Ugly Blog: Errata

Beck and I went through a few iterations to get the layout / design of her new blog, Cooking For Elaine, just right. Somewhere in there it became clear that The Ballad is "ugly." Comment then withdrawn, modified to "it's not what I would do." Eventually translated to "there's too much block text," then further translated to "your paragraphs are too long." Ah, I see where this is going.

In the interest of placating Beck, here's a little experiment. I have several blog posts in the works, all of which are undeveloped ideas that deserve big treatments that, really, it just seems I don't actually have the time to write. So in the interest of appealing to Beck's low-text, short paragraph aesthetic sensibilities*, here are several full posts that will never be, condensed to max-of-five-sentence paragraph form.

* - And this from a person who doesn't tweet!

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The Authenticity of The BS Report

I listen to Bill Simmons's podcasts regularly. In them, he interviews sports personalities, talks shop with various other ESPN personalities, phones his buddies to discuss the latest games, etc., all with a casual tone that gives off the impression that, aside from the occasionally bleeped swear word - this is an ESPN-ABC-Disney production, after all - the listener is experiencing what it would be like to just hang out with Bill. Given the usual gloss / subterfuge / simulacra that pervades most modern media*, the podcast feels like a last refuge, or maybe really a tech-enabled return, to authenticity: the real personality, the unfettered dialogue between these honest to earth, real people, who just happen to live high-profile lives. But then you realize they're recordings, undoubtedly edited and censored, and Simmons himself is giving near-constant indications that he is watching what he is saying due to the powers that be. So even the ostensible casual conversation requires the holding of tongues with quiet reservation, and even while e.g. listening to Seth Myers detail the behind the scenes of SNL skit-writing, the crushing clench of the postmodern spin forces me to wonder, per usual: what's crafted, and what's just crafted by casual tone so as to appear uncrafted?

* - Lame, vague term, I know. Hey, five sentences. It wasn't my idea.

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Jazz, Not Classical

Sprawl players, Hashem help them, cannot remember or successfully run plays to save their lives, yet they want and want plays with specific instructions for precisely what to do in this or that situation. It's borderline absurd, given that there's been no real indication that the plays would be followed even if people knew them, but the bigger problem is that the assumption that there is an exact thing-to-do in every given situation is fundamentally flawed. The expression we've come up for when players keep asking "what do I do when X" type questions is "Jazz Not Classical" - we've got a framework, and yes, sometimes there are definite cuts to make / notes to play, but a lot of it is creative improvisation from within the framework, following certain principles but having the freedom to adjust on the fly, in the moment. Cool metaphor, but it also uncovers a larger problem: we've got some players who don't, um, know their scales just yet. This is time number 42,376 in a teaching context where I've re-realized that my experience set does not match others, and we've got to make sure that a whole ton of fundamentals and background are in place before we can jam.

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Phish and the World Cup

When you listen to Phish jams, Trey is almost always way out front, wailing* o'er the top with incendiary melody lines on his Languedoc guitar, and it's very, very easy to fixate so much on that sound that the remainder of the band sounds like vamping. In soccer... someone has the ball. A way to experience both in a different, perhaps more enlightening light, is to do everything it takes to fixate on the whole instead - in the jam, you can aid yourself by making a concerted** effort to listen to bass and piano and the experience of the whole will just click; on the pitch, try paying attention to the shapes the defenses and offenses make rather than watching the players as individual entities. In short, feel the ball and the guitar more than observing them directly, and both art forms will breathe in a new way. I am becoming increasingly convinced that mainstream popular American sports and music taste are fixated on the former approach, locking in on the lead, and as this vantage gets its kicks from searing notes and goals, it doesn't seem very likely that low-scoring soccer or jam/jazz will overtake football or Taylor Swift anytime soon.

* - "Wailing," not "whaling," for you Mr. Miner readers out there.

** - "Concerted." I kill me.

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The Existential Bench-Press

My favorite memory of high school football, or rather my memory of the best feeling I had during my four years playing high school football, is one that occurred repeatedly - the five minute walk to my car away from the locker room at 6:30 after practice each day. That little five minute window put the maximum amount of time between me and the next time I would have to be back at the locker room, hunkering down, putting on pads and inexplicably putting myself through the nastiness of another day of physically and psychologically torturous CHS football. I bring it up because sometimes at the gym, after that last rep on the bench, or after the forty-fifth (or sixtieth or thirtieth, depending on the day) minute on the elliptical, I catch a brief whiff of that same feeling - I've put maximum time between myself and the next grueling workout. This is a weird thought to have, in particular, leading up to those last few bench presses; hard to keep moving that maximum weight for the day when your orientation is completely towards not doing it any more. All of this points to the necessity of constant renewed goal-setting lest your routine become Sisyphean, but it also points to the following section - if every action is oriented towards other goals, be they Ultimate or pleasure or health or whatever, wherein lies the "real" value?

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Zeal & Anosmia

Whence the drive to do things? Zeal for particular pursuits, like the locus of love or the origin of creative ideas, seems to be one of those mysterious rooted-in-nothing things that nonetheless explains everything. I have been kicking around the idea of a very, very loose framework of a novel entitled Anosmia in which a character goes into surgery to get his sense of smell repaired with the intention of enhancing his worldly experience only to inadvertently destroy whatever the fount of zeal is. This is clearly Smelltardian kinds of autobiographical, as I both can't smell and sometimes (like more people than will admit, I suspect) my zeal drops out - I look at the expanse and just don't have an inkling, an inherent "calling" or whathaveyou, of what to pursue. I kinda feel like the Anosmic lead has limited options in the achieve enlightenment, give up entirely or press-through-in-a-constant-state-of-frustration trichotomy, and I'm definitely leaning toward the latter. In the meantime, fear not, I dig Ultimate, music, and school and philosophy and all kinds of things - I suppose *I* can still smell a bit*, though that probably doesn't make for very interesting reading.

* - Beck would agree - ZING ME!

