As if He didn't have better things to do

So we don't have internet at our new home yet (tomorrow! Finally!), and I'm just taking five seconds off from my busy workday to let you all know something that the Minnesota faithful all figured out, at the latest, on January 17, 1999:

God hates the Minnesota Vikings.

As you were.

So glad it's not triplets

Eh, what's two months?

We've just returned (well, like five days ago) from a trip through western Europe. It was fabulous, and I have lots of pictures, and I'll write some sort of little write-up of it soon. But not now.

I've just seen this commercial again during this afternoon's Sox-Royals game, and I'm reminded of why we have social services.

Now, did those kids write that "song" themselves, or is someone just trying to make people want to kill those (otherwise) cute little kids? I believe there's only one word to describe this commercial and everyone involved in its making, and that word is: eeeeeeeeeeelllllllluuuuughghghghhh.

Speaking of doomed children, we're having one of our own! You probably already knew that, but I felt I should make the announcement anyway. Due in early February, and we're not finding out re. gender until it comes.

Also, we've found a townhouse in northern Chicago, and we're closing on Friday (but not really moving in for a couple weeks). We still haven't sold our house in Virginia, which is going to be that much harder without any furniture in it, but, well, it'll happen sometime.

Another thing that's happened since I've been gone was my ten-year (!) high school reunion. I went, and we looked like this:

It was a lot more fun than I expected. Considering my graduating class was all of 53 people (so that picture there is literally about half of us), and I hadn't seen about 50 of them pretty much since the end of the graduation party season ten years ago, there was a whole lot of potential for awkwardness there, but it didn't really happen. So that's cool.

Oh, and the bar exam. Meh. It'll be easier next time.

So we're going back to C-Ville to throw stuff in boxes and supervise the movers next Tuesday-Friday, then to Minnesota (and even eventually to Minneapolis without the 35W bridge...that'll be fun) over Labor Day weekend, then I start work on September 5. That's all; trip write-up coming soon. Ta!

Everybody's a Critic

...but this is all about me right now. Let's try to stay focused on that.

Here we go!

Waitress
Our sixth (!) anniversary was Sunday, and we took in this little flick (for $6, at 10:15 a.m. at the AMC theater downtown--great deal). I thought it was fabulous.

So basically, Felicity is a strong-willed, down-home, too-cute-for-words waitress (and fantastic pie artist) somewhere in the deep south. She's the kind of person who just couldn't possibly exist (or there'd be a fluffy local news story about her every night of the week), but Russell plays it fabulously well. She has a terrible life and it's suddenly looking a lot worse, and she lets her frustration out by dreaming up new pies and naming them things like "I Can't Have No Affair Because It's Wrong and I Don't Want Earl to Kill Me Pie." That's not really the point of the picture, but it's probably the most creative element. And it made me very hungry for pie.

For a good part of the movie, it looks like every man in this whole little world is dumb, hopelessly selfish and/or evil except Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, but Russell is so lovable and the dialogue between Russell and Fillion (and, to a lesser extent, between Russell and her two caricature-ish fellow waitresses, including late writer/director Adrienne Shelly) is so enjoyable that even that part is okay. And it gets better as it goes. Finally, Andy Griffith (who, in keeping with the gimmick, I should call "Andy Taylor," but that just seems silly since it was "The Andy Griffith Show" and all) just has all kinds of fun in his role as the crotchety old miser with (you find out once it turns out that not all men but Mal are evil) a heart of gold.

It does start out slow (the initial dialogue amongst the waitresses is awfully clunky), but it gets good fast and stays good. Grade: 3.14159.

Knocked Up
This was a really fun, enjoyable movie. There are a lot of things about it that are really creative. And funny, of course. But.

You know how is goes. Everyone keeps telling you how good a movie is. Your friends love it. It scores an unreal (for the genre) 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. And there's just no way it can live up to that.

So it felt a little flat to me, but I'm sure it's only compared to what I was expecting. All the characters except the main two and Paul Rudd's seemed underdeveloped to me. There's a girl that pops up at the stoner boys' house halfway through the movie for no apparent reason and with no apparent purpose (I'm guessing a lot of her character was left on the cutting room floor...but all of it probably should've been). Rudd's character and his wife have a falling-out that revolves around fantasy baseball (!) and really makes no sense at all. And even with the main story, after the initial one-night stand, it's hard to tell how the two characters can stand each other at all, hard to figure out exactly why they drift apart again, and even harder to understand how they come back together in the end.

Again, this is nit-picking. It's just that with reviews like this one got, you expect more than just another gross-out comedy. But, other than kind of a half-assed, weird pro-family message thrown in at the end, it's not. It's just very good for what it is. Grade: Dunno. Right between There's Something About Mary and 40 Year-Old Virgin.

UVA Law Professor K.
I had a very simple, very important (to me) request. You didn't see fit to respond with so much as a "no, sorry." For eight weeks, from April into June. Ten emails, a handful of phone calls, a note on your office door. No response at all. There's got to be a stronger term than "inexcusably unprofessional" for that, but that's what I'm going with. Grade: C+. I'd like it to be lower, but that would really throw off the curve.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
This is not a blog about politics. This is not a review about politics. I like to try to keep myself informed a little bit, though, so I picked up Obama's 2006 book about politicky things.

He's a great writer. Really, at least for a non-professional. He has some really interesting ways of expressing things. Unfortunately, I'd like to say "ideas" in place of "ways of expressing things," but I can't, because there aren't any actual ideas in this book. Alternate titles could be The High-School-Graduation-Speech Dullness of 'Hope' or The Joy of Equivocation. Obama is so careful not to offend anybody and not to take an actual stance on anything controversial, you'd think he'd been planning to run for President or something. He does go way out on a limb in coming out against the war, and spends an awful lot of time patting himself on the back. In fact, Obama comes off as a saint in the book...just a really boring one. The patron saint of wet-naps or something. But he is a good, engaging writer, and I'd really like to read what he'd write if he didn't care (or at least wasn't obsessed with) what quite literally everyone in the country would think of it. Grade: Thumbs sideways.

BAR/BRI this week
I don't want to name names or talk about too many details or anything, because I'm not into being mean for the sake of being mean. But the lecture today was basically the worst thing I've ever experienced (I've led a sheltered life, but still). And more of the same tomorrow. Huzzah! Grade: Zero. Zero. Zero. Again, for your notes, Zero.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"
Who goes and reviews a five-year-old movie? Charlie Kaufman films, I find, are either terrible (I won't say which one or you'll never respect me again, but I really hated it) or great (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, still my favorite movie ever). This, I thought, was one of the great ones. Whatever happened to Rising Star Sam Rockwell? Grade: um, let's say 12.

Okay, so Len Kasper is my Non-Sexual Man Crush

There's so much more complaining I could do about BAR/BRI and this whole process. But there's really no point, and it's boring. I'll say this, though: there's something kind of shady about purchasing education from (and having your practice work "graded" by) an organization that has an incentive to induce you to purchase more education. Think about that. And then go through BAR/BRI when your time comes anyway, because they've made sure you really don't have a choice.

Okay, so I did a little more complaining.

The parents come into town tomorrow, and then my lovely wife (to stay, finally, thank goodness) and my mother-in-law on Thursday. These are good things. Nay, necessary things. I'm spending so much time by myself in this tiny little apartment that I'm pretty sure that given a few more days of this, I'd be drawing a face on and befriending a volleyball. If I even had a volleyball.

