Poor Driving: 4-Way Stops Edition

Alright, Seattle drivers, it's time for another installment of the series wherein I make fun of your goddamn miserable driving and do my best to teach you how to not be lameass shitheels who fuck things up for everyone who does know how to drive.

Given that, on my commutes this past week, I have literally experienced drivers doing EVERY SINGLE MOTHERFUCKING THING I've bitched about in the last two installments (plus an addendum!), I don't know why I bother.  It's like talking to a fucking wall.  Well, yelling, really.  But given how you're apparently scared shitless of walls (seriously, learn to drive through a fucking tunnel, PLEASE), I'm probably just frightening you even more.  Poor babies.

Anyways, our topic of violent frustration and hopeful fucking enlightenment today is 4-way stops.  These are a fundamental element of driving, and everyone should have encountered these literally hundreds of times by now, so there's no fucking excuse for not having a goddamn clue what the hell you're doing when you get to one.  Seriously, it's not that fucking hard.  Here's what you do:

(Just so we're crystal fucking clear, these instructions dispense with the part where you're waiting in line to get up to the stop sign.  If you can't handle that part without instructions, you need to abandon your fucking car on the fucking side of the road and never ever drive again.  And yes, I have seen asshats that this actually applies to.  Anyways.)

1)  Pull up to the stop line and STOP.

Pretty self-explanatory, right?  Yeah, not so much apparently.  See that big white strip across your lane even with the stop sign?  Well, maybe you don't, given how SDOT keeps up with maintenance... or doesn't.  Anyways, STOP THERE.  A complete stop!  Do not keep rolling.  Yes, you may observe others continuing to roll under certain circumstances.  If you need these instructions, you have not earned the right to do this.  You've earned the goddamn right to do what I fucking tell you to do, which is to stop your motherfucking car.

2)  Check for traffic in the other directions.

Are there cars waiting at the other stop signs?  Did they stop before you?  Then they get to go first!  A stop sign isn't just a fucking speed bump; you don't just stop and then go again.  It's a traffic control device, which means it's designed to control how traffic goes through the intersection.  Isn't it clever how the name sort of describes what it does?

3) Actually navigate the intersection.

This is so fucking simple, I'm not even sure I can describe it adequately, but let's try:

- Cars across from each other go at the SAME FUCKING TIME.  Do not fucking wait to go until the car across from you has cleared the intersection.  When they pull out, YOU PULL OUT, TOO.  Don't be the fucking teenager who doesn't have a condom and no self-control.  In both situations, you're going to seriously fuck things up and ruin lots of people's days.

- If you're turning left, turn BEHIND the car going straight.  It's a simple enough idea.  If you turn in front of someone going straight, they have to wait for you to clear the intersection before they can go, and you're forcing them to either violate the bullet above, or wait for their next turn.  Either way, people are going to be fucking pissed at your failure as a human being.

- Once this is done in one direction, the cars in the other direction go.  Wait your fucking turn.

Seriously, it's that fucking easy.  Three goddamn steps.  This could be a motherfucking PowerPoint; it's not like I'm writing a huge-ass manual here. 

Keeping all of this in mind, here are some things to not do:

- DO NOT WAIT UNTIL THE CAR ACROSS FROM YOU CLEARS THE FUCKING INTERSECTION.  Yes, I said that already.  It's that important, and you miserable motherfuckers manage to screw this up ALL THE FUCKING TIME.  You do this, and you should count yourself lucky if someone doesn't slash your tires as you drive past, dipshit.

- DO NOT TURN LEFT IN FRONT OF A CAR GOING STRAIGHT.  Yes, I said that already, too.  Still important, and still screwed up ALL THE GODDAMN TIME.  You do this, and you've essentially added another cycle to every other car waiting at the stop sign.  This sort of shit will earn you "to the seventh generation"-type curses.  You don't do it at a fucking stoplight, because you'd get your stupid ass T-boned, so why would you do it here?

