Cup of Coffee

January 18, 2013: The Plunge

61 Comments

This year, once again, Can of Corn is participating in the Polar Bear Plunge to benefit the Special Olympics. Details under the jump.

Hey there,

This is the greeting template provided by the Special Olympics Minnesota:

“I'm writing to ask for your support. On January 26, 2013, I have committed to grin and "bear" it for the athletes of Special Olympics Minnesota by participating in the White Bear Lake Polar Bear Plunge.”

Okay, I know it does the job but come on, “Grin and bear it”? Bad puns aren’t cute…they’re just bad. That being said, I'm raising money for a very worthy cause and I’ll put up with a lot to get the message out. As you may discover (especially if you're the first to donate online) I’m just getting started.

Given the limited fundraising time I’ve left myself, my goal is to raise $200. Even if you can only afford to contribute $1, it would be appreciated; every little bit helps. I have to admit, I really dislike soliciting donations from coworkers, family & friends. I dislike that sense of obligation which usually accompanies receiving a personal request for money and I apologize for using your work e-mail (if, in your case, I did). However, I’m willing to put myself out there and feel a little uncomfortable in order to support some really terrific individuals and a very good cause.

Click this link to find my Plunge Page and follow the prompts for how to donate.

If you don't care to donate online but would still like to help out, simply reply to this e-mail and let me know how much you're willing to provide. I'll add it to the "off-line" donations and you can give me a check or cash whenever you get the chance.

Finally, even if you're unwilling or unable to make a donation, thank you for taking the time to read my request. If you want to learn more about the Plunge or Special Olympics in general, visit http://www.plungemn.org/ for details.

Thanks,

-Ben

61 thoughts on “January 18, 2013: The Plunge”

  2. also, Citizens had better hurry to Corn's pledge page! He's almost to his goal already. You don't want to get Left Behind.

    1. Thanks for the Cup, plug and donations thus far. Just to be clear, exceeding the goal isn't frowned upon.

    1. I usually watch the show live, but the Gophers were still close. So, I am waiting for NBC to load it onto their website (why is it not up the next morning!?!?!)

    2. The wife and I have been running through season two of Parks and Rec over the past week or two. Season one was better than advertised; season two has been phenomenal.

    3. ok, just got done watching it and

      Spoiler SelectShow

    3. Also, I would like to get a ruling from Spooky on that one? It seems like it would have been a million times easier to use one game and make the dialogue fit that rather than splice a crap load of other games together while also not being annoying. Is this just the entertainment buisness's fetish for waste, or are the people interviewed full of crap?

        1. Right, which means it couldn't be that hard to change the one line of dialogue that is specific to the game on the screen. I assume re-writes happen often on television shows.

          1. I'm guessing MLB strove to minimize rewrites and returned something that fit everything but the original team. The writers/producers/etc wouldn't care about the small continuity issues and so production continued.

            1. That still seems like a lot of unecessary extra work when they could have just handed them a few games that were similar to what they wanted and asked if they could make it work.

              1. Judging by spoons's stories of showbiz, I think MLB wanted to deal with them as little as possible. Going back and forth seems like it would take forever.

                1. That is a good point, and its also possible I'm just more concerned with it than I should be.

      2. I liked the part about how the got the footage from some group who has it as their job to ensure accurate depictions for things like this and Moneyball. How does one get that job?

      3. I believe that the writers have nothing to hide here - they wrote the script, and were so defensive of the script that changing it to make the process way easier wasn't nearly as attractive an option as changing the script.

        If there are multiple changes to a pilot episode and the show fails to bring in viewers, execs will point to stupid things like the writers "not sticking to their guns" as proof that it won't work, so they can kill it and try something else.

        The real fault lies with the writer, who decided to write a scene (probably on spec, never imagining his script would be made, since most aren't) from his head rather than look for a game that happened in order to make shooting much easier. I don't have a creative issue with this, as I think the writing should come first, but in this particular circumstance, you don't have to create a game in order to do the scene. This was just dumb busy work that protected the egos of the writers and the network.

    4. DougExeter
      After seeing this imaginary half-inning of baseball, Manti Te'o proposed to it.

      Oh, that's pretty good.

      1. I have to admit, this Te'O story has brought out some better commenting on deadspin than we've seen in some time. (My favorite was from the original story when someone said "Finally, a reason to hate Notre Dame."

        2. Just wait. Pretty soon they'll reveal that Te'O isn't real either. Then your mind will be totally blown.

          Also, explains Alabama's offensive output.

          1. Dammit. I saw the first part of this in the sidebar and came to say that the Alabama running backs would corroborate that story, but you already said it.

                1. Te'o is actually a girl named Lennay impersonating a male so she can play football in her crippled father's place and bring honor to the family.
                  (Watched Mulan with the kids tonight.)

