Four-Day Delay

I can't believe that it's been so long since I've done any kind of updating to this thing. It's been a busy few days. Let's start with the weekend, shall we?

We had rehearsal for "Fools" at Olathe Community Theatre on Friday. The show had two acts and we ran the 2nd act twice that night. I got several notes that I wasn't doing the character to the director's approval. It was very frustrating that I wasn't able to get it, but I also think that some of the criticism wasn't warranted. Two differing visions of the character, I suppose. It was very hard to deal with, and I walked out of rehearsal not feeling very confident. That's happened a lot with this show and it may just be that I don't have a handle on this character as opposed to some others that I've played, or it may be that it's been so long since I've done a show that I'm completely rusty, or, and this is the worst, maybe I'm just creatively dried out on acting.

That's a scary thing to say because performing is something I very much enjoy, but this show hasn't been an exceptional experience. I'm hoping that as the rehearsal period comes to an end and we're able to get in front of an audience that the whole experience will change. I just don't know.

Saturday afternoon was our poker tournament. It lasted a fairly long time, from about 12:15 to 5:00 PM. I finished 2nd and increased my standings in our tournament points totals. I'm now leading due to my two first place finishes and my two second place finishes. The next tournament will be #15 and the last under the old points regime. We'll crown a winner and start everyone over at zero points. If I can beat the 2nd place person I'll walk away with the funny hat of victory! I also found out who is posting to this blog as Tall David. My apologies for not realzing who you were. Thanks for the tip about Mentos and soda, we tried it and it worked pretty well. I've got an idea for a loader that I think will get the whole package into the bottle quickly: rolled-up paper. I'm going to try it soon.

Sunday was another busy day, a birthday celebration at the Westport Flea Market. That place is hard to describe to people. I don't really enjoy the food there, but I sure do enjoy the atomosphere. I love to go there because they have my favorite beer on tap, some of my favorite bands on the jukebox and the best bar game ever invented: shuffleboard. If I ever had the desire to open a bar, I'd like it to be something like that place.

That night was rehearsal again and it was another frustrating time. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good things about this show. Tricia is hilarious in it, as is Bob Hart and the lead. If I weren't in it, I'm sure that I'd go see it. It could be as simple as a lack of confidence on my part that makes these rehearsals so difficult for me. Tonight we're going back to the 2nd act. I hope it'll be much better for me, and excellent for everyone involved.

Inexorable Turn of the Cards

The clock on the screen says 1:14 AM. I'm staring into the display with the fevered glare of the truly insane. My opponent is taking his time to decide whether or not to call my bluff. It's just the two of us and the match has gone on for four hours. Finally he throws down his cards and I rake a pot that means the difference between elimination and a precious victory. The chair-hopping half-strut that I do only accentuates the feeling of adrenaline pouring through my veins.

I play a fair amount of poker, as some of you already know. It's such an engaging game. I've been playing it for years, since the old college days when we'd play for hours with laundry money. We'd play nickel-ante and quarter max bet. It was such a simple time. If you'd won, you'd come home with your hands smelling with the sharp tang of metal. I always loved that odor, the smell of coins. Why does money have such an evocative scent? It's been said that the religion of America is money. I can believe it, money comes with its own incense!

Poker is something that's so easy to play now. The recent boom and TV exposure has really increased the number of outlets you can try your hand at. Here in town there are four companies that bring poker tournaments to bars. Seven nights a week you can leave the house and play cards for free. Prizes are pretty pedestrian, chip sets, card markers and playing cards. My wife always tells me to "win lots of t-shirts" when I go out to play because there's always some point when they give away a $1 t-shirt. You can see the business model in this, of course. You get 50 guys in a bar playing poker on a Monday night, they're going to increase your business. So by the time you've won that $1 t-shirt, you've spent $20 in alcohol and food. Not me, of course. I'm the guy who drinks one diet soda and gets refills all night.

There's a tournament this weekend that I'm co-hosting. This is our 14th tournament. We've got hosting down to a science and I like to think that we're successful at it. 14 tournaments is a pretty good barometer of success. Of course, people are so busy that it's hard to get the tournament to grow. Even though we have regulars we're still stuck at 17 being the most people who've ever played. At one point we thought we could get 36 players. Now I realize that idea was a pipe dream, who would want to play at something so crowded and unwieldy?

I've won the thing twice. So far, I'm the only person to do it. I'm hoping that this weekend I can make it three times. I think I'm a pretty good player, but I know there are players who are better than I am. It's a fact of life; no matter how good you are at something, there's always someone better. I'll just do the best I can and try to sneak by under the radar, that's the way to win.

