I, Brandon

Day 3 of my 40 Day Positivity Challenge

I’ve spent the last three days basically on my couch. Some sort of weird virus has sapped my energy and left me with 100 degree temperatures. Nothing beyond that; I just sit around, feeling tired and achy.

That being the case it’s been incredibly easy to be positive, at least in terms of my Lent commitment of not openly expressing negativity. This is because I haven’t really been around anybody.

I don’t bother griping about things to Lori because she generally knows how I feel. It’s one of the advantages of being together so long – I don’t have to spell things out at all for her to know how I feel (the number one thing I’m grateful for today.)

My one main negative? I heard some screaming kids outside around 10pm…and it isn’t the first time. I live next door to an older couple, who are very nice but keep to themselves, like all the people around us. But they have a child…I guess it’s theirs, I don’t know. He/She shows up in a trashed out minivan, with the spouse and a few kids in tow.

The kids scream and generally go nuts all through the night, typically outside, in their back yard. Their back yard happens to be right outside Nate’s room, and nothing irritates me more than something that wakes Nate up. That sleep is valuable, dammit. No one messes with that sleep, because that sleep messes with Lori’s sleep, which messes with my sleep.

They’re obviously lower-class, or at least struggling middle class. I base this on their car, the way they dress, etc… and I judge them because of that.

Idiot.

How quickly we forget the path we take.

When I was a kid, we lived in a rotting trailer house with leaks and full-on holes in the ceiling in the room I shared with my brother.

And I was crazy. Absolutely crazy.

You’ve never met a kid as wild as I was. My parents weren’t there to discipline me the way i should be, and when they were around they were too tired to deal with me.

The reason? They freakin’ worked all day. Not just 8 hours, but two jobs for Dad and a job plus school for Mom.

I work one job and can barely handle Nate’s elevated voice. Imagine two of them, screaming, whining, begging for attention.

My neighbor’s kids? Hell, they might be well behaved for lower class kids. I know I wasn’t.

Restitution (or #2): I’m eternally grateful for the sacrifices my parents made for me. I truly believe this sacrifice is what drove me mother to do what she did, and I’m going to pay for that the rest of my life, even if it isn’t my fault.

(#3) I’m also grateful for my upbringing. Because I know what it’s like to struggle and wonder where food is coming from, or what it’s like to hide on the other side of a room during a rainstorm because of the hole in the ceiling. My parents gave their happiness and well-being so I could jump off their shoulders onto something bigger and better.

If living in a trailer park, patching holes in the ceiling with duct tape and eating out of a dumpster is white trash, then I am damned proud to be white trash. Without those experiences I am not nearly the person I am today.

It was brutal and because of what happened with my mother, I don’t know that I would ask for it again. But from where I stand now, I’m thankful for the rough road this one-time country boy had to haul.

Those of you who have followed my various blogs and other publishing ventures know that every year I try to do a little something for Lent. I’m not Catholic, but the idea of self-improvement and appreciation for God through self-denial is totally appealing to me.

I’ve altered from the traditional sacrifices – meat is a must in my diet, particularly seeing as how Lent overlaps my birthday, which historically comes with a meat feast at Rodizio here in SLC. I try to give up things that drag me down majorly, but I also take a little different avenue by adding behaviors that I want to become habits.

My biggest hang-up, maybe in life lately, is negativity. I realize I can never give up negative thinking – there’s a line crossed somewhere after adolescence that exposes one to the real stains of the world, like politics, the emptiness of the pursuit of wealth, and the dawn of the work-10-hours-a-day-then-die life. It would frankly be a little dangerous to look at the world through rose colored glasses all the time, so a little realistic, even pessimistic, viewpoint can be helpful.

But I OD. I make Debbie Downer look amateurish. And I spread it around hardcore. Everyone knows that it only takes one person complaining and whining to get the rest of a room started.

First pledge: No verbalized/expressed negativity. Includes whining, cussing, taunting, poking, badgering, teasing, and on and on… Especially zero snarkasm, which we all know it my favorite.

Obviously I will break down. Old habits die hard. In fact, I usually only make it through about two weeks of Lent before I just give up. But for every expressed negative, I vow to remind myself about a positive.

