Niftical People

After talking about my growing general cynicism yesterday, I felt a need to talk about something a little more positive today. And amazingly, I am turning to sports, something that's fed my cynical streak perhaps moreso than anything save politics of late.

While I was lingering around Ft. Worth with the family last week, I came across this story on ESPN while biding some time before leaving to meet friends.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Bonnie Richardson ran. She threw. She jumped.

And when it was time to hand out the team trophies, Richardson accepted the 1A team championship for Rochelle High School -- by herself.

Richardson was the only Rochelle athlete to qualify for the state meet and stunningly won the team title. University Interscholastic League officials said it was the first time they can remember a single athlete winning a girls' team title.

For the two days of the meet, she scored two firsts, two seconds and a third in various track and field events. That netted her 6 points more for the meet than the next best school (two other schools finished tied for second with 36).

Now if a boy had done this, you know this would have been front page center on just about every sports section imaginable. The boy would have been painted as the second coming of Carl Lewis and Bruce Jenner rolled up into one package. Instead, it got a brief turn as a headline on the main ESPN page and then blipped into obscurity.

But for what Bonnie Richardson accomplished, I think she deserves a little more pub than that. I don't know if schools still give good scholarships out for track and field compared to the "glamour" sports, but my hope is that she has a good one in the wings for whatever school it is she wants to go to. And I'd imagine she'll go out and do that program proud. So one shout out needs to go to Ms. Richardson of Rochelle High School. In case you care, Rochelle is on TX-190 about halfway between Killeen and San Angelo. I get curious about these things, what can I say.

Now the other story I saw last week that blew me away is more impressive by several orders of magnitude. I think the NY Times' blog writes the summary up best.

If there already weren’t enough reasons to get your child involved in sports, the story of Sara Tucholsky will give you another one.

Ms. Tucholsky plays softball for Western Oregon University, but in her high school and college careers, the 5-foot-2 player had never hit a home run. On the last Saturday in April, in a game against Central Washington University, she hit her first home run over the fence. But as she began to run the bases, a misstep resulted in a torn knee ligament and she couldn’t continue.

Graham Hays of ESPN has a more extensive write-up of what happened next. It's an inspiration piece of work that shows there are still people who understand what the true meaning of sportsmanship is all about. If you're really feeling like getting the waterworks flowing, you can watch the You Tube of ESPN's feature on this story here. Several of the women involved get pretty choked up talking about what happened, and I can hardly blame them. It really got to me as well.

I remember when I wrote a brief post about overparenting kids a few weeks ago, I talked about how disturbed I am at times at the ways parents try to push their kids on to achieve things so the parents can experience the success vicariously through them. Accomplishment by proxy. So much of the story above about Sara Tucholsky, Mallory Holtman and Liz Wallace reminds me that there are still people who live, breathe and work in the other extreme, who understand the things that are really important. Not just about competition but about the human condition itself.

If Holtman is going on to be a coach at Central Washington, I think she'd be exactly the kind of person I would want helping my daughter become a woman in college. I thank God there are people like her out there. And should I get to become a parent, I hope that I can teach my kids to be every bit as spectacular as any of the women featured in these stories.

Yeah, I know...sentimental schmaltz from me. Who'd have thunk it?

• 13:59 How do I get to Fort Norton's again...? *wanders aimlessly on the "bad" side of 35* #
• 14:08 OMG the debris from last night's storm is insane! Everything is covered in shredded green. One in 5 houses has a splintered tree! #

But the one that drove me right round the bend this evening, was the passage quoted below:

For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.

“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”

Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.

“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man's life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It's just not worth it anymore to do.’

• 08:47 Ugh. So rainy and lightningy and icky. Gonna wait a couple hours before I drive into town. Jen has enough people to help till then. #
• 09:31 Shit. Just talked with Mom and I totally forgot about the Juice Plus thing this afternoon. I even begged Adri to come! #
• 13:48 Stayed home. Now I'm running around doing laundry and cooking for tonight and this weekend. Gripped by indecision over all the choices! #
• 20:51 JP nutrition talk went really well. Now some seriously scary weather headed our way. Wow that's a lot of lightning! #

While listening to a Filmspotting podcast a couple of weeks ago, I think they came across one of the best Top 5 topics they've touched on in a while. They were talking about the coming of the summer movie season (a week in advance of reviewing Iron Man, if I recall correctly) and how for the most part this summer doesn't seem to hold a lot to anticipate outside of some of the superhero movies. They included Indy 4 in that category because Indiana Jones is a superhero in every sense save perhaps formal title.

