so today is the official first day of short-sleeve shirt weather, which is pretty cool. It's official according to me, and I think it should be a national holiday or something. Maybe I'll start doing a cookout the weekend of the first day of short-sleeve shirt weather.

In other news, here are some miscellaneous things I've been reading lately:

Howard Kurtz of the Post has a big thing about Republicans turning on Tom Delay. I didn't know they removed the ethics committee chairman after he found Delay guilty of three violations.

And Yahoo has an interesting piece (from Business Week, a magazine I guess) about the attempted assassination of a Russian government energy official. Crazy stuff. And pretty messed up that assassination is still pretty common over there (like the poisoning of the Ukraine opposition leader). I guess that happens lots of places, but it's an interesting article anyway.

You can listen to Hot Hot Heat's new album at MTV.com (found on stereogum)

Also from Stereogum, a NY Post article about those "Best Week Ever"/"I Love the 80s"/"Awesomely Bad Videos" shows - apparently they're faked, they'll give the people lines to read and prod them to say certain things. That sucks. I had a sneaking suspicion though, especially since I'll be watching with my two roommates and the people on the show will be going on and on about somebody and we all say "who are they talking about? I've never heard of them." But I'm getting sick of all these reality shows that are scripted and stuff. I mean, put weirdos together and let shit happen, I think otherwise there should be a disclaimer or something. I mean, I heard that they kept Omarosa on "the Apprentice" for much longer than Donald Trump wanted to because she could be the "villain." And there were tons of rumors about "Survivor" being manipulated by network types. It sucks. I'm going to boycott those shows, except for the Real World, of course.

so apparently hipsters are all in a tizzy about the new Kelly Clarkson song (a girl from American Idol) called "Since U Been Gone." I dunno, I don't see what all the hullabaloo is about. She sounds like Avril Lavigne with a hipster producer. I hate how they both say you like "yeeew". And anyway, I think a good rule of thumb is that if a song includes the word "U" in the title, it probably is lame. Prince included. The video of the song is on her website if you haven't heard it (and I hadn't til I saw this, so whatever). There's a cover of the song by Ted Leo on the first link. It's better, but still kind of blah. And there's part of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs song in his cover too, which is neat.

so I thought this image was funny and strange:


Erin sent it to me, it's from a news article on MSN about limited edition M&Ms. They're going to bring the tan ones back, which is cool. I liked the tan ones. It's also funny how I buy into advertising. Doh.

so I just read an LA Times article that says years ago, Tom Delay and his family went along with his comatose father's wishes and took him off life support. It's a pretty interesting piece, and is also interesting since Delay is one of the main people pushing for keeping Terri Schiavo on life support, even though she supposedly didn't want to be. Of course, people can change their minds and each case is different, but there are a lot of similarities between these two, which the piece spells out. And being that it's Tom Delay we're talking about, Congressman Ethics Violation, I'm not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt: to me, it's an obvious ploy to try to court the "right to life" movement in spite of Schiavo's wishes, her husband's wishes, and the court system's rulings. However, I also read a poll that says 56% of Republicans disagree with the Republican intervention in this case. Whoopsie. So not only are are Republicans undermining our system checks and balances (nice DCist article on this), they're not actually courting the voters they thought they were.

But to liven up this serious post, here's some pictures of famous people playing ping pong, from Larry's Table Tennis website.

Fidel Castro


Prince Charles


The Clintons


And Mister Ed.

so I found a lot of cool and interesting sites recently.

-A lady found a finger in her chili at Wendy's. Pretty gross. You'd think that somebody would have noticed at some point though:

"Hey Boss, my finger got cut off and I can't find it. I think it fell in the chili."
"Are you sure you had it when you got to work?"

-My friend Mollie showed me a tshirt blog I had forgotten about that had this funny take-off of those Urban Outfitters state shirts:
Very clever idea, it's from a site called Cat and Girl, which also has a sometimes funny comic. I say sometimes because sometimes it's literature jokes that I don't get.

