We went down to Baltimore for the weekend to watch the NCAA semi-finals and finals. Once I was able to put aside the nightmare of a parking lot full of drunks throwing hard rubber balls at my car, the games were good. After their non-existant season last year, Duke stepped up huge in both games and fell just a little short in the last seconds of the finals against Hopkins, which was one of the most exciting games I’ve seen in a while.

Check the highlight video.

The players from Hopkins literally had sex on the field right after they won. It was an amazing sight.

 

Memorial Day took on a whole new meaning for me 4 years ago, after one of my best friends that I grew up with passed away. Dave was a Navy SEAL and died right before we went into Iraq. He spent time all over the world, including the Persian Gulf helping secure the USS Cole after it was bombed.

Regardless of how badly this country can fuck up a war, there is no group of people that I could be in more awe of than SEALs. They are the absolute best at what they do, and with the process they go through to become one it means most people that want to become one can’t. Dave was part of 7 out of about 120 people accepted from his class. This is a pretty rare video where they actually allowed an embedded reporter, and one of Dave’s friends is the guy being interviewed. When you’re looking for all the positive PR you can get, it probably leads to stuff like this which I would imagine either jeopardizes more lives, or they more likely alter missions while there is a reporter around. It’s good to get a little recognition for a group whose job is to get none.

 

I jumped off the plane from Tampa, unpacked, repacked, and got a plane to Denver which was half underwater.

 

After Vegas I came home, turned around and then did a long weekend in Tampa to go see the NPPL pro paintball tournament. It’s like the US Open without security. It’s amazing how addictive this sport can be – in 8 months our team of 5 has dumped piles of cash, bought multiple guns and everything else, and now we’re traveling just to watch events. Great trip, topped off by ending my 5 year search for Tortuga rum in the U.S. We’ve got our second tournament coming up this weekend, and despite the ass-kicking we were handed last time everyone’s going in with some confidence.

 

So I’m in Vegas and there hadn’t been much exciting going on to bother posting. I could have written how I now skip In-N-Out to go straight to Yama Sushi for kickass all you can eat sushi. I ate like a total pig last night to the point I wanted to explode. Speaking of explosions…

I’m staying at the Luxor for the first time. Last night I was feeling lazy and drove up to the second floor parking so I wouldn’t have to climb the stairs to cross back into the casino. It turns out I parked about 15 cars away from where someone would put a bomb on the roof of a car a few hours later with the intent, and success, of killing someone. I left my car there all day not knowing about it, and once I found out I spent the day wondering if my piece of shit Pontiac rental car was missing windows or even covered in pieces of someone.

At the end of the day I finally got back up there and had to wait for an escort to my car with two people. One to ask me some questions to distract me, and the other to check out my car to make sure those human pieces weren’t on it. There was a full crowd of ATF and CSI sort of people picking up anything they could find, and this was still about 14 hours later. I had to get interviewed again by another ATF guy and that was it, off to margaritas at the Mexican bar.

Check the story here.

 

Mini mullet

 

The other night after the nor’easter hit, I ended up having to find a bunch of alternate routes home because there were so many trees down. While I drive through some pretty plush areas to get to work, it is unbelievable the huge quantity of obscenely expensive houses there are between mine and my office. I have no idea where all these people work, though with this much money maybe they don’t. I drove by massive house after house, all gated in. This is one of the best ones, though the shitty photo doesn’t do it justice.

Speaking of this storm, Nick LaVecchia took some pretty amazing photos of it.