Super Jayhawk

The Con (and Faire) meme...

2008-08-28T01:42:11Z

Ok, since Inaki apparently started it, and I've been wanting to figure out just how many cons I've been to anyway for awhile now, here we go.. including all the Faires, since I'm a multi-fandom sort of guy. My non-FC furry con list kind of trailed off after I quit flying to cons in 2003, I've only gone to MegaPlex 2008 for a "road" con after '03.

This of course doesn't count fursuit gigs, that would be a much longer list. ;)

Furry Cons:

Further Confusion - 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
ConFURence - 1999, 2000, 2001
ConiFUR - 2003
Pawpet Megaplex - 2008
Mephit Furmeet - 2000
Midwest Furfest - 2003
AnthroCon - 2001, 2003
Califur - 2007 (before I knew better)

Non-Furry Cons:

ConQuest (my first con) - 1990
BayCon - 2000, 2001 (before it totally sucked)
Comic-Con San Diego - 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005
FanimeCon - 2001, 2002, 2003
SiliCon - 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007
SpandExpo 1996, 1998, 2000
WonderCon - 2000, 2005, 2006, 2007

Renaissance Faires (Went to 53 out of 54 of them in tights!)

Kansas City Renaissance Faire - 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997
Northern Renaissance Pleasure Faire - 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007
Calaveras Celtic Faire - 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
Folsom Renaissance Faire - 1998, 1999, 2001, 2003
Golden Gate Renaissance Festival - 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
Kearney Park Renaissance Festival - 2000, 2001, 2002, 2005
Southern Renaissance Pleasure Faire - 1999
Valhalla Renaissance Faire (South Lake Tahoe) - 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007
Willits Celtic Renaissance Faire - 1999
Sonora Celtic Festival - 2006
Tulare County Renaissance Festival - 2006
Central Coast Renaissance Faire - 1999, 2003, 2005

So far this year I have yet to go to a Renaissance Faire, and I've been going to at least one for 21 years now-- so we're going to go to Northern Faire at least. Maybe later in September, when it's not 190+ degrees at Casa de Fruta.

Brightly colored tights

2008-08-27T22:08:09Z

I'm not all that much of a Monty fan in the comics, but ever since he started on the whole Type-A Man Superhero story arc, it's been much more entertaining.

One of my all-time favorite moments in the whole genre was at the end of the Lois & Clark episode with Tempus after his defeat right before he gets arrested:

Tempus: Superman, as long as I have you here, just answer one thing for me.
Why tights? Why a cape? You're a grown man, don't you feel ridiculous?
Superman: My mother made it for me.

In somewhat related news, the documentary about Real-Life Superheroes called Your Friendly Neighborhood Hero just came out on DVD. Will have to check it out, hopefully it's better than that abysmal reality show, Who Wants to be a Superhero?. I still don't know how Stan Lee got through two seasons of it with a straight face.

Officially Pushing Forty

2008-08-22T02:26:58Z

So here it is... my Birthday, August 21.

So to commemorate my annual ritual of getting even older (and my last year of being in my thirties) I present my collection of...

You know you're getting old when...

- Your back goes out more than you do.

- You wake up, looking like your driver's license picture.

- It takes two tries to get up from the couch.

- Your idea of a night out is sitting on the patio.

- Happy hour is a nap.

- It takes longer to rest than it did to get tired.

- Your little black book only contains names ending in M.D.

- The pharmacist has become you new best friend.

- You find yourself starting a sentence with any of the following:

"When I was young..."
"Back in my day..."
"Kids these days..."
"When I was your age..."
"They played real music when I was a kid, not like that noise today!"
"I got record albums older than you, kid!"

- It takes twice as long to look half as good.

- You wonder how you could be over the hill when you don't even remember being on top of it.

- You realize that pretty much all of the athletes and Hollywood stars are younger than you.

- You're suffering from Mallzheimer's disease. You go to the mall and forget where you parked your car.

- You notice the older you get, the more pills you seem to have to take every morning

- You light the candles on your birthday cake, and a group of campers form a circle and start singing "Kumbaya."

- Conversations with people your own age often turn into "dueling ailments."
("You think that's bad! I've got a pain in my shin I've had since '93!")

- Your childhood toys are now in a museum.

- The clothes you've put away until they come back in style... come back in style.

- Your best friend is dating someone half their age and isn't breaking any laws.

- Everything that works hurts, and what doesn't hurt doesn't work.

- You look forward to a dull evening.

- Your knees buckle and your belt won't.

- You are cautioned to slow down by the doctor instead of by the police.

- You get lectured to at your salad not from your mother, but from your doctor.

- Your drugs of preference are now vitamins.

- You can remember milkmen, gas station attendants that ran out when your car pulled up, trading stamps, or the TV taking five minutes to warm up.

- You Google the musicians, actors and celebrities that you watched when you were a kid and find out most of them died years ago.

- Children often innocently ask you, "What did people do before the Internet?" And you can't remember.

- When you get older, your willpower doesn't get stronger. Your urges just get weaker.

(Many of these borrowed from http://www.c-boom.com/humor2.htm)

Not so coincidentally, I was also born 106 years after the infamous Quantrill's Raid on Lawrence (future home of the Jayhawks), a major flashpoint in the intense Kansas-Missouri feud that still reverberates to this day, played out in the Jayhawks vs. the Tigers. (Also the reason the City Seal of Lawrence includes a phoenix rising from the ashes).

Writer's Block: Facets of a Hero

2008-08-20T01:27:40Z

What makes a hero?

View other answers

A burning desire to put on a really tight spandex costume and save the world!

The SuperBird is all a Twitter...

2008-08-18T23:29:51Z

Just got on Twitter today, as super_jayhawk

Yes, we Jayhawks can twitter, although they have to do it quietly. Even the super variety.

In other news, I finally updated the LJ Icon-- more on this when I start posting catch-up entries.
(Nearly a year behind so far!)

super_jayhawk @ 2008-08-07T19:01:00

2008-08-08T02:03:30Z

Life is full of uncertainties; there are many times that you don't know what to do.

And yet there are those times that you suddenly feel like your cape is flowing behind you in the wind, even if you don't happen to be wearing yours at the time. And then you do know.

Geez.... seeya, DSL.

2008-06-27T00:36:44Z

After much wrangling, and finding that the new place I'm moving to isn't within DSL range, I finally (and somewhat reluctantly) decided to go with Comcast.

