Five Middle-Aged Men, a Minivan, and Four Days

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Last Friday, St. Patricks Day, I drove down to Savannah, GA to meet up with some friends for a long weekend of golf, poker and fishing.  You know you’re middle-aged when the prospect of having to tool around town in a mini-van (my marvelous Mazda MPV) didn’t scare anyone off.

I arrived at the Savannah airport at the appointed time, 6:30, only to find out that the flight was delayed.  Five hours later they arrived, but it wasn’t so bad because I got to watch some meaningless NCAA game in the Phillips Seafood bar while the score showing my alma mater George Mason beating Michigan State in the first round of the NCAA tournament appeared in the corner of the screen.  First victory ever in the NCAA’s for GMU, yippee!

The guys landed and I had a cooler of beer in the back of the van for them.  I labeled the very large cooler "Mike’s Beer" and the small cooler "Jon, Kevin, Dave and Karl’s Beer".  Mike does love his Bud Light.  An hour later we were at Dave’s house in Hilton Head (Port Royal) playing our first hold ’em mini-tournament.  Then it was off to bed so we could get some decent shuteye before our 8:30 tee time.  That was the second sign that we’re getting old; we actually slept between poker and golf.

After golf (very ugly for all involved except Dave who won 7 skins) it was back to the house to get cleaned up and head to Savannah for a night on a casino boat.  Silly us for cleaning up since the clientele was, uh, interesting.  First bad sign, literally, was the sign at the gangplank that said "Absolutely no concealed weapons allowed" quickly followed by a guy scanning everyone with a handheld detector.  Next bad sign was the overwhelming smell that was suspiciously like the worst fraternity houses I’ve visited.  Then we came across the first patrons decked out in bling that didn’t deserve the second bling to qualify for bling-bling and we were a little scared.

The boat’s air conditioner wasn’t working so within minutes sitting in the card room was like taking a sauna with 400 chain-smokers.  Things got a little better when the boat left the dock and hit the open water, but that’s because about 30 people instantly became nauseous and headed for the open-air upper deck.  We all entered a $100 no-limit hold-em tournament and were doing pretty well, especially since most of the other patrons apparently thought watching one night of poker on ESPN qualified as experience. And I’d say most of them didn’t get past third grade math. 

So what happened?  Well I got knocked out by a guy with two teeth who called my all-in (I had A-Q and my ace was paired up on the board) while holding a J-9 and then caught a gut-shot straight on the river. That’s poker though, and honestly I took out someone with a lucky card myself so I can’t say much.  Still we all were getting taken out by rednecks with horseshoes surgically implanted in their derriers.  Kevin was doing great until the conditions got to him and he went all in on a horrible hand, but that was because he felt so sick he could barely see straight.  Mike ended up finishing in the money (6th place) so it wasn’t a total failure.

Then we were stuck for four hours until the boat went back to shore.  In those four hours we were able to witness the fine spectacle of society’s Wal-Mart crowd getting increasingly drunk and rowdy.  Some guy called his wife a bitch and they started to have it out.  Then a white guy called his black friend the "n" word, which his friend seemed fine with but a woman from a black family sitting next to them took great exception to and a spat broke out between her family and his crowd. 

I escaped to the upper deck for some fresh air, but that didn’t last once the karaoke started.  An old, drunk redneck named Steve went up and requested some Credence Clearwater Revival and the DJ spent a minute finding it while Steve returned to his seat.  When the DJ announced "And now we’ll have Steve singing (I don’t remember what he requested)" Steve looked up and yelled "What the f— you talking about?" The DJ said, "Sir, you requested the song and you get to sing along with it."  Steve said, "I don’t wanna f—ing sing it I wanna listen to it."  The DJ told him that there wouldn’t be any words because the Karaoke version only includes the instrumentals since you’re supposed to sing along to it.  Steve asked him "What kind of f—ing DJ are you?" and the DJ just gave up.  When no one else requested a song the DJ put on a top-40 loop and when Steve heard words I thought he might fight the DJ for "lying to him about not having no goddamn words in the f—ing songs."  That’s when I got the hell out of there.

