I Ate Dinner In 5 Seconds For This?!

Yesterday I had one of the experiences you know will be impossible to top. I attended my first Syracuse vs. Georgetown basketball game. The game where the animosity reaches biblical proportions. Well not quite, but Cuse fans were ready to start throwing rocks at every passing GTown fan. I'm pretty sure they used to do that in the old days when the Vandals played the Romans at lion killing or something. But seriously, nobody was spared. A family of Hoya fans was booed as they passed the students' section. The reason I say family is because I saw a mom. A dad. A 5 year old kid. I never thought I'd see the day when the "Asshole" chant was directed at a kindergartner by thousands of angry students. In the middle of the game an elderly woman was taken out of the stadium on a stretcher because she fainted. If she was wearing blue and gray I'm pretty sure she would've gotten booed too. I'm just trying to set the scene, but to be more accurate I have to go back a couple hours.

The time is 5:05. The place is Syracuse University. 3 intrepid students convene at a sanctuary of modern learning. Battle plans are hurriedly drawn for the coming 7:00 onslaught while one of them changes into battle attire. After a minimal rest, the fellowship departs in hopes of obtaining sustenance for the war brought on by invaders from the Village of George. Reaching an inn only slightly off the path to battle, the warriors hurriedly feast on legs of lamb and drink mead. They then depart at a frantic pace to reach the battlefield before all of the good spots in the ranks of the Orange Horde were occupied.

So in modern language: Two friends and I met at my dorm room. I put on a bunch of Cuse stuff. We went to the dining hall and ate mad fast. We went to the Dome in hopes of not having nosebleed seats. You're right, the first version sounded much better.

So on to the actual game. We were packed in like sardines because we managed to get in on the lower level along with about 100,000 other students (or so it seamed). We start the game yelling, we yell in the middle, we yell at the end. We yelled when GTown got out to a 14-0 lead on us, we yelled when the Cuse came storming back. We yelled when there was a foul. We yelled at the timeouts. We yelled when a little kid came out to mop the floor. We yelled when we made a good play. We yelled when the refs made a bad call. Just to sum up, we yelled. My throat was about to explode, yet I always felt I could be louder. The team needed me! So, in conclusion, the game was loud regardless of the score. It's just that sometimes it got extra loud. PS-Kris Joseph scored 15 points and is fast living up to the cool new nickname I gave him: Kris "The Greatest Basketball Player Who Has Ever or Will Ever Live" Joseph. I could shorten it a bit, I guess. Kris "TGBPWHEOWEL" Joseph.

One last note on that. Those jersey t-shirt things are selling like hotcakes. I saw a ton of them at the game. Regrettably, I only saw one Kris Joseph #32 shirt (mine's in the wash because I played pickup basketball in it). There were a bunch of Scoop Jardine #11 shirts, which is good because he deserves a good amount of credit for taking over point guard duties when our starter decides to fold like a lawn chair. What surprised me the second most was the numerous Theodore "Mookie" Jones #3 shirts. When given a choice, I decide not to dress like the ugliest man in college sports.Believe it or not, this is a flattering picture of him. But anyway, on to the biggest surprise of the jersey shirts. A Nick Resavy #2 shirt was spotted not too far from me. Nick Resavy is a short, pudgy, white guy who hasn't gotten into a game in recent memory. Unlike Brandon Reese, he is not a fan favorite because he does not look like he is 12 years old. So, for grand totals, we have Kris Joseph on one hand- 10.2 points and 5.1 rebounds in 25.9 minutes per game for 21 games. On the other we have Nick Resavy- 0.3 points and 0.3 rebounds in 1.3 minutes per game for 8 games. The commonality: both had one jersey shirt present that I could observe at the game. Looks like KJ still has some fans to win over. Well, next game he will when he scores 20 points and picks up 9 rebounds. Quote me on that, it'll happen.

