Brian.Indrelunas.com: July 2009

They say Christmas only comes once a year.
But I say, 'No it doesn't. Twice — at least!'

And I wasn't the only one having a very merry Christmas today.

Stefan from The Desert Sun's sports desk found himself listening to Christmas music today, well before I waltzed into the newsroom wearing my epic Christmas vest.

Kari, an SSPer, found herself wearing holiday attire earlier this week... because she was running low on non-Christmas clothes right before laundry day, but that's beside the point.

Phil, a State Presser who is probably better known as Denny from "The Room," had a little Christmas in July party / photo shoot with his girlfriend earlier this month.

And Chris held a Christmas in July barbeque and pool party tonight for the Tempe First young-adult group, which he had planned without even knowing that July 31 is the official date when all the cool kids celebrate Christmas in the summer.

By cool kids, I mean myself as well as all the actual (i.e., not old enough to drink/vote/drive/etc.) kids who tune in to the Cartoon Network and saw a marathon of Christmas specials airing today.

Speaking of the magical date, some of you have asked me why I celebrate Christmas on July 31 as opposed to, say, the 25th. Well, it all started last summer...

Sometime in early June, SSP training week was just getting under way up in Sacramento. One evening, while we were waiting to be seated at a restaurant, I was talking with Camille, one of my coworkers who I'd be spending the summer with in LA.

Between the two of us, we somehow hatched a plan to confuse our campers on one day during the summer by acting as if it were Christmas all day long, from the 7 a.m. wake-up call all the way to lights out at 10 p.m. We quickly told the rest of the LA staff about it, and as I recall, everybody was on board with the idea.

It took us most of the summer to get around to actually planning Christmas, though, since we had more important priorities like making sure the whole summery SSP experience ran smoothly for our campers, counselors, homeowners and Hotel Vermont Square guests.

But as the end of the summer drew near, we keyed in on Week 5 as our target week, and Thursday was the day that made the most sense in the context of our program to have a Christmas celebration. That turned out to be July 31, which got us in right under the deadline to have our celebration count as a Christmas in July. Plus, SSP's executive director was going to be in town visiting our site that day, which made our selected date all the more perfect.

On the night before SSP Christmas, two staffers in particular — Camille and Brandon — stayed up until I don't even want to know when decking out the entire program room in true Christmas style. I know that when I went downstairs in the morning and saw all the decorations for the first time, I was pretty much speechless.

Anyway, that day, we roused our campers with "Feliz Navidad" as a wake-up song...

...and we woke up Rick, the executive director, with a very special selection from "Happy Clucking Holidays," an album of Christmas carols sung by a guy pretending to be a chicken:

We played Christmas songs in the kitchen all day, served up Christmas cookies at lunch and sang Christmas carols in addition to the normal SSP songs at evening song time. Plus, we all got our best holiday outfits on for a staff Christmas picture:

Oh, and of course, we didn't give any forewarning that this holiday hoopla was coming up. It was a surprise for the teenage campers, their adult counselors and for Rick as well. And if anyone tried to tell us that it wasn't really Christmas, we would have none of it. We just insisted that no, it really was Christmas despite the fact that it was the middle of summer.

After that awesome experience, I fell in love with off-season holidays and decided that July 31 would always and forever be a day when I celebrate Christmas. I mean, July 25 makes sense and all, but the 31st will always hold a special place in my Christmas heart of hearts.

And as this Christmas draws to a close, let me leave you all with this ancient yuletide saying, which was so poignantly illustrated by Sam a few years ago:

0 comments | 7/31/2009 11:59:00 PM

See? I'm not the only one...

Gotta love Cartoon Network, which aired Christmas specials pretty much
all day.

0 comments | 7/31/2009 10:37:00 PM

'Twas the night before Christmas in July...

...and all through the apartment, not a cookie was found, nor any milk.

I hope Santa likes Red Vines and apple juice.

0 comments | 7/31/2009 01:35:00 AM

how to get twentysomethings to go to church

Religious leaders everywhere, take note. I have discovered one tactic that has been proven to get twentysomethings (well, one twentysomething) into a church.

And that tactic is dress-up days.

No lie.

