A few weeks ago I went to Wild Wings to watch the Bama game and met some other Bama fans. One was a guy who is my age that just moved down here as well from Tuscaloosa and actually grew up about 30 minutes from me. We exchanged numbers, hoping to have somebody to watch Bama games with. Every game one of us was out of town or in ttown, so we finally got together this weekend to watch a game. He said he had some friends from work that go to the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and it they were tailgating for the game and invited me.
These guys know how to tailgate with the best of them. Just because they go to a smaller school you would thing they go to a huge one with the tailgating. In all honesty, its an excuse to drink, but who needed those in college. I say this because three different people I asked couldnt tell me who UL-L was playing. I was dumbfounded by this conversation.
Me: So who are you guys playing? ULL Fan: I have no clue. Me: Are you going to the game? Fan: Hell no, we suck. Me: You watching the game on tv? Fan: No, why?
I had no answer for him. I couldnt imagine going to all this trouble to dress up nice and pull out grills for an event I cared nothing about.....7 times a year. So UL-L is terrible. They lost to Western Kentucky 48-21. Western Kentucky had lost to their last 28 opponents. Yeah.
So we go back to Wild Wings for the Bama game then met back up with the ULL folks to go out to one of the bars near the school. I asked Jeff (the guy from Bama) what this bar was like. He said it was like The Houndstooth.
Wrong.
I have never been to a place like this. First of all, it tries to pass as a club, with club music. Not my scene first of all. Secondly, I have never seen as many different kind of people hanging out at the same place. I dont know if this is like the only bar but these people:
Were hanging out with these people:
And these people:
I kid you not when I say I am not exagerating to the diufferent groups of people in this place.
So now to the most random expeience maybe of my life (yes. i know, the ABOVE STORY does not touch this). So me and another Engineer named Barrett are heading to do a job in Arkansas. Im sleeping in the passenger seat when i hear him say "What the hell is going on here?".
I look up and this guy is trucking it out of the woods carrying something over his shoulder. He doesnt look for cars and crosses our 3 lanes, the median, and the other three lanes without breaking stride. He then dumps the package on the other side of the far guardrail and high tails is back into the woods. The package looked exactly the way a body would look if it were wrapped in a tarp. The way this guy was running we really thought it was. So we pulled over, and turned around, figuring we couldnt live with ourselves if we didnt.
This convo actually happened: Barrett: Get out and look and see if its a body. Cliff: I'm not going to get out. B:Well we gotta see if it is. C: I dont know that I really want to know. B: Im getting out, YOU BETTER KEEP A WATCH ON THOSE WOODS AND WARN ME IF THIS GUY IS COMBING BACK. C: Ok
At this point all the color has drained form his face as he is approaching the tarp. He reaches out his leg as far as he can to try to nudge this body. Looking back on it he may have been doing the Stanky Leg
So he flips the corner of the tarp with his toe and it a ton con copper wires. We look off the road and on the other side of the road is a dump. This guy had been digging in the the dump, finding copper wire to sell. At about 2 dollars per pound copper is pretty expensive. Watching the color return to Barrets face on the side of I-30 was priceless.
Halloween is coming up next weekend, and I have a few costume ideas. Halloween is always fun for me, and I pride myself on Having some of the best costumes. In years previous I was:
1) 1/2 of the Guiness Brewmasters
2) Vince from Shamwow!
Here I am with Old Greg
3)Marty Mcfly from Back to the Future, complete with hoverboard
Some of my favorites Ive ever seen:
1) Old Greg (as pictured above-if you have never seen this, its more than absurd)
2)Hardly Boys (from South Park) I never got pictures and youtube doesnt have any good clips
So I'm thinking of either going as Marty Mcfly again or maybe Antoine Dodson. What do you guys think? Leave suggestions
So I went on my lunch break to the local Chili's and sat at the bar area killing time on my phone when i happen to observe a few things.
1) The lady at the table beside me ordered two glasses of red wine. At 11:00 AM. At the same time. So I think, ok...sure its early but maybe she is meeting somebody. Well, she was meeting somebody, and when they got there that lady ordered two glasses for herself. Who orders two at the same time!? Its not like your getting a discount on these things....order one and when you finish order the second. I knew the Cajuns liked to drink but "Woo! better order two so I dont have any downtime between my frst and second at 11 AM" is a streach.
