Shyzer.com

The next time Microsoft decides to film another round of these commercials, they need to call me up.

There’s not many times my breath has truly been stolen away from me. We’re talking maybe five times in my entire life and that one time I fell from the monkey bars as a kid and had the wind knocked out of me doesn’t count. But this past week, when I strolled up to the Coliseum in Rome, Italy added a tick mark to the tally.

United recently added a direct route from D.C. to Rome and after a little persuasion on my part, my mom picked up a trip to work the flight and we headed over…for a day. It’s funny when I tell people this, because no matter how many times I explain it to them, they still can’t seem to grasp that I fly all around the world for a grand total of one day, if even that. You almost spend more time on the plane (17 hours round trip to Rome) than you do at the destination (a hair over 27 hours). But trust me, there’s no better way to see a city then to simply hit the ground running full speed for just a short period of time.

We landed around 8:30AM local time and the first thing that grabbed my attention was how easy it was to clear customs. Two jumbo jets had landed at the same time and yet all of us were through customs in about 15 minutes, whereas had we all been in Sydney, it would have taken closer to an hour and a half. The “inspection” involved A) Asking if we had anything to declare and then B) Looking at our passport. Not scanning it. Not making sure it was even a real passport. All I had to do was walk past the agent and flash him my passport. He probably saw it for a grand total of one second.

I loved it.

It was also my first inclination that maybe this old Europe and Italians video might contain more truth than I first suspected.

I decided to take the train into the city on my own since I love trying to navigate my way around new places. If you thought most guys hate asking for directions, then you’ll really feel sorry for my future wife. I find it funny that people get so nervous when they don’t know where to go or think they’re lost. With me, it’s the exact opposite. I know in the end I’ll wind up in the right place and once I finally get there, there’s no other feeling of accomplishment quite like it. So why not just hunker down and figure it out for your damn self?

On the ride into the city, I sat in a room with six other people. The man across from me was clearly Italian, as were most of the other folks riding with us. However, when it came time for him to ask if he had gotten on the right train, he glanced at everybody in a clear effort to see who might best look like a local before settling on me and blurting a long string of sounds I can only guess to be Italian or noise dolphins use to communicate. I’m still not sure which it was.

I really don’t get it. In Argentina, cab drivers would eye my mom and Jeff before looking at me and asking in Spanish how I got stuck with the Americans. The same thing happened in Australia, Germany, and basically everywhere else I’ve ever been. Locals will just start talking to me, asking for directions or if I know the time or whatever and then they stare at me in amazement when I respond with, “Uhhh…yeah, I got no idea what you just said, pal.” And again, here I was in Italy, being mistaken for a local, all the while having no idea what exactly made me look like I fit in more than any of the other yahoos around me. It’s a phenomenon I’ve yet to figure out, albeit one I’m not too keen on trying to correct. Let’s just say it comes in handy from time to time.

After making my way to the hotel, hooking up with my mom, and sneaking into the hotel room to drop off my bags (Italian law requires all hotel guests to drop off their passport at the front desk and pay a fee to stay there…yeah, like that was actually gonna happen), it was close to 10:00. We grabbed our cameras, a few bottles of water, and we were off. We stopped at a little cafe for some Iced Coffee, which I think I enjoyed way more than my mom did. Apparently ice cubes and the strongest pure coffee you’ve ever let flow past your lips is an acquired taste I somehow ended up with. She, however, made a great call by buying two tickets for a tour bus company where they have 12 stops or so throughout the city and run umpteen buses, so that you can basically get off at any stop, stay for as long as you want, and then hop on the next one that passes through.

Of course, when my mom left it up to me to pick our first destination, it took all of 3 nanoseconds for me to say “The Coliseum.”

There aren’t many items in the world that are of “historical” significance that I actually give a rat’s ass about. I mean, seeing the Declaration of Independence was cool and all, but my initial thought upon setting eyes on it wasn’t about how old or important the document was, but of how the room smelled. To me, something that’s only a few hundred years old isn’t that big of a deal. There are trees out there older than that and you don’t see me gawking at them.