See, for the past couple weeks, there's been suggested attire at the United Methodist Church of Palm Springs, and I'm not talking about "Sunday best."

Rather, I mean things like Hawaiian Shirt Day, which I missed the memo about. But the next week, I knew to wear my pink shirt for Pink Day. And it was that Sunday that I learned the next week (i.e., this past Sunday) would be Exotic Outfit Sunday.

Now, that's a dangerous charge to give to an SSPer. My summer shopping trips at LA and Sacramento thrift stores have netted me lots of, for lack of a better term, exotic outfits.

For instance, consider my reply to a request from fellow SSPer Kari Neal to wear appropriate attire to her wedding in a couple weeks: "By appropriate attire, you mean a mesh shirt and booty shorts, right?" Sure, it was an idle threat; I'd never wear booty shorts to Kari's wedding. But that's mainly because I'm afraid of how Kari would exact her revenge if I did so and not because of any lack of booty shorts — or mesh shirts, for that matter.

Still, I decided I needed to keep my exotic church outfit SSPG, if not straight-up SS... G. So I decided that I could probably wear my camo pants and some shirt or another and have that be "exotic."

Well, even though I didn't hit the hay until around 4 a.m. Sunday, when my alarm went off at 9:30, I jumped right out of bed because I was not about to squander what may be my one and only chance to wear my ridiculous camo pants (from the epic Mormon thrift store in Sacramento, btw) to a legitimate, all-ages, general-audience, Sunday-morning church service.

And in yesterday's church bulletin, I was glad to see the "strange dress code," as Ashley called it, would continue. In fact, the bulletin listed the suggested attire for the next six weeks.

Next week is Fun Hat Day, so my favorite find from last week's SSP-esque thrifting excursion — Pimp the Chimp himself — will definitely come in handy:

(Fun fact: The shirt I'm wearing in this picture also came from the aforementioned epic Mormon thrift store.)

0 comments | 7/27/2009 11:53:00 PM

I guess I'm still waiting on the release of Brain 2.0

This lasagna has something to do with this post. I promise.

You know, I've been putting all sorts of random details about my life on the Internet for almost a decade now. So you'd think that by now I'd be used to people referring to things I've put on my Web site or Twitter or Facebook just as if I'd said these things to their respective faces.

But sometimes it still catches me off guard, like today when Matt asked me how my lasagna turned out. The whole affair was moderately well documented on the onlines, and for those of you who were also wondering about the results, the lasagna was pretty delicious. There were some crunchy noodles around the edges, but the center was all appropriately soft and wonderful. But I digress.

My point here is that when Matt asked about the lasagna that I full well knew I had turned into a digital spectacle, I still had a split second where my brain didn't quite know why Matt would know that I cooked lasagna this week. My poor mind started to flip through its archives to try to find a memory of me telling Matt about my culinary adventures before the knowledge that I told the whole world about said cooking went and turned the mental alert switch back off.

Maybe that says something about how we're all wired to recall antecedent events whenever we're interacting with someone or something in the present. Or maybe that's just how I'm wired.

I guess some parts of my brain just haven't quite embraced Web 2.0 yet, but I fully expect some tech company to release a patch that'll update that part of my cranium sometime before everyone starts upgrading their lives to Web 3.0. (I'm kidding about that last part... mostly.)

0 comments | 7/22/2009 11:25:00 PM

Oops, I did it again... and again.

As I mentioned earlier, I wrote a story for Monday's Desert Sun about a big local event from exactly 40 years ago. On the same night as the first moon walk, the president of the Palm Desert Chamber of Commerce was shot and killed by a sniper in his Rancho Mirage home. Neighbors recount the event in "Sniper case still unsolved," which was on today's front page.

What's more, one of my La Quinta Sun stories was rerun on page B1, the Valley section front.

0 comments | 7/20/2009 08:12:00 PM

Forty years since Apollo 11
The Desert Sun takes me to the moon and back

For the past few weeks, I've been pretty consumed by moon-related things as I've been talking with Coachella Valley residents who contributed to the space program back in the 1950s and 1960s as America prepared to send three men to the moon.