2)These 4 guys were about 3 beers deep (im noticing a trend developing) when one guy just routinely kept saying "YOU DONT HAVE TO LIE CRAIG!!!" from the movie "Friday". He did this in his most awful female voice. He then goes on to declare that the movie was pure genius and that it should have won an oscar. Hold the freaking phone. I mean, I like watching Debo clock people and hearing "You got knocked the F@#& out!" as much as the next guy. But if an oscar is what your after, dont premise your movie on weed. And dont cast Chris Tucker. I'm just saying.
By the way, how did this guy (Straight Outta Compton)
turn into this guy
And for the record, "Braveheart" won the Oscar that year, so yeah
Its been pretty slow this past week. Last Monday I went to Conway, AR for a job with a guy who just got promoted. The way Halliburton works is, when you hire on you are in training until an arbitrary time has passed until you "break out". I am still in this training period. To "break out as an engineer" you have to accompany other engineers on thier jobs, basically learning everything about how to do W&P in the oil field. Once they are satisfied that you can do a job by yourself (usually you convince one of the guys to let you run it and they supervise) you do a presentation back at the base and then you are "broken out". Distinct advantages come from this:
1)7% raise in salary...i mean, who wouldnt want almost 10% more money per year 2)A bonus right then and there 3)Eligibility for bonus on job tickets......basically whatever we charged the client, I get 1.5% of it as bonus. Usualy we charge 30-40k for jobs, so thats almost 600-700 more dollars in my pocket per job on average. Not too shabby.
Anyway, it was this guys first one by himself after the break out. He was nervous, as im sure i am going to be. It hits you that you are solely in charge of a couple million dollars worth of equipment, 4-5 personnel, and have to get said equipment and people across the country sometimes. This was a pretty simple job and should have taken about 7 hours to do. Because he was double checking everything, and we had some tool failures, the job took around 15. I wasnt complaining, I went on days off last Wednesday and that meant that we would be getting back right when I go off so I didnt have to do anything else. It supoposedly takes about a year to break out ao Im expecting to do it around March or April next year. Im supposed to do a 6-month presentation in Nov to show what I have learned, and I get a bonus for that as well.
So Im finally spending a set of days off in Lafayette. I still dont know anyone here as of course im on the road so much. One guy I went to Bama with also works for HAL down here but he is in training in Mississippi currently. I never knew how hard it is to meet people, when you dont know anybody anyway. All the folks I work with are 30+ and married, plus they spend so much time on the road as well its hard to organize anything.
About a month ago on my way home from work I saw kids playing lacrosse next to this high school. I stopped and introduced myself and asked if they could use any help. So I am now a coach of the Lafayette High Lions Lacrosse team. I'm really enjoying it.
Observations from said endevour:
1)I'm really glad I stopped and talked to them, not only does it get me out of the house but i get to stay around the sport I spent all of college playing and coaching. I thought moving down here i was going to be removed from it cause its still new here.
2)These kids try harded than college kids. Idk if its because thier parents are watching or what, but they really give 100%
3)You cant talk to these kids like college kids....you could joke around and play with college guys but these kids call me sir and stuff so its best I just act like an adult haha.
4) Parents are really involved. This is an awesome part I wasnt ready for. Parents asking me what thier kid can do to improve, asking me to explain a concept to them so they can reinforce said scheme at home. Having parental support is a must for a growing sport down here.
I'm really excited to take these kids to see LSU and Bama play in Feb in Baton Rouge down here. Most of these kids are LSU fans so they give me some ribbing but I know Bama Lax is going to destroy LSU and I kinda selfishly want these kids to see it haha. Plus I want them to see what exactly I've been teaching them performed at a higher level. Darby told me that Bama won its first fall game vs Georgia State 20-3 or something like that, so I'm really pumped for them this year....maybe this is the year they make it to ATL for the SELC playoffs. If your unfamiliar with lacrosse, just check out MCLA.us. That is our league website and you can check all 200 teams or if your just interested in Bama go to tidelax.ialax.com
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out.
We all knew it was going to happen eventually. Im still very proud of this Alabama team and honestly this may be the best thing to jhappen to us this season. Last year all our boys wanted to do was get to Atlanta to play Florida. I think they may want to get there to take on South Carolina now. No excuses, they earned it and beat us all the way around for the entire game. Its been so long since we felt a loss it puts things in perspective for you. I'm still going to be repping my bama hat down here, so lets see how work is tommorrow with LSU being 6-0.
