Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiillllllma!

Bienvenidos a Miami! Sure, it’s all Will Smith songs and palm trees down here. Right? Well, not this weekend.

This weekend, it’s all hurricane aftermath, and I ain’t talking about Miami’s 34-16 comeback victory over the Tar Heels, the reason I’m in town in the first place. No, this is all about power outages, pizza men and general suckitude.

Allow me to recap for you the ridiculous adventures of a little something I like to call Me Covering a Football Game In a Place That Should Be Fun But Isn’t Much Fun When A Hurricane Hit There on Monday. Okay, so it’s a working title. Just call it MCAFGIAPTSBFBIMFWAHHTOM if you insist on being brief.

So, earlier this week I learn that courtesy of Hurricane Wilma, the Courtyard I booked a room in does not have power but could get it back soon. Naturally, I book another Courtyard, this one slightly further away from the airport. Upon arrival, I call the first Courtyard, which does not have power yet. Therefore I cancel my reservation, which is accomplished by the dude on the phone, who apparently hears my last name as Steele the first three times I say it, by crossing it off a list. Remember, there are no computers. So I fully expect to be billed for this room as soon as they’re back on line. But I digress.

From the airport, I call the second Courtyard, informing them that at their earliest convenience, I am ready to be picked up by their complimentary shuttle. They inform me that the shuttle is not running because of the gas shortage in Miami. This results in a $40 cab ride from a cabbie who insists that even though he does in fact accept credit cards, he doesn’t like it. So cash is paid.

In the interest of keeping this from being ridiculously long, let’s just say dinner did not go as planned Friday night, with us being turned away from an unnamed chain establishment (read: Cheesecake Factory) because they weren’t seating anyone else … at 9 P.M! (Side note, what do you do when you want to put an exclamation point at the end of an abbreviation? Period then exclamation point doesn’t look right, but neither does what I did right there. Oh well.) Needless to say, we found a place and traveled all the way to Miami from North Carolina to eat … drum roll … barbecue.

Anyway, on to Saturday. I’ll spare everyone the whole speech about what an absolute dump the Orange Bowl is. It would be like if a piece of shit took a shit, and then that shit took a shit, and then they took that final piece of shit and put orange seats in it … well, you get the idea.

Everything’s fine. Stories are sent. We’re all headed back to the hotel with dreams of hitting up the Cheesecake Factory before it stops seating. Since it’s only 7 o’clock, we figured we were golden. As you can probably guess, if we had actually been anywhere near golden, you wouldn’t be reading this. We were more burnt siena.

We’re denied at the CF. Then at the other restaurant next to it. So we settle on going back to Shorty’s, the barbecue place we went the night before and our final option. The power is out all the way down the street where Shorty’s is located. Even the Burger King was out. At this point, Miami has more outages than a gay-rights parade.

Completely lacking in options, we attempt (for the third or fourth time that night) to engage in constructive meal-planning conversation with our Colombian front-desk guy, who tells us, yes, we can order pizza. After an ordeal that involves four of us making individual orders to Papa John’s over the front-desk phone, we each go to our rooms to await delicious nourishment. N&O columnist and cranky hungry person Caulton Tudor becomes panicked upon receiving a phone call saying the pizzas might not make it. Down at the desk, the Colombian dude calls PJ and tells us, no the pizzas are on the way. Tudes is now just rambling incoherently to Robbi about the Texas-OSU game, losing focus on the pizza.

After numerous calls to PJ, including me translating my own concerns to the guy on the phone after the Colombian dude at the desk unsuccessfully tried to convey what I was saying, we learn the driver is just seconds away! Finally, the pizzas arrive. Never has mediocrity been so delicious.

So now we’re all set. We’re calm, already eating, and all we need are drinks. Robbi says she’ll have a Diet Coke and I figure I’ll have the same. I go to the machine (which incidentally is on the third floor), and start pumping money in.

I hit the Diet Pepsi button.

I get Sunkist.

I hit the other Diet Pepsi button.

I get Sunkist.

Thinking I’ll outsmart the machine, I hit the Sunkist button.

I get Sunkist.

And I start thinking, “This is what I get for liking Sunkist.”

Then I struggle not to crack up laughing in the elevator with the random maintenance dude because I’m pretty sure there is no way he is going to find this whole Sunkist fiasco as frustratingly hilarious as I am.

Luckily, Robbi and Robert (Tudor took his pizza and vanished) did find it funny, a perfect little microcosm for our whole trip.

In short, I’m sick of hurricanes, Hurricanes, and any combination of the letters that spell those words, including “richer anus,” something I certainly won’t have thanks to Papa John’s and Sunkist.

