College is So Two Days Ago

Seriously. I'm over this college thing. I'm done with it. Finished. Finit. QED.

Oh, wait. That last one doesn't fit. Still, I just couldn't help but inform you all that I'm done with college. I know many of you out there are saying, "Abs, you're an idiot. You graduated from college 10 years ago! If it's taking you this long to figure it out, you probably didn't deserve a degree in the first place." And those of you who didn't know that I graduated 10 years ago are getting with the whole "Abs is an idiot" thing. And I may be an idiot, but this pronouncement isn't really more evidence of it.

See, way back during my final Spring semester in high school, I was confronted with a Decision. Where would I go to college? It was a daunting call, as I didn't have any particular place that I had dreamed of going, I didn't have my heart set on any place, and I just wasn't sure what to do. The fact that more than one place was willing to allow me to sully their reputation was a Good Thing, but that I had to choose between them was not. I've mentioned before that I struggle with hard decisions, but this one came up before I had developed my oh-so-effective system of asking a lot of uninvolved people what they would do and lamenting my predicament. Instead, back then, my system was far simpler: I avoided the topic entirely. I didn't claim this was an effective system; it was just simpler. Really, it was easier, too. It involves a lot less effort than asking people what they think. And lamenting. Lamenting is a bitch! The Decision could wait, I thought. All of these colleges had deadlines for notification, and I didn't have to sweat it until then. If I happened to miss a deadline, well, I guess my system had effectively eliminated one alternative. So I was cruising along with my If You Don't Think About It, It Will Go Away method of decision-making and generally enjoying my senior year of high school.

This system wasn't all Goodness for everyone, though. Mama Abs didn't like it at all. This Decision gave her a tremendous amount of stress for some reason. It was very important to her that I pick a college. It didn't matter which one I picked. She didn't care if I picked the one in Ohio or the one in Illinois or the one in Virginia (recognizing the the ones in Indiana were right out). She just wanted me to Pick Something Already! I have no idea why the Decision stressed her out, but it did. She did a very good job of hiding that stress from me. For about 13.5 minutes. Then, she began to ask me where I was going to go to school. I would always truthfully answer, "I don't know," after appearing to ponder the question for about 10 seconds. I wasn't doing any pondering, though. So complete was my dedication to the IYDTAIIWGA method that my mind just filled with a mild buzzing whenever I even thought about thinking about the Decision. I figured each time I answered that way we were done with that topic, that my mom wouldn't ask me again for a while. And that was true, but only because I typically left the house or holed up in my room for a while immediately after she asked me. But she would ask the next time she laid eyes on me. This was her subtle way of suggesting to me that she thought it was High Time I Made Up My Mind. My IYDTAIIWGA method was too complete for her subtle prodding to sink in, though. I thought she couldn't possibly care, as it was my Decision, my education, my ... buuuuuuuzzzzzzzzzz.

Finally, the stress became too much for Mama Abs, and after asking me on a Thursday night where I was going to school and getting the standard response, she told me that I was not going on my scheduled weekend trip unless I made a Decision. Can you believe that shit?! I was outraged! I was shocked! I was in denial! I was leaving in just one day, and she couldn't just go cancelling my plans! I was going to bitch, I was going to yell, I was going ... to the University of Virginia.

And it was over. Decision Made. I don't know that I like the way it came to be, but it did. And I went there, and I had an Experience, and I got a Degree, and things were Generally Good.

So why am I just now done with college, which I am just remembering was the question you asked me in the first place? (OK, fine. You didn't ask me that question. But you would have if I had given you that piece of the dialogue. Work with me here.) Because the University of Virginia has been the Place that Keeps on Taking for the last ten years. And today, it is done taking. I have finally finished paying for it. My student loans are over, and that is, without question, a Good Thing.

For now, I'm just basking in the glow of being done with college. I should probably decide what to do with the money each month now that I'm not giving to the school or the government. And I suppose I could ... buuuuuuuzzzzzzzzzz.