- Stop being so fucking timid!  Know when it's your turn, and then go!  If you're not sure, then promptly gesture for the other person to go, so that the lines keep moving.  Do NOT do the fucking thing where you both inch forward at the same time, see the other dipshit doing the same thing, and stop, only to repeat the same thing 10 seconds later.  This isn't a fucking middle school dance.

- If the car in front of you has just gone, DO NOT GO!  You are the most selfish excuse for a human being in the history of the world if you try to sneak through the intersection as a second car in a cycle.  You're worse than a Fortune 500 CEO, the guy who takes half the cookies in the break room and the guy who takes candy from babies all rolled up into one.  It is not your fucking turn.

(Exception: if it's two lanes going through the stop sign, you damn well better go when the car next to you does.)

The biggest indictment of Seattle drivers' fuckmuppetry, though, is that you actually handle non-standard stops better than you do 4-way stops.  5-way or 7-way stops?  Actually flow pretty well, all things considered, because you presumably take a minute to think about how to handle it.  Even the utterly bizarre intersection by the Starbucks at Green lake (which is actually only a 4-way stop, although it feels like about a 10-way), flows fairly smoothly when the pedestrians don't get in the way.

So get your shit together, Seattle drivers.  Grow the fuck up, and learn to navigate a goddamn staple of American driving.

Bonus:  This guy stole my schtick, but it's still darn good advice about another thing Seattle drivers suck at: driving in snow.  The awesome thing is, this actually works for driving in rain, too, but you don't have to be so conservative!

Mental Cartography

When I first moved to Seattle to start attending UW (14+ years ago, which is ridiculous, because I only lived in Eastern Washington for 12 years, and there’s simply no way I’ve lived here longer than I lived over there), I had only the most rudimentary understanding of the layout of the Puget Sound metro area, which was pretty much based around the I-90 corridor.  Okay, rudimentary is probably an understatement.  Tenuous?  Basic?  None of those really convey the sense of “really have no idea what is where” that I’m striving for here, but my vocabulary is failing me.

Anyways, I think it’s understandable, since I grew up in Eastern Washington, and really only came over here for Christmas, Mariners games and the occasional band trip.  Plus, I was never driving myself, and while I don’t have a problem learning how to get places from riding (although I understand this is a thing, poor unfortunate souls), this was infrequent enough that it never really sank in.  Plus, those were pretty short and focused trips, without a lot of exploring.  Makes it hard to learn an area, y’know?

I knew where the Kingdome (and later Safeco) was (because it’s right off the end of I-90), and that Snohomish and Arlington were north of Seattle (family), and I knew a few spot locations in Seattle (again, family), but not really how to get there, and that was really about it.  As I said, I’m lacking in words for just how pathetically sketchy my knowledge was.

Note that UW is not near any of these places.

Obviously, it started getting better once I moved here, although it took a while.  Driving up to 85^th seemed like going to a different town, let along going all the way across to Ballard.  In fairness, about the only time you get on the freeway in the Tri-Cities is when you actually ARE going to a different town.  Pasco’s the only one where you can really get to significantly different portions of town on a freeway with any sort of efficiency.  And I didn’t really spend much time in Pasco.

Northgate was even farther (especially when you make the mistake of taking the 75 instead of something like the 66 or 67…).  Since I didn’t have a car, I mostly learned bus routes, and a whole bunch of spot locations from band parties and the like, but I didn’t really have a sense of how they all fit together (and not because of any imbibing at the parties, I promise, Mom and Dad).  I’d have experiences where I’d take a new bus route that happened to go by several places that I knew, right in a row, and I’d had no idea that they were all so close together.

Even today, though, and despite my good sense of direction, I still have some gaping holes in my mental cartography of the Seattle metro area.  Actually, that’s not entirely the right way to put it.  Really, it’s that I have some severe misconceptions in my mental structure of the area, which remain despite multiple refutations.  This area is very different in my head than it is in the real world.

For example, in my head, Seattle ends at I-90 and the stadiums.  Sodo?  Columbia City?  Rainier Valley?  Heck, even West Seattle?  Not actually part of Seattle in my head.  What do they belong to?  Not really sure, but it’s not Seattle, I’m sure about that.  I just never (or really, really rarely) go down there (except on the freeway!), so in my head, they don’t count.

That’s not always true, though.  Capitol Hill and Magnolia, say, are both definitely part of Seattle to me, and I’ve rarely been to either of them, either.  What’s the difference?  Arbitrary geographic locations, apparently.  I’m not even sure where the southern line of Seattle is.  Somewhere around Boeing Field?

I’ve got most of North Seattle down, except that everything east of 35^th NE still confuses the heck out of me, because a lot of the street grid structure breaks down.  I will go miles out of my way all the way out to near Magnuson Park just to avoid the streets in the interior of that area.  I’m pretty sure cardinal directions break down in there.  Daedalus would have nightmares about it.  (My hobby: using more obscure portions of famous mythological stories.)  Maybe there’s a minotaur?

In my head, Bellevue is basically an area bounded by 4^th, 8^th, I-405, and Bellevue Way (plus the stuff on the west side of Bellevue Way, because Bell Square is definitely part of Bellevue).  Outside of that, Eastgate counts mostly because it’s on that I-90 corridor I mentioned earlier (although everything south of I-90, like Factoria, isn’t included).  Once you get off of Eastgate, though, or outside of that downtown core, it’s not Bellevue, it’s just, I don’t know, unincorporated forestland?  Oh, and exiting onto Bellevue Way from I-90 and 520 immediately takes you to the downtown core (which is therefore apparently simultaneously both four blocks and five miles wide).  (Sorry for butchering your town, friends from Bellevue.)

This is a perfect example of how these misconceptions persist despite the fact that I objectively know much, much better.  I’ve been to Bellevue High several times.  Taking my vanpool in for maintenance goes through Factoria.  I’ve run several errands up to the Crossroads area.  Every day, I leave work, drive down Eastgate, and then cut off on other roads through to SE 8^th.  I know that these places are all part of Bellevue, but I still don’t actually believe it.

It’s not just the Seattle area, though.  No matter how many times I look at a map, I remain unconvinced that Seattle and Spokane are at basically the same latitude, and that Wenatchee is south of them both.  That’s just not possible.  And Spokane really just consists of about a mile along the river from the dam to Gonzaga, right?

Even where I grew up, I still have trouble with certain geographic relationships.  I always know, intellectually, that my high school, Southridge, is further west than I always think it is.  There’s just a big hill between it and most of the rest of town that keeps you from being able to visually place it.  But I didn’t realize until just now, looking at a map, that it’s actually further west than Kamiakin!  (Not by a lot, but it’s true!)  That just cannot possibly be.  It’s just not physically possible.

I’m sure by now you’re expecting me to pivot to something meaningful about how facts can have a hard time overcoming preconceptions, but I’m going to mix things up and just leave this here on a light note.

And a question: What funny mental geography quirks do you have?

Why I'm Rooting for Oregon Tonight

As a Husky, this is a very difficult thing for me to do, and I recognize that it will be hard for some of my fellow Husky fans to stomach.  However, I have the following reasons, which I feel are good and sufficient:

1) It’s basically Pascal’s Wager for college football.  Yes, Pascal’s Wager requires you to pick a side, which I’m not obligated to do here, but half the fun of sports is rooting for teams in games you have no stake in, so… close enough.

 2)  Pac-12 pride: If Oregon loses, the Pac-12 reputation takes a hit.  It’ll appear, once again, as though the rest of the Pac-12 can’t beat a team that can’t hang with the best.  Less of a risk with the demolition of the BCS, granted, since Oregon has already won a playoff game, and certainly less than the (ever-so-well-deserved) SEC reputation hit this year, but still something.  After all of the mockery of the Increasingly-Inaccurately-Named-Conference over the last few years for being a fairly weak conference, losing to them now wouldn’t look good. 

3) Impeccable politeness: Imagine, as a Husky fan, being confronted with a stereotypical Duck fan (should be easy enough) upon their victory this evening.  This Duck fan would of course be boisterously, even obnoxiously effusive in his glee (albeit deservedly), and would likely attempt to rub in your face their national championship (no matter how polite I’m being here, I refuse to use their appalling abbreviation for this title).  How might this Duck fan react to a polite and positive response congratulating them on their achievement?

a.       They realize that it’s difficult (both tactically and morally) to mock someone who refuses to become upset at the mocking, but instead agrees with them as to the substance of their statements, and they thereby tone down their own behavior.  As a Husky fan, you can feel a certain pride at helping Oregon fans become better people, one fan at a time.  You can also enjoy your moral superiority for graciously taking the high road.

b.      They continue the behavior that has earned them nigh-universal recognition as gauche.  As a Husky fan, you can not only take even more enjoyment in your moral superiority as described above, but also delight in this confirmation of the true nature of (most) Oregon fans.

Now, granted, you could do this even while rooting for tOSU, but I think it would probably be easier if you rooted for Oregon to begin with.

4) Friends:  The few Oregon fans I’m friends with (left over from high school) are actually very decent people (and reasonable fans), and I feel somewhat bad rooting against them when I have no other reason to root for tOSU.

In other words, my reasons are pretty much all cynical and self-serving, except for the last one.  But how else would I manage to root for Oregon?

I recognize that this may not work for everyone, and I don’t blame them for that whatsoever.  These are not the best of reasons; they are not the worst of reasons.  There’s a lot of bad blood (and flung dog feces) out there to overcome.  I don’t claim that this will be easy for me, and Pascal didn’t even expect his infinitely larger stakes to convince everyone (of course, he was also as Calvinist as a Catholic can be, apparently, so there are some free will issues there.  Similes only go so far).  I just thought I should explain before I started getting incredulous hate mail from my fellow Huskies.

#GoDu… okay, I can’t go THAT far.

Scathing Critiques of Beloved Children's Books: The Railway Series

Most of you are probably more familiar with the name of the associated TV series, Thomas the Tank Engine (or Thomas and Friends, or whatever.  I haven't seen it, but I gather they've changed the name several times).  However, that show was originally based on The Railway Series by Rev. W. Awdry.

The series itself is about a bunch of trains on the fictional island of Sodor, which is wedged in between England and the Isle of Man.  The trains run about carrying passengers, goods, etc.  Given that they're trains, and doing real work, you'd think that this would be something good for kids to read.

You'd think.

The vast majority of the trains, Thomas included, are actually kind of jerks.  They constantly call each other names, make fun of each other (and are sometimes downright cruel), disobey instructions, whine about doing their assigned work, and then do it poorly, get inflated opinions of themselves, don't think through their actions beforehand, and get into (generally self-inflicted) trouble.  In other words, they're all basically small children, with the obnoxiousness of Harry Potter in Order of the Phoenix.

(I haven't watched any of the episodes of the TV series, but Emily has, and she tells me that they're even worse in the show, especially the newer episodes.)

While the coaches (passenger cars) are generally well-behaved unless mistreated, the trucks (boxcars, hopper cars, etc.) are constantly being deliberately difficult, playing tricks on the engines and actually trying to hurt them at times.

The passengers aren't any better: they're rude, entitled whingers who are constantly complaining to anyone who will listen the first time anything goes wrong that it's a Bad Railway.  Even Kieran has felt the need to stick up for the Railway against the passengers on occasion while reading these books.

Thomas is one of the worst, which is unfortunate, given that he seems to be the most popular, and that he's the namesake of the series.  He's smug, stuck-up, and self-important.  He treats most of the other engines fairly poorly, and doesn't follow directions, including instructions not to go certain places.  But in a move George Lucas surely would have been proud of, the publisher insisted that the series focus more on Thomas, despite that clearly not being the original intent (he's not even in the first book).  Because he was small and cute, or something like that.  As if that means anything.

You know who the series should be named after?

Edward.

Because Edward is a freaking saint.

Edward is well-behaved.  He's unfailingly polite to all of the other engines and the passengers.  He's always happy to do his assigned work to the best of his ability, and is willing to take on extra work if needed by the railway.  He's not the biggest engine, which means he gets dismissed by many as not as useful, but he tries hard, doesn't complain, and in general is everything that we should want our kids to emulate.

And Edward is actually the main character of the first book, which tells me that until the publisher stepped in, he might very well have been the focus of the series.  Instead, he gets sent off to some other station somewhere along the line, to be reduced mostly to cameos in other trains' stories (although he does eventually get a book to himself), while Thomas gets his very own branch line to run, and many other stories of his own.

True to the real world, I suppose, but not really the message I want my kids getting.

The other particularly good role model in these books, to me, is Sir Topham Hatt (the Fat Controller).  This is a man who understands what it is to run a business well (which is also remarkably like being a parent at times, given how child-like the trains can be).  He's strict with the trains, expects them to do their best, and will follow through on punishments if necessary, but he also has a sense of humor, and is willing to give second chances once he feels that lessons have been learned. 

He's also willing to do what it takes to give his engines a chance to succeed, and isn't stingy about bringing in replacement engines if someone breaks down, so that the other engines aren't stuck trying to do their own work plus some, while not simply firing the engines while they're broken.  And when the passengers complain, as they inevitably do, he pretty much ignores them because he knows that stuff happens sometimes, and that it wouldn't be productive to punish the engines just to mollify the passengers.

So there's that.  And the books are quite entertaining, which does go a long ways.  But seriously, sometimes you just want to reach into the book and Gibbs-smacking the trains until they start behaving.

The Sun Bowl Trip

I'm back.

In honor of this being New Year's Eve, and since I already posted the story of the Rose Bowl trip, I thought I'd now post the story of the worst bowl trip ever: the 2002 Sun Bowl.  Enjoy, and happy New Year's!

(Note that I originally wrote this in 2006.  I've done some slight editing (mostly for clarity for non-HMB people), but almost all of the content is the same.  I thought the contrast to my current writing style might be interesting.)

-----------------------------

So, the infamous Sun Bowl Trip of 2002.  This probably should have been a sign to us that it was going to be our last bowl trip for a while.

It all started with us having to get to Dawghouse (band HQ) bright and early to catch our plane down to El Paso, where we'd then go to our practice facility to get some, y'know, practicing in.  So we're all standing around yawning, waiting to leave for Boeing Field, when word comes down that our flight is delayed until a little after noon.  Now, this is a charter flight, and there are generally few good reasons for charter flights to be delayed.  I never actually heard the official explanation, but the two main theories, as I recall, were that the pilot needed a mandatory rest period that kept us from leaving on time, and that the pilot needed a refresher course on the plane.  While the first is probably more likely, the second definitely fits what happened later better.  (Ed: Since writing this, I've also heard a third theory that the pilot was drunk.  This also fits.) 

I forget the exact order in which things happened next, but we a) got some free time to go get breakfast and stuff, and b) had the day's practice rescheduled to before the plane flight (I think the practice came first, since I seem to recall some bitching about practicing at 9 in the morning, but I could be mistaken there).  In and of itself, that doesn't sound ALL that bad, but recall what we normally travel in.  Yeah, so we practiced in the morning, before a plane flight, in official ToC (Ed: dress shoes, black slacks, and polyester purple polo).  Wasn't that fun.

So the plane finally arrives, and we depart for Boeing Field.  After unloading our bags and piling them at the bottom of the conveyor belt (yeah, no fancy people-to-deal-with-our-luggage for us... but at least we didn't have to actually put them in the plane ourselves), we get on the plane, and away we go.  The flight down is a little bumpy, as I recall, but uneventful, for the most part.  Until, that is, the landing.

During normal landings, the ideal angle between the wings and the ground is just about 0 degrees.  In this landing, it felt like that angle was about 30 degrees.  I'm sure it was less, but that's what it felt like.  Now, you're probably thinking that it would be difficult to get more than one set of wheels down in an attitude like that, and you'd be right to think that.  In fact, it's probably for the best, since a second set of wheels on the ground would almost certainly have to be the nose wheel, which would likely put the wingtip, the nose, or both, below ground level, which is not necessarily a tenable situation for a plane attempting to keep complete structural integrity.   On the other hand,  only one set of wheels on the ground isn't a particularly stable configuration, either.  So here we are, careening down the runway on one wheel.  And I use the verb "careen" advisedly, with consideration of the "weaving back and forth" part of the definition.  So another way to rephrase the previous sentence would be to say, "So here we are, weaving back and forth down the runway on one wheel".

If that sounds a bit nerve-racking, it was.

But obviously we didn't die, so we got off the plane, all wheels safely on the ground and stopped, and headed into the terminal, where a mariachi band put on a bit of a concert and dance for us, which was one of the about three bright spots on the trip.  After the band was finished, we headed out to the buses to go to dinner.  Suddenly, copious amounts of thick white smoke started pouring out from under our bus (and here, by "our", I mean the clarinets and sousas, as I will also mean in the future).  Naturally, the driver got off to assess this alarming situation, which necessitated opening the door, thereby letting some of the -very bad smelling, as it turned out- smoke onto the bus.  Apparently, the problem wasn't major, since he got back on and the smoke stopped, but this was still not a particularly encouraging development.  However, the bus made it just fine to our dinner location, which was an excellent steakhouse.  This steakhouse was the second bright spot on the trip, since not only was the food delicious, but they had karaoke, and the senior staff did a rendition of "Mustang Sally", with Chris Chapman, one of our grad assistant directors, on kickass lead vocals, once again confirming that he's just about the coolest person ever.  Plus, I understand there were buffalo wandering around.

After dinner, we were off to our hotel, which was the final bright point of the trip, because the rooms were pretty damn cool, too.  They were more apartments than hotel rooms, with a living room with a hide-a-bed, a kitchen (with a dishwasher!), a bedroom and bathroom downstairs, and a bedroom and bathroom upstairs (yes, there was an upstairs).  Our luggage and large instruments had been transported separately, so the lobby was entirely full of bags and cases.  And by entirely, I mean stacked up, and barely leaving walkways to the front desk for us to get our room keys.  It was quite amusing.

The next morning, we were off to our practice facility, which turned out to be a high school stadium with dead grass and barely-visible lines and hashes.  If you're thinking that this doesn't sound conducive to a good practice, you'd be right once again.  Plus, there was a freezing cold wind which cut right through bibs (Ed: bright yellow vests worn while marching to enhance the director's visibility of the formations, with a big pocket on the front for music and charts.  They're so ugly that they're actually pretty awesome) and warm clothing, and it even started snowing.  I don't care that is was late December, we were in TEXAS.  It's not supposed to snow in TEXAS.  Really, this whole trip just is more proof that Texas sucks.

Anyways, by the end of practice, it had warmed up to about 70 degrees and sunny, so that was nice, at least, and meant that we wouldn't be completely miserable at the Battle of the Bands, which is where we were off to next.  Theoretically, at least.  About halfway to the Battle, our bus comes to a VERY abrupt stop with a loud bang, having just rear-ended the car in front of us.  And naturally, it can't exactly leave the scene of the accident, so we clarinets and sousas unload the entire bus and cram onto the two or three other buses that have stopped to wait for us.  Of course, our buses are usually pretty full, so most of us are either sitting on laps, or in the aisle.  It's terrific fun, really.

But we finally get to the Battle of the Bands.  And when we do, we find the Purdue band waiting for us, along with... not the rest of OUR band.  Which, given that they went speeding away after we had our little accident, is somewhat puzzling and just a bit concerning, since they should have arrived at the site well before us.  But we gamely pile off the buses and dance to cadences when it's our turn to play, since while we do have the percussion section, most of the brass are missing, and as much as we woodwinds hate to admit it, they are kinda necessary.  Fortunately, about halfway through our third cadence, the missing half of the band comes tearing out of the building we're performing next to, having run all the way from their buses parked on the far side through said building.  Therefore, we can finally get on with demolishing Purdue's band once again, which admittedly had gotten a bit better since the Rose Bowl, but was still a bit stiff.

Afterwards, and after a few hours free time, we're off to dinner at some Mexican place with the Purdue band, where the food is crappy and definitely NOT all-you-can-eat, as promised.  In general, the whole thing pretty much sucks.  But then, that is essentially in line with the whole trip...

Finally, it's Game Day.  We lose, which bites.  At least I don't have to want to murder Cody Pickett for being a coward this time. (Ed: At the Holiday Bowl, Cody Pickett, our QB, ran out of bounds on fourth down a yard from the first down marker to end our attempt at a comeback.  One yard.  Fourth down.  No, I'm not still bitter, why do you ask?)  We head back out to the buses for dinner, and while everyone ELSE can get in and change and eat, the clarinet/sousa bus remains stubbornly locked, with the driver nowhere to be found.  We are sad.  And sweaty, and hungry, and annoyed about losing.  This is not what we need.  But we finally get on, and fed, and changed, and we're off to the airport, where the idea is that we'll leave earlier than planned, which means getting home earlier than planned, which is always nice, especially since it's New Year's Eve.  

However, once we get to the airport, we discover that the President's Party, who we're flying with, is still going by the original schedule, and has gone back to their hotel to change and hang out for a while before going to the airport.  So we're stuck on the buses, at the airport, next to the airplane, for a good two hours.  At least that way we didn't need to worry too much about the equipment truck showing up late with all our luggage.

At long last, the President's Party arrives, and we're allowed to board the plane.  So we do.  And then we sit there.  After about 30 minutes of sitting there, the pilot announces that because we're a charter flight, we have lowest priority for fuel, so we're still waiting for the fuel truck to come.  Never mind that the plane was sitting there for HOURS, with us next to it, even.  And never mind that it's El Paso; how busy can the airport be?  Anyways, after about an hour waiting on the plane, we finally get fueled up, and off we go.

The return trip is mercifully uneventful, landing included.  But thanks to the delays in leaving, it reaches midnight while we're still unloading the plane (rembember the whole no-one-to-handle-the-luggage thing from our departure?).  So we get to watch the fireworks from the very top of the Space Needle over the hill as we're unloading our own luggage from the plane.  The sousas have a light-switch rave on one of the buses.  And then we finally go home.

So there you have it.  The epic story of the Sun Bowl trip.  What fun it was.

Update

Beware. I was concerned with maintaining the balance between finals and Christmas, baking and hosting, sickness and relaxation, not the triumph of one over the other.

Do you remember when Christmas was a simple, uncomplicated thing you could enjoy and leave behind like Christmas lights? Is memory what we perceived or what we want? What do kids think? They concern themselves with the states of fun and not, good and bad. Isn't their perception simple? Doesn't it have to be?

I will return.

(Bonus points to whoever can identify the source material for this. Super extra bonus points for whoever figures out how that connects to why I didn't link to this post on Facebook.)

The World's Largest Clarinet

Every year at the band banquet, one piece of the entertainment (in addition to me setting things on fire) is the band banquet video.  The video consists primarily of photographs of the year, both official and personal (but not, y’know, personal; what happens on band trips stays on band trips, amirite?) with musical accompaniment (often the real versions of field show or stands tunes from the year, which means at least we get rid of the incredibly long Tatgenhorst endings…); in short, a pretty standard awards ceremony montage. 

However, breaking up the stretches of photos is a skit, which is performed and filmed by band members.  It’s usually pretty funny (or it’s intended to be funny, anyways…), and the topic changes every year.  I honestly don’t remember most of the skits, although I do remember one about a quest to find out what the “J” in “J. Bradley McDavid” stands for.  (For those of you not in HMB, JBrad (also known affectionately as “Buddy-buddy-buddy”) is the director.)

And in my rookie year (yes, the year of the burning napkin), we nearly did a skit about the World’s Largest Clarinet.

Why?  Well, our bowl game that year had been against Purdue, which boasts of having the World’s Largest Drum, and has a whole little, I don’t know, cult around it.  And we felt like making fun of that.  (Along with their silly salute during their fight song.  Seriously, whose idea was this?

