Arturo Gatti’s murder: national tragedy or totally awesome action movie?

World-famous boxer Arturo Gatti was murdered in cold blood last week. It was a horrific event, and his family, friends, and fans deserve all of our sympathies. But I wouldn’t be an anonymous blogger if I didn’t offer my own insensitive and irrevent spin on this story.

Seriously, this event has the making of a blockbuster mystery-action movie, or at least a decently crappy movie that you would stay up to watch on an airplane:

Gatti and his wife: a plot made in heaven.

Setting: We’re talking about a guy who was born in Italy, moved to Canada, spent his formative years in Jersey, and then died in Brazil (thanks, Wikipedia); this movie traverse areas populated by the mafia, sexy Brazilian dancers, Jersey guidos, and Canadian mounties.

Characters:

Gatti. A legendary athlete in one of the most corrupt sports on the planet. On top of that, you couldn’t think up a better name, or a better face (swollen and puffed from years of fighting). On top of that, he worked in real estate after his retirement, putting at the cusp of one of the greatest financial disasters of our time. On top of that, he was murdered with a fucking purse strap.

Wife. They met at a strip club in New York. Friends told Gatti not to marry her: she’s a loose cannon, they said. The couple had been fighting for months, and she threatened to kill him on multiple occasions. She is distraught over her husband’s death, and vows to free herself for the sake of her 10-month old son. She is a smoking hot Brazilian girl. These are all facts.

A hard-nosed detective with an eye for the truth. All evidence points to the wife, but he sees something genuine and innocent in the woman’s grief. We follow him as he traverses the dark and secret spaces of Gatti’s life, and we learn that boxing’s golden boy was caught up with dangerous people. His death could uncover a conspiracy with far-reaching implications; that is, if the detective lives to tell the tale.

I can the scene already:

As Carnaval is celebrated with lights, colors, sound and dance in the streets of Rio, a different scene takes place in a dirty hotel eight stories above. Our camera glides up past dancers and banners, onto a balcony and through the open window of a single bedroom. The lights are out except for the eerie glow of a television just feet away. Our detective is slouched against a chair, smoking a cigar and watching the small screen with a steady, but unconcerned stare. He looks tired, as if he has been sitting there for hours.

Through the smoke and on the TV, a tape plays. It is a boxing match; Arturo Gatti is about to lose to Mickey Ward in what will called one of the greatest matches of the past century. As the camera edges closer to the screen, the crowd cheers and hollers in reverence. Gatti and Ward are throwing final punches; a bell sounds, and the two warriors slouch against each other in exhaustion as the noise grows to a fever pitch. This thirty-second interval is paused, rewound, and played again three more times. We are uncomfortably close to the screen now, watching stripes of pixels that have no meaning.

But this time the pause stays put. The detective has noticed something — someone — in the crowd he hadn’t seen until now. He straightens up in his chair and slowly crawls toward the screen. And then his eyes grow wide in horror, his mouth opens, and the still-burning cigar topples in slow-motion from his lips.

…What did he see?

Find out in “Thrilla in Brasilia: The Arturo Gatti Story,” coming to an airplane near you.

(Gulp) Guest Post: Point-Cointerpoint from Phil and the Guv’na at Playazball

A few weeks ago, I offered any DC blogger the chance to write a guest post about any topic at all. Phil was the first to respond, and so today he provides a wholly rational and altogether illuminating debate with his fellow blogger, the Guv’na.

For more fresh takes on life’s unanswered questions, and greater general tips on being a playa, check out Phil and the Guv’na’s blog at playazball.com.

WHEN IS IT ACCEPTABLE TO EAT OUT A WOMAN’S ANUS WITH NO SEXUAL GRATIFICATION IN RETURN, by Phil and the Guv’na at Playazball

POINT: (by Phil)

It is late Saturday evening, and you find yourself at your favorite bar.  A very gorgeous, and very famous woman sidles up next to you.  It can be any beautiful, famous woman, but for purposes of this text the woman is Jennifer Aniston.

Jennifer leans over to you and whispers softly in your ear, “Nothing turns me on more than when a man eats my asshole.  If you like, we can go back to my house in the Hills, and I will take off all of my clothes if you would simply ravage my ass.  However, I will not return the favor.  Nor can you have sex with me.  I will not touch you sexually in any way, shape or form.”