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The Wire Has a Fat Detective, You May Have Noticed

The Wire is, by all reports, the height of television quality, and it is for many reasons excellent - tight story lines ("too tight?" asks Beck), stellar performances, and an avoidance of expository dialog that evokes an attitude of respect for the brainspace of the viewing audience. Still, it's rife with preposterous elements - the constant eating / porn-mag reading of the fat detective, the overt greying of the stressed-out mayoral candidate's hair, the exaggerated "Omar lives by a CODE!" emphasis, the McNultian "I've cleaned up my act!" smirks - that force me to ask WHY DO THAT? I recognize my tendency to nitpick, I suppose the things that sore-thumb here are more indicative of the relative health of the rest of this excellent show, and we admittedly are only partway through season 4, so maybe the best is yet to come. But for all The Wire's composition and refined, near-Shakespearean air, there are still these cringe-worthy moments that jar the experience. So much is smartly left unsaid, why say these obvious things?

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Frustration, Aggravation Is Getting to You

I fight on a daily basis not to have my selfhood defined by frustration; I lose often. Beck called me on one of my WHY DO THAT? rants the other day regarding the healthcare provided on campus - the details are unimportant, but I was irked that they were basing so much of their thinking on a test with obviously confounding variables - and she's right, I get aggravated at these little mistakes and it dictates the remainder of the experience for me. So I can watch that and try to acc-entuate the positive. But what do you do about e.g. the intractable problem of trying to teach undergrads that are missing their second grade skills? I am meta-frustrated at how I am supposed to deal with pursuing a career that seems to involve a lot of farce on its educational side; that is all.

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The Data-Driven Life / The Reframing Capacity of Obsession

In the midst of all my calorie-counting, food diary-keeping adventures, Jenny pointed me in the direction of this article about, as it's called, "The Data-Driven Life." This little sub-post is really just a link, as it's an interesting little article. But I'm struck by the article's blase dismissal of the shift in framing that occurs when one alters one lifestyle so as to accommodate all that number-crunching. True, the effectiveness of all that data tracking is remarkable, but that tracking alters the way you experience the world, and it's unclear to me how you even begin to weigh that as a benefit v. cost - seems like you would need to, not to use the idea twice in two paragraphs, develop tracking for the tracking. I just know that I spend some non-zero amount of time each day looking at nutrition labels, and more important than the time lost is the way it has reframed my everyday experience - I don't know how to begin to evaluate whether the "health" I've gained is worth the unquantifiable alteration in my subjective experience of food and meals.

* - You could raise a similar point about blogging a life vis a vis living it. You *could.*

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Flags of Our Fathers

Requires a pic:

We have an Arizona flag hanging off the newly mounted flagpole on the front of our house. Now, some of you know what this is about: CBS Southwest is just carrying on the vexillological traditions of one iPJ, no further meaning intended, other than perhaps a generalized appreciation for our now home-state. But if you're not one of those in the know - more specifically, if you're a Phoenician passerby - you may be tempted to see this as some kind of ardent support of Arizona. And, you know, its laws. Outside of onomatopoeia, acontextual words are pretty meaningless; what about flags?

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Phew. There you go. Hope you found that interesting and/or more aesthetically pleasing. Now it's time to reorient myself to another value backing a goal worth pursuing. Until next time...

Do the Whirlwind

It's getting harder and harder to find time to blog ... ugh. Here are some bullet point things of note:

• Saw Inglourious Basterds, though I may have mentioned this already. Fantastic. It had the usual effect of making me emphatic and enveloped in the movie AND making me hate the majority of other movies for failure to try.
  
• Case in point: saw The Time Traveler's Wife a couple of nights ago. Taken from the framework of "crappy romance movie," it might have been in the C- range. But given how badly it fell short of the book - and how conveniently it altered the few plot elements that gave the book some depth - it falls in the F-minus category. Beck's angry quote at the credits: "THAT'S NOT HOW IT ENDED! {Sigh} Mojo.*
• Double case in point - we just finished the first season of True Blood. I'm sorry, America, I don't get it. If someone wants to fill me in on how this is not just vampire porn with inconsistent metaphysics, bad acting, unlikeable characters and cheesy, predictable plotlines, fill me in, I'm all ears. Seriously, this show is barely being redeemed right now by Lafayette and Sam, so... anyone?
  
• In the non-entertainment division, I played pickup Ultimate for the first time on Sunday, played pretty okay and survived, and so played in our first Fall League game with the dubiously named "Confessions of a Huckaholic."** We got out ahead quick 4-0, stretched that lead to 9-3 and never really looked back, winning 15-10 in the end. Considering I'm hobbling around the field at 60% or so - knee's still sore, though manageable (and actually gets better as I play) - I played pretty damn well, firing off a number of scores, catching a few goals and making no less than three layout plays on the night. It's VOTS with a bunch of newbies, so the level of play isn't always inspiring, but we had a good time. Beck is on my team by my fiat, so that's sweet - I tried (and failed) to get her the disc on a few occasions, so we'll have to work on this love connection. More detailed stuff on this in the future.
• Speaking of the Beck, she is kicking ass lately, running often, Yogaing most mornings, generally ruling the world. We went out for a really great dinner at a local Jamaican joint this weekend and followed up the dining out with some A+ dining in, a delicious brunch of eggs, bacon, sausage, french toast and potatoes. Combine that with some great grillin' of late, and it's the high life on Flower Street.
• Speaking of the high life, I got to perform one of my favorite rituals yesterday, the purchase album on day of release and blare it in the parking lot game. I will fill you in on what album in another post, but it should be fairly obvious.
  

* - Mojo is Beck's froyo addiction, in case that hasn't been made clear here yet.
** - Having just come off the AA-intensity of Infinite Jest, I'm not sure how much I condone mocking alcoholism recovery. That said, I suppose alcoholism is sort of a traditional comic treasure-trove, comedy in misery, so you can't get too upset.

That's about it for now, just wanted to throw out a quick update. School is going well - getting a lot done, classes are entertaining if not perfect - and hopefully I'm on the path to some form of enlightenment, though I doubt it :). Have a great 9.09.09 everybody, and don't blow too much cash on the Lads today.

