20 Things About Me – Botswana Meat Commission FC

1. My Gawker Handle is based on an actual professional soccer team that’s owned by the Botswana Meat Commission. I just thought it was a hilarious name for a professional sports team. I feel kind of guilty now, though, because Gawker’s Google pagerank is so high that my posts take up most of the front page of Google search returns. Digital divide in action! Anwyay, I first became a Deadspin commenter a few years back, then migrated over to Wonkette for a while, then to Gawker and now over to Wordsmoker.

2. There are two expressions I especially hate: “It is what it is” and sentences ending with “and whatnot.”

3. I’m a straight white guy who REALLY REALLY loves house music (and disco). The deeper and more soulful the better. I know it’s odd, but I love the real diva’d-out house music with lots of piano and huge soaring vocals about broken hearts.

4. My wife is black and I’m white. We met as co-workers, so I like to think I wasn’t specifically looking for a black girl. I only say that because I’m sort of creeped out by people who fetishize other races, like white guys who only want some 100 lb. Thai woman. I like to think I’m just very open-minded, but I’m probably just as bad as anyone else. My Fantasy Celebrity Harem definitely includes Rihanna, Thandie Newton and Halle.

5. I knew from the age of about 14 or 15 that I wanted to be a journalist. I remember signing up for the school paper in high school. Majored in journalism from Day 1 of college. I’m 30 now and still work in the field as a business writer/editor for a small local publication. We’ve managed to avoid a lot of the REALLY NASTY advertising market turmoil, but you never know what the future holds. I regularly get calls and e-mails from longtime journos at the big daily paper here in town and they’re begging ME for work! Journalism as a profession is sicker than a Pig Flu victim.

6. One of my dreams is to own my own bar. My plan some day is to find an old guy who’s ready to retire and buy the bar from him and slowly turn it into my own Emporium of Drunkenness.

7. My political beliefs are ridiculously left-wing. It’s a good thing I wasn’t alive in the first half of the 20th century. I’m sure I would have been an anarcho-syndicalist, or maybe a Bolshevik. Either way, I probably would have been killed by a Pinkerton.

8. I have a habit of getting extremely obsessed with different hobbies for a short time, then ditching them for whatever new activity comes along and interests me. First it was mountain biking, then it was playing ice hockey, then it was homebrewing beer. Now it’s motorcycles. I own a used BMW bike that I mainly commute to work on and take up the North Georgia mountains on the weekends. Lately I’ve been playing with the thought of selling my car and making the transition to a 100% two-wheeled existence. I’ll ride in the cold weather or rain. Anything but snow/sleet/ice and I’m down for a ride. I detest fair-weather bikers who only ride when it’s above 70. My wife thinks I’m nuts, which is somewhat true. Someday I want to tie my tent/sleeping bag on the back of the bike and just ride down to Mexico as some sort of unplanned adventure.

9. I have an alter-ego named Leonard Washington. Leonard was actually a character in a Chappelle’s Show skit called “The Dice Olympics.” Leonard is a salty, cynical, 50-year-old black man who works for the city. His favorite music is probably “Summer Madness”-era Kool and the Gang. He enjoys the comedic stylings of Steve Harvey. He’s from a little town called “None of your god-damned business.”

10. I was raised by a Catholic father and Unitarian mother. I’m a closeted agnostic. The wife and I got married in a very nice ceremony in an Episcopal Church (that’s her side’s church), but I’ve never felt anything remotely spiritual in my entire life. I don’t KNOW there’s no god, but I suspect not. I never really tell people this, though. I’m a closeted God denier.

11. My younger brother is a Muslim. He converted to Islam back in (I think) 2002. He went on his hajj to Mecca last year. He has the zeal of a convert, though I’ll confess that I was kind of horrified when he first told me he had converted. It was a crazy time and to me it just seemed like a bad idea — like converting to Judaism in 1929 Germany. For a while there I was really worried that someone would say something stupid on a wiretap and he’d find himself getting the full John Walker Lindh treatment. It made me nervous, I’ll admit, especially since my brother had gotten into some minor trouble as a teenager by falling in with a mischievous crowd. Luckily he seems to have his shit more or less completely straightened out nowadays.

12. I really want to travel to Namibia. The Skeleton Coast and Namib Desert seem like such weird, desolate, enchanting geography.

13. I don’t think I’m especially intelligent, but I do have a very peculiar type of intellect — I’m good at trivia. In other words, my knowledge is extremely shallow, but it has a wide breadth. In fact, one of the things I’ve always liked the most about being a journalist is that it forces you to be a generalist. You have to be able to hold a conversation with pretty much anyone, on any subject. You don’t have to be an expert, but I think you do need the kind of brain that can absorb and synthesize little bits of random information and fill in the gaps to gain context.

14. My mother is from Detroit and my father is from Pittsburgh. I was born in Pittsburgh and have also lived in Kalamazoo, Mic., Charlotte, N.C., Hartford, Conn., Berwyn, Pa., College Park, Md., Greenbelt, Md., Washington, D.C., Providence, R.I. and now Atlanta, Ga.

15. When I was in college I spent a year studying in Nice, France. I come from a pretty modest, middle-class family, so I never would have had an opportunity like this at any other point in life and I’m glad I took it. Anyway, about Nice…Nice is basically as close as it comes to the Official Fucking Heaven on Earth. Even the name is nice. Anyway, when I got there I hadn’t yet learned to speak much French and the tiny little apartment I shared with a roommate had a broken shower head. I had to trundle on down to the plumbing and hardware shop around the corner and was thinking about how we never learned the god-damned word for shower head in Introduction to French class. Within two minutes the clerk in the store showed me the store’s stock of “pommes de douche.” Yes, they’re called shower apples.

16. My wife and I have an orange cat named Gatsby that I constantly fawn over. If we have a daughter she’s going to have me wrapped around her tiny little finger.

17. I can’t stand feel-good charity bullshit that’s more about the givers of charity than those receiving it, or charities that have ridiculously misplaced priorities. Animal rights groups and breed-specific “dog rescue” groups are particularly egregious. I love that, of all the causes that Bill Gates could give his billions to, he chose to distribute mosquito nets to people in malaria-ravaged tropical areas. Minimal “sexiness” as far as charities go, but that’s probably the single most efficient way to save millions of lives.

18. I’m jealous of my various friends who are now living abroad. I live in what is probably the least exotic place in the entire U.S. of A. right now (Atlanta) and I’ve got a bad case of wanderlust. My wife is a Canadian citizen so maybe the road will lead us to Toronto. I’d like to check out New Zealand, too. I’ve heard it’s a very liveable place.

19. My favorite movie is “Doctor Zhivago.” My favorite scene in any movie would have to be when the World War I deserters are marching back to Moscow away from the front and encounter a regiment of fresh troops heading toward the front line. It’s such a great portrayal of a single rebellious moment.

20. I have been absolutely unable to prevent myself from crying during the following movies: “The Color Purple,” “White Oleander,” “Smoke Signals” and “Forest Gump.” That last one sounds goofy, but the part where Jenny throws the rocks at her old shack gets me every time.

(Hello there possible word-peddler! Are you one of the almost tens of people reading this who haven’t dropped their 20 Things off at Wordsmoker Mansion? That sentence is filled with nonsense! Anyway, you can always, always and always send yours into wordsmoker (at) gmail (dot) com if you haven’t already, or maybe add another 20 Things if you’ve done it already if you’re really interesting or maybe a serial killer and you want to leave clues to where you’ve buried the bodies or shit like that – hell, I would if I’d killed recently! Plums and apples, my friends. Plums and apples!)