Coupeville Sports

I just wasted 18 miles worth of gas, and I’m rapidly losing 23 years worth of goodwill.

I should be sitting in theater #2 at the Oak Harbor Cinemas right now, watching Tom Cruise punch people in the face in “Jack Reacher.” But, I and 14 others, are not, thanks to what is becoming a weekly ritual at said theater — an inability to keep a film running, or, in this case, even start it in the first place.

If this was a one-time occurrence, it would be easy to forgive and forget. But, as I said, this has become the routine at the theater I call home.

And I do mean home. I am not a casual film-goer who shows up for a movie every six months.

Between theaters in Oak Harbor and Anacortes and the wonders of home video, streaming and TV, I have seen 393 films in 2012. During this year I have paid to view close to 98.2% of what the local triplex has brought in (I have no great interest in “Paranormal Activity 53” or the shenanigans of Tyler Perry).

My butt has left grooves in the back row seats of the Oak Harbor Cinemas for 23 years, stretching from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” in ’89 until today.

I accept that things have changed.

That we have to watch ads before the trailers. That nimrods will turn on their cell phones in the theater, glowing squares controlled by morons with no self-control. That the days when Oak Harbor would take a chance on a “Pulp Fiction,” “The Crying Game” or “The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag” are long gone.

Christmas Day, while real theaters get “Les Miserables” and “Django Unchained,” we’ll be getting “Parental Guidance,” with a mummified Billy Crystal and Bette Midler, a movie that looks so freakishly bad it could trigger a real Mayan Apocalypse on its own.

Time moves on. The pay phone in the parking lot is gone. The liquor store across the street shuttered. Somehow, Dairy Queen hangs on, and I say a silent thank you.

Far Away Entertainment, which owns the Oak Harbor Cinemas, needs to do what it needs to do to make a profit.

So, I accept the ads, I’m thankful (most times) for the movies they manage to bring in under a distribution system that it set up to rip the soul out of small theaters, I understand the frequent under-staffing which often makes the same person sell tickets, run to the candy counter and then sprint upstairs to fire up the projector.

But when the movies fail, and fail, and fail again, it begins to eat away at my willingness to drive an 18-mile round trip from Coupeville.

“Red Tails” crashed and burned in the first five minutes. “Prometheus” stopped 217 times and only finished by some miracle. “Jack Reacher” didn’t even start.

That’s only three times, you say. To which I reply, how much time do you have, because if I publish the entire list of movies that sputtered, went black, went out of focus, went up on the ceiling or never started at Oak Harbor Cinemas this year, we’d be here all day.

So, you can take a refund, move to a different movie (both of which had already started, so what’s the point?) or get a pass and try your luck the next time. Which means throwing another 18 miles worth of gas on the roulette table and hoping we hit the jackpot.

I witnessed ONE movie failure in 22 years (though I prayed unsuccessfully for “Made in America” and “With Honors” to melt) and then, in 2012, it becomes a semi-weekly happening.

Something has to change.

You drive away the one-timers, they grumble, they move on, they probably don’t come back. You lose money, but you can take that hit.

Do you really want to take the hit when you lose the 23-year veterans?

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I would kill to see someone in the concession stand dress up like this! Come on, you know McKayla Bailey or Danny Savalza would do it. Make it happen, CHS!!

Noodles. Noodles. Noodles. Simply oodles of noodles.

Attend a basketball game at Coupeville High School, or a football or soccer game back in the fall, and it seemed like every other Wolf athlete was eating a Cup of Noodles.

Based on my eyeballs, I would have staked the claim that the steamy foam cups made by the fine folks at Nissin Foods (who, if they had a heart, would become my first national sponsor!) were the number one seller at the concession stand.

And, I would have been wrong.

After a little hardcore investigative journalism — which mainly involved loitering around the concession stand, talking to Wolf super moms Nanette Streubel, Monica Felici, Lorene Norris and Melanie Kooch and eating a free hamburger or two at the end of the night — I discovered a deep, dark secret.

I, apparently, can’t count.

Because, even though I see a lot of Cup of Noodles going by and being devoured by players sitting in the stands, they are actually only the sixth best-selling product at the concession stand this winter.

Beating them out? Drinks, candy, popcorn, hotdogs and hamburgers.

So, now you know, and knowing is half the battle. If that battle is to know some fairly useless information.

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Oh, Canada…

Apparently when the Whidbey Examiner sold itself to the Evil Empire (AKA Sound Publishing, AKA Black Press) they sold more than their soul and a 15-year legacy as Whidbey Island’s last independent newspaper. They also sold the ability to have a functioning web site.

From the day the Canucks swept in and updated the Examiner’s website (AKA made it look exactly like the Whidbey News-Times), nothing has worked the way it should.

I wrote hundreds of stories in the past three years for the Examiner and most of those stories don’t exist anymore. Broken links litter the site like flotsam and jetsam on the beach after high tide, and good luck trying to use their website to find out what Bessie Walstad or Tyler King did last year.

But then, either through negligence, error or blatant attempt to rewrite history and scrub the decks, something went really wrong on Aug. 30, 2012. Because from that point on, many, many stories written by people such as myself and others (including political endorsement stories obviously written by editor/publisher Kasia Pierzga) suddenly started bearing the byline of Vincent Nattress, an innocent freelancer who now, apparently, is owed quite a lot of money for quite a number of stories he supposedly wrote.

So, the time and effort I put in to help keep the Examiner propped up — while being paid virtually nothing — so that it would be worth something when it was eventually sold out from underneath our feet, is now also being erased.

It’s not like I expect to suddenly be retroactively paid for the countless articles I wrote on my own time. I knew what the gig paid (it kept me in gas and bananas) and chose to write a lot of stories pro bono.

I’m a big boy. I chose to go along. No problemo.

BUT, I would like to see my name remain on the stories I wrote. And, I wouldn’t mind an explanation for why someone else is now credited for my stories.

Is that too much to ask?

Apparently, as we head into Day Two of radio silence from my former newspaper home.

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