But the Coliseum…man. I kinda just stared at it for a while before finally moving to head inside. To say it’s old and has withstood the test of time is like saying I’m devilishly handsome. It’s just an understood given that doesn’t even need to be talked about.

Once inside, I took what amounted to forty-eight million photos. I was rattling off the story behind everything I saw to my mom (hey, that’s the first time my History degree’s come in handy!) before I think I finally talked even her ears off. I can’t even put into words what it felt like to stand in the middle of a structure that’s been around longer than the legacy of Christ. You can have your Eiffle Tower, your Statue of Liberty, and your Taj Mahal. I’ll take my Pyramids of Giza, my Tombs of Petra, my Acropolis. And my Coliseum, no doubt.

We tried to squeeze in the Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City, but realized we weren’t gonna have much time to see the castle I wanted to check out next if we stayed there too long. Some people might scoff at the thought of skipping over the Vatican for a castle. But giant, old fortresses beat churches in my book any day of the week. No surprise there, really.

I will say this though. The inside of the Basilica itself was like one giant color buffet. You could spend three weeks inside of there and I still don’t think your eyes would have adjusted to the vividness of it all. Everything - the walls, the floor, the ceiling, everything looked like a million dollars. You’d glance down at the floor and not help but wonder how much the one small foot of black marble you were standing on cost. It was quite an experience to say the least.

Anyway, after catching one of the last buses to the castle, we ended up taking our time hiking all the way to the top (for which my mom complained after every 10th set of stairs we took :)) while taking in all the art that’s littered throughout the building. Massive portraits painted by Rafael himself adorn the walls as if they were nothing more than a window shade. It was almost as if there was so much history in the place, they didn’t know what to do with it all. After a while though, we finally reaching the peak of the fortress and could see over the entire city.

I’ve always had a thing both for skyline views and castles. I love looking out over a city sprawl just to try and swallow how massive the area actually is and I love walking through old castles trying to recreate in my head what it must have been like for soldiers way back when. But to combine the two…well, I can’t say I’ve ever done that before. Though trying to get a photo of us up there was a bit hard, what with my mom trying to communicate in English and probably offensive sign language what we wanted and me trying to explain that we’re actually mother and son, not boyfriend and girlfriend. After a few photographed thumbs and one what I believe to be an zoomed in show of my nose, we got a pretty good picture.

Not long after that, we were back on a bus headed for our hotel. It was actually just fun riding around on the open aired bus, as the weather could not have been any more gorgeous. We’re talking sunny, 70 degrees, light breeze here. In fact, my mom’s been back since and happily reported that on her second trip, her and a bunch of other flight attendants just bought a few bottles of wine, crackers, and cheese and then rode around on a single bus all day long. You get to see some pretty funny things while riding around, like businessmen in suits flying past you on what looks like a hyped up Moped. Or how there are so many fountains and statues around the city, you stop noticing them after only a few minutes. Or even how there might be two painted lanes on the road, six actual lanes of cars, and yet not a single wreck let alone fender bender in sight. I tell ya, if you were to airdrop a bunch of Americans and their SUVs in the middle of Rome, they’d survive for a maximum of 14 minutes.

Before long, we were standing outside the hotel and since our last decent meal had been two giant Starbucks coffees back stateside, we figured it was time to eat. Almost three hours, two real pizzas, and a few dozen Peronas (they taste even better than their similar sounding, Mexican counterpart) later, we were back in the hotel ready for bed. Well, actually I was ready for bed, but my mom was keen on watching Italian Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, which apparently takes a break after every three or four questions so that, and I shit you not, the host can appear in an infomercial that I suspect is used to help raise the prize money.

See? These are the kind of things you need to travel for.

One night’s sleep and a Business class seat later, I was back in Virginia teaching a bunch of 3rd graders the differences between topsoil and clay. Hell, had I not made this post, you and even the people I work with would have never even known I’d gone.

I wouldn’t travel any other way.

He told him he wasn’t gonna slide!

I didn’t realize Willie Mays Hays actually existed in real life. I also didn’t realize that high school baseball was so pathetic that they’d call this kid out over breaking some asinine rule about momentarily breaking free of the Earth’s gravitational pull or something.

