It's well-known that us Americans don't like to acknowledge that other countries exist, unless, of course, we need to bomb them. The thing is, looking at other countires can be depressing (especially the bombed ones). Some are much worse off than us, starving and dying and such, and that makes us feel bad. One mention of Darfur on the radio and you almost feel guilty for speeding your Hummer down to the Consume-o-mart to buy your hundredth pair of shoes made by Chinese child laborers. Almost.
And fellow developed countries don't help. They may not be as rich or powerful as us, but somehow, without even letting us know, they sneakily end up solving a lot of the problems that still plague us. No one in England is worrying too much about the abortion issue. There's no health-care crisis in France. And Finland is so wealthy, successful and crime-free that the Finnish have nothing to be sad about at all, which apparently makes them very depressed. Poor guys.
But there are a few things that should make any American's chest swell and heart pump blood colored red, white and blue. There are a few things that make even liberal America-hating baby-eaters like myself shed a joyful tear in the shape of an eagle. Yes, Virginia, there are a few things that the good ol' U.S. of A. does better than all the Finlands and Belgiums and Central African Republics combined. And they are:
1. BATHROOM AMENITIES: OK, apparently Japan does these well. But every other foreign country I've been to had shit for bathrooms. Literally -- every single one had toilets, sinks, and showers made entirely out of shit. When you had to do your business, you'd do it and then carefully mold it so that it fit into the other furnishings. Word to the wise foreign traveler: Always bring lots of plastic gloves. And a kiln wouldn't hurt.
Actually, what you typically get in foreign countries is no hot water. And showers aren't showers so much as they're detachable spigots connected to a tub by a hose about two feet long. So if you like your showers lying down, in cold water, you my friend, are in for a treat.
Toilets aren't much better. Overseas you get a lot of the "eternal flush" thing where the toilet slowly fills up with water for days. How does it keep filling up, but never get full, you wonder? (And then your mind EXPLODES.) There's something quietly sinister and otherworldly about the eternal flush. It's like an axe murderer who's coming at you so slowly that even if you're staring at him you can't see him move. Or maybe not.
2) TELEVISION: If you're lucky enough to get cable in a European country, you know how many channels you get? Twelve! Wow! That's enough to fill, five, maybe ten minutes per day! Meanwhile, in America, even homeless people have digital cable boxes with 5,000 channels each. I'm no math whiz, but I'm pretty sure than 5,000 is about a million times larger than 12.
Now I hear you literati already. "More TV is a good thing?!?" you scoff, nearly spilling your cabernet all over your Harold Pinter fan club T-shirt. "Hasn't television already destroyed American discourse?" To that I say, "No, and you know why? Because you are a poophead. Heh, heh, heh. Heh, heh, heh. Poop."
Seriously, though, have you checked out TV recently? It's not wall-to-wall "Three's Company" reruns like in the old days. My cable has two, count 'em two, PBSes. I also have the Discovery Channel, Discovery Health, Discovery Times, Discovery Science, Discovery Philology, Discovery Kazakh Poetry, and a whole channel devoted to nothing but video footage of Bunsen burners. There is a wonderful network called History International, which is just like the History Channel except it has 2,300% fewer shows about World War II. (They still have some.)
Sure, 80% of TV is crap. But 80% of everything is crap. Ever been to a bookstore? Yeah, you can still find Dostoyevsky, but you have to go past several acres of books about how to lose weight while continuing to eat like the disgusting slob you are.
And you know what else? You can't blame television for dumbing down America, because America was always as stupid as it is now. You might not remember clearly, because your memories are sugar-coated, but there was no time in history when discourse was actually elevated. Life in the '50s was not all Edward R. Murrow slowly and gray-ly discussing foreign policy with Adlai Stevenson. Most people switched away from that and watched boxers beat the shit out of each other for fun.
But then, as now, there were pockets of smarties smart-ing it up, and God bless 'em. They're always there to work and strive and harangue and sometimes their messages break through to the dummies watching boxing or Ultimate Fighting or what have you. Then the world changes, usually for the better. TV is simply the messenger letting the sheltered smarties know how the rest of America lives. Don't shoot it.
Man, I've gone far afield of my point. My point was that America does TV great and big and bold, and we should be proud of that. And, uh, we got the bathroom thing going for us too. We don't do endings of Web log posts well though. At least, I don't.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
What the World Needs Now Is Plague, Sweet Plague
The real problem with the world today is that there are too many damn people. The human population is increasing exponentially, and I’m not sure how long the planet can sustain us. A good plague would solve that. Maybe it could kill off a few billion people and get us to a more manageable level.
But I wouldn’t want it to affect anyone I know. Or any countries that I like. Maybe it should happen in Bangladesh. I’ve never been there, I don’t know much about it, and I know it’s crazy overcrowded. I certainly have nothing against Bangladesh, but you gotta start somewhere.
But that won’t work, will it. Wiping out Bangladesh wouldn’t be nearly enough, because the way the human population is expanding, we would replace the Bangladeshianians within a matter of years.
