Aggressive Lethargy

Firing off a response...

2012-01-12T06:43:00.000-08:00

Ok, so hi, yes, it's been like a year. I get busy, ok? Not like you missed me. But hopefully I'm back. New Year's Resolution and all...

I think the worst part of the Mitt Romney "I like to fire people" thing is that he's getting attacked for all the wrong reasons. Yes, it was an inartful sound bite from a guy who is genetically incapable of knowing better. But when you put it in a little context, it doesn't sound so bad. He's clearly talking about having the choice of providers of services.

But then the funny thing happens, when you pull back a little more, and put the remark in it's complete context, it's even worse than the sound bite. First off, his point was that under the Affordable Care Act, you would no longer be free to choose your insurance company. This is a baldfaced lie (and for someone with hair like his, using the word "bald" in any context is a major slur). Never mind the fact that most of us already get very little choice of our health insurance company (my employer offers one choice, my wife's offers two), being able to choose an insurance company is something that is well preserved in the Affordable Care Act.

So in essence, it's a bad sound bite about a reasonable notion that is at best completely irrelevant to the conversation and at worst a gross distortion of current policy designed to scare gullible people into supporting him with phony common sense. Yep, seems about right for Mittens.

Subtraction by subtraction...

2010-11-08T21:39:00.000-08:00

Ok, so pancake breakfast. It's a staple in the fund-raising arsenal of every self respecting school, church congreagation, boy scout troop, not for profit community theater group and secret paramilitary organization. The boy's school went to that well this weekend, and part of the deal is, well, other than pancakes, there's got to be entertainment. Because let's face it, you're not raking in the 5 dollar ticket money hand over fist with a package of Bisquick and the Log Cabin Republicans (Argh, I meant "Log Cabin" brand syrup. This computer has the strangest Auto-Correct.)

So where was I? Right, entertainment. The boy sang in the choir, who neatly toed the separation of church and state line with some fine spiritual work, which ok, whatever, I can't work up a rant about that considering the school is named after a preacher. Something about getting what you pay for. Then came the school's rock ensemble, and that's where our story begins (yes, two whole paragraphs in. Deal with it).

First up was a passable version of something modern and terrible, I couldn't tell you for the life of me which Coldplay wannabes originally did it, including maybe Coldplay. Then came the fun part. The guitar riff that launched a million plaid flannel shirts, Smells Like Teen Spirit. The 8th grader singing it did a passable, if a bit screechy, Cobain and the 11 year old on guitar held his own nicely, considering. Then a vague "what led them to pick that?" from the wife did it to me. The math. You don't want to know the math. But me, I'm cursed with doing the math without thinking.

Nevermind came out in 1991. That's 19 years ago, which is pretty freaking pathetic to start with. Chuck Klosterman sometimes does this thing where he says "ok, so that was x number of years ago. Count back that same number of years again, and to that person this is like whatever happened then..."which he totally stole from me, except of course he didn't because it's obvious for people whose brains work a certain way. So you do that, and you get 1972, which means you get "Stairway to Heaven," which oh my god (yes, I know that actually came out in 1971, but 1972 is all "Nights in White Satin" and "Baby Baby Don't Get Hooked on Me," which is secretly an awesome song. Mac Davis was so underrated). But that doesn't even prove the real point, all that does is prove that "...Teen Spirit" is now an old song, but exactly half as old as "Stairway to Heaven."

Here's the actual thing. The kids in that band were in 7th and 8th grade. If you're reading this (and you must be), then chances are you were in 7th or 8th grade in or around 1983. So a group of your (my) peers standing up there at the pancake breakfast would be singing...Beatles. And not cool White Album era Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" head-bobbing, not-quite-available-in-the-US-era Beatles.

Most people, I think, get stuck on an era when it comes to music. Baby Boomers got stuck on the so-called "Classic Rock" era (I say "so-called" because the term Classic automatically implies a certain standard of quality, and let's face it, a lot of it is just simplistic crap that we've all agreed over time to like because we've heard it so many times and so many other people seem to like it. It's also less embarrassing to like that than it is to admit that you can't tell the difference between Arcade Fire and Vampire Weekend, or god forbid that you actually like new stuff too, except you're actually afraid that the stuff you like is the dorky new stuff, not the cool new stuff. I have no idea where this parenthetical statement is going, so I'm just going to go back to the other point). The hell was I talking about? Oh right, stuck on an era. Boomers-Classic Rock. Well, for me and many of my contemporaries, it was Nevermind that got us stuck. That was when music was somehow exciting and awesome, not like this twee corporate garbage they make now (that last part is mostly my contemporaries, I actually like Vampire Weekend...oh crap, they're the dorky one, right? Uh...Zepplin Rules!!!1!!) But seriously, that was the last time I felt like I knew something about contemporary music, and now 8th graders are playing it the same way I heard "Love Me Do" in junior high when the unreformed hippie music teacher played it for us with this look of "this, my children, is when music was real and righteous and cool" and we looked at him all like "yeah, sure thing gramps, it was a real wild time, we get it." And there, at the pancake breakfast, was that guy, leading the rock ensemble, goatee and short-sleeve-t-shirt -over-long-sleeve-shirt slacker casual, looking like Jason Bateman in Juno, thinking "this is when music was awesome and kicked serious ass," and he is me, sort of, and I sigh deeply.

I'd write more, but Cee Lo Green is rocking a completely outrageous David Byrne in Stop Making Sense level bright red suit on Letterman, and I've never heard this song before, and it's called what now? Oh my...

Today's Advertorial

2010-08-05T20:25:00.000-07:00

Leo (July 23—Aug. 22) — Today is a 7 — If you plan a trip, take advantage of competitive pricing. There’s no need to pay top dollar when hotels are competing for your business.

The hell? I know newspapers are all in trouble and all, but now they're selling ads to hotels.com in the horoscopes? That ain't right.

Hi there, HR rep...

2010-05-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

Congratulations on finding me. It shouldn't have been too difficult, but I've at least tried to make sure it isn't completely tied to me in every publicly identifiable way. But here we are.

So no doubt you're looking here to see if there's anything embarrassing or disqualifying about me that you can use to evaluate my candidacy for your open position. So let's just skip the formalities, and talk honestly for a moment.

You aren't going to find me talking s*** about my boss here, primarily because I started this blog after I left my last job. So, I haven't had a boss since I've had this forum. But also, I'm smart enough not to do that. We'll make a deal. If I need to complain about the boss, I'll do it offline, out loud, to my cats and possibly my spouse. The boy may hear it too, but he's useless to get information out of. I reserve the right to write about it when I turn my wacky work experiences into a book/movie/sitcom on TBS produced by Tyler Perry.

I've already given you the clues about my personal life that you're looking for by a) mentioning a spouse, b) mentioning a child and possibly c) mentioning cats (though if that's really going to come into play in the hiring decision, that's a red flag for me). You also could have just noticed the wedding ring I wore to the interview, and the fact that when you asked what I've been doing while not working, I mentioned spending time with my son. You're clever like that, I know you could pick those clues up.

So what else? My Facebook page is pretty nondescript. From it, you can tell I watch TV, primarily sports, and that I follow politics pretty closely. It's a good bet you can tell which side I'm on in that particular subject area, but I rarely, if ever, bring that stuff up at work.

That's a good place to jump off the specifics and get to a larger point (trust me, I do that a lot here). I'm not the kind of person whose work life and personal life are completely intertwined. Sure, I like socializing with co-workers on occasion, but I'm not going to make the office politics (oh, come on, there are politics in your office, I know what you said in the interview, but there are politics everywhere. It's ok.) into my personal drama. It's just not who I am. Who I am is a reasonably intelligent person who has a life outside of work, and will never do anything stupid to make the company look bad, or be anything but professional. That all having been said, I'm getting impatient with this whole unemployment thing, and would really like to get the job.

Oh, hey, you Googled me, right? You should probably know that I am not a personal injury attorney in South Carolina, and I did not play quarterback for the University of Michigan in 1970 (though that would've been remarkable of me to do so, since I was about a month old when that season started...ooh look, another clue!!!).

(P.S. about the asterisks above, substituting for the bad word...I sometimes forget to do that here, but we're all adults, right?)

Mandatory heart-rending parenting post...

2010-04-09T19:35:00.001-07:00

So you may have noticed that I haven't exactly been keeping up the usual breakneck pace of posting lately. It's partially because I'm somewhat blocked, not sure what's up with that. But a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm working a little bit, for the Census Bureau. It's bullshit work, 15 hours a week for at-least-it's-better-than-Starbucks-pay. I sit in someone else's place of business for 3-hour stretches waiting for nobody to come in to ask for help in filling out their census form. Part of the reason nobody comes in is poor advertising, and part of it is because it's a FUCKING 10 QUESTION CENSUS FORM. If you haven't seen it, if you know what your name is, and the names, genders and races of the people who you live with are, then you really don't need me. And even if you don't know those things, you can fake it if you're semi-literate. But it's work...technically.

Because of said work (I'd get cute and go all ironic quotation marks around "work," but I'm not in the mood), I will, for the first time in the 5 years I've been a parent, miss something. It's a YMCA league basketball game, his first of the "season." So far, I've made it to every swimming lesson, every tee-ball game, and every soccer/basketball game. So obviously, when I figured out that the basketball game conflicted with my 9-12 shift of doing nothing for money, I was bummed. I was pissed that I'd have to miss the game, and questioning what it meant to my whole "family > career" dynamic. But then two things happened.

Yesterday, he lost his first tooth. Details are sketchy as to how it happened, but it was a lower front, the kind that will forever allow us to mark pictures from the next however long, because there's no doubt when his mouth is open (which is always). That meant a visit from the tooth fairy, who, after studying the market, soliciting feedback from the other parents on Facebook, and checking his and the wife's coat pockets, decided that a five-spot was the way to go, along with a Hot Wheel from the secret stash of emergency toy presents. The operation went smoothly, taking the little plastic treasure chest the school nurse gave him out, removing the tooth (its second extraction of the day), and replacing the treasure chest with the money and the car. He rolled over and sighed while I was in there, but I made it out undetected.