In non-sports news (but really it's still sports news), my SOC 318 (quantitative methods) class just got roughly 5693.23 times better. How's that for quantitative. It started with me sitting next to one of my top 3 favorite Cuse football players. Unfortunately, I think he's either dropped the class or has been struck with amnesia and is wandering around Peru or something because he only went to the first class. However, my angst (love that word) has been alleviated (that one too) and the malevolent (that one's my favorite word of all) presence of ennui (keeping it going with vocabulary far beyond what I need to use) is all but vanquished (last one, I promise). We got a new kid today. 6'9" forward, starting for the Syracuse Orange out of Philadelphia and now sitting behind me in sociology, Rick Jeeeeeeackson! I was so excited I couldn't concentrate on the class. Afterward, I walked by Rick as I was leaving and the following exchange took place:

Me: "Nice game, man."
Rick: "Thanks, man."

Easily the most fulfilling conversation I've had this year. Who knows? Maybe he needs a tutor. And I teach him sociology and he thinks I'm the coolest thing ever and introduces me to Kris Joseph. And I get to sit on the Cuse bench during the games. And I win $10 million. And the Broncos, Twins, Magic, and Orange (in football, basketball, and lacrosse) win national championships every year for the rest of forever. And they make ultimate an Olympic event and make me the captain. And I lead them to gold medals until I get too old to play and I settle down and set up a professional ultimate frisbee league. And all because Rick Jackson was in my SOC 318 class.

Contented sigh.

I can dream, can't I?

My Blog, My Rules

Hey, has it really been two weeks? Really, has it? Because to me it seems like one. And if you don't think so, tough. It's my blog and I do what I want with it so if I decide to spare you from a subpar blog in a down week, you have to trust my judgement. Cool? Cool.

So I've had a busy week getting back into the swing of things here at Cuse. First, I got back to school in time for the basketball game Saturday (not to be confused with Monday's game). We listened to the first half in the car, desperately trying to get to a place where we could actually watch it. The first half flew by in about .5 seconds so we didn't get to see any of it before we pulled up to my brother's apartment. And as if the basketball gods were laughing at our predicament, the second half seemed to drag on until the snow melted. Well, to be fair, the snow was already pretty much melted because on January 15 in Syracuse, NY it was about 50 degrees outside. Global warming? Who knows? But anyway, reverse the timeline of the halves and we get to see pretty much the whole game. But whatevs, it was exciting even when it didn't need to be.

As I stated before, it seems an unchangeable law of nature that every Syracuse opponent will automatically make any shot outside of 25 feet and inside of 300 feet. At the end of our contest against West Virginia, WVU was down 10 with 1:18 to go. Impossible to come back from that, right? Think again. WVU hits 5 of 6 threes and gets fouled to hit another 3 free throws down the stretch. Most of those threes were contested fadeaways from 5 feet behind the three point line. Just saying, no other team will ever put on a shooting spree like that ever again. Take that to the bank. Long story short, Cuse wins by one point because WVU botched a sure-thing 80 foot prayer that anyone else could've put in against Cuse with our luck. A win's a win, and now we've got 18 of them.

After that, I returned to the ghost town of main campus. Seriously, what's up with people not coming back to campus until the last night before classes start? Gone are the days of walking through the unused high school to find where classes are. I seemed to be the only person intent on doing that because I missed the memo of having to memorize every room of every building on campus. Well chumps, my preparation paid off. My econ class had two people come in and make themselves comfortable for 10 minutes before finding out they were in the wrong class. Two more popped in after class started and left immediately. I found it funny that they looked like grad students. And I thought that teachers said that if you weren't there for their class you should leave as a high-brow college-type joke. Guess not.

A kid I sat next to said it was a bad sign if a teacher lectured on the first day or thought their class was challenging. Most will say that if you work hard you'll make it through alright. Well I agree with him and so it's a bad sign that today I had one class where the teacher said the class was hard, one who started lecturing almost immediately, and one where the teacher delayed her lecturing just long enough to tell us how hard the class was. That's four bad omens and I've only had three classes so far. Sigh. I guess I deserve it after an easy semester, if only I could've spread the pain out over both semesters. And I haven't even been to writing yet. Unless the theme for my writing class is "Blogs Without Borders" it's going to be a loooong semester.

