The Scalper

The Background

Over Thanksgiving break we had one of the most depressing football games that I have been to in a long time.  Really? Our kicker has to miss three field goals? Not one, not two, but three? Unacceptable.  Anyway, that's all I have to say about the football game, it still irritates me thinking about it.  

Since everyone knew this game wasn't going to be all that fantastic to start with and what with it taking place on Black Friday, I knew quite a few people who ended up not going to this game.  As a a result several of them gave their tickets to me to do with as I saw fit.  And there is our premise, ladies and gentlemen, me with lots of tickets to a football game no one really wants to go to anyway.  

The Intro

I tried selling my tickets to a scalper for ten bucks a piece but he wasn't having it so I moved on.  As I was nearing the stadium, I walked past someone I immediately identified as a scalper talking to a late-thirties-ish woman and her eleven-twelve-ish year-old daughter who were attempting to get tickets.  All I heard of their conversation were the words "fifty dollars" and that was enough for me to intervene.

Now, the woman was haggling with the man and busy so I approached the daughter and asked if she and her mother were looking for tickets.  When she told me yes, they were, I got the mother's attention and told her I had two tickets I didn't need that she could have for free.  She, in the process of paying for her tickets, put her money away and took my tickets.  And, boom, I have done my good deed for the day.

The Change-up

Or so I thought.  Apparently the scalper was not pleased with what I had just done.  The moment he realized what was happening to his sale, there issued for a stream of some of the most eloquent (total sarcasm here, wish there was a font for that) profanity I have ever heard, yelling at me that I was a thief among many other things.  In short, myself, the woman, and her daughter made a fast exit, as he appeared to be leaning towards hitting something.

The Analysis

Now dude, I understand that you're upset that you lost a sale but come on, this can't be the first time you haven't managed to sell to people you think you can.  I realize I lost you a fair bit of money but come on, nobody is going to want to pay such an outlandish price if they don't have to, accept that occasionally you're going to be outdone.

Once again, it's a strange reaction to me.  In his place, yes, I would have been upset at the fact that I had lost a potential sale.  But on the other hand, I'm not going to fault someone else if they do a good deed, the world needs more of that.  Try a little patience in life, a bit more kindness, and I think it'll get you a lot further.

Shameless Showing Off

This post I just want to let everyone know that I made an awesome website about Greek mythology for my writing class and it is freaking amazing and you should all go check it out >here<.  Granted, mythology is a huge subject and my knowledge of web design is rudimentary at best, so I have only done a couple of pages with a few deities, monsters, and titans.  Tell me what you think!

The 90 mph Texter

Today's entry spurs from a moment when I genuinely feared for the intelligence of a fellow human being.  I was cruising down the freeway at a modest 80 miles an hour or so and lo and behold a car went absolutely flying past  me.  I glanced to my right (I was in the center lane, and she was in the slow lane.  Seriously. The slow lane) and I see a girl no older than twenty who must have been doing at least ninety miles an hour.  Not only that she was not even looking up at the road but was focused oh so intently on her phone as she was texting away to her bff that oh so important text that just couldn't possibly wait until she wasn't doing NINETY MILES AN HOUR!

Now, I don't have a problem with people who drive in excess of the speed limit (obviously, as I tend to do it myself) as long as they're not driving recklessly.  I also don't have a problem with people sending the occasional text message while driving, I understand, sometimes you just have to tell your boyfriend what a jerk he's being right now!  But seriously? BOTH AT THE SAME TIME? Do you have a death wish or something? Or are you just interested in potentially maiming/killing everyone around you along with yourself when you wreck your car.

Obviously I get a little sarcastic when I see things like this but truly it makes me weep for humanity sometimes.  Then again, if we go with the survival of the fittest idea, when she finally does kill herself with that oh so important text on the freeway, maybe we'll become stronger as a species for it.  I certainly hope so, otherwise I hope she smartens up somewhat.

Mosh Pit Mayhem

Today's post is on something I do not and probably will not ever understand: mosh pits.  I went to the Avenged Sevenfold concert a while back and saw enough of them to quench my appetite to ever consider joining one.  Now, as one of my friends explained it to me, there are actually several different kinds of mosh pits but the ones I witnessed at this concert were mainly just a whole bunch of shoving each other around as much as possible, with the occasional left hook thrown in for good measure.  I just can't understand in what state of mind one would think to their self, "I should definitely run in the circle of people and try and hurt someone else, even though I have the potential to get very hurt myself."  For over an hour I watched a group of people bashing into eachother, running around, and overall just beating the living snot out of each other.  Which I guess, if you're into that kind of scene might be kind of fun.  (If you're crazy.)

The weird part came whenever someone got knocked down.  Now, as I understood it, the point was to shove someone as hard as humanly possible; and yet, if someone got knocked down from the aforementioned huge shove, everyone would immediately go help that person get back up.  I suppose that's a nice, considerate, humane thing to do, but come on, you're beating the tar our of each other and then you're surprised when someone might actually get hurt?  Something doesn't add up here.  I saw a guy come out of the mosh pit with his forehead cut open and bloody but does that discourage anyone in the slightest? Nope.  Huh, I guess it just promotes the survival of the fittest in both intelligence (for those who avoid mosh pits) and strength (for those who survive them).

The Drunk

As I've mentioned in a post before, it's always a bit funnier when someone isn't completely in their right state of mind.  Inevitably, people's reactions to events around them will be considerably different from the reactions they would have in an entirely sober mind.  That being said, I ran into a rather fun woman last night.

