Losing Streak

Lately, I seem to have a knack for betting on the wrong horse. At least in person.

First, my Ducks go down to an unranked team in an embarrassing defeat.

The following night, I go to see my hometown Warriors take on the not-so-good Sacramento Kings (by way of $10 seats). Turns out the Kings are on a "hot streak", despite losing a few key players. Again, I am crushed.

To make up for it, I head out on the town with some pals and... lose a game of Battleship to some chicks at a bar. I am humiliated.

So when the offer came across the table to go to another Kings game, I had to think twice about it. I didn't know if I could handle another blow to the ol' ego, but the tickets were free, compliments of the station's cross-promotion with the Kings and the TV show Glee. I figured I couldn't argue with free tickets, so I put on my Kings hat and headed out. Turns out the seats were a whole hell of a lot better than the $10 ones. However, that just meant that I was able to see my newly adopted team get their asses kicked from up close.

One thing's for sure... I ain't headed to Vegas any time soon. At least not until this losing streak finds an end (hopefully before the Ducks go to the Rose Bowl!).

Not all of us at the game were losers though. A certain mustached tape-about-town was seen hanging on the court after the game with Glee actor Matthew Morrison. I've never watched the show, so I've got no idea who he is, but Alfonzo was a fan, and the two got along swimmingly.

Movin' the Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on a mound of grass amidst the UC Davis campus.

Humpty Dumpty had to be moved because they were building a new law school.

All of Davis' horses and all of Davis' men...

Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty on a stupid steel pole atop a mound of dirt before I had to get to my next story.

I'm sure your bizarre egg statue looks great in its new location. Try sticking to your schedule next time, and perhaps our viewers will get to see a glimpse of it.

The Great Stanford Heartbreak

Coming off of a big-time USC ass kickin' last week, the Oregon Ducks were ready to huff it on down to Palo Alto and offer up a similar helping to Stanford and that stupid dancing tree mascot of theirs. I sure as heck wasn't about to miss out on this, as I love me a good ass kickin', so I hopped aboard the Sactown alumni party bus and we rocked all the way down to the bay.



With a crew 75 strong, we set up shop and brought a lil' bit of Autzen's notorious drunken numbskullery to the fine folks of Palo Alto. We drank some beer...

...talked some sports...

...and yelled at some stupid Stanford fans...

Oh yes, we had a powerhouse team, and we were ready to start kickin' some ass!! If these stupid Stanford fans only knew what they were in for! Woo!!!

So how'd the game go? Well... not good.

Turns out Stanford showed up to play today, and Oregon's defense... well... they didn't. It was embarrassing. It was painful. It was a 51-42 heartbreak. Damn you Stanford, and your stupid dancing tree.

It was time to drown our sorrows and pain. On the bright side, we did have a party bus to return to!

We drank some more beers, yelled at some more Stanford fans...

...and hey, even Green Man showed up to wallow in our misery.

It was a long 3 hour bus ride back to Sac. Oh well, at least it wasn't pissing down rain like last year's Bay Area loss.

And we're still #1 in the Pac-10! Well, for now, anyway. So long as that holds out, there just might be another Ducks adventure in the Photocalypse forecast.

The San Diego Adventure

Thursday nights have become something special here in the Sactown media market. It started out with two local photogs going to a late night pizza joint every Thursday night for a few beers. They invited a few friends, who invited a few friends, and over the past few months "media night" has grown and thrived. Nothing more than grabbing a few beers with local newsies, often representing every station in the market. It's always a good time.

Last Thursday, as I prepared to venture out into the night and make my obligatory appearance at Media Night, my work phone started to ring. "A caller, at this hour?!" I exclaimed as I glanced at the clock that was ticking towards midnight. Caller ID declared that it was my station's EP, who I assumed was lost on his way to the festivities. So I answered...

"There's been a plane crash in San Diego. Can you be at the station at 4 AM?"

Being told I was the only option, I was left with no other option. I was gonna be starting my day in a few hours, and it was gonna be a long one. I phoned the crew to inform them of my sudden unavailability and headed to bed, desparately trying to scrounge a few hours of sleep.

None came, and before I knew it, my alarm was blaring and my day was beginning, without a minute of sleep.

So I headed to the station, grabbed my gear and reporter, and headed on over to the Sacramento Airport. You see, the evening before, a military helicopter collided with a Coast Guard plane over the ocean. The plane was stationed out of Sacramento and was down South searching for a missing boater. 7-9 people were missing, and the search was on.

As soon as our plane landed, we grabbed our gear, hopped a cab, and literally ran to our first live shot, an 8:45 hit at the end of the morning show over at the Coast Guard station. It was gonna be a long day.

Now, I'd never been to San Diego before (and all knowledge of its media market was based off of a movie I saw some time ago), but from what I saw through my bleary sleep-deprived eyes, it seemed quite lovely.

The day rolled on, the hits came every few hours, and the press conferences were ample. Hopes were high that these folks would be found, and they weren't about to give up anytime soon.

