USA Today, Oct. 28:

“I think God is the reason we got this far,” Rockies reliever Matt Herges said. “We’ve done some amazing things this year (that are) hard to know. Something is going on. I think we may be getting favors from God.

USA Today, Oct. 29:

The Red Sox completed an efficient four-game sweep of the Colorado Rockies 4-3 on Sunday night at Coors Field, winning their second World Series in four seasons.

We hosted a house concert last Saturday featuring Willie Wisely, who’s just going by Wisely now. About 30 people came out, many of them new fans who had found him thanks to the advocacy of actress Jenna Fishcer (Pam Beasley from NBC’s “The Office”), a perfect number for our not-too-large living room.

It was a revelatory performance, reminding me of why I completely flipped for Willie when I first heard him in 1990. He’s an incredibly polished songwriter, but a wonderfully loosey-goosey performer with a great, innate sense of swing and improvisation. Sometimes the two sides seem to be at war — polish has won out over vibe on his last few recordings, and the bands he’s played with over the last 10 years have been stocked with too many noodledick-y LA session types who treat their fretboards like typewriters.

Solo, Willie was completely unfettered. He played moldy oldies like “Six Buckets of Kerosene,” as well as beautiful newer songs.

Click on the links to see him perform “Through Any Window” and “Drink Up.” I haven’t been able so far to post these videos directly here.

We had our soon-to-be-married friends Kim and Mike over for dinner last night. We had two things to play with — a new video camera I got at work, and the lobsters. Here are the results:

Lobsters!.mov

I spent last weekend in Myrtle Beach with golf-mad relatives: 36 holes a day, plus 18 on Sunday morning. That’s 90 holes in all. It was a hoot. Here’s a photo taken by my dad of a 10-foot gator basking in the sun, on the 5th hole or so of a great, swampy course called The Witch. Lots of creepy spanish moss, cypress knees, kudzu. We saw lots of egrets and hawks, a blue heron choking down a fish, and several baby gators too.
36 holes is a lot, even in a golf cart. I’d tend to flag toward the middle of each day and recover for the final nine. I played my usual mediocre game — a few bogies, more double-bogies and a few quadruple bogies every once in a while when I couldn’t seem to hit a solid shot. I made par on the final hole on Friday, a wicked par 4 with lots of water. The other players — my dad, the Hooper clan and a friend of theirs — would spot me a stroke or two on each hole so things could stay competitive.

Myrtle Beach is known as a golf mecca, and thus the entire city is one giant sausagefest. We were generally too wiped out each night to hit the town. But evidently there are a few entertainment options, judging by this exchange I overheard on Sunday morning at the Man O’War golf course:

Dude #1: You guys have fun with the women last night?

Dude #2: Oh yeah. Russian girls. Very cooperative.

Even in 2007, when porn stars write best-selling books, run for governor and appear on seemingly every reality TV show out there, some things evidently still cross the line. A story of mine hit the wire today looking at what constitutes obscenity these days — sexual conduct or speech not protected by the First Amendment. The default lawyer’s answer is, of course, “it depends” — but evidently it doesn’t really depend that much. In short, you’re probably OK if you stay away from bestiality and poop.
I got the idea for this piece after the DOJ announced this spring that it had charged Max Hardcore with obscenity. I’ve never seen a Max Hardcore film, but he’s pretty well known as someone whose films feature abusive sex, especially women choking and gagging as they’re giving him a blowjob. David Foster Wallace wrote a pretty withering profile in his latest collection of essays, “Consider the Lobster.”
That got me wondering, what are the boundaries these days? In the late 1980s, the DOJ targeted the porn industry as whole, but I found out now they’re only inclined to go after extreme stuff like Max Hardcore and leave the Playboys and Hustlers of the world alone.

It’s a much different world now, what with the Interwebs and pay TV and video-on-demand in hotel rooms. Porn is much more mainstream, for better or worse.

