Ultimate media - Digital TV versus Web 2.0?

I'm a regular watcher of Channel Ten's late news. Is it Tom Piotrowski? Is it the obvious sexual tension between Sandra Sully and Brad McEwan? Or maybe it's just that my couch is damn comfy and I can't be bothered going upstairs to bed. Irregardless, the other night they announced Ten's new venture - ONE HD, a dedicated 24 hour sports channel going free-to-air. I love my sport and don't have Austar (that's Foxtel to you metropolitan types), so I'm quite excited about being able to watch NBA, NFL and MLB games in the comfort of my own home.

So I went for a bit of a hunt on Firefox for some more info, and I found the official press release. And I realised just how much of a stronghold this will give Channel Ten on free-to-air sports coverage in Australia - they will broadcast AFL, netball's ANZ Championship, the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the Indian Premier League, Formula 1, Moto GP, NASCAR, ARC, NFL, MLB, NBA, all the big golf tournaments in the US and Australia, NCAA football and basketball, ATP and WTA tour events, and also the Australian Swimming Championships. The final event is a huge coup, since it has always been a huge ratings winner for Nine, especially in Olympic years.

As I got even more aroused as I read through the release, this line caught my eye...

"From time to time, ONE will feature extreme sports, emerging sports and a range of sports-related programming including documentaries."

Hey! Ultimate's an emerging sport! Maybe we could be on One HD!

Not so fast there, champ.

This new channel is going to attract a lot of attention from advertisers looking to throw money at air time that the 18-44 male demographic is watching. Cars, bourbon, beer, sports drinks and the like. Markets that spend a lot of money on advertising, and that will leave Channel Ten executives wondering how deep to make their Scrooge McDuck Money Bin. Pretty soon the other two free-to-air networks are going to want some of that action and will look to set up similar digital channels in the future. But One HD has eaten up a lot of what sports are available, and Fox Sports has the rights to a lot of what's left. Seven (let's face it, Nine have their head so far up their own ass they won't realise what' going on) can take AFL, V8 Supercars and tennis (already massive cash cows), try and wrangle the A-League from Fox Sports, and maybe get horse racing, NBL and WNBL, and throw a bit of money at Super 14 (since they have the Wallabies matches) and they should have a decent competitor. That's the window for us - this is where ultimate could lobby either Seven or Fox Sports for some air time.

Alternatively...

We could continue down the road we've been on for a while - the "Web 2.0" road. Also known as the "user generated content" road, but that's a much less snappy name. Think about it - we have Ultivillage branching out into live coverage, Blockstack with their online TV show, Ballarat Ultimate with their opinionated and biased coverage of the Australian scene and The Huddle with their online magazine. Not to mention the countless amounts of blogs with local coverage, some of which are outlined to your right.

With the technology to do that kind of thing getting cheaper and more user friendly, it should only be a matter of time before we start to see more coverage of international events. Imagine in five years time being able to log on and watch live or delayed coverage of Potlatch, Paganello, UK Nationals and whatever else tickles your fancy.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to fire up the Score Reporter to follow UPA Nationals.

Can pick a winner

So Mixed Nats 2008 was run and won last weekend, with Vintage taking out honours as predicted by yours truly about 3 months ago. In fact, I didn't do too bad with my predictions...

Predicted 1. Vintage 2. Spiderpig 3. FAF 4. Newcastle Pie Wagon 5. YOOOUUUU! 6. Kaboom 1 7. Tribe Of Miniature Horses 8. Mind The Gap 9. SMURF 10. Black Sheep 11. RuBi 12. Sugoi 13. Hills Anti-Socials 14. Newcastle WD 15. Flycatchers 16. UQ Lovers 17. Discasaurus Rex 18. LOG! 19. sCAPEgoats 20. Kaboom 2 21. Wollongong 22. Kaboom 3 23. Lounge Lizards 24. Hand Of God

Actual 1. Vintage 2. FAF 3. Kaboom 1 4. Spiderpig 5. SMURF 6. Sugoi 7. Tribe Of Miniature Horses 8. YOOOUUUU! 9. Newcastle Pie Wagon 10. Newcastle WD 11. Black Sheep 12. Flycatchers 13. Hills Anti-Socials 14. Kaboom 2 15. sCAPEgoats 16. Mind The Gap 17. RuBi 18. UQ Lovers 19. Discasaurus Rex 20. Hand Of God 21. Lounge Lizards 22. LOG! 23. Wollongong 24. Kaboom 3

Variance - +1 +3 -2 +4 +6 - -3 -5 +4 -1 +3 - +6 +4 -8 -6 -2 -2 +4 +2 -4 -2 -2

Also, it's only just today that I've worked out the connection between 'The Tribe Of Miniature Horses' name, their lineup and this post of Rueben's. I see what you did there.

