You got to love exchange students. With apologies to Shannon Elizabeth, Wilder Valderrama, and the great Sean Sung who gets unfairly shafted in this countdown, the best exchange student I have had the pleasure of cultural exchange with was Piotr from Poland

Piotr was a great guy. His host family had about 6 little kids, and by all accounts he instantly became the quintessential big brother. They all ran up to him and climbed all over him whenever he came home. He hugged them and took care of them, and when they fought each other, he would sternly and yet lovingly rebuke them in the way only a person with a strong Eastern European accent can. Think Bela Karolyi, only young and thin. (Wow, Bela Karolyi, that's quite the obscure dated reference. I might as well bring up Kerri Strug too, just so that I can mention she is the half-sister of Kathy Ireland. Did that for you Von! And I might as well mention my brief crush on Shannon Miller whom the Spanish dubbed "The Porcelain Princess." Kim Zmeskal anyone? I am so very old.)

​Previously I extolled the virtue of black music at #32 on the count down. In that post I described rap and hip hop music as embodying a mentality of Arrogance in the face of oppression. That is an appropriate sentiment regarding racial relations in this country for black Americans, but it is also a very relatable sentiment to teenagers of all races because all teenagers feel oppressed by society, and high school, and the legal drinking age etc. I also referenced Rock and Roll music as being about freedom, fast cars, fast women, and the open road. Somewhere in between, these two musical genres spawned a musical movement that never really got a proper genre label, and was housed in the Rock Alternative Radio air space next to Emo and Screamo bands. I am stealing Weird Al Yankovic’s Angry white boy Polka song as inspiration and just calling it angry white boy music.

​These are people who didn’t quite make the 40 for 40 countdown, but maybe they should have? If these people had been greater influences, for better or worse, my life could look very different today. This is not so much about regret, as just to illuminate possibilities that might have been (or maybe still could be).

​​So I have always been of the opinion that “Baseball is a dumb game anyway!”
​In fact this is an oft recited phrase in my home.

Dallas hated me.
I have no idea why.

The first time I saw Adam Sandler was actually on that one show about the Huxtable family. He played one of Theo’s friends and I don’t think he had any lines. I didn’t know it was him for years. Somehow got a glorified extra spot on TV’s number one show And did what he did best, make funny faces and act kind kind of awkward trying not to laugh. He was mildly off putting and endearing all at once. That pretty much describes all of his early stand up too. There was kind of a “oh good for him” type of pity to his success. Like Mel Torme’s enthusiasm for Kramer on that episode of Seinfeld when Cosmo accidentally crashed a fundraiser for the handicapped.