Bud Bowl: The Grandaddy (or at least Drunk Uncle) of Them All

In an odd twist of history and / or math this Sunday will mark the 25^th anniversary of Bud Bowl and the 10^th anniversary of nipplegate. I have to admit that I missed the latter because I had changed the channel to, ok to be honest I have no idea what I changed the channel to. It could have been the Puppy Bowl, it could have been some random show on MTV, or I could have just left the room for a while because I had no desire to see Janet Jackson or Justin Timberlake. In fact, it wasn’t until the next day that I knew that anything noteworthy had happened. And let’s face it, there was a lot more flesh on display at the Puppy Bowl that year anyway.

But Bud Bowl, now that is something that I could look back on fondly. Who can forget the yearly battle between Budweiser (the beer of choice when you are out of all other options) and Bud Light (the beer that is best described as having sex in a canoe.) You had the legendary Budway Joe at quarterback, the heroic Budsky as the kicker and the later addition of Bud Dry. If they played today they would also have to include Bud Platinum though I don’t know how you would bring Bud Platinum into the game without making some very off color remark.

(Truth be told, Kim and I actually tried Bud Platinum when it first came out. Between the two of us we were unable to finish a bottle. Remember that we met in a bar, had most of our first conversations in a bar, had our first date in a bar in the French Quarter and combined we have the high score on bar trivia machines in something like seven states. If we can’t finish a bottle that tells you something about the quality.)

There are people who now talk about how horrible that ad campaign was but I was precisely the right age for a beer commercial (fifteen) at the time and it worked perfectly. For years we were always focused on the Bud Bowl. One year I lost money betting on the Bud Bowl. I’m pretty sure that the Bills lost to Bud Light in Bud Bowl IV. There were times when we cared more about the Bud Bowl than we did the actual game. If there was ever an advertising campaign with staying power it is the Bud Bowl, which is up there with the Hamm’s Bear in terms of marketing alcohol to people who are technically not old enough to purchase it.

I can’t say that it turned me into a Budweiser drinker though and I will end with one of my fun bar stories from my past. I was in Lawrence, KS one night sitting in I think Buffalo Wild Wings burning time before heading to a concert. The only reason I was in BW3 was that it was October and I wanted to watch the baseball playoffs. Anyway, I’m sitting at the end of the bar and this woman in a Budweiser jacket starts talking to the bartender about Budweiser products and whatever new beer they were pitching at the time. I’m the only other person at the bar and somehow I got drawn into the conversation and she offers to buy me a beer and I decline. She just stares at me and asks why and I respond. “I don’t drink Budweiser.” That got her all flustered so she went, “Why don’t you drink Budweiser? You’re drinking a Miller Lite and you know they are foreign owned now so why don’t you support an American brand?” My response said it all.

“Because I hate St. Louis.”

Dauber: Bigger than Lennon, Elvis and Justin Timberlake Put Together

Here is your latest sign that the music industry is screwed up beyond all belief. On VH1 Classic right now they are broadcasting three straight hours of old episodes of Coach. A channel that by definition has fifty years of history to draw from, Beatles on Ed Sullivan to Rolling Stones at Altamont to Live Aid to really crappy boy bands to even crappier boy bands to my God, what the hell is a Bieber and why do I care, has decided that its best broadcasting choice is to go completely off brand and just show old episodes of Coach.

Now I do not want to use this space to disparage the classic television sitcom of Coach. Far be it from me to question the enviable talents of Craig T. Nelson or the comedy stylings of the next to funniest member of the Van Dyke family. Clearly the story and history of the Minnesota State Screaming Eagles is more interesting than my own Fighting Illini and I’m pretty sure that we lost to Minnesota State the past five years straight. And anyone who says that Dauber isn’t one of the greatest television characters and assistant coaches of all time is a fool. So no, I am not going to spend my time questioning the merits of Coach or the forgettable years spent coaching the Orlando Breakers (a dark time in our nation’s history to be sure.)

No, what bothers me is that this is on VH-1 Classic when the show has absolutely nothing to do with music altogether. If you are going to just give up and show old television shows why not pick up Happy Days or The Wonder Years, where the music in the background plays a significant role in the series. Hell, why not show WKRP in Cincinnati, which fits the channel perfectly and fills a niche because those shows can’t be released on DVD due to all of the music rights. I’ll take a Haden Fox for Johnny Fever trade straight up and once we bring Bailey into the equation it is a no brainer. I can think of a dozen sitcoms more fitting to the channel than Coach.

Obviously the easy solution to this problem would be to simply play something associated with music. Even if you say that the video is passé you still have untold hours of documentaries and concerts and specials and, because this is VH-1, “I Love the Insert Vague Pop Culture Reference Here” marathons. Hell, I’ll even accept reruns of old VH-1 reality shows. I’ll watch reruns of Flavor of Love or Celebrity Rehab or The Pick Up Artist (which totally deserved a third season by the way). It just seems like this is the laziest programming decision ever.

I know that we are at the end of the lifespan of such concepts as television channels. Soon we will all get whatever content we want online and we will mix and match to create our own channels. Right now I could build my own music video playlist and spend the next few hours in relative bliss. But the wonder of television is that it can surprise you by showing you something that you didn’t know about in a way that recommendation boxes can’t. You can always ignore a recommendation and to be honest, we are so inundated with information that it is just easier to put on blinders. But it is those random moments when you are changing channels or walking the aisle of a bookstore or flipping through CD racks that you stumble on something that changes your life. It kills me that we are losing that part of our culture.

Wednesday Night Music Club: If there was an album from last year that surprised me it was the latest from Richard Buckner. I’ve followed him for more than fifteen years and while I’ve always been a fan and I will be the first to say that his live performances have left me slackjawed in wonder I haven’t been as taken with his recent work. But Surrounded is just an amazing collection of songs. This video of him singing in an art gallery just shows why I’ve spent nearly two decades collecting his music. Just stunning.

