DOWN WITH PANTS!

Saw Superman Returns last night. Like Kevin and Karl said, Freakin' Awesome!

But ever since then, I have been whistling the Superman theme song, or at least parts of it. Half way through I get confused and combine it with the Star Wars theme music and then I can't figure out which is which. It is seriously starting to drive me crazy.

Both songs are in my head and I can't get them out. And to top it off, I am going to spend 30 hours on a train by myself starting tomorrow, so there is a good chance that I will be whistling those two songs the entire time. I thought the train was supposed to be relaxing.

Damn you John Williams.

I loathe Grease. That movie drives me crazy. In fact, I went so far as to quit choir in high school (yes, I was a choir geek) because the word was that we were going to do a Grease medley compete with costumes and choreography. I wasn't about to do that.

But then I saw Nickelodeon's High School Musical a couple of weeks ago, a movie that some people have been calling this generation's Grease. After seeing this squeaky clean, wretched mess featuring some of the least memorable music in musical history, I suddenly gained some respect for Grease. It made me rethink my whole position, maybe it wasn't so bad after all. Maybe it does have some redeeming qualities. It definitely is better than this pile of stinking poo.

So, when we were flipping through the channels tonight and we saw John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John dancing around, I decided it was worth another watch. While I will admit that the songs are memorable and, without a doubt, it is a much better film, I still loathe Grease with all of my being. The whole thing makes me want to wretch.

Which makes me hate High School Musical even more. How dare it make me question my longtime, devoted hatred of all things Grease. Just who do they think they are?

Wow! We are officially on the bandwagon. You can count us in. Veronica Mars is the best show on television and we have become faithfully devoted fans.

Death? and I just wrapped up watching the first season and boy did it ever end good. What a season finale! I didn't see any of that coming. The last two episodes were mind blowers. Twist after turn after twist, all ridiculously well written and foreshadowed and completely believable. That is one of the best things about Veronica Mars, none of it feels forced and you don't sit there scratching your head at some joke of a plot twist because everything is foreshadowed throughout the season, we just didn't realize it at the time.

It's as if the brain dead monkeys that usually write network television were replaced by actual writers, what a concept. And they have adeptly created a world of characters that are complex and fascinating. Including Veronica, who, despite being the lead character and hero, is not infallible. In fact, she causes so many of the problems that is easy to love and be frustrated by her at the same time. Your root for her, but also cringe at the messes that she makes.

Add these complex characters with the well written mystery of a plot, a healthy amount of snarkiness, a killer cast of supporting actors and of course, the incomparable Kristin Bell in all of her glory, and you have, bar none, the best show on TV.

We are psyched for August 22nd when season two is released on DVD. Since we are very late to the game having just watched season one, I have been avoiding any websites or UPN or anything that might leak some information to me about what might go down. I want the anticipation to be at a fever pitch when we are finally able to watch it.

Over the weekend, we were in a bar in Santa Barbara and they had about five of their televisions tuned to the Angels game on UPN. When the game ended, Veronica Mars came on the screen and I nearly flipped out. I had to pull down my cap and divert my eyes just to make sure I didn't see anything I didn't want to know. It was really, really hard not to watch. Luckily the bartender changed the station within a few minutes and nothing was ruined, but still, it was a close call.

Even finding a picture to put on this post was an adventure. I was scared to death that some screencap would ruin it all for me. I can't wait for season two to be released so I can end this charade and really get down to fandom reading the message boards and fansites and whatnot. Only two months to go. I suggest you jump on the bandwagon with me if you haven't already. Go out and rent season one now!

I'm 6 foot 4, 290 some pounds. When I build up a head of steam, I'm a force to be reckoned with. A big guy like me doesn't have much in the way of agility or outstanding body control. What I have is the ability to run right through things or people without noticing too much. There aren't too many manly men who are willing to get in front of me and put their body in harms way. It's a dangerous thing to do, and the few people that have done it have had to pay the price.

However, during our soccer game tonight, I was on the far sideline and headed up field on a turnover. A perfect pass came my way and I, for almost the first time in my life, controlled the ball and took off on a run toward the goal. I felt like I was in the clear so while I was running at top speed I took a look up to see if anyone had broke towards the goal or if there was anybody to pass to.

All of sudden, out of nowhere, I was hit. All I felt was a head hit my chest and a lump crumble at my feet. Being as tall as I am and looking down field surveying my options, I looked right over the SCUD missile that was coming straight at me. A 5 foot 5, 110 pound, speedy blonde girl with absolutely no fear.

