Digressed

December 15, 2006: Changing Seasons

Football season has all of three weeks left and what a season it’s been. I seriously think the last three minutes of the Florida-South Carolina game cost me three years of my life. Drew and I ended up with tickets stood amidst the Carolina faithful and were screaming our brains out hoping for whatever miracle would grant us a third blocked-kick in the game. In front of us, a Gator couple is putting up with a Gamecock fan obnoxiously reminding us that the kick wins it and that the kicker has already made one from 56 yards out (and while it was called back, he still made. Florida fans can not assume kicks will fly between the uprights this season). I’m hardly paying attention when Drew tells me the husband bets the Carolina fan $400 that the kick won’t go through.

Across the field, Carrie and Ella are submerged in the madness of the alumni side. Ella turns to Carrie and says, If they make this kick, it’s over. There’s no time!. Carrie just matter-of-factly responds, Well, we just have to block this one too. Ella replies, Oh, Ok, as if the game was on playstation and Carrie had the controller in hand and was sitting next to the console in case they needed to hit Reset. Speaking of, blocking a kick on EA’s NCAA Football is nothing shy of impossible. Maybe I just don’t know the trick or maybe it’s changed in this year’s version but I remember the AI controlling the rest of my players didn’t even seem to try. The one time I managed to get through the line and close enough, I ended up roughing the kicker giving the computer an automatic first down. Total BS. No matter, 0:08 left on the clock, and after two tension-building time outs, the teams line up, ball is hiked, the kick is off…

and Jarvin Moss blocks it.

The stadium erupts to the likes of Johnson to Quezy vs. FSU in ‘97. If Samuel L. Jackson would have been next to us in the stands he would have been screaming, This was Divine Intervention! You know what Divine Intervention is? all while he, Drew and myself hugged each other and jumped around like a bunch of kids. In fact, I was really jumping around like a little kid and I definitely couldn’t find enough people to hug. Amongs the alumni frenzy, Ella says to Carrie: Oh wow, you were right and Carrie says: See?.

After some searching I found this guy named Erik who took a bunch of clips taken by fans, condensed them into one and put it on youtube. While I could do without the 37 second intro, the Strongbad techno-soundtrack and the subtitles stating the obvious (home crowd goes wild? Really? Where?), I still get chills watching it. An exciting finale which is not necessarily a good thing considering Carolina came in with a sub-par record. Nobody seems to be able to figure out what has happened to the Gators since the second half at Auburn and it has made for some stomach-churning games. Guess we’ll just have to let the coaches (hopefully) sort it out these last few weeks or else the Noles are going to give us some payback for that ‘97 Janikowski chomps-his-way-back-to-the-bench game.

But that’s what makes college football what it is. Following the magical Rutgers story this season has been awesome (you know it’s big when National Football League writers add three three extra pages to their weekly NFL column to share their experience at a Rutgers vs. Louisville college football game). It’s even the little things that get captured every Saturday that are a treat, with my favorite this week being the photo of the head-painted fan laying a wet one on the Georgia player after their upset of Auburn. The expressions are just priceless.

Austin’s Powers

Carrie’s conferences usually mean travel time and for her most recent one we booked a few days ahead and spent the first weekend of November in Austin. We planned for this a few months back and I suggested to try and make the Texas-Oklahoma State game to check out the Longhorn-style pre-game activities. I figured, Texas is as crazy about football as Florida so it could be a great chance for photos and some sightseeing. Plus, Texas’ Royal-Memorial Stadium now boasts the ridiculous 134×55 ft. Godzillatron, a screen that requires 40 five-ton A/C’s to keep cool during warmer days. If that’s not flooring you somehow, keep in mind that college football fields are 160 ft. wide so this thing is just 26 ft. shy of spanning across! Seriously, what the heck?

Obviously being a football-crazy school provides the means to do this sort of thing. Beyond that, one of the cool things about schools like Florida or Texas is that football is so big that the women are just as crazy about it. My friend Melanie is a sports nut and a mad Florida fan. She has orange and blue everything to wear if need arises. During her years in Gainesville, she would turn into a 12-year old when Albert (as in, the mascot) was nearby. Alright, so pretend Albert is Orlando Bloom and you get the idea. That might seem odd to some people, so just know that a friend once wore the Albert suit to his dorm and the girls went crazy and started posing with him for pictures… in their underwear. I wouldn’t doubt for a second that, had Melanie been there, she would have been all over Albert wearing nothing but an orange bra and blue panties and we would have the pictures to prove it. Then again, maybe it’s better that this took place BM. Regardless of anything else, these mascot people are onto something here.