Remembering the 80's: Volume Three: The Rubik's Cube

In my entire life I have never successfully solved a Rubik’s Cube. Even when I had instructions in front of me on how to precisely solve it the algorithm was absolutely worthless to me. Given that the Rubik’s Cube made it to the states in 1980 and became a huge phenomenon the fact that the precocious, mop headed, math genius version of eight year old me was unable to figure this out was kind of inexplicable. All of my siblings figured it out quickly, including my younger brother Kevin who was five at the time. I never did as I just am unable to do three dimensional geometry in this form. Anyone who has seen me try to pack a car will know that this is still the case.

We talk about how things were simpler back in the 80’s. I grew up in a world without cable television and where our Atari was top of the line entertainment. So while this is simpler than what we deal with today but at the time we had no idea. I grew up with the assumption that there would be a nuclear war with the Russians by the time I turned eighteen. We were still dealing with the after effects of disco. Life was stressful and dangerous, which makes the fact that the entire world was mesmerized by a cube.

And we are talking mesmerized here. There have been 350 million Rubik’s Cubes sold worldwide. There was a Saturday morning cartoon series. I am not making that up. Rubik was voiced by Ron Palilo, better known as Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter. The story just gets stranger and strange. The Hungarians built a giant, rotating Cube as the centerpiece of their exhibit at the World’s Fair in Knoxville. Yes, in the 80’s when people thought of where to hold a World’s Fair they thought Knoxville. Did I mention that cocaine was also prevalent in the 80’s? Given that the Rubik’s Cube was simply that, a cube with multi-colored stickers, you had all of the knockoffs. There was a pyramid, or a cylinder or some vague snake like thing. But every kid had one and every kid tried to solve it.

What is interesting, especially when you think of problem solving, is that there are three different methods of solving the Rubik’s Cube. The first is what people consider to be the proper solution. You move the various rows over and over again until all of the colors match up. This is the mathematical solution where people have written algorithms and determined that any cube could be solved in no more than twenty moves. Then there is the “lazy kid in your grade school class who wants to look smart” solution where you simply take off all the stickers and reapply them so that you have a solved cube. You can rightly look at them with disdain.

But the most interesting solution, and the one as a kid I wish I had tried, is the one where you completely break the rules by grabbing a screwdriver, prying the cubes apart and reconstruct the cube in a solved state. You end up with exactly the same answer as the people who use the “approved method” but you do it by working in a completely out of the box manner. It’s incredibly clever in a way I didn’t realize as a kid but now I look for ways where you can win a game by changing the rules.

Anyway, this is the 80’s in a nutshell. A Hungarian builds a cube and three decades later people will still talk about the thing. Between this and Tetris you could say that the main export from the Iron Curtain were extremely addictive puzzle games. 

The greatest machine ever built

I will start this off by saying that I grew up fascinated by NASA and the space program. As a kid I found myself in a house where we had National Geographic books on the planets and the space program and a promise that we would be to Mars by the start of the 21^st Century. While the last part hasn’t come true and my dream of working for NASA is yet unfulfilled I have been able to watch with great interest what they have been able to accomplish. This weekend marked what I feel is one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind and I am not being facetious here. The Opportunity rover has just completed ten years of continual service on the Martian surface.

This is without a doubt the greatest machine that we have ever built with its twin Spirit close behind. Let’s walk through the entire engineering of this entire project. First, it is launched by rocket from Earth to Mars which is a trip of about 60 million miles give or take the effects of general relativity. Yes, on this scale you usually need to take into account both Einstein and Newton when trying to calculate the physics. Then, once you made this trip and the ship is in orbit they drop the lander to the surface, which in those days was done with the wonderful “Let’s just enclose the entire thing in bubble wrap and drop it to the ground” method. It was actually one of the most ingenious solutions to landing a spacecraft on another planet ever developed. They wrapped the entire things in airbags and dropped it to the surface, letting it bounce a bunch but surviving the trip in one piece.

Then once the rover was able to roll out onto the surface it started its 90 day mission. Yes, that is how long the mission was scheduled (and more importantly, budgeted) for. It was assumed that after 90 days the solar panels would become covered with dust and the rover would shut down. Except that didn’t happen at all. Opportunity kept on roaming across Mars, examining rocks, finding meteorites on Mars and giving us a view of daily life on a planet so far away that it takes four minutes to send information back and forth.

Every once in a while I think we need to look up at the sky and just think about what we have done. If you have a star map, live away from a lot of city lights and are incredibly bored you can look up at the night sky and see Mars. It is just a bright dot in the sky. But we sent a machine there and for ten years it has been rolling around the planet. Without any way to repair it, without any way to control its environment, on a planet that we can’t really imagine what it is like, we’ve built a rover that has lasted longer than any car that I have ever owned. If that isn’t amazing I don’t know what is.

There is so much of modern technology that is now taken for granted. My phone has more computing power than almost all of the computers that I have ever owned combined. We can speak to anyone around the planet on a moment’s notice and there isn’t a fact that can’t be gathered in ten seconds from Google or Wikipedia. That has caused us to lose a lot of our sense of wonder. But look up at the sky at that dot and realize that we put a rover there and it is still going.

When we land on Mars (and I hope I will see that in my lifetime) I hope that one of our goals will be to recover Spirit and Opportunity and bring them home for a hero’s welcome. They deserve it.

Best of 120 Minutes: Speaking of people taking things for granted back when I was a teenager getting our hands on Anime was a dream of almost mythic proportions. We were happy to have Voltron and Battle of the Planets and we knew there was a whole world of cartoons that were nothing like Hannah-Barbara. Matthew Sweet helped to make anime mainstream by using Space Adventure Cobra as the background for his Girlfriend video. This, along with using a picture of Tuesday Weld as the cover of the album, makes his entire career worthwhile.