    5. 1. Just reading through I thought those looked like Phillies jerseys, I thought "well, maybe its just the pixelation or the way it's laying.

      2. I assume that due to the MLBPA, none of these players will get residuals from their appearance in the show. Too bad there wasn't a goof up that had Ron Mahay or Kevin Millar in it.

  8. Twitter reports that Proposition Joe has died but I haven't seen it officially on the google machine.

  10. Oooooo.

    suddenly, American malted whiskeys — most of them single malts — are popping up, some to loud acclaim. “There’s been a wave this year,” said Sean Josephs, a co-owner of Char No. 4, a restaurant in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, that features a bar flush with domestic and imported whiskeys.

    1. If my family lived anywhere nearby, I could have happily called D.C. home.

      This line summed it up for me:

      It was proximity, and a sense of intimacy, that made the impression stick.

      I've lived in Athens and Rome as well. Those places both had more "intimate" charm (as did Paris in my experience) in the traditional sense. Cozy little flourishes around the city, turning a corner and finding a fountain, etc. But it's all... distant in a way. You might be tucked into a beautiful cafe overlooking a fountain, but you're apart from the rest of the history, the rest of the bustle of the city, the rest of the grandeur. In D.C. you experience more of it at once. It's closer, and bigger, and more out-front. It's a different sort of intimate, in that you're more immediately tied to all of it. You sit at the Jefferson and you experience the Washington Monument and the White House too. You sit at the Capitol and you experience the entire mall. It's just more up front. Most of D.C., at least. There are tucked away treasures (I'd say the portrait gallery feels more like the European cities than D.C.) too, so you can get some of that other mystique too. But there's more proximity in that bigness, and it creates a closeness too. Maybe it's an easy city compared to Paris or Rome, because it's all right there. You don't have to search to find the treasures.

      Yeah... I miss D.C.

      1. I've never lived (or been, for that matter) abroad, and D.C. was the first big city I'd ever really experienced, so my comparative experience is limited. There are so so many intimate, little memorial touches scattered about the city. Rock Creek Park deserves to be explored. The Mall area deserves to be explored. the National Portrait Gallery too. But also the architecture of the 1930s-era federal buildings, the Dirksen and Russell SOBs :-), the Cannon HOB, on and on and on. America's Favorite Architecture is replete with DC structures for good reason. (I was able to check off only 28 of their top 150)

        I lived in Cleveland Park for a summer, on East-West Highway at Rock Creek Park for a year, and in Rosslyn for a year. All three areas were interesting in their own ways.

        All that said, I wouldn't want to raise a family in DC, or pretty much any other major city. Traffic congestion, crime, cost, etc. City living is for the young and childless, or the mature with grown kids. YMMV.

        1. I guess I wouldn't raise a family in D.C. proper, but Northern VA would work for me. I worked out there for 3+ years and got to know some families pretty well, so saw it being done, which helped. Harder than, say, MN, but not as impossible as it initially seemed to me.

          Living there is fantastic for those little touches. But I didn't think it compared to the other cities. And I always found myself struck by the incidental sight of the major monuments. Grab a cab from downtown and head out to VA? Oh yeah, we're going right past the Lincoln. Wow, that's cool.

          1. isn't "DC" pretty much anything inside the Beltway anymore?

            My in-laws lived in Bethesda for a long time. When I first met them in the mid-1980s, downtown Bethesda still had a lot of "quaint" and "small town" in it. Ditto Silver Spring. Not much of that left in either.

            they then moved to Palo Alto. A very livable city, if you are well off....

            1. It probably is, but I thought Arlington/Alexandria felt suburban enough for raising a family.

            2. Nah, Philo's right about the suburban feeling of NoVa or Maryland. They are much more suburban and I don't consider them DC proper for the most part.

              Interesting this is coming up as the wife and I move from Downtown, to NoVa. We don't consider Arlington part of "DC" but it is more affordable and less tall buildingy [so long as you are not right next to the metro]. It has been a surpisingly hard move from Logan Circle to Cherry Dale. Oof.

              The rate of change in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Tyson's Corner is really amazing. They are all becoming downtowns in their own right.

    2. If you don't walk the neighborhoods, and only hit the high points I think he's right. It takes a while to appreciate a lot of what DC has to offer. That said, the DC monuments at night are one of my favorite things.

      I don't see why people compare DC to European cities. Talk to me in 300 more years.

      1. I think the comparison is natural enough... capitals and their grandeur, basically. But yeah, Europe has a long head start.

        1. also, the main arteries of DC were, you know, designed to avoid the narrow, easily barricaded streets of European cities.

          If you want quaint, old-townish in a major American city, it's hard to match Old City in Philly.

      1. Sam the Eagle was my favorite as a kid. Really.
        Upon adult rewatching, Statler and Waldorf are by far my favorites.

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