Dan says he refuses to pay for parking. Dan has never been to L.A.
But I was there, this weekend in fact, for the NAQT National Championship Tournament, aka Geekfest 2003. For those of you who don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky. It's basically like Jeopardy in teams formed from different colleges. But not as cool and for no money. Also, you don't pick categories or any of that shit, you're just read questions one at a time, trying to answer it faster than the opposing team. But Alex Trebek is there for whatever reason. (If you believe that, leave this site right now.) We played poorly and ended up splitting the rounds with a record of 7 and 6. The title "Lord and High Protector of all Nerds in all of Nerdom," was not to be ours. Thank God.
So anyway, my first observation about L.A. was that you pay for parking everywhere, including the parking lot of the hotel where we were staying. For this reason alone I could never live in that city. That and the fact that it's a model of how not to design an urban complex, unless of course your goals include ungodly sprawl, traffic, and pollution. Still, The Doors were from Los Angeles and L.A. Woman Arianna tells me that I haven't seen the nicer parts, so I give the city props on the basis of those two bits of information.
The highlight of my weekend was wearing sunglasses the entire time, including indoors and during NAQT rounds. It's L.A. okay? I have to make an attempt to look cool so fuck off. Also, I was waiting for someone to make a snide comment about me wearing my shades indoors so that I could then tell him that I was blind and that he shouldn't be so cavalier in mocking the disabled. Then I'd laugh as he walked away in shame.
The other hightlight was sticking my finger in the face of some fat guy with a gaudy orange sweater. No, it wasn't as sexy as it sounds. This was just some guy spouting out some crap about how the U.S. had no choice but to go to war with Iraq, yada yada. I'm willing to concede that there may be a few arguments, but this guy wasn't making any of them. Finger out and sunglasses on, I entered the debate with, "That's HORSESHIT. Listen, if you have about five hours after the round to debate this crap with me, we can do it. But I will slam you on all of your arguments. Right now I have a round to play." He didn't approach me afterwards, for whatever reason.
So that's that. Next time I should check out the ocean and get my ass kicked in some kind of urban sports competition. That should be fun.
Posted by mike at April 8, 2003 04:01 AMTrue on the parking thing. I'd never really thought about it. And true on the sprawl, but that's part of what makes it such an odd city - it changes so much so quickly.
Next time: Dodger game, Pacific Ocean, Venice Beach, Chinatown, and, of course, Topanga.
An interesting read! I'll consider what you said over my christmas holidays. I want Petra EA44 Mini great Chicki Egg Boiler for Christmas!
Posted by: Petra EA44 Mini great Chicki Egg Boiler on December 7, 2004 02:40 PM