I haven't traditionally been all that big of a fan of cable internet, considering you're sharing the same pipe as the neighbors and it used to be you couldn't get a static IP-- so I'd been a loyal DSL customer for 9 years now. I got the DSL so long ago it was called "Pac Bell DSL" (at 384k/128k! woo hoo!). That was before PacBell was devoured by SBC, at which point it was called "SBC Yahoo! DSL". I ditched SBC for SpeakEasy about three years ago when their service started sucking hard-- outages every week or so and data speeds of about 120-200k. I was happy with SpeakEasy even though they were pricey, since they offered 6 Mbits/768Kbits and SBC didn't. And you still couldn't have a static IP on a cable modem.

But I guess times have changed. Since I didn't have a choice of DSL in the new place, I decided to try out Comcast's new Enhanced Internet connection, and the installers did the work this morning, setting up the equipment in my server rack. I knew it would be faster, but this was more than I was expecting.

(Ironically enough, this is SpeakEasy's speed test screen, my old DSL provider)

All that for about $89/month. Right now I'm paying $115/month for 6 Mbit/768Kbps DSL at the old place. And now Comcast lets you have static IPs (more than 1 even) if you get a business account, which is what I ordered.

Guess we'll see how they go and what kind of shenanigans they pull, I've heard plenty from comcastmustdie.com and comcraptic.com about their port-blocking, net spoofing, and horrendous customer service. Guess we'll see....

A Landmark Decision

2008-05-16T02:34:18Z

Congratulations to the California State Supreme Court for realizing that civil rights and equal protection under the law apply to everyone, no matter who you love.

The decision will likely be as significant as the 1967 US Supreme Court decision striking down laws banning interracial marriage. Back then, most people felt that it shouldn't be allowed, but today nobody gives it a second look. The same will happen over time.

(Incidentally, the ban on interracial marriage was overturned two years before I was born-- good thing too, otherwise my own parents' marriage would have been considered illegal).

The best part is going to be watching all the ultraconservative pundits go into a foaming frenzy over the decision. If Falwell and Thurmond hadn't already croaked, they probably both would have today. Yup, just would keeled over. I'm sure that the religious firebrands will make all kinds of pronouncements that this is a sign of The Apocalypse and that the end is nigh, and that Divine Retribution is at hand. Will be lots of fun to watch.

What happens in California happens to propagate to the rest of the country after a few years-- we'll see what happens.

The Quest for Final Four Glory - Saturday at the Final Four Watch Party

2008-04-10T08:54:23Z

(First part of the story-- I'm way behind and trying to catch up with all the madness)

This last Friday night I had a hard choice to make. I could go to a party with friends and just drink and watch the game, or I could run off to San Francisco to appear as Super Jayhawk in a rough-and-tumble looking Irish Tavern, where I didn't know anyone there, with no changing or heads-off space to speak of, and possibly no parking. Not to mention the fact that I generally avoid going to San Francisco like the plague since it's impossible to get around or through that city, much the less park.

So after carefully weighing my options, I decided to do the insane thing and go for it. In my quest to be Super Jayhawk, and after waiting two years for the new suit, there was no turning back. I sent my regrets to my friends hosting the party down near home and drove up on Friday night to scope things out to figure out parking, where I would change, how to get there, etc. I didn't get there till 9:30pm and it took me about an hour to get everything figured out and talk to the bar people, and I didn't get home till 11:30pm to even start packing up all the things I would need to pull this off. It took me till 4:30am to get packed, showered, and get to bed, and it was painful getting up only four and a half hours later.
I had to make sure everything was loaded-- I brought both the original Super Jayhawk and the new one, all the fursuit gig gear, cold packs, ice chests, fans, chairs, tarps, just like we were doing a fursuit gig.. since it was.

terraluna_bat came over about noon and we met up with ultragor in San Bruno, who had just dropped minnieme4rl off at SFO for her flight. We arrived at San Francisco's Lombard Street Garage, managed to back both vehicles into a somewhat secluded spot to change, had a bite at Mel's, and then went after our quest for Final Four Glory.

After spending a late night at work and an even later night scoping out San Francsico and then packing until the wee hours of the night, I was feeling pretty tired, and I could really feel it when we moved around some of the equipment and boxes back and forth between Ultra-Gor's "Ul-Truck" and the HawkMoible. We schlepped things back and forth for a bit to make room, and it was when I picked up Terraluna's bat box and felt how heavy it was, that I knew heavy lifting was out for Saturday. So I had to make the painful decision to just go with the new head with the old body (but new boots) for Saturday. No one had seen Super Jayhawk as of yet, so they probably wouldn't mind either way, and there were lots of people in my LJ entry that were warning me about getting the new suit messed up anyway.

So I suited up with the old body with the new head, and felt better already-- I was surprised how much lighter it was without the new body with the full wings. After scarfing lots of water, candy bars and a couple of Gatorades, we arrived at the bar much to the shock and surprise of the KU fans that were waiting for the game. There were already about 200 people packed in a place that could hold maybe 125, so it was already crowded. I get there and they immediately start playing the KU Fight Song, and I was going, "Oh crap, now what?". So I danced and faked it as best I could, as well as pulling off (hopefully) a halfway passable Rock Chalk Chant set of moves. It's been over 15 years since I've seen them performed in Allen Fieldhouse, and I wasn't really paying attention at the time to the particular moves, so hopefully I pulled it off. I managed to make it through the whole gamut of songs that they played and move deeper into the bar.

Terraluna and Ultra-Gor did a great job covering for me in an incredibly crowded place and taking video and pictures-- it was probably one of the hardest fursuit escorting gigs I could ask them to do, and we've done some pretty rough ones over the years. Lots of KU fans, all holding beer or wine glasses, and somehow I didn't manage to spill any of them since they were looking out for me. (I think I dipped one of my glove feathers into a beer once or twice though on accident). Everybody loved Super Jayhawk, and I was mobbed for pictures. It was tough getting photos in such crowded quarters, and to get through to the back of the place I had to put my winged hands together and make like I was swimming through the whole place. We made it to the back of the bar to the pool table for the start of the game.

The Jayhawk fans stopped looking at me and started concentrating on the game, our big re-match with Roy Williams, and the first time the Jayhawks had played North Carolina since that fateful meeting in 1993's Final Four where North Carolina won and went on to win it all. This was the highly anticipated rematch of the two storied teams that had so much history between them, and the media had been hyping thsi game up as a clash of the titans.

I did my best to pump my first and wave and pantomine the mascot moves during the game, but there wasn't really much room at all and the guy next to me pulled on one of my wings and asked me to stop hitting his girlfriend with my left wing. Oops! Sorry... The tough part was staying mascot-silent for the game when my default urge during a basketball game is to cheer and shout and get really into the game--- and here I end up having to stifle my every vocal reaction. Also, it was hard to see the game through the eye mesh, I could make out the players and the general action, but couldn't see much in the way of details or the score. Sometimes I couldn't tell whether the shot had actually dropped or not and had to wait for the reaction from the crowd before reacting myself.

