Photos: The Spartan Race

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This year, I ran in my first-ever Spartan Race.  Zombie runs are tiresome and the chasing nature of them leads to take away from the physical challenge of obstacles, since it caused people like me to blow up before any obstacles.  And after the debacle of the Georgia Run For Your Lives event, I was actually a little eager to redeem myself from such an abysmal time, even if my group and I were screwing around the entire time, due to the fact that it was an uncontrollable mud pit.

As a whole, I really liked the Spartan Race.  Not being chased by overzealous fake zombies led me to concentrate on the task at hand, and manage my endurance to traverse four miles as well as numerous physical obstacles.  I realize what my strengths and weaknesses are in general; when it comes to running, I’m pretty comfortable and right at home, but when it comes to sheer upper-body strength, despite how much I workout, I’m absolutely terrible with stuff like monkey bars and having the sheer strength to lift myself over an eight-foot wall.

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Just doesn’t really seem right

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I was driving to work, and I saw this car at a stoplight.  It was a Honda Element, and on the back window were two stickers.  Dead red center was a big, gaudy Harley-Davidson sticker, and in a far less flamboyant section of the window, tucked away in the bottom left, was an Apple sticker.

I don’t really know what I’m getting at, but this odd mish-mash of identities all conglomerated onto a single vehicle fascinated me to where it sparked me to actually write about it.  When looking at everything as a whole, I sing the lines “one of these is NOT like the others,” and it leads me to making illogical assumptions about the person behind the wheel.

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I think I love this woman

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Not just because Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo looks like total wifey material, but primarily for her actions, namely the one that has got her in the most childishly stupid of hot water. I can assume that most people have heard about it by now, but if you’ve been living under a rock, Mayer has pretty much told all Yahoo employees that working from home is no longer an option, and that they have to show up to work, or quit. Naturally, this has caused a monumental uproar from all of the Yahoo employees who abused the option to work from home, and they’re up in arms, and bringing everyone they can with them to fight the pointless fight.

I am unequivocally, 100% on Marissa Mayer’s side on this argument. The concept of “working from home” is one of the biggest crocks in the history of mankind, and there is absolutely nothing that could convince me that someone working from home, unsupervised and immersed in all of their worldly possessions and distractions, could actually be more productive than someone actually present in the workplace. I just don’t think it’s possible at all. I would really like to see each and every one of these Yahoo employees who are crying foul on this whole thing to try and prove otherwise, because already many have already fallen flat on their faces in attempting to do such.

Some of the biggest fail challenges are the people who claim that this completely screws up their parenting. That having to go to the office and do their job interferes with them being to stay home and well, not do their job, in favor of parenting, and all other job-irrelevant tasks and activities. Oh, I’m sorry Yahoo employee, that you have to GO to work and DO YOUR JOB. I guess you’ll have to be like all the other plebeians, and hire a babysitter or a nanny to care for your kids while you GO DO YOUR JOB.

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I think I’m the worst baseball fan in the world

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It’s that time of the year again, when baseball begins to permeate into my writing, into my daily activities, and into life itself.  Technically, it’s still a month away before the Major League Baseball season begins, and I go back to rooting for the Atlanta Braves again, but there’s still meaningful baseball being played currently in parts of the world, as the World Baseball Classic has been going on for a week now.  I should say there was meaningful baseball being played, because in my case, my main involvement with the WBC has always been that Team Korea has always been present and played well at prior WBCs and international baseball tournaments in general.  Well, they were knocked out of the WBC this morning, and despite playing in the semi-finals and the finals respectively in 2006 and 2009, they’re bounced in the first round this time.

It’s really ironic how it all happened too, considering that in the four-team pool that Korea was in, three teams went 2-1, with Australia embarrassing themselves going 0-3.  But Korea didn’t do themselves any favors, getting embarrassed themselves, getting blanked against Curacao the Netherlands in the first game, which put them in the wrong side of a tie-break situation, which ended up coming to fruition, resulting the favored Koreans getting bounced, despite winning their last game against the cheating Taiwanese.

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About as big of a surprise as Clay Aiken revealing he’s gay

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Yeah, I know I dog on the Chinese a lot, but to some degree I can’t help it because I’m Korean, and all us Chinks rag on each other all the time.  Not that it’s really anything that’s really acceptable in the first place, so let’s chalk this up on animosity towards the Taiwanese baseball team for trying to cheat by illegally scouting the Korean team.  All the same.  Now it’s war, motherfuckers.

Anyway, there was recently a story about how the Fung Wah bus company, which provides dirt cheap bus service between the New York City and Boston Chinatowns, facing scrutiny under allegations that 75% of their buses are under code and fail all sorts of safety standards.  Cracked frames, busted steering columns, not to mention Chinese drivers who don’t speak a lick of English, and probably are illegals to begin with, but apparently it’s just now that Fung Wah is facing some scrunity, after almost a decade of debacles.

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Epic Chinese airport rage

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Credit Barstool Boston: I think my favorite part about this entire video is the fact that the Chinese police/TSA/whatever just kind of stood there and let this guy go to town on the check in counter.

It’s like, no wonder China is full of Triad gangs and criminals, because frankly they can apparently get away with whatever they want, when they want to, while the authorities politely wait to the side for them to turn themselves in. It’s almost as if they’re the cops from Demolition Man, and they’re waiting for the guy to finish raging and destroying the entire counter, before deciding to lay down and put his hands behind his back.

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The importance of storming the court

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So while I watching the latest upset of Duke the other night, as the seconds and minutes ticked down, and Duke hadn’t made a barrage of three pointers and Mason Plumlee dunks to cut the gap and overtake the lead, all I could think of was if UVA was going to storm the court when they won. Considering the fact that NC State, Miami and Maryland had all stormed court after beating Duke, and that UVA hadn’t beaten Duke in like forever, so the answer was pretty obvious. Naturally when the final horn sounded, UVA stormed the court as everyone and their mother relished at the sight of Coach K and Duke walking off the court in failure and disappointment.

Seldom is there a Duke loss on the road that doesn’t involve the home fans storming the court. According to the WSJ, an astounding 80% of the home team fans have stormed the court following an upset over Duke over the span of the last ten years. In fact, the article is a little dated and doesn’t factor in the wins of Miami, Maryland and Virginia into the equation so it’s now a little bit more. Obviously, my favorite one is the one shown above, but it really doesn’t matter who it is in the end; everyone on the planet that did not go to Duke loves to see Duke’s men’s basketball team lose on the road and seeing their opponents’ fans storming the court in celebration. I’m pretty sure people would be okay if Duke lost to the Soviets in 1972 and Soviet fans stormed the court, to be perfectly honest.

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