Va-gay-tion Part II

Where did we leave off last? Ah yeah...the tic tac story. Well with only 2 days left of vacation we decided that we'd return to Rehoboth on Sunday. But first J and I wanted to go river kayaking. J's parents had just purchased two new kayaks and we were eager to try them out on the river behind the house. We walked through the woods and down the path to the 2 'Manatee' kayaks and carried them down to the water.

Unfortunately the tide was extremely low and some Delaware regulation prohibited the construction of any permanent docks so in order to get the kayaks out to the river we had to push them across several feet of mud. It was tough but we got them out to water. The river was slow moving and peaceful. As we paddled upstream we saw several turtles jumping into the water. We also saw plenty of small fish and a large egret (I think) that kept flying down river. We must have chased it off inadvertently 5 or 6 times.

Kayaking was really relaxing. The craft move through the water so effortlessly, but somehow I managed to develop two nice calluses between my thumbs and index fingers from gripping the paddle.

We went several miles upstream before deciding to turn back. Upon arriving back at the dock we found the tide had lowered significantly. Now to get the kayaks back on land we had to hop out onto the mud. J stepped out with one leg which immediately sank calf-deep. With one leg in and one out of the kayak he slowly inched the craft to the shore.

I was a bit lazier and just hopped out with both legs. I immediately sank up to my waist in this thick mud. It was almost like quicksand. I struggled to slog through the mud while dragging the kayak behind me. It took a few minutes and when it was all over I was saturated in mud. Damn that was messy.

Later that day we got back in the car and headed to Rehoboth for the 2nd time. The weather was nicer this time and the place was a lot more crowded. Everyone determined that my SPF 50 sunblock was too excessive and would prevent them from getting tan so we stopped in a convenience store to buy some sunblock. J and A, both of which are avid gym buffs, had their shirts off.

For those of you who don't know, Rehoboth is known as a 'gay beach' meaning there are lots of businesses owned by gay/lesbian people or businesses that are gay/lesbian friendly. So as we entered the convenience store J and A found some SPF 8 which would prevent them from getting burned but let them pick up some color. As they stood in line another customer was on his cell phone. It appeared he was doing some text messaging but upon closer inspection the back of his cell phone had a huge camera lens on it. As I walked past I noticed his phone's display. He was videotaping.

I watched him pan back and forth over the shirtless torsos of A and J before his friend (maybe boyfriend) said something like 'Come on, stop filming them.' I told A and J what I just witnessed and they were flabbergasted. J was especially pissed.

They had both been oggled like pieces of steak and now there was a good chance they'd appear on the next 'Guys Gone Wild' video. I cracked up. I searched youtube to see if I could find the footage online, but I didn't succeed. I did find this video though, which was taken in 2007 at the same beach. WARNING: Contains muscular, swim-trunk clad men. Look for A and J in 2008's edition.

After being visually violated at the convenience store we headed to the beach which was packed. We managed to carve out a small square and then surveyed our surroundings. This was definitely no Dewey Beach - tons and tons of families, little kids, older people. There wasn't really any room to run around or throw a football so after awhile everyone wanted to walk around. I volunteered to stay and guard our stuff so A, K, and J got up to 'check things out'.

Upon their return they told me how they found a group of attractive young ladies who were running from seagulls. They laughed at the girls for being so skittish when the hand of karma smacked them. As J walked by a seagull pooped right on his face. The fateful shot hit him right above the eye and worst yet everyone in the vicinity saw it and started laughing. The only consolation was that multiple people told J that getting shit on by a bird is good luck.

Sure it is.

We returned to our tiny plot of sand when two younger girls returned to their towels. They couldn't have been more than 14 or 15 because I overheard one on the cellphone asking her dad for a ride. I then zoned out but according to everyone else these teens then talked about how they got drunk and hooked up with random people.

Geez, what's with these kids today? When I was 15 I didn't do anything. I never 'got drunk' or 'hooked up'. Damn whippersnappers!

We had dinner that night at a place a bartender suggested. It was called Zogg's. Everyone seemed to love it but my food wasn't so great. My advice - don't order food at a place that has 'bar' in the name. I got some clam/mussel penne pasta which was pretty disgusting. I regretted it later that night.

