how do you avoid getting on a roll?

I'm making a sincere effort to leave well enough alone. This evening, I got a text message from Scott. He had an idea. An idea so perfect and obvious that I kind of hated myself for not coming up with it. We bounced a few idea back and forth and got ourselves to work. The result is big, dumb fun on the internet that you might want to take a peek at come tomorrow.

So I've officially made my contributions and shut things down for the night, eager to go to bed with Andi. Once I was there, though, I couldn't even begin to sleep. If you know me, then you know I'm in a pretty unsatisfying rut in a lot of aspects of the ol' life. So little things like the exchange between Scott and me and the results thereof end up keeping me awake. It's why I don't sleep after the SUPER SPARKLE SHOWCASE or a great show at The Worx. When I remember what it's like to actually do something I'm a little proud of, I want to do more.

So I'm trying hard to leave it be. Let what I've done sit so I can settle down and get a good night's rest. But it's awfully hard, because these moments aren't part of the daily routine.

so, um, i need to update this thing...

...but not today. In the meantime, this is still happening tonight:

on my failings to properly cover basketball on this blog

So I was going to go down the results of the ACC tourney one game at a time. That didn't work out, but I did manage to liveblog a pair of the games for How RDU Doin'? Then I thought I'd reprise my NCAA burning questions gimmick from last season. Then I filled out my first set of brackets and found that I had all four #1 seeds in the Final Four. So I'm going to grow a pair and then fill them out again. I'll let you know if I have anything worth reporting on before games start on Thursday.

March. Madness.

ACC tourney - virginia tech 65, miami 47

I am distraught by the inclusion of David Cook to the ACC festivities, specifically, how hard the Raycom gang is trying to pimp his album. This is not what I want from my basketball. Also, I wanted Miami to show up for this game for my entertainment. Instead, they'll be rockin' the NIT after one of the most disappointing seasons I've ever seen from a team that isn't NC State.

That said, Virginia Tech played pretty outstanding "team defense," which they'll need again tomorrow when they have the tall order of trying to catch UNC on an off day. I doubt they'll have it in them, but I wouldn't mind if they made Carolina work harder than they want to.

In the meantime, I have only to survive Georgia Tech vs. Clemson and then a break before sneaking a radio into work tonight so I can hear NC State take on Maryland. If State is going to win this thing, my boys will have to take down Maryland, Wake Forest, (probably) Duke, and then (probably) Carolina in consecutive days. I don't like our chances. And now I have to worry about the possibility of the Wolfpack getting stuck in one of the two tournaments that sit below the NIT. Bad season. Bad, bad season.

March. Madness.

SUPER SPARKLE SHOWCASE sunday morning recap on a tuesday

We'll just go ahead and cop to week 2 being the part of the show where the contestants begin to figure out what they do that works and what they do that doesn't. I had some quality banter with PT scheduled for the lulls between acts, but JMatt finally managed to put some good old fashioned fear of God into the contestants and their changes happened pretty quickly and smoothly for once.

Not as good a show as week one, but Phil definitely improved from last week to this one, coming home with the night's best performance.



The rest of the videos for the SHOWCASE can be found here. Next week, it's the Broadway...which will present a pretty big challenge to more than half of this cast unless I miss my guess. So show up this Saturday at 10:30 to Comedy Worx and try to figure out if our six intrepid performers can make Broadway SPARKLE!

i'm not looking forward to obsolescence

Hey, CNN has announced that America is becoming less Christian at a pretty quick rate. I mean, that's how the headline reads and everything. So what gives?

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League said he thinks a radical shift towards individualism over the last quarter-century has a lot to do it.

"The three most dreaded words are thou shalt not," he told Lou Dobbs. "Notice they are not atheists -- they are saying I don't want to be told what to do with my life."

Well, that's a simple answer. It's that pesky individualism that's got people giving faith a miss. We don't care for your rules. We're all rebels. We're all rockers.

But if you actually read the article, there's something else at play. Something that I find a little more disturbing.

The survey also found that "born-again" or "evangelical" Christianity is on the rise, while the percentage who belong to "mainline" congregations such as the Episcopal or Lutheran churches has fallen.

One in three Americans consider themselves evangelical, and the number of people associated with mega-churches has skyrocketed from less than 200,000 in 1990 to more than 8 million in the latest survey.

Right there, folks. I don't at all think it's a coincidence that as "'born-again' or 'evangelical' Christianity is on the rise," a larger number of people are being turned off by the idea of faith altogether. Really, I'm surprised that these fundamentalist, anti-intellectual, harshly judgmental, and (in the case of the mega-churches) impersonal versions of Christianity haven't chased off more people.

Especially as, more and more, this is the version of the Church most people are seeing.

i'm just sayin'...the dark knight was better

I saw Watchmen yesterday, and I'll be short about it. It was as good and as faithful an adaptation as a fan of the original story could possibly hope for. For those of you out there, who think that Alan Moore should justifiably be shaking his many-ringed fists in the air and screaming drug-addled obscenities to the heavens, I have two examples of how it could have been worse. Hilarious examples:


"Will you sign my copy of Watchmen Babies?"

Or, instead of a pretty faithful feature-length film, it could have been optioned into the kind of toy-pimping cartoon I grew up watching.



In short, it was enjoyable and carried a pretty fair amount of the themes and events from the comic. Oh, and it had blue wangs all over it. Lots of blue wangs.

UPDATE: Slate has a few other ways this thing could have ended up mangled, depending on which directors could have gotten the job. The Judd Apatow one is dead on and hilarious.

SUPER SPARKLE SHOWCASE sunday morning recap on a monday

So the dancing competition for week one of season two of the SUPER SPARKLE SHOWCASE was a lot of fun, with the contestants cross-dressing, cross-undressing, going psycho, dry humping stuffed animals, and in some cases actually dancing. There there was plenty of in-between. We're going to need to see some of the contestants separate themselves from each other in the next weeks, but I think it'll happen eventually.

The night came to a pretty horrific finish for Brice Powers, who finally got a measure of comeuppance when he was chosen to dance in the judges challenge. What happened to him was not for the faint of heart, are alluded to on his facebook page, which should be visited to get the total SUPER SPARKLE SHOWCASE experience.

However, I really thought the show belonged to PT and Chris, whose performances as Jason Aquarius and Ricky Dean Del Fuego really upped themselves from the first season. So, you know, good job guys.


SUPER SPARKLE judges

funnybook of last week: New Avengers #50

Well, the ending to issue #49 and the cover to this issue seemed to promise a big, fat showdown between the New Avengers and the brand new Dark Avengers. Did it deliver that?



Nope. But what we did get was a great look at how Norman Osborn's Dark Reign in the Marvel Universe is going to work. What we did get was Clint Barton going after Osborn through the media in a pretty rockin' monologue. What we did get was Bendis extending a middle finger to his many critics who claim there isn't a difference between the voices he gives characters. What we did get was a pretty epic throwdown between the New Avengers and a different squad. What we did get, was the funnybook of the week.