Never Leave Early

Most people, when attending a horrible movie, will stay through the end of the movie. Even if it's 150 minutes! You paid $10 and you're going to sit through the whole thing. The same rules apply for a bad comedy show ($10-$20). And you'd almost definitely look at every painting in a bad art exhibit if you dropped $10 to get in the door.

But if people pay $25 dollars (and that's on the low end) for a baseball game, they're happy to leave early. To beat traffic, or go to a bar, or because the people they're with who don't care about baseball are bored. Never leave early. Never. Ever. No matter how bad the game seems. Even if you don't care about baseball. The neat thing about baseball: every game you go to, you might see something you haven't seeen before.

Last night at the Orioles-Red Sox game, we sat through a rain delay of more than an hour, when the Red Sox were already up 9-1 through four and a half innings. They restarted the game at 9:50, and the Sox tacked on an extra run to make it 10-1.

In the bottom of the 6th, I thought we had our special moment. After the second out, the entire Red Sox infield ran to the dugout, apparently thinking there were three outs. They had to come back out to finish the inning. It happens, but I've never been at a game where it happened. Everyone got a laugh.

And then the Orioles scored 10 unanswered runs in the 7th and 8th to complete the greatest comeback in Orioles history.

NEVER LEAVE EARLY. About half the crowd had already split when the magic happened. What's the worst case scenario? You'll be tired at work? Your kids will be tired at school? Is that worse than being the guy who had tickets to one of the best games you'll ever see live and then LEFT BEFORE THE BEST PART? No one will ever think back on that time their dad took them to a baseball game and they had a really easy ride home.

Never leave early. Unless you have to check in with a parole officer.

Tags: baseball

Artomatic

On Saturday me and the GF hit up Artomatic for the second year in a row. It's a giant month-long showcase for D.C. artists, and for the second straight year it was in a partially completed office building -- so that's 9 floors of paintings, photographs and the occasional sculpture or installation piece. You know, for the discriminating buyers who wants something that appears to be a pile of scrap metal, to keep in their living rooms.

It's a lot to digest, and I think the one thing I've taken away (both years) is the difference between skill and creativity. There are a lot of very good photographers, for example, with very nice equipment, but when you slap up 40 portfolios, side by side, there are a surprising number of similarities -- there are only so many ways to frame a shot, so many techniques to use and so many ideas for subject matter. Turns out that taking pictures of your backpacking tour through Europe doesn't make you a stunning individual! Go figure. For all the photos that are very good, very few stick out as memorable.

We consider most people with any artistic bent to be "creative," even though the vast majority of creative endeavor is already railroaded into a pretty narrow channel. Everyone's working from the same playbook, so the end result might be very nice, but it's not exactly distinguished; it I guess that goes for comedy, and writing, and just about anything that involves creativity.

Still, a lot of cool stuff to see. If I recommend anything: don't realy what the artists post about themselves. Nothing worse than enjoying a painting, then reading what the artists' intent was, hating the artist for being a pompous d-bag and then by extension no longer liking the painting.

Book Review: John Adams

I've had "John Adams" for years. I got it as a gift from the father of an ex-girlfriend. I didn't really want it at the time, and I wasn't too fond of the dad, so I threw it on my shelf and forgot about it. But a few months ago, I was all done with Dwight Eisenhower and needed something to read ...

It's good. It doesn't really have any of the action or bombast of Washington biographies, or TR, or Eisenhower. Adams was a very impressive dude, but most of his accomplishments and conflicts were on paper. But there are, courtesy of John and Abigail, about 5,323,000 letters letting us know what they thought on just about every subject, so you can get a much more personal picture of they guy than most other heroes of the 18th century. I appreciated his thoughts on family and general human nature more than a simple blow-by-blow political account.

Two things stand out in my mind: one, how much of a jerk Jefferson seems to be. He certainly has some redeeming qualities, but he comes off as less of a noble-minded philosopher than an expedient snob. And a backstabber! He personally organized a lot of smear campaigns against the people who stood in his way.

Second: it's impossible to emphasize how vastly the world has sped up. When Adams goes to Europe for diplomatic service, he goes months without knowing his orders, or how the war is going, or what exactly he should be doing. When he sends letters to Abigail they take months to get back to the states and half of them never make it there. A lot of people traveling today talk to their spouses every night; the Adamses were apart for years with only highly unreliable mail service to tie them together. And travel -- there weren't any spontaneous januts to the country, or rushing home for funerals or anything like that. It took two weeks to get from Boston to Philadelphia, a trip you can now do in a morning.