A Simple 'No Comment' Will Do

I was going to contain myself. I really was. I was not going to lash out at the many, many spam comments that have recently plagued the bottoms of my posts. In fact, the only reason it was really bothering me was that all comments are emailed to me, and I was forced to read about dudes with links to turkey farms or whatever the fuck.

Anyway, I had no choice. I finally had to respond, finally had to draw the line, if only because my latest post about Christian Slater in the movie "Pump Up the Volume" elicited the following comment from some ass-bag spammer:

I discuss this topic daily myself. I also have a website that talks about web site hosting provider related things. Go check it out if you get a chance.

Oh, you discuss "Pump Up the Volume" daily? Really? Do you? Man, and I thought I was being exceptionally random in mentioning it offhand in this blog. But, shit, if this is something you talk about EVERY DAY, by all means comment away! That link in your post couldn't possibly be spam-related. I mean, where would you even find the time to visit random blogs and try to drive up your business site's traffic, what with all that discussion of "Pump Up the Volume" that you engage in DAILY!

Oh Mr. Spammer, you master of multitasking! You wizard of the Web! Where ever do you find the time?

If you can squeeze it into your busy schedule, Mr. Spammer, sometime in the near future, please feel free to kiss my ass.

Talk Hard(ly)!

I was, for whatever the hell reason, thinking about podcasts earlier. For those of you not aware, podcasts are these random radio-like shows on the internet, where anyone can basically have their own show and anywhere from one all the up to, oh, let's say ... seven people will download and listen. (I'm kidding, there are some big-timers out there, too.)

Anyway, in thinking about that, I started to ponder the Christian Slater movie, "Pump Up the Volume." For those of you unfamiliar with this movie ... seriously, what's wrong with you? This is vintage Slater people! But seriously, if you really don't know, I will summarize the movie briefly for you:

1. Christian Slater is a disaffected teenage misfit who is painfully shy at his new high school in Arizona and bumbles awkwardly through his day, eating lunch by himself on the stairs (and who inexplicably looks almost 30 years old).

2. When Christian Slater comes home from school, he runs a short-wave radio setup in his basement, where he spends all his time talking about raging erections and copious ejaculation with the help of a voice modulator of some sort. And apparently, he really likes playing Leonard Cohen.

3. Kids flip for it, tapes are confiscated, and the PTA flies into a collective rage.

4. The too-cool-for-school-yet-still-sort-of-nerdy hottie love interest (who has been in nothing else that I can remember) takes off her sweater, revealing immaculate teardrop-shaped breasts.

5. Something about a jeep, um, and um, the phone receiver in the neighbors' shed, and ... uh, um ... did I mention the breasts yet?

Anyway, the larger point -- aside from how the chick somehow wasn't excruciatingly itchy while wearing a sweater with no bra -- is that, had this scenario been played out today, it would never be movie-worthy, and that is sad.

First off, short-wave radio? Hey, why not smoke signals? Or a series of telegrams? In the age of podcasting, you can reach anyone anywhere with whatever message you want. As a podcaster, Christian Slater would be able to piss off too many different PTAs for it to be cinematically viable.

Secondly, none of his "shocking" antics would be very shocking nowadays, even if its scarcely more than a decade later. Things way more gross than what Christian is spewing (figuratively speaking) are on the radio every day. Even NPR has Terry Gross, host of "Fresh Air." I mean, come on! (Side note: I have just outed myself as someone who listens to entirely too much NPR.)

Long story short, I'm sure podcasts are cool and all, but remember: for every little technological treat we give ourselves, we might just be robbing ourselves of a classic movie by a young star who will later go on to problems with booze, drugs and mediocre films ("Kuffs" comes to mind). Oh yeah, and the boobs-straight-out-of-the-sweater-unannounced thing. God, why is that such a turn on?

Things I Realized Over the Last Few Days

1. Orange Crush soda cannot hold a candle to Sunkist orange soda. Sit back and debate Coke vs. Pepsi all you want. But that's like arguing which member of the Blue Man Group has the best makeup. The real schism is happening a little farther down the soft-drink aisle, folks. At one end is Orange Crush, and at the other is Orange True Love, or as it's more commonly known, Sunkist. It's not even close.

2. I have watched way too many movies lately that star Jennifer Jason Leigh. The latest was called "The Anniversary Party," and it was a good flick. But come on, aside from scoring the ever-elusive triple-first-name bonus, why is this chick in so many movies I see? She also looks like the creepy love child of Patricia Arquette and Elizabeth Shue. Seriously. Is this weirding anyone else out?

3. I am automatically suspicious of any product or event that begins with the prefix "mega." Yeah, we get it. Your product or event is great. No need to beat us over the head with it. In other news, thanks for reading my mega-blog.