Saints and Saints

New Orleans Saints

I've been trying to figure out which Twilight Zone episode most resembles the New Orleans Saints season so far. It's got to be one of the ones where the protagonist goes to sleep or blacks out, then wakes up in a world that doesn't make any sense. The guys in the fleur de lis helmets aren't doing the things Saints fans are used to. I've never seen such a bewildered look as I saw on the face of someone who has cheered for the Saints their entire existence, and now can't fit that in with what she knows as reality: that the Saints never, ever play this well. The big stat of the moment: through five games, the Saints have not trailed. At all. Even for one second. It helps that they've had the ball first in all five games and scored on all five first possessions (4 TD, 1 FG).

Best stat against the Giants: seven touchdowns scored by seven different players.

No game has been closer than 14 points at the end. Margins of victory: 18, 26, 20, 14, 21. They've won three games cranking out points faster than their opponents could keep up, scoring 45, 48, and 48 against Detroit, Philly, and New York (Giants edition). They've won the other two with aggressive defense that never allowed the other team to get going, allowing 7 and 10 points to Buffalo and New York (Jets edition). I'd like to see them do better running the ball on short yardage plays, but that's really the only thing I can pick at right now.

I've heard some people say that they want to see how the Saints offense does in "weather", which usually means cold/rain/snow/wind. That's a valid point, since they could be playing on the road in the playoffs in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, or some place like that. In the regular season, it's not a factor. The northernmost road game left on the schedule is at Washington on December 6. It'll be cold, but it won't exactly be Minnesota-ish that early in the winter. At Carolina in January could be snowy, but Carolina stinks (STINKS). Of the Saints eleven remaining games, seven are in domes and two are in Florida. I just don't think weather is a major factor for them right now.

After reflecting on it, let's go with the only Twilight Zone episode set in New Orleans, "The Masks" from 1964. A crotchety old man about to die makes his wretched family members wear masks that reveal their true personalities. As the season goes on, we'll see if the Saints wearing the mask of a contender, or if they really are one.

Scene from "The Masks"

The "Other" Saints

Businesses that sponsor the Saints are known as "Patron Saints", which is clever. However, I wonder if those businesses know how a lot of actual patron saints obtained their patronage. The Church has a morbid streak when it comes to making such decisions.

Looking for the patron saint of butchers? One of the eight is Adrian of Nicomedia. Adrian was hacked to pieces in 304. (I was sort of hoping he'd be named Lazar Wolf)

Feeling culinary tonight? Lawrence of Rome is the man when it comes to cooks. Of course, he was cooked to death on a gridiron in 258.

Got a headache? Pray to Saint Denis, if you can ignore the fact that he was beheaded by the Romans. Statues of him often show him holding his head in his hands. The founder of Natchitoches was named Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, so St Denis is one of my favorites.

The patron of stonemasons is Saint Reinhold, who--you guessed it--was beaten to death with hammers by stonemasons.

If you ask me, the king of all these gruesomely murdered patrons is Saint Sebastian. First, he survived being shot full of arrows by the Romans. Later on, they stopped fooling around and just beat him to death. In the Dark Ages, plague victims likened the random nature of infection to being shot by nature's archers, so they prayed to Sebastian. So now Sebastian--usually depicted tied to a tree with arrows sticking out of him--is the patron saint of archers, arrowsmiths, fletchers, and plague victims (and hardware stores, for some reason).


If possible, I'd like to be the patron saint of either dying peacefully in bed, or performing heroic deeds while saving the life of a complete stranger. I'm good with either one.

Two Nights in Bangkok

Chocolate

If one night in Bangkok makes a hard man crumble, what does watching two Thai martial arts movies do? The first was Chocolate, which follows the violent adventures of a young autistic Thai girl named Zen who has the ability to learn any martial arts style just by watching it. Her ex-gangster mother is sick, so she pays visits to her mom's former clients to collect on their debts. When they refuse to pay, the fight scenes take over. Zin is played by Jeeja Yanin, who studies Taekwondo in real life. I thought the fights were fun to watch. My favorite is when she fights another twitchy autistic kid. After he knocks her around for a while, she learns his style for herself, twitching and all.

Ong-Bak

A few weeks before this movie came out, a friend of mine paid a visit to DC and stayed with me while he was in town. This particular friend is my most trusted authority on Asian movies. If it gets his seal of approval, it's good enough for me. When the 1994 version of The Legend of Drunken Master was coming to American theaters several years ago, I read some nonsense about it having a 20 minute fight scene at the end. Knowing he would have already seen it in Chinese, I decided to test Leon by sending him an email.

"Hey Leon. Should I go see the Drunken Master movie? Is it any good? I hear it has a 15 minute fight scene at the end."

"Scotty. Yes, it's good and you should go see it. And it's a 20 minute fight scene."

Now it's my favorite martial arts movie. Trust in Leon. So when he said, "Make a point of going to see Ong-bak. It's good.", I should have listened. I just never got around to it until the other night, when I watched it instantly on Netflix. It's really, really entertaining. There's not any sort of cringe-inducing injuries, just guys getting punched, kicked, kneed, and elbowed--especially elbowed--by Ting, the small village lad/Muay Thai expert who has to go to the big city to get his people's sacred statue's head back. We've all been there, haven't we?