Simpsons v. Family Guy*

* - Previously recorded. I heard a lot of Family Guy quips from the young guys this weekend, and it made me want to cry.

This argument actually comes up a lot, that the Simpsons lost their edge a long time ago and the golden age is long past. I won't debate that - the Simpsons golden age (roughly seasons 3-7) was ridiculously better than the stuff they're putting out now. But the stuff they're putting out now is still very high quality, if a bit more formulaic than you might like. But any program that has characters go off to church camp "to learn to be more judgmental" or uses backward messages in Boy-Band songs to recruit for the U.S. Navy has not completely lost its edge.

Family Guy is a good show, don't get me wrong - good characters, ridiculous plotlines, hilarious moments, etc. - but I have always felt that have a bit too much of a carpet bombing approach to comedy in that they throw 500 jokes in your face in an episode hoping that 200 will be actually funny. And yeah, those 200 are funny, and some will make you fall out of your chair laughing - but for me, anyways, that's accompanied by a lot of moments that just fall flat or are somewhat uncomfortable and embarrassing. Not Larry David embarrassing, but getting there.

I also think a lot of the humor on Family Guy is shock driven, outlandish for outlandish-ness's sake rather than thought-provoking. Not that there's anything wrong with that (hahaha) - i nearly fell off my couch laughing when Stewie (the eerily mature and evil baby) got locked in the women's dressing room, got excited at all the, um, nudeness and said, "oh, my wee wee seems to have undergone rigor mortis." I mean, yeah, I wasn't expecting that, and it's amazing that the censors didn't stop that, so it was hilarious. But when you get bombarded with tons and tons of jokes like that per show, it can feel a little cheap.

Also don't forget that the Simpsons has been around FOR-EVER. And, btw, has never been canceled - not that being canceled is always indicative of how good a show is (See: Arrested Development). But it might point out that enough people felt, at least initially, that Family Guy was too much of a Simpsons rip-off when it originally came out.

Again, I don't mean to overly knock the family guy; it routinely cracks me up, and their pop cultural referencing and general "anything goes" comedy approach are bold and occasionally inspired (like when the son got dragged through the produce section at the grocery store and his world turned into an A Ha video; I mean, that's priceless). But I would really argue that the two shows have wildly different philosophies - The Simpsons, Halloween episodes and the occasional meta-gag aside, is a family sit-com that happens to be a cartoon (a fact that they abuse for comedy on a routine basis). But part of the charm is that it ultimately feels real and/or represents elements of our culture that are definitely out there. Plus you really care about the characters, and they can and often do work episodes to play for the sentimental and emotional angle as much as anything. They'll then turn around and ultimately mock that, but still - there are episodes where the resolution b/w Bart & Lisa or Homer and Marge is really the big point.

I don't see that with Family Guy - i see a show more oriented around sight-gags and general cartoon universe mayhem (i mean, a talking dog and baby are fixtures of the show, come on) that uses its characters to achieve its comedic ends rather than treat them as human (or canine). And that's fine - i don't think it's a fault, I just think they are not trying to be that, especially now, which should further distance them from the Simpsons.

In sum - both very good shows, both animated families, but the shows really take a different approach to comedy. And both are good. Family Guy needs to be around for a long, long time before it will even approach the pantheon status of the Simpsons, though. I mean, I can have entire conversations of Simpsons quotes EASILY, and I can't do that with Family Guy just yet. Among other reasons, "rigor mortis" and "wee wee" just don't come up that often in daily conversation.

p.s. interestingly enough - the two shows have lightheartedly feuded with one another lately, both largely attacking the Peter = Homer angle. Good stuff, and I think both shows realize that direct comparison is really moot.

Should We Talk About the Government?

Hi Hi ... Hi Hi.

Just took the dogs for a walk at 6 in the morning... and it's only 91 degrees. I couldn't bring myself to go to pickup yesterday, my elbow was still sore (feels better today, thanksforasking) and the computothermometer read 117 (!!) at 5:00. I seriously doubt we would have had more than 6 people there anyways, and to drive 20+ miles to play box and die of heat exhaustion is just... well, let's just say you're welcome mother earth.

The plan for today, written here to hold me to it - do some serious damage on Wimsatt's Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. It's general claim is that reductionism introduces biases into our thinking and that we need to reconceive our understanding of the world as being a heuristic enterprise, not one that pins down TRUTH; i.e., every method of learning about the world is going to have built in strengths and weaknesses, biases and focuses that give you a limited glimpse. Interesting and promising so far; hopefully by the end of the day I'll have conquered it.

Beck and I finished season 2 of Burn Notice last night, a glitzy, Miami-boobed-up spy version of MacGyver, which sits entirely in the "entertaining" portion of the entertainment spectrum. There are funny, cool characters, a reasonable over-arching plot, and plenty of action and bad-assness, but we'd be the first to admit that it's a ridiculous, dumb show. Ah, well; we finished Season 4.0 of Battlestar Galactica and are just waiting for the final season 4.5 to come out; in the meantime, I think we are entitled to our goofy pleasures. Plus, the characters, while somewhat static and one dimensional, are FUNNY, and you can't pass up listening to Ash* crack wise on a nightly basis. We missed finishing season 2 in time to catch the first ep of season 3 on Hulu, so we may be forced to buy an ep or two if we're too impatient to wait for the DVDs...

* - Shop Smart - S-Mart.

Got froyo (I am so hip, yo) with D & C and D's parents on Friday - good times, but by far the craziest news of the night was that D's parents unexpectedly put an offer on a house right around the corner from all of us. Dan's ability to not crack Everybody Loves Raymond jokes in this circumstance impressed. I don't think they'll be coming down for a few years, but when the reality show starts filming in 2012, remember that the seeds were laid here.

Alright, work-time. Here goes. YEAH!

