Over Dinner

I recently saw a topic thread online that sounded like a fun experiment. It’s where you can invite any two people (living or dead) to join you for dinner, but you are not allowed to join in the conversation. Order your food and drinks, but otherwise just keep your mouth shut and don’t ask questions. Just listen to your two guests talk. Oh yeah, one parameter—you can’t invite God, Adolf Hitler, or Abraham Lincoln. Too easy. I came up with several pairs—some are diabolical, some are historic, but I hope you would find them entertaining. The thought is to share them over time.

The first pair I’ll throw out there is sports related—Vince Lombardi, longtime coach of the great Green Bay Packer teams of the 1960s, and Bill Belichick, current coach of the Super Bowl Champion New England Patriots.

I’m not here to discuss Belichick’s ethics, which have been hashed and rehashed for a very long time. Neither he nor Lombardi should be considered saints.

Belichick is not exactly known for being a chatterbox, but I hear his players love playing for him, mainly because he wins football games. I don’t begrudge that—we all have our reasons. He knows part of his job is talking to the media, and that’s where his reputation comes into play. Coaches do not want to share anything that might clue an opponent in to a weakness, so he does not like to talk where there are cameras around. I imagine his players don’t care about that. Plus, I’m wiling to bet Belichick is more of a social being on the practice field or in meeting rooms. He is also a master at breaking down game film and getting many different parts to work together. He likely learned these skills as a boy when he would spend time with his father, who was an assistant at the Naval Academy.

Vince Lombardi lives on primarily through books and NFL Films videos. He was one of the Seven Blocks of Granite on the Fordham football team in the 1930s (interesting that he was the starting offensive tackle at 5’8” and 180 pounds). The image that comes to mind is one of a stereotypical old-school football man. He’s a world champion coach, winner of five NFL titles in seven years, including the first two Super Bowls. The man most definitely knew what he was doing.

Belichick graduated from Annapolis (Md.) High School in 1970, and Lombardi was coach of the Washington Redskins for the 1969 season, and he died in DC in 1970, so there may be some sort of connection there. It would be fascinating listening to nearly 100 years of football history, since these two men could form a timeline that runs as far back as the 1920s.

            I feel sure my food would get cold—I consider myself an (very) amateur historian and I don’t think I’d eat. I’d just listen to the stories and to the history lesson.

Rollerball

When I was small, there was a movie I was scared to death of. I would hear the opening notes of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, and I would just freeze. I don't remember why-- there must have been some sort of formative event, but it escapes me as to why I couldn't watch this movie.

I eventually overcame this fear, and I actually own the VHS version of this film (I know-- how 90s can I be). It has come to be one of my favorite movies, and I saw the last five minutes of it the other day.

Every time I watch Rollerball, I am reminded of how visionary Norman Jewison was, because I sure do see parallels between his movie and sports of today. Perhaps that's how things were in the mid-1970s and earlier. It certainly seems plausible to me.

The 2002 knock off of this movie will not be discussed here. Sacrilegious.

James Caan is a great Rollerballer in a violent sport of the future. This is a game where rules are changed in order to increase ratings and excitement, sort of like changing a rule such as the line of scrimmage for the kickoff in football. Players must go along since they are under contract. Individualism is frowned upon, even punished (instead of fined). The players are expendable, and there is a seemingly endless stream of new guys to replace the ones who are hurt.

All of these things I see in professional sports today. I have no trouble connecting the dots.

I've not included every plot detail, and I don't believe in spoilers as it relates to a 40-year old-movie, so here we go.

Rollerball is a dangerous and deadly game played on a slightly banked track. Two teams comprised of bikers and skaters try to take the object, a large, weighted, metal ball around the track and score a goal, seemingly by any means necessary. The game does not start with a national anthem, rather a corporate hymn or anthem.
  
Jonathan E (Caan) as the protagonist is just a mean dude in this movie. He has had a great rollerball career, but he has started asking questions about how and why things are the way they are. Mr. Bartholomew (John Houseman) of Energy Corporation (based in Houston) has decided he needs to retire and has planned a half-hour show around Jonathan's supposed announcement. He defies Energy Corporation and does not retire, as his Houston team is advancing in the postseason and he doesn't want to leave them in the lurch. This now makes Jonathan expendable, and the rules again are changed in order to eliminate him.

Bikers and skaters going at it in a Rollerball game. Jonathan E is shown with the rollerball in his right hand.
This picture is from the Madrid at Houston quarterfinal match.