Hm, maybe it would be better just to make a whole bunch of people infertile. That would work better. And no one who’s alive would have to die, so it would be a lot less cruel, too. Sure, it would be very sad for people who always wanted to have kids but can’t, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few dreams.
Why am I talking this crazy talk, you ask? Well, it’s all a load of crap, to be sure, but it does get at something I’m seriously concerned about. I am perpetually frightened for our species. Eventually, one way or another, there will just be too damn many of us for this planet to handle. We’re going to outstrip our environment somehow. Any species growing as fast as we are is trouble, and that’s trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for “catastrophe.”
My worries are based in well-accepted science, thank you very much. See, the world is made up hundred zillion little ecosystem cycles in the natural world, all carefully balanced, all interacting with each other. Having one species come out of nowhere and dominate can ruin everything. A wolf that becomes too good at killing deer will eventually eat up all the deer and then have no more food source.
The point is that too much success can ruin a species, and while we may be one hell of a smart species, we’re subject to the same rules. In the history of the natural world, extinction is common, and we’re not immune from it. This is seriously how I look at things. I am lots of fun to be around, let me tell you.
But I honestly don’t think it’s that crazy of a perspective. Like it or not, we do depend on natural cycles for survival. Granted, the wolf example isn’t a great one, because we're probably not going to run out of food for ourselves too soon. We have sorta made our own little ecosystems that are under our control, through agriculture and animal husbandry. So in one sense, we solved the problem. But now the greenhouse gases that we pump into the atmosphere are fucking things up. So we’re back to threatening ourselves with our own success.
Sometimes I look at global warming this way: Think of the world as an organism (this perspective, by the way, is known as the Gaia hypothesis). All large organisms have other little organisms inside them. Humans have tons of little amoebae and paramecia and who the hell knows what else inside us, swimming around and not really affecting us one way or another. Most are harmless, but occasionally you get a nasty one, and then you get a disease.
Humans, and indeed all other species, are microbes within this Earth organism. All other species, so far, have not affected the Earth one way or another. But now the human species is becoming a virulent little mofo. We’re expanding rapidly and taking over the Earth, much the way a virus expands rapidly within a host and takes over. The Earth responds by raising its surface temperature, much the way we get fevers. The point of a fever is to make the place inhospitable for the bug, to essentially kill it off.
That’s what global warming is for, to kill us off. It’s the Earth’s own self-regulating mechanism for doing what I was talking about before, getting our species to a more manageable, sustainable level.
Normally, plagues are good for this sort of thing, as I mentioned above. They’re the Earth’s white blood cells, keeping a population down before it can go past a tipping point into becoming dangerous. But we keep evolving these resistances to these plagues, through modern medicine. So the Earth’s only recourse is to turn up the heat and see what happens.
Of course, we’re talking in terms of geological time here. In geological time, our switch from harmlessness to virulence has been unbelievably fast, within the last 100 years or so. So the killing-off process will be similarly fast by geological time standards, but slow by our standards. Maybe temperatures will get hotter and hotter, and more and more parts of the world will become too hot to live in. Then those people will have to move somewhere, so they’ll crowd to the North.
Frankly, there’s plenty of open space in Canada and Russia, so we maybe actually have room for these folks. But like ecosystems, economies also work best when there’s a measure of stability. Think what crazy flux everything will be in if people have to abandon Texas en masse and move to Canada. Do you think the Canadians want about bunch of Texans around? Canadians are nice, but not that nice.
That’s a facile example, but you get the idea. We don’t know what kind of chaos that global warming is going to cause. It’s such a fundamental change that it will affect every aspect of our lives and our societies.
All this is why the environment is my number-one issue, and always has been. I’m not saying that what we’re doing to the planet will necessarily destroy it, but there’s the threat there of such widespread, cataclysmic change that will have ripple effects everywhere else, and that frightens the shit out of me. And frankly, it trumps everything else.
Take the Iraq War, for example. It’s very serious and very tragic, no doubt. But the human species has weathered serious, tragic wars before. I’m confident we can do it again, albeit with more scars and probably more wars to follow.
Meanwhile, our species has never faced something like global warming before, and I’m not so sure how well we’ll do. I’m sure we’ll survive in some form, but not the way we are now if we don’t make some serious changes fast. That’s scary. That could mean famines, economic collapses – who knows what.
This is why I’m a strident environmentalist – it’s totally self-interest. Or more precisely, interest in humanity. I don’t really give a crap about the planet per se. I give a crap about it because the species I love, human beings, depends on it for survival. It’s sort of like the fact that I care about the chair I’m sitting on. This chair doesn’t do much for me in itself, but if it were suddenly taken away, I’d fall and break my tailbone. I don’t want humanity to fall and break its collective tailbone. (OK, I took that too far.)
I’m not even that big on nature, exactly. It can look quite nice in small doses, but I find it looks best through the window of a comfortable hotel room. I’m not outdoorsy – I’m indoorsy. I can find my way around the indoors amazingly well, surviving only on the food and water I can forage together from refrigerators and food courts.