Melanie now lives in LA with her husband Bob. I visited her about a year ago and she told me how Bob always comments on how, not only does she have to say Go Gators to any by-passer sporting anything that reveals them as a Florida fan but, even worse, how everyone always replies back with Go Gators showing no hesitation what-so-ever. Any time I run into this situation (which does happen quite often), I always think of Melanie and Bob. The version I play in my head is of the first time where he asks if it is some sort of rule we learn in school and, if not, why is it Florida fans are compelled to always say it. Melanie then responds by simply turning and looking at him like he has three heads.

Melanie and Bob just married recently and our friends Sara and Barbara came up to Gainesville, painted an orange and blue congratulations message on the 34th street wall, took a picture and gave it to her at the wedding. Out of all things to get emotional about that day, Melanie just couldn’t hold the tears upon seeing the photo. I wasn’t there to see this but I heard it from Laurel who, while working on her doctorate at Florida, went to every home and away game over a two year period and then wrote her dissertation on football fan behavior. I’m telling you, freaks!

Anyways, on our flight into Austin, the two people on the row in front of us started chit-chatting. He lived in Austin; she’s in town for a wedding and this was her first visit. It turns out, she went to Florida. But she didn’t just say it by claiming she went to school there or even talking about her major. What she did mention, however, was that all Gators are eternally grateful to Texas for beating Nebraska in the ‘96 Big-12 game thus triggering the chain of events that would propel us into the national championship, all of which is entirely accurate.

We arrived Friday late afternoon and caught the bus to downtown to meet up with her grad-school friends at The Dog & Duck, a pub just south of campus. We had dwelled over renting a car but finally decided against it which was just fine as Austin’s bus system turned out to be quite effective and hard to beat for the money. Rides are 50¢ but if you pay $1, you basically have a full day pass anywhere including the airport. The ride downtown took twenty minutes and we entered the pub another ten minutes later.

After ordering a round we started to catch up with Carrie’s friends and former roommates and are introduced to the new faces. One of the girls was armed in a burnt-orange Longhorn tee and seemed the prime candidate to inquire about Saturday. A Louisiana native, Sam is not only an avid Texas fan but also keeps up with SEC football because her brother is a huge LSU fan. Not only did she give us some tips but also offered to help us get into the student section so things were going quite smoothly so far. As dinner-time nears, we are originally tempted by the decadent aroma of The Clay Pit, an Indian restaurant across the street, but it turns out we have a picky eater who is not an Indian-cuisine fan among us so it’s Thai Tara instead.

America needs more Alamos to remember

Ask anyone about Austin and they’ll either bring up the live music scene or that it’s the rose petal amongst the armpit that is Texas. Ask anyone who lives there and they’ll list the Alamo Drafthouse as a venue not to miss. Austin boasts five different Alamos, all showing movies, serving food, beer & wine (even sangria, and in pitchers too!). However, the Alamo is far from your traditional drafthouse and they are making it big (ranked #1 theater by Entertainment Weekly) because they get it. You can obviously just head to enjoy a movie but you can also get your fix of wacky shows and special movie-inspired events.

I visited Carrie while she was still in grad-school at UT and, for my first Alamo experience, she took me to check out Videoke, where audience members would to take turns voicing over 5-minute long clips of movies like Shawn of the Dead and Office Space. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I got a pretty good idea as we watched previews for upcoming shows such as the School-Bus Massacre Special (you ride a school bus around town while watching movies that featured school bus accidents), the School Cafeteria Special (movies featuring high-school cafeterias while your food was served by actual cafeteria ladies), and Jaws at Barton Springs (watched the movie from a tube in the water while people sneaked around in the water nibbling at people’s toes - or at least that’s what I would imagine they’d do). One word ran through my head as I watched all this: Ingenious!.

Thus, during our visit to Austin, our list of things to do contained an Alamo show as a minimum requirement. Upon landing, Carrie called the downtown location (the one that presents the coolest shows) and cracked up when she heard what was in store: The Sinus Show featuring none other than Snakes on a Plane. The Sinus Show is lead by Jerm Pollet, Owen Egerton, and John Erler and might be best described as an off-the-chain Mystery Science Theater. These guys will notice every little aspect of a movie that can be poked fun at and will shamelessly do so while adding their own ad-lib dialog and commentary. To top it all off, at some point during the show, the movie is stopped and they perform a live skit related to the film complete with costumes and props. And all this while you’re furiously trying to keep from spitting out your beer. In fact, I was laughing so hard it was making it difficult to down my drink. Fortunately, they organized an audience-wide drinking game anytime the camera would switch to Snake-Eye view thus buying us 10 seconds here and there to quench our thirst.