Second pledge: Keep up a positivity journal to remind me of all the good things I have going, plus rectification for my “pledge one” relapses. Most of these will be posted on my blog, some on my Twitter, some written down in a notebook, 1.0 style.

Second pledge (b): I read somewhere that sitting quietly in positive meditation for even 10 minutes a day has great physiological effects on a person. I’ve tried it before, and it totally works. The problem is actually finding 10 minutes of silence. Late and early I fall asleep, and if I try to do it at work then that just raises a whole stink.

Third pledge: Floss nightly. I’m good for two or three nights a week. Not an every night man yet. Workin’ on it.

Fourth pledge: Don’t be a topper. I’m not a topper by any stretch, but I’ve become surrounded by them. You should hear the stories. One guy’s visit to McDonalds turns into someone else’s visit with the Ray Croc, which forces someone else to chime in about their visit with the Dalai Lama. Even though I’ve hung out with Shaq, I’m not going to try and top them. If my story doesn’t fit, or if it feels gratuitous, then I’ll hold back. Most toppers don’t listen to anyone else; I like to think I’m a listener.

In the past I’ve tried other pledges, like giving up the F word, or not eating pudding, but I realized that I was cheating myself out of real growth by going for low-hanging fruit. I don’t use the F word very often and I don’t eat pudding unless I’m at a Chinese buffet, which I rarely am. I’ve been lucky to avoid a lot of destructive behavioral traits, but I think the few that I have stem from my cynicism and negativity, so I’m taking aim right at the core.

The goal? I want to be fully aware of just how much I’ve been given in life, to recognize the good above all other things, to the point where I’m oblivious to the small things that just don’t matter. Hopefully then I’ll be one of those folks that is able to make people feel better after a few minutes together, the kind of people can stand to spend more than 10 minutes at a time with.

Sorry to go a little Stuart Smalley there on everyone, but my sentiment is genuine.

So, join me in giving something up, even keep me accountable if you like – bsc @ bscarter.com if you’d like to email me. Got something you’re going after? I can help with yours as well.

Happy New Year everybody!

Myspace Graphics | New Years Images | Myspace layouts

Whhoo! Glittery MySpace graphics!

What’s that you say, it’s February?

Crap.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I have VERY LOGICAL reasons why. And they don’t even include the fact that I’m mostly incapable of writing less than 500 words on a given topic.

We’ve been traveling. First we spent the post-holidays in Oklahoma with my family. I got to go to Pete’s Place, which is still awesome.

I was home for about 72 hours, then headed out again, this time to Anaheim to work social media at a trade show for a client. We kicked ass, trending twice on Twitter. That’s a big deal for a craft & hobby company to become such a hot topic in the midst of the Brett Favre/Purple Jesus Vikings meltdown.

On top of the travel, we began a transition to a new email server at my office. Did I mention I’m now the IT guy? You know how hard it is to transition people over, especially when some of them are used to big city-style massive IT departments? We have Macs and PCs, iPhones and Blackberrys, people using Outlook, Entourage, Mail, Thunderbird and Gmail, we have people who are in the office everyday and people who don’t even know what it looks like.

What I’m trying to say is I’ve been working essentially around the clock, and I’m tired of looking at computers.

But it’s my job, and I want to remain employed. Even if I’ve pulled out every one of my hairs and still haven’t solved all the problems.

Okay, so there’s my excuse for not posting for a while. Moving on.

This is the post I had hoped to make at the end of 2009

What a strange ten years.

My initial reaction upon looking back was to say “What a crappy ten years.” I thought about 9/11, wars, the current financial crisis, toiling for two years in the bowels of the Delta Center for basically nothing, struggling to find a job after jumping out of college, the death of my grandfather and on and on…

Then I thought about how good it was. Amazingly good, in all the ways that truly matter. I graduated college, got married and had a son. I’ve advanced in my career as a writer/PR guy/IT director, and have a home plus two vehicles.

I have nothing to whine about.

