Profoundity

This last Sunday, season 2 of "Eastbound and Down" came to a close. And although I felt this season was no where near the level of awesome that was the first, it still had its funny moments. The episode on Sunday closed with a quote that I found rather profound and since I so rarely find things to be profound I figured I would share it with you here:

"Just like that the journey is over. Depression is finished and you're on your way back to the world of the living, smiling, regular people. The road has been paved with dickheads, back-stabbers, and pains in the fucking ass. But memories are made, allies were had, pole smokers were toppled and the truth was discovered. And like any journey, if you stay the course long enough, the road might just show you what you need. All you got to do is keep your eyes on the road and your foot on the fucking gas." -Kenny Powers

So there you have it. And since this will inevitably be the only post I put on this blog this month, I hope you will savor it and enjoy the profoundity of it!

Drew Brees owes me 825 dollars.

Ok we haven't had a sports blog in a good long while and since this weekend was probably the worst sports weekend ever for me personally, I figured it was time for one.

Let's start with the Texas Rangers. After winning the first two games of the ALDS in Tampa Bay, the Rangers somehow didn't get the memo that you actually have to win the 3rd in order to advance. So now the series is all tied up at 2 games each after Tampa came into Arlington this weekend and quite frankly put a beat down on the Rangers. I still think that they will advance to the ALCS to play the Yankees, but they need to get their shit together ASAP. Luckily, I think they will have Cliff Lee starting for them in game 5 which should give them the advantage. At least the Phillies already clinched since I am quasi rooting for them in the National League.

Moving right along to the Houston Texans. I have neglected to write about them this season because I wasn't really sure how the team was going perform this year and I didn't want to jinx them. After starting out 2-0 by beating the Colts at home and the Redskins on the road in their first ever overtime victory, there was some considerable hype that this might be “the year". I'm talking, of course, about making the playoffs. (Playoffs?). ESPN had the Texans ranked number 3 in their power rankings after week 2. Well I must admit that after watching yesterday's game against the Giants, I would be surprised if they managed to finish 8-8 this season. In fact, that is my most optimistic scenario since the Texans are your classic "Myspace Angle" team at 3-2. In all likelihood, they will finish at 7-9 or 6-10 just like we always expect them to. Until they can figure out how to show up week in and week out, I just don't see the team doing anything of value. Beating the Colts at home in the season opener doesn't mean jack if you aren't able to finish out the rest of the season.

And now for the triple whammy, the New Orleans Saints. I decided to play in a Survivor/Knock-Out style fantasy game this year. The idea is that you pay 15 bucks at the beginning of the season and then pick an NFL team to win each week. No point spread or anything, just win. If your team loses, you are out and if they win you continue on. Last man standing gets all the money. The only catch is that once you pick a team, you can no longer use them the rest of the season. I had planned out a perfect road map for the season and figured that the Super Bowl Champion New Orleans Saints would be able to beat the miserable Arizona Cardinals who were starting an undrafted rookie quarterback. Boy was I wrong. Drew Brees took it upon himself to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by throwing 2 interceptions in the 4th quarter, both of which led to touchdowns for the Cardinals. It is in that respect that I figure Drew Brees owes me 825 dollars. The game was a lock for crying out loud!

Ah, felt good to get that all out of my system. I thought it was an omen that this Sunday was 10/10/10. I figured that all 3 teams I was rooting for would get "10's" for their performance. So much for superstition. By the way, there is a slight chance that I will be going to the Texans/Chiefs game this Sunday. Should that opportunity present itself, you can bet your ass that I will be wearing a bag over my head. Look for me on tv!

*EDIT*
I forgot that I was supposed to give Christine a shout out. So here it is, go check out her blog here!

The Sharktopus

This past week, I noticed that the word "Sharktopus” was a trending topic on Twitter. Intrigued, I looked up what all the fuss was about. You see, since I no longer have cable, I am occasionally behind the ball on new TV shows and made for TV movies. Sharktopus was one of those movies airing on the Sci Fi channel. After reading some of the reviews on the internet and watching the promo commercial, I decided that I had to see this thing.

So last night, I watched the Sharktopus movie. I'm using the word "movie” lightly here since there was really only about 30 minutes of actual plot related material. The other 60 or so minutes were the indiscriminate killings of the Sharktopus on the some sort of vacation resort in Mexico. Now, you may be asking yourself, what is the Sharktopus? Let me break it down for you one time. The Sharktopus is half man, half shark and half octopus. It was created by the DOD, apparently, to be a super stealthy killing machine or something. It was controlled by a control collar that conveniently gets destroyed in the opening scenes of the film, thus setting up the story.