So yeah, I’ve been made soft by the comforts of modern life. I like them and I sure don’t want to give them up through some kind of man-made catastrophe that returns us to the Stone Age. So if we can make small changes now to stave off the big changes we might suffer down the road, I’m all for it. More solar panels and wind farms? Sure. Fuel-efficient cars? You betcha. Change to fluorescent bulbs? I’m on it. Maybe it’s a pain to make these adjustments, but it’s much better than the alternative. Granted, I don’t know what that alternative will be, but the odds are it won’t be pleasant.
But I wouldn’t want it to affect anyone I know. Or any countries that I like. Maybe it should happen in Bangladesh. I’ve never been there, I don’t know much about it, and I know it’s crazy overcrowded. I certainly have nothing against Bangladesh, but you gotta start somewhere.
But that won’t work, will it. Wiping out Bangladesh wouldn’t be nearly enough, because the way the human population is expanding, we would replace the Bangladeshianians within a matter of years.
Hm, maybe it would be better just to make a whole bunch of people infertile. That would work better. And no one who’s alive would have to die, so it would be a lot less cruel, too. Sure, it would be very sad for people who always wanted to have kids but can’t, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few dreams.
Why am I talking this crazy talk, you ask? Well, it’s all a load of crap, to be sure, but it does get at something I’m seriously concerned about. I am perpetually frightened for our species. Eventually, one way or another, there will just be too damn many of us for this planet to handle. We’re going to outstrip our environment somehow. Any species growing as fast as we are is trouble, and that’s trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for “catastrophe.”
My worries are based in well-accepted science, thank you very much. See, the world is made up hundred zillion little ecosystem cycles in the natural world, all carefully balanced, all interacting with each other. Having one species come out of nowhere and dominate can ruin everything. A wolf that becomes too good at killing deer will eventually eat up all the deer and then have no more food source.
The point is that too much success can ruin a species, and while we may be one hell of a smart species, we’re subject to the same rules. In the history of the natural world, extinction is common, and we’re not immune from it. This is seriously how I look at things. I am lots of fun to be around, let me tell you.
But I honestly don’t think it’s that crazy of a perspective. Like it or not, we do depend on natural cycles for survival. Granted, the wolf example isn’t a great one, because we're probably not going to run out of food for ourselves too soon. We have sorta made our own little ecosystems that are under our control, through agriculture and animal husbandry. So in one sense, we solved the problem. But now the greenhouse gases that we pump into the atmosphere are fucking things up. So we’re back to threatening ourselves with our own success.
Sometimes I look at global warming this way: Think of the world as an organism (this perspective, by the way, is known as the Gaia hypothesis). All large organisms have other little organisms inside them. Humans have tons of little amoebae and paramecia and who the hell knows what else inside us, swimming around and not really affecting us one way or another. Most are harmless, but occasionally you get a nasty one, and then you get a disease.
Humans, and indeed all other species, are microbes within this Earth organism. All other species, so far, have not affected the Earth one way or another. But now the human species is becoming a virulent little mofo. We’re expanding rapidly and taking over the Earth, much the way a virus expands rapidly within a host and takes over. The Earth responds by raising its surface temperature, much the way we get fevers. The point of a fever is to make the place inhospitable for the bug, to essentially kill it off.
That’s what global warming is for, to kill us off. It’s the Earth’s own self-regulating mechanism for doing what I was talking about before, getting our species to a more manageable, sustainable level.
Normally, plagues are good for this sort of thing, as I mentioned above. They’re the Earth’s white blood cells, keeping a population down before it can go past a tipping point into becoming dangerous. But we keep evolving these resistances to these plagues, through modern medicine. So the Earth’s only recourse is to turn up the heat and see what happens.
Of course, we’re talking in terms of geological time here. In geological time, our switch from harmlessness to virulence has been unbelievably fast, within the last 100 years or so. So the killing-off process will be similarly fast by geological time standards, but slow by our standards. Maybe temperatures will get hotter and hotter, and more and more parts of the world will become too hot to live in. Then those people will have to move somewhere, so they’ll crowd to the North.
Frankly, there’s plenty of open space in Canada and Russia, so we maybe actually have room for these folks. But like ecosystems, economies also work best when there’s a measure of stability. Think what crazy flux everything will be in if people have to abandon Texas en masse and move to Canada. Do you think the Canadians want about bunch of Texans around? Canadians are nice, but not that nice.
That’s a facile example, but you get the idea. We don’t know what kind of chaos that global warming is going to cause. It’s such a fundamental change that it will affect every aspect of our lives and our societies.
All this is why the environment is my number-one issue, and always has been. I’m not saying that what we’re doing to the planet will necessarily destroy it, but there’s the threat there of such widespread, cataclysmic change that will have ripple effects everywhere else, and that frightens the shit out of me. And frankly, it trumps everything else.
Take the Iraq War, for example. It’s very serious and very tragic, no doubt. But the human species has weathered serious, tragic wars before. I’m confident we can do it again, albeit with more scars and probably more wars to follow.
Meanwhile, our species has never faced something like global warming before, and I’m not so sure how well we’ll do. I’m sure we’ll survive in some form, but not the way we are now if we don’t make some serious changes fast. That’s scary. That could mean famines, economic collapses – who knows what.