Fast forward to 6:50, or 10 minutes before wake-up time. "Daddy, can I get up?" came the call. Usually, it's met with a simple "no...10 more minutes," more begging than ordering. But I was awake already, so what the hell. I went in, having mostly forgotten about my visit from the night before. But he hadn't. "Daddy...daddy...the...the...tooth fairy left me a race car and...(looking) FIVEDOLLARS...FIVEDOLLARS Daddy!" I smiled and sat down on the bed behind him. He leaned back onto me and ripped open the package, pulling out the randomly selected Hot Wheel and running it over the bed, making a the requisite quiet "vroom" noise (quiet because Mommy was still asleep). One of the cats joined us, and he started petting her with one hand and running the car over her tail with the other. This proved to be confusing but acceptable to her. He was wide awake, but still a little groggy, so he slumped back against me, leaving the car on the bed, speculating as to why the maid service we still indulge ourselves in using would put his new Star Wars sheets on upside down the way they did. He posited that it was so he could see the characters facing up to him the right way as he lay between the sheets, their lightsabres forever pointing up at him. Sound theory, even if I knew it was more likely that it was a coin flip as to which way the sheets would go on. No more than three minutes went by this whole time, then it was time to get up and start the day, which I signified with a kiss on the head and a "let's go, buddy." The smile on his face, still aglow from the revelation of the tooth fairy's bounty, was indescribable. "Can we put my fivedollars" (lack of spacing intentional, by the way, thank you large sandwich chain for indelibly imprinting 'fivedollarfootlong' on his brain, as though it were one word) "with my Wii money?" See, we're trying to teach him a few basics about money, i.e. its lack of a tendency to grow on trees and such, so he's saving up the occasional dollars he earns for doing odd jobs toward a yet-unspecified game for the Wii. The dentatorially (I don't care) mandated Abe Lincoln brings him to about 12 bucks, so he's more than halfway there, unless he's looking for Madden 10 or something. "Of course you can, here, I'll do it now" I said, setting it up on his dresser with the rest. With that, the spell was broken, and he ran downstairs, ready to start the day.

That led to the second thing, a revelation of sorts (ok, I'm overselling it. More of a slow-developing thought that marinated over the next few hours). Fuck the basketball game. That's what I'm in this for, that last few minutes. Could've been me, could've been Mommy, doesn't matter. Tomorrow, at the game, barring something unusual, nothing will happen. He'll pratice for 1/2 hour and play a game for 1/2 hour. In practice, he'll try to dribble between his legs and fail (my fault. I'm useless as a legit basketball player, so I go all Globetrotter anytime I've got the rock...I can't make 6 out of 10 layups, but I've got trace amounts of handle). During the game, he'll make a shot or he won't. Whatever. Because the moment upstairs, before the obligations of the day took over, marveling at the handiwork of the Tooth Fairy and speculating on the sheet-orientation habits of a Dial-A-Maid employee, was the real moment. That may sound obvious, but that realization led to a bigger realization (you might even say, a Larger Point).

I'm not the only one who has to work tomorrow (meaning a Saturday, btw). I have to work not because "Mr. Dithers needs me to work on the Penske file," but because I have a schedule, and that schedule says "Sat. 9-12." The whole "I must be there for every soccer practice, school play, recital and game" notion really is a silly product of the Upper East Side (Upper West Side? I don't know which is which, and frankly I don't care, because fuck New York, too) "Mommy Wars" mentality, in which interactions with your child have meaning only if they occur a) in public and b) in the context of structured activity. I have to be there for the game because to not be there is to Not Be There. Working is a choice for those assholes, and the Noble Stand they take to leave the office early to be horrifying stage parents is, among other things, a Giant Fucking Luxury that they usually don't appreciate in the slightest. The funny part? Of everyone in this situation, the one that understands the most is the boy. You can't be there because you have to work? Oh, ok. Can I have a piece of candy now? (subtext: I'm over it, truly). Kindergartners, more so than most adults, understand the concept of "have to," because it's their entire life. Get out of bed, eat your cereal, get dressed, go to school, line up, sit down, line up, go to gym, line up, sit down, line up go to lunch, eat your lunch, put your coat on, line up, go outside, line up, go back inside, sit down, line up, go get on the bus, go to the Y, line up, time for art class, line up, back to your room, get your coat, get in the car, eat your dinner, put your toys away, get in the bathtub, go to sleep. There's very little leeway in that routine for them, so the fact that I have to go sit in someone else's office while he's playing one of his 25 basketball games this calendar year is really not much of a revelation to him. Someday, someone may try to tell him that tomorrow was a bad thing. And hopefully, what he'll think, is (in all it's time-shifted glory) "fuck tomorrow. We had this morning."

Frustrating...

2010-03-24T21:10:00.001-07:00

I had a really good idea for a post the other night, just as I was going to bed. For the life of me, I can't remember it. It even had a larger point. Sorry, wait, by now that needs to be Larger Point (tm). As opposed to a Lager Point, which is something you make after a coupla beers, or even a Point Lager, which is decent but not spectacular beer from Pennsylvania, by no means the peer of Yuengling. And since I just googled it, I now find that Point is actually from Wisconsin, meaning it's actually no peer of of Leinenkugel. Aggressive Lethargy regrets the error.

Unrelated things...

2010-02-26T06:24:00.000-08:00

These things all happened yesterday...

1. On the train to a "career fair," (quotation marks explained below)I saw a van parked behind a building somewhere on the NorthSide. The van was painted up with the logo and trade dress of the Illinois Lottery (Have a Ball!), and sitting on the front dashboard were two giant novelty checks.

2. Chatting with a woman in line at one of the booths at the fair, she recognized the person at the table as someone she'd interviewed with earlier that morning.

3. Open letter to the gentleman on the el sitting across the car from me...the whole "tough guy hair net" thing complete with "you lookin' at me? Huh?" scowl is totally undermined by the fact that you are carrying your son's Thomas the Tank Engine backpack. Cute kid, but it's kinda hard (and unnecessary on a midmorning Red Line train) to be that much of a badass that way.

4. Still on the train, at one point (maybe Argyle) a woman quickly fumbled with her fancy phone-camera (don't know what kind, but a nice one) and started furiously taking pictures of...? No clue. There was nothing I could imagine anyone taking pictures of, unless the train was the only way she could get a high enough view of something. But then, why the suddenness to it? Wouldn't she know where she was looking if she was on some sort of photographic mission? My guess was she was looking for a car parked somewhere it shouldn't be.

5. Return trip, several hours later (I really need to ride the train more often, I guess), a rough-looking older guy is sitting in front of me. He's on his phone barking orders at someone in a gravelly, Eastern European accent that instantly reminds me of some kind of bad guy from 24. With that image in mind, I can see him texting. It's relevant that he's older, because a) his phone is pretty old, and b) it's taking him FOREVER to text. Naturally, I'm fascinated by what could be worth this much effort. When I manage to sneak a peek as he's finishes, it says "Sorry for the way I've been acting lately. I love you." I feel terrible for spying on him.

6. This last one, I need to tread lightly. Because there are all kinds of things wrapped up in this that I don't really want to go stomping around in. But here goes...So I'm standing in line to get in to this "career fair" (ok, explaining the quotes. Basically, if you're unemployed, avoid these things like the plague. If you want to spend your time more productively, make two phone calls to random companies inquiring about their open positions, then take a 3 hour nap. At least you'll be refreshed, instead of exhausted from getting dressed up, slogging downtown on the train, getting totally f***ing lost in the Merchandise Mart, standing in a giant line of desperate people only to find out that the 20 booths inside consist of 4 insurance companies hiring sales people, a retail chain hiring stock clerks, 2 or 3 companies looking to fill incredibly specific positions (you could tell the HR person just wanted out of the office for the morning), and 10 or 11 booths where they were actually trying to sell you something (get computer training! Get your bachelor's degree/GED! Enroll in the police academy! Have you considered the Coast Guard? Run your own home busines over teh interwebs!) Just. Don't. Go. Next time you go downtown, fling 10 copies of your resume into the air at random points on the sidewalk while passing large office buildings, you've got a better chance of landing something. Ok, I'm done now. Where was I? Right, standing in line). So I'm standing in line, waiting to "register" (don't get me started). Everyone has their resume out so the registration desk can take your information. Looking over the shoulder of the woman in front of me (hmmm, seems to be a theme...I was nosy yesterday, I suppose), I saw her name written in comically unprofessional 18 point type, the kind where the letters were all jagged and uneven. If she was a graphic designer, then maybe it works, I suppose, but it was the name itself that jumped out at me.
Her name was DeJaVu.
Yes, it was her first name, and yes, it was capitalized like that. Her last name was something common, plus I don't want to publish it here. Oh, and I almost forgot, there's an accent mark in there somewhere, but I couldn't tell if it was over the J, the a, or the V. And yes, only one accent mark. Again, I know this gets complicated when discussing these things, and gawd knows that a guy whose surname is pronounced "more head" (not to mention a first name that can be a title or a verb) has no business making fun of anyone else's name, but how much do you have to hate your child to name it something that ridiculous? How is she ever supposed to be taken seriously? How does she not strangle someone after hearing, for the 3,052,789th time "Haven't we met before?" In short, and to sum up: argh.

At least I don't have to pretend Andie MacDowell can act

2010-02-03T08:14:00.000-08:00

Of course I watched Groundhog Day last night. What the hell else was I going to do? There are two movies which must be watched on the same day every year...Planes, Tranes and Automobiles must be watched on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving (the day the story starts), and this one. I can't believe TBS doesn't show it on a continuous loop every year the way they do A Christmas Story. What other movie has been named for something (in this case, a holiday), then has completely overtaken the meaning for it? When someone says "it's like Groundhog Day around here," they don't mean that there's a weird animal ceremony regarding the weather, they mean it's the same thing over and over, like the movie. People reference the movie far, far more than the actual day.

Anyway, even though it's Super Bowl week, and it was primary night (and let's face it, watching the local news doofuses try to be CNN or MSNBC and report on election returns while mixing in occasional commentary is high, high comedy), I watched it. First, a nitpick: really, Bravo? You took a 1 hr, 41 min movie, stretched it to two hours and yet still somehow had to cut the flapjacks line? D-bags. Whatever.

I should warn you that I'm a sucker for these types of things. I don't know if there's a good word for them, but I suppose you could call them Connundrum pieces. They aren't all good, but they are, to me at least, interesting. "What if you lived the same day over and over?" "What if you had 30 days to spend $30 million?" and sadly, even "What if you were on a bus that couldn't go below 40 mph or it would explode?" There's a book that my friend Ramon gave me a long time ago that's sort of a variation on the Groundhog Day theme, where a guy has a heart attack on his 40th birthday and wakes up 18 and in college again, and keeps living his adult life over and over, always having the same heart attack at the end no matter what. Whereas Groundhog Day was personal, this book ("Replay") got more into how this one guy could change things (could he prevent the JFK assassination? Could he make a gazillion dollars investing in Microsoft in 1975? And so on.) Hell, I even still like playing the "What would you do if you won the lottery?" game. But back to Punxsutawney...

It never fails to strike me what a sad movie it really is. Maybe it's because I buy into Phil's
character so completely, but the look on his face sometimes when he "wakes up" is excruciating. Harold Ramis says that originally, the idea was for Phil to spend something like 10,000 years reliving the day, but they considered that too cruel, so it's probably more like 10 years. I suppose that's enough time for him to learn the things he learned, but it really feels like longer to me, as though he lived an entire lifetime just on Feb 2nd. Watch it once and you'll laugh, watch it a couple times and it will become a Connundrum piece for you too...