The Five Random CDs for the Week:

I’m starting this back up again. Admittedly it is no longer on CD but through my iPod but I am going through my entire music collection five albums at a time. Completion time will take something like three years at the current pace.

1)      Neko Case and Her Boyfriends “Furnace Room Lullaby”

2)      Drovers “Blink”

3)      Tori Amos “Little Earthquakes”

4)      Matt Nathanson “At the Point”

5)      Amy Farris “Anyway”

For reasons never fully explained, every song is about how awesome the sun is...

Ok, I am going to be pretty quick tonight as a bit of a work / life driven time crunch has limited my blogging time. However, for those wondering where my priorities lay blogging comes in behind forty minutes of yoga but ahead of finishing the dishes. So I have found inner tranquility that will last until someone notices that I haven’t finished the dishes and that is the one housekeeping job that I am trusted with because I am utterly useless at everything else to the point that even I now wonder how I survived on my own all those years. But I am halfway through week four of the Advanced class of DDP Yoga so I’m not going to complain just yet.

Wednesday Night Music Club: I’m going to keep with my plan of using the Wednesday Night Music Club to continue to talk about music that has been released in the last six months or so. But given that I have really fallen out of the music scene compared to where I was before I am open to any and all suggestions of what I should be listening to at the moment. Once you hit forty you fall out of the target demographic (and the Wal-Mart demographic for that matter) at popular music just goes whizzing by you as you wonder “So is Haim a Corey Haim tribute band?”

Anyway, one of my favorite bands released a new album last fall. The Polyphonic Spree is less a band and more of a cult or at a minimum, three separate bands that were apparently booked to play at the same time and decided to take the stage together. It is the only band that I have seen that has had people playing harp and theremin simultaneously with a nine person choir hanging out in the background. Everyone wears matching robes and Tim Delaughter (formerly of Tripping Daisy for those of you who are also fugitives from Alternative Nation) leads the festivities. For as much of a cynic as I am seeing this band in concert was some of the most fun that I have ever had at a show. It is impossible to leave without feeling happy. I have no idea how these guys even make enough money to tour but if you ever get a chance to see them you really should take it.

Boyhood: The film you will need to see

Here is something to look forward to in the New Year. If there is one film that I have been looking forward to for years, more than Harry Potter, more than any potential new Star Wars films and more than anything to come from the creative genius that is Tyler Perry, it is Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”. All you need to know about the film in order to want to see it is this: Over a dozen years Richard Linklater would, on a yearly basis, gather Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and two child actors together and film scenes. The film is effectively shot in real time with each year being a real year. Everyone ages and you watch as the children grow up on screen.

I don’t know if I have ever heard of any film that has ever been that ambitious. I honestly don’t have anything to compare it to. The closest would be the 7 Up documentary series but that is a documentary. This is a feature film.

The first review out of Sundance that I have seen is glowing. There may be some flaws to the film because of its nature but it is so unusual in nature that I think that you can overlook those flaws. I can’t wait to see this film because it is so rare to find something that is truly unique and this film might be it.

What I find interesting is that Richard Linklater has quietly become one of the greatest filmmakers of our time without anyone really noticing or recognizing him outside of the indie scene. If you were going to rank his top films you would have Slacker, Waking Life, the Before Sunrise / Sunset / Midnight trilogy and then Dazed and Confused. School of Rock doesn’t even break into his personal top five. These are some of the most fascinating, unconventional and at times ground breaking films of the past twenty years yet he doesn’t get the praise of a Tarrantino or a Nolan. His only Academy Award nominations are for the script for Before Sunset and Before Midnight (and those are shared with the lovely and talented Julie Delpy.) Yet I feel that he will be studied for years to come.

So, one day in the near future I will finally get to see this film. I really don’t care if it wins any awards either. I just want to see a film driven by one amazing concept and vision and followed through with over a decade. 

In the future we shall all have dancing robots

I’ve said all of the following over the past few weeks. I don’t know when I got so old but I doubt that five years ago I ever anticipated myself saying any of the following…

·         You know, purchasing a tuxedo turned out to be a wise financial decision.

·         You have to go with the vest instead of the cummerbund. A cummerbund just screams high school prom.

·         Ok, just let me finish my yoga workout and I will get back to you.

·         Hey, remember back when VH-1 used to show videos?

·         It would be a lot nicer here if they turned the music down.

·         Instead of the vegan option I would prefer to have a steak in which the cow was continually insulted throughout its lifespan. Just so that it always knew who is the boss around here.

(Ok, the last one was more of a failure of the Sincerity Project than a sign of my growing old but it was my best example as to what the polar opposite of what a militant vegan would be. Sometimes having those analogies ready comes in very handy.)

Yes I do want to mention that I own a tuxedo and I really do where it with regularity. Kim often goes to black tie events for work and I get to accompany her as arm candy and I do my best to look dashing. The fact that this is my life stuns me to no end. No kidding, I am wearing a Star Wars t-shirt as I write this but will occasionally dress up like James Bond. Life is a neverending series of adventures, much like The Neverending Story but sadly with fewer Luck Dragons.

Remembering the 80’s Volume Two: Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”

Wow, so much I could say about this one. Let me run through the highlights…

·         Maybe I was the only one who heard this rumor but I was under the impression as a kid that the reason this song didn’t have any lyrics was because they were so dirty that they couldn’t be aired. Apparently no one ever informed the nine year old version of me about jazz.

·         Seriously, there was a point in time in which a jazz / hip hop fusion piece could become a hit song primarily due to the fact that it had a video featuring relatively simplistic robots. The 80’s were either quaint or avant garde in that respect, take your pick.

·         Also, I really do recall there being a good bit of moral outrage surrounding this video driven by the fact that it features mannequins in lingerie. We’ve advanced in that regard thanks mainly to the groundbreaking films Mannequin and Mannequin 2: On the Move.

