Friday totally not music but still a video anyway posting blogging

I apparently take a bizarre pleasure in making those titles in particular as awkward as possible.

Tomorrow night I get to hang out (for free) in an executive suite at the Rose Garden for a Blazers game, due to the wrecked economy inducing an ad hoc bartering system. That basketball connection isn't really why I'm posting this, though.

I'm from Indiana, where people listen religiously to even high school basketball. Gotta know who's going to be the next big NCAA pick. That's also not why.



I posted that because it was fucking awesome. Via Nancy, one of my (now thirty year old) sister's elementary school friends, on Facebook. My sister's not even on Facebook, yet I'm somehow friends with everyone she knew as a child.

The video above gives you enough to do the math that Jason McElwain shot six three-pointers and another two points. What it doesn't mention is that he scored those twenty points within four minutes.

Go Jason! (This is from 2006, I think. Sorry for the delay?)

Friday Count 'Em Up Music Video Blogging

[Jay-Z, 99 Problems (But a Bush Ain't One), from the Obama for America Inaugural Staff Ball]

We live in this world now

I hate it when people read over my shoulder, but I spent my bus ride to work spying the newspaper of the guy in front of me on the bus.

"Clinton Approved as Secretary of State."

"Obama Overturns Bush Records Secrecy Order."

"Guantanamo Bay to Close."

* * *

It was like that SNL skit with Al Gore and the parallel universe where he was elected validated by the Supreme Court and everything is incredibly perfect. Or like waking up from an intricate nightmare, with that mixture of overwhelming relief tempered with peevishness at all the energy wasted on anxiety and disappointment. I still keep expecting to wake up at any moment. The only thing that kept me tethered to reality was the hope that if I were dreaming of a perfect world I'd at least be on my way to somewhere way more interesting than a Thursday at work.

Remembering

The world, the Portland theatre community, many people I care about, and I lost a singularly wonderful person from our lives yesterday. Joshua was a smart, caring guy who truly invested himself in the work he did and the things he believed, and he deserved nothing but the absolute best the universe could muster for him. That, unfortunately, was not what he was given in the last, shitty hand dealt to him. There are reams of people who were far, far closer to the man than I was, and my heart goes out to them and especially to his family in this time of shock and sadness.

I was about to write that it was impossible to not be happy to see Josh, but that's not quite right. It wasn't possible to not be happy about things in general when you saw Josh. For my part, I could be having a ridiculously bad day, and could indeed be immersing myself in the ridiculousness of my bad day by venting about it to him in some histrionic manner, but even that was always laced with a certain unexplainable joy of commiserating with him. I'd be happy to have had a crappy day, essentially, because Josh turned complaining about it into such a delight.

None of that really covers it. As an example of what I'm trying to get at: on the last day Josh was really with us, I regret to say that I didn't see him - but I heard what I've overheard lovingly described in recent days as "that ridiculous laugh" elsewhere in the building, and even just that cracked me up and kind of made my day. Even before everything that happened in just the hours after, and somehow even despite that, too. I wish it could cover the next many, difficult days as well.

There's nothing on YouTube that will make this all better, despite my habituated urge to want to dig up some song or some anything that will magically turn this into something that makes sense. I've been trying all week to make it make sense, and it just won't.

There is, however this preciously short documentary, via a friend of Josh's:



I miss you, Josh. I'm not sure you could have known how much we all do.

Happy(?) Thanksgiving

Darkness Turkey. Heh. Via Dave.

Goodnight, Silk

In memory of Sokhak, who was one of my first friends in Portland and who drowned off the coast of Oregon last weekend. He got me into Stars back in 2005, so here's a song for him:



[Stars, Sleep Tonight]

Sokhak was just back in Portland visiting shortly before jetting off to Cambodia to feed starving kids. The world can't really spare a person like him - a crazy sweet dude who'd jump in the water to help his friend even though he couldn't swim. You'll be missed, Silk.

Pacing

The same dude has been walking up and down my street since nine o'clock this morning. Or before. Nine is when I first went outside for the coffee and cigarette ritual. The first time I spotted him his beard and jacket led me to wonder if he might be my old housemate, but this guy is older and the beard is less weird-dude-ish.

What I'm really stuck on for some reason is the fact that this stretch of sidewalk is a block away in two directions from a lovely river with a lovelier skyline. This block is a garage and some apartments.

I've come and gone several times today, and had several balcony vigils, and the guy keeps walking back and forth from nowhere. What's he expecting to change?

Why the Large Hadron Collider is really freaking cool.

Because you just never know.


For what it's worth, my money's on a scenario involving monkeys and Etch-a-Sketches. Pre-singularity funnies via Abstruse Goose.

Oh, hell, as long as I'm on it, did y'all see this?



[Kate McAlpine and others, Large Hadron Rap]

(Please tell me I haven't already posted that. I think it was via National Geographic a few months back.)

Monday something might really change blogging

Because it's not every day that your (un-)average Republican governor calls for gay equality:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today expressed hope that the California Supreme Court would overturn Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that outlawed same-sex marriage. He also predicted that the 18,000 gay and lesbian couples who have already married would not be affected by the initiative.

"It's unfortunate, obviously, but it's not the end," Schwarzenegger said in an interview on CNN this morning. "I think that we will again maybe undo that, if the court is willing to do that, and then move forward from there and again lead in that area."

...Today, Schwarzenegger urged backers of gay marriage to follow the lesson he learned as a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were too heavy for him at first. "I learned that you should never ever give up. . . . They should never give up. They should be on it and on it until they get it done."

The good news via Pam's House Blend. I had felt very "unicorns and sunbeams" about my view that no matter how successful at the polls, Prop 8 was not long for this life. Gov. Schwarzennegger's not-quite-endorsement by no means guarantees that I'm right, but it seems to me like a huge (if belated) step in the absolutely right direction.

Friday celebratory music video blogging

[Two-time Grammy award winning president-elect Barack Obama and several artists, Yes We Can]

The more it has time to roll around in my brain, the more amazed I am that I was able to experience the incredible sight of hordes of people taking to the streets with joy. I've known about but never witnessed riots, and I've been in Boston when everybody went nuts over their sports teams and started overturning cars. But I've never thought that in this fractured, apathetic age I'd get to know what it's like to feel that elated commiseration between every person I saw Tuesday night. Aside from dancing in the street and playing a bizarre game where two huge crowds by the Baghdad ran across the street and switched sides every time the light changed, while cheering incessantly and setting off fireworks, I hugged a lot of strangers. I hadn't done that in a long time (although the period I spent fundraising for charities rings a bell) and it pretty much rocked more than any even half-recent night even half-has.