This is the second time this summer (click here for the first time) that I have seen my church mentioned in the Missed Connections section of Craigslist. I never knew church was such a popular pick up place. It just happens that I sometimes wear a green polo shirt to church and I normally sit in the back. It's just too bad that I am nowhere near six feet five. Or maybe this woman is dyslexic and really meant to say five feet six.
Fox has done a terrific job at using all the partnerships and assets at its disposal to promote The Simpsons Movie. From rebranding select 7-Elevens into Kwik-E-Marts to changing Tom Anderson’s MySpace picture into a Simpsons cartoon sketch, the company has done all it can to ensure that as many people are aware of the movie’s existence as possible.
Last night, I decided to use my parents’ kitchen to do my part in promoting the movie. I present to you, Spider Cat.
If you don’t get the joke, watch the movie.
I am sure some of you have heard that Cheryl Jones (who played Matt Damon’s character’s mom on Ocean’s Twelve) will be playing President of the United States on the next season of 24. Some speculate that this is a move by the producers to subtly promote Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. I don’t agree. 24 has always had a tradition of playing “outside the box” by doing things such as killing off key characters or having a black man as President. So I don’t think we should interpret any political motives into. However, I do think that to avoid the appearance of playing partisan politics, 24 should mention in passing that in addition to being the first woman in the Oval Officethat she is also a Mormon.
In other 24 news, I read over the weekend that Keifer Sutherland mentioned recently that in the next season, Jack Bauer will be working independently of the Counter Terrorist Unit. It looks like 24 is taking a page from the James Bond movie franchise where it decides to do a plot where its hero tries to save the world by working “off the grid.” James Bond did this in License to Kill and it looks like Jack Bauer will be having his own “License to Kill” moment next season.
Over the weekend I read a story in the Washington City Paper about an internet site that has become extremely popular in our nation’s capital. Late Night Shots is a by-invitation-only social networking site made up of (relatively) young working professionals who tend to frequent the same subset of bars in the Georgetown area. The average member is someone who comes from a well off family, attended a preppy college where he/she was in a fraternity or sorority, and likes to party. This is how the writer describes this groups social scene, both on and off line:
"Then the bearded one in the middle busts out with this: “Do you like anal sex?” I squint. I’m confused. “Do you do anal?” he repeats, head bobbing with excitement. The litany continues. Do I want to take it in the ass? Have I ever taken it in the ass? My silence is taken as an affirmative and he announces that this interview will go no further unless he receives a hand job. I retreat into a hole carved out during similar sessions in high school and head for the door.
Later, at home, I decide to find the fellows online. It’s easy to do since these were no run-of-the-mill meatheads. All three are members of Late Night Shots, a very exclusive, invite-only social-networking Web site. The anal-sex proposition came from John Tabacco, a 25-year-old graduate of Georgetown Prep and Denison University. His friends were both graduates of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Late Night Shots caters to Washington’s hard-partying preppy crowd. Think of a new generation of young Republicans getting trashed at St. Elmo’s, hooking up, then writing about it at 3 in the morning. The bar-scene-themed Web site launched in late spring 2006 and has since branched out to four other cities. But it’s nowhere near as popular anywhere else as it is here in D.C. Founder Reed Landry, a prep-school boy from McLean, Va., claims he has 14,500 members and that a third of them visit the site every day. He and partner Neel Patel say they make enough money from Google ads and banner ads to abandon outside employment."
Reading the article reminds me of the crowd that I very much wanted to be a part of when I was younger and made me wish I was a twenty-one year old frat boy so I can try to hook up onto that scene. But one of the (few) good things about getting older is that you better understand who you are and I have since realized that this is really not the my scene. When I lived in Virginia I knew this girl and her sister and they would invite me to all their parties. These parties were unlike any of the other parties I normally went to. It was there that I first played beer pong and flip cup. These parties made me feel like I had accomplished something, that I had found acceptance among a group of people that others wouldn’t normally associate me with. It wasn’t much later (literally I realized this as I was writing this post) that I realized that these parties did not change who I was, they simply made me feel differently about myself momentarily. I kept in touch with very few of these folks because I had build very little in terms of relationships with them, most likely because we had a very little in common to begin with (except, of course, that a lot of us went to UVA).
Instead of spending my nights trying to out party a bunch of frat boys, I am better off allocating my social and intellectual capital discussing theology with the guys in my bible study or drinking with graduate students in the English department in Milltown, both of which I have done in the last seven days.
This morning’s New York Times had a great story about how the management of the buyout firm Blackstone Group used smart tax strategies to pay $553 million in taxes in return for tax savings with a present value of $751 million.
