Constant

Good evening, to the sun as it breaks

the plane of the Pacific.  Large and burning like during a harvest

when the optical illusion paints everything

bigger.

That's just dust you know.

It's no bigger or

smaller.

Stable, with gravity playing mason.

The sun is the sun,

foolish to fight it.

Dust is just that, dust.

One Goal

Yes, that is a picture of the back of Coach Q's head.  Yes, my seats were close enough to smell the budding puberty of Patrick Kane.  Yes, you can still tell that Coach Q isn't smiling even when his back is turned to you.

After coming out as flat as Carrot Top's career (yes, there was just a Carrot Top reference, it's still early out here), the Hawks traded goals with the Kings until taking the definitive lead with their 4th goal with about 5:30 to go in the 3rd.  Great game, decent company with Ducatti, CFA and Indy Filmmaker in attendance.  Also, the group of Chicago fans in our section were tremendous.  There is nothing like hearing a south-side Irish accent screaming at a referee that his mother would be embarrassed of that last call while simultaneously teaching his seven year old son when it is appropriate to raise your middle finger and when it isn't, to remind a guy of home.

Always good to get to see the Hawks, even better to see them win, even better-er to see them win in front of loud LA "fans" who pretend to care about a sport that Kobe Bryant doesn't play.

Ed Belfour,

-I Heart Palindromes

"He's got longer arms than I thought..."

Yes, yes he does.  So the Hawks are two for two against the Kings so far this year.  This is much more important than it initially sounds because, as a displaced Chicago sports fan, I can generally only watch Blackhawks Hockey when they play the L.A. Kings.  National television will get me the Cubs, Bears and Bulls once in a while but not the Hawks.  In fact, unless you're in Canada you're not going to get to see any hockey without also having to endure Sidney Crosby's face which is annoying at best and has also been undeniably linked to some forms of personality disorder at worst.

With that said, the Hawks and Kings meet at the Staples Center (aka: the house that Kobe and gang riots built).  I was planning to meet up with Ducatti to watch the game at our favorite Chicago-esque bar in Hollywood.  As an aside, I know what you're thinking, and no there is nothing about this bar or its patrons that remind me of Chicago.  You can't have anything Chicago-esque in Los Angeles, the time-space continuum would collapse in on itself if anyone ever succeeded at that.  In any event, that was all before Uncle 3 of 5 (who has made other appearances in this space for being generally awesome) came through with his four Kings season tickets for me and the three LA based but Chicago-born Hawks fans I met during the course of the Stanley Cup run last year.

This is probably the perfect place to pause and remind everyone that the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup last year.  Oh, and that 2 million people showed up to the victory parade.  Did I mention that they managed not to riot or burn any taxi cabs during said celebration?  Amazeballs.

I digress, back to the real point of all of this:  I am the beneficiary of fortune a lot in life and I should probably be more constantly aware of that.  Uncle 3 of 5 got a leg up early in his adult life due to some brotherly charity from The Legend and now feels the need to repay me for something that I had absolutely no hand in.  I trounce around LA Country Club playing free rounds of golf and sit six rows behind the Blackhawks bench without any real effort on my part.  I am allowed all of these things because I happened to be lucky enough to grow up the son of The Legend.  Now that doesn't mean for a second I'm not going to be putting on my Bobby Hull signed B'Hawks hat (thank you Boondock) and rooting for John Scott to break an LA Kings' jaw, but it does mean that I will know I don't inherently deserve to be there.  I will be toasting to The Legend for the rest of my life, I just hope he's lifting his drink in return.

Slainte.

Da na na na na na...

-I Heart Palindromes

Was that Wesley Snipes?

144,400.  A nice even number that happens to be the number of miles I travelled in an airplane in 2010.  To put that in perspective, that is the equivalent of flying around the world via the equator six times.  Word.  This is why when people tell me that they like to travel I am always a skeptical.  I think most people mean they like to take vacations, which is a little redundant given the inherent nature of a vacation.  I don't like to travel -- I need to travel.  If I have spent three consecutive weekends at home I get nervous, at least I think I did, the one time that happened. 

United Airlines appreciates this affliction.  On my first flight of 2011 (LAS-LAX, if you're curious) the pilot came back before takeoff to shake my hand and thank me for my "loyalty", whatever that means.  He asked me if I was in management consulting, I have to answer that question a lot with United employees.  No, I am not, I work in finance and a good 80% of that first number in this post was logged on weekends, no work travel there.  In fact, outside of at the temptation of seeing Boondock, I rarely use vacation days.  Friday night red-eyes after work are the most common.