·         I will to my dying day remember the robot who gets his head slammed into the cereal bowl over and over again. That is a metaphor for life if I ever saw one.

·         The fact that I have gone my entire life without designing a set of those dancing legs for my personal bemusement is one of my greatest regrets. I think that they would make for a great statement piece for any home.

·         Probably the toughest concert decision of my life was whether to see Herbie Hancock or Fats Domino at Jazz Fest one year. I chose Fats (who put on an amazing set) but part of me wishes I would have seen Herbie even if he was sans robots.

The Year in Books: 2013 (Part Three of Three)

It’s time to finish off the recap of all of the books that I read in 2013 with the remainder of the non-fiction list. As always opinions and recommendations are mine alone and keep in mind that I am someone who has paid to see Weird Al in concert.

“The Great Fire of London” Neil Hanson: When Kim and I started dating we spent much of our time hanging out in the library in her house. Kim had a legitimate library to the point that we really should institute the Dewey Decimal System at some point just for convenience. This book was one that I saw on her shelves and wanted to read immediately. Ok, it took a few years for me to actually read it but if you are interested in the inner workings of 17^th century London and want to get a sense of the calamitous fire that destroyed the entire city this is the book to read. Well, technically Samuel Pepys’ diary would be the book to read but this one doesn’t require you to read numerous diary entries detailing the purchase of cheese.

“Afterliff” John Lloyd: A literary / comedy game in which you take a city’s name and use it to define something that doesn’t have a word for it yet. So it is essentially a Sniglet. Yes, I consider a book that is a collection of Sniglets to be just as worthwhile to read as a Shakespeare play. Don’t bother trying to understand me. I don’t understand me and I’ve been me for a very long time.

“Monkey Mind” Daniel Smith: A memoir on anxiety and how it shapes one’s life. I’m a bit more honest now about my struggles with anxiety issues and how it has affected me. For the most part I now have them under control and in the process have learned a lot about how the mind works and the wonderful moments when you realize “I am being completely irrational here and even though I know that I have no idea how to stop.” This book kind of gets into it but wasn’t as good as I hoped it would be.

“102 Minutes” Jim Dwyer: I have a tendency at times to step back and try to look at the world as an outside observer. At times this results in my being cold and critical but I like to think that it also adds insights that are missed in the accepted narrative. Even though 9/11 is the biggest historical event of my lifetime and that it occurred only a dozen years ago the details of the event have seemingly been erased from the popular retellings. You do not see the unedited footage and you do not read the stories about what it was like during those horrible hours. I feel that it is wrong to forget that horror, no matter how challenging and depressing it can be to face it. This book recounts what happened in the Towers that day and these stories should be remembered as facts and not as political talking points.

“Every Love Story is a Ghost Story” D.T. Max: Ok, keeping with the uplifting tone here is the biography of the late David Foster Wallace. As I mentioned when I reviewed his last essay collection I am an unabashed fan of DFW and this provided the clearest look into his life and his troubled mind. It’s a story of someone who was too bright for their own good and who struggled with addiction and depression his entire life. Wallace isn’t for everyone (it really helps if you understand central Illinois, tennis and high level mathematics) but he will always be the author I turn to in order to be inspired about what writing can be.

“Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” Willie Nelson: This is a little better. To be clear I am going through these books in chronological order so you can get a sense of when I am in my dark moods and when things are a little brighter. A nice little collection of road stories from Willie Nelson who apparently spends a lot of time in Hawaii playing poker with Woody Harrelson. Not a bad life if you can get it.

“Playing the Moldovans at Tennis” Tony Hawks: Years ago I read Tony Hawks’ first book “Round Ireland with a Fridge” in which he took a bet that he could hitchhike around the whole of Ireland while bringing with him a dorm sized refrigerator. In this follow up, Tony takes on another silly bet in which he proclaims that he could beat the entire starting lineup of the Moldovan national soccer team in tennis. I like anyone who does challenges like this. There is such a big thrill about living life just for the hell of it. I’ve always said that I want to one day try for a world record but for it to be in the silliest manner possible.

“The Fix is In” Brian Touhy: A book that focuses on conspiracy theories in sports. Some of these I agree with: the first NBA lottery sure seemed fixed so that the Knicks got Patrick Ewing, I’m pretty sure that Michael Jordan’s first retirement was really a suspension for gambling and NASCAR has a very interesting history of certain results occurring when it would fit the overall narrative. However, he ends the book by going through the past ten Super Bowl’s and explaining how they were fixed. While Peyton Manning leading the Colts over the Bears did fulfill the storyline of Peyton finally winning the Super Bowl I don’t think the NFL needed to do anything to accomplish this other than making sure that the Bears started Rex Grossman at quarterback.

“The Squared Circle” David Shoemaker: Probably the best book on pro wrestling that I have read from the sense of analyzing the sport and what it means from a cultural standpoint. It is close to what I have always though I would write a master’s thesis on in some vague liberal arts subject though I would focus more on how pro wrestling mirrors the wants and desires of the public. If you are a wrestling fan you need to read this book immediately. Very well written, only minimal mistakes on the history of the sport (and with something like pro wrestling the history is nebulous to begin with) and a lot of fun.

“Geek Wisdom” Stephen Segal: A world view taken from science fiction, fantasy and pop culture. Hits a little closer to home than I would like. Not by that Stephen Segal, which takes away a lot of the promise of the book.

Best of 120 Minutes: Blur’s “She’s So High” from their shoegazing period. I want Damon Albarn’s t-shirt from this video so much that I should just put it on my birthday wish list. I was clearly on the Blur side of the Blur vs. Oasis war that tore apart Alternative Nation. In the end I still hold that I was on the right side of history.

Just show up...