How To Start a Season (Cont'd)

I know it's not historically common for me to blather about basketball games, but I can't help myself right now. Those college hoops just keep on coming, more recently courtesy of my beloved Hoosiers. Last night they beat the Lafayette Leopards by a score that wasn't really indicative of how close the game was. Watching the Hoosiers play a real game in superb and stunning HD made for the head-to-toe happiness. The Girl and I watched it, and she must have been pretty happy about it, too, given that she stopped softly calling, "Ask me about my weinerrr..." for the duration of the game. Plus, she mentioned about 214 times that she was excited about getting to watch our boys play again. I was glad that the Hoosiers managed to win, and I wish it would have been less touch and go for the majority of the game. Still there were lots of things to think...

The Good

• Earl Calloway is really fast. The Jack-be-nimble point guard repeatedly knifed into the lane to easily score against the Leopards. At one point, he scored 5 buckets in a row (or maybe 5 of 6). As the cherry on top, he pulled up and drilled several pull-up jumpers, which Lawton and I have been preaching for years are the single biggest lost art in hoops.
• The Hoosiers don't have to have a big game from DJ White to win. At least not against Lafayette. DJ's fouls per minute stat was absurdly high last night, and he only scored four points, and those were after the game was decided.
• Rod Wilmont can still score, reminding us that he was a 30+ ppg scorer in high school. He lit it up from beyond the arc, dropping 6 of 11 3's. He's also still the best energy guy they have.
• Kelvin Sampson started off with a win. Don't ask me why I care about this. Maybe it's because if he didn't, people would be talking about how no other IU coach has ever lost his debut game or something equally trivial and irrelevant. Regardless, it's good to start off on the right foot.
• This squad can fill it up. Sampson's teams aren't known for high-octane offense. They're known for slug-it-out 62-56 types of games that feature a lot of long possessions full of D. I'm fine with that sort of play, but it's fun to put up the points once in a while.

The Bad

• The Hoosiers had to win without DJ. It's a good thing that we listed that they can do it without him in the Good part because they didn't have a choice. He needs to keep his ass on the floor for more than 5 minutes a game.
• Aside from DJ, the Hoosiers don't have anyone who can defend the post. Or rebound very well on the inside. Or score down there. Ben Allen has some skills, and you can't let him have a stand-still 3, but he's the smallest 6-11 guy I've ever seen play at this point. Really, we're just assuming that DJ can do it, since he was a near non-factor last night. But he could defend and rebound and score two seasons ago, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. It's only one game, but I'll be interested to see how this situation develops for the rest of the season.

The Annoying

• The refs are calling absurd numbers of fouls this year. I've watched two full games so far. The one I saw on Sunday in Hooville, and the one on TV last night. One game featured 51 foul calls, and one had 52. That's ridiculous, especially when about 20% of them are ticky-tack crap that didn't give anyone an advantage. Plus those Shane Battier-style flops. Yuck. (Had they been going the Hoosiers' way, I would applaud the Dane Fife-style craftiness. But let's not talk about my hypocrisy.) I sure hope they settle down with those foul calls. It bugs.
• Duke Vitale did the game. I've mentioned before that Dookie V. is a pain in the ass, and he sure didn't change before last night. There was a 12-minute stretch (that's game time, not real time) in the first half where they didn't talk about the game AT ALL. Happily and surprisingly, Vitale wasn't talking about Duke, but damn. He talked about Sampson's recruiting violations at Oklahoma. He talked about the scandal around uber-recruit Eric Gordon. He talked about Bob Knight (but not about Knight push-/slap-/clubbing one of his players in last night's game because that hadn't happened yet, thankfully -- incidentally, I think it's non-news, and I'm not going to talk about it). But he wouldn't TALK ABOUT THE GAME. If he weren't deaf in one ear (as he constantly claims), he would have heard me yelling at my Big-Ass HDTV to do just that. There were all sorts of newcomers checking in and out of the game that they didn't even waste one word on. It was awful. Luckily, I'm a good guesser, and I was able to figure out who they were. Thankfully, someone else will be doing tonight's game.

All in all, the Good outweighs the Bad and the Annoying (because they are Dumb -- oh sorry, got carried away with a bastardized Spaceballs line). And Hoops are here to stay for a while! Good times indeed.

