Kevin Towers has brain cancer

I hate what the Padres are doing, and I'm not sure they'll be able to hang on to the NL West, even in what is obviously the weakest division in baseball. Right now it looks like they're sending Phil Nevin to Texas for Chan Ho Park, assuming Park waives his no-trade clause and Nevin okays it (and it looks like he will). Taking a shot at an up-and-down starter like Park isn't worth dealing Nevin, especially since Ramon Hernandez is injured and Nevin is the only other catcher they have with any power. Still, the Giants fan in me has fond memories of Chan Ho giving up two grannies in the same inning back when he was with the Dodgers. That's right, two grand slams - both to the same hitter.

I do like the move for Joe Randa at third, since Sean Burroughs was making it abundantly clear that he was never going to replicate his Little League World Series hitting prowess. Still, most of their moves give me the feeling that it's more of a panicky reaction to the fact that they've been in free-fall for the last few weeks rather than a long-term solution. At least Nevin blocked the potential trade to Baltimore for Sidney Ponson, who (as the Giants could tell you) is not NEARLY the kind of midseason acquisition who will help anchor the rotation.

I'll put together something later tonight, but right now I have a poker tournament to attend and money to lose.

This one goes out to the ladies

In response to my last post, I got the following comment: "Tell me if you've ever been attracted to a girl who did the bare minimum to 'smell and look decent in public.'"

Since some people still don't quite get the issue, I think a clarification is in order. It does not require more than a small effort to look good in public. This applies to men AND women. Metrosexuality is not a trait that is exclusive to men; it's just a new name for something that women have been doing since time immemorial - which doesn't make it a positive trait for them, either. It would be somewhat sexist of me to say that guys shouldn't spend an exorbitant amount of time and money trying to look good, but women should. Which is why it's so great that I think girls shouldn't either.

To answer the question above, I'm attracted to girls who do the bare minimum to "smell and look decent in public" all the time. In fact, I would go so far as to say that girls who are obviously not putting a lot of thought into their appearance win points with me, and I'm more skeptical about girls who constantly look "prepared." The key here is to remember that "not putting a lot of thought into one's appearance" does not necessarily equal "unattractive," a distinction that some people are unable to make. Hot is hot. I can tell when a girl is attractive and just didn't spend a ton of time getting ready that morning, just as I can tell when a girl is unattractive yet made a huge effort to make herself look nice. I'm not saying throw preparation to the wind, but I can assure you with 100% honesty that sweats and a T-shirt are more of a turn-on to me than any expensive well-coordinated outfit/makeup/hair combination.

As far as "looking decent," all that means is taking care of yourself: staying clean and working out occasionally. It doesn't even require fanatical gym attendance. The hottest girls I know work out because a) they need to stay in shape for some kind of athletic endeavor or b) they feel better about themselves when they work out, just like I do. This is probably why I love girls who play sports so much. Female athletes tend to be comfortable participating in a forum where the way they look takes a back seat to how well they're playing, so they don't care as much about it. Not only are they hot by virtue of training to be good at their sports, they usually know a fair amount about sports and wear ponytails a lot for convenience. But I digress.

It doesn't require a superhuman effort to look good. Keeping your body in shape by going for a run every once in a while is not the equivalent of spending hundreds of dollars on beauty products, which I could care less about. As long as you have nice skin, which can be accomplished with very little, you're fine. The most I can be attracted to a girl is when she looks "undone:" with her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and with no makeup. Furthermore - and, ladies, I know this concept may be difficult to grasp for some of you - anything you wear is fine with us. Seriously. It absolutely does not matter.

Here's a quick lesson to all the women who spend huge sums on beauty products: cut that shit out right now, because you're wasting your time and money. I am attracted to nice smells and a hot face as much as the next guy. But if you think anything more than simply making your hair smell good and staying in shape is going to appeal to a dude beyond a cursory physical level (if he even notices it, which is unlikely) you are sorely mistaken. Not only that, the fact that you spend hours on your hair and makeup is more than likely going to drive him batshit-crazy if he spends any significant amount of time with you. The difference in physical attraction that an incredible amount of preparation and effort on a girl's part makes is relatively tiny in a guy's eyes, but the difference in personal value between a girl who obsesses about her appearance and a girl who doesn't is enormous. Looking nice is all well and good, but what matters much more is not being a materialistic harpie who will make you 15 minutes late for the movie because she's applying eyeliner.

