This year I got a running start into my vacation by virtue of the fact July 3 was a company holiday.  So I haven’t worked now in over a week, and man do I feel good.  I did manage to accomplish a lot of Summer of Bean activities as well, so let’s do a rundown.

The Hangover:  The End of the Trail season actually begins in mid-June with a couple of high school and youth tournaments.  During this time, you’ll generally find me inside the tournament headquarters feverishly working on the programs for the two big tournaments.  We also find plenty of time to have fun as well.  A few years ago, we were all about sticking Mentos into Diet Coke bottles and watching the subsequent chemical physical reaction.  Other years we’ve created fantastic inside jokes.  This year was all about movies.  Well, one in particular.  My friend was all about Transformers 2.  ”Better than the first,” he continued to exclaim.  I had to go see it.

Right.  I pointed him to Rotten Tomatoes and also discussed some of the speculation that the thing had racist and anti-Semitic themes and explained that there was no way I was going to pay Michael Bay $10 to watch him abuse John Turturro like that.  I told him I’d check out The Hangover instead.

The Hangover has been the summer’s break-out hit to this point.  I say break-out because it came from sort of nowhere and steadily gained an audience through idiots like me on Twitter and their blogs.  The word of mouth was tremendous.  I caught it on Friday night down at the Eastport Plaza, my favorite theater in town.  I arrived just as the previews began expecting to find an empty theater.  It was packed.  After stepping on a couple of toes, I found a seat.

I won’t give anything away except to say the movie is wildly original and freaking hilarious.  There were times when I was the only person in the theater laughing, but that’s to be expected sometimes.  The writing and the acting were both solid.  Everyone’s been talking about Zach Galifianakis’ performance, which was damned good, but when I go back, and I will, I’ll be going back for Ken Jeong.  He absolutely kills his role and, on further review, makes a solid cameo in Knocked Up.  According to his IMDB page, we’ll be getting to see a lot of him in the next few years.  I hope so.  He’s good.

I Love You, Man:  I’m embarrassed to admit that I completely missed out on the first two three four(!) seasons of How I Met Your Mother on CBS.  It’s not like Anna and Jason haven’t been trying to tell me since day one.  They have.  It’s just that my remote control constantly forgets CBS is even on the air anymore.  Why that is, I couldn’t tell you.  I guess I’ve been trained since the 80s that the only funny and clever things worth watching on TV have been on NBC Thursday nights or Fox on Sundays.  That’s it.  Monday nights on CBS have been where NBC retreads have gone on to second acts.  Turns out I was completely wrong.  HIMYM is spectacularly funny and well written.  Now I have to go back and watch the first four seasons so I can know what I’m watching when Season Five rolls around in September.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because Jason Segal, the second lead in I Love You, Man also plays one of the main characters in HIMYM.  Aside from the thought of Rashida Jones in a bikini (if you’ve seen the movie, you know of what I speak), Segal is the film’s only redeeming quality.  Thinking back on it, I’m not sure if it’s more a product of his acting or the role.  Either way, he did his best to save the thing, but I just didn’t buy it.  I Love You, Man was sold as a guys answer to a chick flick.  It’s not.  It’s a chick flick that explores what makes men tick.  If chicks haven’t figured that answer out yet, I don’t think they ever will.

Basketball:  The End of the Tail is old home week for me.  Like I said, I’ve been doing this since high school and a lot of the faces I see every year have been coming just as long.  Generally we all sit and swap the same stories year after year, but every now and then a new one bubbles up.

One of the guys who helps run the thing is a retired NBA official.  He does a lot of college work these days but is still on a first-name basis with most everyone in the fraternity.  The subject of ejecting coaches came up, as it always does.  Coaches, he said, generally want to get thrown out of a game because they don’t want to get blamed for what’s happening on the floor.  When your team is getting drilled by 30, you don’t want to stick around.  So a few well-timed comments to the referee, and it’s over, right?

As the story goes, one night in the late-seventies down in Atlanta, the home team was down by double-digits early.  The coach saw his team wouldn’t be putting in an effort that night and he wanted to beat them to the locker room.  So he starts chipping at the officials.  They paid him no mind, figuring he was just letting off steam.