It's so simple

I've heard many people say that ultimate is boring to watch. Actually scrap that, I've heard many ultimate players say that ultimate is boring to watch. I've never heard a non-player say that. Of course it's boring to watch when you'd rather be playing. But there's an oh-so-simple explanation of why that perception exists among the frisbee fraternity.

You are not emotionally invested in the outcome of the game.

Or, in layman's terms, you're not barracking for anyone.

Every sport on the face of this planet is shit to watch if you don't care who wins. Think about the number of footyheads who pay out on soccer for the 3 years and 11 months that the World Cup isn't on. Think about how much more interesting equestrian at the Olympics becomes when there's an Australian within striking distance of a gold medal. Think about how you never cared about boxing until there was an opportunity to see Anthony Mundine getting repeatedly punched in the face by Danny Green.

If you are barracking for either side, any sporting contest becomes much more interesting. If you are watching the final in a tournament you got knocked out of a few hours earlier, of course you're not going to give a shit who wins - it's not your team.

I'm planning on going to Nationals next year. Not as a player, but as a spectator/journalist. I'll be picking someone to barrack for and I bet I'll find the final more exciting than anyone who is not in it.


Also, I've spent the better part of the afternoon reading the archives of Thoughts, Matt Mackey's blog. I think you should read it too.

Reflections of AUG Part 2

After a sweet party on Wednesday night, we had to front up for the game where the tournament really began for us.


Day 4

After originally believing we were up against ANU, a reshuffle of a three way tie determined our new opponents. We were facing Edith Cowan Uni in the Quarter Nine-als. This was the game we really wanted to win as it would a) put us on the way to beating our seed and b) automatically give us our best ever finish at AUG (previous best was 13th in 2007). ECU were an athletic bunch, but had virtually zero experience outside a tournament or two in the west and a season of social league. We were very careful not to go into this game being too cocky, and approached it like we did with any other game. But ECU came out harder than we did and we had a very tough battle on our hands. Neither team could get any kind of breakaway going. Looking back, we never got out of first gear, and ECU simply wanted to win more than we did. But there were two distinct areas where we were simply rubbish. Catching, and transition from O to D. If we had have caught every throw that went to our endzone, we would have won 15-5. But to quote my under 12s cricket coach, "Catches win matches." We put down too many easy chances. As soon as we turned, ECU would have three or four long cuts straight away. I tore my vocal chords to shreds trying to get our team to "point to who you are marking" but it was a mess - guys marking girls, then girls marking guys, then guys not marking anyone because they can't see who was open. ECU just about always got in 4 or 5 passes to poached players before we were able to cover them. By the time we sparked up, it was far too late and ECU took the game 11-9.

We then had a long walk to our next game against RMIT. If you ever wanted to talk about how a positive mindframe can make a huge difference, a perfect example of what not to do would have been this game. RMIT were going in with absolutely no confidence and complete apathy, while we went in with no energy or enthusiasm at all. Our senior players were devastated that we'd just lost such a winnable game and having that mood filter through to our rookies was inevitable. Our offence was better in this game than the ECU game, but our defense was...well, non-existent. On any other day we should have convincingly beaten them, but on this occasion we simply couldn't get our shit together enough to string a few points together. We lost on universe point 11-10.

After this game I was in a filthy mood. Not with anyone or anything in particular, but a combination of hangover, two shitty losses, playing around 70% of all points and fulfilling team manager duties caught up with me and I simply needed to be grumpy for a while. We'd done everything as a team all week, but that afternoon was declared "free time". I pulled up a chair to watch the Melbourne v Flinders semi final, and some Robsquading with Doobs cheered me up.

That night I got a stern talking to from our trainer and coach for being such a dickhead. I had it coming.