So does that mean that getting all dolled up and spending X amount of money on clothes might make you slightly more attractive on a purely physical level? Sure. But that trend is indicative of the fact that you care too much about your appearance - and again, anything more than basic personal hygiene and fitness is too much - so you're worth nothing to me. You're a pretty picture whose crowning achievement is looking 1% cuter rather than anything else you could have done with that time or money. But hey, I guess you can always take pride in the fact that your God-knows-how-expensive mascara makes you look that much better when it's mixed with some guy's jizz and running down your cheek at four in the morning.

I Hate Metrosexuals

EDIT: This article is a cover story in the July 27 edition of Barstool Sports (www.barstoolsports.com).

"Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men."
- Norman Mailer

When we go out to get food with our friends, it is no longer hanging out, it's a "man-date." Taking a shower and washing your hair isn't enough anymore - you need to get "manscaped."

I fucking HATE LOATHE DESPISE metrosexuals. Metrosexuality is bullshit. It is a bankrupt personal philosophy. I even hesitate to use the word "personal," since by this point metrosexuality has become a packaged phenomenon that you can pick up for a couple hundred bucks at a major department store. The best argument for why metrosexuality blows, however, is the general personal quality of the type of dude you would find wearing $400 jeans, but the second-best is the article written by British writer Mark Simpson, who first defined the term in 1994 with this sentence:

"The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis - because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference."

In other words, metrosexuality is making your life all about you. It is a NEGATIVE TERM, as its inventor defines it. You become what you own - you are a hairstyle, a sculpted abdomen, and a flawless mask of oil-free pores. The word "metrosexual" screams materialism and self-absorption, so whenever I hear someone define themselves as such I want to bust out a tire iron and perform some frontier orthodontia.

I get questions from girls a lot about why metrosexuality is irritating - generally, the phrasing is "Why wouldn't you want to make yourself look nice?" You know why? It's not about looking nice. All I have to do is be presentable, which I can do with a $3 bottle of Pert Plus and a toothbrush. I'm not going to grow a lumberjack beard or go weeks without showering, but as long as I can smell and look decent in public, I'm fine. If I have to expend any more effort than is barely necessary on "looking nice," then the people who are going to notice that kind of discrepancy and use it to pass judgment on me aren't people I want to impress anyway. Seriously, do you really want to hang around people who take your hair highlights into account as a deciding factor on whether you are worth hanging out with? If you are a woman, do you really want to be with a dude who spends more time and money on hair and skin products than you do? If the answer is yes, then I want to spray your internal organs around the room.

Obviously, some women will still consider a guy who is willing to jump through these hoops a "finished product" and will find him more attractive, albeit slightly feminine. However, these are the kind of women who need their men to identify, share and appreciate their sartorial choices and give them tips on exfoliation. Being overly appearance-conscious isn't a good quality in either sex, and if you find yourself buffing your nails or spending 30 minutes selecting a shirt to appease your significant other, you had best check yourself before the Queer Eye team pops out of your closet. (So to speak.)

Buying a $500 purse or spending $100 on a haircut is basically a big "fuck you" to the rest of the world. It's saying, "I know I could be helping other people with this money, or even buying something selfish I don't need like a plasma-screen TV that at least other people can enjoy, but instead I'm going to stare longingly in the mirror and masturbate over how good I look in my pinstriped Armani Exchange shirt."

The value system that we grew up with as men has been irrevocably corrupted. The football-loving, poker-playing guy, in popular culture, has become the TV Dad - the bumbling idiot who never succeeds with women and is the butt of every joke in Hollywood. Everything associated with the traditional definition of masculinity is something to be put down, and beer commercials and lad magazines (which generally insult our intelligence to begin with) are the last bastion of maleness.

WHY IS THIS OKAY? HOW HAS THIS BECOME ACCEPTABLE IN OUR CULTURE?

The first answer is obvious: the fashion industry realized that if they could brainwash the 50% of the population they don't already have suckling at their anorexia-shriveled teat into wanting a bunch of shit they don't need, they could double their profits. Simpson goes on in his article:

"The stoic, self-denying, modest straight male didn't shop enough (his role was to earn money for his wife to spend), and so he had to be replaced by a new kind of man, one less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image."