The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. On Monday we took J's parents out to lunch to thank them for letting us crash in their basement. I probably had the best meal of the week at this place calld Smith and Co. I ordered a lamb burger and it was pretty damn tasty. In fact, I was almost done before I noticed a small black beetle crawling across my plate. I assume it came out of my burger, maybe hitch-hiked on a piece of lettuce.

The beetle made it about 2 inches before it collapsed and died, a victim of the suffocating olive oil. I informted the waiter and he comped the burger and gave us a free dessert. It was a good dessert.

Then we were off...several wrong turns later (GPS isn't as useful as you'd think) we made it back home where my parents had a BBQ going for us.

Not a bad trip, not the best, but definitely some memorable tales.

Vacation: Lidocaine and Tic-Tacs

So, for the past week or so I've been on vacation with a few of my friends. For privacy's sake I'll only identify them by a letter. If you know me personally you'll probably be able to figure out who is who quite easily. So on with the tales...

***

Last Wednesday I finished up at work (shined the last few bowling balls of the day) and called it quits. The next day I drove back to my parents' house because we were all meeting up in that town before leaving on our trip. I got home late afternoon which afforded me enough time to enjoy a home cooked meal and spend a few hours with my folks. At around 9 PM the members of our party had finally converged at my parents place, we loaded up A's Honda Fit (which is surprisingly roomy) with our bags and took off for tropical Delaware.

A little over 3 hours later (probably would have been sooner if not for a few wrong turns) we arrived at J's parents' house. We quickly set up camp in the basement where we slept on some old mattresses. K took the 'jelly bean couch' despite it appearing to be too small to accommodate his girth and found it quite comfortable. J took the 'best' used mattress which had a nice pillowtop, A found another mattress and I took a boxspring and stacked the remaining mattress on top of it. It was a bit of an odd camp, complete with assorted garden utensils, ping pong table, and other unused furniture but it served us well during our stay.

That night was pretty much shot so we called it a day and hit the sack. We awoke the next morning unexpectedly early, perhaps due to the strange environment, and had breakfast. From there we piled into the Fit and drove to Rehoboth Beach. Rehoboth is a pretty nice place. There's a nice strip and boardwalk and a pretty decent sized beach. It's not nearly as huge as Ocean City but the size feels a lot more manageable but offers enough to keep you entertained for the day.

The weather was okay, but not great. It was probably in the high 70s, pretty windy and sunny. The water was absolutely freezing so there were only a few braves or stupid souls who dared to take a dip. We stayed strictly on the beach. It was a pretty quiet day due to the brisk weather so we enjoyed a uncongested beach. Of the four of us, I was the only one who used any sunblock and later that day I felt pretty damn smart. I have this SPF 50 stuff which might be excessive but I sure as hell didn't have a single fleck of sunburn, which was the exact opposite of the rest of the crew. A and J both had noticeable redness, especially on their shoulders, but K somehow got extremely roasted on his forearms and the tops of his feet. His skin was literally lobster red. We left the beach, returned to the home base, took showers and went out to eat. J's parents suggested a seafood place they had heard was good.

It was this big market/restaurant that somewhat resembled a long barn. A massive propeller sat outside the window. I decided I should take advantage of the proximity to the ocean so I ordered this platter of steamed seafood which included clams, shrimp, and snow crab legs along with two non-seafood sides.

It was a lot of food and it took forever to eat it, mainly because extracting meat out of crab legs is a pain in the ass, even provided with the proper tools. I got this basket with a plastic cracker, food shears and this plastic knife-like utensil used to scrape the meat out of the shell. Frankly, it wasn't really worth the hassle. I'm not a huge fan of seafood to begin with and it just turned out to be a huge production to eat very slowly. The clams and shrimp were only okay and since they were steamed they really only had whatever flavor the old bay seasoning provided. The crab legs were dipped in butter but eventually I got too lazy and stopped eating. I had also developed a headache from being at the beach earlier in the day.

After dinner I felt not so good so as we drove to Dewey Beach for the night, I stopped at a gas station to pick up some Advil. A said he had some in the back of his car and K dug around and found it for me. Unfortunately it was some kid's fever reducer that expired in 2000. I decided not to risk it with some shady decade-old medicine.