Now for the part where I stroke my own ego and share what I think was superior from the Aughts

Top Five Albums of the 00s – Not based on some artsy-fartsy trend crap, like Animal Collective, but based simply off of the albums that I listened to over and over again:

5. Arcade Fire – Neon Bible
4. Kanye West – The College Dropout
3. Muse – Black Holes and Revelations
2. Radiohead – In Rainbows
1. Queens of the Stone Age – Songs for the Deaf

Top Five Movies of the 00s – Again, this is what I liked, not what “advanced the art of film making” or “the movie that speaks for a generation”:

5. Pineapple Express
4. All 27 hours of the Lord of the Rings trilogy
3. O Brother Where Art Thou
2. The Kill Bills
1. The Dark Knight

The Best Oklahoma Football Teams of the 00s:

5. 2001 – Ridiculous defense, terrible offense
4. 2008
3. 2003 – Put Quentin Griffin on this team, and they destroy LSU
2. 2004 – Still don’t know what happened in the USC game
1. 2000

Politicians Who Were Corrupt and Will Continue to be:
1. All of them, stop supporting one side or the other. None of them give a damn about you until it’s time to vote. Find ways to work with people for the sake of ousting corruption, not working against people for the sake of standing behind some entitled scumbag “public servant”

Best Food I had:
5. Ganesh Indian here in Utah
4. Jambalaya on Bourbon Street
3. Red Iguana in SLC
2. Crepes in Cancun
1. Ribeyes at Joe Allen’s in Abilene

Things I’m looking forward to in the 2010s:
5. Growing my little business
4. Time Travel and Hovercraft Skateboards
3. The birth of my niece, which will be in May this year
2. By the time the decade is over Nate will be a teenager. Okay, I’m actually not looking forward to that.
1. Another child (not right now, dangit, but eventually)

Favorite screen-cap I snagged in the 00s:

Favorite screen-cap I grabbed yesterday – this kid had just committed to play football at USC and was celebrating on Twitter:

Yaaay Happy New Year!

My entire life the dentists I’ve been to have all told me that there was no need to remove my wisdom teeth. They were growing in fine and generally an excellent addition to a subpar group of chompers overall.

Then I moved to Utah and all the dentists here said I needed to have them out. I trust them here, because approximately 60% of the population here are dentists. So instead of having mine yanked out around high school like most other folks, I had mine extracted at 28.

This is my sad, sad story.

15 minutes!
That’s right, 15 minutes.

Basically we walked in the door at 9a.m., just ahead of a 17′ish girl who was probably also having her teeth yanked. Within 3 minutes I was getting a needle stuck in my arm and fading to black.

Just before I went out, I managed to make sure the people in the room knew I wanted the teeth. I don’t know what they usually do with teeth, and to be truthful, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with the teeth… I just wanted them. They were in my mouth for 28 years (I guess less, but still…), I want them to come home with me.

Which makes me wonder if people who lose other body parts are allowed to keep them.

Personally, if I had to lose an arm or something, I would want it. Unless they were going to donate it to a poor, armless person or something.

I would keep it in formaldehyde and pull it out for guests, maybe slap them around a little bit. Maybe tuck it into a sleeve then have it fall off when shaking someone’s hand and be like “Ahhhh! You tore my arm off you strong bastard! Ahhhh!”

Or if I lost fingers, I could preserve them and scare kids at Halloween or hide them under my wife’s pillow.

Anyways.

The surgeon was done with me after 15 minutes. My teeth were grown out pretty much all the way, but that’s still some serious hacking. After a few minutes in the recovery room, Lori and Nate came and put me into the car.

This is what I do!
I remember none of this:

While in the car, it seems I was pretty desperate to get a gory shot of my bloody mess, so I tried to stick my iPhone in my mouth. When Lori objected, I told her “this is what I do!”

Which is mostly accurate, when you think about it. I do weird crap like that all the time. I’m a slut for the shocked reaction.

After getting a good photo, I rolled down the window to try and spit some blood out of the car. I don’t think I said it again, but it’s the type of thing I do frequently, mouth surgery be damned.

Back Home
Lori put me straight to bed when we got home and I snoozed off an on for the next few hours, waking up to take more painkillers and penicillin.

At 3, I woke up and decided to work. Remarkably, all of the emails I sent out over the next two hours were coherent and on-target. This is now what I usually do.

By the way, those cotton swabs they put in your mouth are horrible. I know they’re supposed to help create clots that are crucial to healing, but sweet Lord they’re awful.