How can we get men to spend more money? By making them just as insecure about themselves as women are, that's how. Hence, the feminization of the American male. The second big reason is that guys who have no sense of self glom onto metrosexuality as a way of life because it allows them to buy what they perceive as cool rather than actually being cool.

Go watch American Psycho five or six times. To his "friends," who can look at a guy and immediately identify the price and designer of every article of clothing he is wearing, Patrick Bateman is someone to be emulated. He can do 1000 sit-ups. He uses deep pore cleanser lotion and a herb-mint facial mask. He is rich, good-looking, young, and funny. Of course, he's a raging homicidal psychopath in his spare time. But why would that matter? He's fabulous! The point of the movie is that the glorification of the superficial is ultimately meaningless, because even Bateman's friends don't care to know him well enough to see what's underneath.

Permanence and substance don't come from the opinions of the style editors at GQ. I refuse the notion that I cannot adequately clean myself with a bar of Irish Spring. I have cut my own hair in a satisfactory manner for almost seven years now, and that streak will continue. And if I ever start referring to anything as "product," just shoot me in the face.

Now if you'll pardon me, I have to go return some videotapes.

Wedding Crashers: missed opportunity

Look, nine times out of ten I would rather eat a bucket of vomit than condemn a movie starring Will Ferrell, but this was a catastrophe. It's like the entire movie was written as a vehicle for three funny scenes: everything that happens during the visit to the Clearys' house, John's (Owen Wilson) first meeting with Chaz (Ferrell) and John's bender scene at the end.

There were a lot of things I liked, most of all the introduction of the word "eyefucked" into the lexicon. However, there was some stuff that we could have done without, and it makes me sad, because there were so many funny parts that with only minor alterations this could have been the best comedy since Anchorman.

- The montage about ten minutes into the movie that shows Vaughn and Wilson storming a bunch of weddings went on WAY too long without doing anything important. The first minute of the film sets you up for the two weeks of "wedding season" and then we blow through the entire thing in a three-minute seizure-inducing blast, leaving everyone in the audience with blue balls. They could have at least slowed it down and had one funny moment in there without the racing musical background, which kind of killed it.

- There are so many plot points that happen without explanation that it makes you want to gouge your eyes out. Mrs. Cleary disappears from the plot entirely after Owen Wilson wakes up with her rack in his face. Vince Vaughn endures a near-homosexual-rape scene and then decides that yes, he has a duty to sack up and stick it out with his buddy instead of bailing immediately, as any American male would do. (I'm sorry, but avoiding getting clay-mined in the middle of the night supersedes playing wingman. The Guy Code stands.) Also, Owen Wilson apparently got to know the Clearys' butler well enough for the butler to hook him up with a job waiting tables at Claire's engagement party, when the two characters HAD NOT SPOKEN TO ONE ANOTHER PRIOR TO THIS.

- Then it all comes together for what is pretty much the most unbelievable scene in movie history when Vince Vaughn's climactic wedding stops at just the right moment for a heated five-minute argument to take place at the altar while the congregation of like 500 people waits patiently and in silence. Oh, and Claire chooses Owen Wilson, who lied to her repeatedly and whose real identity she is JUST NOW FINDING OUT, over her rich douchey fiancee. Furthermore, she appears to come to this decision on the spot. AND HER FATHER SUPPORTS HER. Any father here would have laid the smack down instead of allowing his daughter to dump a life of luxury for a dude who she knew a total of three days and whose identity was a complete sham. Especially Christopher Walken.

- On that note, what was with Walken not appearing to care that Vince Vaughn was tied up in his daughter's bed, right after giving him the "I'm a very powerful man" speech? It was funny based on how random it was, but come on. We can only believe so much.

- Will Ferrell is becoming a caricature of himself. You knew his cameo was coming, and it was fucking awesome, but only because he's acting the same way he always does. I keep laughing at him every time he yells, and I don't think that's a good thing. I feel like the Pavlovian dog; it's like we've just laughed for so long whenever Will Ferrell raises his voice that now we have to do it.

Still, lots of funny parts. Vince Vaugn pretty much saves the movie. "IT WAS MY FIRST ASIAN!" So was it a total loss? No, not really. Would I see it again? Probably not. Am I a total douche for writing a movie review in a blog? Irreversibly.

Now I have to go paint. Homo things.