EveryDayShouldBeSaturday.com is an awesome blog written by a Florida grad by the name Orson Swindle. He is the funniest writer and you really need to start visiting this site. Here are two posts about this weekend. These are long but worth it. Keep in mind he is a Florida fan:
Shackleton said the first and most important element of group survival was to keep morale up. Shackleton put this into practice during his Antarctic escapades by organizing soccer matches for his men on the pack ice, and by allowing them to date seals so long as they made no promises or babies. Most of the men, being British, honored their agreements. The stiff, formal manner of the seals surrounding Elephant Island to this day remind locals of that British sojourn a century ago, especially when they wear bowlers as they are wont to do.
The assembled miserable denizens of visitor's section NN6 in Bryant-Denny Stadium followed Shackleton's advice.
For instance: Alabama could use some more pregame montages. A coked-out Oliver Stone clearly consulted on their pregame, because Alabama's pre-game montage is preceded by its own pregame montage, which in itself has five successive pregame montages. All of them are set to the theme for Requiem for a Dream, and half feature Bear Bryant narrating solemnly over the footage.
None feature Bear Bryant becoming hooked on heroin and getting electroshock therapy, and that's a shame since it was a really important part of his life.
Alabama should add a solid hour to two hours of pregame montages in front of these montages, and charge admission. We decided this could be done with movies, which for a nominal fee and with some fairly easy digital tweaking would feature Bryant himself. The version of No Country For Old Men featuring Bear Bryant as Anton Chigurh would be reviewed by the Birmingham News as "The finest and most uplifting comedy ever filmed."
There were other ideas. They distracted from the wreck of a game happening three hundred feet or so below us. Watching games from the upper deck feels like you digest everything at a clinical but still delayed distance. The effect is one of watching football on cough syrup: crowd movements and cheers aren't synced up, everything but the play itself feels delayed, and still there's a kind of precognition you have from up on high that other don't. They can't see the safety overplaying the run fake, but you can.
The effect is not a good one in a blowout, especially when you can see the proverbial runaway baby stroller of a play rolling into the semi-truck traffic of the counterplay. We watched a lot of strollers roll into traffic in the first half of Saturday night's game at Bryant-Denny Stadium. They were all Florida's.
It was brute, negative football. Watching from up high you could see the safeties flex into the plays before they happened, little dots of Crimson meeting Florida Blue at every point. It was exactly like every other game we'd watched Florida play on offense since the 2008 SEC Championship Game: a series of eleven tangoes arranged so that at any point on the field one defender was matched up with one offensive player. Good offense dislodges these romantic moments: it takes those dots and puts them in space alone and unpaired. Good football offense is bad tango. This was excellent tango, and bad football offense.
Everything was designed around making you screw up first, a simple but effective wager that your opponent would jab, and then you countered, and then your opponent was on the mat spitting up teeth and talking long distance to imaginary interlocutors in Shanghai without the use of a phone or other wireless communications device. They called screens, because you were going to overrun them. They called simple, one cut runs with brutal blocking. If they didn't break one way, they took one simple cut and went the other way. You didn't need anything fancy when your opponent willing stuck his member in the bear trap each time.
They played like they didn't even like football: like it was a job with three or four simple, clear-cut rules. All the work had been done beforehand: the tendencies, the formations, the technique. The simple plays were executed with scalpel-sharp precision. The patterns were calmly nodded at and countered. On five wide sets defensive backs stood their ground, since the ball was going nowhere deep, nowhere close to deep, and would in fact be parked on a route somewhere in the three to five yard range (provided that the qb was not sacked, rushed into a bad throw, or otherwise beaten within an inch of his life.) On run plays no fakes were respected since they did not merit respect, but were faked anyway.
It was so efficient you might think Alabama hated football, and wanted less of it by turning a potentially competitive game into a suffocated and forgone conclusion. They might have hated it if they hated boredom. The only thing of any real consequence that happened in the second half was John Brantley getting the shit knocked out of him scrambling unsuccessfully for the first down marker. They might have hated it because those who excel at what they do hate easy things because they are boring and a waste of time.
This was both easy and boring.
