The Olympics! (Yay!) They’re Over (aww)

Ah, the Olympics. Every four years (and kinda sorta every two) they force me to sit for weeks at a time, staring blankly at my TV screen, watching sports that at no other point in my life would even remotely interest me. Seriously, did you know that competitions is most of the Olympic events happen EVERY YEAR? But when I turn on the TV, and come to like the World Championship of Gymnastics, I’m all “fuck that” and I go look for something more entertaining. But put those Olympic rings on the screen and I am SO THERE (and for some reason, an expert). 

The first Olympics I remember were the ‘92 Barcelona Summer games. I watched them sort of passively, since everyone else in the house was, and patiently waited for them to end so the Ninja Turtles could come back on or something. But by the 94 Lillihammer and 96 Atlanta Olympics rolled around, I was absolutely transfixed. Especially those Atlanta games. I decided then and there, in the house that our family lived in in Gatesville with one bathroom for the five of us, that I was going to one day be in the Olympics. That’s one of those dreams that might have died. 

98 Nagano was of course big, cause they were in Japan and, if you know me, just say “Japan” and I’m all “Watashi wa Nihon ga daisuki desu!” (still got it all these years later!). I remember those being a big deal because snowboarding was made a sport, which once again I could care less about but because it’s the effing Olympics I act like snowboarding is God’s gift or something. I hear that the games might be coming to Tokyo again in a few years, which would kick so much ass I don’t even know how much ass it would kick. If I couldn’t get away from the TV for Beijing, imagine if you combine the SUMMER Olympics and Japan. My ass hurts just thinking about it (cause, you know, I’d be sitting down so much). 

For some reason, I skipped the 00 Sydney games completely. I don’t remember watching a single event. Watched a lot of the 02 Salt Lake City games. This is where everyone hated America because A) they were in America, B) we won a lot, and C) people thought we got too much attention for 9/11 when bad stuff happens all the time all over the world. Well, you know what, fuck you, rest of the world. That’s what the Olympics taught me. But, as it just so happens, I was sick (for reals) the entire time the games were on so I just laid in bed and watched nothing but ice skating and skiing and hockey and curling and the like. It was wonderful. 

When 04 Athens rolled around, things started to get unhealthy. I estimate that I watched roughly 93% of televised coverage. This was the time when I got my first DVR, so I was able to speed up a bunch of the stuff (really, do you need to see shit like rowing at its normal speed? Do you really need to see it at all?). They were also in Athens, which is cool cause it’s like, you know, the birthplace of the Olympics and stuff. And I knew more about myself, so swimming was a much more enjoyable event to watch. And there was that one swimmer, that one guy, who I liked back then but was kinda sick of him by the end of the recent games. I think I watched the 06 Torino games. I seem to remember skiing. But it’s a blur. 

Which brings me (finally) to the 08 Beijing games, and I had a blast. I missed the opening ceremony cause I was helping my sister buy a computer but, from what I hear, they were fake anyway and I could have done just as real a job with Legos. If I went through every event I watched, we’d be here longer than Billy and Gretchen’s Wedding post, and anyone who read would tell me to “shut the hell up” and never read again. So, here are a few quick bullet points:

-Michael Phelps is great and all, but Jesus H! NBC treated him like God or something. When he won team races, they were like “and Phelps does it!” If I were his teammate, I would seriously consider finding another sport. And why did he have a handlebar mustache before the games? 

-And speaking of swimming, how much ass do the UT people kick? Seriously, the water might as well have been burnt orange. 

-I might even watch diving and synchronized diving apart from the Olympics since it’s my new second favorite sport. And congrats to Matt Mitcham. Who, you might ask? It’s okay. NBC didn’t tell you about him. Stopping the Chinese from sweeping the diving medals was not a big enough story, I guess. 

-We might have the dorkiest looking men’s gymnastics team ever. Seriously, this looks like something out of Tiger Beat circa 1986:

-I think I can cut rowing out of my Olympic intake and not really notice. 

-The track events came off as really boring this year, even with all the Usain Bolt stuff. Maybe I’ve just moved on to other events? This used to be my favorite part. Did anyone else notice a lack of excitement?

-I missed all the taekwondo. And the ping pong. That pisses me off. 

-The closing ceremonies were really, really boring. I turned them off. 