This is evidently a case of the tail wagging the dog — the FBI is only inclined to investigate cases that it knows it can win. Most agents aren’t so excited to go after porn in the first place when they’ve got terrorism, crime, corruption, mortgage fraud and any number of other issues to worry about.

Here’s the story:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush, twice elected with solid backing of conservative Christians, promised to curb adult pornography in the United States.

But the administration has had little effect on the $13 billion industry, anti-porn activists say, largely because the FBI has focused investigations on small operations producing extreme forms of smut instead of on the bigger companies.

Adult-obscenity investigations have taken a back seat to more pressing issues such as terrorism, even though former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales named obscenity as a top priority, two FBI officials said.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Kevin O’Reilly had the best taste in music of anybody in high school. While the cool kids were all listening to the Grateful Dead, Kevin was trying to turn me on to Husker Du, Metallica, Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. It took me about 20 years to come around.

Kevin is also a monster bass player — he and drummer Seth Warner were the best things going in any band we had in high school. Kevin has documented them all, complete with a “suck-o-meter” rating: He gives the Relapses a 4, the Baked Potatoes MK I a 6, the Baked Potatoes MK II a 5, and Mr. Soul a 4. I’m not sure if a higher suck rating is a good or bad thing, but I can’t really argue: “The Baked Potatoes was a band that sounded like teenagers. It had talent, a lot of attitude but it couldn’t quite pull it off.”

So what’s Kevin up to now? He’s playing in a folk group called the Dave Rowe Trio. They’re firmly in that well-scrubbed ’60s revival tradition spoofed in “A Mighty Wind.” A wee bit of Irish, some Canadian maritime fiddle tunes, a hearty helping of sea shanties, some sensitive modern songwriter-y musings, and lots of Pete Seeger-y exhortations to SING ALONG!

They came down from Maine a week ago to play a tiny town called Sykesville about an hour north.
They were quite good and very tight. The fiddle player was aces, the singer’s Maine-Yankee “humor” bits didn’t go on too long, and they sang very well together. Still, it was bizarre to see Kevin running between cables during the epic freak-out at the end of “What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?” But they had a room full of 60-year olds going nuts on a Thursday night in the Baltimore suburbs, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

Yesterday, I was in the same square mile as the world’s greatest sports superstar, Mr. Posh Spice!! And I got to see him take his shirt off!! Twice!!

The home team, DC United, enjoyed a sell-out crowd at RFK when Beckham and his LA Galaxy came to town. (Why do teams in second-tier sports leagues have to have such crappy names? Detroit Shock? New England Revolution?) Usually they don’t open the upper deck at RFK for DC United games, but they filled it on up last night. That’s at least 20,000 more tickets.

It quickly became apparent why: When a certain bench player stood up and began jogging along the sidelines, flashbulbs popped. When he bent over to stretch his legs, the ladies squealed. And when he took off his shirt just before entering the game at 71 minutes, they went WILD!

I don’t know much about soccer, but you could tell he was good. Every time he touched the ball he seemed to control it, rather than just letting it bounce away.
Unfortunately, the $50 million man didn’t make that much of a difference in the 20 minutes he was on the pitch. His team lost 1-0.

At the end of the match, he took off his shirt, slung it over his neck, and strolled over to the TV cameras for an interview. This guy knows what he’s doing.

He told reporters something along the lines of, “The level of play is not up to snuff here in the States.” How weird must it be to get a pay raise and a demotion?

A bachelor party has two objectives: 1. Do lots of stupid stuff. 2. Make sure the groom-to-be does not die or permanently injure himself.

Mission accomplished. Mike M. (names changed to avoid random Google discoveries), has caught himself the rockinest gal in Rockville and to celebrate his upcoming wedding we took a private plane to Iceland so we could pass out in the gutter. Mike returned in one piece, mostly.

The six-seat Cessna Citation III was rented by “Javier,” a college buddy of Mike’s who runs a hedge fund in New York. This sort of work involves drinking with sketchy government officials in places where malaria and ringworm are the rule, so Iceland is a real step up for him.