But a strange thing happened while I was watching it last night (warning: Larger Point Ahead). I realized that in some ways, I had been patterning my own life after Phil's for the last 11 months or so. Ever since I've been unemployed, getting a new job was my "waking up on Feb. 3rd." And like Phil, I've tried a lot of different ways to make it ok for me to wake up tomorrow. By which I mean I subconsciously think "ok, if I can just do X, then I can move on." Over the last 11 months, X has mainly been based around "getting my s*** together" either figuratively or almost literally. Getting our financial house in order by finally, after 10 years, getting all my old 401Ks into the same place, and really, truly learning my lesson about being in debt and spending too much money seemed like the thing. Then it was "doing all that stuff around the house" like remodeling the upstairs and cleaning out the garage. Surely I'd get a job after I did all that. "Getting in shape," while certainly not complete, was a contender there for a while. I go to the gym a lot, which coincidentally enhances the Groundhog Day feel to the whole thing (I try to use the same locker and the same elliptical machine every time, and until yesterday I had no idea why). I could've sworn that the universe was going to give me a job recently when I decided that it was time to swallow my pride and apply for a temp job with the Census. The fact that I got a call for an interview for a real job the same day I decided to do that was a clear sign. I guess not.

The lesson here, I suppose, is that I need to let go of the crazy. I'm not a superstitious person (great line by Peyton Manning at Media Day yesterday "I'm not superstitious...well, maybe I'm a little bit stitious"...what, you thought there'd be no football at all in this post?), but for some reason I've been working under the unconscious assumption that two unconnected things could possibly be affecting each other. So no more. I do what I do, and that won't change whether or not I get offered a job. Period, end of story.

Unless, of course, watching the movie again, making this realization and letting go of it was what I needed to do all along in order to move on to February 3rd, which would be some remarkable irony if it happened on February 3rd, right?

Your move, groundhog...

Roman Numerology

2010-02-02T06:51:00.000-08:00

So a lot of people have been asking me who I'm rooting for in the Super Bowl (ok, not really, that's just a construct to start this thing off). The bye-week story seemed to be that these were two evenly matched teams with no good-guy/bad-guy issues. There are no TOs to root against, no arrogant cheating-coach overdogs, and no aging superstars who want one last shot at a ring.

It also happens that these two teams are involved in the complex calculus of teams I root for in the NFL (yeah, I stole that line from King Kaufman, big deal. It's not like he's Rick Reilly, going around trademarking all his bits). So the reality is that no matter which team wins, I'll be ok with it for a change. I say "for a change," because I'm not sure the team I was rooting for has won more than 3 times; Giants in XLII, (and even that had a caveat), Bears in XX (I didn't live in Chicago yet, but c'mon, nobody outside of the state of Massachusettes was rooting for the Patriots), and Broncos in XXXII (only because I wanted Elway to get one so he'd be ahead of Marino, who I always thought was a punk and a loser). There were a few times I didn't really care that much (Patriots/Panthers in XXXVIII? Ugh, whatever. I was more interested in the long roman numeral than the game). There were also, of course, times when I cared a lot; two of them, to be exact (XVI and XXIII). Both times I was crushed by the same Notre Dame quarterback, cementing my hatred of two pro franchises, the one in San Francisco and the one in South Bend.

So anyway, this is the first time, at least in recent memory, that I've had two teams I liked in the game. How to distinguish between them? I mentioned a complex calculus, here's an in-no-particular-order ranking...

Bengals: Ok, this part isn't so complex. Still rooting for them pretty much no matter who they play. I grew up there, went to my first game there, and even attended a playoff game in the run-up to XXIII, the infamous "Joe Nash injury game" that you no doubt remember (Seahawks DL Joe Nash faked a leg cramp on every 3rd down to slow down the Bengals no-huddle offense). Or at least you would remember it if it hadn't happened 3 hours after the "Fog Bowl" at Soldier Field.

Bears: I have a really complex relationship with the Bears. I either want them to be 13-3 or 3-13. It has to do with the sports talk radio. It's cool when they're good, and schadenfreudtastic when they're bad. Seasons like this most recent one, where there are mixed expectations and mediocre results, are the worst. The hiring of Mike Martz as offensive coordinator makes me happy, because it means both 13-3 and 3-13 are in play.

Those are the easy ones, and I dare say the top 2. No matter who they play, I'm rooting for them, and if they play each other, there's no doubt I'm rooting for the Bengals. Then it gets tricky. There are a bunch of teams I don't care about, and a few I root against actively (PIT, BAL, CLE, DET and MIN for divisional reasons, SF for historical reasons, WAS for racist nickname reasons). There are some who will note an omission in that last set of parentheses and maintain I can never really be a Bears fan because I don't hate Green Bay with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Those people are stupid. Green Bay, in theory, is what all sports franchises should be. Publicly owned, part of the community, smaller market that actually gets behind the team (I'm looking in your direction here, Jacksonville). The others I root for:

San Diego: Yeah, ok, it's mostly about the throwback uniforms, but what I really like is the restraint they've shown in not becoming the Los Angeles Chargers.

Tennesee: Hard to explain this one, but I like the fact that they have had the same coach for 15 years.

But neither of them are in the Super Bowl, now, are they? I'm clearly procrastinating here. So let's get into it...

I really should dislike the Colts. They were a classic bedrock franchise of the NFL, and then they packed up in the middle of the night and moved to Indianapolis, ripping the hearts out of Barry Levinson and everyone else in Baltimore. Peyton Manning destroyed my Wildcats in a bowl game (something I never forgave Keyshawn Johnson for). They play in a dome. They once employed Jim Harbaugh. But here's the thing...screw Baltimore. First of all, it was 25 years ago, you really should be over it by now. Second of all, you guys went and stole another team, so you got your blood revenge (for which I thank you, because you made Cleveland miserable, and that makes me happy). Manning? Eh, it was the Citrus Bowl. I was so hung over for that game, I don't remember it much. As for Harbaugh, well, everyone makes mistakes.

But Indy has a lot going for it, both as a team and as a fan base. They're right in between my other favorite teams, three hours from Chicago, two from Cincinnati. I once spent the Friday afternoon before a game day in downtown Indianapolis. It was a regular season game, but if I recall correctly it was fairly important. Walking around Monument Circle and the surrounding few blocks, I was stunned. Almost half of the people walking around were wearing Colts jerseys. And yeah, a lot of them were #18, but there were a ton of Marvin Harrisons and Edge James and Dwight Freeneys also. Of those not wearing jerseys, there were a ton of Colts sweatshirts and hats, and even a couple of guys wearing horseshoe ties. And not only was this not the playoffs, this was a Friday. One last note on Indy fans. You'll rarely see Manning give the "quiet down" wave, because those guys act, when the Colts are on the field, like they're at a golf tournament. Once the play is over, they applaud, even cheer, for about 10 seconds, then it's back to near silence. That's why any time you watch a Colts home game, you can hear everything Manning says.

As for the on-the-field stuff, the Colts don't do much that's fancy. They don't run guys around or shift guys four times before the snap. In fact, they seem like they only have 3 or 4 formations. If Wayne is in the slot left for the first play of the drive, he's probably there for the entire drive. There used to be a lot of whining about Manning's machinations and gyrations before the play, but I think people understand now that it works. It's scary how well Manning reads defenses, and how well the offense has been tailored to his strengths.

New Orleans? It's one of my favorite places to visit, which is not exactly a stunning insight. But I should dislike the Saints primarily because of a really picky thing. "Who Dat?" is really similar to the Bengals rallying cry of "Who Dey?" While "Who Dat?" has been around at Southern University and/or Alcorn State forever, the Saints reportedly didn't start using it until 1983, while the Bengals started with the "Who Dey?" in 1981. Now everyone assumes that Cincinnati stole it from New Orleans, because what the hell would Cincinnati be doing with something before New Orleans? But that's stupid, and I actually think it's kind of cool, in the age of the generic stadium with the Jumbotron that has to tell you when to cheer with the same graphics package that every other team has, to have something unique like that. As for the fans, I think the national media makes more of the whole "lifting the city up after Katrina" thing than the locals do. But they're into it, and they don't really seem all that bandwagon-y. It seems like how you feel about the Saints determines how you feel about Reggie Bush. I thought the guy handled it perfectly when he came into the league the season after Katrina. He negotiated sponsorship deals for himself that demanded the company make significant contributions to the city as well. He gave his his share of merchandising revenue to relief efforts (thus why I was willing to own something with the name "Bush" on it in 2006), and he was very conscious of doing good without calling a whole lot of attention to the good he was doing. How many 23 year olds can handle something like that? Ok, sure, it was probably a shrewd agent, and yeah, it makes for a good joke that he didn't need the money, he still had plenty left from his days at USC, but still...

As for the on-the-field, dang is Sean Payton good. They throw like nine guys at you, all with different skills, all of them really good at what they do. Their defense is exciting, in that they give up a lot of big plays, but they make a lot of big plays. In other words, they are the perfect opponent for an entertaining Super Bowl.

As I write this, I realize something. The point of this whole thing was to tell you who I was rooting for, and truth be told, I haven't figured it out yet. I'm leaning Colts, but it's a very, very slight lean, and it may have more to do with my prediction than my feelings.

So let's get that part out of the way. Every schlub with a picks column, or a football blog, or an internet connection and a blogspot account (present company included) is going to make an "official" pick. I'll go one better, I'll make a prediction about the predictions. A whole lot of guys who do this for a living are going to look at the line (hovering between Colts -5 and -6, depending on where you look) and take the ultimate copout by saying "Hmmm this feels like a field goal game" and thus default their pick to the Saints. It's a copout because they're really just picking a close game, which is much safer than saying either that the underdog will win outright or the favorite will win big. Since nobody really cares about my pick, I'm willing to do that. I try to make my Super Bowl pick as soon after the Championship games are over, just because you get so much crap over the next two weeks, you can talk yourself into anything. Freeney's injury is big, but it's not as big as we all think. It won't matter that much in the end. The Colts just have too much offense. They have shown they can win 14-12 games and 45-38 games. I think this one ends up Colts 38, Saints 24.

That's what I think will happen. Is that what I want to happen? I'm surprised to say, I still don't know...

Flabbergasting...the black Grinder found

2010-01-16T20:34:00.000-08:00

Ok, if you've talked to me extensively over the last few years (or, for that matter, just stood somewhere near me for more than 5 minutes), you've heard me bitch about the fact that sports commentators (you could stop the sentence right there and eliminate the "the fact that..." let's face it, I despise these people, or at least the half-assed way they do their jobs) have this annoying...um, let's call it a verbal tic. In order to remove this all from the realm of some larger social commentary, we'll say verbal tic.

