@iMissTempe No. 40: Random State Press celebrations
So I noticed last night that State Press reporter Derek Quizon wrote this as a Facebook status update:
Derek Quizon Completed his 149th State Press story tonight, not counting Police and city council briefs. ASU State Press, does 150 full-length stories merit a cake and a newsroom office party?
Well, tonight I discovered that the answer to his question was yes. Here's the announcement from the newspaper's official Twitter account:
Reporter Derek Quizon wrote his 150th story today http://yfrog.com/bchr4j Read 149 here and see #150 in tomorrow's paper http://tr.im/Dplp
It's good to see that they still know how to have fun at The State Press, even though today's newsroom shenanigans seem to involve far fewer snakes and planes than back in the day.
birthday recap
In case you haven't heard, I'm 24 now, and I actually spent much of my birthday in bed or at work... but that's only because we did a little night-before party that bridged from when I was still 23 on the 23rd over to when I turned 24 on the 24th.
So I was pretty tuckered out on Saturday because, as Stacy said, "Brian's 24th birthday last night was almost too wild to comprehend- but the stories will last forever."
Some of those stories need not be told on the Internet, but as usual, I'll tell you what I can and make vague references to the rest.
dinner
So we kicked off the evening with dinner and drinks at the infamous Spa Resort Casino, where Stacy had some Brian-esque parking problems that got the song "Birthday Spot" stuck in my head. (It's to the tune of "Birthday Sex," but it's about parking.)
Also, there we spied a handsome young gentleman who was there with his... dad? No, wait. Boyfriend. Gross.
back at the ranch
Then, back at my apartment, we looked at SSP pictures, I told everyone about my international modeling career and we made good use of my laminated world map that you can use dry-erase markers on:
Soon afterward, we took the markers to the actual whiteboard to record all the ridiculous quotes that had started flowing. The first full-on epic quote of the night was this little conversation right here:
Stacy: There are no black people in this movie. How's it a black comedy?
Mariecar: No, it's like a dark comedy.
me: Yeah, like—
Stacy: Oh, I thought—
me: Wait. You thought it was like "Big Momma's House?"
Stacy: Yeah!
Then, these quotes were also enshrined on my whiteboard or on Twitter. I'll leave the names off of these just to be safe...
"Oh no. My zipper is stuck on my money."
"I'll give you a nickel to tickle my pickle."
"There was so much crotch on the back of my head."
"Kill your beers!" / "This is Sparta!"
"Fuck yo' couch!"
Then, after we had so much non-Internet-discussable fun that we had compiled a list on the whiteboard of "who we've wronged," we took the show on the road to a gay bar in downtown Palm Springs that's just a few blocks away from my apartment for further shenanigans.
at hunters
Now, at Hunters, my memory starts to get a little fuzzy since I was the beneficiary of a few birthday drinks. What I do remember is that there was some drinking and some dancing, and two guys from the sports desk showed up to celebrate ye olde birthday even though the gay bar was not exactly their kind of scene.
Then came another tweeted (and retweeted... and retweeted) quote:
me at 1:32 a.m.: How drunk am I on a scale from 1 to Ginger Jeffries?
Jodi: I think it's time for news.
Then there was more dancing, the 2 a.m. walk home and the winding down of the festivities.
what about the room?
I'm glad you asked. With all this birthday biz going on, we never got around to watching the best worst movie ever, "The Room."
Since Tommy Wiseau's 2003 masterpiece has yet to have its official Palm Springs premiere, that means you'll all have to keep an eye on Facebook for a future Room-party date.
Can we talk about how bizarre today was?
Not only did much of the country watch a UFO-looking silvery helium balloon soar over northern Colorado for a good portion of the afternoon, but we were also worried that a child might be aboard.
And things really got weird when we heard that the family involved had been on ABC's "Wife Swap." Soon, The Desert Sun newsroom was buzzing, wondering if the child thought to be aboard the balloon was in fact Curtis, "the bacon kid."
Luckily, we soon discovered that Falcon Heene was on another episode of "Wife Swap" (one that, I'll admit, I have seen in its entirety) and King Curtis was presumably safe on the ground.
As it turns out, so too was Falcon... Well, he was technically in a box up in the attic over his family's garage, but that sure beats flippin' and floppin' around thousands of feet up in the air.
But when that balloon turned up empty after its landing, people in the newsroom started wondering if this would turn out to be some elaborate publicity stunt, if it was somehow all for (the) show.