The Cubs, while they're the only one of the two baseball teams in this city that I can watch without wanting to vomit a little (and then to think that this man has children!), also are a really, really bad baseball team. I keep thinking, and everybody else does too, that they've got to get better sometime soon, and they do play in the worst division in baseball (where, as of this writing, they're a scant five games out of first). But they've been so terrible, it's getting harder and harder to imagine.

But, I've discovered, there's at least one member of the Cubs organization that's doing his job really, really well, and that's broadcaster Len Kasper. See, if you don't watch much baseball (why are you still reading?), you should know that most baseball announcers and color commentators currently are, well, terrible. They tend to be former players at some level, by and large, and yet tend to know very, very little about the game itself. There's a lot of senseless blather, a lot of "in my day" nonsense. A bizarre fear of most statistics. A little bit of latent racism (there's an unnerving tendency for funny little white guys who can't actually play to be labeled "scrappy" and athletic African American or Latino guys who can to be "lazy"). You know, fun stuff like that.

Kasper's different. First, he's young (36, give or take), and a real live professional broadcaster (most play-by-play guys are, to be fair, but the very worst offenders, like The Hawk, are emphatically not). Second, he actually focuses on the game (whenever he's allowed to, with mandated diversions such as last night, when Larry the Cable Guy wasted 15 minutes of my life in the booth). Third, and most importantly, he understands the game the way people who are paid to present and analyze the game should. He knows the importance of on base percentage, and drawing a walk every now and then.

The best thing about Kasper, and I'm basing this on precisely one moment in time, is that he does his homework. Broadcasters, and baseball media folk in general, have this tendency to go with their gut and make stuff up. Watching Twins games on MLB.TV, I've heard the opposing teams' broadcasters say things about Twins players that are plainly false, and could have been verified with an internet connection and approximately three free seconds. In contrast, earlier tonight, Kasper wanted to know a certain statistic. He said what all broadcasters say, which is something like "I don't know what the Cubs' batting average is this year in extra innings, but it sure seems like they struggle," only then, Kasper got on his laptop, pulled up the best site in the world, and found out what he wanted to know. You just don't know how unusual this is. Baseball-reference.com should be the single most important resource for anyone who works in the game, and most of them seem never even to have heard of it. Unfortunately, he's teamed with Bob Brenly, a horrible manager and a worse-than-average commentator. But that's how it goes.

As Mike was just mentioning to me a moment ago, there's one great baseball announcer left. And Vin Scully can't last forever. What Kasper doesn't have is that classic, soothing sort of baseball voice; but did Vin always have that? I'm hoping that Kasper keeps it up for another 40 or 50 years and finds his unique voice, and then he can be like a stathead version of Vin Scully.

Also, Scully can't rock like this. Or this. Heh. (Actually, if you ever wondered what "Folsom Prison Blues" would sound like performed live karaoke style with every last ounce of soul sucked out of it, click on the second link. It's still mildly entertaining, and I'm not sure whether that's because it's so bad or something else.)

I wish I hadn't lost my passport, and I wish someone would buy our house already.

So, as I've said, I've been sitting around with some time on my hands, and I've looked more than I should at this site. The comments (particularly the long strings of comments after any associate-salary-related post) are terribly depressing. These people are apparently among the top young lawyers in the country, or at least have weaseled their way into the top law firms in the country, but almost to a person they're petty, greedy, offensive, and in many ways just plain foolish. It's become to me kind of like what Jerry Springer is to some people--I know I should look away, and that I'd be happier and healthier for it, but I can't.

To bed!

So bored.

It's not that I haven't had time to post. As much work as studying for the bar exam is (and there's really a lot to do), if you've only got one single thing to focus on in your entire life, odds are you'll be able to find time to do that one thing and much more besides. And with my beautiful wife and dumb but adorable dog still sweltering down in Charlottesville, with not having a whole lot of money, and with most of my friends busy with the same thing I am (only on different schedules), bar review has pretty much been my one thing. So I've had the time...just haven't had anything to say. Because, you know, all I'm doing is bar review.

Studying for the bar exam is dreadful. There're no two ways about that. You're spoken to like an eight-year-old about things 90% of which you already learned in law school, some 50% of which are so dumbed-down for bar exam purposes as to actually have been made blatantly false, and at the end of the day you're likely to have forgotten most of it anyway. For you visually oriented people, it's really very much like this, only much, much less funny.



I'm sure the exam itself will be markedly less pleasant than even this. But then I'll go to Europe and be happy for two weeks.

I almost feel bad about posting this, because this guy was so obviously trying to draw otherwise undeserved national attention to himself, and it's an awful example for the kids that play baseball for him and all that (not that the five people who will watch it on here add appreciably to the two million or so who have seen it on YouTube or the untold millions who saw it on SportsCenter, but it's the principle of the thing). But nonetheless, it's pretty funny.



Still probably not quite as good as this one from last season. This one was slightly more creative, but not nearly as crazy (crazy though it was). But enough of that.

I know I had something more to say, but it's gone right through my already empty head. I suppose that's good; maybe I'll remember and come back in something less than three weeks.

One thought and one offensive video

Mostly just to demonstrate that I'm still alive. By the way, in the last week I've driven from Charlottesville to Chicago, flown from Chicago to Charlottesville, graduated from UVA Law School, and flown back to Chicago. But back to that one thought:

If it wasn't for the NBA, no one outside of southern/central Texas would have any idea that there was a city called San Antonio. I mean, sure, the Alamo is there, but historical significance isn't really all it's cracked up to be in terms of national attention (visited St. Augistine. FL, or, for you non-UVA people, Jamestown, VA lately?).

And isn't that the NBA's biggest problem? The two best teams of the past five-to-eight years (okay, so I don't pay nearly enough attention to the NBA to justify writing this post) do their bidness in San Antonio, which is a non-entity on the national scene, and Detroit, which is frankly an ugly, boring city to the rest of the country (though it has a great airport, which I've visited twice in the past week). Moreover, those teams are defense-oriented, which to the non-basketball-obsessed public is dull, dull, dull. The second most exciting player plays in Cleveland, home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Drew Carey Show and (as far as America is concerned) nothing else. And while the most exciting player plays in L.A., he's surrounded by, well, stiffs.

So the Pacific Northwest is about to become the epicenter of professional basketball. The Portland Trailblazers got the first pick in this year's NBA Draft, with which they'll take Greg Oden. Oden is no Shaq, but he's an incredible defensive player who, teamed with Rookie of the Year Brandon Roy, will immediately make the Blazers a force in the Western Conference.

It should be noted that while I'm not really such an NBA fan these days (though with the sustained absence of player-to-fan violence, I've become determined to pay more attention to it as of tonight--we'll see if that holds until next season), my two favorite teams are the Timberwolves and the Sonics. So more interesting, to me, is that the Seattle Sonics improbably managed to nab the second pick, with which they'll take Kevin Durant. Now, even if Oden ends up being the more efficient player (which is likely), Durant is the kind of exciting player that fans love a lot more than they love defensive-minded centers, and Durant plus Sonics mainstay Ray Allen equals an exciting, fast-moving, high-scoring kind of team. So between the Sonics and the three-hours-south Blazers, the Northwest looks like it'll be the place to be for exciting basketball for the next couple years. So that's fun.

Speaking of fun, here's a scene that involves Will Ferrell acting with a toddler who is made to say some things that toddlers should really never say. I can't stop watching it or laughing at it. You've probably seen it, but it's worth watching again. (And again, and again, and again.) Can I have four beers?



Let's see if that works. And let's see if I can manage sitting through a 3 1/2 hour bar review class, which happens every weekday starting tomorrow. If not, this summer is going to be...really fun. And then I'll get a job at Starbucks or something.