Whenever a white player makes a great play, does something great, or just is great, it's because he works hard, is the first guy on the practice field and the last guy off the field, and is a smart, hustling, grind-it-out guy who gets the most out of his talent. For shortcut's sake, let's call this kind of player a "grinder."

When an African-American player does makes a great play, does something great, etc., it's always "look at the athleticism! The natural, god-given ability! That he is in now way responsible for! It's all talent!"

Now you see why I want to call it a vocal tic. Maybe it's intentional, maybe it's not. I don't care. It's annoying. But tonight, for the first time in history, I heard the exception to the rule. From, of all places, Dan Dierdorf.

Ok, I know. He's terrible. He is to football announcing what Jeff George was to the quarterback position. He should be better than he is. But good god, he's not. He doesn't know the rules of the game (he tried to tell us there would be a 10 second runoff had Indy been called for delay of game near the end of the half...no, Dan, no. First, the clock was stopped, that penalty only applies when the clock is running). He makes mistakes all the time, and I'm not sure if he's actually watching the game, or if he's doing the People magazine crossword puzzle. But tonight he (sort of, temporarily) redeemed himself.

In the 3rd quarter, Ed Reed jumped Pierre Garcon's deep out route and picked the ball off. Because he's Ed Reed, he started running it back, and quickly at that (he's good at this part). Even though Garcon was at a dead stop when the ball got picked (and Reed had a good 5 foot head start), Garcon took off after him, chasing him for about 40 yards, then executing a textbook punch-the-ball-out move (yeah, I know, technical term). The ball popped out, bounced right to Dallas Clark, and the play ended about 8 yards behind where it started. It was quite possibly the best defensive play I've ever seen from an offensive player (and don't give me Don Beebe, because a) that play was a meaningless part of a blowout, and b) Leon Lett had given up).

So the play ends, the crowd is going batshit crazy, and Dan Dierdorf...Dan Dierdorf...says, while narrating the highlight "look at the hustle!" And he didn't just do it once. He called it a great hustle play at least four times the rest of the game. Not once did he mention the athleticism of Garcon, who to be fair looked like Usain Bolt chasing the guy who just stole his lunch. I mean, damn, he was flying.

But no, not a single mention of his speed. Just the hustle, the never giving up on the play...dare I say, the "grindyness."

So, if you're scoring at home (or even if you're alone...), this football season has now seen:

1. Herm Edwards as sage evaluator of talent ahead of the curve ("those Bengals can play some defense..." Week 1)

2. Bill Belicheck as basic strategy failure (4th and 2, Indy)

3. The following coaches are in the playoffs: Brad Childress, Norv Turner and Wade Phillips.

4. MVP discussion (before he got hurt) of Cedric Benson.

5. And now, in the second round of the playoffs, 361 days after the inauguration of the first black president, the designation of the first black Grinder.

Pierre Garcon, welcome to the club. See Aaron Rowand about your jacket and membership card. And even though he's behind you professionally, you still have to get Tebow his coffee.

Credit where it's due

2009-12-09T07:07:00.000-08:00

I can't help but notice that a bunch of these posts are negative, as in "Why I don't like X (where X=the Superstars, Republicans, and for some bizarre reason, Alan Thicke)."So I'm sucking it up and handing out some credit.

That new NBC show, "Community," merits some special mention. Not to go all hyperbolic, but it is quite possibly, at this point in its development, a flawless show. Joel McHale makes me laugh out loud a minimum of 4 times per episode. The supporting cast is growing on me, and (yes, Mitch, I'm stealing your line) I'm really happy to be able to find Chevy Chase funny again.

As much as I was trying to avoid it, there's a larger point here, because the emergence of "Community" has pointed out to me what both it and "The Office" are really about. It's the slow, and usually soul-crushing realization that you (because let's face it, both Joel McHale's Jeff and John Krasninski's Jim are "you" in this scenario, meaning I like to picture myself as being about 6'3" with atrocious hair and a permasmirk) are no better than your surroundings, no matter how much you may think you are. Sure, you may be back at a community college, stuck working for a crappy paper company, or working yet another in a string of unfulfilling corporate jobs, but eventually the reality settles over you that this is, professionally speaking, all there is. You aren’t going to be magically transported to some other world where everyone acknowledges your inherent awesomeness, quintuples your salary and promises to make it up to you for all the suffering you’ve endured over the years. My guess is, this a better thing to experience for 24 minutes a week on network, surrounded by impossibly attractive and witty co-workers (or classmates) who always neatly wrap things up before moving on to the next adventure. If Jeff struggles with the self-doubt his situation is bound to have caused, it’s temporary and can be whisked away by a few encouraging words from a pretty girl. Jim can go play a prank on Dwight, smirk at the camera, and regain his sense of superiority. The rest of us? Well, I guess we get to tune in next week, anyway.

The Wait is Over...My Take on Tiger (Finally)

2009-12-06T22:08:00.000-08:00

Hey, uh, it's me...Tig..um, I mean, Eldrick, no, dammit...Steve. Yeah, it's Steve, go with that.

Is it me, or is this whole thing just a little too convenient, a little too sordid. Ambien? Are you kidding me? The denials, then the immediate admissions? The wall to wall to wall coverage in every single news outlet? For frack's sake, ESPN is now throwing it to an actual ABC News reporter for the Tiger stuff. It just smells funny, is all I'm saying.

Maybe it's late (it is), and maybe I'm just odd (duh), but this whole thing is starting to feel like a rebranding initiative that got off to a little bit of a rough start. Sure, the accident went as planned, but the problem was the first people to run with the story got it a little bit wrong. The Friday after Thanksgiving (perfect time to launch, your entire demo is watching Who Cares State vs. Digested Tryptophan U) all the networks ran the breaking news crawl "Tiger Woods seriously injured in car crash." This is, admittedly, a Major Story. You're left wondering "wow, is he dead? Is he in a coma? Does he have massive internal bleeding and organ failure? Did he lose a limb?" which leads to "is his career over?"

Then the story quickly changed to "treated and released" which always reminds me of the Carlin bit (it really only works with that voice of his) "usually, I'm treated and detained." Then it became "and by the way this was all 12 hours ago." The hell?

There was some idle speculation on Saturday, but it was mostly cleaning up the details. Escalade, fire hydrant, tree, no airbag, not talking to police yet, Elin with a golf club. It wasn't until Monday or so that the "rumors" started. Then the one who was in the Enquirer, Rachel something, gave a pretty convincing (if bat-guano crazy sounding) denial about the whole thing. Combine that with her hiring the lawyer, and it seemed like this was going to go away, maybe. Sure, there were a couple other women playing the me-too game, but whatever.

Then the voicemail. Oh, ok, so this is true, then, eh?

So here's the thing. This all sounds so weird and out of whack that you could make the case that this was an image-rebranding that launched poorly. Imagine:

Minor car crash...check.

Oh crap, they're reporting it as serious, which is causing this to cross over to non-sports media. Abort!

Floodgates open, etc. Quick, what's our exit strategy?

Have the girl deny everything. There'll be some collateral damage, but we can revisit this thing in the spring.

Other women are coming out of the woodwork (heh). And it's not just the sports blogs picking it up. Who is? ESPN? Oh, #%$%&, Access Hollywood. Ok, I guess we're full go with "Operation Horndog Tiger" again. Put Elin in hiding, let's get the marriage counselor on retainer.

I mean, look at the calculation here. First, the lead seems to be "Tiger's squeaky clean reputation ruined!" But is it? Has he lost anything here? Are his sponsors going to drop him? Amex? No, though they're probably the most likely to be hacked off at this. They'll get over it. Nike? For crying out Pete, this was probably Nike's idea in the first place.

Let's face it. Tiger is pretty boring. And he knows it. And so do the companies that sponsor him. Now? Not so much. And when he wins 10 tournaments and 3 majors this year, it'll be hailed as the greatest achievement in the history of achievements, what with the "distractions" as this will officially be known from now on.

If this whole take seems unusually cynical, even for me, I should back up a second. This entire scenario is based in my belief that, with certain exceptions, most celebrity relationships are a complete and utter sham, created by marketing consultants. In the case of athletes, it's even worse. These people are young, rich, famous, and on the road a lot. And you're going to tell me that there aren't certain trade-offs you, as the spouse of an athlete, aren't making? Come on, unless you're completely and totally naive to the world of professional sports (and Elin was a nanny for another professional golfer, let's not forget, so there's no way that's possible), you've got to know what goes on. Put it this way...I'm not a professional athlete, and I know at least three slang terms for the women with whom such extramarital relations happen (groupies, Annies, and Road Beef). When I was in college, the Magic Johnson HIV story broke. It came up in a discussion group, which was filled to the brim with moralizing (I know, you'd think college kids, but no...this was Northwestern. Oy, the repression) when one of my classmates cut in, saying that he played Class A minor league baseball the previous summer, and even they had groupies. And not just a few, either. So go ahead, name a Class A baseball player for me. They aren't exactly what you call mainstream famous. And if they're attracting groupies, can you imagine Tiger's groupies? I'm not defending him or saying he had no control over himself, but come on. What I'm saying is that to not understand the situation, and to suddenly go completely nuts over the revelation of an affair just seems a little fishy. My final piece of evidence that this is a fake? The cocktail waitress. I mean really, Jamie Grubbs? Did you add in the extra "b" thinking we wouldn't notice her last name was a verb that describes what she was doing in selling her story? Amateur hour.

One final point. How many more times does this need to happen before we acknowledge that Tomme Lee Jones was right in Men in Black? The first media outlet on this story, a full 4 days before the crash...the National Enquirer. They were right. Again. Damn.

Tribune Sports...I got nuthin'

2009-11-17T13:55:00.001-08:00

Ok, so it's Monday afternoon. I'm a sports reporter for a major city daily paper. The local team played last Thursday, so there's not much left to dissect about the game. The next game...well, it's a little early for that. Hmmm, what can I do? Hey, I haven't called up the Bear's QB's dad lately, I'll do that. Hmm, don't know Jay Cutler's dad's number. Or Caleb Hanie's dad. Or Brett Basanez' dad. Hmm, I wonder what the father of the backup for Houston thinks about Jay Cutler?

Hard to believe newspapers are in trouble, isn't it?

...and Wolfgang Puck popped the popcorn

2009-11-11T21:31:00.001-08:00

Oscar winner Halle Berry, Oscar nominees Don Cheadle and John Travolta (both of whom were robbed, by the way. Forrest Gump and Ray Charles, my ass), Tony and Emmy winner Hugh Jackman, Emmy winner Drea De Matteo, Oscar and Emmy nominee Sam Shepard. All brought together to bring you one of the biggest crapfests of the decade, "Swordfish," a movie that is only ever shown on HBO, and for only one reason (OK, two reasons. Heh...oh jeebus, a boob joke? It's late, forgive me).