-I thought this was an interesting article, about an ad campaign for independent stores and things, called "Keep ____ Weird," as in "Keep Austin Weird" and "Keep Louisville Weird." The idea is that chain stores and big box retailers are sapping local culture by making smaller, interesting independent stores go out of business. I support this and I wonder if there'll be a "Keep DC Weird" campaign. Except billboards are illegal in DC.

-And apparently David Spade was wearing a penis-shaped fake nose in a sketch on SNL the other day. The blog I found it at, Boing Boing, says the sketch was making fun of Owen Wilson and his weird nose.

Two GW players to enter NBA draft

pops
Originally uploaded by squidpants.

So according to the GW Hatchet, the student newspaper at GW, two rising seniors on GW's basketball team are entering the NBA Draft, Pops Mensah-Bonsu (pictured) and Mike Hall. However, both players said they won't get an agent, which means they are free to come back to the team if they don't get much interest.

This sucks, because if they do go, that will really hurt our team, since they are two of the best players (obviously). I don't think it's a good idea for either guy though, because although Pops gets a lot of press for his monster dunks and has gotten much better in the paint, he also is kind of slim, average on defense, and lacks a mid-range jump shot, which I really think would make him unstoppable. If he got that, he could do well in the NBA. Mike Hall has a more complete game, I think, in that he's a great rebounder, good on defense, and is a good outside shooter too. I think he has more of a case to get taken in the draft, but he could be better offensively inside. Of course I don't want to see either guy go, since if they came back, we'd be a really good team. That being said, it's pretty cool that we could have two potential NBA draft picks.

so this is some of the craziest shit I've ever seen: it's a video of some hairy dudes playing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" with a guitar and some various kitchen implements. Hilarious and bizarre. (A guy posted it at www.gwhoops.com). It looks like it's from some TV show, but unfortunately I have no idea who or what it is, since I can't read Icelandic.

UPDATE:
After wondering around the internet a bit, I found some more info on the band. Apparently they're called Hurra Torpedo and have some records out. They also appear to be Scandanavian, as their record label is Norwegian and that site above is Icelandic (although technically Iceland isn't in Scandanavia).

Their record label (I guess) has a bit of info on them.

Here's what appears to be a discography.

And a metric ton of photos of the band in concert. Man, I'd like to see that show. Most of the photos appear to be from the 90s. And they aren't on Amazon and I don't have any Scandanavian pals to translate this site for me.

And elsewhere on the internet, they appear to be playing a show in July of this year in Kristianstad, Norway. They also apparently once had a couple on stage having sex during their show. This link has photos (!) so it's obviously not work safe. I'll have to read that article at home.

I found a Norwegian-English translator online, but it spits out a bunch of nonsense. Although apparently Hurra means "whoopee!"

so if I never saw another picture of Terry Schiavo, it'd be too soon. I'm so sick of that story, and they always show the same picture. I mean, I guess it's good this is on the news, or else we'd have to see more housefires and car wrecks.

Honestly though, I don't understand why local news shows these things. If something happens every day, even if it sucks, it's not news. Cars crash every day. Houses catch fire every day. That sucks, but what does that tell me about the world? Sure, they have to fill their shows, but there is tons of other news from around the world they could do, or even around the city. What happened at City Council today? What are local residents up in arms about? What happened on Capitol Hill? What about new restaurants or bars or concerts or theatre stuff? Or more local sports even. Or you know, something crazy, like a debate of something the mayor did. If you're just going to have car crashes and fires, you might as well have puppets or this guy do the news.

GW at the NCAA tournament in Nashville

warmups
Originally uploaded by squidpants.

so I went down to Nashville last weekend to see GW play Georgia Tech in the NCAA tourney. This was GW's first time in the NCAAs since 1999, when we got beat by Indiana. Ga. Tech was a tough draw, especially since I think they were in the championship game last year. GW was a 12 seed and Tech was a 12, thus hopefully setting us up for the 12-5 upset that always happens at least almost once every year. (Pictured is GW doing warmups before the game.)