Jonathan then has to compete against New York in the finals-- a side that has been instructed to do the eliminating. Our hero barely has any support in his own locker room, as his teammates don't approve (or have been told to not approve) of his individualism. The final game is played with no penalties and no substitutions (a step up from the semis vs. Tokyo, where there were limited penalties and limited substitutions), and players from both sides drop like flies as the game's violence does its work. Eventually, Jonathan emerges battered and bloodied but victorious, much to the dismay of Bartholomew, whose best-laid plan has been foiled. The movie ends with Jonathan skating defiantly around the track, slaloming around the motionless bodies on the track as toccata and fugue in D minor ends the proceedings.

Jonathan E is one of my favorite movie characters, and this movie really speaks to me. Now you know a little bit as to why.

The Royals

Here in the last few weeks, I've been taking a new phrase out for a spin in the reaches in my mind. It is a set of words that explains my state of mind and what kind of man I think I've become.

West Texan by birth, Kansan by choice

I feel I truly learned how to be an adult during the 7 1/2 years I lived in Clay Center, Kansas. I met many lifelong friends, including my bride. I learned how adults work, make decisions, treat each other, and have fun. The places I worked in Texas did not offer me these opportunities. That, or I didn't know how to take advantage of the chances I got. I worked a lot of lonely shifts at TV and radio stations when there very few others around to learn from. As a result, I didn't learn how civilized adults behave.

So I consider myself a Kansan first.

I've also become partial (or have strong opinions of) the state's teams. Specifically, the Kansas State Wildcats, the Kansas City Chiefs, and these guys:

2014 American League wild-card winner, Division Series champion, and winners of the 2014 American League pennant

In addition, the radio station I used to work for was a Royals on Radio affiliate, a network the called the largest radio network in the American League. We'd go to to Affiliates' Day at Kauffman Stadium, hear Royals officials speak, listen to George Brett, and visit/meet with their radio people. This included Denny Matthews, Ryan Lefebvre, Fred White (miss ya, Fred-- RIP), Paul Splittorff (also RIP) and even the broadcasters from the other team, which one year included Joe Castiglione and I think Jerry Remy of the Boston Red Sox. We then got good seats for the evening's game and got back to Clay Center after a three-hour drive back up I-70.

I didn't listen to decades of games on the front porch or while plowing fields, but I did listen to my fair share and I did watch my portion of the Royals during the 2000s, which were some wretched years. What I'm saying is that KC winning the pennant doesn't mean as much to me as it does to a lot of my friends (who have waited longer than me), but I was just as excited to see our guys beat Oakland, the Angels, and Baltimore.

So I bonded with the team and I consider myself a Royals fan, and I understand what this team means to a bunch of us Midwesterners. This story by Joe Posnanski hits the spot for me:

What the Royals mean to us

I've also learned what baseball teams mean to folks. A good friend who hired me in Clay Center gave me a Starting Lineup figurine of Ozzie Smith in a Cardinals uniform as an expression of thanks when I covered him as he went to go bury his mother, who was a huge St. Louis fan. It is a prized possession.

Another friend is a huge Orioles fan who lost his wife about a year ago. A friend went behind his back asking the O's to do something to maybe bring a smile to his face. The team responded with a very kind condolence letter. A third friend is a man I served in the Navy with. He's an Orioles fan and I've seen the pictures on Facebook as he passes along his love of the O's to his son.

In 2004, when the Boston Red Sox went to (and later won) the World Series, The Sons of Sam Horn message board had pages and pages of powerful stories of fans who wrote what this would have meant to their blind grandmother who would stay up to listen to the late-night Sox games from the West Coast. Or of going to the Sox games with their dad, seeing Ted Williams or Johnny Pesky or Carl Yastrzemski play at Fenway.

I feel that sort of connection with the Royals, and I identify with the folks who have been fans longer than me. They are the ones who were around in the glory years of the 70s and 80s and the 1985 World Championship side. They also felt it worse when KC would regularly lose 100+ games with a collection of guys nobody wanted.

This team and this season are why we watch and the reason we stick around and why we are loyal to a fault. This is what we Royals fans have been waiting for. Regardless of how the series with San Francisco turns out, it will have been a remarkable and wild ride.

Finals Series

It's been a few weeks since the Australian Football League crowned its premiers for 2014, which means I haven't needed to record the matches that air live either late at night or early in the morning, here on the east coast of the U.S. I've been recording them and watching them during the week to get my fix.