That tops my previous favorite, which was Oscar winners Helen Hunt and Phillip Seymour Hoffman in "Twister." And I guess Bill Paxton isn't going to get any Emmys for "Big Love" the way I thought he would, so this one is of limited future value, barring some sort of Jami Gertz disease movie.

I'm disqualified from commenting on what should probably be the winner in this category, because I've never had the pleasure of seeing Multiple Oscar winner Denzel Washington and Oscar winners Russell Crowe and Louise Fletcher in "Virtuosity." Small favors, I suppose.

A Few Random Thoughts

2009-11-09T19:55:00.000-08:00

Color me completely naive for not thinking of this before, but I finally figured out something that has bothered me for a while. Most, if not all, of your major organized religions, frown on or outright ban birth control (and no, Pope Benedict, I don't consider "the rhythm method" actual birth control). I've never quite understood it, and wrote it off as simply sex=fun=bad, so unless you want a child, no sex. But maybe it's more practical than I give them credit for. Maybe it's just simple marketing (sorry, when it's a non-profit it's called "membership recruitment"). Most people are indoctrinated to their religion through their parents, so wouldn't you want those parents to pump out as many custome...uh, new recruits as possible? So they know people want to have sex, and will do so no matter what they say. But to balance out the guilt of committing sins of the flesh, they'll skip the birth control and thus greatly increase the likelihood that they'll be giving the church what they really want, which is more little'uns. Does this theory make me a cynic? Probably. But if I'm anywhere in the ballpark, I'm not the biggest cynic in this equation, now, am I?

Mad Men is a really, really good TV show. It can make you like some really bad people. They can make you laugh at really horrible things. When Roger, Bert, Don and company called in whatshisname (with the glasses, don't make me look it up) and explain their plan and he's stunned into saying "are you kidding?" and Roger doesn't even look up and says "yeah, we are. Happy Birthday" I was glad it was Diet Sprite (ahem, excuse me, Sprite Zero) I was drinking, because that diet Cranberry soda I've been drinking lately would've stained the furniture.

Note to, well, all football announcers...is Mendenhall really that much easier to say than Roethlisberger? Because you don't have any trouble busting that one out, but the other one is always just "Ben." Stop that.

While we're at it, specifically to Jon Gruden...you went to college, ok? Stop doing the whole "whoa, I don't understand all these big fancy words you guys use" shtick. I know you think you're appealing to middle America that way, but what would appeal to middle America more is someone doesn't insult their intelligence. You said this week that you heard about a couple of players who sleep in hyperbaric chambers in order to heal minor injuries faster. Then you pulled the whole "whoa, I have no idea what any of that means." Hey, Jon, here's a tip, then. Google it. Most people already know what that is (possibly because Michael Jackson supposedly had one), but if there are those who do not, how 'bout taking the opportunity to tell them about it? Just because most coaches are anti-intellectual pricks doesn't mean you have to be also.

I hate to admit this, but the health care reform debate has finally beaten me. By which I mean, I just want it to be over. Pass something, declare victory, and let's move on. The GOP strategy seems to be to say and do more and more outrageous and crazy things because they know not a lot of moderates are paying attention, so maybe this is just a temporary lull for me and I'll get a 14th wind and get revved up about it again, but we'll see.

Hmm, college basketball already? I suppose.

and now for Something Completely the Same as Everything Else.

2009-10-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

So I've been watching, somewhat faithfully (by which I mean within 24 hours of it airing) the new Monty Python documentary on IFC. And yes, it's a well made talking-head retrospective documentary talking about some incredibly interesting people, but I'm kind of sorry I'm watching it.

Backing up a bit. I love Python, but I'm by no means a fanatic about it. I doubt I've seen every single episode of the show, though maybe I have, and I've probably only seen Life of Brian 2 or 3 times. But I love Live at the Hollywood Bowl and of course the Holy Grail and I even like the Meaning of Life more than most people. And at one point, I was enough of a fan to watch Fawlty Towers.

But one of the things that struck me while watching this documentary is that I knew absolutely nothing about these guys. Ok, not entirely true, I knew Terry Gilliam was the lone American. I knew Graham Chapman was dead. But that was pretty much it. And I realize now that I preferred it that way.

I didn't want to know that Graham's coming out of the closet caused tension in the group, not that they disapproved but because they were so shocked at it, which Graham apparently took as disapproval. I didn't want to know that Eric Idle hardly ever wrote anything. I especially didn't want to know that, when battling with BBC censors, John Cleese occasionally sided with the censors against the group. Ok, sure, I do find it amusing that Cleese's father (or grandfather, I don't remember) changed the family name from "Cheese" to "Cleese." But I don't want to hear about how John and Terry (Jones) were frequently at odds, and made everyone else pick sides. And one of the stories Cleese told (about the parrot sketch) actually contradicts the legend of how it was created (he said it was based on a car salesman Michael used to know and they immediately knew it should be a dog or a parrot. The legend I'd always heard said it started out as a toaster, they couldn't get it right and Graham, who hadn't even been working on the sketch said "forget the toaster, make it a parrot")

In other words, I didn't want to know that Monty Pyton was a collection of human beings. My preferred vision for them was that they were beamed here from another plane of existence as a unit, given the ability to create this mystical blend of satire and slapstick, and were then immediately beamed back to their home world, leaving behind older versions of Cleese, Idle and Palin to do the occasional travel documentary or "A Fish Called Wanda."

I suppose I could try to make some larger point about how back in the day we didn't need to know every little obsessive detail about celebrities, and how they go to Starbucks Just Like Us. But I think this is more of a one-off situation. I actually like knowing that Keifer Sutherland is so self-conscious about his height that they only cast people who are 5' 8" or shorter on 24. Or that Stephen Colbert doesn' let his kids watch his show because he doesn't want them to think he's really like that guy on TV. Python was different, and they should stay that way. I think I'm going to delete the rest of the documentary and just watch Grail again.

Quitting

2009-10-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

So I was all ready to crank out this post on Republicans who quit, since Tom "The Hammer (meaning the indicted former House Majority Leader, not the Adam Carolla movie of the same name)" DeLay quit a TV show I've never once watched the other day. Apparently, he had some sort of stress fracture in his foot, which would seem to not be the kind of thing you want to have when you're trying to dance for several hours a day.

I once danced (excuse me, I need to get the air quotes from the back porch) "danced" for 30 straight hours once, and that pretty much sucked all the way around except for the part where we raised a couple thousand dollars for a charity and I got to see Alan Thicke get all sleazy and give a 19 year old his hotel room key.

Quick side note: I have twice in my life been in the same room as Mr. Alan Thicke, comedian (wait, "comedian") star of "Growing Pains" "Thicke of the Night" (on which I, for one, thought he was surprisingly tolerable) and "Pictionary: the Game Show, not at all a rip off of Win, Lose or Draw which was a rip-off of Pictionary to start with" (title approximate). Once was during aforementioned charity dancing event, for which he was the celebrity (just consider them assumed) host, and once when he wrote a book for the company I worked for. The book, which is still in print with another publisher, is called "How Men Have Babies: The Pregnant Father's Survival Guide," which I can sum up thusly: Wow, the boobs get big! But don't touch 'em, they might explode! Because the hormones, I tells ya...anyway, you get the point. It was incredibly unfunny and stereotypical and sad, considering he claimed to be motivated to write it thanks to witnessing the miracle of pregnancy and childbirth and enjoying so much the experience of becoming a father a few years back (this was in 1998 or so)...no doubt much to the confusion, chagrin and rejection of his adult children from his first marriage, who only inspired him to leave their mother for a 26 year old Miss World contestant. So yeah, he wrote this totally hypocritical and shallow book that privately we called "Bill Cosby's 'Fatherhood' for sleazy middle-aged Canadians." Or maybe that was the jacket blurb, not sure. So, as is occasionally the custom in these situations, we flew him in to chat up the sales force and have dinner. He spent the entire night badmouthing the food (it was a made-to-order stir fry type thing, which he called "pork and peanut butter"...they must not get much Thai food in your part of Canada, eh Alan?) and slobbering over my friend (name redacted), who did everything but shove her new engagement ring up his nostril trying to get the creepy old guy away from her. I guess the moral of the story, if there is one, is that Alan Thicke is creepy and horny. By the way, the 19 year old immediately started passing around the hotel key, trying to get someone else to use it, but no dice. It now occurs to me that the key was for a room in the same hotel where the meet-and-greet dinner occurred 6 years later. I feared for my job at the time, so I did not have the guts to ask him if he remembered the last time he was at that hotel.

Hmm, that really didn't pan out as a "quick" side note, now, did it? Well, that's how these things go, I guess.

Anyway, where was I? Right, Tom DeLay. Quitting. This, on the heels (relatively speaking, at least), of Sarah Palin quitting as governor of Alaska. It made me wonder if maybe this were some sort of trial balloon by the GOP, as in "let's see how far we can get by quitting" or maybe the reality show bit was just a short term test of whether they could raise someone's prospects by appearing on a show like that (much like Bill Clinton did by appearing on Arsen...hee, I can't even say it with a straight face...Arsenio Hall's wildly successful late night talk show...woof) and maybe after a couple weeks they had all the data they needed. We'll know if that was the case if we see Newt Gingrich on "The Bachelorette".

That made me think about quitting in general, and how we're so conditioned to see it as a bad thing. And it's not necessarily. There's no shame in quitting when there are better options, or even when doing nothing is a better option than doing what you're doing. I've often said that the best move I ever made in school was quitting the 8th grade football team. I sucked at it, and I hated it (those who know my love of the game now will be shocked at this, but the coach was a tyrant, I was out of shape and had very little interest in puking my guts out every day for 6 weeks so I could be a 3rd string offensive lineman, even though I was clearly a fullback or tight end). I'm not sure why I decided to quit, I just remember sitting in the bathtub after practice one night, wondering if I could risk bringing my homework into the tub with me so I could soak for another hour and...oh yeah, that's why. It was a rough time at home. My dad had recently come off a two year long layoff and was working either 2nd or 3rd shift, meaning I only saw him on Sundays, really, and he was pretty well wrecked then from the weird schedule. I didn't want to disappoint him by quitting, because I knew all of his stories from playing football at my high school (my favorite being the time he got knocked unconscious and they had to hold up the game...mainly because they couldn't get him off the field, but also because our team only had 11 players so they had to wait for him). Not having the relevant source of advice available was a problem, so I left him a note. In retrospect, I could have stayed up until he got home from work, but I seem to recall that being a) a waste of time, since it was the middle of the freaking night and he was tired, adn b) to be used only in a genuine, something's-on-fire emergency. Essentially, I asked him if he would be upset or disappointed if I didn't play football anymore. Maybe I wrote two lines. What I got back, without getting too corny, was pretty much the template for the parent I've always tried to be. It was definitive and supportive and genuine, and I don't remember exactly what it said, but I do remember the words "ABSOLUTELY NOT" in all caps (in reference to the "will you be mad at me?" question, not the question of whether I was allowed to quit). He knew that I was miserable, and was able to put aside his own biases and ideas and see things from my point of view, which is a pretty remarkable thing for a guy trying to support a family by busting his hump at a terrible job in a stupid factory for 10 hours a day. And, though no mention was directly made of the incident, shortly thereafter a job miraculously opened up on the first shift again. I'd have hated to be my dad's boss the day after he got my note, and now where the hell did my snarky little post about republicans and Alan Thicke go, and why did it suddenly get dusty in here? Damn you, allergies.