Wednesday Night Music Club: I am going to be a little shorter than normal tonight as I just got off a plane and have an early morning meeting. Plus, I wanted to mention I am going to have a new rule for the Wednesday Night Music Club in that it will focus on music that has come out over the last year. I think the remainder of the video schedule will be…

Sunday: Best of 120 Minutes (Really good videos from the 80s and 90s alternative scene)

Monday: Remembering the 80s (Really bad videos from the 80s)

Occasional: Songs from the Alt Country Gutter (Whatever catches my interest from my Americana collection)

Anyway, here is a song from Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis album from last year. As has been documented many times on this blog that when I first saw Kelly Willis perform (which was back in 1998 and wow does that make me feel old) I decided that I didn’t just want to buy her records but that I wanted to marry her. Before the encore if at all possible. Well, she married Bruce instead and the two of them became some of my favorite musicians of all time. I’ve seen them many times over the years, talked with them after shows on several occasions and just found them to be incredibly nice and super talented people.

The reason I mention this is that I have been thinking recently about the old Woody Allen line about how 90% of life is just showing up. A lot of people take that to be that almost all of life is just pure luck. I think what it really points out how few people even bother to show up in life. I am a shy, socially awkward type of guy who would go to concerts by himself. But, and this is the big thing, I would just hang out, see really interesting bands that caught my attention and occasionally buy them a beer after shows. Some of them went on to be famous, some were never heard of again but I’ve ended up with all of these stories that would never have happened if I stayed at home living a literally virtual life. I’ve ended up with a pretty amazing life without really having a plan for it and mainly by just being willing to accept whatever happened. I’ve gotten better at showing up (fear still gets to me more than I would like) but I certainly appreciate it more.

Anyway, Bruce and Kelly are awesome and any reason to play one of their songs is a good one. 

The Year in Books: Part Two

Continuing with my review of what I read in 2013 with a roundup of some of the non-fiction I read this year. I will split this into two parts because I don’t know if I will want to force this into one huge entry.

“More Baths Less Talking” Nick Hornby: A collection of essays in which Nick Hornby discusses what books he had bought and read over the past month. So this is a blog post in which I discuss a book I read that consists of an author discussing what books he read. Yeah, my head hurts just thinking about this.

“Both Flesh and Not” David Foster Wallace: I am an unabashed fan of David Foster Wallace. I will always say that he was the best writer of my generation and / or the last forty years. Sorry, amongst literary snobs I fall into that camp. While his work is not the easiest to read his non-fiction essays are probably the best way to understand just what an amazing talent he was. The way he captures and explains events and provides this clinical yet at the same time profound insight is something I’ve never encountered before. At a minimum read the title essay on Roger Federer which is the best piece of sports writing of the last twenty years.

“Life After Death” Damien Echols: A brutal, gripping and at times mind boggling true story of an innocent man who spent nearly twenty years on death row. Damien Echols was once of the West Memphis Three, a group of teenagers in Arkansas who were without a doubt innocent of the charge of murdering three children yet were railroaded and convicted based on claims of Satanism and occult beliefs when at best all they did was wear black clothing and listen to heavy metal. This is Damien’s account of his years spent on death row as well as his life before and during the trial. It is a story that will make your heart stop. A book that everyone should check out just to understand the flaws of our justice system and the fact that, unbelievably, while Damien is now out of prison he still isn’t legally free.

“The Book of Animal Ignorance” John Lloyd and John Mitchinson: If you want to waste a lot of time on YouTube search out the British panel show QI. Hosted by the legendary Stephen Fry, it consists of four British comedians who all seem to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge discussing really interesting facts from history and science. It is much more fun than my description makes it out to be. This book is a collection of some of the facts with the best being that a combination of horse and zebra is called a zorse. Personally I would have preferred Horbra just so we could have a Skank of Horbras.

“Gulp” and “My Planet” Mary Roach: This is what I would consider my light science reading. Mary Roach writes very readable articles on science without getting too technical. For example, Gulp is about everything that happens when you eat from when the food enters your mouth to when it leaves the other end with discussions on what happens physically and the strange tales of those that study this to begin with. I read things like this to relax, which is probably scary.

“Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls” David Sedaris: I’m tossing this in my non-fiction category though that is probably a bit of a stretch. I assume David Sedaris follows my rule of writing in which both my fiction and non-fiction is 75% true with the only difference being which part of the story is true. This was an easier writing rule to follow when I was single and telling embellished stories about my time in bars. Now Kim looks at what I’ve written, points out the inaccuracies and tells me that “being married to you is like dating Taylor Swift.” Sadly, that last line is a) true and b) much wittier than anything I have written over the past two years.

“Dishwasher” Pete Jordan: The tales of a man whose dream was to wash dishes in every state of the union. Also talks about his zine. Remember zines? They were like blogs before people realized that the internet existed. This, along with record stores, rotary phones and personal dignity, are going to be the items that we tell our children about as they look at us in dismay. By the way, part of this book revolves around his inability to get a dishwashing job in New Orleans. He must have been a really crappy dishwasher.

“I Wear the Black Hat” Chuck Klosterman: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Chuck Klosterman has my dream job. He just sits around, watches a lot of television, listens to music and writes long essays on pop culture in which he compares Paul Stanley to Ralph Sampson and gets paid for it. I would have focused on that as a career over electrical engineering except that no one ever told me that rambling essays that only vaguely hold together is an actual career path. This was a pretty good collection of essays that focused on the bad guys in culture including a very interesting comparison of O.J. Simpson and Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

“Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love” Andrew Shaffer: Pretty much self explanatory. 

Remembering the 80's: Volume One

We are starting a new, probably weekly feature on the blog this week with Remembering the 80’s: A look back at what we once thought was amazing. We will start with the mind blowing video for Simple Minds “All the Things She Said.” If Wikipedia is to be trusted this video is from 1986. Let’s catalog the awesomeness, shall we?

·         We start with a star background that appears to have come as the default package with the video editing software. Somehow the computer graphics are of lower resolution than if they had just taken the video camera to the roof and shot the actual night sky.