This is why I’m a strident environmentalist – it’s totally self-interest. Or more precisely, interest in humanity. I don’t really give a crap about the planet per se. I give a crap about it because the species I love, human beings, depends on it for survival. It’s sort of like the fact that I care about the chair I’m sitting on. This chair doesn’t do much for me in itself, but if it were suddenly taken away, I’d fall and break my tailbone. I don’t want humanity to fall and break its collective tailbone. (OK, I took that too far.)
I’m not even that big on nature, exactly. It can look quite nice in small doses, but I find it looks best through the window of a comfortable hotel room. I’m not outdoorsy – I’m indoorsy. I can find my way around the indoors amazingly well, surviving only on the food and water I can forage together from refrigerators and food courts.
So yeah, I’ve been made soft by the comforts of modern life. I like them and I sure don’t want to give them up through some kind of man-made catastrophe that returns us to the Stone Age. So if we can make small changes now to stave off the big changes we might suffer down the road, I’m all for it. More solar panels and wind farms? Sure. Fuel-efficient cars? You betcha. Change to fluorescent bulbs? I’m on it. Maybe it’s a pain to make these adjustments, but it’s much better than the alternative. Granted, I don’t know what that alternative will be, but the odds are it won’t be pleasant.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Things I Hate: Vegas
I was approached by my boss yesterday and asked if I wanted to go on a trip. "Sure!" I said, thinking he was referring to one our typical trips, which involves meeting with a client in Poughkeepsie or Bridgeport or Gary, Indiana and having day-long meetings about their new site. That I'd enjoy. But then he revealed that he was actually talking about a mid-week conference in Vegas. "I'll pass," I said.
I hate Vegas. I hate everything about it. I had a bad experience there, but it wasn't the type you think. I didn't get rip-roaring drunk and pass out on the street or get crabs from a two-dollar hooker or anything. What happened was that I was surrounded the whole time by the hollow artificiality that is Vegas.
Everything I saw was fake in one way or another, often a bald-faced copy something great somewhere else. It's a whole city "faux," cheapness (often cheapness that cost a lot money, paradoxically), that is badly masquerading as elegance. And not in a kitschy fun way. It's fake in a calculated, focus-grouped sort way. When I was there, I felt manipulated just walking down the street.
And the streets I've walked were the newer Disneyland-for-adults part -- maybe if I had been in the legendary grungy old part I wouldn't have felt this way. Instead, I would probably felt sad and disgusted. I guess that's not a lot better.
I'm sure there are parts Vegas that I could enjoy. It's a big place, after all. But I know I wouldn't see those parts if I went on this junket. See, I would apparently be going with a nice, well-meaning coworker mine who would be the only person I know there. He would want to hit the strip after the meetings, and being a nice person (no, really, I swear), I would probably feel obligated to go. I would walk around and feel uncomfortable everywhere. We would hit the big, touristy bars, spend way too much, feel like yokels, and meet no one. Whee.
Perhaps I'd meet a few people at these conferences and maybe go out with them -- but that would mean lots forced, strained small talk. Or, more likely, they'd turn out to be obnoxious drunks and I would spend the whole time being irritated and wanting to escape.
Obviously, I'm not that wild about being drunk in public. Or, moreover, being around drunks in public. Young drunk people are the worst people in the . In a place like Vegas, young people get full license to let their true selves let loose, which means acting like the insufferable pricks they truly are. A whole city full them does not sound like a good time to me.
But I'm also not wild about gambling. I've gone to a few casinos and occasionally had a good time. But the problem is that the costs are not worth the benefits for me. When I win some money, I'm sorta like, "Hey, that's not bad. Now I can afford one those horribly overpriced cocktails." If I lose the same amount money, I'm more like "Jesus, what's wrong with me! I blew that money on nothing! Fuck!" Maybe I have a bit a bias towards negativity.
And there are other issues at work here. There's the conference itself, which sounds like several days nonstop awkward mingling. I don't know if you've ever been to an "industry event," but it's awful. It's like a party where you can't have fun. You can't be yourself; you have to be your work persona. You have to "network," which is a term that is appropriately soulless and mechanical-sounding for what happens. You have to pretend like you actually give a shit about what you do for a living, carefully hiding the fact that you really just go through the motions and then collect a check.
And then there's the simple fact that Vegas is unbelievably expensive. That's been my experience, anyway. Long gone are the days when you got a free shrimp buffet just for setting foot in a casino. Maybe those places are still out there, but I really don't want to sift through the rest it to find them.
And there's also my contrarian nature at work here. The assumption is that everyone loves Vegas. In fact, the site for this conference says so explicitly: "Everyone loves Vegas!" That's the kind thing that invariably makes me want to say, "Well, I hate Vegas. And I want you to hate it too, now." Any time it's expressed as a universal given that something is fun, I have the need to pop that balloon. I don't know why.
