A picture of the young lady from my class last week who looked like Bends-era Thom Yorke. She wasn’t wearing glasses for much of the session, mind you.

Yesterday was a singularly unimpressive day. I expect today to be better, as I am cutting out at 3 PM to drink beer with Ben before we see game 2 of the Devils/Hurricanes series.

I expect to one day forfeit my autonomy. Good while it lasts.

AC4: Saturday (Part II)

Somewhere during the 4:45 show, Jack Spencer came and brought his old couch for the green room, and we took the old Cronkniture sofa out by the dumpster. Someone, I think maybe Andy Berendht from Green Bay, realized that this would be a great place to hang out, so we began spending as much time on the trash couch as on the new one.

It was on the couch that I realized I could take my crush on Green Bay’s Carrie Masse to silly extremes. I’d already told her jokingly that since I thought she ruled, I was going to add her name to the list of teams people could vote on. I’d already added her name to that list and plotted how I would be able to add some votes as the board admin. And since her reactions were so sweetly comical, I’d already told her (and anyone who would listen) that she was my new crush. So, while on the couch, I told her we were getting married when our age difference was no longer creepy, which I guessed would be another 21 years. (She’d be 40, I’d be 48.)

Team Chicago borrowed our I Heart NY shirts and taped over the NY with “Chi.” It was Zach Ward and Beth Melewski from Dual Exhaust, and they picked up Bill Cochran for a third player to make it look more ComedySportz-y. They looked like they were having an absolute blast. They played an Alphabet Genre that became all about falling down with this really wonderful, almost childlike in Zach’s case, conviction that made me think that everyone should do shortform and longform, just to have fun with the differences.

By then, I was dead on my feet, and after Green Bay played Buffalo, I ended up on the couch with Carolyn Gillespie and Carrie from Green Bay, Jeremy Hardwick from Buffalo and John Betz from DC. A lot of sitting upside down.

I kept zipping inside throughout the afternoon, because we had set up a place for fans and players to vote online for their favorite team, who would face Raleigh in the championship. Sooner or later, noticing that we had maybe 100 total votes, with each club averaging 12 or so, someone called home and got all their friends to register real quick and vote. Pretty soon, Richmond and Buffalo were well over a hundred votes in the lead, and I suggested to a couple of the other managers that they might as well try the same tactic. We went from 100 total votes to around 900 in an hour (with scads of new registered users… a few of whom have come back to the boards, which kind of amazes me).

I was pretty bummed that the spirit of the competition had been violated, because I thought it would be cool if people who’d seen the shows had the chance to vote on the team they wanted to see more of. So that it turned into a game of “We have more folks with internet access that we could reach on a Saturday night” was a big disappointment. I almost felt like wanting to play to that extreme missed the point of the weekend.

Green Bay won eventually with a last-minute nudge. Which was cool, because they’d had a pretty solid lead before the ballot stuffing began, and I suspect that a lot of the Raleigh players had voted for them. (I could go check, but why bother?)

I did, of course, use my admin privleges to go in and fix it so that Carrie had more votes than any team in the final standings.

Richmond and Austin/KC played an hour-and-a-half first half, which was capped by a monumentally long but entertaining Musical Chairs. At the end of the half, Jorin Garguilo awarded Austin/KC with the childhood soccer trophy of Karl Rectanus. You know, so it wasn’t just the second half of the show that meant something.

The name Rectanus got laughs again.