JoelBrigham.com - Where Curiosity Meets Comedy

Student Quotes 2010

2010-06-01T13:22:00.000-07:00

It's been damn near a year since I posted something on the ol' blog-a-roo, but with the school year over I feel like it's only fair to give up the goods on student quotes. Many of you who have read this blog over the years have read it for little else.

In case you're wondering why the hiatus, it's because I'm swamped with work for HOOPSWORLD and FreshScouts and L2T. I'll try and be more productive now that it's summertime, but considering I've got a little baby (and a very cute one at that), keeping this thing updated is proving to be a significant challenge.

For bite-sized entertainment on a more regular schedule, follow me on Twitter.

Enough plugs. Let's get on with the quotes!

First day of school, five of my homeroom girls (now sophomores) came running up to me before class looking very excited. When they got about four inches from me they slammed on the breaks and just sort of stared at me awkwardly. “You guys want to hug me, don’t you?” I asked, reading the looks on their faces. Kalli, leading the charge, said, “Yeah, but we don’t know if it’s illegal or not.”

Me, to my first-block English 2 class: “I hear the football team might actually win a few games this year—is that true?”
Alex: “Who knows. Whatever happened to their ‘Turning the Corner’ theme from last year?”
Ashley: “They turned the wrong way.”

Traci Manning (art teacher): “What holiday are you making a card for?”
Travis: “June.”

Me: “How old do you guys think I am, just out of curiosity?”
(Kids throw out random numbers, but nobody guesses correctly).
Me: “Man, you guys suck at this game. I’m actually 27.”
Seth: “Wait! You didn’t let me guess, yet.”
Me: “Well it’s kind of late now, but what would you have guessed?”
Seth: “27.”

Me: “If you can’t see anything with your glasses on, why do you wear them?”
Allie: “Because my dentist said just to keep wearing them until I got used them.”

A couple gems from the introduction of Alissa’s persuasive essay:

“Satan laughs as the mothers abort their babies because they have the ‘freedom of choice.’”

“Abortion is inhumanly.”

Me: “Do you guys remember what state Morrie (from ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’) lives in?
Jacob: “Connecticut?”
Me: “No, but you’re close…”
Allie: “London?”
Me: “Seriously?”

Izzie: “I have no problem with gay people, I just hate lesbians.”

From Aaron’s test essay about Puritans: “The Salem Witch trials were bad because those little girls accused them to death.”

Alex spent about five minutes today trying figure out why his paper wasn’t coming out of the printer. He kept printing and printing and wondering why his essay wasn’t coming out. When he and I finally went to figure out what was happening, he asked why I was walking in the direction I was walking. I told him because this was where the printer was. He looked longingly back at the copy machine and uttered a quiet, “But…” before realizing his silly mistake. There, in the actual printer, were five copies of Alex’s essay.

One from Traci Manning’s art class: “Ummm….Mrs. Manning? I was looking at the sketch assignments and like, seven weeks from now we’re supposed to draw an ice cream sundae and I don’t like ice cream, so what should I do?”

Sara: “I'm not sure if I wanna go to BYU in Utah.”
Mr. Hewitt, the Drivers Ed teacher: “Why?”
Sara: “Because they’re D1 athletics and I don’t want my whole life to be about sports. If I go there it will be all sports and no social life.”
Hewitt: “You don't even play sports in high school!”
Sara: “Yeah, I do. Soccer.”
Hewitt: “Oh yeah, soccer. Has any college even contacted you about playing soccer?”
Sara: “No.”
Hewitt: “I think your social life is gonna be ok. Try intramurals.”

Me, at the beginning of a silent reading day in advisory: “Alright guys, get your books, get comfortable, and get reading. It should be silent now.”
Kalli, a chatty sophomore, is lingering at the door and talking to someone in the hallway instead of doing what she was supposed to do. So I call her name: “Kalli…”
She ignores me and continues talking to the person in the hallway, so I continue: “Kalli. Kalli. Kalli. Kalli. Kalli…” I must have said it six times before she responds impatiently, “What?” after finishing her hallway conversation.
Me: “Please sit in your desk today instead of on the floor with your friends.”
Her: “Why?”
Me: “Because you just ignored me for like 30 seconds when other people were trying to read!”
Her, legitimately pissed off: “I heard you saying my name, but I was in the middle of the conversation. You were really rude.” Then she pouted and stalked off to her desk.

Nick, writing an original sentence to go with the word “tangible,” which means, “something that can be physically touched”: “MC Hammer was intangible.”

The P.E. teachers got a note from our assistant principle about a student that’s been having stomach pains:

“I have received 2 calls from Mrs. M—guardian of Joseph—he has an enlarged spleen and they ran several tests at the doctor today (Tuesday). They will have the results back in a week.

“In the mean time---HE is NOT to participate in any contact sports---he is NOT to be punched in the stomach area. We are to receive a doctor note regarding PE activity on Wednesday, October 21st.”

Following that email Mr. Stine, a math teacher and coach who had been forwarded the email, replied, “Do you think that she’ll get back with us when we can start punching Joe in the stomach again?”

From Wesley’s test essay about whether or not Timothy Treadwell (aka The Grizzly Man) is a modern-day transcendentalist: “Just because you go out in the woods and wipe your rear end with leaves and sleep in squirrel crap does not mean you are a transcendentalist.”

An overheard conversation in the hallway between a couple of sophomore girls:
Girl #1: Why do we call it a fire bush, anyway?
Girl #2: Because its leaves turn red.
Girl #1: Oh. That makes more sense. I always thought it was where we were supposed to meet in case there was ever a fire.

Me: Whenever I’m in a new city, I have to check out the thing that city is known for. But I’ve never been up the Sears Tower. It’s like in St. Louis, I’d go and see…
Student: The Arch!
Me: Right, and in Philadelphia I’d go see…
Another Student: The Liberty Bell!
Me: Exactly, and in Boston I’d have to check out…
Alissa: Massachusetts!

One from Traci Manning, the art teacher:
Juslee: “Today is my dad & step-mom’s anniversary.”
Traci: “Oh, how many years have they been married?”
Juslee: “They’ve been married ten but they’ve been together for 17. I’m only 16, so that tells me something.”
Traci: “Yes. I think I know why your parents are divorced.”

I read something inappropriate on a student’s computer screen from a few seats away and called him on it. From there we had this exchange:
Wes: “How can you see what I’m writing from there?”
Me: “Wes, I’m only two computers away. I can see everything fine.”
Wes: “But you wear glasses—aren’t you supposed to have bad eyes?”
Me: “You do know how glasses work, right?”

The English 4 Life kids were doing an exercise where they had to think of different musical instruments starting with specific letters. For “A,” Seth thought of the alto sax, but this is how he spelled it: “Alot Sex”

“When the Caucasians, also known as whiteys to the Native Americans, came to America they slowly started taking over Native American land.”
- from Sarah’s frontier paper

“If you were a Native American, westward expansion meant that more white men would come and steal your stuff. Also this meant that the perils of alcoholism would soon be cast upon your tribe.”
- from Vincent’s test essay

Jessi, describing her first day in Art class: “Mrs. Manning told me my stick people suck. I’m screwed.”

Sasha, after having a brief discussion about how “tyrant” is the root word of “Tyrannosaurus”: “Are there any other origins of dinosaur names that you’d like to know?”

From Hewitt: Dylan just swam a lap in the pool with full National Guard fatigues on. He is exhausted. To quote the D-Train, "I am NOT going into the Army!"

One of my test questions: “List three hardships the King of England imposed upon the people of America, as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.”
Kyra’s response: “Two hardships that the King imposed upon the people of America was tea and molasses.”

Jessi: “My dad uses the Ab Lounger when he works out.”
Ashley: “My dad has one of those! He puts his laundry on it.”

Sasha: “I’ve been having weird dreams lately.”
Me: “Oh yeah?”
Sasha: “Yeah. Last night, I dreamt that my dad shot my voice box out.”
Me, suppressing laughter: “Really…”
Sasha, starting to giggle: “Yeah. Then he realized what he’d done and tried to take me to the hospital, but it was too late. Then I became an undead.”
Me: “That’s ridiculous, Sasha.”
Sasha, laughing hysterically: “And the really weird part was that at the end of the dream, my dad built me a house out of granite.” More hysterical laughter.
Me: “I see.”
Sasha: “My family’s kind of weird.”

Alex, yelling to someone in the hallway: “Are you still pooping blood?”

Me, asking the Creative Writing kids driver safety trivia questions for the student council: “Okay, how often are you supposed to change your oil—once a year, twice a year, three times a year, or four times a year?”
Several students: “Four times a year.”
Meghan: “I thought you were supposed to get it done every three months.”

Meghan, on the phone trying to sell yearbook ads: “Hello, this is Meghan with the Olympia High School yearbook. I’d like to talk to you about bringing more business into your… Um… Oh…”

And then she hung up the phone and cried.

Me, being the lovable mentor I am, came up behind her and said, “Allow myself to introduce… myself.” Deep down, she thought it was a pretty good joke.

Jonathan, from his persuasive essay about lowering the activity fees at Olympia: “If you know anything about the ghetto you should know that the ghetto is a very hard place to live in.”

Me: “So what stories have you read by Edgar Allen Poe before this class?”
Alexis: “Isn’t there something about a black owl?”
Me: “You mean The Raven?”
Alexis: “Yeah, that.”

Lindsay: “Are you good at multi-tasking?”
Jesslyn: “Hang on, let me finish typing this…”

From Traci Manning: We are doing a design using either the students’ first or last initial….
Chris C.: “Do I have to use my first or last initial?”
Me: “Doesn’t really matter, Chris. Yours are the same.”

The first few sentences of Nic’s slave narrative (Nic isn’t known for putting much effort into things. Actually, the fact that he turned this in on time was a small miracle in and of itself.):

“I am Samuel Jackson. I was enslaved for 20 years of my life. My master was named Kernol Sanders. He made the finest chicken in the south. My mama always said she worked inside, so she would always get to try his chicken. She said he had the secret recipe that was full of all kinds of secret herbs and spices. In my opinion, I had the greatest master ever.”

Taylor: “I heard that if you swallow your gum it can get stuck in your lungs and you can die.”

Students were asked to define “deprecate” on a vocabulary quiz. It actually means “to insult or put down,” which they should’ve known had they studied. A couple of kids came comically close:
Devan: “When your car loses value.”
Jeremiah: “To poop, to release waste from your bowels.”

The kids were picking out a banned book to read for a project we’re doing in English, and Sasha picked out “Annie on My Mind,” which is about teenage lesbians. Jeremiah in response to this selection: “Is it a picture book?”

From Patrick Hewitt:
Sasha in reference to Austin: "One time in elementary school, he punched my brother so much that he puked! Other than that, he's a pretty nice fellow." I laughed hysterically and said, "That's not really funny."

Alexis: “Does this look like a tumor?”
Me, looking at a nickel-shaped scab on her foot: “No, it looks like a callous or a wart or something.”
Alexis: “It’s actually a burn.”
Me: “Okay.”
Alexis: “Can tumors grow under burns?”
Me: “I really don’t think it’s a tumor, kiddo.”

Devan, asking for clarification of a question on an American Literature test: “Mark Twain’s the black guy, right?”

Skyler, God bless him, is a horrible speller, but to his credit he’s very good at spelling things out phonetically. Still, his attempt at “ohbitchuary” left me chuckling.

Bryan: “Mr. Brigham, I’m having a hard time coming up with ten books that I like. Help me think of some, because I’ve only got seven here and that includes the three that I’ve actually read.”

Jesse (a student notorious for being “undersized”), to Mr. DeLoriea: “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not allowed to go on the computers anymore.”
Mr. DeLoriea: “Okay. What else can’t you go on?”
Me: “Most rollercoasters.”

Vintage Student Quotes, 2004

2009-09-10T19:33:00.000-07:00

I had a former student ask what happened to the quotes from his freshmen year of high school, which was something like five years ago, so I dug them up and here they are. These are my first ever students, who will always hold a special place in my heart. But man, did they say some stupid stuff.

In fact, looking back at this I can say with relative confidence that these classes were some of my favorites. These kids rocked in just about every way possible. So, so funny.

So, without further ado, student quotes from Fall 2004 through Spring 2005...

The following quotes are from a discussion regarding surveys my students filled out on the very first day of school:

Me: “So you had an imaginary friend named Theodore the 3rd? What did he look like?”
Eric: “He was a bike.”

Me: “Your imaginary friend’s name was Mr. Harrison. Was he an older man or something?”
Zach: “He was a P.E. teacher that ate all the people I didn’t like.”

Me: “You said that your dream date would be Pamela Anderson.”
Robert: “Yeah. Well, that was before the kids and diseases and stuff.”

In our discussion about EA Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” I asked my freshman students whether they thought Montressor’s killing of Fortunado was justified. One girl said no because it was illegal, and this is how Katie responded to that: “Yeah, but this was olden times. People couldn’t get arrested for killing and stuff back then.”

Amy later added, “I think Montressor earned it. He worked so hard to do it all perfectly. So, killing someone is alright as long as you’re really careful and you do it the right way.”

In my American Literature class, the students and I were discussing what things make us uniquely American, and some of the kids started mentioning different foods. These included things like hot dogs and apple pie, which were obviously very reasonable, but while I was writing these on the board, one student (I’m not sure who because my back was temporarily to the class) added an interesting one: “What about French Fries?”

Mitchell: “Hey Brigs, have you had the Tenderloin here?”
Me: “No.”
Mitchell: “Oh my God, they’re awesome. They’re the tenderest of loins.”
(I have since had many a tenderloin. They are, in fact, delicious)

Nate, researching his ancestry: “Where’s Wales?”
Me: “Somewhere far, far away. I’m sorry, geography was never my strong suit.”
Nate: “So should I just say that I’m half-Whale?”

Cory, recently moved from Florida, sneezing like a maniac: “I hate allergies.”
Me: “What are you allergic to?”
Cory: “I think it’s the corn.”
Me: “Man, you’re screwed.”

“Wait… the Bulls are from here???”
-Becca, after finding out that the full moniker of the team is the Chicago Bulls.

In our discussion of the short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” one character named Zaroff hunts people instead of animals. I asked the kids if they thought he was civilized:

Mason: “He’s civilized because he has a house and good food and stuff.”
Me: “Yeah, plus he wears clothes I guess, so he has to be at least a little civilized, right?”
Katie: “No, he just does that to make the people feel comfortable so he can kill ‘em!”
Me: “So he’s just pretending to be civilized while people are there, but when they’re gone he runs around naked, wearing tribal face paint?”
Eric: “That sounds like me on weekends.”

“Bats are for the United States only.”
-Katie. Even out of context, it’s ridiculous.

From class discussions surrounding “The Scarlet Ibis:”

“I didn’t think we had pigeons in Illinois.”
-Kandace

Abbi: “Wasn’t Doodle paralyzed?”
Me: “No, he wasn’t. He could walk, remember?”
Abbi: “Oh. That makes sense, because the whole time I was reading that story, I was trying to figure out how he could walk if he was paralyzed.”

“Snufficate”
-a word invented by Becca, used in lieu of “suffocate.”

“It’s like… get a job, you bum.”
-Amy, expressing her sentiments towards Madame Loisel, main character in the story “The Necklace.”

“I’ve got a headache in my eye.”
-classic Katie

We were reading a story about an old Native American man who died, and once they did, the people in his tribe painted his face with tribal makeup.

Me: “So why the face paint?”
Katie: “ I thought they were like, joking around with a dead person.”

Stephanie: “Can we use that little thing with the dot?”
Matt: “What? An exclamation point?”
Steph: “Yeah!”

Me: “I’m now going to drink water and talk at the same time.”
Stephanie: “Don’t do it, you’ll choke! I’ve tried it.”

Me: “If you sink, you’re floating.”

Me: “Whoa, one of the Texas Rangers got in a fight with the fans!”
Jenny: “What, you mean like Walker Texas Ranger?”

Alicia: “If something tastes more like a banana, would you say, ‘this tastes bananier?’”

Kandace: “Hurricanes start in the water, but they don’t come up onto land, do they?”
Katie: “No, you’re thinking of earthquakes.”
Me: “What are you talking about?”
Katie: “Earthquakes start in the water, don’t they?”

Abbi: “Is Romeo and Juliet where the guy pulls on her hair and climbs up a wall?”

Katie: “Aren’t time capsules like, time machines where you get to go to other parts of the world? I always wanted to see Abraham Lincoln.”
Kelsie: “What about your grandma?”
Katie: “And my grandma.”

Katie: “Aren’t Spartans like, Indians or something?”

Stephanie: “Whenever you say ‘Caucasian’ it reminds me of Japan.”

Stephanie: “You’ve got to be 18 to get into Chuck E. Cheese.”

Me: “I’m an awful cook. I don’t make Macaroni & Cheese; I make Macaroni & Powder.”
Grace: “Just add more liquid.”
Me: “You can do that?”

Me: “At age 18, Shakespeare married a woman named Anne Hathaway.”
Katie: “Isn’t that the same name as the girl from the Princess Diaries?”
(a few students nod in agreement)
Kandace: “Really? Shakespeare’s wife was the girl in that movie?”

Katie, upon seeing a picture of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London: “Isn’t that where they had the first Olympics?”

Kandace: “What’s ‘his stories?’ Oh, histories.”

The class and I were discussing the section of the Declaration of Independence in which Jefferson makes his complaints and justifications towards King George III of England, and this is the interesting turn taken by the conversation:

Stephanie: “If the King did all this bad stuff, why didn’t they just leave?”
Me: “Well that’s why it’s the Declaration of Independence, Stephanie.”
Steph: blank stare.
Me: “Okay, we’ll try this. What’s the root verb in the word ‘Declaration?’”
Steph: “I don’t know… ‘deck?’”
Me: “I can’t believe you just said that.”
Steph: “Well how am I supposed to know? How do you declarate something, anyway?

Matt, commenting on my tiger-print Dress-Up Day garb: “Where do you get something like that, Kids ‘R Us?”

Me: “So, when you’re reading, keep in mind that Juliet is 12 and probably doesn’t have a very concrete idea about what love actually is. For example, when my little sister was 12, she was in love with Justin Timberlake.”
Eric: “I still am.”

Me: “Since Juliet is so young, she’s extra-impressionable. It’s like this: girls, what happens in your heads when a guy tells you he likes you?”
Erin: “You start liking them back.”
Me: “Exactly, the wheels start turning and…”
Mitchell: “That’s not the way it ever works out for me and my crushes.”
Me: “Really? These girls know how you feel and still nothing?”
Mitchell, kicking Katie’s chair in front of him: “Yeah… Damn you, Katie!”
(It was hilarious, but he did get in trouble for cursing).

“I can say English in Spanish!”
-Stephanie

“The Rock is the wrestler who always said he cooks.”
-Stephanie

“I went and saw The Forgotten this weekend at… um… I forget.”
-Adam, and yes, it was inadvertently ironic.

Corey, trying to guess what “frail tenant” lives inside the snail-like shell of a chambered nautilus: “I don’t know. A turtle maybe?”

Stephanie, commenting on the VERY old television used in class: “That TV looks like the ones they give away on the Newlywed Game as prizes.”

Katie: “I forgot what you said it means when he says he wanders lonely like a cloud. Does that mean he’s on top of the world, except there’s dandelions up there? I mean daffodils. Like, he’s the God of Daffodils?”
-Discussing Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

Ashley: “Mr. Brigham, can I use the word heck in my poem?”

Me, discussing Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem”: When Hughes asks his reader if a dream “explodes,” what dream might he be talking about as a black person in the 1920’s? What does Hughes want?
TJ: “To be free?”

Me, discussing EA Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado: “Montressor has faced some sort of insult at the hands of Fortunado. Now, we don’t know what he actually said to Montressor, but it must’ve been bad. I mean, it could’ve been something like, ‘your mama’s so stupid, she thought MCI was a rapper.”
Kandace: “He is a rapper, isn’t he?”

Mitch, making his point that “black” doesn’t necessarily mean evil in the poem “Eating Blackberries”: “Black doesn’t always mean death. If we were talking about Deathberries, but they were actually pink fluffy clouds of delicious candy, that wouldn’t be evil.”

Me: “What should I be for Halloween?”
Zach: “You should dress up as Waldo and have somebody be policemen who are looking for you. They’d have the Where’s Waldo book for identification, and they could be like, ‘Have you seen this man? Hang on, he’s in here somewhere.’”

Billy: “Mr. Brigs, have you seen Harry Potter 3 and the Prisoner of Azkaban? Hermoine is HOT in that movie. She’s so stuh-fisticated. I’m not sure what I just said, but I know it’s supposed to start with an “S” and end with a “cated.”

Zach literally brought in toast with his haikus written on them. We were all quite confused by this:
Justin: “Why would you do something like that?”
Zach: “Because I’m artistic.”
Jarrid: “More like autistic.”

Zach Williams’s haikus:

"Go Mario"
Mario is small.
Hurry! Run for the mushroom!
Mario is big.

"Where’s Waldo"
So where is Waldo?
Why do we want to find him?
Does he have money?

Me: “Do you guys know what spot research is?”
Eric: “Research about Dalmatians?”

Me, reading a Laffy Taffy wrapper: “Hey Billy, what does a cow use for math?”
Billy: “A pencil… no hang on… a moo-alculator?”
Me: “A COW uses a ‘moo-alculator?’”
Billy: “Oh! A cow-culator!”

Zach: “One time, I tried to make my butt look big by putting two wallets in my back pockets. It kinda worked.”

Stephanie: “When I get really mad, I just get real quiet and don’t say anything.
Dan: “Well then you’re never mad.”

Kandace: “Do bald people still wash their hair?

Katie, noticing the English II notes on the chalkboard: “What’s that word?”
Me: “Transcendentalism.”
Katie: “Does that have to do with going to the dentist?”

Me, explaining religion to the children: “A sin is like getting your name on the chalkboard in grade school, and God’s just waiting to keep you inside for recess.”

Stephanie: “Don’t the Ukranians speak like, Canada language?”

Steph, again: “What does the FBI stand for? Federal Bartering Agency?”

Grace: “Sometimes in class you use words that are too big for us to understand.”
Me: “Yeah, but you get the gist, don’t you?”
Grace: “What’s gist?”

We were watching “The Birds,” and we couldn’t help but make a few off-color comments:

A child in the movie: “Are the birds going to eat us, Mom?”
Me: “Yes, son.”
Zach: “Now eat your taters.”

TJ, after the birds leave and dead people are lying all over the streets: “You just got Punk’d!”

Me: “Have any of you noticed that despite the fact that thousands of birds have attacked this town at one time, there hasn’t been an ounce of bird poop anywhere on the ground?”
At that moment, the little girl in the film asks: “Why do the birds want to kill us, Daddy?”
Me, dramatically frightened: “Because they... can’t... poop!”

Katie: “Is that blood on her hands?”
Adam: “No, that’s finger nail polish.”

Katie: “Mr. Brigs, I don’t have my homework done because I didn’t understand it, and I forgot to dress up for my speech today, and my first block teacher thinks I might have mono .”

Nate: “Hey Brigs, tell me if this is sweet or stupid: [my girlfriend] and I were at a huge Christian convention and were watching this pretty big Christian band playing. Well, I got the lead singer to devote one of the songs to Devon in front of like 3,000 people. So is that sweet or stupid?”
Devon, while I ponder my answer: “He’s forgetting to tell you that song that got devoted to me was about breaking up!”
Me, after a brief pause and a blank stare: “Yeah, that was stupid.”

Dan: “We convinced Katie she had mono first block.”
Stephanie: “Couldn’t she just poop it out? I mean like ringworm. Can’t you poop out ringworm?”

Corey: “Hey Brigs, poverty isn’t in the dictionary. I can’t find it.”
Me: “It’s in there, I promise.”
Corey: “Wait, which comes first, W or V?”
Me: “Are you serious?”
Corey: “Well I was thinking V came between W and X.”

Matt: “I want to move to Kentucky someday.”
Jess: “Why Kentucky?”
Nate: “So he can marry his sister.”

Stephanie: “Oh my gosh, I was scared! I thought I was dying because I was looking at you and then you just weren’t there!”
-This said immediately following a short blackout.

Jesse, trying to tell a story after a long day of short jokes made at her expense: “When I was little…”
Austin Meyers: “How about ‘When I was younger…’”
-Collective laughter ensued.

Jesse: “My dream is to build one of those houses… you know, the ones in trees?”
Lydia: “You mean ‘tree-houses?’”
Jesse: “No, I mean the ones made out of wood.”
Stephanie: “Aren’t all trees technically made out of wood?”

Me: "How does Scout describe her Aunt Alexandria?"
Mitchell: "He says she's like Mt. Everest: cold and just sorta there."
Kandace: "Where is Mt. Everest?"
Katie: "Isn't that the one with the president's faces in it?"
Darci: "No, it's in Canada; it's the one with the waterfalls."
Me: "NO! It's in TIBET! Katie, you're thinking of Mt. Rushmore and Darci, the waterfall in Canada is Niagra Falls! What is going on here???"

Me: "Captain Ahab really believed that it was his fate, his destiny, to kill Moby Dick."
Jesse: "Isn't that kind of silly?"
Me: "I don't think so. We all have causes that we fight for every day, you know? We all have our own 'whale,' so to speak."
Nate, referring to his girlfriend Devon, who sits right next to him: "Devon's MY whale. Wait, I mean... I'm not saying you're fat! It's just... oh crap."

Me: “So what did I say was the word that embodies the whole point of this book?”
Amy: “Empathy!”
Me: “Right, so what is Mr. Cunningham doing?”
Kandace: “Empath-eye-ing?”

Me: “The Klu Klux Klan doesn’t like a lot of groups of people. Irish Catholics? Nope. Jews? Nope…”
Zach: “Crunchy Cheetos? Nope.”

Kandace, noticing a hole in the back of Jarrid’s pants: “Hey Jarrid, you’ve got a hole in your butt.”
Zach: “Don’t we all have holes in our butts?”

Me: “Okay, here’s the game plan for today…”
Stephanie, excited: “Ooooh, we’re playing a game today?!?!”

Zach appeared to be disheveled this morning in class, so I asked him what was wrong. I should never have done that. He replied, “Last night at speech team practice, I kept getting nervous when I was up in front of everyone, so someone told me to picture the audience in their underwear. I think I concentrated too hard because I went straight to naked, and now it won’t go away. Stop the naked!”

Justin, upon finding out he had a test in my class the day before Christmas break: “Man, now I have three tests on Friday!”
Me: “Well, do you guys know why teachers assign tests on the Fridays before breaks?”
Amy: “I just always assumed that it was because if the kids did poorly on them, they wouldn’t be able to just walk into school the next day and shoot everybody up.”
Me: “Okay, yeah… I guess that would be a good reason, too.”

A group of ridiculously-dressed Spanish students stopped in my room towards the end of second block, requesting a picture of their wild garments. Apparently, they had to do a presentation in which they identified each of their articles of clothing in Spanish. Playing along, I got out the camera, held it up, and said, “Okay, now say ‘queso!’” The three Spanish students looked at each other confusedly, when finally one replied, “what’s that?”

Jenny: “When I was little, my dad would make me watch Chucky movies as punishment because he knew how scared I was.”
Me: “That’s horrible!”
Jenny: “Yeah… and then that night, after I was done watching the movie, he made me sleep with my brother’s My Buddy doll.”

Jesse: “When I was a kid, I’d set up a bunch of chairs and pretend I was an airplane pilot, and I’d set up the plane into three sections: the cool people, the losers, and the children. But I’d crash the plane on purpose, and I’d run all over the place and knock chairs over. First I’d kill the kids, then all the losers, and then finally the cool people, too.”
Me: “You did this when you were all by yourself, didn’t you?”
Jesse, smiling shyly: “I was the only survivor.”

Me: “So you guys remember my friend Gates? He’s the really good black tennis player.”
Stephanie: “Bill Gates is black?!?!”

Megan: “My cat’s gay.”
Jesse: “Actually, one of my neighbor’s dogs is gay. Both of them.”

Katie, watching the movie version of “To Kill a Mockingbird”: Atticus looks like a computer nerd.”

Top 5 '90s One-Hit Wonders I'd Still Go See in Concert

2009-09-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

Writing about the Blessid Union concert got me thinking about some of the other great one-hit wonder bands of the ‘90s, and today’s Top 5 List is about which of those groups I’d actually still take the time and money to go see in concert. Of all those bands, these are the ones I think have the best potential to still put on a fun show:

#5 – Tonic – “If You Could Only See” – Back in 1997 this song just sort of spoke to me in ways other alternative ballads did not, and even now the lead singer’s smoky baritone paints a lovely musical picture. As far as a concert is concerned, I’ve actually seen them, and it was apparently right before the group went on a five-year hiatus. It was back in 2004 (I think) at DePaul, and they were actually really good. Of course I bought their first two albums and enjoyed them immensely. The song they did for the “American Pie” soundtrack was what kept me interested. That wasn’t a huge hit by any means—not like “If You Could Only See”—but still a good track. And a pretty good show, too.

#4 – Sister Hazel – “All For You” – As far as harmonies go, these guys are awesome. And yes, I’ve seen them live, too, at Milwaukee’s Summerfest probably six or seven years ago. It was a beautiful night and everyone in attendance was absolutely into the music, dancing and having a great time, so it was hard not to get swept up in that mood. There from Florida and I think my buddy Kevin said they one of them went to his high school or something. I don’t know. In any event, they rock (still), and put on a really fun show. A lot of their other songs sound familiar, and I’m not sure why…

#3 – Fastball – “Out of My Head” – Technically I’m not sure we can call these guys one-hit wonders since “The Way” earned two Grammy nominations in 1998, but “Out of My Head” was their huge hit, and it still holds up. Considering I heard the new song from these guys recently and enjoyed it very much, I can only assume that they’d still be a pretty relevant and fun group to see live.

#2 – Cake – “The Distance” – One of the weirdest styles I’ve ever heard in a band, but Cake does some really cool electronic-sounding stuff. Remember “Short Skirt Long Jacket”? There’s a newer song of theirs called “No Phone” that I love, too. I guess these guys aren’t quite as obscure as other folks on this list, but other than that one hit they really haven’t been topping charts since the mid-90s. I still love them, though, and would be completely content at a Cake concert. Also, goats go to hell.

#1 – Silverchair – “Tomorrow” – They were like 16 when this song came out and rocked the world, but the combination of fame and anorexia for the lead singer sort of put a hamper on how well things went from there. Their “Neon Ballroom” album saw some moderate success with “Ana’s Song,” but the next album, “Diorama,” barely got out of the gate and went pretty much unknown despite it being, in my humble opinion, their best work. They’re sort of fallen by the wayside the last decade, but they rock. No amount of time can change that. Just ask BB King (the blues musician, not my cat).

Honorable Mention:

Fiona Apple – “Criminal” – One of the only rocker chicks I could ever really get into. Did some cool experimenting with rhythms and stuff, which I always dug. Plus, deep down, I always thought she was kinda hot.

Duncan Sheik – “Barely Breating” – I think the only other Duncan Sheik song I’ve ever even heard is “Half-Life,” but that’s okay because I liked that one, too. Clearly I’ve got a penchant for singer-songwriters, and Sheik fits that mold.

Blessid Union of Souls – “Hey Leonardo” – Obviously I just saw these guys and had a great time. They inspired this whole list, so how could I not include them?

Eagle Eye Cherry – “Save Tonight” – The son of jazz artist Don Cherry has a voice born for folk music. This song made him hot in the U.S. for a short time, but none of his newer stuff caught on here. Over in Sweden (the motherland for him) and other parts of Europe he’s huge. Most recent album came out in 2006 but didn’t even sniff at any charts, domestic or international. I hope he doesn’t suck, having put him on my list of honorable mention candidates. I have the feeling his shows would be relatively worthwhile.

Cypress Hill – “Insane in the Membrane” – Something about the way B Real raps just gets me excited. And boy was he great on the “Space Jam” soundtrack, right?

Did I miss anybody? Keep in mind that I’m basing this off which groups would put on the best overall show, not which groups had the best overall songs. Add in your two cents, gang. It’s always welcome…

Nice to Meet You #20 - Blessid Union of Souls

2009-09-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

My students asked me on Friday if I was planning on going to the first football game of the season, and I told them no. It had nothing to do with the fact that my high school’s football team has not been particularly successful the last two or six years (honestly, it didn’t), but that I already had plans to attend a free Blessid Union of Souls concert that evening.

“Who?” my students asked.