If I still haven’t convinced you about the greatness that is the Alamo and that you should push to get one started in your own city, take a peek at some current and upcoming shows (follow the link and check out the previews):

• Saturday Morning Cartoon Cereal Party. All while being served all-you-can-eat sugar sweet cereal, baby.
• Revenge of the Nerds. Presented by none other than Curtis Armstrong, with a Q&A session following the movie.
• School House Rock Sing-Along. I quote from the description: But if you thought it was fun to learn about the body’s circulatory system when you were sitting with your siblings in front of a TV, just wait and see how fun it is to learn all those facts all over again in a theater crowded full of 200 friends.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. All-you-can-eat pizza, as if you could expect anything else.
• Old School Hip Hip Rap-Along: Need I say more?

The Alamo is one of the many places in Austin that makes it bearable dealing with 108°F weather. And it’s worth every penny.

South vs. South West

Saturday morning we took care of a little shopping and were planning on spending the day amongst the Texas faithful getting ready for the 6:30pm kickoff against Oklahoma State. On our way to campus, we happened to walk by the Clay Pit so we decided to plan ahead for the evening and made dinner reservations for after the game. It was now after 3pm and, although overcast, there was good enough light for photos so I’m totally excited about capturing the Texas fans getting their tailgating going on.

Except there were hardly any to be found.

Three-and-a-half hours before game time and the UT campus feels like we’re in the middle of Spring Break. Sam had mentioned they’re not really big into the tailgating thing here - and she knows what it’s like thanks to her LSU ties - but I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it myself. This was a week after Texas made a great comeback to beat Tech and now the team is ranked high and poised for a title run. Makes no sense.

My brothers spent Labor Day weekend in Gainesville, wanting a bit of time to get away from their daily routine. Carrie and I had laid out tentative plans for that Saturday consisting of an all-bicycle-day and so it went: We rode down to the new 2nd Street Bakery for breakfast, then connected to the Hawthorne Trail down to the north side of Paynes Prairie. On the way back we cut through campus - something I actually had never done - and it was a non-stop array of people parked, throwing footballs, grilling, watching games on portable satellite setups all the way from 13th, by the plaza, the stadium and past the law school. We finished with some ice cream at Sweet Dreams before heading home for some a little rest. The entire time on the bike I kept thinking I should have had my camera on me.

So I guess I was pretty much expecting something along those lines at Texas. I had yet to take some good football-fan photos this season for one reason or another and here I had the great opportunity to experience how it’s done away from my own ground. Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed. We headed up to Austin Pizza to grab a drink and check out some other games. Sam showed up around 6pm and we started walking toward the stadium. I found myself a ticket (Sam had one for Carrie) and we worked our way in. Texas played a flawless game and the Godzillatron was insane. I found myself looking at it more than the field itself so I don’t know how to feel about that. Do you really want to go to the stadium to watch the game on TV? It was impressive, nonetheless.

When marketing backfires

Travel out of Gainesville is not generally the most convenient thing. You either find a cheap fare out of Jacksonville, Orlando or Tampa and then deal with the extra time and cost to drive and park; or you occasionally find a cheap fare to fly out of the regional airport and deal with a layover in (most likely) Atlanta. Some people I know choose the former because they claim to never have good luck with flights out of here. Personally, I’ve flown enough to know the do’s and don’ts of flying out of Gainesville because the problem is most likely Atlanta. You usually want to fly out in the morning, but not too early because a delayed flight on the night before that came in real late will be delayed going out since the pilots are required to have so many hours of rest in between (thankfully so). You also never want to fly out too late in the day because flights start to back up more and more as the day goes by. And you never, by any means, fly out Friday afternoon or evening. I lost a silly odd-man-out game to Kevin and Jeff once and the punishment was a shot as chosen by a bartender that none of us knew. Bad news: I was treated to what he referred to as a flaming grasshopper: half tequila, half Tabasco. I love Tabasco but, trust me, this thing was nasty. Still, ask me to choose between a night of getting plastered by drinking nothing but flaming grasshoppers or booking an itinerary flying through Hartsfield on a Friday night and I will choose the drinking night 20 out of 20 times. People will tell you it’s because you fly Delta, or American or some other airline they normally fly. Whatever. Air Force One would be delayed if it had to fly through Atlanta on Friday evenings. Hartsfield is the curse and it will make your Friday night pure misery.

As long as the worrisome times can be avoided, I usually prefer to fly out of Gainesville because the convenience of an airport 15 minutes away is worth a bit of extra cost particularly when it’s fairly reasonable. I only have to think of the return leg: nothing feels better than being 15 minutes from home when the plane lands. Also, the aircraft choices have improved these past few years. Back in the day, Delta actually used to fly large aircraft into the airport but after some restructuring we were left with ASA as their partner servicing us. It was during this time that I started traveling for work and the aircraft choices then were, well, a hoot: you had either a variation of the Embraer EMB120 Brasilia or the ATR 72, both being prop planes.

