Don't Back Down

I've seen a few Arena Football games in my time. Truth be known, I've probably seen more Arena Football games than I have seen NFL games (in person, anyway). The first that I recall was the Los Angeles Cobras, who played (someone). I don't even remember the game much, except for the Pauus. You see, the Cobras had a player named Yepi Pauu on their team, and he was Samoan if I remember correctly (sources online say he may have been Tongan). At intermission, his family would come out and lead the cobra dance - unfortunately for the team, the Family Pauu was about the best part of their performance. They folded after one season, 1988. If you search Google for Yepi Pauu, you'll be prompted to change it to Yeti Pauu. Go figure.

It so happens that I also caught at least one game of the Charlotte Rage. While the Rage lasted a whopping five seasons - from 1992 to 1996 - it was during 1996 that I saw the game. So at this point that I'm thinking I'm the death knell for Arena Football teams. And yes, there were others in there. These are just for dramatic effect, because I saw both teams during their final (or only) season. The Rage didn't have the Pauus, so I can't say what brought about their downfall, other than me. But I decided to attend my first indoor football game since that fateful night when I brought down the Rage in 1996. It was to catch the Carolina Speed on Saturday night. The Speed played their first season in 2007, which means we'll have to see if 2008 is their last, now that I've seen a game.

Read "Carolina Speed Season Finale" »

When we were kids, we all collected things. Baseball cards and comic books and action figures. But it wasn't collecting. It was just stuff. Okay, maybe we didn't all collect things. Maybe it was just us boys. Frankly, I think that girls collected things too, it was just different. Being that I wasn't one of them, I don't know what it was. I'd be likely to say dolls and ponies and shoes or something. If you knew the right kind of girls - or perhaps the wrong kinds of girls - then they would have collected boys.

But the point is, at the time, we had those things because we enjoyed them (especially those girls I was talking about). At some point along the line, it all changed. Rather than just having things that we liked to have around so we could use them, take them out and play with them - and at this point I'm going to stop talking about those girls - we became collectors. At least some of us did. Here, I'll also probably need to stop including myself in the analogy, because I don't really consider myself a collector of things. This point is where those treasures became objects that we thought might be worth something to people other than ourselves, and that is when our lives became just a little more jaded.

Read "What Makes People Into Collectors?" »

If you've been reading the blog for the last little while, you know that I've been hanging out on Plurk recently. Naturally, that means that I have been playing with Plurk as well, and trying to integrate it into my daily routine. When I used Twitter, it meant that I used Twitterfeed to create Tweets from the entries that I posted here. The problem is that Plurk has no such interface, as it doesn't have an API, so no such solution exists.

Luckily, Plurk power-user Ryan Lim came to the rescue. Not long ago, he released RLPlurkAPI, a PHP-based API into Plurk. It's not an official API, but it's good enough to allow outside services to access Plurk from the outside. It isn't Twitterfeed either, but what it did was allow people such as myself to see that it's possible to access the system from the outside. Unfortunately, I still couldn't do it, and I needed some more help.

Read "Integrating Your Movable Type Site with Plurk" »

It's time again for the hot dogs to start flying. Just over a year ago Charlotte hosted a regional qualifier that was pretty well attended by some of the larger names in the Major League Eating circuit. Juliet Lee and Hall "Hoover" Hunt battled it out to the very end, with Hall Hunt edging Juliet by just three-quarters of a HDB (hot dog and bun), setting a North Carolina and personal beset with 28.75 in twelve minutes.

This year, the official time has been dropped to ten minutes, after investigations have determined that the original contests took only ten minutes, rather than the traditional twelve. Why no one looked into it previously is a bit of a mystery, but that's the case, and so ten minutes it is. Chances are good that no one will be matching up with Joey Chestnut, but hey, it's good, clean fun, so who really cares, anyway? The stage was moved from the back side of Concord Mills around to the side, and it seems to have helped - a few more people showed up, even though there was no readio sponsor, and the event didn't seem to get much mention in local media.

Even Tom Sorensen, local sports reporter who wolfed down a monstrous helping of four HDBs last year, decided to cover senior center croquet this year. No telling why. I think he was afraid.

Read "2008 Nathan's Hot Dog Regional Qualifier" »