What a day.

So that whole law school thing? Yeah. That's over. Had my last final today--knocked it out of the park. And by "knocked it out of the park," I mean "wrote words, more or less in response to each question, which may or may not have formed sentences." Significantly, I turned it in, and I'm fairly certain I'll pass.

We're going to Europe in August, and have racked up huge credit card bills in the planning process. Using my impressive grasp of economics, I ascertained that the credit card company would be charging us significantly more in interest over the next few months than the bank would be paying us in interest on my savings account, so I paid the bill in full. Only, using my less-than-impressive grasp of computers and my own motor skills, I inadvertently paid the bill out of our checking account rather than our savings account.

Several days ago. And in the meantime, our bank has happily gone along accepting our checks and debit card charges, charging us overdraft fees, and not saying a thing. When my debit card was finally rejected during my pre-exam water, energy drink and donettes trip to 7-11 this morning, I logged in to find our balance at something like -$4209. A transfer from the savings account stopped the bleeding, and I then spent a good chunk of my afternoon on the phone with the bank's "customer" "service" staff. And let me tell you, nothing takes the edge off after a 3 1/2 hour exam like a solid hour on the phone with a pleasant but woefully incompetent phone-answerer. Anyway, I've got most of the charges refunded, still working on the rest.

I was lucky enough to win a kind of pointless little contest on Seth's popular Minnesota Twins-themed blog, and my prize was a boxed DVD set containing all seven full games from the 1987 World Series put together by A&E. So after I was done with all the bank silliness for the day, I got up on the treadmill in front of Game One. I was at Game One, as an awestruck eight-and-a-half year-old, and I remember Frankie V pitching well and a grand slam and a win, and a subsequent celebration where some loud lady spilled beer all over me (though that might actually have been Game Two), but not much else.

It's really an incredible experience to go back and see through adult eyes how it actually went, and to see players like The Wizard of Oz and the late, great Kirby in the context of a full-length ballgame again. I actually found myself yelling at the TV at times, usually at the umpire for a questionable call (which, as silly as it is in any situation, is at least doubly so when you're trying to yell not only across hundreds of miles of space but across twenty years of time). It was great fun, except for all the running in place and sweating. (Boy, if you've been skimming, that's gonna be a really hard one to decipher!)

Got a call cutting the nostalgia short--had to stop, actually, just after the grand slam--saying someone was coming to look at the house between 5:30 and 6:30. So I go downstairs, and I'm climbing out of the shower at about ten to 5 when I hear our cute little dog barking her cute little head off; there's a car parked in our driveway that isn't mine. I was sure I'd heard them wrong, that really they were coming at 5 instead of 5:30 (in which case they're still early), and I'm standing there in my towel. So I throw my clothes on, having to put on the jeans twice because the zipper stuck in the first pair, and pulling my t-shirt on over my not-nearly-dry upper half, and run outside to discover a very nice realtor and client who were not the people I was expecting, and who couldn't be bothered to make an appointment.

After that I met my wife for dinner and had generally a very pleasant evening. But I was out of breath for like an hour. Really far too stressful for a day when I'd planned to do nothing but enjoy all the done-with-law-school-ness.

***SUDDEN SUBJECT CHANGE!***

I tend to talk about baseball a lot, and yet to totally ignore the issues in baseball that most people talk about when they talk about baseball. For instance, I'm utterly bored by the steroid issue. If it were coherent to say that I was militantly, almost violently apathetic, that's what I would be about steroids (and HGH and what-have-you) in baseball. Similarly (though less violently), I have almost no interest in what Curt Schilling has to say or the job security of various non-player Yankee personnel.

But lately, the tragic yet (or rather, because) utterly avoidable death of Josh Hancock has a lot of people both inside baseball and out talking about the alcohol policy in most clubhouses (namely, that they provide it, and a lot of it). Now, I've read Ball Four, as everyone should. I know that baseball players, for the most part, are thoughtless, sociopathic losers. But I had no idea that teams encouraged this behavior on a nightly basis. This is ridiculous. Now, the firm I'll be going to has a Friday afternoon happy hour, and some people (present company included, once or twice, last summer) get a little silly. But then they (we) walk home or to the train station. Baseball players own big expensive cars, many of which are made to travel very, very fast. It really doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even a smarmy used car salesman, to realize that this is a problematic policy. I mean, come on. As Seth Myers and Amy Poehler might say, "Really, Bud Selig? Really?"

Sissyness and Linkyness

One exam to go. Ever. Pretending at anonymity for a moment (hey, it's been weeks since my facebook badge was up), the exam I took this morning was for a class taught by my favorite professor at the law school. It's the third class I've taken from him, and I spent my first summer working for him. He's quirky and funny and brilliant. The following, lest they be swallowed by the ceaseless current of time (I find the back page of the Law Weekly just doesn't have the permanence and timelessness you'd expect from a free weekly non-journalism-graduate-school tabloid-style newspaper), are among the numerous gems he unleashed upon my small-section 1L torts class:

“When you go home for Thanksgiving…you will have dazzling conversation at the dinner table and expose the general sloppy and illogical thinking of the lay world and just to cap it off you will brandish this book.”

and

"Walls are not for drawing, paper is not for eating."

and

“If you don’t know the law, give them the policy. If you don’t know the policy, give them the law. If you don’t know the policy or the law, just look good.”

and

"You guys are either playing exceptionally dumb or you are exceptionally dumb."

Amen.

Seriously, do you know how lucky I am? I'm getting sappy and sentimental and stupid about law school. And in the middle of finals. This is an amazing thing. This is not a thing that happens to most folks foolish or unfortunate enough to go to law school. I'm very lucky. We--to you UVA folks--are very lucky. That's not exactly an inspirational speech of Old Ball Coach proportions, but, you know. It's good to remember. And oh, if you haven't seen the linked-to video or the 2006 Libel Show (especially if you go to UVA, but regardless), so do. Now.

Back? Okay. Well, I've loved law school. Charlottesville is a great place--there's no place in the world I'd rather be serving three thousand hours of community service. I'm going to miss taking classes from that one professor I didn't mention. And John Harrison, and Lillian BeVier, and even from most of the mere mortals from whom I've taken classes as well. I'll miss Barrister's and PILA and Libel Show rehearsals and Bar Review and the Thursday keg in the garden; I imagine that things will get bad enough that there are times that I even miss my work on my journal. And that's...a little depressing. Moving on.

I apologize to whomever I stole that picture from (to from whomever I stole that picture?). Copyright infringement threats will be responded to swiftly and in the manner of a paranoid and spineless coward.

There's never much else going on in a world that includes final exams, but with the incomparable Derek Leach apparently moving on to bigger and better things this must never be forgotten. Also, the guy color-commentating the Warriors-Mavericks massacre just said "I think a lot of it is psychology," only he pronounced it "psychoLOJy." If you can even imagine that. And finally, to underscore the point I may or may not have bothered making at some point about blogging being an inherently narcissistic exercise no matter what else I or anyone else may say about it, see this.

...and a song.

On the heels of my petty whining about professional responsibility, the song (slightly paraphrased due to my poor memory) that was the one thing I got to do in my 1L-year Libel Show:
(to the tune of "Coney Island Baby." Sing along!)
Professional Responsi-bi-li-ty,
What I like to call P.R. (P.R. for lawyers);
Give me some Model Rules to fo-ol-low,
Like not soliciting and (never can solicit any)
Priv'lege and confidenti-a-li-ty,
What is the diff'rence 'tween the two? (The two)
So don't steal,
Don't cheat,
Don't like a scandal; (do doo)
So Professional (do doo)
I can be ethical (do doo)
Ethical professional too-oo!

