notes from the fallout shelter

my newsletter came in today's mail. i only recently started receiving it again even though i'm a lifetime member. seems they lost track of me when i moved seven years ago and stopped sending it. guess it took me a while to notice something was missing.

so anyway, i flipped quickly through, glancing at the pictures (of course, there were none of me)before settling down to read it over a dinner of roasted pork loin and winter root vegetables in a maple-mustard glaze. sadly, i found but one article that i was even remotely interested in reading. it was kyle weisbrod's piece, which made me aware of the situation involving the names of coed teams (i'm sorry, mixed teams) at nationals and the upa's request to have them changed. as a founding member of we smoke weed, this was a topic i found interesting. of course, after finding that kyle never reveals what the names of the teams were before they were changed (perhaps he assumes we all know? nah.) i quickly lost interest. besides that, all i did was look at the pictures, and then only briefly.

boy am i glad i have a lifetime membership. it would suck to have to pay for this thing.

so, am i the only guy out here who looked at the kati halmos poster and noticed her athleticism right up until the point when i realized it was a centerfold, and then started to check out her butt?

so that got me interested again and i read the pufahl award interview. what does spirit of the game mean to kati? patting your opponent on the backside and sharing ass pats with your teammates.

i took her poster down.

check this out: of the 38 players listed on the rosters of the teams in the mixed finals, 23 shared this amazing stat: their turnovers equalled or exceeded their goals caught, goals thrown and d's combined. and that's even with two stellar players having double digit turnovers, which would seem to leave very few for the rest of the players to share. nope. talk about a swillfest. (interesting aside here...although the numbers seem to tell a different story, the reporter for the finals writes "Brass Monkey played their best game in the finals.") in defense of the players, i've heard it was windy, and perhaps the conditions are to blame for the turnovers. after all, i have it on good authority that when it's windy your teammates seem very far away.

speaking of which, how about getting discraft to print a warning on all discs like the one that appears on rear view mirrors in cars: warning-in high wind your teammates are closer than they appear.

but here's another angle: maybe it wasn't the wind at all. maybe the reason they put on such a shameful display in the finals was because they had been forced to change their names by the upa. maybe it was an identity crisis that led to a crisis of confidence. thinking i might have something here i did some digging. it turns out that a groundbreaking research study done at a prestigious university at some point in time revealed that baseball players whose names were removed from their team jerseys immediately prior to playing a game recorded significantly lower batting averages and in turn reported that the baseball seemed very small. a follow-up study has yet to be completed. hmmmm.

so, after a few days without posting to rsd, the furor seems to be dying down. it's a good thing too. i don't think i could stand seeing ad hominem one more time. looking back i have to say i'm quite pleased. the four posts over two days generated a total of 90 some posts before a week was out. if you subscribe to the theory that for everyone who posts there are 100 who read but don't, that's an awful lot of people with nothing better to do. of course, there's no justifiable reason for subscribing to such a preposterous theory.

more amusing even than the number and passion of posters was the volume of email i received. the highlight of that wasted bandwidth was one of the history book's writers taking time out from his vacation in st. martin to inundate my inbox with messages that questioned my loyalty to him, ultimate, humanity and the yankees. in one especially impassioned moment, a four line paragraph called me cruel, harsh, weak, and cruel. clearly, after all that writing for the history, he was running short of adjectives.

i won't violate the spirit of the game and post a private email, so i'm afraid you'll just have to imagine how good the rest of them were based on that brief snippet. and again, in case you forgot, he could have been on a beach in st. martin.

speaking of spirit, or more accurately etiquette, is it customary to find readers copying your blog and posting it onto rsd, rather than simply directing people to the blog? i'm new to the game, so my inquiry is sincere. it seems a little shady to me.

guess that's all for now. with school back in session it'll be hard for me to find the time to keep posting regularly (either here or on rsd) but i'm having so much fun i'm going to keep it going as long as i can. it won't be easy, but i think i owe it to the sport.