Del Taco: Losing Ground

I would just like to inform everyone that the Del Taco on Marguerite severely disappointed me tonight. I ordered a Bacon Double Del Cheeseburger, three Breakfast Burritos, and a Chicken Cheddar Quesadilla at 3 AM, and the voice-box-respondent-guy waited until I had pulled around to the window to inform me that the buns for the Del Cheeseburgers were "still being delivered, mang." Also, while we were having that delightful conversation rats were pouring out of the building's adjoining dumpster like they were fleeing a sinking pirate ship. Not that the rats haven't been there forever, but they just seemed more malicious because I was hungry.

That is all.

Life's Everlasting Truths

Sorry for the absence, but I am busy furiously pouring mucus out of every hole in my head. More once I get healthy.

-No matter where you are sitting in the stadium, the cheerleaders are always shooting T-shirts at the other side.
-Hockey and soccer will never be popular in America.
-Every guy has secretly wondered what an apple martini tastes like.
-The phrase "Just one more time" has never resulted in positive consequences, ever.
-50 years from now, people will still make fun of the name "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim."
-Anyone who claims he is good at poker is never as good as he thinks he is. Even Antonio Esfandiari. ESPECIALLY Esfandiari.
-No matter how awesome your argument is, mispronouncing or misspelling a word will make everyone deny you credibility.
-Women who are bad drivers will never admit it.
-There will be a critical time when you have less than five minutes to figure out how to program your DVD player/TiVo to record something. You will fail to do it correctly.
-Everyone knows exactly what their own armpits smell like.
-Men who own more than one cat are gay.
-Women who own more than one cat are fucking crazy.
-If you're waiting for a phone call and decide to take a shower, the phone will ring and you won't hear it.
-Anything involving chimpanzees is funny.
-Women who do cutesy shit ("PrInCeSs") with their screen names or typing patterns are desperate for attention and are terrible in relationships.
-Women who let you know early on that they "aren't high-maintenance" always are.
-Nobody will ever be as intimidating at the plate as Barry Bonds.
-No animated television show will ever be as funny as the Simpsons was at its peak.
-The Cubs will eventually win the World Series, but the clinching game will not be at Wrigley.
-No white politician will ever take black voters seriously as long as Lil' Jon is producing music.
-There is no more depressing place than a strip club while sober.
-when you leave Vegas, you will always have less money than you thought. Even if you were up $3000, somehow when you leave there will be 200 bucks missing, but it won't seem to matter.
-Any time any public speaker starts off with "This will be short and sweet," the next hour will be one of the most painful of your life.
-Everyone has a friend of a friend who has found something terrible in his food at Del Taco.
-Women in relationships who get boob jobs secretly think they can do better than their current men.
-Chinese food never tastes as good after it's been in the microwave.
-Your mother will never learn to use a computer correctly.
-People who feign outrage at racist jokes are usually the ones who are afraid of their own racism.
-As long as the movie industry is in business, stupid women will have unrealistic expectations of men.
-Women who have tattoos on their lower backs are whores, or secretly aspire to become whores.
-Drinking on an airplane will not make a flight seem shorter or more bearable.
-No matter how carefully you select your seat on a transcontinental flight, a fat man, a pair of 15-year-old girls, or a woman with an infant will sit within 10 feet of you.
-Nothing tastes as good as a Double-Double when you're drunk.
-If you have to ask yourself if something will come back and bite you in the ass, the answer is always yes.
-It is impossible to overestimate the stupidity or laziness of the average person.
-"Diet" anything will never taste as good as the original.
-If Duke is playing basketball on television, the announcer will bring up the fact that the players are smart and good citizens as well as athletic.
-It is impossible to make a dog smell truly good.
-People who look for arguments about politics never know what they're talking about.
-The NFL game that you missed while at church is always the best game of the day.
-In 20 years, the fact that Limp Bizkit put out three successful records will be one of the damning failures of our generation.
-Any car with more than two American flag stickers on it will be an SUV.
-Any car with more than two anti-war or anti-Bush bumper stickers will be a dirty Geo Metro, a Toyota Tercel, or a VW van.
-Nobody will remember how awesome Greg Maddux was in his prime.
-Women who say "f'ed" instead of "fucked" are bad in bed.
-Greek food is never as good as you remember it being.
-Nothing is more difficult to clean up than jizz.
-Lindsay Lohan will be involved in some kind of serious legal trouble within the next six months.
-Homeless, mentally retarded, and fat people will always be the butt of jokes. No amount of political correctness training will ever alter this.
-No matter how good a time you had, it always feels good to leave Mexico.

