South Park Me

The sad part is that it's so much handsomer... 


Go to THIS SITE and create your own. It's all in Danish or Dutch or some such crazy language, so you have to look for "Exklusiv" then "SP-Studio" then "South Park Studio" and then "English." The rest is pretty delf-explanatory.

In Defence of Rap

If you are anything like most caucasian people in the United States of America, you probably hate rap music. You are not wrong, you have probably just been misled. When you think of rap (or "hip-hop," as the term was coined by Natalie Merchant many years ago, though I will be calling it "rap" here because there is less typing that way), you probably have the following images:

• Large-breasted, large-bottomed women dancing shaking their large breasts and bottoms.
  
• Lots of gold teeth.
  
• Large cars.
  
• Matching white suits.
  
• Guns.
  
• Fish-eye lenses and weird camera angles.
  
• Gobs of jewelry.
  
• Fancy people drinking champagne.
  
• Slow motion.
  
• Lyrics about big breasts, cars, guns, money, big bottoms and drinking champagne (or "Cris").
  
• Lyrics that don't make any sense or are untelligible.
  

But you're wrong!

You, Cletus and Clementine Q. American, have been sold a fraud. Yes, most rap sucks, of course. But most of any musical genre sucks too. We only get what they give us. It's nearly impossible to find good music in the current musical climate, for a couple of reasons:

1. MTV and radio are garbage and will only play the same crap over and over instead of rotating different artists and/or songs.
   
2. The record industry punishes oddball and niche artists by trying to get them to become more mainstream (it's happened to every major musical artist since the dawn of time, look it up).
   
3. Music media latches onto certain artists and promotes them. (I like Spin magazine, but how many times can they mention Dashboard Confessional, Interpol, the Killers, the Libertines, Death Cab for Cutie, etc., etc., etc before I'm starting to wonder if this is new-Millennial payola.)
   

So rap, when you look at it in the grand scheme of things, is hardly in a different category. I think it gets a bad ... uh... reputation because it separates itself from other musical genres more easily than many rock acts. For example, few would say that someone like Iggy Pop is typical of rock music, because he is but one facet of the large, diverse rock pantheon. But even a learned music listener may discern that Li'l John is typical of the average rap act, which is just not true.

I'm not saying that you should like rap music. In fact, one of my great maddening pet peeves of music criticism is the way that mainstream (usually white) music journalists give rap -- even obviously shitty rap -- a free pass. Maybe it's a desire to seem more "credible," or just more open-minded to the rap-listening contingent (or maybe it's just a ploy so as not to get shot by Fiddy Cent), but it's sickening that no rap album gets less than a "B-" or a "6/10" in any mainstream music magazine. Are you seriously telling me that some Ying-Yang Twins album is a "B+"? I'll slap you in the mouth!

If you want to hate rap, please feel free. But know what you're hating. Just as one would scoff at putting, say, Nickelback in the same realm as, say, U2, don't put Eminem in the same category as Aesop Rock. (And if you even have any clue who Aesop Rock is, I'm already seriously impressed.) All rap is not the same.

Let's debunk four main myths about rap music together, shall we?

MYTH #1: RAP IS NOT MUSIC

This contention has always amused me. People who say this have clearly not heard any rap since 1986. Gone, dear friends, are the days of one hollow drumbeat and a simplistic rhyme scheme. Condolences. Nearly every modern hip hop song uses some kind of musical accompaniment, be it a sample of another song or some godawful synth. Again, feel free to hate it, just know what you're hating.

Is it not music because there is no singing? Look at any kind of instrumental music, like jazz or techno. There is often no singing there, and hardly anyone could categorize it as non-musical.

Is it because there is sometimes no melody? Listen to the song "Shotgun" from Jr. Walker & the All-Stars sometime. Find the melody for me. What you are hearing (and what is so great about the song) is the groove, with a jazzy saxophone riff. Music is not always about melody, sometimes it's about a pulse. (Please note that I have no knowledge of musical terminology or nomenclature, so you will often find me not quite able to say what I'm saying.)

Find me one song in rap music that is not "musical" in one way or another. You can't do it.