I get a lot of odd looks when I try to explain this to people.  Specifically, the people that I work with and for when they realize that I am travelling most weekends, even after travelling during the week.  Why, they ask, do I feel such a need to fly other places when I live three blocks off the beach in a place that a lot of other people (read: Europeans) spend a lot of money to travel to?  I usually try to gloss over that question with something about being young and doing it while I can.  The real reason is both much more simple and much more complicated.  The real reason is that there are people at the other end of those flights that I frankly don't care to replicate.  I don't think I could ever let proximity determine who my best friends are or who I can fall in love with.  Those people are irreplaceable to me and a few hours (or, you know, twelve) on an overnight flight is a small price to pay to see them.  I am lucky enough to live in the first generation that has entered adulthood in a world where global communication, travel and mobility is not just possible, it's almost cheap.  Well, not cheap, I could make the car payments on a V12 Vanquish with what I spend in a year on plane tickets but I can't imagine not doing it.

Yeah, I know, the person who really likes to take vacations and has trouble with jet-lag when they're traversing three time zones domestically is the one who is skeptical now.  I think about this a great deal; what do you get for 144,400 miles in the air in a year?  Should I just stay at home and play more golf on weekends?  What did all of that moving around get me in 2010?

Here goes:

- Getting to see what The Hammer looks like before the sun comes up as he picks me up at IAD after a LAX-IAD red-eye.  There is something particularly priceless about getting to wake up your friends who live a life of leisure at the hours you rise for Mr. Market from the west coast.
- A life-altering relationship with Boondock.  Worth all those miles and then some if you ask me and I'm certainly not asking you.
- A picture of me with a stuffed koala in Sydney, AU.
- An understanding of just how bad modern art is in AU and how lacking in talent the homogeneous island is via their version of Australian Idol.  Painful.
- Dinners with Boondock in Chicago, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, London, Palermo.  Some of the best hours of my life and the conversations that keep me sane.
- Making it back to Chicago for holidays with The Dancing Orange and The Sky is Falling
- Discovering that I heart crumpets -- seriously.
- Getting to tailgate for an MLS soccer game in DC and learn how to swear at other players in Spanish.
- The ability to render The General's 1970's vintage BMW inoperable and then participate in having to lift it into a parking spot for safe-keeping.
- My first ever SEC football game (USC vs. Arkansas) in Columbia, SC (along with the new parlance of "legit nineteen")
- Not nearly enough time on a couch or in bed with a book, The Office & Boondock.
- A round of golf on an ocean-bordered course in Italy.
- Sunday night dinners at the bar
- Watching The Hammer fall into the James River.  Priceless.
- Drinking champagne in New Hampshire with Jr. Investment Banker.
- Cubs games at Wrigley, an irreplaceable part of my life.
- Have I mentioned more time with Boondock yet?
- A disturbing knowledge of booking codes, elite levels, upgrade probabilities.  Also, the ability to make plane travel actually comfortable and enjoyable for those that I love.
...

A fraction, yes, but already more than I could live without.  Sorry Santa Monica, you may be gorgeous, but you aren't all of those things.  Not even close.

We've got the muscle -- We've got the hustle,

-I Heart Palindromes

Angry Badger

At the end of my run I was greeted with this; the beginnings of a sea of Wisco Badger fans at Santa Monica Pier.  Now I know how minorities feel -- when every average looking white dude puts on the same red t-shirt they really do all look the same.  Tough to make out, sorry, but enough to make a guy want to buy a TCU T-shirt.

There is a three story tall inflatable badger down there.  No joke.  Subtle.

Of all days universe, really?  I sure hope there's a point to all of this.  Wish I could e-mail this to Boondock so we could have a laugh.

Turtle Time,

-I Heart Palindromes

It Gonna Rain!

The reports of my death were only moderately exaggerated.  I have returned to the annals (stop laughing The Hammer) of the inter-web to share some incredibly important information:  It is raining in Los Angeles?!?!

