Scatter Shot

Man, I keep wanting to do a conherent post one of these days, but whatever...

  • Brozo turned me on to the Amy Winehouse, and holy shit is she good! (She uses the lyric "What kind of fuckery is this?" How genius is that?) She may also be a train wreck, which adds some flavor. Lots of vids on teh YouTubes.
  • The Rocky Mountain Rollergirls have announced their 2007 schedule. Good times for cheap, right there.
  • Rod and I still swap snarky emails about the 24, but it's just not the same as our old Tuesday IRC chats. I still think I need to set up a BBS or something. I miss my boys (and my Boo).
  • That football games was crazy, eh? Good for Peyton. He can stop whining now. The commercials sucked eggs, generally, though I give the win to CareerBuilder. And Prince doing Hendrix doing Dylan for the halftime show... Surreal.
  • My BU Ice Dogs are in the Beanpot final again. They shut out Northeastern yesterday and will meet arch-rivals, BC, next Monday.
  • Check out this Desperate Astronauts soap opera. The details of it are awesome.
  • Ryan O'Neal has quite a soap opera going on in his family, too. The money quote: "He hit his own girlfriend in the head."
  • Hang on... The name of Turner Broadcasting's ad agency is "Interference, Inc."?! No wonder they dig on the guerilla marketing!
  • As far as iPod cases go, these little honeys are super hip.

There's probably more in the buffer, but that's all I can be bothered with for now.

Hugs & kisses.

Bad Sikh Pun Here

Somehow, I've manage to avoid learning that Sikhs are required by their religion to carry a dagger:

The kirpan, one of five items baptized Sikhs are required to wear, is meant as a reminder of the duty to uphold justice. The others are reminders of other things: the kesh, or Sikhs' uncut hair, to live as God created you; kanga, a wooden comb, to remain neat; kara, a bracelet, to do good deeds; and kachera, or large underwear, to remain chaste and faithful sexually.

The story is about Homeland Security maybe being a little less asshole-ish to one particular group of brown folk, but I'm more excited about a whole group of people being required to pack a blade!

Derby Girl Press

There's a great feaure on our Rocky Mountain Rollergirls in the Coloradoan: Rollergirls ready to make their own thunder in the Rockies

Practice also includes learning to get up quickly using just the legs. Hands just get squished under a passing skate if they hit the rink, explained Fifi, an accountant who's been with the league for only a month or so but said she has already learned this very important lesson, wiggling five of her digits.

That's right - Fifi's an accountant. Underneath the tattoos, piercings and fishnets are court clerks and business owners. Not exactly what you'd expect of a "derby chick."

Icy U Hurtin' is a Loveland trauma nurse and mother of four. Lucky 7 is a business development specialist with Turner Media Group. And Gwen A. Flattenya' is an attorney.

There's some weird overlap with a different story at the end, I think... Nevertheless, it's good stuff. I think this is at least the second story I've seen in which the Rollergirls have basically adopted a female reporter, resulting in a glowing review. It's totally infectious, I guess. ;)

Derby Night, Aug 5th

Tonight we were fortunate enough to witness the Red Ridin' Hoods of the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls put on a clinic versus the always game (but outmatched this night) Sugar Kill Gang. The stars of the night were She Who Cannot Be Named (aka SHEEEE-WHOOOOO!!!), jammer extraordinaire; Peaches & Scream (PEEEEEEACHES!!!), who was on loan from the Pikes Peak Derby Dames league and put on a show both offensively and defensively; and my new secret sweetheart: Pinky 500 (PINKEEEEEEE!!!! - I know she heard me at least one time.) with her Mighty Ass of Defense and her Jammer Whip power move. (That's her in the striped stockings below.)

Good times.

Hoods Vistory Lap 2 Originally uploaded by Jake Sutton.

Update: John Eisel is much better at taking roller derby action shots than I am:

Photo by John Eisel

Yvon Rocks

In case you didn't know, Yvon Chouinard is the man.

... Because he just won the inaugural award of OutDoor Celebrity of the Year. The jurors said he is renown for his “visionary business strategy and high degree of environmental awareness.� Stating he is “an outstanding figure above all because of his contributions to environmental protection.� Yvon is best known as the founder and owner of Patagonia, an outdoor clothing company, with over $240 million USD in annual sales. Yvon committed his company to only using organic cotton 10 years ago, even when there was no reliable supply. They had to built the infrastructure to obtain the fabrics they needed. He was also the first to convert his line of fleece jackets to using recycled PET bottles as feedstock. ...