MYTH #2: SAMPLING IS STEALING

You are probably thinking of a lesser rap artist such as Sean "Puffy" Combs (I'll just stick with his first name from a decade ago rather than play along with his pathetic ever-changing persona) or another such artist who would simply take a small snippet of a popular and obvious song (usually from the disco-era, but not always) and loop the instrumental over and over so the song essentially became a remake, not a rap song.

Look no further than "Puffy" himself, and his versions of "Every Breath You Take", "Kashmir", "I'm Comin' Out", "Been Around the World", etc, all in his off-key sing-song style. You can hate this if you want. I hate this. This is stealing.

But most rap music does not perpetuate "Puffy"'s propensity toward plagiarism. Most rap music does sample, yes, but with a few key differences. Firstly, "good" rap (for lack of a better term) uses obscure songs, ones that you won't hear on some K-Tel retrospective. Most great rap songs use samples from jazz or soul, mostly before 1975. And often, the samples are no more than 3-5 second, non-chorus parts of a song that are repeated. (These are called "break-beats," but I won't get into it here.)

The best artists not only find the most obscure musical samples (a good crate-digger won't even have to cite the source of the clip), but often fashion the sound in a way by which even someone who has heard the song will not recognize where it came from. It is the manipulation of one or several sounds to create a brand new composition, usually having no sonic similarity to the original.

This is a far cry from the wholesale hijacking of pop music that "Puffy" and the like have been trafficking in since the mid-'90s. Hate "Puffy" if you like, don't hate sampling.

MYTH #3: RAP IS ANTISOCIAL AND AMORAL

This myth comes from the fact that the popular rap music right now is the "club" rap music, like Nelly, 50 Cent, Li'l John and all that other Crunk shit. When young people are in a club, they tend to have sex on their minds, and therefore they listen to the music that makes them feel sexier. What better way to make people feel sexy than to constantly talk about sex? This is why "Hot in Herre" was such a hit: it threw out all subtext and actually had the lyric, "It's getting hot in here / so take off all your clothes." And who says romance is dead?

But it's not just sex. Indeed, violence and materialism also run rampant. Much talk of guns, jewels, cars, money, sex, etc. But you know what? You will probably find that in any Motley Crue video too.

When people satirize rap, or try to illustrate the stereotypes associated with it, they still say things like "bust a cap in your ass" or some such thing. Again, hate to tell you, but the phrase "bust a cap" probably hasn't been used in a legit rap song in 10 years. And no one calls each other "G" either.

The truth is, there is much rap music out there that does not fall into the traps of negativity. Now most rap is not kittens and clowns, but there is much of the genre that does not fall into hedonism. There is, believe it or not, creativity to much of it. And there is a breadth of subject matter the further you go underground.


MYTH #4: RAP REQUIRES NO TALENT

This is the most insane argument of all.

I want you go to and write a rap song. Make it three verses, and make it good. It's much much harder than you think. It takes talent.

Is it because they don't sing? How is being able to sing a talent, really? Isn't it more than a gift. Some people are not born with a good singing voice, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't try to make good music. Some good singers have bad voices, but still make great songs.

Is it because they don't play instruments? Mariah, Whitney, Celine and all the rest don't play instruments to my knowledge, and most don't even write their own songs. But they are never called "untalented."

There are many rap artists out there who have made it without talent, but there are musicians in every genre who have done the same. Don't hate the game, hate the players.

I'm not trying to get you to like rap, in fact I hate most of it myself. I know it would be a futile attempt anyway. I know, for example, that no amount of persuasion could make me like country music, a genre that I detest almost as much as I detest Oprah. But I know that there is some good country (or country-ish) music out there that I actually like, like Johnny Cash and, well, some others I can't think of right now. But I know what I hate, which is pretty much any country music made in the last 20 years.

And knowing is half the battle...

Am I Cultured Enough For You? (or "Can You FEEL Me?!")

In 2002, Rolling Stone Magazine came out with a list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. I wanted to see how my collection stacked up with the supposed pantheon of 20th Century music. Turns out I have exactly 99 of them in my possession, that's nearly 20%. Not too shabby. The number of these I have actually purchased with my own money is a mystery that continues to baffle authorities.

1) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (The Beatles)
3) Revolver (The Beatles)
5) Rubber Soul (The Beatles)
6) What's Going On (Marvin Gaye) +
10) The White Album (The Beatles)
12) Kind of Blue (Miles Davis)
13) Velvet Underground and Nico (The Velvet Underground) %
14) Abbey Road (The Beatles)
15) Are You Experienced? (The Jimi Hendrix Experience) #%
19) Astral Weeks (Van Morrison) #
23) Innervisions (Stevie Wonder)
25) Rumours (Fleetwood Mac) %
29) Led Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin)
34) Music From Big Pink (The Band) #
36) Tapestry (Carole King)
41) Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (Sex Pistols)
43) The Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd)
45) The Band (The Band) #
47) A Love Supreme (John Coltrane) %
48) It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Public Enemy)
58) Trout Mask Replica (Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band)
63) Sticky Fingers (The Rolling Stones)
65) Moondance (Van Morrison) #
66) Led Zeppelin IV (Led Zeppelin)
69) Superfly (Curtis Mayfield) %
70) Physical Graffiti (Led Zeppelin)
75) Led Zeppelin II (Led Zeppelin)
86) Let It Be (The Beatles)
91) Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (Elton John)
94) Bitches Brew (Miles Davis) %
96) Tommy (The Who) %
102) Giant Steps (John Coltrane)
110) The Bends (Radiohead)
118) Stand! (Sly and the Family Stone) #%
128) Marquee Moon (Television)
133) Ready to Die (The Notorious B.I.G.) %
134) Slanted and Enchanted (Pavement)
135) Greatest Hits (Elton John)
137) The Chronic (Dr. Dre)
144) Straight Outta Compton (N.W.A)
145) Aja (Steely Dan)
148) Deja Vu (Crosby Stills Nash and Young)
149) Houses of the Holy (Led Zeppelin)
154) The Low End Theory (A Tribe Called Quest)
162) OK Computer (Radiohead)
173) Something/Anything? (Todd Rundgren)
176) Rocks (Aerosmith) %
177) One Nation Under a Groove (Parliament/Funkadelic)
187) So (Peter Gabriel) +
193) Dookie (Green Day) +
206) Tea for the Tillerman (Cat Stevens)
207) Ten (Pearl Jam) +
210) Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (Pavement)
217) Licensed to Ill (Beastie Boys) %
219) Loveless (My Bloody Valentine)
227) Paid in Full (Eric B. and Rakim) %
228) Toys in the Attic (Aerosmith) %
238) Can't Buy a Thrill (Steely Dan)
239) Let It Be (The Replacements)
246) The Shape of Jazz to Come (Ornette Coleman)
248) Reasonable Doubt (Jay-Z) %
253) Trans-Europe Express (Kraftwerk) #
259) Crosby Stills and Nash (Crosby Stills and Nash)
260) Buena Vista Social Club (Buena Vista Social Club) %
266) Quadrophenia (The Who) #%
274) Mothership Connection (Parliament) %
292) White Light / White Heat (The Velvet Underground) %
293) Greatest Hits (Simon and Garfunkel)
297) Weezer (Blue Album) (Weezer)
300) Fear of a Black Planet (Public Enemy)
305) Odelay (Beck)
309) Nothing's Shocking (Jane's Addiction) +
314) The Velvet Underground (The Velvet Underground) %
320) Pink Moon (Nick Drake)
326) Disintegration (The Cure) #
328) Exile in Guyville (Liz Phair)
336) Superunknown (Soundgarden) +
341) Play (Moby)
346) 3 Feet High and Rising (De La Soul) %
364) American Recordings (Johnny Cash) #
367) Is This It (The Strokes)
385) Pretzel Logic (Steely Dan)
386) Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers (Wu-Tang Clan)
390) Elephant (The White Stripes)
397) Rain Dogs (Tom Waits)
400) Illmatic (Nas)
403) Radio City (Big Star)
419) Dummy (Portishead) %
435) To Bring You My Love (PJ Harvey) #
438) Number 1 Record (Big Star)
440) Sea Change (Beck)
442) Boys Don't Cry (The Cure)
444) Criminal Minded (Boogie Down Productions) %
455) Synchronicity (The Police) %
459) Strictly Business (EPMD) %
468) Elton John (Elton John)
477) The Score (Fugees) %
478) Radio (LL Cool J) %
497) Yo! Bum Rush the Show (Public Enemy)