We left Dulles at 12:30 on Friday. We stopped in Labrador and Greenland to take on fuel and get rid of empty scotch bottles. Here’s Greenland. How ’bout them icebergs:

Somewhere along the line I lost $100 at poker. We hit the Rekyavik bars at 3 a.m local time, right when things are hopping.

They have two local drinks in Iceland: an aquavit-like schnapps nicknamed “Black Death,” and a syrupy concoction that tastes like Jaegermeister mixed with worchestershire sauce. This doesn’t deter the locals much. The clubs are packed until 5 a.m., when everybody spills out onto the street and breaks bottles. I ended up hanging out with two nice young guys named Dagmar and Robert, while the others went to the strip club (the dancers were all from Eastern Europe). We played guitars until about 6 a.m. Like the suspenders?

Mike A. didn’t make it home that night. Evidently he wandered off and spent the night in the gutter, though he insists he slept sitting up against a wall.

He wasn’t back by noon, so he missed out on the glacier snowmobiling. Here Mike M. displays his slalom technique:

It was about this time that we decided to form a band called Gay Black Sabbath. It will be neither gay nor sound like Black Sabbath. Do you think this would make a good album cover?

We also made plans to commercialize The Cuke, perhaps by marketing it in green cucumber-like bottles the size of Red Bull shots. I’m going to dummy up a kick-ass Powerpoint presentation and lay it on Javier’s millionaire investor pals. We’re also working on a proposal for an international bachelor party reality TV show — starring us, of course.

See, we weren’t just blowing money. We were inducing the necessary environment to allow our creativity to flow.

We returned to town around 9 p.m., to find Mike A. alive and happy with the choices he made in life. Dinner was at an extremely fancy and extremely expensive restaurant — we ordered the tasting menu, which featured items like “pistachio foam.” At this point our Nightlife Consultant arrived. He said he would take us to the finest clubs and steer us clear of the boring ones. What this meant was that we had a table at a packed nightclub full of beautiful women, many of whom sat at our table and drank our champagne. I felt like P. Diddy, but white.

Our new best friends tended to be married, but single for the evening. They didn’t like our band name very much. “But you are not gay or black,” said the one on the right, who was from Namibia. The one on the left (I think her name was Eelee, she had four kids) didn’t believe me when I told her Gay Black Sabbath was going to play the local football stadium on her 40th birthday. After we offered them enough champagne they decided to let us dance with them. The DJ was fond of Dolly Parton, remixed with a club beat.

Round about 5 a.m. the Nightlife Consultant disappeared with Eelee. Mike M. disappeared by himself. Mike A. and I spent an hour or so looking for him, to no avail.
In any event, the gutter was safer than our hotel. Some Long Island meat-heads had evidently had a run-in with some English meat-heads. One decided to further the cause of international diplomacy by screaming “fuck you!” at the receptionist and kicking the elevator a whole bunch. When I told him to get ahold of himself, he came storming out into the lobby, spittle flying: “Do you want a piece of me?” I don’t think my laughter was the response he was looking for.

Noon Sunday. Mike M. is in his room, covered in mysterious abrasions. But his iPod, iPhone and digital camera are intact.

On the way out of town we stopped at the Blue Lagoon, a famous geothermal spring. An incredible place to soak. Here is a picture stolen from the Interweb, I do not know this woman. Yes, the water really is that color.

Even after the rejuvenating algae and silica-laden dip we were all feeling a little peckish. I was glad we were not getting on a commercial flight, even though this meant that I would lose another $120 at poker. Here’s Greenland again:

In Conclusion: Iceland is an incredible place, but don’t spend more than a weekend there unless you want to come down with bankruptcy and cirrhosis. We plan to return when the statute of limitations expires. Anybody out there know how to translate Icelandic legal documents?

Meg and I are just back from Hawaii. Snorkeling with sea turtles, learning to surf, hiking across incredible lush jungle mountains, etc. But the highlight for me was hanging out with this guy:

That’s right, George Lynch!! The nimble-fingered virtuoso from ’80s hair-metal standard-bearers Dokken!! (I can’t figure out how to do an umlaut on this keyboard.)

