...aaand we're back

After a not-very-well-earned sabbatical, we now return you to your very nearly regularly scheduled attempts at humor and insight. Sorry.

The christmas season came and went. The season kicked off as usual, with me and my dad getting into the holiday spirit by swearing a lot. I feel no remorse about this - there's always something wrong with the fucking christmas lights. You get all the way done and discover that one of the strings died while you were putting it up. You take that one down and replace it with another string containing an equal number of lights, only to find that this string is 3 feet shorter than the last. I will never understand why 70 lights at 4 inch spacing does not consistently result in 280 inches. Then you accordion everything downstream of that over 3 feet to match, and you end up not making it around the last window. So you add another string, and now you have an extra 20 feet of lights that you have to hide in the bushes. This cycle would go on and on forever without a) better planning or b) an eventual "eh, that's good enough" attitude. Guess which we usually end up on. Once I achieve this frame of mind, I usually have about three-and-a-half weeks to let it fester before last minute panic forces me to shop for gifts. If the mall is crowded, you're all getting extension cords.

At the moment it's storming like a righteous mofo. Blowing so hard that whole trees are coming uprooted! Actually it's kind of awesome. If the weather is going to be crappy, it might as well do it in style. Get interesting for a bit, then get done so we can go outside and have a picnic or something. Maybe not quite Katrina interesting, but there are falling sticks to dodge and random crap strewn in designated no strewing places. Why yes, that is a SodexHo food cart in the hedge. Thank you for noticing.

hell if i know

Just back from another fine weekend of practice. Except, our act is not together, whatever it is, and whenever I run to the easiest bunker in town I get shot stupid about 20 seconds in. Questions about next year are right in our faces now. Do we want to keep going, who's in, what would it take. Sponsorship, a home field, a full squad, consistent practice? We're counting players, thinking of holding open tryouts, thinking of moving, thinking of asking people on, considering pyramid schemes, something to make it work. And if it can't work, we need to figure it out so guys can get on with life or find a team and keep going. To the guys mature enough to be able to give a straight answer, thanks.

I'm going to out and admit it - I often consider quitting paintball. Some Sundays you can't take three steps without getting lit up, and you drive two hours home wondering what the hell you're doing with your time and money. Some days the only other people at the field are there for a dorm trip or to test their battle skills or some bullshit, plus one kid who thinks he's hot shit and spends all day screaming and overshooting the new guys. Some days only three guys can make it and you can't do shit, but you got up at 5:30 and came out here to sit in a parking lot. Sometimes it's when you have to pay the credit card bill you racked up for air fare, hotel, rental car, and paint and suddenly you're staying in every night until the first comes around. Sometimes your friends from the rest of life wonder why you keep doing this, after you pass yet again on another soccer league with a bunch of guys you love, or skip out on a friend's wedding because the team needs you to fly out to East Bumfuck and put some paint on some people just so. And some days, you watch a couple games from the stands and go "what the fuck is this that we're doing here?"

If you're playing to impress people, you're going to be disappointed. You learn that talking about paintball is about as good at parties as describing the chain of events that led to you switching fabric softeners. 95% of the time you end up on the wrong end of some raised eyebrows that say "seriously?", or some jackass tries to tell you about how hard his gun can shoot and how his cousin used to have this angel.

But then Wednesday rolls around and you can't wait for Sunday so you can show up and do your thing and blast some people. Thursday afternoon your roommate catches you pretending to snap-shoot behind the couch, and you have to try and play it off like you were stretching. One weekend you go play by yourself and suddenly these guys you spend your Sundays with don't have your back, and there's no way in hell you're going to trust that kid wearing the camo to get your tape so you can do your thing, and absolutely zero chance people are going to shift and lock the zones back down when the snake side starts to drop. Field layouts for the next tournament are released and automatically half your work day is up in smoke. And when it's you who spots the gap and takes the other team apart, you wonder how you could ever give this up.

Recent quotables from the field:

"It's 9:00, where the fuck is everybody? And why can't I feel my fingers?"
"That's the rage."

"I'm seriously going to cry the day we decide not to be a team anymore."

"Left nipple's hot!"

"Some guy with a chest protector on bunkered me."
(chest protectors are the Smirnoff Ice of paintball. Unless you have boobs, in which case protect away.)

"Who else gets to do what we get to do? We travel around the country shooting people. We get to do something we love. When are we going to be able to do this again?"







apologies to Matty Marshall, who said it better than I did.

Oil Spills

Every now and then something happens where I find myself really wishing I could've just been in the room when the engineers were doing their design thing. Presumably they did the best they could, and it just wasn't idiot proof enough. Here's what probably happened:

Engineer 1: So we'll be carrying 1300 tons of oil. How do we prevent it from spilling everywhere in an accident?
Engineer 2: Lets beef it up. We'll give the ship a double hull.
Engineer1: Sounds good. And what happens if we hit something pointy, and it manages to pierce both walls?
Engineer 2: Well it would be stupid to put all our eggs in one basket. Let's make 10 compartments for the oil, so if we rupture we don't lose all of it at once.
Engineer 1: Got it. Ok, what happens if they hit something really big really hard? Like, they run into a major bridge?
Engineer 2: A bridge? Fuck, man, we put a rudder on it, right?
Engineer 1: Right, steering. Ok, I think we're good.
Engineer 2: I'm going on lunch break.