But he was serious.  And one time down the floor, he let fly with a few magic words that would get any coach run anytime.  The lead official walked over to the coach and said, “listen, if I have to be out here to watch this turd of a game, you do too.  Now sit down and take it like a man.”  At that point the coach called the official a motherfucker to which the official replied, “that may well be, but I ain’t throwing you out.”

The coach got the message, and went back to the bench.  He didn’t say a word the rest of the night.  Genius.

Smokin’ At The Ocean:  The tournament ended on Thursday which meant I still had another weekend to go before vacation was over.  I decided to take a leisurely Friday and mosey down to the coast for Smokin’ at The Ocean at the Chinook Winds Casino in Lincoln City.  Many of you know I took second in last year’s media rib eating contest.  While I was invited to participate again this year, I politely declined.  I think I’ve had my fill (if you’ll pardon the expression) of eating contests for a while.

Before I left Friday morning, I hit the Surftides website to see if there were any rooms available there.  As it happened there were.  They’re located right on the beach and their rooms all feature balconies with great ocean views.  I decided to go cheap this time around and get the $99 room.  From the description, it sounded like I’d be facing the parking lot which was fine.  I figured I was saving around $150 on the trip.  And did I really need the ocean view?  Answer?  No.

Boy was I shocked.  They gave me a room at the end of the building.  It was set maybe 30 feet back from the oceanfront side of the property, otherwise the view was the same.  The beautiful Pacific was right there.  Had my own balcony and everything.  What wasn’t to love?  Seriously.  If you’re ever in Lincoln City, Surftides is the only place to stay.  Thank me later.

I headed over to the casino after a few hours and sat down to play some blackjack.  I dig the casino at Chinook Winds.  Friendly dealers and great floor staff make it a good experience.  Plus they have single deck blackjack, which is tons of fun.  It takes some getting used to though.  It’s a much quicker game and doesn’t have the flow of the multi-deck shoes.  And weird freaking things happen in single deck that you wouldn’t see at a regular table.  For instance, after being dealt a 4 and a 2, I took a card which turned out to be a 5.  That gave me 11.  All I needed was a face card and I was home free, right?  Well the dealer gave me another 5.  The guy next to me starts grumbling that he needed one of my two 5s.  Tough darts.  So I’m sitting there with a 16 against a dealer face card.  I have no choice here but to take another card.  So I hit and wouldn’t you know it, another 5 comes up.  Three in a row!  I got my 21 and promptly shut up.  The guy next to me was incredulous.  Turns out he had the other 5.  He needed a 5 to make 20.  Instead the dealer gave him a 6 and HE shut up.  And so it went.  Single deck is a weird game.

Unfortunately the whole gambling experience didn’t turn out well for The Bean.  I lost a few hundred dollars and for a few hours wasn’t sure what was left in my bank account.  Turns out I was fine and could afford it, but it made for a sleepless night on Saturday.

The real reason I went down was to check out the barbecue competition which ended up being a real downer this year.  The last few years there have been over a dozen different competitors showcasing their wares, plus a bunch of other sauce vendors and such.  This year there were just two guys cooking and two guys hawking sauce.  That was it.  Very disappointing.  I’m sure the economy had something to do with it, but still.  Yikes.

Joey Chestnut was also there to defend his rib eating belt, which he did by eating almost nine pounds of ribs.  I love ribs and all, but yuck.  That’s just too much.  Unfortunately I didn’t stick around for the competition due to the previously noted sleepless Saturday.  Perhaps next year.

So now the Summer of Bean carries on.  Tonight I’ll be attending the AAA All-Star home run derby with a close advisor.  And Wednesday I have an appointment with a personal trainer.  We’re gonna kick the exercise thing up a notch.

Until recently, movies have never been intended for repeat viewings and the scrutiny they invite.  For example, it’s well known that Jeremy Piven was in several early Cusack films.  Watching those films now, it’s funny to see the guy who would become Ari Gold regress into the “give me my keys!” guy.  It’s just as awkward to see Piven in One Crazy Summer or Grosse Pointe Blank.

I think my entire high school class saw themselves in Say Anything and to be honest, we still do.  Watching it twenty years later, we think back to that same time in our lives.  The decisions we made at the time that we thought were so momentous, but in hindsight weren’t.  I probably shouldn’t, but watching the movie now, I think back to things I might have done differently.  Girls I might have asked out.  Friends I might have made.  Meh.