I kinda passed out the rest of the way to Dewey, which is the hot nightspot of the area. Pretty much all the college kids and 20-somethings flock there since there's a nice drag of assorted bars. We went last year and I remember how packed the places were and how smokey they were. A and J wanted to go to this bar that had a pretty huge line and K and I decided we didn't want to mull around in a smokey mosh pit so we decided not to go. K started complaining about his burned feet so we stopped to buy some lotion. He picked up some combination gel with aloe and lidocaine, which is a topical anesthetic. We needed to stop so K could put some of this gel on so we sat on by the side of this house.

Randomly, this girl on a cell phone walks up to us and says '21 year olds are cunts.' I couldn't tell if she was talking to me or to the person on the phone so I ignored her. But then she kept looking right over and us and walked over. She repeated herself again. I responded, 'We're not 21.' Then she said something about how she was 28 and 21 year olds thought they knew everything. We nodded our heads in hopes that concurrence would make her go away. She then told us that we were cool because we were 'down to earth'. A forced high five later, she was off.

That was weird.

About that time J and A called because they were sick of being mobbed at the club. They had gone in, gotten some drinks, and apparently some man pushed A's face into some woman's chest for no reason. They met up with us and I mentioned another less crowded bar we could go to. We walked to the bar and A went to get a beer. I wasn't in the mood to drink given my headache, K was the designated driver and J had no money. Therefore it wasn't much of a party atmosphere. A got mad that he was the only one drinking and stormed off. I was just zoning out and J got excited over some 'frozen t-shirt' contest that was going to happen shortly.

I didn't even bother getting up for the contest, but apparently what happened was 3 women had to break apart a frozen t-shirt, take off their own shirt and put it on. The contest only lasted about 30 seconds, and according to J, was quite boring.

A eventually came back and we decided to leave.

***

The next day we woke up late and went to Ocean City. We feared that it would take forever due to traffic but our tardiness actually meant a traffic-free trip. We got there late in the day but the weather was nicer. We stopped to pick up some booze at the liquor store where we purchased some cheap zinfadel, a corkscrew, some water, ice, diet coke, and 2 cheesy looking cups to disguise our illegal booze. Outside of the liquor store we transferred the wine to the cups. Today everyone was begging to use my sun screen and much of it was slathered on charred extremities.

We headed to the beach, me lugging my duffel bag which contained everyone's towels, wallets, phones, a football, etc and someone else carrying the cooler. Ocean City, for anyone who hasn't been there is pretty huge and walking the boardwalk can take hours because it's miles long. We go to the beach and A decided there weren't enough people (read: hot girls) around so we walked to find a more populated area. After awhile K started complaining about his burned feet so we ponied up 3 dollars a piece to ride the boardwalk tram. The tram took forever to pick us up and we probably waited 20 minutes while drinking warm zin from our touristy cups. We finally got on the tram which moves about 1 mph faster than walking and rode it for a good 15 minutes. As we went down the boardwalk we discovered we were actually seeing less and less people on the beach, so we cut our losses and got off.

It was pretty late in the day so the beach was pretty open. Again, the water was cold, so we camped out on the sand. We tossed the football that I bought around and relaxed. A kid (probably 16 or 17) was lying out in front of us when 3 young girls (probably early teens 13, 14) came and started harassing him. It was pretty clear he wanted to be left alone but the 3 junior harpies wouldn't leave him alone. For some odd reason A started talking to them and soon they had attacked us. These 3 girls started asking us where we were from. A lied and said we were locals and immediately they showed doubt. A played along by continuing to lie and eventually some conflict and teasing came about. I was getting annoyed so I said nothing. Somehow this made me 'cool'. One of the girls said 'I like you, you don't say anything.' At that point I got up and decided to go throw the football.

A and J continued to entertain themselves with girls you might see on Dateline's To Catch a Predator and eventually one of the girls said something to the effect that she was Superwoman. A countered that he was Superman and she said that wasn't the case since she knew Superman personally, being Superwoman. I yelled 'so, do you have x-ray vision?' and the girls then responded that A had a small penis. They even gave him a nice nickname before scurrying off - Tic-Tac Dick.