Calvin

You know what really grinds my gears? Stickers of Calvin (and sometimes Susie Derkins) praying to a gigantic cross. In addition to this being a fatty copyright infringement, did these people ever actually read Calvin and Hobbes? No. No they did not.

I'm thinking as retaliation on behalf of me and whoever cares to align themself, I'm going to cook up a batch of stickers depicting [insert your favorite religious figure here] water skiing. Now I'm not saying they water skied or didn't water ski. I don't know. It's not really well documented, I'd imagine. The point is, that's not what they're about. Cowabunga!

Somebody go halfsies on this with me

If we buy two, we get five dollars off! Plus we can tape cardboard to the front as armor and have wicked jousting fun with wrapping paper tubes.

http://sacramento.craigslist.org/bik/438351939.html

"2 California Charriots with front suspension and hand brake. Minimal usage, foam grips are dry. Shock covers may have cracks, otherwise good condition. These cost $119.00 each new I believe. The other one looks about the same but is buried in my garage. $40.00 each or both for $75.00."

• Location: Cameron Park
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Freshmen

Tomorrow marks the first day of the year for students at UCD, which means a number of things. The roads and eateries will be packed, the bathrooms on campus will once again become disgusting and unusable, furniture will go missing, and not-very-clever messages will be left on our chalk boards. More importantly, though, there will be 6,000 freshman trying to stay upright on bicycles. Davis is a biking campus and a biking community, but if you zoom out beyond that you quickly find that we, the people of the United States of America, are not a cycling culture. Maybe we are between the ages of 6 and 10. So basically what you've got is a bunch of 8 year olds (with rusty bike-handling skills) trying not to run into one another. Stanford is also a biking school, being enormous, flat, and mostly paved, and has similar troubles. Everybody is back on a bike for the first time in years and waaaaaay too confident in their abilities to maneuver past trouble with their superior intellect and life skills. I heard that the average Stanford student gets into two bike crashes a year. I only managed two* during my entire stay there, and I was considerate enough to not take anybody else down with me.

Stanford has an Intersection of Death, which is basically what it sounds like - an unmarked intersection that nearly everybody has to ride through on the way to and from their classes. There are a few conveniently placed benches right on one of the corners of this intersection, and if you can get over being a bit of an asshole, its some terrific free entertainment to sit and watch people do stupid things. Extra exciting when somebody goes flying though late for class or if somebody on a skateboard doesn't know what they're doing. Davis seems a little more self-aware, on the administrative level at least, because they've installed traffic circles at all of the major bike intersections. However, I'm not confident that everybody knows how to use a traffic circle. Shit, I'm pretty sure not everybody here knows to ride on the right and don't stop abruptly and start talking on your cell phone in the middle of a busy street. But anyways, if I'm unavailable tomorrow, try the traffic circle by the silo. I could use some company.



*Crash number 1: Riding down a short hill, over a plank across a stream, and then up another short hill on Nic's bike. Nic's bike has no brakes, no seat, and no clamp to prevent the handlebars from rotating freely. It is orange, though.

Crash number 2: Attempting to take a turn, wave, and switch on my bike light while going over a curb and carry several large pieces of aluminum roundstock for a project. It's also worth noting that I can't ride with no hands. I crashed right in front of the side of my dorm with all the windows, a dismaying number of which produced familiar faces. All I could think to do was make a gravel angel and try to play it off.

NPPL Kansas City, Update 1

All seven guys arrived safe and sound in KC, despite a missed flight and some last minute scrambling. We spent Thursday walking fields and figuring out game plans. We also spent a good amount of Thursday lost in various parts of Missouri and Kansas. Everything is under construction here, and every time we think we can see a straight line to our destination, we're blocked by half a building or a city-block sized pit. What else about Kansas...For some reason, its cool for people to randomly park in the right and left lanes. There don't seem to be any signs saying its ok during certain hours or in certain areas, people just do it, parked right in the lane. You'll be cruising along and every couple blocks there are a few cars right in your way. Also, it looks like people have trouble turning right cleanly. Most of the corner curbs have been pulverized by constant curb integrity checks.

Preliminary round consists of 8 games, 5 on Friday and 3 on Saturday. We went 5-0 today, which is an excellent start, despite some sloppy closes. I think at least two or three of us shot JT at various times. JT is on our team, so...not the best person to shoot. As for the venue, Hello staph infection! We play on astroturf, which they reuse and bring to each tournament. Problem is, they hose down the turf after each event, then roll it up wet and let it sit for two months. There's this funk nasty smell that I can't really recommend.

Check out nppllive.com on Sunday if you want to maybe video of us playing. No idea when and if, though. More soon!