“Blessid Union of Souls,” I said, and then sang a little sample of “I Believe” and “Hey Leonardo” thinking that would be enough to snap them into understanding. The melodies were entirely unfamiliar to the lot of them. Blank stares across the room, maybe one or two admitting that the second song sounded kinda familiar. I started to get upset, but then remembered that most of my high school sophomores were born in 1994, which was after “I Believe”became a humongous hit.

Sigh.

My buddy Kevin, who was responsible for bringing the band to his venue, had similar issues with his workers, most of whom had never heard the songs, either. They were all born between 1988 and 1991, making it slightly less excusable but infinitely more depressing that they’d be completely ignorant of two mega-hits like those. The one-and-two-hit wonders of my era are falling by the wayside, ladies and gentlemen, and this means that I am officially old. Do you realize how huge “Hey Leonardo” was back in high school? It literally was that song you couldn’t go 30 minutes tuned into a top-40 radio station without hearing it seven times, and there I was in the second row of a free concert by these guys.

I remember working at Dairy Queen and hearing that song all the time, either while I was assembling burgers in the heat of a busy lunch or later on in the evening, when all us employees would be wiping things down and putting foodstuffs back in the cooler. At that age—at any age, really—we envision the bands making hit records for the radio as some untouchable gang of golden gods sitting atop throans of fresh fruit, golden goblets, and nude women somewhere in Hollywood. And if you’re Aerosmith or Green Day that’s probably true. But for all those other groups—not just Blessid Union but Lit, Stroke 9, Papa Roach, and scores upon scores of others—life is probably only like that for a year or two. Three if you’re lucky. Then the hype dies, their new songs get lamer, and the mass public stops caring. When that comes to fruition they’re just guys like you and me.

And that, I think, is part of why I enjoyed the free concert so much. I worked in that venue as a sound guy for two-and-a-half years, so it also sort of felt like home to me. The warm and fuzzy ambiance of that room always appeals to performers, which means that music shows always are excellent. “I Believe” was flawless, folks. Eliot Sloan (the lead singer) hasn’t lost it one bit. He’s lost the dreadlocks to late-30s male-pattern balding, but the voice is still there. Just him and a keyboard and 400 people listening. Very moving.

I learned on this night that he wrote that song at 3 in the morning, still awake and upset because his old gal-pal Lisa had recently dumped him because her father sort of made her. The last verse he sang live—which I hadn’t heard before—implied that it had something to because he was a black guy from the streets. The song itself is so positive, and that’s why it’s easy to get behind these guys as a band. It’s all good stuff. She likes me for me, and so on…

They’ve got a song called “The Light in Your Eyes” that has always been my favorite tune of theirs, which they slowed down a little in a live setting (it was an acoustic set, after all), but I didn’t care. It was a gorgeous version. They closed with “Hey Leonardo,” which Sloan said was written to be a ballad. At first it was intended to be this slow, lovely love song, but the producers had the idea to speed it up and make the beat a little more cathcy. The band—Sloan specifically—fought that idea to the “bitter end,” as he put it, apparently still upset that the song wasn’t what he intended and now he has to close every damn concert he ever does with it, but admitted he had a hard time being too made because the end result was a top ten record that probably accounted for about 40% of the money those guys have ever earned as musicians.

I had previously heard three of the 20 or so songs that Blessid Union performed that night, but it was a really nice and intimate show. Definitely worth my time (especially considering the football time got crushed by four touchdowns), even if only for the music alone. But what would a “Nice to Meet You” piece be without an actual meeting?

After the show Kevin hooked me up with a poster and a silver Sharpie, and all four guys in the band signed autographs for me. I definitely felt like I was twelve hounding some annoyed celebrity for the signature, but whatever. When am I ever going to see those guys again? Took a picture with the gang, too, and the guys were all very nice. Especially the bassist, who if I’m being honest had this creepy raper face all during the show, but he ended up being the most amiable of the bunch.

My little brother, who worked for Kevin too once upon a time, met Blessid Union at a showcase conference once, and he and Craig mentioned to these guys that they were going to do “Hey Leonardo” for a cover band contest. They were really pumped out it and actually checked their tour schedule to see if they’d be in the area around the time of the show. They apparently were considering stopping by to help Kyle and Craig with their performance. I’m pretty sure they won anyway, but I have to think that certainly would’ve solidified it.

And Kevin, who’s worked with Blessid Union on a couple of occasions, relayed to me one cool story from when he accompanied the guys to a bar after one year’s showcase. Sloan, the lead singer, asked the karoake DJ to pop in the instrumental version of “I Believe” and then tore the place up. Because most people have no idea that the lead singer of Blessid Union is a black guy, nobody made the connection that it was actually him. There more than a few comments, though, that went something like, “Boy, that guy sounds just like the real dude!”

So yeah, my students have no idea who these guys are, but does that change the awesomeness that they represent in my own life? I mean, I’ve got absolutely zero appreciation for Prince and The Police from a pop culture standpoint because I was either too young and not alive to have experienced it. I think I know “When Doves Cry,” but I wouldn’t recognize any other Prince song, especially if my English teacher tried singing it for me. You know, if I had an English teacher.

I’m old now. So what? It was going to happen someday. Now I get to look forward to having children of my own that grow up and listen to crap I’ll never understand. Meanwhile I’ll still be bumping Blessid Union and all the other delicious music from the ‘90s that the next generation won’t care two squirts of pee about.

They’ll be like, “Dad, have you heard the new song by the Silver Monkey Weasels?”

And I’ll look back at them blankly and ask, “Who?”

Joel & Amy Across America, The End

2009-08-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

Day 5:

Walden Pond – To be a transcendentalist was to be, in a lot of ways, pretty friggin’ awesome. If my general readership is anything like my American Literature students, the term “transcendentalist” might as well be in a foreign language for how much meaning it holds. But for guys like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the original transcendentalists, it was a way of life more than a philosophy. In Thoreau’s case, it took him out into the woods for two years.

One of the cornerstones of the transcendentalist philosophy is a love for nature, so in 1845 Thoreau built a little cabin on a patch of woodsy land owned by Emerson so that he could spend some legitimate time with nature. It had, he thought, lessons to teach him about simplicity and beauty. After two years out there he got what he wanted to get out of the experience, and returned to real life in Concord, Massachusetts, just a short distance from the Pond where he’d been living.

That pond was our first stop on the way home, and immediately Amy and I could tell how Thoreau could learn about beauty here. Walden is just a small kettle hole surrounded by trees, but the water itself some of the clearest I’ve ever seen. There’s a trail along the outskirts of the pond, and about a half-mile back is the location of Thoreau’s cabin. Considering it was built from questionable wood a century and a half ago, the actual structure is long-gone. In its place now are small concrete markers that show the general dimensions of the one-room structure, as well as where the woodshed would’ve been out back.

About ten yards to the left of the cabin site is the area believed to have been the cabin site for years before a professional came in and found the real thing. I’ve got to admit that for a wild guess they did a pretty good job. At the incorrect cabin site are stacks and stacks of stones that people bring from all over the world to place there, some of which were marked with people’s names and birth/death dates. I’m guessing the families of big-time Thoreau fans would bring those stones and place them there as a final sendoff to a loved one. Considering it just so happened to be Amy’s dad’s birthday, she added a small stone to the pile as well.

On the walk back we had an issue with a broken walkway that resulted in relatively wet feet for us travelers, and we bumped into an overweight skinny-dipping soprano loudly humming some medieval melody. We were sort of in the area furthest from the entrance, but yeesh! Those were breasts I could’ve died perfectly happy having never seen.

Like Thoreau, we had seen what we’d come to see, and it was time for us to head to Concord. Having only been on the road for a little over an hour, we’d already seen way more than our fair share of beauty for one day.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery – No, not that Sleepy Hollow. The cemetery used as a backdrop for Washington Irving’s famous story about the Headless Horseman is actually in New York. But that doesn’t mean this particular Sleepy Hollow doesn’t boast its own little claim to fame. Up on Author’s Ridge are buried four legendary American authors: Thoreau, Emerson, Nathanial Hawthorne (author of “The Scarlet Letter”), and Louisa May Alcott (author of “Little Women”).

Click HERE for More Concord Pictures!

The difference between Thoreau’s and Emerson’s headstones was almost laughable. Thoreau has a tiny traditional marker about the size of a school textbook, with only the word “Henry” etched in the middle. Emerson, on the other hand, lies beneath a five-foot-tall slab of what appeared to be (I’m no geologist) quartz, with an impressive metal plaque at eye level. These two guys were like best buds, but clearly Emerson had a little more cash to deal with his postmortem living quarters.

Alcott and Hawthorne have stones similarly modest to Thoreau, with Alcott’s being nothing more than a small brick with her name on it laying even with the surface of the grass. What was cool to see was all the trinkets left at these graves. Thoreau had a little wooden fife, Hawthorne a silver cross necklace, and Alcott a number of different flowers and pens.

It may not have been THE Sleepy Hollow, but it brought up the rear very nicely on our weeklong tour of famous graves. At the end of it all, the list looks like this:

Ben Franklin
Betsy Ross
John Hancock
Samuel Adams
Paul Revere
The Five Victims of the Boston Massacre
John Hawthorne (Witch Trials Judge)
William Bradford (Plymouth Governor) and other Pilgrims
John Adams
Abigail Adams
John Quincy Adams
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Louisa May Alcott
Nathaniel Hawthorne

I wouldn’t say we’re obsessed with dead people, just interested in sharing the same space as some American legends. Damn, that’s a list, isn’t it?

Homes of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott – The night before Amy and I had discussed the possibility of making a stop on the way home. It was going to be an awesome stop, but in order to have time for it we’d have to cut some things out of our original plans in Concord. The Awesome Stop happened later that day, but it came at the expense of the Emerson and Alcott homes.

Emerson’s place is, quite simply, an old white house kept in immaculate condition. We peeked in the windows a little bit but really didn’t spend too much time worrying about it. Inside, Emerson wrote “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar” and a host of other essays that made him the 19th Century’s most famous thinker.

Down the road is Alcott’s Orchard House, where she both wrote and pressed “Little Women.” Personally, I never liked the book, being a man and all, so we just took a quick little walk around the grounds and scooted. Would these tours have been historically worthwhile? Probably. Was spending time there more important than the Awesome Stop we’d hoped to visit later in the day? Nope. Not a chance. So while we would’ve loved to get more out of these places, we didn’t, and I refuse to regret that.

Old North Bridge, Site of “The Shot Heard Round the World” – Unofficially, the last stop of our vacation in Massachusetts, the Old North Bridge wasn’t as easy to find as I thought it would be. For some reason I was under the impression that we’d drive over it, but that wasn’t the case. After doing some walking we found our way to the place where the first shots were fired in the American Revolution.

As a result of those shots a battle ensued, which the American Minutemen won. We know how the rest of the war panned out. USA! USA! USA!

North Bridge spans the Concord River, and on one side is the famous Minuteman statue meant to commemorate the “Shot Heard Round the World” that happened at the spot where it now stands. On the other bank is a memorial to the British soldiers who died, as well as an obelisk commemorating where the bridge stood before it was rebuilt in 1875. It’s been rebuilt three other times since then, the most recent in the 1940s. So the bridge that’s there isn’t the real bridge, but you can’t fudge the history. In some ways, it was in that spot where the United States of American got started. It was also in that spot that our vacation ended.

Well, sort of…

Baseball Hall of Fame – There was no way Amy and I were driving 18 straight hours back home, so we’d made plans to stay the night about halfway there, in Erie, Pennsylvania. I made the reservations on Priceline for some ridiculously low price, so whatever we did the rest of this day we just needed to make sure we’d make it to Erie by bedtime. After breezing through Concord all morning, Amy and I decided to take a very small detour to Cooperstown, New York, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

While only about a half hour out of our way, the drive was long and winding through the rain, and as we got further and further away from the tollway I found myself wondering where the hell we were going. Sure, there were signs for Cooperstown the whole way, but the drive is like 50 miles of two-lane highway through Nowheresville, New York. At one point Amy asked me why the Hall of Fame was even located in Cooperstown. I had to admit that, at the time, I didn’t know.

Click HERE for More Cooperstown Pictures!

Turns out that a committee in the early 20th Century was put together for the sole purpose of nailing down where the modern game of baseball was invented. The final consensus led the committee to Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown. So there you have it.

In any event, finally driving into Cooperstown was like entering an entirely new dimension. All of a sudden everything was beautiful and green and quaint, with the Hall right smack dab in the middle of Main Street. We quickly parked (for free, by the way), and headed inside to the place where baseball legend goes to live on.

Amy was most enamored with the Babe Ruth section, but not because it housed his uniform or the bat from his 60th home run or the bat from his called shot homer, but because it had a book he signed the night he died, certified by a letter from the nurse on duty that night. Just like a woman to find the sentimentality in a building filled with manly baseball stuff, right?

Some of my favorites included Hank Aaron’s record-breaking home run balls, the mitts of Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson, and the No-Hitter wall, which spans an entire end of one room with the baseballs and photographs of every no-hitter in baseball history. For Nolan Ryan, who threw seven of them, they have an extra display with his game hats.

For Barry Bonds, who broke Aaron’s all-time home run record in 2006, they’ve got a case with memorabilia from that memorable season. The fan that caught the ball, however, sent it to the Hall only after having an asterisk emblazoned in the leather. For those unfamiliar with baseball, Bonds is very, very likely a one-time steroid user, meaning his prestigious home run record is questionable. The asterisk thing was awesome. Not only did the guy have the audacity to put that symbol on there, but the Hall of Fame actually put the thing on display.

The place is just littered with baseball history—memorabilia from Stan Musial, Micky Mantle, Ernie Banks, Joe DiMaggio, Roberto Clemente, Ted Williams, Lou Gherig, Cy Young... it just goes on and on and on. It wasn’t the Field of Dreams (which I’ve also been to), but it was just as magical an experience. Any baseball purist needs to make the trek out east because it’s totally worth it. People wear the hats and jerseys of their favorite team and the gift shop alone is worth the trip.

I, of course, wore a Sox shirt and Sox hat and took pictures with the old pinwheel from the original Comiskey Park scoreboard, as well as the hat Freddy Garcia wore the final game of the World Series in 2005. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Chicago stuff, right?

We had a great time, not just at Cooperstown but for the entire trip. We went home absolutely exhausted, but this was a sight-seeing vacation, not a sit-by-the-beach-and-drink-pina-coladas vacation. Besides, as teachers we’d get plenty of time to relax when we finished the rest of our drive home.

The only problem we’ve got now is, since we did so much in our week out east, how much history is there left for us to discover?

Amy & Joel Across America, Part 9

2009-08-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

William Bradford’s Grave – Bradford’s “On Plymouth Plantation” is probably the most famous and most detailed primary source we have of the Pilgrims’ early experience in the New World, but we don’t credit this guy just for being an interesting author. He was also the governor that held the new settlement together through some ridiculously tough times.

He’s buried in the town’s oldest cemetery, Burial Hill, which overlooks Cape Cod and the rest of the town of Plymouth. Fittingly, he’s got one of the largest headstones on the grounds, but even that doesn’t come close to showing the sort of appreciation he deserves. For goodness sake, the tallest gravestone we saw all trip was for the parents of Benjamin Franklin. And they didn’t do anything but give birth to the guy!

As for Bradford, it was never the plan for him to become governor of Plymouth, but when the man who was originally appointed died within the first year, Bradford was the logical guy to take over. This was a guy who, despite being devoutly religious, was able to put out some pretty violent orders to maintain the safety and stability of his colony. His wife died before she even got off the boat. Perhaps worst of all, at least to Bradford, what had started as a strictly religious colony became less and less so as more Anglican Englanders made the trip over.

The guy had guts, though, like a lot of these early settlers, and his job was the farthest thing from an easy one. You’ve got to wonder how things might’ve been different were he not there to hold it all together. Would we even have a Plimoth Plantation and Mayflower II to visit today? Maybe, but probably not. But possibly. Most likely. Or not…

The Adams Family Tomb – On the way back to the car, Amy and I plucked a decent-sized stone from the Plymouth shoreline to take home with us. Why would we do such a thing? To display Plymouth Rock prominently on our bookshelf. Okay, so it’s not THE Plymouth Rock, but it’s definitely a rock from Plymouth. We had fun doing it, okay?

On the way back towards Boston we made a stop at a church in Quincy, which is where John Adams, Abigail Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Catherine Adams all are buried. We were absolutely wiped out from a long on foot in the sun, but this was right on the way and seemed like something we should do. It ended up being the most solemn experience of the week.

Click HERE for More Pictures!

Walking up to United First Parish Church you’d never guess that it houses a family tomb that includes the bodies of two presidents. Inside it’s a beautiful old church, and there were a couple of older docents there giving tours. We had come towards the end of the day, so while the older woman was talking to a group in the actual church, we chatted up the kindly old gent who waited with us to get things started. After having asked about our reason for coming we told him we were teachers with voracious appetites for history and how almost the entire vacation was devoted to taking in as much of it as we could before going home.

He sort of looked at the other tour group in the church and finally said, “I’ll just take you down to the crypt.” So that’s what we did. The thing about our tour guide was that he took his job very seriously, and I’m positive that had a strong effect on how seriously Amy and I took the whole experience as well. He told us that every morning he’d come down to the tombs and thank to second and sixth president for the opportunity to do what he does. This guy was extremely solemn and patriotic fellow, so we did absolutely everything we could to be as respectful as possible.

The tomb is just a little room with four gigantic granite boxes that hold the caskets of the Adams. We found out that earlier that day some direct descendants of the family had been there to celebrate John Quincy’s birthday. President Obama had personally sent a wreath of flowers that was now sitting atop JQ’s tomb. We were, to say the least, pretty bummed we’d missed out on that, but just being in a room with two dead presidents was in itself emotionally overwhelming.

On the way out, the docent offered Amy a flower from the presidential wreath. He wanted us to share the experience with our students, and for Amy to show the flower to her students. It was an extremely benevolent gesture and we of course accepted. We’ve got no idea where to put this flower, but how do you turn down something like that?

When we stepped back and looked at the long list of graves we’d visited over the course of the week it was difficult not to label these particular ones as the most memorable. Few people had as much to do with shaping early America than John Adams, and his wife Abigail was one of the first real feminists. John Q. was no hack, either, so just being there, in a church no less, was about as solemn as a tourist attraction gets.

Brigham’s Restaurant – My family comes from Massachusetts. There are Brighams spread out all over the country, but probably the strongest concentration of them is out East, where the original Brigham set foot on American soil a long, long time ago. As a result there’s a really famous Brigham hospital in Boston, as well as almost a full page of other Brigham’s listed in the Boston phone book. Perhaps the most famous of all, though, is Brigham’s Ice Cream.

There was absolutely no way I was going home without tasting the stuff, so our last evening meal in Massachusetts took us like 30 minutes from our hotel to find the nearest Brigham’s. It’s sort of like a fancy Culver’s, with burgers and fried goods and, of course, ice cream for dessert. We ordered whatever and did the ice cream thing, which was good, but we definitely had more fun taking pictures of and with everything labeled “Brigham” in the entire building. The poor teenagers working the till must’ve thought we’d escaped from some sort of mental facility. We probably could’ve pulled the name thing and gotten some free stuff, but we didn’t want too many people asking for autographs and all that. The girl didn’t even blink when I busted out the Brigham credit card. So much for celebrity. And, as it would happen, so much for Boston. We’d be leaving in the morning, but not after a few more stops on the way home.

Joel & Amy Across America, Part 8

2009-08-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

National Monument to the Forefathers – Our last full day in Massachusetts took us an hour down the coast to Plymouth, which is where the Pilgrims eventually settled after coming over to America on the Mayflower. It’s one of the most fabled stories in our history, and that’s why someone built an 81-foot monument in the middle of a huge grass park hidden towards the back of modern-day Plymouth.

As far as monuments go, this one is friggin’ ornate. The centerpiece is a toga-clad personification of “Faith,” which is flanked by four smaller figures meant to represent Freedom, Morality, Law, and Education. Higher up are two huge lists of those aboard the Mayflower etched in marble, and the many other small details are too tedious and too many to spend more time on.

Built in 1888 it was originally designed to be almost twice as tall, but the whole point was to have it face Plymouth Harbor and be dedicated to those men and women that braved the Atlantic Ocean to start a colony in the New World. For us it was a precursor to the rest of the day in Plymouth, which would prove to be one of the coolest things we did all trip.

Plymouth Rock – What better place to head next than the most famous stone in America? Growing up both Amy and I were taught that this rock was the place where the Pilgrims first disembarked to start their colony. So what if that’s not exactly true? This was Plymouth Rock, people! A rock!

Okay, I’m being a little facetious. It really was pretty cool to stand right at the shore and look out on the water, knowing that almost 400 years ago the Pilgrims stepped off a boat and decided that this was the place they’d live for the rest of their lives. When they landed in 1620 they had almost no idea what was out there, other than the Natives who very likely would make things as difficult as possible for them.

A few times on our trip I would be inspired to stop myself and just imagine the history happening before me, and this was one of those times. Granted, nowhere in Plymouth governor William Bradford’s “On Plymouth Plantation” does he mention a rock, but it’s been generally accepted that the rock has always been there. It might not have been the first place they landed, but it was a landmark for incoming ships looking for Plymouth Harbor.

The Pilgrims didn’t even land at the rock and then immediately set up shop. The first land they saw was the tail of Massachusetts, and then they spent a month on the boat while search parties scouted the area for a desirable settlement location. Bradford’s wife, for example, lasted the boat trip over from Holland, but died before Plymouth was chosen as home base.

So yeah, Plymouth Rock isn’t quite the icon some history books have made it out to be, but it was still a cool moment to stare out at the cape and imagine the Mayflower moored somewhere out there. Then to turn around and see the high sloping hill where the colony was started… well, it was just a cool moment. And it was free.

Plimoth Plantation – The replica Wampanoag village and Plimoth settlement a couple miles down the road was not free, however, but despite the relatively steep price (nothing was more expensive on this trip except the Red Sox tickets), it was absolutely worth the price.

Set up exactly three miles to the south of where the real Plymouth colony was founded, Plimoth Plantation is essentially a living museum meant to resemble that colony as closely as possible as it would’ve been in 1627. We were told that the English village was actually built in 1950s and is about one-third as big as the original would’ve been. Actor/Historians come from all over the country to be part of this project, so not only is every building and tool and food item on site totally authentic to the era, but the “colonists” who reside there (from 9am-5pm) know what the hell they’re talking about.

These people stay in character the whole time, so any question they’re asked they come back with an answer pretty close to what a Pilgrim would have actually said. For example we asked one guy what he was cooking for lunch, and he looked at us as if he’d never heard the word. Because he never would’ve heard the word. Back then it was called dinner, so when I corrected myself he was able to answer me properly.

Then, trying to catch him with a question that would throw him off, I asked about religion. Because I teach this Puritan stuff to my American Lit students, I tossed out a little diddy that went something like, “What’s it like living in a Puritan community considering you didn’t come here as a Puritan?” Then I sort of leaned back and smirked. That will show him.

Except he went off for like seven or eight minutes on how offensive it was to call him a Puritan instead of a Separatist, and then explaining why he feels the way he does and how much the religion has helped him and philosophically how the whole thing works for the people at Plymouth. It was nuts. When it came time for my rebuttal I was like, “Cool. Enjoy your dinner,” and Amy and I just sort of nodded and left. Dude wasn’t rude or anything, but he definitely showed me. I dare him to talk me about basketball, though.

Click HERE for More Pictures!

The other cool thing about this place was the Wampanoag home site, where the Native people that wear authentic garb and spent their days doing authentic Nativey things, actually are descendents of the area’s Wampanoag people. They dress the part, but don’t have to stay in character the way the Plymouth actors do. You just ask them what you’re thinking and they answer. The guy we talked to new literally everything about the area and its history, so we spent about thirty straight minutes chatting him up. It would’ve been a great place to take kids for a field trip. It’s only an 18-hour drive. Totally worth it, right?

Those two things combined kept us busy for a solid four hours, and if we hadn’t been starving it’s very likely we would’ve stayed longer. When we found the whole place is a non-profit facility and the only thing keeping it going was the steep admissions price, we didn’t feel so bad. Still, we could’ve spent the day at Six Flags for that kind of bread. But this wasn’t a Six Flags sort of vacation. It was about learning, and dammit, we certainly did plenty of that.

Mayflower II – After lunch at a seafood place back in Plymouth, a lunch in which I demolished my first entire lobster for the low, low price of $18, we walked to a replica of the Mayflower moored at State Pier, available for self-guided tours.

Anybody can build a boat that looks sort of old-ish and boat-ish, but to create a faithful reproduction of the Mayflower, which was a well-used boat even when the Pilgrims got to it in 1620, requires a lot of research and specialized builders. Built all the way back in 1955, this particular replica was done the right way.

Plimoth Plantation had wanted a replica of the famous boat for some time, and actually had commissioned a specialized ship builder to put together blueprints for one and start building it. The guy they hired did meticulous research about ships of the era and combed primary sources for any information about the original Mayflower, then he combined all that information and made what would prove to be the most accurate replica blueprint to date.

What P.P. didn’t know was that an English organization wanted to build a replica Mayflower as well and actually recreate the journey across the Atlantic. They just didn’t quite have the funding to do it, and had no idea where they’d permanently moor the boat when the voyage was over. Naturally, this group, called Project Mayflower, joined up with Plimoth Plantation and made it all happen.

Before sailing across the ocean, as the Pilgrims did, Project Mayflower had to make the blueprints into a tangible boat, and they did so as authentically as possible. The accuracy of this vessel went down to every minute detail—carefully chosen English oak timbers, hand-made nails, hand-sewn linen canvas sails, real hemp cordage, and exactly the sort of Stockholm tar used by ship builders in the 17th Century.

Today, the boat is still seaworthy (it sailed to Rhode Island in 2002), but it’s mostly just used to educate people about the Pilgrims’ journey to America. Just like at Plimoth Plantation there are costumed role-players on board telling all sorts of stories and answering all sorts of questions. Seeing the way the crew and passengers slept and ate was more than a little remarkable. To think of 120+ people shoved into that tiny a space for two months was a little overwhelming, but those original Americans were under no illusions that the trip would be an easy one. It was a heck of a lot easier for Amy and me; we just walked up a ramp, looked around for about a half hour, then walked down a different ramp. Our journey to America was a can of corn compared to what the Pilgrims must’ve gone through, but that’s the advantage of being born in the 1980s, I suppose.

Joel & Amy Across America, Part 7

2009-08-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

Harvard University – When I was applying for colleges at the ripe age of seventeen my father made it very clear to me that I should send out my information to whatever school I wanted, even if I didn’t think there was a chance I’d get accepted. He told me the story of when he was coming out of high school he only applied to the University of Illinois (where he eventually went) because he knew that was what his family could afford. His dream was to attend Harvard, but it would’ve been too expensive for my grandmother and grandfather. So he just didn’t out the application, even though he was a bright kid and would’ve liked to know if he could’ve made it in. Whether or not he actually went wasn’t the point—he wanted to know if he was good enough to attend Harvard University.

Even though I never really had much desire to go there myself, the place has always held some sort of mystique for me knowing how closely intertwined Harvard was with my father’s educational dreams as a young man. It’s iconic American college and we’d probably have no reason to ever go there again, so we went, just to take a little snoop around.

My good childhood friend and distant cousin David just wrapped up a three-year stint at the law school there, so Amy and I met up with him to get the five-cent tour. Harvard University, established in 1636, is the oldest school and the oldest corporation in America, and Harvard Yard is probably the most famous quad in the country. It’s where smart people go to college, and if you knew my buddy David he’d serve as living proof of that. The following list of people all went to Harvard. It’s crazy looking at all these names in one place. You ready? Here it is:

John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Rutherford Hayes, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, George W. Bush (Lord knows how the hell that one happened), Al Gore, Barack Obama, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Helen Keller, William Rehnquist, Janet Reno, Ralph Nader, Al Franken, Adlai Stevenson, Bill Gates, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William S. Burroughs, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Norman Mailer, T.S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Michael Crichton, Robert Frost, William Randolph Hearst, Bill O’Reilly, Buckminster Fuller, Leonard Bernstein, Yo-Yo Ma, Conan O’Brien, Jack Lemmon, Natalie Portman, Matt Damon, John Lithgow, Mira Sorvino, Tommy Lee Jones, Jonathon Taylor Thomas, Darren Aronofsky, Tom Morello, W.E.B. Du Bois, and, of course, The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

Click HERE for More Pictures!

Seventy-five Nobel Prize winners are associated with the university, and in the last 35 years, 19 Nobel Prize winners and 15 Pulitzer Prize winners have served on the faculty. The standards here are pretty high.

Comparing this to my own college, Illinois Wesleyan, is futile, no matter how excellent we are academically. We boast 7-time NBA All-Star Jack Sikma (hell of a guy, by the way), Oscar nominated actor Richard Jenkins (also a hell of a guy), and Andy Dick (who I’ve never had the displeasure of meeting, thankfully). No other school in America is going to come close to Harvard’s list of attendees. It’s just gonna happen.

Our tour of the campus included a breeze by the library, which is the largest private library in the world and the fifth largest collection of books in the world, as well as David’s law building, the famous John Harvard statue, and plenty of other buildings on campus as well.

We took a picture with the John Harvard statue, which is allegedly one of the most photographed statues in the country. It’s called the statue of three lies because the statue is not actually John Harvard (the sculptor used a student model), Harvard is not the founder of the university (he left several books and a hefty inheritance to the school years after it had already been established, so they changed the name then to honor him), and it was founded in 1636, not 1638 as the statue proclaims.

Just off campus is a little park called Cambridge Common, and it’s here that George Washington first took control of his Continental Army, and across the street from there are some bronze horseshoe prints in the sidewalk meant to commemorate the route of William Dawes, who like Paul Revere made a ride across the countryside to warn of the British coming to arrest Sam Adams and John Hancock.

After walking around Harvard Square a little bit, buying t-shirts at the Coop, and getting a delicious red velvet cupcake at Sweet, a little bakery we’d heard a lot about, it was pretty much time to call it a day. There was baseball to watch later that evening, and we had to get a little bit rest and nourishment before the Fenway experience.

Fenway Park – Many baseball purists claim that some of the more modern ballparks are bastardizations of what a baseball experience should be. Having now been to the two oldest ballparks in American, Fenway and Wrigley, I can fully understand why some people prefer an old building for a baseball experience, even if modern-day stadiums have more comfortable seats, better food, and more navigable concourses. It all depends what you want out a ball game.

One thing is for sure, though—you can’t see your first game at Fenway without being at least a little wowed by it. Built in 1912 it’s the oldest professional baseball park still in use, and once you get inside you can see the charming presence of old age in the green rafters, the wooden grandstand seats, the dungeon-like underground concessions area, and the absence of a state-of-the-art souvenir shop. Walking into the building reminded me a lot of going to Cubs and White Sox games as a kid at Wrigley and Comiskey, and that was the part I really, really liked. It’s the kind of place where you almost have to buy a bag of peanuts en route to your seat (unless, of course, your wife is allergic to peanuts, in which case you skip that part).

Probably the most recognizable part of Fenway is the Green Monster, a 37-foot wall in left field meant to compensate for the short distance to that side of the field. Back when Manny Ramirez was playing for the Red Sox during the World Series years of 2004 and 2007, the Monster relayed a ton of doubles as it blocked line-drive homers from sailing out. Rising above that huge wall is the famous Citgo sign, which shines in all its neon glory above the park as soon as night falls.

The game itself was kind of blah since the Kansas City Royals ended up whooping up on the Sox, but for what it was worth we both really enjoyed the experience. For the better part of a couple innings I moved up to an empty seat a couple rows back from the field to shoot some pictures, and I got into a great conversation with a couple of locals. The Boston accent you hear so much about—with the r’s dropped off the ends of words—is legit. By the time I headed back to my actual seat I felt pretty confident that I could’ve passed as a Bostonian if I wanted. My White Sox hat probably would’ve given me away, though. One thing I’ve learned in visiting other teams’ ball parks is that it’s hard to stay interested the whole time, so we left in the 7th inning and took the subway back to our hotel. It was an excellent experience marking my 10th professional ballpark. I have now officially been to one-third of the baseball stadiums in Major League Baseball. I’m glad I didn’t have to save Fenway for last.