Feeling the contact, I weighed my options. Do I completely plow her over and keep going and risk hurting her and possibly get into a fight with one of her teammates, or do I pull off, give a little bit of a World Cup flop and try to draw the foul?

In that split second, I decided to pull off, it being co-ed rec soccer and all, and with help from her crumpled body underneath me, I took a flop (although, chances were that I was going down either way). Unfortunately, unlike a little bitch Italian (did you see the game today?), I didn't sell the flop at all. I popped back up and went after the ball, which by this time was too far away, so I didn't even get the call.

To top it off, little miss big balls jumped right back up with no ill effects. Not even a scratch. Just a "good tackle" from her teammates, a forced turnover on me, and the satisfaction of taking down a speeding freight train and living to tell the tale. My hat goes off to her.

Arguably the best scene in the movie, En Español...

"Niños de ocho años, dude."

P.S...I finally figured out how to type Spanish characters on my English keyboard. So now, we can finally take this bitch bilingual...

¡ABAJO CON PANTALONES!

The upside down exclamation point makes all the difference.

UPDATE: Springsteen just rocked it on Conan. Wow! Incredible! The Boss still has it.

I always knew that my friend in college, Gilbert (the son of the Ghananian ambassador to China), would get the last laugh. Damn you Gilbert!

It's 2:00 AM and we just returned from a Coronet Theatre doubleheader in Los Angeles in which we saw...

1. tick...tick...BOOM! - An autobiographical musical by Jonathan Larson, who also wrote Rent. The music is great, the performers were awesome, the story is simple but very interesting. It was one of the best musicals I have ever seen. I highly recommend it if you are in the LA area. Tickets are a bit pricey at nearly $50 but you can get $20 tickets in the front row by calling the box office when they open.

One quick note, has anybody ever sat next to someone and been able to feel the air from their nose on your arm? Every time the girl next to me laughed, I got a full blast of wind. It wasn't that bad, it didn't bother me that much, but it was just so weird, so personal.

2. Eddie Izzard - Testing out some new material in preparation for a tour, or at least that is what I assume, Eddie is doing a handful of shows at the Coronet for the next couple of weeks. Eddie was ridiculously funny and because he was in preview mode, he ad-libbed a ton and made stuff up that was probably funnier than his scripted material.

Plus, we sat mere feet from him in the second row because we were mistakenly given our tickets early by the poor girl working the early show will-call booth. She wasn't supposed to, but because she did, we got to skip the line and sit right up front. Awesome!

Again if you are in the LA area, I highly recommend checking Eddie out. The only problem is that tickets sell out almost instantly and if you are lucky enough to get tickets, the show doesn't start until 11:00 PM because of tick...tick...BOOM! No matter, you will still have a great time. We sure as hell did.

Well, it's only four hours until the soccer match. Time to hit the hay. I'm not normally much of a patriot (I hate how cocky we are when it comes to international sports), but I am excited for this game. USA! USA! USA!

Occasionally, I like to give thanks to all of the great people associated with Down With Pants! and all that they do to keep the dream alive. So here we go....

Thank you to everybody (Dave in particular, Karl as well, I'm sure there are others too) who have raved about Veronica Mars. What an incredible show. We finally were sucked in last week, better late than never. If you aren't watching it, do yourself a favor, go rent it and get hypnotized by Kristin Bell and all of her Neptune classmates.

Thank you to RW for just mentioning Bill Veeck in a post today. I think I will re-read Veeck As In Wreck and other Veeck related texts that I own. Of course, then I'll get nostalgic for working in sports again and question my current employment. Oh well, it's worth the risk.

Thank you to The Roxy on Sunset - for nothing! $35 for tickets, $8.50 in fees and, on top of that, we have to buy two drink tickets per person for $15 to see a less than stellar performance of Hedwig and the Angry Inch? What a joke. Never again.

Thank you to Scott-O-Rama for renting my blog. I'd also like to thank him for turning me onto Conservatives For American Values and I would like to thank them for spreading the good word of conservatism and crushing liberalism. Well done!

Thank you to MC for liking my "Your Weekend Lebowski Fix". Although, I have thought about changing it to "Your Weekend Harold and Kumar Fix", simply because there is much less H&K content out there. But we'll go with Lebowski at least for a while.