Leaving Los Angeles: A Sports Pilgrimage

This piece is kind of adapted from one of the earlier posts on this blog. I decided to throw it up anyway because it's a good "introduction" article and it's getting posted as my first piece in the Boston newspaper Barstool Sports (www.barstoolsports.com).

"WHY THE HELL ARE YOU MOVING TO BOSTON?"

This is a question my friends have posed to me a lot in the last few weeks. I can count on my fingers the number of times I've ventured into the dark, scary world outside California, so my decision to begin my post-college life back East scared them. Their shock was usually accompanied by the words "expensive," "rude," and "freezing rain." Still, I'm resolute in pulling up my Orange County roots and moving to the Cradle of Modern America for one primary reason:

The sports.

I am a California boy through and through. I grew up surfing and attending meaningless September baseball games in shorts and T-shirts. I say "dude" more than is necessary. Consequently, this may make me an ill fit for Massachusetts. However, if there is one thing I've learned that I have in common with Bostonians, it is that they have in spades the most glaring absence in Los Angeles: they care about sports.

Don't get me wrong, you will still find the occasional serious Angels fan, or the guy who remains in mourning for the exodus of the Rams and Raiders. Still, the sports knowledge of the average Angeleno (God, I hate that word) could be inscribed on the outside edge of a dime. The avenues for legitimate sports here are discussion are few and far between. Furthermore, because sports don't typically qualify as the New Hotness in terms of trendiness, the L.A. sports fan is afforded little respect or attention. Little by little, I realized that my development as a sports fan in Los Angeles is akin to Stephen Hawking being born in the remote wildernesses of Papua New Guinea. I awaken every day in an environment that is hostile to my kind - a place where more people know who Ryan Seacrest is than Yhency Brazoban.

Let's break it down:

The prime seats at every game are treated as an opportunity for celebrities to make themselves visible. This is why it is an unwritten rule for a telecast of any L.A. sporting event to spend a minimum of two full minutes pointing out every B-lister in the crowd, often to the point where they MISS IMPORTANT GAME ACTION. If I wanted to see Cameron Diaz eat Justin Timberlake's face in a public setting, I would pick up a copy of Us Weekly. Also, I would be a middle-aged housewife.

Even the average fans leave something to be desired, though. I came of age attending Angels games at what used to be the Big A, watching a slew of terrible Disney-owned teams swap uniforms on a yearly basis. Still, I had a great time. Then I gradually made the troubling discovery that all the fans around me were a)wasting two seats on their three-year-old twin daughters, b)conducting cell phone conversations in the middle of innings, or c)conspicuously absent by the bottom of the seventh. The terrible truth about many generalizations is that they tend to come into being for a good reason. When people say that Southern California sports fans suck, they may or may not be speaking from a position of authority - but, as a rule, they are correct. Meanwhile, at Fenway people know and obey the "don't get up during a pitch" rule and will vocally tell you of their displeasure if you violate it - just as God intended.

The final straw came when I was around 17. I still have a vivid memory of attending an Angels-Blue Jays game with a friend of mine in around 2001. My baseball coach had offered us his season tickets for the night, so I was watching the game from an excellent seat down the third-base line, in the second row. The family in front of us seemed okay, until their two rugrats started climbing all over their seats and staring at us. They were decked out in brand-new Angels gear, distracting others from the game with their shouting, and generally behaving like prime candidates for postnatal abortion. The mom, obviously sensing our discomfort, tried to calm me down by letting me know, "Oh, we'll be out of here in a few minutes. We just came for the fireworks."

Great. Thanks.

During the fall, I wandered around blindly like a homeless drunk, a man without a country. I was cruelly deprived of something no red-blooded American boy should live without: a football team. The fact that L.A. has no team doesn't mean that it doesn't have football fans, though - it just means that the few diehards in existence have nothing to do on weekends except get liquored up, strap on their Raiders pillaging gear, and celebrate with a couple of new tattoos and stab wounds. Imagine downtown Oakland on game day. Now imagine that without the added benefit of a football game being played, and you have most sports bars in Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon.