Back when I was just coming out of college with a degree I had already pegged as useless to me, one job I thought I wanted a lot was doing anything for Black Diamond. Sometimes I still kind of wish I could work for them...

Roller Girls!

Image002.jpg Originally uploaded by Jake Sutton.

The Wife and I finally made it out to a Rocky Mountain Rollergirls bout as the 5280 Fight Club took on the visiting Tent City Terrors from Arizona.

We actually got there late and left a bit early, so I can't really give you a play-by-play. I will say the Gaypleton crowd made for some interesting people watching (Stapleton is suddenly one of my favorite Denver neighborhoods) and the derby action was something to behold!

Suntory, You're The Divil

A while back I read an article about Japanese single malt whiskey being the shit these days, so when I stumbled upon a bottle of Suntory Yamazaki 12 year-old single malt whiskey in a liquor store recently, I went ahead and plunked down the requested $35. First a little interesting trivia: The Suntory brand is famous for using big name (mostly Western) celebs to shill for them -- this is the inspiration for the fantastic Lost in Translation. You can find some of the old commercials at Japander if you have the patience. Good stuff...

Now back to the booze: It's really friggin' good! The Suntory site refers to a "smooth, honeyed taste", which I think is the perfect description. I presonally like to describe it as sitting right on the line between good small batch bourbons and proper Scotch. At least one other reviewer liked it a lot, too.

Try it. You'll like it!

[Slightly Related Side Note: I have yet to lay hands on a bottle of Jinro brand soju. 'Round these parts I have only tracked down Kyung Woul Green Soju, which is sweet potato-based and is completely awesome. It tastes like slightly sweet water. Yum. Still gotta get the Jinro, though...]

What Should I Do with My Life?

For the record, Po Bronson's book by that title doesn't really provide any answers. It just tells you about some of the lucky bastards who have figured out an answer to the question. So, yeah... This is something I'm thinking about a lot these days. Unless something changes drastically and some switch gets flipped in my head, I don't see myself doing what I'm doing now for more than, say, another five years.

So what do I want to do instead? I have absolutely no idea.

It's a hell of an exercise to try to figure out where your passion lies and what work would make you happy day-to-day. Lately, I've been asking myself the lottery question:

What would I do if I won PowerBall today?

The thought is that even if I had buckets of cash falling out of my ears I would do something to keep myself busy. I figure that if, I can find the answer to that question, I might be able to translate that into something that would actually pay the bills. As of yet, the answer hasn't come to me. I have no effing clue.

And aside: For those of you who might be thinking "Why is he all freaked out about this now? He's in his early-mid-thirties, shouldn't he be settling into a groove right about now?" Well, maybe / maybe not. Let me just use my darling mother as an excuse: While I was in college studying to be the rocket scientist I never became, she took the opportunity to go to Tufts and become a veterinarian. Total mid-life (a bit early) career change. This is the precident I'm working with.

One option I've long carried in my hip pocket is the posibility of becoming an architect. It's what I wanted to do before I got distracted by airplanes and went into Aerospace. It would take me three and a half years of full-time school to get a Masters Degree, after which I'd be starting at basically zero. Not that it's really the part that matters to me, but the salary would probably be about 50-60% of what I'm making now. Truth be told, I have no real idea if I would enjoy the work, or if I'd be any good at it. It's a scary gamble.

Then there's the idea of making things and earning a living with those creations. Right now, I always think of furniture when I go down this path. Problems with this idea include the fact that I'm really not that skilled at the woodworking yet, and I really don't want to be in the position where I have to beat the streets to self-promote (If you're making furniture, you have to let people know somehow, right? I'm doubtful that I'd be any good at that part. And then I'd starve.).

(The self-promotion angle comes along with the architect idea, too.)

Friends and I have talked about refurbishing houses (with custom furniture and all that jazz) and flipping them, but it doesn't seem realistic to me. Especially since we'd have to start out doing it part-time while coninuing to crush our souls at the office (that's a joke, it's not all that bad). It's be cool though - and might even work, because these people are talented in areas where I am not.

Maybe I should just come up with a few more t-shirt designs or something...

Now that I'm petering out a bit, let me say out-loud that I really don't hate my current job. I love the people I work with, and we solve extremely interesting problems every day. This career path was a complete accident, and I am grateful for it.

I just don't think it's the path I want to follow for the rest of my life.