·         The entire video consists of band members filmed multiple times floating past the camera. This makes the video so high concept that I can almost guarantee it won Video Music Awards.

·         I really think the black and white, vaguely Native American, poncho with hat and sunglasses look is ready for a comeback.

·         I bet the guitarist was thrilled to be able to show off just how many guitars he owned and that he could pull off the same rock star move multiple times in a row.

·         Simple Minds must be the only band in which the lead singer is also a trained hawk wrangler. I would also like to know how the record label justified the budget item “hawk glove” on the expense report.

·         There may never have been another video in history with so many dramatic spins.

·         Ok, I will admit that I think the black suit and hat combination is really cool and I totally want that hat. The gold lame jacket with owl accoutrement a little less so. I love the fact that you can actually make out the guitarist walking through the background as if he has a better gig to go to.

·         Also note that both the bass player and drummer basically looked at the concept and went “Screw this, we’re going to the bar.”

·         On the mullet scale I am going to have to give him four Billy Ray Cyrus’ out of ten. I am certain that the guitarist spent two hours getting his hair just perfect, though.

·         Did anyone ever see the lead singer of Simple Minds and Dana Carvey in the same place at the same time? I mean, we could hire him and Mike Myers to remake this video. It’s not like they have anything else to do at the moment.

·         At three minutes in we get this weird breakdown where we have faux Dana Carvey a) wearing striped pants, b) chewing a hayseed and c) letting what appears to be a cockatoo sit on his legs. What the hell is it with this song and birds? Was his girlfriend an ornithologist? Were all the things she said a whole flurry of bird trivia?

·         You can tell when the camera crew grew sick of the whole thing when they just decided to film everyone from the knees down even if that meant focusing on pants silk screened with dollar bills.

·         I yearn for the days when if you could just vaguely wave your limbs around in time to music could be considered dancing.

·         For all of this you have to admit that this is one damn good song. I mean, compare this to 90% of what you hear on the radio today and you will think this is a much better song and it didn’t even break the top 20 in the US.

2013 Year in Books: Part One

As I mentioned in the New Year’s Resolutions post one of my goals for the year is to read forty books. Last year I hit thirty seven, which might sound impression if it wasn’t for the fact that Kim probably read somewhere between 100 and 200 books for the year and that still might be a low estimate. Still, I figure that it might be nice to review what I read last year and it will be easier than trying to add these to my Goodreads account. I really like Goodreads though giving books a 1 – 5 rating seems really silly. Anyway, here is an overview of all of the fiction that I read last year and my memories of the books.

“One Last Thing Before I Go” Jonathan Tropper: I think that I have always described Jonathan Tropper as a lower rent, American Nick Hornby. That seems like a really harsh critique of someone who I own every single thing he has ever written. Interesting book featuring Jonathan’s usual main character of a guy who is a screw up in a very funny way but not one that really stayed with me.

“A Wrinkle in Time” Madeline L’Engle: One of those books that I was told to read when I was ten years old and didn’t read until I was forty. I hate to say this because I know that for many people this is one of their favorite books of all time but I just didn’t get it. It was nice but I couldn’t see what made it such a mind-bending success. Maybe I am just too old and cynical.

“This is How You Lose Her” Junot Diaz: Probably the best book I read all year from a pure literary standpoint. More of a short story collection than anything else, though certain characters appear and reappear, and a very interesting take on modern life. Sadly, I read it a year ago so my memories of it are very sparse.

“Tristan and Iseult” Traditional: Kim gave me this book to read when we started dating and I finally came around to reading it. This was one of those books that I read because I feel that I should understand some of these old stories as though I am missing wide swaths of our common mythology. Absolutely great story involving love potions, love triangles, curses and knights. It was surprisingly good and didn’t drag you into the medieval abyss as some other stories of the ilk do.

“Attachments” and “Eleanor and Park” Rainbow Rowell: One of Kim’s biggest critiques of what I read is that I tend to read authors for the sole purpose of saying that I’ve read them. I’ve read David Foster Wallace and James Joyce and it is difficult for me to say I did that for any reason other than to be a literary snob. Heck, half of these comments on what I read last year will come off as being a literary snob. As a result, when I started to read Rainbow Rowell’s books (another Kim recommendation) I really wanted to dislike it. It was light, relationship based and the type of book that I scoff at when I am in Barnes and Noble. To my dismay, though, I could not put these books down and they were easily some of my favorites for the year. I just loved these books with characters I could relate to and Rainbow just has a way of writing really fun and engaging scenes. Really recommend checking her out.

“You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here but it Helps” Tom Holt: I have no idea where Kim found this author, or why I had never heard of him, but the book involves magic, goblins, immortals and office politics. It is a strange mix of Dungeons and Dragons and Office Space. Again, how I had missed Tom Holt in the past is beyond me.

“The Middlesteins” Jami Attenberg: I want to say that this was a modern take on Middlemarch. I know that it involved a Bar Mitzvah, an extremely obese woman, really good Chinese food and probably some other plot points. I swear that I enjoyed the book a lot but getting older has really screwed with my recall.

“Z” Therese Anne Fowler: A novel on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald. As someone who said that he was always in search of his Zelda this book obviously was very interesting to me. On the plus side you get to really understand the wild and carefree life that Zelda and Scott were living in the 20’s and be amazed at a time when an author could be the toast of the town. On the other hand, it paints F. Scott Fitzgerald as an alcoholic jerk, which is probably accurate but I would rather not have to view my idol in that light. Still better than the Gatsby movie.

“The Financial Lives of the Poets” Jess Walter: Killer book about someone who decided to start a financial website written in poetry and who in the process bankrupts himself and his family and gets pulled into a very comical drug deal. A lot of fun and a good take on the financial crisis as well.

