Ben’s Blog

The 13th Annual Oxford Double Decker Arts Festival was held on Saturday, April 28th. The festival takes its name from the double decker bus that was imported by Oxford in 1994. The bus was a big hit, so another one was imported a few years ago. They’re used for special events and entertaining visitors. A bit of history for you: Oxford, Mississippi was named after Oxford, England in the early 1800’s in an effort to convince the state legislature to build a University here. Obviously it worked. Thus, the buses kind of fit with the British theme.

I wandered around during the early afternoon and took a few pictures with my Fujifilm F31fd. I’ve posted 15 of them on Flickr. The slideshow is probably the best way to view them. Don’t miss the history in the description of one of the courthouse pictures.

This is the first set of pictures I’ve run through Lightroom. It saved a couple of them that were pretty badly underexposed. In the past I would’ve had to just throw them away. I think I’m getting better at separating the wheat from the chaff. I took over 100 photos and pared it down to these 15. Your comments are welcome. If you don’t have time to look at the entire set, I’ve posted four below.

The American Screenworks Theater opened last August near where the “New Square” is being developed on the east side of town. They had ten screens, with tables between the seats. They sold sandwiches, pizza, and alcohol to go with the usual theater fare. I had wondered if a small college town of 12,000 full-time residents and another 12,000 students could support two theaters. Apparently the answer is no for now. According to the Daily Mississippian the theater hasn’t paid their rent since late 2006. Their landlord won a $450,000 judgment against them yesterday.

Cassie and I had only been there a couple of times. Being able to order “real food” was nice, but they just never seemed to have any decent movies playing. Hopefully someone else will give it a go. I think it could be pulled off, but only if it was done right. At this point I imagine the owners of the building would be willing to rent it to someone at a discount. Hopefully this won’t set back development of the “New Square.” It already seems to be going slowly.

Moe’s Southwest Grill also shut down a couple of weeks ago. They are going to be replaced with “Redneck Burrito” soon. It sounds like the owners got tired of paying franchise fees. Bad management was their problem. They were always running out stuff. Moe’s was pretty popular for the first six months or so, but it had gone downhill for the past six.

The winner of the 27th Annual Lafayette County Bowl Pick was Will Lewis, who picked 26 games correctly. I’m assuming that’s the same Will Lewis that owns Neilson’s on the Square. Also picking 26 games correctly was Benny Shankle. Lewis won the tiebreaker. The funny thing is that both of them picked Ohio State to win the championship game. That means anyone crazy enough to think Florida had a shot at winning also made a bunch of bad picks. That’s how improbable Florida’s win was.

I picked 22 of the games correctly, putting me 4 games behind the winners. That’s as good as or better than 87% of the pool participants. Not too bad.

The bowl season is one quarter of the way through, and I picked the wrong team for two of the eight games. That puts me in third place in the 27th Annual Lafayette County Bowl Pick. While that sounds good, it’s really not. Out of 357 people in the pool, 13 of them (3.6%) have picked every game correctly so far. Another 49 (13.7%) have only missed one game, and 114 (31.9%) have missed two like me. That means 49.3% of the pool is doing as good or better than me. I could be doing worse, but not much.

I had chosen Rice over Troy in the New Orleans Bowl, along with 67.5% of the pool. I also chose New Mexico over San Jose State in the New Mexico Bowl along with 49.6% of the pool. I thought both of them would be close games. San Jose State was definitely the better team, but I picked New Mexico because the game was played in their home stadium. Oh well.

Still, if the rest of my picks pan out, I’ll be in a seven-way tie for first place. The tie would be broken by the score of the national championship game. It’s rather unlikely that the rest of my picks will be correct, but I can dream. The winner of the bowl pick will get $5,962, second gets $1,071, and third gets $357.

Larry the Barber talked me into participating in The 27th Annual Lafayette County Bowl Pick, which bills itself as “A spirited contest for a paltry $20.” You pick the winner of 32 bowl games as well as the score for the national championship game as a tie-breaker. The winner gets 80% of the pot, second place gets 15%, and third gets 5%.