Amen.

Finals Fun

So we went to that Nationals game on Saturday, and it was a blast. I was hoping to have pictures to show you, but a) we forgot the camera and b) I can't figure out how to email myself pictures from my phone. You'll have to be content with this:

Clearly a ripoff of Milwaukee's inimitable Sausage Race, but kind of entertaining nonetheless. I bring it up only because of an exchange I witnessed while waiting in line for ice cream. While I was standing there, Honest Abe and Teddy walked by (I have a close-up picture of the latter on my phone...too bad you can't see it). A boy and girl, probably in fourth or fifth grade, were standing in front of me in line, and briefly got quite excited as the characters walked by and waved at them. The kids waved back and stared and uttered a few little exclamations, and after the giant-headed presidents had passed, the boy asked, "were those the Guinness guys?"

It was apparently a rhetorical question (of course those were the Guinness guys), and immediately they were on to something else. But I found it sad and entertaining.

The game was entertaining, too--we were in the first row, right behind the dugout, and could hear the Mets players yell at one another. The Nationals eventually lost, 6-2, having come within one strike of winning it in the 9th and then falling to pieces in the 12th. I also got my first-ever game used baseball (there were no kids around to give it away to that didn't already have one--that's how close to the action we were) and kind of an embarrassing picture of Omar Minaya that I wish I could share. Anyway, it was tremendous fun, and well worth the six hours in the car.

I took my first final of the semester, and third-to-last ever, this morning. It was Professional Responsibility, which is a worthless class the few moderately useful parts of which are entirely redundant with the MPRE (which I passed by, I'm sure, a much better margin than I'll have passed this exam). Utterly, soul-crushingly dull, and terrible to study for. Nothing against the professor or anyone else involved; it's just not a law school class, except that the ABA requires that it be one.

My last two finals, which I haven't started preparing for, should, well, not be that. And that's something.

Adventures in Miscellany

• One thing that every person should do before he or she dies is ride in a hot-air balloon:

See? This was my birthday present from my wife, and we finally got to enjoy it this past weekend. And, man. It was great. Everyone should get to do this.

• Colin Cowherd is a jackass. He directed his listeners to overload and essentially destroy a website, apparently in response to some perceived slight no one else actually understands, and stole a joke from another website and later refused to give its originators credit for no discernible reason. Moreover, he's terrible at his job, as long as one understands the requirements of his job to include knowing things about sports, communicating them over the radio airwaves in an intelligible manner, and/or being entertaining while doing so.
  
  Here's the thing, though: I can't stop listening. I mean, I can; I would never listen outside of my car, and I can't say I've ever stayed in the car longer than I have to to hear what he has to say. But if I'm in the car and driving and he's on, I listen. It's fascinating. He really is, by any measure, a stupid man, with a severely limited understanding of his native English language. He has a grating and unpleasant speaking voice. He is, I truly believe, a bigot, and is often quite offensive, like earlier today when he improbably turned a light-hearted (but entirely unfunny) dig at Pittsburgh being named the U.S.'s "most romantic city" into a very thinly-veiled attack on San Francisco for being accepting of homosexuality. His sense of humor is disastrous; the other day, he read a "top ten signs your recruit might be on drugs" list, and none of them was any more than a humorless restatement of one or more stereotypes associated with abusing drugs. A representative sample of his humor is this "joke".
  
  In short, I hate every single thing that comes out of his mouth. Which, I think, is why I listen: for the reminder that we live in a country where some large number of people can listen to Colin Cowherd (or Carlos Mencia...but I digress) and actually find themselves entertained. This is what he wants; a guy like Cowherd couldn't care less what I think of him as long as I listen. He's winning. And yet I can't stop. It's kind of depressing.
  
  
• The Onion's AV Club has a nice sampling of wit and wisdom from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. I'm not sure I'd have made all the same selections they did, but it's nice nonetheless.
  
  
• I just don't know what to think of Alex Rodriguez anymore. I've been rooting for him to succeed while the rest of the Yankees fail, because the disparity between his value and fans' perception of him is almost as great as Derek Jeter's (but in the opposite direction), and A-Rod really hasn't deserved anything he's gotten the past couple years (except the MVP award and the $25 million a year). But this start is ridiculous. Nevermind that he's actually winning games for the Evil Empire, with two game-ending homers in the first three weeks. I still kind of love the guy, but he must be stopped.
  
  
• Speaking of baseball (what? me?), I'm taking a trip up to D.C. this weekend to watch some bad baseball in a bad stadium, but from a great seat. Back in October, I bought two front-row-over-the-dugout Nationals tickets at UVA law's PILA auction, so I'll be there to watch David Wright, Jose Reyes and the Mets dismantle the local(-est) nine on Saturday night. Wish me a game worth watching. I really can't justify taking the time out of studying, but that clearly isn't stopping me, either then or now.
  
  
• Kudos to us. By "us" here, I mean we gun-toting, Idol-watching, Colin Cowherd-listening, largely idiotic Americans. We pleasantly surprised me this week by revolting against NBC's (and other networks', after the inevitable trickle down) decision to show the video and other materials sent to them by Cho Seung Hui. We're hopelessly voyeuristic, and we look at things we know we shouldn't (or listen to them, like me with that blowhard Cowherd) for any number of stupid and sometimes vaguely troubling reasons. But there has to be a line somewhere, and that line has to be well in front of the point where we're giving horrifically evil mass murderers exactly the kind and amount of attention they're seeking. I didn't expect us to really recognize that line, but I guess we did. This time.
  
  
• Colin Cowherd is a jackass.
  
  
• Incidentally, Jim Rome is no better at his job; his voice is just as bewilderingly inappropriate for radio, and he's just as unfunny, and really does seem dumb. But he doesn't actually seem like an evil person, so I'll lay off him.
  

The problem with trying not to take anything seriously

Here's a fresh, home-typed transcript of what Jon Stewart, who a bit more than five and a half years ago said the most sincere and moving thing I've ever seen on television, said to open his program this evening (after the usual cheery welcome and guest plug):

Obviously for anybody who's been tuned to the television today, a horrible, horrible day. Uh, I have absolutely nothing to add that is insightful or anything. I will just do what I always do when faced with something, uh, that, uh, is that powerfully damaging to the emotional core; I will begin to repress it, and I will swallow it, uh, and I imagine that thirty years from now, someone will spill juice, and I will freak the f*ck out. So, uh, to that end, let's move on as though the world is okay.

That's pretty much all I can do on days like this. That, and pray, and every now and then start to cry and freak out just a little bit. But mostly that.

Jackie Robinson Day

I'm currently watching Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN. (I should be studying or something, but it's fascinating.) Today is Jackie Robinson Day: sixty years ago today, Robinson, a genuinely great ballplayer who would have been a bona fide Hall of Famer even if his only contributions to history had been with his bat, legs and glove, became the first African American to play Major League ball (or any major American professional sport). In celebration, they're interviewing prominent people who knew and were affected by Jackie (the most interesting of which has been Jackie's widow, Rachel Robinson, an engaging and fascinating woman) while the Dodgers-Padres game is carried on in the background.

Earlier, meathead ESPN "analyst" John Kruk said something I think I agree with, which would be an all-time first; the gist was that we're celebrating Jackie because it's the 60th anniversary, and that's great, but it should really be celebrated every year, because it was a momentous occasion not only in baseball, but for all of America. He suggested that it should be a national holiday, and I don't know if I'd go quite that far. But it should be remembered. And at the very least, it probably shouldn't also be tax day. Get on that, feds.