The Times

They Are a-Changin':

New Simpsons intro for HDTV. I've been noticing that shows are filming in HD and not caring how awkward the shots look for those of us with the ol' 4:3 - cut off foreheads, uncomfortable zooms, half bodies, the whole deal. While the super sharp clarity of the new medium is dazzling, it's really the wider shot that's starkly altering the form. I suppose we'll have to cave and go for the new deal sometime in the next year or so, if for no other reason so that we can see both participants in TV conversations. Ugh...

Five by Five! Again!

Very happy to see another Joss Whedon show on the air, and even happier to have it star not one but two of my favorite Buffyverse feministas, Faith aka Eliza Dushku AND Fred aka Amy Acker:


(And trust me, if you're thinking this is just an excuse to post pics of Buffy babes on the blog, know that these are two of the more modest entries in Internet-wide image searches for Eliza Dushku and Amy Acker. Plus, if the point were just to post pics of Buffy babes, then I'd HAVE to post Cordelia somewhere, too, right?)

The show seems pretty solid - my first impression was just gratitude at the actual effort put forth in the show to create character arcs off the bat and generate an interesting universe within which to operate. If you haven't heard or seen, the general premise is that there is a weird corporation (that looks suspiciously as though it purchased the building vacated by Wolfram & Hart) that has a slew of attractive though vaguely zombie-ish people walking around in yoga clothes. They are agents who have next to no personality, allowing them to be "programmed" with various personality traits in order to achieve missions - some of the missions are your run of the mill "rescue the kidnapped child" type thing, while others seem to be "give a guy a nice weekend." When the missions are completed, the agents go to get a "treatment" that zaps their memory clean. So clearly, there's a lot of moral ambiguity - how did this corporation get these models volunteers? - though the individual workers in the firm claim to be in the business of making the world a better place. Eliza plays Echo, a character who after a single epsiode is already exhibiting signs that the system doesn't work entirely - she has flashes of memoryies that weren't quite erased - and who also has some sort of checkered past that has yet to be revealed.

To don the philosopher hat for a while, interesting that a Joss Whedon show - normally such a locus of talks of souls and love and good and evil and the like - is operating on a materialist model of mind where personality, ability, memories, etc. are all reprogrammable by computer circuitry. Seemingly reducing the human condition to neural circuitry and electric potentials? Maybe? Unless, natch, that machine has some mystic soul component - or, better, if the fact that it is failing is a pointer toward the immaterial. We shall see.

I have read some criticism here and there that the premise - women who can be used for dates, whose memories can be conveniently erased so the next day they remember nothing - has a sort of nasty roofies-referencing undertone to it. Whedon has such a history of pro-feminist motifs that this seems to be a little bit of a paranoid charge, but the idea, once planted, is pretty sketchy seeming. Still, the initial mission in the pilot - where Echo certainly seemed to be serving as a tailor-made escort - gave the entire episode a weird vibe.

And beyond that, the pilot - which was reportedly reshot to provide more exposition - handed the goings on to the viewer on a platter in a much more overt manner than the typical Whedon vehicle. Lots of scenes where characters stopped and explained in speech exactly what they do and exactly the moral dilemmas involved - it wasn't quite an expository voice over, but it did have a little bit of LCD. AH, well - the second episode is supposed to be the original pilot and much better than the first. We'll see next week.

So I'm down with the show - it's got that energetic vibe and big setup that's given Joss his cult-god status - but I understand some of the complaints thus far. Interesting if they'll be able to flesh out the "erased memories" ideas without resorting to sci-fi silliness. And interesting to see if there will be anything approaching the interlocking chacter arcs of the other Mutant Enemy efforts, since so far Echo seems even more of an overwhelming center to the show than Buffy of Angel ever were. Give it time, I suppose.

Was there anything else I was supposed to include?

Classic Pregame Speech

Thanks Verbs - this is the speech that our coach at Tufts would give before big games against Shelbyville aka whomever we were playing that day. I get chills just thinking about it.

Merry Tuberculosis!

Beck and I had a nice Christmas Eve - she got home at about 3 after a partial day at work and started preparing things for tonight's Christmas dinner. We went for an early dinner at Giuseppe's, a local Italian joint, and it's a good thing we did as they closed up shop pretty much immediately after we left at 6:45. Christmas Eve smack in the middle of a largely mass-going population turns out to be not the busiest time for dining; bonus for us, because we had the entire place to ourselves. Nice. (This is actually the second time in a week where we went out for a date and "had the entire place to ourselves" - last week we watched Bolt in a theater all by ourselves. We are either highly exclusive or really lame). Really good if small portioned food (or maybe their portions are normal, and Vinny T's has wrecked my sense of scale) - bruschetta for appetizers, Beck had ravioli, and I had olive oil seaping mac and cheese. Yum. We stopped by the Block on the way home and rented some flicks for a quiet evening.

After my failings, Beck managed to find Chanukah candles at her Super-Fry's. Turns out they were not in the Holiday section, nor were they in the candles section. They were in the Hispanic / Jewish food section, between the matza and tortillas. You know, because Jewish people eat candles. Perhaps a topic for another post, but I HATE GROCERY STORES and their WACK ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLES. It is a scientific fact that I have wasted 4.72 days of my life wandering around grocery stores searching for products that should have been in obvious places but were not. Oh, charcoal? That's not next to the hamburger buns, it's next to the Liquid Plumber. Jelly, you say? As in peanut butter and? You say you looked in the bread, peanut butter, and fruit aisles? Silly boy, that is clearly a canned vegetable! ARGH. Anyways, Beck to the rescue, and we had a nice four candle menora setup for traditional Christmas Eve ambience. Many stoichiometry problems were solved. At least in our heads.