Joel & Amy Across America, Part 6

2009-08-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Day 3:

Salem Witch Trials Monument & The Burying Point – Salem, Massachusetts is only about a thirty-minute drive north of Boston, so Amy and I made arrangements to spend some time out there to engrain ourselves in the local witch fare. Today, Salem has become something of a haven for Wiccans, but our interest in visiting was, like everything else on our trip, purely historical.

The American religious landscape in 1692 was extremely Puritan, meaning most people were very strict when it came to the Bible. Salem was no exception, and beyond their stringent adherence to the Bible’s bylines, they also believed in predestination—the idea that God has one’s entire life all planned out and everything happens for a very specific reason. If someone were to find buried treasure in their backyard, it was because God felt the need to reward them. If someone’s child got very sick and died, it was God’s punishment for some wrong that person had committed. No matter what happened in a person’s life, it was all for a reason.

A combination of these things, added to the boredom of Salem’s young girls and some complicated political dishevelment, led to some men and women being accused of witchcraft in Salem and the surrounding areas in 1692. The girls doing the accusing would fake seizures in court and point fingers at their “tormentors.” Eventually these girls’ parents would use the whole ordeal as an excuse to accuse people they didn’t like of witchcraft, and from there the whole thing dominoed completely out of control. By the time it was all said and done, twenty completely innocent people had been executed as witches.

Our first stop in Salem was the memorial constructed for those twenty men and women that had been wrongly killed. None of these people are actually buried there, but the names run around the little stone garden to remember the people that died. Anybody who had to read “The Crucible” in high school will recognize names like John Proctor, Sarah Good, Giles Corey, and Rebecca Nurse. Many of the others I hadn’t heard of previously, but it was cool to be there after having taught the book to my students.

The trials came to an abrupt close when the wife of a higher-up in the province was accused. Knowing it was all ridiculous, this man called an end to the trials and released the 100+ people who were being detained at the time as potential witches. The girls weren’t punished, nor was anyone else, because to admit the whole thing was a sham was to admit that their religion was a sham, and nothing was more important to early Americans than religion.

Click HERE for More Pictures!

Something was accomplished in the wake of all this, however. Because of these trials, spectral evidence (having to do with spirits and ghosts and all that) was outlawed in future hearings. No longer could someone say, “I’m being possessed by spirits unleashed onto me by so-and-so” and have that count as credible evidence towards convicting someone. It’s just a shame that 20 people had to die for so obvious a conclusion.

The Salem Witch Trials Memorial is right next to the city’s oldest cemetery, where Colonel John Hathorne, the head judge from the trials, is buried. Also interred there is Richard More, one of the original Pilgrims that came over on the Mayflower. So many of the stones in this small graveyard are dated in the 1600s, which, like the other cemeteries we’d already visited on this trip, didn’t fail to impress us. The oldest I think I’ve ever seen here in Illinois was 18-hundred-something-or-other. We’ve got a lot of great history in this state what with Abraham Lincoln and Chicago and all that, but sometimes it just can’t hold a candle to the East Coast, where almost everything is older than the dirt it stands on.

Witch Dungeon Museum – Salem is, in a lot of ways, just a giant tourist trap trying to capitalize on its fascinating history by appealing to those in search of anything tied to the witch trials. As a result there are quite a few different attractions in town with the words “Salem,” “Witch,” and “Museum” tied into their storefronts in some order or another. Most of these are some combination of wax sculptures and educational videos, and few, if any, of them have much by way of original artifacts from that era.

As tourists, however, Amy and I wanted to visit at least one of these kitschy little traps and so we chose the Witch Dungeon for the primary reason that they do an award-winning reenactment of Ann Putnam’s trial. You have a seat in a giant auditorium, watch the fifteen minute show, then get a brief tour of “The Dungeon.”

Amy and I must have looked like campers because we ended up on the front stoop of this place about five minutes before it actually opened. We were the only ones in attendance for the first show, and we sort of got the impression that the actresses weren’t accustomed to starting right at 10:00. My guess is that most tourists didn’t wander in until the 10:30 or 11:00 show. We literally saw one actress walk in after us in street clothes, then show up on stage in full 1692 regalia about 120 seconds later to play her part in the performance.

In all honesty, it was pretty good. All three actresses were more than solid, and considering it was just Amy and I in this huge auditorium they put on the show as if they were doing a Broadway opener or something. Plenty of bang for our buck in that regard, but it was the dungeon that we found to be particularly fetching.

Just like today, when someone was accused of a crime back in the seventeenth century, they’d be arrested and put into holding until a trial could be arranged. The jail in which these people were held was like a dank, moldy basement meant to accommodate no more than fifty people, but by the end of the trials up twice that many were living in that one room. There were no restrooms here, obviously, so people used the bathroom right where they were, and after a hard rain the entire room could flood up their knees. Such conditions were horrible, made all the worse considering those jailed there were actually innocent.

The cell in the basement of the Witch Dungeon Museum is not the original, but was built to the exact specifications of the original, which was discovered in the mid-1900s during preparation for a new building site. There was no real historical society back then so the dungeon was torn down completely, though a few relics were salvaged, including an original beam which was on display in the room we currently were viewing.

In terms of what was available to us there to get a sense of Salem’s history, this was very easily the best option. The Salem Witch Museum, a beautiful old converted church a short walk away, would have been our next stop were we not being asked to pay $8 a piece to watch a half-hour video on the history of trials. This place looked so cool from the outside and ended up being ever-so-lame that we ended up heading back for Boston around lunchtime. It’s a fun place to spend the morning for anyone looking to try a day away from the city, but to spend more than a few hours there would’ve been overkill. Very cool experience, but just a little too far removed from history to be as meaningful as some of the other things we’d seen thus far, and would see in the days to come.

Joel & Amy Across America, Part 5

2009-07-31T05:00:00.000-07:00

Old North Church – The tallest and oldest church in Boston is Christ Church, known by just about everybody in Boston as Old North, and it’s because of its towering steeple that it was chosen to hang the lanterns for Paul Revere and William Dawes so they could alert the arrival of British troops.

The Patriots learned of General Gage’s plan to ride to Lexington and Concord to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock, so they set things up for Revere and Dawes to ride through the countryside warning all the important Tories when, as the saying goes, the Redcoats were coming. One lantern would be hung in the Old North steeple if they were coming via land, and two if by sea. Just as Longfellow mentioned in his poem.

We know Revere, thanks to Longfellow, but a lot of Americans will have never heard of William Dawes, even though he completed his ride an hour quicker than Revere. The reason for this is that Longfellow, who wasn’t even born until decades after Revere died, wrote the poem as a romantic gesture to the new lady in his life, who just so happened to be a direct descendent of Revere. Henry wanted to butter up her and the family, so he wrote the poem, and took a few artistic liberties in doing so. He didn’t write it to be history; he wrote to impress potential in-laws.

That’s not to say Revere wasn’t an important guy, because he was. He just didn’t do it all by himself. He and Dawes and several other riders all helped in trumping the Brits’ plan that night. There’s no need to marginalize the guy, but he just wasn’t quite the huge hero American mythology has made him out to be over the years. He can thank Longfellow for the publicity, because for a long time history books used his poem as the foundation for what they included about Revere.

Whatever happened, it started at Old North. We weren’t allowed to go up into the steeple, but the church itself is still used for Episcopal services and is set up in a curious manner. Set up in box pews—tiny cubicles that families purchased the same way we’d purchase season tickets to the Red Sox today—Old North comes off pretty strange at first. Knowing it was built in the early 1700s, though, makes the odd seating arrangement a little more reasonable.

There was no way anyone was going to light a fire in a church back then for fear of burning down a neighborhood’s most beautiful and expensive building, so the box pews were installed to keep out drafts in the winter, while also boxing in the body heat of families sharing a cubicle. They’d put a hot stone or brick in a little metal box and that would help keep things warm in the winter as well.

It was a really neat old church, and the second-to-last Revolution-era attraction of the day. But that didn’t mean we were done with The Freedom Trail. There were still a couple of stops to make—on the other side of the Charles River.

Bunker Hill Monument – After stopping by the U.S.S. Constitution, a warship from the War of 1812 that earned the nickname “Old Ironsides” because British cannonballs bounced off its sides as if they were made of iron, we humped it uphill a few more blocks to the Bunker Hill monument—a gigantic obelisk that marks the end of the trail.

The thing we remember most about 1775’s Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major battle of the Revolutionary War, is the famous line, “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes,” a saying which nobody really knows the origin of. America lost that battle, forced to retreat because of a shortage of ammunition (hence the famous saying), but took out a lot of British before calling it quits.

Click HERE for More Pictures!

Today there’s a giant tower standing a top a hill in Charleston where all this fighting went down, the cornerstone of which was laid down in 1825, fifty years after the battle. I almost had to drag my wife up the steps to see this thing because she was so tired, but she was a pretty good sport about following me to the end of our day’s voyage. She took a picture of me at the last Freedom Trail marker, and then we were done.

That is, until I found out you could go up the monument.

It’s only a 294-stair haul, which is absolutely as bad as it sounds, and Amy gave me that womanly look of doom as we schlepped up each and every one of those steps. It was hot and exhausting and we had walked almost four miles over the course of the day, so I can’t blame her for regretting my decision to go up this thing. It’s not like the Arch in St. Louis, where you just take an elevator to see the view. You earn the view in Boston, but it was cool to see everything so high up. Plus, we felt a certain sense of accomplishment when it was all said and done.

A short hop and a skip to the nearest Subway stop, and we were finally on our way to our hotel in Cambridge—exhausted, educated, and absolutely starving.

Joel & Amy Across America, Part 4

2009-07-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

Old South Meeting House – On December 16, 1773 Sam Adams and thousands of other Bostonians met here to discuss what to do with the 30 tons of taxable British tea on boats moored in a Boston harbor. Nobody came to any real conclusion, so Adams said “Screw it” and led what would later become known as the Boston Tea Party. He and up to 130 other man dressed up as Natives and dumped all 342 chests of tea into the harbor as a protest to the Tea Act, which played into the whole Taxation without Representation mantra that helped kick off the Revolution.

By 1775, the British had raided and taken over the meeting house, ruining the interior by using it to practice horse-riding, and they also stole an original 1620 manuscript of William Bradford’s “On Plymouth Plantation,” a memoir about the Pilgrims journey to American written by the colony’s original governor. It’s no longer a church today (the congregation built a new one after a 19th century fire almost burned this one to the ground), but stands as an interesting footnote to one of Boston’s most famous historical happenings.

Old State House – Built in 1713, the Old State House is the oldest public building in Boston, and like a lot of places in this city it’s been used for more than a couple different purposes over the years. It started as a sort of British headquarters, but once they were driven out it became the seat of the first elected legislature in the New World. In the years between declaring independence and electing George Washington the first president of the United States, John Hancock was elected the commonwealth’s first governor. That, of course, happened in this building.

Boston was the third place the Declaration was read (the first obviously being Philadelphia behind Independence Hall, the second being New York), and that was done from the balcony of this beautiful red brick building on July 18th, 1776.

Today it’s available for tours and actually is a popular place for wedding receptions. The subway runs through part of the basement. We wanted to go inside and check out the little museum, but our tour guide didn’t allow much time for breaks, and even though we said we’d come back the day never really provided us with the time or energy to make it back. We’d get more than our fair share of history before bedtime, though. Way, way more than our fair share.

Site of the Boston Massacre – Right across the street from the Old State House is the intersection where the Boston Massacre took place in 1770. The site is supposed to be marked by a ring in the sidewalk of a small traffic island, but our tour guide said that was made the “official” location to keep tourists from running out into traffic to take pictures with the “actual” location, which is right in the middle of a crosswalk a few yards away.

Other than Crispus Attucks, four other people were killed in the massacre, which is, in my opinion, a bit dramatic a word to use for the killing of five people. I’d call it more an “incident,” but this downplays history, and I would rather not be called unpatriotic for changing the name to the Boston Incident. Doesn’t quite resonate the same way, does it?

No matter what you call it, the whole thing must’ve been pretty intense and frightening. Obviously tensions were high in 1770, what with the whole British soldiers babysitting Americans and the tea taxes and what have you, so when a Redcoat hit a kid with the butt of his gun for insulting a commanding officer, the colonists went nuts. It started off with us throwing snowballs at them amidst a barrage of insults, but ended up with the Brit soldier calling for reinforcements as the rowdy American crowd grew to the hundreds.

Click HERE for More Pictures!

When a club got thrown instead of a snowball, the soldier who was hit fired his gun. Anarchy ensued, colonists stormed, more gunshots went off, and when the whole thing was done five American men were dead.

So what ever happened to the soldiers who did the killing? All but two were actually acquitted of all charges and sent on to live their lives, thanks to the efforts of John Adams, who defended the British soldiers. It was a tough call for him but seemed like the right thing to do, even though it pissed off his cousin Sam to end. Again, the cajones these early Americans showed never fail to amaze me. How John Adams can defend the friggin’ Brittish in the early 1770s and then sign the Declaration of Independence a few years later is amazing to me. You can see why some people get so into history with guys like this to read about.

Faneuil Hall – Before doing my planning for the Boston trip I’d never even heard of this place, but it’s one of the top five most-visited tourist destinations in the country. Yeah. After seeing it all for myself I can understand why—there were just rows and rows of restaurants and shops and trolley tour booths and street performers. Think Navy Pier on land, without all the rides and stuff.

Actually, Faneuil Hall itself really isn’t all that big. It was built by Peter Faneuil in 1742 as a sort of combination marketplace/meeting house, and Sam Adams did some of his best work here, firing people up about the Stamp Act and other such British nonsense, and that’s why his statue stands in front of the building. On the lower level there are still a number of shops and a post office.

Faneuil’s extremely rich uncle Andrew died a childless widower and left his fortune to his two nephews, with the odd condition that neither one of them ever get married. Money or Chicks, boys? Faneuil’s brother chose chicks, but Peter, who was portly and disabled, didn’t have much luck with the ladies anyway so he took the dough and built the hall. Ladies most likely came a-knockin’ later, but Pete kept his bread and did a lot of good things for Boston with it.

Behind the Hall is Quincy Market, which is where all the crazy shops and restaurants are. Pretty much any sort of toursity shirt or restaurant or saltwater taffy you can imagine is behind there. In the midst of a tour laden with history, this was sort of the opposite of what we wanted. We were also hungry, it being lunchtime after a morning of walking and learning, so it was time to find some grub. There was only one place we would even consider…

Cheers – We knew we wanted to eat lunch at Cheers, probably Boston’s most famous bar/restaurant, but as far as we knew the original location was somewhere on Beacon Street—which was back the way we came. Little did we know there was a second location right there in Quincy Market, but we found that out after having eaten a mile’s walk away. Sounds like a hassle, but the version at Quincy looks and feels like a TGI Friday’s. The original, on the other hand, was the Cheers we’ve all grown to love over the years.

Originally called the Bull and Finch Pub, the Cheers on Beacon Hill is the one used for the exterior of the TV show, though the interior was never filmed. The commercial branch at Quincy Market is supposed to be a replica of the bar from television but only somewhat resembles what I’ve seen on Nick at Nite about a thousand times.

The ambiance in this original bar is much more Cheers-ish, and the food is actually really good. Amy and I each bought a shirt at the little gift shop and did our best not to wear them while actually in Boston. That would’ve been a little too nerdy, even for us. Sadly, nobody knew our names, as was advertised, but it was still worth the haul. To work off those lunch calories, we now had to hoof it back to Faneuil Hall to pick up The Freedom Trail where we left off.

Joel & Amy Across America, Part 3

2009-07-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

Day 2:

Boston Common – In Boston there is what’s known as The Freedom Trail, a 2.5 mile path of history through the streets of Beantown that leads to all kinds of early American wonder. To follow the trail is easy; all one must do is walk the red line—sometimes painted, sometimes made of red brick—throughout the city, and it’s impossible to miss the main attractions.

The path begins at Boston Common, which is one of the country’s oldest public parks. It’s been around since the 1630s, when it was purchased by the Massachusetts Bay Company to be used a central grazing area for Puritan cows (also known as Pilgrim cows, or cows that came to America to avoid religious persecution), but later played home to the British in the time leading up to the Revolutionary War. It was also there that many public hangings took place, at least until 1817 when that whole business was shut down for more humane ways to kill criminals.

It became a park in 1830, and a fence was put around it and trees planted all throughout the grounds. Today it’s a pretty expansive area, lush with trees and statues and all the things you’d expect from a public park in a big city. This is also the location of the city’s visitor’s center, where we went to try and set up a tour of The Freedom Trail. Having bumped into a kindly gent dressed in colonial-era garb, we found that a tour of the first two-thirds of the cites would be starting soon, so we paid the cost of admission and began one of the longest walking days of our lives.

The Granary Burial Ground – A couple years ago I started getting into visiting famous people’s graves. In fact, my fellow road trippers would tease me for including so much death into what was supposed to be a fun trip, but when you’re in the neighborhood of a famous dead and buried person, why not stop by?

The Granary was, overall, probably the coolest cemetery I’ve ever seen in my life. Amy and I were pretty much in awe the entire time we were there, and this was definitely where the tour guide took the most time to tell us stories about the famous early Americans who are buried there.

Click HERE for More Pictures!

We started with John Hancock, who’s got one of the tallest headstones in the place. Most of us remember him as the guy who signed his signature to the Declaration of Independence before anyone else, and did so in such huge letters that even today we use the expression “I need your John Hancock” when asking for someone’s signature. What most of us don’t know is that when Hancock was the first to sign the document, most of the others didn’t sign until much later, meaning for a while he was the only guy with the balls to sign a genuinely treasonous document and publicly put himself out there as anti-British. Dude could’ve gotten arrested and killed for that. As if that isn’t enough to make him one of the biggest B.A.’s of his era, he also helped plan the Boston Tea Party. The Brits must’ve seriously hated that guy.

As for his grave, the original marker doesn’t exist anymore, but in its place is a huge memorial placed above the spot where historians are pretty sure he’s actually buried. Other prestigious burials in the grounds have the original headstones, but Hancock’s is just a little less certain. When he was buried, grave robbers dug him up and cut off his famous right hand, which did the signing, to sell on the black market. Some other idiot cut off his left hand for the same reason, just in case Hancock was a lefty, without giving much consideration to the fact that almost nobody in that era would’ve been left handed. Left-handedness was thought to be sinister, so parents and teachers beat kids’ hands with rulers until they got it “right.” So wherever Hancock is, he ain’t got no hands, and some collector out there has himself a nice, priceless little relic. I smell another “National Treasure” sequel!

Today all the stones in the Granary are arranged neatly in rows, making it convenient to mow, but before FDR paid struggling American workers to move the stones in that manner back in the 1930s (stupid New Deal), the place was a smattering of stones. People got buried wherever there was room.

Our tour guide told us not to worry about where we stood because no matter where our feet lay inside the burial grounds’ walls we’d be stepping at least one of the 8000 bodies interred below.

Included among those bodies is Paul Revere, known for his Midnight Ride thanks to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem. There’s a memorial there now which most people mistake for his headstone, but the real thing is just to the right and is extremely small. It says only “Revere’s Tomb” and calling it a modest marker would be an understatement.

Samuel Adams, probably most famous today for the beer named after him, actually had nothing to do brewing ale. His father dabbled, but really the brand is just the results of the Boston Beer Company issuing their first beer, the Sam Adams Boston Lager, in 1985. To make the whole booze connection even more ridiculous, the guy pictured on the bottles isn’t even Sam Adams. It’s of a younger Bostonian chap so that it can appeal to younger audiences.

So other than being a beer brand and John Adams’s cousin, what did he do? Basically, Sam was the biggest hero possibly to the Patriots and the biggest prick possible to the Loyalists in the time leading up to the Revolution. He too played a huge part in the Boston Tea Party and did pretty much anything he possibly could to push the colonies towards independence. He was also one of the signers of the Declaration.

Ben Franklin’s parents also are buried at the Granary and have the biggest memorial in the whole place dedicated to them. Right next to the Sam Adams grave is a headstone marking the group burial of the five victims of the Boston Massacre, the only name of which I recognized was Crispus Attucks, who was black and allegedly the first martyr of the American Revolution. Anybody who’s seen Revere’s engraving of the Massacre knows Attucks is front and center, and that’s probably why he’s the only guy we remember from that particular moment in history.

Of the two hours we spent with the tour guide, easily 45-50 minutes was spent here, and not a one of us complained. There was so much to learn here that it’s a miracle I’m even able to remember this much two weeks later. Very easily one of the coolest things Amy and I did the whole week.

Joel & Amy Across America, Part 2

2009-07-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

Liberty Bell – Literally right across the street from Independence Hall is one of the nation’s most iconic and recognizable symbols of freedom: the Liberty Bell. It was ordered in 1751 for the bell tower atop Independence Hall, but got its first crack within months of finding its new home. And that’s how it all started.

Amy and I realized as we walked through the building that houses the bell that we had pretty no clue as to why the darn thing was so important. Was the Star-Spangled Banner first chimed out on this thing? Did it alert the Minutemen that the Redcoats were coming? Did it killer Hitler?

Turns out it did none of these things. It’s just a bell for the most part. It rang to announce the opening of the First Continental Congress and after the battle of Lexington and Concord at the start of the Revolutionary War. In the 1830s it was adopted by the American Anti-Slavery Society as a symbol of the abolitionist movement. Before then it wasn’t even called the Liberty Bell. Originally, it was called Independence Bell or Old Yankee’s Bell, which sucks considering Philadelphia has way more Phillies fans than Yankees fans. I can see why they changed it.

And here’s a little somethin’ to pass onto those looking for Liberty Bill trivia—the huge crack we see today isn’t from the bell breaking; it’s from a crap attempt to fix the bell that went horribly wrong. You know how it is when you continue to use something that’s clearly broken. One of my recliners, for example, makes cracking noises every time I flip up the footrest. Does the fact that I’m probably continuing to ruin it hinder my using it? Not at all, and so it goes with Philadelphians and the Liberty Bell.

When it came to fix it, the bell doctors separated the crack a little bit to insert pins at the top and bottom of the split that were supposed to stabilize the structure and return the bell’s natural timbre. But instead of saving they day these two goofballs pretty much forced the bell into retirement forever, which worked out for Independence National Park, because it was still in that bell tower they couldn’t make any money off it being on display. See? Everybody wins. Except the Brittish. And Hitler.

Ben Franklin’s Grave – Christ Church in Philadelphia, where Benjamin Franklin attended weekly services, purchased two acres of land in 1719 for the purpose of burying the town’s glorious dead. Today there are something like 4000 historic Philadelphians within those walls, including five signers of the Declaration of Independence, but you have to pay $2 for the full tour.

Were Franklin himself buried somewhere in the middle of the grounds, only to be seen with the price of admission, we would’ve sucked it up and dropped the two bones. But as it happened Franklin’s grave was visible from the sidewalk, and we arrived at the same time as a city tour guide and so got to listen in a bit.

Click HERE to view more pictures!

The thing about doling out for a tour guide is that you get extra tidbits you wouldn’t have known anything about otherwise unless you’d read a pretty detailed biography. In this case we found out that Benjamin Franklin’s son was a Loyalist, so the two never really got along and after The Good Guys won the Revolutionary War, Franklin Junior had really no choice but to move back to Britain and finish out his days there. Sort of messed up the American descendancy of the Franklin family tree. Ben’s wife is interred at the Christ Church cemetery, though, as his grandson. So there’s that.

On the topic of Ben Franklin and death, we also learned that because infant mortality rates were so horrible in the 18th Century, families would actually give several of their infants the same name knowing that it was likely some of them would die. In Franklin’s case, “Benjamin” was an important family name, so he actually had four brothers named Benjamin Franklin, even though he was the only one to survive his childhood. George Foreman would have been right at home in the 1700s, wouldn’t he?

Betsy Ross Home & Grave – We all know the Betsy Ross story. George Washington and a committee allegedly came to the Ross home in 1775 to ask Mrs. Ross, an upholsterer in the Philadelphia region, to design and construct the nation’s first flag. The result was the precursor to our modern flag, except there were only thirteen stars then, and they were arranged in a circle instead of rows.

Unfortunately, this whole story might be a big stinky load of yoo-hoo.

They don’t tell you this at the Betsy Ross Home, of course, because you’re paying admission to learn more about how awesome and iconic Ross was. But that’s okay. It was neat to look straight into the room that plays the backdrop to the most famous Betsy Ross painting. The place was very small but had a cool basement, which served as a combination store room and work area.

As for how much Ross actually had to do with the construction of one of the world’s most instantly recognizable flags, most of what we know comes from Ross’s grandson, who was 11 when his famous grandmother passed away and didn’t share the story we all know and love until 34 years later, when he was well into adulthood. Thing is, there’s really no evidence to discount his stories. More importantly, however, is that there’s really no evidence to successfully prove it, either.

While it’s indisputable that Ross made flags for the burgeoning U.S. government, nobody really knows for sure if she made the first flag. There were seventeen other people in Philadelphia with the same profession as Ross, and other artists and government men claimed to have had a hand in designing our banner. In any event, I’m not one to rain on the parade of one of America’s earliest female heroes. I’m just sayin’, that’s all.

Eastern State Penitentiary – One of my favorite things to do on vacations is visit old prisons. I blame the Ohio State Reformatory (a.k.a. Shawshank) for this, since touring that dilapidated old prison was one of the coolest things I’ve ever personally seen. Alcatraz was a cool experience, too, and Philly’s Eastern State Pen was supposed to rank pretty high on the list of neat-o American prisons, too, so I talked Amy into going with me. She may have been reticent at first, but the place was so old and so creepy that we were too overwhelmed to be bored. This place was right up there with the best of them.

ESP’s claim to fame was that it was the first prison to fine-tune the use of solitary confinement, which was there way of actually reforming inmates instead of just shoving society’s outcasts into a cell so they could either rot or kill each other. The idea of prison reform was relatively new in 1829 when the jail opened (it closed in 1971), but the success had by prisoners there inspired a whole new way of looking at the American penal system.

It was designed to look like a castle for the sole purpose of looking imposing to its residents. At the time it was built it was the biggest and most expensive public structure ever built. This wasn’t a quaint little town jailhouse. Al Capone and Willie Sutton did time here, as did many other less famous hardened criminals, and having seen it myself I can say it’s an extremely daunting structure.

Sprawling out like some sort of giant spider, the Eastern State Penitentiary’s wings stretch out in all different directions from one central hub. Since it’s been closed for almost forty years many areas are sort of falling apart, which creates a really cool ambiance up and down the wings. Paint is peeling off the walls, bars are rusted, old bed frames sit twisted and broken in the middle of dirty cells. If you dig the vibe of haunted houses, you’d dig this place, too. My only concern now is that I’m running out of awesome old prisons to visit. Where do I go from here?

Joel & Amy Across America, Part 1

2009-07-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

My wife and I know that someday, we will have children. When these children—hopefully smiling, poopless little bundles of joy—arrive into our world, vacations will have to be organized with their short attention spans in mind. Disneyworld, for example, would be an ideal place to take small children, as would any other flashy and colorful amusement park with $15 bundles of cotton candy and human-sized fuzzy replicas of the cartoons the kids watch on TV.

What absolutely will not work for children between the ages 1 and 17 is five rigorous days of purely historical information, visiting buildings with a color wheel varying from brick red to cement gray with very little in between. Young people do not appreciate the rambling zeal of obsessed historians and tour guides the way two educators would. Knowing that at some point in the coming few years that children will in fact be part of our lives (we hope, at least) to rob us of our vacation money and ability to enjoy the historic beauty of America, we decided to take a trip out East while the getting’ was good.

So in planning this particular trip for Amy and myself I crammed as much American history as I could into one week, and we then drove for several hours through several states to learn, dammit. And learn we did.

Now, of course, you can too…

Day 1:

Independence Hall – Because it’s an 18-hour drive to Massachusetts, we stopped after our first full day of driving to spend some time in beautiful Philadelphia. As far as downtown is concerned, it’s one of the more gorgeous American cities I’ve ever been to. Lots of red brick and pillars and fountains and statues and greenery. Just a very cool place to wander (As long as you don’t wander too far; Fresh Prince wasn’t kidding when he said there people makin’ trouble in the neighborhood).

Click HERE for Pictures!

The first stop of our vacation was Independence Hall, and truthfully if you’re starting a trip that covers most of the bases of early America, is there a better place to kick things off? This is, after all, the place where both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drafted, debated, and signed. When the Declaration was done on July 4, 1776, the delegates just went out the back door of the building and read it to the people of Philadelphia for the first time.

That area behind Indy Hall is still a grassy park known as Independence Square, and that was the first mind explosion of the trip—to imagine being in that very building while George Washington and Ben Franklin and John Adams and scores of others argued about how the country should be outlined, or to be one of the minions out back hearing the Declaration or Constitution for the first time. What an amazing time in history.

The country was split back then about whether or not we should quit England. Sure, life was crappy in a lot of ways, and it was nearly impossible for Britain to govern us effectively 3000 miles of water away, but about half the population in the colonies actually wanted to avoid war. It freaked them out, as it should have considering England was a clearly superior military power at that time. It was people like this who Patrick Henry spoke to in his “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death Speech,” which is a damn convincing piece of oratory, by the way. To have been someone who wanted peace listening to the Declaration must have been one of the most frightening things in history. It’s like being the shrimp at school who gets picked on the bully all semester, then you finally stand up for yourself by telling him no, he may not have your milk money today. Sure, taking that stand was necessary, but that sort of freedom doesn’t come with impunity.

An interesting snippet about how we were able to convince the people that war was inevitable—remember hearing about that whole Taxation with Representation business growing up? According to my childhood history books, that was like THE reason we were driven to fight the English. They were levying taxes on us without giving us a seat in Parliament to stand up for ourselves. It’d be like holding Rhode Island to all the same standards as the rest of the country without any congressmen (or women).

Well apparently that was a stinky load, at least partially. We didn’t have any representatives IN Parliament, but we had a representative TO Parliament, and his name was Benjamin Franklin. Benny was pretty famous overseas for his work with electricity and other inventions, and he’d spent some time living in Europe so he knew some people and certainly could get his voice heard when the legislature met up. His buddies in America, however, told him that if he were ever offered an official seat he was to turn it down immediately.

They did this for two reasons. The first is that if Franklin had a seat he’d a have a voice, sure, but the rest of Parliament would out-vote him every time. That would hardly get anything done, which leads us to reason number two—much more powerful than having a real seat in Parliament was NOT having a real seat in Parliament, which would piss the people off to the point that they’d get behind a war against the motherland. Ah, politics. They’ve never been clean at all, have they?

As for Independence Hall, it was neat to be in the same room in which all this stuff was debated. Just about every piece of furniture in the place was a replica, but the chair at the head table was the actual chair George Washington occupied during these proceedings. American history at it’s finest, folks, and a great kick-off to what would be a great trip.

Top Five Summer Flavors

2009-07-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Summer rocks, partly because I’m a teacher and I get those three months off, and partly because my birthday is June. Also partly because of warm weather and baseball and bikinis, perhaps most importantly, the summer food.

And so, this week’s Top Five counts down the most delicious edibles for the summertime. One note on the way I judged this stuff—things like burgers and hot dogs on the grill are definitely a summer must, but they’re not on the list because those things taste equally awesome in the dead of winter. The following five items are some better because they’re eaten in the summertime. Keep that in mind while you read…

#5 – Popsicles – While all popsicles are acceptable, I’m most referring to those little plastic wands with frozen Kool-Aid inside of them. The ones where you have to snip the top off with scissors, but you suck the tiny piece of frozen fruitiness out of the plastic lid before tossing it in the refuse bin. Moms don’t have to feel bad about giving their kids one of these because there’s like two ounces of juice in them. Personally, I could never chomp down on these things the way other kids could. I preferred eating about 2/3 of it frozen and then tipping the thing back and drinking down the leftover juice. Sometimes, when the popsicle was still too cold for me to chew, I’d drain all the flavor out of a particular chunk, leaving a bland, white-washed ice cube. But there was always juice at the bottom to make up for it. That’s also kind of why snow cones are so awesome.

#4 – Sweet Tea – Growing up I didn’t really appreciate the value of sweet tea, but it’s literally the perfect beverage to supplement a barbecue. Let’s be honest; if we’re cooking out we’re at least good for two or three burgers with the works, and sometimes beer can just be too heavy for that sort of meal. Soda’s too sugary, water’s too bland, and milk is always a horrible choice in excessive heat. That leaves delicious, ice-cold sweet tea, which has that refreshing splashy watery feeling going down, but just enough tingle of a taste to separate it from boring ol’ H2O. And if you’re going to do barbecue for real—I’m talking ribs, brisket, pulled pork—you literally can’t drink anything else.