About 15 minutes later another pre-pubscent girl walked up to us and said to A, 'Is your name Tic Tac?'

***

Wow, that was a lot of writing. Next time: Quicksand, Non-consensual videotaping, and the good luck of the seagulls!

A Scene

(Start the embedded audio track below now and then continue reading.)

I was driving back from basketball tonight and a U2 song came on the radio. It was 'Where the Streets Have No Name'. I'm sure you've heard it many times, but for those who haven't it starts out with a really haunting synth + guitar intro that gradually fades in.



As the song started a very clear scene surfaced in my mind. It was like something from a movie...a funeral scene.

Imageine it's a clear bright day, in the middle of spring. The sky is blue and clad only by a few wisps of clouds. There's a slight breeze and birds can be faintly heard in the background. It's a pretty typical funeral, a crowd of mourners in black, weeping as a priest reads a prayer. The words of the prayer can only be heard indistinctly and blends with the sounds of sobbing.

The priest finishes the prayer and gestures with his hands. The coffin is lowered into the grave and the camera shot suddenly shifts to the perspective of the coffin - looking up out of the grave at all the surrounding mourners. The brightness of the sky causes a little glare.

As the song picks up the coffin begins to lower into the grave. As it descends it begins to slowly pick up speed and it doesn't stop when it reaches the typical 6 feet. Instead, it keeps falling, faster and faster as the sight of the mourners disappears out of view. The coffin continues on a free fall as if it's falling into a bottomless pit.

Or perhaps it's not really going down. Falling, after all, is relative.

Quick Post: All you leave behind

A friend of mine lost her father this weekend quite unexpectedly. One moment he was there and by all indications, a healthy person, and the next moment he was gone.

In this day and age of science and medicine, we tend to feel more protected against the fickle finger of death. We have the map of the human genome, advanced diagnostic instruments, and the ability to perform amazing procedures to correct conditions which decades ago would seal someone's fate. However, we're not perfect and there will always be things even our most powerful tools cannot perceive or correct.

In the bigger scheme of things I'm not just talking about medical conditions. You could be walking down the street and get struck by lighting. The roof could collapse. You could spontaneously combust. My point is simple - the reality is your life could end at any moment with no warning at all. Your gender, age, health, race, socioeconomic status - none of that necessarily has anything to do with it.

So due to the capricious nature of fate we must always keep in mind that we're not owed any specific amount of time on this green rock hurtling through the cosmos. We can do all the 'right things' and still suffer a premature departure. Because of this uncertainty we can't afford to live our lives with some grandiose goal that can only be achieved after X years of hard work. While it's admirable that someone would have the foresight to see so far into the future, it's also a bit presumptuous to think you'll be awarded with the time to see your plan to fruition.

So I say live every second of your life as best as you can. Ask yourself 'if I was to die this very second, what would I be remembered for?'. When I ask myself that question I realize I haven't accomplished any monumental goals - I haven't walked on the moon or freed the slaves - so maybe I won't be remembered on a global scale.

However, I do feel that if I was to die today I would be remembered for the way I treated people. I would like to be remembered as a loving son and brother, as well as a loyal friend. I'd like people to remember my willingness to listen and counsel people and my trustworthiness. I'd like people to remember my sense of humor and level-headedness. Finally I'd like to be remembered as someone who had potential to do great things, even if I never achieved them.

If you died today how would you want to be remembered?

Keep that in mind as you live your potentially last day, every day.

Spygate - Rebuttals

I'm not going to offer background about the Spygate scandal because it's been well publicized enough over the past year. What I'd like to do is list some common arguments used against further investigation or prosecution and offer my objective rebuttals.

Some of these are idiotic, but again, I'm listing the most common arguments and sadly, the majority of sports fans are in fact idiots.