Thank you to Jason Jones and the Daily Show for making me laugh about as hard as I have laughed in years. Click here to watch this hilariously ridiculous story.

Thank you to Stephen Colbert for his "Better Know A District" segment on Thursday night. In this clip, Colbert exposes Congressman Lynn Westmoreland to be a fraud. In it, he can't name more than three of the ten commandments. Off the top of my head that night, I named eight and I'm not religious. This guy is a retard.

Thank you to the US Soccer Team for not completely choking, yet.

Thank you to the fine folks over at I Talk Too Much for not tearing me a new one, yet.

Thank you to Cute Overload for this puppy. Seriously, how cute is he?

Thank you to former M*A*S*H star Mike Farrell, who I am pretty sure we saw at dinner last night.

Thank you to everybody who has added me to be their friend on MySpace. If you haven't yet, what are you waiting for? It is so addictive, I am ashamed.

Finally, thank you to everybody, all of you, who put up with me and my randomness, my lack of focus, my poor grammar and all of my flaws and help me continue to enjoy writing Down With Pants! I'm very surprised to have lasted this long and have any readers at all. I very much love doing this and connecting with people from all walks of life on here and I doubt I will stop anytime soon. A lot of people knock blogs and bloggers, but it is one of the best things to ever happen to me, mainly because of all of you, and what's wrong with that? Thanks again and keep up the good work!

What is even funnier than The Big Lebowski? The Big Lebowski edited for content on Comedy Central. I just found this clip on YouTube...

I think from now on I will wrap up the week with one Lebowski related item, either a clip or some artwork or whatever. Just some kind of Lebowski to get everybody going over the weekend. It's bound to make you happy!

"Do you see what happens, Larry? Do you see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?"

Almost every single day I see a guy riding his bicycle, smoking on a cigarette. That is not a good look and it seems very counter-productive.

There is one Mexican gangsta looking guy I see two or three times a week riding his beach cruiser. I've seen a NASCAR kind of guy on a mountain bike a couple of times with his flannel and his mustache flapping in the wind. I've seen a total douchebag dude with no shirt, shorts and flip-flops riding a little tiny BMX. There is another 300 pound guy I see occasionally riding a 20 year-old ten speed that looks like it is going to buckle under the weight. And there are more. Many, many more.

I have found one common denominator. Mustaches. Virtually every guy I have seen smoking and riding his bike has had a mustache. I don't know what to make of that, other than all of these guys seem like trash. Trash smoke, trash have mustaches, and trash are forced to ride their bikes occasionally if the car is up on blocks in the driveway.

I have lived many different places, all trashy in their own way. But I have never seen this many people smoking while riding their bikes. It's an epidemic down here that constantly amazes me. I hope to start documenting this phenomenon, I've got my camera ready.

P.S...Go visit my new renter, Scott-O-Rama. Good stuff.

Tell me if you think this was the wrong thing for me to say...

Death?: "I haven't got juror duty since we've been here."
Me: "Yeah...So?"
Death?: "Well, a lot of people at work have had jury duty this year."
Me: "You haven't had the clap yet either, but, like jury duty, it's only a matter of time."

Yeah, after further consideration, it probably was.

Anyway, I feel like doing this meme tonight. I did it a while ago but I feel like doing it again just for the hell of it. So here are the first 20 songs that come up when I push shuffle on my iPod.

1. Publish My Love - Rogue Wave
2. Big Dipper - Built To Spill
3. Smile No More - Gas Huffer
4. Black Friday Rule - Flogging Molly
5. Older - They Might Be Giants
6. Soul Sucking Jerk - Beck
7. Blue Orchid - White Stripes
8. Can I Kick It? - A Tribe Called Quest
9. Regrets - Ben Folds Five
10. Keep On Keepin' On - Curtis Mayfield
11. Folsom Prison Blues - Johnny Cash
12. They Reminisce Over You - Pete Rock and CL Smooth
13. Just - Radiohead
14. I Am Somebody - Jurassic 5
15. She Lives In My Lap - Outkast
16. I'm Not Down - The Clash
17. Stuart - Dead Milkmen
18. Virginia Reel Around The Fountain - Halo Benders
19. I'm Free Now - Morphine
20. Marijuana - Reverend Horton Heat

Geez, I really am an aging hipster.

First of all, go visit my renter, The Watercooler. It's a great blog worthy of a quick click. Also, I have put the suggestion box on hold just for a few days, I will get to the great suggestions later.