I went with my friend Mike from GW and we flew down on Friday afternoon for the game which was that night. We got to our hotel, sort of near the airport in an industrial area, and took a bus downtown to go to see what was going on and to catch the GW alumni reception. Weirdly enough, Nashville is really easy to get around by bus, we took it everywhere we needed to go all weekend. The bus was pretty funny, lots of random odd city folk on there, and they were much friendlier than DC buses, since nobody ever talks on the DC buses. We got to the stadium and the place was mobbed, it looked like Mardi Gras without the boobs, the were streets packed with not totally sober folks all wearing different colored shirts and jerseys. We saw a lot of Louisville fans with the occasional Ohio or other fans. Then a minute or so later we saw some GW folks, who turned out to be big posters at gwhoops.com which was pretty cool, since we're both posters there too. We went to get a beer with them at a nearby bar and talked a bit before we all headed up to the alumni reception, which was pretty sweet. As we walked up to the room it was in, we saw the mascot (pictured below with me and my free shirt) and the band and a huge pile of buff (i.e. tan) shirts and hats. We were pretty happy to learn they were free, so we got those and hit the buffet.


Met some more gwhoops.com folks and also saw some folks I knew from school, then we decided to go to see the game before ours, Louisville and Louisiana-Lafayette. I don't know why they don't just call it the University of Louisiana, since I'm pretty sure it's the biggest one there, definitely bigger than UL-Monroe, and I've never heard of any others. I mean, everyone calls Tennessee just Tennessee and the other ones Tennessee-Chattanooga or UT-Martin and so on. But anyway, we heard our seats would be good, but I was worried since they were row CC, they'd be way up there. However, that turned out to be the third row, which was awesome. Here's the view during the Louisville game.

Obviously they're really good seats, and that's Michael Wilbon's bald head there. (You can see more pics I took during the trip at my Flickr.) Anyway, the Louisville-Louisiana game was pretty good, and Louisiana had one of the hottest cheerleaders I have ever seen in my life. She was amazing. I wish I had taken a picture, but felt kind of lame doing it so I didn't. And it was cool to see Rick Pitino, Louisville's coach, right across the court, it sort of felt like I was seeing a movie star. Which was odd, but cool. We enjoyed the game and talked to some forties-ish ladies sitting behind us who were Louisville fans. They thought we were Georgia Tech fans at first, which made sense, because both Tech and GW are exactly the same colors. We got the usual "so where is George Warshington anyway?" "what's your mascot?" and so on, but they were nice ladies. The stadium itself was impressive, it was where the NHL team, the Nashville Predators, play. It seemed to have a good atmosphere too, it was nice and loud, unlike the MCI Center, which is like a giant, silent cave. The place was packed, mostly with Louisville fans, so it was pretty loud.

So Louisville won a close one, and soon it was time for our game. It started really well for GW, we started out with two straight monster dunks by Pops Mensah-Bonsu, getting fouled on one, and then a three-pointer by TJ Thompson. The Tech fans were stunned, they must have been thinking "who the hell is this team?" The cool thing was that there were probably as many GW fans as Tech, as we were louder for practically the whole game. It was pretty close throughout, the score going from about us by 1 to Tech by 3 for probably the first 15 minutes. However, the whole time we were shooting terribly from the free-throw line, missing the front end of one-and-ones and both shots a couple times. We finished the game 4-19, which is terrible, we usually shoot 70%. So we kept missing foul shots and Tech started to make ridiculous running shots and they pulled away with a few minutes to go. They won 80-68, which sucked because it looked worse than it was. We played a good game and kept most of their players in check, especially the big goofy-looking 7 foot Australian Luke Schensher, who we all worried would dominate our smaller front line. So that was too bad. After the game we were pretty down and went to a bar called the Flying Saucer, a small chain (with a bizarre website) that two of my friends recommended. It was a cool place, kind of like the Brickskeller in DC, with a lot of different beers. There was a $2 cover, which was weird, but I had an excellent local beer called Onward Stout from the Nashville-based Yazoo brewery. I highly recommend it if you can find it. Plus it was like $3.50. Most of the beers down there were cheap, Guinness and Sierra Nevada were always less than $4 wherever we went, and they were always fresh, which is something I haven't been able to find in DC.