Thankfully we were back on land at 1 a.m.  We drove back to Hilton Head and then crashed.  The next morning, Sunday, we got up played some poker and then at noon took a fishing charter that Dave had set up.  It was probably 50 degrees with a 15-20 MPH wind blowing and we froze our butts off.  The captain didn’t want to but convinced him to try going to a spot offshore, and after weathering five-foot waves for 1/2 hour we saw his wisdom and had him take us back into the sound. We managed to catch four fish that had a cumulative weight of about four ounces, but I had the best time because my college roommate, Bobby, called me on my cell to do a play-by-play of the last 13 seconds of GMU’s win over Carolina in the NCAAs.  I might have jumped off the boat if my knees hadn’t locked into place hours earlier.

We got back to the house about six on Sunday and everyone took hot showers to try and warm up.  We ordered pizza and then played hours of poker…probably the highlight of the weekend.  Kevin and Mike played another round of golf Monday morning but the rest of us slept in and packed to leave.  That afternoon I dropped them off at the airport and had a great time driving home, laughing my ass off the whole way.  I kept thinking about five middle-aged guys driving around in a mini-van trying to cut loose and hitting every snag you can imagine.  It was a blast.

Patriot-ism

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Thanks to the fact that my alma mater, George Mason University, won two significant basketball games this past weekend I now no longer have to answer the question, "Where’s that?" when I tell people where I went to college.  In fact GMU has had a growing reputation in the DC region for years, but it took these two wins to put it on the map outside the DC area.

Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbloch does a good job describing the lack of respect that the university and its namesake have received over the years.  The school boasts an impressive faculty, and if you’re a conservative then the law school is definitely for you. Now if they’d just get an a damn 1-AA football team all would be right in the universe.

The place to be to watch the Patriots’ Sweet-16 game against Wichita State is Brion’s Grille in Fairfax, across Rt-123 from the campus.  The first couple of years I was at Mason the space that Brion’s occupies was a nasty little dance dive called Jorges, but for the last 15+ years Brion’s, which was established by a couple of Mason alums, has been the de facto campus joint.  The food’s pretty good and it holds a special place for me because that’s where, as a recent graduate and budding entrepreneur, I met my wife in ’90 for lunch to hire her to do some clerical work for me since I was too chicken to ask her out on a date.  Thankfully she was desperate enough for money that she overlooked my obvious geekiness and took the gig. If you’re in DC on Friday I can almost guarantee that Brion’s will be the best place to catch the game.

USC Fans Trump the Cameron Not-so-Crazies

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College pranks are great, and some of the best have occurred at athletic events.  But my new favorite is this one pulled on Southern Cal’s point guard before and during the USC-Cal game. (Here’s another person’s account of it as well).  Here are the highlights from the article:

Sure, heckling visiting shooting free throws is nothing new, and
First Team All-Pac-10 guard Gabe Pruitt of USC has received his fair
share of taunts. But when the sophomore stepped to the stripe during
last Saturday’s game at Cal he heard something incredibly familiar yet
even more jarring from the Bears’ student section: his own phone number.

As SI.com first reported, it turns out Pruitt had been chatting on AOL
Instant Messenger the week leading up to the game with “Victoria,” who
claimed to be a cute UCLA student.

Pruitt liked the pictures she sent, allegedly telling her, “You look
like you have a very fit body,” and, “Now I want to c u so bad.” Sure
enough, he eventually gave the “girl” his digits and agreed to meet her
when he returned to L.A.

Unfortunately for Pruitt, “Victoria” turned out to be a member of the
Cal RallyCom, who shared the information with the rest of his student
section. So when Pruitt came up to shoot his first free throws of the
night, the student section erupted in chants of “Victoria,” as well as
his phone number.

The guy missed both his free throws and according to some accounts had quite the look on his face.  Can you imagine the utter confusion and embarassment?  The Crazies have pulled a few in their days, but nothing as good as this.

Government Sanctioned Nosy Neighbors

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The East Orange (NJ) Police Department is recruiting citizens to monitor video feeds and report suspicious activities.  There are plenty of annoying, nosy people in every community so I can see this really taking off, not just in East Orange but all over the country.  I’d be tempted to go out and do something that looks suspicious just to see what happened.

American Theocracy?

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Rolling Stone has a long article called "God’s Senator" that is likely to scare the bejesus out of you if you’re scared of fundamentalist Christian Senators from Kansas who have aligned themselves with powerful forces like Opus Dei and something called the Fellowship.  If half the stuff in this article is true it makes "The Da Vinci Code" seem downright realistic by comparison.