How to Start a Season

I've been all sorts of stoked for the start of college hoops, and today it's even more pronounced than before. A buddy surprised me yesterday by saying that he had an extra ticket to the Wahoos' first basketball game of the season, which happened to be the opening of their sparkling new arena. He asked me if I wanted to go. Did I want to go?! Does the pope shit in the woods? Damn skippy.

So we took the 2-hour drive down to Charlottesville and went to the game. First, let me say the new arena is awesome. It's just an excellent basketball venue, and it has all this state of the art audio visual equipment, too. It's an absolute gem. Sure, it cost more than $130 million, but ... I like it.

Not surprisingly, the excitement was palpable as they readied to start the game. There were fireworks and lasers and flames and general craziness. There was an animated Cav Man video (a cheesy thing they do where an animated mascot does battle with the opposing teams mascot - it's incredibly campy, but it's hard not to like it) that led to the "real" mascot rappelling down from the roof. Then, they had Michael Buffer, who might very well be a caricature of himself at this point, announce the starting lineups. I was thinking that I had waited 7 months for some college hoops so it would be fine with me if they could dispense with all this buildup business and get down to some game action. They finally did so, and what a game it was!

The Hoos started out shooting well but quickly cooled, and Arizona started to run away with the game, leading by 19 at one point in the first half. I was thinking that I could handle such a blowout, as Arizona is damned good, and I would at least have had the chance to see the opening game in the new arena. But those crazy Wahoos came out on fire in the second half, and they came back to secure an improbable 93-90 win.

Now that's the way to start a college basketball season. I'm just hoping to get a win out of my beloved Hoosiers in their opening game tonight. Either way, hail, hail, hoops is here!

The Friday Five: PSA

I felt the need to write something, but I couldn't decide what. So I'm blatantly stealing a meme from Jen, who's back with a vengeance after her wedding (for which we all heartily congratulate her, I feel sure.

1. What’s your biggest pet peeve?
   
   Wow. I'm starting off in trouble already. It might be when people ask me to come up with superlatives. I'm no good at it. I still haven't come up with a list of things to choose the happiest moment of my life from, and the prospects don't look good. Question involving my favorite or the best don't sit well with me. You could argue that I put it to myself, since I'm the one who, just two paragraphs ago, decided to steal this meme, but ... I don't want to hear it. This question is making me less than comfortable. So let's just move along.
   


2. What fashion faux-pas do you see frequently that makes you want to sign the victims/perpetrators up for “What Not To Wear”?
   
   First of all, let me just say that I'm embarrassed that I know what "What Not To Wear" means. For those of you who don't know, it's a show on TLC wherein two somewhat snarky but fashion-savvy hosts throw poorly dressed people's clothes away and make them shop for shiny new clothes. Or something. It hurts my brain to think about how it works. Those of you who are already primed to tell me that I should begin looking for my pride or possibly my testicles or maybe even both because they're likely in the same place should know that it's not my fault. I'm sure some of you hang out with women sometimes, and I'm just as sure that you are occasionally subjected to TV you would never choose as a result. Such is the case here. Sometimes, I visit the Girl, and, while I think the remote control is a device that is happiest in a man's hand, I think it's rude to commandeer the TV when I'm visiting. So I have seen this show before.
   
   That said, I don't really have much to say here. I expect I see a lot of fashion faux pas on a somewhat regular basis, and I expect that most of the ones I see are in the mirror. My belt typically matches my shoes, but that's about all I know. Still, there is one thing that makes me groan, and, having been an engineer and worked with other engineers for years, I've seen it more times than I would have otherwise thought possible: the short sleeve dress shirt with a tie. Add a blazer or a suit to make it even worse. (As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. People do it.) I don't know who thinks this look is a good idea, and I'm not confident that it's legal to claim that there is such a thing as a "short sleeve dress shirt." I think "short sleeve" tends to trump "dress." Really, is there someone who thinks this combination looks good? I can't imagine it.
   


