18 Jul

Storytellers

Last week, my friend Gina came to town with her husband Frank. It was great to see them both. Frank is a champion storyteller. He teaches high school outside of Portland, and he runs an extracurricular social studies team that competes at things like geography bees. They made it to nationals a couple years ago and placed sixth.

One of the kids on the team actually failed Frank’s class. I guess he’s not all that interested in school, but he’s great in competitions because he knows any flag you show him. The superintendant of the district came in to talk with the successful team and asked this kid what he thought of the Israel/Palestine conflict. He said, “huh?” Some other kid interrupted and said, “he just does flags.”

Later, Frank was telling us about how he goes to the grocery store every day. I have that tendency too. But Frank is a pretty outgoing guy, and he talks to everyone. Apparently, one of the clerks gave him the employee discount and actually thought he worked there. He’d go through the line and she’d say things like, “are you working tomorrow?”

In the second half of last week, Eileen and I went up to Door County to camp with her parents in Peninsula State Park. Eileen’s mom has cousins in Green Bay who came up a few times to sit around the campfire. The Blaney’s. They’re Irish. They can tell stories.

In Irish families, you tell a good one and it will probably get recycled later; tell a bad one and you might get ridiculed. At some sort of family gathering, the Blaney’s were sitting around telling stories and someone told one that kinda fizzled out. Someone else, we’ll call him John, said, “That’s not how you end a story!” He proceeded to recount an experience with a patient of his who had come in for a blood transfusion or a plasma donation or something. The guy was blind, but on the medical history, it didn’t mention anything about his being blind. John asked the man about it, and the guy explained that in a psychotic episode, he had gouged out both his eyes! “Now that’s how you end a story!”

12 Jul

Apologies

Since July is national blog awareness month, I decided to do some research. Guess what. It turns out I have a blog!

I’ve got an excuse for the dry spell, though I’m not sure how good it is. I’ve been working on polishing up a story I started at the Write By the Lake thing a few weeks ago. I’ve screwed it up pretty good, so I think I’ll give it a break now. It was inspired by this house:

witchy

It’s about a boy who investigates a house that’s rumored to belong to a witch. But of course, I had to go make it all inner-struggley. The plot is alright, but I’m at that stage where I just need some distance from it. We’ll see. As Chicago (the band) says, “even lovers need a holiday (I had to say) far away from the ones that we love.” Groan. I’m clearly reaching for content here, aren’t I?

As long as I am, I might as well announce some good news: Wisconsin isn’t the fattest state in the country. Really. Check this out: obesity map.

And in other news, Zinedine Zidane, one of the world’s best soccer players, head-butted an Italian player named Marco Materazzi in the World Cup final. But of course, you already knew that. If you are one of the three people who haven’t seen it yet, here it is: Zidane head butt. And just in case you think Materazzi is a “good boy,” as his father calls him, you need to see this footage: Materazzi madness. Or you can just search for Materazzi on YouTube and find out what he’s known for.

30 Jun

Spoiler Alert: Don’t read this if you haven’t looked at news today.

Two depressing events took place on the not-popular-in-the-United-States sporting front today. Depressing for me, anyway.

First, a whole bunch of top cyclists were suspended from the tour de France, which starts tomorrow. The two top favorites, Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, are out, as are Oscar Sevilla, Francisco Mancebo, and Joseba Beloki. I was rooting for Jan, who would have won several tours if it weren’t for Lance. I figured this year, he deserved a victory. But now he’s out.

There are about 50 more people implicated in this scandal; it could end up leaving the field pretty up-in-the-air. As far as I know, the entire Discovery Channel Team is still in the tour, as is Floyd Landis. Most of the sprinters are also still in the race, so there will still be some good stuff to watch.

Personally, I think they’re all on drugs. The tour is just a sick event. If you take out the two or three time trials, the average distance of a ride is around 120 miles. They have a few rest days here and there, but otherwise, they’re biking hard and long for three weeks. And the average speed over the course of the three week period is somewhere around 24 or 25 miles per hour.

They’re incredible athletes to begin with, but as five-time champion Jacques Anquetil once said, “you don’t win the Tour de France on mineral water.” A German sports journalist by the name of Hans Halter, wrote that “for as long as the Tour has existed, since 1903, its participants have been doping themselves. No dope, no hope. The Tour, in fact, is only possible because, not despite the fact, there is doping.”

Speaking of German journalists, they’ll all be writing about Germany’s victory over Argentina today. It ended in a shoot-out, which is always a bad way to end a game. I wanted Argentina to go on, but it wasn’t clear that they were the better team. Neither was Germany, for that matter, but someone has to advance.

Ideally from here (according to me), Portugal goes all the way. But if it can’t be Portugal, I’m rooting for Brasil.

England plays Portugal tomorrow: Brasil plays France. The semifinals are on Tuesday and Wednesday.