Day 5

By this point, we were over the competitive aspect of Uni Games and we wanted to have some fun. In the 15th/16th playoff we were facing ANU. We arrived at the fields at 8:27 (game time 8:30) to see ANU in the middle of throwing drills. The following quote was delivered from one of our leadership group - "If they want fifteenth place THAT bad...they can fucking have it!" We threw seven on the line as I considered cleating up. This game we brought up all the usual shenanigans - upside down throws only, underwear points, disrespect D (aka Protect The Castle), and created the Pinball Point, although ANU weren't keen on the idea of a Multi-disc Bonus Round. At this point I should mention ANU weren't joining in our tomfoolery and were playing their normal game. ANU took out the win 10-5, which puts another game on the "we probably should have won that" list.

Flashback to Thursday night - our trainer and I joined a couple of other Uni of Ballarat people at our backpackers bar for a trivia night. Nice relaxing night, and plenty of laughs were had. In the end, our table won convincingly and got a $50 drink card for our efforts (which equaled five jugs of beer between 7 of us. Good return). I was about to pack it in for the night when I was invited up for the Impossible Question Cash Jackpot Round. Now, I like going to trivia nights because I know a lot of useless shit. The question - "Which brand of Ford car celebrated it's centenary this week?" My first reaction - "Are you from Syria? This question is worth one hundred bucks?" The MC tried to build up the suspense while I was trying to take the mike off him to give the answer (this is the answer, by the way). Well, I won $100, and immediately took it to the bottleshop to buy vodka, goon and cheap champers.

Flashforward to Friday morning - I busted out the booze stash for the team and we watched the Latrobe v Deakin 9th/10th playoff and taught the newbs how to play Fantasy Ultimate and Stubby Guts. We got our Robsquad on in the final with the Monash and Latrobe boys and all in all had a really fun day. It was the perfect antidote to the sour mood the day before. It was also the drunkest I have ever been prior to 3:00pm.


I like winning. Most people do. But AUG was still a lot of fun for me because we were able to make the week fun. We came third in spirit (in fact, we've finished 3rd or better in spirit every time we've been to AUG) through no particular effort - we play hard right to the end, and we bloody love our ultimate. It's no secret that I'm disappointed with our 16th place finish, but we took 11 new players to their first AUG, and they're already looking forward to AUG2009. Which means we have a good player base to build on. For once.

Yeah BUUF.

Mixed Nats preview (Part 2)

Ok, I'll try this again.

For the first time in four years, I'm not fronting up to the Australian Mixed Ultimate Championships. The trouble is when all Victorian players decide they have the energy and funding to go play, I get relegated to "not good enough". So I'll be honest, I haven't really been following the build up. Although there hasn't really been any since the qualifiers. Hmm.

What really strikes me as strange this year is the shifting about of many players between "states". Pottsy playing for an SA team? John Damiani playing for a Victorian team? Wetnose and Stefan playing for a Tasmanian team? Tanya Waisbord playing for a Sydney team? Is everyone taking the piss?

I thought about picking the quarter finalists, then realised I could simply divide the field into three tiers.


The Developers

Well I'm not going to call it "The Shit Teams", am I? Last year I predicted that we have seen the last of the "party teams" at Mixed Nats, with the qualification process making sure folks have been stacking their lineups to get one of the 24 spots. That being said, Hand Of God and Lounge Lizards will still be flying the flag in that regard. ACT have taken the smart approach by creating Kaboom, who aim to establish themselves as a fully fledged mixed club. However I think their second and third teams won't challenge a lot of the more talented teams. My personal belief is that NSW get too many spots, but that is the reward for having nearly three times the number of players as any other state. I can't see the bottom 3 NSW teams getting higher than 17th, and I think there's teams that missed out from Victoria and SA that would seriously challenge them. The absence of Ash Martens and Mike Baker leaves a massive hole in Log, so I don't think they'll improve on last year.