Faster in most cases means better, but it's interesting to think about how that ease of access and communication has changed the way relationships themselves develop. We're probably less thoughtful about what we're doing, the things we talk about and who we're talking too ... it's easier to spread yourself thin, and when you consider that the number of mental distractions (TV) has increased by about a billion ... SIMPLIFY! SIMPLIFY!

Tags: art, presidents

Howdy, Ma'am

1) I called Orkin last week, in part to say hi, but mostly to set up an appointment to kill some of the other living things in my house. The guy on the phone called me ma'am, so I corrected him. When my roommate called later in the week to follow up, they had it on record that "some woman" had called earlier in the week.

2) I made a hotel reservation for the Jersey shore and left a credit card number with the gentleman at the hotel. When the card was declined (I had forgotten to activate the new card), he left me a voice mail saying that "some woman" had called making a reservation with my card and asking if I even knew about this. The woman was, of course, me.

I'm 6'1" and a tick under 200 pounds, but fate has decided that I should sound like a woman on the phone. I am trying to figure out how to make this work for me, beyond calling lesbian chat lines. It's great when you want to stop a telemarketer cold, but even most of them are now immune. They apologize and keep on pitching. If you can think of a way for me to steal millions of dollars with this unusual gift, please e-mail me at chris@dcstandup.com. If it works I will cut you in for 40 percent.

Tags: me

Trivia Recap

Good times in the DC Improv Lounge last night! The house was packed for HHT, with 70 people crammed in to compete for 90 minutes. We had 90 reservations, but our brilliant answer girl / organizer Allyson was spot on figuring out that the attrition rate is about 30 percent. Basically, if you don't charge for an event, people think it's OK to make a reservation and then not show up. So you go from "me and my 13 friends will be there" to "me and one person I met on the steps are here." That's preferable to the table of 9 where no one shows up, though. Who am I kidding, I love you all.

But this had to be, unintentionally, the toughest trivia night yet. Maybe TOO tough, so I promise to dumb it down a shade next time out. Round one was a "Pop Quiz" -- questions about soda or anything that popped. The "Capital Idea" worksheet was feast or famine -- given a list of 30 cities, the teams had to circle the 10 national capitals. "Fantastic Fours 2" was our video round -- people had to identify the missing member of a famous foursome based on three visual clues. And "Summer Lovin'" was inspired by the start of the season.

The members of Sqizzle arrived breathless, three questions into the first round ... and they still managed to pull out the win with 24 out of 40. Ed McMahon's Final Words (here's second place) scored a 23. And the Turtle Necks got a 20 and won the dance-off tiebreaker for third. Here they are in order of finish!

And I'd be remiss if I didn't include this true competitor ...

She didn't win the dance-off for third place, but she opened up with the Kid n' Play. She got my vote, at least.

Next Trivia July 16

Mark it down!

Tags: trivia

Black Tie

Thanks to my excellent choice in women, on Friday I was able to attend the 65th annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner at the Washington Convention Center. For people who don't watch a lot of C-SPAN (i.e. losers), that's the second of the two big dinners for reporters each year where the president is invited, and then some kind of speaker tries to avoid career suicide while making fun of the president. General thoughts:

Black tie. I had to rent a tux for the night. I looked very good. This is less a function of me than the tux. If you are a man who looks bad in a tuxedo (and they're out there) then there's basically no hope for you, because tuxedos are the last line of fashion defense. At that point, you've stabbed the vampire of ugliness through the heart with a railroad tie, and he treated it like a splinter. Just plan on some kind of lifestyle that never, ever involves formal wear, like being a bachelor turnip farmer or a hermit. Also interesting was how many of the ladies interpreted black tie. A lot of them looked stunning and sophisticated; others were dressed like they were about to give it up on prom night, at a special seperate prom exclusively for the slutty girls. CLEAVAGE. In ridiculously bright fabrics.

Celebrities! When I say "celebrities," I mean the best kind: WASHINGTON celebrities. For example, when I walked into the pre-dinner cocktail hour, the first person I spotted was House Appropriations Chairman David Obey of Wisconsin. He's one of the most powerful and important people in Congress. But I did not say hello, because I was not confident enough that it was him. In Washington, the most important people are all middle-aged to old, and they aren't on TV all that much, so you wouldn't know them if you saw them. Ditto for Louise Slaughter, chairwoman of the House Rules committee, who was standing in the middle of the room for a bit with no one talking to her. Not that she needs it, because she's LOUISE SLAUGHTER. The highlight of the cocktail hour, for me, was watching a young woman in a backless dress ask Obey to take a picture of her and her friend. You know, if you aren't too busy thinking about how to allocate all the spending of the federal government, could you take a picture of me and my friend? Awesome.

