September « 2005 « Black Marks on Wood Pulp / by Corey Vilhauer

1-0, on the way to 1-15

September 14th, 2005

The Miami Dolphins are currently 1-0.

They beat the Denver Broncos 34-10.

They are ranked 11th in the Sporting News Power Rankings.

They are ranked 23rd (more appropriately) in the ESPN Power Rankings, though are inexplicably ranked three spots below the Broncos.

New coach Nick Saban has already shown that he’s a big deal, former Vikings backup Gus Frerotte looked decent (he was a hell of a lot more effective than former Vikings backup Jay Fiedler), and the defense has regained its “top-five in the league” ways.

So why am I still bracing for the crush? Why is Kerrie still wondering why I even watch football when I’m expecting the Dolphins to lose their next 15 games and end up with the worst record in the league? Why do I have such little faith in the Dolphins’ ability to beat the Jets this coming Sunday?

Because I’ve been through this before.

I sat through a 4-12 season last year when Ricky ditched us and left the country to become a yoga instructor. I’ve watched the team struggle to find a quarterback, seemingly cursed in that department ever since Hall of Famer Dan Marino left years ago. I’ve watched a supposed great defense wilt as the season went along. I’ve watched Dolphins teams that have gone 9-1 end up missing the playoffs. I’ve watched Dolphins teams that needed only one win (against a horrible team) always… always… lose.

I also know that the New York Jets have had the Dolphins’ number for as long as I can remember. The Dolphins could pull out a miracle and go 14-2, but invariably those two losses would be to the Jets.

Gus Frerotte will come back down to earth. The defense will get tired and underachieve yet again. Nick Saban will feel the sting of leading a losing team.

I’ve already resigned myself to this. If I’m wrong — and I hope I am — I’ll still mope around the house: “Oh, now we’re in the playoffs. They’ll lose horribly, they always do.”

I’m a self-loathing Dolphins fan. I can’t help it.

Comments: 2

Issues Considered: Football, Miami Dolphins, Sports

The New Yorker

September 12th, 2005

Please, tell me if this is weird. I’d hate for this to be some embarrassing item that will come back to haunt me later on in life, so I’d prefer to know now so I can stop.

Someone brings copies of The New Yorker, a very highbrow literary magazine, to work and invariably leaves them at the stations. Every night, as I have mentioned before, I pick up all of the magazines and put them in our magazine rack. Except for the copies of The New Yorker. These I take home.

Here’s where my secret is revealed: I’ve never read an article in The New Yorker. Not one. In fact, I’ve hardly even skimmed through them. Most of the time I don’t know anything about the issue I’ve nabbed except for the odd artistic cover and the advertisement for Krug champagne.

Why do I do this? What am I trying to prove?

It would be one thing if I scattered them around the house to give the illusion of being a well-read gentleman, but I don’t. I stack them upstairs next to my reading chair. Each issue does nothing more than keep the issue below it a little warmer.

The first one I picked up had an article by Umberto Eco, an author that I had just struggled through a few weeks prior. That’s my excuse for one of the twelve issues I’ve collected.

The rest? I think I’ve entertained the idea of actually browsing through them and reading a few articles. It’s like my love for short stories – there’s no real commitment to what you’re reading. If I hate it, I can stop and not feel that much time was wasted. If I do like it, I can seek out more from the same author – something of more substance. I should, therefore, be simply ecstatic with the idea of reading The New Yorker. It has everything – brevity, intellectual value, a sense of being important.

So here’s what I’m doing: I’m taking very well received magazines from work that someone has left, bringing them home and not reading them (though they are worth reading) and not displaying them (though they’d give the impression of being a very smart person) and instead am just stacking them on an old box in the dormer, a stack that I quite often use as a beer coaster.

Is that weird?

Comments: 1

Issues Considered: Literature, Writers

Capote

September 10th, 2005

There’s a movie out about Truman Capote, and I’m pretty excited.

Truman Capote, who died in 1984, is widely known as one of the country’s most original writers. He pioneered the “non-fiction novel,” a genre where real events can be written more like fiction – full of description and suspense. He took facts out of the hands of historians and threw them into the open arms of talented writers.

His crowning achievement is In Cold Blood – a novel that was thisclose to making my list of 26 books for 26 years, a fictional box set that I had created a few months ago. In Cold Blood is the recreation of the gruesome murder of a wealthy family in Kansas. He interviewed everyone who was involved and created a novel that broke all boundaries of non-fiction writing. He became attached to the killers themselves, but continued to tell the most truthful story he could.

The most interesting fact about Capote was his friendship with To Kill a Mockingbird’s Harper Lee, a friendship that led Lee to include a character based on Capote in Mockingbird: Dill. Lee writes:

Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow white and stuck to his head like duckfluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him. As he told us the old tale his blue eyes would lighten and darken; his laugh was sudden and happy; he habitually pulled at a cowlick in the center of his forehead.

The book itself is one of the best I’ve read. It has a story in my own life as well: I bought it at the famous Shakespeare and Co. in Paris, France; I started reading it in Hyde Park in London, England; I finished it while lying on a bench in Heathrow Airport (I had to sleep in the airport in order to make my flight the next morning.) It’s historical to me in that it will always remind me of my “lazy day in London” – a day where I did nothing but relax and read.

As I said before, I’m pretty excited for this movie. Not only does it look very good, but it has one of my favorite under-appreciated actors in it: Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Go here to see the trailer: Capote.

“Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans – in fact, few Kansans – had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.” (from In Cold Blood)

Change (revised)

September 9th, 2005

In my working life I have found there are two things that consistently butt heads: comfort and opportunity. More specifically I’m talking about the difficulty for me to jettison myself out of the comfort zone of one job and into the new but difficult experience of a better job.

It’s a question of “do you follow your dream even if your quality of life will decline?” Would it be right for me to give up a good job – a job I enjoy for the most part – for a position that may pay less and will force me to pay more for adult things like health insurance. Do you take a dream job, especially if you’ve been given a wonderful chance at a current one?

There’s a difficulty in dropping something comfortable – to consider taking a dream job. In sports terms, it’s like giving up on a solid starter in order to draft a “possible” superstar.

Really, there’s just one question to ask when these situations come up. Should you make the jump from a comfortable place and lose a little personal security or should you just forge ahead and follow your dreams, regardless of how many years it might take to reach the full potential?

Personally, I’d never be able to do it – at least most of the time. I’d rather stay in my cocoon and be comfortable instead of challenged, and this, I find, is my ultimate downfall. I’m not a risk-taker. I like doing the easy thing. I only do things that I know I can be successful at, and I only take the paths that lead to the easiest outcome.

So when – if – a dream situation comes up what am I going to do? What am I going to choose? Will I ever take the giant step to get to my destined lifestyle?

I guess in this situation, the only question I have to ask myself is: why am I so scared of change?

Self censorship

September 9th, 2005

Sometimes I can be incredibly short-sighted in what I put on this website.

I did it when I moronically put our prospective mortgage numbers (in an effort to show how much of a change it would be to play that much per month) in a post a few months back, and I did it again yesterday when I blindly mentioned the status of a dream job.

Both times Kerrie reminded me of the sensitivity of these items. I changed the first one (about the mortgage) and I hid the second one (about the dream job.)

Don’t worry. You didn’t miss much – aside from my own naiveity in thinking that the things I say wouldn’t be connected to my name. Duh. Now I see why my site host doesn’t use his real name.

Anyway, I’ll try to keep the private and endangering stuff off the public domain. I’ll do a cut and paste job on the original post, because I still feel the same way about it. It’ll go up later.

Corey V.

Random stuff — 09.07.05

September 7th, 2005

Something light today, since I’m still trying to get motivated after a great four-day weekend.

I found this article on CNN.com and thought that it was incredibly fitting for my job at the Sioux Falls relay center.

See, we’ve got problems with our refrigerators at work: namely, people are eating lunches that don’t belong to them. The biggest problem is when people leave pizzas in the fridge and find, when they leave at night, there is no pizza to be had.

Well, apparently people can get fired over this.

I guess we just need to catch them.

Pizza firing wins on-line contest

Tuesday, September 6, 2005; Posted: 2:09 a.m. EDT (06:09 GMT)

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — A computer engineer who lost his job because he ate two pieces of pepperoni pizza has been named the winner of an offbeat Internet contest that solicited stories about outrageous firings.

A panel of Silicon Valley judges picked Jim Garrison’s strange tale from more than 1,000 entries submitted during the past month. The reward: a free Caribbean cruise.

Garrison, 39, prevailed over some tough competition.

The runners-up included a furniture mover who got fired after he and a co-worker were caught fencing with some adult sex toys found in a customer’s bedroom; a worker who misunderstood a manager’s instructions to send some sensitive data to microfilm and e-mailed it to a “Michael Finn” instead; and a warehouse worker found doing perverse things with the prosthetics made by his employer.

Garrison, who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, said he never thought he would be rewarded for getting fired. Then again, he never dreamed he would be fired after he ate two of the six pieces of pepperoni pizza left over from a company meeting.

What he didn’t know is that several other employees had already worked out a plan to take the leftover pizza home with them.

When they discovered one-third of the leftover pizza pie had been eaten, the employees reported Garrison to management, ultimately leading to his firing last November — a month after he ate the food.

The “offbeat Internet website” is here: Simply Fired

If you are a Conan O’Brien fan, you should go to ConeZone.co.uk. It’s full of great clips from his shows. It’s a great way for someone like me (who can’t watch the show without taping it) to catch up on the skits.

There’s a link to the FTP site (the main site only has a few clips at a time) if you want to download a bunch of stuff.

Since it’s not on the site right now, I’m going to give you this link — the funniest Triumph skit I’ve ever seen:
Triumph vs. Jacko Fans

Finally (and I know this is old) but Reggie Miller has gone from my favorite basketball player to my favorite NBA analyst: Reggie Miller — NBA on TNT.

That’s all for me. I could do fluff like this every day.

Comments: 4

Issues Considered: Linkage

Driscocity.com

September 2nd, 2005

Okay, unless something drastic happens, I’m not going to blog about New Orleans or Katrina anymore. It’s too depressing for me to see one of my favorite cities completely wiped off of the map.

But, I need to get one last shot in, and it comes in the form of a “Blog Pimp.”

As in, I’m pimping a blog.

Chris, the fearless host to this very site, deserves all sorts of “props,” or whatever they’re called on the streets these days, for helping me set up, run, and keep maintained this here blog. Thanks, Chris.

Here’s his blog — it’s the same address, just put “blog” instead of “cdub.”

I present this specific post because it is about Katrina, and it has a pretty sad little graphic at the bottom. It’s nothing horrific — no pictures of drowning puppies or George W., but it’s sad all the same.

Who says the media isn’t biased?

Thanks Chris. Go there: driscocity.com

Comments: 1

Issues Considered: Friends, Linkage