“The Ocean at the End of the Lane” Neil Gaiman: Now I am a huge Neil Gaiman fan going back to his earliest work in comics but I have to admit that this story left me a little flat. I understand that it was in part a retelling of events that occurred to him in childhood and many of the scenes about his home life and those nooks and crannies of the area around your home that fill your earliest memories carry a lot of weight. It’s just that the fantastical elements didn’t strike me as being as strong as in Sandman or Anansi Boys or much of his other work. Nice story but not his best.

“The Long War” Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter: Sigh. Please understand that I feel that Terry Pratchett’s long slide into Alzheimer’s is an absolute tragedy. I also understand his desire to work with other authors in creating stories that take place outside of Discworld. The Long World series, which take place in a world where people discover a way to travel to a seemingly infinite number of parallel earths, is fascinating in terms of discussing what that type of world would be like but really lacking in terms of characters and plot. I would rather have a new Discworld book.

“The Last Dragonslayer” Jasper Fforde: Ok, I occasionally read Young Adult books by authors that I like in order to pump up my book count. Jasper Fforde is the author of the excellent Thursday Next series and this story, like everything else he writes, is filled with literary references and asides and is a great gift to give to that child who is much too smart for their own good.

“Bright Passage” Josh Ritter: Josh is one of my favorite singer-songwriters and is one of the few people whose lyrics truly are poetry. This was his first novel and is interesting in that it focuses on the First World War and thus brings up scenes of battle that have not become clichés. It is strange and surreal and a fascinating first effort at writing a novel. I like his songs better but then again, the number of people who can challenge him as a songwriter could be counted on one hand.

“The Maltese Falcon” Dashiell Hammett: Sam Spade, badass. Amazing to see just how politically incorrect the book is when viewed in a modern light. Given that this story invents the entire film noir world of detectives and crooked cops you owe it to yourself to read the book and watch the movie.

“A Clash of Kings” George R. R. Martin: At some point I will read enough of the Game of Thrones series so that I can catch up to the TV show. Great book though it takes forever for things to actually get going. Plus, my biggest problem with the books is that I don’t understand how the economy of Westeros could possibly function. It seems that everyone is either royalty, a soldier or a prostitute. Wars are constant and everyone dies all the time. Who is farming? Who is raising cattle? For crying out loud, where are the garbagemen in this world?

“All’s Well That Ends Well” William Shakespeare: My Shakespeare play for the year. Surprisingly feminist at times with a female character begging to cure the king and showing that she is as well trained and gifted as any male character. Surprisingly unfeminist as it involves a character saying “Yeah, I’ll marry you but I will never see you again” and involves an affair involving mistaken identity in order to consummate a marriage and somehow this is considered a happy ending.

Best of 120 Minutes: Post was long so I will keep the video short. Guided by Voices with Teenage FBI.

A network for those of us who wear facepaint on a regular basis

So after years of hearing rumors (and even more years of wondering “Wouldn’t this be a good idea”) they have finally announced the WWE network. I will admit that I wasn’t watching the announcement live as, well, I would like to say that watching corporate announcements are never that exciting but it is nice to know that there were a number of people that I knew at CES who could have stopped by and watched in person for me. As a wrestling fan for more than thirty years now I figure that I am as much of an expert as anyone else in explaining what this network means for you.

First off, this will not be a channel on your cable system. They are going the Hulu / Netflix / Roku model of an internet channel running on as an app on your PC / Kindle / Apple gadget. This is actually a really smart move on their part. I know they tried to get a cable channel up and running but there was no way they would make it into one of the basic tiers. Just think about how much of a struggle it has been for the NFL Network to gain a foothold. A WWE Network was going to be a niche product to begin with and they would have ended up as channel 387 and wouldn’t even be carried by most providers.

What the WWE is essentially offering a $10 / month subscription that will get you a) original programming, b) streaming access to the pay per views and c) access to their content vault. I’ll break these down in order.

The original programming portion is pretty meaningless. They claim that they will do a daily studio show, which I’m guessing might be interesting but will be tough to keep up day in and day out. They will do Top Ten countdown shows that should prove to be useful time burners. They’ve already filmed Legends House, which is the Real World with retired pro wrestlers and as a result may now be the only thing on television that is worse than the Real World. My only hope would be a return of the Legends Roundtable, which they used to have on WWE Classics on Demand. It was a show where you had five wrestling legends spend an hour talking about some vague topic like “Greatest Tag Teams of All Time” and sharing stories from the past few decades. Awesome for a long time fan and you got to hear some great stories about the old territory days. But again, right now you already have seven hours of wrestling on every week so you don’t need that much new material.

The pay per views is a huge deal and is done to address the fact that the entire pay per view market is dying a slow and painful death. It is a little known fact that wrestling has always been cutting edge from a technology standpoint: they were quick into the home video market, built the pay per view model and some of the first major portions of the internet were built around pro wrestling. What this means is that the wrestling fan today has figured out how to stream pay per views for free or has simply decided to not pay $60 tonight when he can find out all the results for free tomorrow. Even someone like me, who never uses the illegal streams, would never bother to pay for a pay per view because I always figured I could wait to find out if a match was good or not and then find the show. At ten bucks a month for a pay per view they have found a pretty good price point. If you buy two or three shows a year the network is pretty much a fair bet.

But in my mind the big carrot, especially to the long time fans like me, is access to the video library. The WWE owns something like 90% of all wrestling footage from the US that exists today. Really any match that you can think of they have the tape of it (unless they were too stupid to remember to tape the match. When my time machine is complete the first thing I am going to do is go back so I can see The Last Battle of Atlanta.) They have said that they will make every pay per view ever available for access plus a lot of other shows. It is the holy grail for hardcore wrestling fans. The fact that I could come home from work and let my brain shut off by watching a match from 1989 is something that I have hoped for for years.

I’ll wait a bit before I order it of course. I’m a little wary of the technical side of the equation, especially when it comes to the PPVs. I fully expect the system to crash multiple times upon launch. But while I have been pissed about how the WWE has been writing their shows for the past several years for once I think that they have done something right.