24. Hand of God (Townsville)
23. Lounge Lizards (Brisbane)
22. Kaboom 3 (Canberra)
21. Wollongong (Wollongong)
20. Kaboom 2 (Canberra)
19. sCAPEgoats (Sydney)
18. LOG! (Hobart)
17. Discasaurus Rex (Sydney)


The Nine-als

Last year, it was fairly straight forward to seperate the quarter finalists from the rest of the field, but this year the line is a bit more blurry. UQ Lovers have a great lineup but are missing a key playmaker. Sugoi will benefit from the addition of Owen Shepherd to their lineup, but didn't really impress me at Halibut (as iCarrot), and it remains to be seen if they've improved since then. Newcastle reckon they haven't split A/B, but I think that on paper Wing Defence are the weaker side. Ocean Madness' performance last year suggested that Newcastle didn't have a lot of depth outside their A team, but I think that will change this year. Hills have a large squad with some star power in Andrew Goldstiver, Lee Coady and Nikki Shires, but I'm not convinced they can break the top half. Suufa...sorry, RuBi...are making a lot of noise, but even with the addition of Megan Gamble and Rach Grindlay to their Uni Games line up, they don't look to be quarters material. Black Sheep and SMURF could very well be quarter finalists, but I can't really go picking ten top 8 finishers, can I?

16. UQ Lovers (Brisbane)
15. Flycatchers (Adelaide)
14. Newcastle Wing Defence (Newcastle)
13. Hills Anti-Socials (Sydney)
12. Sugoi (Brisbane)
11. RuBi (Sydney)
10. Black Sheep (New Zealand)
9. SMURF (Adelaide)


The Top Eight

I should include some sort of disclaimer about my blatant Victorian bias, but fuck it, it's not like I have some sort of journalistic integrity to uphold. There's 3 Victorian teams at Mixed Nats this year - the lowest since 2004. And I believe that all of them will make the top 8. In the absence of Bootius Maximus, I think that Mind The Gap will revel in the hometown advantage and get to quarters, but probably not further. Kaboom and Miniature Horse certainly have the talent to challenge for the title, but may lack the experience of playing a tournament together. YOOOUUUU! will still be in the running by Sunday, but I don't quite think they can crack the top 4. So that leaves the top 4 that I've picked - Spiderpig, Vintage, FAF and Pie Wagon. It's late, no one will read this, so I'll just throw this prediction out there and see if it floats.

8. Mind The Gap (Brisbane)
7. The Tribe Of Miniature Horses (Melbourne)
6. Kaboom (Canberra)
5. YOOOUUUU! (Melbourne)
4. Newcastle Pie Wagon (Newcastle)
3. FAF (Sydney)
2. Spiderpig (Sydney)
1. Vintage (Melbourne)


It's not like I'm bitter at not going or anything.

Uni ultimate teams are part of a larger team as well

Believe it or not, ultimate isn't the only sport at AUG. It certainly seems that way for most of us, since we rarely get to see any other sports in action. A lot of campus sporting organisations take great pride in how their squads perform in the Overall Winner and Doug Ellis Trophy classifications at AUG. You can spot these unis - they're the ones with the matching uniforms across all sports, and have all teams staying together at the same accommodation. So I thought it might be interesting to look at where everyone's squads finished in the Overall and Doug Ellis Trophy classifications.

For those not in the know, the Doug Ellis Trophy is awarded to the university that earns the most points per student enrolled. It is used as a measure of how strong a university's sporting program is.


AUG Ultimate (Mixed) Final Standings
1. Flinders
2. Sydney
3. Adelaide
4. Melbourne
5. Macquarie
6. UWA
7. Monash
8. Newcastle
9. LaTrobe
10. Deakin
11. Murdoch
12. Edith Cowan
13. RMIT
14. UTS
15. ANU
16. Ballarat
17. Griffith
18. Wollongong
19. QUT


AUG Overall Classification
number in brackets denotes actual ranking

1. Monash (1)
2. Melbourne (2)
3. Sydney (3)
4. UWA (4)
5. Macquarie (6)
6. UTS (8)
7. Latrobe (9)
8. Griffith (10)
9. QUT (11)
10. Adelaide (12)
11. RMIT (13)
12. Deakin (14)
13. Newcastle (16)
14. Wollongong (17)
15. Edith Cowan (19)
16. Flinders (21)
17. Murdoch (23)
18. Ballarat (25)
19. ANU (26)


Doug Ellis Trophy Classification
number in brackets denotes actual ranking

1. UWA (1)
2. Monash (3)
3. Melbourne (4)
4. Ballarat (5)
5. Macquarie (7)
6. Adelaide (8)
7. Sydney (9)
8. Latrobe (12)
9. Griffith (13)
10. Deakin (19)
11. Flinders (20)
12. UTS (22)
13. Murdoch (23)
14. Newcastle (24)
15. Wollongong (25)
16. QUT (26)
17. Edith Cowan (27)
18. ANU (28)
19. RMIT (31)


So what can we learn from this? Well, we can identify which campus sporting organisations would give a shit in starting up an ultimate frisbee team with assistance from the ultimate community. Out of the top 20 Overall unis, 15 had ultimate teams at AUG, and 3 have teams that didn't attend. Victoria University (7th) and University of New England (20th) obviously have large sporting programs so they would be good to target. Using the Doug Ellis Trophy standings, we can add Australian College of Physical Education (6th), Bond University (11th) and Southern Cross University (14th) to our target list.