I was going to pick on ESPN's coverage just a little bit, but I'm enjoying it so much that I don't have the energy to do justice to my argument. Here it is in a nutshell: tied in with this celebration, because there always has to be a controversy, is this lurking idea that African American representation in pro baseball is dwindling, going from a high of some 27% in 1975 to just 8.5% today. This seems to me like a bit of a red herring; those percentage points are being taken by Latino and Asian players, and the percentage of white players is decreasing as well (apparently about the same number of percentage points, which admittedly is a much slower relative decline since the starting percentage was much higher). An alternative way to look at it, it seems to me, is that rather than African Americans losing interest in the sport (which may be happening to some extent), a sport that was once heavily dominated by white and black players has become vastly more diverse, with better international relations, more advanced international scouting systems, and just generally better competition for a larger-but-still-very-limited number of roster spots. So I'm not really seeing a problem here (certainly not one foreboding enough that it needs to be juxtaposed with this happy event). Let me know if I'm wrong, and check out some of the recent numbers (and a very favorable diversity report for MLB) here.

So it goes.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

-Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Last night, around the time that I was blathering on about the worst show on television, the news started to break that the world was now populated by one fewer Great American Novelist (and we're down to so few!); Kurt Vonnegut had died at the age of 84.

I make a poor eulogist for Vonnegut. I've read nearly everything he ever published, but honestly, I hadn't looked at any of it since about 1999. I disagreed to varying degrees with most of his views on politics and religion. This was a man who genuinely disliked most of the world and loathed or at least distrusted its precepts; but such are the men and women that so often make great artists. At least three of his books (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, and Breakfast of Champions) are, in my inexpert estimation, certifiable works of genius, and have largely stayed with me since I read them back in college. Many of his others would also rank among the better books I've ever read.

I think Vonnegut often gets unfairly labeled as a sort of definitional artifact of "his time," which in turn is often unfairly labeled as "the sixties"; bizarre treatment for an author who produced valuable work for parts of six decades. It's true that Vonnegut resonated particularly well with sixties audiences (or at least with college students in the sixties). But Vonnegut covered difficult topics in ways that hadn't been done before, wrote from perspectives no one else thought of, and adopted a kind of otherworldly-yet-conversational style that was entirely his and has never really been emulated since. It strikes me as lazy and irresponsible to attempt to confine a talent like his to a particular generation. Even worse, to label him a "humorist" or (most laughably of all) a "science-fiction writer"; Vonnegut's novels were often quite funny and often (but certainly not always) took fantastical turns, but these labels couldn't possibly do justice to his body of work. Vonnegut was insightful, often moving, and refreshingly original, qualities that no temptingly easy label (other than, perhaps, "Great American Novelist") can capture.

And so on.

I hate American Idol.

No reason to mess around with a clever title. A little over two years ago, my beautiful wife and I got hooked on American Idol. I'll never really know why. It was always a bit frustrating, what with all the inane pop music, the making fun of people during the audition period who are probably mildly mentally disabled, and the judges who don't really know all that much about singing. But there were a handful of people who were really, really talented and fun to watch, and while neither of the last two winners (Carrie Underwood and Taylor Hicks) fits that description, the good people were always at least in it until something close to the end.

I haven't seen it as much this year, to which I think I can credit my continued relative sanity. In one year, it's gone from a slightly embarrassing but harmless distraction to an unmitigated disaster. I'm not even going to talk about Sanjaya, except to say that he was exactly as awful last week as he was every other time I've seen him, and I hope he wins and ruins this show forever, because the show is an abomination even ignoring the most abominable of them all. But a picture is in order for the uninitiated:









Yeah, they really put that guy on TV. And he can't sing any better than you can.

But that aside, very nearly everything about this show is now unspeakably awful. There are two exceptions--two singers who, while they're not the goddesses the show puts them out as, really are pretty decent singers. Unfortunately, they look like this.











Lakisha Jones above; Melinda Doolittle to the left.

Now, I'm really not making fun of these two. They're very good performers, and thus are totally out of place on this season of this show. The obnoxious truth is that people (especially women) that look this average just don't become stars. There's always plastic surgery, I suppose (though how well that worked for this desperate and far less talented Idol alum is not for me to say). And while their future star potential doesn't necessarily bear upon their watchability on the show, I honestly don't think they're good enough to make it worth putting up with all the other crap, a summary of which follows.

First, there are the six (five, after tonight) other contestants. Haley Scarnato, who was booted tonight, is beautiful but essentially talentless. Phil Stacey, who will almost certainly get the hook next week, is probably the best of an absolutely horrendous group of males. Seems like a nice guy; can't sing as high as he thinks he can, and can't stay in tune. Blake Lewis, who seems to be the favorite among squealing teenage girls, is the kind of guy with whom I could stand carrying on a conversation for precisely seven seconds, looks absolutely ridiculous week after week and can't stay in tune. Chris Richardson is basically the same as Blake, only with even less talent and personality. He really wants to be Justin Timberlake, and can't even live up to that astoundingly low threshold. Jordin Sparks is a 17-year-old girl with good stage presence and energy who sings like a pretty decent 17-year-old.

Second, the judges have gotten worse. Randy Jackson appears to have no qualifications to judge a singing competition, and it shows; the few good performances are "pitchy" and the many truly terrible, torturous, off-key performances are invariably "hot." Paula acts pretty much like this in every episode (watch that video if you haven't seen it--it's hilarious). With Danny Devito getting all that attention for that one interview, how does Paula go out there in a considerably worse condition twice a week without causing any actual controversy? But I digress. Simon remains by far the most realistic of the judges; his comments on the technical aspects of the singers' singing are accurate probably 70% of the time, which is at least twice as accurate as either of the others. He's just not funny anymore; he's completely run out of clever insults.

So this is pretty bad. How to make it worse? Try hiring celebrity "coaches" Diana Ross, Gwen Stefani and Jennifer Lopez. Now, Ross had some chops once, but now she's gone loopy (best moment of that episode was her use of the "word" "pronounciate"); the other two are never-weres. This is like hiring Billy Joel to teach you about driving or Paris Hilton to talk to your kids about abstinence (of either commonly discussed variety). Roseanne may well be next. And the video behind that link may actually hurt my ears less than hearing Blake butcher Marc Anthony's already cringe-worthy "I Need to Know." But I digress again.

I mean, needless to say I won't be watching anymore (I have to be a pig for a moment and admit that Haley, despite being no better than the rest, was the only reason I was still watching at all), which is how I can justify wasting just one more hour to blog about my frustrations with it. If you're not a singer, think of something you're passionate about; now imagine a show that purported to be an attempt to find the next best thing in that hobby, but featured contestants who couldn't do it, fawned over by judges who didn't know the first thing about it, interspersed with appearances by other people who already make a lot of money by sucking at it (is there a Gwen Stefani of, say, cooking?) and hosted by this soulless gnome:
You there with me now? If so, you may be beginning to understand my pain...

Dave Foley really does know funny, Libelous thoughts, other notes

I watched both premiere episodes of Thank God You're Here last night, which you can waste up to two hours watching at the link just provided. It's far too early to tell whether I should be embarrassed at having watched it. But I thought it was mildly entertaining--a really interesting premise that would be more interesting with better celebrities/comics involved (Joel McHale, Kevin Nealon and Jennifer Coolidge were great; Richard Kind and Mo'Nique, not so much).