#3 – Watermelon – First and foremost, God bless the person that invented the seedless watermelon. As a kid I never fully appreciated the fruit because mining for seeds made the whole process more trouble than it was worth. Now you can buy an eight-pound melon, slice the whole damn thing up in fifteen minutes, stock a gigantic Tupperware thing for your fridge and have watermelon for the next week and a half. And there’s no seeds! Cool, delightfully crisp, and just sweet enough, nothing can beat a watermelon in the summer months. Plus it’s like the only healthy thing on this list, so… bonus.

#2 – Ice Cream – My summer job for like the entire second half of my teens was a Dairy Queen, which I enjoyed very much. Because my Dairy Queen held itself in such high regard and actually did things the proper way, I transformed into something of an ice cream snob over the year. But for realzies, ice cream in pretty much any incarnation rules the universe when it’s hot outside. This is why children go berserk for the ice cream man—because he provides the nectar and lifeblood of the summer. Remember orange push-ups from the Schwann Man? Good God. My favorite growing up was the Nerds Blizzard at DQ. That or I’d get a sundae in a mini baseball helmet to add to the collection (I’ve still got all those somewhere—the complete set plus some retro caps. I rule so hard). As I’ve gotten older, chocolate ice creams have grown on me, but at the end of the day it’s all the same to me. At this point in the post you’re either salivating like a bulldog or you’re a Somali Pirate. It’s got to be one or the other.

#1 – Lemonade – That cool, refreshing drink. The bite of lemons intertwined with a syrupy, sugary undertone makes it one of the most unholiest alliances in the history of beverages. I’m talking hand-squeezed here, though the powder stuff isn’t horrible I guess. Still, when you get a lemon shake-up at the fair, or pour yourself some fresh lemonade before curling up in the hammock with a good book, or you drink a glass of lemonade in June and win the lottery in July, nothing can beat it. That’s why it’s #1 on the list. It takes a lot to beat out ice cream, but citrus does it again.

Nice to Meet You #19 - Daniel Tosh

2009-07-02T07:27:00.001-07:00

The funniest single standup comedian I’ve ever seen is Eddie Murphy. If you haven’t seen “Delirious,” you’re missing comic genius. Ice cream man, James Brown, Goonie-goo-goo… All classic. The best. Actually, give me an hour, I’m going to go watch it right now.

Back. Still awesome.

Anyway, the point is that even though 1980s Eddie is the best, it’s pretty difficult for me to pinpoint who my second-favorite comedian is. Mitch Hedburg and Steven Wright are the kings of confusing one-liners, Mike Birbiglia is the king of awkwardness, Brian Regan is one of the best storytellers, and Chris Rock is far and away the best active “ghetto” comedian. Those are all my guys, but none of them win the silver.

Daniel Tosh does.

He’s irreverent, witty, a little bit crass, and most importantly, hilarious. I’m reminded of him because he’s finally got his own show on Comedy Central, “Tosh.0,” which centers around the internet’s most interesting viral videos and Tosh making fun of them all. Personally, I love it, but I know it’s destined to be cancelled soon enough. These types of shows rarely last. It’s a sad thing, too, because Tosh is the (second) best.

I’ve seen Tosh live twice in my life, both back in college, and once when I ran sound for him, probably circa 2003. (It’s truly depressing that I’m already forgetting these things).

After the show, as we always did, we went downstairs and had a beer with the comic and talked about times past. Tosh, for example, revealed to us that he was inches away from joining the cast of “Punk’d” but pulled out at the last second because Ashton Kutcher was such a huge douchebag. It made sense, but considering Dax Shepard got himself a couple of feature films from that show, it probably wasn’t the smartest career move. Last time I saw Tosh he was a bully in “The Love Guru.” So, yeah.

In any event, he’s a guy with principles. Would YOU sell YOUR soul to Kutcher just for a couple of movies? Me neither. Genuinely cool guy, and one of the best comedy shows you’ll ever see. Seriously, rent “Completely Serious.” You’ll have tears in your eyes. Tears of joy.

Extreme Rice and What Have You

2009-07-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

This child is hilarious, yet mildly disturbing...

The only reason this "Extreme Rice" bit is so amusing to me is because the dude in the video looks so much like my insane buddy Rich.

Kitty Viddy of the Week: Slinky Cat!

DYK - Invisible Light

2009-06-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

Here’s something to blow your mind—light is invisible.

I’m telling you, I heard this and it took me like fifteen minutes to wrap my mind around it. See, when we’re “seeing” light, we’re not seeing the light itself. What we’re seeing is the matter that light bounces off of.

Think of the moon, for example. The moon emits no light, but looks luminescent because light bounces off its surface. But can we actually see the sun’s rays on their way to the moon’s surface?

If light wasn’t invisible, we couldn’t see anything anywhere, because the light would just be this crazy shiny mist between our eyeballs and everything else in the world.

And if that weren’t enough, here’s another one—darkness doesn’t exist. There’s only the absence of light. Some of you are thinking, “But that’s what darkness is! It’s the absence of light!” Right, but forget about the names we give things that don’t exist. I mean, Santa Claus has a name and a definition for goodness sake. But darkness itself isn’t real. Mind-blowing, right?

That’s what I thought.

Now 27 Times In My Life

2009-06-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

I turned 27 a couple weeks ago, and you know what that means?

Nothing, actually. It means absolutely nothing.

Since turning 21 I’ve found that birthdays are increasingly blasé events. A few friends and family asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I just shrugged my shoulders. They do, of course, realize that I got married last year, and the result of that wedding was just about every knick-knack and paddywhack a man and his wife could ever need, so I’ve got nothing left on the wish list.

Oh sure, there’s always books and fun t-shirts. I can’t get enough of those things. But I’ve got like three rotations of t-shirts right now and an entire bookshelf full of tomes I have yet to crack open. What’s the point of asking for more?

What I really want is a gigantic flatscreen HD television set, but who do I ask to get that?

Aside from the perennial conundrum of wanting and needing nothing special for my post-21 birthdays, there’s just the issue of these years not being particularly exciting. When you’re 16 there’s the driver’s license. At 18 it’s cigarettes and lotto tickets and Playboy. At 21 it’s booze and bars. Even 25 is something to celebrate because you can legally rent a car and your auto insurance rates drop. But 27? Who are we kidding here? Birthdays are going to be boring from now until I’m 30, at which point I’m secretly hoping for a huge surprise party with all two of my friends. That’s three years away. In the meantime, I’m in birthday purgatory.

To help pass the time, I’m giving a short summary from some of the birthdays I can actually remember. Many of them are a blur, but there are some that I’ll never forget for one reason or another.

Happy Birthday to me…

Age 1 – Obviously I can’t remember this birthday but we’ve got it on tape. When my mom brought the birthday cake to my high chair, all alit with a single burning candle, I of course smashed my pudgy little craw into the frosting and delivered the sweet paste to about 90% of the lower half of my face. I looked like a baby mime. This was the year I was given a tiny little multi-colored xylophone with a yellow plastic mallet. It appeared to be my favorite new toy. By a 27-year-old’s standards, it looked pretty boring, but I’m sure the cake was good. My mom and dad seemed really happy. I can’t imagine what that’s like—watching your firstborn kid hit a year, then ruin the cake and deliver frosting into his own hair. Must’ve been like a dream.

Age 8 – I begged and begged and begged parents for years to allow me to host a birthday party at every child’s Mecca—Showbiz Pizza. The name of the company has since been changed to Chuck E. Cheese, of course, but the shtick was essentially the same—indoor jungle gym, ball pit, video games, skee-ball, and tickets, which bought you crappy prizes like giant pencils and stickers. I don’t remember much, but I was allowed to bring four of my closest friends. I’m pretty sure my friends Marty and Neal were there (one of them got me a Ninja Turtles/Bart Simpson t-shirt that I’m not even sure how to explain—the 90s were awesome), but I don’t remember the other two. Bro and Sis came too, obviously, and I’m sure it was lots of fun. It was the only birthday party I ever had there, but that’s more than I can say for my wife. She’s never stepped foot into a Showbiz Pizza in her entire life. Fate just never guided her there. This is the place where a kid can be a kid, and she was robbed of that. Had I known here when I was eight, I certainly would’ve invited her.

Age 16 – My folks took me and a few of my sophomoric high school buddies to Chicago for the evening, allowing us to dine at the delicious yet kitschy Cheesecake Factory at the base of the John Hancock building. After chowing down we took a trip to the top of the city’s second-tallest skyscraper and got a nice view of the city. We were allowed to wander around Michigan Avenue for a while, which ended up serving as a mistake, because my buddy Andy got stopped by a homeless guy who shined his shoes and made him pay $30. We were all a little too stunned to stop the whole thing. My parents felt really bad and reimbursed him, and I was so scarred that I never went to Chicago ever again. Except for all those times I’ve gone since then for Bulls game, Sox games, visits to friends and family, school field trips, and one time for the Taste of Chicago. Other than that, though, I’ve never been back, no matter how good the cheesecake was.

Age 21 – Most people do something crazy on their 21st birthday, like get tanked on near-nuclear quantities of alcohol and then throw up on their dorm room floors. As a summer baby, I was not given the usual college student bar tour and celebrated my 21st back home with the two of my friends who were actually in town at the time. We went to a couple bars, had a couple of beers, then drove home. I want to say I was in bed by 11:00. Personally, I have no problem with this because bars always have been among my least favorite places—all that smoke and noise and expensive booze. I could have more fun buying the beer for cheaper and hanging out with people I’ve hand-chosen at someplace quiet and breathable. So don’t feel bad for me; I really didn’t mind. My parents, on the other hand, seemed a little upset. They waited for me to get home that night, their 35mm cameras in hand, expecting me to wobble in like Andy Capp after a hard night at the pub. Instead I was like, “Hey guys. It was fun! Going to bed!” And that was that. Lame? Absolutely, but have I ever claimed to be anything but?

To celebrate 27, my wife and I recently hosted a little joint birthday party (hers is July 3rd–she’ll be 25) and had a very nice time. We got the cheesy decorations, tied the balloons to the mailbox, and even talked most of our guests into doing relay races. It was like being a kid again (well, except for the inclusion of Bud Light), and everybody really seemed to have a good time. That’s the way a birthday should go. It doesn’t have to be exciting or even particularly eventful. Just get the friends together, have a few drinks, and play few games. That’s all I need.

At least that’s all I need until I turn 30. Then somebody better bring the noise and turn this mother out. I’ll bring the cheesecake, you bring the flatscreen.

Runnin' Wild, Day 5

2009-06-26T05:00:00.000-07:00

Cave of the Mounds – Let me tell you a little story about a man named Ebenezer Brigham, the man who discovered Wisconsin’s famous Cave of the Mounds. Mr. Brigham and his cohorts were blasting up a limestone bed in the 1930s when they stumbled upon this gigantic underground cave, some parts of which were twenty feet high. It opened up into two different directions, and after wooden walkways and handrails were installed the geological oddity was opened up to the public, and millions of visitors later, the rest is history.

My brother and I—both Brighams—had no idea that the gentleman responsible for this road trip attraction was himself a Brigham. Brighams still own property in the area and there’s even a Brigham Park nearby. It would be nice if I could shrug this all off as a coincidence, but there are things at play here bigger than myself. You see, when Ebenezer Brigham became the first permanent white settler in Wisconsin’s Dane County in 1828, he did so by traveling from Massachusetts. Why is this important? Because my very own grandfather, Mr. Charles Brigham, also came from Massachusetts.

What this means, obviously, is that Kyle and I, in a way, discovered the Cave of the Mounds. You’re welcome.

Click HERE to view pictures!

Being likely descendants of the same Brigham clan as Eb (that’s what we Brighams call him), the workers there treated us with the expected fanfare. We were given a private tour of the caves, sharing our guide with only one small group of fifteen first-graders on a school field trip, and were charged the low, low price of $14 for our excursion. We only had to wait one hour for the tour get started, and—here’s the kicker—in honor of presence, every worker in the place wore matching green polos. Truly, it was nice to see the gang all dressed up. I don’t want to say it was like we were royalty or anything, but it was like we were royalty.

The caves themselves were pretty awesome. Compared to our only other spelunking experience (Doesn’t “spelunking” mean exploring caves? We’re going to say “yes” for now) at Iowa’s ridiculous Spook Cave, this was a pretty roomy tour. I for some reason worked under the assumption that we’d discover the stalactites, etc. via boat, just as we did at Spook, but there were a series of walkways to traverse instead, making the whole ordeal much less calming.

Geological formations within the cave sprawl from every single possible angle. Long, icicle-shaped rocks drip form the ceilings, while other sections of rock curl and twist into themselves. Sometimes the ceilings were so high you couldn’t even imagine touching them, but in other places the squeeze was so fit that you sort of had to touch the walls, even though there was a strict “no touching” policy in place there.

Our tour guide treated us exactly like one of the first graders duck-walking alongside us. She kept making sure the group was all together and actually kept a closer eye on us than she did the children. I’m not sure if she thought were going to touch something or drink beer or deal drugs, but whatever the case she eyeballed us the way an old man eyeballs teenage hooligans walking down the avenue.

Pretty amazing experience for the most part, and especially amazing considering it’s now such a rich part of my family heritage. Assuming that we’re related to the great Ebenezer Brigham (which I, of course, and going to go ahead and do), it’s kind of like finding out you’re a distant relative of George Washington or George Washington Carver or Chelsea Clinton. It was a real honor, and I’m proud to consider myself part of the Cave of the Mounds Family.

Jake’s Deli – Corn beef has always quietly been one of my favorite foods, dating back to my time as a childhood parishioner of St. Patrick’s church, which held a corn beef and cabbage dinner every March to celebrate St. Patty’s Day. For being an unnaturally pink slice of meat it just speaks mouthfuls to me, and on a sandwich with a little bit of sauerkraut and mustard/thousand island dressing, there’s little more one could do culinarily to make me smile.

So, when looking for a good Milwaukee restaurant for the ride home, Jake’s Deli and their world famous Rueben sandwiches stood out to me. See, Kyle lived in Milwaukee for a summer and when I would visit the two of us enjoyed a pretty fair sampling of the city’s cuisine, which of course consists mostly of beer and cheese and bratwurst. For some reason, though, neither one of us had ever previously heard of or visited Jake’s. As we would discover upon locating the restaurant, that reason had everything to do with the shabby neighborhood in which the storefront is located.

It should be noted, however, that a good corn beef sandwich is worth potentially getting shot over, so we braved the questionable hood and made our way into the deli to get ourselves a sammich.

The results, predictably, were delicious. Never in my life have I enjoyed corn beef so delicious. It helped, of course, that we were all starving, but I don’t think it would’ve mattered. This was straight-up good food—so good that Craig called it the greatest food of the trip. Yes, even better than the Fly Trap. None of the rest of us agreed, but there was no doubting that at the very least it came in second place.

Sure, the neighborhood sucked, but sometimes the shiniest diamonds can be found in the rough. Just ask Aladdin about that. He got judged by his cover, too, and see how it turned out for him? A genie and a hot princess. Exactly like Jake’s Deli.

Jelly Belly Warehouse Tour – When Amy and I visited the great state of California last year we were able to tour the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield, where the famous jelly beans are actually manufactured. That was a legitimately cool tour.

In Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, where the beans are centrally located in a warehouse, to be shipped to the rest of the country, the tour is significantly less cool. In California you traverse the entire factory, watching all the processes of jelly bean making, but in Wisconsin you hope into a little train and drive in a circle around the circumference of the warehouse, watching videos about the California tour along the way. In other words, it was lamey lamertons.

But we didn’t go to the Jelly Belly warehouse for the tour. We went for the Belly Flops, which are the little screw up beans that aren’t regulation size or shape, so they get sold for pennies on the dollar. For example, you can get a two-pound bag of assorted flavors for $17 at any participating location, but six pounds of Belly Flops go for the comparatively low price of $18. I bought three two-pound bags while were there and pretty much filled up the gumball machine in our basement. That alone was worth the trip.

Conclusion – I can say this: Day 3 of this trip, the one through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, was easily the worst day in road trip history. There was like ten hours of driving through rain to see some of the lamest things we’ve ever seen on the road. I’ve worked very, very hard over the years to make these trips as fun as possible, but Day 3 was an utter failure. It pains me to say this, but I failed in that regard. I just did.

Of course, the U.P. sucks, so I can’t take all the blame.

Click HERE to view pictures!

As far as the food is concerned, it was by far the best road trip we’ve ever had. Last year’s barbecue massacre in Tennessee offered quite a few num-nums, but it is absolutely true that too much of a good thing can result in nausea and long hours on the toilet. This time around the food was varied, delicious, and well spread-out. Delicious. Absolutely delicious. Cozy Corner BBQ is still the best restaurant I’ve ever eaten at, but the Fly Trap is definitely in my top five now, too. Food was definitely good.

Who knows what future years will bring, but the four trips I’ve taken in the last five years have been legendary. The videos have been awesome, the food has been awesome, and the company has been awesome. I love these trips. I just do. No matter where we all go in our lives from here on out, I hope the other guys I’ve been running around with the last half-decade feel the same way.

Runnin' Wild, Day 4 (Part 2)

2009-06-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

Birthplace of the Ice Cream Sundae – In researching places to go for this year’s trip, I had read that a museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin had the original storefront of Berner’s Ice Cream, the place where the sundae was invented. The story goes that one day a gentleman asked Mr. Berner if he would take some of the chocolate syrup used for sodas and just drizzle it over the ice cream instead of mixing it in. Of course this became very popular, but Berner would only sell the treats on Sundays.

What changed that routine was an adorable little girl asking for a sundae on a non-Sunday day, pleading for Mr. Berner to “pretend it was Sunday.” Apparently her cuteness won out, and the treats sold every day, obviously extending from just chocolate to strawberries and caramel and butterscotch and, for pregnant women, pickles.

Click here to see pictures!

A quaint little story indeed, but here’s the problem—the Washington House Museum in Two Rivers does NOT have the original Berner’s storefront. It’s just a creepy old house full of weird antiques (nee “junk”) and a special room set aside for making ice cream sundaes. The young ladies who served us had to have both been in their 70s, and though they were very nice only managed to assemble ice cream treats at the speed of soil creep. Honestly, it was a quaint little room, with old-fashioned signs and seating areas, white walls and a framed chunk of the Berner’s store façade. They even served our sundaes in legitimate glass sundae bowls.

So we sat together enjoying our sundaes in the town where they were invented, each of us spooning the ice cold goodness into our mouths as a tribute to the good Mr. Seymour, who indirectly employed me all through high school at the local Dairy Queen. Without him and his invention, I may never have had the money to purchase that teal 1997 four-door Chevy Cavalier back in college.

Cole, naturally, almost ruined the homage at the counter by declining a maraschino cherry. He was last to order, and even after having seen all of us answer “yes” to “whipped cream?” and “cherry?” he approached the second question with—I kid you not—“You can keep your cherry.”

Kyle, Craig, and I couldn’t believe his un-American audacity. What sort of domestic terrorist turns down a maraschino cherry to top off his sundae? He was, it should be noted, forced by us to take the damn cherry and enjoy every grenadiney moment of it. He’d later apologize, but let’s face it—the damage had already been done. Ol’ Mr. Berner must have been rolling around in his grave.

Crash Site of Sputnik Satellite – Other than that godforsaken hotel in Eau Claire, this was the most difficult attraction for us to locate, mostly because there was almost nothing to see in the first place.

Having driven back and forth over the spot where Russian satellite Sputnik IV—a relative of the first human-made object to orbit the earth—crashed in the early 1960s, we still couldn’t locate any giant crater in the road or any sort of historical landmark sign on the side of the road. So, we stopped by a gas station and asked the attendant if she knew anything about. Being approximately 17 years old, she hadn’t even heard of Sputnik (a real testament to the American system of education—don’t blame me, I’m an English teacher), so she asked the older bakery lady and she knew exactly what we were talking about.

“Just go back up this street and you’ll see it in the middle of the road. You can’t miss it.”

She pointed, naturally, to the area from which we had just come. So we parked along the road back in that area and walked back and forth for five or ten minutes before asking a passerby if they knew where it was.

“Yeah,” they said, pointing to a tiny metal ring in the middle of the road right next to us. “It’s right there.”

See here’s the thing—we had been confusing the renowned crash site of Sputnik with some sort of tiny manhole or water valve cover. No label, no sign, no nothing. Just a tiny ring in the middle of the road and that was it.

We left, assuming that was the end, but I’d later read that the art museum right across the road from the landing spot actually houses the little piece of space detritus in its galleries. There’s apparently a whole little story that goes along with it. But we didn’t get that story. We just got the stupid metal ring in the middle of a busy street.

The Truebloods & Great Dane Microbrewery – Our last full day ended in Madison, at the home of our good friends Kevin and Jess Trueblood. They at one time lived in the same town as my wife and I but headed for greener pastures when the money was right. Pretty much everybody considers them sellouts, including their dog. We call this “jumping the shark,” though I’m not sure why.

Despite it all, they’re still really good people and offered up their home for our last evening of slumber on the 2009 trip. We would eventually sleep there (and Cole and I—the infamous snorers of the group—were finally quarantined off so Craig and Kyle could get a decent night’s sleep), but not until we’d eaten something.

Going with the theme of the trip we wanted to make sure the evening’s cuisine didn’t come at the hands of a TGI Friday or Applebee’s. We wanted something local, yet delicious. The Great Dane Microbrewery was right up our alley.

Click here to see pictures!

And as Kevin pointed out it was, in fact, right up the alley. “It’s just a mile or so away,” he tells us. Liar. Fifteen minutes later and in an entirely different town, we dined on hearty foodstuffs and refreshing ales.

The place was pretty packed, but as one of those relatively unlit eateries with dark woods and brushed nickel accents all over the place, it would’ve felt needlessly hip without all the patrons. Some of us ordered macaroni & cheese, others fancy-pantsy burgers, but all of it was extremely good. Kevin chose well, so we pretended like he never jumped the shark for the evening. Just to make him feel better.

But between you and me and his dog—he totally sold out.

Runnin' Wild, Day 4 (Part 1)

2009-06-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

Leinenkugel Brewery – If there was ever something I looked forward to on a road trip, this was it. I’ve been to a number of breweries and distilleries, several of which were in the state of Wisconsin, but Chippewa Falls has always been just a tad too far away to make a day trip out of. It’s no secret that as a brand, Leine is my favorite brew (Summer Shandy? Sunset Wheat? Berry Weiss? Are you kidding me? Delicious…), so coming down from Michigan we finally were given the excuse to visit the place where the finest of ales is concocted. Finally, guys. Finally.

The brewery and the Leine Lodge are rustic combinations of wood and old stone, giving the entire facility exactly the sort of comfy northwoods ambiance one would expect. While waiting for our tour to begin we were allowed to browse the gift shop which, as Cole so eloquently put it, “Is where other gift shops should go on field trips to find out how to properly be a gift shop.” The stuff on sale was awesome—cool t-shirts, colorful cozies, steins and pint glasses, even beer-flavored soaps and candles—but the giant fireplace and taxidermed animal faces above it helped paint the picture, too. Sampling facilities were tucked back into one corner of the giant room, and we knew that once our tour was over, we’d be given the opportunity to put our faces underneath those tappers and let the amber rivers of Chippewa Falls flow freely down our gullets.

Click here to see pictures!

Oh yeah, the tour.

To be perfectly honest, Kyle and I have toured more than our fair share of breweries at this point in our lives—Miller, Busch, Sprecher, New Glarus, to name a few—so viewing the tanks and diagrams about the brewing process didn’t exactly blow our collective mind. The warm, homey smell of brewing beer never gets old, though, and every brewery has its fair share of photogenic antiquity, which we obviously took advantage of. In general, though, we’ve discovered that brewery tours are usually just 45 minutes of anxiety before the free beer happens. Leine, being an especially tasty beer, produced just as much anxiety as any of the other tours, even though our guide—a cool older dude named “Coach”—was especially cool and interesting.

At our post-tour tasting we learned that Leinenkugel beers can be mixed together to create new and amazing other Leinenkugel beers! It’s like, a mouthful of red Skittles is delicious, but there’s no denying that mixing a bunch of reds and purples can be equally delicious as well. By far the best blend was what the locals call a “Pink Lemonade,” which is equal parts Berry Weiss and Summer Shandy. No crap, it actually tastes like pink lemonade. There were other combos—mixing the Berry with Sunset Wheat, a dab of Honey Weiss with the Leine Red, and so on—all of which completely expanded the possibilities of what one can enjoy with a bottle of delicious beer.

We just continue to learn. Beer is truly a building block of civilizaztion.

Wausau Mine Company – To be perfectly honest, there was absolutely no indication that the food at the Wausau Mine Company was particularly delectable, but the interior of this place was designed to look like the inside of a coal mine. And truth be told, it succeeded on that level. The food wasn’t bad, but this place definitely looked like a coal mine.

Based on the exterior you’d swear that this place was another screwed up Mystery Spot, but inside there were rocky walls, blocked off shaft entrances, and even stalactites dripping water for effect. It truly was like eating lunch in a cave.

As for lunch itself… meh. Kyle got some sort of pasta sampler and Cole got a pizza burger, and both dishes shared the same “marinara” sauce, which essentially tasted like ketchup with a sprinkle of oregano and a few small chunks of tomato. I too was served this sauce as a dipper for the house specialty, the Italian Fries, which were essentially very greasy cheese breadsticks. They sat like a brick in my stomach for the entire afternoon. I felt like I was pregnant with mozzarella. Not the most light-hearted dining experience of the excursion, but certainly one of the richest in atmosphere.

After having eaten so many good foods, we found ourselves emulating Iron Chef judges, saying things like, “It’s a little pungent, but the texture is ferocious. What an effervescent combination of starches and dairy.” I’ll admit that it was mostly Craig and I taking such a hoity-toity road to doing something as simple as eating lunch, and it clearly started to work Kyle’s nerves towards the end. By Day 4 at the Mine Company, Kyle was rolling his eyes and shaking his head. “It’s food. Eat it!” Then we’d compare him to his old high school boss—a farmer with taste buds about as picky as a drunk frat kid looking for an easy lay—who used to say things like, “Are you full? Did it fill you up? Then shut up about the taste.”

It’s already becoming clear that Kyle’s going to be a cranky old man. Also, Craig and I are developing a rather superfluous vocabulary in terms of describing the credits and shortcomings of food. So, everybody wins.

Birthplace of the Hamburger – There’s no questioning that the hamburger is an American creation, but it seems nobody knows for sure where exactly in America the burger came from. There are people in Texas and Connecticut staking claims on the iconic invention, but only one man—in this case Charles “Hamburger Charlie” Nagreen of Seymour, Wisconsin—can be the winner.

To be fair, there’s no end-all proof that Nagreen was The Guy, but circumstantial evidence points to his having been the first guy to roll ground beef into patties and serve it between two buns. Amazingly, he’s reported to have done this in 1885. When he was fifteen years old.

There’s a monument in Seymour to Nagreen, something a burger mascot for the little town just outside of Green Bay, but no information whatsoever about who he was or what he did. All that stuff I just talked about I had to look up on the internet, which as well all know is just about as credible as a source can get.

Click here to see pictures!

But at least there was something by way of explanation for the gigantic grill across the street—the one with a huge fiberglass burger sitting on top. At one point the town grilled the largest hamburger in history with the good people at Guinness handy to mark it as a record. The enormous grill is still there, but alas, no free hamburgers.

Actually, there’s no special restaurant in town to grab a burger or anything, so when you go it’s just to see the statue and the grill, which takes all of four minutes. At least last year when we went to the birthplace of the cheeseburger (calm down—this Kentucky diner just thought to add cheese, and it’s closed down now anyway) there were cheeseburgers to be eaten. It was probably for the better considering I still had about six pounds of “Italian Fries” digesting in my gut at the time.

Runnin' Wild, Day 3 (Part 3)

2009-06-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Bear and the Eau Claire Hotel Fiasco of ’09 – There were, just driving south through Wisconsin on the way to our hotel for the evening, when it happened. We had come very close to smacking into deer on two or three separate occasions over the course of the day, so our eyes were pretty peeled for more of the same as we finished our daily driving. Ultimately, however, it was not a deer responsible for the closest call of the evening, but a full-grown black bear.

Of course I was the one driving, when Cole pointed to the median and exclaimed uncertainly, “Uhhhh, bear?” As the driver of course I’d seen the bear, too, but somehow didn’t quite believe it was happening. After spending almost ten hours in the car that day, driving through rain and the upper peninsula of Michigan, I wondered if maybe I was just seeing things. A big, black, hairy mirage.

But it was no mirage, and our good friend Yogi decided to bolt across the highway just about twenty yards in front of Kyle’s poor little Elantra, which certainly would have died a cruel and horrible death had it run into the giant bear. As Cole would tell it, the bear was at least 400 pounds. Can you believe we saw a bear that was 500 pounds? I know! A 600 pound bear!

Luckily, we and the bear and Kyle’s car all survived, but when the big guy arrived at the edge of the woods safely, I could’ve sworn he looked back at me with vengeance in his big brown eyes. “You almost HIT me!” he said silently with that look on his face. We slowed down a bit hoping to get a picture, but as soon as he flashed those crazy eyes I pressed on the gas. It was cool and everything, but not worth dying over just to get a picture. Seriously. A friggin’ BEAR.

We had hoped to end the night in Eau Claire (pronounced “Oh Claire”), and had a hotel room booked through Priceline at the Sleep Inn, which ended up being more difficult to locate than Amelia Earhart’s remains in the damn Bermuda Triangle. We spent 45 minutes driving around looking for the place, going 5-7 miles in just about every direction before finally locating it. “Oh,” the hotel clerk told us, “GPS always sends people to the wrong location. Weird, huh?”

Oh, chuckle chuckle. How hilarious. We just laughed and laughed about that. Exhausted after a full day in the car, 9:30 at night, that’s just hilarious. Hardy har. In any event, we’re here now, so give us our room please. We’d like to swim in the pool and relax.

“Um…” the clerk said, “It appears that your request for a hotel room has been cancelled.”

I’m a man with a reasonable temper. I think you have to be in order to educate high school children for a living. But right here I lost it. Went crazy. Biggest ball of twine JFK crazy. Priceline naturally had it on record that the reservation was accepted, but the Sleep Inn did not. I spent an hour on the phone trying to figure it out, but eventually, since the Sleep Inn had literally zero vacancy to resolve the issue peacefully, we had to leave and find ourselves a new hotel. After all that—and I’m not doing any justice to the level of frustration I felt that night—we left.

As it turns out, the AmericInn was our savior. We didn’t walk into the lobby until five minutes ‘til 11:00, which was five minutes before the pool was set to close, but the awesome clerk there kept it open for us, which ended up ruling because they had a basketball hoop set up in their pool. Two-on-two in the water is an exhausting game, but having sat down in a car so much that day it was exactly what we needed. Most comfortable hotel beds of the entire trip, too.

And so ended the worst day in road trip history. We were bound for a bummer eventually. Luckily for us, Day 4 was an extremely redemptive 24 hours, and before we knew it everything was right back on track.

Runnin' Wild, Day 3 (Part 2)

2009-06-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

Da Yoopers Tourist Trap – Ugh. That’s all there really is to say about this place. Originally our intention was to go and snap a few pictures with the World’s Largest Chainsaw and the World’s Largest Shotgun, but there was supposed to be other things to do there, too. Because there’s literally nothing to do in the U.P. we would drive like three hours between stops and hope to have at least fifteen minutes to do something fun before hopping back into the car again.

Hence, we spent way more time at Da Yoopers than we probably should have.

Click here to see pictures!

After the chainsaw and shotgun, we explored the backyard of the gift shop, which was supposed to be decorated with fun and tasteless photo opportunities. Instead, it was mostly us walking in the rain to take pictures with stuffed dear in people clothes and creepy scarecrows with rubber masks. To this day I have no idea what the overlying theme of that place was supposed to be, but it creeped the crap out of us all.

Definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, this place was funless. We couldn’t even get a kick out of the ridiculousness of it all. It just felt like we’d walk into some creepy old man’s backyard and we could be murdered at any time. So we left, not yet realizing that the whole “creepy old man/potential murder” feeling was just a precursor to what we’d experience later in the day. Da Yoopers only gave off that impression, when in reality it was just a silly gift shop. There would come a time before the sun set when we would actually fear for our lives.