KU played with a vengeance during the game, going up 40-12 on North Carolina, the #1 Team in the Nation with the much-ballyhooed 2008 Naismith Award Winner, Tyler Hansbrough. It was great to see the Jayhawks playing so well, and the crowd at the bar really got into it, cheering and rocking the house. I was starting to get tired, and it was way hot in the bar, so we made our goodbyes and announced Super Jayhawk was exiting the stadium, which brought lots more people that wanted pictures. We ran into some drunken sorority girls at the entrance that grabbed me and wanted to do things to Super Jayhawk I wasn't that crazy about, and fortunately Ultra-Gor and Terraluna were able to get things under control.
Most avians consider attempts to pull apart their beaks rather impolite.

We headed back to the HawkMobile as I was pretty much soaked with sweat at this point, especially since my cold packs weren't fully charged up when we started. Getting back to the HawkMobile, I de-suited and put the head on a fan and plugged into the portable power pack in the car. Switching to my "incognito" Blue Suitcoat and pants with red shirt and beaked KU hat, we went back to watch the second half. I told my two escorts that I was actually kind of worried about de-suiting, because KU was playing so well, that if I stopped being Super Jayhawk they might not play as well the second half.

We got back to the bar, and North Carolina was already staging a serious comeback, which was exactly what I was worried about. We decided to hang with it and keep watching, and the Jayhawks started playing good defense again and hitting their shots, and the game was out of North Carolina's hands by the last few minutes. The reaction from the KU Faithful at the bar was deafening. Cheering, screaming, yelling, and two girls behind me screaming in this harmonic that made audible warbles ensued as Bill Self and Roy Williams shook hands at midcourt and that was it, Kansas Won and defeated North Carolina, the team they weren't supposed to beat. The bar erupted into cheers as we hung out and celebrated the moment, before we left to save Terraluna and Ultra-Gor's eardrums. I had years of going to games in Allen Fieldhouse to get used to that sort of noise (and probably have lost half my hearing range) but to my escorts, it was a new experience.

The KU Alumni organizer of the event asked me, "So, are you going to be back for the next game on Monday?"... I said I wasn't sure, but that I'd try to be. We hightailed out of there and drove home to San Jose, to celebrate our win and taste of Final Four Glory, good Italian take-out and Italian wine, until way too late in the night (I think it was 4 AM or something before I went to bed)

Much thanks to Ultra-Gor and Terraluna for spotting for me and helping me get through the whole thing, I couldn't have done it without them, especially since we changed in the parking garage and went to a way-crowded bar!

Saturday was awesome, and an epic game against North Carolina, and a great appearance by the Bird in Spandex, but it was only the warmup for what was to come on Monday.....

OK... We're doing this!

2008-04-05T08:29:20Z

The Jayhawks are playing the big showdown game of their lives tomorrow, against North Carolina, in the Final Four. Everything they've worked up to for the season. No, wait, the last FIVE seasons, comes to a head tomorrow night in San Antonio.

After careful consideration and advice from my friends, I will be cheering them on in full Super Jayhawk regalia at Kelley's Tavern at 3231 Fillmore (at Fillmore and Lombard Streets) in San Francisco. No, I don't like even visiting San Francisco in general, but my Jayhawks need me, and it's time to answer the call, put on the tights and become Super Jayhawk!

And so the decision is made. I'm going to go for all the marbles, unless I have to go with plan B.

Ever since I was about four years old and my Dad took me to the Jayhawk games as a pre-kindergartener, I would watch the Jayhawk mascot. I can't tell you anything about what went on in the games then, but I know every frame of video that the mascot was doing. Thirty-four years later, I have worked relentlessly (some would say obsessively) towards getting the most awesome Jayhawk costume I could ever have, and run with a bunch of crazy freelance mascots for a nearly a decade, among other things, to learn their Jedi ways, their magic and their command of the Mascot's Force. And to, of course, help them with what they were trying to do in their mission to entertain and make countless kids happy.

I just hope I'm ready. This has been at least 20 years in the making, if not more. It's kind of scary to be a dog who's been chasing cars for over half his life and suddenly catches one, without having a clue with what to do.

(and if I'm in doubt while running around in costume... I will ask myself "What Would Yippee Do?" and he shall guide me. "Lo, for though I walk through the shadow of NCAA Tournament Sudden Death...")

If you'd like to join us, come by around 2-4 PM at Kelley's or give me a call. I will be suiting up after that. terraluna_bat and ultragor have valiantly volunteered to be my wingmen. (Get it? Wingmen! HAA!) But seriously. We march in to seek nothing less than Final Four Glory.
Win or lose, I will be Super Jayhawk, and my heart bleeds crimson and blue. I wouldn't have it any other way.

So if you do want to join us, the uber-secret parking garage that's the closest parking to the bar is the Lombard Street Garage, at 2055 Lombard Street, San Francisco.

The trick you have to know (click here) is that you have to go to Lombard and Webster, head South on Webster for like 40 feet, and then take a right turn into the one-way Moulton Street, where the uber-secret on-ramp to the Lombard Street Parking Garage is. Even after driving the mighty HawkMobile 4-5 times past the area, I still couldn't find the entrance, I had to park insanely far away and walk to the bar and ask the Kelley's Tavern bartenders where it was.

So I will see you there, if you are with me! And if you can't be there, wish me luck! I'm excited, kinda scared, and highly disoriented from how fast this is all happening, but I have to do it. I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't.

And now, for my first commissoned full-page art of Super Jayhawk in 17 years...

2008-04-03T18:17:18Z

That's right, other than a couple of badges and some impromptu drawings given as gifts (thanks to nerfcoyote and others), I haven't commissioned a full-page piece of artwork featuring Super Jayhawk since I came across the artist who did the original drawing in 1991. This might seem amazing, especially since I've gone to like 20+ cons now, all with dealer rooms full of artists.

Largely this is because I'm so fricken' busy at cons that I never make it into the dealer room, and even when I do have time to make it in, I don't find the artist that would match what I'm looking for. Which is too bad, because Super Jayhawk is right out of the comic books. (Or Champions!, at least)

At Pawpet MegaPlex 2008, I was determined to actually (a) make it into a dealer room for the first time in 4 years, and (b) get a new full-page drawing of Super Jayhawk in over four times that long. I walked through the dealer room for an hour, looking at everyone's portfolios to see who would be the best fit for bringing Super Jayhawk to life.

And then I found what I was looking for!