The AFL Twitter feed is dormant at times I usually check, so I never saw the final score before I watched. I still haven't really adopted a team to follow, and that is probably a good thing, since I typically follow underdogs, and underdogs typically lose. I kind of have a thing for Gold Coast, Fremantle, Port Adelaide, St. Kilda, and the GWS Giants. It's a long list and it's somewhat fluid. I just like watching the matches.

They also have a rather unique finals system, which is how they seed teams for the playoffs. They call it 'making the eight.' The sides are seeded according to their regular season record. 1 plays 4, and 2 plays 3. In the bottom half, 5 plays 8, and 6 plays 7. The top half features no elimination games in the first week. Winners there get a bye directly into the Preliminary Final round, and losers must play the winners of the bottom half of the eight in the Semi Final round. Losers in the 5/8 and 6/7 matches are eliminated. That is what happened to Richmond this season-- they won about their last nine games to squeak into the eight (beating Sydney, which is a good side) on the last day of the home and away season, only to get beat down by Port Adelaide. I guess they spent so much energy on qualifying that maybe they were spent. (1) Hawthorn beat (4) Geelong, and the Sydney Swans beat Fremantle. Bottom half: Port Adelaide beat Richmond and North Melbourne took down Essendon.

Anyhow, we're down to six sides. The two losers in the top half play the winners of the bottom half. Geelong lost their first match to Hawthorn and then lost their Semi Final match to an inspired North Melbourne side. In addition, Fremantle fell to Port Adelaide in this round by 22 points. So the Geelong Cats and the Fremantle Dockers are both done, and we're down to four sides remaining.

Hawthorn and Sydney both got byes into the Preliminary Final round, and both were winners. The Hawks beat Port by three points in a match that saw the Power rally at the end only to come up short by an eyelash. In the other game, Sydney gave it to North pretty good. It's the advantage of doing well in the regular season, to give yourself the chance to rest and only play two games to make the Grand Final, where a team from 5-8 would have to win three times just to make it.

Now all these playoff games were available on my cable system, but the Grand Final was not, and paying an extra $15 a month to watch one match just didn't seem worthwhile. This was a rare good decision on my part, since Hawthorn dominated the Sydney Swans to earn the premiership.

It is a back-to-back premiership and the 12th for Hawthorn since their entry into the league in 1925. They were one of the better sides when I used to watch a bit as a teenager, and they are pretty dominant nowadays too.

So no more AFL until the 2015 premiership season starts in mid-March. The trade window is still open, schedules will still be released, but we are still several months away from matches that count. I'll be waiting.

At the Movies and Robin Williams

I'd driven past the marquee several times that indicated the movie house was showing The Butler, with Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, and others. Then we moved to the other end of town and the sign was no longer visible on the drive home. However, it stayed on our radar and last month we finally got around to watching it.

This was an outstanding movie, although a tiny bit predictable in places. It joins my personal list of films I have trouble watching, because they are so well done. Sideways, Crash, and Dead Poets Society all fit in this category.

I won't bore you with lengthy plot discussions, but the movie is centered around the life of Cecil Gaines (Whitaker), who serves eight presidents during his tenure as a butler at the White House. He works there during some very turbulent times, including Vietnam and the civil rights movement.

It was a history lesson unlike any I've ever seen. I like seeing who we are, as a people/nation, and where we've been. We first see Cecil as a boy working on a cotton farm in the deep south. We watch him grow into a man and see him get out of the cotton field, and see how these historical events affect his work, his wife, and his kids. It also gave us a small look into what it was like being a black man trying to raise his family in the shadow of these times.

The ensemble cast was impeccable, including Vanessa Redgrave, John Cusack, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Lenny Kravitz, and more. Great actors all got together to put a stellar product out there. I enjoy movies that are well written, tell me a story, and make me feel something. Director Lee Daniels told me a story from a different perspective, and I loved it.

Another cast member in The Butler, playing the role of Dwight Eisenhower (son of Kansas), was Robin Williams. Surely by now you've heard of his death by suicide at the age of 63. I will not judge the man for the choices he made. I am about as sad as I was when I heard of the deaths of James Gandolfini and Philip Seymour Hoffman. We are lesser for not having these men around, they are sorely missed, and we will no longer get to marvel at their creativity.