You obviously cannot go into this movie expecting anything but entertainment value. I found myself laughing at the simple absurdity of most of the kill scenes. The Sharktopus can impale people with its tentacles, jump into the air to catch a bungee jumper and walk on fucking land. I bet you thought the Sharktopus would be confined to its watery home, but you'd be wrong. The Sharktopus can climb mountains to kill people in a cliff top restaurant. Also, the Sharktopus doesn't even consume his victims; he just kills them for what I can only assume is the pure joy of it.

I'm not going to go into any more of the plot details because I honestly believe you should watch this movie. It has everything a Sci Fi movie of the week should have: overzealous reporter, power drunk Shartopus creator, down to earth Shartopus creator's daughter, former Navy Seal hero, annoying radio DJ guy and girls in skimpy outfits. I applaud the Sci Fi channel for knowing no bounds when coming up with these films.

What's next, Sci Fi channel? Got any more ideas for the next half something half something killing machine? How about a half crocodile half hippopotamus: The Croctopotomus! It can even have the same plot and story! Think about it: "The Navy, wanting to have a bigger yet also stealthier presence in the Sub-Saharan jungle, creates a new breed of monster, The Crotopotomus. But, due to a malfunction, the Crotopotomus is released in downtown New York where it dwells in the run down subway lines waiting for its next victim.” And then at the end you could have it climbing the Empire State building or something for no adequately explored reason. And when the monster is finally killed at the end by the Army or another Croctopotomus or something, the creator will weep and shout to the heavens: "Who's the real 7 billion dollar monster now? Not I…..not…I.” Credits roll.

All rights reserved. Just be sure to send me my movie check when it gets made.

Las Vegas Road Trip

This post is a long time coming. I apologize in advance if it is TLDR. It has already been a month since I took the road trip and it was about damn time that I blogged about it. A little bit of history first, the idea to go on a road trip to Vegas originated from watching a day long marathon of History Channel's Pawn Stars. It was during this marathon that my brother jokingly reminded me that I had yet to sell the Country Legends autographed guitar that I had purchased at a charity auction earlier the previous year. I jokingly responded by saying that I should drive to Las Vegas and attempt to get on the Pawn Stars show and sell my guitar there. For some reason, we both got really serious about the idea and just sort of ran with it since 1) my brother has never been to vegas and 2) I really wanted to go to vegas again.

So we set out. I drove from Houston to San Antonio to pick my brother up from his school on a Friday after work. The next morning we woke up around 6:00am and proceeded to drive to Albuquerque, NM, some 800 miles away. That first day was rather uneventful. Getting stopped at the border control stations along the way always makes me nervous for some reason. I mean, I am a legal citizen who is also not a drug mule but nevertheless I always think in the back of my head that I am one of those drug mules who doesn't even know it and I would end up going to prison like in that awful Claire Danes movie Brokedown Palace. I was also pleasantly surprised at how nice of a city Las Cruces was. I guess I really never had a reason to think it would be a dump other than the fact that it is in the middle of the freaking desert and I just figured it would have more of a The Hills Have Eyes kind of vibe. I couldn't have been more wrong; Las Cruces had a Jack in the Box and Super Target and everything else you would expect to find in a civilization. Albuquerque was nice too.

Ok so the next morning we got up early again and hit the road bound for the Grand Canyon. This segment of the journey really struck me at just how empty the parts of northern New Mexico and Arizona really are. At best we would see a truck stop every 80 or so miles but pretty much everything else was just flat plains with the occasional mountain range. Oh, and the 4 for $20 Indian t-shirt deals that were advertised every 4 miles or so. That day's trip was relatively short compared to the epic 13 hour drive the day before. We arrived in Williams, AZ around 1:00 local time and attempted to check into our hotel. The story about this hotel is so long and ridiculous that I will spare you it right now for another blog post. Anyway, check in time was 3:00 so we decided just to grab some food real fast and do all of the Grand Canyon stuff that day before checking in to the hotel later at night. The Grand Canyon was awesome as usual.

I was pretty surprised at the amount of foreign visitors that were there. I would say that maybe 30-40% of the folks there were French and maybe another 20% of the people were from Asian countries. I didn't remember it being so culturally diverse the last time I was there.