So without any further ado, here's the commission done by the amazing artist gen, with Super Jayhawk taking flight in a classic "Superman Returns" pose. She did an awesome job, and pulled off the whole thing in one day at the con! Thanks Gen!

This one made my whole con! (not to mention the photoshoots!) 17 years is too long to wait!

I'm going to have to go get more drawings done... anyone have recommendations for artists that can pull off the superhero look? (I can see now why some furs get addicted to art)

The Kansas Jayhawks are going to the Final Four! (No April Fooling, either!)

2008-04-02T03:28:58Z

YAAAAAAAAAAAY!

Finally, the Jayhawks have made it to the hallowed ground, the top tier of the NCAA Basketball Tournament, the Final Four, for the first time since 2003. Congratulations to Coach Self and the team for showing what they were capable of and getting rid of the early-exit curse that the Jayhawks have suffered from in the last few years!

Now I have to find somewhere to watch the upcoming semifinal championship game on Saturday evening-- wonder if I should show up in Super Jayhawk to a sports bar (hosting KU Alumni), like Croc did for the Gators in last year's tournament? Wonder if I could get some people interested in that...

It might be better for me to be in costume during this game, because I will have to deal with....

One thing that I knew the media hype machine would start talking about immediately is Kansas' erstwhile and complicated relationship with North Carolina, especially now that the big showdown with UNC is coming near. There are of course Jayhawk fans that are very passionate about the whole thing, and still upset five years after Coach Roy Williams left right after the 2003 NCAA Tournament Championship loss to Syracuse. It was hard enough losing the NCAA TItle Game, but losing Coach Roy was really hard, especially since he went back to UNC almost immediately after the loss before we could even lick our wounds.

There are KU fans that span the whole gamut, from mad, resentful, pissed off at North Carolina forever, angry at Dean Smith, take your pick. The last five years has seen all the Jayhawk basketball blogs rife with the internicene warfare between the Roy-haters and the Self-haters.

I prefer to take the long view.

Kansas Basketball and North Carolina basketball have been intertwined for a long time, like it or not. Dean Smith played on the 1952 Kansas National Championship team, and ended up coaching at North Carolina. There, he developed the "Carolina system" that Kansas used so effectively later. Not to mention that he gave us the last two coaches before our current one, 20 years' worth of winning seasons, six final fours, and the 1988 NCAA National Championship. They are two of the top three winningest basketball programs in the history of basketball, period.

But back to Coach Roy.

I met Coach Roy in 1989, so long ago that his hair was still black, and no one knew who he was. The NIT Tournament back then mistakenly listed him as "Ron Williams". I saw his live talk show "Hawk Talk" with Bob and Max in the Kansas Union, and I was amazed that he just hung out and chatted with people after the show and would let ordinary students like me come and talk to him. He was one of the nicest people you could possibly meet, and had a bone-crushing handshake. (I still remember, nearly 20 years later).

The Kansas Jayhawks basketball program was still reeling from the NCAA Sanctions that had been placed on it due to the recruiting violations under Larry Brown - which had put the program into a rebuilding climb back up. The Jayhawks were banned from postseason play the next season after they had won the NCAA Tournament in 1988, and 1989 was a rough year, where they went 19-12 and lost a number of recruits and scholarships. Roy had his hands full, that's for sure, especially with pretty much all of the "Danny and the Miracles" graduated and gone.

And there we were, the Jayhawk faithful, cheering Coach Roy as he turned things around and started making Kansas Basketball great again, starting with the Final Four in 1991. That one was a heartbreaking loss to Duke, who started their own dynasty of NCAA Titles in the 90's, but the fact that the Jayhawks had even come back after only three seasons from the rebuilding year was nothing short of amazing. Roy brought the Carolina system with him, and he made Kansas basketball a blast to watch.

I was there, with my fellow KU fans as he brought us to two Final Fours in 1991 and 1993. We would camp out in front of Allen Fieldhouse for days before the iconic Kansas-Missouri game, and Roy would bring donuts and pizza to the faithful. He would launch T-shirts into the stands when he came out before a game. We loved the guy. He did it again in 2002 and 2003, consecutively, bringing KU to the Final Four with Collinson and Hinrich, and even though KU lost to Maryland and Syracuse in those years, he did us proud.

Some of you know that I had to leave Kansas myself when my economic situation wasn't working there, and after five years of trying to work in what passed for the technology business in Kansas City and driving nearly 30,000 miles a year to various jobs there, I finally had to go back to California and return to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area where I grew up. So I can't really blame Roy for wanting to go home, especially back to where all of his family and everyone he grew up with. It was a gut-wrenching decision to sell my house and give up any hope of ever owning a house again, leaving my birthplace and a place where I had spent over half my life, to come back to California. But sometimes this stuff has to happen, and that's how it is, regardless of hurt feelings and longings for what might have been. I personally blame Matt Doherty, who managed to pretty much sink the North Carolina basketball program during his time there and give Roy no choice but to go back and save his alma mater. I was actually glad for Roy in 2005 when he finally got his first National Championship, not for us Jayhawks, as it turns out, but for his beloved Tar Heels, especially as we had gotten knocked out by one of the "B" schools that year.

So this brings us to 2008. Roy has been back at North Carolina for five years, and turned the entire program around, and they're a basketball powerhouse feared by all else, getting the No. 1 overall seed and steamrolling pretty much everyone they encountered all the way through this year's tournament. Kansas has not played North Carolina since 1993, where it was Roy leading the Jayhawks and Dean Smith himself leading North Carolina in the semifinal of the Final Four that year. Carolina beat the Jayhawks and went on to win it all, and that's one of the losses that still gives a twinge in this Jayhawk's heart. The Jayhawks and the Tar Heels have not tangled ever since.

And so now, five or fifteen years later, depending on how you look at it, the showdown looms.

It's going to be Bill Self's Jayhawks vs. Roy Williams' Tar Heels, in what promises to be an iconic game for the ages. I love Roy and I appreciate all he did for the Jayhawks in the fifteen years that he was there for us, second only to Phog Allen in terms of wins and duration of stay, but on Saturday he will just be another opposing coach to me and I'll root for the Jayhawks to show Roy just how far that the Jayhawks have come since he left.

I am a Jayhawk, like my father before me. (and Mom too). Much as I respect Carolina and feel about Roy, I will be pulling hard for the Jayhawks to send Roy back home to Chapel Hill empty-handed.

GO JAYHAWKS!

Going to Megaplex!