In any case, though... srsly, how bizarre was today?
All your media are belong to us.
I've made it no secret that I'm a card-carrying member of The Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Man — i.e., that I work for a newspaper and news Web site. But I don't know if you realize just how much the rest of the Indrelunas (and Campbell) clan has been represented in the media lately.
For one, my brother's got his aforementioned weekly radio show on The Blaze 1330 AM.
Also this fall, some community newspapers ran briefs on my mom receiving an award from the American Diabetes Association. She also gave ABC 15 viewers a lesson on proper coughing technique after taking calls about the swine flu as a phone bank volunteer during KNXV's evening newscasts.
But then today, as a helium balloon took off from Fort Collins, Colo., and initial (as well as not-so-initial) reports indicated there might be a 6-year-old boy aboard, I took an immediate interest... mainly because one of our local television stations had decided to send out an e-mail alert about a decidedly non-local story.
But soon, after MSNBC had picked up live footage from KUSA-TV's helicopter, I glanced up at the TV and saw my aunt's name in the lower-third. (My aunt and uncle just so happen to be hot air balloonists who live in Fort Collins.)
"Hey. I think my aunt is talking on MSNBC right now," I announced to the newsroom. "Can we turn that up?"
As the #balloonboy drama unfolded, I kept seeing my aunt's name and hearing her voice as she talked to the MSNBC anchors, and I also caught my uncle talking to KUSA as I was previewing a story page on mydesert.com that included live video from 9News, which just so happens to be a Gannett TV station.
At one point this afternoon, my aunt and uncle were even preparing to go on NBC's Today show tomorrow to offer whatever expertise they could about a balloon that's not exactly like the one they fly.
That appearance has been scrapped, and I'm guessing we'll see the Heene family on one or more of the morning news shows tomorrow... but I just want to point out that the Indrelunas/Campbell/Quinn family has become quite the media savvy bunch.
Unlike the Heenes, we haven't broken into reality television — yet. (But I hear that a certain family member may or may not have tried out for "The Real World" last weekend.) Still, we've got news reporting, entertainment and all kinds of news sourcery covered.
Free movies are so bomb.
Seeing movies for free is quickly becoming one of my favorite things to do in the desert. In fact, I've already seen two free films in the past two days alone.
On Thursday, I met up with some folks from church at the Palm Springs Art Museum, which always offers free admission on Thursday afternoons/evenings. But this past Thursday they also started free screenings of movies from the Global Lens 2009 foreign film series. This week's film was Getting Home, which I found pretty amusing and heartwarming... and it also made me really want to go on a road trip.
Then tonight, I went and saw Child's Play — i.e., the first Chucky movie — at the IMAX theater in Cathedral City because I saw on their marquee as I drove past today that they'd be showing a free scary movie tonight at 10.
Now, I may regret tonight's movie decision tomorrow morning after I wake up from whatever nightmares good ol' Chucky might give me, but right now I still consider it an epically good choice. The movie was really good, and for some reason I had never seen it before.
Now if you too want to get in on this free-movies-in-the-desert biz, both of the places where I saw free flicks over the past two days have more free film coming up on Saturday and Sunday.
The Desert IMAX Theatre will be showing a scary movie again Saturday at 10 p.m., and from the looks of Fandango, it'll probably be Child's Play again.
Then, on Sunday, the art museum is having yet another free-admission day and is showing a black-and-white silent film from 2002 (Yep, from this century.) at 11 a.m.
I can't make it to either of those two movies on account of work on Saturday and church on Sunday, but I encourage anybody who's around the Coachella Valley this weekend to take advantage of these gloriously free screenings.
It’s good to be back in the water
Continuing on with the blast-from-the-past theme, something else you may or may not already know about my teenage years, is that I was on the Chandler High swim team my junior and senior years.
I swam the 500 freestyle more often than not, and while I wasn't ever that fast, I did get better over the course of those two swim seasons and I also had a blast being on the team.
Anyway, toward the end of my senior season, our head coach gave me a piece of advice — well, more like a mandate, really. Coach Johnson told me, "Never quit swimming," and I promised him that I wouldn't. Although I've taken some very long leaves of absence from lap swimming and gone through spans where I'm swimming very infrequently, I always have a swimsuit and goggles on hand for those spare moments when I can get to a pool — whether I'm in Tempe, Palm Springs, Cape Town or LA.