We watched Hancock; I'll review it later. Surprisingly dark and short. Unsurprisingly stupid. Actually, scratch that; the first half was pretty cool. Things fell apart after his transformation. I won't ruin anything else. Anyways, a reasonably pleasant way to spend the holiday night. Beck and I then tackled the NYT Crossword puzzle and kicked its BUTT. Finished a Thursday in something like 16 minutes. Huzzah! We listened to Elvis's Christmas Album while doing it (which explains the King appearance in the previous post); just a nice homey scene. I'm surprised there aren't more Norman Rockwell paintings of people with menoras and Hancock on the TV and Mac laptops listening to mp3s on their other computer. All we needed was a fireplace to complete the picture. Sigh. Capped things off with an episode of Ugly Betty, a show we've been told is good but smacks of predictable lameness to me thus far. Perhaps I am not the target audience. ANyhoo, it was then on to bed, as Beck has to work at the ER today. :(. (She does get off at 2, though). I stayed up reading 100 Years for a little while; I've got about 100 pages left.

So I'm home alone on Christmas morning with the dogs. But it's okay. You know why? Because it's a VERY JIMI CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Now playing: Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child (Slight Return)

Slight Respite: A Misc Mix

Trekked into school today and put in the last couple of hours on a quick research project I was doing for Jason. 'Twas about some of the neuroscience aspects of using model organisms for research. Not my favorite topic, and I didn't do a bang-up job, but I got something down on paper, so there's a physical thing to build from. Always helpful. Given that he and everybody else are absent for the holidays, I'm going to work from home until at least after Christmas day. Wahoo.

(In other school-related news, I got my grades back from my papers today, and everything went swimmingly to the tune of a 4.12 GPA for my first semester. Wahoo Two. Before you get too excited, I am told everyone and their dogs get As in grad school, so all this really means is that I am mediocrely competent and didn't overtly offend anyone's academic senses. Go Team Nyet).

Good Sunday - got some reading done in the morning and played a solid couple of hours of Ultimate in the PM. I ended the day with a crazy back of the endzone full layout catch on a big huck from Vince; tres exciting Ultimate action to win the game. Much better than regular frisbee, indeed. More importantly, I talked to Aaron yesterday and he had a much better time at his Austin Ultimate league. He's getting back into the swing of things after a long break from bigger, whiter, floatier (BETTER) disc sports, and after a shocker of a first week, it sounds like he is back on track for glory. We'll be sure to get some intense training in over New Year's and turn him into an indomitable beast. A forehand flickin', chump-skyin', layout-Din' beast. Raw; scream.

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This is a quick interlude to allude to things TIP. For those of you who don't know, Mike NTPB and I attend the Duke Talent Identification Program during our wayward youth. It is best defined as nerd camp; we took college-esque classes like Film and Intro to Philosophy while hanging out with dorks of our own ilk and girls who would talk to us. Unbelievably formative, at least for me; among other things, this was where I picked up Ultimate and a penchant for dancing the Time Warp. I'll save a detailed rundown of it for a rainy day post, but the things you need to know are this: 1, we had this friend Franklin who apparently has used the powers of e-mail to dominate Hollywood. I can't even explain this; Franklin was a shy child genius who seemed destined for I.R. glory or something, and now he's a bedreadlocked big guy behind the scenes. Who knew. That link is probably wildly uninteresting to you, but... hmmmm, let's say that Mr. Rogers turning out to have fronted a punk band in the late seventies has about equal "WHAT???" value. Anyways, thing 2 that you should know is that every year ended with a talent show. Mike mentioned this as his most embarrassing moment the other day in the comments, and what is scary to me is that I have no recollection of this whatsoever: we played G'n'R's version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," complete with Mike playing Axl and a call and response section. And apparently Mike couldn't hear himself or the audience or anything - no monitors at the TIP talent show, unshockingly - and so he essentially did a call and response sans response. Holding the mic out to the crowd and everything. Oh wow. This is just stupendous. And I can't believe I don't have it trapped between my ears somewhere. So next time you need to calm yourself down before speaking in public, just think to yourself, "as long as I don't warble "knock knock knockin' on heaven's dowowowowoorrr, hey hey yeah" and hold the mic out to a cricket crowd, I am okay." Yikes. Serious bonus points to Mike for surviving that.
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We capped Friday with dinner with D&C for the first time in a while - hit up a place called Ticoz which had some reasonably tasty southwest fare and some OH TRES CHIC attitude as well. Another one of those restaurants - maybe not as bad as Ra Sushi in this department - that made me feel like I wasn't anywhere near cool enough to be there. Fun times with D&C regardless, and we headed back to their place to watch the truly bizarre 2008 European MTV music awards despues. Why bizarre? Um, I had a dream once that Jared Leto crappily interviewed miscellaneous rock stars, Katy Perry¹ screamed her brains out to introduce acts called the Ting Tings, Kanye West dressed like Carlton from the Fresh Prince circa 1991, Kid Rock ruled a place called the Irony Free Zone², a slew of wackos gave shoutouts to Liverpool, Bono verbally climaxed as he introduced Paul McCartney, and then Paul actually showed up to pump his fist in half-assed they paid me to be here triumph. But the dream WAS REAL. Yikes.

I can't remember past that. It was raining a lot last week, as I recall. Anyhoo, I'll try and get some posting done over the next few days. Hope everyone's having a great holiday. And a big happy birthday eve to the Dadster!

¹ Don't know Katy Perry, eh? Well, that's amazing, because her trite songs have been all over the place this year. You should know that she has a white-washed weak drunk girls night out lesbian experience song and another that perpetuates the use of the term gay as a mild derogative. Did I mention she's a former Christian rock artist turned pop-sex prostitutestarlett? You stay genuine, Katy. Let's just let the allmusic review of her album describe her relative place in the trash pop spectrum: "she sinks to crass, craven depths that turn One of the Boys into a grotesque emblem of all the wretched excesses of this decade."

² As dubbed by MC Dan. I don't think that's original*, but it quite aptly describes the fur wearing blues mangler ripping off Warren Zevon and Lynyrd Skynyrd simultaneously in his sad sack summer single. I like that the same show welcoming him as a legend follows up with Bono and PM. That's just great.

* - It has come to my attention that "Irony Free Zone" is a DFW-ism.

Week Eleven of the Philosophing

We'll week-in-reverse this bad boy:

Sunday - put the final touches on a first draft for my law paper. A lot of time, probably way more than would indicate any efficiency on my part, was put into that beast, so it was nice to have it done.

