Rock N Jock Part III Recap

All the stars came out in the sweltering heat this past Sunday to do battle in the third somewhat annual rock n jock wiffle ball game. While the game lacked a certain sexual tension due to the absence of one reno melons, the action was white, pasty and hotly contested. Rock n jock III featured an appearance by the long lost ghostface, typical stellar performances from AG and Huevos, and a "batman" at bat by the sauce that nearly wiped away memories of his humiliation a few years back. Despite all the great performances, no star shone as brightly mcsquared who, in his last GA wiffleball at bat (at least for a while), hit a towering three run home run that sealed victory for the "oglethorpe" team. Goodbye, mcsquared, you will be missed in the ATH, and there will always be a place for you in the Hill Street Penal League.

refresher course:

constitutional law in five minutes.

cool t-shirt i ordered:

get your own obama gear here.

classic 4KS:

i'm please to bring you a particularly relevant installment of the old school. as our loyal readership is surely already aware, the third [somewhat] annual rock 'n jock wiffleball challenge will take place this sunday at 1 pm at the hill street penal league field. a great time will be had.


originally posted 4/10/05, entitled "rock 'n jock".

the second annual hill street penal league rock 'n jock wiffleball spectacular will be held on april 23, 2005 (2pm). the event will be a joyous celebration of life and sport, particularly with an esteemed contingent of ATLiens returning to athens for the game.

what will be the highlight of the day? might it be the graceful defensive prowess of dave "the destroyer" conley? the sunbathing of the luscious meghann hummel? the consistent pull-hitting of austin "AG" gillis?

the one thing that will surely not be the highlight? the woeful pitching efforts of saucy sellers. sellers is expected to employ his famed "lull you to frustration" technique, whereby his pitches are so consistently bad that impatience forces the hitter to take a cut at a ball at least 3 feet from the strike zone.

I've been looking for freedom...

I was surprised to find this article on page one of the online version of the N.Y. Times the other day. When I went home to my mom's house this weekend I found an old picture of my dad and me cleaning our first Trabant or how we call it here: Trabi.

If I think back today it is quite difficult to imagine that the Trabi used to be our family car back in the day. We went on vacation in our Trabi, my parents built a house using it to haul material, and it was also the car that took us across the border into West Germany for the first time in our lives.

The article mentions that you had to wait forever to get a Trabant. It wasn’t such a problem to buy a used one if you had the money (the one on the picture was a used one). However, buying a new one was quite difficult since you had to wait for more than a decade to get one. My dad ordered a new Trabant when I was born in 1977. It was in the summer of 1989 when the letter arrived - the letter telling him that the car he ordered 13 years earlier was finally available. And he didn’t get the normal Trabant. He got the special version – the “Trabant 601 S de luxe”. It still sounds like music in my ears. The “de luxe” version came with a special interior: carpet, a low fuel light (in the normal version you had to open the hood and stick a plastic stick into the fuel tank, which was underneath the hood, to find out how much fuel is left…), fog lights, and reverse lights. He even paid extra for a radio and a heating system. In other words: that was the full package – the real deal!

I will never…and if I say never, I mean never….forget the moment when he came around the corner with this baby blue wonder for the first time. He asked me whether we should go for a ride. When I got into the car and rested my feet on this carpet that tells you “yes that’s a ‘de luxe’ ”, I knew instantly that I was the proudest son in the whole German Democratic Republic. I rolled down the window, took a deep breath, and we drove off to pick up mom from work.

Two cylinders and 26 horse powers took us down the road. My dad turned on the radio and what I heard was the only song that did the situation justice: “I’ve been looking for freedom”, sang buy a guy who was driving around a black car that talked to him in this TV-series that I was not allowed to talk about in school since you were not officially allowed to watch West German TV. The guy on the radio was David Hasselhoff and even though I know that I'm catering to a stereotype here I want to point out that I'm not making this up…

My dad didn’t take notice of the song because he was still shocked about sitting in his first brand new car after waiting for more than a decade. He was shocked again a couple of months later when the wall came down and he realized that he could have gotten 16.580 West-Mark for the 16.580 East-Mark that he bought the baby blue Trabi for…he could have easily afforded even a Mercedes, a used one that is...

We kept the car for quite a long time. My mother drove it until 1996 (she sold it in 2003) and was back then one of only a few people who stayed loyal to their Trabi. After I got my license she let me borrow it. The Trabi became the first car that I was driving around looking for freedom...

thigh bruise, origins unknown:

My new summer jam...

Redd Kross
Born Innocent

I used to really like Redd Kross. Sometime around 10^th grade or so I read a blurb from Thurston Moore talking about how they really loved this band from L.A. who started as a bunch of kids, and wrote really great pop songs. So anyway, I bought Phaseshifter, decided that they were in fact a really great pop band that sounded like they could have written priceless ditties for TV commercials somewhere around 1977, and then at some point decided it just wasn’t really my thing anymore and traded it for some record in Little Five Points that I’m sure I’ve traded back by now. Mostly, I guess I just kinda forgot about them. Until today, that is, when I picked up their first record, from 1982.

Born Innocent clocks in at around 20 minutes or so, maybe a bit more, and within that short time encompasses just about everything you need in a good punk rock record. And maybe it’s not a real punk rock record in that not just anyone could have made it. There are moments on the record that sound just as accomplished and polished as something that Sebadoh might have done in their late 90s good period, before that really bad late 90s bad period. But those are just moments. Most of the record sounds like it was done in a basement, with everyone in the band singing regardless of talent, with a bassist who sometimes seems like he’s playing a different song (but still sounds right on), all with the goal of getting it right on the first take to save money for the drive-in afterwards. It’s the kind of record you wish your favorite band would make out of boredom if nothing else, though few ever do. And somehow, Redd Kross manages to pull more than a dozen kick ass songs out of it. If I had known about this record in 1987 when I skated I would have insisted they play it at Brickyard (our local half pipe) every time.

fun facts for people of all ages!!

did you know that there is a georgia county with less than 2000 residents? that 10% of georgians don't speak english at home. that there are six states with less than 1% black population? learn these facts and more at the interactive u.s. census website.

Pedro being Pedro

With his little buddy.

paris coming unraveled.

check this out. this incarceration could end up being just what she needs to get over herself a bit. or she could become a pathetic shell of a human before the 45 days are up.

Making Jelly

Ted Turner gave the commencement address at UGA the year I graduated. I'm pretty sure he was drunk at the time.

This is a letter his dad wrote to him when he was in college. It's pretty famous among classics majors. I remember having some remarkably similar (and uncomfortable) exchanges with my own dad.

And for the record, I think Columbus proved the world was not flat, not that it was not a square. Whether or not I am a snob is still up for debate.