The state of football in Florida is pretty good or average, depending upon where you are. Every other sport seems to be suffering a little, no doubt in due to unpopularity and/or the economic situations around the country. Title IX sports are taking a heavy hit, I would assume. But this just made me laugh. 

http://www.gatorsports.com/article/20091013/ARTICLES/910139867/0/GATORSOTHER

Okay, let me get this straight. You’re a gymnast and you have a safe filled with shotguns and stolen computers. Okay, a stolen computer is one thing. People steal stuff all the time, of course, I don’t support grand larceny outside of Grand Theft Auto 4. You’ve been a All-American nine times in a sport most people wouldn’t care for. You were great at what you did, toiling in relative obscurity for a free education. Instead, you and your boyfriend decide to steal some computers and store guns at your apartment.

When I first saw the ticker on ESPN News, I only saw a piece of it…and honestly, I thought it was someone from the football team. It really didn’t get a rise out of me. Hell, if someone on the Gators FB team decided to grab an AK-47 and do his best imitation of the awesome GTA 4 mission “Four Leaf Clover”, it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sur0v2JhKA

But a gymnast having nine shotguns…wow. What the hell was she doing? But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she and the boyfriend weren’t imitating GTA 4. Maybe they watched a little too much Heat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USZARLgMl6o

Wow. Didn’t Plaxico Burress teach us anything?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpgL5kuBpMA

Thank goodness this ended peacefully. Maybe she watched the end of The Professional. It didn’t end well. Then again, not many people go out in a blaze of glory anymore. I guess movies really do teach us things.

Farrah Fawcett’s dead. Now…

Oh wait…

Michael Jackson’s dead! Stop the presses! What’s next? Jodie Foster gets mowed down in a drive-by? Ben Affleck has a WW II plane fall on his house? Megan Fox gets burned at the stake by everyone who hated the Transformers sequel? (On an aside, I don’t understand the hatred for the Transformer movies. You know who’s directing it, you know what you’re getting…so why bitch about it? You can’t complain about something you saw coming anyway. Jesus Christ, internet! Calm down!)

Katt Williams gets stomped by Shaq? Although…some people who loved Michael may consider that after this hillarious diatriabe (to be kind) about Michael two years ago on the Pimp Chronicles Part I DVD…

(warning! Really…really bad language abound)

(check at about 1:17)

And then there’s Chris Rock’s take…

Damn, now I got watch Thriller again. I don’t need to listen to Smooth Criminal, Alien Ant Farm’s cover was pretty good.

Now, Michael wasn’t perfect. He had…serious issues. But I think the world is more interested in celebrating his music and not demonizing his other stuff…which is kinda refreshing…and disturbing at the same time. I don’t know. There are no easy answers for that.

On another note, The Hangover was pretty funny. A lesson in what not to do in life. I just wished I’d seen it when it came out. Now I got to get around to watching Star Trek when ever it comes out on DVD.

I looked at the previews about cinema version of  My Sister’s Keeper…I thought it’d be darker than the way they presented it. Plus, it’s not as long (unless the paper had it wrong) as I thought it would be. My only issue was that they changed the ending. What was wrong with the original ending? Now, the actors were not who I expected them to be. When I read the book, I had a completely different mental image of the characters. I wasn’t expecting Alec Baldwin to play Campbell’s character. That was just a weird mental image. Oh well, what can you do? I may be wrong. Who knows?

As for my novel, I still have to finish up my chapter by chapter summaries. It shouldn’t be long before the entire thing is complete. Anyway, work to do and all…ciao!

But apart from that, about 70 percent of the prep-work or grunt work, is done. Phase Three is writing out the chapter-by-chapter, which is still a work in progress, do some last minute research and organize all the pictures and what not. Then, I can take some time off…and start writing the damn thing; just hit the ground and run with it.

Maybe I’m doing too much organizing, but I really, really want this to succeed. And nothing’s worth its salt if it’s not done properly.

Now, on a more humorous note, I had a crazy idea to make the show Jon and Kate Plus 8 even better by drawing in those casual viewers. I got the idea after talking to a guy at work about the same old paternity, you’re the father/you’re not the father stories, and not just Maury’s show. 

Since we’re sports fans, we hashed out this absurd idea while we nearly doubled over in laughter. here’s the end result of our stroke of genius (or lack thereof, you might say)

You make a two hour special, and you take John, Kate and all their kids, put them in a gigantic toy store with cameras all around. Then, you pick up the Octomom and her dozen kids (if I remember correctly).