Here's the thing, though; the show co-stars one of my heroes, or rather a shockingly old-looking, wild-gray-haired-and-goateed imitation of one of my heroes, and it's kind of sad. Dave Foley, probably the most talented and consistently funny member of the excellent--nay, legendary--Kids in the Hall comedy troupe, is the "judge" of the program, which means that David Alan Grier asks Dave what he thinks about each performer, and that at the end Dave gets to pick the "winner" (who wins a little plastic trophy). But, at least for the first two episodes, what Dave "thought" was essentially that the performer was absolutely fantastic--just really great--and he then picked the "winner" seemingly at random.

This is a sad waste of a brilliant comic talent, and a man who, despite appearances, clearly does understand what is funny. Observe (less than a minute, PG, really funny):



My hope is that he's trying to be nice to everybody to encourage bigger and better stars to come on the show in the future, and that he'll start being more realistic if the show gets picked up. But you never know. I just really love this video (especially the end: "requests?"). I wish I could find a version that's not captioned in a language I don't recognize.

Other notes:

• -In leaving a comment on my own blog this morning (does it get any more self-indulgent than that?), I noticed that it said that anonymous comments are not allowed. That seems silly. So they're now allowed. Just not as enthusiastically encouraged as the alternative.


• -The leadership (er, "junta") for the 2008 Libel Show was elected last night. A little sad, since it's the very last time I can even pretend to be involved with the Show. Also, I've decided after experiencing it three times that the election process is about as poor as we could possibly make it. People are nominated or nominate themselves for a position, and speak for a minute or less about their qualifications, and then leave the room while the rest of us discuss their high and low points for something more like ten minutes before the vote takes place. This is supposed to be a secret thing; what is said in the room stays with the people in the room and so forth. Of course, UVA being what it is, with the Honor Code and whatnot, everyone finds out precisely what was said about her while she was out as soon as the meeting ends. So it's like this: there's all sorts of opportunity for people to make unfounded, often ridiculous accusations against a candidate (and that certainly happened last night); the candidate has no opportunity to defend herself, relying on her friends to do it for her, which often makes it a really awkward pissing match; and then afterward, the candidate hears all about it and can do nothing but get angry and/or feel sorry for herself. So 1Ls and 2Ls? Fix that. I'm not sure what the best way to do it is, but you could scarcely do worse.
  
  
• -I took my facebook badge off of the sidebar, because I decided there was a difference between being open and personal on the one hand and actively inviting identity theft on the other. But I also changed my facebook profile picture today, to the headshot that was taken of me for the lobby during the Show, and now you don't get to see it. So here it is:
  
  Terrifying, no? I should probably change the adjective in this blog's title. Nonetheless, I like it. It's probably my favorite bad picture of myself ever. And there have been so many.


• -The Twins did indeed lose last night, and Mr. Ponson didn't quite give up 25 runs, but he was good for 8 over 6 innings (though one who watched it much closer than I said he wasn't actually all that bad). Nonetheless, Ponson remains roughly as worthy of a rotation spot as I am.


• -I left my cell phone in my car. Be right back.
  


• -Back! But it turns out I've nothing left to say.

Talkin' baseball...

Kluszewski, Campanella!

First, a breakdown of my readers thus far, as I understand them:

Me.
My wife, when I remind her.
Mike and Melissa.
Stephanie.
My mother-in-law.
My Advanced Legal Research professor.
My other Advanced Legal Research professor.

Good group. A small group, but a sociologically and geographically diverse one stretching (well, more like jumping) from one coast of this great nation to the other. And growing at a rate of approximately one U.Va. Advanced Legal Research professor per week (warning: due to sample size issues, data may not be a reliable predictor of future performance). If you're reading this for some (or more likely no) reason and don't appear on the above list, I hope you'll let me know somehow (like by using the "comments" link below). It's fun to hear.

Right. So, as one who is hopelessly addicted to the complex, often frustrating, and ultimately pointless world of Major League Baseball, and in particular to the very out-of-market Minnesota Twins, I'm now entering my third year of subscribing to MLB.TV, which allows me (subject to certain restrictions, which are the subject of this portion of the entry) to watch essentially every game through my dying laptop and the miracle of the internet. This year, I even shelled out the extra thirty bucks for their premium package: you get a much higher resolution picture, and access to a software program that allows you to watch and shift seamlessly among the audio streams for up to six games at once (and may even function someday soon).

All in all, I'm happy with it. The picture quality is very good, and streams much more smoothly than a few years ago. I don't have digital cable, so I can't get the Extra Innings TV package, but I don't think the difference is such that I'd be willing to pay the extra $50 per season.

But here's the problem: local and national blackouts. First, each team has a set of zip codes, viewers within which are banned from watching any of that team's games over the internet. The idea, I suppose, is that there's about a 50/50 chance that you'll end up watching the other team's broadcast, and thus miss out on all those critical local commercials. And I'm fine with that. The real problem is that the zip code 22901, wherein I reside, is on the banned list for both the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals, whereas both teams have contracts with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Networks (MASN) to carry their games locally, and Comcast Cable doesn't currently provide access to MASN in said zip code. So I can't get the games on TV or over the internet. What's worse, ESPN has contracts to black out its nationally televised, non-premium (i.e. any night but Sunday night) games when those games are also available locally, presumably covering the same overly expansive lists of zip codes. So while the Twins' opening-night game against the Orioles last Monday was theoretically available on local TV, national TV, and the internet, I had none of these sources available to me. The bottom line is that lawyers ruin everything.

In a similar vein, ESPN and Fox both have exclusivity contracts with MLB that provide that no other games will be made nationally available in competition with their national broadcasts (Saturday afternoon for Fox, Sunday night for ESPN). This makes sense and is completely above the board, etc., etc. The problem is that their definitions of both what qualifies as a national broadcast and the time range of what qualifies as being in competition are ridiculously broad. To take them in order: an internet "broadcast" of what is intended to be a local telecast, made available only to paying subscribers to a website, should not be subject to these blackouts. I'm sure that the language of the contracts explicitly states that they do qualify, but that is true only because, as mentioned, lawyers ruin everything.

Second, Fox has gone and moved the first pitch of its Saturday broadcasts from about 1:00 p.m. EST to about 4:00. This is great in that it allows Left Coast viewers a few more hours to sleep it off and gives pitchers the decided advantage of pitching through really awkward late afternoon shadows, but it's terrible for MLB.TV and Extra Innings subscribers. Games that start at the ordinary start time of 1:00 p.m. Eastern, of which there are several (especially in the colder-weather months), continue to be blacked out, despite very little (if any) overlap with the Fox broadcast. Of course, West Coast afternoon games will also be blacked out, as will games that start in the early evening (say 6:00 EST), which occasionally happen on Saturdays. When one considers that at least half of all local broadcasts are carried on a regional Fox Sports channel, and that Fox is effectively then keeping viewers from choosing not to watch its broadcasts in favor of watching...its broadcasts, these contracts start to seem senselessly restrictive. I'm pretty sure the whole point is to annoy me.

Speaking of annoying things and baseball, the Twins seem to have latched onto the idea that one sticks with what works. Which, in ordinary circumstances, is a fine idea. The problem is that what "worked" for them last year was starting the year with among the least talented lineups that could possibly have been formed of all the talent available to them: Tony Batista and Juan Castro manned third and short, while Jason Bartlett toiled in the minors; Francisco Liriano started in the bullpen. They recovered from this to win 96 games and the division. So, this year, why not give spots in the starting rotation to Ramon (or is it Russ?) Ortiz, Carlos Silva and Sidney Ponson instead of Matt Garza, Glen Perkins, Kevin Slowey and/or Scott Baker? The problem, of course, is what saved the Twins last year is that they recognized these mistakes, come about May, and rectified them. That might need to happen even earlier this year if they're going to have similar success.