Quick tangent: On the way to the Grand Canyon, my brother and I got the opportunity to go to Meteor Crater. Set aghast by the $15 dollar admission fee, I began plotting my revenge. While exploring the crater, I picked up a small rock on the outer rim and put it in my pocket. I sure showed those guys! Now fast forward to being at the Grand Canyon. I decided that it would be in mine and all future generation's best interest if I hurled the rock from Meteor Crater into the Grand Canyon. And I did exactly that. Think about it, in 8 brazillion years (that's 4.7 years in metric), alien archaeologists are going to be poking around in the Grand Canyon, find my rock and say "By golly, Grog, this rock shouldn't be here, this throws my whole view of ancient Earth in a New Light I tell ya". Grog is the name of an alien, in case you couldn't pick that up through context clues. Also, the aliens are from the southern region of whatever alien world they come from.

Moving along, the next day was the day we would be driving into Las Vegas! Having driven this route before, I remembered that we would be passing over Hoover Dam. This was an unexpected bonus from my brother who had never been there before. The water beneath the dam looked even lower than the last time I was there when it was already pretty damn low. According to Wikipedia, the entire basin is expected to be dried up in the next 20 years. Scary thought for folks like me who like Las Vegas having electricity and running water. But that is a problem for future people to figure out…it was time to do some gambling! We stayed at Bally's since I had complimentary nights there. I like staying at Bally's because it is right in the middle of the strip and you don't have to walk too far in either direction to get where you want to go. So we did some gambling and my brother won quite a bit of money right off the bat with his bullshit beginner's luck while I had a pretty heavy dose of veteran gambler's luck. I managed to win a poker tournament at Mandalay Bay the second day we were there, the very same Mandalay Bay which began a series of unfortunate events that led to me being kicked out of the Luxor Hotel and Casino last time I was in town.

So we stayed in Las Vegas for 2 nights. There was a plan to stay for 3 but we were both pretty vacationed out by this point. I laid some money on my Super Bowl picks and we headed out to the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop that was the main reason for this whole trip anyway.

The pawn shop is a lot smaller than it looks on TV. None of the people you see on the show were working the day we went there. This was a disappointment to my brother who really wanted to meet Chumlee. They had some of the stuff from the TV show in the show room and a merchandise area that I have never seen on the show. My brother and I both picked up a Chumlee t-shirt and we went back to the car to bring the guitar inside and do some dealing. After standing in line behind a guy who was pawning his Xbox 360 for what I could only assume was drug money, we stepped up to and placed the guitar on the counter. The counter where we were at was the place where you usually see them paying people on the show for the items that have been brought in. It was really cool seeing the desk behind the counter where the old man sits. Long story short, the guy pretty much offered me the same amount of money for the guitar that I had bought it for. "I can't even get near the 2k you are looking for", he said. Discouraged, I took my guitar with me back home where it will no doubt lay in anguish for a while until it appreciates a little more in value. Fail.

So we left Las Vegas, headed back over the Hoover Dam and proceeded to drive to Tucson, AZ. The original plan was to stay in Tucson for a night, explore some of the things around there the next day and then drive back to Las Cruces for one final night. It turns out that we were so sick of driving that we decided to forgo the final night of our trip and just drive straight back to San Antonio from Tucson. This was hardly the scenic route that we took on the first half of our trip. Driving through the empty desert is certainly not as nice as driving through forested mountain ranges and plains. Luckily with these new fangled phones and cars, we were able to listen to hours and hours of uninterrupted music which definitely cut down on the mundanity (not sure if that is a word…) of driving 867 miles. We made it back into San Antonio around 8pm, only 13.5 hours after we departed Tucson. 80mph speed limit zones really help out on long stretches of road like that.

All in all it was a fantastic trip. Getting back out to the Grand Canyon and finally getting to see Meteor Crater were definitely highlights of the trip. My brother had a great time in Vegas. Don't get me wrong, I had a good time in Vegas as well, I just would have had a better time if I had got the $2000 I was hoping for at the pawn shop. At just over 3300 miles, it was a little bit less than driving from coast to coast. As much fun as it was retelling this story, you must absolutely stay tuned for my post about the adventure we experienced at the hotel in Williams, Arizona. It was nothing short of a debacle.

Ok, I am just under 3 full pages in Microsoft Word right now, better stop typing. This is by far my longest post on this blog yet and should make up for the utter lack of updates recently. If you actually read through this whole post then I applaud you for being able to fight through my incoherent rambling. Be sure to leave a note in the comments on if this post even made sense. Hopefully I will be able to get back to updating this thing with some kind of regularity.

And now for some keyword selection...

Writers Block

It's official, I have the dreaded writers block. Not that I ever had anything of particular interest to write about before, mind you. With that in mind, let's do a little bit of brainstorming for future blog posts, shall we?

The mathematics of quantum neutrino fields.