Our Dumb Leader

I won't call this a political blog because it's not primarily about politics, but I do have an interest in current events. I read quite a few newspapers each day because of my job, so I like to think that I'm reasonably well-informed. At least, more so than the average American, who gets the news from god knows where since so many people are willing to believe in things like creationism, despite the evidence to the contrary. Maybe they hear it all in bars.

Like I said, this isn't a political blog, but I just read something that's so scary-idiotic that I have to comment here. Our president has decided that the best way to get the Iranians to give up their nuclear program is to refuse to rule out attacking them with nuclear weapons. So, the way our leader has decided to prevent nuclear spread is to threaten to use them again. It just seems like when people decided to vote for this alleged leader Bush, they forgot that one of the primary things we should have in a leader is intelligence. I don't think Bush has any conception of what would happen after he used nuclear weapons on Iran. I can imagine that he thinks that after the bomb is dropped the Iranians suddenly see the error of their ways, rather than, as is incredibly more probably, the entire Muslim world arises in fury and plunges the world into a nightmare of collapse.

There's nothing wrong with negotiating with Iran closely. I think we should be over there talking and get them to stop their nuclear program. It's in our interest to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of religious fundamentalists. But threatening Iran before the talking begins only hardens every position and makes it more difficult to achieve our goals. Actually using nuclear weaponsgives the Muslim world its very own "date which will live in infamy". Let us sieze the moral high ground and use our nuclear arsenal in an intelligent way, a way which gives us the advantage. A way that puts the Iranians in a place where they want to give up the weapons. Of course, that'll take intelligence. Maybe someone can keep President Bush busy for a week or two and the adults in the White House can take care of this. Get that man an XBox 360!

Lazy Easter Sunday

It's Easter and it's a day for family. I talked to my parents and, amazingly, my oldest brother. I only say amazingly because it was fortuitous that I should be on the phone with my parents when they stop by for dinner. I also found out that he reads this blog, so: Hi Bill!

It seems like all my friends are with family today. I wonder what the call is on Easter that makes people decide to come together with relatives? I don't think the religious aspects of Easter are what drives the need to gather together with their family. Too many people I know are post-Catholic (thanks to Tracy for the term) to have that be the reasoning. I suppose that it's just a convenient time to get a group of people bound by love and blood around a table. Family maintenance, I guess. Bonds fade if they're not renewed. And that's it. Renewal. The central theme of Easter, from the Christian tradition of Jesus' resurrection to the Anglo-Saxon rituals celebrating the return of Spring. It's comforting to know that today's observance of eating ham around a table extends as far back as the 7th century.

As an aside, I'm also pleased that a stream-of-consciousness paragraph can elucidate such a revelation (to me at least, those of you who figured that out before me can leave deragatory comments if you wish) about the observance of Easter. There may yet be hope for me...

Well, I wish you all a happy and healthy Easter. I've got an oddly optimistic view of Spring this year. It makes me wonder if there's something in the air besides pollen...

The Bands of My Youth

I'm reading Greg Kot's "Wilco: Learning How to Die" this week. It's a short book, a history of the band Wilco (one of my personal favorites. Right before I started this blog I went to their show at the Uptown, which rocked hard). The book is more like a biography of Jeff Tweedy (the leader of Wilco) than being about the band itself. The early chapters deal with Uncle Tupelo, probably one of my favorite bands of all time and definitely the best band to come out of Belleville, Illinois, ever. The book is not what I would call well-written, the writing can be flat and uninspiring, but the story is very compelling. Of course, it could just be the personal feelings I have for Uncle Tupelo that make it so engrossing to me.

Which is probably why, when I got to the part of the book that dealt with the breakup of Uncle Tupelo, I became so incredibly sad. I was reading late at night in bed (couldn't sleep, but that's an unrelated issue) and had to put the book down. I couldn't read anymore. I had to go downstairs and listen to some of the albums and just listen. Recapture the feeling I had when I first heard those tunes on No Depression, the feeling that someone finally was saying what I had felt. They were speaking to me through my stereo, they knew what was missing for me for all those years in high school. It was great, and it was melancholy, because that music's gone.

I guess I shouldn't be too sad, the two guys seperate and find their own identities in their own bands. Both excellent bands, that put out music that I love, but sometimes I just wish they could have worked it out. It's an elegy for what might have been. Now I'll throw on some Wide Swing Tremolo or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and celebrate that these guys are still young, still prolific and have grown as artists apart from each other. Besides, they're still speaking to me through the stereo. As they've grown, so have I. I hope these conversations go on forever.