-China. What a shady, shady place. I felt bad for every Chinese athlete who didn’t get the gold, cause you know the government was holding their grandma or dog hostage. I don’t want to take the time to list every questionable thing they did (like employ 9 year olds on the gymnastics team, shutting out the press, covering up the death of tourists, etc.), cause that would take longer than Billy and Gretchen’s wedding post. Suffice to say, I was surprised more people didn’t speak up about China. Now, I know they were the host country and you have to be nice. But still. And NBC basically sucked their dicks (China’s, not their own). It would be nice to think that maybe hosting the games would make for some change in China. We’ll see. I’m not holding my breath or anything. But, man, I really want to visit China now! 

I could go on forever, even though I already have, with impressions of the games but I think you get the point. I am OBSESSED with watching the Olympics, staying up till one, watching stuff I don’t care about, ignoring totalitarian governments, stuff like that. And I can’t wait until the next summer events in London cause London is cool and everything. Yeah, I know there’s a winter one in Vancouver to tide me over. But if you haven’t gathered it by now, the winter ones don’t excite me as much. Why? Too much clothing. 

And lest you think I will be glum about the Olympics ending, football season starts this weekend!

In Which I Unearth Writings From My Youth!

Can I just say first off how awesome it is that the ATX is finally getting some rain, and how nice it is to watch out the window?

I had this brilliant idea to post about all the pets I’ve ever had, because they were all beloved and they all have funny stories attached to them. One broke my nose, two became blind and hairless, and one we thought had a really large ass but it turned out she had cancer. So by funny stories, I mean bizarrely tragic. But when I sat down to write the post in TextEdit like I usually do, I noticed that it was beginning to get a bit long. And by long, I mean it was ten pages (double-spaced in Word, just cause I was curious). And I wasn’t even through the dogs yet. Ten pages! When you’ve had six dogs, three cats, three hamsters, and a chicken like I’ve had (told you I was from the sticks), I guess there’s no way it can be brief. So now I don’t know what to do with this post. I could make it into a recurring series, but I just don’t see people caring that much. I mean, I spent some time on it (it ain’t easy to write ten pages). So what do I do with it? I think I’m just going to complete it, all fifty pages or whatever, and save it for my eventual memoirs.

But since we’re on the subject of childhood (I guess), I thought I’d share a discovery I made when I was at home a few weeks ago. I was helping my mom clean out some boxes from our storage house (where all my childhood memories are eaten by rats) when I came across some spirals. And what were in these spirals, you might ask? Stories that I had written as a kid! Yes, I came across a treasure trove of vintage, first edition stories written by me in my formative years. I knew this was something I would have to share, if only to display how awesome I was as a kid.

The first thing I noticed about these stories was hardly any of them were finished. Yes, even at that young age, I was a tortured novelist, fraught and anguished by the toils of writer’s block, and couldn’t for the life of me finish anything. The same is true to this day. The second thing I noticed was, apart from some stilted dialog and on-the-nose narrative (I was in elementary school!), some of the ideas were not half bad. It embarrasses me, but I want to share the plot lines of a few of my favorites.

First up we have “The Craft”. Mind you, this was years before my brilliant title was stolen and used for a pretty bad teen witch movie, which in turn was made into a pretty bad (but it had its moments!) teen boy witch movie, The Covenant. But back to my “The Craft.” The story concerns a scientist who finally gets around to making one of those hovercrafts that we’ve all been bitching about. You see, World War III has just ended, and there’s world peace and all that nonsense, so scientific minds are able to sit down and invent shit like hovercrafts. So he’s a brilliant scientist, everyone loves him, until he goes mad. You see, he’s also invented some sort of cream that makes things invisible. Thats right! And he decides he wants to kill a bunch of people. So he makes his hovercraft invisible. How does he do this? Well, he’s also invented a container that does not become invisible when invisible cream is put inside it (you following yet?). He stacks tons of these barrels against the wall and, in a scene truly representative of my knack for dramatic flare, crashes the hovercraft into the barrels, causing invisible cream to cover him and the hovercraft. Now, he stalks the streets of New York City in his invisible craft! Don’t you see how scary that is? It’s a car that’s INVISIBLE and IT’S ABOUT TO RUN OVER YOU!

Well, eventually two cops catch wind of his little plan and have to stop him. It goes on for several pages, people die, cops are frustrated, and so on. BUT! The cream has a weakness. If it gets water on it, you can see the object again (so bite me, M. Night Shyamalan). The scientist crashes the car into a lake and, AHHH!, everyone can see him! So the cops chase him. The scientist ends up boarding a ship headed for the new Moon Colony. After a dramatic fight on the space ship, the scientist is taken down and put to trial. And the world continues on in bliss.