So, to regroup and recap...quitting, not all that bad of a thing. And maybe it's a trap, softening the ground for another 2012 hopeful to get massive free exposure. I'd watch next season's lineups on the reality shows if I were you, which certainly beats the hell out of watching the shows themselves.

Collinsworth opens the real season.

2009-09-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

No, not the NFL season, but the Highly Paid Network Football Commentator Saying Something Monumentally Stupid season (or the HPNFCSSMS).

The situation: tie game, under a minute left. Hines Ward (WR-Pit) catches a ball at something like the 20 yard line, makes a nice move at the 10, and cuts back toward the end zone for what will surely be the winning touchdown, when from the back side comes a defensive back to make a one in a gajillion play and strip the ball, which was promptly recovered by the defense.

Collinsworth, new to his gig as the lead commentator for the marquee game of the week, lets fly that (I'm paraphrasing) Ward made a mental error by trying to score a touchdown...instead "all he has to do is kneel down and they kick the game winner."

On its face, this statement is factually correct. Had he knelt down at the 10 yard line, the Steelers could have run the clock down and kick the FG. But to suggest that a player should not try to make a reasonable effort to score so that they can kick a field goal later is so patently stupid and obtuse that it's almost hard to fathom.

First of all, it's not like he was dragging three defenders with him fighting for three inches. If the DB doesn't flail at him desperately, he breaks the arm tackle of the other DB and scores easily.

But Collinsworth isn't satisfied. "Even if he can manage to score a touchdown there, you've still got 51 seconds left for them to answer."

Ok, Cris, let's take that "education" you got at Florida out for a spin. What would you rather have, a 7 point lead with 50 seconds left (really 45 after the kickoff), when Tennessee has exactly one touchdown all night, and your pass rush can "pin their ears back" and go after the 36 year old immobile quarterback? Or a chance at a 30 yard field goal? Let's not forget there had already been one miss, one block (both for the other team's kicker), and one really ugly low line drive that went through. I'm doing all this by memory, so forgive me if I'm off by couple percentage points. FG accuracy in the NFL is like 80% overall. Drives that start from the 20 yard line (and there's no gurantee that they would start that deep, but they would likely have run any kick out of the end zone) result in touchdowns something like 15% of the time. Add in the fact that they had 50 seconds to do it? Well, I'll let you decide what you'd rather have.

I've often said (and I stole it from someone else from wayyyy back) that the single least qualified group of individuals to comment on the game of professional football are those who have in fact been hired by the networks to do so. Collinsworth, usually better than this, seems to be fitting in nicely.

P.S. No, it doesn't change my opinion that Hines Ward said "I need to get down there." Try to score, dude, it's your job.

In which I get fed up and start naming names...

2009-09-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

I've yet to be political in this blog, and that's on purpose. I'm a liberal, and I'm proud of it, but I don't want this blog to become about that any more than I want it to become about my fondness for Nutter Butters and "Mad Men." But today is an exception.

If you are a certain kind of conservative, and you know who you are, who protested (or, frankly, allowed to exist unchallenged the protest) the President's address to school children this morning, then shame on you. Calling it an "indoctrination" speech, the Lunatic Right has taken a remarkable opportunity away from some children. The wingnut morons have railed against this speech to the point that several school districts decided not to broadcast it.

Read the speech here. Now, all you so-called conservatives out there, I dare you, I defy you to find one single speck of liberal propaganda or indoctrination. One thing. Go ahead, I'll wait. There's not a word of politics in there. There's not even anything political about education, which is the subject of the speech (Of course, now Karl Rove is now claiming that the White House re-wrote the speech to take all the politics out of it thanks to the protest. But we all know that's not true, and we all know that that's the easiest game to play...claim that if it weren't for your heroic efforts, there sure would've been a lot more merit to your baseless complaints). How dare they claim to know better what's best for children than a leader giving a message to kids to get an education (note: I originally wrote "what's best for their children," until I realized that most of the knuckleheads doing the protesting probably didn't have children, or sent them to private schools where they get plenty of indoctrination already).

As a result of the phony outrage, some schools are not showing the speech. The principals and district supervisors responsible for the decision not to show the speech should be removed from their positions immediately. The message they just gave to their students, that in the face of a figurative temper tantrum, the appropriate response is to find some flimsy reason to give in to the tantrum, shows they lack the capacity to educate children, and they lack the backbone to be leaders. That they would allow something as positive and harmless as this speech to be shouted down makes me wonder, what else are the children in the care of these spineless fools missing out on?

You've gone too far this time, wingnuts. This speech is simply about working hard, staying in school, overcoming personal hardships and being responsible to others in the community. Hmm...on second thought, maybe this was a liberal indoctrination speech. Hard work? Education? Not trying to take the easy way out? Those would seem to be, especially today, exclusively liberal values, because the right lacks the seriousness of purpose and the overall credibility to claim those values as their own. It makes you wonder what, if any, values they have left.

Things that don't mean what you think they mean...

2009-07-28T21:36:00.001-07:00

Space Age: Technically, this means that the thing in question comes from roughly the same time period as the TV show "Mad Men." So don't say that something modern is "Space Age," because that means it's almost 50 years old. Same thing goes, sort of, for "Classical Music." When someone complains that you never hear any good new classical music, you may feel free to inform them that that's because the Classical Era ended around 1825. You may also feel free to introduce them to the work of Phillip Glass, but then you'd be an idiot.

Bipartisanship: contrary to what CNN tells us, bipartisanship is not the same thing as a compromise. Bipartisanship is a cudgel that Republicans, who could give a crap about bipartisanship when they're in charge, use to beat moderate Democrats about the head and neck to get their whiny little regressive policies listened to.

Having a dead hooker in the trunk: OK, that one usually does mean what you think it means.

Being Waylaid: Not only is this a consistently solid entry in my standard joke repertoire given how dirty it sounds, but it's also genuinely misunderstood. It doesn't mean you were delayed, it means that you were attacked by someone or something lying in wait, which is usually what causes you to be delayed.

More as they become available

Reluctant TV Complaint

2009-07-16T11:38:00.001-07:00

Just about anyone who reads this will know that I have a special relationship with the old 70s era TV show "the Superstars." It was the original "Trash Sport" dynasty (though the producers of the old "Home Run Derby" and "Shell's Wonderful World of Golf" might argue, they were different in that the competitors were, respectively, Major League Baseball players and professional golfers). It was a beautiful competition, with baseball players and football players and skiiers and track and field types and boxers all competing in some goofy sports with an arcane scoring system. There were 10 events, of which each athlete needed to compete in 7, plus the obstacle course (or maybe that was the 10th event, but I remember it was mandatory). The events were straightforward, athletic type events, like a swimming race that damned near killed Joe Frazier. There was usually a bowling or a billiards or something goofy thrown in for balance, but in general it was real sporting events, legit competition, and it was names you knew trying hard to win, with a ton of action packed into every show.

This new incarnation, not so much.

Hey, look, I know, this is the easiest post imaginable. "Something from my childhood is changed and therefore inferior! waahhhh!" It's really not all that difficult or imaginative to dump all over the modern version of something. That's why I gave this crapfest every chance to succeed. But it just ain't happening. My complaints are many, and they break down as such...

A. The set-up:
Instead of a bunch of recognizable and semi-obscure athletes, they took 8 "athletes" and 8 "celebrities" (believe me, those quotation marks are carrying a lot of water there) and teamed them together. Each team is a boy-girl team, with each male "athlete" paired with a female "celebrity" and vice versa. The quality of athlete varies widely...Terrell Owens down to Kristi Leskinen (apparently some sort of skiier), while the quality of celebrity really flatlines at the top (uh, Dan Cortese?) and goes nowhere (one of the Extreme Makover designers? Seriously? Were all the Baldwins busy? Are you sure?). Along the way, we get such luminary athletes as Robert "Fourth Banana" Horry, Lisa "Impending ACL Tear" Leslie, and Jeff "Wearing a baseball cap 'cause I don't feel like putting on the hairpiece" Kent. The celebrity side...Christ, I'm not even going to bother, but suffice to say there are a couple of supposed models, an Iglesias (not that one...no, not that one either) a Baywatch dude (no, none of those), and the chick from the Doritos commercial from the Super Bowl a few years back.

B. Quantity and quality of action:
The teams compete in two (2) events each week. Two whole events, one filmed each day. After the two events, the top X teams are "safe" the bottom X teams are "going to the obstacle course" and, ostensibly to eliminate ties, two teams perform in "the rubber match" which is not nearly as dirty or interesting as it sounds. Essentially, they get a mini-do-over from the second event, and the loser goes to the obstacle course. That night, they go double elimination relay on the watered-down (sadly, not literally) obstacle course, and the loser is eliminated. Herein lies a major flaw. Whereas most competitions are about winning, this one is entirely based on not losing, a fact that skiier Bode Miller has exploited successfully. But, you say, just look at the nearest analogue in the reality-show world, "The Amazing Race," in which the losing team is eliminated each week, and a team could conceivably finish 2nd to last each week until the finale and win it all. This is true, but at least on TAR, the winner of each leg gets a prize. In this show? Nothing. It's never even really mentioned who won the week. That means the bulk of the thing is about who is almost losing. I'm completely used to the fact that most modern day game shows (Survivor et. al.) celebrate mediocrity (can't be seen as too competent, I'll be exposed as a threat!) but this isn't Survivor, this is the Superstars. This is supposed to be about ubercompetence, not scraping by.

Back to the quantity of competition. Two events. I'm sorry, let me go back into my dwindling supply of sarcastic quotation marks and say two "events." One of them was a long jump, though a long jump into water, which was vaguely awesome. But, in total, the thing had about 90 seconds of actual athletic exertion, total. Because each team member jumped once. One jump. Sure, they got a "practice" jump, so I'll give them a full three minutes of action. But this was fully one third of a 90 minute episode. Then they had to show each competitor wading out of the water and telling Warren Sapp (no, I'm not kidding, it's actually Warren Sapp. What, like you thought he was busy?) how it felt out there. Gah.