Giant Hiawatha Statue – Ironwood, Michigan is sort of the last stop in the upper peninsula before hitting Wisconsin, and to be honest we sort of couldn’t wait to escape that wretched stretch of state. But before we could leave, there was the issue of photographing ourselves with the gigantic statue of Hiawatha on the edge of town.

Nowhere could we determine why this statue was built, but nearby there was a little sign claiming it had something to do with the mining of iron ore. Again with the iron ore. Personally, I see no connection between Hiawatha and mining for minerals, but I also have zero knowledge of Michigan’s history, outside of Melonheads and the guy who bludgeoned his wife to death with his false leg.
It was, at least, the largest attraction of the trip—on par with the giant bull we visited with Kevin in Iowa back in ’06, but beyond it being huge there really wasn’t much to see. And, of course, it was still raining.

At the gas station in town we filled up at a pump that didn’t take a credit card outside. It was one of those oldschool pumps that looks strikingly similar to Johnny 5 from “Short Circuit.” Talk about backwoods. Inside we filled up on beef jerky and water, and Kyle accidentally stole a camouflage baseball cap. The woman at the counter forgot to ring it up apparently, and Kyle was off with six dollars worth of stolen merchandise. Sinner.

By the time we hit the “Now Entering Wisconsin” sign just a couple of miles away, our enthusiasm couldn’t be contained. We did that crescendo of yells that children do when heading into a new state. Peace out, U.P. I can safely say that I will never purposefully visit you again.

World’s Largest Ball of Twine – If we have learned anything from past experiences of “World’s Largest” items, the people that assemble these things have to be at least a little nuts. There’s a certain sort of obsession behind these concoctions that fully sane people can’t even begin to understand. Personally, I can’t imagine collecting loose twine for 30 years and forming into a ball that weighs almost 20,000 pounds, but the real JFK apparently can. And thank God for that.

The “real” JFK is not John Fitzgerald Kennedy, as many of us would assume, but instead is a kind, relatively toothless old gent from northern Wisconsin named James Frank Kotera that’s been assembling this monstrosity of twine since 1979.

Located miles away from any major road, amidst rows and rows of tall trees, Kotera’s home and twine ball sit literally in the middle of nowhere. When we pulled into his gravel driveway, the old, beaten up home looked unoccupied, so we emptied ourselves from the car, trekked through the backyard to the little pavilion housing the ball, and began snapping pictures. After a few minutes of this, reading the incomprehensible signs and wandering around the enormous structure, Kyle got a nervous look on his face and said, “Uhh, guys…” as JFK himself emerged from the house.

Forget that we were technically trespassing, and that Kotera looked like one of the bad guys from “Deliverance,” this took us all by surprise. But he just moseyed on out, seemingly as friendly as can be, and began telling us the life story of the world’s largest ball of twine.

It should be noted here that I was not afraid of the guy, even if Kyle, Cole, and Craig were nearly pissing themselves in anxiety. Sure, Kotera was either a little slow or a little nuts, proven when he brought out his 45-pound mini twine ball named “Junior” for picture opportunities, but he seemed to me perfectly harmless. However, after receiving one of his “business cards,” which as it turns out was an eight-page autobiography written in stylistic chicken scratched and plastered to a large piece of cardboard with black electrical tape, the fellas were more than convinced he was certifiably insane and most likely planning to kill each and every one of us. After shaking his hand and re-entering our car to leave, I sat there and began typing in the next destination in the GPS. After only a few seconds JFK reemerged with another “business card” (this one an entirely different story), and Kyle told me to screw the GPS and just get the hell away from there.

Click here to see pictures!

So I had drive two miles in what ended up being the wrong direction just so I could figure out how to get to our hotel for the night. The guys expected JFK to end up running 60mph alongside our car at any point, only to jump onto our hood and rip his hairy fist through the roof of the car. I knew he’s just an erratic old man finding an odd passion for his life and going with it. The guy was harmless.

The bear was not.

Runnin' Wild, Day 3 (Part 1)

2009-06-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

The Mystery Spot – We had a case of the Mondays. It rained all damn day and, as it turns out, Michigan’s upper peninsula is probably the lamest stretch of land in the continental United States. But does that stop four idiots from making the best of it? Come on, you know us better than that…

Just down the road from our Super 8 lay our first two attractions of the day, but the Mystery Spot came first. Advertisements at the hotel and billboards along the road really didn’t give us much of an indication as to what, exactly, a mystery spot is, but we assumed that this was sort of the point. Secretly, I worried that it would be as lame or lamer than the “Top Secret” attraction my wife and I visited in Wisconsin Dells a few years ago. Outside, it’s the White House upside down, and they don’t tell you anything about what’s inside. Turns out that inside is also the White House upside down. We paid $12 and were in and out in like seven minutes.

Click here to see pictures!

Well, the Mystery Spot wasn’t quite so disappointing. An affable young man gave us the tour of what ended up being some sort of freak of physics in the middle of the Michigan woods. Apparently, iron ore in the ground screws with gravity somehow, so the combination of that and a small shanty built at a 45-degree angle creates all sorts of interesting photo opportunities.

Personally, I don’t buy into the whole iron-ore-defies-gravity thing. I think the goofiness of the crooked building is what makes the spot so cool, but whatever the case I was genuinely dizzy and nauseous once inside the little tilted shack. The photos and video we got were, sadly, one of the highlights of the day.

It was a reasonable start to the day, but as the rain continued to pour and the U.P. continued to suck, it was a bit difficult to keep our spirits high. Eventually, things would get so horrible there’d be nothing to do but laugh.

Weird Michigan Wax Museum – Before the storm, though, there was just a drizzle as we entered the Weird Michigan Wax Museum just across the street from the Mystery Spot. Our previous experience with a wax museum was in 2005, when Kyle, Ed, and I made a visit to the Bible Wax Museum in central Ohio, and that easily would’ve been the most boring thing in road trip history were it not for us scaring the urine out of Ed in the dark display room, and the creepy churchy tour guide with the dangly cross earring who hung out in the men’s bathroom afterwards and asked us if we enjoyed the attraction.

Knowing that we turned nothing into something the last time around, we felt this particular wax museum would provide us with similar fun stories for the road.

It did not. At least, not things that happened to us personally. What it did provide was a couple of stories from Michigan’s weird history (as advertised) that we’d take with us. Most notably, there was a display of a one-legged man bludgeoning his wife to death with his false leg. That was rather quaint, we felt.

The last of the room’s wax displays told the story of Melonheads, which were some sort of freak human retards with giant heads that escaped an asylum around the turn of the century and now roam the woods of the area. Despite the fact that the mannequins looked more like a cheap display at a Halloween megastore than something legitimately frightening, the story itself struck a cord. What a fantastic scary movie that would make! Uninspired horror film writers could very easily put together a decent film if they’d just do a little research.

Was it worth $7? Probably not. But one thing we’ve learned about road trips is that it’s not about how fun each individual attraction is, but how they all form together like the Power Rangers’ robot dinosaurs to make a huge robot dinosaur. As a whole, would “Runnin’ Wild” be complete without a really horrible wax museum? Again—probably not.

Muldoon’s Pasties – First things first: the word “pasties” is pronounced “past-ee’s,” not “paste-ee’s” like you’d imagine. Apparently yoopers aren’t particularly fond of phonics. In any event, these little pot-less pot pies were supposed to be very tasty (tass-tee?), so we located what was supposed to be the best pasty place in the U.P. and gave them a try.

Driving the most of the morning along Route 2, which skirts the northern end of Lake Michigan for miles and miles, you’d be lucky to drive 10 minutes without passing some sort of pasties dive. Without exception, every single one of these places looks like a little shack with a hand-painted sign on the side advertising the food within. These are tiny places that seat maybe somewhere between six and twenty people, but the owners make everything from scratch, so it only makes sense that a homemade meal be eaten a home-like atmosphere.

Muldoon’s in Munising was voted the best pasties in the upper peninsula (by whom, we never really did get a straight answer—we assumed by the Muldoon’s Pasties Organization or something similarly ridiculous), so that’s where we ate. The food was, by all measurable standards, both delicious and hearty, though not really the sort of meal you’ll have sex dreams about. That’s reserved for huevos rancheros.

Click here to see pictures!

By definition, a pasty is a mixture of either beef or chicken, then potatoes, carrots, onions, and rutabagas folded into a pie crust and baked. Once on the plate they look rather imposing but hit the spot nicely. Gravy is the favorite topping of such delicacies, but ketchup, hot sauce, or ranch dressing are apparently other options as toppings as well.

At the end of lunchtime we left full and happy, and the woman behind the counter serving us was really friendly and had perhaps the strongest north woods Canadien-esque accent we experienced the whole trip. We left to her saying, “Thanks for stopping oot, yah? Come back whenever you want, eh?”

Runnin' Wild, Day 2 (Part 2)

2009-06-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

Mirrormaze and the Laser Challenge – Towns like Frankenmuth seem to pop up every 100 miles or so all throughout Michigan and Wisconsin. Designed as touristy, kitschy-European-themed towns, most of these places have main streets lined with fudge and cheese stores, maybe a small winery or a smattering of antique/craft places for garnish. The facades of these storefronts are usually extremely colorful caricatures of what a real Austrian/German/Bavarian/Swiss building would look like, but that’s the way American tourists like it. Who needs actual Germany when it’s cheesy bastard cousin is just right upstate?

Click here to see pictures!

Tucked away in one little pseudo-Austrian complex, between a Wisconsin-themed gift shop and a place that sold variously tanned and branded leather, lay a small attraction clearly designed for children—an oasis of fun in the midst of what must be a hell-like desert for anybody under the age of 12. The Mirrormaze and Laser Challenge seemed to hold a lot of potential, which is why we invested in both activities the little game center had to offer. Only one of them would eventually pay off.

The Mirrormaze is essentially a labyrinth of archways, some of which are openings to the maze itself and others that are merely crystal-clear mirrors meant to confound and confuse you. The website made it seem like this maze would take hours and hours to escape, and the photograph it offered made the place seem huge. Of course, as we learned at the Museum of Magic, few things trick the eye more effectively than a high quality mirror.

In truth, the whole thing took us about three minutes to navigate. It was a solid 180 seconds of fun, and for a while we were legitimately weirded out in the dark, prismatic passages. But once the path was discovered we realized we were doing a maze intended for kindergartners. Severe disappointment.

But then there was the laser challenge, which is essentially a room of lasers not unlike what you’d see James Bond maneuver acrobatically en route to the jewel safe secured in a villain’s headquarters. One would have to contort his body very carefully to avoid setting off the hypothetical alarm, and since we are all grown men (at least according to our numerical ages) we had entirely more with this than was probably necessary.

Helping us stay motivated in our quest to overcome the Laser Challenge was a timer and a leaderboard, at the top of which was a small child who ripped through the whole thing in just over ten seconds. The legend goes that she spent six hours in that room one day figuring it out. It should be noted that none of us did better than about two minutes. Not helping our huge, awkward man bodies was the fact that every laser you touched tacked on 30 seconds to your final score. I, let me just tell you, sucked at it.

But Cole did not. Somehow he crawled under the lowest lasers and leapt over the highest ones to post the best score of all of us. At one point I just said, “Screw it” and did some sort of front flip/summersault through the room, hoping I’d get lucky. I finished in about three seconds but triggered damn near every laser in the place. Needless to say, it was my best score of the day.

The Cheese Haus – Seeing as how we were surrounded by stores selling cheese and fudge, we wandered into the biggest and reportedly most famous one in town, right up the street from our previous location. The lure for us was the giant mouse just outside (because what’s a road trip without pictures of us standing next to giant stuff?), but there were also rumors that within this Haus of Cheese lie free samples. As growing boys, the temptation of a free snack was just too much.

There was bacon cheese, garlic cheese, jalapeño cheese, strawberry cream cheese, and even chocolate cheese (which tasted more like chocolate cheesecake than chocolate cheddar, for the record), all of which earned the full attention of our taste buds. There were processed meats shaped like all sorts of things, and various microbrewed beers that were all entirely too expensive.

We didn’t buy a thing.

Next door, however, everyone except me rang their charge cards through the register of the saltwater taffy place. I’ll admit freely that what drew me into the store was the undulating pull of pink taffy in the window. Few things are more mesmerizing than one of those taffy pullers, as the fluffy pink candy folds over itself over and over into saltwatery goodness. Besides, little candy places like that make good stuff, even if the prices are a little steep. Come to think of it, it’s probably the quality of the stuff that makes the prices so steep in the first place. In any event, candy trumps cheese every time, and that’s exactly what happened as we wrapped up our stay in the delightfully tacky Frankenmuth, Michigan.

Skalawags – At the very tip-top of the Michigan mainland is the small port town of Mackinaw City. I call it a port town without having any real knowledge as to whether or not it is, in fact, a port town—or even what a port town technically is—but it just felt very clean and fresh and watery. Mackinac Island, a short ferry ride away, is allegedly one of the more beautiful areas in the state, but back on land things weren’t so shabby either.

Click here to see pictures!

A city surrounded by water on three sides is bound to capture some delicious fish, which is the specialty of a little restaurant called Skalawags. Anybody who dislikes fried fish and chips can’t be wholly American, and the goods at this particular eatery were, well… good. Not great necessarily, especially by the culinary standards set earlier on in this trip, but good. It’s hard to go wrong with hushpuppies.

We ended the evening at a Super 8 Motel in St. Ignace, which is right across the Mackinac Bridge from the restaurant. The bridge itself is the third longest in the United States and the twelfth longest in the world, and actually offers an extremely gorgeous view of Lake Michigan on the left and Lake Huron on the right. It’s nowhere near as imposing and iconic as the Golden Gate Bridge, but it’s just about as long and probably just a little bit more useful. Connecting the two sections of Michigan state is an important job. Also, isn’t Michigan weird? A double state? Shouldn’t it be two states, like North Dakota and South Dakota? I’m just sayin’…

Runnin' Wild, Day 2 (Part 1)

2009-06-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

Motown’s Hitsville USA – Detroit, sometimes called the Motor City, which can be shortened to Motown, is where Berry Gordy redefined pop music in the 1960s. When you look at the list of classic black musicians that sprung forth from Gordy’s Motown Record label over the years, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of historical spookiness standing on the front stoop of the building where all these legends recorded their music.

The steps we walked up so casually where the same steps used by the following groups and artists to put hits onto records in Hitsville USA’s Studio A: Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, The Isley Brothers, and the Jackson 5, among others.

Click HERE to view pictures.

Sounds epic, right? Too bad the damn place was closed on Sundays and we didn’t get a chance to tour the studio. Last year’s go-round at Sun Studio in Memphis was a highlight, and one has to think this would’ve been cool, too. But what can you do? Closed is closed. At least we got to do the whole walking-up-the-same-steps-as-legends thing.

The Henry Ford Museum – Aside from the fact that Henry Ford revolutionized both the automobile and the assembly line (notice I didn’t say “invent,” because he invented neither), but he also was a pretty passionate anti-Semite. Yup, the hero of Detroit hated Jews, and knowing that I supported the Ford estate by ponying up $12 for a ticket to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

Despite my clear aversion to Ford as a human being, this very well could have been the most memorable aspect of this year’s trip, if only for a handful of eerily historical exhibits. If the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile was the centerpiece of the day, then other, more macabre artifacts like the limo John F. Kennedy was assassinated in and the Fords Theater chair Abe Lincoln was sitting in when John Wilkes Booth popped him in the back of the head were both close seconds.

Perhaps the deepest emotions I felt all morning were on the bus Rosa Parks made her famous stand for black rights. The museum actually lets you board the bus (THE bus—not a replica) while a narrator tells the story through speakers. At one point, when the rest of the guys had moved on to other parts of the building, I stayed behind and sat on the bus, listening to Parks share her account of what happened that day. Some call me a history nerd for loving this sort of thing so deeply, but as I sat there replaying the whole scene over with the bus’s interior spread out in front of me, I couldn’t fight back the goosebumps. No joke here. It was awesome, as in absolutely awe-inspiring.

But if you think for one moment that all the four of us did for two hours was walk observantly through old cars with our hands behind our backs, you’re wrong. We’re not refined enough to experience museums in such a way. As part of the “Cars of Rock Stars” exhibit there was a Guitar Hero station set up, and Kyle—something of a Guitar Hero impresario—hopped aboard and rocked the whole west wing of the building. No one was really paying attention, but he pretended like he did, which was what made it so hilarious.

The whole ordeal was enough to work our appetites into a tizzy, so we drove to a nearby suburb to eat what would eventually be the most delicious food of the entire adventure…

The Fly Trap – I’ve had huevos rancheros maybe once in my life previous to visiting the Fly Trap in Ferndale, Michigan, but I can tell you that I’ll probably never have it again. Not because I didn’t enjoy it—believe me, I really, REALLY enjoyed it—but because no huevos rancheros will over hold a candle to what I ate on the morning of Sunday, June 7th, 2009. It was a day I shall never forget.

The building itself is barely bigger than an oversized walk-in closet, and there was a little bit of a wait for us once we got there (it was no surprise for us to see a diner be packed on a Sunday after church services let out), but once we got in it was hard not to be impressed. The special of the day, which Kyle ended up ordering, was biscuits and gravy, except the biscuits were of the cheddar persuasion, and the gravy tasted more like butter sauce than anything. Out of control. Absolutely out of control.

Click HERE to view pictures.

My own dish, which I think I’ve already mentioned, was scrambled eggs served on a bed of black beans, pico de gallo, loads of sticky cheese, and a healthy dollop of sour cream. A few drips of the restaurants signature hot sauce made the dish one of the holiest culinary combinations I’ve ever had the witness to savor.

As if the food weren’t good enough, the owner was so impressed with out awesome road trip shirts (guess who designed those?) and the Fly Trap’s spot on what we were wearing, that they gave us free hot sauce and t-shirts. Never in the history of road trips has our road trippedness earned us free stuff. Talk about a highlight—this was probably the second-best restaurant I’ve ever eaten at, behind only Memphis’s deliciously delectable Cozy Corner BBQ. The Detroit ‘burbs have a real gem in the Fly Trap. I’m salivating just thinking about the food again. Mmm… huevos rancheros…

Runnin' Wild, Day 1 (Part 2)

2009-06-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

Hell, Michigan – Oh, the fun we had with all the ironic wordplay here. Quips like, “Hell is a lot nicer than I would’ve though,” or “The road to Hell is a windy one,” or “I’ll see you in Hell!” And so on. The drive there was just about as fun as actually being there. Interestingly enough, our GPS had no record of Hell, Michigan even being an actual town, so we had to sort of float around that part of the state for a while looking for it. Finally, tucked away somewhere in between Jackson and Ann Arbor, we found the little town with a population of about 300 and had our way with it.

Click HERE to view pictures.

The main attraction was an ice cream parolor named, fittingly, “Screams.” Inside were all sorts of witty t-shirts and keychains and other gift-shoppy keepsakes tattooed with “Hell” all over them. So we did what we do at a place like this—take lots of pictures to prove we had been to Hell and back.

Get it?

Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger – Food is such an important part of these trips, and restaurants are hand-picked to ensure that we got the most out of each and every meal. We had to visit the University of Michigan campus to get it for our first dinner of the trip.

The Blimpy Burger was featured on Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives”—a show we trust blindly, as if Guy Fieri were the only person on the face of the planet capable of making intelligent restaurant decisions. The catch here is that you can order your burger in any of a number of ways, with all sorts of special toppings and ingredients. Craig, for example, got a fried egg on his burger. Cole got mushrooms and feta cheese. Me, I got my burger and lower bun placed gently into a paper boat and drowned in chili before being crowned with the head of the bun.

You know it’s a great spot when there’s Sprecher root beer in the cooler. We all washed the delicious goods down with some of that, picked the remnants of burger and feta and egg from our collective craws, and headed to Detroit Rock City, our final destination of the evening.

Tiger’s Game – Comerica was MLB ballpark number nine for hermano and I, headlined by the two Chicago stadiums, Busch in St. Louis, Miller in Milwuakee, Kauffman in Kansas City, the Metrodome in Minneapolis, Jacobs Field in Cleveland, and the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati. Of all of them, Comerica ranked pretty high on the list.

Granted, the Tigers as an organization are nowhere near my favorite team, but Comerica as a ballpark was more than affable. It is, for example, the only stadium I’ve ever been to with a full-sized, working carousel within its walls. Not that a carousel should say anything about the quality of a park, but I’m just sayin’. Other highlights of the actual building included gigantic plaster tiger sculptures and some seriously bitchin’ bronze statues lining the concourse beyond center field.

Our bleacher seats were second row in left center, which offered us a pretty tight view of the game. To keep ourselves interested throughout the contest, we devised a game where each of us put $5 into The Pot before the game, then passed a half-dollar around all night from one of us to the next as batters stepped up to the plate. The first person to be holding the coin when a homerun was hit would receive the entire pot—until the next homerun was hit. Then the pot money would be transferred to the new winner. The last guy to have the dough when the game ends, keeps it.

The only problem with this was that nobody hit any homeruns all game long. We still had fun hoping and wishing, though, and the fireworks display after the Detroit win made the $19 we spent on tickets more than worth the cost.

Click HERE to view pictures.

Downtown Detroit isn’t a bad-looking place, despite all the horrible things we’d been told about how cruddy the city is. Even at night the area surrounding the ballpark felt like a little mini Chicago in some ways, right down to the People Mover, which is their version of the El. It’s like two cars long, and considering the Red Wings were playing in the Stanley Cups Finals just down the road things were pretty smooshed, but overall there were no problems. No one robbed us at gunpoint, no one kidnapped us and forced us to get the Tigers’ Old English “D” tattooed onto our arms, and Eminem didn’t challenge us to any embarrassing freestyle rap battles down by 8 Mile Road. We just did our thing and headed back to the hotel for one of the worst nights’ sleeps in the history of road tripping.

We stayed at the Renaissance Center downtown, which is part of the complex that houses the GM building. It was a lovely building in its own right, but entirely circular and extremely confusing. For being so “nice” the beds were like sleeping on plywood, and worst of all there was some sort of commotion not unlike an argument from the show “Flava of Love” happening in a nearby room. Just loud, spirited shouting and cursing well into the night. We never did figure out the origin of the noise, but it was like falling asleep with the TV on and having the anger slip into your dreams. None of us slept, but after a lovely Day 1 it hardly mattered. There would be time for sleep later. For now, it was sweet(ish) dreams and preparation for the rest of the Michigan mainland.

Runnin' Wild, Day 1 (Part 1)

2009-06-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

American Museum of Magic – The first stop of any road trip is usually a relatively surreal experience because it’s so hard to believe the whole thing has already begun. We clumsily nab the camera from its bag, mosey up to the storefront, and try to start enjoying ourselves, as if it’s ever that easy to just summon fun.

This “museum” was really just one store in a long line of other similar stores running along the main street of downtown Marshall, Michigan. Every wall inside the building was plastered with antique magic show advertisements, and the floor was decked with all sorts of magical paraphernalia which most notably included one of the three water tanks Harry Houdini used in one of his most famous escape acts. We weren’t allowed to get inside (we were barely allowed to touch it with our pointer finger), but it was still cool all the same.

Click HERE for Slide Show

Our tour guide was a nervous, intelligent red-headed woman dressed respectably for her relatively young age, but classlessly offset her outfit with the ever-popular calculator watch. But she was cool enough to let us explore a little more than most guests probably did, usually at our own ridiculous suggestion, and those explorations led to playing dress-up with intricate magicians’ jackets and performing tricks—I mean, illusions—with beautiful assistant mannequins.

Our biggest criticism was that although the room was filled to the brim with old tricks and props, the redhead wouldn’t tell us how any of them worked. She legitimately thought that if she spilled any secrets the Magicians’ Alliance would track her down and take her legs. When she told the story of that masked magician who reveals the secrets of magic on TV she seemed genuinely concerned, telling us about how he as to live in some sort of witness protection program and where a mask all the time like Michael Jackson’s kids.

She was, it’s probably safe to say, a bit of a nervous woman. But she allowed us to shake out of the road trip cobwebs and get the familiar rumblings of fun rolling. Before we knew it good times were spilling forth from us like things that spill forth from other things. It was, as they say, magic.

Dark Horse Brewery – With the loss of an hour heading into Michigan’s goofy Eastern time zone, lunch crept upon us more quickly than we’d expected, but our first planned stop for the culinary aspect of our adventures was a little wooden shanty tucked behind a sort of green warehouse where they brew Dark Horse beer.

The restaurant itself, with hand-kindled Dark Horse steins dangling from every low ceiling beam, served only pizzas and sandwiches, but we had been told the sandwiches was where it’s at. So we each ordered a different microbrew from the menu—all of which ended in a maelstrom of deliciousness—and sampled varied sandwiches.

Our waitress there was exceptionally cool, if not exceptionally speedy, for giving me loads of crap for ordering the Raspberry beer. Kyle and Craig ordered these heavy stouts that must have been like chewing alcoholic motor oil. Downing that sort of brew is apparently a true test of manhood. A test, by the way, I lost by adding fruit to my beer.

Kyle added to his collection of pint glasses by buying one in the gift shop from a gigantic man in a cutoff shirt, and then we hit the road, leaving Marshall for the next leg of our trip.

Armory Arts Village/Jackson Prison – My experiences with old prisons have been overwhelmingly positive, which was why we chose the former Jackson Prison as a stop on this year’s itinerary. Alcatraz in San Francisco is, of course, a fantastic historic prison, and the Ohio State Reformatory a.k.a. Shawshank is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen on any road trip, period.

The Jackson Prison, however, didn’t even come close to holding a candle to either of those. Not that there wasn’t potential for this to be cool, but because the jail has been converted into an artists’ community in the last 18 months, there’s no longer any of that old, dusty, brick-laden creepiness that the other old prisons just emanate.

Click HERE for Slide Show

Granted, the apartments built from the old cell blocks are undeniably badass lofts, the history left unscathed is extremely minimal. Our tour was given by a spiky, short-haired woman who spent the first 30 minutes of the hour “tour” lecturing to us about the history of the building without actually showing us anything. We literally sat in chairs for a half-hour.

The other half of the tour actually was relatively interesting, the most interesting of which was the basement, where solitary confinement used to be located. Michigan was the first state to abolish the death penalty, but prisoners who had previously been condemned to death didn’t just get dumped into gen-pop with the petty thieves; instead of dying they were stuck into solitary for the rest of their lives. It was twenty years before they realized that complete silence and darkness for two decades would drive people loony, and two-thirds of the prisoners who were finally removed from those cells were declared certifiably and irretrievably insane.

It had its cool moments, but for the most part the Jackson Prison was a bit of a disappointment. On the bright side, we later found out from another Jackson resident that just a couple weeks ago Ed Norton and Robert DeNiro just finished some filming at the jail for a big movie coming out next year. So there’s that, at least.

Top 5 Man Crushes

2009-06-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to define the term “Man-Crush” without making it sound like something homosexual, but it’s really not. To me, a “Man-Crush” is something born of admiration. The following five guys are men I would, on some level, like to be. In some cases, I would totally be these people, and very much want to be these people. But in other cases I really don’t want to be them, but admire who they are and how they do what they do.

It should be noted that I don’t sit out these guys’ windows and watch them get into bed at night (anymore); I just wish I could turn myself into some hybrid of all of them so I could be fully awesome. Argue with this list. I dare you.

#5 – The Rock – Is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson somewhat irrelevant now? Absolutely he is. But back when he was doing his shtick with the WWF he was like the coolest guy I’d ever seen. The guy’s built like… well, like a professional wrestler… but he also played pro football, can sing, and is hilarious as well. Many, when he used to say he was going to turn things sideways and stick them straight up someone’s candy ass I used to just laugh and laugh. The eyebrow thing was awesome, too. Sure, his movies sucked, but does that mean I should love him less?

#4 – Dr. Gregory House – I get that he’s not technically a real person, and that Hugh Laurie (the actor that plays House) actually is a British comedian and not a devil-may-care gimpy doc with a penchant for insulting people whilst brilliantly solving cases across the board. I could live without the limp and addiction to pain killers, but I love watching someone be that good at a profession that specialized. I wish that I was instantly brilliant like that. I also wish I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. And most of all, I wish I had more really funny ways to insult those closest to me.

#3 – Brandon Boyd – With the recent release of “Black Heart Inertia” I’ve been rediscovering my love for Incubus. Not that it ever really retreated, but new songs just tend to reenergize me. You always like steak, for example, but when you don’t eat steak for a while and then get a juice 16-oz t-bone, it reminds you how much love you steak. For those of you who are a little slow when it comes to metaphors, Brandon Boyd is my steak.

I can’t say I have much desire for the gross dreadlock/molestache period of Boyd’s career, and he does more drugs than I’d care for, but his intelligence, artistic nature, and musical talent make him one of the best at what he does. If you’re still sleeping on Incubus, it’s time to wake the hell up. At the very least, buy “Make Yourself.” You won’t regret it.

#2 – Justin Timberlake – My wife is the most beautiful woman in the world, but Timberlake has “been” with some of the hottest broads in the business, from Cameron Diaz and Brittney Spears in their respective primes, to Scarlett Johanson and Jessica Biel. He even spent a couple months doinking Alyssa Milano, and none of this says anything for the multitudes of hot groupies he’s surely spent intimate time with over the years. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a resume.

But the fact that he can sing and dance so well helps too. I mean, it’s one thing to be pretty and get the ladies, but to have an actual talent bumps him up the list considerably. The dude’s just a stud. “Dick in a Box” and “Mother Lover” with Andy Samberg were the cherries on the proverbial sundaes for me.

#1 – Michael Jordan – My wife and I occasionally have discussions about what we would name future children (No, she’s not pregnant. Relax, gang), and the name Jordan came up the other night. In her mind it’s just a nice name for a boy; she suggested it and didn’t even make the connection. But if there’s a chance for me to name my little boy Jordan Brigham, you can best believe I’m jumping all over that. It’s His Airness, for goodness sake. I hear he’s a prick in real life (one of the only NBA players I have yet to add to my “Nice to Meet You” corral), but who cares. It’s Mike. I want to be like Mike.

Nice to Meet You #18 - Kobe Bryant

2009-06-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

When it comes to all the NBA’s superstars, Kobe Bryant is probably the guy I know least well. If we’re being honest about it, Kobe couldn’t pick me out of a crowd of three people. Upon being asked, “Which of these three somewhat overweight, yet curiously attractive white twentysomethings is Joel Brigham?” he wouldn’t even know where to begin. If he did actually get it right, it would be due to the “curiously attractive” hint. But name alone? Not a prayer.

So what gives me the gumption to write a “Nice to Meet You” blog about a guy that I’ve only technically “met” twice—both as one of about 25 media members shoving microphones in his face? I don’t know. He’s Kobe Bryant and the Lakers are in the Finals again. I’m trying to be topical for cripe’s sake. Give me a break.

I can say this about Kobe—he walks, talks, and acts like he’s spent his entire life trying to emulate Michael Jordan. You don’t believe me, watch this YouTube video. Beyond the game, though, he has the same sort of cocky smirk and smooth, charismatic baritone. The swagger is similar, the facial expressions are similar, there’s just one thing…

This man ain’t no Michael Jordan.

Here’s the thing about Bryant that’s always bothered me: he’s actually seems like a really cool dude to be around, but when you talk to him you get the impression that he only seems that way. Does that make sense? He’s so great in front of a camera—very patient and friendly—but I have no idea what he’s like behind the proverbial curtain. Somehow you get the feeling that it’s all a show.

But it’s mean of me to say such things considering he’s never been anything but nice to me and the people I work for. I’ve got a number of Kobe-bashing friends who would have me skinned for apologizing, but I’m just not the kind of dude who wants to see Kobe suffer. Truth be told, I’d love to see him win a Shaq-Free ring this month. I really would.

He’s arguably the greatest player of his generation, so who cares if he’s actually nice or only pretending. It’s still Kobe, and if he asked me to party with him, I totally would. So what if that invitation will never come? At least I’ll always be curiously attractive.

Redemption of the Afro Ninja

2009-06-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Daniel Tosh is my favorite. The best parts are when he calls a certain celebrity "Horse Face," and at the end when the afro ninja attempts to redeem himself. Laughed out loud at least three different times during this spot.

Tosh.0

Thurs June 4th, 10pm / 9c

Preview - Afro Ninja: Redemption

It's Jemaine! I mean, Dr. Ronald Chevalier...

