Scene & Herd - It’s boat time

B-ball, MLK and ‘The Simpsons’

On Sunday afternoon, I stopped by the Dunwoody High School gymnasium to peek in on the Harlem Legends charity basketball game. The Harlem Legends is a sort of spin-off of the Harlem Globetrotters founded by ex-Globetrotter Michael Douglas (not the one married to Catherine Zeta-Jones). The match raised money for the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta and the Michael Douglas Foundation.

The team that the Legends got to beat up on changed each quarter. None of them were awful, but they were no match for a team comprised of former Globetrotters and former college and pro basketball players. Besides, it wasn’t about competition. It was more about Globetrottery goofing around.

The main goofer was Douglas himself. The ex-Trotter played the entire game with a wireless microphone so that his schtick was clearly audible. He entertained the kid-heavy crowd with backward half-court shots, silly dancing and - my favorite, probably because I remember it from when I was kid - walking into the stands and stealing a woman’s purse so that she’d come out on the floor and dance. The kids in attendance ate it up. Expert showman that he is, Douglas approached me at halftime (the score was 73-34, by the way) and double-checked that I was able to get some good photos.

The halftime show consisted of a dance troupe named Contagious Fever. They brought most of the kids from the stands down to the floor and had them dance to a medley of recent hits, including Usher’s “Yeah!” and Ciara’s “1, 2 Step.” Small children are, by and large, terrible dancers, but they’re damned cute when they’re doing it.

Got MLK?: The paper’s deadline made covering actual MLK Day activities impossible. However, ignoring the holiday would have been rude, so on Sunday I went to Hands on Atlanta’s MLK Service Summit at the Auburn Avenue Research Library. I sat in on a great hour-long lecture featuring Ellen Beattie of the International Rescue Committee, Anne Olson of Amnesty International and Abdullahi Abdullahi of the Somali Bantu Community. The subject was the global refugee crisis.Most interesting to me, because I didn’t really understand it before, was Abdullahi’s explanation of how the arbitrary colonial borders drawn a century ago are at the heart of refugee crisis that currently displaces 35 million people. It’s not super Scene & Herd-y, so I’ll go into more length on my website (see below).

Exciting And New?: Last weekend, I went to the 43rd annual Atlanta Boat Show. The day before I went, my friend Denise told me to make sure that I check out the show’s water-skiing squirrel. As she described it, the squirrel skied behind a tiny boat floating in a kiddie-sized pool. So when I arrived at the show and was waiting for my media badge to print, I asked the nice people at the media table about the water-skiing squirrel. They laughed at me quite heartily. I’m pretty sure that Denise wasn’t pranking me, but I felt like my cousin Massoud probably did when two other cousins convinced him to walk into a roadside produce shop in Southern California and ask the clerk for dingleberries. Thanks, Denise.Momentary embarrassment aside, I had a nice time at the boat show. I’m not much of a boater, but deep down I’m still a boy who likes gawking at big, shiny machines. The shiniest of the machines, and easily the coolest, was the Soviet-made Tupolev Aeroboat. The craft looks like a small spaceship. It’s powered by a propeller airplane engine mounted behind the cabin. At its top speed of 150 mph, it flies above the surface of the water, cushioned by a few inches of air. It was designed by the Soviet military to be dropped from helicopters onto the ocean surface where it would rescue downed pilots. The boat even has its own website, www.therussianboat.com.

The boat is owned by Jerry Schulte, a friendly man who inquired whether my camera was of high enough quality to take photos of the boat for an upcoming issue of Millionaire magazine. Even though my work is more suited to Millionaire’s upmarket sister publication, Billionaire magazine, I’m still considering his offer. (Note to readers, those are actual magazines).

The bulk of the show was dedicated to more leisure-type boating and fishing activities. The show featured several classes as well, including last Wednesday’s “Crappie Fishing Tricks,” last Thursday’s “Crappie Year Round” and last Friday’s “Crappie Fishing Tips.” At first I thought the instructor, Al Bassett, must be suffering from low self-esteem. It turns out that crappie is a type of fish. Go figure.

Remember: It’s only appropriate that I start this item with a trivia question. Are you ready? What’s more fun than a weekly trivia game about the “Highlander” TV series at a bar called the Simpsons? While members of the Adrian Paul fan clubs draft their angry letters to the editor, I’ll tell you. The answer is Sunday evening’s “Simpsons” trivia at a bar called the Highlander.The match begins immediately after “The Simpsons” is over on Sunday nights. Despite the name, the match is not solely dedicated to “The Simpsons.” Host Bruce Combs merely tosses a couple of “Simpsons” questions into the usual mix of questions devoted to politics, movies, geography, music, etc.

Like most trivia matches, a series of easy questions lulled me into thinking that I had a chance, such as, “Who sings the song that begins ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life?’” and “Name the actor to whom Peter Falk was reading the story in The Princess Bride.” Soon after those came two Middle East geography questions. “In what country is Aswan High Dam located?” and “What’s the only country named after its ruling family?”

Did I win? Of course not. I got my ass handed to me, even though my competition included a guy who, when asked the trivia question, “What do the letters in C.P.R. stand for?” walked up to Combs and asked, “Will you take abbreviations?” Everyone within earshot got a chuckle.

andisheh@creativeloafing.comFor more on the global refugee crisis and, uh, the Atlanta Boat Show, visit Scene & Herd at www.atlanta.creativeloafing.com.??