Posted by paulrivas on: Mon 27th Feb, 2012

Our new dog’s name is Barry. My wife tells people it’s for Barack Obama, and dresses him in an Obama Dog sweater. I say it’s for Barrilete Cósmico, the nickname Maradona earned when he scored the best goal ever.

I speak to Barry in chilango and porteño accents, and although he understands both, he doesn’t listen in either - all his commands are in English but with my wife’s Scottish tone.

Barry is a multicultural mutt, but he’s no dummy. When we saw this sign posted at the Sheffield Reservoir, he looked at me as if to ask, ¿Qué chingaos es esto, boludo?

Pretty much every Spanish word on here is either wrong or not actually a word, and to list all the mistakes would be to make the County of Santa Barbara look incompetent. Some of the errors are so bad, they’re even funny to people who don’t speak Spanish.

Los Perros De Ben Estar A Marrados means, “Ben’s Dogs To Be [something that makes no sense]”. Deben and amarrados should be one word each, which would at least make sense but still be sloppy: “Dogs Must Be Tied Up”.

Mo Munopatins En el Parque means, “[Nonexistent words] in the park”. There is no such word as mo, and monopatines is Spanish Spanish for skateboards, which wouldn’t have been the best choice in California even if they had spelled it correctly. They should have said patineta, but even nothing would have been better, what with the illustration right beside it and all.

Talk about disaster! 

If decent Spanish translations cost $0.10 USD/word, how much would it have cost the County of Santa Barbara to get this sign half right? 

My wife is a nurse and wants Barry to be a therapy dog, but I think he should go into the Spanish business.

Categories:

Tags: barry, county of santa barbara, spanish, bad translations, barrilete cósmico, barack, maradona, dogs, ben's dogs, Obama

Posted by paulrivas on: Tue 7th Feb, 2012

How pumped am I for episode 17 of Real Gauchos tonight at 7pm on KCSB 91.9FM?

THIS PUMPED!!!

My guest is Margaret Connell – the first Mayor of Goleta – who, at age 81, is currently serving her last year on the Goleta City Council. Through the magic of pre-recording, Connell will be sharing her fascinating oral history with the KCSB 91.9FM and kcsb.org audiences while – at the same time – celebrating the City of Goleta's 10th birthday at a special edition City Council meeting tonight.

To honor this historic double Goleta event, and to make it possible for hard-core Goleta enthusiasts to enjoy both the interview and the meeting, the Margaret Connell episode of Real Gauchos is already available to listen to or download!

Listeners will be rewarded with the following revelations:

1) Connell’s first job after college was working with comb jellies;

2) Connell agrees with the Santa Barbara Man About Goleta that Old Town Goleta is actually – and should, in fact, be called – Downtown Goleta; and

3) Connell thinks the Santa Barbara Man About Goleta should run for public office!

Categories:

Tags: margaret connell, first mayor of goleta, city of goleta, fist in the air, comb jellies, ecologist joe connell, kcsb, santa barbara, sbnews

Posted by paulrivas on: Sat 4th Feb, 2012

The Other Dream Team is the story of the Lithuanian basketball team that won the bronze medal in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. The whole story, from the Russian invasion of Lithuania in 1939 to the 2001 NBA draft, when a Lithuanian was picked fifth. Written by first-generation Lithuanian-American director Marius Markevicius (pictured), funded by Sarunas Marciulionis and Arvydas Sabonis, it came out last week and is already one of the greatest sports movies of all-time.

When Russia beat a loaded USA team for the gold medal in 1988, four of the five starters were from Lithuania, which used to be a whole other country. The USSR only paid its players $100/month, but the Lithuanians were so valuable that the KGB looked the other way while they supplemented their income by buying free-world goods while traveling to play abroad and selling them for three times as much back in the USSR.

By the Barcelona Olympics, Lithuania had emerged from a January 1991 revolution to field its own basketball team, but was bankrupt. Enter The Grateful Dead, who sponsored the team and kitted them out in tie-dyed dunking skeleton t-shirts (pictured) that made them cultural icons when they wore them while accepting their bronze medal after losing big to the Dream Team in the semifinals but beating the Russian unified team in the third-place game.

