another crazy week

yesterday: Kyle polo (the number one varsity goalie is out of town this week, so Kyle's going to get a chance to shine [as opposed to get lit up like a Christmas tree, like he has the last couple of weeks... he doesn't do well with little/no warm-up]... and last night he did: nine saves, only two allowed, a steal and some GREAT passing)

today: Jack polo practice, Kyle polo

tomorrow: the Shakespeare project begins, Kyle polo, Jack polo practice

Thursday: Jack polo practice, Kyle polo (maybe)

Friday: Shakespeare (the Scottish play) under the stars...

and I'm trying to do some painting as well...

crazy

Gaslight Anthem and Bruce

Oh, to have been in Merry Ol' England last week:

goodbye to GG

Saturday was GG's "Remembrance" ... it was very nice. Family, friends... it felt OK... it didn't seem to dredge up too many emotions.

I kinda wish we had done one for Ma... Pa had said that she didn't want one, so we didn't.

But, as Lisa says, the memorial is not for the departed... it's for the living, a way to grieve, a way to say goodbye. We didn't get that. Is that one of the reasons I was (am?) depressed?

I feel fine now, the meds are working fine... but when the prescription ran out a few months back, I spiraled down into the funk, so I'm not fine (though I may feel it)... thank goodness for modern pharmaceuticals.

Bruins drafted

Holiday fell to 17... not surprised. Had he lived up to the hype, he would have been lottery. But as it is, I really believe his career will be hard-pressed to match the 21st guy in the draft: Darren Collison... he's the man

boomerang

It's summer, so the boys bought outdoor toys... including a foam boomerang and a three-pronged foam pseudo-boomerang. The last couple of days we've spent a little time messing around with them, not really getting them to work correctly.

But just before lunch yesterday, Kyle discovered the secret... and Jack is catching on, as well. So we went on-line and bought some new things from boomerangs.com (not kidding)... when we printed out the receipt, we found this statement at the top:

There is a strong competitive boomerang scene in the US which you can take part in by joining www.USBA.org

You know me, give me a link and I gotta click it.

OMG, it's like Dodgeball and the Ocho... There are video player profiles and everything...

Listen to the voice-over... it IS straight out of Dodgeball



But still pretty cool... we can't wait for our new boomerangs to arrive!

next year's Oscar race

just got a little more exciting (at least the Best Picture category)...

In a pretty bold move for the staid Academy, they've increased the number of nominees in the top category from five to TEN... if Up doesn't get a nomination now, the process really is hosed...

hulu better watch its back...

looks like TimeWorthless (er, Time Warner) and Comcast are teaming up to fight what they consider to be the most pressing evil in the world today:

hulu

on the plus side, I'm not sure they can succeed, given TW's track record...

kate plus eight minus jon

TLC was the catalyst, but these two were dysfunctional to start.

Though Lisa liked to watch the show, I couldn't stand it... I found no pleasure in watching emasculation week after week... in the short segments I could bring myself to watch, I kept wanting him to stand up for himself.

Looks like the only way he could stand up was by lying down (or maybe he likes it standing up).

Coming soon: Jon joins the cast of HBO's "Cathouse: the series"... and after TLC's ratings plummet, Kate will be relegated to the Game Show Network's new series "Ballbusting with Kate"... or she could take over the Janice role in the next iteration of "I'm a Celebrity... get me out of here!" ... or maybe we could get a MMA steel cage death match thing goin' with Octomom....

fiction 101 redux (or, rather, three minute fiction)

NPR is hosting a contest:

Three Minute Fiction

It's time to dust off the Fiction 101 submission, and put it to work!

father's day

It was a great dad's day yesterday:

breakfast at Smokey's BBQ

nap

cleaned house, hung UCLA stuff on the wall, helped Kyle move his bed

nachos for lunch

"The Proposal" with the family... pretty good... not Oscar-bait, but well-done romantic comedy

Souplantation for dinner...

good day

-------------------

Just listened to this as a podcast... great father's day stuff from the Weinbergs...

craziness begins

GG died, what, 2 months ago, but next weekend is the "remembrance" (don't call it a "memorial service" ... Lisa's mom doesn't like that... why? who knows... but now I've got LL Cool J going through my head: Don't call it a comeback...).

Lisa's two twin sisters (and the 8-week granddaughter of one of them) are coming out on Monday. The brothers and their families are coming down later in the week. Stress will rise, Lisa will be on edge. Luckily, Pa will be out of town in Laughlin Monday-Friday, so he'll either miss the drama or only the prelude to Vesuvius. I kinda want him to leave Wednesday and come back Sunday, so he'll miss it all, but no, that wouldn't be cool.