And last week, I put an end to another of those dry spells by getting back into the pool for the first time since probably the summer of '08. After a summer of convincing myself it was too awfully hot to do things outside during the day, I finally looked up the lap-swimming hours at the Palm Springs Swim Center and got back in the water last Monday evening.
I also picked up some new pool "toys" from Big 5 last week — a kickboard and pull buoy... and a new Speedo to wear under my shorts. (The one I've had since the fall of '03 is kinda gettin' worn out... Never mind that the swimsuit I've been wearing lately — my Chandler lifeguard suit — is even older.)
Then I put all that stuff to use tonight at the city pool. I haven't been swimming very far, and I certainly haven't been going very fast... but it's good to be back in the water again, and it's good to know I'm still upholding that promise I made almost six years ago.
My brother’s on The Blaze.
Michael on the radio
Monday mornings, midnight to 2 a.m.
blazeradioonline.com or search for KASC on the Shoutcast iPhone app
So I heard through the family grapevine this weekend that my brother Michael is now DJing on The Blaze 1330 AM, which back in my day was on 1260 AM... but we all listened to it online then too.
Well, since Michael's on the air early Monday mornings from midnight to 2 a.m. and I have Mondays off of work, I listened overnight and got to hear Michael at work. My favorite moment was when he asked for requests specifically so that he could bump MGMT off the playlist... "unless you're going to request MGMT, in which case — whatever dude."
I only really know of one MGMT song, "Kids," and I didn't hear that for the rest of the show, so hopefully Michael got someone to request something other than the Spice Girls, which I always used to ask for whenever Sam was DJing on The Blaze back when we were in college. (As I recall, one time he actually found a random remix of "Spice Up Your Life" and played it on the air. I was impressed, to say the least.)
Anyway, all you insomniacs out there who can't sleep on a Sunday night / Monday morning should listen in and/or heckle Michael on the request line at 480-965-1260 — "a remnant of the old frequency," as I think Michael put it last night.
So close. So very, very close.
Chandler 20, Hamilton 24
For those of you who don't know much about my high school days (or if all you know about my alma mater is that one of its more well-known alums thinks that it's OK to be a prostitute if you "just own it") let me get you up to speed.
I'm a proud graduate of Chandler High School, home of the Wolves. And for roughly 80 years, CHS was the one and only public high school in my hometown of Chandler, Ariz.
But by the 1990s, Chandler High had gotten crazy overcrowded, so the Chandler school district built a new high school a couple miles down Arizona Avenue. And when Hamilton High School opened in 1998, many of Chandler High's best athletes ended up at the school, or at least so we Wolves told ourselves every year when we lost to the Hamilton Huskies on the gridiron.
We never beat Hamilton in football while I attended Chandler High, but I thought we had a chance a couple of seasons while I was in college. I remember going to the game down at Hamilton with my friend and fellow CHS alum Tina, which probably would have been during my sophomore year at ASU. Then, during my junior year of college, I went to see the game on our home turf — Austin Field in historic downtown Chandler — that was televised on ESPNU.
Every year, though, the final outcome was always the same: Hamilton won... again.
But this year, it was lookin' like the tables had turned.
Chandler scored the game's first touchdown and went into halftime with a 13-0 lead. In fact, they led the Huskies throughout most of the game — until Hamilton pulled ahead by scoring a touchdown with three seconds left in the fourth quarter. Lame.
So in the end, it was the same old outcome as every other year since 1998. But I'm not hanging my head in shame this year, and I won't attempt to justify our loss on the gridiron by changing the subject to how Chandler has always been academically superior — which I'm sure it still is, btw.
No sir. This year, I say, "Hamilton, you got lucky. And next year, it is on."
Some day, the Wolves will beat the Huskies in football, and hopefully when that day comes I'll be able to see history happen live — like it seemed like I was about to tonight.
Even though I'm pretty bummed about tonight's final score, I'm really glad I got the see (most of) the game without going to Hair of the Dog and begging them to put on Fox Sports Arizona.
Mad crazy props go out to azcentral.com for livestreaming the game tonight... and for sending expert live-tweeter (and State Presser) Gina Mizell to cover the game. Even though the live Web video was often choppy (which is to be expected), Gina's tweets were always popping up on my phone with the game's key details and no unnecessary fluff, so I was always clued into what was going on.