The point where the discussion turned interesting was when they went over their Top 5 List of Box Office Bombs That We (meaning Adam and Matty of the podcast) Genuinely Like. As someone who falls into film snob mode a little more than sometimes is healthy, this topic fascinates me. It's presumed that movies bomb at the box office because they were bad, but that's not necessarily always the case. Some movies that bombed at the box office do well in the afterlife that is home video. And there's always the question of anticipation: what movies were really hyped when they came out, only to whither and die on the vine?

They used this entry at Wikipedia as a jumping off point for trying to set down a guideline for what qualifies as a bomb and what isn't. They started with a standard that the film had to gross less than 50% of its production cost. Their added criteria was that the movies on their respective lists had to have some kind of high expectations tied to them before they underperformed commercially. After all, if you look at the list a movie like Zyzzyx Road lists as the biggest box office failure by percentage of cost recouped, but honestly who's ever even heard of that thing? By contrast, something like Alexander (Jesus, they lost $122 million on that thing?) qualified by the numbers, but failed to make either of their lists because...well it sucked.

With that in mind, and using their standards, I put together a list of four titles that would (in my opinion) meet all of the above criteria. Not all four are listed in the Wiki entry, but I would make the argument that the Wiki entry is less than comprehensive. Take that for what you will. I welcome comments on my own poor tastes, or your own personal favorite stinkers in the comments. Films listed in no particular order, links are to You Tube for the trailer:

1. Mars Attacks! (1996 - Estimated cost $70 million, box office gross $37.7) So we're fudging a bit out of the gate, as this did make slightly more than half its cost in theatrical release. That said, the expectations were high for this piece of sci-fi insanity given that Tim Burton had just come off a run that saw him make money hand over fist with Batman and Batman Returns, earned critical acclaim with Beetlejuice, Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands and just generally seemed like he could do no wrong. But this sprawling homage to 50s era sci-fi schlock fell pretty flat once in came out. I personally have a blast with this film whether it's Glenn Close doing her best riff on Nancy Reagan, Tom Jones and Jim Brown pretty much just being themselves while looking like they're wondering how they got into this mess, Natalie Portman still being delectable jailbait (a robust 15 years old at the time), and the compgen Martians hopping around blasting people with laser firing super soakers. It's a train wreck, but I'll watch it just about every time.


2. Solaris (2002 - Estimated Cost $47 million, gross $14.9 million) Adam from Filmspotting had it as his number one, and I was tremendously glad to hear it. If you watch the trailer I linked on the film title, and are at all familiar with this film, you can see easily where things went wrong. 20th Century Fox tried to sell this as something of a mystery/thriller, capitalizing on the then recent runs of success by George Clooney (his three films prior to this one being Ocean's 11, O Brother Where Art Thou? and The Perfect Storm) and Stephen Soderbergh (his three previous films at the time: Ocean's 11, Traffic and Erin Brockovich). Throw in the hype about Clooney's nude scene (a gratuitous ass shot) and you sell a movie this doesn't even come close to being. What this movie is in reality is a slow, deliberate moody pure sci-fi film with a bit of ghost story thrown in. It is a movie that I think deserved far more credit than it ever got.


3. Grindhouse (2007 - cost $67 million, gross $25 million) Someone really needs to beat the Weinsteins silly for "counterprogamming" this by scheduling it for release on Easter weekend. Gore-tastic zombie fun in Robert Rodriguez' opening salvo of Planet Terror, followed by what in my mind may be one of the best things Quentin Tarantino has ever done in Death Proof (Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Pulp Fiction are up there, but they don't have the woman I'd like to be my future ex-wife in Ms. Zoë Bell). That has summer movie written all over it, but no it gets an early April date instead. Bollocks. And if that's not enough to tell you how much this movie rocked, all you need is the faux trailer for Machete (not safe for work) that fronted the original release. John, any chance I can get "They fucked with the wrong Mexican!" on my business cards?
   