Saturday - Wrote the arguments and conclusion for the paper. This took pretty much all day. Blar.

Friday - Great day. Came in early and polished off the "cultural arguments" section of the law paper. Went to my seminar class on Gender, Race & Technology and just had a great discussion, a lot of which was prompted by me and my impatience with people who don't talk. We were missing a few of the Bio & Society people due to conferences, so here was a high potential for some sitting and staring. I threw out some controversial ideas just to wake people up, and it completely worked, got people heated and bantering and all that. We talked about sexual language "inherent" in nuclear war, the appropriateness of fictional work as an academic tool, and different concepts in racial genetics. Cool stuff. A couple of professors were visiting, and though the tendency for them is to sit back and observe, they jumped right in. Awesome.

Followed this up with lunch with the HSD crew, then went to a presentation on nanotechnology and 4th amendment rights by Alan Rubel. He was one of the visiting professors from class, and in his presentation he essentially argued that nanotechnology will actually serve to improve privacy concerns. Tres cool. Ran back from that to the lab for about five minutes, then had a quick meeting with Dr. Steve Hoffman about his neuroimmunophilsophy course. Which sounds excellent - he's interested in concepts of self and mind as understood via immunological processes / pathologies. I'll probably take it.

And capped that day off by running home to take care of the dogs and then jetting over to Scottsdale to play some softball. We won both games big (20-1, 16-3), and then Beck and I grabbed dinner at Los Olivos. Yay for a fun end to the week.

Thursday - Spent the bulk of the day doing the reading for Friday's seminar course, though I also managed to get in a bit of preliminary work on the cultural arguments section of the paper. I also had a fun pizza lunch with Mark and Melissa and then met a bio student named Jake for coffee at 1. He is interested in collaborating on a cool sounding bio-philosophy project on the conscious experience as limited / defined by biological factors - exactly the sort of "informed existentialism" stuff I might be interested in. So a good, productive meeting, and I'm glad I'm not the only yahoo who thinks in this way - even a bona fide scientist type has noticed the problem! Yeah!

Wednesday - An entire day devoted to finishing up the legal arguments in the evolution controversy. I also went to a law class on "forbidden science" where we essentially learned that we're all going to die from bioterrorist attacks, and how! A sort of a bummerish day.

Tuesday - A day spent entirely writing and citing legal papers. I think I took a 20 minute break to toss the frisbee, but otherwise it was nose to grindstone from 7:15 - about 7 at night. Argh.

Monday - A morning spent on the aforementioned Alan Rubel's paper and a presentation on it from John in HSD. Law class featured discussions of democratic decision making and jury competence, focusing a little bit on genetically modifed foods. Otherwise I polished the outline for the law paper.

There you have it. A busy, productive week. There's alot of reading and meetings and whatnot that I glossed over in there, too. And lawn-mowing, Ultimate, and watching two (Beck-chosen!) movies, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and You Don't Mess with the Zohan, which were entertaining (the former much more so than the latter) when they weren't abjectly stupid (the latter, period). As a redemption, Beck also grabbed Pushing Daisies, a nice macabre show whose first two episodes were very solid.

More later. Time to get back to work...

Smokin' SNL

I caught a little bit of SNL after Game 3 the other night, and shoutouts are due - Jon Hamm (aka Don Draper, Conquistador Extraordinaire) was the host, and they put up at least a consistently funny first 45 minutes. A couple of highlights below; you can click through to see other parts of the episode, but here were some of my favorites:

And WOW, I am not sure if the rest of the nation found this quite as hilarious as I did, as I'm sure having a caucasian in-law playing reggae for a living adds quite a bit to this. But there's one moment in this vid (toward the end, with about 20 seconds left) that makes the entire thing worth it. Enjoy, and have a groovy Monday.

Being for the Benefit of My Loser In-Laws

¡Hombres Enojados!

Beck and I started watching a new television series called ¡Hombres Enojados! And I'm having real trouble understanding it! It's a Spanish television series without subtitles, and man do they say some funny things. I mean, "hola" instead of "hello?" "Musical" instead of "musical?" "Las vidas del pendejos" instead of "American Consumer Culture?" Oh, that crazy moon language.

What's worse is that the show is all about Spanish conquistadors and their boats. And how they were constantly trying to make their Spanish items marketable to a mass audience, like, "Hey everybody, buy our armored breastplates and matching helmets, they're bueno!" And they constantly mistreat their ships - I mean, really, it's like they don't even know that the ships are what keeps them afloat! Crazy! Loco! Mad! I mean, Enojado!

Now, I took Spanish in high school, and a little in college, so that's not the problem. The problem is that I have never been a conquistador, and I didn't live in the 15th-17th centuries, so I have no hope of possibly comprehending anything that's going on. It's like there's a wildly different social dynamic than the limited one to which I have become accustomed, and as a consequence, their plot elements baffle me. I mean, take the pilot episode, for example. Ponce de Leon is all walkin' around, saying woah, I don't know if I should sleep on this ship or that! What's right, what's wrong? And I'm all, "Dude, why don't you just take an airplane?"

I will say that it seems that the show sometimes makes it point a little too overtly. Like, we all know nowadays that chewing gun powder is bad for you because it can blow your face off. But, in like every scene, all the conquistadores chew gun powder! Man, they were so stupid back then. The ships chew gun powder and drink arsenic, too, even when they are carrying smaller ships. Stupid ships.

Beck has a somewhat different viewpoint on all of this. Allow me to try to represent it pictorially:

I think she might be onto something there. Then again, I can't relate to or comprehend this show, so it would probably behoove me not to comment.

So, I guess I recommend checking out ¡Hombres Enojados! Maybe if you are a conquistador, or a ship, and you lived in the appropriate century, and you speak the language, you'll enjoy it.

Disparate Topics

1: Another year, another loss for the NL. Snap.