Hydrocodone
I was excited at the prospect of spending a few days doped out of my mind, because it sounded fun and was better than PAIN.

I also watch Intervention and knew the stuff could stick with me for a lifetime of numbed insanity if I didn’t keep it under control.

Not a problem. The first 24 hours were bliss, but around Wednesday night, approximately 36 hours after the surgery, my world turned to crap.

I could sleep during the day but was constantly itchy. I couldn’t sleep during the night and even began hallucinating.

I was riding a unicorn and eating a deer. Not a deer leg or other small part, but a full on deer, biting chunks of hair and raw meat. I was wholly convinced it was real.

Then I would come back to the real world, where I vibrated and shook rapidly. Not a violent, crackhead shake, just like sitting in one of the nice chairs at Brookstone. Still, I wanted to sleep, not vibrate.

I sat and took notes from the stream of consciousness that poured through my head, and it was some great stuff. I wrote out political theories, diatribes (politically-minded white guy who hates Kanye West for the things he says yet worships at the altar of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh is an unfailing megadouche for lack of his own awareness) and other nonsense/genius.

(My all-time favorite: I love how “right-wing political activist”, “religious kook”, and “world-ending conspiracy goof” have all merged into one Mighty Morphin Power Douche.)

By Friday morning I was exhausted, itchy, dizzy, nauseous and teetering on oblivion. I ditched the drugs, and vowed to not mess with hydrocodone again. I still may end up on Intervention, but it’ll have to be for something else.

Where are we now?
Good question. I made it through the weekend just fine, except for one rough night when I developed a sudden cold and had to breath through my mouth. The cold air constantly hitting my empty sockets caused me to wake up about 3a.m. in intense butthurt.

I managed to remove most of my stitches via tongue harassment but I don’t think it hurt anything. Last night I dug some random chunks of food out of the holes, which are now close to being sealed off. I regret not having photos to share of this.

In fact, I wouldn’t be in any pain at the moment if not for dueling abscesses on my cheek caused by a couple stitch knots popping out.

Happy Holidays!

The terrified bug eyed looks. The sadistic emotionless face of Ronald. The Hamburglar, who has a serious hamburger addiction issue, prepares to give in to his habit with lustful glee.

It’s not in the photo, but to the side of this scene is a river, where Grimace, pantsless as always, is attacking the fish. In other scenes, Birdie the Early Bird flies away with a chicken McNugget that is desperately reaching out for it’s mother* with tears streaming down it’s nuggety face. The mother has her own issues, as Mayor McCheese has declared her his next “intern.”

Nightmare Fuel.

Click on the pic to get a larger version. This is part of a mural painted on the walls of a McDonald’s in Sandy, Utah. A mural of terror.

*- I’ll assume it was a mother. I’m not up to speed on the sex characteristics of McNuggets. If I find something out, I will report it to you.

“Brandon, you never post anything personal. It’s already something weird, like you want people to reenact bad 80s movies with your corpse or some PR junk that no one cares about.”

I’ve heard your criticisms and instead of ignoring them, I’ll talk about our Pioneer Day vacation to Wine Country in California.

See in Utah they have a special holiday on July 24 called Pioneer Day. This is the day when the Mormons came into town, and is celebrated by basically copying Independence Day. Oddly enough, the local boy scouts place flags in lawns as if it were a patriotic holiday. But I digress.

If you know me then you understand I’m more of a jack and coke and ribs guy than a wine and cheese guy. I fully expected four days of snobbery and self-loathing, with a few subtle barbs thrown my way for having gnarled tastebuds.

Instead it was a really nice, laid back trip. A few notes:

-Sonoma and Napa are totally different places. Napa is tourist country, with more obnoxious attractions like castles. The wineries along this route mostly charge for their tastings, unlike Sonoma, and you’ll battle a lot more tourists along the way (the castle is insane, and costs $10 per person just to get in). Sonoma is classier, more laid back and features lot of free tastings. Both are pretty, but Sonoma is worth spending more time in.