It's been a while since I waxed philosophical but I just read the last Dan Brown book so cut me some slack. I just want to take a minute to say that there are few sights more beautiful than snow in the dark. Tonight when I was walking home I walked through the perfect snow shower. Perfect big fluffy flakes, perfectly no wind, perfect lighting by streetlamps, it was a sight to behold. It's been a while since I appreciated nature, and I guess it's hard to do that in a place like Syracuse. Maybe it's the fact that I saw the environmentalist movie Avatar twice, but I think it's important for people to notice the tapestry of sights and sounds that Mother Nature has woven for us, even if it's just looking up from picking a song on your iPod on the way to class.

Haha I just reread that sentence and I'm left hoping that my readership includes no lactose intolerant people because it was so cheesy. And that joke wasn't light on the Gouda either. Have a good week everyone, I know I will.

Smackdown 2010

Yep. Pretty tough week for me. Denver Broncos. Upstaging themselves from a year ago. Let's go back in time to December 2008. The Broncos have a 3 game lead in the division. 3 games to play. They're in the playoffs right? Wrong! 3 game losing streak = skiing in January instead of football. I'm told that's the first time that that's ever happened to any NFL team ever. Well, something even more impressive happened this year.

I'll start at the beginning. This past summer, Denver hired a new hotshot 32 year old coach. His first move was to try to trade his franchise quarterback, fail, piss off said quarterback, and then trade him. He also almost ended up trading the NFL's most beastly receiver but thankfully failed. I battened down the hatches for a crappy season of rebuilding. Well, surprise surprise, but what should Denver do but run off 6 wins in a row to start the season. I began to think they were an actual decent football team. I was wrong again. 2 wins and 8 losses later, the Broncos have done something that has only happened 3 times before-started 6-0 and missed the playoffs. Yeah, sometimes it sucks to be a Broncos fan.

To make matters worse, Cuse basketball lost. My rock, the team who would always succeed, my "Lean On Me" team for when my other teams are not strong. Doneskies. No more undefeated record. All because of 1-13 from beyond the arc. And poor officiating. And two guys on Pitt who couldn't miss a three. Ever. But besides that, we played pretty well. Oh well, we got Memphis tomorrow...today? and we'll get back on track. But, at least I got the one item I have been questing after since the beginning of last year's bball season (kind of). My Holy Grail (kind of). My golden fleece (kind of). A Kris Joseph #32 Syracuse basketball jersey (kind of)! Actually, it's a t-shirt, but I am wicked pumped nonetheless.

Ok, no more goofing around. Time to talk about Snakes on a Plane. I watched it for the first time this weekend. Probably one of the worst movies ever created. Let's take a look at the plot. A guy decides there's someone on the plane who he needs dead. So, he takes the most convoluted route to it that could possibly be taken. First, smuggle a bunch of snakes onto a plane. Next, a timer that will release the snakes. And third, commandeer the leis on the plane, spray them with pheremones and let the air circulators do the rest. Then, wait for results. Or, he could have done the following as an equally inefficient way of taking down the plane.

• Steal an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, shoot it at a satelite, make the satelite crash into the plane
• Inject a stewardess with swine flu, have her infect the guy, wait until he's in bed drinking gingerale, then drop a piano on him
• Have the person next to him offer him a cigarette , hook him on smoking, and wait until he dies of lung cancer
• Wait until humans create robots and time travel, send a killer robot back in time to kill his mom before he's born, if that doesn't work, keep sending more advanced models after him until it succeeds (did someone already try that?)

Let's take a second to see how tight security has become since then. Now the only way a terrorist can even think of taking down a plane is flammable underwear. I think that's a step in the right direction.

Well, here's to a better week coming at us. Only a week and a half at home then back to school. Hopefully by then I'll be back in my groove then and my blog'll be back to its normal awesome self. Woo!