The Background
First I have to explain the lead-up to this or it won't make any sense at all.  I had been over at a friend's house whose air conditioning and heater have serious issues and as such I had taken my shirt off while there to try to cool down.  When I left to go home, I simply didn't bother to put it back on.  On the way home, at roughly 11:20pm, I had to stop and get gas.  There happened to be a Redbox at that gas station so I started my pump and walked over to it.

The Event
It was as I was looking through the Redbox that I first noticed her; a woman was walking her dog down the sidewalk towards the gas station.  Bear in mind that it is nearly midnight, so a woman walking her dog alone is far from ordinary already.  As she nears my car, I walk back towards it from the Redbox which was a good twenty or so yards away.  As I got closer she saw me coming out of the darkness so she scrunced up her eyes and looked at me really hard.  She then opened her eyes wide and the first thing she said to me, I quote, "Really, dude? No shirt? You must be drunker than me!" Which of course immediately explained to me every weird thing about her walking her dog in the middle of the night.  We then had a wonderful little conversation about her puppy and how he's sick, and what I had rented from Redbox and that it should be a lot of fun and then we bid each other farewell and I continued home slightly more amused than I had been ten minutes earlier.

The Undie Run

Setting a World Record
This Saturday I had the opportunity to be a part of something big.  Something awesome.  Something so freaking fun I could scarcely believe it was happening.  Roughly 3,300 people showed up at the Galivan Center on Saturday night wearing nothing more than their underwear and shoes to participate in the Undie Run.  It was an attempt to break the previous world record of 550 people running in their underwear through town and we beat it by having over 2,500 more people than the previous record.

My Part
I got a group of about ten people to come with me to the Undie Run and we had quite the fun time.  There were six of us who were wearing nothing but a pair of boxerbriefs and a cape each.  It made quite the impression I'm sure.  As a group, everyone who came to the Undie Run ran from the Galivan Center up to the capitol and back again.  After we returned we were spoken to by Rocky Anderson and the afterparty began.

My Favorite
My favorite part of the Undie Run was not the people in the Undie Run themselves but rather the reactions of the people watching.  It was very clear who approved and who disapproved of this particular kind of protest and that directly influenced how they reacted to it.  Many people cheered us on, laughing excitedly, and most of them videotaped the run as it passed them by.  It was the people who disapproved that were the fun ones though.  The fact that everything we were doing was legal meant that they couldn't tell us to stop or get us in trouble.  So the majority of people who were unhappy with the run would just glare at us.  They wouldn't say anything to us, even if we spoke to them, they just ignored us.  Which of course to me was no less funny than anything else they could have done.  Offending people on purpose is generally a bad idea, but I feel a certain level of discomfort can always lead to a lot of entertainment.

The Utah - USC Game

Oh, what better place to observe human hilarities than at a college football game?  Specifically, the University of Utah - University of Southern California game.  Which, by the way, was supposed to be an easy win for USC and ended up almost being a win for us; rather it would have been a win for us, had we a quarterback who isn't mentally deficient from time to time.  Argh, that's all I have to say about the game itself, it still irritates me to think about it. 

The game itself doesn't really matter anyway, my focus here is the tailgate.  Holy cow, USC has one of the biggest tailgates I have ever seen! There are people everywhere, virtually half of the campus had to be covered in people.  And props to the roving Utah fans, there were WAY more of us there than I expected.  My friends and I even made the local news, but that had a lot to do with the fact that we had giant red and black letters painted on our chests. 

The funniest part about messing with people at the tailgate is the fact that, even though they were playing against us and making fun of us, most of their insults, even those that were actually intended to be offensive, were far from it.  The majority of the people there clearly knew absolutely nothing about Utah, save for the one fallback joke: the "aren't you all mormons" joke. Which is confusing because were I even Mormon I still wouldn't find that offensive, I'd probably be proud of it.  However, even that joke fell short for us as not a single person in our group of 10 happened to be Mormon.  We got a lot of jokes about "not being allowed" alcohol in Utah and so we quickly began playing that one up; we would run up to a tailgate, point to their drinks and act like we'd never seen them before... the best part about it was that people believed us! They actually thought that it was illegal in Utah and far be it from me to quash someone's beliefs.  I guess the most amazing part to me was how easy it was for someone to believe something outrageous when they already wanted to believe it.  I convinced a couple people that I did in fact have 6 wives waiting for me at home and that I was looking to pick up at least one more before heading home... after all, I didn't drive 700 miles just for a football game, I'm coming home with another wife in tow too.  They found that hilarious and a couple of people even tried to offer me their friends.... I almost accepted a couple of them. 

All in all, I think I've realized that the best place to observe people is a place where they just let themselves go.  It makes for much more interesting stories and kept me entertained for hours.

The Naked Man

My inspiration for this blog started with a man I noticed on campus one day.  Now, the title of this particular posting is a little bit misleading because he wasn't naked, but he was in fact changing clothes.  Outside.  In broad daylight.  In a flowerbed.  Now normally, if you're stuck somewhere and you need to change clothes I can understand the occasional public change.  If and only if however, you took some care to, oh I don't know, make it a little less obvious.  You see, when I walked up, all he had left to put on was his shirt, so it wasn't a huge deal but the fact that he was changing clothes isn't what made things weird.  It was the fact that he felt it necessary to stand in a flowerbed to do so.  I mean, if he had found a bush to hide behind I could understand but he was standing in nothing more than mulch and petunias; not exactly going to hide much now is it?  I just thought it was exceptionally odd that when faced with the prospect of changing in public he just went ahead and did so... but still felt the need to have some semblance of shame or decency or whatever it was that made him step into a flowerbed that hid nothing from anyone.  Oh well, at least he tried.