The article is a feature on Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas who has been ordained as the presidential front runner by the fundamentalist Christian movement.  Normally I’d write the guy off as a quack, but the article also explores his leadership positions in groups like the Fellowship.  Here’s how the article describes the fellowship:

Seventy years ago, an evangelist named Abraham Vereide
founded a network of "God-led" cells comprising senators and
generals, corporate executives and preachers. Vereide believed that
the cells — God’s chosen, appointed to power — could construct a
Kingdom of God on earth with Washington as its capital. They would
do so "behind the scenes," lest they be accused of pride or a
hunger for power, and "beyond the din of vox populi," which is to
say, outside the bounds of democracy. To insiders, the cells were
known as the Family, or the Fellowship. To most outsiders, they
were not known at all.

The Senator also converted to Catholocism through Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic group that could probably be described using many of the same adjectives as those used to describe The Fellowship. Then there’s the "Values Action Team" which the article describes this way:

Every Tuesday, before his evening meeting with his prayer
brothers, Brownback chairs another small cell — one explicitly
dedicated to altering public policy. It is called the Values Action
Team, and it is composed of representatives from leading
organizations on the religious right. James Dobson’s Focus on the
Family sends an emissary, as does the Family Research Council, the
Eagle Forum, the Christian Coalition, the Traditional Values
Coalition, Concerned Women for America and many more. Like the
Fellowship prayer cell, everything that is said is strictly off the
record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from
discussing the proceedings. It’s a little "cloak-and-dagger," says
a Brownback press secretary. The VAT is a war council, and the
enemy, says one participant, is "secularism."

The VAT coordinates the efforts of fundamentalist pressure
groups, unifying their message and arming congressional staffers
with the data and language they need to pass legislation. Working
almost entirely in secret, the group has directed the fights
against gay marriage and for school vouchers, against hate-crime
legislation and for "abstinence only" education. The VAT helped win
passage of Brownback’s broadcast decency bill and made the
president’s tax cuts a top priority. When it comes to "impacting
policy," says Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, "day to
day, the VAT is instrumental."

This guy is a player and he’s tapped into some powerful and monied networks and that makes the author’s analysis that "Brownback seeks something far more radical: not
faith-based politics but faith in place of politics" very frightening indeed if it’s true.

Got a new ATM card for no reason? Here’s why.

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Citibank recently revealed that thousands of customers’ PIN numbers had been obtained by scam artists and that it had to freeze PIN-based transactions for customers in Canada, Russia and the UK and then reissue cards to those customers.  They also apparently didn’t inform their customers about what was going on.  And now it looks like they aren’t the only bank dealing with what one expert calls "the worst hack ever."  Finally, if you used your debit/check card at Sam’s Club or OfficeMax you might want to check with your card company since it looks like the leak might have occured there.

If One Man Can Father Children by 11 Women, Why Can’t He Marry Even Two of Them?

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An interesting story from CNN’s AC360 blog about 11 mothers in Virginia who selected sperm from the same man when they went in for artificial insemination.  From the story:

Well, while reporting this story, we looked at a case in Virginia where
one man’s genetic profile has proven especially popular. He is said to
be of German descent, tall and athletic, and is responsible for
"fathering" as many as 20 children through 11 different women.

He
chooses to remain anonymous, but the mothers have established an
incredible connection to each other through a Web site called
DonorSiblingRegistry.com. The site allows mothers who conceive children
with donated sperm to connect with one another.

My question is this: Why can a man be the father to children by any number of women he wants, but he is not allowed to marry more than one at a time?  Not that I’m arguing for polygamy (I’ve often said it is way too hard making marriage work with one woman to even consider a second) but isn’t it somewhat strange that a man can sire children with any number of women he wants, and for that matter that a woman can have children by any number of men she wants?

I should also point out that I’m not arguing for laws against sex out of wedlock, but I am questioning why we deal with some moral issues with laws and not others.  There are obvious cases where moral and legal issues overlap: murder, rape, assault, etc.  But when everyone involved are consenting adults who are not harming or adversely affecting others why is the government inserting itself into the equation with laws?

Craigslist Ran More Classifieds Than All US Newspapers Combined

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According to this article Craigslist sites are generating 3 billion page views every month and running more classified ads than all US newspapers combined.  According to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster the biggest problem they have is keeping up:

"We struggle to keep up. Last year overall
growth was 200 per cent, both in terms of page views and listings – and
if it pools to 100 per cent, we would be happy with that."

I can think of a few newspaper people who would LOVE to have that problem.