A moment ago, my girlfriend poked her head into the living room as I was watching reruns of "The First 48" and said "baby, blog, now." It was 10:57. It's now 10:59, and I'm well on the way to my closest finish yet in the 52 Posts in 52 Weeks Challenge. She's the best. I had completely forgotten. This whole Monday holiday thing has me all disoriented. It felt like Saturday. I'm glad I only have to dodge a couple more of these Monday holidays before I can collect my pie and enjoy Jodi's post extolling my many virtues.
One of the reasons for my blog delinquency (like I need a special one) has been my recent acquisition of Grand Theft Auto IV, otherwise known as the best-selling, best-reviewed most heavily hyped video game of all time. I'm here to tell you its pretty damn engrossing. I'm still a petty enforcer at this point, but I'm hopeful that I'll soon be a mid-level goon. I dream big. My girlfriend left my place around 2 p.m. and returned around 6 p.m. to find me sitting in the exact same place she left me (I know, I'm a hell of a catch).
In other news I skipped the KRS-One show last night, even though I had tickets. I'm making kind of a habit out of it. I think I watched Flight of the Conchords on DVD instead. I'm making sort of a habit of buying concert tickets, thinking said concert sounds like a rip-snorting good time, and then bailing at the last minute. It's kind of an expensive hobby.
Alrighty, its 11:08, and my pie is safe, if only barely.
As an avowed grammar nerd, there are few things I like more than collective nouns. I love that they run from the whimsical -- a "charm" of hummingbirds -- to the morbid -- a "murder" of crows -- to the just plain strange -- a "rhumba" of rattlesnakes.
My question, which a five-second perusal of the Internets failed to answer, is who gets to decide when one of these things enters the lexicon? I mean they're already words, right? If I just start calling every group of car salesmen I see a "cancer," and enough people pick up on it, does that get to be a collective noun? Or is there some secret society of English professors in a remote dungeon somewhere that approves these things? These are the sorts of questions that trouble men's souls.
Anyway, I've been pondering a few new ones, and once I figure out the process, I'll be submitting them to the collective noun tribunal, or whatever it is.
- a "Pabst" of hipsters
- a "shrill" of tweens
- a "Zima" of sorrority girls
- a "date rape" of frat boys
- a "Prius" of non-profit workers
I'm something of a one-trick-pony from a sporting standpoint. I love the National Football League, and specifically my Washington Redskins, but I've never been able to muster much in the way of interest in other sports. The way I typically explain this to people is by saying that the Redskins break my heart every year, and one abusive sporting relationship is already more than I can take, but the reality is that I just don't find most other sports all that interesting. Baseball bores me so much I bring novels to the games, basketball is only interesting in the last five minutes of the game, and hockey is...well hockey. I quite like competitive martial arts, but try admitting to that in mixed company.
Anyway, all that changed last weekend when I had the opportunity to attend the DC Rollergirls Championship Bout between the DC Demon Cats and Scare Force One. I can say without exception that semi-professional roller derby is the second finest team sport being played in America today. It's got girls, skates, girls on skates, hip checks, shoulder checks, bad puns, good puns, noisemakers and creative bloodletting. If it doesn't replace hockey as America's fourth major sport in the next decade, there's something deeply wrong with people.
The night got started as my favorite team (decided the afternoon before after a glance at the Web site) The Secretaries of Hate tried to get their first-ever win against the Cherry Blossom Bombshells in the warm-up match. The Secretaries were game but undersized, and soon the Cherry Blossoms' blockers were able to impose their will with a series of vicious checks, winning going away in the second half. Apparently I choose roller derby teams about as well as I choose football teams, but whatever. We still we have the best name and the coolest banners. The victories can't be far behind.
In the finals, the unbeaten Scare Force One looked to defend their title against the tough-minded Demon Cats. Scare Force One has a player named Six-Five in Skates, and what was remarkable was not that she was tall, but that she was not all that much taller than the other players on the team. Tough, tough girls. The Demon Cats got off to an early lead, but they could hold off the Scare Force onslaught. Scare Force One pulled ahead in the second half and sealed their third-straight championship.
I'm buying season tickets (if that's possible) next year. If you live in DC and you don't you're dumb.
Tough week. I'm skeedadling off to Oregon on Sunday for work, which meant I had to do all the things I would have done last week, this week...blah, blah, blah. Boring. Anyway, the point is that I didn't have a lot of time to blog this week and I won't have time to do it tomorrow, so here I am, saying something with nothing to say.
I suppose I could leave it up to chance that my hotel in Portland will have wireless -- a reasonable assumption -- but I am not the sort of man who leaves his victory pie to chance.
Speaking of pie, I saw what may be the best vanity license plate in the history of vanity license plates (though frankly, that may be damning it with faint praise):
So yeah. That was...disjointed. But you can't win a pie without breaking a few berries. I'm in it to win it.
