The Greatest New Game/Gladiatorial Combat of the Year

What were you doing Labor Day weekend? Grilling? Sitting in the sun? Watching television? Well, if you were Joel Abrahamson, you were doing all of that and more, because you went to the Lake of the Ozarks with David “Red” Shoemaker and friends. But you’re not Joel Abrahamson; I am. So I have to tell you this story.

This is actually something of a tradition for me, in that this year was the third in a row that I participated in this retreat for only the manliest of men. Generally, the weekend involves testing our prowess at jet-skiing, boating, tubing, and Chuck Norris movie watching. (Have you ever seen Invasion USA? It’s ridiculous. See also: pretty much any episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. Which reminds me: that’s one of my newer nicknames for W. *chuckle*) Those on the retreat also generally spend some time wrestling over large floating blocks of Styrofoam that have broken off of older docks and drift around the lake. (Have you ever seen the Lake of the Ozarks? There’s a lot of trash in it. The water is also exceedingly sketchy-- on a previous trip, Steve went swimming with some superglue on his hands, and the lake actually dissolved it.)

Maybe enough people finally upgraded their docks to the newer, floating barrel/tub models; for some reason, the Styrofoam blocks were nowhere to be found this year. While this was good, ecologically speaking, it meant that we could not play King of the Foam Block. Maybe that was why a long-germinating idea finally saw the light of day that weekend: TUBE WARS!!

Tube Wars works like this: you tow TWO tubes behind a boat moving at reasonably high speeds. On each tube is a person (or possibly two, if we are talking about Tag Team Tube Wars). Each person steers their tube around and generally tries to knock the other off. Hand-to-hand grappling is highly encouraged, and outright wrestling matches did develop at times. Cool moves include jumping your tube over your opponent’s tube, overturning your opponent’s tube while he is flying over you, ditching your tube and hanging on to your opponent while dragging half of your body in the water, and tilting your tube to drag the aforesaid opponent even more in the water. Sadly, no photographic evidence exists of the first series of Tube Wars matches. I guess we’ll just have to do it again.

Random Acts

Right now you get a little detour before I jump in to retelling the tales of the last semester. It goes something like this:

Today I was doing my laundry. Around the time I was transferring from washers to dryers, Fox Sports Network was making some declaration about how Gale Sayers was the sixth best running back ever. I thought of the laser beam that forms from all of the Names of Fame in the Memorial Stadium opening video they show at all our home football games, and how it blasts forth from Mr. Sayers name to destroy the opposing team’s helmet. Because, as we all know, without your helmet, you can’t play football.

Then a man walked in the door of the laundromat. He walked around the machines to me and presented me with five two-dollar bills, neatly paper-clipped together, saying, “Here you go.” I was very much taken aback for five seconds as he turned to leave, wondering if this man had just seen and very much enjoyed Pay It Forward. But instead I collected myself enough to say, “What’s up?” (How intelligent.) Mystery Man replied, “Merry Christmas. Pass it on if you feel like it.” Then he walked out the door and disappeared melodramatically into the night.

Well, maybe there’s hope for this old world yet.

FREEDOM!!

Well, realistically, I didn’t expect to get much time to post to this blog during the semester. I was fully aware it would be the most intensive academic period of my life to date. Still, I think it caught me off guard somewhat; ergo, the complete lack of ANY post for the last 4+ months. Yikes. Sorry, folks, if you were interested in what was happening in my life during that time. I’ll make it up to you in the next few posts. For now, let’s just say that there was a lot of homework, some gigantic projects, and what free time I had generally found me too brain dead to want to write anything.

But now I need to write about something more current. I promise I will give the highlights of the last semester in due time, but right now I need to write about today, before it slips my mind.

This morning, I woke up at 3:30 AM. Not because I had to, but because I could. Because I had finally had some free time and could take liberties with how I scheduled it. You see, my friend, the Zach Ol’ Party (ZOP) had snagged a block of air time from 4 to 8 AM on our local college radio station, KJHK. What’s more, this is what’s known as “freeform” programming, meaning you can pretty much play whatever you want (subject to FCC limitations, naturally). So I thought, this would be an interesting experience: early morning radio broadcasting. I’m all about adventures and interesting experiences. They make for good blog posts, after all.