Blame it on the zebras

Another week, another soulcrushing Denver Broncos loss. I am at a loss. Always searching for someone to blame for my team's failings, this time I turn to the referees. The play that led directly to Philly's game winning field goal was a sideline "catch." I believe that the ball was bobbled when the player fell out of bounds=no catch. The refs called it incomplete, reviewed it, and reversed the call. Not cool. Oh well, at least my amazing (and forgiving) neighbors were there to host us with delicious taco dip and all sorts of other goodies. Thanks for not kicking me out when I spilled punch all over the floor.

Heartbreak aside, I am pleased to say that Syracuse is asserting itself as one of the best teams in college basketball. A guy on the other team is shooting 3's from out of state and drops 38 on us. Every loose ball was apparently repeled by the color orange (makes sense, the ball is orange-ish too). Syracuse was hypnotized into thinking that their teammates were at least 5 feet away from where they actually were and ended up throwing the majority of their passes to Seton Hall. Andy Rautins could've possibly been playing drunk or at the very least on 72 hours of no sleep. But we won. And I'll tell you why. Wes Johnson is the greatest basketball player in the country. Case closed. He literally willed Syracuse to victory. The rest of the team played their worst games of the year. Johnson crashed the boards and cleaned up missed layup after missed layup. He grabbed every rebound, blocked shots after the defense fell apart. Basketball's a team sport, but this is one of the greatest individual efforts I've seen in watching college basketball. PS- my man Kris Joseph scored 16 and had some sicknasty dunks. Check them out on Sportscenter top plays.

I just got back from my church's Kwanzaa celebration. Gotta say it was pretty cool. Lot's of good music and dancing. So I think I should go ahead and talk a bit about it because not too many people know what it's about. It's got multiple days like Hannukah (7 days for 7 principles). There's gift giving like Christmas. And it was invented out of the blue like Festivus (in 1966 by Ron Kerenga). So it has the pieces of all of the winter holidays and is a whole boatload of fun. Plus, you get to learn some Swahili along the way. And if the Lion King is a good indicator, Swahili is and awesome language. These are the 7 principles the celebration is based on:

• Umoja (unity)
• Kujichagulia (self-determination)
• Ujima (collective work and responsibility)
• Ujamaa (cooperative economics)
• Nia (purpose)
• Kuumba (creativity)
• Imani (faith)

Just say those words. I know. Good stuff, much more fun than English.

It's getting late and I'm going to see Wicked tomorrow (so excited!). So I'll leave with one simple request. Cross your fingers for the Broncos. They need a couple big breaks to get into the playoffs and they can use all the help you can give them. Merry Late Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Excuses Excuses

I wasn't planning on even writing this tonight, but one thought about my tearful readers, heartbroken by the fact that they would have to survive one week without my profound prose and amazingly potent sentiments, brought the reality home to me. The blog must go on! So I am writing while sleep deprived and with dry scratchy eyes after the 2:45 marathon that was Avatar in 3-D IMAX style.

So I'll start with Avatar. It's awesome. Watch it. I've heard that people are saying that special effects are being used as surrogates for...well, you know. A plot. And in this movie that's 100% true. But it's also 100% worth it. It's like looking at a piece of artwork with all of its colors and whatnot. Except this painting has a huge helicopters vs. pterodactyls battle.

That said, it's necessary for me to recount the horror of this past Sunday. AKA the worst day of football ever. I went over to my awesome neighbors' house to watch the games. I was with my mom, a Packers fan, my neighbor, and my 'brother', both 49ers fans. And we watched all three games because they were all at the same time and my neighbors have like the ultimate uberfan superawesome package for football. So all went well, we departed for a party at a friend's house. Then it hit the fan. One after another, our teams fell like the valiant Spartan warriors at Thermopylae. The 49ers fell to a relentless Eagles attack, my Broncos lost on a last minute touchdown pass by the worst and largest of NFL quarterbacks, and the Packers lost on a literal last second touchdown that was pretty much the best thrown ball of the season by any player on any team. Oh and not to mention that the divisional rivals of the Broncos and 49ers both won. The only redeeming factor of the day was the Sunday Night Football meltdown of Brett Favre. And his coach hates him now.