La Fee Verte

Damn Matt to hell. He sent me this link and any adverse consequence is entirely his to bear... I have long been a sucker for the mystique built up around absinthe. Anything that might have contributed to Van Gogh lopping of his ear can't be all bad, right? Right? Well, you know what I'm getting at. Plus, I like anise/liquorice flavors, so I bet I'd dig it.

So then comes this: The Mystery of the Green Menace

So Breaux decided to make some himself. He found a French-language history book with "pre-ban protocols," a vague description of how absinthe was made back before it was outlawed. Armed with the protocols, he prepared a batch in the lab. The result? "Not very good," he concedes. "I couldn't imagine that being the most popular liqueur in France."

He got his chance to taste the real thing in 1996, when a friend spotted a bottle marked "old French liquor" at an estate sale. They were asking $300, and Breaux, seeing it was a vintage Spanish Pernod Tarragona absinthe, immediately wrote a check. When he got it to his lab, he plunged a syringe through the cork, extracted one precious sip, and downed it. "It had a honeyed texture, distinct herbal and floral notes, and a gentle roundness uncharacteristic of such a strong liquor," he says. "Those protocols were crap."

So, Ted Breaux used his gas chromatography-mass spectrometer to analyze some old, pre-ban absinthe and has figured how to distill something approaching the real thing. (Breaux calls the stuff you can get in the Czech Republic, etc. these days "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil.")

"It's like an herbal speedball," he says. "Some of the compounds are excitatory, some are sedative. That's the real reason artists liked it. Drink two or three glasses and you can feel the effects of the alcohol, but your mind stays clear - you can still work."

Breaux has hooked up with a distiller in France and you can order his goods online -- shipped via courier -- for around $150 a bottle. Yikes. I don't even spend that kind of scratch on Scotch, and I know I like Scotch.

But I am sorely tempted...

Damn you, Matt.

Aryan Olsens?

As many of you must know by now, one of my personal watch items is racism and hate groups/crimes - particularly as manifested in the white power movement and its various incarnations. Given that, you can probably guess how I reacted when I saw Matt's link to this article: Young Singers Spread Racist Hate

Known as "Prussian Blue" — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."

Holy shit! Daddy brands his cattle with swastikas, y'all! And of course, they are free to say whatever they want here in the USofA... but WOW!

I see it like this: I consider it animal abuse to train a dog to be aggressive -- eventually that dog is going to cause severe damage to something or someone and have to be destroyed. By training the dog to attack, you are basically killing the dog (nevermind whatever gets mauled by it). On the same side of the same coin, I also consider it dangerous psychological abuse to raise children to hate other people based on superficial judgments. That applies to everyone -- any religious zealots, any nationalist xenophobes, etc. -- not just some swastika swinging cowboy in the California wastelands breeding Aryan pop stars who seem just a likely to end up in a trailer strung out on meth in ten years as to do anything worthwhile with their lives. (So why do I say that? I say it because hate thrives in isolation -- these girls' parents already want to move to an "all-white community in the Pacific Northwest" because Bakersfield, CA isn't white enough. So, yeah, it's easy for me to imagine these girls getting home schooled in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere until they get married off to a couple of prison tattooed crankheads. Am I prejudging them the same way they prejudge people of color? Do they deserve it? Do my preconceived notions have any more factual basis than theirs? Is it right to hate hate?)

Hate ruins people, and there's no excuse for teaching it. I don't care how precious you hold the First Amendment.

It Is You (Oh, yeah...)

I'm totally and completely stuck right now. I have listened to the Specials' version of the song "Pressure Drop" (also features on the Gross Pointe Blank soundtrack) over a dozen times in the past two days (plus the Toots and the Maytals version a few times for good measure).

This isn't entirely unheard of for me -- last time it happened, though, it was the entire American Idiot album.

I'm not entirely sure what brought this on, but the song makes me borderline ecstatic. (Comment about my questionable sanity redacted.)

At any rate, bless the Specials.

Rollergirls back in action

Thanks to a comment from Ms. Jayne Manslaughter, I'm here to remind everyone that the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls are back in action this month:

Grudge Match: The Rumors are True! The Red Ridin' Hoods will take on the Sugar Kill Gang again! September 17, 2005 Bladium Sports Club 2400 Central Park Blvd, Denver 303-320-3033

Tickets are on sale now. (And btw, the Bladium didn't stink, apparently....)

Sadly, I'll be missing this match as well, as the Wifey and I are taking off (in the Honda -- hooray for $3-5 gas!) to LA that very day.