The Other Dream Team tells the most epic sports story that nobody remembers, with archival footage that nobody’s ever seen, some of which was only difficultly obtained through bribery. There’s even video of the 1991 Soviet atrocities that could have been shot on some of the same camcorders the Lithuanian players had smuggled in to feed their families when their nation was still under Soviet rule.

The Other Dream Team will soon be recognized as one of the best sports movies of all-time. Don’t let it be the best one you’ve never seen. Go see it at the Metro IV today at 1:40 or tomorrow at 4:20. If you skip the Super Bowl for it, you’ll feel like a genius.

Categories:

Tags: sbiff, santa barbara international film festival, the other dream team, the real thing, best sports movies of all-time, markevicius, marciulionis, sabonis, 1991 soviet atrocities, lithuania, independence, politics through sports

Posted by paulrivas on: Thu 2nd Feb, 2012

Twenty percent of all professional baseball players in the United States are from the Dominican Republic. The system by which Dominican prospects are discovered, trained and signed to professional contracts is exploitative and criminal. Players lie about their age, trainers get un-American percentages of their players’ signing bonuses, and agents like Rob Plummer "basically broker Dominican 16-year-olds to Major League Baseball teams."

But if you’re interested enough in baseball to sit through a feature-length documentary, you knew all that already.

Pelotero is a film without an audience. I’ve been thinking about this over and over again ever since I sat through it on Sunday night wondering if it was ever going to say anything to which I wasn’t already hip, and my conclusion is that if it hadn’t been for Michael Prodanovich’s mom’s partner Karl Koerbling asking whether any professional teams beside US ones have set up baseball academies in the Dominican Republic, I wouldn’t have learned anything at this movie.

The answer, as director Ross Finkel and producer Andrew Moscato explained during the Q&A, is that the Hiroshima Toyo Carp are the only non-American team with a Dominican academy, and that’s where they got Alfonso Soriano, before the latter ended up in the grandes ligas.

Finkel said Pelotero started as a school project, which explains why the finished product resembles a book report on film. Moscato said that Bobby Valentine is a partner in his production company, which explains how a baseball film whose content is this predictable ever got made.

If you’re the rare American who loves baseball but has never heard of San Pedro de Macorís, go see Pelotero tomorrow, February 3 at 8am at the Metro IV or Saturday, February 4, at 10am at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Wait! I just thought of something else I learned: in the Dominican Republic, they call a grounder a rolling.

Categories:

Tags: santa barbara international film festival, sbiff, pelotero, bobby valentine, ross finkel, andrew moscato, karl koerbling, michael prodanovich, rolling, miguel ángel sanó, jean carlos batista, rob plummer

Posted by paulrivas on: Wed 1st Feb, 2012

The only way I’m not going to enjoy a movie in Spanish is if there’s no talking in it. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the case with Los últimos cristeros, the sparse dialogue and repetitive landscapes of which make seeing it entirely unnecessary.

Initially, I was excited to see a feature film based on the events of the forgotten Mexican holy war of 1926-1935. When I got to the theater, I was honored to be third on the press list behind local Mexican Radio Bronco personalities Sandra Mendívil and Norma Mendoza, whose work I listen to while driving my car with a Mexican name, El Vocho.

I would have loved to have loved this movie, but I could have learned more about these post-revolutionary religious fighters by looking at a postcard with one eye and reading Wikipedia with the other.

The 27^th Santa Barbara International Film Festival audience is an intelligent one though, and everyone in attendance Monday night realized that the joke was on them. When the movie ended with the last five members of the Mexican God squad bathing in a spring before going off to die, everybody just laughed.

Go see Los últimos cristeros tomorrow, February 2, at 8:10am at the Metro IV. Or don’t. Da lo mismo.