And, of course, a video about funny cats:

DYK - In God We Spend

2009-06-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

So here’s a question for you—if there’s supposed to be a separation of Church and State, why does our money say “In God We Trust,” and why is the phrase “One Nation Under God” included in the Pledge of Allegiance?

In the first place, it should be noted that the phrase “Separation of Church and State” is not located anywhere in the Constitution. At all. Jefferson wrote about it in a letter about how the idea relates to the first amendment freedom of religion. And how does it relate to our freedom of religion? Well, the idea is that the government and education system should not push or advertise any one religion to the masses. Keep the Church out of State matters. And you’ve got to admit, that’s not the worst idea in the world. Read “The Crucible” to see what happens when the Bible is used for evidence in court.

But even still, if we’re supposed to be about freedom of religion in this country, then we should be tolerant of those who don’t believe in any sort of god at all, right? With these people in mind, is it constitutional to have that phrase on our money, or that phrase in our pledge?

In regards to the pledge, the rules have already changed for some schools in America. Just like “sitting Indian-Style” has become “sitting criss-cross applesauce,” a lot of kids in younger generations just leave “one nation under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance. That’s probably the most appropriate measure. Parents who want to teach their kids otherwise can do so at home. At school, with a mixture of all different religions and whatnot, things stay sober so nobody feels left out.

As for “In God We Trust” and its relation to our currency, it first appeared on bills during the Lincoln presidency, but Teddy Roosevelt—a devout Christian—tried getting it lifted during his own term because he felt like having God’s name on money was sacrilegious. Nowadays die-hard conservatives would call taking the name OFF the money was sacrilegious. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

The bottom line is that all of the original permanent settlements in America were Christian in some denomination or another. So were several of the founding fathers. The men that put together our Constitution believed in Christian values, and certainly there are echoes of that in the system of government that they set up. But that freedom of religion means it’s okay not to believe the way the founding fathers did. Do what you want to do, but I guarantee that no atheist is throwing away dollar bills just because it has God’s name on it. It spends the same as anything else, and it’s all green, baby.

The Day I Retired

2009-06-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

When the Cleveland Cavaliers lost to the Orlando Magic the other night, putting them out of contention for this year’s NBA championship, LeBron James just walked off the court and didn’t come back. Didn’t talk to media, teammates, anybody. Showered, got dressed, and hustled out of the arena like he was being chased to the team bus by bears.

And you know what? I understand. The man was embarrassed on the highest stage in professional basketball in front of millions of viewers. When that sort of embarrassment happened to me in front of only eight of my closest friends, I almost gave up the game for good.

Truth be told, I didn’t touch a basketball for almost an entire year. That’s how scarring it was. Perhaps I should explain what “it” was. A man who loves hoops as much as I do doesn’t just give the sport up for no reason. It takes something extremely scarring to suffocate that sort of love. Truthfully, I’d just gotten to the end of my rope.

It should first be noted that playing basketball was the first thing I’d ever had any success with in my life as a result of serious practice. Singing came easily, acting came easily, comedy came easily, so I participated in those things. Piano was difficult, archery was difficult, tetherball was difficult, so I did not participate in those things. Tried, but gave up very quickly.

Basketball was something else, though. Maybe it had something to with growing up in Chicago’s backyard during an era when Michael Jordan was the most transcendent athlete the world had seen since Mohammed Ali, but the game was just something I loved. So, even though as a sixth-grader I was only slightly taller than that creepy midget dad on crutches from “Little People Big World,” I still worked my butt of because I wanted to play.

I’d lay on the floor practicing the proper wrist-flick for shooting. Over and over again, ball goes up, ball comes down. I’d spend hours in my neighbors oversized driveway doing dribble drills—through the legs, behind the back, “The Spider,” and I’d be out there until my lower back was sore from leaning over all day. My buddy Jimmy and I would lower his adjustable rim to where we could dunk it, and that’s where I’d practice jumping. We even played with older black kids who were way stronger and way better than us, just to get the hang of things.

Always overmatched, often scared, and usually inept, I went through all the motions summer and after summer. It helped, of course, that I grew several inches by eighth grade, and by then I was experiencing some success in school ball, even though stylistically I was more a Harlem Globetrotter than a Chicago Bull. The coaches didn’t like that, and eventually it put me on the bench.

I was sore about it, but deep down I knew I was pretty good. I could dribble with the best of them and shoot the ball from pretty much anywhere on the court. I’m known for my showy passing, which more often than not bounces of someone’s face or misses the target completely en route to “out of bounds.” What I can’t do is play defense or “be strong.” Which is what got me into trouble the night I decided to retire from the game basketball.

So how, after devoting years of my life to honing my skills as a baller could I just quit. Well, quite simply, I was dunked on.

That doesn’t sound too bad, but trust me, it was. I was involved at an intramural league in college with black roommates, and we were a pretty solid group of guys. Definitely won more than we lost—that much I can say with confidence. But we also wore the baggiest shorts in the league and were known to play the least orthodox brand of basketball of any team. My black friends are great people, and absolutely hilarious, so it was almost always a fun time.

Except for the night we played against some fraternity with a light-skinned kid towering over just about all of us. He could shoot, play D, and dunk the damn ball, so we stuck our best defender on him. I can’t remember which of us that was, but I’m positive it wasn’t me. I usually guarded the chunky white kid who hovered around the three-point line in his little cut-off t-shirt and never made any attempt to hustle or make cuts.

But on fast breaks defensive assignments mean nothing. Mr. Light Skin got a steal, and I was the only one with a chance of stopping him. So I took off after him and caught up five or six steps from the rim.

Then, everything went into slow motion, and I knew what was about to happen even before it actually happened. L.S. picked up the ball and took his two steps of momentum before rocketing towards the rim. Me—pale and unathletic—did the same, but the difference in height and hops resulted in him stuffing the ball in a pretty nice dunk, and me slamming my body into his, arms extended, while the ball came crashing down on my head.

There aren’t a lot of dunks in IM games, so his team was going bat-crap over the stupid play. My teammates were laughing their asses off. I can’t remember what happened the rest of the game, but that may have been the game-winning point. I don’t remember.

What I do remember is dressing much faster than everyone else and returning to the suite alone. The rest of the guys must’ve stayed back to play another game or something because I was there on my own for a while. After showering in frustration and wondering what it was about basketball I loved so much, I came to realize that I wasn’t really all that good at it. The dunk hadn’t been my only downfall that game; I’d missed a ton of shots, defensive assignments, and easy passes. Some nights you just play horrible, and this had been one of them. Except while most horrible nights are tolerable, this night ended with getting my head dunked on.

Also at the time the Bulls—my lifelong favorite sports team, period—were friggin’ awful, somehow adding to my overall frustration.

So, I got out of the shower, and retired from the game of basketball.

I left a note on the door for the guys expounding upon my decision, and I forget exactly what it said but I remember it being really formal and ridiculous. The guys loved it and told me I’d be back for more, thinking it was all some sort of ruse. But it wasn’t. They kept asking me to play and I kept declining. It wasn’t until the next school year (I’d be a junior) that I’d play again. I don’t know what got me back out there, but it wouldn’t be the end.

What does a guy do when he’s retired? I could’ve chosen to beef up on my piano or tetherball skills, but like I said, I’ve always hated practicing. My recent exploits in the game of basketball had proven this to me. Instead I devoted the majority of my time to my girlfriend at the time, something that proved to be a much worse choice than trying to block the dunk of an athletically pristine frat kid several inches taller than me.

But what is life but a collection of bad choices? The important thing is that we learn from them. In a way, it’s just like practicing a sport or an instrument. You make mistakes early on but learn from them and get better.

Me, I don’t have the patience for that. I’d rather just be good at it from the beginning. Of course, LeBron James was put on earth as the quintessence of athleticism and even he can’t seem to win a title. I guess the moral of the story is, whenever you fail at something, it’s best to just storm out and quit for a little while.

Hey, it worked for me.

Student Quotes, Spring '09

2009-05-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, your favorite and mine, the student quotes. As always, these are real things real students said. I love them, but come on... these are hilarious! Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

Alexis: “Are there exercises to make you get taller?”

Janson: “Hey Brigs, do you know how much snow we’re supposed to get tomorrow?”
Me: “No I do not.”
Janson: “Is it supposed to be a lot?”

English 2 was doing a vocabulary activity for the word “accolade.” To help them understand the word, I listed a few celebrities and asked them what accolades each would win. Garrett answered those questions as follows:
Kobe Bryant – MVP trophy
Tom Hanks – Golden Globe
Mariah Carey – Platinum Record
Miley Cyrus – Nothing she should die.

Lindsay, in the midst of a word puzzle exercise, asks her friend with a dictionary the following question: “Hey, can you check W-O-R-D in there and see if it’s a word?”

Then, when I repeat this story for kids on the other side of the room who heard me laughing, Brie looks around confusedly and says, “I don’t get it.”

Sami, responding to an assignment where I asked them to write a letter to their future child: “I don’t want kids. I used to think I wanted to adopt, but now I want them to remove my eggs and put them inside somebody else because I don’t want cankles.”

From student summaries of Washington Irving’s “The Devil and Tom Walker”:

Nathan: “He then went to Boston and became a user.” (It’s supposed to be usurer, someone who provides loans).

Megan: “Tom was really mean about being a load shark.”

Today we did a scavenger hunt using reference books from the library. One of the questions was who got the Oscar for best director in 1983. Almost every kid in the class wrote down “Tears of Endearment.”

Samantha, to Mr. Nordstrom (who had grown out his beard for no-shave November): “Mr. Nordstrom, you look like a homo.”
Nordstrom: “What did you say?”
Sam: “Hobo! I meant hobo!”

After answering “false” to the FFA agriculture week trivia question, “True or False: Corn originated in North America,” I asked Jake to explain why he’d answer that way. He responded, “Because corn didn’t originate in North America. It originated in Mexico.”

From Zach’s English 3 test, an essay question about how to improve verbal skills in a speech: “The way you talk determines your audience’s attention. If you talk in broken or slow words, your audience will be very bored. Now if you jump on stage and throw candy and put some spunk in your speech, that will get the audience entertained and assertive of what you are talking about.”

Tyler: “When speaking vocally…” (does it even matter what the rest of that sentence is?)

Mr. Hewitt (the Driver’s Ed teacher): “Hey Brigs, you’re looking better today. Strong, like Lance Armstrong.”
Me, joking: “That’s because I overcame cancer twice.”
Alexis, overhearing the conversation: “And he walked on the moon.”

From Darwin’s “Grizzly Man” paper: “Timothy Treadwell was very crazy and individual. I think he may have been retarded or something.”

Lindsay, asking about a “confusing” test question: “I know there were only two characters in the story ‘Berenice,’ but was Egaeus the boy or the girl?”
Me: “What was the title of the story again?”
Lindsay: “Berenice.”
Me: “…”
Lindsay: “Oh. Right.”

From Emilee’s storybook in Creative Writing: “And from that day on, Dr. Batty was vanished from the kingdom.”

Emilee’s vocabulary quiz: “I was told I need to be at school proximity five minutes early.”

We were giving award acceptance speeches in English 3 today, and Seth’s “Redneck Award” had me laughing so hard there were tears in my eyes:

“Thanks, Wink. There are many people to thank for this award. First, I want to thank my friend Wink for helping me gut, skin, and eat the animals I kill. Of course I want to thank my girlfriend Betsy, my four kids, Betty Lew, Bobby Jo, T-Bone, and Bubba, for filling me with the rage that I take out on small animals and other aspects of nature. I would also like to thank Wal-Mart for the $40,000 settlement they gave me for slipping on pee in the bathroom. They paid for my new truck, lift kit, big tires, and tank bumper. And even though they are using UFO’s to watch me, I would also like to thank the government because they are paying my bills because I’m disabled. Most of all, I would like to thank the RRR for this prestigious award. It is the greatest honor a guy with a fifth grade smart level could receive. My grandma always told me, “If you don’t graduate grade school you won’t be anything.” You were wrong, grandma. I’m now a record breaker, and I added to my record on the way here. I hit a herd of deer on Route 66. Thank you.”

Lindsay, in a class where we ended up talking about interracial relationships: “I’m not really attracted to Asian guys, but I would still marry one just so I can have Jon and Kate Plus Eight babies.”

Alex: “What is time but an inconsequential measurement of… um… time?”
Me: “You were screwed halfway through that sentence.”

From Mr. Hewitt: A couple of gems from Doug in the Driver Ed. car today:

Doug: “Yeah, me and my dad were in Minier yesterday.”
Me: “Oh really, Doug. And just what were you and your Dad doing in Minier?”
Doug: “Just checking out the scene. Looking at tractors.”
Me: (laughter)

30 seconds later…

Doug: “There's a funny story about one of our cows.”
Me: “Do tell, Doug, do tell.”
Doug: “It got stuck in the birth canal too long. It's retarded. We had to pull it out.”
Me: (stunned silence followed by...) “That is quite a funny story, Doug.”

Chase, a sophomore Creative Writing student of mine, was writing a short story where four teenagers were camping in the woods and illegally consuming alcohol. Completely ignorant to how much alcohol is required to successfully inebriate four high school kids, he wrote that the group had packed along “Four 24-packs of beer and four bottles of vodka.” He apparently was hoping the autopsy would turn up with a BAL of 0.65.

From a batch of Becky’s research papers:

“It was here her two sisters became fatly ill with tuberculosis.”

“One of Sense and Sensibility’s moral lesions is the battle between greed and the heart.”

Doug: “Olive Garden is about as fancy as it gets.”

Doug: “What’s your favorite meal—breakfast, lunch, or dinner?”
Chara: “Lunch, probably.”
Doug: “Me too. Well, lunch and supper. And sometimes when you go to a restaurant for breakfast. And cinnamon rolls.”

From Melissa’s research paper on the California Gold Rush: "Gold fever was something common that people got in the west, but no one died from it."

Some more quotes from Becky’s little cherubs:

“Darwin was the psychologist Sigmund Freud. His theory of evolution and his own psychoanalysis had resulted in an affront to mankind’s naïve egoism.”

“Jane Austen grabbed hold of her rip writing atmosphere and took flit into an age defying author.”

Frank: “Did he get suspended?”
Me: “Yup.”
Frank: “Did he get suspelled?”
Me: “You mean expelled?”
Frank: “Whatever. Did he?”

Me: “Okay, Caitlin, it’s your turn to give your movie pitch.”
Caitlin: “I wrote it last night but I forgot to bring it with me to school.”
Me: “Well you still have to pitch it, kiddo.”
Emilee Mohr: “Just go up and there and talk out of your butt.”
Caitlin, stone serious and absolutely confused: “How am I supposed to talk out of my butt?”

Some more of Becky’s, from a “Jane Eyre” paper:

“The social class of Jane Eyre and of Victorian England is similar. They are both very difficult social class times.”

“Women were also the ones who were the most mistreated because of feminism.”

“In Victorian England time there was many different leaves of classes you could be in.”

Hayden: “Malcom married his sister Betty X in 1958 in Lansing, Michigan. His was very weird to read and think about. But I guess it was popular back then to marry a sibling.” (He clearly misunderstood what the book meant by “sister.”)

Me: “And what does narcotic mean?”
Crystal: “Isn’t that like when someone falls asleep uncontrollably?”

Nice to Meet You #17 - Carlos Zambrano

2009-05-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

Of course Carlos Zambrano got tossed from yesterday’s game. Of course he did.

I found myself watching baseball highlights early last evening, and when one watches the baseball highlights in the early evening, one only gets highlights for the day games. And no one plays more day games than the Chicago Cubs. Which is how I saw Big Z doing his temper tantrummy thing in front of the home crowd. That’s always good for some hoots and hollers, but what really made my day was seeing Zambrano actually toss the umpire out of the game. Obviously he can’t do that, but that’s what he did. Made the motion with his arm and everything. It was hilarious. What a nutcase.

My chance encounter with Zambrano after a Bulls game failed to end positively, and I’m not saying that just because I loathe and abhor the Cubs the way teenagers loathe and abhor chores and curfews and stuff. It ended negatively because, well… because Z just wasn’t really all that cool a guy.

Like many professional athletes, Zambrano has a posse, and they rolled down the United Center corridor like the crew from “Reservoir Dogs” you could almost imagine them in slow motion, smoky dry ice trailing behind their tattooed, leather-clad bodies. Sunglasses indoors. That kind of thing.

He and his boys were hoping to say hey to some of the guys on the basketball team, but they were still in the locker room, so they lingered. I, too, was lingering, so it felt like an appropriate time to introduce myself. NBA guys I’ve met in droves, but it’s not often I meet ace pitchers, even for teams that I hate.

So I said, “Hi Carlos. Nice to meet you. Did you guys enjoy the game?” Can you believe I had the audacity, the unmitigated gall, to say such a thing? Neither could Zambrano, who looked at me like a homeless person asking for a $20 bill and huffed a haughty laugh to himself while sharing glances with his equally aloof buddies. All that was missing was him throwing a thumb in my direction and chuckling a “Who does this guy think he is?” It was needlessly rude.

So it came as no surprise to me to see him tossed from a game today and then throw a tizzy fit the likes which I haven’t seen since I was six years old and my mother wouldn’t just buy the damn coloring book for me at the Walgreen’s. To be truthful, I needed no more reasons to dislike the Cubs, but Carlos Zambrano is the meniscus to my tall glass of Cubs Hate. If they somehow find a way to trade for the cast of “The View,” my cup shall overfloweth.

I can’t write about this anymore. I’m getting myself all worked up. Go Sox.

Bandy Toaster, Joakim Noah, and Cat Yodeling

2009-05-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

One of my all-time YouTube favorites:

These poor cats. Why is there always at least one cat video on these things? Because I love my kitties dearly and cat videos are so much finnier now than they used to be.

This is why I used to hate Joakim Noah. Now, of course, I love him:

DYK - Why Women Have Long Hair

2009-05-26T05:00:00.001-07:00

I ask myself questions sometimes, and my most recent question was, “Why do women wear their hair long, and men their hair short?” And then I wondered, “If it hasn’t always been this way, what was the cause for change?” Because I knew at one point haircuts weren’t really something cavemen (and women) thought about, so everybody’s hair was long. This is how things had to have been at one point. This is a given. So what changed?

In reading and reading and reading about this subject (Why? I really don’t know. I guess it was sort of a waste of time, but who cares. It was a fun process), the only conclusion I could really come to was that the history of hair varies by culture.

In Ancient Greece, for example, whether male or female you wore your hair long if you were rich and you shaved you your head if you were a slave. In the Old Testament, hair is a sign of strength (a la the story of Samson). Somehow over the years, it became culturally solidified that long hair was more feminine than short hair.

Over the course of the last thousand years or so, there have been fads and political statement and fashions that all directly resulted in the norms about hair being flipped on their head, so to speak.

So in short, there’s no real answer to the damn question, which has made me sort of upset. The answer is, basically, it’s just the way it’s sort of always been. Somewhere along the line someone thought long hair looked feminine, and there ya go. It’s sort of the way it’s been ever since.

So… yeah… sort of a waste of my time. But who cares. It was a fun process.

Top 5 Alternate Names for My Cats

2009-05-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

When Amy and I adopted our two cats at the end of last summer, we really didn’t spend a whole lot of time considering what to name the little goobers. Most of our discussion took place during the drive home from Petco, which eventually led us to BB King and Buddy Guy to pay homage to my two favorite blues artists. Amy has no real attachment to the blues, but she thought “BB” and “Buddy” were cute names. Now they pretty much go by “Beebs” and “Budman.”

Still, we’ve had moments of clarity in the several months since they became permanent members of our little family where we wondered whether we could’ve been more creative in the naming process. The following is a top-five list of names we may have chosen instead (even though we’re pretty happy with them.) Be mindful that when I say “we,” I mostly mean “I.” Amy never would’ve approved of most of these.

#5 – Ozzie & Albert – What two guys better personify the White Sox and Cardinals than Senor Guillen and big Albert Pujols? This would’ve turned our little guys into mascots, which would’ve been fun. Now that the White Sox suck, however, I would only be painfully reminded of my favorite team’s futility every time I spoke the little guy’s name. Cool idea, but I couldn’t handle that for the next fifteen years.

#4 – Pork & Beans – Personally, I just love the ring of it. Buddy—our chunkier orange cat—would definitely be “Pork.”

#3 – Davey & Goliath – I’d probably find someway to bastardize “Goliath” into something like “Go-go” or “Goalie,” but when we’d tell people the names we’d picked out, people would crack a smile every time. “What’s your cats’ names?” they’d ask, and we’d respond, “Davey and Goliath.” And then we’d all laugh and have a beer together, remembering all the times when we talked about our cats being named Davey and Goliath. What more could a guy want?

#2 – Kobe & LeBron – Two iconic sports names, and easily the two best players in the NBA right now. Those wouldn’t get old. Ever. Amy and I actually talked about this a few months back wondered if it was too late for us to change it. I mean, cats don’t answer to their names anyway. The only thing stopping us was that we’d put their names on our most recent Christmas card. We didn’t want to confuse people. Plus, ya know, BB and Buddy are pretty cool when you come right down to it.

#1 – Cartman & Butters – I say this in retrospect, knowing our cats’ personalities. Beebs is definitely the Cartman of the relationship, always getting into trouble and plotting up ridiculous schemes, and Buddy just sort of tags along like Butters, cute and innocent, and entirely unaware for all the trouble the other kid’s going to get them both into. I would love it if our cats had these names. I would laugh out loud all the time thinking about it.

At the end of the day, they are who they are, and we can’t really imagine calling them anything but what they are. Their names grow into their personalities, and eventually it’s just impossible to switch. Even if they were called “Poop” and “Pee” we’d still love them. Well, maybe not the one called “Poop.” That’s just gross.

Nice to Meet You #16 - Allen Iverson

2009-05-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

We went to a lot of cool parties during All-Star Weekend this past February, many of which served an open bar with tons of celebrities and athletes wandering around to brush elbows with, but only one of these parties was, well… the only word to describe it is “weird.”

The normal parties were what you’d expect—florescent lights, thunderous music, pools lined with tiki torches, guys in sport coats with gelled hair, groupies wearing clothes that could technically be classified as lingerie. But most importantly what these parties shared was a general sense of togetherness, entertainment, and flat-out good-spirited fun. Business like T-Mobile or Sprite or whomever would pay big bucks to make sure people had a good time, and occasionally you’d run into somebody cool, have a good laugh, and continue on with your evening.

Allen Iverson’s Reebok party, though, was not like the others. Not even a little bit.

Okay, so the beer was free and there was thunderous music, but the fun, the harmony, the brushing elbows—none of that happened here.

Pushing our way through the throngs at the bar en route to the dance floor, we quickly located Allen Iverson, but other than Larry Hughes we didn’t really see anybody else of note. We thought we’d go over and say hi, but as we approached, a couple of bouncers (who reminded me of Dot-Com and Grizz from “30 Rock”) let us know that this particular section of the party was off-limits.

We looked around, noticing that the entire dance floor area was divided in two by a long, undulating white sofa. On our side was an interesting combination of losers (including, of course, ourselves)—wannabe gangsters, average-to-unattractive ladies, and white partyboys looking for a good-looking girl to grind up against. On Iverson’s side stood Iverson, Hughes, a couple of dudes from each guys’ posse, and what looked to be the scantily-clad cast reunion from all of Jay-Z’s music videos.

I literally felt segregated, like when Chuck Berry got hot in the 50s and the concert crowd were cut in half, separated by cops, to keep the whites from the blacks. Only this wasn’t a racial thing. It was more like, those worthy versus those not worthy.

The truly strange thing was when Iverson, for seemingly no reason whatsoever, stood atop the dividing couch, right in the center of the room, and just stood there drinking his drink. Those average-to-unattractive ladies I mentioned earlier flocked to that zone of the couch and sort of did a reach-up thing like they were teeny-boppers in the front row of a Backstreet Boys concert. My two colleagues and I looked at each other after about fifteen minutes of trying to enjoy ourselves and left.

It was weird.

For all his talent, Iverson just isn’t the coolest dude I’ve ever met. I’m positive it wouldn’t hurt his feelings to hear me say this, but it’s simply the truth. But I come from a different world than he does, I suppose. We’re not supposed to get along. It’s the classic Romeo & Juliet plotline. Boy meets basketball star, but because of differing lifestyles they can never be friends. I think this ends with me either drinking poison or stabbing myself in the chest with a rapier. Either way, it would show A.I. my commitment to being let onto his side of the dance floor.

But who am I kidding? It was just one party, and my experiences at literally every other gathering that weekend were 100% positive. So one of them was weird? I’ll live. Unless, you know, I have to do the poison thing.

But otherwise, I’ll live.

Trick Shots & Carpet Monkey

2009-05-20T06:40:00.000-07:00

So what if these guys all look like d-bags? Trick shots of this caliber are pretty sweet no matter who you are...

The Indian guy from "Human Giant" and "Parks and Recreation" is my new favorite bit character on comedy shows. This monkey thing cracked me up for some reason. Is it funny, or is it my imagination?

This one takes a little patience, but got me to chuckle out loud at the end. Andy Samberg is fantastic...

DYK - We've Always Been This Tall

2009-05-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

It's not uncommon to hear some praise modern medicine by explaining how much longer people live in today's world now that we've got Zoloft and Viagra and AIDS medicine. The common assumption is that people tended not to live as long in what has become affectionately known as "The Olden Days" (basically anything pre-1975), especially going back to the Middle Ages and before.

It's also a generally accepted fact that people are taller now than they used to be. Some even go so far as to blame the hormones in milk for today's much taller human race.

Both the height myth and the age myth are false. Sort of.

See, people were, on average, shorter and less healthy a couple hundred years ago. They didn't get the same nutrition we do now, and they certainly didn't get the sort of rest and access to laziness that we do now. That doesn't mean, however, that human beings didn't have the capactity to be 6-foot-whatever and live to be 90 years old. It just depended on what sort of lifestyle you lived.

For example, a nobelman who ate well versus a serf who ate drippy horse slop would be much taller. Hard-working farmers were, on average, 4 to 6 inches shorter than people in the upper classes. And popes, who through the course of history, have lived to be well over 70, 80, and sometimes even 90 years old because the life of a pope (moreso then than now) really wasn't all that stressful.

And while the "average" age of lower class workers was right around 30 years old back then, the numbers are a bit skewed. Infant mortality was horrible back then, and if you average in all those one-month-olds with the people who died when they were 60, well... you do the math. Plus women died more often during childbirth then because they weren't allowed six weeks recovery time. So they died right around 30, too. It's amazing how we can make statistics do whatever we want them to, isn't it?

So the bottom line is this: there hasn't been some fundamental change over the last few hundred years that's suddenly given human beings the ability to grow taller and live longer. We're just eating better, working less strenuously, and saving the lives of more babies and mothers.

Go On, Look Foolish

2009-05-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you why I hate golf. Actually it all probably boils down to one simple reason—I’m not good at it.

Activities I consider “fun” are the ones I try and experience at least minimal success the first go-round. These include telling jokes, playing ping-pong, and being handsome. Sometimes you can just do stuff well, and as a result things are fun. This is why people like food. Anybody can eat good foods. I, for example, am naturally very good at eating, and as a result I find the process enjoyable.

But you don’t just have to be good at something right away to enjoy it. I’ll be the first to admit that it took me a long time to learn how to sing well and play the game of basketball properly (my first three years of YMCA ball I took only two shots and made only zero of them). But the thing about these was that they felt realistic somehow—like if I practiced enough it would eventually all come together, and then it would be fun.

Singing is now something I really like to do, especially when in my car and people can laugh at me as they pass by on the interstate. And basketball has become fun, too. I like doing stupid between-the-legs dribbles and shooting stupid threes. When one of those two things actually works, it’s positively euphoric.

Golf, however, isn’t like that. No matter how much you practice, you simply can’t master the game. I know this because I’ve watched Tiger Woods—one of the most amazing athletes alive—screw up royally on a number of golf courses a number of times. And he gets pissed off and throws his club around and curses out his caddy.

He’s the best in the world and he does this.

I am not the best in the world at anything, and I’m guessing I’m somewhere in the bottom 3% of the world’s golfers. This includes the elderly and toddlers of third-world countries who wouldn’t know a golf ball from a coconut. Athletic ability isn’t absent from my being, but I swing a golf club with about the same amount of confidence I’d have if I were disarming a nuclear warhead.

My golfing friends tell me things like, “Keep your head down. Square your shoulders. Eye on the ball. Bend your knees. Open the head of the club. Lock your thumbs. It’s all in the wrist. Follow through. Wash with delicates. Tumble dry low. Do not bleach.” But I’m unable to do all of those things at once. Two, maybe three of the times on that checklist I can focus on at once. But every time I bend my knees, I forget to square my shoulders. Every time I keep my eye on the ball, I straighten my legs and whiff at the ball. It’s frustrating as hell.

And it’s not like swinging a baseball bat. If you miss the ball the first time you still get two more chances. Even if you sort of hit the ball but you hit it wrong, they give you more chances. In golf, you get one shot, and that’s it. So you’re sitting there staring at the ball, feeling the sort of nerves you get before having to give a big speech in front of people, after having taken three perfect practice swings, you for some reason do things absolutely incorrectly when the pressure’s on, and your ball is either heading into an entirely different zip code or it’s rolling seven feet in front of you.

It’s frustrating as hell.

It’s also expensive as hell. If there were 18-hole golf courses just laying around where you could just hang out for a day and practice with your buddies (the same you would for literally every other sport that exists on the planet), maybe I’d have more fun with it. But knowing you just dropped $25 bucks ($40 if you’re getting a cart) makes it feel like you have to siphon every last drop of “fun” you can out of a day’s golfing excursion. And when you try to siphon drops of fun out of something it usually means that something won’t be very fun.

Think of all the things you could spend $40 on instead of a day doing something you suck at and don’t particularly enjoy—a really nice shirt (or two if you’re shopping at Old Navy), dinner at Chili’s with the Wife (plus dessert), see a quadruple-feature at the movie theater (plus popcorn and soda), or forty packages of those really good generic sour cherry candies in the snacks isle at the grocery store. Skip golfing twice and you could buy a new pair of shoes, a jacket, a Derrick Rose jersey, or an octuple-feature at the movie theater (plus popcorn and soda).

Skip three days of golf and you could afford the engagement ring I bought for my wife. Wait, that makes me sound cheap. Make that seven golfs. Yeah, seven.

And that doesn’t even include the cost of clubs (which I’ve never purchased because, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve got better things to do with my money), funny plaid pants, and a those grip gloves everybody seems to own except me. If all you had to do was buy a pair a golfing shorts and maybe one club to get through a round, I’d be a little less pessimistic, but that’s just not the case. Golfing, according to a survey that probably exists, is the most expensive sport. Too rich for my blood.

So if golf makes me so unhappy, how is that I still occasionally play? For one, the playing field, or “course” as it’s known in the business, is probably the most gorgeous playing field of any sport I’ve ever played. Few things are more beautiful than a well-groomed baseball diamond, but a well-groomed golf course is one of them. I worked at a golf course one semester in college, trimming sandtraps, changing garbage cans, refilling water coolers, etc., and when I would work at like 5:00am on Saturday mornings, before the sun even came up, I was always amazed by the pearly film of due on the short fairway grass, the steam rising up from the ponds, the ominous trees shadowing the greens. If you’re going to spend a beautiful day outside doing something active, golf isn’t the worst choice. If you like golf, of course.

The other reason is that so many of my friends and family really like golfing, and when given the choice of golfing with them or staying at home to watch TV or fiddle around on the internet, I’m going to hang out with the fellahs, even if it means paying all that money to play a game I hate, only to perform horribly and embarrass myself thoroughly. I love my friends and family, and I enjoy the quality time. If that means golf, that means golf. I’ll smile and drink the beers they snuck in for us to share, but I won’t enjoy the game. Don’t get me wrong; I’ll try. I’m too competitive not too. And once in a while I’ll hit a good shot and think, maybe I’m better at this than I thought. Maybe golf can be fun.

But then I screw up royally on the next hole, which results in me throwing one of my brother’s clubs farther than my ball even went. I think to myself, “What am I doing here?” and the rest of my day is spent hitting borrowed balls into tall, grassy swamps or bodies of water fifteen years behind the tee.

If I had a caddy, I’d curse him out. But that’s as close as I’ll ever be to Tiger Woods.

Top 10 Yo Mama Jokes

2009-05-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

I grew up around black people, and it always amazed me the wit with which they insulted each other’s mothers on the playground during recess. Over the years I’ve had countless black friends, and as I got older the Yo Mama jokes got more and more cerebral, and more and more hilarious.