The Twins play the Yankees at home tonight, on a nationally televised game that I will get to watch. For some reason, the completely useless Ponson will be starting despite the availability of the completely average Boof Bonser on six days' rest. These are the kinds of decisions that end up costing a team a very tight division, and the kind that lead a team to end up giving up 25 runs to the Yankees on national television. But then I guess Ponson giving up 25 runs, which is honestly well within the realm of possibility, might lead to Garza's recall coming faster, so maybe that's a good thing?

Wow.

I have almost nothing to say right now, except that it's Opening Day, and the Twins won, and I'm happy.

But I had to put this up, despite the fact that it was released today and appears to be pervading the entire InterWeb right now, because I think it's brilliant. It's great when genuinely good artists turn out to have great senses of humor too.



It also shows how a truly talentless performer can release perhaps the foulest pile of elephant dung ever recorded, and then a genuinely good artist can make it almost enjoyable. Just amazing, really.

Enjoy!

Turning over a new leaf...eventually

Having received confirmation that Professor Morris has, in fact, found this blog--whether before or after yesterday's shout-out, it's impossible to say--I feel compelled to talk about something that matters. Something about politics or current events, or at least a kind of witty observation about human nature. You know.

So...look for that soon. Today I've got some petty whining about the sale of residential realty.

But before I get to that, on a point cryptically related to the above (the professor, not the whining), I've linked to my friend CS' blog, The Reliant, along the right side of this page. CS (sometimes she uses just her first name, sometimes just her last; we'll use neither to be safe) is a 1L here at UVA. She's brilliant, and also hilarious, though that second part doesn't come through all that well on her blog, which is all about things that really matter. Someday, I hope to understand enough about international politics to make it all the way through an entry like the one from March 12. Very much worth a link nonetheless; maybe you'll get what she's talking about. And there's always the chance that she'll say something characteristically funny. At the very least, you'll think I know smart people, making me appear smarter by extension.

So we're selling our house. I'm a bit sad to be doing so in the first place; I like this house, and it's about twice as large as the sort of place we're likely to end up getting in Chicago (and cost us about 60% as much money as we're likely to spend there). But here's something you don't hear much about (actually, it's something that everybody talks about when they're going through it, but then if you're not going through it--as you aren't--you just sit there and get annoyed and roll your eyes when other people talk about it--as I am--and don't really think about it until you're going through it): selling one's home really sucks. I mean, really.

It's not just all the cleaning and putting things in storage, although that's taken hours and hours and was really quite a colossal pain in the rear. It's having to constantly keep things clean. And not just clean, but the kind of clean that gives the illusion that nobody actually lives here. I have to keep my toothbrush under the sink, for example. And make the bed.

On top of that, I have to be ready to leave at essentially every moment. Some stranger calls and says she's on her way, and I have to take my dog and get the hell out. Of my own home. I mean, I haven't had to do that yet (just went on the market today, in fact), but I will. And I won't be happy.

I mean, I can't complain too much about it, for no reason other than that our real estate agent is also my aunt. But man.

Until next time. I'll keep thinking.

Not Dead Yet

This blog isn't, that is. I'm hoping this will be more than a once-a-week thing, perhaps starting as early as this week.

So the Show was last week, and was everything I'd hoped and then some. I got to make fun of Packer fans and dress up as a gender-bending glam rocker. See?



Oah, jeeze, come on in dere!

The girl in the upper picture is the makeup artist who did this horrible thing to me. Anyway, it was amazingly fun. Tickets sold well, and the show went over well. I was up until 3:30-5 am every night, and still kind of waiting to recover. You'd never believe how many talented and, especially, incredibly funny people you can find at a law school (or at least at UVA Law School). I'm going to miss it terribly, but looking forward to sitting and watching the whole thing next year (assuming I can escape the office for a day or two).

This weekend is the annual UVA Law Softball Tournament. Some 100 teams from other law schools come out to UVA for a weekend every year to, essentially, live like a Virginia law student and get soundly beaten by a Virginia law softball team. This is the first year that I'm "playing" in the tournament; I'm on the least competitive of our six teams and probably won't play in the field much, but it's exciting to be a part of it. I'll hope to check in over the weekend with photos and amusing anecdotes (there are many from the Libel Show, but I'm not sure which I can/should share).

To that end, true story: just a few short minutes ago (hey, I type fast), I was in class and was lectured on the dangers of maintaining a blog and facebook profile, because employers and such can see them. Which is, of course, a perfectly valid point (and a hearty hello to Prof. Morris, if she's reading this). It's a little scary. But, horrifying stage makeup aside, I don't think there's anything particularly controversial (or even, frankly, anything all that interesting to anyone but me) about all of this. I trust you to let me know immediately if that ever changes.

Finally, one more very funny/interesting thing I've found that is probably common knowledge among the general web-obsessed public but is brand new to me: OverheardInNewYork.com (as well as its companion sites, overheard at the beach and office). It's fascinating, and updated with astounding frequency. Enjoy!

These shoes are three hundred f^&%ing dollars.

Saw 300 on Saturday night. That movie sucked hard. Powerful hard. It was a lot like Braveheart, if Braveheart had been written, produced and directed by developmentally challenged seven year-olds who had played a lot of really unrealistically violent video games rather than by a drunken anti-Semite who happens to be really, really good at making movies.

On Friday we had about a dozen friends over for a four-days-late birthday party. The classic combination of wine, gourmet pizza, cookies and leftover birthday cake. It was a great time. Not much more to say about it, except some of my friends showed me the video below. There's a whole lot of amateur crap masquerading as comedy on YouTube, but this almost makes it all worthwhile. Some dirty language and stuff, and it gets better as it goes:


We had our first Libel Show run through last night. We have another tonight and one tomorrow before the show opens on Wednesday. At the end of this week (Saturday through Friday), I'll have spent approximately 42 hours in Caplin Auditorium, around the same amount of time sleeping, perhaps eight hours in class, and precisely 0 hours studying. In other words, it'll be the best week ever, and then I'll sleep for a day or so.

Past my peak

Among baseball geeks, there's a school of thought (formed, basically, by exaggerating the importance of and grossly misapplying a real statistical trend) that essentially holds that age 27 is the ideal, peak-performance year for a ballplayer. It's been inflated by some to the point where a player's "age-27 season" has kind of a mystical, magical quality to it.

On the other hand, another, more realistic group says that a player's "peak years" run right up through age 32. So I've got five good years left in me.

I'm not thrilled to be spending my birthday in Libel Show rehearsals until 10:00 p.m., but there are worse things. I mean, I'm sure there are going to be people at the school at that time that will be, like, studying and stuff. No one I know (or care to), but people.

When I said away back in February that I'd be bringing you stuff from other places that I find funny, I never would have guessed that the very second one I brought to you would be a stand-up comedienne, or, even less likely, a ventriloquist, but I find this woman kind of awkwardly hilarious (it's a bit raunchy, but just a bit):



Her name (as it may say in that clip) is Nina Conti. We watched For Your Consideration two nights ago, and while it had its moments, I found it really disappointingly lazy for a Christopher Guest film (basically Waiting for Guffman goes Hollywood and loses most of its wit and charm on the way). But Conti (with her monkey) plays a weather woman on the local a.m. news program, and there's a lengthy clip of her doing her material in the bonus features, and I think the DVD is worth a look just for her. Cute and funny. And really a very talented ventriloquist, for whatever that's worth.