Obama! We were supposed to shake the president's hand at the cocktail hour, but he changed his plans at the last minute and only showed up for the first part of the dinner. The impression I got, shared by my lovely meal ticket, was that he did not want to be at the dinner at all, and did not do a good job hiding it. A lot of the jokes in his speech (which he did deliver very well; he has excellent timing) were about how the dinner was a second-rate event (behind the White House Correspondents Dinner a few weeks before) and it was a chore to attend. He left as soon as Johnathan Hodgman finished calling him a nerd. I don't begrudge a guy his Friday nights, but when you have a reputation for arrogance, you might not want to dump on all the reporters and support staff who have to cover you every day. All that said, we had ridiculous seats. I was about 40-50 feet from the podium and dead center, and it is cool to see the leader of the free world from that close. You should try in sometime, you know, if you can get your girlfriend to hook you up with free tickets.

Hodgman. You can go online and see Jonathan Hodgman's speech. I liked it -- it wasn't really a stand-up routine, but a thematically consistent presentation. He didn't play for big laughs at the beginning, which confused a lot of the room, but by the end he used some slides to quiz Obama on whether he was a legit nerd. Events like this are REALLY tough for entertainers, because a) you're poking fun at the president; b) the audience, ostensibly of open-minded journalists, is a lot more PC than they would ever care to admit; c) you have to follow the president. It's almost impossible to knock it out of the park. Hodgman was solid if not spectacular.

After Party. After the show, there's the after party! In this case, we just walked into a room with a live band and started dancing. It was like a weird wedding. At one point Michael Steele, the head of the Republican Party, came to the stage to announce a raffle winner. Glad to see we're making progress, GOP. I don't want to brag, but as we were leaving, another couple, UNSOLICITED, told us we were the best dancers out there, "not that there was much competition." I'll take it.

Golfstravaganza

It is my great blessing in life to be a visionary, and my great burden to envision only pointless things. On Saturday my vision of the Grand Slam of Mini Golf came true!

Sort of. The orignial plan, which came to me in a vision quest, was to play four separate miniature golf courses in one day, with the winner declared the greatest mini-golfer who ever lived ever. It was called to my attention that this, though ambitious, would eliminate any sane people from participating, because who goes mini-golfing four times in a day? The new plan: three courses. One in Maryland, one in Virginia, one in D.C. A date was set, courses were picked and people were invited.

Naturally, Saturday started off with severe thunderstorms. But did anyone quit? NO! Because they wanted a taste of the glory. I called ahead to Rocky Gorge mini-golf in Laurel, and they said that as long as there wasn't lightning, people could golf. We got there at 11:30, 13 people stood in the clubhouse and the man behind the counter assured us the storm would move through soon. It did, and so we went to pay, and the man behind the counter promptly informed us there was no way we could play golf. Because the course was flooded. Apparently he thought we were standing around next to the Cruisin' Exotica machines for 20 minutes for the ambiance. And so we trudged to the parking lot (over top of the words painted on the walkway, "Open All Weather, Rain or Snow").

But thanks to the miracle of Internet phones, we found a second course in Laurel and actually managed to get there and squeeze in a round of disturbingly humid golf, as the sun came out and blue skies appeared. Great battles were fought and unspeakable acts of bravery and machismo were committed, etc. etc. But as we were now about an hour behind schedule, we switched plans again and headed down to D.C., skipping the Virginia course, to play the East Potomac mini-golf, one of the oldest in the nation. And when we got there, the gate was chained shut.

Checking in with the pro shop (the mini-golf course it right next to a real golf course), it turns out they sent their mini-golf employee home at 1 p.m. because of the rain. Never mind that it was now 3 p.m., with blue skies and sun, and only a few small puddles on the course. Never mind that, as we tried to convince them to reopen, about five or six cars of dads pulled up with their kids, looked at the locked gate, and then drove away. No, closed means closed.

So it was back to the cars, and off to Cameron Run regional park in Virginia. It was not on the original itinerary, but it was close and, according to the people answering the phone, open. Great battles, mighty putts, etc. etc., but by now it was 5 p.m. and everybody was very hungry, so we bagged any thought of a third course and headed back to the 19th hole (my house) for a cookout. And then I almost killed everyone with undercooked chicken, but that's a story for another day.

To sum up: the plan went from four courses to three courses, and then we ended up playing two courses, neither of which was a course we had originally planned to play. I have to say that I have some excellent friends to stick with it through all those obstacles. Thanks, guys! And sorry about almost poisoning you all.

Pictures: The guy in the coveted plaid jacket (awarded to all winners of this tournament) is Josh. He's also sporting a bacon wallet, yet another prize of this amazing event. The guy with the two broken hands is Doug, who proved that personal stupidity is no barrier to mini golf. The guy with the sweater is Philip, who is Philip.

Tags: politics, golf