-The best experience we had was our first winery: Blackstone. Not actually a full winery, but they make several of their labels here. We paid $25 per person for a hands-on tour, barrel tasting and wine/cheese pairing. I expected snoberry and people holding their noses in the air, but instead the lady doing the tasting was very cool and totally understood that years of abuse have destroyed my sense of taste, and that I was being totally honest when I responded to her questions of “What do you taste?” with “Grapes.”

Even still, I totally get the concept that wine is best served with a matching food. Suddenly wine that I thought was awful before was fantastic when matched up with the right cheese, or sausage.

Know the scene from Ratatouille where Remy gives his fat, disgusting brother samples of wine and then cheese, and fireworks go off for the little chub? That was me. Stuff was good.

Hork It Down

Go see Judy at Blackstone. Her husband is a Supertaster. He has the tastebuds and nostrils of one thousand Supermen. She can’t wear perfume because his nose is far too sensitive to handle it.

I can’t decide what is more awesome: that the guy gets paid to taste wine all day, or that when you reach the top of the tasting profession you are simply dubbed a Supertaster. This is far superior to the boring titles of “Senior” and “Executive” normal people give each other.

-Be prepared to drive. A lot. The wineries are just far apart enough to prevent walking or even biking comfortably. Also, don’t take a tour bus. Those people looked miserable. Both valleys are best toured at whatever pace you want, and the best places are the ones the buses don’t stop at. Key among these is a little line of shops on the outskirts of tiny Glen Ellen (late home of Jack London as well as Hunter S. Thompson at one point). Right next door to each other is an olive oil maker with fantastic oils and vinegars to taste, a chocolate maker with some fancy candy, and a cheese maker, who was actually closed when we stopped by. Go figure.

-Skip The Girl and the Fig. It looked really good and came recommended by “insiders,” but was a real letdown. And foie gras, while a great Iron Chef ingredient, ain’t that special.

-Mustard’s on the other hand, was phenomenal. The touristy place recommended by every brochure may have actually been the best meal we had in the place. The pork chop is fantastic and you must order it.

-Other good meals: The Crepe House in San Fran; Dierk’s in Santa Rosa; Buster’s in Calistoga (order the lunch portion, it’s massive); Cafe Tiramisu in San Fran; and the place in Sonoma that gave us our own little table for dessert. I can’t remember your name, but that was cool.

-Besides Blackstone, my favorite wineries were:

Arista, which is owned by the in-laws of a childhood friend of Lori’s – go see them, they’re good people despite being Texans.

Frank Family, which is owned by some former TV bigwig and their wines aren’t that great BUT YOU SHOULD CARE BECAUSE one of their tasting hosts is a former OU player that started for some of the great OU teams in the late 70s. His stories are fantastic. Wish I could remember his name.

Freemark Abbey – Lori ordered this super sweet Edelwein gold Late Harvest Reisling that was basically like fermented Kool-Aid. Their pours are generous and the ladies are very understanding of people who can only say, “Well, I taste grapes.”

It was also the first time The Wife and I had been away from Junior for longer than 24 hours, which was also very good. But however cool Sideways made the place seem to be for a week away, I really believe three to four days is more than enough for the average wine enjoyer. If you’re the type who can taste tiny hints of cranberry in a rich syrah, then maybe you ought to just live there.

Those of you who know me well have heard me gripe at least once about the demise of the original Iron Chef. The Japenese program aired for six years and eventually sailed across the ocean to the US on the Food Network, where it found the warm and loving space of my bosom.

It’s a fantastic concept: Take two outstanding chefs, give them all the ingredients they could want and state-of-the-art kitchens (or a stadium, natch), throw in a secret primary (usually disgusting ingredient) ingredient and give them one hour to create a full meal.

Beautiful.

You had your Japanese Chef, the Chinese Chef, a French Chef and later (inexplicably as well, since he lost all the time), Italian Chef. If I were young enough, I would’ve had their posters on my wall.

Throw in some Engrish, Godzilla-style cheesy overdubs, a judge who doubles as a gypsy fortune teller and BOOM GOES MY HEART.

Then at some point the Food Network got a little greedy. they dumped the syndicated original and created “Iron Chef America.”

Same concept – the big kitchen, the big name chefs, top competitors, judges, and so on. I do enjoy Bobby Flay, and his matches against Morimoto on the original version are classics. But do not confuse the two shows.

