I almost titled this post “when you get sunburn on the back of your neck.” Then I realized that I don’t hate it when you get sunburn on the back of your neck. In fact, I find it mildly humorous. There’s nothing like seeing someone with a sunburn and rubbing their face in the guilt of their careless behavior. Or just slapping them on a nice big patch of red skin.
But I do hate it when I get a sunburn on the back of my neck. Most other sunburns, I don’t mind too much. Sure, I’ve got an annoying sock tan, the occasional red nose or cheeks, and so forth, but nothing is as troublesome as the back of the neck. No matter how much sunscreen you put there it’s bound to sweat off. And even if it’s not a terrible burn, the heat just radiates from your neck for the next few days. And that is a very bad thing in the middle of a hot summer, because there’s nothing you can do to cool off once that happens. You step out of the shower and by the time you dry off you’re sweating. You walk from your front door to your car and you’re sweating. It’s bad enough living through a New Orleans summer under any circumstances, and it’s just torture when the back of your neck is sunburned. And you always feel that you should have been able to prevent it, so you get an icky guilty feeling, too. You know that feeling when you don’t brush your teeth before you go to bed and you wake up the next morning and your mouth feels so disgusting? That’s guilt. It’s the same thing with a sunburn. And it’s terrible.
The rumor mill has been going full blast lately, with pundits around the country suggesting that Chris Paul will soon be headed out of New Orleans. And you know what? I don’t blame him. A few seasons ago this team seemed to have a lot of promise: a 56-win season in 2007-2008, followed by a Game 7 conference semifinal loss to the Spurs. The core of the team was CP3, West, and Chandler. All of them were young and seemed to have tons of upside: Chandler a dominant shot-blocker and alley-oop man; West a power forward with great range on his jump shot and the ability to score inside, and CP3 the best point guard in the game, a virtual lock for 20 points and 10 assists every night. And the supporting cast was solid: Peja Stojakovic a three-point assassin, Jannero Pargo a solid backup 1 who could also pair with Paul in the backcourt, Julian Wright a youngster with incredible (albeit unpolished) athleticism. Things were looking up. I don’t think anyone expected that the next two seasons would be completely downhill from there.
Now, some of the problems have been basketball-related. Peja’s huge contract started to surpass his productivity as age took its toll. A number of young players didn’t pan out, especially Hilton Armstrong and Julian Wright. This stuff happens. But what really sucked is seeing George Shinn be a total cheapskate, with salary dumping becoming the number one priority. In December 2008 they tried and failed to dump Tyson Chandler’s contract. After the 2008-09 season they did in fact deal Chandler, picking up Emeka Okafor, who was making slightly less but had a longer contract. In basketball terms it seemed like a reasonable move: a more polished offensive player instead of Chandler’s raw athleticism. Unfortunately, the trade didn’t seem to work out for either side: Chandler played in just 51 games for Charlotte and Okafor’s production dropped to 10 points and 9 boards a game—hardly dreadful, but not much for someone making $10.5 million a year.
Then the Hornets dumped Rasual Butler—one of the bright spots in the 08-09 season—for a 2016 second-round draft pick. What the fuck is that shit? I realize we had just gotten some young guards in the draft (Thornton and Collison), but this was a blatant salary dump, pure and simple. They did almost nothing to improve the roster. They tried to bolster their backup frontcourt—the biggest shortcoming in the 2008 playoffs—by picking up Darius Songaila and Ike Diogu. Songaila proved a useful addition, but Diogu missed the whole season with injuries. They dumped Hilton Armstrong—not that I blame them—for another 2016 draft pick. Then they dealt Bobby Brown for yet another draft pick. The number one concern was obviously with avoiding the luxury tax, with little regard for improving the basketball team. Continue reading ‘the cheapskate george shinn’
I know you might not guess it from the title of this blog and from my usually introverted personality, but I think of myself as a nice guy. And while I’m no extrovert, I love throwing a party. Actually, to be more specific, I love it when my parents throw a party and I get to take the credit.
I always strive to be pretty inclusive; if I’m having a cast party for a play I’m not going to hide the party’s existence from anyone in the cast or crew. For my Tony parties, there’s nothing I love more than seeing a huge, diverse group of theatre people; some of them I’ve just worked with, others I may not have worked with in years. Some people prefer small groups of their best friends, but not me. The more, the merrier, in my opinion. So I invite tons and tons of people.
Hospitality, however, goes both ways, and I find it frustrating when hospitality is not reciprocated. First of all, I consider it a faux pas when people show up at a party (my place or elsewhere) and don’t bring anything. I realize sometimes this isn’t practical—you go to a late night cast party when grocery stores are already closed, you find out about a party at the last minute, and so forth—but in general, it’s almost always possible to bring something. It need not be expensive—even a bag of potato chips will do—but you gotta bring something. Didn’t your momma raise you better than that? I don’t know if people are lazy or poor or just ignorant, but if it’s the third, then I’m here to fix it. And if it’s one of the first two, I think I’ve shown that those shouldn’t be obstacles. Continue reading ‘unreturned hospitality’
I’ve been on the job hunt lately and needed to pick up a few copies of my transcripts from college and grad school. One of those two schools makes it quite easy to get transcripts: fill out a form online and poof, it’s done, and is mailed to you free of charge. The other? You’re required to print out a form and mail it in, or go in person during business hours. What the fuck? It’s 2010 and you can’t get this shit online? I won’t name names since I enjoy my part-time employment there, but this university (which happens to be located on St. Charles Avenue and isn’t named Loyola) also used to require that grade forms at the end of the semester be filled out with #2 pencil and turned in by hand. They only changed over to an online system in 2009. So many things can and should be done online, yet aren’t. It baffles me.
