Summer in SoCal

Nothin' on earth that'll get me hummin'
Like a heat wave comin' and I'll come runnin'
With her makin' that tan in the broad daylight
And every night is a Saturday night
And everything's right with the summer comin'
I'm the first one standin' in line
For my day in the sun I've been workin'
'Til the sun don't shine.

“Summer’s Comim’” -Clint Black

Well, I certainly started the summer off in high fashion with the Pepperdine Bible Lectures, now nearly a month ago. I mean, be honest with yourself now, who wouldn’t want to start their summer off working a 10 day, 73 hour week? Even at minimum wage, it makes for a nice paycheck though. Surprisingly enough, once the lectures themselves got started, I really did enjoy myself. My job was to run power-point in the fieldhouse.
I’m not sure how many people we packed in there, but it was quite a few. By the way, the pictures I took got erased. This photo is courtesy of Ms. Gwendolyn Siska. I was in the back of that gym from 7.30am till about 10pm (granted, with 3 hour lunch break in the middle) during the days of actual lectures, and if I messed up, there were thousands of people in there who would have seen it. Fortunately, everything went pretty smooth. It was funny to me to look at the different way different preachers prepared their presentations. Some people had slides and didn’t even know what was coming next. Some people had pretty good outlines and some people, had their sermons typed out and presented them almost verbatim. No joke… it was quite impressive.

Anyway, after lectures I moved into my living arrangement for the remainder of the summer. Good ole Rockwell Towers 120.

For the rest of this summer, I and Ryan (Dap) Dapremont are crammed in a not only the living structure with the smallest rooms on campus… but one of the smallest rooms in that living structure. But, we couldn’t just take it laying down. We took that small room and turned it into two rooms; a bedroom and a living room.


We figured that we should probably name our lounge, as one would name any other historic dorm room. In honor of the fact that we live in first floor dungeon of Towers and were both in London together, there was really only one option. The Underground.


As much as I love that recliner and couch, and of course the television, my favorite accessory in that room is this. My Apple Airport Express! Not only does this provide me with wireless internet, and wireless printing, but it also has a function called AirTunes. What this means is that Dap and I are able to play music from our laptops through the 600-watt surround sound system wirelessly. How cool is that?!


Anyway, moving on. It’s a good time for me in the land of the sport. I’m not a huge basketball fan, but I am a huge Dallas Sports fan, and right now the Dallas Mavericks are making franchise history. Game four tonight. For more coverage, check out 1310 The Ticket’s Bob Sturm’s blog. It’s what I primarily use to stay on top of the Dallas Sport’s scene.

Pepperdine University Athletics

In other sports news, the Pepperdine Baseball Waves have won the West Coast Conference for the 17th time, and enter the NCAA Championships as the number one seed and will face No. 4 Missouri. Furthermore, for the first time our Eddy D. Field will play host to the first round of the tournament. Hope UCLA and UC Irvine don’t mess it up too much.


Oh, and we’re also National Champions in another sport this year. Last summer it was Volleyball that won us that title, this year, it’s Tennis. That’s something that’s got a lot of my friends excited, but the only sport that really has the potential get me pumped up at this school is baseball, so here’s hoping that I get to see a few good games in the coming days!

Well, I’ve been working on this post for about a week now, and I know its fairly lacking in any semblance of substance, but hopefully it’s a peak into the happenings here on the Left Coast for my past few weeks. Maybe I’ll get something a little more thought provoking up in the near future, but I sort of doubt it. Keep checking back, you never know what you’re gonna get!

Da Vinci

Ladies and Gentlemen… the moment you’ve all been waiting for… Wait, who am I kidding? There might be a discrete handful of people who actually check my little corner of the blogosphere every once and a while to see what inordinate ramblings, musings, or otherwise poor attempts at lyrical composition I have spat out recently, but among those of you here there are few ladies, and there are certainly no gentlemen (yeah, that’s to you Sawyer.)

At some point in the not to distant future I’ll compose the diary-blog that addresses some of the major points of my life over the past couple weeks since I last posted. However, at this moment I’m compelled to cover an eminently more controversial, and interpersonally relevant subject. That of, course, would be the main news item over the weekend; The Da Vinci Code.

Despite the fact that I was warned over and over again by all the reviews that the movie was the cinematic equivalent of McDonalds when you want a real hamburger I thought I already knew exactly what the film was going to be like when I darkened the door of the Mann’s theater in Agora Hills last night. I was wrong. I expected more out of Ron Howard, famed director of “Apollo 13” and “A Beautiful Mind.” In fact, I expected to see a lot of the same effects and art direction that we saw in the latter. But, let’s not put this all on Ron Howard… break it down something like this:

Howard chose to stick with his usual editing duo of Dan Hanley and Mike Hill. For the cinematography, he turned to Salvatore Totino whom he had just worked with on “The Missing” and “Cinderella Man.” The cinematography wasn’t horrible in and of itself, but when it was combined with unmotivated cuts, it was very difficult to get an idea of the space in which the action was taking place. That could have very well been unavoidable in the Louvre due to the expansive floor space, but it continued throughout the movie, and was a constant headache.

Outside of some other technical flub ups, the main drawbacks in the movie are carry-overs from the novel. Tom Hanks, who continues to be one of my favorite actors due to his versatility, was anything but stellar in this film. The lines were over all unmotivated and just generally unbelievable. Unbelieveable? Did I really just say that? That’s a good summation of the film. It’s a pulp fiction novel that’s been turned into an uninspired pulp-laden movie. And while it is certainly not as good as the book, (par for the course with cinematic adaptations,) the movie, with all it’s flaws and lack of development, depth, or worthwhile content, is a wonderful portrayal of a book that’s sensational, unrealistic, and focused wholly on moving from plot point to plot point sacrificing any shred of potential character development.

It was good to see Audrey Tautou, the wonderfully talented French actress from Amelie, in a major Hollywood film, hopefully next time around she can find her way into a film with a little more depth. And Paul Bettany continues to impress. I do wish he had taken his character a little deeper and portrayed a little more of the pain of his past than being content to portray unbelievable monster his character became. Unbelievable; there that word is again, I just can’t get away from it. Oh well.

All in all, I think there is no doubt that the best film that opened last weekend was Over The Hedge