Categories:

Tags: los últimos cristeros, da lo mismo, casi no hablan, la cristiada, mexican film, conaculta, Radio Bronco, santa barbara international film festival, sbiff

Posted by paulrivas on: Sun 22nd Jan, 2012

As a half-white, half-brown person, I know an all-white crowd when I see one, and I can tell you that there were at least three brown people in Campbell Hall last night to see Ira Glass.

The show got off to a late start on account of airport fog, and if the intro excuses were a little cheesy, Glass more than made up for it by passing off the lame parts as things he was doing ironically and would only do seriously in Marin County.

When Glass started at NPR as a 19-year-old semiotics major at Brown, public radio had the sound of something that tried to make people feel better about themselves for listening to it. This American Life doesn’t try to make feel better about themselves, but only tries to be fun to listen to.

Glass didn’t discuss the phenomenon whereby today’s NPR listeners feel superior to others because they tune in, especially to This American Life, but he did say that the average time spent listening to the 60-minute program is 48 minutes.

Glass’s parents still don’t think much of his radio career, and only gave up on him becoming a doctor when he reached age 40. The reason? “Jews.” 

The crux of the show was the six minutes where Glass detailed the This American Life story formula that would enable audience members to create mesmerizing radio of their own: action, action, action, thought.

“A story is entirely about motion. It’s very animal…As long as there’s forward motion, you can create suspense…Ask people things chronologically…Get them to give you the dialogue...Radio is best when it mimicks normal conversation.”

For this paying customer ($40), the best parts were where Glass didn’t appear to be trying to conjure up production value by touting the iPad app he used (Ableton) or making symphonic gestures, but instead surrendered to the moment and spoke without premeditation.

When he learned that a single whining shriek in the crowd had come from a baby, Glass said, “Why would you bring a baby to a show like this? That’d be like bringing a deaf person. Babies are too stupid to know what’s going on. My dog could get more out this show.”

Categories:

Tags: ira glass, white people, santa barbara, class segregation, stuff white people like, npr, npr is for white people, UCSB Arts & Lectures

Posted by paulrivas on: Thu 5th Jan, 2012

I don't always watch TV, but when I do, I watch NBA TV. (My wife's parents are soccer junkies, so we get every channel.) ((We live at her parents'.))

NBA Gametime is the best show on TV because NBA TV isn't really a real channel. It's TV, but instead of commercials there's infomercials for stuff like the Jupiter Jack.

All NBA Gametime requires of its highlight presenters is that they have super-tight game. Standard American English, African American Vernacular English, and hoop thug slang are equally represented. Even the white guys get crazy. The other day, Rick Kamla said Derrick Rose was 'bum-rushing the rim'.

So when new NBA TV presenter Shaq announced he'd give $1000 to anybody who got a tattoo of Charles Barkley kissing Dick Bavetta, and a Santa Barbara bartender called Emmet Bentley actually did it, and the NBA put him on TV to skype about it with Shaq, and Shaq issued Bentley a new challenge to get a tattoo of all four NBA TV dudes for another $1000, and Bentley agreed to do it instantly because he was skypeing from the tattoo shop, I SAW IT ALL!

Kenny Smith and Greg Anthony tried to clown Bentley for going immediately from the bar to the tattoo parlor, implying that he must have been drunk and shouldn't have sold out so cheaply. The bartender explained that while he does love bars, when his associate told him about the challenge he had been working and not drinking, so alcohol wasn't a factor in his decision to answer the call, and that this $1000 windfall was merely an unforseen consequence of his commitment to epic tats.

For those of you who don't have the good fortune to live with your in-laws and get every channel, behold another of Bentley's tattoos, the A.C. Slater as Slayer!

Seriously, if I even so much as order a water from this dude I'm tipping him $20.

Categories:

Tags: emmet bentley, tattoo challenge, shaq, epic tats, ac slater, nba tv tattoo, peddling one's ass, aave, sae, hoop thug slang

Posted by paulrivas on: Sat 12th Nov, 2011

This is a telephone/electric pole, and these are the vibes buzzing over the Goleta foothills.

