to wonder if they’re just protesting for the sake of protesting. I often wonder this, living in the nation’s hot bed of liberalism here in the Bay Area. People here will protest anything. Somehow the neo-hippies feel the need to validate themselves and prove that they are just as passionate and committed as their idols from the 60’s.

I don’t mean to say that the issues that face us today aren’t important; they just don’t seem to quite carry the same weight as the ones faced back then. If 60,000 soldiers had been killed to-date in Iraq (roughly the number killed in Vietnam), I’d be down on the street with them. As it is, I’m not sure how turning downtown San Francisco into a parking lot for a few hours today will really hasten the end of the war. Voting for Barak Obama feels like enough for me and is possibly more likely to actually effect the change I’m seeking here.

Protesting the Marine Recruiting Center in Berkeley or sitting in trees at Cal (trees the University planted in the first place) just feels to me more like a self aggrandizing plea for personal attention or a way to recapture some idealized bygone feeling of rebellion. Do these people really care about the trees or the Marines or are they just grasping at some way to validate their lifestyle? I’d like to think there was real feeling there, but when I watch video of a college kid getting arrested for tree sitting, I can’t help but think “he’s just doing that to get laid.”

By instilling in me such cynicism, the protestors do nothing to make me sympathize for their cause. Seems like everyday someone protests something in the Bay Area, or the country as a whole. When protesting becomes that prevalent, it becomes ordinary, mundane, and ineffective. It becomes the background noise that swallows up the real problems facing this country.

Yes, the war is one of those real problems, or is it? Isn’t it just symptomatic of our society’s over reliance on petroleum or big business’s control of our political system? Maybe if people weren’t so busy laying in streets or sitting in trees, maybe if people weren’t looking for the next issue or war to protest, this war wouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Best Windsheild Graffiti Ever

Originally found on sfist.com
Photo credit: Omega it's jameth

St. Patrick's Day Joke

I wrote this last year for a friend to enter into her office joke contest. The challenge was to combine St. Patrick’s Day and Chinese New Year into one joke. It won a prize.

St. Patrick and Buddha are sitting together at a pub. St. Patrick turns to Buddah and says, "Alright, I've done it. I won the bet. I drove all the snakes out of Ireland, now you owe me the secret to inner peace. And I'm going to share that secret with all my people so that the Irish can live in peace for all time. So what is it?"

Buddha turns to St. Patrick and says, "In order to have inner peace, first you need a snake..."

Irish

A number of year’s ago on St. Patrick’s Day, a coworker asked me if I was part Irish. I enthusiastically replied that my great-grandmother was a Murphy and 100% Irish. She, being significantly closer to her Irish ancestry, replied somewhat disdainfully “Is that all?”

Is that all? I was taken aback. It had never occurred to me that that wasn’t a lot. Being the Western European mutt that I am, to be able to say I’m about 1/8th Irish is about as much as I am anything. Sure I’m more German than anything, followed closely by my mysterious Swiss ancestry that gives me my name, but Irish is right up there. Besides, no popular holidays exist for celebrating one’s Swiss or German heritage, let alone the trace amounts of English, Scottish, Welsh, or Danish I have swirling about my DNA.

So why celebrate the drop in my gene pool that is Irish? Perhaps the better question is why have Americans created a holiday upon which everyone can claim to be Irish? I marvel at the phenomenon especially considering how America once shunned its Irish immigrant minority. Can we look forward to a day where everyone is black on MLK Day?

Let’s face it: we’re a nation that loves to party, but generally needs an excuse to do so. We’ve built three major holidays around getting drunk: New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween (with Cinco de Mayo swiftly ascending the ranks to make that trio a quartet). St. Patrick’s Day provides us with a prime opportunity to drink given traditional associations with the Irish and alcohol. Today everyone can lift a glass of Guinness or whisky and feel in touch with some mythical Irish ancestry of their own.

Whereas I get a day that I can feel more in touch with a tiny part of my heritage. A day when that 1/8th swallows up the rest of me and gives me a rare opportunity to feel ethnic instead of the white bread diluted majority that I am. Today that 1/8th is a lot.