We checked out the downtown bars a bit, which was pretty quiet, then went back to our hotel. The next day we decided to see the sights, like the Parthenon (below).



As you can see, the Parthenon is a full-size replica of the one in Greece, built for Nashville's centennial in 1879 or something, and rebuilt out of stone this century. Kind of hard to tell from this picture but it's ginormous and has a big statue of Athena inside. We took the bus to get there and walked past an anti-war rally, which was cool to see. We then went to a place to eat my friends had recommended, called Rotier's. (Pronounced "Rochers" or something by the lady who gave us directions.) It's something called a "meat-and-three," which must be a Nashville thing, traditional southern food, with a meat dish and three veggies like okra, greens, etc. When we got there I realized I had been there before a couple years ago when my friends and I went up to Nashville either to see Al Gore name Joe Lieberman his VP, or for a Barenaked Ladies concert, I forget which time. Anyway, they had great burgers and shakes, and more cheap, fresh beer. It's right near the Vanderbilt campus so we decided to check that out too, and Mike, who is from New York, saw a Tennessee license plate with a Yankees sign on it, so he was pumped. We saw Vandy's football stadium, which is nice (I actually place lacrosse in it during high school, which was cool), and the frat row, which is awesome. Way better than GW. But then a row of boxes would be nicer than GW's frat row. I also picked up some local beer (Blackstone, also good) and some Goo Goo Clusters, an old-timey candy from Nashville made of marhsmallow, caramel, nuts and chocolate. Good stuff. Mike was shocked at the unhealthiness, which was funny, he was shocked a lot at the food. I wish I could have found a deep-fried twinkie or something ridiculous like that for him.

But our flight back was at 5, so we pretty much had to head back, and as usual, took the bus to the airport. It was a fun trip, despite the loss, so that's ok. Then when we got back, my pal Chris came out to pick us up at Dulles and he ended up driving around the place like 5 times because we were on the wrong level. Whoops. Here's a few more photos from the trip.


Pitino and Wilbon talking after our game


The court after our game


The marquee at the stadium


Mike with a GW shirt with the Titans' stadium in the background.

See bigger and deffer versions and more photos at Flickr.

so apparently lots of Brazilian soccer players' moms are getting kidnapped, which is too bad. They usually get released though, so that's good. However, this reminded me how much I hate that Brazilian athletes only use one name. It's annoying, you're not that spectacular. I first heard it in men's soccer, like Ronaldo and Elson and Ronaldinho, which to me is the stupidest - someone already had Ronaldo, so now you're "little Ronaldo." Why not just be Ronaldo Smith, or whatever your real name is. Imagine if we did that here.

"That young man is quite a slugger, what's his name?"
"Little Mark McGwire."
"No, really, what's his name?"
"That is his name. Read the jersey."

Honestly, it's not that hard to remember people's last names, think about every American sports star. But then I started to hear the one name Brazilians thing during the Women's World Cup, "Ana passes to Veronica," whatever. Like there is only one Ana playing soccer, come on. Of course, then Mia Hamm stole the ball and scored, because she has a full name. Eat it, Brazil. And they even do it now in beach volleyball. Beach volleyball?!?

But since there can only be so many first names, they are starting to get stupid. I saw a list of players and one was called "Dunga." Great, Dung-a. But then my favorite has to be Kaka. I suppose that doesn't translate in Brazil, but good luck becoming famous in the US. I mean, Ronaldo and Juninho and people are on Nike commercials, but I don't think Kaka is going to get a lot of advertising deals. "Hey kids, Kaka wants you to eat Gogurt!" "Kaka wears Reebok." "Kaka smells great when he uses Ralph Lauren cologne." Actually, that last one is actually kind of clever.