Working for the Man

Sometimes when I'm working hard all day I start thinking about my old boss, Angie. She was disorganized as hell and didn't do a whole lot of actual work, but when she left she said she was going off to start her own independent research company. Since that's basically what I spend quite a few of my days doing, it makes me wonder if I could do something like that. I know I've got mad skillz as far as finding things. I mean, I've been able to pull proverbial needles out of excessively large haystacks before, so that wouldn't bother me, but what I do wonder about is the amount of time spent working versus the amount of time you'd spend pimping yourself, and that doesn't just include the time spent blogging about how good you are (I don't like boasting like that, in fact, that's one of the things that turns me off to hip-hop, the constant boasting. Just an aside, or as it should be more properly known, a tangent). I wonder if Angie was able to make it work. I don't think so, because the last thing I heard about her was that she was back to working for the man, at the public library.

So, to put a cap on this thought, working for the man can suck, but working for yourself and failing doesn't sound like any kind of picnic either.

Went out into the woods yesterday and it was beautiful.

I think Spring has come for us and I'm oddly happy about it. Usually I'm kind of down when it gets hot because I like Winter's starkness, but this year I feel pretty good to be walking around in the warm sunshine. I highly recommend it to anyone who gets down about impending Summer.

Stan the Man Glazer!

So Tricia and I were grocery shopping today at the Hy-Vee on State Line.
As we were leaving the store, I look over and I see a care that looks like this:
[Edited to remove the picture. It was messing with the formatting. Suffice
to say that it was a ridiculously expensive Mercedes R-Class]


It's being driven by this guy:

I don't know if you know who that is, but it's Stanford Glazer. The reason I knew it was him was that on the side of this (very) expensive car there was one of those magnetic stickers. It said in huge blue and red letters:

STANFORD GLAZER

FOR

MAYOR

It was the most ridiculous thing I'd seen in probably a week, since I stopped paying attention to FOX News. Stan, driving around in his Phallo-mobile, that he's decided to take a deduction on because he's driving around in it to get groceries. If he runs for mayor again I hope he gets two votes, one from himself and one from the person impressed with his stupid $50,000 car.

Crazy Strange Day

Today, Tricia (wife)'s mom came to visit, she was going to be here around 1:30 PM, so we got up early (...ish, 8:30 AM. Early for the weekend, anyway). We got the grocery shopping done. This was also early as this is usually a Sunday chore. My internal clock is all messed up! With that and the time change last week I hardly can tell if I'm coming or going.

Tough Rehearsal

Tonight was a Friday night rehearsal, which I'm never in favor of, but that's the way the schedule worked out. It was a frustrating rehearsal for me, I'm pretty low-energy and that's death in comedy. I wound up getting a ton of notes from the director, which I knew that I needed. It's hard when you know that you can do better at something, but your body and mind won't cooperate and make it happen. This role needs levels and the right attitude at the right time and I was trying to force it the whole night. If this is going to work out, I'm going to have to find a way to make the character more consistent.

Part of the problem is that I haven't been to rehearsal since Monday, so the work we did that night has dissipated over the week. This week is not much better, since the next time I have rehearsal is one week from tonight. I'm going to have to do a lot of script study and get all my lines memorized. Hopefully I'll be spot-on next week. Hopefully.

Theatre News

I'm currently in a show at the Olathe Community Theatre. It's Neil Simon's Fools and it promises to be quite funny. I play Count Yousekevich, the villian of the show.

Today, the director sent out an email letting us know that our cast is now complete (we were missing an actor after the person who was cast went out to do a paying gig). The last person cast is someone I've never done a show with, but he's positively hilarious and will be a great addition. I'm very excited to be doing this show, but then, I was excited even before Bill was cast since I get to do a show with my wife and this director, RickL.

My wife just reminded me that our bios are due. I'm terrible at these things but she's always on top of these things. Dammit! I always write something dumb about 'glad to be in the show' and 'favorite roles'. I need something creative. Maybe I'll put that I'm glad that the rest of the cast can support me. ;-)

Issues

This Slate.com article details a day spent patrolling the border country in the South of Arizona with the Minuteman Project. If you don't know anything about these people, they're a group of (mostly) men, white and over 50 who fear and detest the people whe come into this country illegally. It disturbs me that these people can't get the idea through their heads that there's very little they can do to stop the onrush of immigrants, and more importantly, there's little that they should do. Immigration is what feeds this country's growth. Undocumented workers (to use the current political jargon) do a large number of jobs, create wealth in their home countries and subsidize our Social Security system. Without that large amount of money flowing into Social Security, the people out in the desert couldn't cash their Social Security checks to keep themselves out there.

Of course, they feel that they're out there strictly to make a point, but I have to think that that viewpoint is held by a minority. You don't get the number of people they have there (500 or so) if they don't feel they can do any good. It's the same impulse that drives people to get a lynch mob together to take care of the local "trouble-making" minority.