Key:

#: Listened to less than 5 times
%: On Cassette
+: Rage's, not mine

Interesting* trends:

• 5 Jazz albums
  
• 6 Beatles albums
  
• 17 Rap albums
  
• 16 '90s Pop/Rock albums
  
• 3 albums from the 2000s
  
• Most recent album: #390 (2003)
  
• Highest rated Rap Album (entire list): #48
  

*Not actually interesting

Best Show on TV

Your ass better start watchin' it this season. Do yourself a favor and rent the Season One DVD. You will likely buy it when you are done. If Home Improvement could last like 7 seasons, surely you all can help Arrested Development out.

Bruschi

Medical studies have shown that a person can have a stroke from constant fake-smiling in a disingenuous manner.













All that charisma wasted...looks like the Pats are going to have to find a new heart and soul of their defense.

Fare Thee Well...

I always liked Travis Henry. One of the unheralded running backs coming out of the 2001 draft with the likes of Deuce McAllister, Michael Bennett and LaDanian Tomlinson, Travis had a workman-like quality that I thought was admirable.

Now one of the most overused cliches in all of sports is that Buffalo fans are "blue-collar." This is a pretty condescending phrase, I think. I know people mean it like, "These people are real," but what it really means to me is, "These people are not really bright, so they have to work blue-collar jobs." You never hear anyone say something like, "Los Angeles Lakers fans are white-collar." It's stupid.

But maybe blue-collar is the best way to describe Travis. He's a good runner inside, legs always churning, never giving up. He gets yards where there aren't any. He doesn't have blazing speed, but he's a good cutback runner, and a decent receiver out of the backfield.

Travis Henry

He was the Bills' MVP in 2003 (as voted by his teammates), and it was well-deserved considering he played with broken ribs and a couple games on a bum leg. Fumbles a little too much, but an excellent player.

But I have to say, I always thought his attitude toward Willis McGahee (the Bills' new running back, and a potential superstar) was pretty poor. From day one, when Willis as drafted (some said too early at the time), Travis never was quite able to get over it. His first words on draft day were that it was a "slap in the face." It showed a lack of killer instinct. If someone is out there trying to take my job, I am gonna fight for it. It always seemed like Travis couldn't quite do it; he took a fatalistic attitude toward Willis.

Willis McGahee

In 2004, when the Bills were 0-4, and Travis got hurt, they finally put McGahee in. He had a huge game against Miami. Travis had been pretty ineffectual anyway early on, but McGahee sparked the offense. The team went on a 9-3 run to end the season. Willis is clearly the future of the team.

I liked Travis, and would have loved to see him have a better attitude. Because if he did, this could have been a pretty incredible backfield. But if you have to pick one, all you had to do was watch the Bills last year. They were a different team with McGahee in there. Not a slight against Travis, just a fact.

Travis had four solid years with the Bills, and I truly wish him all the best with the Tennesee Titans, but he's gonna have to learn to welcome competition instead of succumb to it.

A Shining Example of Inpenetrable Moral Superiority

Ken Mehlman, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, said that the "angry left" -- including (repeatedly) John Kerry, Hilary Rodham Clinton and Howard Dean -- is launching a smear campaign against Karl Rove and they owe him an apology. (Mehlman has become good at the idea of apologies, admitting that his party -- the party of Abe Lincoln -- played racial politics in 1968 to use it as a wedge issue with Southern voters.)

Claiming someone is launching a smear campaign against Karl Rove is like accusing someone of saying something inappropriate about Eminem.

It's not like Rove has done anything to earn a reputation for being unethical, is there? Oh wait theres...

• ...the time he broke into the office of Illinois State Treasurer hopeful Alan Dixon in 1970, stole campaign stationery, and created fraudulent invitations promising "free beer, free food, girls, and a good time." Oh, but that was just a prank.(Read)
  
  
• ...the time during the 1986 Texas governor's race when he claimed (with no proof) that his office had been bugged. No proof was ever discovered.
  