One night when I was a sophomore in college, my seven black suitemates and I sat in our living room area and roasted the hell out of each other for well over an hour. Just took turns ripping on each other. It was one of my favorite memories from that year, but like these sorts of roasts always do, insults eventually turned to mothers in a hypothetical sense. Some of these cracks I heard that night, and some were laid out by kids I went to elementary school, but they’re all classic. These are my favorite Yo Mama jokes of all time.

#10 – Yo mama is so fat, her belt size is equator.

#9 – Yo mama is so stupid, she could trip over a cordless phone.

#8 – Yo mama is so fat, she fell in love and broke it.

#7 – Yo mama is so ugly, even the tide won’t take her out.

#6 – Yo mama is so poor, she can’t afford to pay attention.

#5 – You mama is so old, when God said let there be light, she flicked the switch.

#4 – Yo mama is so fat, she eats Wheat Thicks.

#3 – Yo mama is so fat, when she steps on the scale it says, “To be continued…”

#2 – Yo mama is so stupid she got fired from the M&M factory for throwing away “W’s.”

#1 – Yo mama is so fat she has to use diet soap.

I know I pretend like cerebral humor is the only sort of humor worth crediting, but even stupid little jokes like this crack me up in the right mood. Admit it—you laughed at a few of these, right?

Nice to Know You #15 - Graduating Seniors

2009-05-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Usually I use Thursdays to chronicle my experiences with athletes and pseudo-celebrities, more for myself to remember all the incredible people I’ve met over the years than to flaunt my weak inclusion into B-list Hollywood Americana. But this week, in the spirit of what I do for my other job (you know, the one that buys my groceries, pays my mortgage, and supports Amy’s nasty hot water addiction), I’m going to use this space to talk about my seniors, who graduate later this weekend.

Tuesday night was academic awards night at the high school—an event with increasingly scant attendance due to its reputation for being long and boring—which is my chance to thank publicly my three-year and four-year staffers for all their hard work over the course of their high school careers. This year I had two such kids to thank, but only the senior—my editor—showed up.

I gave her the gratitude she deserved, cracked a few jokes, people for clapped for her. It was pretty much what you’d expect from this sort of thing. But when I finished my spiel and sat back down in my cushy auditorium seat I realized that I didn’t even begin to come close to what I wanted to say. This is a young lady who donated four years of her life to helping me put together a book. Where so many of my staffers quit after a year or two in order to pursue part-time after-school employment or play sports, she stuck with it. I probably could’ve stood up and there and sung her praises for thirty minutes and still not had enough time.

And that’s just one kid. How impossible is it for teachers to tell every single student how important they are in front of an audience like that? It’s not just us who touch students’ lives, it goes the other way around. And so here I am at the end of my fifth year of teaching feeling as if I didn’t send off my seniors with the gusto they probably deserved.

For most people that don’t teach high school, the thought of spending several hours a day with hormone-driven adolescents doesn’t rank high on life’s Fun-o-meter, but something cool happens at the end of a kid’s senior year. All of a sudden you start to see who they’re going to be as adults. There are students in my classes right now that I can see as mothers and fathers. There are future nurses and mechanics and teachers and God knows what else. You can really start to see it. And compared to what these young people were as freshmen, at age 14, it’s really incredible to witness.

The really sad thing is that I miss these people when they’re gone. Thanks to Facebook I can sort of keep with a handful of them, but just the day-to-day of having enjoyable kids in class, joking and sharing knowledge and growing together—I always end up missing that, especially with the really, really amazing kids.

I said when I started teaching that I loved the idea of having a family several hundred people large, but now I realize I was being a little over-optimistic about how teaching works. Kids don’t often come back. Once in a while, sure, but for the most part they move on and forget all about you. And if they don’t forget about you, you hardly ever know. So it really is the end of an era when they graduate. It’s the last time I’ll have a personal relationship with an overwhelming majority of them.

I’ll probably spend my whole life wondering why that is, but in the meantime I’ll just be grateful to have been blessed with such wonderful seniors my first five years as a teacher, and hope that the rest of my life’s graduating classes will be just as fantastic.

The 100 Best Movie Lines (in 200 Seconds)

2009-05-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

The motivational speech thing is still cooler, but there were some moments in here where I had to just laugh. Yes, including some of the more serious parts.

I can't help that cats crack me up.

What's more disturbing: the guy who comes to these things and photographs the Amazons, or the woman who is clearly a man in the latter portion of the clip? You decide (I'm still on the fence).

DYK - The Place Where People Are Naked

2009-05-12T06:10:00.001-07:00

I personally never knew that the word "gymnasium" was supposed to be the Greek name for college, but I'm glad I was never taught that because it's not true. Literally translated, "gymnasium" actually means "place where people are naked. Just like they are now, gymnasiums were places where athletes practiced sports, but as you probably know were done naked at the time.

Also, the Colosseum in Rome was not given its name because of it's colossal size. In fact, the Colosseum wasn't even the 50,000-seat stadium's original name. built in 80 AD by the Roman Emperor Flavius Vespasianus, the building was originally called the Flavian Amphitheater. It wasn't called the Colosseum until the Middle Ages.

The Time I Almost Punched a Guy in the Face

2009-05-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

Only twice in my life have I ever come THIS close to punching someone in the face. The first experience was something relatively uneventful that happened in high school—this fat kid I’d always hated knocked the books out from the arms of a freshman I knew for absolutely no reason. Fury burbling in my guts I could feel my eyes go white around the edges and I pushed him without even thinking about it.

He looked at me like I had purple skin and, at about 120 pounds, I told his gigantic, rotund, bully butt to pick the books up before somebody got hurt. I probably looked about as frightening as Spongebob Squarepants when I offered this threat, but because my knuckles were white and I was shaking with rage, the fat kid probably didn’t care to test my unpredictability. Knowing I wasn’t the sort of the kid who normally got into fights, and having about zero adrenaline coursing through his own veins at the time, he gave me a “Fine, geez” sort of look and picked up the books. I went to Biology next class shaking. It took my like fifteen minutes to settle down.

The second experience didn’t go over in a flash like the incident with the fat bully. It did, however, relate to my first near face-punching in that the near victim was also a bully who some could easily classify as overweight. But this guy wasn’t the sort of fat where you can imagine throwing a punch into his gut and losing your fist like you’d just punched a vat of pudding; he was fat the way old weight-lifters were in the 1800s—barrel-chested with a gut that wasn’t immediately recognizable as gut but as girth. For all I knew the man was just filled too full with muscle, like a glass filled so full with water it falls just short of dripping over the edge. Let’s just say I wouldn’t push him from behind no matter whose books he knocked to the floor.

As a rookie teacher I was thrown into the yearbook business because it was just part of the job, and it was through this extracurricular responsibility that I came into the contact with the man I’ve just spent about 150 words describing. He was my yearbook sales rep from the company we published through—we’ll call him Tom Dread for the sake of the story—and from the first time I met him he scared the piss out of me. People built like him are used to getting their way, and they know how to impose their will with their daunting physical presence. Total bully, through and through.

But despite the fact that I’d been bullied all throughout grade school and high school because I was a skinny goof that got good grades and liked choir and theater and books, I’d spent the last four years at college, where bullying really doesn’t occur in a conventional sense. I had been under the impression that my days of getting bullied were over, and I had adjusted my level of self-confidence to compensate for that. Having just gotten a job and started dating the hottie I’d eventually marry, I didn’t think I could ever feel more confident.

But this Dread guy always had something weird about him. He’d often say, “If you ever need anything just give me a call,” but it was in a way that insinuated that, “If you call me, it better damn well be because something’s on fire or someone’s dying, because anything less than that isn’t worth my time.” We all say, “Hey, if you ever need anything…” but how often do we really mean it, right? Well, helping me was this guy’s job, and I always had the distinct impression that helping me was absolutely the last thing on his list of priorities.

But he did a smart thing, at least from a business standpoint, by having me sign a four-year contract with him and his company within weeks of getting the job. I had absolutely no clue what that meant at the time, but I feared that by not signing something I’d ruin the yearbook in only my first few weeks with the job, and I didn’t want to do that. So I signed it, as Dread stood behind me ringing his hands, muttering, “Yes, yes… Just sign there. Yeeeeessss…” And he didn’t have a mustache but if he did he’d be twisting it like a true villain.

I later found out that my current contract wasn’t even up at that point and didn’t need to be renewed for another year, and that the standard contract extension is three years. Four years is absolutely unheard of. That son-of-a-gun swindled me.

Now, I didn’t trust Mr. Dread in the first place, but after finding out about this I felt really burned. But what can a guy do? He beat me, straight up. I’d just have to live with it.

Or so I thought.

It just so happened right around that time that a rep from another company asked if he could make a pitch for our business. Considering I viewed Dread as an abusive step-parent at the time, I agreed, though I felt really dirty about doing it. I’d never in a million years cheat on my wife, but I’m sure it feels something like it did to have another yearbook company come in and attempt to woo me away from Tom Dread and my current publisher.

This new rep—we’ll call him Joe Bright—came in with better software, better customer service, and most importantly an attitude and disposition that made me feel as if the sales rep paid to help me would actually be helping me. Immediately I clicked with the new guy and loved everything about his pitch.

“But,” I told him, “I’m only a year into a four-year contract with Tom Dread’s company.” Joe of course is very familiar with his biggest industry rival, and told me that the contracts schools sign with yearbook publishers can be broken extremely easily. It’s not in a company’s best interest from a PR standpoint to sue a school for wanting to switch publishers, regardless of what some contract says. What’s the best way to lose customers? How about sue your customers? Is that pretty high up there?

When I told Tom Dread as cordially as possible that I’d be leaving him to go with another company, threatening legal action was his first recourse. Imagine that in a marriage—“Honey, I want a divorce.” “I’m going to sue you so you’ll stay with me.” “Yes, because that will make both of us happy.” “It doesn’t matter because at least we’ll still be together.” “I hate you so much right now.”

Freaked completely out at that point, I called Joe Bright and said to forget the whole thing. I wanted to switch companies, but I didn’t want to get sued over it. Joe gave me a pep talk, and then I met with my principal and he gave me a pep talk and offered his support, so I called Dread back to say I meant what I said. I was changing companies.

That phone conversation went a lot longer than I’d hoped because Dread wanted to know the monetary details of my decision to leave so he could match them and alter our contract. I should’ve kept my mouth shut and told him to shove it, but as I’ve already mentioned the man had a way of getting what he wants, so he someone talked me into it. Begrudgingly I gave him the numbers and he agreed to better each and every one of them. At the end I told him, about as nervous I can ever recall being in my adult life, that I was switching anyway.

He hung up on me and drove to the school.

Dread came in and charmed the oblivious secretary into allowing him down to my room during prep period. He had with him a copy of our contract and a particularly unpleasant disposition with which he delivered it into my hands. Exhausted, I couldn’t get him to leave my room, but I kept telling him over and over that I wanted to switch companies and there was nothing he could do or say to change my mind. I had my principal behind me and everything. This was a done deal, and could you please leave. I said all this with the confidence of a six-year-old asking the pretty flower girl to dance at some uncle’s wedding.

“I mean,” I finally said, “You really want take this to court? That’s really the smartest move for you?”

“If that’s what it comes down to,” he said smugly, squeezed into one of my students’ desks, looking like a water balloon with a rubber band squeezing in the midsection.

After weeks of frustration and being bullied, my knuckles got white I started to shake with rage, but it’s not in my nature to fight, mostly because the idea of fighting scares me to death. So I sat there pissed off and completely silent. We sort of stared at each other in the quiet of the room for what felt like several minutes, and eventually, somehow, the man left without our having resolved the issue.

What did resolve it was my principal writing Mr. Tom Dread a letter asking him to never step foot on the school’s premises ever again without having been invited, and he CC’d it to the man’s higher ups to make sure they knew about it, too. At that point, he just never came back, and I was free to join Joe Bright and the new company, who I’ve been with ever since. I feel like a battered wife who finally found a man who spoke with his words instead of his fists.

To this day I still get newsletters and emails from Dread’s company, some of which feature his picture. I look at that picture a few years after last having seen him in person, and all I can think is, “Man, I’d still love to punch that guy in the face.” Or at least knock his books out of his arms in the hallway.

Top 5 Childhood Meals

2009-05-08T05:02:00.000-07:00

One of the girls I used to baby-sit didn’t care what was for dinner—all she wanted to put into her system was chocolate milk. That was it. The daughter of one of my colleagues spent three or four years of her life ingesting nothing but desserts. That was it.

The point is that children are picky about what they eat. I’m not as bad as I used to be, but I can remember rooting through my Manwich to pick out all the non-meat additives, like the onion and pepper chunks. Needless to say, Manwich was far from my favorite childhood meal.

But there were some meals that I couldn’t seem to get enough of, and the following five are the best of those meals.

#5 – Chicken and Dumplings – More than anything I’ve just always enjoyed the rich, starchy taste of a good buttermilk biscuit, especially when it’s drenched in butter, jelly, and/or honey. And so in the context of a good chicken and dumplings meal, the dumpling is what makes it golden. I’d always save the bread part for last and savor it.

#4 – Macaroni & Cheese with Cut-Up Hot Dogs – Instant classic. Just try and argue with the delectable nature of this five-star dinner. On their own, hot dogs and Mac & Cheese are pretty solid, but together they form like Voltron to create an unstoppable mutant robot dinner that any kid would love.

#3 – Hamburgers on the Grill – It’s hard to screw up a burger, but dad has always had a really fantastic way of putting them together. He adds A1 steak sauce and an onion soup powder mix before slapping big third-pound meat loafs on the grill. Add the tasty hint of charcoal smoke, and you’ve got yourself an instant classic. Probably my all-time favorite summer meal.

#2 – Spaghetti – The secret was adding a pinch of sugar into the sauce, and also a pound of hamburger meat. Sauce alone on spaghetti just isn’t hearty enough. Add garlic bread and a tall, sweating glass of milk and it’s a picture of the all-American dinner. Except for the fact that it’s technically Italian.

#1 – Breakfast for Supper – If I was being truly diplomatic numbers one through five would’ve been some variation of breakfast for supper because there’s just so much to love about this. Let’s face it, 90% of breakfast foods are essentially desserts, so when you get to eat them for an actual evening meal you’re pretty blown away. Pancakes, waffles, eggs, bacon, sausage, biscuits and gravy, French toast… there are so many ways to go about it, but all of them are awesome. And delicious.

Honorable mentions for this include my Grandma Brigham’s goulash and porcupine balls. If you’re confused about what either of those is, goulash is a sort of soup/pasta hybrid, and porcupine balls are essentially seasoned meatballs with rice rolled into the fray. All good stuff.

Now, who’s hungry?

Nice to Meet You #14 - Marv Albert

2009-05-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

As I write this, I’m watching Game 2 of the Boston/Orlando series, which is quite frankly a blowout, but I’m still tuned in because Marv Albert can make anything sound interesting.

Growing up, he was the guy that did play-by-play for all the Bulls championships, so in a strong majority of the Michael Jordan highlight reels you’ve ever seen in your life, he’s the one narrating you through sports history. Nobody can say “From downtown!” the way he does, then follow it with an effervescent “Yes!” when the shot actually falls. Doesn’t matter if it’s Ray Allen or Brian Scalabrine taking the shot; when it goes down, you’re excited, dammit.

Sure, he’s got the worst rug in the history of the toupee, but the man’s an icon, no matter how many women he bites in the back during sex.

Knowing his surly past I should’ve been a little more anxious when I finally met the guy, but I wasn’t. Amazingly enough, I’ve grown to the point where meeting the actual superstars of the NBA doesn’t cause me to urinate my boxer-briefs anymore, but meeting Albert gave me butterflies. Shaq, LeBron, D-Wade. I’m fine. Excited, but fine. But when I meet these extraneous personalities in the NBA—anybody who’s anybody that I might bump into unexpectedly—I grow more nervous than a junior high kid asking a cheerleader to dance.

Albert was an extremely gracious guy. After shaking his hand and telling him that I was a fan, he showed genuine gratitude. His toupee these days is better than the one he wore in the Jordan years, and it softens his facial expressions a bit. He’s not a particularly tall guy, especially compared to the players, but he carries himself like a big man on campus. Just think of all the incredible games he’s seen over the years… Definitely a cool dude.

As far as a list of people I’d love to have record my outgoing voicemail message, he’d be pretty far up there. Maybe I’ll start practicing his speech patterns so my students are more interested when I lecture in class. A kid will raise their hand to ask if they can use the bathroom, and you know what I’ll say? “Yes!” And it’ll never get old.

He's the Best Player I Ever Played Against

2009-05-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

Another classic America's Funniest Home Videos Moments. Absolutely classic...

"The Final Countdown" is proably one of my top ten favorite songs ever, and this nerd makes it work with some unconventional instruments.

I can't explain to you how much I love Ron Artest sometimes.

DYK - The 3rd People to Fly a Plane!

2009-05-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

You know Kitty Hawk? The place where Wilbur and Orville Wright became the “first” people to ever man a machine-powered aircraft? Yeah, well, turns out we shouldn’t have been making such a big deal about that whole deal.

We’ve all heard a thousand times that the Wright Brothers made their first flight in the latter portions of 1903, setting off a buzz for flight that graciously led to those wonderful Southwest Airlines television ads we’re treated to twice a commercial break. But those guys were beat to the skies not once, but twice.

It’s become generally accepted that a New Zealand farmer named Richard Pearse had been flying for a year-and-a-half when Willy or Orv did their thing. And this guy didn’t even need help; alone in his barn he put together a flying machine in 1902. But at least that puts the Wright Brothers as the first flyers in America, right?

Wrong-o. Over two years before the Kitty Hawk flight, a Connecticut man named Gustave Whitehead flew a half-mile. There are no blueprints for his machine, but as more and more evidence turns up to prove this guy did what his descendents say he did, it becomes harder and harder say it didn’t happen.

It did. And so did Pearse’s flight. Which means, as I’ve already stated, that the Wright Brothers flew third. They suck at life. Glory hogs.

A Swan Song for the Bulls

2009-05-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to argue with my father when he says the greatest series in sports he’s ever witnessed was the 2004 ALCS between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. Boston, after being down 3-0 to the hated Yanks, rallied to win the series. They were the first team in baseball history to do that, and they did it against their biggest rivals. Okay, fine. That’s probably the greatest series I’ve ever seen in any sport.

But the second best? This Bulls/Celtics series, hands down. If you follow all the media coverage you already know the statistics—four overtime games in seven meetings, seven overtime periods, well over a hundred lead changes, and more last-second shots than any healthy human heart can tolerate.

When the Bulls finally lost the series on Saturday night, I felt horrible. Watching sports has extended beyond just entertainment value since I’ve been covering the games, because I actually know these guys. I don’t view the disappointment and jubilation of the players filtered through a television screen; I’ve been so close to it at times that I could actually smell it (it’s not always the most floral of scents, lemme tell ya).

Derrick Rose is a fantastic kid, and because I’ve got former students two or three years older than him I can’t help but see him the same way I see my kids. I root for him, I slap him on the back after an interview, and, at times, I’ve even told him I’m proud of him (like that should matter to him, but he knows I’m a teacher and it seems like when I say that, it actually does matter to him). After wins he manages to stay modest, but after a loss he hangs his head and his eyes get a little droopy. He’s hard on himself.

So is Ben Gordon, who is one of the more intelligent guys to chat with on the team (though you wouldn’t think so after hearing he turned down a $55 million contract last summer). He carries losses around on his shoulders like a backpack filled with stones. He hates losing, and he hates when the loss is in any way his fault.

After game five, when Brad Miller missed his free-throws after getting clobbered in the face, he talked later about he barely slept. This stuff matters to these guys, and because I’m on a first-name basis with these people, knowing the emotion and effort they put into a losing effort in this historic series has left me pretty bummed out.

It’s always a sad day when basketball season ends. Any time I make the drive to Chicago over the course of the next five months will feel empty without the usual trip to the United Center. It just sucks to be on the losing end of that much emotion. It’s like dating a girl for five years, asking her to marry you, and hearing her say “no.”

Covering a professional sports team changes the way you watch the game, and in a lot of ways I’m grateful for that. But because I’m in closer with the guys than I used to be, losses come that much more painfully. I’ll survive—it’s not like I’m the one who has to lose sleep over this thing—but there’s some vicarious disappointment to be experienced here.

Should you feel bad for me, you’ll have wasted your emotion. This is a swan song, that’s all. Welcome to Monday. I hope you’re thoroughly depressed now. Have a great week!

Top 5 Childhood Crushes

2009-05-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

When you’re a little kid, the type of girl you find attractive is a heck of a lot different from the type of gal you drool over from adolescence on. A woman’s form, for example, doesn’t matter much when you’re eight years old because the girls you’re in love with aren’t even into training bras yet. So it’s a cute face and a fun personality that draws you in, which is exactly how I felt about my own childhood crushes. The following five young ladies owned my heart for about a six-year span between the ages of six and twelve.

And so, doing all I can to not sound like a pedophile, my top five childhood crushes:

#5 – Soleil Moon Frye (“Punky Brewster)” – This is probably the first crush I can actually remember having as a kid. My little six-year old hormones apparently had a thing for multiple bandanas wrapped around jeans. The pigtails were cute, the freckles were cute, and I vaguely recall enjoying the raspy quality of her voice. I was already a picky guy, even at so young an age. It helps that she grew up hot, too.

#4 – April O’Neil (“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”) – Okay, she’s a cartoon. I get it. But if she was cool with the Turtles, she was definitely cool with me. If we’re being real, April’s probably the second hottest cartoon chick ever (the obvious winner being Ariel of “The Little Mermaid” fame), hence my life-long affinity for the color yellow.

#3 – Anna Chlumsky (“My Girl”) – Because I looked almost exactly like Macauly Culkin when this came out, and because his character and Veda made such a cute couple in the film, I sort of lived vicariously through him. I used to have dreams about she and I holding hands, but that was the extent of the affection I had the gumption to show, even in my dreams. I was sort of a lame kid.

#2 – Nicole Eggert (“Charles in Charge”) – Other than April O’Neil, Eggert has probably held up the best of anyone on this list. She was hot as the oldest sister on “Charles in Charge,” and she’s hot now. Where most of the girls on this list were more “cute” in my book, Eggert was probably the first gal I ever considered to be “hot.” There’s a big difference, and reruns of “Charles” helped me realize that. Of all the great things Scott Baio has contributed to my life, bringing her to the limelight is by far the most valuable.

#1 – Larisa Oleynik (“The Secret World of Alex Mack”) – The show was weird, I’ll be straight up about that. I don’t remember many of Alex’s superpowers, but the main one was that she could turn into a puddle of liquid mercury and float under doors. God, what a lame concept, especially in retrospect. But at age 12 I was really starting to get some idea of what it meant to be in love, and this chick was probably my first real experience with that. She got hotter in a cameo on “Third Rock from the Sun,” and hotter still in “10 Things I Hate About You.” Her character may have been able to melt into a puddle of liquid mercury, but the thing she melted most, was my heart.

Now I’m sure this opens up some memories of your own, so hit up the comments section and your own childhood crushes. Come on. Don’t be shy. You know you want to…

Nice to Meet You #13 - Phil Jackson

2009-04-30T05:00:00.000-07:00

There are some people who just exude coolness on a level that mere mortals can’t even begin to comprehend. Lakers head coach Phil Jackson is one of those people.

I don’t even know how to explain it. In the first place he’s this huge guy, which you don’t always realize when you see him on the sidelines. Some coaches look like just any old bum off the street, like Orlando’s Stan Van Gundy (who bears a striking resemblance to Ron Jeremy) or New Jersey’s little Lawrence Frank (who looks like the little leprechaun from the Lucky Charms box). But you can tell that Jackson used to be a player. He towers over the scrum of media, hands placed coolly in his pockets while giving interviews. His hands aren’t so much hands as they are paws, and because he’s something of a cowboy he walks bowlegged, which would look stupid on most people but just makes him look like an even bigger badass.

Truthfully, he’s not a very charismatic personality. Knowing his history as the “Zen-Master” I assumed he’d have a little more mystery and intrigue about him in person, but he’s just a pretty laid-back, normal dude. The way he smiles, though, suggests that he’s in on some joke that nobody else knows the punchline to.

When you’re a kid there are adults that you call “Sir” or “Ma’am” instinctively because you’re afraid of the repercussions if you don’t. These were the kind of people that you worked so hard to please because their approval mattered that much, yet at the same time you’d do anything not to let them down. These people required you somehow feel admiration and fear for them at the same time, and that’s the kind of vibe Phil Jackson exudes.

He’s just clearly a patient, intelligent, thoughtful dude that takes his life in stride. I remember watching Bulls games as a kid, and he would let Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen keep playing through huge bursts from the other team, refusing to call a timeout. He’d just be chillin’ on his chair, scratching his nose or chatting up the assistant coaches, and I get the sense that this is the way he lives every day. No timeouts. Just let it roll.

I'll Stab You With My Skate

2009-04-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

I think what I love most about this clip is that the dude playing Morgan Freeman sounds EXACTLY like Morgan Freeman. God, Shawshank is right up there with my all-time favorite movies.

The chick that plays the mannequin in this prank knows exactly how to be creepy. Her gestures are those, "Did I just see that?" sorts of gestures. And that poor, poor girl at the end...

One of my all-time favorite America's Funniest Home Videos moments:

You're telling me that the Ron Artest "Malice at the Palace" incident was more agregious than a Boston Bruin removing his skate and using it as a weapon against a fan? I thought that was just a joke on "Happy Gilmore," but no, it actually happened! Hockey is ridiculous...

DYK - Kiss Me You Idiot

2009-04-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

Today's Questions:

Where did hugging get started?

Where did kissing get started?

Why is it called a "French" kiss when you use your tongue?

My wife asked me Sunday night while watching Extreme Home Makeover, “Where do we get the idea to hug people? It’s such a comforting gesture, but how did that get started? Who decided one day to just up and hug somebody?”

I thought, “That’s a fantastic question,” but my wife is usually the supplier of fantastic questions. My initial response was that it probably had something to do with the instinctual relationship between mothers and their children—the first thing a new mom does after giving birth is cradle the child close to her. I’m guessing that as we get older we exercise that instinct on several non-mother people as well, usually looking for comfort, protection, or warmth.

That led me to wonder where the kiss comes from, since the answer didn’t immediately pop into my head in quite the same way. Where a hug can be defined in a lot of different ways, a kiss has to be much more deliberate. There’s a lot more aim involved in planting a kiss, as my wife will attest to considering all my missed targets for good-night kisses right after we’ve shut off the lights and said our final “I love you’s.”

Kissing, as it turns out, doesn’t just occur in human beings. Animals make kissing motions during grooming, and there has to be a certain level of trust and comfort in allowing another animal in the same group to take on that responsibility. Monkeys, dogs, birds, rodents, and all kinds of other animals exhibit this behavior, including my two male cats, who make out constantly and are gay together.

Anthropologists still don’t know if human kissing is a learned or instinctual behavior, but it does seem to be rooted in the grooming procedure. This could become even more believable if we consider that man is evolved from primates. If you believe that mankind was created by God, I suppose that argument won’t work.

Still, from a biological standpoint kissing is extremely interesting. Kissing allows two members of the opposite sex to taste and smell a potential mate to test compatibility for mating. I suppose this could work for gay people, too, but the instinct portion of kissing suggests that it’s done for the sake of procreation. I have nothing against homosexuals (remember, I have two cats that are gay), but same-sex marriages aren’t going to be producing any naturally-born offspring.

Humans use 34 facial muscles to execute a kiss, and psychologically it’s one of the more complex activities a person can undergo. As for the French Kiss, it’s been around for hundreds of years but didn’t earn that specific name until 1918. And nobody can say with any certainty that it actually originated in France. Sharing saliva via a joining of the tongues has been around forever, long before France was even called France.

Bitch, Moan, and Wine

2009-04-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

I watched “Sideways” this weekend, which I appreciate more every time I watch it, partially because I understand wine better with each passing year, but mostly because I myself am technically a failed writer. So I can relate to the Miles character a little bit.

But no matter how much I relate to Miles or how much I learn about wine, it doesn’t change the fact that I will never be refined enough to enjoy the whole wine-tasting experience as much as some of my more distinguished peers. For one, fermented grape juice gives me heartburn, and for two, I really, really don’t care about nutty undertones and effervescent aromas. I’m just not that into it.

My first real experience at a high-class winery occured somewhere in the Wisconsin backwoods (okay, it was like fifteen minutes away from the Dells) and when it came time for the tasting portion of the tour I stood around with my brother and buddy Kevin like yokels at a book club. We were clueless. What is the proper etiquette for this sort of thing?

Everything I knew about the process I had learned from “Sideways,” but that movie was a distant memory when I lifted the glass to my face to initiate the wine-tasting procedure. Cupping my palm around bulb of the glass and raising it to my lips, the lady working at the sampling table stopped me with the look of someone watching a child trying to shovel food into his mouth with the handle-end of a fork. “No,” she said, “You’re not doing it right. Have you ever been to a tasting before?”

Kyle and Kevin, mere bystanders at this point, chuckled heartily at the question, inwardly thankful it was me making the ass of myself instead of them.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

She looked at me skeptically.

“Okay, no,” I corrected, hanging my head, chin-to-chest. “I’m so ashamed.”

Then I cried a little bit and the lady held me in her lap, rocking me and stroking my hair until I calmed down. Then, she showed me the right way to do it. The steps of proper wine-tasting are as follows:

#1 – Hold the glass by the stem and lift it to the light, so you can see the color.
#2 – Turn the glass sideways to see the density of the color.
#3 – Insert your nose into the glass and sniff, getting a full sense of the wine’s aroma.
#4 – Swirl it around to let the oxygen invade the wine. This is called “letting it breathe,” and it’s good for flavor and aroma.
#5 – Smell it again.
#6 – Taste it, but only just a little, and let it swish all over your “palette.” That’s the word wine people use for “tongue.”
#7 – Spit it out into the spittoon. Bonus points if it makes a puh-TING sound.

Before having been straightened out, these were the steps I assumed were to be taken:

#1 – Raise glass to lips and drink contents in their entirety.
#2 – If there is still wine in the bottle, pour more into your glass and repeat step #1. Continue doing so until bottle is empty.
#3 – Pass out on winery lawn.

As you can see, my way would’ve been simpler, but less refined. So I did it the winery lady’s way and was left feeling somehow dirtier. It’s like when the waiter at a really fancy restaurant puts the cloth napkin on my lap for me. Something’s not right about that—there’s just too much pomp involved in the whole process. It’s a napkin for cripe's sake. I can handle it.

Anyway, the wine was tasty enough, but all wine is tasty enough. Church wine is tasty enough. There’s no need to go through all the huffelty-puffelty just to put down a gulp of alcohol. Imagine going to a bar and ordering a black & tan in a long-stemmed glass. The barkeep would laugh at you, and if you tried sniffing at it and swirling like a little girly-person they’d boot your rear end out of the building.

Whatever the case may be, I was glad I’d learned the ins and outs of wine-tasting when my wife and I went to visit my cousin Joanna in San Francisco, because we spent the better part of a full day wandering around Sonoma Valley. Clearly I’ve established that I’m not a wine person, but Wine Country (hell, California in general) is just about as beautiful as America can get.

So riddle me this—how does a guy spend three to four hours at various wineries and experience not so much as a single inebriated giggle from the whole ordeal? Like I said, the scenery was amazing. Rows and rows of grapes wrapping over subtle hills, the whitest, fluffiest clouds even spaced on a perfectly-blue canvas sky. Gorgeous weather, gentle breezes, and clean California air (thank you, Governor Schwarzenegger). It was lovely, but sober.

If you’re looking for a refined, good-natured afternoon at a winery, where you can hold glasses of liquid to the light and sniff to your little heart’s content, then Napa and Sonoma Valleys are a wise vacation destination decision. But if you aren’t the sort of person who eats fancy cheeses not named "Cheddar" or "Mozzarella" or, preferably, "American," and you don't mind living a relatively classless life, I've got the answer to your winery needs...