Maybe it's the programming that I feel everyone has succumbed to, the whole mythology that the Vegas marketing whizzes have created. I find all that bullshit very grating: Not only does everyone love Vegas, but it's the place to go crazy! Woo! What happens here, stays here! Like when the hooker you bring to your hotel room ODs on coke and pukes blood! Uh-oh! Well, what happens here, stays here!
And I don't think it's because I'm a prude -- I believe people should have the right to gamble and get drunk on the streets and snort coke with a hooker who then bleeds through her nose if they damn well please. I just happen to know that that I don't damn well please. I would rather go to Poughkeepsie for day-long meetings. Cuz what happens in Poughkeepsie, stays in Poughkeepsie!
I hate Vegas. I hate everything about it. I had a bad experience there, but it wasn't the type you think. I didn't get rip-roaring drunk and pass out on the street or get crabs from a two-dollar hooker or anything. What happened was that I was surrounded the whole time by the hollow artificiality that is Vegas.
Everything I saw was fake in one way or another, often a bald-faced copy something great somewhere else. It's a whole city "faux," cheapness (often cheapness that cost a lot money, paradoxically), that is badly masquerading as elegance. And not in a kitschy fun way. It's fake in a calculated, focus-grouped sort way. When I was there, I felt manipulated just walking down the street.
And the streets I've walked were the newer Disneyland-for-adults part -- maybe if I had been in the legendary grungy old part I wouldn't have felt this way. Instead, I would probably felt sad and disgusted. I guess that's not a lot better.
I'm sure there are parts Vegas that I could enjoy. It's a big place, after all. But I know I wouldn't see those parts if I went on this junket. See, I would apparently be going with a nice, well-meaning coworker mine who would be the only person I know there. He would want to hit the strip after the meetings, and being a nice person (no, really, I swear), I would probably feel obligated to go. I would walk around and feel uncomfortable everywhere. We would hit the big, touristy bars, spend way too much, feel like yokels, and meet no one. Whee.
Perhaps I'd meet a few people at these conferences and maybe go out with them -- but that would mean lots forced, strained small talk. Or, more likely, they'd turn out to be obnoxious drunks and I would spend the whole time being irritated and wanting to escape.
Obviously, I'm not that wild about being drunk in public. Or, moreover, being around drunks in public. Young drunk people are the worst people in the . In a place like Vegas, young people get full license to let their true selves let loose, which means acting like the insufferable pricks they truly are. A whole city full them does not sound like a good time to me.
But I'm also not wild about gambling. I've gone to a few casinos and occasionally had a good time. But the problem is that the costs are not worth the benefits for me. When I win some money, I'm sorta like, "Hey, that's not bad. Now I can afford one those horribly overpriced cocktails." If I lose the same amount money, I'm more like "Jesus, what's wrong with me! I blew that money on nothing! Fuck!" Maybe I have a bit a bias towards negativity.
And there are other issues at work here. There's the conference itself, which sounds like several days nonstop awkward mingling. I don't know if you've ever been to an "industry event," but it's awful. It's like a party where you can't have fun. You can't be yourself; you have to be your work persona. You have to "network," which is a term that is appropriately soulless and mechanical-sounding for what happens. You have to pretend like you actually give a shit about what you do for a living, carefully hiding the fact that you really just go through the motions and then collect a check.
And then there's the simple fact that Vegas is unbelievably expensive. That's been my experience, anyway. Long gone are the days when you got a free shrimp buffet just for setting foot in a casino. Maybe those places are still out there, but I really don't want to sift through the rest it to find them.
And there's also my contrarian nature at work here. The assumption is that everyone loves Vegas. In fact, the site for this conference says so explicitly: "Everyone loves Vegas!" That's the kind thing that invariably makes me want to say, "Well, I hate Vegas. And I want you to hate it too, now." Any time it's expressed as a universal given that something is fun, I have the need to pop that balloon. I don't know why.
Maybe it's the programming that I feel everyone has succumbed to, the whole mythology that the Vegas marketing whizzes have created. I find all that bullshit very grating: Not only does everyone love Vegas, but it's the place to go crazy! Woo! What happens here, stays here! Like when the hooker you bring to your hotel room ODs on coke and pukes blood! Uh-oh! Well, what happens here, stays here!
And I don't think it's because I'm a prude -- I believe people should have the right to gamble and get drunk on the streets and snort coke with a hooker who then bleeds through her nose if they damn well please. I just happen to know that that I don't damn well please. I would rather go to Poughkeepsie for day-long meetings. Cuz what happens in Poughkeepsie, stays in Poughkeepsie!
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Things I Hate: Dane Cook
Every year, the baseball playoffs give me an amazing opportunity to get really, really sick of a few commercials. The entire playoffs are apparently only allowed two or three commercials, played over and over and over and over until your head starts to bleed. This year, the pain reaches a new, exciting level with heaping helpings of Dane Cook. He stars in a bunch of ads showing during the playoffs that try to get you excited about watching the playoffs. (Aren't the playoffs themselves supposed to do that? And moreover, isn't that sort of like McDonald's putting ads inside their own hamburgers? We don't really need to be told to buy the product, guys -- we already bought it.)