Now that’s a hell of a story, if I do say so myself. Sure, a little unbelievable at parts. And I’m pretty sure that plot line was used in a Batman: The Animated Series episode. But man, I had three-act structure down and everything. In fact, I’m a bit jealous of my younger self. The today me would never write a story so over the top stupid (okay, maybe one or two, What Goes Around Comes Around for those of you who remember THAT little project). And I think I was a better speller back then.

But my favorite, FAVORITE, story that I ran across was called “Cost.” Now, this was one of the ones I didn’t finish, and it’s a damn shame. Just listen to this plot: humanity has spread across the galaxy, colonizing and all that stuff. One of the planets they choose to inhabit is called Cost. Why is it called “Cost?” To remind them of the great “cost” it took to spread to the stars (yes, in the fourth grade, I thought about things like that). However, this planet has a little problem. There’s no water (which means nothing would live there in the first place, but I digress…) No water means there’s no oceans. No oceans means there’s no TECTONIC PLATES! With no tectonic plates, the geological pressure that builds under the surface can’t release itself! You know what? Here’s an excerpt from the story that should explain it better. It is presented entirely unedited, just as I wrote it whenever it was that I wrote it:

Dr. Mead ran his fingers through his hair as he listened to Dr. Pace lecture them about the problem.
“I can’t explain it,” Dr. Pace said frantically. “On Earth, we didn’t have to worry about a little pressure. We had volcanos [sic] and earthquakes. Here, on this planet, a little pressure could kill us all.”
Dr. Mead finally spoke. “If a little pressure was that dangerous, why did we move to this planet?”
“I don’t know,” said Dr. Pace.
The Mayor, who was also in the room, cleared his throat. “I can explain that. When the scientific pioneers landed heer [sic] they found only rock beneeth [sic] the earth.”
“So what could happen?” asked Dr. Mead.
“Well,” said Dr. Pace. “If it builds up more, this whole planet will explode.”

Did you get that? THE PLANET IS GOING TO EXPLODE! THERE’S NO TECTONIC PLATES. First off, why the fuck is The Mayor even there and how come he knows more than the scientists? And I think Dr. Mead got his name from the fact that I was writing in a Mead notebook. My creativity had limits, it would appear.

As I said, I didn’t finish this one. But there was a bit of a rough outline of where this epic was headed. Everyone, naturally, freaks the fuck out and they evacuate the planet just as it explodes! And they go someplace else. Cut to a few years later. One of the kids who escaped the disaster is cruising in his spaceship with his crew around the area where the planet was and, holy shit, it’s still there! Why? Didn’t it blow up? Well, they land and explore the surface. As it turns out, and I swear I am not making any of this up, the earth of Cost was highly magnetic and the planet had a strong magnetic field. When the planet blew up, the pieces eventually drifted back into place. Cause, you know, that’s what magnets do.

So while the crew is there the planet, naturally, decides to release its pressure and blow up again. Funny how that timing worked out. So they get out in time as the planet explodes again (that’s right, I wrote a story with TWO exploding planets!). And then the people decide to colonize Cost again cause apparently it’s the heroin of planets and they can’t realize the need to leave well enough alone. They just know that, every twenty years or so, they have to leave for a bit while the planet passes gas. The End.

Those were just two of the stories that I found. There were a few more, but these were by far my favorites. And you know what? I’m pretty damn proud of them. And I’m pretty damn proud of you if you made it this far. I mean, come on. That “Cost” story? Brilliant! I can SO see Michael Bay optioning that one from me. And “The Craft” would make a great Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie. You might have to change the title though. Anyone out there write when they were kids? Were you as brilliant (or stupid) as me?

I could talk about the Olympics, but I was going to save that until they were all over. Needless to say, I’ve been watching quite a bit of them. More than probably healthy. And we still have another friggin week to go! They’ve been fun, and I have a few things to say (not ten pages worth, sadly) but I’ll get to those later.

Drinking Sure Is Fun. Can I List It Under “Hobbies?”

I love it when Austin is named the “Best of…” anything. We’re usually on lists of best cities to live in, best city for singles (that’s bullshit, BTW), best city ever, and the like. But I was particularly proud when the Center for Disease Control, the ones who fought the monkey in Outbreak, named Austin the hardest drinking city in America. Okay, well, technically Forbes magazine complied the data from the CDC and made a slideshow out of it, but its a lot cooler when you say the CDC did it.