What do you do?

I know.  It’s something we’ve thought about time and time again.  It is a question that has stumped the most sexually brilliant minds.  But I have an answer, and if you are an honest man, your answer is the same as mine.

You eat Jennifer Aniston’s asshole, no questions asked.

Now first, let’s make the assumption that you are a “common” man, with no ready accessibility to Hollywood’s starlets.  This is the basis for my argument in favor of performing analingus on Ms. Aniston.  The reason that you, or any man, would agree to this request is so you could simply say to all of your friends: “I ate Jennifer Aniston’s anus.”  Who else could make such a claim?  Who would dare question your motive?  The motive is clear:  a once in a lifetime opportunity to see Jennifer Aniston – in person – naked.

I know what the nay-sayers will say.  “But that’s disgusting!”  I will agree, it would not be pleasant on its surface.  But for purposes of this argument, Jennifer’s anus is 100% clean.  She is waxed and possibly bleached, and has just showered prior to your encounter.  There is no chance of any foul-ness ‘down there’.  The point of this exercise is not “what’s in it for me?”  The point is you can claim something that maybe only 2 or 3 other men on this entire planet could claim.  You would always have the memory of Jennifer Aniston’s nakedness.

I state for the record that this would be an instance for a man to accept a woman’s request to eat her anus with no sexual gratification in return.

COUNTERPOINT (by: The Guv’na)

I am not a selfish lover.  I believe there are times when a man should surrender his needs for a woman. This is often easy when it is likely that she will return the favor with gusto at a later date.  However, even when another opportunity is not guaranteed, there are times when a man can derive nearly as much pleasure as the woman by simply being the provider of her ecstasy and bearing witness to her naked form and physical response.

This is nearly impossible, however, when one is required to eat ass.

What the NBA Draft and Duke Basketball says about my employment prospects.

Another NBA draft came and went, and, once again, I was not selected. Apparently NBA scouts weren’t impressed with my workout (I don’t work out), or my intangibles (I don’t know how to play). But I suppose that’s not too surprising, because most four-year seniors don’t get drafted anymore.

And at the draft’s conclusion, more of my peers unwillingly joined the ranks of the unemployed. These guys aren’t unlike me and you (and by you, I mean me again): they were highly touted coming into college, showed occasional flashes of brilliance, but settled into relative mediocrity for four years. They are still highly skilled, but they simply can’t match the level of their peers, who were more talented, worked just as hard or harder, and ended up being paid professionals.

Like I said before: this blog is about how every event is somehow inextricably tied with my existence. So I got to thinking: who is my counterpart? That is, what college basketball player represents my experience in college? After a few minutes, the answer became painfully clear:

This guy.

A new and exciting personality test for Wall Street Journal readers.

Please read this sentence:

“Sex has upended so many political careers in the last few years that we have become dully inured to the tableau of staged contrition by which the fault is confessed to the world.”

—06/27/09, Gerard Baker in “Sex Americana,” Wall Street Journal.

How many blue words do you understand?

0-1: You mostly nod and smile when the following subjects are brought up in conversation: politics, education, science, foreign policy, languages, literature. You can, however, provide a wealth of knowledge and anecdotes about the weather, gas prices, and parenting. If somebody uses French words like cliché or rendezvous, you suddenly go on the defensive and make fun of “Johnny College over here.”

2-3: You were in the gifted program in middle school and won your school’s spelling bee in sixth grade; this has given you an undeserved sense of accomplishment for the past 30 years. You watch football games with the boys every Sunday, but secretly keep a typewriter and painting easel in your garage. If all goes to plan, your first movie script will give you enough money to quit your day job and become a full-time artist.

4: You received high marks in school and will read the occasional novel, but usually spend most of your time managing your Quicken account and looking for deals on Amazon. Sometimes you think about Jill, your old college girlfriend. She was dumb, but damn she had great tits.

5: You mask your social ineptness with a large vocabulary and love making witty, caustic comments under your breath. You despise all the liberal quasi-intellectuals who quote Camus but can’t pronounce his name correctly. You did heroine once, but frankly, taking painkillers and reading Kafka has the same effect.

