Personal Site

Greetings Internaut and welcome to Juanomatic.net, the weblog and personal web den of Brother Juan Monroy Jr. Here you will find my online journal, various photographs of my life in New York City, and musings about my favorite hobbies: bicycling and baseball. Anything posted here that is of use or of interest to the general public is purely coincidental.


Softball Team Shirts... Cheap

21 March 2009

One of the frustrating parts of managing a softball team is getting everyone team shirts ready for the season. I can't tell you how many times I've spent hundreds of dollars for team shirts, paying around $20 per shirt.

Sarah has been screen printing for some time, and she really enjoys the process. So, we decided to take things into our own hands and make the shirts ourselves for a whole lot less than $20 per shirt. So we have done the shirts for almost all of the teams I play on, including the Mulholland's Robots, the NYU Cinema Studies team, and the Bandits, whose shirt you can see here.

A mockup of the Bandits 2009 softball team shirt.

We're producing team shirts for New York City softball teams as a service to fellow softballers. If you run a softball team and would like to have your shirts done locally... and for cheap, drop me a line and ask for a quote.

Happy Birthday to Sarah!

11 January 2009

On Saturday, about ten of Sarah's friends joined me in surprising her and wished her a happy birthday at the Fish Bar on East 5th Street.

SW29Birthday_0053.jpg

The theme for the evening was "Enchantment Under the Sea," which was none other than Shortz's idea for naming the bundle of an evening at the wonderful Mermaid Inn and the big surprise at the Fish Bar. The photos from the evening are in the photo album on this website.

Thanks to everyone who came out. I was really happy to have everyone help me in sharing this day with Sarah, and it really meant a lot to her.

The Last Few Months...

04 December 2008

So it's been a while since I've updated this blog. So what's new?

In August, around the time I stopped updating this blog, I snapped the tendon in my right ring finger catching a fly ball in the outfield at Slackers. It wasn't as painful as one would think but I've been wearing a variety of splints since then. It's been a little annoying.

My little brother got married in September to a lovely gal, Alycia, who is probably wondering what she got herself into now that she's in the family. The wedding was lovely but it likely cost the team I had been managing a championship, as I missed the championship game against Balls Deep. We had the best regular season record but we didn't achieve our destiny. However, the wedding was a lovely event, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world... and I didn't even cry!

Sarah, who had never been to California before the wedding trip, has now been twice in one month. She seems to like it, and aside from sundowner fires burning a lot of what we saw, who can blame her?

In addition, there's been a whole of other small things happening. There was Halloween, where Sarah had a long planned costume of going as a pineapple, and I had a last-minute costume, of battered boyfriend, to match the splint on my injured ring finger.

The holidays are upon us so I'm sure there'll be some rumblings on this site about the various goings on. I can hardly wait!

Mason-Dixon

01 July 2008

My unusually busy summer travel season has taken me to the South for two separate and unrelated trips.

The first was to Kentucky, where Sarah and I went to for a wedding, which was actually near Indianapolis (a mere two car hours away, I later learned), and touring some distilleries of the famed Bourbon trail. The wedding was for Sarah's cousin Jon and his new bride Bri. As you can see in the photos from the wedding, the night concluded with some beer pong action.

On my two trips, I spent significant time in dark rooms: during one in bourbon barrel warehouses in Kentucky.

During the other at the Peabody Awards Archive and at the conference room, pictured, where the Peabody Awards are decided.

Following the wedding, Sarah and I rented a car and toured the Kentucky Bourbon trail, which was a worthwhile experience. Contrary to popular belief, bourbon does not have to be make in Kentucky to be bourbon whiskey. It only has to be made from at least 50% corn, have only water added to it, and that it be aged in a new, charred oak barrel for at least two years. In addition, for it to carry the "Kentucky" labeling, it must spend at least two full years absorbing the Kentucky summers and winters. Yes, folks, that's what Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey actually means. Also, it turns out that Kentucky sits on a limestone bed that filters the ground water of its iron content, making it ideal for aging whiskey, as it won't rust. On the tour, I also learned that the new, charred oak barrels is where it gets it color and complex flavors (vanilla, for instance). When I take a whiff from a glass of bourbon these days, I imagine all those cereal grains mingling with the elegantly sweetened lumber.

While in Louisville, we learned that two days before we arrived, the Louisville tourism office launched a program called the Urban Bourbon Trail where you essentially do a pub crawl, collect stamps on a "passport," and get a T-Shirt once you finish it. Sarah and I started the trail on a Sunday night and by Monday night, we had collected six of eight stamps. We would have all eight except that the remaining two places were closed on Mondays. Boo!

My second trip to the South was a solo sojourn to Athens, Georgia, for a research trip. Last fall, I applied for a Lambdin-Kay Visiting Research Fellowship at the Peabody Awards Archive, which is housed at the University of Georgia. The archive is the third-largest moving image archive in the United States, behind only those at the Library of Congress and at UCLA. My trip happened to coincide with Athfest, kind of a SXSW for Athens which boasts a pretty good musical heritage and continues to see a disproportionately large music scene. I spent eight days looking at the films in the archive, and I was drawn by the amount of local originated programming that remains preserved. Most television histories suffer from focusing on the network-produced programming, as it remains the most accessible, but the material at the Peabody really enriches our understanding of television programming. Television historians would be well advised to consider the locally produced programming surviving in this archive.

Alumni Passions Consoled

01 May 2008

Wow, it has been a long time since I updated this website's blog, but with teaching three classes, having moved to Queens, and the start of the softball season, I haven't found time to add content to this site. Last weekend's Console-ing Passions Conference gave me a reason to finally start putting something worthwhile online. And, I finally posted some new photos.

Console-ing Passions allowed me to see so many familiar sites, and...

yes, even some very familiar faces, like my parents.

One of the reasons I really wanted to go to the conference was because it was at my undergraduate alma mater, UCSB, and I figured that I could see some old friends there. Also, being familiar with the place would let me not be so nervous when it came to present my paper.

Speaking of which, my paper was on a new subject for me on translating three Colombian telenovelas for US television during the 2006 season. I will post a copy of the paper which I read at the conference on my professional site.

At the conference, I reunited with many of my old professors, whom I only get to see at other conferences these days. The department has surged since I left, not only in adding a graduate degree program, an additional 200 students, and about another half dozen faculty. It's almost unrecognizable, and I'm certainly proud of all they've done.

I also got to visit the old stomping grounds at KCSB-FM, where I spend so many of my undergraduate years. Elizabeth, Ted, and Bryan gave me a warm reception, not only showing me around the place but also storing my luggage, allowing me to print my conference paper, and, in Bryan's case, giving me a ride downtown.

Since I only get a limited amount of money to spend at this conference, I stretched my travel stipend as far as I could by staying with Ives and Jerome, which oddly enough was the best sleep I had gotten in a while.

I was scheduled to come back, on Sunday, one day after the conference, but I ended up staying a day longer. My original flight was overbooked so they sought out volunteers with confirmed seats to fly out the following day. Volunteering was certainly rewarding as I was given a free roundtrip ticket, a meal voucher, a hotel room near the airport, and my return flight to New York would be in Business class. Not bad for taking the next morning's flight, which got me back right in time for my Monday class at Fordham.

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