I voted today. It was a Democratic primary but there were also a few statewide propositions to vote on. One of them was Prop 82, a proposition that would increase income tax on individuals that make over $400,000 a year to fund preschool for everybody.

There are a few ins and outs that make this proposition a little complicated but I decided to vote "Yes" on it for one reason and one reason only. It taxes the rich. I'm in favor of any tax increase on the rich, especially down here in California where the rich are even more deplorable.

Seriously, they could have told me that they were going to burn the money and I still would've voted "Yes". I'm into anything that pisses off the wealthy in this state.

Death? and I spent the weekend up on the Central California coast camping and generally enjoying the laid back atmosphere and beautiful scenery of the area. That general San Luis Obispo, Morro Bay, Cambria area really agrees with what I like. The beach, the mountains, great food, Division I college sports and community baseball. I don't ask for much more.

On Saturday we decided to take in a baseball game between the East LA Dodgers and the SLO Blues, a collegiate wood-bat baseball team, at beautiful San Luis Obispo Stadium (look for more about the game and the team tomorrow on The Sports Logo Pundit). We were sitting on the grass berm behind the seating bowl enjoying the game and the great crowd when in walked two drunk girls with two guys. The PA announcer made a point of noting the entrance of one of the girls who whooped it up and drew attention to herself. But what I noticed wasn't her, but the two guys. They looked oddly familiar, but I couldn't quite put my finger on who they were and why I would know both of them.

Slowly it came to me. The one guy was probably Beer Breath Jeff, and the other must be Jeremy, fellow KGRG DJ's in my formative Green River CC days. But I wasn't completely sure. Do I really want to go up and ask and have it not be them? How awkward would that be? But how could I not take this opportunity to run into someone I know in that random of a place? It was a difficult decision that toyed with me for the next three innings.

Thankfully, the drunk girl intervened by yelling their names at the top of her lungs. The names Jeff and Jeremy were heard by half the stadium. So with confirmation in hand, I made my move and sure as shit, it was them. They just moved to SLO in February to take over as the morning show hosts on 93.3 FM KZOZ after quite a few years working in Pullman, Washington.

I was blown away, how crazy is it to see someone you know that far away from where you knew them in such a random way? How many things in this universe must come together to make your paths criss-cross at any one time? Just think about the dynamic in the stadium itself. I could easily have sat on the other side of the stadium, in fact, that is where I originally wanted to sit. But Death? was cold in the shade so we moved to the sunny side right behind where Jeff and Jeremy and the ladies were destined to sit.

And the drunk girl. If she wouldn't have been yelling and carrying on and wearing a dress that was just about to fall off that we kept joking about (the only thing keeping that dress on was the collective will of all the men in the stadium), I probably wouldn't have noticed them. Life sure is strange sometimes.

By the way, the drunk girl is the station's promotions director. How appropriate is that? That girl should probably get a raise and a cab ride home.

I was disappointed to find that I had no takers on "I'll Write You A Letter" week. Apparently everybody is pretty happy with people in this world. That's fine. No big deal. But now I have nothing to write about, and I was planning on having a whole week where I didn't have to think about what to write.

So to remedy that I think I will just leave it open to suggestions. I did this a couple of months ago and it was really successful. A lot of great suggestions and fun topics to write about. So if you have a topic you would like me to write about this week, anything from thermonuclear war to boogers, please leave me a comment or email me at downwithpants@gmail.com and my lazy brain will get to work this evening. Thanks in advance!

We are going camping this weekend up on the Central Coast. Other than the numerous warnings about rattlesnakes, ticks and scorpions that I have read in materials relating to the park that we are staying, I am really looking forward this weekend. Ticks are creepy.

Anyway, when I return on Sunday night I expect to find a long list of people who I need to write a letter. Remember, if there is someone who is pissing you off but you need a third party to let them know, just leave me a comment or email me at downwithpants@gmail.com with the backstory and I will personally write you a letter telling them to, more or less, piss off. It can be anyone. Someone you know or someone public, I don't care, I'll tell anybody to shove it for you. A quick look at the suggestion scoreboard shows us a big goose egg, so get those suggestions in now.

Also, go visit my new renter, The Watercooler. It's a damn fine read that will probably be added to the old blogroll after his tenancy. It seems like I always accept a renter right after they finish up renting from Karl at Secondhand Tryptophan. I want to trump his numbers so get to clicking. What? Rent My Blog isn't a competition?