Yesterday it snowed again, leaving 4-5 inches of fluff everywhere. Since this is Kansas, not North Dakota, the streets are only marginally plowed initially. Here it’s pretty much assumed (correctly) that the weather will soon warm up and melt everything anyway. It’s already happened once this year. The downside of this practice is that for the day or two before things have really melted, things can be a little slick. The ZOP’s car, the Jade Falcon, couldn’t quite make it up the hill to the Shack, as the KJHK station is affectionately known. We were forced to abandon ship and trudge upwards through the strange twilight glow that falls upon cities with at least a few street lights and plenty of reflective ground cover. Powdery flakes continued drifting down. My super-all-terrain hiking boots performed satisfactorily.

After the colder-than-expected hike up the hill, the radio show began. The inherent freedom of freeform programming was only enhanced by the knowledge that we were broadcasting noisy experimental electronica and obscure rock on a college radio station after finals had finished in the early morning. I don't have to tell you that college kids aren’t up that early, and any that stayed up late from the night before patronizing bars and such establishments have already fallen asleep (or passed out). We could easily have had a single-digit audience. I suggested that perhaps aliens circling some distant star centuries or millennia in the future might pick up our signal, so the audience might in fact be larger. To tell the truth, I don’t really know the relative power of KJHK’s transmitter, or, for that matter, the effectiveness of FM signals where interstellar communication is concerned. They don’t have the wonderful ionospheric reflections that shortwave does, that’s for sure.

Perhaps an hour or so into the broadcast, the ZOP and I discovered the hole in our small-audience logic-- KJHK is streamed live over the Internet. And the Internet reaches the whole world. And it is not 5 AM everywhere in the world when it is 5 AM in Lawrence. Some places it is 10, 11 AM, even… afternoon. This was evidenced by the longest-distance request call I have ever witnessed. A former KJHK dude, now in CHINA, was listening to the show on the Web and called to request something by a local (to Lawrence, not to China) band called the Regrets. Needless to say, we obliged his request.

After recovering from that surreal experience, the ZOP decided that he had been up since at least 2 PM the previous day and that he was, consequently, tired. Thus, I took the controls and The Big Chair for a few hours. I have been to the Shack several times now, so I know my way around the boards reasonably well. In any case, the ZOP had basically planned the whole four-hour show out ahead of time, so I didn’t even really need to think about what to play next. Mostly I just needed to answer the phone if it rang (it didn’t), announce the station ID (on the hour), and throw in some promos and public service announcements (required by Uncle Sam). So that was easy enough, but I’m the type who wants to be doing something else while he listens to music. This is especially true when we play an hour or so of ambient electronica. So, prompted by the longest-distance request, I decided to actually visit that page that teaches you important Chinese characters used in restaurants that I wrote about two posts (but almost five months) ago. Learning little scraps of languages here and there is almost a hobby for me, so I had a lot of fun. I think I learned quite a bit in ~2 hours, although the ZOP correctly questions how useful this knowledge will be, since the website does not teach pronunciation. Still, you have to start somewhere.

That’s all for now. Coming soon:

the greatest new game/gladiatorial combat of the year,

my experiences seeing half of the US concert dates for the fantastic Swedish acapella jazz quintet The Real Group,

the greatest new game (with combat, perhaps, but not gladiatorial) of two years ago,

one very awesome board game and one very awesome card game that everyone should know about (but probably will not learn about in time to purchase as a holiday gift… oh well; they’re kind of hard to find anyway)

perhaps the best photograph I have ever taken

a Waking encounter in my Life, and

the amazing magical talent of Gleaning.

I think that’s all I need to write about to get caught up. Wow. I have my work cut out for me. Of course, it’s not that I have nothing to do, strictly speaking. There’s still the matter of finishing the various graduate school applications I have out there…. they’re due in January… I’ll get them done…