Failure really can be fun provided you have the right attitude and a complete lack of involvement with the failure itself. Take Saturday night, or the past year and a half with the Florida offense. You know logically that this is something you have nothing to do with, no control or sway over, and little besides a general consistent bleat in the din of general public opinion. You are excepted from this statement if you are so wealthy you can write checks to build things at Florida without feeling them too much.
You have no control, and in a moment of remembering some kitchen wall copy of the Serenity Prayer you remember the bit about accepting things you cannot control. When Florida ran a screen that looked like an invisible moped accident, we thought this. When we ran John Brantley to the short side of the field on an option he would never, ever keep in any billions of probable realities, we thought this. It would have made us feel better if the Serenity Prayer worked. It also would have made us feel better if there were a shred of hope of this changing, but there isn't. They should point this out in the footnotes of the Serenity Prayer, but unfortunately David Foster Wallace is not its author.
Toward the end you run out of ideas and people to bounce them off of in a blowout. The clock wound down. Alabama courteously ran the ball to kill the remaining useless minutes left. Leaving before double zeroes is the only superstition we have about football games: you don't leave with time on the clock. Consequently we have spent a lot of time sitting by ourselves at the end of games. The gentlemen in front of us left, but said they wouldn't mind taking part in the impromptu discussion group again under better circumstances.
We concurred. "Got to keep morale up. Shackleton's first rule of survival in the Antarctic."
"What's the second rule?" they asked.
"Get the fuck out of the Antarctic."
And this one is hilarious about LSU this weekend:
You know a classic piece of live football atrocity when the highlight film begins with a converted 4th and 14, especially when it's against a Tennessee team that has no business being in the game in the first place, a Tennessee team playing a lawn chair at center, a Tennessee team with linebackers whose ACLs explode for no reason, a Tennessee team whose depth chart just reads "NOPE" at no fewer than seven major positions. Tennessee's there, and like a novice climber stranded in the death zone on Everest, you know it's a matter of time before they run out of oxygen, take off their clothes, and begin rolling in the snow like dying men suffering from mountain madness and cerebral edema.
Tennessee's already doomed in theory as the inferior team late in the game even on basic football princlples before you activate the computer worm capable of crippling the entire football matrix as we know it: Les Miles.
Some men just want to watch the world burn. Others set it on fire accidentally and call their friends to come over and watch. Les Miles is both.
Jarrett Lee throws a pass into triple coverage to start the sequence. Jarrett Lee, he of the multiple pick sixes and benching two years ago. He's back, and that's how bad LSU's offense is at this point with Jordan Jefferson attempting to "make pass go that way into hands." They now use him as a kind of running quarterback, which he's not. That would be Russell Shepherd, who is now a wide receiver who never gets the ball. Jordan Jefferson, the non-running QB, scored LSU's only TD to this point in the game on a wholly uncontested 83 yard run through the gut of the Tennessee defense. You knew the demons were in charge of this game from this play forward, and also that when you run on offense as nonsensically as LSU does, the only logical cure is to face an equally nonsensical defense. Tennessee rose to that challenge, and we toast you for this, Volunteers.
LSU gets the ball on the two as a result of a pass interference penalty (natch) and does what any good coach would do with three downs and a running clock with 32 seconds left in the game: call a quarterback sweep with your non-running running quarterback. Like much of Dangermouse and Cee-Lo's work together, the matchup of Gary Crowton's playcalling and Les Miles' attitude makes for sometimes nonsensical but always disturbing, affecting work.
The clock runs. You do two things when you might want to stop the clock on the goal-line down 14-10 with a running clock. You may spike it---wait, that's not happening. There's a thing about spiking the ball at LSU, if you'll recall. They could call time out, but they have no timeouts because Les Miles is pretty sure the federal government demands those back at the end of the year if you don't spend them all. Though they've been on the two yard line ever since the pass interference penalty, the LSU offensive staff suddenly remembers OH MY GOD WE HAVE A GOAL LINE PACKAGE and sets off a fire drill the People's Republic of China would call "disgracefully hurried and chaotic."