The mathematics of wonton burrito meals.

How good or bad an endangered animal might taste.

Hurling various items into the sun and their order of said hurling.

Cartography: A Love Story.

Real life Gold Farming.

A discussion about the various items on my desk.

Possibility of consuming 10 McDouble cheeseburgers in 10 minutes.

Mosquitoes: An Apocalypse.

Electricity: Is it magic?

The freakin Energizer Bunny: A tale of Horror.

Writers block: A smorgasbord of bad brainstorming.

See? See what I mean? These ideas are all terrible. I mean MAYBE the one about mosquitoes, but seriously!

Anyway, I’m on Foursquare now. Go there and stalk me, you stalkers.

Pawn Super Star

Lately I've been watching a lot of the show "Pawn Stars" on the History channel. In case you aren't familiar with the show, it basically chronicles the day to day operations of a pawn shop in Las Vegas. And in case you really don't know, pawn shops are places where people bring in stuff to either sell outright or take a loan out against that stuff in order to buy drugs and/or pay off their loan shark. The show is interesting in the fact that people bring in some really weird and unique items that are sometimes worth a lot of money.

Now, why is this relevant to anything? Well, if you recall, I purchased a Country Legends autographed guitar about one and a half years ago. This guitar was autographed by country legends such as George Strait, BB King, Kenny Rogers, Charlie Daniels, Willie Nelson and Loretta Lynn. The idea at the time was to flip the guitar and make insane amounts of money. In fact, that is still the idea, one of my best.

You see, I plan on taking this guitar to that very pawn shop on the History channel. The reasons for this are three fold. 1.) Taking a trip to Vegas. 2.) Selling this guitar for lots of money. 3.) Did I mention Vegas? Not too mention the fun I am going to have haggling with the guy and potentially being on tv. I’m thinking about walking into the place with my newly purchased Captain's Hat that I got in Port Aransas over the weekend so they know I mean business when I walk through the door.

The current plan is to drive out to Vegas with my brother who has never been there before as an adult. I will then sell the guitar for a large amount of money and then I will make it rain in the club. Well, at least in the hotel room.

As to the decrepit state of this blog, yes, I have been neglecting it pretty bad recently. Hopefully that will all change on this road trip where I plan on blogging through out the entirety of the drive out there and back. If I am not too lazy, maybe I will upload a few pictures of the voyage as well. I am taking a much needed whole week off work to accomplish this. So stay tuned for more updates!

Christine and I again both recently passed the $100 mark in Google monies and are currently planning the party where it will all be wasted, ie: more riot punch! You can check out her blog here to keep the monies flowing into our accounts. You do want the monies flowing, right? Of course you do.

Painting and Alcohol

*stock photo, mine was a billion times better*

So this past weekend, I went with a couple friends to this thing called "Painting with a Twist”. The idea is that you show up, and these people will walk you through the step by step process of creating a masterpiece on canvas. Oh and there is also booze involved, hence the “twist” in the title. Now if you know me at all, you know I have the artistic skills of a rabid badger that has been drinking too much. However, it turns out that I am able to follow directions pretty well and needless to say my painting turned out to be one hell of a masterpiece. I’m talking Renaissance level art here.

Going into it, I figured that my painting would be, at best, abysmal. But they actually did a pretty good job of showing us how to blend the colors and create tree branches to hide any and all of the screw ups. The whole thing took about 2 hours from start to finish. And while the painting we chose to do was really effeminate (the girls chose this one), I still had a good time painting it while listening to Heather (shout out*) talking about how shitty her’s was turning out. Also, blending colors is a real bitch.

Christine (shout out*) and I each killed a bottle of smooth, delicious champagne that morning. Needless to say I was impressed with my ability to draw well while under the influence of alcohol and orange juice. All of our paintings turned out pretty well in the end. I found that the best strategy to not messing up your art was to just stop painting. The more I tried to fix problems, the more terrible it got. It’s like I always say, sometimes you just gotta put the paintbrush down and take another sip of your mimosa, you know what I mean?

So who knows, maybe I am in the wrong profession. Perhaps it was my destiny to paint the walls of the Sixteen Chapels in the Vatican or something. I would most definitely go do this again although I wouldn’t mind doing a more gender independent work. I always see people buying lame, non-masterpiece art for ridiculous prices at like Bed Bath and Beyond so I figure I could make quite a bit of monies selling my work on the side. Or, better yet, I’ll just start up my own art teaching class. With blackjack…and hookers! In fact, forget the art class...

*Shout outs were demanded by the viewing audience.

Link: Painting with a Twist