Jack has a water polo game at 12:20 and the mem-- er, REMEMBRANCE is at 1. Pa reminded me just an hour ago, that there's a JV tournament on Saturday and Sunday, so it may even be crazier than projected (Kyle's coach wants him at EVERYTHING, both varsity and JV... in high school water polo, the varsity plays before the JV, so if Kyle doesn't get time in the varsity game, then he'll see the majority of time in the JV... so it looks as if the coach wants to get him varsity playing time [but at this point doesn't see Kyle as supplanting the senior goalie's starting spot... he has a month to do that IF it's going to happen]).

Yeah, crazy (Almost Famous quote alert... thank you, Ben Fong Torres)

a beginning and some pauses

So I launched The Bill / Shakespeare Project... check it out.

That's the beginning. The pauses come from our basketball team: injuries have struck both returner Drew Gordon and incoming frosh Taylor Honeycutt. We're going to be thin enough as it is (with some projecting a third place finish in next year's strong Pac-10. Damn, I hope recovery comes quckly.

-------------------------

And just when you think YOUR teenager makes bad decisions...



Wow, Kyle's not such an idiot, after all... (just kidding, not about the NOT being an idiot, about being an idiot... oh, you know what I mean...)

the spider and the fly

OK, I've been away again for a while...

And while I was gone, this happened:



I've been waiting for a PETA response, but they've been (surprisingly) silent.

---------------

In other news, I'm starting up a new blog.

The Bill/Shakespeare Project

Think of it as being like Julie/Julia, only instead of recipes, we're going to do plays.

Don't know how it will affect this blog... I'll try to do both, but we'll see...

I'll post a link tomorrow.

nooooooo

the school year is coming to an end... and the boys are about to invade my office space for the next two and a half months...

I can't wait for


It's the most wonderful time of the year.... (school and college football, baby)

Timmah!

Ah, where does one begin?

from ESPN:

How much will the NCAA look at Floyd as a sacrificial lamb in the wake of a major investigation that involves football and basketball? Was this move pushed by USC so that when it's in front of the committee on infractions it can show that it took corrective action to avoid a charge of lack of institutional control?

from Fox Sports:

the likely truth: USC did not technically ask Floyd to resign. But the school made Floyd's office seat so uncomfortable, it might as well have been made of burning nails.

When Arizona called, USC did not renegotiate his contract. Floyd landed star recruit Renardo Sidney, then suddenly stopped recruiting him. It was pretty obvious that USC had told Floyd he couldn't take Sidney. Tim Floyd does not suddenly walk away from one of the top recruits in the country.

Garrett wanted Floyd gone, and Floyd knew it. So Garrett and USC pulled one of the top recruits in the country away from him.

Does anybody think USC would have done the same to Pete Carroll? Make no mistake: Tim Floyd made his own professional deathbed. If Floyd was truly innocent, of course he would speak up for himself. He wouldn't just resign.

Instead, Floyd leaves because USC had to sacrifice somebody. More than three years have passed since Yahoo Sports reported that an agent paid Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush well into six figures while Bush played for the Trojans. That case is still pending. It has become quite obvious that USC would like that case to pend for another few centuries.

(and even) from the LA Times:

Tim Floyd submitted his resignation Tuesday and Athletic Director Mike Garrett accepted it so fast he probably got a paper cut snapping it out of the fax machine.

The good news, of course, is that it's only the fall of USC basketball, leaving the all-important work of preserving, defending and protecting the constitution of USC football.
...
Remember, like we said, in the end, it's only Tim Floyd who's leaving and it's only USC basketball being asked to take a long walk in a dark alley.

USC football opens at home against San Jose State on Sept. 5.

from me:

Good fuckin' riddance.

Nurse Jackie

Went over to the Coreys last night to watch the first episode of Weeds and caught the premiere of Nurse Jackie.

Very dark, VERY funny.

SPOILER ALERT





The opening (with its reference to Eliot's "Love Song..."), depicting both her bad back and her consequent addiction to pain-killers (she snorts the granules from the capsules) felt pretty real... but it had me thinking, "Where's the funny?"

That was only increased by the opening medical sequence in which we see her prowess (and the ineptitude of the ER doc...) which ends in the patient's death. Uh, but where's the funny?

That begins with her forging of his organ donor card (yeah, I know, it doesn't sound funny, but it was, ironically so [especially with its followup with his family])... and her followup with the inept doc (and his bizarre sexual gesture Tourett's).

