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.
  

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.