In addition, you raid the NBA, NFL and MLB  for all the current and former players with more than five kids. That would include some of the Mount Rushmore of Multiple Progeny, Evander Holyfield, Travis Henry (though the felony stuff could be a deal breaker) and Shawn Kemp.

Now, in a situation like this you may have to find another couple with multiple kids (particularly ones with multiple births).

The target is 100 kids in total.

Then you call the special: Jon and Kate Plus 108. I’m telling you, this could probably draw high double digit ratings. I mean, you already have a built in audience of people who like to laugh at athletes who have no idea what the word contraception means, much less self-control.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call this schadenfreude…oh what the hell, it is.

But of course, our society’s always doing things for the kids…right?

(On another note, I’m probably going to take a break and go see The Hangover. I haven’t been to a movie since I saw Watchmen. Hope it’s as good as they say.)

I was outside a small house in Midnight Hill when a single bee landed on the ground near me. I wonder if it was attracted to the nauseating scent, not of garbage, but the Dogwood trees around me. Then several others came along, as if it were gathering at a club.

It didn’t matter what neighborhood a person went to, there was the bitter smell of the white leaf trees. Nature was undergoing quite a bipolar trip; it could be thirty four in the morning and seventy nine by noon. But the great sign things had changed was the slow return of the insects. When the bees came, I became a bit apprehensive. It was a pity, I wasn’t afraid of death…but a damn bee made me raise my guard a little. But maybe it was the memories.

Three years ago, I was in ninth grade and my biology teacher, Mrs. Hamilton, lectured us on scientific classification. The way it worked was that every living thing had a series of classes they belonged to and the higher you went on the chain, the more you’d see many animals were under the same umbrella.

“Consider the Africanized Killer Bee,” she said, “one of the most dangerous creations of mankind. An insanely territorial creation, classification: Animal, Arthropod, Insect Class.”

“Why does it have such a long name?” I asked.

“It’s a Latin name, but the issue, Rocco, is that it’s all connected. It all means something and it all separates one thing from the other.”

Her point was that every life could be broken down into component parts and each part, while miniscule to some and anal-retentive to others, had an importance; as if it were the tiniest cog. The specific species name Apis mellifera scutellata made the Africanized bee different from Apis mellifera, or the regular honey bee. That little name was the screw that held together the great machine of this winged species.

But one cannot forget that some ambitious man changed the original type.

The scary thing was that the killer bees didn’t take any anything from anyone. They were among nature’s ultimate stealth weapons. You couldn’t even tell the freaking killer bees apart from the regular honey bees! They would soon kill you for breathing in their general direction. It wasn’t hard to figure out.

The woman that took me in after my mother’s death just happened to be wandering around the California Desert. There was just a percentage of the Unites States population that just happened to wander around when things went wrong. It didn’t matter if you were white or black, Hispanic or Indian.

Imagine this, a story goes that years ago, two college age Caucasian Homo Sapiens went into the Mojave Desert with nothing more some mescaline and acid pills, as if they were trying to resurrect the seventies. One of the women, part Anglo Saxon, part Dutch, encountered the Apis mellifera scutellata while under the influence. It did not end well.

Crazy people were a dime a dozen and they came in all kinds. Believe me, I knew plenty of crazy people, and a third of them were in my high school. But it was with these people I found an identity. I didn’t criticize them, I only pointed out their oddities. It was because I was just as strange as them.

In the process of this, I was crawling through old writings I had, looking for things I would not use in my novel. I had a passage I wrote just to get the idea on paper. But I’m not sure if I’m going to use it, so here it is:

The thing was, I knew everyone didn’t deserve a happy ending. The world was not perfect and some things were just never resolved. Villains did not deserve one because, unlike heroes, villains always end up where they were because of their own circumstances. They screwed up the murder plan, the bank robbery, the kidnapping, the hostage negotiation, the shootout…

So they deserved to get shot fifty times by the police or thrown off a massive building…or even have a massive piece of technology fall on them.

But heroes were never guaranteed anything. Nor should they have been. After all, heroes always lost something in their lives and that…is the price of heroism.

The good news is, I’ve proven to myself that I can go the distance. This experience has served me well…for all its struggles. After all, that’s the basis of novel writing…getting the damn thing written.