  
• ...the time around the 2000 Republican primaries where he accused John McCain of having a black child out of wedlock (Read here, here or here, or even here) (it was actually his adopted daughter from Bangladesh, and of course the Bush camp denies it).
  
  
• ...the time he accused McCain's wife Cindy of being a drug addict (Read)
  
  
• ...when he publicly questioned McCain's "war hero" status (Read) (and remember, these are fellow Republicans!)
  
  
• ...that time he was actually fired by the campaign of Dubya's daddy, George H.W. Bush, in 1992 for leaking key information to (guess who) Robert Novak about some Texas Republicans. Read here and here)
  
  
• ...that time in March of 2001 where he, while a member of the Bush White House, successfully facilitated a merger between Intel and a Dutch company. Coincidentally, he had $100,000 in Intel stock at the time. (Read here or here.)
  
  
• ...way back when Enron was still a working company, and Rove (holding between $100,000 and $250,000 in Enron stock), was helping the Bush White House create energy policy. (Read here here or Congressional Records, here.) Probably no conflict of interest there...
  
  
• ...when he said that "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," (Read) even though the entire U.S. Senate unanimously (Note: that includes Democrats too) agreed to using force (Read).
  

Luckily, Bush has changed his mind about whoever could have leaked the information. Instead of firing anyone who leaked any information, now he will wait to see if anyone broke the law by leaking information. Whew, wouldn't want to make a decision without having all the facts or thinking it through, woulda ya, W?


With a record of integrity and honesty that spartan, how could anyone question this man's words at face value? Anyone who would question this public servant's commitment to the truth is a traitor and should be sent back to whatever country they came from. Mr. Rove, I salute you! You make me proud to be an American!

Ken "Talking Points" Mehlman

Do not speak to this man face to face, or you may be sprayed with the constant bullshit spewing from his mouth.
 

So bad for you... 

Terrorislam?

You will find few more fervent defenders of religious freedom than myself. I think "Under God" should be in the pledge of allegiance, I think "In God We Trust" should be on our money. I think you should be able to have a cross or Star of David or whatever you want on your own property. While I don't think that government should push religion, I think it should respect it. I think a lot of religion gets a bad rap in this country.

I think aetheists who dedicate their lives to the separation of church and state are rather sad. But...

I don't understand why when it comes to Islam -- even radical Islam -- suddenly every government official and media type wants to become the face of understanding and tolerance. When there is a terrorist attack, which are, let's face it, done by Islamic extremists lately, one of the first things government officials say is "We know that most Muslims are peace-loving people and this religion does not represent the majority of them." (Great article by Mark Steyn of the London Daily Telegraph on this.) I am certainly not trashing the religion of Islam, but I am perplexed as to why Islam gets a free pass when it comes to hate crimes.

If a radical Christian idiot bombs an abortion clinic, Christianity as a whole takes a hit. Much of the media (left and right) will attribute the act as some kind of byproduct of religion, as opposed to a bastardization of it or an anomaly. (Note: I think the Christian Right is as crazy and facist as anyone, so please don't think I'm justifying their sometimes abhorrent actions.) We never hear anyone say "the Irish Republican Army has hijacked Christianity, we realize that most Irish Catholics do not support this and are a peaceful people."

Yet, when something as horrific as the 7/7 London Bombings happens, we are so quick to defend Islam and the hate that some branches of it can sometimes produce. I am not saying that Islam is a religion of hate, but I don't see anything in the Five Pillars that mentions loving one's neighbor. Where the Ten Commandments has a bunch of "Thou Shalt Nots" (yes, some do find this off-putting), the Five Pillars are mostly about duty. Fine. But why are people so quick to defend Islam, when they would never be so quick to defend an atrocity that was borne of a different religious denomination?

If you have the Ten Commandments (including "Thou Shalt Not Kill") in front of your courthouse, you had better be prepared to take it down. But if someone from the local Mosque firebombs a subway or kidnaps a truck driver, the first thing anyone standing behind a podium will say is how peace-loving most Muslims are. I'm sure that 90% of Muslims love peace and are fine people. I don't actually know any Muslims, period, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt. But if we can attack the entire Catholic way of life, and (often justifiably) criticize its culture over a bunch of priestly-perverts, why can't we even call into question Islam (or at least the modern interpretations of it by fallible men) and hold Muslims and their culture to the same standard?

