Winthrop Paroo and you, and a story by Bill, too!

I was less than honest yesterday when I indicated I'd spent my weekend totally listless, lounging on the couch and reading about dudes getting dumped.

Alas, I left out some some of the good stuff, including the "Indian food, showtune sing-alongs, late night dancing, and all-round low brow joke telling" that my new friend Emily alluded to in my last post.

In addition, I've recently decided to get back to my street-ball roots. So Eric and I have started going down to Mabel Davis District Park to get some serious run (ignore briefly that serious run leaves me in serious pain and in need of a serious physician).

Eric and I had illusions of being like "White Men Can't Jump," despite both being white. Turns out, white men can't run, shoot, dribble, jump or pass.

On Sunday we caught a game with some curious characters, including one dude who looked a bit like a huskier Chris Bosh, but with the game of this Chris. There was also a guy in camouflage pants with an unkempt beard and a tangled gray mane, who kept talking about how he had been working on his left-hand game (we couldn't tell).

Interesting fact* about Chris: Every four years he serves as a French judge for figure skating in the Winter Olympics. We learned this thanks to this exchange yesterday:

Eric: [makes shot, starts getting back on defense] Score?
Chris: 13-9, us.
Eric: [perplexed] My last basket was our 10th, I'm pretty sure it's more like 10-11.
Chris: Nah, you're wrong.
Eric: I don't think so.
Chris: Nah, you're wrong. Maybe you would have had a 10 if you had landed that triple axle.

Eric and I went back to the court today, a little apprehensive, but found that the Monday night crew is way cooler and more fun to play with. I also found that I am not half the player I used to be, and that player used to be a pretty significant cog in the Nestucca High School Bobcats basketball machine.

Two straight Most Improved Player awards do not lie.

I'm attributing my sub-par performance to my jammed left ring finger. My injury occurred at the start of our first game when teammate rifled a pass into the post that ricocheted off my finger, leaving my second joint as swollen to the size of a ... a swollen finger.

"I just jammed my typing finger," I declared. Nobody cared.

To hammer home the point, I thought I would write my blog with every "s" replaced with a "th" -- a la Winthrop from the "Music Man" -- and each "w" with a "v" -- in the spirit of Dracula. I was counting on not needing to type "x" very often.

But Danny told me that would be annoying.

So I bucked up ... but tried to avoid using words that contained either an "s" or a "w."

I'm glad I finished this story about lacrosse before I suffered my injury.

*Fact [fakt] (n): something Bill made up