Whistle if you want to see my instrument

NRV are doing their final home bout of the year this weekend. I'm not on the roster (and it's an all-stars bout anyway), but I'm going to be there as a NSO.

Specifically, I think I'm jam timing, or that's what I put my hand up for. This is hilarious, because I've never jam timed in my life, and this is going to be a proper, official, WFTDA bout thingy. Argh. From what I undetstand, all I need to do is be able to blow a whistle and work a stopwatch. If someone gave me a stopwatch and told me how to press the buttons, I think I'd be okay.

But, here's a bit of an admission. I didn't even know how to work a whistle properly until about two days ago. I figured I should own a whistle anyway for derby purposes, so I got a nice one from Fox 40 off the interwebs. It's yellow. :) I've been practicing doing four tweets and stuff, but I keep spitting everywhere. Ha.

I am registered to do my first bout.

So Richmond (in Northern Virginia, for those of you--like me--still not familiar with US geography) has a league that holds an annual holiday bouting thingy called Season's Beatings. It basically is just like a whole bunch of bouts for different levels. I've never bouted before, and I know some of the NRV ladies are heading up there, and for some reason I thought I might be interested in doing that.

I don't know what possessed me to to think that; I still find US derby intimidating, and I don't know if I want my first bout to be in some random tournament when I'm not really representing a league that I'm a member of. But I can't bout with NRV until sometime next year, so River City it is. And they even have categories for people who are >1 year experience, Intermediate, Advanced (i.e. on all-star teams), etc. And there are co-ed bouts. I told Ze Boyfriend and he was like "uh, you are going to get crushed and killed." Little does he know that most of the hits on me will probably not be in a legal target zone on me because I plan to just cannonball the whole time, bahahaha. But yeah, they are also for people who are Advanced, so not me. Anyway, sometimes I doubt my abilites to do these things because what if I am super crap and munt myself or faceplant in front of everyone and whatnot?

It took me about two whole days to decide whether or not to even register. :P With the encouragement of my wife, I have now registered for a whole bunch of festive bouts at the end of the year. Seriously. I put myself in >1 year (since, technically "intermediate" requires that you have had some bouting experience) and I've spoken to the organizers and they said that if >1 is too easy for me then I can get moved up during the day, which will be nice. :) I don't want to be completely fucked up out there getting my ass kicked, but I don't want to be completely unchallenged. But yay! I hope I meet lots of fun people there and stuff. I also want to go to my first afterparty.

WFTDA posts Championship bracket

BAD made it into the championships so they're on their way to Atlanta! Well, not right away, since the championships are in early November. A bunch of people from NRV are driving down from here, but stupidly I have a conference on that weekend. But no socializing for me since I'll probably be watching DNN the whole time.

Here's the bracket:

Click to enlarge

It's a tough bracket, but at least BAD wouldn't have to meet up with Oly until after Philly and TXRG. Anyway, these are all freaking amazeball teams, so it will definitely be one to watch. I'll have to break out my BAD shirts for the whole weekend while everyone else is wearing fancy suits and whatnot at this conference.

If you want to help BAD make it to Atlanta, click here.

Blog updates

Hello, little red book.

The blog name has changed to reflect my new derby name. Don't worry, you can still call me Mouse. Also, the URL is the same; it's just the actual title of the blog that's been changed.

To be honest, I'm actually surprised at the number of people who think the name change suits me--I don't know if this is suggestive of my dictator-like qualities, or the fact that I'm going to execute a lot of intellectuals, or whatever.

Don't worry, the content is still the same random crap that I've been writing about stuff I'm learning and what it's like to be moonlighting as a skater.

Tonight I've got drinks with the league, yay! Also it's down the street from here, so within good staggering distance. Having a new derby family is a bit weird to start with, but we'll see how that works out.

Jammer Candy

We've been working on scrum starts, and one thing that we looked at was the fact that we didn't all have to be in a line right on the jammer line. In fact, your jammer can do a lot of work in directing where the opposing pack goes and how they work.

Suppose (for the sake of simplicity) we have a 4:4:1 situation, so let's say it's a powerjam for red. The green blockers are going to move whereever the red jammer is, and so the red jammer can lure them etc. to whereever she wants. Plus, if her blockers don't just line up in a giant line in front of the green blockers, it gives them more room to set up this play:

 After the jammer is released, the wall of green blockers will move with her. This is where a quick jammer can act as a lure for the green blockers. So, suppose she goes to the outside, and the blockers follow her:

This then gives her team an opportunity to swoop in on those blockers and pin them against the outside line. If your jammer is fast enough, while the opposing blockers are pinned on the outside, she can sweep behind on the (now open) inside line:

So that's the jammer candy: using your jammer as a lure to get the other blockers to go where you want them to so you can trap them there and make it easier for your jammer to get through the pack. Whee. Of course, when you have two jammers, it's hard (but possible) to get this to work both ways.

