For those of you who haven't heard, I recently coached a recreational dodgeball team, sponsored by the Boiler Room. Our record this season was 0-7 (we're a rookie team to be fair) but last night at the playoffs, we won not one but two matches! This makes us the third place team! And it's all because I told everybody that we should win more! For this brilliant scrap of coachery, I received a very prestigious award signed by the whole team. Thanks dad!



My pal and teammate Tyler made some pretty cool photoshops of the team that can be found here:

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=106713&albumID=2898326&imageID=40919682a=2898326&i=39622043



Not to be outdone, I did some awesome MS painting myself while at work highlighting some of the more memorable moments of the big game. Here is an amazing catch that Tyler made...on purpose?







And an awesome throw that Mike made...on purpose?







I might make more, but they each take about 7 hours of steady work to create. Eat that, Tyler!

I just wrote two blogs about my trip to vegas but I don't want to copy and paste the entire things to LJ so you'll have to follow the links to the myspace page. I hope you don't mind, I think you'll like them:

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=7730018&blogID=396680508

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=7730018&blogID=396685723

if those links don't work for some reason, just go through my main page:
http://www.myspace.com/dr_love

Attention all smart friends! I have a new shirt design just for you. But I do need your opinion. The design is posted below, and as you can see, it is for "faces of math" (either a play on "faces of death" or "faces of meth" depending on who you ask). The faces are Newton, Einstein, and Hawking. Are any of these choices controversial in the math world? I wanted to go with familiar faces but if my target audience think that Newton was a hack, then that's bad for business.

Also, how many can I sign you all up for? I give a super discount for pals.

...well, actually last Sunday in the bar I host karaoke in.

I found a new favorite thing to do. I draw things in MS paint and post them on the desktop image while the song is playing and when the song comes down, my beautiful artwork can be enjoyed. It currently consists of images inspired by the last day of spring break. I sang "Get this Party Started" by Pink and later "Let's get it Started" by the Black Eyed Peas (in case anyone missed getting it started the first time). Please enjoy the two images I created for this special occasion:



and my tribute to frat guys:


Bigoni can just eat his heart out! I'll start my own gallery!

Our door guy will tell this story better, since he was the one who dealt with the situation, but I'll describe what I heard.

There was a young man with an enormous torso. The kind of guy who deals with every situation with anger. The kind of guy who probably has a very hard time bending his disproportionate body to wipe his own poopy butthole (you heard me). He was booing every other singer for no apparent reason. We don't care for that around here, so our bouncer asked him to "chill out" or something that the kids can understand. He did not, in fact, "chill out" at all. Instead, he continued being a big ol' bag of douche.

After a few more brief chats (mostly where he claimed to know the owner and threatened to have various employees fired), he excused his behavior by declaring that he was a fireman.

That was the best excuse for being an A-hole that we had heard in a long time. When we finally asked him to leave (which was inevitable but he did manage to stay 3 hours), he stood in the doorway and went on and on about being a firefighter and getting us all fired.

I told our door guy that he should have lit a match and thrown it out onto the sidewalk and said, "there's a fire. Go put it out."

Man, i would have burned him good (not literally).

It's time once again to deconstruct one of the movie boxes that I find memorable from work.



Magic Kid (1994) stars Ted Jan Roberts as A 13-YEAR-OLD BLACK BELT MARTIAL ARTIST (as the back of the box loudly describes) and his "very pretty sister" who goes to visit their "second-rate alcoholic movie agent" Uncle Bob in California. One wonders if this implies that he is a second rate movie agent or a second rate alcoholic ("Uncle Bob just never could binge as well as Aunt Sharon...")

The box promises that "Dreams are just wishes...coming true" and it's so important that they put it at the top of the front and the back of the box. I'm not sure that this statement is factual, 'cause I just dreamed last night that I was eating cantaloupe out of a human skull which is not actually a wish-come-true (but it's close...).

The front cover bothers me because of two particular elements: One, the look on Robert's face is about the gayest look I've ever seen. Second, his pose and position makes it seem as though he is giving birth to that convertible. Ooh, I just noticed a third: the car is bursting out of a Yin-Yang symbol as if to say, "Fuck you, unity of opposites!! We're driving right out of this kids crotch and straight through that shit." The box also swears like a sailor, apparently. I also, at first, thought that Uncle Bob was played by a poor man's Artie Lang and then realized it's Flounder from Animal House. I also thought that the clown on the front and back was Mickey Rooney but it turns out it's Flounder...from Animal House. I was thinking about when Mickey Rooney played a clown in Babe 2: Pig in the City. I almost referred to him as Andy Rooney and I will always get them confused, and there's nothing anybody can ever do about it.

The only other things of note are that at some point, the Magic Kid will don a ninja outfit and also wear a matching Don "The Dragon" black shirt and jeans combo.

Wait a minute... why is this movie even called "Magic Kid"? There isn't any mention of any magic happening (Maybe Hollywood magic?) except for him doing the splits on a cloud and the stars that emit from the flying crotch-car. Maybe that titular magic is just wishes...coming true.