2008-03-27T21:01:56Z

20 Years ago, when I was a poor KU student, I watched everyone else in the dorm head out to spring break.
There would be all kinds of trips advertised to Florida, Cancun, South Padre Island, or wherever. I never got to go to Spring Break, instead having to spend an entire week in Chicago, my least-favorite city in the whole country, with my parents. When I managed to move out of the dorm and get a place of my own, I just hung around Lawrence and watched the bustling college town be empty for a week, while everyone else went to Daytona.

But now, twenty years later... it's MY turn!

(Thanks to Ultra-Gor and his mad Paintshop Pro skills for the background!)

This is a first for me on a number of fronts... first time that I've ever gone anywhere during spring break season, much less during the NCAA Tournament (more on that later). And also the first time I've flown to a con since the disastrous 2003 season, where my fursuit box got crushed by the O'Hare Luggage Muncher Machine both going to and coming back from MFF.

So if you're looking for me around Megaplex, I'll be the one in full spandex, or in my blue suit. I'm kinda hard to miss, but some people have managed. And BTW, if you see a guy in bright red and blue with yellow shoes, I'm NOT Jimmy Chin. People keep mistaking me for somebody with much, much more talent.

So maybe owners really are like their dogs...

2008-03-25T02:47:05Z

Took this quiz, and got this result on the first try, without even trying to game the answers.

The dog in the picture looks a lot like Nugget, even sitting funny off-center like he always did.
He would have never left a milk-bone that long in his mouth though, it would have been gone in 3 seconds.

The war, five years later

2008-03-20T01:55:53Z

So here we are, five years after BushCo and his cronies started a stupid, pointless and illegal war in Iraq and decided to invade Baghdad. I said it was a bad idea then and now the rest of the country and world has gotten to find out what a profoundly bad idea it was. Oh, we would be greeted as liberators. Oh, we have to do it to stop those WMDs. Oh, they were behind 9/11. Oh, if we don't fight them there we'll have to fight them here. All a pack of lies. We were led into a 21st Century version of Vietnam despite the domestic and international outcry, and the invasion and occupation was a horrible mess and a complete debacle from the start. We've turned Iraq from a country that had no terrorism to the most Dangerous Place on Earth, a breeding ground for terrorists to train against American forces. We've turned the entire nation into a battle zone between three warring tribes, none of which respect or accept the rule of the quisling government that we've set up there.

Now we have over 4000 troops dead, and 30,000 wounded, and God knows how many dead and wounded Iraqis. We have alienated our allies and shown rogue nations that if you don't want to get invaded, you better get real nukes fast. Our reputation and standing in the world have suffered immensely in the last five years, and we have squandered every bit of good will offered to us after 9/11. It will take generations to rebuild that, and even longer to repay the bill (especially at $1 BILLION a day to run the war) and already has cost half a TRILLION dollars. Imagine what the US could have done with that kind of money.

Not only will we be stuck with the bill, but so will our grandkids.

So, on this fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, I'd like to take the opportunity to dedicate an old Bob Dylan Classic to the architects that got us in this mess : Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, Powell and Rice.

While this song was originally written for Vietnam, it still rings just as true today as it did during our last pointless war of occupation led on false pretenses. (and no, this ain't going under a cut tag-- not today). You tell 'em, Bob.

Masters of War

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand o'er your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead

Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

Vote for Big Jay!

2008-03-14T18:28:10Z

The EA Sports NCAA Football '09 Mascot Challenge is on now, so vote for Big Jay! Voting closes today, Friday March 14!

(Whoever you vote for... don't vote for the ugly purple cat-looking thing with just a mascot head and football pants! Geez, you think he could afford to buy the rest of his body now instead of snagging gear from the football team!)

GO JAYHAWKS!

A Quarter Century Online

2008-03-06T12:20:58Z

Twenty-five years ago, on March 4, 1983, I entered the online world for the very first time. I'd used modems for a few years before when my dad would let me use his teletype and log into the VAX at his work a few years beforehand, but this was a whole different deal. This was calling a BBS, a place where you could actually talk to someone. (Someone besides the operator of the mainframe, anyway).

The same model as my first modem (that wasn't built into a teletype), an acoustic Novation CAT (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

It was the morning of March and my friend Mark was staying over at my place for the weekend. He was one of my best friends back in the Junior High, and he always seemed to be one step ahead of me technologically. I had learned BASIC, and he already was messing with 6502 assembly. I'd learned about copying floppies with COPYA, and he was doing esoteric LockSmith 4.0 parameters to hack the copy protection on VisiCalc. I was so jealously competitive that I buried myself into the innards of the Apple II, and started learning everything about the computer, the processor, about data communications and telecommunications just to catch up to him, for at least the next twenty years, even though I haven't seen him since 1983. But I digress.

An Apple II Plus, similar to the one I used back to get online for the first time...only mine wasn't in a museum

The morning of March 4, 1983 we actually worked up the nerve to call this place called The Pirate Bay BBS in San Francisco.
I can still remember the number even 25 years later, but I won't post it here as it's obviously been reassigned to some poor unsuspecting sap. Mark brought this floppy with a "Terminal program" called TranSend which did something mind-blowing... it would use the serial port on the Apple II and connect it with the modem! We hand-dialed the number, and it was busy.. so we tried again and again for about 20 more minutes, and then we got the carrier on the other end that was the roar of the online world at the time. We hurriedly slapped the phone into the acoustic cups and hit the "Originate" button and the modems started singing together. LEDs on the modem flashed! Characters rolled across the screen at the breakneck pace of 30 characters per second, as if someone was typing to us! I had written programs for the Apple II before to make it do things, but I'd never seen something like this. It was like connecting to another world.

(This may not seem like great shakes to anyone in 2008 or even 1995, but in 1983 it was FM.. f'ing magic)

This was before there was really any such thing as ASCII art, when most BBS's only presented their text IN ALL UPPERCASE BECAUSE NO ONE HAD A LOWERCASE CHARACTER SET, and every BBS program supported "null character" line-printer delays because a lot of the devices used to go online were teletypes that would leave scroll-footage of paper behind the system. The online world was still more similar to teletypes, telegraphs and Telex networks than anything else. (In retrospect, this wasn't that long after The Forbin Project, and the online experience was more similar to that than to now)

We logged the entire session to a file on a floppy called "MAR 4 1983" which is why I can even remember the date. I printed it out for posterity and still have it somewhere. It has me logging into the Pirate Bay BBS and chatting with the sysop, they were one of the premiere BBS's of the time but charged a whopping $15/year to get to all their kool warez! (Alas, I never got a subscription, that was like three floppies back in the day)

And with that everything changed. I started going online to learn about other systems and call everywhere I could. Unfortunately at age 13 I didn't realize that calling in your same area code is NOT a local call, and ran up a helluva phone bill (lots of people did that when they first got into modeming). But it was some of the most addictively fascinating stuff ever. You got to see stuff other people were saying, on your own computer! OMG! It was like an Ouija Board for your computer, only the people you were talking to were still alive. I met people that weren't in the same school as me! When my parents would ask how I met them, I would tell them through the BBS's, and that just blew their minds! I might as well have said I met them through the looking-glass or in Narnia.