Quick comment on something that probably went entirely unseen, or at least entirely uncommented upon: in the bottom of the 11th. Ian Kinsler hit a single and tried to steal second, but was thrown out. Kinda. He looked safe anyways, but the replay showed that Tejada did not even tag him - pulled the ol' "slap tag" routine and got the call. Now, this being America and the land of honesty and fair play and equal opportunity and aren't sports grand and don't they teach us all kinds of good-heareted lessons and everything else, Tejada immediately went to the umpire and explained, "No sir, I in fact missed the tag, and Mr. Kinsler should be declared safe." So they let Kinsler stay at second, and he scored two batters later when J.D. Drew singled up the middle. So the game ended in the 11th.

Oddly, though, all of the papers say it went until the 15th this morning. Maybe I mis-saw something.

So Tejada clearly knows he missed that tag, but he got away with it, and no one blinked an eye. That's clearly within the realm of "gamesmanship," but why? Looks like Tejada just used deceit to gain a competitive advantage. So while it falls under gamesmanship, it also falls under "win at all costs." Which *demands* the question: is anyone thinking of the children?

2: So beck and I, lacking inspiration and high brow prejudices, have watched a few episodes of Last Comic Standing. And there's this duo called "God's Pottery." Here's a clip that gives pretty much the whole shtick:

So it's pretty much open season mocking of the entire "Chirstian Acoustic Youth Group" movement. Which is interesting on the one hand because it's a group mocking Christianity on primetime network television - these guys are hardly pulling David Cross atheistic critiques of religion here, but still, not exactly family-friendly to a significant percentage of the country's population. But the other hand is that it's just a very limited shtick - these guys pull it off well, but it's one joke over and over. And over, but that is what's truly surreal about it - on this purported reality show, they keep up the act the entire time! Ridiculous, and made for some bizarre situations, like when they were in a "Yo Mama" joke telling contest and just kept complimenting their opponent's mother. Not to mention that they theoretically acted in this manner off-camera, too, just in normal living situations with the other contestants. Nice - they almost get points for me for some quality theater of the absurd stuff, but fall just a hair short because it's just frankly not quite absurd enough. Anyways, they were eliminated last week essentially because their one joke finally ran out of steam, and I'm pretty happy, because should I choose to waste more time with this show, I'd prefer it not to be at the hands of a one-off act.

(Train of thought to be continued in a moment - but in the meantime, speaking of "theater of the absurd," looking into the music of The Fortress of Solitude led me to an avant-garde group from the 70s-present called The Residents. They're famous - you may recognize them from their iconic eyeball masks - and I recognize that I am way off the cool path here - but check out this video. And be warned: WEIRD. Divinely so. I think I'm in love).

Getting back to the "acoustic comics" theme - thanks to an afternoon spent in Rochester with Meghan and Greg and an iPod hooked up to a TV, you can't think of "acoustic comedy duo" and no give props to these guys. In fact, I've probably posted this before, but here it is again:

"Be more constructive with your feedback." Indeed. Those dudes are much funnier / more talented / more musical, etc., than God's Pottery imho. And more versatile (if by "versatile" you mean, "can play funny acoustic guitar songs from other genres").

So compare and contrast with this guy, a seventeen year old acoustic guitar / musical comedian from Boston. Big props: witty lyrics, wordplay, and definite presence. Un-props: if you watch a bunch of his videos, you'll start to see a pattern of immature mugging and a consistent reliance on the same kind of jokes. And some pretty poor-taste jokes.

Oh, and if weren't for all the lewd references and disgusting, sophomoric imagery, I would totally dedicate this to Zil because the topic here is, loosely, high school math. Consider the preceding sentence a warning on two fronts (nerdy and illicit content). Btw, if you're looking for the "made soda come out of my nose line," it's the one that starts off "squaring numbers are (sic) just like women..."

In completely unrelated news: t-minus two until Ben and Ali!!! HUZZAH.

Overheard on the TV

Announcer: "Lots of senior citizens are wondering where they can find a few extra dollars these days. If you are over 62 and own your home, then you may have heard the news about the exciting new opportunity of a reverse mortgage."

Confused Elderly Lady: "A reverse mortgage? What's that?"

Announcer: "It's a mortgage... that's reversed!"

I kid you not.

Beck and I both had the day off today, so after I played some fun morning Ultimate, I came back and showered, and we went to see Get Smart. Predictably stupid, predictably Hollywood drivel blah blah blah, but cute in its own right, and that Steve Carrell is a funny guy. Hats off to a well executed if not exactly culturally enriching performance.

Shaven, Still Not Stirring

Heat continues to rule the day / headlines here in Sunny, Sunny Azz. Took the pups in to get a fur cut today and they're still lounging around the house like sweaty Cleopatras. No relief in sight. We get what we deserve!

Am continuing on the road-blazing trail: I indeed ran 3 miles on Sunday morning to complete the 30 for last week, and have since run 7 on the roads and 4 on the treadmill and another 3 jogging / sprinting combo this morning. So that's 14 for this week, 44 for the one month time frame. Yeeha!

As a consequence, though, I am hella tired. Barely made it through my scant tutoring hours today, though that is admittedly 50% due to exhaustion, 50% due to sheer boredom with all aspects of the SAT. Blar.

Tired as I am, I am not touching the Beckian levels of last Saturday. She came home from work, we started to eat some of the leftover pizza from Friday and next thing I knew, she was muttering, "I'm just going to rest my head," and falling asleep. At 6:30, or thereabouts. So much for the Deadwood marathon. We both effectively hung out around the house on Sunday, stopping momentarily to lunge in the pool. Man-o-man, no fun this time o' year. We did managed to take in a few more Deadwood eps and are now just about at the thrilling conclusion of season 3, looking forward to some Hearst-blood. We shall see.

Speaking of blood: poor Beck got attacked by a clawless cat today who sank its fangs into her hands multiple times. She then had to go to the clinic to get antibiotics, which apparently came in the form of shots... in her hands. Ouch. Occupational hazard, but still, no good. I am taking the dinner reins tonight in order to help her rest her paws.