The fruit of all that labor is featured on the front page of Sunday's edition of The Desert Sun. And of course, all the stories are also available on mydesert.com, which I updated tonight during my usual Saturday-night Web shift. I'm not gonna lie; it was slightly weird posting my own stories to the site. But there was plenty of other stuff to post that I didn't write, so I didn't have too much time to dwell on the coincidental timing of it all.

Anyway, be sure to check out my mainbar story on the valley folks who had various ties to the first manned moon landing, "Valley residents recall roles in race for moon." Also, I spun off into a sidebar the story of where I met two of the sources for the mainbar — in a weekly gathering of aerospace retirees.

Online, we have first-person recollections from three local folks who had memories of to the Apollo 11 mission ranging from being a part of the launch countdown, catching a glimpse of the astronauts just after their return and seeing a son receive personal correspondence from Neil Armstrong. Also, a colleague from The Desert Sun wrote a reflection on growing up in Armstrong's hometown.

And if it's wire stories you're looking for, we've got some of them as well over at mydesert.com/moon.

Yeah, we kinda went all out.

What's more, in Saturday's Desert Sun, I wrote about a lecture at the La Quinta Museum in which a guy from the Jet Propulsion Lab's outreach team outlined NASA's current moon missions. I was surprised to learn that both of these latest unmanned trips to the moon are scouting out spots for a permanent manned base. Anyway, you can read more about that in "Ihde discusses current NASA missions."

And in Monday's paper, we plan to look back at another big event from 40 years ago — one that's decidedly more local but arguably just as memorable as the moon walk.

0 comments | 7/19/2009 03:38:00 AM

And that's the way it was.

1916-2009

About a week ago, an anonymous copy editor in a newsroom somewhere said Michael Jackson's death made "a good dress rehearsal for Walter Cronkite."

Little did we know how close the dress rehearsal and the performance itself would turn out to be.

As I'm sure you know by now, Walter Cronkite died tonight. And as that copy editor's comment suggests, Uncle Walter's passing isn't necessarily unexpected. A month ago, rumors that Cronkite was gravely ill began to circulate.

Even back in 2005, when I went to hear Cronkite speak to an introductory journalism class at ASU, the legendary newsman needed to be hooked up to a sound system to be able to hear what was going on two feet away from him.

"You know, the first man on the moon didn't have this many wires," he joked at the time, referencing a story that he covered in 1969 and that I just wrapped up a retrospective look at for Sunday's edition of The Desert Sun.

I would see — but never meet — Cronkite a few other times during my collegiate career, at Cronkite Award luncheons and, of course, in that evergreen "special video message" that Cronkite School Dean Chris Callahan introduced at every graduation as if Walter had just recorded it days before. (Never mind that it was clearly taped on a Channel 8 set that I'm pretty sure was junked years ago.)

But when Cronkite, the man who donned a hard hat for the 2007 groundbreaking of the journalism building in downtown Phoenix that bears his name, declined an invitation to attend the building's dedication last fall, I knew he wasn't in good shape.

Below is a letter he sent at that time, which Callahan relayed to all Cronkite School students via e-mail. It begins like a speech to be delivered at Cronkite Week but then shifts to announce that Cronkite would not attend the events:

Not unlike many Cronkite School students, alumni and faculty, I'm proud to have attended the journalism school that bears Cronkite's name... and I always wanted to play roller derby in the fourth-floor hallways of the building that bears his name.

I'm also proud to have reported for the wire service that bears his name... and I think the fact that the news service that Cronkite himself worked for makes no mention of his passing on its homepage is a sad statement.

Like Sam, I'm proud to have Cronkite's name on my degree... and that's the way it is.

0 comments | 7/17/2009 10:17:00 PM

Gotta roll with the punches blackouts

Today definitely did not go as planned, mainly on account of two instances of technical difficulty: My apartment complex's one dryer was on the fritz, which postponed my laundry plans until tomorrow when it'll hopefully be fixed. Also, the power went out, which put a stop to my Degrassi-watching... right in the middle of my favorite episode! It later came back on, but only for a few minutes. SoCal Edison can be such a tease.

Anyway, the power's been back for a few hours now, which gave me plenty of time to iron the one clean pair of pants I do have. So neither malfunction proved to be too much of a crisis. And hey, at least we're not doing load-shedding — or rolling blackouts, as I think they're called here. Steve Gerner reminded me that we Americans are "spoiled with constant electricity anyway."