And people reckon I make this kind of shit up on the spot.

Mixed Nats preview (Part 1)

Mixed Nats is on? When the fuck did that happen?

Part 2 coming tomorrow.

Geelong League update

On Tuesday night I drove down to Geelong, as has now become the norm. Much better than the hike to Albert Park that was the Monday night routine for three years. But this week I didn't have the cleats packed - just a chair. It was Grand Final time, and BUUF wasn't in it. Again. In fact, BUUF lost every game this season. The game was between Flying High and Yoghurt Slingers. Both teams had around 14 or 15 players, all itching to get game time.

The standard of the first round of Geelong League a few months back wasn't crash hot, and BUUF had a bit of a stroll through the park for the first few weeks. But the standard jumped. Dramatically. And the game on Tuesday night was a bloody good game. Dan and I speculated on the possible match-ups... Jake Angelovich versus Lewi Broad, Pete Nixon versus Dave Pelletier, Tyler Dickson versus whoever wanted to follow him on a deep cut, and Maddie Thomson versus anyone cutting in. But those match-ups got changed up, with several other kids taking the job of Boss and Jake-As. Dave P continued to run wild, but his targets were limited. Andrew Berry threw himself at countless stray discs - I think he took about four or five catches on second efforts. Luke McCully caught anything thrown remotely near him. It was a great game to watch.

Flying High won in the end, but next season they'll be two teams. You see, Slingers and Flying High have a LOT of players. Last time BUUF played Slingers they had 19 players. The growth of this league is ridiculous, and with the warmer weather starting to (finally) show, it'll happen faster. So the move to a new venue (Deakin University) and expansion to 6 teams is necessary. Am I working towards a point here? Yes.

Everyone...well, the AFDA and UPA, seems to banging on about youth development. And while I thought the intentions were good, I wondered why we were reaching out to an audience that can't drive themselves to tournaments. But with the enthusiasm, energy and improvement shown over these last few months, I'm sold. Kids all the way.

Reflections of AUG

It's been over a week since I dragged my worn out self back to B-Town after a long, arduous week at Australian Uni Games. There's been plenty of write-ups around the place about what went on among the top few teams, so I thought I'd focus on Ballarat's efforts down the bottom end of the table. We finished 16th out of the 19 teams after making it through to the top 12 on Day 2, which I am incredibly disappointed with. I thought we had the capability to finish top 10, and if we were given the week again, I have no doubt we'd have been in Deakin's place playing Latrobe for 9th spot on Friday.

So what went wrong?

Actually, that's an unfair question. We should be asking ourselves, "What could we have done better?" And the answer is easy - better preparation. We had 16 players - 5 with AUG experience, 3 who were at the higher end of the learning curve but hadn't played a tournament longer than two days, and 8 whose ultimate experience level stood somewhere between 'little' and 'none'. Our biggest training (the week before holidays) saw 12 players in attendance. More commonly we had 4 or 5 show up at any one time, and our Geelong league team consisted mostly of non-uni players. The first time all 16 of us were in one place at one time was at the backpackers bar on the Sunday night. As best as we'd tried to make it happen, we did not have 16 players on the same page come Monday morning.