*Deep breath.* Wow, I really needed to get that off my chest. Other than that, it's just great to be home. My present to you: more shopping time and less blog reading! Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, blah blah blah.

The Only Good Politician is a...Republican?

Good afternoon! It feels great to say that now that I'm not writing this in the middle of the night/Wednesday morning. I hope that the end of everyone's semester is going well. Since it probably actually matters that you guys study this week, I'll try to keep this brief and easy to read.

So I guess I'm trying to use finals as an excuse to not write very much, but the fact of the matter is, I really don't have too much to discuss this week. Tiger Woods is still the main news story basically everywhere, so I had to dig really deep to find this week's non-sports story. I chanced upon this one, which I found quite interesting. It's about the gradually lessening disdain that New Yorkers have for Gov. David Paterson. His favorability rating is up to 36%, the highest that it's been in a while. However, he'll apparently need to increase that by quite a bit more by election time next year to earn the Democratic nomination to run for reelection. I'm going to go back a bit- 1994, Republican George Pataki is elected governor of New York, one of the most Democratic states in the country. He is elected quite easily to second and third terms and declined to run anymore. This opened the door for Eliot Spitzer to win the next election, so 2006 gave us our first Democratic governor in 12 years. How does he reward the voters? About a year after his election he is busted for being caught in a prostitution ring. After being the most outspoken opponent to said rings. Not only that, but everyone started to hate his replacement, David Paterson, pretty darn quick too.

The whole roundabout point I'm trying to make here is: politics, what the hell? It was confusing enough to figure out how someone could win a presidential election with the other guy getting more votes. Now even party lines are becoming blurred. That was the one constant for politics in my (not very highly trained) view. Republicans stuck with Republicans, Democrats hobnobbed with Democrats. But looking back at New York, they absolutely loved their Republican governor and all of the new Democratic governors are becoming quickly the most hated men in the state. But, come presidential election time, nobody even bothers to campaign here because it's guaranteed to vote Democrat. I don't get it.

But, for something I do understand, Syracuse basketball continues to dominate on the court. We played Florida, undefeated and #11 in the country, on Thursday if you didn't know. Managed to beat them by 12 points too, despite Florida's uncanny ability to make impossible shots. I swear, this wouldn't have been out of place in the game:

Announcer: Boynton [Florida player] brings the ball up, stops about 50 feet from the basket. He pulls out a blindfold, ties it on. Throws the ball behind his back, it bounces off the scoreboard...and good! Three points! Thats the 34th behind the back shot that Florida's made in the last 5 minutes.

But no worries, Cuse pulled it out. And let's face it, they play up to their competition. When St. Francis (NY) came to town, we only won by like 24 points. Luckily for us fans, Kris Joseph came up with a monster slam dunk to get us to 75 points and free tacos. Looming opponents include St. Bonaventure and Oakland. St. Bonaventure: Why don't you man up and rename yourself after a saint with a cooler name. Oakland: Nobody even knows where you are. There is no Oakland in Michigan.

I hate to end on a serious note, but I came across a saying this week that I found highly inspirational and just awesome in general. "The only difference between our secrets is whether we allow them to evolve into tales of heroism or fear." Good luck on finals everyone!

At least I'm not as screwed up as Tiger Woods...

Back in business, guess you gotta read this blog again. I received some negative feedback for the first time in the history of this blog (and possibly my entire awesome life). Apparently it is not a good idea for me to get too emotional or nostalgic with my blog. Admittedly I probably could've done better than a timeline of my Thanksgiving, but I have prepared a brief defense. Number one, Thanksgiving was awesome and reliving it one more time was the least I could do for the honorable holiday after all it has done for mankind. And second, the turkey still hadn't quite worn off and I was feeling a bit lazy to tell you the truth. My bad for being human, it happens to the best of us.