I don't want to bring up professional basketball, since the Lakers appear to exist only during the seasons when they have a winning record. Still, if they're in the playoffs, you can expect every other car on the freeways to be sporting a yellow "GO LAKERS!" flag. Oh, and Jack Nicholson. Hadn't you heard? He's a Lakers fan, apparently. So are Leonardo DiCaprio, Dustin Hoffman, and noted sports fanatic Tobey Maguire. Furthermore, our most successful professional hockey team to date was founded by the Disney corporation, and shares the unfortunate name of a movie starring Emilio Estevez that I will neglect to mention here in the interest of good taste.

Somehow, I endured all this and emerged from the fire with my love for sports unscathed. So now, I feel ready to play ball with the big boys. I want to use the phrase "nickel defense" in mixed company and not have to explain what it means. I want to have a meaningful discussion with a girl in a bar about the importance of competent long relievers. I want to have someone get my jokes about Clint Barmes and Edgardo Alfonzo. So please, open your doors to me, city of champions. It's time for a fresh start.

YEEE-HAWW!

I made my first trip ever to the South this week. Ostensibly I was supposed to go to a wedding reception with my girlfriend and her sister, but really it was just an excuse to drive around for a couple of days and see the country. The best part about the trip was I got to ease into the region gradually, by driving with my girlfriend from Chicago to Alabama via Kentucky and Tennessee. The whole way we were making overalls-and-banjo jokes about what Guntersville, AL would be like. Of course, we expected to be pleasantly surprised by the level of sophistication and urban development that the thriving metropolis Guntersville had to offer.

AND THEN IT WAS JUST LIKE OUR JOKES. Here are some helpful traveling tips for northern Alabama in the summer:

-It is oppressively hot and humid. Being outside is like having a Great Dane breathing heavily in your face 24 hours a day.

-There are enough insects to make you believe Moses just radioed in a plague. They sell "Off!" in the supermarkets - sorry, the "Piggly Wigglies" (yes, that is the actual name of their major grocery chain) - in aisle-end racks, like Gatorade.

-Every building is made out of corrugated aluminum.

-Every other building is a fireworks store, and advertises itself with a giant plywood sign hand-painted with "FIREWORKS!" and some combination of the words "BANG!", "POW!" and "BOOM!"

-A Waffle House in the South may be the best choice ever for a prisoner's last meal. It tastes like heaven, but the residue from the accumulated gunk on the cooking surfaces will probably kill you before you get to the electric chair.

-There are no sidewalks, even in the large (like 20,000+ people) towns. There's just the highway and grass, and occasionally a thin berm of roadkill that hasn't been cleared away.

-If Tyson Chicken ever went out of business, the entire Bible Belt would become anarchy. It seems like every other town has a giant concrete warehouse, which I assume is full of rows and rows of chickens a la Napoleon Dynamite and smells like the inside of Chris Farley's stomach after a post-SNL party.

-There seems to be a remarkable divide between the wholesome God-(and dangerous-minority)-fearing South and the violent promiscuous South. If you were to take a random sampling of five billboards around Guntersville, it would look something like:
REPENT SINNERS
NAUGHTY & SPICE ESCORT SERVICES
WHICH DIRECTION ARE YOU GOING? JESUS CARES
PRIVATE PLEASURES GENTLEMEN'S CLUB
ATTEND FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH WITH PASTOR LEROY CLAY

I did, however, see the best billboard of all time in Albertville. Nothing can top this:


If you can't read the text, it says: "Are you RISEN IN CHRIST or DAMNED IN EVOLUTION?" Alabama, I have to hand it to you - you're fighting that evolutionary "theory" all the way to the grave.

Also, when we had an afternoon to kill, we went to see a famous cave about 5 miles from the Georgia border. Our guide told us that despite what we might have heard about the stalactites and stalagmites being millions of years old, "we know that they were created when the whole earth was underwater during the Great Flood, around six thousand years ago."

And on that note, I have nothing further to say.

Oh, one more thing: Why isn't Edward Norton more respected or well-known? Name five other actors in his age group who have put together as impressive a body of work in their first ten years. He made American History X, Fight Club, and Primal Fear - in which his transformation is one of the biggest "OH, SHIT, I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING" moments in cinema history - in his first three years of work. Granted, he's tapered off a little and he doesn't make that many movies, but 25th Hour was pretty impressive too.