Off to continue "enjoying" my "birthday."

Kids, imagination, and tragedy, take two

I think the best book I ever read as a kid was Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, which I read in either third or fourth grade. It seems most people I know around my age read it at some point and have at least a vague memory of it. I wasn't exactly averse to reading as a kid, but I remember attacking that book like no other. It's the story of a boy and girl, both just a year or two older than I was then, who develop a powerful friendship and help each other through difficulties at school and at home by imagining a rich fantasy world that they create in the nearby woods. The girl in particular, Leslie, is an unusually endearing character; a bit awkward and bizarre but astoundingly self-confident and imaginative, she becomes in an odd way sort of the wise old sage to the boy's (Jess') naive apprentice--though they're the same age--teaching him how to use his imagination and talents to enliven and enrich his otherwise awkward and frustrating preadolescent life. Then real life intervenes, in a surprising and heartbreaking way.

It's hard to describe how deeply this book affected me way back when, though I suppose the fact that I remember it so well almost twenty years later gives you a hint. The characters were so well drawn (for a children's book, especially) that I was completely engrossed. I felt like Jess, and I really, really wanted a friend like Leslie (as I suspect almost every boy that age does). And it was the first book I remember reading--in fact, probably the first story I ever came across in any medium--in which real-life tragedy strikes a "good guy" (let alone one I could really identify with). I cried, a lot, and had to have a long talk with my mom about it. I don't think I was the same for a few days after that, which, when you consider how quickly kids recover, was really something for a little book.

So when I saw the trailer for the Disney film based on the book, I was (to overstate it slightly) offended. The book was about fantasy as an aspect of a lively imagination, not about fantasy as a film genre. The trailer, which you can see here, and other advertisements promise a non-stop adventure with trolls and other creatures (possibly even robots?), a la Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. That's a complete bastardization of the book's heart and message--in other words, pretty much how you expect Disney to roll.

But, praise be, it was the marketing firm that ruined it, not the filmmakers (and actually, the filmmakers have disavowed any connection with those terrible ads). Aside from the fact that the film took place in 2007 rather than 1977 and has just a bit of awful Hillary Duff-like pop music, I felt very much like I was back in third or fourth grade reading the book. The few fantasy elements that are actually depicted are merely (and clearly) representations of the children's imagination, and take up a very small portion of the film. And when the movie takes its tragic turn (which I fear parents will be unprepared for, thanks to those ads), it's handled very, very well. I cried again--not quite as much as when I read the book, perhaps, but that's because I already knew the ending, not because I'm too mature for it or any such crap. This is a good film for anyone of any age that has at least some memory of once being a kid. So that means you.

One thing about this film, and all kids' movies where the main characters are outcasts: they're too pretty. I know 5th-8th grade is tough for everybody, but no one who looks like this:


and has any sort of personality at all is going to be made fun of much. The above is AnnaSophia Robb, who was also Violet Beauregarde in the excellent remake of Charlie in the Chocolate Factory and is going to be a star for at least the next couple years and possibly many more (but at age 13 you can never tell), as Leslie. The thing is, though, she's so engaging and likable that it's impossible not to suspend one's disbelief over the fact that she's supposed to be a nerd who gets ostracized just because her family doesn't own a television. It's hard to imagine any child other than Dakota Fanning getting as much out of this (already excellent) role as she does. And who wants to see yet another Dakota Fanning flick?

The boy, Josh Hutcherson from Zathura (which I will never see), does almost equally well in a less shiny but equally important featured role. Evil Terminator Robert Patrick, who once kicked the lifeless corpse of X-Files square in the head for an entire, painful season, plays the first 3/4 of the movie rather listlessly, but really shines in the final scenes. And Zooey Deschanel, who was adorable opposite Will Ferrell in Elf, is almost equally adorable here in a small but important role as the kids' hippie music teacher.

All in all, this is a great film, for kids (who are old enough to handle it) and for everybody else, whether you loved the book as a kid as I did or never heard of it. I'll be buying the DVD when it comes out, and it'll get more than a few viewings well before our children-to-be are old enough to see it.

In other news, my beautiful wife just learned that she was accepted into the University of Chicago's Master of Arts in the Humanities Program for next year. Huzzah for her! I'm very proud, and alternatives to sitting in a condo watching TV all day are good.

Most exciting post in blogging history?

It's been almost a week since I posted anything, but then, it's Spring Break, and I didn't go anywhere (while my friends did), so I've had nothing to post. I've been doing a lot of sleeping, and using the treadmill, and trying to get the house ready to sell. There are many worse things, really, but none of these activities provide good blogging fodder.

Apparently, "none...provide," rather than "none...provides," is correct. That blows my grammar-nerd mind. I mean, I have no reason to think that this is particularly trustworthy, but it sounds convincing.

When I grow up, I want to be one of those doctors whose job is to go on TV and scare the mother-loving piss out of people by talking about the latent dangers in things that everyone does all the time and lives to tell about it. The guy on Regis and Kelly right now (and I'm not nearly as okay with watching Regis and Kelly as I am with crying at movies; it just happened to be on after I finished watching the Tivo'ed Daily Show) is some kind of expert on germs and contagions and the like, and just said that a single drop of vomit or diarrhea can infect a million people. Therefore, America's largest terrorist threat is, in fact, our own children ages 0-9. It's so simple! Bring our boys home. And then send them into our homes. This threat must be neutralized.

In a similar vein, there was a guy on the Today Show the other day (may actually have been the same guy--they all have wild gray hair and bushy mustaches, which I suppose they think makes them look like Einstein or something) talking about how long it was safe to keep different foods in your fridge/freezer/pantry. I don't want to exaggerate or misrepresent what he said or anything, but I'm pretty sure the gist was that if you've had that TV dinner in your freezer for more than twelve hours, you're going to die. Don't even look at it.

And that's really all there is to talk about. Back to the cleaning.

A Collection of Clearly Connected, Non-Random Items

This is my all-time favorite SportsCenter commercial (and there have been so many great ones):



I went to see Pan's Labyrinth tonight with my beautiful wife. It was gory, and weird, and subtitled, and fabulous. I cried. (I cry at movies sometimes...I'm okay with that.) I probably wouldn't be able to sit through it again, but I'd recommend it to anyone who could handle, say, the first eleven minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

When we were waiting in line for popcorn--which is really the only reason we go to the movies rather than waiting for the DVD--we discovered that waiting behind us was one of Charlottesville's three biggest stars. No, not Dave Matthews, and not John Grisham. It was none other than Howie Long, star of many enjoyable commercials and such action-packed cinematical smash hits as Firestorm.



He's much taller than he looks on TV, but I suppose one should expect that of an action superstar (I heard he used to be a decent football player, too, and they're sometimes kinda tall). He was also very scruffy, and oblivious--the poor girl behind the counter must've said "I can help the next person" half a dozen times before she finally said "Mr. Long?" in a kind of politely irritated voice.

I mean, I shouldn't make fun of the guy, except for that Firestorm thing. Seems like a good guy, from what one can tell (which is to say, from nothing at all), and of the two most visible personalities on the Fox Sports NFL pregame show, he's the one who doesn't typically have me reevaluating the merits of eugenics. So, it was good to see ol' Howie. I guess. Honestly, I'll have forgotten it by next week. My mother, sister, and wife saw (-slash-stalked) Dave Matthews on the downtown mall some three months ago, and will never forget it. I'm pretty sure my little sister's life has been forever changed.

That's pretty much all I got. Here's an old picture of my dog: