Thoughts on Conspiracies, Movies and Ants

-We are down 0-1 in our best of 5 final four series against Meggido, our arch nemesis.  This series is more important than the potential finals because the top 2 teams both get to move up to the first division next year.  The two times we met in the regular season they beat us by a combined 50 points.  We were able to stay close the whole game this time, getting as close as 3 with about 3 minutes left.  My game was a little up and down, but I was proud of my effort overall, and I finally found my missing 3 point stroke.  Next game is at home on National TV, so our 500 fans should be rockin and rollin.

– The last 2 games the official scoresheet has cheated me out of stats.  I swear on my life my last game I had at least 11 points, 4 assists, 3 rebounds and 2 steals in 23 minutes.  Not the best game, but it looks a whole lot better than what the stat sheet read: 8 points, 2 assists, 2 rebounds, 1 steal.  They completely disregarded one of my 3 pointers!  And in the previous game I also had 11 points and was only credited with 9.  There is always a debate over what counts as an assist, and even rebounds can be tricky sometimes, but they should never mess up points.  I am dumbfounded.  Everyone’s point totals add up to the correct final score, so someone is secretly getting a slight PPG boost and not owning up to it.  I’m not saying I would say anything either, or that these things can actually get changed, it’s just interesting.  I am big on conspiracy theories, so I’m assuming this is what went down:

One of my teammates wanted a little bump in the scoring column and thought a quick and foolproof way to accomplish this would be to pay off the scorekeepers.  I am sure it wouldn’t take much, maybe 50 shekels total, and they would promise to skim a few points off the person least likely to notice.  The scorekeepers are always bored looking young people.  They would probably like nothing better than to participate in some harmless scoring fraud to earn a few shekels.  So who better to screw over than me, the guy who has a hard time finding the box scores online, never knows anyones stats, doesn’t speak Hebrew and hardly even scores that much anyway?  Someone is clearly plotting to undermine my entire career.  Or maybe it was just two honest mistakes.

-I spent my day off, as per usual, staring at my computer screen.  I watched Blood Simple, Annie Hall, the most recent episode of Breaking Bad, and Wedding Crashers.  Blood Simple is the first Coen Brothers movie, and it was very entertaining.  I recommend it.  Annie Hall was the first Woody Allen movie I’d ever seen and I loved it.  Dude is funny as hell.  Breaking Bad was so, so, so awesome.  And then there was Wedding Crashers.  I had very fond memories of the first viewing of this movie years ago, and I had not seen it since.  Maybe I had just watched too much good stuff too recently, but I thought Wedding Crashers was pretty lame.  There are a few good jokes but overall it is just a super cheesy, chick flicky kinda movie.  The last half was particularly awful.

-I went on a walk yesterday and spent 10 minutes watching a line of Ants.  I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this yet, but many of the Ants out here are on some serious insect steroids.  The ones I came across yesterday ran the gamut in sizes from tiny to ginormous, and I was really intrigued by what they were doing.  They were marching across the dirt path into the brush and carrying teeny little pieces of plant material back to their hole.  The weird thing was, I could find no rhyme or reason as to why some ants where dragging sticks and others weren’t.  There would be this small guy struggling to lug a huge (in ant terms) branch while a perfectly healthy looking monster ant strolled alongside, carrying absolutely nothing! I saw this scenario repeated all throughout the line.  Little guys admirably making their way over rough terrain pulling a stick twice their body length while the roided out ants walked around doing jack shit.  I don’t know if the big guys bullied the little ones into doing their dirty work, but something did not seem right.  Were the big ones barking orders in their undetectable ant language?

And what they hell were they building in that hole anyway? I didn’t know ants used construction materials.  I always assumed this just waded around in the dirt.  Also, I can’t build or fix a god damn thing.  How come these insects with pin needle brains can engage in large-scale architectural endeavors but I can never in a million years get my fridge to stop buzzing, or fix the light in my bathroom?  Can you train ants?  Do people work with them in a laboratory setting?  I want some ants to use their assembly line power, limitless energy and blind devotion to make my life easier.  Why can’t someone teach them to clean my floor of debris, or organize my laundry.  They are already using teamwork to build mysterious structures under the ground for christs sake, they could handle a few domestic tasks.

Well, the ant watching may seem boring, but its a step up from the walk where I spent a good chunk of time trying to hit a tree with a pine cone left-handed.