Friday afternoon brain diarrhea

So I was in the store when I ran into the University of Arizona women's soccer team. They were like a different species, all hot, blonde and ridiculously fit. I said hi and then realized they probably all have herpes. U of A!!!

I'm not that into Halloween, sorry to all my oddly overly disapointed adult friends, it was cool when I was 7, but then I turned 12 and egged and toilet papered someone's house and it's been downhill ever since. I did try to bring back some of my youthful joy by dressing up in my old phone costume from when I was really young at a high school halloween party but everyone kept punching me in the chest where the keypad was to dial their phone numbers. But again, this weekend, probalby Friday and Saturday nights I will drag myself to Halloween parties where in order to do something I like (drink) I have to wear a costume. I will come to know the sadness of the clown.

I have read two awesome books lately, "Whatever it Takes" and "Born to Run" (not about Springsteen, shockingly) so if anyone wants to discuss them, I'm game.

Great week for the Bay Area. Violent gang rape followed by Bay Bridge breaking followed by oil spill followed by all sports teams sucking. Happy Halloween.

Still there?

I'm back.

And I'm bringing some of the "medieval awesomeness" Mandel has become so fond of.

Brace yourselves like the legs of a polio patient,

G Rat

kok boru

Wow, so on May 9 of this year I posted this article about an Afghan sport called Buzkashi which I termed "medieval awesomeness". Now, today, October 21, on my sojourn through the world of news I come across this! Kok boru is the Kyrgyz version of Buzkashi, played with a beheaded goat! This is clearly the central Asian version of soccer. And frankly, Drew can write all he wants about Football but when the ball is made out of pigskin that clearly plays second fiddle to a full animal carcass.

Hypotheticals

People often ask, "if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, did it make a sound?" I now wonder the following:

If a blog once at a certain website loses the lease to that site and goes back to a site they had 3-4 years ago and the bloggers keep posting but few people out of an already scarce endangered species of readers are aware of the move, do I still have pants on that are sanitary?

I am solely offering hypotheticals.

Football Science.

Two of my great loves are science and football. There is no science better than football science. The linked Wired.com article suggests a scientific explanation for something football fans have always known: you can't trust a kicker.

The extremely profitable, multi-billion dollar NFL attracts a lot of scientists, especially the ones desperately seeking tenure, in order to grab an easy journal publication by studying the players and strategies of the United States' most popular sporting event. Or they're like me and they're obsessed with the game and trying to pull that obsession into the lab. I don't blame them. I'd rather be standing on the practice field bullshitting with a few kickers around the league than in some dark lab watching an infrared laser bounce off some mirrors.

I wouldn't mind doing a scientific study trying to find a link between having Ray Lewis stare you down and immediately pissing oneself and sacrificing a defensive touchdown.

A Salute to Drinking

If there's one thing we at El Monstro can get behind, it is drinking yourself into a heinous stupor at 10am on Tuesday. Seriously, this guy has it going on, and is going back for more beer!

cheers to you drunk internet guy!

Not working hard, lots of crazy news today

Most importantly, Garth Brooks is back. Where has my life been this entire decade without him? I think history will point to the "oughts" (2000's) as a dark period in history, void of anything except, well, nothing.

This story is either going to get more or less weird. I mean so far we know that a boy went airborne in a weather device, the family has been on "Wife Swap" and think that storms create their own magnetic fields and UFOs are legit, etc. Weird stuff.

And then, holy shit the living dead! This is pretty awesome and I'm not even half the sci-fi dorks of other monstronauts. I was just reading this yesterday so it's all kind of starting to make sense. Dying is not a single event but it's a process, or a series of events so if one or more of those can be stopped the process can be prolonged and remedies can be applied. This first piece though about the rats kind of takes it another step further.

Social status on social networking

This is an interesting article I just read about how your social status (wealth, race, job-type, education) can often be determined by which social networking sites you use. They argue that Myspace is the more blue collar site as opposed to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I remember around 2004 I signed up for Myspace and thought it was pretty cool, but then got Facebook and kind of phased out Myspace, not sure why, I just didn't like it much and I think I fit into the class they are talking about so it's an interesting debate or point to raise.

I was at Jason Mraz/Brett Dennen concert last night

Goddam that was a lot of white people!

Lots of Good stuff. Really? Yes, really.

Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize? It seems like the other Nobel Prizes are pretty respected, science, literature, etc. but the Peace Prize is totally political. Yasser Fucking Arafat won this! Anyways, I'm all for Obama, but what has he done to deserve this? Not much yet I don't think. Although my friend Patrick made the good point that if you picked him as a sleeper in your Nobel fantasy league you'd be sitting pretty.

It'll just be more fodder for the right, and if anyone missed the SNL skit last week, it was brutal in that it was pretty dead-on. I'm hoping the whispers of him being Carter-esque are grossly premature and unfounded.

In TV-land, "House" and "The Office", two of my favorite shows, had amazing episodes this past week, especially with Pam and Jim's wedding which they could have made super cheesy, the writers managed to pack in some amazing awkward Office moments to keep the hilarity rolling.

And in other news, this amazing girl fight was captured from a MUNI bus, good old SF Bay Area public transportation!

My Fashion Diva

I will do a lot of things to spend time around a beautiful woman. Lately, my vice has been pulling me into fashion boutiques that have belts that would push the limits of my paycheck. I feel like I am an impostor every time I enter these stores, but I cannot help it because they are all populated by gorgeous and fashionable women that sit smiling behind the counter. They possess the edgy but not necessarily intelligent demeanor of a person who confidently believes that they are more fashionable than you are. It why it is difficult to dub Tyra Banks as "smug" because one wants so desperately to presume that with smugness comes wit, but anytime Tyra Banks ventures to comment beyond the realm of fashion, the glaring absence of wit becomes painfully obvious. She knows she's beautiful and well dressed, and this grants a level of unique authority that few of us commoners may challenge. Fashion divas, unlike police officers who have authority because of title or college professors who have authority through education, have authority simply because we - the slobbering and obedient males - give it to them. As a result, I sit sheepishly on the bench in a changing room trying on a $175 pair of jeans that I have absolutely no intention of purchasing solely so that I may bask in the glow of a fashion diva. I sit examining my white socks against a rug that cost more than my car. I can hear the girl chatting on her cell phone outside the changing room. She is dumb, and I know that, but all she has to do is say "try this on" and plop something over the door and I am hostage for another 30 minutes, unable to say no.

Holy Monstro I just crapped the pants I'm not even wearing!

Let's think about this blog. It was born out of a house inhabited by many and cleaned by few. And then suddenly everyone scattered because we had gotten too powerful and had to take over our own corners of the world. Now we are reuniting and for a few days here in early October, Captain Planet's powers won't have shit on King Kong, or US! Expect some pictures later in the next week since "Soccer Dad Stiles" will be in attendance, surely snapping away.

The participants:

Aaron Mandel, Adam Maldonado, Alex Carlson, Brandon Weil, Clark Blumenstein, Dan Baxter, Drew Lorona, Garrett Stiles, Greg Dering, Hans Bengtson, Julian Trowbridge, Lane Aikin, Sam Johnson.

The plan: Take all these people to my place of employment, brilliant.

A photo:



Yea, this is going to end well.