3. What hideously inappropriate act or comment have you recently witnessed?
   
   You mean other than half of the things Michael Scott says on The Office? These aren't easy questions here. I'll come back to this. Oh, who am I kidding? No I won't. Move along. There's nothing to see here.
   


4. What’s more important - table manners or driving etiquette? (Not driving safety, just etiquette - like waving when someone lets you merge in front of them or not honking at 5:00 AM when driving through a neighborhood.)
   
   Table manners seems like the obvious choice here. I mean, it can be very gross (as Jen pointed out in her answer to this one) when people don't have table manners, and it drives me crazy when people chew with their mouths open. I just don't get how those people can stand to hear themselves chew like that. Maybe they grew up eating in very loud places. Considering that aversion, table manners seems like the better answer here.
   
   However, not to go all John Stuart Mill on you, I think that driving etiquette would provide more overall happiness (or utility, if you like Mr. Mill) by affecting more people. One doesn't typically eat with a lot of people every day, but he likely shares the road with lots of them. Living in an area with a shitpot (it's a technical term) of traffic, I really think we could use some of that driving etiquette. And it really burns my bacon when I let someone in in front of me and that person doesn't wave. It almost always elicits a, "That's it! Don't even wave, asshole!!" Road rage isn't good, and waving goes a long way toward calming the people who would definitely shoot you if they only had guns. If that's the case, then you should always remember to wave when you cut off an NBA player.
   
   I don't know if this really fits under driving etiquette, but I'm wondering whether exotic sports cars should be legal in areas with heavy traffic. On one hand, it's kind of sad to see one of those cars unable to fulfill it's purpose in the world, crawling along in a bad case of bumper-to-bumper, reminding those driving normal cars how much more money some people have. But there's another hand to that coin. On the days when I commute way out to my customer's site, I have to fight Beltway traffic on the way home. For some reason I can't explain (possibly involving fluid dynamics and fashion faux pas and other things I don't understand), the next-to-leftmost lane typically is the best lane to be in for stretches, and I find myself passing cars that sit in the leftmost lane expecting to go faster than everyone else because it is, after all, the "fast lane." Not long ago I took a picture of a car I passed, which I have posted below for your enjoyment. It gave me no small amount of traffic-time pleasure to take that picture with my phone as I passed. I did resist hanging out the window and yelling, "WHAT GEAR ARE YOU IN?" as I passed. I would have definitely waved afterward, though.
   
   
   
   


5. If you were producing a PSA for a local TV station, what would the topic be and which celebrity would fulfill their community service sentence by starring in it?
   
   There's no question about it that I would have Steven Jackson of the Indiana Pacers singing and dancing, Chicago-style, warning kids of the dangers of jazz, liquor, strippers, and guns. Or at least the last 3.

It's That Time Again...

Time to watch Don Knotts videos?

No, it's time for the sounds of sneakers squeaking on hardwood, of leather bouncing, of the groans of those forced to watch early-season zone defenses. In other words, it's time for COLLEGE BASKETBALL SEASON!!!!

Yes, I'm reasonably excited about it. Maybe it's because the Wahoos are not faring so well on the gridiron this year. Maybe it's because college hoops have been part of my life since I was a wee lad. Maybe it's because this means that there will be sporting events on pretty much every night!

Regardless of why I'm excited, I am. As a result of that excitement, I started looking at the ESPN Full Court schedule to see when they'd be showing my Hoosiers. To my delight, the answer is rather frequently. (Also somewhat frequently are the Hoosier games on ESPNU, a channel which approximately 14 people receive, which annoyed the ass out of me. But I'm not here to talk about how ESPN has become a company I hate for their practices in bilking the people who love sports for more and more money all the time by moving content people already watch from the channels everyone gets to channels they (ESPN) creates out of nowhere just to drive up demand and increase their revenue by claiming they have yet another channel with high-demand content that the cable companies almost have to buy from them. Case in point: no one carried ESPN2HD - probably because they hadn't even filled ESPNHD with HD content, so why bother with a second HD channel? - so ESPN decided to put the entire World Cup '06 on that channel. They're dicks. They are working hard at becoming the Best Buy of the TV world. But I digress.) Man, I wanted to get that Full Court goodness set up for my house since the coverage is supposed to start this Friday. However, given my past difficulties in getting Comcast to sell me the Full Court package, I figured there was no way they'd have it available at the beginning of the season.