Pretty much every BBS at the time was a one-line affair run by a hobbyist out of their bedroom; you had to sit there and hand-dial the number (at least I had touch-tone) over and over again and just hope you got a carrier. Sometimes, to my surprise, the number would ring and the modem on the other end would start the answer tones-- but I hadn't turned the acoustic modem on yet. I got pretty good at whistling the carrier tone to the other end to keep it alive long enough for me to switch on the modem and slam it into the acoustic cups. (Newer "Direct-connect" modems could dial the number for you.. but I didn't get to mess with such newfangled things until a year later).

Online BBS's had really imaginative names like "CP/M Oxgate San Leandro" or "TBBS #14". But the really cool ones were places that had their own theme, like the Pirates Bay BBS, Mystic Caverns, or Montezuma's Revenge. Even with ASCII (you had to use your imagination in those days!) the textual description of the world you were encountering brought you into a whole new fascinating world. Some of the BBS's even had online games, and G-files that would tell you about all kinds of amazing and bizarre things! (I vividly remember some of them talking about the day that "tele-commuting" might be possible someday!)

It was in this world that I ran with the Apple II Pirate community back in the day, and learned assembly and how to crack software. I got to meet up with the BBS community, a bunch of people that banded together and hung out just because they all used computers, a rare thing at the time. I attended my first "pirate party" (they call them "LAN parties" now) at age 15. Had my own modem line that same year, and set up my first BBS at my high school in October 1985. Ran off to Kansas in 1987 to go to college (and turned into a spandex-clad Jayhawk) and started The Rock Chalk BBS there in 1988. Set up around 9-10 more BBSes to cultivate and develop the online community, collaborating with all the Sysops that would work with me. We made Lawrence, Kansas a rocking place to be online.

Then, alas, I graduated from college, and went from being an intensely geeky student from California to a unemployed Kansas graduate. This was 1991, so the economy in California was in the dumper, and I couldn't go back. So I had to go work for The Man in Kansas City, and get whatever job I could just so I could eat. And so most of my programming with reckless abandon and doing tons of cool things for the BBS's went by the wayside... to doing TPS reports for The Man.

I had used the Internet while in college and done all the telnet/FTP/Gopher stuff at the time, but little did we BBS people know that we were in the latter Mesozoic era, and the asteroid was coming. Suddenly the web browser came out, and legions of people went online in unimaginable numbers, spurred by AOL spam floppies. I was busy trying to get a job as a LAN tech and a SysAdmin and had no time to keep up any more-- and before long the BBS era was drawn to a sharp close when people quit calling (and when a Kansas lightning thunderstorm nuked my BBS via internal modem). That's when I packed up and went back to California.

Now, years later, oodles of people are online, and some of that's good, and some of that's bad. Concepts like identity theft and cyberbullying (and pure evil like somethingawful.com, portalofevil.com or even sibe) were unheard of and didn't exist back in the day. It was a much more innocent time, when the premise was that we were all in this together as the early pioneers; even using a computer to talk to each other was some serious common ground. So many people are so snarky and prone to nastiness these days-- I fought plenty of BBS Flame Wars back in my day, but I get tired of them now because I know they don't amount to anything before long at all.

But now people understand what the online world is, and cyberspace is big business. We used to talk about whether you would ever be able to actually BUY something online using a computer, and now everybody does it without a single thought. You can look up everything from satellite maps to prices at a grocery store in Poughkeepsie, NY or even some wacky video that we put together for FC. I have met every fandom I have ever been in, from pirate to Wicca to rennie to sci-fi and furry, online and met some amazing people. I have met more friends than I can even keep track of with this, and at the time it was the first time that people were able to do this at all. Lots of us have found people online that were into the exact same things as we were, with the usual amazed cry of "I thought I was the only one!". It's kind of like "Message in a Bottle" by The Police, only the bottles are packets.

The tones and hiss of the modem mating dance have gone the way of the Victrola now, but the world of cyberspace only gets bigger with each passing year. I only hope I can keep up with all the changes, as they've already been mind-blowing and have introduced me to more people than my parents' generation could even comprehend.

Here's to the next 25 years!

Too outrageous not to comment on this....

2008-02-25T08:59:55Z

This happened right before FC 2008, so I didn't get a chance to catch up on it until now--

Apparently some addle-brained Missouri lawmaker wants open season on Jayhawks by introducing a bill in the Mizery Legislature to make the Kansas Jayhawk the official game bird of that state, declaring it the official avian to be hunted. I was amazed that anyone could be so cluelessly stupid as to pull a stunt like that, but then I realized the lawmaker in question is a Mizzou graduate, twice over. Geez, can't they work on fixing their state and educational system rather than being a bunch of mini-Quantrills?

Silly Tigers! Basketball wins are for Jayhawks!

Birthday Season

2008-02-08T03:15:55Z

First off, I want to say Happy Birthday to 3catsjackson, 55seddel, chairoraccoon, crocodile, flipperanubi, redmonika, smashwolf, uckticoonox, ysengrin, and my good friend Brad, who got me into LJ in the first place, back in 2002.

With all the birthdays going on in such a short time I regret I won't be able to keep up with them all, especially with the work and family stuff going on right now that's taking a lot of my time. If I don't see you on your birthday, I still wish you all well and happy birthday, it's just hard for me to keep up with everything going on in the post-FC birthday follies. (Especially as I'm going on vacation next week).

Ok now, a question for those of you that saw Furry Night Live 2008........

2008-02-02T11:31:14Z

For those of you that are interested in helping us with feedback for FNL...

Does anyone have any comments, good bad or otherwise, about what you thought about the Furry Night Live 2008 Show that we worked on... other than the same objections about "Dick In A Box?

There were 19 other acts, and we'd like to know what you thought about those too.

If you are up for it, please post them to furrynightlive)

Thanks!

-SJ

Missed the con (or maybe it just felt that way)

2008-02-01T04:34:39Z

Before I get into specifics of how my FC 2008 was, I just wanted to say sorry to all those that I didn't get a chance to hang out with or that I had to run off with only a brief hi. I spent pretty much the entire con hauling stuff, working on Furry Night Live, hauling for and setting up the parties I was madly trying to organize, cleaning up after said parties, and trying to get all the details for our skits and movies put together (and burn lots of DVDs and CDs for FNL, too). I felt like I pretty much hid in the hotel room the whole con, and I didn't even leave the DoubleTree building itself for five days.

