Not dead, just lazy.

After having gotten scolded by four different people from three different time zones in the span of a few hours last night for not having updated the blog in nearly a week, I realized I owe everyone an apology. Yes, I have been a slack-ass blogger lately, and I don't have much of an excuse. Last night, of course, I was in Atlanta for the UGA-Tech baseball game at Turner Field, which Georgia won 7-5; over the weekend, I was in Columbus, tidying up the place so my parents would have a clean house (and a stocked refrigerator) to come home to after their big trip to Europe. My secondary motive for going home was to get some work done in a big empty house and a distraction-free environment, but I quickly found out that any house with a Nintendo Wii in it, no matter how empty otherwise, is not a distraction-free environment. So obviously I didn't get any blogging done (or much else, for that matter), but I did raise my skill level on Wii baseball by like 700 points. So suck on that, bitches.

Now, as for last Thursday, I do have a legit excuse: I was invited by longtime commenter Zen Bubba up to Nashville for (drum roll, please) the final round of auditions for the Tennessee Titans cheerleading squad, held at the Wild Horse Saloon downtown. ZB, if you'll recall, graduated from law school with a classmate who was on the cheer squad last season and was aiming to re-up for 2009-10, and when he asked if I wanted to come up to Nashvegas and cheer her on, I had only two questions: 1) How quickly can I say "Hells yes" without sounding like a tool, and 2) is flash photography allowed?

As it turns out, Bubba took care of most of the photography (the good pictures are his, while the shitty ones are pictures I took on my iPhone), so here we go:


The inside of the Wild Horse Saloon right as things were getting started. It's a rather large venue. The vibe at a cheerleader audition is kind of like a cross between a Vegas show, "Dancing with the Stars," and the Miss Georgia pageant, and like Miss Georgia, the audience at the cheerleader auditions was filled with girls who were dressed like they expected to be yanked up on stage at any moment.


This would be the Wild Horse, I guess, sittin' easy by the main staircase.


And here is Jocey, now packing a Juris Doctor in addition to her dancing skills.


And here is me, egged on by ZB to douche it up as much as possible; the mirror-lens shades are kind of taking on a life of their own at this point. The PBR, on the other hand, is a Nashville tradition for me; I was in Nashville the weekend before the 2004 Tennessee Democratic Primary, and after a marathon day of campaigning, we all got together at like one in the morning at Robert's Western World on Broadway, where I had a pork-chop sammich and a Pabst Blue Ribbon that constituted what at that point felt like one of the top ten meals I'd ever eaten. So ever since then, trips to Nashville have involved at least one (and usually multiple) PBRs.


You may or may not be able to read this sign hung from the second level of the Wild Horse, but it says "Erica cures my swine flu." I must admit I'm impressed by both the curative powers of the Titans cheerleading squad and their fans' awareness of current events; I doubt the auditions for, say, the Raiderettes would be this topical.


And last but obviously not least, here's me with Jocey (right), who did indeed make it back onto the squad for a second year, and squad captain Valerie (left).

And that's basically why there was no Friday Random Ten+5 last week. I regret nothing.