   
4. Big Trouble in Little China (1986 - Estimated cost $25 million, gross $11.1) Not on the wikipedia list, but one that I think more than qualifies. It meets the failure to cover cost standard easily. Expectations? Well it must have had some big ones from the studio, as it was a summer release in 1986. John Carpenter had a run of low budget successes under his belt with Escape From New York, Starman, Christine and The Fog prior to this release. Carpenter proved to be ahead of his time with this movie in some respects. The wire-fu action sequences that were so heavily influenced by Chinese martial arts films that at the time didn't have exposure in the US the way they do today would later be used the Wachowski Brothers as the basis for The Matrix, and build them a nice commercial franchise. Personally, I think Jack Burton could have taken Neo out in a heartbeat, but I'm biased. I have fond memories of catching this film with a couple of old friends from El Paso for a belated birthday celebration the summer before I moved to Ft. Worth. Nice memories.

• 16:17 Jenn, hallucinating from lack of sleep: "I am your common cause! I am your greater good! I am the greatest good you are ever gonna need!" #
• 16:29 OMG Jen is barely finishing her papers on time and we need to go print them and turn them in NOW.... Like.... NOW..... O_O #
• 19:17 It's hard to listen to news of the disasters in Asia. But worst is hearing about the Burmese citizens trying to help each other. #

A friend shared a link to this. The response from Constance in IM was golden:

OH for fuck's sake, you bourgeois pansies, just snort fucking COCAINE!!

SurgeStix my ass.

I'm back in town after a nice long weekend visiting the parental units in Ft. Worth and spending time with friends. As I try to get myself back up to speed, I'm going to scattershoot tonight, and get to more substantial blogging starting tomorrow (more on that below)...

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So the vegetarian experiment is behind me, and overall I think the results were pleasantly surprising and positive. I found that after so long away from animal flesh, the thing I missed most wasn't beef but bacon. Had a very nice brunch with old high school friend Jenn at Lucile's American Bistro in Ft. Worth on Saturday. No website for them, sadly, but they're located off Camp Bowie just west of Hulen for those in the area. I dug into one of their breakfast pizzas as we sat and caught up, and as I savored my first bite of crust, scrambled eggs, cheddar, bacon, roma tomatoes and red onion, I heard Travolta as Vincent Vega in my head as the flavor danced on my tongue.

Bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.

I did not set out to find sewer rat that tasted like pumpkin pie afterwards, but did manage to enjoy some offerings we picked up from The Cupcake Cottage beforehand. Friendly little place and the cupcakes were tres yummy. Strongly recommend the peanut butter cup ones if they have them, and mom seemed happy with the lemon ("nice and tart" she told me). I went back to Lucile's in the evening with friends for a late supper and thought they made a solid lobster bisque. It's not Eddie V's, but I'm biased in my love for my Austin eateries.

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Now that the vegetarian experiment is behind me, I do intend to try and stick to it somewhat, though not religiously. I just love me some dead cow and pig a little too much to say farewell to them forever.

But now that the experiment I was referring to as Lent 2.0 is done, I had made up my mind to work on to Lent 3.0 to try and maintain a sense of focus and purpose mentally towards trying to improve myself. Having settled on what I was giving up, I do think it was perhaps a little foolish or mischievous to mention that I would be starting six weeks without alcohol at my beer meetup gathering at the Ginger Man yesterday evening.

On the plus side, though, they are a good group of people to tilt my last pints for 40-someodd days with. You would have thought the way some of them were looking at me, I'd sprouted a third arm or something, but I do really think it is going to be a good experience for me to dry out for a while. I didn't really feel like my drinking was getting out of hand or anything, but I do feel like a timeout with it for a while will do my body good, and help get some mental garbage cleaned out. Fact is, I was finding myself getting increasingly depressed when I drank in the evenings, especially if I was around large groups of friends who were coupled out. I know I've not been happy with my status of late, but I think that bothered me enough to say that I need to try and get my head in the right place to be happy and constructive with myself. If the odd beer or three isn't helping, then it needs to take a hike until I can get past this mental block I've got.

I've been told by some friends who I've mentioned this to that I should maybe avoid said drunken gatherings in the future, but I personally think that being sober in such surroundings may provide some interesting perspectives for use in future writing projects.

Which I suppose is my way of putting my friends on notice for the next six weeks ;-).

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While I'm taking this renewed effort towards sobriety, I'm also executing a redux on my writing dedication from the original Lenten period. I've slacked off considerably for the last couple of weeks, and there's been no good reason for it beyond a general apathy that I shouldn't have been facilitating with distractions like the web and video games. Look for considerably more blather from me over the next couple of months. It's summer movie season, it's not like there won't be things to talk about.