And speaking of dinner: Beck is kicking all kinds of culinary butt these days. Yummy salmon on Sunday, turkey burgers last night... all delicious. I am reminded every day how much I WIN.

Speaking of, there's a leftover turkey burger calling my name for lunch. Mmmmmm...

(Btw: some reviews are slowly making their was down the Ballad Factory conveyor belt. SO you have that to look forward to. Some of them will come from my lauded "And Civilization" series. Get psyched!).

Unbearable Cuteness

Last night's episode of The Office featured a super-sappy but aw-shucksy moment between Pam and Jim in which they joked about moving in together and then about Jim proposing to her. They cut away to the documentary-interview style shot where Jim says, "I'm serious about this; I bought this one week after we started dating," and then holds up an engagement ring. The Beck gushed. The following ensued:

B: Awwww, JIM!!! I love him. I'm going to marry him.
N, in squeaky whisper: I'm sitting right here!!!
B: Ha. It's okay. I can have Jim, and you can have Pam.
N: WOOHOO!!!
B: (Look of Death).
N: Ha! I thought of that look, and then it happened!
B: (Look persists).

Hilarious. Of course, at risk of personal injury, I decide which pics to post:

The State of Sports Reporting

Overheard on Sportscenter just now (severely paraphrased):

Buster Olney: The last two days, scientists and medical professionals have testified about the lack of evidence for HGH improving performance in athletes.

Steve Phillips: That can't be the case. The proof that HGH improves performance is the fact that athletes use it. If it didn't, then they wouldn't be using it. Also, HGH improves eyesight, so these older guys are able to see the ball better.

Bob Levy: Really this all boils down to the fact that HGH speeds up the healing process. The body has a natural healing process, and athletes shouldn't be doing things that interfere with that.

Join us next week, when we discuss how bleeding cures cancer, because otherwise why would people have done it, and why ice has been banned from MLB locker rooms. Also, we'll learn how orange skittles improve your hearing.

Seriously - we have congress testimony from medical experts, and we here at ESPN are deferring to this pair of BS spewing morons for analysis? Entry 32726 on why mass epistemology is pointless exercise.

For the record, there is no standard, scientific-type evidence that HGH improves performance, strength, or eyesight. The logical fallacy of "they do it therefore it must work" is obvious. And hmmmm, it certainly seems that injecting a bolus of cortisone into one's joints (or reconstructing someone's elbow) also falls in the "interfering with the natural healing process" category. Quick, somebody suspend Curt Schilling!

Minor Adjustments

Phew. Just got back from a little rehaul on the old nyetjones.org site. So little that you won't even notice it. All I really did was change the rating scheme (at least on the reference pages, if not within the reviews themselves) so that everything is multiples of five - i.e., MASH is no longer a "68," it's a "70." This makes it a lot easier for me to think through the relative ratings (I effectively changed it to a 20 point scale), plus it garners cheers from Shavano Creek because we can finally equate MASH with Knocked Up. Thank goodness.

More importantly, I got tired of staring at the electronic pile of reviews that I have yet to do, so i quickly reviewed everything I've seen / read in the past 8 months in this little ditty:

8 months!

So that's that. I also am hereby publicly promising to get back on my review bandwagon, because I know that's what the people want. The now greatly shortened pile includes Murikami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and the excellent movie we saw on Saturday night, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I am getting on those pronto. Wahoo!

As for the weekend, Beck and I slugged our way through and suffered tremendously Sunday night. Oh, those poor Pats. I have no problem with the upset or all the glee that comes with the "18-1" chants; clearly the giants played very well and their defense gave the Pats O-Line et al much more than they could take. More than anything it's just disappointing to see such a lackluster performance - again, all credit to the Giants, but having by far the worst game of the year in the super bowl just makes the whole event disappointing. (And it all would have been okay were it not for one of the most amazing helmet pinning catches, um, ever).

So minus that tragic Sunday occurrence, Beck and I made a good weekend of it. We caught up on Lost on Friday, and Beck renewed her hatred for the "show where nothing happens." And yet she likes Seinfeld. Woah. I worked all day Saturday and unfortunately could not connect with tufts-bud Jesse - you may remember him as the wedding air guitar legend - who was in town for the superbowl. Sorry, homes. Beck and I were supposed to go to a Chinese New Year party but lacked the energy / motivation, and wound up going to watch the aforementioned French flick instead. Drove around Scottsdale and got to see all the beautiful people humming it up in their hammers or various other elongated cars. We hit a mexican restaurant where I paid a stupid amount of money to eat a fried tortilla with cheese, which I can make at home for about 120th of the cost. D'oh.

On Sunday morning we looked at the rain and wind and coldness outside and said, "hey, let's go hiking!" Kidding, kidding - it was pretty cold and a little wet, but we did a nice easy jaunt around South Mountain park and got some nice, cloudy views of our smog-smothered town:

So not the most beautiful setting, but a haunting one that provided some nice pics regardless. We next contemplated the face that it was Superbowl Sunday which means time to eat - we headed over to Chompie's, a New York style deli around the corner from our house. Beck was feeling Druish, so she ordered some unpictured scrambled matzah & eggs, and I was feeling heart-attacky so I order a Monte Infarct:

Sooooo bad. That reflection off the plate is due to the flavor. Those plates are actually black. Scary.

Replete with calorific goodness, Beck and I headed to the grocery store to buy our super snacks. Given the choice of two Fry's within walking distance of our house, we chose the lesser of the two, and boy are we glad we did!

Oh, we wish we were. Were. WERE.

Then the game, and... well, this guy captured our feeling:

Tragic. An episode of HOUSE, and off to bed. Sad. Nothing too crazy from the next two days, other than my driving all the way down to Tempe last night only to find our game had been canceled due to rain the day before. BARF! PIZZA THE HUT!! Annoying. I made up for it by scoring 360 points at Scrabble instead.

Okay, so those reviews will come, AND I will make more of an effort to write on the site proper. Ideas, Thoughts. Essays. RANTS!!!!

The Quote of Sunday Night

"He who is tired of Weird Al is tired of life."

Homer Simpson