And with that, today is King Felix day. If you own mlb.tv or Extra Innings on Direct TV, tune in to Seattle’s game tonight and prepare to be impressed.

For anybody who has never made an Earth Sandwich, been a member of the League of Awesomeness, or had a fixation with small duckies, you have until March 17th to check out The Show with Ze Frank.

You might have seen some of his other work without even knowing it (much can be found on his main site), but for the past 11~ months, Frank has been writing, editing, and staring in his own three to five minute videos which he creates and uploads every weekday. Each episode is tight, fast paced, up close, and personal as he covers anything that tickles his fancy at the moment - news, politics, culture, sports, whatever. But he does so in a Jon Stewart/The Daily Show-esque manner with a dash of raunchiness, a heaping of absurdity and cooked at the speed of a TV lawyer announcing all rules and regulations to a contest.

Every week he seems to come up with a new idea or theme and from there, he lets his audience run with it and shape it into it’s future form. This isn’t some giant community we’re talking about here, but instead a relatively close (and fairly large) group of fans with similar viewpoints and even more similar absurd thinking. Besides the aforementioned recurring themes in the first paragraph, one great example is where a college student from his forums had nothing to do over Christmas holidays, so long story short he became a human baton, driven cross country from New England to California by follow Sports Racers (translation: fans of Frank’s show) before returning all the way home the via the exact same method.

It might sound stupid, but trust me, after you watch a few episodes, you realize Frank is not only capable, but is fully pulling it off.

If you happen to live anywhere other than New York City or near any major media outlets, you might not have heard to story of Wesley Autrey. Earlier this week, a normal weekday morning in a NY subway station suddenly transformed into a scene rarely spotted outside of movies or mythical lores. Cameron Hollopeter, a student and total stranger to Autrey, began having a seizure before falling down onto the subway tracks, where a train quickly raced towards him with the full intention of occupying the same space as his flailing body. What happened next is something many say they would do, but few ever follow through with. Autrey, sizing up the situation, knew Hollopeter’s only chance at survival was to lie between the two rails, so he jumped down, pinned the young man beneath him, and comfortably lied as a NY city subway train screeched to a halt a full two inches above his head.

Autrey might not seem like your everyday hero. He certainly isn’t somebody who gives good interviews, as you can see for yourself in the David Letterman clip below, but that’s what makes his actions even better. This wasn’t a man out looking for fame and glory. He had no grand visions of accolades or rewards dancing through his mind that morning. He simply saw a man in trouble, knew he was the only person who could help, and acted.

Of course, since doing so, he’s not only been giving the highest award a citizen can earn from the city, but has received a free trip to Disney World, a $10,000 check from Donald Trump, a free lifetime subscription to Playboy (since his favorite Playboy hat was destroyed by the train), and a promise by the New York Film Academy (where Hollopeter is a student) of scholarships for his daughters when they’re older, among many other rewards. Let’s just hope he doesn’t end up like some of the other national hero sensations in recent memory.

The last thing we need to do is find yet another reason to discourage the average citizen from helping those in need.

There are only a small handful of songs that upon hearing them for the first time, evoked a response in me of, “Damn, I wish I had written that song.”

This is one such song.

I’m not sure why the audio and video get out of sync in that version, but it’s not like you need to watch him play in order to listen to the music. This second version is a bit longer and takes a while to get into, but it’s well worth it.

John Butler Trio - Ocean

My “bedroom” is actually just an extension of the play room down in the basement. The laundry area is also connected to my room and being a family that adheres to a strict 15-outfit a day per person policy, my mom and I spend a fair bit of our waking moments in there sorting through clothes and getting out skid marks in underwear. One of the other fine benefits of living downstairs is the fact that I get to enjoy the sounds from above in their full glory. When somebody walks through the kitchen, I am treated to loud thumping. When somebody runs through the kitchen, I hear elephants wrestling. When two humans are actually wrestling in the kitchen (it happens in this household), I hear the full wrath of God coming down upon me.