Basically, the ads feature him shouting a bunch of cliches about how "Dude, there is only one October!" and gesticulating frantically as clips from previous years play around him. Even if I weren't already watching the playoffs, Dane Cook is not exactly inspiring me to do so. Vince Lombardi he ain't. His demeanor is more one of a frat buddy trying to get you "psyched" to go to a kegger across town. Maybe I'm pretentious, but I like to think of the baseball playoffs as more than a chance to get blitzed and shout "woo!"
Of course, they got Dane Cook because he's popular with the young men. Let's be clear here: Young men do not, and have not ever, known what the hell they're talking about. Dane Cook is not funny and never has been. He's a spazzy frat boy at best. He's the "Don't tase me, bro!" guy without the self-righteousness. (Which doesn't leave much.) I've seen his stand-up -- it's a lot of "Dude, you know when you get really hammered and take home a really ugly girl? We've all been there, right?" No, Mr. Cook, I actually haven't been there. But thanks for bringing up the fact that even what you would find regrettable and beneath your standards would have been a dream come true for me when I was a sad, lovelorn college student.
But anyway, he doesn't do stand-up in the ads, so I suppose I should be thankful for that. But still, it's only going to get more and more grating as the playoffs progress. Last year's most-repeated ad was heaven by comparison -- it was the ad for Chevy (or Ford, or GM, I can never tell the difference) which featured John Cougar Mellencamp singing "Generic John Cougar Mellencamp Song #67578565," which I can only assume was created by loading all of his previous songs on a computer, shaking it vigorously, and then pouring the result onto a tape recorder. You know the one; Ford (or Chevy or GM) still plays it at every opportunity. "The dream is great, and so is America ... We lift dirty things into trucks all day, workin' dumb and hard ... Let the voice of freedom shine out of our big, fat, overfed mouths ... this is our country! (And by "our" I mean GM/Ford/Chevy and other massive multinational conglomerates!) From the East Coast! To the West Coast! To Indiana, where I'm from, cuz I'm just an ordinary hard-workin' American, just like me and you .. see, look, I'm wearin' jeans and everything, and talkin' all down-home ..."
Anyway. The point is that advertisers are shitting bricks over Tivo's ad-skipping capabilities -- well, they deserve it for making crappy ads like this and playing them ad nauseam. (Is that really the point? Well, yes it is, as of now.) And the other point is that Dane Cook needs to die horribly. Maybe he could be tased to death.
Basically, the ads feature him shouting a bunch of cliches about how "Dude, there is only one October!" and gesticulating frantically as clips from previous years play around him. Even if I weren't already watching the playoffs, Dane Cook is not exactly inspiring me to do so. Vince Lombardi he ain't. His demeanor is more one of a frat buddy trying to get you "psyched" to go to a kegger across town. Maybe I'm pretentious, but I like to think of the baseball playoffs as more than a chance to get blitzed and shout "woo!"
Of course, they got Dane Cook because he's popular with the young men. Let's be clear here: Young men do not, and have not ever, known what the hell they're talking about. Dane Cook is not funny and never has been. He's a spazzy frat boy at best. He's the "Don't tase me, bro!" guy without the self-righteousness. (Which doesn't leave much.) I've seen his stand-up -- it's a lot of "Dude, you know when you get really hammered and take home a really ugly girl? We've all been there, right?" No, Mr. Cook, I actually haven't been there. But thanks for bringing up the fact that even what you would find regrettable and beneath your standards would have been a dream come true for me when I was a sad, lovelorn college student.
But anyway, he doesn't do stand-up in the ads, so I suppose I should be thankful for that. But still, it's only going to get more and more grating as the playoffs progress. Last year's most-repeated ad was heaven by comparison -- it was the ad for Chevy (or Ford, or GM, I can never tell the difference) which featured John Cougar Mellencamp singing "Generic John Cougar Mellencamp Song #67578565," which I can only assume was created by loading all of his previous songs on a computer, shaking it vigorously, and then pouring the result onto a tape recorder. You know the one; Ford (or Chevy or GM) still plays it at every opportunity. "The dream is great, and so is America ... We lift dirty things into trucks all day, workin' dumb and hard ... Let the voice of freedom shine out of our big, fat, overfed mouths ... this is our country! (And by "our" I mean GM/Ford/Chevy and other massive multinational conglomerates!) From the East Coast! To the West Coast! To Indiana, where I'm from, cuz I'm just an ordinary hard-workin' American, just like me and you .. see, look, I'm wearin' jeans and everything, and talkin' all down-home ..."
Anyway. The point is that advertisers are shitting bricks over Tivo's ad-skipping capabilities -- well, they deserve it for making crappy ads like this and playing them ad nauseam. (Is that really the point? Well, yes it is, as of now.) And the other point is that Dane Cook needs to die horribly. Maybe he could be tased to death.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Excitement!
AND NOW for the exciting conclusion of ... Baseball, Woo!