Meg and I signed up for a kayak trip along the Napali coast, and he happened to be along as well, celebrating a belated honeymoon with wife #4, a very nice mortgage broker named Danica. He just seemed like a cool aging rocker type until he casually mentioned at the end of the day that he played “a little guitar” and used to stop over in Hawaii on his way to gigs in Asia.

“What band did you play with?” I asked him.

“Dokken,” he answered.

“Dude!! You’re George Lynch!!” I shouted.  I had just been talking with one of the tour guides about the Oxford Plains Speedway in Maine, and here was a guy who had played there on the Monsters of Rock tour in 1988.
Dokken was a second-tier act during the great Hair Metal Explosion of the 1980s, but they still sold millions of records and toured the world. Grunge killed them off, but George kept playing with his own band and now makes a solid living as a product endorser/developer.

As a chopsmeister, he’s still revered by wannabe shredders everywhere, and has his name stamped on all sorts of gear: Randall Amplifiers, ESP guitars, Yamaha acoustic guitars, stompboxes, even his own type of Dean Markley guitar strings (they have a higher nickel content, and are made in a nonunion shop so they can be wound slower and with more care).

I was super-excited to meet him, but didn’t want to come off like a spaz. Fortunately, he was excited to find out that I was a reporter with “The Rooters,” and wanted to share his views on marijuana legalization, Eastern religions, and those crooks in Washington.

We went out to dinner at a fairly horrible hippie joint and swapped stories. Here’s a favorite:

He had a roadie named “Cuddles,” who was responsible for running George’s pedalboard during gigs. But Cuddles would screw up, so George would have to come over to the side of the stage and step on the pedals himself, crunching Cuddles’ fingers in the process. Cuddles would then cry, which earned him the nickname.

Another tidbit about Cuddles: he used to wear two pair of pants all the time. Why’s that? Well, a previous roadie had been butt-raped after a gig in Tijuana, and Cuddles didn’t want that to happen to him.

How about that?!?!?!?
Evidently Digitech is working with George on a stompbox that will digitally model his tone. I can’t wait to get one.

You might have heard about Roy Pearson, the DC judge who’s suing his dry cleaners for $54 million because they lost his pants. This is why the District of Columbia is a wonderful place to be a reporter, if not a taxpayer. I’ve had the glorious good luck of covering this story. I think my story from Wednesday captures the vibe pretty well:
Pearson’s lawsuit has drawn international ridicule. It also drew plenty of chuckles from spectators who crowded into the stuffy municipal courtroom.

Even (DC Judge) Bartnoff had a hard time keeping a straight face as Pearson, wearing a gray pinstripe suit and a stained lavender tie, wielded a 6-inch-thick (15-cm-thick) binder of laws and court decisions that he said bolstered his case.

That’s him in the middle, with the stained lavender tie. (Photo courtesy of/swiped from AP.) He’s a meticulous guy — he told the court that he hasn’t worn cuffed pants since the 1970s, and he said he learned the “hard way” that you shouldn’t take in your suit pants and jacket separately to be dry cleaned because they would turn different colors.

So what’s up with the stained tie? Has every dry cleaner refused to handle his business, in a gesture of solidarity?

Inquiring minds want to know. He left by a side entrance. I chased him into an underground parking garage (he doesn’t own a car) asking about the tie. He wouldn’t answer. That older guy to the right in the photo was very agressive, asking questions like “How can you sleep at night? Do you know you’re an international laughingstock?” as Pearson wandered deeper into the depths of the parking ramp.

Twice the older guy (I was told he’s a reporter for Inside Edition) collided with Pearson’s tote box, spilling legal documents everywhere. The second time Pearson, who had been silent up to this point, said: “I told you not to walk in front of me.”

“What are you going to do, sue me?” the Inside Edition guy retorted.

At that point I figured it was time to leave before things got really ugly. This case has been a tragicomedy from the start, and at this point we had literally driven the joke into the ground.