Today's little problems aside, I still did way less than I expected to this weekend, but I'm just going to write it off as some much-needed hibernation. I've got a busy week ahead of me: I'm working on an A1 story, doing some La Quinta Sun stories and who knows what else the week will bring?

0 comments | 7/13/2009 10:19:00 PM

Who's bad?

This morning on one of the radio stations here in town, the DJ proclaimed himself King of the Coachella Valley and read on the air an e-mail from a loyal subject: "King Casey, can you make the news cover something other than Michael Jackson?" He replied, "Even as king, I don't know if I can do that."

Yes, we in The Media (a wholly owned subsidiary of The Man) have gone all out in our coverage of all things Michael Jackson in the two weeks since the pop star died. Even I got in on the act this week with a profile of a La Quinta man who once worked at Motown Records and often traveled with a young MJ during his days in the Jackson 5.

He was a really cool guy, so if by some chance you haven't already gotten your fill of Jackson coverage, you can check out the short piece on Eddie Gilreath I wrote for the daily. And hey, don't stop till you get enough: You can also read a longer story about Gilreath's interaction with the Jacksons in today's La Quinta Sun.

0 comments | 7/09/2009 01:04:00 PM

Dang... I have 1,000 Facebook friends.

When I got on Facebook tonight, I saw that one of my friends had resurrected her long-dormant Facebook account and the number of friends listed on my profile page had jumped from 999 to 1,000.

I don't exactly know what to think about reaching this milestone, other than "Who exactly are these 1,000 people?" To answer this question, I turned to the handy, dandy Friend Statistics app, which I've been using for some time now.

Unfortunately, one of my dear friends has escaped the watchful eye of this stats application, which is still kicking out numbers that total up to 999 even though it includes the last couple of friends I added as well as the friend who resurrected her account recently.

Still, I think it's an appropriate time to kick off a many-part series I like to call "Better Know a Facebook Friend." To begin, let's talk about sex, baby... and by sex, I actually mean gender. They're not synonymous, but hey, I'd like to see you try to come up with a catchy song lyric with the word "gender" in it.

BETTER KNOW A FACEBOOK FRIEND
Hey, ladies!

I've got slightly more special lady friends than I do guy friends, at least among those who are out in the open about their gender. In that group, it's a 49-51 split with the ladies having that slight edge.

But almost a quarter of my Facebook friends are either actively trying to keep that bit of info a secret from The Man, aka Mark Zuckerberg, or somehow managed to keep Friend Statistics from finding the gender they did list. So I went through and did my own count of those 235 folks.

Again, slightly more people of the female persuasion came up in this subset — 125 of 'em. Then there were 107 guys and three Facebook friends that I determined to be of indeterminate gender: Feral Cat, Sparky the Sun Devil and State Press.

When you add all that business up, you get a grand total of 481 dudes, 515 chicas and those three remaining outliers. That gives the ladies slightly more of the advantage, pushing their percentage of my peepdom up to 52 percent.

So just like Sundays at The State Press back when I was EIC, it's also ladies night on my Facebook friends list: No cover, and drink specials until 10. Oh, what a night!

0 comments | 7/08/2009 09:03:00 PM

Gotta love Facebook ads

Generally, I'm glad to see any ad on Facebook that isn't touting a gay dating Web site, but this one that popped up today just made me sad:

0 comments | 7/06/2009 03:46:00 PM

You'd think I had moved to Hollywood...

...with the number of movies I've seen since I moved to California.

Sam and I saw The Hangover during on my first Saturday night in Palm Springs before we hit up the infamous Spa Resort Casino.

Then, the next weekend, I saw The Proposal and had a major wardrobe malfunction.

But this past weekend, we really kicked things into high gear. On Sunday, I went to see Transformers with some guys from The Desert Sun, and on Monday, my mom and I saw the Best of the Fest comedy collection on the last day of the Palm Springs International ShortFest. That was nine, count 'em, nine short films of varying levels of hilarity.

0 comments | 7/01/2009 06:58:00 PM

©2001–2009 Brian Indrelunas