As the day wore on, my sleep deprived mind became lost in a haze of confusion. By 3 PM, as I was driving the rental car through a city I'd never before seen in desperate search for food or some sort of sustenance, I realized that I could barely understand what my sidekick reporter was yammering about. We grabbed some tacos, headed back, and I collapsed in the back of the rental car for a solid 30 minute power nap. Following that, I suddenly became surprisingly more coherent, and the live shots continued.

By that evening, our San Diego sister station had gone through three crews- morning show, dayside and nightside- in the time that we had been there. Also one of our tape-to-tape decks died on us, but all in all, things went surprisingly smoothly (especially compared to previous out of town work trips). By 11, we were finally done with our 20 hour day.

We crashed hard at a nearby hotel, and come 7 AM, we were on our way back to Sacramento. A whirlwind adventure and a test of endurance. Am I glad I did it? Eh, sure. Makes for a good adventure and a fine story. Still, I can't help but wonder what would have happened if I had shown up to Media Night on time rather than trying to be fashionably late...

Halloween and Such

As adulthood has dawned upon me, I have come to realize that Halloween, much like most other holidays (New Year's Eve, St. Patrick's Day, heck... even Christmas) is just an excuse for "grown-ups" to get drunk and act like fools. Don't get me wrong, as I'm not complaining... I'm just sayin' that it ain't the night of glee and whimsey that it once was.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Now chicks, they got the costume thing easy. They can take anything and slutty it up a bit, and nobody complains. A slutty cop, a slutty pirate, I even saw a slutty bumblebee (explain that one to me).

Dudes have to be a little more creative. The most popular of the night was my pal's Silent Bob get-up (left):

Other costumes we came upon ranged from the hilarious...

to the kinda gross...

to the just plain wrong...

Mine was sort of a combination of all three, as I donned a stereotypical Oakland Raiders fan costume:

If you don't get it, you've never been to an Oakland Raiders game.

Another year, another Halloween filled with drunken debauchery. Ah, the holidays!

The Art of Noshing

Something Sacramento is rapidly becoming known for is its crawls. With something like 100 bars and restaurants within the midtown grid, the walkable drinking terrain in this city is highly impressive. Last weekend, we took part in The Big Nosh, a 25-stop crawl to raise money for cystic fibrosis research (similar to last year's Crawl for a Cure). Basically you make a team, pay $30, and spend the afternoon bouncing from place to place, each of which gives you a helping of food and booze. From 12-5 PM, it's your duty to try and make it to every stop on the crawl, or face utter defeat. A hefty task, no doubt, but Team Noshtradamus was ready to fight the good fight.

With a team consisting primarily of Piedmont High alumni (voted the #1 high school in the country for underage drinking during our tenure, or so I recall), we set out with ambitious ambitions, ready to eat and drink our way to glory!

Each stop provided its own style of eats for consumption, some more impressive than others. Tacos, soup, sandwiches, sushi, fancy cheese, froyo, pizza, risotto... A little bit of everything in no logical order. Same with the booze... wine, beer, mohito, sangria... all tossed together in a random liver-busting mish-mash. Pound it down and move along, we've got a long way to go!

Hands down, the best stop along the way was The Melting Pot, a classy-type fondue joint. With two types of dippin' cheese and hearty wine pours (complete with abundant refills), I was tempted to set up base camp here and proclaim that the crawl was called off... but alas, we had a mission. A mission bigger than one man. So I took what I had coming to me, and we went on our way.

So in the end, did we win? Well, it wasn't a competition, but the answer is still no. Last year our team hauled ass across midtown with the determined goal of finishing strong. We lost a few along the way, but damnit, we did it. This year? Not quite as glorious. We did manage to make it to 20 of the 25 stops, which in itself is a reasonably decent accomplishment. But we did fail. In all fairness, it's difficult being "closing time drunk" at 4 in the afternoon, and huffing it around The Grid can get tiring. No excuses, and Team Noshtradamus gave it our best... but we still failed.

Our grieving was done at the final location, by way of a Pabst-fueled chess match.

Training for next year's crawl starts today. I refuse to fail again.

Flip Cup: A Gentleman's Sport

Ain't nohin' better in this world than kickin' back with some drinks and watchin' some sports. But... what if drinking was the sport? I know what you're thinking... that's crazy talk. Nobody could drink and compete on an athletic level. That is simply ludicrous in principle, hands down. Period.

Or so I thought, until I was invited to join a team for last weekend's Flip Cup Tournament. What is flip cup, you ask? Why, it's the sport of gentlemen. Drunk, belligerant gentelemen... but gentlemen none-the-less. Chicks came too.

Hosted by local "sports and social league" XOSO, the event drew a hefty crowd of eight teams, each with six players. How do you play? It's a simple two-step process. You drink the beer, you flip the cup. Easy as that. Each person drinks a (small amount of) beer, sets the cup on the edge of the table, and tries to flip the cup so it lands upside down on the table. It's done in a relay fashion, and the first team that makes it through the six members wins. Simple, effective, exhilarating.

In the end of the double-elimination tournament... we lost pretty bad. But hey, we're new to the sport and were facing some seasoned veterans (AKA college students). But, in classic Rocky-style, The Flippin' A's (our team name) are ready to start training and make a big-time comeback in next year's competition. Oh man, it's gonna be epic.