My friend Marie-Paule and two of her girlfriends went on a month-long trip to Nepal. They spent a few days in Kathmandu and then wanted to hike up the lower 2kms of Mount Everest (or something like that, I can’t exactly remember the story but it sounded fun and crazy - just up her sleeve). The only way to reach the hike’s starting point was by plane. A prop plane, no less. They spent three days waiting for weather to be safe enough to take off. And by waiting, I mean sitting-at-the-airport, waiting for this very rare and brief window of time. When this unpredictable window appeared, someone would run in frantically screaming at them so they would grab all their gear, run down to the plane, board and then sit there, props running and all, only to eventually be told it wasn’t happening because it just wasn’t safe. Two days they went through this until finally they took off on the third. And, you can just imagine what the ride was like considering they were next to only the tallest mountain in the world.

Anyways, I know exactly what that ride was like except, being in Florida, there are no freezing cold temperatures and no Everest. But I made plenty trips between Atlanta and Gainesville on an EMB 120 Brasilia and every time I swore the plane was going to tear itself to pieces in mid-air. You could feel the entire body of the plane vibrating in a slow ping-pong pattern through the whole flight. To make matters worse, these things were slow as molasses. It was nightmarish. So it was with open arms that I welcomed ASA’s fleet upgrade which phased out the EMB 120 in our area. While the ATR 72 is still active, we now have the option of flights aboard a Bombadier CRJ 200 that, though a little cozy, it gets you from Gainesville to Atlanta in under an hour. In any event, while shaky, slower and a little stressful, the props were still good enough to get you there and back so they still deserve the credit due.

What’s the point of all this? Well, the other day I got a sample in the mail for Gillette’s new Fusion razor. First of, if you don’t know, we don’t have cable TV at home so we don’t see much in terms of commercials outside the times we’re watching a game or something else at a friend’s or at a bar. Anyways, I had heard about this thing but hadn’t actually seen it with my own eyes. Besides, the whole thing seemed ridiculous and, sure enough, as I stared at it through the packaging I thought to myself the same thing: ridiculous. But hey, I figured I had the sample so might as well try it.

Well, it may have 3 times the number of blades on the Sensor but it is definitely not three times sharper nor did it allow me to shave three times faster. The thing is just way too big. On top of that, I’ve used it all of six times and the blades are already feeling like they’re old. I can’t even imagine how much these things cost considering the far inferior Sensor cartridges with their measly two blades run like $6 for a pack of 5 and, frankly I’m not going to bother to find out because there’s no way I’m ever going to purchase this thing. In case you missed the point, Gillette, when The Onion features you in a news story they are actually saying you’ve gone beyond ridiculous. There is absolutely no reason why any razor should have near or more blades than any aircraft designed to carry human beings across long distances be it to Gainesville, Atlanta Hartsfield or the base of Mount freaking Everest.

The whole thing actually got me doing some reading and I discovered some people even recommend not using shaving cream at all! Others recommend the old-fashioned blades or creams that are better than any of the junk Gillette has to offer. I eventually came across Corey Greenberg’s How to get that perfect shave and that’s when I decided I’d had enough. I’m on to you now, Gillette, and from the looks of google, it seems many other people are as well. You’re just lucky I bought a new can of gel a week before I received your free crappy sample. But guess what, I no longer believe anything.

Plastic Saves the Day

The new house is in major need of windows. They’re single-pane, aluminum-frame from the early 70’s meaning they’re crap as nothing good came out from the era that gave us disco and classic rock. They are so bad you can feel the draft even when they’re closed. We don’t even dare open some as we tried once and then spent more than enough effort to get them closed again. Much worse, the noise bleeds right through them: the kids playing in the pool behind us and the lawn-obsessed neighbor with his damn blower from across the street always feel like they’re in the room next to you. Needless to say, I decided upgrading the windows was high on the priority list and, coincidentally, decent tax breaks were available for homeowners doing energy-efficient upgrades this tax year. After getting a couple of estimates I placed the order with Heritage Glass and Windows. I started with just the bedroom ones ordering a total of six along with trim and new sills. I was told they would be manufactured so it would be about 6-8 weeks before they would come back to do the install. The total charge was just over $3,000 and it went on the Amex.

Nine weeks go by and I start to wonder what’s up so I call Heritage but get a number-disconnected message. I think to myself I’ve misdialed so I try again only to get the same result. I panic and do a google search and, sure enough, the website has been converted to a forum where the web admins inform everyone that Heritage has gone under and that they never paid them for their site. I catch up on the few messages from the handful of registered users and then call Amex. They take the info and put the amount on hold - which is moot since it’s already paid for. No matter, it’s going to be another 6 to 8 weeks while they attempt to contact the vendor and investigate the claim. Thankfully, about two months later I get a letter informing me the amount will be fully credited to my account. So the moral of the story, kids, is to never write a check for major home improvements.

And finally, if you really want to know: the Carolina fan declined the bet.