The freedom to make our children wear rat tails and flag bathing suits.
I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get excited to read stories this week about the idiots mixing fireworks and mass quantities of alcohol and doing stupid things.
Here’s a good YouTube query, Fireworks + Drunk.
Happy 4th of July!
Well, it’s been a few months since my last post, but that’s for a good reason. Let’s take a look back at the last few months for me…
April
- Enter 96.5 The Buzz’s 2nd Chance Prom Prom King contest
- Go to Vegas for a bachelor Party
- Return from Vegas, win prom king, and have an awesome time at prom
May
- Spend a week in Cancun
- See Depeche Mode, one of my favorite bands ever
- Spend 10 days in Europe (Barcelona, Paris, & London)
June
- Finally return to work, only to be recruited by an advertising agency a few blocks away from where I live (Downtown Kansas City) and am offered a great opportunity that I’d be crazy to pass on. I took the job.
Coming up
June
- Float trip with a bunch of friends this coming weekend
July
- Start my new job
- Go to one of my old roommates weddings in Omaha
August - October
- Come up with something creative to do
November
- Go see the Jayhawks play likely #1 Florida in Vegas
December
- Birthday & Christmas
Soooo….. I haven’t really been bored enough to write about anything lately as the last few months have probably been the craziest, most exciting months of my life. A lot of times people say you come back from vacations re-energized and motivated. No, really, I started the month of May pretty motivated with work, and at the end of the month, had nothing left. Now all I want to do is travel, hah. I was really getting used to the whole work 10 days a month & travel to other countries the rest of the time thing. Oh well.
But here is the point of this post… The one thing I have learned from the last few months is that while you need luck for things to go your way sometimes, luck isn’t completely out of your control. If you continually put yourself in new situations, try new things, and make good decisions about the things you can control, the things out of your control will start to fall your way.
There has been one specific quote that has really stayed with me through this process… “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative” - Oscar Wilde
Nothing could be more true, so go experience something new.
Navigate your square around, collecting as many black squares as possibly without touching any red ones. Can you beat 11,053?
Blog This! ?You can easily blog interesting web content with Flock, in just a few clicks.Example: 1. Highlight a passage on a web page that you would like to blog about.? 2. Right-click that selection and choose Blog This. ? 3. The blog editor opens with that selection already inserted. Not only that, the selection is properly formatted as a Blockquote and appropriate citation is included.
Hmm…. Not that blogging was too hard before, but this is pretty damn cool. I just installed Flock, a firefox based browser with all sorts of cool features… this being one of them.
No kidding Shep. Check out this clip to see Fox News’ Shepard Smith get blown away by hurricane Rita. Good times.
I love the attitude Sun is, or rather was (some of these ads were pulled), taking against Dell with the launch of Sun’s new server lines.
And on a completely unrelated note… HBO’s “Rome” is awesome! It is so awesome in fact that HBO has ordered another 12 episodes which we will see sometime in 2007. Great… just in time for the Sopranos.
What happens when you get some of the most testosterone fueled men (who are quadriplegic by the way), put them in a wheelchair (which is more like a battering ram), and give them a ball? Quad-rugby.
Quad-rugby is a sport that has been around for just over a decade and while very intriguing, has gone largely unnoticed. You would think that feel good stories like this would be covered on the new magazine shows and especially ESPN, who love to have 10 minute “overcoming-the-odds” sports stories on Sunday night SportsCenter, but apparently not.
You would also think that the new documentary film covering this sport and its participants, Murderball, would be one of those transcending the genre documentaries (like Hoop Dreams, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me), but nope. Mysteriously, it is going largely unseen in indy theaters nationwide and is being dropped left & right (In KC, the Tivoli, Glenwood Arts, and Screenland have all dropped it).
There were obviously many things to learn from this movie, first off, that being quadriplegic doesn’t mean you lost all movement from the neck down, just impaired to some degree. Another being that while paralysis is something most every person fears to death, there are people out there that excel at coping with their disability, and this is their story. One wouldn’t even turn back the clock and undo what has happened to him. During a Q&A at Sundance, Team USA captain Mark Zupan and Murderball central figure had this response… “No, I don’t think so. My injury has led me to opportunities and experiences and friendships I would never have had before. And it has taught me about myself. In some ways, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” Many people think that paralysis would be the end of your life, and this movie points out that sometimes that can be brutally true, but it can also be the start of a new one.
While it is a sports movie, Murderball mostly covers everything about these athletes not related to the sport; their accidents/diseases that let to their situation, their jobs, their families, how they learned to cope with their injuries, and yes… even how they have sex.
So who are these guys? A KC Star movie critic said it best… “These guys don’t want your pity, they want your girlfriend.” Having known non-quad rugby players in the past, one thing is apparent to me… rugby players are an interesting breed. It’s even more apparent that rugby is more a mindset than simply a sport because these quad-rugby athletes are exactly the same guys I’ve known who play arguably the most brutal and macho sport on the planet, only in a wheelchair.
Think you can’t party hard, get drunk, talk shit, start fights, and get gorgeous women as a quadriplegic? Think again. These guys do it all, and on gameday, beat the crap out of each other with their $3,000 custom made wheelchairs. How have they managed to land their hot wives/girlfriends? First off, Zupan’s girlfriend claimed the wheelchair and the sport intrigues many women initially and then the motherly instinct kicks in. In contrast, one player bluntly put it this way… “The more pitiful you look, the easier it is to get laid.”
As I was leaving the theater, a girl behind me asked her husband what he thought, “I definitely shed a tear or two.” So I guess you can lump this in with Old Yeller and Brian’s Song as movies it is ok for guys to cry in.
So there you go… 4 Stars. Two thumbs up. Absolute must see. blah blah blah. Just go see the movie. Easily one of the best docs I’ve seen and really opens up your eyes to a whole new world, and from my experience, that marks the sign of a great documentary. Next up… The Grizzly Man.
On a side note… I saw this film at Screenland (17th & Washington) and it is awesome. Leather recliners, a great vintage film atmosphere, and not to far from my loft makes this one of my new favorite theaters in KC! Oh, and they also have a liquor license which makes it the first theater that I’ve been to that actually serves alcohol, which oddly enough was quite popular with the other matinee movie-goers today.
For further reviews… check out Maxim & Yahoo.
For Johnny Knoxville & Mark Zupan having a little fun on MTV’s Jackass, here ya go.