Here’s my idea: You build a facility with award-winning winemakers behind the scenes so that the wine itself is actually delicious. You've got to have that because you want people to come, but the kick to my dream here is that everybody gets to wear jogging pants and collarless shirts while they drink wine out of plastic sippy cups. There would be a stage at one end of the grounds where awesome bands would come and play, and you could bring tents and grills and just stay all night drinking wine and listening to music in your pajamas. Instead of selling cheeses and summer sausages in the gift shop, there’d be Doritos and a little pizza place like they have at some gas stations. We could set up beanbag games and horseshoe pits somewhere near the camping area, and you’d get in free if you could belch the alphabet. We'd have to call it something audacious, like "Nipple Slip Winery," but I'm not married to that name.

Seriously. That’s a winery I can get on board with.

Less interesting is the hoity-toity environment surrounding all the other wineries. I’d love to enjoy it more, but the process has made me a little bitter. And, someone needs to invent a wine flavor that doesn’t require I ingest 6 TUMS after a glass and a half. Come on, Science. Where you at?

Top 5 Crappiest Vegetables

2009-04-24T05:00:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid my parents used to tell me that I’d like vegetables a lot more when I got older. Well, I’m older, and I still hate damn near every edible veggie that exists. I can do some of the basics, like carrots, peas, broccoli—but there are even more that disgust me to no end. I have always said that onions and peppers have ruined more foods than anything else I can think of, but I can’t put them on my list of worst vegetables because the flavor is okay. It’s the texture I can’t stand.

What you see below are foods that both taste gross and feel gross in your mouth. Even just writing that previous sentence felt gross somehow. And that’s exactly why I hate vegetables so much. Here’s the list:

#5 - Cooked Spinach – I can do cold spinach in a salad because it tastes essentially the same as lettuce. It’s crisp and refreshing. But if you’ve ever gotten a chicken sandwich at a fast food place with lettuce that had been sitting under the heating lamp for thirty minutes, you know that cooked lettuce is friggin’ nasty. To me there’s no differentiation between that and cooked spinach.

#4 – Asparagus – I know two things about asparagus: one, there are lot of people who absolutely love how this stuff tastes, and two, it’s supposedly makes your pee smell really, really bad. If you like the taste, then foul-smelling urine is a fair tradeoff. But if you can’t stand the taste it’s like you’re losing twice.

#3 – Squash – It’s all stringy and mushy, like eating sand pudding with human hair mixed in for texture. Also, it smells and tastes like cooked vomit. With the right ingredients added, it can even look like cooked vomit. Pumpkin pie is as close to any sort of squash dish I’ll eat, and I’ll be honest—I’m not even a huge fan of that.

#2 – Cauliflower – There are a lot of people who are surprised that I dig broccoli but not cauliflower, but the taste is what turns things off for me. Broccoli at least goes good with cheese, but the white twin doesn’t go good with anything. It doesn’t even go good with candy, and everything goes good with candy. Especially more candy.

#1 – Brussel Sprouts – My father used to feed us these periodically, constantly telling us that they were so delicious if we’d just give them try. Well, it’s like sucking on a little ball of hot soggy lettuce, which I’ve already described. The only difference is that instead of just sucking down the warm, wet leaves, you actually have to chew into a semi-solid mass of brussel sprout to get it to where you can actually swallow it. King of gross. Duke of gross. Earl of gross. Gross.

This has been exercise in dieting. I have now lost my appetite for the remainder of the day. Just water and candy for me.

Nice to Meet You #12 - Dikembe Mutombo

2009-04-23T05:00:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week Dikembe Mutombo, an eighteen-year veteran of the NBA, ended his career as a pro basketball player after a nasty knee injury in the playoffs. The man didn’t retire willfully; it took an injury to take him out commission. He probably should’ve retired six times by now, but the Houston Rockets just keep him bringing him back. He’s a great guy, so why not?

Before meeting the gigantic African, whose full name Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo (seriously), I knew very little about him other than he’s done an unreal amount of humanitarian work in Congo and other parts of Africa. The man funded a hospital for Christ’s sake. He’s practically a saint, and at seven-foot-two, that’s a whole lot of saint to go around.

Anyway, when the Rockets came through Chicago last year I was unable to meet up with him before the game, but since he is one of only a handful of guys still in the league from when I used to watch basketball as a kid, I made it a point to do a quick interview afterwards. Even that proved difficult. When someone on the roster doesn’t play—and therefore doesn’t sweat—they’re in and out of the locker room extremely quickly. By the time security opens up the doors for media availability, most of the Did-Not-Play guys zoom right out.

This was the case with Deke, but I stopped him and shook his hand while asking for a quick interview.

His response, even though I knew what to expect, rumbled my entire body. You see, Mutombo is known for his deep, gravelly Cookie Monster voice. So when he responded with, “Yes, but I am on my way out,” I was sort of star struck. He has the sort of iconic voice that reminds you, hey, you’re talking to Dikembe Mutombo.

So I popped out my hand recorder and walked him to the bus, and we did the interview while walking, his gigantic tree branch of an arm on my shoulder for the entire walk. It made me feel like a child, but I could also empathize for all those kids in Africa that have gotten help from him over the years. He really does wrap you up and make you feel at peace. Generally there are butterflies when you interview someone you admire that much, but he was able to just put me at ease. It’s almost a superpower, like that creepy quiet vampire brother in “Twilight.” And yes, I just made a “Twilight” reference. Right, ladies?

Truthfully, I haven’t the first idea of what the interview was about. It was gobbledygook one-on-one that almost nobody cared about (probably pretty similar to how nobody cares about how I met Dikembe Mutombo), but it was a cool experience from me. I remember watching when eight-seed Denver upset one-seed Seattle in, I think, 1994. As a twelve-year-old in the height of my love for professional basketball, that was A Moment.

And that’s why I loved Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo. Also, because of that awesome name.

The Great Ron Burgundy

2009-04-22T05:00:00.000-07:00

Today we start by exploring this delightful Ron Burgundy interview with North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams:

Ron Burgundy Interviews Roy Williams (UNC) from Ron Burgundy

And this classic, "The Landlord" (Not safe for work):

The Landlord from Will Ferrell

"Landlord" Outtakes:

The Landlord Out Takes from Will Ferrell

DYK - Killer Hippos

2009-04-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of zingers from mentalfloss.com’s “Amazing Fact Generator” (forgive me for stealing today; an early Bulls game last night forced me to leave school without my “Did You Know” reference books):

If a foreign-born female gives birth on an airplane in U.S. airspace, or on a ship within 12 nautical miles of the U.S. coast, her child automatically becomes a U.S. citizen.

In 2000, not a single hurricane made landfall in the United States.

Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s Vice President was a Kaw Indian. He attained the highest elective office (so far, anyway) of any American Native.

The hippopotamus is considered to be the most dangerous animal in Africa. Hippos kill more humans annually than lions, crocodiles or snakes.

The bikini wax has been around for hundreds of years. Muslim brides-to-be in the Middle East and North Africa remove all their body hair before the wedding night.

Baseball and Dreams

2009-04-20T05:00:00.000-07:00

A lot of filmmakers have tried to capture the essence of baseball in their movies over the years, but no film has ever done it better than “The Field of Dreams.” There are at least three Goosebump Moments in that film, one of which is the long string of glowing headlights snaking through Iowa country roads to get a peek at the field that Ray Kinsella built. “People will come,” little Karin confidently proclaimed in the movie, and come they did.

In July of 1991 my family made its own pilgrimage to Dyersville, Iowa to see the cornfield baseball diamond built for the movie. It was the first vacation the four of us had taken since my mother died in March of that year, and my dad was staring down his first wedding anniversary to spent without his wife. He tells me now that the trip was for him—that he needed some sort of distraction—but those three days in what Shoeless Joe mistook for heaven was one of the greatest trips of all our lives.

Considering my memories of the 4-and-a-half hour drive are almost eighteen years old, I remember the trek as a flash, but I’m sure it wasn’t all that easy breezy at the time. Put three kids under ten in the back of a station wagon and take them on that sort of drive and your bound to have some whining and slapping and arguing and whatever else we did as misbehaved children. But my dad didn’t seem to care. We got to Dyersville, dropped our bags off at the Colonial Inn—a well-kept 1950s motel—and headed straight for the field.

It’s a bit of an adventure getting out there, as that stream of headlights from the movie suggests. Lots of twists and turns through cornfields, rows and rows of crisp green stalks with wispy straw-colored tassels flitting in the breeze. Coming up on the film site itself, though, is something magical. The last stretch comes down over a hill, so the field and the house and the wooden bleachers lay out right in front of you, and on this beautiful summer day the place was packed with kids and their parents playing ball on the field.

We parked, packed our fists into our child-sized ball gloves, and quick-stepped over to the field. It is exactly what you remember from the film. The old white farmhouse wasn’t just a set; it’s still there. And the field stretches out in front of you, the outfield wall replaced by a wall of cornstalks. The ivy at Wrigley pales in comparison.

Waiting for our turn to bat was a painful experience, as the line to take a swing wrapped halfway up the first baseline. All the adults manned the field, and there were probably two or three kids at each bag waiting for the ball to be hit so they could finish making their way around the bases. No one was keeping track of runs or anything, but it was definitely a serious game. Had to show the masses what you were capable of with a bat.

There’s a home video somewhere of Kyle waving a bat high over his shoulder, chomping on a huge wad of gum like a big-leaguer while he waited for the pitch. His little ball cap’s bill aimed towards the sky, and his shortish shorts and high socks made for a pretty iconic picture of early ‘90s children’s fashion. Right before the pitch came in, the wad of gum slipped from Kyle’s mouth and landed on his shoulder. Unfazed, he carefully craned his neck to the shoulder to retrieve the treat, but the movement caused it to drop to the dirt a millisecond before his lips hit the gum. Despondent, he used the tip of his tennis shoe to rub the candy carcass into the dirt. America’s Funniest Home Videos, here we come.

After making a donation in a left field box we each pocketed a little vial of dirt from the outfield, and we made our last minute rounds of the grounds before heading back into town for dinner. The only disappointment of the afternoon was weaving into the rows of corn on a search for Ray Liotta, to no avail.

It wouldn’t be the only trip to the field, however. My dad tells me that we went a total of three times. Our first trip was great, but it’s the second go-round Pops seems to treasure most. We came back much later as the sky changed to deep gold and swirling purple, one final group of fellow tourists heading out for the night as we came to claim the empty field for ourselves. I don’t remember exactly, but I’m sure there wasn’t much baseball played in the twilight. Parking ourselves on the bleachers, we watched the sun set over the corn, casting sweet summer shadows on the outfield grass. None of us really said anything, despite the twins being only six, so the silence of the country was that much more pronounced. There was an unidentifiable howling of some animal off in the distance, but nothing intimidating or scary. Just a fellow wanderer letting us know that we weren’t alone in the world.

Day three was our time for saying goodbye. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandchildren, even a wedding party, did their thing at the film site on a really busy weekend morning. My dad calls it “basking in the mystery of baseball,” and it’s helps explain why the movie has been so successful and why so many people consider baseball to be the American pastime. Team allegiances have been passed down four or five or more generations. There are legends in this game older than our grandparents. There are stories of heroes and improbable victories and heartbreak and redemption. The history of baseball is in so many ways parallel to the history of America, and that’s why a father takes his three kids to a baseball field in a small Iowan town three months after losing their mother.

There were, of course, tons of pictures being taken that morning, tons of bats being swung, tons of baseballs being tossed around. It was a lot of what we did on the previous day but busier. We didn’t care. “The Field of Dreams” was one of our favorite movies growing up, so to be there experiencing it all was enough for us. My dad bought us each a “Field of Dreams” shirt before we left, even buying a 1917 White Sox hat (which I still think he has somewhere) for himself. Then, inevitably, we headed home, back to real life and back to getting on with our lives.

In talking to my father about this vacation recently, he mentioned that he’d like to go back but he’s afraid to have a less magical experience than the first time. I suppose some memories are best left as they are. It certainly wasn’t the same when Kyle and I went back to visit in 2006, but it was interesting to see it all again. The corn wasn’t as high as it needed to be, there were now two entrances and two gift shops (there had been a property battle since our last visit), and because we showed up for a fifteen minute clear window on an otherwise rainy day the place was barren. I can say pretty confidently that it wasn’t the experience we’d had the first time, but it was still the Field of Dreams. What a name for that place.

Top 5 Unvisited U.S. Cities

2009-04-17T05:00:00.000-07:00

For those of you excited to see what ridiculous things the Road Trip crew visits this summer, check back in Mid-June. We’re heading straight up Michigan this year, through the Upper Peninsula, then back down through Wisconsin. The theme this year: Runnin’ Wild. How awesome is that?

As plans for Road Trip 2009 get finalized, I can’t help but find myself really itching for a bit of travel. Along with friends, my brother and I have seen an extremely delightful portion of the middle of this country, but anything west of Omaha, east of Cleveland, or south of Memphis still has yet to be graced with my presence. This, of course, leads to today’s Top Five—American cities I have not yet visited but would most like to.

#5 – Washington DC – Just about every single person my age was taken to Washington D.C. as an eighth grader, yet somehow my brother and I were left out of this particular rite of passage. I want to see the White House, Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, and all that other good stuff. I know it’s probably a generally unexciting trip, but I’m a history nerd. I dig that sort of thing.

#4 – New Orleans – I fully understand that outside of the French Quarter, “Nawlins” is a mess, but there’s a mystique to the city that has always made me long for a visit. The food, the music, the architecture—it’s all so uniquely New Orleans. I really need to go, even if just for a long weekend.

#3 – San Diego – After having visited San Francisco last year during Spring Break, my wife and I fell in love with California, and from what we understand San Diego rivals San Fran as California’s most beautiful city. I’ve got a cousin out there who loves it, and plus there’s that awesome zoo.

#2 – New York City – It’s huge. There’s so much to do there. And I know it’s expensive to have fun in NYC, but between Ellis Island, the Statue of Lib, and Times Square, there’s more icons there than I’d know what to do with. Add in all the shows, restaurants, and homeless people and you’ve got yourself a vacation.

#1 – Boston – There’s no reason for me to be this infatuated with a city I’ve never seen, but just knowing it’s the oldest major city in the county intrigues me. Plus, Salem is close, Plymouth Rock is close, and Lexington & Concord is close. There’s so much history there. Plus, my grandpa Brigham grew up like 45 minutes west of Boston, even giving me even more reasons to get out there and sniff around a little bit.

Curiously Left Out:

Los Angeles – My wife wants to see Hollywood more than anything, but L.A. doesn’t really hold much appeal to me. I’d absolutely go, but it’s a bit to smarmy for me.

Honolulu – Hawaii is supposed to be beautiful, and I’d actually really love to go, but because it’s so ridiculously expensive I’d rather spend my money on more attainable goals. Hawaii is like the hot chick you know you’ll never get, so you aim lower to maintain your happiness. For the record, I married my Hawaii, so I’ll also assume this vacation will happen eventually.

Las Vegas – I don’t gamble and I don’t like strip clubs. What other reason do I have for Vegas? Plus, I’m scheduled to make my first trip there this summer to cover the NBA summer league. So I’ll get a gander at it then.

Philadelphia – I actually really want to go for Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and, most importantly, to run up the Art Museum steps to the theme song of “Rocky,” but beyond that I’ve found that there’s really not much to do in Philly. You could spend about half a day there without getting bored. I’ll go to do what I want to do, but it doesn’t crack the Top Five.

There are probably great cities I’m just not thinking about right now, but these five are the ones I think most about when Wifey and I or Brother and I talk about doing a bit of traveling. It’ll take me a lifetime to get through everything I want to get through, but that’s why there’s so much to see. I don’t want to retire and have nothing left to see, right?

Nice to Meet You #11 - Jack Sikma

2009-04-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

When you attend a Division III school, there aren’t going to be a whole lot of insanely famous athlete alumni to brag about. My university, Illinois Wesleyan, was lucky enough to have one, but boy was he a doozy.

In the trophy case at the Shirk Center en route to the recreational basketball courts, there’s a yellowing vintage Seattle SuperSonics jersey with the number 43 plastered across the front in a somewhat discordant combination of yellow and kelly green. You can’t see the back, but it reads “Sikma” in a block font curling in an arch over the numbers. The first name that accompanies “Sikma” is, of course, “Jack,” a former NBA All-Star and IWU alum.

As a lifelong NBA fan, I know my stuff when it comes to basketball that was played before I was born, so I’m fully aware of how good this guy was. It helped too that he played his high school ball at one of the school’s in my alma mater’s conference, so I’ve been hearing about how legendary this guy is my whole life.

That’s why it was such an honor to finally meet him.

Nowadays he’s an assistant coach with the Houston Rockets, his primary function being to help turn Yao Ming into a respectable NBA center. I guess it’s sort of working, but any shortcomings by the famous Chinese center are no fault of Sikma’s. Yao’s just soft, that’s all.

But in introducing myself at a 2008 Bulls game as a fellow IWU grad, I found Sikma to return the handshake with genuine kindness. That may not sound like much, but when I’ve introduced myself to other former NBA legends currently acting as assistant coaches (cough—Patrick Ewing—cough, cough), I haven’t been greeted quite so warmly.

They say we Wesleyanites are particularly intelligent, and I see no real evidence to prove otherwise, so I wasn’t surprised to find my conversation with Mr. Sikma to be an extremely cerebral one. He talks about basketball like it’s physics or something, raining down deep sports philosophies with loquacious phrasings and poetic flair. Nice and smart. He’ll find himself an eligible lady in no time with qualities like that.

I thought my one meeting with Sikma would be the end of my experience with the legend, but when the Rockets came through the United Center again this year I re-introduced myself and he actually remembered me. Turns out he found the magazine piece I wrote on him to be especially flattering, so he took a minute to introduce me to his brother (another Wesleyan grad) and a couple other friends from his college days. Had a great little conversation that reminded me how great it is to be in the IWU Bubble.

Three full seasons into doing the basketball thing, visiting players and coaches are starting to remember me when they come back. It’s just a matter of repetition. But to have a guy I respect so much remember me was pretty flattering. I can’t stand the Houston Rockets, but I always check that game off on my calendar hoping to bump into my Wesleyan Idol again.

To read the 2008 piece I wrote about my meeting with Sikma for the Illinois Wesleyan alumni magazine, click HERE.

China's Next Big Olympic Star, Etc...

2009-04-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

I know Easter's over, but this entertained me.

Asia is so ridiculous with their training of future Olympic champions. They'll be putting this girl in the 2012 summer games and telling us she's 19 years old. Just wait.

The Whitest Kids You Know are always good for some fun, politically incorrect humor, and this "Black Doctor" bit is no different.

And finally, a link to the new Eminem video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o8UgIgI8BU&feature=channel

He's always good for a chuckle. Enjoy this week's YouTube goodies!

DYK - Silver, Gold, or Olive Branch?

2009-04-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

We in Illinois are rooting for the Olympics to take place in Chicago next decade more fervantly than anybody else in the country, and that's sort of put me in a state of mind to do some Did-You-Knows on Olympic goodness. Enjoy!

Back when chariot races were part of the Olympics, the charioteer was not the person awarded the traditional olive branch. Instead, the owner and breeder of the horse was given props. It didn't help, of course, that most charioteers were pithy slaves.

There were women drivers back then, though, and the first woman to ever technically win an Olympic event was a young lady named Kyniska, who won first in a chariot race way, way back in the day. But she was a slave, so she couldn't technically go in the books as a winner. The first woman to actually win a gold medal was Charlotte Cooper, who dominated Tennis in London, 1900.

The games have changed a lot over the years, though cheating is nothing new. We've grown up dealing with sterroid scandals, but back in 388 BC a boxer paid all his opponents to lose. Back then you couldn't strip an athlete of his olive branch, so as punishment he had to commission six statues of Zeus to decoarte the entrance to the Olympic Stadium. That couldn't have been cheap.

So there's your daily nugget of Olympic trivia. Let's hope Chi-Town takes 2016!

The Nobodadday Rap

2009-04-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

When one hears the term “study group” one makes the assumption that said group has been assembled for the primary purpose of studying something. My “study group” the last semester of my college career—Rhys, Elwood, Garrett, and myself—certainly did its fair share of studying, but that was the farthest thing from its primary purpose.

In the first place, beer has absolutely no business standing seductively on the same table as a midterm study guide. Six proud brown Pacifico bottles sweating sweet condensation through their honey-gold labels, taunting us to abandon our studies of Romantic European Literature. Nope. Something like that has no more business on a study room table than a large-chested stripper pining for singles. But it was sort of a foregone conclusion that halfway through any study session we’d take a beer break, just one drink a piece, so we could free our minds momentarily from the very deep intellectual depths of poetry I myself could barely comprehend.

It’s just that—once in a while—that slight procrastination coupled with that one delicious temptation took us away from what was necessary for our academic betterment. This is what happened the night of Mardi Gras, which doubled as the eve of our Romantic Lit midterm exam. Clearly, stupid things were meant to happen. And happen they did.

Studying for a literature exam isn’t at all like studying for a science or math exam in that chemical formulas and sigma functions have pretty black-and-white answers. You’re wrong or you’re right. But when it comes to literature the grading is subjective, and depending on how ridiculously intelligent your professor is and expects you to also be, getting full credit on deeply analytical questions can be as challenging as childbirth or juggling.

So the environment at one of these study sessions is pretty heavy. Usually we met at Rhys’s building—a converted mansion now used to house several international students—because it housed this fantastic Victorian library room (sans books) with a long oak table down the center. Sitting in there made it feel like you were holding a meeting of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or like Sherlock Holmes were due at any minute to explain a crime to well-dressed men with giant gray mustaches and monocles. It was a cool setting for being intellectual, and it was quiet, and it had those doors that rolled shut instead of swinging on hinges. In other words, it was perfect.

The four of us gathered ‘round one end of the giant table and scoured over notes and tomes, trying to make sense of Blake and Shelley and Keats. We’d argue over what certain lines meant, or how a particularly complex phrase could hold two or three different meanings. I’ve said this many times before, but as I graduated college my English major was right there on the brink of what my brain was capable of comprehending. Had my courses gotten even 5% more difficult I would’ve had to cover my ears just to keep the exploded bits of brain from leaking down the sides of my face. This stuff was hard, no question about it.

Luckily for me, the other three guys in my group all managed a unique blend of intellect, love for literature, and spontaneity. I was the only guy heading into the education field, which meant Rhys, Elwood, and Garrett all would likely attempt careers as writers. You’ve only got three options as an English major—teacher, writer, or editor—and these were not guys meant for cubicles and office buildings, combing through science textbooks for a paycheck. These were the kind of guys who needed to travel to places like Scotland and London to get in touch with their literary roots. These were the kind of guys who needed to smoke things and drink imported beers. They weren’t like me at all in any way except humor, but I always envied them for the free-spiritedness they brought to the table. At 21 years old fresh off not one but two serious heartbreaks over the course of my senior year, I needed them and their stupid ideas more than they’ll probably ever know. They helped me have fun and loosen up my underthings a little bit. Think of that last semester of college as my metaphorical switching from briefs to boxers.

In the spirit of these three guys’ impulsiveness, we broke from studying after about ninety minutes and decided to run up the road to what was perhaps the most shoddy, rundown Kroger in this history of grocery stores to grab a six-pack of something. For some reason Garrett had this obsession with Pacifico back in college, so that’s what we almost always got. By the time we’d returned to the oak table and cracked open a cold, bitter cerveza, the desire to study any more had all but abandoned us. The fact that Mardi Gras parties were taking place on campus that night didn’t help us refocus our efforts.

One would think the simple gravity of a huge midterm examination would be enough to keep us studying despite our restlessness, but in this one would be wrong. Mardi Gras parties meant that women would be exposing their chests to anyone with beads, and as four single males we really wanted to see some exposed chests. So Garrett came up with the plan.

“Look, let’s just go to Mardi Gras,” he said, “and see four pairs of breasts. We’ll see four pairs of breasts, maybe have one drink, then come back and finish studying.”

“Four pairs of breasts?” Elwood asked, “Or four breasts total?” This was apparently an important distinction.

“Four pairs,” Garrett reiterated.

“But we need beads,” Rhys chimed in, a fine point indeed. “Where can we get beads on such short notice?

Suddenly I was inspired. Saving the day, I shared that there had been some beads around the necks of statues at the campus library earlier that day to celebrate Fat Tuesday. Maybe they’d still be there.

So we heartily stomped through the front doors of the library like Reservoir Dogs, splitting up on the ground floor on a search for beads. It was an in-and-out mission, and after five minutes we reconvened outside and counted up our wares.

“Four,” Elwood said, grinning the grin of fate. “We’ve got exactly four.”

And so, we began the cross-campus trek to the fraternity house hosting the biggest Mardi Gras party of the night, intent on coaxing coeds to lift their shirts at us. This is the way we studied for tests.

We must’ve thought the ten-minute walk would involve the usual unintelligent jibber-jabber of twentysomethings, but along the way something interesting happened. Through February chill—bare branches stretching ominously overhead like cracks in a midnight blue sky—we started to study, remembering things from our first two hours of cramming. Except we didn’t do this via witty conversation; we did it via hip-hop.

I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but we started putting all of our mnemonic devices and memorizations into the form of song. Each of us was pretty musical, so we’d take turns beatboxing and humming while the other person rapped. To be honest I don’t remember a single thing from that literary freestyle now except for the word “Nobodaddy,” which was part of a title of a William Blake poem we needed to know.

It passed the time well and surprisingly, though there were quite a few beers and other forms of Mardi Gras entertainment squeezed in between our walk and our exam, we remembered everything we needed to remember. After spending minimal time at the party we headed back with a buzz and finished studying, and the following day each of us did exceptionally well. No one did worse than a B, which was saying a lot for a teacher that awarded A’s only for geniuses and the ghosts of the Romantic poets themselves.

“Studying” for our final exam later that semester was equally eventful, as we hoped our new revolutionary way of preparing for tests would lead us to the same success on the semester exam. It went well, too, as we expected. So confident were we that it would go well, Garret brought a small red cooler to class and stuck it under his chair while we tested. When the four of us were finished, we walked a couple of blocks south to the park on a beautiful April afternoon, and flipped open the lid with an air of finality and celebration.

Inside were six honey-gold Pacificos, nested amidst melting ice cubes blinking brilliantly in the sunlight like wet diamonds.

Top 10 Baseball Hats

2009-04-10T05:00:00.000-07:00

Allow me to preface this week’s list by saying that the best hats in baseball have absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I like that team. Some of the top finishers are organizations I can’t stand. I’d endure long conversations with Paris Hilton about fashion and Purse Chihuahuas before I’d ever be caught dead in a Yankees cap, for example. So take this for what it’s worth, and enjoy baseball season now that it’s finally gotten underway!

#10 – Oakland A’s – I can think of so few times in the history of professional sports where green worked effectively. It does for the Athletics of Oakland.

#9 – Chicago White Sox – So what if they’re my favorite team? I love the logo and the black-and-white color scheme empowers me (and matches everything). Good guys wear black!

#8 – Chicago Cubs (1914) – So what if they’re my least favorite team? The modern day hat gives me nausea just being in the same room as a person wearing it, but this old Cubby Bear logo is rather quaint. I dig the simplicity of it.

#7 – Washington Senators (1960s) – I could probably just as easily give this spot to today’s Washington Nationals, but the hat doesn’t match the rest of their uniform. Why award the throwback when the original started the trend?

#6 – Detroit Tigers – Both hats are gorgeous, but I like the orange “D” a little better than the white one. I’ve always had a soft spot for Old English fonts, and it works for Los Tigres.

#5 – St. Louis Cardinals – Nobody does all-red like the Cardinals, and their infamous “STL” logo is classic. I wanted to put the old St. Louis Browns hat on this list too, but it’s essentially the exact same hat substituting brown for red. Great hat.

#4 – Chicago White Sox (1917) – My love for the Sox and “The Field of Dreams” makes this simple hat one of my all-time favorites. The grey wool adds a little character to the whole ensemble, but the cool logo and the pinstripes are what make this hat work.

#3 – Boston Red Sox – The “B” is classic. I still have a hard time believing the team introduced an alternate cap this year to give their iconic noggin-toppers an occasional rest. Simple color scheme, cool oldschool font. Formula for success.

#2 – New York Yankees – Believe me, I hate, loathe, and abhor the Yanks, but no logo in the history of sports is more recognizable. It’s simple and classic, and great for all the same reasons Boston’s is, except Boston doesn’t have quite the championship history as New York.

#1 – Brooklyn Dodgers (1940s) – In my humble opinion, the most beautiful baseball hats in the history of the game. It’s a shame they had to move to LA and change everything up. But who doesn’t think of Jackie Robison when they see this hat? My favorite, hands-down.

On the Other End of the Spectrum

Pittsburgh Pirates (1970s) – Not only did this hat have horizontal yellow stripes, but it was box-shaped as well. Pee-yew!

Seattle Pilots (1960s) – Were the little wings on the bill necessary?

Chicago White Sox (1980s) – I love my Sox, but the 70s and 80s were dark days for the South Side of Chicago’s fashion sense. And yes, I own this hat anyway.

Milwaukee Brewers (1980s) – The “MB” glove logo is genius, but the finished product is overly colorful and cartoony. Fun hat, but ugly all the same.

I’m positive I’m forgetting a few winners (and losers) here, so feel free to weigh in with disagreements. For those of you that care nothing about baseball—what’s wrong with you?

Nice to Meet You #10 - Dave Coulier

2009-04-09T05:00:00.000-07:00

If I were to ever meet any serious A-List celebrities my blog’s readership would probably increase exponentially. People care about A-List celebrities—the Brad Pitts, the Angelina Jolies, the Octomoms—but actors and musicians beyond that top tier only receive followings from devoted fans. As a child growing up with TGIF television, I was a devoted fan “Full House” and its cast.

Perhaps my favorite character on the show other than Baby Michelle was Joey (not “Uncle” Joey as is commonly misconceived), so when I got to meet Dave Coulier in college I just about lost it. And by “it” I mean bladder control.

Between the years of 2000 and 2004 one of the hottest trends on college performance circuits was bringing the semi-stars of the ‘80s to campuses to speak or sing or do standup or whatever it is that these people were doing for money at the time. I’m sure this idea will still be hot ten years from now, but it will be the little fat kid from “Two and a Half Men” or those little Zach and Cody’s.

But for me, on a delightful night my senior year of school, Coulier came through my university to do a standup comedy set. I worked sound for the student center, so it was my job to help make sure Joey had everything he needed over the course of the night. After his show—which featured all his “Full House” staples, including the Bullwinkle impression, the water sprinkler thing, and Popeye—our boss arranged a meet-and-greet, so he shot the crap with us and signed autographs and that whole deal. He was an extremely nice guy.

Seriously, exactly what you’d expect him to be, he was. Think Joey without the bad acting. Just a naturally, kind, middle-aged dude doing his thing. Zero trace of arrogance and just a real everyman feel about him. I know that sounded gay what I just said, but I’m not sure how else to say it. The fellah was a gent, what can I say?

Now, if he’d brought the Olsen Twins I could call this an A-List experience, but even without the big name I enjoyed the crap out my night with a childhood favorite.

Now I have to cut-it-out and get back to real life. Get it? Cut…It…Out…

From Ginger Dancers to Ukranian Katy Perry Covers

2009-04-08T19:21:00.000-07:00

This little ginger kid can DANCE... The funniest thing about him is that he reminds me of my little next door neighbor back home, but no matter who you do or don't know, this is funny stuff.

Kimmel isn't always the most tasteful humorist, but this piece about what Obama jokes are okay with black people is pretty classic.

This PSA took a lot of heat in Australia because... well... because it's just WRONG. Watch it, and you'll see why.

Ukranians know how to rock...

DYK - A Case of Singultus

2009-04-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

I hate hiccups. For some reason I only seem to get them right before I go to bed, and those ridiculous, painful convulsions keep me up hours past when I wanted to crash for the night. I have often wondered what exactly was happening inside my body when I hiccupped, so I did the research and am here to share that information with you.

Singultus is the technical term for hiccups, and it occurs when your diaphragm (the muscle under your lungs that helps you inflate and deflat them) gets irritated and forces rapid intakes of air. Those intakes happen so quickly that your throat makes a little noise.

The cause of these little bastards is one of three things: you've either got an upset stomach, out-of-whack gastric temperature (whatever that is), or you've eaten/drank too much too quickly.

Most hiccups only last for a few minutes, but they can go on and on, sometimes lasting for days. And as it turns out, a lot of those old homemade cures can actually help--holding your breath, drinking from the far side of the glass, swallowing a spoonful of sugar--it's all supposed get rid of hiccups.

The moral, of course, is to eat slowly and in moderation. Or none of this matters and hiccups are just occasionally unavoidable. Glad I could be of assistance.