HOST: So far, we've gotten to know one of the two records that were broken at the end of the 2007 baseball season. One has yet to be revealed. Reader(s) received hints as to the identity of the our winner, but no one has known for sure until today. Now for the moment we've all been waiting for ... (Make a sudden cut, reality-show-conclusion-style, to a shot of Ed looking nervous. BUM-BUM! Cut to a baseball. BUM-BUM! Cut to a computer screen. BUM-BUM! Cut to Jimmy Rollins. He waves cheerfully. BUM-BUM! Cut back to Ed, looking annoyed. BUM-BUM! Cut to a shot of the cameraman's feet. BUM-BUM! Cut to a shot of Ernest Borgnine in "Marty." BUM-BUM! Cut back to Ed, asleep. BUM-BA-DA-BA-DA-BA-DAAAAA-BUM!
ED (waking up): Yeah, uh, it's Jimmy Rollins. He broke the record for at-bats in a season. He had 716, while only three players ever even managed 700 before. Willie Wilson had 705 in 1980 and was the previous record holder. So Jimmy cleared it by a pretty large margin. Pretty cool. Well, I thought it was, anyway. So, yeah.
DA-DA-DA -DA-DAAAAAAAA!!! (Confetti and balloons fall from the ceiling. Jimmy Rollins jumps up and down ecstatically. People in the audience go apeshit. The camera swoops around pointlessly.)
HOST: THANK YOU EVERYONE so much for this wonderful experience! We've all had the time of our lives, and we want to thank you, the reader (i.e., Joe), for making it all possible! We love you!!! Good-bye!!!
BA-BA-BAAAA-BA-BA! BAAA! BAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Explosion! Fireworks! Planes zooming by! Machine guns being shot in the air! Ululations! Kangaroos doing backflips! Other things denoting excitement!
CUT TO CREDITS
HOST: So far, we've gotten to know one of the two records that were broken at the end of the 2007 baseball season. One has yet to be revealed. Reader(s) received hints as to the identity of the our winner, but no one has known for sure until today. Now for the moment we've all been waiting for ... (Make a sudden cut, reality-show-conclusion-style, to a shot of Ed looking nervous. BUM-BUM! Cut to a baseball. BUM-BUM! Cut to a computer screen. BUM-BUM! Cut to Jimmy Rollins. He waves cheerfully. BUM-BUM! Cut back to Ed, looking annoyed. BUM-BUM! Cut to a shot of the cameraman's feet. BUM-BUM! Cut to a shot of Ernest Borgnine in "Marty." BUM-BUM! Cut back to Ed, asleep. BUM-BA-DA-BA-DA-BA-DAAAAA-BUM!
ED (waking up): Yeah, uh, it's Jimmy Rollins. He broke the record for at-bats in a season. He had 716, while only three players ever even managed 700 before. Willie Wilson had 705 in 1980 and was the previous record holder. So Jimmy cleared it by a pretty large margin. Pretty cool. Well, I thought it was, anyway. So, yeah.
DA-DA-DA -DA-DAAAAAAAA!!! (Confetti and balloons fall from the ceiling. Jimmy Rollins jumps up and down ecstatically. People in the audience go apeshit. The camera swoops around pointlessly.)
HOST: THANK YOU EVERYONE so much for this wonderful experience! We've all had the time of our lives, and we want to thank you, the reader (i.e., Joe), for making it all possible! We love you!!! Good-bye!!!
BA-BA-BAAAA-BA-BA! BAAA! BAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Explosion! Fireworks! Planes zooming by! Machine guns being shot in the air! Ululations! Kangaroos doing backflips! Other things denoting excitement!
CUT TO CREDITS
Monday, October 1, 2007
End of the Season! Woo!
This one is for Joe, who I'm pretty sure is one of two people who actually reads this. (Hey Joe! Hey Lynn -- sorry this won't be more interesting for you.) I felt inspired this morning to write about the end of the baseball season. So here I go:
The End of the Baseball Season
I've actually been a bit negligent of the baseball season this year, because I have a non-baseball-fan wife and both my teams (the Cardinals and Twins) stink. So this morning I gave the latest news a good thorough look and felt a bit bad about all that I had missed.
Of course, there were lots of upsets and ... uh ... downsets(?) this year. The long-suffering Phillies overtook the occasionally-suffering Mets on the last day of the season. Meanwhile, Joe right now is no doubt mentally (and perhaps spiritually, physically, and molecularly -- I don't really know what he goes through) preparing for the Padres' one-game playoff with the Rockies, which will determine the fate of their season. And of course, the Cubs won, the Cubs won ....
But that's not even what I'm really talking about. Pennant races are nice and all, but what got me going this morning were a few matters of stark, lifeless accounting. I'm talkin' stats. Cuz I've always loved the games, but I've always loved the stats even more, if that's possible.
Two records that I've come to know and love and cherish and stroke lovingly and perhaps slightly inappropriately both changed hands this season. I was a bit surprised to see them go, and yes, a bit cheated to realize I didn't know about them earlier.
One was the record for strikeouts in a season. I had actually seen about a week ago that Ryan Howard was on the cusp of breaking this long-standing record that stretches all the way back to the summer of 2004. I remember 2004 well; it was a crazy time. Perhaps we'll never see the like again. George W. Bush was president, and he had led us into an intractable local conflict with no clear strategy for securing the peace. The country was abuzz over the misadventures of young chanteuse Britney Spears. Everyone, everywhere, was eating bagels and enjoying them.