This reminds me of a story my taxes in finance professor talked about in class about how the late cosmetic entrepreneur Estee Lauder employed tax strategies that succeeded in passing her assets onto her heirs without triggering the inheritance tax. Not only did her heirs not owe a dime in taxes, they received a tax refund over the next number of years.
Last Tuesday I received a letter in the mail from an organization called Cambridge Who’s Who. I was “being considered for inclusion into the 2007/2008 Cambridge Who’s Who Among Executives and Professionals.” It goes on to tell me that it was the I was to be included on the list of “our country’s most accomplished professionals” and that “inclusion is considered by many as the single highest mark of achievement.”
This letter reminds me of the one I got in high school telling me I was nominated for Who’s Who Among America’s High School Students. That “high honor” did absolutely nothing for me except giving me the opportunity to pay for a directory that included my name and a one-line blurp listing my extracurricular activities.
I did a blog search on Cambridge Who’s Who and found several entries that confirmed my suspicions about the organization. What was that quote by Groucho Marx about certain types of organizations that he always refuses to join?
Last summer I purchased an American flag from the office of U.S. Senator Richard Burr. I have since hung it from my balcony on many occasions, the anniversary of 9/11, Memorial Day, and now today on the Fourth of July. But as much as I enjoyed putting up the flag this morning and watching it wave from the third floor overlooking a good portion of the parking area at my apartment complex, there was a bit of sadness in doing so this morning. Part of it was knowing that because my lease is up soon, this will probably be the last time I am able to fly Old Glory from my apartment balcony. The larger source of the sadness, however, came from knowing that on this most patriotic of all holidays, my flag would very likely be the only one displayed in the entire Alta Springs apartment complex.
When I was a kid, on the Fourth of July I could walk down the street and see an American flag on every block. Yet in the past couple of years, I don’t notice as many flags anymore. This is even more baffling when you take into consideration that our nation is at war overseas and Americans are being targeted by terrorists living among us. I am not sure why this is. It could be that I have been living in a rental complex and people who rent are much less likely to own, not to mention display a flag. It could also be that Chapel Hill is politically liberal and those on the left are less patriotic, at least according to Ann Coulter. But I am thinking that perhaps the real causehas todo with what Americans are learning in schools nowadays. That instead of being taught that America is a special country that has done great things for people everywhere, they’re more likely to learn about the bad things that America has done. I suspect what I am seeing is the logical result of this type of education. In the past months, I have read books (Telling the Truth by Lynne Cheney and The Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan) that have made the point that when you teach young Americans that America is no better than any other country in the world, as adults, they will be much less likely to support their country.
Yesterday as I was at the Undergraduate Library working on cover letters, it was noon and the song You’re A Grand Old Flag chimed from the Bell Tower. I began to instinctively hum along to it and remembering that I learned the lyrics in the fifth grade. It then dawned on me that very few college students today probably know the lyrics to that song. So perhaps it is a good thing that this is the last time my American flag will be flying over Alta Springs since I have a feeling she is not only feeling lonely but also beginning to feel like a foreigner in a strange land.
I was at the Undergraduate Library yesterday when I noticed a man sitting at the next table. He looked similar to a grad student I knew at UVA. I was pretty certain it wasn’t him but decided to do an internet search on the grad student just to be sure.
Google gave me very little useful information but a search on Hoosonline gave me an updated photo and a recent submission he had sent to Class Notes. Turns out he graduated this past May from the UNC School of Law and is now teaching at a private college nearby. So I figured it had to be him and went over to say hello. He told me that after receiving his PhD from UVA he chose to go to lawschool as a result of a mid life crisis.
If I ever find myself having my mid life crisis, hopefully I will respond by doing something other than spending three years and $45,000 - $90,000 (depending on whether this student received in or out of state tuition) on going to law school.
I get mistaken all the time for someone whom people seem to think they have seen or met elsewhere. At the church that I go to, there is an area where people gather in between services to drink coffee, socialize, and enjoy fellowship. Since I don’t drink coffee, whenever I go there I line up to get the lemonade and occasionally get dirty looks from kids who look at me and wonder just what’s wrong with me that I don’t drink the “adult beverage” and have to compete with them instead for lemonade.
After the service yesterday, as I was filling my plastic cup with lemonade, a woman came up to me and said the following:
“You look really familiar. Did you used to help out with Sunday school here before leaving to go to Iraq?”
I will leave it up to my readers to decide for themselves whether they have an easier time imaging me packing heat and shooting insurgents or in a church classroom surrounded by ten year olds.
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