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While I'm thinking about the summer film season, Iron Man rocked. For the maybe three of you who read this and haven't seen it, you really, really need to stay in the theater through the end of the credits. It is a singularly comic book geeky moment to close the feature out, but I dug it so much it wasn't funny. I have to believe the film has something to offer just about everyone. My father actually paid to see it twice, having seen it with my mother opening weekend and then taking my nephew River to see it while I was visiting this weekend. I couldn't even guess as to what the last movie he saw twice paying full admission both times. I qualify it with the full admission, as my father is a notorious auditorium hopper. So that really is saying something.

Speaking of which, I'm seriously toying with the idea of trying to grow the mustache/goatee/soul patch combo Robert Downey Jr. is sporting in the flick. A decent look at it can be seen in the second pic at this link. As Constance noted when talking about it online, she thinks I could actually potentially make that work as it appears to avoid most all the areas where I can't seem to grow facial hair to save my life. I don't know if I can successfully make the look work for me, but it might be fun to try. Could potentially increase my coolness factor by a few degrees.

Well, a man can dream anyway.

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Speaking of summer and movies, Paramount has begun posting some of the offerings for their Summer Film Classics series on their website. There's no page set up yet with all the offerings listed out, but starting with the May calendar, you can see the offerings month to month (link should work, but let me know if it doesn't). Amusing irony, Constance...the weekend screenings on the 24th-25th of May (Casablanca and Key Largo) are bookended with one unrelated movie. Grease. Not joking, and I had nothing to do with it. I think you need to pay to see it, as I think once you do relent since the damn movie seems to be stalking you, once you give in, as the last credit rolls, all prints in existence will spontaneously combust and the movie will be eradicated forever.

Well, you can dream anyway.

Easily the highlight double bill comes first week of June: LA Confidential and Chinatown June 4th and 5th. Hard boiled detectives, femme fatales (well, and Kim Basinger playing futilely at being one), and 1950s LA crime and punishment. It doesn't get any better than that.

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What the hell is up with the Dobie's booker this week? For those of you not in the Austin know, Dobie Theater is the arthouse option right by the UT campus. At least normally it would be, but you'd never know to look at the offerings for this week.

What Happens in Vegas - the Ashton Kutcher/Cameron Diaz debacle

Speed Racer - Wachowski Brothers live action riff of the old import cartoon

Forgetting Sarah Marshall - mainstream raunch comedy from the Apatow machine

Redbelt - maybe the only thing that can qualify as "indie" as it's written and directed by David Mamet. Course, it's about jujitsu and the MMA phenomenon, so hardly edgy material

And then not this week but next they're picking up the new Indiana Jones feature. Oy freaking vay, people. Nothing they're carrying I would consider watching there, given I can see it at Alamo with much better production value and real food for roughly the same cost overall. Maybe it's just a sign of how the economy is tanking, that they're booking mainstream features in the early part of the summer to get the money flowing. If that's the case, I think I'm finding that more than a bit depressing.

• 06:56 Up at 6am. Woolfing down oatmeal and going over flashcards again. I feel good about this, but I need to leave SOON. #
• 08:15 Stuck in traffic. Should have left an hour an a half early. Please go, please move, please let me get there on time... #
• 08:49 Well, begging the universe for mercy seems to have worked like a charm. I am in Parlin with a bluebook and pens and i'm on time! #
• 12:10 I just OWNED that exam. My arm is tired from spanking its ass all morning. A plus! Haha. I'm awesome. #
• 12:35 One quick errand and then to a coffee shop with Jen to get lunch and help her with her Big Scary Papers of Doom. :) #
• 13:37 Earthquake in central China kills 10000 people. It was a 7.9. They expect the number of dead to rise. #
• 14:49 Why is Austin Java full of gorgeous men who have no interest in three pretty ladies? I am so tired of being single. #
• 15:53 Robert Plant & Allison Krause are good for editing papers. #

• 09:21 HILARY IS GOING TO CONCEDE! tiny.cc/wX3nu #
• 14:14 Just got done shooting, great weather today. EIGHTEEN WEEKS TILL BEIJING! #
• 14:15 Just noticed that I'm using a LOT OF CAPS today. Strange. Perhaps I am excitable or something. #
• 18:33 Trying to study, but I keep getting distracted. By this stupid laptop right here. Yes this THING, which I am now going to close.... Grr.... #
• 19:36 All of a sudden i don't feel very good. Kinda annoying since i need to make Mom her dinner soon. Oog. Maybe some ginger mint tea? #