Squombie

I had lunch today with my friend Emma, a.k.a. Squombie. I know her from Renaissance Faire wherein her name is “Squombie”. Yes, I have been known to do Faire. No, this does not make me a freak with no social skills.

Perhaps the best part of participating in Faire is meeting people I would ordinarily never have met. Squombie is a prime example of this. How else would a home-schooled Muslim teenager who splits her time between Montreal and the Bay Area become a part of my social circle?

And had she not my life would have been far less rich. Squombie is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. I could go on and on about her (for instance the image for this post is her artwork), but I don’t want to turn this into a “how great is Squombie” post. The point is, sometimes we meet the most random people in the most random of places. Places we would never expect. People we would never expect.

Faire is one of those places and has a lot of those people. And getting to dress up in medieval clothes and gross out patrons by biting chunks out of fish heads is a bonus.

Ruined It For Everyone

People often borrow my Muni Pass here at work, if they want to go somewhere on their lunch break and want to save the fare. As long as I’m not planning on going anywhere on my lunch break, I don’t mind. They take it in the morning. They return it in the afternoon. Never had any problems.

Until today. Genius borrowed it this morning and then called me in the afternoon from Oakland. Not only was she out for the rest of the day, but she’s not coming in tomorrow.

Well, she is now to return my pass and pay me for the 2-3 fares I’ll have to pay for between now and then. I’m off to the allergist tonight and I don’t know if my transfer will still be good to get me home. When she heard that she considered coming in tonight, but I didn’t feel right about forcing her to come back in.

It’s not so much the money that bothers me, it’s the hassle of having to track down a dollar fifty every time I want to ride the bus. That’s the primary reason I bother with the Muni Pass in the first place. Now there’s also the nagging worry of the unknown. Being “Worst Case Scenario Guy” as I am, I worry that she won’t come in tomorrow for some reason and I’ll be stuck without it all weekend. Then I worry about her not wanting to pay me for the extra 4-8 fares I’d rack up over the weekend. What if this creates a major rift in the office the decreases productivity and ultimately causes the collapse of a major corporation and plunges our economy further into a recession?

Maybe I should have been harder on her. Maybe I should have forced her to come in tonight. As it is, she just called me to say she’s giving it to another co-worker tonight who lives near her. That’s a measure of piece-of-mind I guess.

I’ll tell you though, I’ll think twice about lending it out in the future. The fate of the nation could be at stake.

Hamlet Adventure Game

A friend of mine posted this link in his blog:
http://versificator.co.uk/hamlet/

It’s an old school text adventure game based on Hamlet. I finished it in a few days playing it in my spare time. I should have tracked exactly how long it took so I could brag about my adventure game prowess, but alas I did not. Say good-bye to your afternoon.

Claritin

I have allergies. I discovered this almost two years ago when I kept turning up at the doctor’s office complaining of flu-like symptoms. He handed me some Astelin and said “you have allergies”.

About six months later I changed doctors. My old one was in Oakland. I haven’t lived in Oakland since 2001 and it was finally time to get with the times. In the transition from my old doctor to my new doctor, I had to go about a week without any Astelin. I used Claritin instead, and quickly discovered a very unusual fact: Claritin makes me high.

My heart races a bit, but more importantly, my mind races jumping from half formed thought to half formed thought like a frog fleeing a burning forest of lily pads. I find this incredibly annoying. I can’t even concentrate long enough to play a board game, and I talk incessantly. Those of you who actually know me know this is somewhat the opposite of my normal state.

That week I was on the Claritin I drank a lot, just to take the edge off.

Last fall I went to see an allergist and found out I’m massively allergic to dust mites, or really, I’m allergic to dust mite shit. (People generally aren’t allergic to the dust mites themselves). So I started on a run of allergy shots.

Unfortunately last month we got to a dosage that results in a giant itchy welt on my arm every time I get a shot. Because of the reaction, they can’t increase the dosage, and so the shots really aren’t doing me any good. Last week, the allergist suggested I TAKE A CLARITIN THE DAY OF MY SHOT.

So I did, in hopes maybe it wouldn’t effect me the same way. It does, but somehow I managed to write this and make it coherent. Of course, it took me 2 hours, but…