Back to the repeated viewing thing.  After watching the movie back in April, I came up with a few observations I emailed to a friend of mine.  Watching it again last night, I still have questions.

So Diane goes into her dad’s office, pries open the chest on top of the desk. The chest was stacked three across and I’m guessing somewhere between 8 and 10 deep with bundles of hundred dollar bills. This means the chest had somewhere between $250k and $300k. Maybe more? There had to be another stack somewhere. But let’s say for argument it was $300k.

The deal the dad struck with the government was 9 months and $150k. This leaves at least $150k in cash lying around plus whatever he had in his pirate chest in the backyard.

What does he do with the money? Does Diane take it when offered? Or does she just stay in Europe and live the life of an art history major? That’s what I want to know.

Lloyd actually did better than all of them. He had a buddy who got him into Amazon in about 1997 or so. It was a perfect slacker gig. He’s now in charge of some music category and pulling down six figures. He’s set. Wife, maybe couple of kids. Probably has a house in the old neighborhood.

But what became of Diane? And, more importantly, what became of the money?

These are questions I have.  Any guesses?

Sidebar:  If you didn’t already know this, the Lake Oswego library is the best thing going in the area.  I make the drive almost every weekend on my way to or from Fry’s.  Here’s how fantastic the Lake O library is.  You’re familiar with the hold system various libraries use, right?  You put your name on the list and when you get to the top, they put the item on hold for you and when you’re done it goes to the next person.  Well, at the Lake O library, you get to skip to the head of the line on any item that belongs to the Lake O library.  So say someone in Estacada is waiting for my book a month ahead of me.  If it’s a Lake Oswego book, it comes to me first.  So I managed to jump like 8 people to get the book.  So now I have 2 copies.  This is a whole other problem.

Oh…the name of the book?  You’re gonna have to wait a few days.

The Pie Champ thing was something that sort of came out of left field.  I thought I could win it, but when five other guys showed up on Saturday, I wasn’t that sure.  It blew right through my 1500 calorie plan, which also wasn’t a good thing.  On the plus side, I’ve made some new friends and the folks at Whiffies got some great publicity out of it.  So that’s all good, right?

To get back on track with the 1500 calorie project, I’ve joined the Lance Armstrong Daily Plate site.  They’re got a fantastic tool for both the iPhone and the Blackberry, so I can track my intake and my exercise both at work and on the go.  It’s pretty sweet.  But like anything weight loss related, it’s not so much about Day One.  It’s about Day One Hundred.

I also need to talk more about the movies and TV shows I’ve been watching.  I want to go see The Hangover at some point.  And my Comcast DVR is backing up with movies I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never seen.  However this conflicts with my new “if you’re awake you should either be working, exercising, or writing” thing.  So we’ll see how that works out.

It seems a lot longer than two years since I declared the last Summer of Bean.  A lot has happened in that time.  I read The Dip and decided to try and live it.  I left a relatively stable job and struck out on my own to see what that felt like for a while.  I was published in the Portland Tribune, still one of the biggest and coolest things ever to happen to me.  And…  Well…  That’s about it.

So we take another swing at the Summer of Bean.  It’s all based, of course, on Seinfeld’s Summer of George, the summer in which George had been laid off by the Yankees and received three months severence.  You can read the Wikipedia entry here.  The episode’s script is here.  You’ll notice the categories on the right are based on the Wikipedia list.

1. Reading a book, from beginning to end and in that order.
2. Playing frolf. He plays at least once.
3. Watching television programming.
4. Relax and de-compress.
5. Mid-morning naps.
6. Insignificant telephone conversations.
7. Banging his head on tables.
8. Assisting Jerry in maintaining his relationship with Lanette (Amanda Peet), a younger woman Jerry is dating. 
9. Growing a mustache.

Not a bad list, no?  I’ve made some alterations, but I’m pretty faithful to the Wiki entry.  For example, rather than helping others out with their dating issues, I’ll be dating a reasonable substitute for Amanda Peet or at least attempting the same.  And as for the mustache, been there, done that.

 If you Google “Summer of George“, you come up with a couple of other websites with cool ideas based on a similar philosophy.  I may try and work a few of those things in too.  We shall see.

So this is going to be all about self-discovery and self-improvement.  A very mid-life thing to do.  Thanks for tagging along.