I had four things to submit to Furry Night Live, (Under The Same Sky, the animated dragon opening, the Godzilla Project, and Snow White and the Seven Samurai), two new fursuits I never got to do much of a walkaround in, was too exhausted to even enter in the masquerade, didn't have time to go to anything I wasn't directly working on, missed the fursuit parade due to the FNL Rehearsal issues, and missed the Patron Lunch that I paid extra for (also due to the FNL Rehearsal scheduling fiasco).
[Thanks to Minnie for bringing me a take-out box from the lunch]

I crashed really hard on Monday and had to spent a good deal of it lying down in the room after being so tired. I wanted to go to dinner with people, but they had already left, and I had to get help to even pack up all the gear that we had brought. I wasn't better until Tuesday afternoon when I went around the DoubleTree looking for any remnants of the con or people that I could just hang with after six solid days of sheer ass-busting work, but nearly everyone was gone.

So for those of you that I missed or didn't get a chance to say hi to, my apologies that I missed out on the opportunity.

If you want to catch up with me, my AIM UID is superjayhawkks. I hope to catch people later in the year, or at FC 2009, when I plan to have more time. (and won't be trying to work on eight major projects at the same con)

OMG the one one week mark before FC!

2008-01-16T09:25:46Z

So now we're rapidly coming up on triple-OMG weekend. The weekend of Jan 5-6 was OMG! Weekend. The next weekend of Jan. 12-13 was OMG OMG!! weekend. This next weekend, the last weekend before FC, is OMG OMG OMG!!! weekend. I don't know if I'm ready for the stresses of even the weekend, much the less the con itself.

We've been working on the "really big shoo" (as Ed Sullivan would say) at Furry Night Live at Further Confusion since February 2007. We've thrown around all kinds of ideas, have had lots of head-banging-against-the-wall script writing sessions, informal meetings at Crack Chicken, and later, heavy involved day-long sessions where we bang out scripts in the heat of summer and while the autumn leaves blew by. I spent the whole year going after it as hard as I could, but the time flew by so fast regardless.

For this time, rather than just doing a fun stage act at FC itself, we were filming a full-blown movie or two on location, with HD cameras, a set, and with all the annoyances and needs that such a thing requires. We pretty much reached the point where the things we wanted to do for a fursuit performance couldn't be done with the limitations of the stage before, and so we went hard after doing our own furry movies. But being in location was a real challenge. I've done nine years of fursuit gigs now, and even then I had no idea how involved it was going to be.

The filming sessions of November and December were especially grueling. Man, it was cold. The sun is your #1 enemy when filming on location there, as it goes down at about 4:30pm and you scramble like hell to just get your filming done before the light fades. The fursuiters do fine in 38-degree weather, but the cameraman and the director freeze their asses. We now have the legend of the 4-hour slow-roasted lasagna, and the Safeway sandwich campout in the parking lot (followed by debauchery at the Duke of Edinborough).

For one of our major projects I took the highly perilous drive up Smash Mountain to rent some equipment from him, and he told me... for every minute of footage you take, it takes about a day to film and produce it. Actually, it took a little longer than that. I thought the tough part was the film shoot, but the editing was really the hard part. Doing all the editing sessions, the audio recording sessions and all the snippage of footage and audio was a huge amount of work. My hat goes off to Dax for being such a kickass video editor that he dropped our jaws most of the time. Also I want to similarly doff my hat to Kiswara, who did the most amazing movie score for our project in a mere four days from the rough cut. You guys are nothing short of amazing.

Also I want to mention Dusty, who has been my partner through the whole production, and a relentlessly motivated go-getter who wouldn't leave anyone alone when things needed to be done, least of all me. The big Samurai project would not have been possible without Dusty renlentlessly charging after it and challenging me to figure out what needed to happen next. I originally thought a few years ago that he was a big scary biker dude, but he's a brilliant and sophisticated artist that I have grown to understand these last several months. Dusty, I love ya, man.

Most of all I want to thank all the amazingly creative people that jumped in and lent a hand to get our film projects going when all I had were ideas and energetic drive to make them happen, without my even knowing all the details. It has been a bit weird being a producer (Executive Producer, even) rather than a director or the guy that's actually in the show, but I have learned to lay out my ideas, bring in people that know what they're doing, and get out of their way. In many cases we went in not knowing what we were doing, but we learned fast, and the story and the sequencing was developed as we all worked it out. The original script is marked up to hell now, and is only readable by a few people, as we've fleshed out the story.

I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to have worked with so many talented people, from the directors and the actors, to the soundtrack musicians and everyone all the way down to the foley artist and the Key Grip. I can now understand why people want to make movies so badly, it's both terrifying and exhirilating at the same time, kind of like riding a bull at a rodeo, only if it's Chthulu instead of a bull. I now understand why people in the movie biz in Hollywood are such a-holes, as they deal with this sort of stress all the time. Even a few months' taste of it in an amateur indie and furry setting has given me an idea of what it must be like. Triple OMG.

I can thank those that held things together and knew what they were doing for making things happen, and though there are too many names for me to remember and list here, I thank you all. Again, I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with you and made something as amazing as what's going to show in Furry Night Live 2008.

Ever since we started doing acts in the Masquerade/Furry Night Live at FC, we've pushed the envelope and tried to do a big-time show (or even a Mr. Big Project) to push the art further along and show what's possible and what would rock the house. I hope that going to film and doing things on location (and with the right editing) will bring it to the next level. It's going to be one helluva show, and I think we're going to break into the world of furry movies with this one. You just gotta be there.

I hope you'll all join me at Furry Night Live 2008. I hope to make it an event that people talk about where they were when it happened years from now. I want it to rock the house that much. Those of you in the audience at FC 2008's Furry Night Live will see that happen.

A Return To The Land of the Jayhawks

2007-12-24T08:19:58Z

Christmas is always a pretty involved time, this year even more so for me. A few days ago, I got on a plane (something I don't do much of since 2001) to revisit Kansas, the land of the Jayhawks. The place of my birth, and my childhood, my college days and most of my twenties. The place where I ran off for college and became Super Jayhawk. And the place I tearfully left 11 years ago to build a new life in California, and have only been back a few times since.