The most recent episode was the breaking point. There were 5 teams left, including a team that had been eliminated and brought back citing the shady "if another team drops out, we bring back the most recently eliminated team." Apparently, someone in Buffalo caught wind of the fact that their high priced free agent WR was competing in an athletic endeavor and, more to their shock, I'm sure actually trying, and so they put the stop to that but quick. But I digress. The 5 teams competed in a "relay race." In this race, each person had to run in the opposite direction from their teammate around a "course" (it was the cart path around one hole at the golf course at the resort this nonsense was filmed at). They met somewhere in the middle-ish, handed off a baton and ran back. First team with both members back wins. They were a little vague about the distance, but the incredibly stiff John Saunders (more on him later) referred to it once as a "half-mile" run. I'm thinking that means each competitor ran a half mile (give or take where they met up with their partner) in total, or a run of less than 5 minutes (most people can walk a mile in just over 1o minutes, if they try). And that's your day's grueling event. Wow, kids, a whole 5 minutes of effort? Say it ain't so. Turns out, that was the endurance test for this week, because the next day's event was bowling. Ok, sure, they used to do bowling on the old show, so it's legit, but it was the format I quibble with. First, the bowling lane was, for no discernible reason, set up to stretch out over the pool. That made it incredibly wobbly, and meant that the pins were falling when I don't think they should have. But more importantly was the scorekeeping. Each team bowled a frame. Yes, one frame. Each partner threw one ball. The team that had the lowest total was eliminated. The the scores re-set to zero and they did it again, eliminating the next team and the next and the next. That means that to get to the winner, a total of 14 frames were bowled. Not by each team, but total. Bowling less than a game and a half takes about 15 minutes, and that's with beer involved. I mean, was it too taxing on the editing staff to have them edit down (or, god forbid, show) one full game of bowling? Do the producers think so little of their audience that they fear that we wouldn't understand the complex bowling scoring system? If that's the case, I've got news for you...the people who you are the most worried about are the ones who generally bowl the most.

That's about 20 minutes of action, followed by a best of three elimination round on the obstacle course (by my count, each round took about one minute to complete, but I'd be willing to go all the way to 90 seconds each, so 3 minutes for the 2-0 sweep. Twenty-three minutes of athletic competition, (did I mention that the relay race seemed edited down some?) to fill an hour-long episode. That's less action than a major league baseball game, and just barely more than my 5 year old's tee-ball game. It somehow makes it worse that this was recorded over two days. On the old show, by the end of the 10 events, the competitors were gassed. I think they did it over a couple days as well, but it was more than one event per freaking day, that's for sure.

C. The presentation
Four words: sideline reporter Warren Sapp. There's a female sideline reporter as well, named Jenn somethingorother, and I have no idea who she is, nor do I care. They are both predictably awful.

But the real surprise amongst the announcers is the generally competent and amiable John Saunders. Here, he's terrible. He's trying to sound like part Jeff Probst, part Alex Trebek and part Bob Costas (otherwise known as TVs White Man's Holy Trinity). He's clearly reading the "play-by-play" from a script in post-production, and it's poorly written by some intern who's not a writer OR a play-by-play person. When he goes into reality-show host mode, he's so stiff and bad that every time he goes into faux-drama patter "and we'll find out (Shattnerian pause) what challenge awaits you next," the heretofore unmentioned athlete Brandi Chastain actually gives him the fake scared "ooooooh," complete with "I'm scared" finger wiggle.

That's not to say it's a loss. There is, at least, some unintentional comedy. The psychosexual ramifications of the dynamic between Brandi Chastain and her much younger partner, Julio Iglesias Jr. give us, like some dirty-minded "Before and After" clue on Wheel of Fortune, a Soccer M(om)ILF vibe, complete with his occasional lapse into the "besibol been berry berry good to me" Latin Lover stereotype. Lisa Leslie's complete and utter lack of the most remote shred of athleticism is both awesome and telling (how could she lose the basketball shooting competition? Seriously?!?!) Robert Horry (pre-elimination) constantly trying to cop a feel on his partner under the guise of celebrating with his teammate brings new meaning to his old "Big Shot Rob" nickname. TOs partner (I'm not going to bother looking her up, she's some model) was such a horrible person and a bad teammate, she made him into a totally sympathetic figure. And the fact that the most anonymous team (ballroom dancing show guy, extreme skiing woman) is probably going to run away with this thing is exactly what ABC deserves for putting this moronic thing on the air.

Ok, well, that's enough of that. I should go. Keyshawn Johnson is judging "Iron Chef America" on my DVR right now, and I need to go make a bunch of "Just Give Me the Damn Balsamic" jokes.

Gonna pass on this one...

2009-07-13T17:23:00.000-07:00

Good to know I've still got standards. Today, I was offered a shot at a telemarketing job for an online university with nonstandard hours (some evenings, every other Saturday) for roughly half my previous salary.

Separately, I saw an ad on (big major job site) for a Marketing Manager for medical devices. Location of the job: Northern Iraq.

So at least I know I'm not there yet.

Nitpicks

2009-06-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

@ Dan Patrick, SI:

Charles Barkley cannot be a "perennial source" of your quote of the week, unless you mean to say that he provides one quote per year.

@every company on Careerbuilder.com:

Most of you, if not all of you, would instantly disqualify me from the position I am applying for if my resume or cover letter had even one of the typographical errors that are in nearly every one of your listings.

@Steven Soderbergh

At the end of "Ocean's Eleven," There's no way that the crew could pack all that money into the black bags in the few seconds between Brad Pitt telling them to cut the power and the explosion. Also, I'm not clear where the hooker flyers came from that were in the back of the van that blew up at the airport.

@most sportscasters

A team cannot have scored 10 "unanswered" points (or runs or goals) in the middle of the game. They may have scored 10 "as yet unanswered" runs/points/goals, or 10 "consecutive" runs/points/goals, but the runs/points/goals cannot be "unanswered" until the end of the game (match, whatever).

while we're at it, sportscasters...

a player who is not performing well does not need to get "untracked," he/she needs to get "on track." The problem is not the player's being tracked, the problem is the player's being off track.

More as they become available...

Open Letter to Myself

2009-05-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Self,

For the love of god, stop complaining about the weather in Chicago. Yes, it's the end of May. Yes, it's only 65 degrees. Yes, it's mostly cloudy, and threatening to rain, just like it has been 5 of the last 6 days. Yes, it dropped 15 degrees in an hour yesterday, and you were freezing on the way home from the library.

Two choices. Move, or shut up. It's like this every year, and every year you complain about it. Everyone you know is really sick of it, I'm sure.

The average high temperature for May in Chicago is 70 degrees, and that's at O'Hare, and as close as you live to the lake, it's always going to be like this. So again, move to Naperville, or Cincinnati or Phoenix (there may be other options, I'm not sure), or shut up. It's 68 now, that should be fine. Go outside already.

Also, please don't forget to take the garbage out. That is all.

Regards,
Self

A Gift

2009-05-19T08:42:00.000-07:00

So yesterday, after a spirited set of tennis at the park with the roommate (he lost his serve halfway through, and to be fair, was feeling the aftereffect of the sleep aid he took the night before, so it was more competitive than the final 6-2 score would indicate), I saw something hanging from the front door. Usually, something in a little hanging bag on the front door like that would be a course catalog/brochure from the local community college, or a flaming bag of poo.

But this was a book, with a green leatherette cover, with a brochure tucked in with it. The faux-gold leaf detail was the first tip, this was a religious tract. Oh goody.

See, we live in what the roommate has called "the most liberal Zip code outside of San Francisco," so we have people of many faiths and races here. I'm not sure if that makes us more fertile recruiting ground for the Jehovah's Witnesses and the other proselytizers or less, but we do get the occasional knock on the door that we have to politely blow off. But it turns out this was different...

Dear Neighbor,

Please accept the enclosed book as a
gift from the Muslim community...

And thus I saw the title "The English Translation of the Message of the Quran." Hmm, this was new.

Then I had a stunning moment of self-awareness (not really stunning, and probably not all that self-aware). The fact that it was the holy text for one religion I don't believe in (Islam) made it somehow better than it being the holy text for another religion I don't believe in (Christianity). Does that make me the kind of namby-pamby liberal that Ann Coulter (who is anything but a Christian) is always on about? I can hear her sneering "oh, sure, they love the Quran, but if it was a Bible, they'd have had some kind of fit." And she'd be entirely missing the point, but she'd also have a grain of truth in there. Because if it had been a bible, I'd have scanned up and down the block to see if the people delivering them were still there, and if so, I'd have jogged my copy back to them and said something charming like "here, don't waste the dead tree on trying to tell me about your invisible man in the sky." But since it wasn't the Bible, I actually set it down on the kitchen table, with absolutely no intention of reading it, but certainly no intention of making a show of tossing it out, either.

So is the Christian Right, which of course really is neither (no, I never will get tired of that joke, why do you ask?) actually correct about me? Or is it simply that complicated but genuine notion that I was raised to be more polite to the neighbors than to my family? The president keeps talking about having more respect for those that disagree with us, and I keep thinking "yeah, what he said" without really considering if I need to do the same.

Sorry, I guess this is one of those posts that raises more questions (1) than it answers (0). But that's what you get for now.

Reading is Fun, Learning How is Really Irritating

2009-05-12T09:13:00.000-07:00

So the boy, as you can see from the little "About Me" section over there, is 5 years old. That, in and of itself, is not a problem. He's adorable and precocious, and just generally a lot of fun/work. But there's a growing issue, and it involves the unholy marriage between learning and entertainment that is PBS (more accurately, PBS Kids).

Our morning routine, at least for the last few months (those months corresponding to those in which I have nowhere in particular to be in the mornings) has been pretty stable. With the exception of the days when Mommy takes the late train and lets Daddy sleep in, we (the boy and I) get up at 7ish, stumble downstairs (he bounds, I stumble), fish a granola bar out of the box, and turn on the TV (at this point, a lot of you parents out there are thinking "Gah! You turn the TV on in the morning? Don't you know that the latest research indicates that the developing neuroreceptors of preschoolers are 11% more likely to show a decreased response to stimuli if they are allowed to watch television before 11AM?!?!? Don't you love your child?!?!?" I'm here to tell you now: shut up. Seriously. Shut the hell up, and go back to making your child a neurotic germophobic wreck by subtly resenting him for taking away what was doubtless a promising social life). The choice on TV was automatic, to the point where we didn't even need to discuss it most mornings. One episode of Curious George, one granola bar, one glass of milk. He could watch the first one (each episode has two separate cartoons) while he ate the granola bar, then get dressed during the second one, and if you need me, I'll be dozing off on the couch over here, the dulcet tones of narrator William H. Macy gently drifting into my last few moments of attempted sleep for the day. When George was over, it was time to put on shoes (both of us), and get off to school/daycare/whatever it is.