Common Arguments Against Further Investigation or Prosecution in the Spygate Scandal

1. 'Everyone else did it, so it's not a big deal' or 'Team X was using steroids back in the 19XXs'
This argument is used by some people to downplay the severity of the Patriots' rule violation. By saying 'hey, everyone else does it' the arguer implies that because other people did it, it is not wrong. The number of people that break a rule is irrelevant to the validity of the rule. It is, however, indicative of how strictly the rule is enforced. A rule is a very simple thing - it is absolute. In this case, the rule is in the form of 'X is prohibited'. Therefore if you do X, you broke the rule. If you and a friend did X, you broke the rule. If you and 1,000 people did X, you still broke the rule. The number of people that also broke the rule does not diminish the fact that each individual who did X broke the rule.

The other argument is similar - another team broke another rule and they were not punished. Once again, this argument is an attempt to divert attention from the current violation. It implies that because a prior violation was not prosecuted, the current violation should also not be prosecuted. Again, violating an absolute rule is black or white. The prior enforcement of the rule does not affect whether or not you broke it.


2. 'Doesn't Arlen Specter have anything better to do' or 'Why are our tax dollars being wasted on investigating the NFL' or 'Specter needs to spend his time trying to reduce the price of gas'

This is another diversion that attempts to question the character of the prosecutor. The arguer is basically saying the whistle blower should 'look the other way' because he or she has more important things to do. This is a diversion because it attempts to lead your focus away from the absolute nature of the rule and instead question whether or not the rule should be enforced. The nature of the rule is absolute, whether or not a certain person should be devoting time to enforcing the rule does not change whether or not a violation has occurred.

3. 'Matt Walsh is just a disgruntled employee who is out for revenge on Belichick and the Patriots'

This could be the case. Who knows? But Walsh has provided evidence in the form of videotapes and unless they are fabricated you cannot ignore the evidence. His words and intentions may be biased but the evidence he provides is objective. Evidence is objective by nature and is not affected by human bias unless it is tampered with.

4. 'The Patriots would have been just as successful without illegally taping their opponents'
This is like the first argument which tries to diminish the severity of the rule violation. This argument does not deny that violating the rules gave the Patriots an unfair advantage, but it states that the advantage was not decisive enough to change the eventual outcome. Basically it's saying 'things would have turned out the same without violating the rules so therefore the rules violation wasn't a big deal'.

My counter to this argument is we don't know how things would have turned out without violating the rules. Football is often called a game of inches and there is absolutely no way to go back in time and know how things would have played out under different circumstances. Again, I keep coming back to the same point. The absolute nature of the rule remains unchanged. This is simply another attempt to say 'breaking the rule wasn't a big deal'.

5. 'Taping their opponents never gave the Patriots an unfair advantage'
This argument is similar to the previous one. It admits the rule was broken but that breaking the rule didn't really affect the outcome of the situation. If this is true, that means the rule is ineffectual. But one should assume rules are in place for a reason and therefore when they are broken the outcome is affected.

Another counterargument is that if the Patriots really gained no advantage from taping their opponents illegally, why did they continue to do it for so many years while taking the risk of being caught? People don't consciously violate rules for years and years unless there is some benefit which outweighs the risk of being caught.

6. 'The Patriots were already fined $$$ and lost a draft pick, this should put an end to the scandal'

This argument says 'we were caught red-handed, we were punished and that should be the end of it'. I agree, that should be the end of it, if no further violations are revealed. In this case, the Patriots were found guilty of violating the rules in 1 particular game and they were fined and punished for that infraction. However, since that punishment was assigned, new details revealing further infractions have sprung up. Therefore, a new series of punishments should be assigned for the new charges.

Imagine a man is arrested for trespassing and is subsequently jailed. While he's in prison it's discovered his person contains several pieces of stolen jewelry as well as some illegal drugs. The judge doesn't say 'well, you were in jail anyway for trespassing so that's enough punishment'. Separate punishments would be handed down for each individual violation.

7. 'You people are just Patriot/Belichick haters'
This is another argument about bias. It's a way of the arguer saying 'I'm not going to listen to anything you say because I think you are biased'. It's the rhetorical equivalent of sticking your thumbs in your ears. As I stated before, people are biased but evidence is not. If you refuse to accept evidence because it was brought forth by someone you perceive as biased you are excluding objective elements of the scenario.

