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.

The Joy of a Fake Mustache

It has been clearly established that adding fake mustaches to things makes those things funny. Having a bad day at the office? Grab a fake mustache and do some wandering. It's sure to make for a good time.

But don't limit yourself... feel free to experiment. A mustache could easily be used to make entertaining eyebrows, sideburns, etc.

So grab a fake mustache and begin your journey into hilarity. You'll wish you never had to come back.

Hangin' in the Kings' Court

OK, it's no secret that there's a new player in town. There's a lot of folks that can dress up nice and talk with an accent... but that only gets you so far. You aren't somebody until you've scored courtside tickets to the local NBA franchise... and, well heck... looks like we've got a new playboy in town!

Alright, well maybe we didn't quite score a handfull of courtside tickets, but the bottom line is that we were courtside. And hell, we were paid to be there, so beat that!

I was sent out to cover the Kings-Blazers preseason game the other night. This was actually my first time covering an NBA game... I'd shot plenty of college (and a bit of WNBA) ball, but I'd never actually been courtside for an NBA game. Not bad... I just wish somebody decent was playing.

Now, in all fairness, I was raised a fan of Oregon sports. My dad is a UO alumn, and I regularly wore a Blazers hat to class in elementary school. So it was nice to see someone familiar beating my newly adopted home team. Still, there's a lotta famous ballers out there... it would have been nice to see at least one.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this experience was seeing who was actually paying to be down on the court. For you see, the folks sitting behind the photogs were pretty darn close to where we were crouched. A cross-legged shoe kept kicking the back of my battery pack, jolting my beautiful shot from where it should have been. It started to piss me off after a while, especially after listening to their conversations (old rich douchebags trying to impress young floozie bitches... highly entertaining). Still, they were out of my league... sitting so close to the action and all... so I left them to their own.

The next day I hit up my chiropractor (something no photog should be without, in my opinion), who mentioned that one of his clients hooked him up with courtside (or "Kings' Court") tickets once... which were priced at nearly $1000 each. Sweet Jesus... If that's what it takes to get down on the floor, then it's no wonder that those floozies with those guys were so good lookin'. Too bad they didn't have a team that justified the price!

Can't argue with gettin' paid for chillin' courtside though! But damnit, I gotta get me one of 'em little chairs.

Nascar, or How I Learned to be a Golden God

Celebrities are an interesting species, as you never know what you're gonna get when you run into one. Ron Jeremy, despite being creepy and having a notably unsettling musk, is actually a very friendly guy...

My boy Alfonzo has had a few run-ins with the fame claimers, and is an expert in judging whether or not an A-lister is on-the-level enough to meet a mustached beta tape.

But in my (and Alfonzo's) travels, I have to say that the most pretentious, P-O-S golden god wannabes are, without question, Nascar drivers. Now granted, my access to and understanding of Nascar is mostly based on a single visit to Infineon Raceway to cover a race's time trials, but sweet Baby Jesus, these guys take themselves seriously. I had a brief run-in with Jeff Gordon, who didn't even acknowlege the screaming fans or media trying to grab his attention, as if he was some sort of Roman emperor or something. Although, in all fairness, he is treated like one.

So here's where I'm going with this- Last week, our main sports anchor- the sports guy in the Sacramento area (market #20, with plenty of small town Nascar enthusiasts) setup a satelite interview with one of these dieties. Here's how it went...

What's more, Jim has been recieving correspondence from around the world, both positive and extremely negative... including this gem, which manages to both enforce and re-enforce all my biases against Nascar and its fans-

Note that the genius misspells "knows" in the title.

Wish I was a golden god. Or at least able to drive a car in circles for money.