Are you scared-to-death?  Flabbergasted?  Bamboozled (yes, Bamboozled, as in the slang term, not the terrible Spike Lee movie)?  No?  You're not?  Well that makes exactly one person in the entire world.  It has been raining, rather literally non-stop, for the past six days.  Houses are falling off of mountains, beaches are empty, roadways are flooded.  The Governator has declared this a State of Emergency, dude.  The only frequently cited upside to these events?  Lots of snow in the mountains (think 12-25 feet, yes, that much).  That's so LA of you Los Angeles; you're rewarding yourself for surviving such a perilous bout with moderately inconvenient weather with a ski trip to Tahoe.  You go right ahead LA, it's the holidays and you deserve it, don't forget to leave the Prius at home and take the Escalade -- the roads are flooded after all.

Now, I want everyone here to keep in mind that when people in Southern California freak out about rain, it isn't the kind of rain that you think of when you think about freaking out about rain.  The evening news dedicated five minutes yesterday to attempting to define a "thunderstorm", meaning what makes it different than a "rain shower".  No joke.  These people have never even seen a thunderstorm this side of a Marky Mark film.  The best part?  The weatherman implored people to stay inside if there was thunder and lightning lest they tempt fate and be struck by it.  I. Can't. Make. That. Up.  Clearly he's wrapping up his Ph.D. in math at USC with a thesis on conditional probabilities of things that will absolutely never happen to you!

Deep Breaths.  In good news, this set of events has allowed me to learn all new things about the city in which I live:

1) Despite a massive budget deficit and untold billions of dollars of Federal funding for make-work infrastructure projects, only seventeen dollars and twenty-eight cents were spent on engineers.  That's right, there are almost zero drainage spouts on any of the major expressways here.  Even if there were, unlike every major city outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the six-lane roadways here aren't even graded in order to run water off the roadway.  Instead, they opted for the "put in bowl-shaped low spots that create lakes" method of concrete'ing.  Hydroplaning is tremendous, especially at 75 miles an hour in a city where you know damn well that the car you hit/the one that hits you is not going to have insurance.  Golden.

2) Operating an umbrella is evidently not an innate skill for some adults.  I have seen people hit other people in the face as they pass by on the sidewalk.

3) It doesn't stop at umbrellas, women here don't seem to understand the concept of rain-appropriate shoes.  Six inch heels probably aren't the best.  Though you're dramatic fall was very entertaining, I should probably cut you some slack.  Oh no, don't cry, please?

In any event, the weather is supposed to revert to normal today and through the weekend (i.e. 72.138 degrees and sunny).  We'll have to go back to having the weatherman talk about Lindsay Lohan then.  Or Lindsay's mom, who gets a surprising amount of press attention for someone who has never done anything that is even remotely interesting.  At least I'll be in Chicago by then, now where did I put those gloves that I moved out here with?  Word.

Ducktales Woohoo (h.t. Boondock)

-I Heart Palindromes

On a scale from One to Awesome...

... That was totally Tony Danza.  If you have to ask me which extremis of the scale that Mr. Danza falls at, we are no longer inter-web acquaintances.

We all know that all Californians have a number of inalienable loves:

1)  Running or riding their bike along the ocean
2)  Being mellow, especially in situations that call for excessive amounts of alarm
3)  Inexplicable sources and aggregate amounts of income
4)  T-shirts

Well, you can add another thing to that list:  "shopping malls" near the ocean.

You may have noticed that I placed the shopping malls in mocking air quotations.  This is because I grew up in the real world (Chicago) where the concept of a mall was inseparable from teen angst, bad perfume, overweight mall cops, and food courts that made you question if OSHA really had any power or oversight.  Not out here in Santa Monica, the above article references a monstrosity that currently resides approximately twenty-five feet away from my toaster (yes, note that the immovable quarter-of-a-billion-dollar structure resides in reference to me and my belongings... I was here first dammit).

In any event, malls out here evidently include views of the ocean, valet parking, five star restaurants and... a billion people.  For the past two days the police have blocked off the alley that serves as the only entrance to my parking garage in an effort to stop... well... me from every actually arriving at home, as far as I can tell.  What was that?  Someone from southern CA complaining about traffic?  Unpossible.  In all seriousness though, every intersection within a mile radius of my apartment resembles that to the right.  I thought I had escaped this madness when I moved off of Michigan Ave.  Evidently I was just trading in white-tennis-shoes for flip-flops and converse.

Word.

Los Angeles:  5,381 -- I Heart Palindromes:  0

Kirs Kross Gonna' Make Ya' Make Ya'

-I Heart Palindromes