Day 1

Our first match up was against QUT. I knew that they didn't have much going for them, with all but one player making their debut. But I didn't tell our team that - we wanted to go out and do what we practiced. And that's exactly what we did. Once our jittery throws got out of our system early, we cruised to a 15-2 win. Our next game was against Sydney, and our team had caught wind of the hype. It was Suufa's first game, and they weren't keen on showing any mercy. The game was over 15-0 in about 40 minutes, but we'd showed some promise on defense. The third game against UWA was the biggest shock of the day. In years past, BUUF vs UWA was always a tough, hard fought game, but this year we got rolled 15-1. UWA brought the one thing we left at home somewhere - intensity. In the first 10 minutes, we got stalled out four times. Our newbies faced up against a pommy zone and a LOUD sideline, and they froze. They completely forgot the one thing Greta had drilled into them at training all year ("turn and look at your dump on stall 5") and would throw away on stall 8 or just not even throw at all. We pulled our experienced handlers back behind the disc to work their zone around a bit, even if it meant we weren't going to score. After several breaks through the zone and an eventual score after a magnificent drive of around 40 passes, UWA abandoned their zone. We'd achieved one of our aims - face up to a top team and force them to rethink their strategy.


Day 2

Our final pool game was against Wollongong - 7 players who had never played before. We approached this game with the completely wrong attitude (walk-in-the-park). Our key players didn't hit their stride at all (I didn't even cleat up until 30 minutes into the game) and our D was flat out lazy. It wasn't until 10 minutes to go, and we were down 5-4, that Coach Greta put her game face on and called a rockstar line. We closed out the game 7-5, and we were through to Pool E. That afternoon we faced Flinders, who possessed a very strong lineup. However it was remarkably similar to the team we beat for the bronze medal at SUG in 2006. Hmmm. This game demonstrated just how long two years is in frisbee (ie: it's pretty much fucking era), but Flinders approached this game very differently to Sydney. They came out all guns blazing until half (8-0), and then took the foot off the pedal. Joel Pillar didn't play the rest of the game, while Erin Wallis and Sean Lace only played a couple of points each. The second half went Flinders' way 7-4, but their tactic of resting their key players obviously payed off later in the week. The game against Adelaide was a similar story to the UWA game - we contained them on D to the point where they didn't get easy goals, but we simply couldn't get our shit together on O. The 2 points we got against them were the result of steady, patient O - something we couldn't consistently achieve.


Day 3

We only had two games on Wednesday to round out the Pool E games - Latrobe and Melbourne. By now we'd identified where we were getting killed - the transition from O to D. Our new players were too used to both teams taking their time to set up on a turn, and had never come up against teams that "run and gun" off a turn. In previous games, we'd turn in our endzone, and 10 passes later, the opposition was shooting for their endzone and we still hadn't matched up man-on-man. Our big focus against Latrobe was getting that done. And we did. There was a strong cross wind in this game, and both team's zone D was forcing turns, their's moreso than ours. Latrobe would often break past our wall, and our deep and wings would be able to pick off risky punts to the endzone. However our O could never get it moving because Latrobe's wings would play short enough to mark the handlers, leaving only their deep to police the entire field behind their wall. And it worked - have you ever tried breaking a force, around a wall to hit a marked cutter while throwing upwind? And that was just to hit the dump. In the end we started taking risks on long throws to force their wings to get out back. Despite a lot of turns, this worked and we were able to get 4 points and hold out until timecap for the first time (in a losing game). Latrobe 11-4.

In the afternoon we faced Melbourne, minus Tarrant Meehan and Michelle Phillips who were resting injuries. At this point we were content just to get out there and work on our weaknesses - we were finishing 6th in Pool E no matter what, and Melbourne were relying on some convoluted result to finish higher than 4th, so the game was more or less a dead rubber. Once again, zone D was the order of the day, although the wind had died down since the morning. As expect, Chris Freise ran the show on O, and his upwind hucks always came when they were least expected and caught our deep and wings out every time. We simply could match their efforts, and were relying on short throws. We eventually started to use the width of the field and opened up several gaps in a tiring zone and got 2 points, but Melbourne closed out the game 14-2.

For the final point, we opted for a bit of fun. We suggested to Melbourne we have an "all-in" point - 16 on 16. They took the line, while only myself and Doobie took the O line for BUUF. As the pull went up, Melbourne sent their two rookie girls down to play D. Doobs and I had great fun with this - blatant fakes, directionless cuts, and bullshit throws that should only be reserved for showing off down at the beach. We turned it over around 5 metres from the endzone. Sadface. Chaos ensued as the rest of our squad stormed the field, and in the end, we got the point.


My memory of Wednesday night and beyond is hazy at best due to a kick-ass Rubix Cube party at The Precinct. I'll continue this story when I start getting Lost episode-style flashbacks.