(I have to admit that I stole the title of this post from this. But it is totally true.)

Some days, I want to pack it all in.

Ugh, it is that time of year when job stuff comes around again. Basically, I'm in a role that gets renewed annually, so it's not like a perament position or anything. And that's really shit because of the lack of job security etc.; I could actually be on the other side of the world this time next year doing more or less the same thing but at a different university. After a while, the moving gets old. Also, I felt like I just went through the job merry go round shit and I'm not ready to do it again, I think.

I also often have dreams when I am participating
in competitive eating and being a super viking
at it, but that seems more a product of gluttony
than actually wanting to be a competitive eater.

Last night I was really stressed out about jobs and I had this awesome dream that I just decided not to do my real life job for a year and spend that year basically on my skates the whole time, and improving as a skater. It was amazing. The idea of being able to spend so much time working on something I really like was really exciting. I had training 3x a week, and the rest of the time I skated everywhere and got over my fear of outdoor skating on hills and stuff, and I would go to rinks and work on things and everything. And in my dream I got super good at derby over the year and could do backwards crossovers (on both sides) and pegassists and I understood derby strategy and was lead jammer ALL THE FUCKING TIME and nobody could touch me and nobody got munted.

Then I was like, "boo, that's not going to pay the bills," and I woke up. I do this a lot--I will be having an awesome dream and then my stupid pragmatic cynnical self will come and shit all over it and I will actually wake up because I realize that my dream isn't real. And now I am like, FUCK YOU, BRAIN.

But the idea has been planted in my mind. There aren't any professional derby leagues (thankfully I think), but how awesome would it be if you could just do derby all year and not have to worry about stuff like work and whatever else gets in the way?

Naming is hard, derby numbering is even harder

I have to change my derby number. Ugh.

Normally, it's <3)~ (as in the emoticon mouse). However, because of WFTDA rules, you can't use symbols in a derby number, so it's usually just 3. But NRV already has a 03, 3 and 3X on their team, so FUCK. But also hooray that they are even considering this, which suggests that I might get to bout soon and have someone yell out something other than "3"--of course, there's no guarantee that I'll remember and respond to the new number; I might accidentally go off to the bin when whoever actually IS #3 gets majored because my brain is stupid. Blargh.


But yeah, new number. Poo. I really like the mouse. I'm the only person that has that of the 65,000+ names on 2E, and it's obviously suited to the name. It's also an emoticon thingy, which is super geeky, and I like that too. But it'll have to go, and that means I'll need to replace it with something else, even if it's just while I'm skating with NRV.

For the record, Facebook didn't like my derby number either when I tried to change my name about a year ago.

Anyway, so I need a new number. Gritz suggested 131, because it kind of looks like the mouse now, but that's a mouse with a squashed face. Also because the font on my scrim tank makes it look like that.

Others have suggested more 3s, like 33 or 333 or 3333. (Haha, at VDL we had a 33, 333, 13 and 303, and once we were ALL on the track at the same time, and that was just fucking confusing and hilarious.)

For practical reasons, I'm also considering 7777, because that would be the longest possible thing to say for a ref, and so it would give me more time on the track before I got binned while they were trying to read out the entire number and what I was getting binned for.

My favorite so far is 100. I'm fucking Chairman Mouse, and Mao has a famous speech where he say:

"Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and the sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land."

Or, when poorly translated into English, "let 1000 flowers bloom"--how the fuck do you fuck up numbers so badly in translation? (Oh but maybe 1000 is also an option for a number because if they read out the individual numbers that would give me an extra zero). Of course, this was during the Great Leap Forward, and the 100 flowers campaign was used to tell dissidents that they could speak against their government, and then they were subsequently arrested and probably executed. So I don't know if I'd want to be going down that path.

Other suggestions welcome!

Here's what 1000 flowers blossoming looks like, assholes.

UPDATE: I considered 40,000,000 (as the number of people that died under Mao's regime) but I think that's inappropriate. Also it won't fit on my arm. But imagine if the refs had to read out all the individual zeroes!