Recently, though, events have conspired to change this hard-earned routine, and I'm partially to blame. First, there haven't been many new episodes of Curious George lately, and it really started to get old. If I had to watch the one where George and Hundley are on the deserted tropical island (that exists approximately half an hour off the coast of what is generally assumed to be New York, but I'll save that for a "Kids' TV nitpicks" mega-post that will probably have to be published in multiple 8,000 word segments) one more time, I was going to have to take Mr. Macy hostage. So I deleted a few from the DVR, and went about searching for another show or two to record, just to freshen things up. And that's how we ended up with "Word World."

For the uninitiated, Word World is a PBS show where all the characters and many objects are made out of letters that roughly form the shape of the thing. Thus, dog. And so on. In this universe, if you needed, for example, a ball, you would need to find a "b," an "a," and two "l"s, then put them together, wherein they would magically cling together in the shape of a ball. Again, nitpicks aside (what sort of matter are these letters made of? How do they know what kind of ball?), the annoying part is that a) it generally takes the characters the entire 7 minute segment to find the requisite 4 to 5 letters, even though it's a known fact that Dog has a giant pile of all sorts of letters strewn about his house, and b) you have to do the word building while singing "It's time to build a word/Let's build it/Let's build it...Yeah!" to what I believe is an old House beat from the mid-90s. Needless to say, I can't really doze off during this.

Of course, the boy is mesmerized. And this morning, just as I was considering donating the TV to charity or stabbing my eardrums with a knitting needle (and subsequently lamenting the fact that we don't own knitting needles), I hear "Map...m-a-p. Ball...b-a-l-l. Drink...d-...daddy, how do you spell drink?" "Mmmph..rrrgh...erfft...nnnenggh" I replied, which apparently was close enough. "Drink...d-r-i-n-k."

"Good job, buddy," I said, and then it occurred to me. Drink wasn't one of the words on the show, and ball was yesterday. Holy crap, this stuff just might be working. I wonder if there's a new episode this afternoon...

Liveblogging my roommate's hookup

2009-04-23T14:22:00.000-07:00

For the last 8 months or so, a friend of mine has been living in our basement. It's cool.

The one issue that never really came up (that's a bad pun...you'll see) is the problem of...well, let's say overnight guests (see? Bad.) The bulk of the problem comes from the fact that I really don't want to have to explain to the 5 year old what that strange woman with the rumpled hair and the roommate's dress shirt on is doing in our bathroom at 7AM. Luckily, we had one thing going for us in this regard...the roommate is terrible with women. Ok, two things. Not only is he generally terrible with women, I don't see a whole lot of women being attracted to the following scenario at a bar: so, you're almost 40, you're an unemployed member of a profession generally seen as recession-proof; you live in what is essentially a dorm room in the basement of your friend's house, and you want to go back there now? Ok, sure, where do I sign up?

But all that has come to a tragic end this evening. Because the roomie has just brought someone home (to his infinite credit, he called ahead and asked if we minded). A rough timeline:

3:30 PM The roommate departs. Who leaves for a date at 3:30? What are they, 70 year olds hoping to catch the senior special over at the Old Country Buffet?

3:31PM I forget about the whole thing for about 6 hours.

9:30PM Phone rings. Seeing the roommate's number, I look for a comfy place to sit as he gives me the tale of woe about how bad the date went while he waits for another friend to show up at the bar.

But no, this is the "uh, you mind if we come back to the house? I'll take your stunned silence as a 'yes'" call. They are to arrive in about 20 minutes.

9:30:30PM My wife, hearing the plan, nearly sprains something rolling her eyes. She decides to go to bed. In retrospect, this is why I married her. She is much, much smarter than I.

9:40PM Because I am the most awesome wingman in the history of wingmen, I rush downstairs to the roommate's room, and clear a rough path from the door. He's not what you might call a tidy person, so this is no gimme. I initially went down there to make sure there was no stray dirty underwear sitting out, but then decided it would be a mitzvah if I helped a brotha out.

This is not without it's cost. First of all, I don't want to know why there was an unopened bottle of squeezable mayonaise on the nightstand. Second, no human being should need that many tubes of Carmex, and I shudder to think how those two facts may be related. But I digress.

I clear off the bed, feed his cat (not a euphemism), and turn off the computer monitor. I briefly consider dimming the lights and turning on the stereo, but I'm running out of time, and I can't immediately recall where my "Barry White's Greatest Hits" CD is. Plus, that'd be a little on the nose. Don't you think?

9:50PM I'm back upstairs on the couch. They arrive, through the back door (again, not a euphemism). I am thus spared the awkward "uh, hi, what are you kids up to?"

9:52PM The roommate runs upstairs to use the restroom. "Did you clean my room, or were we robbed?" He is appreciative, but that might be the Labatt's talking. In fact, the Labatt's is not only doing the talking, it is also controlling most of the central nervous functions at this point.

9:55PM Having unfortunately paused the DVR, thus muting the sound on the TV, I'm treated to my first noise. Oh great, I think to myself....she's a screamer.

9:55:03PM Correction: that was him. I think. This could be a long night, what with me needing to attempt to forget I just heard that.

9:59PM Well, that was quick.

10:10PM The roommate emerges, naked (GAH!) No, wait, he's got pajama bottoms on. Close call there. He is entirely too pleased with himself. Which is unusual in that usual he's pleased BY himself. He gets a glass of water, walks toward the living room, and gives what I'm sure he thinks is a "Victory is mine!" arm raise salute kind of thing that actually looks more like Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos at the Mexico City Olympics, or maybe Nixon's farewell wave after a fifth of Old Granddad. I am simultaneously appalled and bemused. Then it's back downstairs for mandatory cuddling.

10:15PM Or not. At least I know this will be quick, and thankfully, the hockey game I'm watching is sufficiently interesting, if not quite loud enough. C'mon, Vancouver, let's make some noise!

10:20PM Up til now, I've been afraid to go into the kitchen, which is where the door to the basement is. I fear the noises, I fear the awkwardness of who might come up the stairs, and so on. But dammit, I'm hungry, and I need a sandwich.

10:22PM Ok, sandwich acquired. Ugh, forgot the chips. Cover me, I'm going back in.

10:35PM Footsteps on the staircase again. Multiple. Oy. It's both of them. They are fully dressed, back in bar costumes, and headed out, but she just wanted to meet the people he lives with. Because I'm still eating my sandwich, I do not stand up to greet them. I do notice, however, that in my haste to get in and out (ha!) of the kitchen, I made the sandwich on my 5 year old's Spiderman plate.

She seems nice, in a "just barely not drunk enough that I need to have my roommate arested for date rape" kind of way. The three of us chat for a few moments, and when the roommate mentions the 5 year old, she is surprised that there is a child in the house, despite the fact that she is literally standing in the middle of about 30 Hot Wheels that we neglected to clean up at bed time. She also says "oh, but he's probably asleep now, right?" I look at the clock to make sure it is actually nearly 11PM, then mentally cross off the list titled "Possible Jobs Held by the Person I'm Talking to" the entries "rocket scientist," "brain surgeon," and "day care professional." At least it's a good bet that she didn't notice the Spiderman plate.

10:45PM They depart, and it's unclear if he's taking her home or if they're going back to the bar. Nonetheless, the idea that has just hit me requires swift and immediate action. After all, straightening up the room was a good deed, and I just can't let that stand.

10:50PM You know that old computer paper with the holes along the side that comes in a big continuous perforated sheet? My in-laws had a box of it laying around and gave it to my son for his burgeoning art career. So I borrow a 6 foot or so section of it, and, using the boy's Crayola markers, make a large George-W.-Bush-on-the-aircraft-carrier banner reading, of course, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" complete with suggestive rockets and fireworks. Careful to avoid looking at anything too closely or touching anything, I hang the banner over his bed.

12:05(ish)AM Having just barely drifted off to sleep, I am briefly awoken by the sound, two floors down, of hysterical laughter mixed with unspeakable profanity, both directed at me. Mission Accomplished, indeed.

Uh-oh time

2009-03-27T13:46:00.000-07:00

So here's the thing. I'm unemployed. I was let go at the end of February from a well, from a really crappy job. No, that's not right, the job itself was fine, midlevel Marketing BS. It was the situation that was crappy. My old boss was a Mayberry Machiavelli (until I figure out how to embed a link, I'll do it, but until then you'll have to accept my explanation that that's what they used to call Karl Rove and his ilk, but more generically I'm referring to someone who fashions themself a great strategist/thinker when really they're a couple of elements short of a periodic table). She was a "couldn't be bothered with the details, until something goes wrong, in which case I'll be all up in your business about the details, but let's be clear that my hands are clean here because I didn't even know anything about this" type. There was enough dysfunction around me that on one hand, I'm glad to be free of that place, and (some of) the people.

But you know, no matter how hard you try to be the guy that doesn't get wrapped up in what can charitably be called a "career," losing a job hits you eventually. It's been 4 weeks today (coincidentally, it's also been exactly a month, since it was February), and I guess today's my day. Not sure what triggered it, but I was walking down the stairs, and I thought of a name. It was the name of someone I was supposed to call back in February for some consultation on...whatever the hell, it doesn't matter. But that led me to realize that I hadn't crossed that phone call off my mental to-do list. That led to a couple other things that I realized I was still thinking about. The results weren't good. For some reason, I started re-living a lot of the nonsense that went on there. I started thinking about the politics, the mind games, and the way people treated each other. I felt the familiar feeling of being lost with no help. See, you weren't allowed to ask for help, not that you'd get any if you did. I remembered how every assignment was vague, every project was open-ended.

At the grocery store, I saw a guy who I thought was someone from there. I was only off by about 20 years, 50 lbs, and a race. I have no idea what I'll do if I ever actually run into anyone. Thankfully, that only happened maybe 3 times when I worked there, and that was almost 4 years.

Clearly, I'm not as over this as I thought.

So, now I have a blog. So now what?

2009-03-06T10:08:00.000-08:00

A lot of people tell me "you need a blog." Ok, one person. And I think she was kidding. But I suddenly find myself with a lot more time these days, so time to get on with it, I suppose.

No expectations on what this will be. Meaning, I don't have any expectations, and I don't yet know what this blog will be about. I'll likely spout left-leaning politics pretty frequently (because there isn't enough of that on the interweb). And once it's in season, fantasy football (see earlier parenthetical). But really, I'm setting this thing up as a placeholder on the off chance I feel like I have something original or interesting to say, which really kind of seems conceited, when you put it that way.

At any rate, more to come...