A representative from Sony or some other record label that I didn't catch, just called the bar and talked to the bartender. He gives me the phone, I stumble through a sleep-deprived conversation and now I'm opening for Kid Rock at the Roseland Theater on Tuesday.

Wait, what?!

I guess they want a half hour of karaoke before the show. I'll be taking the disk player, all the books of disks, and one song book. I have no idea what to expect from a Kid Rock crowd. I mean a modern Kid Rock crowd. Kids who are either still totally loyal to their favorite late-nineties rap-rocker (5%) and folks going for the irony factor (95%). Either way, I hope I don't get stuff thrown at me. Any ideas what I should sing if no one has the balls to turn in songs? My current votes are for Electric 6's "Gay Bar" and Kiss' "Calling Dr. Love." Or maybe The Who's "Baba O'Reilly." This whole idea is both awesome and retarded.

Fun Fact: Did you know that Robert James Ritchie's career started at the age of 11, as a member of the b-boy group 'The Furious Funkers'. True!

A memorable night at the bar I host karaoke in.

But first, a preface:
1) I'm totally stealing this blog format from Willierandolph who writes about the bar he serves drinks in. The only difference will be that I will try to blog LIVE as things are actually happening around me. As a result, these will be hastily written.
2) I love my job and think that I am actually over-paid for what I do, but the best blogs are about the bothersome, the annoying, and the things that one hates. Knowing this, don't read these under the notion that I don't like my occupation in karaoke.

That said, tonight was insane.

3 hours ago, a gaggle of office co-workers rolled in. Office parties are almost identical to bachelorette parties, only with less penis paraphenelia. These are the people who don't go out often. They don't know how to tip (or they do tip generously at the beginning and then act like they own you), and they often don't know how to drink, and they certainly don't know how to NOT throw up. This crew was okay except for the undeserved self entitlement (they come up and yell a song title at me and walk away without telling me who's singing it and expecting me to call them up immediately). Other than that, this particular group tipped nicely and seemed to enjoy my antics (feeding my ego is the quickest way to my heart).

The problem began (or increased, rather) when a young lady, let's call her "Sunshine" (because that was her name), got more and more intoxicated (which is a service we provide here). She wasn't with the office crew, but she glommed onto them (and everybody else in the bar). She's a spotlight hog (if anybody has a better name for this type of person, please let me know). She was very demanding: wanted to play the tambourine with every song, an instrument I like to bring out for special songs (like anything by Abba). She also stole it and played it badly several times. At one point she said to me "are you kidding me? Where's my Madonna song?" To which I replied, "You already sang it... twenty minutes ago..." She didn't believe me at first, but I think she remembered at some point, or at least her stumbling away implied she understood. Later, after the 20th time she stuck her face into some other persons microphone space to sing along during a song that was not hers, our door guy told her she had to stop butting in and so she left in a huff.

About 30 minutes later, said doorguy is rolling on the floor with a homeless man who had just punched him in the neck. In three years, I've never actually seen two people go down swinging in our bar, until tonight. A hulking office partier joined the fray and I talked him into not crushing everybody involved. There was a scuffle and the guy got kicked out. I sat down to start the next song and about 30 seconds later, I feel a spray of water. Homeless guy came back in, and impressively, from across the entire bar, had thrown a water bottle in my direction, hitting the karaoke player and soaking a few stray DVD's.

Neddless to say, the office partiers had gotten their money's worth and filed out rather quickly, frightened back to officeland and the safety of their PTS reports.

I sung "Eye of the Tiger" in honor of our neck-punched doorguy and we are now closing a little early...

I just thought of the latest hilarious installment from the brilliant creators of those movies with "something-movie" in the title.

Holocaust Drama Movie! Picture this: Oskar "Meyer" Schindler is CEO of a hot dog plant and... wait, I can't do this alone. Since these "comedies" always have like thirty writers and my mind is not sick enough to come up with a whole movie that insensitive, I'll need my fellow bloggers to add some elements. To make things easier, let's just make the title: "Depressing Movie." Let's hear the pitches! (I'm looking at you, Punchy and Mechmuertos...).

Hunt Stockwell wants me to blog more often. About him. Or about my jobs. So I'll do both right now.

Hunt Stockwell is an American, through and through. Tomorrow is Columbus day. Celebrating a man who sort of discovered America. Tonight at the bar I host karaoke in (a plot device ripped off from willie_randolph) we sang such rousing Columbus Day classics such as "Don't Rock the Boat," "Young Americans," "Greatest American Hero," and many other songs about seafaring and our proud country. And all day Monday I'll be holding my annual Campbell Columbus Day Clambake (for charity!). Bring your razorbacks, your steamers, your quahogs, and your huddled masses over to my house to enjoy the clammy goodness. I only wish I could change the name of our country to Americlam! Oh well. Maybe later.