Christopher Thomas, Professor Emeritus and former Chairman of Pace University’s Theater Department, passed away last week. Chris was Chairman of the Department during my four years at Pace. There’s a lot to be said about him, and a lot of things to say to him.

Chris, you may not have been one of my favorite professors, but you were always one of my favorite people. You treated theater students as if we were your grandchildren, and I don’t mean because of an age difference, but because there’s a relationship between grandparents and grandchildren that is very different from the one between parents and their children. You were always proud of our accomplishments and you always wanted better for us. You went to bat for me when I needed help, you made me feel at home in a wounded city nearly 2,000 miles from my old home, and you always had a new fascinating and animated anecdote up your sleeve–which you always made time to tell.

We miss you, Chris.

–Reid.

I celebrated with Loren by seeing Guster at the Fox Theatre in Boulder last night, ten years after we saw them there last with Jason. It may very well have been their first time back at the Fox since we last saw them there. And the date was just a happy coincidence–I gave Loren the tickets for his birthday. Well, his ticket anyway.

It was a great show, and the first stop on Guster’s new tour promoting their upcoming album Easy Wonderful (which, now having heard music from, I am even more psyched to hear). It turned out that the night was actually a radio showcase, in which three bands played, and somewhere among the crowd were radio station executives deciding if they wanted to play any of the music they heard on stage on their radio stations. But, as all three bands noted, it just felt like a night of really, really good music.

In addition to seeing Guster, we were introduced to two indie bands; first, Delta Spirit, one of Ryan Miller (of Guster)’s favorite bands, as evidenced by him standing right next to Loren and I and saying “this is one of my favorite bands.” Next, we saw Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, an ensemble band with ten performers, including a trumpeter, an upright pianist, and a requirement that once you join their band you must be baked for every waking (and probably sleeping) moment of your life. Both bands were good, but Edward Sharpe stood out as a rare band whose album I knew I needed after they had been onstage for just a few moments. They had a lot going on, and their first song could not have possibly been more appropriate than the one the played: The Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour.”

Anyway, Nine Months (minus a day) Left To Go is juuust super.

–Reid.

I won’t take all the credit for making them fall in love, but I’ll take some of it.

–Reid.

–Reid.

–Reid.

No… wait. Wait a minute! This whole time I’ve been shaking my fist at a law… that only affects California?! Aw, what the… dammit, this always happens. I get all riled up… and I don’t read the fine print…

Colorado gotsta git us one theyum purty propositions so’s that we may strike it down, too.

Yee-haw!

–Reid.

(I lied, I read the fine print.)

–Reid.

*This is an inside-out joke.

I think it has to do with probability. For a lot of people, it’s dumb luck. They’re TXTing and don’t immediately notice the walk sign, so that car running the red light just misses them. They decide to hike a new path and don’t get hit by the boulder that rolls down across the path they’ve been walking every day for the past six years. Their alarm doesn’t go off and they miss their plane that never arrives at its destination.

I suppose I have a somewhat predictable feeling about probability. I got cancer, which most people don’t get. I got leukemia, which most cancer patients my age don’t get. I got hemorrhagic pancreatitis, which most leukemia patients don’t get. I’m that .01% that you hear about on the drug commercials who get headaches, cramps, and/or hooves.

But I’ve also managed to hold onto a very different view of probability. I couldn’t get a diagnosis over four months in NYC, and finally came home to be diagnosed with leukemia a week before it almost certainly would have been fatal. Because I thought I’d broken my arm, I wound up at The Children’s Hospital, where I had seen my old orthopedist. While I hadn’t really broken my arm, I was bound to The Children’s Hospital at which, as an adult, my chances for survival from the pediatric cancer I had contracted were astronomically higher than they would have been at an adult hospital. My hemorrhaged pancreas was destroying my internal organs, and when my mom asked the doctors and surgeons at the U if I would be okay, they told her they’d never seen anyone survive that was in the condition I was in–but I did survive.

So, while I’m that .01% who might get headaches, nausea, and/or male pregnancy on the drug commercials, I’m also that .01% who has survived everything thrown at him. Maybe it’s dumb luck. Maybe it’s something else. I don’t know.

What I do know is that next year will be my golden birthday–I’ll turn 28 on July 28, 2011. But that’s certainly not the only thing that will make it special. It will be my first chemo-free birthday in four years. It will be a victory, just as these past three birthdays have been, and just as every single birthday for the rest of my life will be. Victory in the face of probability. Victory that I’ve made it around the sun one more time.

–Reid.

Featuring a frog jumping around with a mouse on its back. What else could you possibly need to know? Mother Nature provided the animals, I provided the jokes.

–Reid.

Nevertheless, my channel has spawned a minor hit. “Baseball Revenge,” a short sketch comedy video Jason, and I made with Matt the summer before college, was featured on Yahoo! Sports over the weekend. It’s the first video from my personal YouTube channel to be viewed more than 20,000 times. For that matter, it’s also the first to be viewed more than 2,000 times.

Here is “Baseball Revenge.” It is nine years old:

This is a very mathematical YouTube graph showing video views for this video:

You may not be mathematical enough to understand it. That green spike on the right is the day people viewed the video. The green line to the left of that, which runs along the bottom of the graph, represents the entirety of human history all the way back to November 19, 2008, a dark time during which no one watched the video.

 

I knew the video had been posted somewhere popular when I was notified that the number of comments had more than doubled:

Now there are four comments and even a (hidden) spam comment! Wow. To top it all off, none of the commenters are telling me I should get cancer and die. That’s a refreshing change.

 

There is a neat new feature on YouTube that, if a video has lots of views from a different website, YouTube automatically displays an “As Seen On:” title underneath the video. In this case, underneath this video, it says “As Seen On: sports.yahoo.com.”

Better Than The Machine doesn’t have any official YouTube “As Seen On:” links, although, I’m certain we would if the feature had been implemented way back in Twenty Ought Six.

If you’d like to check out any of the other videos in my archives that I do not believe will ever cross the 200 view threshold, let alone the 20,000 view threshold, mosey on over to my YouTube channel. Or don’t. If I’ve learned anything from this, it is that lethargy is the key to success. Write that down and look at it often, kids. Or don’t.

–Reid.