The First Lady and I commemorated Williams' passing by having a bit of a Robin Williams film festival. We watched The Fisher King, Good Morning Vietnam, and The Birdcage. For someone whose persona was a man with a scalding case of ADHD, he sure did seem to fully grasp the nuances of his characters in these films. I had never seen The Birdcage, and it was fantastic. I've also seen him in Dead Poets Society, as mentioned, and Good Will Hunting, and he was fabulous. He was in too many other films to mention here, but I look forward to seeing some of his other stuff, including a rewatching of What Dreams May Come. What an actor.

He also did one hell of a job of making us laugh and forget our troubles. If you haven't listened to A Night at the Met (1986) you owe it to yourself to give it a shot.

Black Friday

Editor's note: I just noticed this post I wrote in November 2013, and am posting it now. It's pretty sweet to post it now, since I've put in notice.

I work in the fitness department at a big box sporting goods store, and I really didn't look forward to spending any of my Thanksgiving away from my sweet wife. Working Black Thursday/Friday is more than just working the shift-- it's preparing to do so. It's cutting things off or not doing them at all. Changing plans so that others can go shop when they're tired of doing the family bit.

I went in at 7:30, and saw people lined up past the building. Great. We're gonna get snowed. So we had out little staff powwow and we manned our sections. As it turns out, my fitness coworker and I had it pretty easy. We sold two bicycles in the first half hour, then nothing. People came and looked, lifted/played with the weight sets, punched the heavy bags and left, just like they usually do. We just became support types, helping as needed. There was plenty to do, since apparel was strewn all over the place, and folks put items back on the shelf nearest to where they changed their minds.

Because customers came for .22 ammunition, shoes, and clothes. The outdoor section by itself ran three lines trying to help folks. The store was pretty full, and the checkout line ran all the way to the back to store where we work, but it wasn't a mob scene. It stayed that way until maybe midnight or 1 am. The nearby movie theater was open, and it seemed like people came in and looked because they didn't want to go home yet. 

I guess I'm wondering and maybe ranting a little, as to what this is all about. I understand there are fewer days between holidays this year, and that businesses don't make money by staying closed. Perhaps the competition is wanting their share of the pie and our company doesn't want to get left out. I don't get paid unless the meter's running. I get that too. But I worked an eight-hour shift that ended at 4:00, and went back in at 5:00 Friday evening. 

But for all the extended holiday hours (which folks haven't become aware of yet), how about opening at midnight or early the next morning? Because these were well-dressed people who came in-- people who were shopping because they could, and didn't seem to need a holiday sale to come out. And I'll speculate here, but I wonder how many people put ammunition under the tree for the hunter in the family. I'm a transplanted Midwesterner, so I'm not sure. 

Understand that I like the people I work for and with. But it didn't seem like we were thankful for very long. 

Pocket Soccer

Let's be realistic-- many apps on our phones are nothing more than time wasters. Got 15 minutes to kill? There's an app for that. I play a lot of Words and Scramble with Friends, check Facebook and Seesmic, plus other random games.

But the one that I keep coming back to is this one, something I found while looking through the top apps section of a magazine at the grocery store a few years back.

Pocket Soccer, by Rastergrid Entertainment. As you can see, it's a three-on-three indoor soccer game, with the three discs moving about the board much like the puck on an air hockey table. Your finger controls where the discs go, and the controls are very responsive. You're able to 'kick' the ball directly, bounce it off a side or end wall, or hit another disc into the ball. All that matters is that the ball goes into the net.

Lots of gameplay options are available in single-player or tournament mode. What kind of ball is used, playing surface, and whether you play to 5 (or 10) or in timed mode. I typically play tournaments with a one-minute clock, choosing a country and trying to win (or tie) four matches to win a title.

Tournament mode screencap. The player can choose any or all of the 16 teams, or let the computer select.

This app has long since reached addictive status for me. I play several times a day, working to get my tourney winning percentage up (currently at 51%). I'm a bit of a stats guy, so I look at wins on easy/medium/hard levels, plus my player rating vs. all who play.

For all the games and time killers on my phone, this is the one I keep coming back to. The only negative I can find is on the title screen, where the World Class option is perpetually 'coming soon.' I'd sure be eager to see the possibilities with that, though if the designers haven't done anything with it yet, it's possible they won't. Also helpful would be an in-progress scoreboard, since the score is only displayed when a goal is scored.

I still love playing the game, though. It has a good beat and I can dance to it. 4.5/5 stars.