(It’s a bit ridiculous how much both my high school and college careers involved schools boasting “World’s Largest Drum”s, or at least really big drums.  Kennewick High has one.  Purdue has one.  Texas has one.  With all of the bowl games during my band tenure being against either Purdue or Texas, there was literally a “World’s Largest Drum” at every bowl game I went to.  Seriously, people, overcompensating much?  And none of them are actually the World’s Largest Drum.)

In all honesty, we probably thought the idea was funnier than it really was, but that’s not our fault.  Exhaustion, dehydration and impending sickness will do that to you.

For those of you who have never done a full Rose Bowl trip… actually, I’m just bragging, because I know that’s most of you.  Anyways, the day of the game itself is… let’s say “long”.

 It starts off with getting up around 3 am, because you have to leave the hotel around 4 am to head for the parade staging ground.  Once you actually step off (which could be hours later, because the overriding motto of marching band is “hurry up and wait”), it’s a 5.5 mile route.  If you’ve ever walked 5.5 miles straight, you’ll know that’s not all that bad on its own.  But now imagine doing it in a heavy wool suit, in sunny, 85-90 degree weather, while playing an (often heavy) instrument and performing choreography the entire way.

I am not exaggerating when I say that at the end of the parade, I was able to scrape solid sheets of salt off of my rather sunburned face.

(Now that I stop to think about it, what I thought was a quirky HMB tradition of shaving facial hair before the Rose Bowl actually makes a lot more sense.)

After that, you get a quick lunch and head off to the stadium itself, where you do a pregame show (and fantasize about spraypainting “Jones” onto the state flag that the Purdue band hauls out in addition to the American flag because how selfish is that?  Where’s the Washington state flag?), a halftime show, and four quarters of screaming and yelling and playing.  By the time all the postgame stuff is over, it’s well into the evening.

However, our day didn’t end there, because winter quarter at the illustrious University of Washington started, in the Year of Our Lord MMI, on January 2^nd.  (Remarkably, they changed the policy after that so that classes start no earlier than the 3^rd, and often a day or two after that, depending on where things fall on the calendar.  Only took them 140 years to figure that out…) And that meant we needed to get home that night.

So, we all piled back onto our buses and headed for the airport.  Unfortunately, it was so foggy at the airport that we had to sit on a road near the charter plane for a couple hours before we could leave.  As best as I can recall (and working backwards from the fact that I got back to my dorm room at 2am), our plane took off around 10:00 that evening, by which point we’d all been up for around 19 hours, marched in a burning hellscape of a parade, had a full game day after that, and had very little to drink (seriously, I don’t think most of us got more than about 24 oz. of fluid the entire day) along the way.  It’s no wonder half of the band was sick the following week.

(However, this has nothing on the worst bowl trip ever, which was a couple years later.  I’ll post that story in the near future.)

At any rate, that’s why we were exhausted, dehydrated and getting sick.  But as I’m sure most of you have experienced at some point during your lives, at a certain point in this cycle, everything gets incredibly funny.  And thus, the idea of the World’s Largest Clarinet skit was born.

So what was the World’s Largest Clarinet?

The skit would have been filmed in a documentary style, covering the history and ritual of the World’s Largest Clarinet, and including interviews and footage of the World’s Largest Clarinet in action.

There would have been four poles attached to the World’s Largest Clarinet so that four people could carry it while marching, while another couple people would run along behind and take turns trying to play it. 

The carriers would have been spectacularly outfitted in knee-high striped socks, short shorts (even the guys), some sort of shirt (I’m fuzzy here) and colanders on their heads.  They would also have spoken their interview lines in chorus.    (This will make more sense if you go look at the folks wheeling around Purdue’s drum.)

The joke, of course, besides those outfits, because how great would we have looked in those?, would have been that the clarinet itself would have just been a regular clarinet. 

So apparently the answer is yes, this was way funnier at the time.  In fact, in my head, it’s still hilarious.  Sorry.

I don’t really remember why we didn’t get around to making it; I think laziness was probably a big part of it.  But I still think it would have been awesome.  Because who cares about a giant bass drum?  It’s still just a drum.  It goes “boom” when they hit it.  Woo.  (And their choreography sucked, too!)