But ANYWAY.

Now, I was actually kinda proud when I read this. Is that a bad thing? Should I be concerned about this? Yes, having a large contingent of drinkers leads to more bad things like alcohol-related fatalities and drunk girls taking pictures with Leslie, but as the article points out, ” A top-drinking town could be populated by health-conscious adults who sip a glass of wine a day in order to keep their hearts healthy. And just downing a few cold ones doesn’t make a person irresponsible.” So there. Drinking is okay! The CDC says so!

But just the fact that we beat cities like New York and Miami and New Orleans makes me wonder a bit about this list. I guess we have more drinkers per capita but it still seems to me like other cities would be higher. And yeah, UT contributes a lot since college students are drunk 23/7 and the drinking lessons you learn in college take a while to go away (what is this “one drink with dinner” thing everyone talks about?). But Austin is so much more than just UT. Think about college towns where all that’s there is a college. I would think they would have a higher per capita alcohol intake than Austin.

In the interest of science, I though about everything I drank over the weekend. Here is a list:

Friday: two strawberry daiquiris, one rum and diet, one Jim Beam and diet
Saturday: three(ish) Jim Beams and diets, six(ish) Molson Lights (that’s damn good
beer)
Sunday: One Bud Light (they were out of Miller), two Lone Stars

That’s not really so much, is it? In fact I think thats FAR less than what I usually drink, or what other people around me drink. I’m kinda ashamed that I wasn’t able to drink more, actually.

So this is obviously a cry for help. You can catch me at the Methodist Church on Thursday evenings. My name is Austin.

Odds and Ends 5: Odder and Endier

-It wasn’t so much a new favorite book I was looking for, methinks, than a new favorite author. I compiled a list of books that were my favorite and found that I had quite a few. I just really don’t have that author that I can turn to for anything anymore, and that might be what I miss the most. So who’s a good author? Cause I gots me a shit ton of books. 

-When I was at home a few weeks ago, I saw The X-Files: I Want to Believe with my mom and sister. I was going to do a full post on it, but I didn’t figure anyone would really care, and they shouldn’t: the movie wasn’t too good. I love me some X-FIles, but it has to be, you know, supernatural and shit. The movie was like an episode of CSI. There were no aliens, no ghosts, no monsters, no nothing. Just a couple of gay guys that killed people to steal their organs so one lover could help the other into a new female body (sorry I spoiled it, but you weren’t going to see it and you know it!). So we moved on from aliens to killer gays. Orson Scott Card would have approved, I think. But the movie was just BORING, and it makes me sad that the franchise, for all intents and purposes, is dead at the movies since it made less money than I do. Now, I don’t mind talking or any of that kinda stuff. And the themes and everything were very close to the series. But, you know, throw in a flippin’ alien! 

-So the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (the ones who had all those children that were taken from them, if you remember), have a clothing store. Which rocks, cause those chicks were sporting some very becoming dresses. When the ’80s and eventual ’90s revival comes and goes, I think the 1800s frontier revival will be right behind them. So, I was all prepared to buy me some overalls and magic underwear. But there’s no clothing in the men’s section! Seriously, mormons. What a cock tease. Maybe I can just order a really large size of the boy’s pajamas. 

-Watched Project Runway for the first time the other day. I wasn’t terribly impressed, but my heart kinda fell for Tim Gunn. If he ever gets his own show, where we don’t have to put up with shitty designers who talk about themselves in the third person, I am totally there! 

-This might, might, be my most boring post ever. I think I will call it Just Like the City: I Want to Believe I Will Have Something Interesting To Say Again One Day. 

-So, Wordle lets you put in a bunch of text and make pictures out of it. Say you put in the text of a book. The site figures out which word is used the most, and that word is biggest in the picture and so on. You can also input a URL, so I did my site. I think it only accounts for the first page, since I didn’t talk about weddings that much. But here’s the current first page of my website, in picture form:

-Seriously, I had nothing to say! I just posted something cause I felt something needed to be posted. But, things will get more interesting soon! Cause TV season is coming up! (but Friday Night Lights and Lost won’t be back for a while). And football season! And birthday season! So many birthdays pile up at the end of the year. Screwing around at Christmas leads (approximately) to August babies, New Years to September babies (that’s right, you were probably conceived drunk!), Valentines Day to October babies (or in my case, probably my mom’s birthday…shudder), and so on. I might be a little off on some of these dates. These are only preliminary findings. I will publish my full paper in scientific journals shortly.