I was born, nearly forty years ago, on KU's campus. Well.. OK, the KU Med Center in Kansas City, Kansas, at least (still a part of KU's campus). My parents were both young KU students in the late 60's, in the middle of the protests and turmoil of the Vietnam era. I grew up on campus and touched my first computer there, at age 4. In the same year, my Dad took me to the Jayhawk Basketball games and I saw the Jayhawk mascot for the first time and my destiny was forged. I even left California to return there 13 years later and was there when the Jayhawks won it all with Larry Brown, Danny and the Miracles. About a year later, I became Super Jayhawk and have been so for nearly twenty years now.

So this Christmas we came out to visit my Grandparents in Overland Park, who are in their mid-eighties now. I am truly lucky to have three grandparents still alive, all in their mid-eighties, They have been pretty much the only constant in my life (other than KU) as my parents moved around every few years and yanked me in and out of schools, just when I was making friends and getting some sense of stability. But for more a third of a century now, there was always the Grandparents' house. First as a toddler barely three years old when they moved in, to visiting as an adolescent and later as a college student and a working poor twentysomething stiff in the ninetes just trying to make my way and get a career (without much success, for alas, it was Kansas).

It is odd and strange to be back, in the place where I spent nearly half my life, where so many memories come flooding in. Every object in the Grandparents' house is something I can remember when they first got it, and everything has a story that comes to me in an instant. Just driving around the area gives me both memories of seeing it as a child and as a college student and working graduate, and everything I come across while driving around is eerily familiar, in a way that feels strange since I have been back to the Bay Area for nearly a decade now. I can drive down the street and suddenly timewarp into 1976, 1987 and 1995 at the same time, and it's strange to see such places again.

The travel coming here was pretty grueling, as Christmas departures out of San Jose are not easy. We had an hour and a half flight delay, and missed our plane in Denver, despite us running 30 gates between flights to barely miss it. We had to play the standby lottery in Denver, and managed to get some seats on the next plane out, only to have a two-hour flight delay as the wings kept icing up from the driving snow. Landing at KCI, we had to do the usual run all the way from the Missouri side to Overland Park that took about an hour, and I was so fried from sleep deprivation that all I could do was pass out in the evening. The next day we had to drive through driving sleet and snow, something I haven't done in 12 years. It came down hard yesterday, several inches of sleet and then powder. Scared the hell out of me, as being in California for the last decade has gotten me out of practice on driving on such stuff. We had a 4WD Jeep Grand Cherokee, and I took it slow and easy, so we did OK, but still, I would have rather had dry pavement any day. Two people died in the area after a 30-car pileup on the highway, which is why that sort of crap on the roads gives me the wllies.

We've spent time since then visiting with relatives and catching up, mostly. Both grandparents are old and have had their own set of health scares in the last few years, and have markedly changed since I was last here. We stayed in, especially when the snow came down hard. Shopping today was a pain, but the malls weren't as crowded as they usually are in the Bay Area. It's still a trip to go to a mall or another public place and see at least half the people wearing Jayhawk coats and sweaters, like I do all the time. I wonder if Superman managed to return to Krypton, whether he would have been thrown off by all the people wearing "S" logos on their chests. ;)

It's been friggin cold, too. Got down to 14 last night, and I realized I had to get the case of water that I had left in the rental car out, for otherwise it might freeze. Not used to thinking in such terms these days. I've had to wear two layers of spandex and thermals under my clothes since I got into town! I forgot how to use an ice scraper, haven't had to use one of those in years. That, and spending 5-10 minutes just putting on gloves, coat, undercoat, hat, earmuffs, boots, and fleece neckguard on before going outside. Had to kick off the chunks of ice built up in the wheel wellsa ater warming up the car for 15 minutes. I've forgotten what this is all like spending over a decade in the Bay Area.

So tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and the last-ditch effort to get presents, right before we open them up on Christmas Eve. I hope everyone has a great holiday, and I hope to be back in town in a few more days.

Jayhawks and Tigers and Bowls, OMG!

2007-11-24T21:29:52Z

The KU-MU football game at the end of the year in recent years is something that most people don't notice.
Both teams by then have already knocked themselves out of any bowl contention other than a Consolation Bowl somewhere you'd never heard of, at best. So at the time when the TV networks talked the KU AD Lew Perkins into moving it to Kansas City's Arrowhead Stadium at the beginning of the season, it didn't seem like all that big of a deal.

Of course that's before we knew what would happen with the football season so far. Never did I think that the football Kansas Jayhawks would go 11-0 and be ranked No. 2 in the nation, with MU ranked No. 3 at 10-1.
The last time that KU was this good was 1899, when the rivalry with Missouri was still pretty new and most people still rode in horse-and-buggy. Normally the game that doesn't mean anything means everything, as it stands to shake up the BCS Standings big-time and determine the conference champion of the Big 12 North, and possibly who gets to the National Champion in football. Wow.

The Jayhawks and the Tigers, for those of you that don't know, have likely the bitterest and second-longest football rivalry, called "The Border War" going back to the Civil War and the "Bleeding Kansas" era of the state's history. Both the Kansas Jayhawk and the Missouri Tiger are born out of this Civil war between two states back in the 1860's, and you can still see the rivalry (and the divisions) played out in Kansas City, which straddles both states (making it two Kansas Cities)

This is played out in many sporting events between Kansas and Missouri ever since, but none more than the football game. Especially this one. I expect this game will be one for the ages. I'll be on ABC-7 at 5 PM today watching!

The FOOTBALL Jayhawks are 8-0!

2007-11-02T10:47:50Z

Much as I love and hold dear my alma mater of The University of Kansas, I was told at an early age to not expect much from the football team. My dad would take me to KU football games in the early 70's and I would watch him just get mad as the game progressed and we would leave before the end of the third quarter. I was too young to understand what was going on, but looking at the win/loss records, I can piece it together.

A decade and a half later, during my time as a young Jayhawk student in the late 80's/early 90's, if the Jayhawks won more than 3-5 games in a season, that was doing pretty well. I lived through the infamous Valesente years where I think there were two wins in two years. It was insanely hot, the game would go badly, and my dear Jayhawks would get blown out by margins of twenty to seventy. Worse yet, you couldn't even buy beer in the stands to console yourself! (at least I got to watch the Jayhawk mascot though)

So you just learned to not expect that much success from football, and look forward to basketball season, where the Jayhawks dominated. (and by then we'd learned the art of smuggling in schnapps and vodka in squirt bottles)

So as a die-hard KU fan, I salute the Football Jayhawks that have brought the team to an incomprehensible 8-0 record so far this season. The last time the Jayhawks did this well was 1908, and my Great-Grandfather was 4.
Not bad for a "basketball school"! May all of the young and crazy football Jayhawks in this year's team fly all the way to the Orange Bowl, and take their place among the greats in Jayhawk football history!