2004 may seem like another lifetime, but there was a similar feeling in the air, since a major-league baseball player struck out more often in a season than any other player ever had. In that year, Adam Dunn unapologetically broke Bobby Bonds' 34-year old record for strikeouts in a season. "Unapologetically" is key, because several players had come close before, only to spin around, run away, and hide like pit bulls frightened of their own shadows.
It was worse than that feeble analogy, even, because these players had shown such a singular, epochal ability to strike out, and yet when they were on the brink of immortality, they sat out. It was like watching Picasso fake a hand injury so he could sit and watch TV instead of paint. Yes, I'm talking to you, Preston Wilson and Jose Hernandez. You know you could have broken the record and you sat out at the end of the season to avoid doing so. For shame!
But not Adam Dunn. He kept swingin' and missin', swingin' and missin', even long after the games were meaningless. And now Ryan Howard eclipsed even his mighty mark, coming oh-so-close to starting a brand-new one-person club (namely, the 200-SO club), by logging 199 strikeouts.
That's a lot of strikeouts, ladies and ... well, just Joe, I suppose. That's a lot of strikeouts, Joe. As my friend Joe likes to say, if you laid all those strikeouts end to end, they would reach to the moon and back a full 199 times! (Strikeouts are very tall.)
But there was another record that fell this year, and I had no prior warning, no memos, no APBs -- no idea that it was in even in danger. It had been held for 27 years, and had a unreachable height for leadoff hitters who play a lot and don't walk much.
What was that record? Who set it? Do you give a shit? Find out on the next edition of the World Wide Web Log of Pointless Ramblings, coming to your computer screen ... whenever I get around to it!
The End of the Baseball Season
I've actually been a bit negligent of the baseball season this year, because I have a non-baseball-fan wife and both my teams (the Cardinals and Twins) stink. So this morning I gave the latest news a good thorough look and felt a bit bad about all that I had missed.
Of course, there were lots of upsets and ... uh ... downsets(?) this year. The long-suffering Phillies overtook the occasionally-suffering Mets on the last day of the season. Meanwhile, Joe right now is no doubt mentally (and perhaps spiritually, physically, and molecularly -- I don't really know what he goes through) preparing for the Padres' one-game playoff with the Rockies, which will determine the fate of their season. And of course, the Cubs won, the Cubs won ....
But that's not even what I'm really talking about. Pennant races are nice and all, but what got me going this morning were a few matters of stark, lifeless accounting. I'm talkin' stats. Cuz I've always loved the games, but I've always loved the stats even more, if that's possible.
Two records that I've come to know and love and cherish and stroke lovingly and perhaps slightly inappropriately both changed hands this season. I was a bit surprised to see them go, and yes, a bit cheated to realize I didn't know about them earlier.
One was the record for strikeouts in a season. I had actually seen about a week ago that Ryan Howard was on the cusp of breaking this long-standing record that stretches all the way back to the summer of 2004. I remember 2004 well; it was a crazy time. Perhaps we'll never see the like again. George W. Bush was president, and he had led us into an intractable local conflict with no clear strategy for securing the peace. The country was abuzz over the misadventures of young chanteuse Britney Spears. Everyone, everywhere, was eating bagels and enjoying them.
2004 may seem like another lifetime, but there was a similar feeling in the air, since a major-league baseball player struck out more often in a season than any other player ever had. In that year, Adam Dunn unapologetically broke Bobby Bonds' 34-year old record for strikeouts in a season. "Unapologetically" is key, because several players had come close before, only to spin around, run away, and hide like pit bulls frightened of their own shadows.
It was worse than that feeble analogy, even, because these players had shown such a singular, epochal ability to strike out, and yet when they were on the brink of immortality, they sat out. It was like watching Picasso fake a hand injury so he could sit and watch TV instead of paint. Yes, I'm talking to you, Preston Wilson and Jose Hernandez. You know you could have broken the record and you sat out at the end of the season to avoid doing so. For shame!
But not Adam Dunn. He kept swingin' and missin', swingin' and missin', even long after the games were meaningless. And now Ryan Howard eclipsed even his mighty mark, coming oh-so-close to starting a brand-new one-person club (namely, the 200-SO club), by logging 199 strikeouts.
That's a lot of strikeouts, ladies and ... well, just Joe, I suppose. That's a lot of strikeouts, Joe. As my friend Joe likes to say, if you laid all those strikeouts end to end, they would reach to the moon and back a full 199 times! (Strikeouts are very tall.)
But there was another record that fell this year, and I had no prior warning, no memos, no APBs -- no idea that it was in even in danger. It had been held for 27 years, and had a unreachable height for leadoff hitters who play a lot and don't walk much.
What was that record? Who set it? Do you give a shit? Find out on the next edition of the World Wide Web Log of Pointless Ramblings, coming to your computer screen ... whenever I get around to it!
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