The picks were harder to make than I had initially thought. As it turns out, most bowl games are fairly evenly matched, at least on paper. I used ESPN.com and a few sports betting sites to make my predictions. The games are listed in chronological order, and my picks are in bold.

Poinsettia Bowl - 12/19
Northern Illinois vs. TCU
Northern Illinois has a great running back in Garrett Wolfe, but not much else. They lost their QB to a knee injury late in the season. TCU hasn’t lost since early in the season and has a strong running game, a decent passing game, and a solid defense.

Las Vegas Bowl - 12/21
BYU vs. Oregon
Oregon has a strong running game and a tough defense, but has over 30 turnovers this season, lost their last three games, and has a QB controversy on their hands. BYU has a balanced, explosive offense and an adequate defense. Both have top ten offenses, so it should be fun to watch, but BYU will come out on top.

New Orleans Bowl - 12/22
Rice vs. Troy
Troy likes to spread out opposing defenses to make room to run. No doubt they’ll have success doing that against Rice. However, they’ll probably turn the ball over a few times, and their defense won’t be able to stop Rice either.
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Yesterday, Cassie and I gave geocaching a try. Geocaching involves using a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver to find caches that have been hidden. Geocaching was started in 2000, and it’s getting very popular. There are 64 caches within a 15 mile radius of Oxford. I’ve been wanting to give geocaching a try for a while now, so last weekend I borrowed my mother’s GPS, and Monday afternoon Cassie and I picked three caches and headed out.

As it turns out, it’s a lot more challenging than you might think. Consumer GPSs are only accurate to about 20 feet or so. That’s fine when you’re driving, but when you’re trying to find a small container that’s been well hidden, you’d prefer more accuracy.

The first cache Cassie and I tried to find was called Faulkner’s Stompin’ Grounds. It is located on a trail between the University Museums and Rowan Oak, William Faulkner’s home. Cassie and I have hiked this trail several times, so we were familiar with the area. The GPS got us within 20 feet or so of it, but we weren’t even sure which side of the trail it was on. We found it after about three minutes of looking around. It was a waterproof match container stuffed in a hollow spot in a tree. We opened it up, signed the log, and put it back in its place. By looking at the geocaching web site, I can tell that cache was placed there on February 6, 2005, and has been found 22 times.
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I’ve been looking for an excuse to post something about L.Q.C. Lamar, and today I got one. Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II should be much more well known than he is, especially around here. I would argue that he should be Oxford’s second most famous person (behind William Faulkner), but I had lived here nearly four years before I had even heard of him. I don’t remember him being mentioned at all in my Mississippi history course in high school.

Lamar came to Oxford when his father-in-law, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, came to Oxford to be the second chancellor of the University of Mississippi.

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Last night Cassie and I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at the new theater in Oxford. It was the first time we had been to the new theater. It looks a lot like the new theater in Tupelo, though quite a bit smaller. It’s a huge improvement over what we had.

I’ve read all the Harry Potter books and seen all the movies. Cassie has read none of the books and had only seen the movie previous to this one, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I’ve tried to get her to read the books, but on the whole she thinks the whole thing is silly. I think she only went last night to see the new theater.

I thought the first half of the movie was just a little silly. I can’t point to anything in particular, but it definitely felt sillier than it should have been. I also thought a lot of important things got left out or changed. I realize it’s hard to pack a long book into a two hour movie, so I don’t hold that against them too much. I thought the second half of the movie was very good. I knew exactly what was going to happen, but I still found it very exciting. Overall the movie was very, very good. If you’ve read the books or seen the other movies, you’ve got to see this one. If you haven’t read the books or seen the movies, I suggest you start now. They are both very entertaining, even for adults.

This past weekend I went to see Serenity. Serenity is a science fiction movie based on Firefly, a series that was on Fox for a single season a couple of years ago. It is written and directed by Joss Whedon, the same guy that did Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. This movie has received a lot of good publicity from several web sites that I read on a regular basis. I went into the theater with very high expectations.
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