Huge men sprint off the field and onto it. The clock winds. Les Miles is seen throwing live chickens onto the field. Who knows where he got them, but they're all part of the plan now. The LSU sideline's complete anarchy triggers a disproportionate reaction on the Tennessee sideline. They send off three men, put in four, and one of the three sent off rushes back onto the field like a child terrified of missing the school bus for a field trip. (This child then ends up in the wrong town because they got on the wrong bus.) Derek Dooley wraps the headset cord around his neck and attempts to choke himself to death rather than watch what's happening. The crowd silences itself by placing a eighty thousand bourbon bottles in eighty thousand mouths at once and draining them simultaneously.
Then the most magnificent part of the play happens. This sentence appears in its own box because everything about it is spectacular:
Then the ball is snapped with the game on the line between two major college football powers with one team having 13 men on the field and another with a non-running running quarterback who watches in horror as the ball is snapped over his head and covered for a game-ending busted play. THIS ALL HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE.
Competence is overrated as a form of entertainment while incompetence can be side-splitting stuff. I watched this in a bar full of people in Tuscaloosa, and the reactions were giddy not because of any real mass hatred toward both teams, but because they knew that with a quality arsonist like Miles on the sidelines something was getting set on fire: LSU, Tennessee, or possibly both. Oh, and LSU scored on the next play when a penalty was called on Tennessee for too many men on the field because a 9-4 defense is effective but highly illegal, and Tennessee players started weeping on the field.
I'm applauding, all of you, as loud and as hard as I can in your general directions. We shall not see another ending to match this beautiful hatchet job until next week when LSU beats Florida at home 7.5 to 2 on a blocked extra point and a half a point awarded for hitting all three crossbars on a single missed FG attempt. It's in the rulebook, look it up.
A few of my friends asked why I named my blog "Crimson in Acadiana". Here you go:
Acadiana, or The Heart of Acadiana, (Cajun French: L'Acadiane) is the official name given to the French Louisiana region that is home to a large Francophone population. Of the 64 parishes that make up Louisiana, 22 named parishes and other parishes of similar cultural environment, make up the intrastate region.
The flag can be seen in various uses around the Acadiana area. Some local governments will fly the Acadian flag with their respective local colors and the American flag. Many residents of Acadiana will fly the flag on their homes or businesses. To many it is seen as a unifying image of the historic and present socio-economic ties that bind the region.
So I got really lucky and got to go to the Bama-Fla game this past weekend. A top-10 matchup ended with us blowing out the reigning SEC East Champs 31-6.
On Friday at 3 my boss tells me I'm going to go on a job in Demopolis, Al. This is only about an hour south of T-Town. So I call up Darby and ask if he can possibly pick me up on Friday. My dad's last week of work in Baton Rouge is this week, so again I got lucky and could ride back with him. My plan was to finish the job, get the crew to drop me off in Demop and send the crew and equipment back to Louisiana and meet them back at the shop on Monday morning.
My boss tells me we need to be on location at 6 friday morning. So i go home at 3 thursday to try and get some rest. After packing and cleaning it was already 8 so I decided no sleep and met the crew at 10 to drive. We arrived at 6 and shot the job until around 4 in the afternoon. At this point I have been up 36 hours straight. Everything is going right until we start to leave the rig and one of my drivers gets the truck into a ditch.
It was actually alot worse than the photo shows, it was really close to just falling over and then we are in serious trouble cause there goes a 500K truck. So we end up getting it pulled out and im on my way to ttown. I man up and go out, eventually making it to a new record of 42 hours without sleep. While out I ran into an old high school friend, Sarah Pace. We graduated together and our junior year of college she transfers into engineering so she is still in school after 7 years. She tried to tell me she is ready to get out and leave college and I gave her this almost verbatim:
So I got to see alot of good friends on Sat. We were celebrating Hunters 25th birthday which made us remember when we were 21 making fun of Darby for turning 25. Sad day. I got to catch up with Darby, Tweeder, Blue, Hunter and his gf Ginger, Cross, Perez, Steve, Glover and his gf Sarah, Chuck and his wife Laura, and new folks like Cross' friend Mitch and Steve's friends Desh and Garrett. It was Desh and Garrets first game and I ended up sitting with them in pretty good seats in the upper deck. They loved every minute of it.
All in all it was a pretty good weekend. It was also a pretty good day at work down here after the LSU debacle this weekend. Somehow fitting, one of the guys caught an alligator yesterday and brought it in hog tied on the back of his truck. I guess gators are just not doing well all around this weekend.
