prod & ponder

The DC Flickr gallery show opening was a success. It all came together: great photos, a good crowd, tasty food, strong drinks, and a DJ spinning good grooves.

The show is staying up for several weeks, so you can still stop by El Tamarindo (7331 Georgia Ave., NW) if you want to check out the photos, which are located both upstairs and in the downstairs lounge.

I passed by Dupont Circle on the way to this month’s blogger meetup and noticed that some butthead decided to add graffiti to the fountain. I hope karma works quickly in this case and said butthead gets the thwap upside the head or crippiling hoo-ha infection he so richly deserves.

It was a good meetup, with seven bloggers attending. Personally, I think the best idea to come out of the meetup was the demented vision of a marathon drinking & blogging gathering, a kind of beer pong meets blogathan. But that’s just my take. There was also banter about social networking theory, epidemiology, cyberculture, google and technorati, the hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy, the aesthetics of facist propaganda, and the inconceivable slowness of dialup internet connections. There also was a broad consensus that next time we should meet someplace other than SoHo, someplace with beer.

I got home in time to watch the premier of 30 Days, the new show by Morgan Spurlock, of Supersize Me fame. If the first episode is any indication it’s going to be a very, very good show. I’d say that this guy is the next Michael Moore, except I think it’s much more honest and poignant than Moore’s stuff.

Say what you will about my alma mater (for my BA and MA degrees), between South Florida’s marijuanna imports and North Florida’s mushroom-friendly climate, FSU students have no shortage of available drugs.

This may have had something to do with why Florida State was regularly at the top of Princeton’s party school list (currently at #6). I can say that it definitely had something to do with why an old college acquaintance of mine back in the day, Marshall Ledbetter, took over the state’s capitol building in 1991, warding off police for five hours with nothing but a bottle of JD in his hands and issuing the following poetic list of demands:
“666 Dunkin’ Donuts
A 20-inch veggie pizza from Gumby’s
Extra jalapenos on the side
And a case of Asahi Dry

I wish to speak with Timothy Leary
Lemmy, Jello, and Ice Cube too
Carton of Lucky’s with filters
And bringa CNN news crew…”

Jello Biafra even wrote a song about it, appearing on the LARD album, with an mp3 of it available here.

I bring this up now because of a what sounds like a vaguely similar incident involving Florida State’s potential starting and star quarterback for this year: Wyatt Sexton. On Monday night Sexton was arrested as he ran around the streets in just a pair of wet shorts, occasionally dropping to the ground to do push ups, and claiming that he was “god and the son of god.”

On the drug front, there’s no definitive information on whether they were involved or not, but it probably should have been a bit of a red flag when, in his player profile interview, Sexton listed Bob Marley as one of the folks he’d most want to hang out with.

But even without mind-altering substances, somewhere in the grey zone between deep and loopy religious convictions are nothing new to Florida State football. Coach Bobby Bowden is an outspoken evangelical Christian who caught national attention last month from a speech he gave at the Fellowship of Christian Athletes meeting in Colorado Springs.

In defending Air Force Academy football coach Fisher DeBerry’s organizing of his team around evangelical Christian norms, Bowden said DeBerry was fighting against the U.S. government, “fighting a heck of a battle because he happens to be a Christian, and he wants his boys to be saved. I want my boys to be saved…. We know we’re going to get challenged on it, but that’s what we believe in. I ain’t gonna back down.”

(Props to one of my old religion profs, Leo Sandon, who took Bowden to task for those remarks and the wrongheaded idea that coaches pushing faith on players in a public education institution is at all appropriate.)

Florida State’s truly awful quarterback of the past several years, Chris Rix, was also an evangelical Christian , and he toured with Bowden to give faith-based inspirational speeches. There were rumors and speculation that his religious connections with Bowden were the only thing that allowed Rix to keep his position as starting quarterback. Rix did have this habit of tossing terrible passes in critical situations, chucking the ball high in the air and seeming confident that god would sort it all out… in his favor.

So toss all the drugs and religious fervor together into the pressure cooker of being young and holding the weight of a college football dynasty on your shoulders. Add the pinch of family pressure that Wyatt’s father, Billy Sexton, is FSU’s running-back coach. And now does it seem all so crazy for Wyatt to be running half-naked through the street, dropping to do push-ups and claiming to be god and the son of god? Not so much.

So here’s to Wyatt. I’d sure love it if he could eventually make it back to playing. He was a fantastic quarterback, the best I’ve seen at Florida State in a long while. But mostly I just hope he gets the help, and rest, and break he needs. A repreive from every faith, family, and football pressure imaginable. And maybe some welcomed Gumby’s pizza, and a tasty doughnut or two.

Ok, let’s start with the pictures. Despite the outrageous heat, I went exploring at the Locust Grove Nature Center. It’s right by where I’m taking tennis lessons, just a mile or so from my house. From the road it looks like a just a little hut with a few bird feeders, but it turns out there’s a long network of trails behind it and a gigantic sprawling meadow that seems right out of the pages of Bloom County.

Unfortunately I didn’t bring a wide angle lens with me, so I couldn’t take any pictures to do the meadow justice. Next time.

Apparently this discussion occured not far away in Frederick County, on Monday, when police Sgt. Shawn Tyler pulled over a motorist:
“Did I do something wrong?”
“Yes, you did.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What about the three children you have in the trunk of the car?”

Smoking Gun has posted the court filings.

Who’d have thought it? The Nationals, as in the team formerly known as the Expos, are again in first place in the National League East.

In college baseball, Florida State beat Auburn today, taking an NCAA Regional Title in the process and advancing to the super regionals. It might be time to start scoping out airfare to Omaha.

And my ill-fitting photo for the day? Well I didn’t have any new baseball stuff handy to photograph around the house, so instead here’s a little old school football. The fancy new Sony PSPs haven’t tempted me, but I couldn’t resist this blast from the past on Ebay.

I’m reading through Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics.

I usually don’t pay much attention to bookjacket blurbs, but when Malcolm Gladwell remarks that “Steven Levitt has the most interesting mind in America,” my curiosity gets piqued.

I’m about halfway through the book right now and enjoying it. Some good hooks into it if you’re curious:
NPR Interview with Steven Levitt
The Freakonomics Blog

Levitt and Dubner have also started a Freakonomics column in the New York Times. Their first story: monkeys learning to use currency.

I got a late start to the day today, since it was a late night of poker last night. So there wasn’t any free time to go hunting for photos, but here are some shots I snapped while running afternoon errands:

I took a break from writing this afternoon to step outside and take some photos around the house…

I’m pretty sure the copter was a medevac copter heading to nearby Suburban Hospital.