Well, back to work.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/My-Sisters-Keeper/Jodi-Picoult/e/9780743454537/?bnit=H&bnrefer=RECOMMEND

Now, I didn’t know anything about this author. I’d never read her stuff. This was after I’d finished reading all the Stephen Ambrose books. I figure, eh…what the hell? I read the book, and I liked it. Pretty depressing stuff (I wouldn’t wish cancer on anybody, well…maybe Osama Bin Laden…if he’s still alive). But that entire time, I felt it was my personal secret. I read it work and no one really asked me about it. My own personal cult classic, if you will.

Apparently, I understimated how popular this book was.

Flash forward to 2009. I’m in the same place…and I see another version of this book.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/My-Sisters-Keeper/Jodi-Picoult/e/9781439157381/?bnit=H&bnrefer=RECOMMEND&pv=y

But the keywords: Now A Motion Picture.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, I thought at the time. Now, let me make myself clear. I’m notsaying this is a bad thing. Hey, if more people read the book fine. I’m a staunch supporter of capitalism.

Back when I read it, I did have a fleeting thought that it could be made into a movie, but I never thought it would happen. Now…that’s no longer the case.

It was awkward. It didn’t feel like I owned my piece of this underrated brainchild of Picoult any more. It was strange place to be. This book holds a special place for me…just like Band of Brothers, The Wild Blue, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Generation Kill and White Oleander do. Books that I could be stuck on a desert island with and never get bored.

Maybe that’s the mark of a good book. A book you didn’t expect to be good ends up being a special one to you.  You can’t explain it…it just does.

Anyway, I might see the movie or I might not. I don’t know. I do know this. I’m reading My Sister’s Keeper again. It’s been awhile.

Then there’s the conversation hijacker. This is the guy who always cuts into your conversation with someone else. You know who he is and everybody knows someone like that. He’s the guy who talks much louder than you ever would, he’s always dumber than you, and he’s always talking about stuff you could care less about. He’s the guy who knows you you’re talking to, but hangs around them more often. The ironic thing is that you’re not sure if he’s more important than you are. Most of the time, he’s not. And it’s always the guy who couldn’t be more bored with what you’re talking about. He’s the guy who thinks he’s much more important than he actually is.

He always tries to make you feel like he’s your friend…when you just want this jerk to go away.

I may have to put a character like that in my novel.

Speaking of which, I’ve mostly hashed out the direction I want my story to go…now I just have to get it all written in my notes. The problem is I’m trying to finish the other story (not for profit) I’m writing so I can focus like a laser beam on my novel: Princess of the Neptune Children (tentative)

Well, I may change the title. The story is mostly about a pair of sixteen year old childhood friends who live across the street from each other, but both have life threatening diseases. The only problem is that the boy doesn’t know he has a genetic defect connected to vampirism. There’s a lot more, but that’s all I’m giving away.

Of course, my personal hell would be this: I’d be locked in a room, tied to a couch and forced to watch soccer for eternity.

So my brother and his girl, my mother and me…we all go out to eat. Talk about awkward as hell. There were plenty of moments where everybody was just sitting around, not saying anything. It’s like that time a few weeks ago, when the happy couple and I were talking…then we just stop and we stood around for like fifteen seconds in total silence. It just seemed very Seinfeld-like. And when my mom spoke about my brother, it was the most passive aggressive I’ve ever heard her talk. Of course, not that my brother doesn’t deserve some criticism…he’s a crazy person, but goddamn. That was awkward.

But I got a nice steak out of the deal. I usually don’t eat medium or lower, but I had it at straight medium. Of course, my mother was kind of concerned, but I will say this: it was the best steak I had in awhile. Well, since I’m writing a vampire novel…I might as well get used to blood in the meat, wouldn’t you say?

Now, I’d been watching a the NBA playoffs lately, hoping for another insane tilt like Bulls/Celtics. And the sad thing is, I usually hate the seven game first round series. But every time I watch the games, I’m bombarded by this commercial…not a bad one, but:

Despite the cornball, over-exaggerated nature of the ad, I love it. I don’t know who came up with the idea, but I bet the person who did it  had one of those moments all writers have from time to time: they come up with a cool idea and strut around their computers, proud of themselves for the incredible thought process.

It’s a hell of a lot better than those G commercials, I’ll tell you that.

I wish I could be called the most interesting man in the world. Right now, I’m just the weirdest guy in my own family and that’s a monumental gap between that and riding in a boat with pageant contestants. A huge gap. The main actor, this Jonathan Goldsmith, kinda reminds me of the Sean Connery-James Bond days. I don’t know if he’s been in pictures, they need to put this guy in movies.