8. I actually support further investigation but they should investigate EVERYONE.
This is a deceptive argument because it actually starts out by supporting more investigation. However, this is really a variant of argument #1 - that everyone else did it. The arguer hopes that if further investigation is done on all teams, it will reveal that the Patriots were not the only team that broke the rule. Then by the false logic of argument #1, the violation of the rule is not as big of a deal because multiple teams committed that violation.

***

Those are all the arguments I'll discuss for now but I'm sure you've recognized a very common theme in all my rebuttals. I feel like I'm repeating myself over and over again but that's the nature of this type of situation. All the arguments I've listed above are merely diversions from the simple nature of an absolute rule.

You may not do X.

You either did X or you didn't do X.

You did X, therefore you violated the rule.

Period.

***

Before the Spygate scandal emerged Bill Belichick was unanimously considered a 'genius' by football fans of all teams. The Patriots were the closest thing to a dynasty of the 90s-00s and their success was undeniable. The unfortunate thing for Belichick and the Patriots is that this revelation of cheating has called into question all of their achievements. There is really no way to know how much of their success was due to the genius of Belichick or the quality of the team's play.

This situation would be like discovering that Charles Dickens plagiarized some of his work without knowing which works were plagiarized. It could be one passage in one book or it could be all his work. In this example it would be more feasible to distinguish Dickens' work from the stolen material. Belichick, however, is not so lucky. Football victories cannot be parsed into discrete units like Dickens' books.

Here's an article from a Boston newspaper which elaborates more on the topic.

Love and Hate

The title of this post contains two words that most would consider polar opposites. But in my own experiences I've noticed an odd pattern. Maybe I'm a weirdo, but in many instances women that I become attracted to start out in my mind as those who annoy me.

Usually the annoyance is a result of the way they speak, their mannerisms, or their overall attitude toward life. I view them with disdain, cringe upon hearing them laugh, or roll my eyes when they blather on and on about some totally inane topic in a completely inappropriate forum. But somehow, amidst all these negative feelings an attraction is formed. I can't quite figure out why this is, but it's been said in order to create a spark you have to have friction.

Maybe it's more superficial than that. Maybe I find the person attractive subconsciously but it's masked by how repulsed I am by their behavior and after awhile I become numb to their idiocy and only notice how alluring they are.

Who knows. Oh well, they say keep your friends close and your enemies closer, perhaps I'm just following that adage.

ARRRRRR.....ssssss.....sssss!

I've added a RSS feed to my site. RSS stands for 'really simple syndication' and it allows people to view my site as a 'feed' of information that can be piped into other programs beside your web browser.

So instead of typing in the website address to view my latest posts you can subscribe to the feed and view it in an application like Google Reader for example.

What's the advantage? Say you regularly read 10 websites. Instead of typing in each website and visiting it through your browser, you could subscribe to its RSS feed and then view just the content in Google Reader. This would allow you to quickly scan through 10 websites' worth of content in a single program without having to individually visit each website.

It can be a big time saver, so if you're interested you can click the 'Subscribe to my RSS Feed' link in the upper right of my page. Check out Google Reader too if you're interested.

Look Ma, no hands!

Boy, it was a tough day at the bowling alley. Lane 12 kept jamming up and I had to make about 10 trips throughout my shift to unclog the damn thing. Plus, I spilled half a bottle of ball wax on my brand new work shirt. I hate my job sometimes :(

Anyway, here is a cool video about a woman in China who was born without arms. You'll be surprised how capable she is despite what we'd consider a pretty huge 'disability'.

It really makes you appreciate what you have and reevaluate your excuses for not being able to do something.

Enjoy.

The Keeper

For a long time now
I've felt as if I was shrinking
The lights dimmed, the sounds grew softer

I told myself 'things will get better'
And tried to rationalize
My most primitive feelings
Into acceptable behavior

But I've gone long now
And I no longer feel hungry
When I do not eat
Thirst no longer parches my throat
Because I do not speak

I climb the familiar staircase
An odd companion for what feels like ages
And I count the steps
As if they will end

But eventually I reach the top
Five flights later
And I turn the key
The door swings open to my beacon in the world

I've waited so long
I've grown tired of being tired
So I extinguish the light
Blackness embraces the rocks

So I give to you all that I have left
My money, my possessions
Take my skin, take my bones
Perhaps they'll find a happier home