The point of all this is that I have found the original Iron Chef hiding out on something called the Fine Living Network. One Comcast this channel was somewhere on the 18th tier, but it’s on the lower DishTV package I currently subscribe to.

Since it comes on several times a day, tt eats my DVR, but I couldn’t be happier. Now I can spend late drunken evenings enjoying scorpion fish soufflé, truffles a la pig brain, boiled human foot sushi and other oddities that no one eats anywhere.

Seriously. Five years I’ve been waiting on this. My heart is aflutter.

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Happy Weekend, folks. Enjoy Meshuggah’s love song

Happy Friday to one and all! These are the best of times (great weather) and the worst of times (all interesting sports have hit the offseason).

On the to-do list this weekend, now that I’m being forced to go outside:

1. Mow lawn

2. Try and keep garden alive

3. Go over to Old Lady Sorensen’s house and talk crap about how pathetic her lawn looks

Hell yes I’m going to do number three. I don’t get competitive anymore, except for lawn manicuring. I don’t care that she’s 86 and her husband passed last year. As Pete Caroll says, “WIN FOREVER!”

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Dominos Pizza has had some issues of recent….

…which means they’re trying very, very hard to repair their image. They did a good job of it and America has always shown a willingness to forgive, as long as some sort of contrition is displayed.

Part of the rehab, and to promote a new product, this week the pizza giant staged a massive giveaway of their new pasta breadbowls.

Being cheap and generally attracted to things that shouldn’t be ingested, I jumped at the chance.

When I stopped into my local Dominos, the promotion was going to expire in about 15 minutes. When I ordered the Italian Sausage Marinara, the manager said he still had 10 pounds of dough left and that I should order two, no charge.

So I ordered three. “Right on dude, right on.”

Sweet. To the Italian Sausage Marinara I also added the Chicken Carbonara and Three Cheese Mac and Cheese. Then I took them back to the Sprout office for general consumption and to serve the greater good.

The Verdict

Mixed emotions. The end result is basically a thin crust pasta pizza with one of those garlic bread rings around it. Except the garlic bread is gigantic. And greasy.

Though my iPhone camera isn't that great, if you look closely you'll see GREASE, and not the one with the cutesy songs and the scientologist.

On their own, the pasta and the “breadbowl” are mediocre. You can get better pasta elsewhere and better bread elsewhere. Combined it’s interesting. Not great, but interesting.

The Italian Sausage Marinara was the best, and was lighter than the others. This is like saying Baghdad is a more pleasant place to be in than Beirut. It’s an improvement, but must be considered in overall terms.

The Chicken Carbonara was too salty, and who knew that “convenience store nacho cheese” was one of the three-cheeses in the Mac and Cheese?

That being said, they were free, which made them delicious and welcome.

I think they sell for $4.99, and half of one comprised a full lunch for me, and I’m fat. I would literally try just about anything, and be fairly pleased with it.

You could do worse, like getting a handful of items from the Burger King or Taco Bell value menus. At least the pasta breadbowl didn’t make me feel like I was giving birth to a bowling ball.

Which reminds me…

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Swine flu. Somewhere last week, the Twitter universe went nuts with panic about it. Then around Thursday, an elite group of Twitter snipers worked themselves into a panic trying to make fun of the original panic.

I think, in this day and age when you’re legally required to talk about Twitter at least once a week, it was the second group that jumped the shark. They’re the ones who look like assclowns.

People gathering in groups to gossip, wonder and even panic has been going on for thousands of years. It’s normal, human nature to wonder what the hell is going on, and to find comfort in speculating with other folks.

It’s the second, “we’re above panicking” group that is the cliche. “Look at me and how confident I am! I’m not going to get the HorsePig flu at all! LOL Nurdz” or my favorite, “More people died tying balloons to lawn chairs than the HorsePig virus has killed.”

Wow, way to contribute. This group has basically become Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club. Major epidemic or not, the swine flu has killed people, including small children. I have one of those, and I worry about regular flu, and you’re damned straight I’m concerned about another strain of it. I’m not publicly panicking, but only because that’s not my personality. Don’t dog on people who are.

———–

Wait, am I a third, even more elite douchegroup by making fun of the making funners?

