Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Oktoberfest Weekend Recap

Oktoberfest La Mesa was this past weekend so I took Friday off of work and skipped my NFL Picks blog. Sorry about that. But just for the record my picks sucked and they wouldn’t have helped you anyways. Needless to say, this past weekend was a crazy one. Not just because I ate a crap load of food or because I drank an inordinate amount of booze. It was everything else that happened. To prove it to you, here’s a Top 10 List of the Craziest Things That Happened this Weekend:

10. Stanford upsetting USC
Stanford was a 41 point underdog heading into the game at USC and pulled out an amazing 24-23 win. After watching the first few SC games this year I knew they were overrated. While everyone hyped him up as the Next Great SC Quarterback after Palmer and Leinhart, John David Booty just didn’t have the “it” factor going for him. Palmer and Leinhart just looked like a star quarterbacks. John David Booty didn’t have the look. Even his name is goofy. Wouldn’t he just sound better if he went by John Booty or David Booty. Even JD Booty. John David Booty sounds like someone who just tried to assassinate the President.

9. Me not being able to eat as much as I used to
I set the over / under for the number of meat-on-a-sticks I’d eat this weekend at 15. You know how many I ended up eating?

Five.

I know, it was almost as disappointing a performance as John David Booty’s against Stanford this weekend. The surprising thing was the chances that I continued to pass up. I deliberately ate a light lunch on Friday so I could get a meat-on-a-stick later but I passed on the walk home. And again on Saturday, on the way back from trolling around Oktoberfest all I was thinking about was hitting up the meat-on-a-stick stand and when push came to shove, I decided to pass.

What the hell is wrong with me? Would this have happened to Phil Lam 2005 or Phil Lam 2006? Back in the day I would have attacked that stand the way Tony Montana attacked a pile of coke. There would have been no end to me completely gorging myself. Now, I might as well be dead.

8. The Diamondbacks and Rockies advancing to the NLCS
Not only that, both teams swept their opponents in their respective division series. Not only that, but this means that either the Arizona Diamondbacks or the Colorado Rockies are going to represent the National League in the World Series this year. As a Padre fan, you can’t help but think that had the Padres gotten a decent hitter this summer they would have made it to the NLCS and possibly the World Series. Now, unless they make some major moves this offseason, they’ll probably be the third or fourth best team in their division in 2008.

I will now shave with a rusted steak knife.

7. The ungodly number of bad movies I watched
I was battling a little cold on Friday, was semi-hungover / sick on Saturday and drunk on Sunday so when I wasn’t drinking down the street from my house at Oktoberfest or watching football or the baseball playoffs I crashed on the couch, took cold medicine, recovered and watched movies. Here are the movies that I watched:

The Pursuit of Happyness
Freeze Frame
Silent Hill
Talladega Nights
The History of Violence
Babel

Babel is a good movie although it was my second time watching it and I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the first time (Initial Rating: 8, Rewatchability Rating: 4) and Talladega Nights is OK but outside those two the rest of those movies were below average to plain old bad. To make matters worse as I’m writing this I feel like there was another crappy movie that I watched that must have been so bad that my mind isn’t letting me remember it right now. Since I’m pretty picky about the movies I watch, I watch maybe one bad movie out of five. This weekend out of the six movies that I remember watching, I will never watch four of them ever again. I can’t believe how many bad movies I agreed to watch. Just a disturbing ratio, plain and simple.

6. LSU pulling out a win against Florida
This was the best college football game of the weekend. LSU was down 10 in the fourth quarter and came back and won on some gutsy calls by their head coach. After Florida pulled out to a 24-14 lead I thought the game was over. But somehow LSU came back.

With USC probably out of the mix the best national championship game we can hope for now would probably be LSU-Cal, LSU-Ohio State or LSU-Boston College. Yuck. Needless to say, college football has seen better seasons.

5. Notre Dame winning its first game of the season
Of course they had to knock out UCLA’s quarterback and Jimmy Clausen only threw for 84 yards but hey, a win’s a win.

4. The Cowboys coming from behind to beat the Bills on MNF
3. The Indians eliminating the Yankees from the playoffs
Last night was just a riveting night of television. I kept flipping back between watching the Indians putting away the Yankees and Tony Romo crapping the bed then bringing the Cowboys back to win in the final minutes of the game. To make things more intense, my fantasy team was a couple of points behind heading into the game and I needed Romo to score negative points for me so I was actually rooting for him to throw all those interceptions. It was completely nuts. A crazy night all around. Peter King does a good job of breaking down the night in the Tuesday edition of his MMQB column.

2. The Chargers embarrassing the Broncos 41-3
THE CHARGERS ARE BACK!!!

Err, I mean, they’re still alive.

The crazy part about all of this is that the Chargers play the Raiders this weekend and the winner will have sole possession of first place in the AFC West. So even after their atrocious 1-3 start the Chargers have a good shot at being in first place heading into their bye week. Let’s just hope they don’t screw things up this weekend.

1. El LamGal and I booking a trip to Denver for my 30th Birthday
Tannia wanted to get out of town for my birthday and had a credit at Frontier Airlines. So last night we were looking at places we could go and saw that for some reason all flights for Frontier out of San Diego had a connection at Denver -- if we wanted to fly to Cabo, we had to connect at Denver. San Francisco? Connect at Denver. So we figured: What about going to Denver? When we were looking at restaurants and hotels around the area to see if anything there would entice us, we noticed a hotel that was near the Pepsi Center so obviously I wondered if the Nuggets would be playing the same weekend we were looking to go over there. Turns out, the Nuggets are playing the Knicks that weekend and they had courtside seats available for a reasonable price so I got the tickets, booked the hotel and before you knew it, we were going to Denver to watch the Nuggets-Knicks game on my birthday weekend.

Nuts huh?

There’s crazy and then there’s booking a random trip to Denver on a whim.

(PS- This will be my first time in Denver so if anyone out there knows any good restaurants or hotspots in the area send them my way. I would appreciate any recommendations.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oktoberfest sounds like it was a good time. Best line ever - "Not just because I ate a crap load of food or because I drank an inordinate amount of booze." HAHA - this is how i picture it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bel1yA4sMY

Anonymous said...

denver! sweet!

enjoy the elevation. they don't call it mile high for nothin'!

Unknown said...

We talked about Elways, which I think is right up your alley. And while I don't know how you feel about dipping your meats in sauces, I have heard good things about Vesta Dipping Grill.