This kind of thinking incenses me. What is it about Mexicans coming here that makes old white people crazy? What's disturbing is that the people who are coming across the border only want what the people watching them already have: a better life for themselves and their families, freedom to live the way they want, free from the crushing poverty at home. America's promise has always been that people can work hard and get ahead. Well, if the illegals want to take jobs that are offered them, who can argue that they're doing exactly what the Minutemen's ancestors did only a few decades ago? The only reason to be out in the desert is to close the door of opportunity. This has been tried before and always fails. I like to think that America's ultimate sense of fair-play will overrule these idiots in the desert. Let them sit there until they sweat through their wife-beaters and camoflage pants*.

*ok, that was uncalled for, but what's a blog without a little unfair humor?

Frothy Meta-Entry

Sometimes I wonder what's an appropriate topic for a blog entry. Some of my life seems so trivial, and I'd hate to have this become a diary of the mundane. But then I look at what some other bloggers and proto-bloggers (historians call them 'diarists') have written and it occurs to me that the important thing isn't to say something profound, but to have said something at all. It's like I wrote at the beginning of this blog, I want to be able to keep this up because I think it's a useful tool to get my thoughts out of my head and also to let people who read this (hopefully it's family and friends, but if there's others out there who are interested, you can know too) what's going on in life. That's got merit in and of itself, even if I don't have something to be angry, irritated or informed about.


So, to that end, I'm doing well and expect to be able to continue to do well. Here's what's on my mind at this very moment ----->

That's right! Probably my favorite drink in all the world. I mean, regular water's great and all, but there's just something so good about the taste, sound and even feel of a can of Diet Dr Pepper. It's got a special taste that can't be found in any other drink. You can keep your fine wines, your martinis and your 20-year-old scotches. I'll take my carbonated companion here any day of the week.

Now there are those who will tell you that it's better out of a fountain dispenser, but they forget that you're at the mercy of the operator to get the CO2 and syrup mix correct. When I worked at a softball diamond back in Rock Island, IL, I would get there early before anyone else had opened to ensure that the mix of CO2 and syrup was just right. Extra bubbly! Otherwise all you get is the sweet and none of the subtle nuance of flavor that comes from the proper mix. That's why I prefer the cans. Not only are they more portable, but the mix is so very consistent.

Oh, and it has to be in a can. The plastic bottles don't transfer the chill of the ice/refrigerator properly. The can is just the optimal unit of storage for soda.

Ok, that's enough on that subject for now. Tomorrow promises a return to narrative, but today is about refreshment.

Explosion and TV 5

There was an explosion at the West Edge building site about 4:00 PM today. I both heard and felt it. My co-workers and myself were at the south facing windows almost instantly, trying to figure out what happened. It couldn't have been more than 15 minutes before there was a TV truck there. Who else would it be but Channel 5. "Live, Late-Breaking, Investigative". They forgot to add "Lame" and "Lousy" because they break the regular newscast to report that one person was injured, not seriously in a planned explosion at a construction site. She's an employee at JJ's Wine Bar, and was hit in the head by some flying debris. I hope she's ok...

Voted Today

Well, I went to vote first thing in the morning. There were two questions on the ballot, neither one of them worth anything. The stadium questions #1 and #2 were the only thing at my polling place (other places have school boards and other elections on their ballots). I, of course, voted 'no' because I think that teams that profit in the 10's of millions, but haven't had a rent increase in 30 years don't merit $500 million of taxpayer money. For a very balanced viewpoint on the stadium questions check out this link. I saw on Tony's KC Blog this link. Which has my favorite quote on the whole thing:

"It galls me to think that a minimum wage worker buying store-label soup at an inner-city grocery store will be subsidizing an SUV-driving Johnson Countian who thinks he believes in self-reliance."

HA! Too right! Of course, it also pisses me off that the pro-tax crowd thinks that we're so gullible to the idea that the teams will leave that we'll do anything to keep them here. I say, I wouldn't mind if they'd tried to bribe the city; maybe with lower ticket prices or, say, (in the case of the Royals) a winning season or (in the case of the Chiefs) a team that wouldn't fall apart under pressure and lose easy games. But this blackmail crap is for the birds. The public deserves better, especially from a city that seems to support them wholeheartedly.

First Post

I'll start here by saying I hope I'm able to keep this up. I like the idea of blogging, but like so many ideas, it's hard to maintain the follow-through. Like Homer Simpson, it's not my strong suit.

Speaking of the Simpsons, I was pretty annoyed with FOX for hyping "an announcement of epic proportions" when it's for a 10-second trailer for a movie that doesn't even come out for 15 months. It seems to me that the Simpsons have been on for 17 seasons. If anyone who's interested hasn't watched the show by now, I'm guessing they won't be too interested in the movie. Lousy FOX network, I can't stand them since they killed off Arrested Development. Check out the link in this post to see how it's so incredibly unlikely that the show will ever be seen again. I loved that show, and it would have paired nicely with "Weeds" on Showtime. Dammit.