First impressions of DC from a wide-eyed Midwesterner.

I haven’t written in this blog for a while because I just moved to the city! It was an auspicious start to my first day in the district: my landlord gave me the wrong pair of keys; I was yelled at by a pedestrian for stopping in the crosswalk; and I was yelled at by a pedestrian because he seemed to be high on PCP. Here are some first impressions:

• Based on my preliminary observations, every male in the city is a business-savvy metrosexual. Everybody seems to wear some variation of khakis, a blue button down shirt, and that ambiguous side-totebag. And yes, I’ve been spending too much time in Dupont Circle.

• I never thought it would be this fun to be anonymous in the city. I shaved my facial hair into a goatee today, and I wore a button-down shirt that exposed my chest hair (I’m a man, by the way).  These are things I never should be doing. Maybe living in the city isn’t a good idea.

91.8% of 2009 college grads live in their parents’ basement.

The job market for recent college graduates is pretty awful. Don’t believe me? Fine, I’ll just let shoddy Internet research do the talking:

Here’s a quick view of the Google Search “college graduates 2009 employment.” I moved up some results to get all relevant headlines in the same image, but they were all top 10 results:

ABC News can bite me.

And if you don’t believe in the explanatory power of Google Search results, then read a tidbit from this uplifting article:

My Michael Jackson story.

I was driving my car down my town’s main street, trying to film a video job application with a friend, when we heard the news. He got the call first, from his sister.

“What? Are you kidding me? Fuck. How? Oh my god, that’s crazy.”

"rip mj." The text says it all.

I couldn’t hear the other line, but I gathered somebody had died. As my friend continued his conversation, I wondered: who could it be? It couldn’t have been a close friend or a relative, because he would have been hysterical. But then…why even make the call? Whose death couldn’t have waited until we came home?

Then my friend got off the phone: “Michael Jackson died.” Right as he told me, I felt my phone vibrating in my shorts – a text, stating simply, “rip mj.” And then we switched to radio, where two DJs were re-hashing Jackson’s heart attack and subsequent death.

Needless to say, we didn’t finish making the video. It just seemed so silly now. Instead we spent the afternoon driving around a little aimlessly, switching channels as they gave us any news we could, and listening to any MJ song that was on the radio.

If only for a moment, Michael Jackson’s death caused the world to fall off its axis.

If you want a friend in DC, get a blog.

Every time I tell people I’m moving to DC, I invariably get some version of  the quote “If you want a friend in DC, get a dog.” My dad puts it in a slightly different way: “Nobody in the real world gives a shit about you.” Ha ha!

Well, it’s the 21st century, and as a child of the Internet, I lack the requisite social skills necessary to make friends or even function in sunlight. And forget about dogs — I’m allergic, and the lease on my new basement apartment forbids it. So I think we need to update President Truman’s quote: “If you want a friend in DC, get a blog.”

Seriously, it seems like everybody in DC blogs. And if they don’t blog, then they Twitter. And if they don’t blog or Twitter, then they’re living in an ivory tower. And that ivory tower probably doesn’t have internet access. Let’s just move on.

About me.

I’m a recent college graduate of a top 15 university, and like many of my peers, I don’t have a job. So I’m doing what any sensible person would do: I’m moving to DC, baby! Because that’s what you want to do when you have no income: live in one of the most expensive cities in the world (72nd, and 8th in the US, according to The Internet). Did I mention my dad’s a doctor?

I’m not there yet, but I’ll moving to the city in a few weeks. In the meantime, I’ve been preparing for DC life by waking up early, reading newspapers and online news content, and having extramarital affairs with congressional staff members. After that, I’m bracing myself for a few months of considerable financial hardship as I party every weekend and live off my parents’ income.

What you can expect in this blog.

This blog is all about me, and how every single event in the world is just a new and interesting way of explaining the historical importance of my life. It’s like the Truman Show, only if Truman was OK with the whole thing and then blogged about it every night.

What you can NOT expect in this blog.

Musings. Fuck musings.

OK, that’s it. I’m going for a hike in the Appalachians, I’ll see you when I see you.