New Year's Resolutions: 2014 Edition

As someone who believes in public accountability here are my resolutions for the year for the world (or at least the twenty people and / or robots who seem to read my blog posts) to see.

1)      The Sincerity Project: I’ve already discussed this as it is one of the main reasons for restarting the blog. In essence, my goal is to change from being a cynical bastard to someone who is an actual caring human being. To be honest this has been absolutely brutal to put into practice. I don’t know if it is humanly possible to watch Brent Mussberger announce the BCS title game and not be sarcastic but I am certainly trying. You’ll occasionally catch me stopping myself from saying something and saying “sincerity check” instead. Hopefully I’ll end up a better person for this at the end of the year.

2)      Complete the 13 week advanced level of DDP Yoga: I’ve mentioned it before but I am a huge fan of DDP Yoga. I firmly believe that the best fitness programs are developed by former professional wrestlers as they are clearly medical experts. I’m serious here, I’ve been doing DDP Yoga on and off for the past nine months and the degree that my flexibility and fitness have improved is amazing. I’m in the best shape I have ever been in and my weight is now under 180 pounds, which is thirty pounds less than it was five years ago. I really want to make it through the advanced level and see what the results are.

3)      Keep the blog going all year: Huge challenge but I feel so much better when I write that this is something I need to do. You may see more posts like last night though where I hit a few points and then just end it. I can’t spend an hour staring at a screen trying to figure out what to write any more. Trust me, I really wish I had that much free time again.

4)      Read forty books: I’ve come close the past few years but I typically end up falling short. This year I want to actually break the forty book barrier. As always, my yearly goals of 1) read one classic novel, 2) read something by a female author and 3) read a Shakespeare play still hold and I can say that over the past decade the second point is no longer a challenge. I had too many years where if it wasn’t for Harry Potter I would never have achieved that goal.

5)      Travel someplace new this year: This is a nice way to say that Kim and I need a vacation that is different than ones that we have taken before. We are in a bit of a rut in terms of trips and just need to escape to someplace fresh. Obviously we will still make our trip to New Orleans for the Krewe of Barkus and all of the fun associated with our second home but I particularly need to find myself in a new place.

6)      Reader’s Choice: I’ve done this before and it is always interesting. Place your suggestion in the comments for what my resolution should be and I promise to do it (legality permitting of course). This is how I ended up doing yoga in the first place.

7)      Run a 5K: An easy fitness goal but one I would like to do. After so many years of being scared of doing anything physical due to fear of causing myself harm I want to go back to trying something athletic. Plus, I will now be in the 40+ category so I might actually have a decent chance at placing somewhere in the top 90%.

8)      Take at least five minutes each day to just be: I don’t think that I will ever believe just how lucky I am in life. I’ve achieved so many of my dreams that I feel guilty about it. However, I’ve learned that the man who gets everything that he has ever wanted finds himself pulled in a thousand directions without time to appreciate or be grateful for any of it. If there has been anything that I have lost over these past few years it is that sense of appreciation of just what this world is. I’m hoping that by just making myself to take five minutes in which I turn off everything, avoid the digital noise that surrounds me and just let myself be and think I will be able to improve myself in countless ways. That is the idea behind the Sincerity Project. Modern life forces you to be tired, over-stimulated and cynical. I want to be open, honest and thankful instead.

Wednesday Night Music Club: The best album of 2013 was easily Jason Isbell’s “Southeastern.” It is a haunting and piercing collection of songs that stay with you for days at a time. He is an amazing songwriter and while this album can’t be considered uplifting (it deals with addiction and its aftermath) you will not forget some of what he sings. This song, which closes the album, ends with what might be one of my new mantras in life. “Here with you there is always something to look forward to. My lonely heart beats relatively easy.”

Dennis Rodman: Threat or Menace?

Ok, I will have to admit that I have gotten old and turned off the BCS title game at the start of the fourth quarter. Every time I flipped to the game it looked like Florida State was never able to get into a rhythm and I was tired and really didn’t feel like staying up to see how it all turned out. So, yeah, I missed the ending. That said, as an East Coast resident I can complain about having the game end after midnight when some of us have jobs to go to in the morning. Ok, that doesn’t explain the years when I would be out at a concert until three in the morning on a Tuesday but I am old and grizzled now and can make those complaints.

(But I did watch much of the Old School Raw and was thrilled to see Jake “The Snake” Roberts close out the show for several reasons: 1) He was one of the best all time, 2) He looked to be in pretty good shape and 3) I am stunned that he is actually still alive. Trust me, if you know anything about Jake the Snake is that The Wrestler was based on his life and that was the nice version of his story. Plus I take this to be another success story for DDP Yoga. As I’ve mentioned before I am a proponent of DDP Yoga and I know that Diamond Dallas Page has spent the past year working with Jake to get him in shape and healthy and the fact that he has made this much progress is pretty much a miracle.)

Switching gears, is there anyone else moderately concerned that our foreign policy strategy with North Korea rests in the hands of Dennis Rodman, who was an excellent rebounder but was also a participant in Celebrity Rehab and that was one of his highlights in the past decade. If we are going to rely on former basketball players couldn’t we at least use someone like World B. Free, Majestic Mapp or, in a perfect world, God Shamgodd? It just seems stunning that the person who has the best access to a world leader who recently “fed his uncle to wild dogs” is the guy who kicked a cameraman in the groin and appeared on Monday Nitro to wrestle Karl Malone. It’s like we have all just admitted that the world has gone completely insane so we might as well not even bother anymore.

That is pretty much it for tonight. I will go through my New Year’s Resolutions tomorrow. As is my tendency I do not officially state my resolutions until after the first week of the year. That way I know that I will have done better than ninety percent of the people in that I can’t fail until the eighth of the month at least. Success by delay is success none theless.