Last night, I was performing one of my hourly rituals of transferring laundry from the washer to the dryer. This lucky batch included bed sheets, socks, and a rug Koral had peed on, among other things. Juls was watching television in the next room and Clay was playing on the computer, so the only person upstairs was Colton, who was supposed to be in bed falling asleep. It was right around the point where I was pulling out the rug when I froze dead in my tracks and my heart stopped. The entire house, not just the laundry room, shook with a violent force and my chest literally vibrated for a second. The deep boom that filled the air lingered in my ears for what seemed like minutes and before my brain even had time to compute what was happening, my legs were in Emergency Mode and carrying my body upstairs.

I’ve never moved as quickly in my life as I did during those few seconds.

I was upstairs and in Colton’s room before Clay or Juls were even out of their seats. The rumble was so heavy, so consuming, that I knew it wasn’t just Colton tripping and falling down. Something else far more massive had succumbed to the force of gravity with him and my mind was racing with visions of him trapped under a bulking set of chester drawers or a massive armoire or even a collapsed roof.

You can imagine my surprise when I burst into his room and was greeted by Colton, sitting up in bed with a giant grin spread across his face, and telling my, “WHOA! That was a big explosion! It woke me up!” Clay and Juls spilled into the room moments later and we all stood there for a second looking around before my mind finally caught up with the situation again. I barked out a few orders to the kids and went to look around the rest of the house. Something, somewhere, had to be wrong in the house. The noise had sounded as if it came from upstairs, as if the entire roof was trying it’s hardest to come crashing down upon us.

And yet not a thing was amiss. None of the large object in the house had fallen to create the shudder. A few small things here and there had been knocked over due to the shock, but for the most part, everything was fine. Having made sure the kids were safe and the house wasn’t falling apart on my watch - because I’ll be damned if I’m blamed for it! - I decided to venture outside and see if maybe a car had rammed the house or something. As I stepped outside, I noticed I wasn’t the only one out searching for answers and finally I realized it wasn’t just confined to our house. Just about every single person in the neighborhood was outside, trying to figure out what had just disturbed them as well. We all stood around with a queer look on our face for a while, trying to guess what had happened. Someone thought a plane might have crashed, but I ruled that out because with most plane crashes come fires that light up the nearby night sky. Others thought maybe there had been some explosion at one of the nearby factories, but again, I figured we’d at least see a fire if that had happened. My money was on a gas explosion somewhere and literally right as the words tumbled out of my mouth, Clay got off the phone with his friend and burst with the news.

Clay: “Ryan, a house blew up down by Matt’s! It just….exploded!”
Ryan: “By Matt’s? That’s only two hundred yards away! How come we don’t see a fire?”

Around this time an entire brigade of rescue vehicles came screaming down the road and swerving around the corner. In fact, I had enough time to go get Colton out of bed and over to the window to watch them since the stream of sirens and flashing lights was almost endless. Before long, the vultures started coming in full force and by vultures I mean curious people who are only getting in the fucking way and who should have just stayed home. I can understand slowing down to look at an insane car wreck, but people who go out of their ways just to drive by the car wreck get on my nerves to no end. A cop finally pulled up alongside our house and started turning people around. Clay, Juls, and I sat on the steps listening to what he was telling people and we learned that there had been a gas leak in a nearby house for what must have been house. It built up in the garage and when the father went outside to start up his car, a spark from the engine ignited the entire place. He managed to crawl out of his car and into the street, where he was airlifted to a nearby hospital and luckily, nobody else was home at the time.

Needless to say, Clay and I were glued to the late night evening news and finally, we were able to see some pictures of the destruction. One of the first answers we got was why there was no fire blazing in the night sky - there was nothing to burn. The entire house was virtually vaporized and in its place was a pile of rubble and twigs of lumber that were smoldering with small fires. Debris was actually scattered across a few miles radii and they still won’t let us down there to take a look at it. I wanted to include some pictures along with this post, but the local news in this town makes the Spartanburg Herald Journal look like the New York Times, so I guess I’ll have to wait until they let us down there in a few days.

But don’t ever let me say again that nothing interesting happens up here.