The fights are great. Really great. Muay Thai doesn't show up much American theaters, especially compared to karate and kung fu. In addition to fists and feet, it makes use of shins and elbows as well. I don't think any of the cage fighters use it right now since their sport's more about grappling and "ground and pound" strategies than striking. (Lyoto Machida excepted) I sort of knew what it looked like, but the movie worked in a lot of athleticism and stunt work that really raised the energy level.

Ting seems like a nice enough fellow, and his fellow villagers are a sweet bunch of people. That's about all the analysis I have that doesn't involve something along the lines of "Holy crap, that was an awesome move." If you see one Thai martial arts movie this year, make it this one.

Google

Note: when I use the Google taskbar to search for something, I often stop in the middle of a word or phrase to see what the suggestions are going to be. Search for the lyrics to "One Night in Bangkok", I typed in "one n" and stopped. Three of the suggestions were about the Paris Hilton horizontal tango video, and two were for the song. A few weeks ago I put in "jon " with the space, and 8 of 10 suggestions were "Jon and Kate Plus 8" related. Now it's up to 9. The only intruder on the list is Jon Stewart.

If you have any suggestions for me to check out, let me know.

Stalking Zombieland

Monday Night Zombies

I have often said that the best time to go see a movie is Saturday morning. When I say it's the best time, I mean the best time for me, of course. Saturday afternoon and night, then all day Sunday you get the crowds. I realize that these people paid their money just as I did, but I just want to run most of them out of my theater so I can watch the movie in peace. I've been to opening weekend blockbuster movies at 10:45 on a Saturday morning at Tyson's Corner, and there's maybe ten people there.

I have less often said that the second best time to go see a movie is Monday night. There ain't nobody who wants to go to a movie on Monday night. They've come back from a long day at work and are just yearning for Friday, or at least Wednesday. Going out isn't on the agenda for most people, so there's not a big crowd.

As you might have guessed, I went to see a movie Monday night. I was curious about what Zombieland would be like. I figured it would be sort of a silly zombie-killing adventure, and that's pretty much what it was. It was a bit gruesome at the beginning, but a bit funnier than I expected, and I liked that it was made "differently." There are some creative bits to it that show that somebody in the production or writing crew was willing to add a little something special to the film's landscape. And of course, it's got Bill Murray. I thought it was a fun hour and a half.

Stalking

Earlier this week Tracee Hamilton wrote an article about being the victim of a stalker for many years. I don't have any experience in this area, so I'm not going to get into any analysis of what she wrote. I just think that it's a great piece of work that took a lot of guts to write, and I think it's worth a few minutes of your time.

Watch Instantly

It's becoming clear in a hurry that Netflix's Instant Watch option is going to be trouble. My current account plan allows me unlimited instant viewing per month. I see myself bringing up movies I like just to click forward to the parts I really like before moving on to something else.

"Local Man Disturbs Resting Dead"

Scotty, Media Star

I got the chance to do some grave cleaning Thursday afternoon as part of service learning for my graduate program. I cleaned my first grave about a year ago as part of a class assignment, and I liked it a lot. It's easy, mindless, quiet, and nobody asks me any questions while I do it. I can work on one thing and think about another at the same time. With the cleaning product we used, I also got to see immediate results. The marble I cleaned was dark gray when I started and almost copy-paper white when I finished. It was pretty rewarding. So when I was told I could do it again, I gladly said yes.

Cemetery preservation is the centerpiece of my project thesis, and I'm holding a cleanup activity at a local cemetery in November. Getting people to show up for it is one of my tasks, so a little publicity couldn't hurt. However, I was still very surprised when a reporter from the Natchitoches Times showed up while I was working. My committee chair had told her I would love to be asked a few questions. I've answered a question or two before, but this was the first time I can remember where I was actually the target of a newspaper interview. The reporter was nice, but she was too quick to move on to the next question before I'd completely finished answering the first. She also didn't tell me anything about why she was talking to me, or when I could expect to see something in the paper. Stay tuned for my next media appearance on "AC 360."

I've been trying to think of funny headlines that should go with the story. The title of this post is one. Send me any that you can think of.

A Pleasant Surprise

I was browsing a friend's FB page the other day when I came across something that made me pretty happy. One friend had posted the results of some survey, and an exchange in the comments went like this:

Commenter 1: "With this kakistocracy, nothing would surprise me."

Commenter 2: "I AGREE! (Ya I had to look up kakistocracy...)"

Commenter 1: "Well yeah, you're not Scotty."

Believe me when I say that I had nothing to do with this post at all. I didn't say anything, didn't comment, didn't know about it until I browsed and saw it a while later. So out of nowhere, an unusual word gets used, and I get referenced as somebody who probably knows what it means. In this case it happened to be true. Even if it weren't it's kind of nice to be used as the measuring stick for a good vocabulary. It made my day.

And now: Sports!

Don't look now, but the New Orleans Saints and LSU Tigers are a combined 9-0.