For some reason, I browsed through my guide and saw that this Friday's games all showed up on the channels where the ESPN Pay Programming happens. "That's awesome!" I thought. "Surely, they wouldn't put that up there to taunt people who want to buy it. That must mean I can get that stuff!" Laughing about how I shouldn't be calling anyone Shirley, I called up my neighborhood Comcast office and had the following exchange:

Me: I'd like to buy the ESPN Full Court college basketball package.
Comcast guy: Basketball ... let's see here. You want the NBA Season Pass?
Me: [Incredulously, feeling major deja vu, not pointing out that it's the NBA League Pass] Umm, no. I was hoping for the college basketball package. ESPN Full Court.
Comcast guy: Oh. We don't have that available.
Me: [thinking, "Am I Sisyphus here?"] Well, the only reason that I called is that I looked in the guide on my cable box, and the games schedule for Friday night show up on those 700 - 706 channels where they're shown every year.
Comcast guy: Yeah, but maybe that was only in some areas ...
Me: Maybe ... But it showed up on my cable box in my living room.
Comcast guy: [Clearly not expecting that] Oh, well, the only basketball package I have in the system is the NBA one. Maybe the marketing guys haven't put it in there yet.
Me: I could see that, but I'm surprised that's the case. I mean, I'm surprised that I can't pay to watch something that actually shows up in the guide.
Comcast guy: Right. I'm just not sure what's going on. Maybe it's the sort of thing where it will be in the system before Friday but it's just not yet.
Me: [Thinking that this guy clearly didn't talk to me last year] I guessss ...
Comcast guy: Well, what I can do is take down your number, go talk to my marketing guys to see if they know anything about it, and give you a call back when I know something.
Me: So ... You're going to check things and ... then what happens?
Comcast guy: I'll call you back at your number after I talk to them.
Me: Oh, OK. When should I expect to hear back from you? [Thinking in terms of days]
Comcast guy: In about 10 minutes or so.
Me: [Surprised] Oh. OK. Great. I appreciate your help.

Well, it's already been a good hour, and I haven't heard from the Comcast guy. Whey they suck soooooo badly at this, I have no idea, but I expect I'll be calling them a few more times to get it right. Not Comcastic at all. Or maybe it is. Sigh.

Nonetheless, be happy. College hoops is nigh!

Chuckleicious

I'm coming to appreciate Deadspin more and more. They make me chuckle pretty much daily. Even their FAQ got me (#3). Throw in the fact that they're talking about sports, and what's not to love? This post's parenthetical in the penultimate paragraph (sorry for the alliteration) is the latest one to make me laugh out loud.

Leading Indicator

This past weekend I went to see my beloved Wahoos engage in gridiron battle with the Wolfpack of NC State. I was a bit trepidacious about the game, as the Wahoos have been bad this year, needing a missed extra point in OT to beat Wyoming and losing at home to Western Michigan, to name a couple of missteps. (I can't even go into giving away the game against the hated Terps.) On top of the general not-goodness of the Wahoo team, NC State had managed victories against once-mighty Florida State and never-shitty Boston College. None of those factors made me confident that UVA could pull out a victory, even though NC State's overall record wasn't that great. In retrospect, I should have been overtaken by a serene calm and supreme confidence once I got to my seat.


My seat happens to be near the visitors' section in the stadium, meaning that their cheerleaders are in front of me. Once I saw that crew, I should have known we were going to win. "How could you know from seeing the cheerleaders?" you might be asking. And it's a good question. Really, it's not the cheerleaders that should have foretold the downfall of the Wolfpack, but the mascot. Seriously, how can you possibly expect your team to win a tackle football game with the mascot pictured below on your sidelines? Shouldn't you just expect to lose that game?




Final score: Wahoos 14, Pearl and Dress-Wearing Girly "Wolfpack" 7