Zoe the new nurse... funny... then it was great to see Anne Deveare Smith working again... "Quiet and Mean... those are my people." ... Jackie-pharmacist-sex with the bad back... [the fact that it's with the actor who was Carmella Soprano's priest makes it ]even funnier... (but when the sex begins to look like she's whoring herself out for pain meds, it goes dark again...)... then darkly comic again "Puke away from the ear, Zoe"... her lunch with the English doctor was hilarious ("Dr. Cooper grabbed my tit today." "Did your tit make the first move?"...the discussion of healing=nurses and cutting up bodies=doctors... the reluctance to save the choking old woman)... third-degree burns on the scrotum (and Zoe's phone-picture taking of it... the ironic "I like to have a clear head." ... ) ... then the dead patient's girlfriend sends us back into dark territory, as does a scumbag prostitute cutter... then the ear in the toilet brings us darkly back into the funny... "cole slaw"... dating a severed head... "I think you're a saint..."

But the final twist... her daughters and (WTF?) husband? Brilliant.

The episode was tightly written:
The final St. Augustine discussion links back to the beginning and its discussion of "those with the greatest capacity for good are those with the greatest capacity for evil."
The pancakes from loving significant others.
Her "saintliness" vs. her infidelity.
Her prowess vs. her mistakes.

"Make me good, God, but not yet."

For your (edited) enjoyment:


It was damn good. Not The Soprano's good, not Deadwood good, not The Wire good... but pretty damn good.

first go's

Here's the sonnet version:

The graveyard rasp, looked to the source.
Bloodshot eyes opened, and he asked from bed,
"Your shift again already, nurse?" "Of course."
"I used to have a story, but--" he said.

"No audience. My wife, with raven hair,
My everything, then disappeared, was gone.
Detective I hired, but found her nowhere.
This blackhaired beauty, too, abandoned me.

If only I could see her 'gain tonight.
There she is! Now behind you, I can see
Through you, a ghost transparent, is her light."
"I'm here," I said. He closed his eyes, now free.

I cried, and held and squeezed my husband's hand
And watched as he slipped from my life again.

And the prose version:

A graveyard rasp, and his eyes opened. "Your shift again already, nurse?"

I smiled: "Of course, honey."

"I used to have a story, but...” Eyes lost. “Now, no audience."

"Tell me."

"My wife was my everything. Then she was gone. I hired a detective. Even she, too, vanished. If only I could see my life again.”

Eyes cleared.

"There she is! Behind you… I can see through you. A ghost transparent. She--"

"I'm here," I said.

He closed his eyes, now free.

I cried, and held and squeezed my husband's hand and watched as he slipped from my life again.

-------------------

I have a title I absolutely hate: Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Old Man
Yuck... I really need to change it.

I'm not happy with either version, either (though I'm closer to satisfaction with the sonnet, but that's 109 words)... if I had 201 words, I think I could have nailed this... I'll need to put it away for a while and see if I can do something with that prose version (it's at exactly 101)...

----------------------
UPDATE: I'm thinking about "CJD" as a title... cryptic, but also the acronym for a type of Alzheimer's-like dementia...

writing

the VC Reporter is having a writing contest: Fiction 101... a story in 101 words or less.

Have been batting around an idea for a couple of months now, but it was more novelistic ... but thinking about using the conclusion of it for this contest.

In the middle of the night, an idea struck me: a sonnet has around 100 words... if I could write the story as a sonnet, a real experiment, it would--by its very constraints--force me to hone my language. While the contest accepts no poetry, I could then loosen the chains that bound the piece for 100 words... it's not going to be easy...

the above is TEN WORDS OVER THE LIMIT...

can't wait until fall

(like I'd be able to anyway)

Matt Hayes from the Sporting News names UCLA the top team on the rise for 09, projecting us to go from our dismal 4-8 record last year to a 9-4 record this year.

Look Inside >>  June 4, 2009

I'd take 7-6... but I'd love 9-4.

More Karma for Timmah

Wah, Wah, Wah...

Even the Times (the Trojan Times) is hitting the NCAA investigations hard... there must be fire under all that smoke.

Here is a great quote:

"Kansas has two players who would have been NBA lottery picks, Cole Aldrich and Sherron Collins, and they are returning to school," USC Coach Tim Floyd said late Monday night, only hours after hearing about Johnson. "Good for them."

"Our guys get an offer from Islamabad and they're gone."

There are jokes to be made about rats re: sinking ships, and Islamabad's safety relative to South Central, but it's just too freaking easy.

No wonder the Times article is accompanied by this photo:

Again, I say, wah wah wah

And as I've said before: it couldn't happen to a more fitting bunch of Unscrupulous Scumbag Cheaters.

UP

UP is the best film I've seen this year... and I'm counting The Shawshank Redemption, which I saw for the first time only last week.

