Odds and Ends « The Blog for the Sports Gamer

22Sep/050

Odds and Ends

I'm 31 years old and I have discovered what it is to feel pure joy. There's a million variations, but quite simply, it's having your 20-month old daughter sneak up on you while you're doing other things (washing dishes, picking up, etc.) and wrapping your legs up in a big old bear hug. Not sure why I feel the need to post about this, maybe it was this week's episode of House, but I just feel compelled to say what a daily joy my daughter (Anastasia; Ana) has been to my life. My son, Kyle, is almost five months old now and I grow more attached to his silly grin each day, but adolescent fits aside I'll take a laughing, loving, running around the house and climbing everything 2-year old any day of the week. Simply an amazing experiene and nothing -nothing- compares to it.

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I finally got around to watching the movie Sideways on Monday. Once I got past the fact that Lowell from Wings (Thomas Hayden Church) is in a movie I was able to settle right into this one. Maybe a touch overrated, but highly enjoyable none the less. I just wish they hadn't included the scene right near the beginning where Paul Giamatti's character ripped off his mom. His character may have been something of a loser, but that was a bit much. Anyway, I'm not a big wine guy, but I immediately identified with Giammatti's failed attempts as a writer and thought all the dialog about wine in the movie was interesting as hell. A copule memorable lines:

"I am not drinking any f@#ing Merlot!"
"Do not drink too much. Do you hear me? I don't want you passing out or going to the dark side. No going to the dark side!"
"Try to be your normal, humorous self. The guy you were before the tailspin. Do you remember that guy? People love that guy."
"It tastes like the back of a f@#ing L.A. school bus. Now they probably didn't de-stem, hoping for some semblance of concentration, crushed it up with leaves and mice, and then wound up with this rancid tar and turpentine bulls#@!. F'n' Raid."

And the scene where Giamatti has to get Church's wedding rings back from some married woman's house left me in stitches while at the same time scarring me for life. Good stuff.

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I've been waiting all week for something really bad to happen (to me, personally). I was always a big fan of the short-lived TV series Sports Night. In one episode there's a run of dialogue about the song Eli's Coming by Three Dog Night. In the show one of the characters heard the song as kid and didn't understand the song was about a womanizer and instead regarded "Eli" as a portent of something dark. So whenever he felt a sense of impending doom he would utter the phrase, "Eli is coming." I liked the sound of it and I sort of adopted the phrase for my own. This week the song, for the first time in my memory, ended up playing on a local radio station on the way into work and now I'm expecting to encounter disaster around every turn. Yes, I know. My mind is a scary place sometimes.