And I swear, if any of you send me the email that has the picture of the kid kissing a pig…argh. Hell to pay.

Happy weekend, folks!

Ahhh, NFL Draft Weekend. Where young, pampered athletes are selected by pro teams to come to their cities and receive millions of dollars and eventually get a DUI or domestic abuse charge. It’s not football per se, but it is two days of talking football, watching highlights and soaking up what you can of God’s sport before the summer-long exile. In other words, your final excuse to drink beer in front of the TV for a while.

It’s also when ESPN puts some of their more intolerable personalities out front for hours upon hours at a time. Todd McShay, Chris Berman and Mel Kiper. Get used to Kiper and his hair, because this weekend is a virtual Kiperkakke.

Behold, Mel Kiper

I actually have an appreciation for Kiper, despite the goofy look and rumored outsized ego. When my team, the Buffalo Bills, inevitably wastes one of their top picks on the kid no one has heard of from the school no one knows about, Kiper can seem like he is the kid’s dad.

“This is a value pick for the Bills. Dingleberry Shorts has a high motor but a slow engine. He’s an aggressive lineman with the appetite of a child slave locked in a basement. He loves Magnum P.I. and has the touch of an Armenian masseuse when making love.”

I would normally say there’s no way the guy truly knows all the information he relays, but he really doesn’t do much else (outside the occasional stint on ESPN Radio). The guy is paid to watch and learn about college football players.

————–

That being said, here’s my prediction for the draft: Top six picks go mostly as planned, with Stafford, Monroe, Curry, Smith, Sanchez and Crabtree. After that, trade city. No one wants to get into the top six; considering those guys will make as much as $10 million a year, why would you? There are proven veterans who don’t make that.

Duke Robinson to go in the second round, Loadholt and Iglesias in the third. Nic Harris, Lendy Holmes and Cooper will go on the second day. Knowledge, I haz it.

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The advent of grilling season is upon us! Most folks have already broken out the grill a few times, and the rednecks among us have already grilled at least four different animals.

I’ll throw in a plug here for allrecipes.com. Everything I’ve picked to make off there has been fantastic – I recommend doing a general search for whatever it is you want to cook (say, pork chops), then select the highest rated recipe. But don’t stop there – go to the highest rated comment. This is where some smart-ass has thrown out an improvement to the posted recipe (“Add Minced Rat!”).

This comment almost always proves to be an improvement, because it usually adjusts the original ingredients to better proportions.

So go out, grab your Rambo knife or your spear, nab yourself a wild animal and throw the booger on the coals!

See you Monday.

Know what’s really hard for me? Writing an initial post that won’t make me feel ashamed in a few years.

I’ll skip the pithy attempts at wit and just tell you about myself.

I’m a 28-year old Oklahoma native living in Salt Lake City, Utah, with my wife and son. I’m a freelance writer, public relations pro, OU Sooners nut (with a passioned nod toward the Tulsa Golden Hurricane), sports nerd, beer snob and “buy local” loyalist.

This blog will basically be a journal of the things that interest me that I think may interest you as well. I’ll write (badly, sloppily) about the world of PR, sports, Salt Lake City-area local restaurant reviews, products you should love and on and on and on.

All I care about is that it’s fun and not a waste of your time.

That being said, a few promises from me to you:

1. I promise to never try and sell you crap or any schemes. No “Make Millions NOW!!!!!” or such non-sense from me
2. One word you’ll never see on here: WOOT or any of its variations. Punch me if I ever do
   (An exception granted to the fine folks at woot.com, who have great deals. The word as a noun is fine; as a random exclamation it’s intolerable)
3. No inspirational quotes, unless there’s a specific reason. Those of you on Twitter will understand and likely even appreciate this
4. I won’t be a douchebag. If I’m posting about faith, restaurants, political theory or something that counts as personal preference, I will present it as so. You’re welcome to tell me I’m wrong (see #5)
5. From time to time I’ll post something you don’t agree with, and I welcome you to flame away in the comments. Keep it civil and minus personal attacks, and all will be well

Reading it back….okay, there’s no way I can write anything in this post that I won’t look back on as weak or cliche. Might as well hit publish and let ‘er rip.

Thanks for being here.

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