I'll need another viewing and some time to gather my thoughts for a true review, but suffice to say, there is better storytelling in the first 15 minutes of this film than in 90% of movies made today (the newsreel section and the marriage montage are exceptional: the first visually and with use of a voice-over that gives exposition and foreshadowing, the second without dialogue but nevertheless telling a detailed story, one that is at turns funny, loving, nostalgic, and heartbreaking).

Even without a second viewing (and I do want to see it again in 3D on a big-ass screen), I can say pretty definitively that I think this is the best work Pixar has done (and I'm a HUGE fan of The Incredibles, Wall-E, and Toy Story 2 [not that I think any of the films fails to entertain (hell, I even tear up at the end of Cars)]).

The sad thing is, UP won't even get a SNIFF at an Oscar nomination next spring. Because of the ghetto-ization of animation into its own category, the members of the Academy can rationalize their decision... but it still isn't right (were Benjamin Button or The Reader really better films than Wall-E? seriously, I want to know, as I haven't seen either).

But more on UP later...

plumbing

want to write about Drag Me to Hell... can't do it
want to write about Night at the Museum 2 (or rather my new crush on Amy Adams and her assets)... can't do it
really want to write about UP... can't do t

not now...

we're in plumbing hell.

we have a leak under the house... just below our bedroom floor

We discovered it late last night as its whooshing sound (which we THOUGHT was the neighbor's hose watering the back yard) was keeping us up. So we turned off the water and went to bed and called our plumber at 7. His guy arrived at 8:15. I walk him through the situation, starting in the bedroom and then outside to the subfloor access (thank goodness we're on a raised foundation). He grabs a flashlight and goes under. Five minutes later he's back.

"I know where the problem is. The problem is I can't get to it."

Huh?

There's a sewage line that makes a c-shaped snaking turn that is in front of the problem... he needs to take out the sewage line to get to the problem... but that way he can straighten out the C and make it all good. But he can't figure out why it's the way it is... I tell him we had the entire house reconstructed around two years ago... maybe they had to do it to make it work. He smiles and shakes his head. ANYWAY, How much? $550 and will take three or so hours. OK, do it.

I hear sawing under the house and fifteen minutes later he's back saying he needs to go and buy some stuff, but first a question:

"So do you have any problems in the back bathroom?"

Well, occasionally we hear a glub-blubl-glub sound in the toilet. You mean other than that?

"Nope, pretty much what I expected."

Why?

"Well, let me show you..."

And he takes me around back where he has the sewage line he's removed laying out on the grass (nicely avoiding the neighbor's dog-dookie... we really need to address this issue, but later). It looks like some Rube Goldberg thing. The plumber has no clue as to why that curve was necessary. But that's not the issue at hand. The issue with our glub-blub-glub problem is that the sewage line from the back of the house going to the main line tilts UP rather than DOWN and so the flow isn't as good.

Great.

And then he asks the question:

"So did you and your contractor end on good terms?"

No, but that was at the end, and by the time we finished the plumbing we were still good. Why?

"Because this (points to the C) and the slope seems to me to be there just to piss someone off."

Fucking Fred and his worthless piece-of-shit outfit.

So it's going to cost another $150 fix the slope... that will solve the glub-blub-glub issue... 150 for peace of mind... I'm cool with that.

Fred's a dick.

But I'm ok... really, I am.

--------------------------------------------

UPDATE (11am):

so, maybe I'm not all right.

Plumber's done. quick and relatively painless: $675. Only his news was more painful.

When I asked if all was good, his reply was "for now."

What?

Seems the contractor used thin-walled type M copper, instead of the standard medium-walled type L. The plumber says only a handyman or a contractor trying to cut costs would use type M.

I asked if the leak was where I thought it was and he said yes. I said that was kinda funny as that bathroom was pre-existing and was already copper-piped. He said that all that pipe from front to back was new M stuff.

WTF. So did they remove the existing pipe and replace it with this shit?

So I asked the plumber if we needed to replace everything. He said we would at some point? When?

"When you start to see leaks in the type M stuff... I can't tell you when it's going to fail, but I wouldn't be surprised if you got another leak somewhere in the next four to six months."

FUCK.

So how much would it cost to replace? We went over the needs: 3 baths (one upstairs), plus kitchen and laundry room. He said it would be around 7K... and that doesn't include the finish work repair to any walls, floors, and tiling that has to be busted out.

FUCK.

Talked about it with Pa. We should do nothing until there's a leak... if the upstairs bath leaks, then we attack that immediately and tear through the ceiling of the first floor instead of through the floor (we'll know where the leak will be because of the water damage in the ceiling). And attack the first floor stuff, piecemeal.

Talked about it with Lisa. She's finally considering lawsuit.

I've got a call into the city to find out what their specs are for minimum requirements in regards to type of copper piping. If it's L, then the City has some explaining to do.

This is fucked.