Anyway, this week I'm back in full force and I'm a little bit angry to tell you the truth. I don't know if you've heard, but Tiger Woods has been in the news just a couple times over the past week or so. Show of hands for everyone who knew that...anyone? I guess I'm the only one who noticed, because I saw zero hands go up. Oh well, you'll probably catch it sooner or later. Here's my take on the situation. Tiger Woods leaves his house at 1 in the morning. He crashes into a fire hydrant backing down his driveway. Then he inexplicably continues to back up, eventually introducing his car to a tree. Now, if my physics class taught me anything, a car that backs up into a tree will have the rear part of the car obstructed by said tree. However, the early story was that Wood's wife just happened to be on hand, at 1 in the morning mind you, to smash the back window of the car and drag good ol' Tiger out onto the driveway. One problem...if the car backed up into several objects, the back of the car probably looked like the below picture, leaving no need to smash any window. Plus, I'm guessing the driver side door was probably unlocked, but that would be the smart option, and nothing in this situation could be confused with a smart idea.


I'm going to take a quick second to relay one of the greatest jokes I have heard in a long time. This was completely off the cuff and unintended by one of my group members, making it all the more awesome. "I really appreciate the irony of Tiger Woods' wife using a golf club to get him out of the car."

Ok, maybe it's just my kind of humor but I thought that was awesome. Anyway, there's more to this story than that. This is like a fricking soap opera. And I hate soap operas. The media will run a breaking news headline for anything coming out of this. And I mean anything. For instance, I'm watching ESPN and on the bottom line, in the middle of the college basketball scores, runs a headline that went something like this: Tiger Woods found at fault for car accident and receives a citation. COME ON! It's a one car accident. Middle of the night. Who the hell else are you going to give the citation to? The fire hydrant? The tree? It had better not be the tree, it is the only thing/person that acted sensibly in the situation. Seriously, it stopped Tiger from backing into his neighbor's houses, schools, children's hospitals, nunneries, and pretty much everything else that you can ram an Escalade into because the fire hydrant sure as hell didn't. But come on, I'd rather see NHL scores than learn about the mundane details of Tiger's driving history.

Lastly, there's this whole deal with Tiger's mother or mother-in-law or some random old lady who went to the hospital on Tuesday. The events aren't even related! Am I talking crazy here? This got bottom line coverage, had stories written about it everywhere, and had absolutely zero impact on anything ever besides Tiger's personal life. Sometimes I hate the media. No offense to my brother who is a part of said media.

Now that that's off my chest, I can turn to the sporting world, which wasn't very exciting but saw the Syracuse Orange beat Maine 101-55 (my favorite player, Kris Joseph, scored 14 points and had many an emphatic slam dunk). Oh and by the way, the score at halftime of this one was 60-12. Syracuse 60, Maine 12. I will now pause for effect. Done pausing. That kind of score should not be welcome in any sport. I want nothing less than to insult Syracuse, I just think we're taking it a bit far with scheduling easy opponents. Let's see some games where the other team gets within 30...could be fun, right?

Additionally, my Broncos won 44-13 over the Chiefs. I was watching the play-by-play on my computer and I have to admit, the digital representation of the Broncos' statistics looked good. Here's a breakdown of the first few possessions of the second half for the Chiefs: turnover on downs, interception, interception, punt, fumble recovery for a touchdown. Besides that punt, the only time the ball was in Broncos territory was when Denver was kicking off after scoring. Man that was a sweet game. I haven't seen that kind of domination since Jose Canseco fought Hong Man Choi. Just skip to like 1:00, 1:10 and you'll see what I mean.

I just love the opportunity to make fun of Jose Canseco like that. He's an idiot. Oh well, despite all appearences, no I don't count the Tiger Woods thing as a sports story, so this wasn't a hundred percent about sports. Seriously, Tiger has so much drama he's turning into a chick flick. A chick flick where the hero offers his wife $60 million in a revision of the prenup to stay married to him for two more years. Just sayin.