All-Stars of the Non-Chuck Taylor Variety

My cable company had a free preview of NBA TV for most of the month. Last Friday night I was eating some breakfast for dinner* and managed to catch the last five minutes** of the 1991 All-Star Game. Wow. This one had a seriously amazing lineup, including Jordan, Barkley, Ewing, and Magic.


I was watching the game and thinking about what I was doing seventeen years ago when this was originally happening. I think I might have been recovering from the awkward disaster that was Winter Formal, but I'm not positive. CORRECTION: Upon further consideration, the events I was remembering probably took place at Homecoming, not Winter Formal. So, I don't know what I was doing in February of 1991. I know that in February of 1992 a friend of mine and I skipped the dance in favor of seeing Wayne's World on its opening weekend. Now, that was a good time. Some might even call it excellent and play a few riffs on an air guitar.


The camera did a few shots of the crowd, and lingered on this guy for a bit:

I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed that I thought, "Hey, isn't that Bruce Hornsby?" a full ten to fifteen seconds before Bob Costas identified him for the viewing public. Bob also reminded us that Bruce did the national anthem, accompanied by Branford Marsalis. At least I didn't know that.

Back on the floor, most of the attention was on Michael Jordan. I'm pretty sure that I had my Michael Jordan growth chart by February 1991, even though I didn't have anywhere to hang it up.*** So, I saved it all through college until I got my first apartment. One of the first things I did after moving in was have it mounted on foam core so I could hang it up on the wall opposite the front door. I eventually put one of my CD racks in front of it, but you still get the general idea.

I spent most of the rest of the weekend flipping between NBA TV and TNT. It's a good thing that all the 2008 events aired at least twice, because I nodded off around 10:30 on Saturday and Sunday nights and had to catch the repeat to find out who won the slam-dunk contest and the all-star game. Apparently I'm an old lady, and that stuff was on after my bedtime.

I was awake enough to catch my new favorite Converse commercial a few times. What's up with this Kinks resurgence? Technically, I guess it started about this time last year, with "All Day and All of the Night" in an ad for Tide, but more recently "A Well Respected Man" popped up in Juno and "Everybody's A Star (Starmaker)" was featured in the Target/One Star ad.

Meanwhile: This is my new desktop wallpaper.

*Scrambled eggs with mushrooms, broccoli, and veggie cream cheese; sausage patties; rye toast; Sunny Delight. Yum!

** Five minutes on the clock. In real time, at least twenty minutes.


*** My room in the attic didn't have any flat walls tall enough — the ones that didn't have windows had sharp angles in them around the four-foot mark. I used have a massive Michael J. Fox poster taped up on one of the slanted walls above the bed, and it fell down on a regular basis until I finally gave up. I already had this on my closet door, so I was running out of real estate:


I still have this poster, too, but it's kind of beat up. The corners are creased, there's lots of pieces of tape left in the corners, and there are purple smears from where my sister colored on it — no doubt in retaliation for something I did to her.

OMG! I have to go watch all the Mars Blackmon commercials on YouTube now, starting with this one. Do you know what I mean? Do you know? Do you know? Do you know?