Categories:

Posted by paulrivas on: Thu 10th Nov, 2011

I can't tell you how pumped I am for the KCSB fund drive. I could try, but I would fail. I'm that pumped.

There was a time when I listened to KCSB 40 hours a week. I worked at UCSB, where I had a job that required no work and where the radio station is located. When DJs offered to give away an interesting prize to the first caller, I'd call in by dialing 2424 - the on-campus extension - and win every time. Often you could hear the phone ringing in the background before the DJ was done saying (805) 893-2424.

I have a real job now, again at UCSB, and a radio show of my own. It's called Real Gauchos, where 'gaucho' refers to the second definition of gaucho in the official Spanish dictionary: 'distinguished badass'. My guest for this special fund drive episode is Dick Flacks, himself a City2 blogger and KCSB host (Culture of Protest, Thursdays 6-7pm). Aside from being my father's, my sister's and my favorite sociology professor at UCSB, he's a bona fide rabble rouser with a massive FBI file.

For a truly epic hour of oral history, listen to my interview with Flacks this Sunday at 1pm on KCSB 91.9FM or online. To really feel like you're part of the magic, call (805) 893-2424 anytime between now and next Friday - or just 2424 if you're on campus! - to pledge your support to the only local radio station worth a damn. Remember to say that you're donating because Real Gauchos is awesome.

Shortly after the 1pm broadcast, you can listen to or download the interview - and all past episodes - on Real Gauchos and iTunes.

Categories:

Tags: richard flacks, dick flacks, jackie robinson, paul robeson, sds, chicago 8, rennie davis, mickey flacks, kcsb fund drive, gaucho, community radio, the left, the new left, FBI, Tom Hayden

Posted by paulrivas on: Thu 3rd Nov, 2011

I got this image off Google to illustrate that, although you've never heard of him, Bill Mahoney (right) is so highly regarded in the sports world that dudes get their picture taken with him and post it on their blogs.

Mahoney has seen more Gaucho games than anybody in history. He also worked for the Angels, where he once attributed an innocuously made-up quote to catcher Ernie Whitt for which the latter later chewed him out, and the Lakers, where he came to believe that A.C. Green was not, in fact, a virgin. Mahoney even worked with Jim Rome before it was cool.

I worked for Bill for nine years straight, from eighth grade through my fourth year of college, and subsequently off and on after my return from Europe. Much of my inside knowledge of UCSB Athletics is a result of this relationship. Working for Bill, I learned from others that Barry Zito had been body slammed on DP in the fall of 1997, and the true story of how Zito left UCSB. Bill told me how Eric McArthur really got the nickname Freeze, and what then UCSB assistant and now UCLA head coach Ben Howland's explanation to the UCSB softball coach was for why her team wasn't winning as much as she would have liked.

For a truly epic hour of Gaucho history, listen to my interview with Mahoney this Sunday at 1pm on KCSB 91.9FM or online. Shortly after the broadcast, you can listen to or download the interview - and all past episodes - on Real Gauchos and iTunes.

Categories:

Tags: freeze, bill mahoney, winchell mahoney, ucsb gauchos, ben howland, jim rome, eric mcarthur, barry zito, dp, del playa drive, ernie whitt

Posted by paulrivas on: Fri 28th Oct, 2011

There are 20,000 students at UCSB and this Scottish lady is in charge of 18,000 of them!
 
She was the first member of her family to attend college, she had a baby in Fiji, and she's an administrator who loves teaching. She's also my mother-in-law, which is perhaps the unlikeliest fact of all.
 
Find out what her deal is by listening to my interview with her for Real Gauchos Sunday at 1pm on KCSB 91.9 FM or KCSB.org. Afterwards, you can listen to or download the interview anytime on Real Gauchos or iTunes.

Categories:

Tags: dean mary nisbet, undergraduate eduation, mother-in-law, bonny scotland, fiji, economics, accountancy, higher education, tertiary education, right wee teuchter

Posted by paulrivas on: Thu 27th Oct, 2011

I found this apothegm in the bathroom at Giovanni's in Isla Vista. What do you think inspired this dude to share in such a public forum?