Paperwork is messy and complicated. If you want to give someone else what you have, you have to go to a copy machine, make them a copy, then find a way to bring it to them. But need to send them a file on your computer? Thanks to the Internet, that takes a few seconds and you don’t even have to get out your chair. And you don’t have to waste any paper, either. I mean, if someone invented devices that could communicate with each other in an instant, even from one side of the world to the other, you’d want to use them, wouldn’t you? Continue reading ‘paperwork’
Occasionally I find myself planning a vacation and booking a hotel. Usually it’s for a bunch of college-age people, so our priorities are low price, low price, and low price. But sometimes I find myself in a nice hotel—a fancy one, even—and I almost uniformly hate the experience.
Why do I hate it? There are an awful lot of good things about a nice hotel. The rooms are usually well-furnished, big, and clean, the lobby is nicely decorated, the staff friendly. But what I hate is the fact that the more expensive the hotel, the fewer things you get for free. Seems completely ridiculous, right? Continue reading ‘fancy hotels’
I know many of my readers may not be sports fans. And they probably won’t want to read this. But even they’ve surely heard about LeBron James, quite possibly the greatest athlete on the planet. He just left the Cleveland Cavaliers, where he’d been since entering the NBA at the ripe old age of 18. He left, heading to Miami to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in an attempt to win the NBA title that has thus far eluded him.
As you might expect, LeBron’s decision led to a great deal of turmoil in the cities he rejected, most of all Cleveland. And the apoplexy even came straight from the top: consider this incredible letter from the Cavs’ majority owner, Dan Gilbert.* Some choice excerpts: “cowardly betrayal”; “shameful display of selfishness and betrayal”; “shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown ‘chosen one’”; “heartless and callous action.” And my personal favorite: “Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there.” What? Continue reading ‘people who are upset at lebron’
The past few years have seen an inundation of different social networking sites. And I admit I was always something of a late adopter on all of them. First there was myspace. Then came facebook. Then came twitter. The last of these three is something of an unusual creature. It’s clearly not a full-out social networking site like facebook or myspace. It’s good for short messages, links, and maybe a few snapshots from your cell phone. It’s not a bad idea per se, although it has its flaws. The biggest problem is that there’s no real consensus (as far as I can tell) on exactly how to use it. Continue reading ‘twitter’
A little while I was doing the dishes. (Yeah, that’s right. I do the dishes. I know that’s pretty much the #1 thing women look for in a man, so ladies, just line up over there.) I was down to the end of the box of Cascade, struggling to get the last crumbs out before opening the new box. I shook the box a bit and the next thing I knew there was powder all over the floor. Needless to say, this was highly frustrating. And it would also be entirely avoidable, were it not for the idiotic design of every dishwashing powder box ever.
As you probably know, there’s a little piece of metal that pulls out from the side of the box. It’s about 3/4ths of an inch long and hinged at the bottom; you pull it out and pour the detergent out through the opening. For some reason, however, there’s about a half-inch gap between the top of this piece of metal and the top of the box. So, inevitably, when you get to the end of the box and go to pour the detergent out, some misses the opening (it’s only roughly one-third the width of the box) and gets stuck in the top corner. Then you have to shake the box or rip the top off to get at the rest of the stuff.
Now, I’m no engineer, but surely there are better ways to design an opening for the detergent to come out of. Push the opening up to the corner and widen it? Make the top detachable? Alas, I’m guessing that we are the victims of a vast corporate conspiracy; the less detergent we can get out of the box, the more we have to buy. Consumer Reports even had an article about containers that cling desperately to the last remnants of their product.
I was on vacation (to Six Flags Over Georgia) a week and a half ago. I saw something I hadn’t seen in quite some time: automatic hand dryers—you know, the annoying machines that blow hot air at your hands but never manage to dry them off. I’m surprised how rare they’ve become. Maybe it’s just because I don’t go into public restrooms to often, but in my childhood it seemed like they were everywhere, despite the fact that you’d just have to wipe your hands off on your clothes to get them dry.
Now, let me say that I have no idea whatsoever whether hand dryers are better for the environment, or whether they are more cost-effective for businesses. What I do know is that hand dryers suck, and paper towels work a hell of a lot better. Every time you try to use a hand dryer, the first push of the button (or activation of the motion sensor) never keeps the dryer on long enough to dry your hands. So you have to push the button again. Also, if you’re slightly OCD like me and you like to use a paper towel to grab the door handle of the bathroom as you exit, you don’t have that choice if there are hand dryers but no paper towels.
Finally, although I admit this is a conjecture, it seems like the newer public bathrooms (the ones with automatic faucets and soap dispensers) have paper towels instead of hand dryers. So presumably, it’s either less costly or greener than hand dryers; or perhaps everyone else is just fed up with hand dryers too.