A) Getting up from his pizza to ask some chick out, being shot down, and returning to the table only to find that his pie had gone cold

B) Conducting years of trials and concluding unequivocally that he can't spit game on an empty stomach

C) Anticipating his womanizing leading to drinking, and wanting to take preemptive action against a hangover

D) Simply being committed to function over form

E) Other (Please list in Comments)

Categories:

Tags: pizza, bitches, pizza before bitches, pizza > bitches, IV, rules by which to live

Posted by paulrivas on: Fri 21st Oct, 2011

Colorado Rockies outfielder and Santa Barbara super-loc Ryan Spilborghs is widely known to be one of the nicest people on Earth. Here he is after giving my wife a batting practice ball before playing the Mets in New York.

 When Spilly was a redshirt sophomore in the midst of a 35-game hitting streak for the 2001 UCSB Gauchos, I was the team's official scorer and media guy. At the Long Beach State series, he lent me a glove so that I could shag balls during batting practice and feel like something more than a stat geek.

Had I asked, he would have done me the same solid when the Gauchos made the NCAA Regionals at Notre Dame. Then I would have shagged balls in the outfield during batting practice instead of jogging around the perimeter of the field and eventually getting brained by a Dave Molidor warning track shot.

Ryan Spilborghs is contemplative, hilarious and socioculturally astute, as can be heard in my interview with him for Real Gauchos, which airs Sunday at 1pm on KCSB 91.9 FM in Santa Barbara. Shortly thereafter, like 2:30pm, this epic conversation with the big leaguer who was once knocked out of a Little League majors game by the Life Artist Bubba Ray Robison will available to listen to and download on Real Gauchos and iTunes.

And yes, we will talk about the time he faced Bubba.

Categories:

Tags: real gauchos, kcsb, ryan spilborghs, spilly, sb super-loc, 2001 ucsb baseball, gaucho baseball, colorado rockies, life artist, bubba ray robison

Posted by paulrivas on: Sun 16th Oct, 2011

If you know people who are down with Argentina, do 'em a solid and let 'em know that the history of stand-up comedy in that country, as told in the first English-language interview with industry insider Gabo Grosvald, is now available on realgauchos.com and iTunes, after having appeared on the radio program Real Gauchos today at 1pm on KCSB 91.9 FM in Santa Barbara which, by the way, had its' third straight week without a tsunami or any other incident causing the red telephone in the studio to ring.

You can tune in to Real Gauchos live on Sundays at 1pm on KCSB 91.9 FM and kcsb.org. If you miss the live broadcast, you can always listen to or download the podcast of the show on realgauchos.com and iTunes.

Categories:

Tags: real gauchos, gabo, ezequiel campa, malena pichot, merpin, jansenson, gabriel grosvald, paul rivas, el bululú, tim lee, louis c.k., lenny bruce, chris rock, george carlin, este gallego tiene menos talento que la concha de la lora

Posted by paulrivas on: Sun 9th Oct, 2011

Real Gauchos had its second earthquake-free show Sunday 1pm on KCSB 91.9 FM in Santa Barbara. If you're concerned about earthquakes, it's good luck to listen to Real Gauchos!

This week's guest was Justin Mabardi, whose rise from holder of a single share of Disney stock to bigtime stage manager hinged on 10 days in Moscow and sounding older than he was. He's never been afraid to ride the Greyhound Bus in a suit, and he used to live at Caesar's Palace. He's traveled the world, but he kept it real in Santa Barbara after high school and went to UCSB, where he was an accidental drama major.

Play or download the interview on RealGauchos.com or iTunes

Categories:

Tags: jmabs, justin mabardi, mabrouk productions, paris, moscow, new york, santa barbara, ucsb, gauchos, ron artest, metta world peace, dude is krazy, kcsb, Disney, double zeros, Egypt