Around the time the latest Iraq war started, there was a massive protest in Washington, D.C. that I caught on C-SPAN. They had several people come out to criticize the war and voice their disgust. I had no problem with this. What I did have a problem with, was a certain Muslim speaker of indeterminate Arab descent, who was carrying on like a madman, screaming and yelling, thumping his fist and carrying on. His tie was flapping in the wake of his spastic movements, his unkempt hair was flying all over the place. One of the themes he kept repeating was, "Peace be unto you." I think this is a great message. I think we should all strive for peace and encourage dialogue and understanding in all aspects of life, leaving violence and confrontation as a last resort. But this man said (and I'm paraphrasing) "Peace be unto you! Islam, which came thousands of years before George Bush, was the first to say 'Peace be unto YOU!!!!'"

Anybody who knows me knows I didn't vote for Bush either time, so this is not a defense of him. But for this gentleman to suddenly come out on the side of peace in the name of Islam is like a Red Sox fan say he's always LOVED Derek Jeter because he was just traded to Boston. (Don't have a heart attack Will or Javen, this didn't really happen.) Where was this guy on 9/11, denouncing violence and spouting all the tenets of peace? Why wasn't he decrying those who committed cowardly acts of murder in the name of Allah, whom he loves so much? Maybe he was busy that day.

I really have no problem with any religious person who is sincere in their belief, thoughtful, open-minded, and pious. But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. But let's stop hiding behind faux religious appreciation. Government leaders are using this disingenuous call-to-tolerance so as not to come off as racist; it's not a religious issue, it's a racial one. Of course, maybe if any of our government leaders gave a damn about people of color (and yes, that does include you, Bill Clinton), we might have tried to stop all that, y'know, ethnic cleansing that went down in Rwanda in 1994.

There are encouraging signs that the Muslim/Arab world is starting to tire of the constant violence and terror, but signs of some leaders still justifying the attacks remain, saying that somehow we as citizens reap what our (sometimes corrupt, historically imperialist) governments sow, as if it's the West's fault. And maybe it is, but if terrorists think that the U.S. or Great Britain is suddenly going to capitulate to terrorism (as, sadly, Madrid did in 2004), then they don't understand how it works. There is no way that any government worth a damn is going to operate on a quid-pro-quo basis, terrorism in exchange for a hands-off approach.

It can't be done that way, and it should never be done that way.

You can't react in a way that rewards terrorism. The only -- ONLY -- reaction can be to squash the bee that stung ya, then go after the rest of the goddamn hive.

If Islamic extremists can say, "The U.S. is creating more terrorists by their occupations in the middle east" then why can't we say, "Terrorism is going to result in violence against Muslims and more oppression in the Middle East"? We can't say that because it's stupid, and it doesn't justify anything other than the two-wrongs-making-a-right theory. So why do we pay this kind of simple-minded terrorism-justification logic any credence?

I'm speaking in generalizations to prove a point. I'm disgusted by people who try to justify cowardly, dastardly bombings and terror attacks. I would hate to see innocent Muslims hurt in retaliation of 7/7 or 9/11, but we have the right to place blame. We have the right to be angry. And in times like this, we shouldn't feel the need to temper our anger with, "Okay, we know this isn't everybody, but...." If one fourth grader is chewing gum, the whole class puts their heads down on their desks.

We DO NOT have to accept this or apologize for being attacked. We DO NOT have to accept terror as a form of political discourse. We DO NOT have to understand terrorists or find out WHY they resort to terror. We in the West are right to criticize them, since so many in the Islamic world (even if they agree that terrorism is a horrible act) are so reluctant to do it. If we try to explain terrorism, or see it as "their only option" then we are accepting it by our rationalization. The only way that terrorists will stop resorting to violence is not by our understanding, but by our (and more importantly, other Muslims') contempt. A martyr is not a martyr if no one "celebrates" his death.

"London Can Take It". But they don't have to take it alone.

I tried to express something to you in a couple of those numbers and maybe, just maybe heal this country a little bit...

G.O.B.: How about the fact that I made you a thank-you gift last week, about which you haven’t said word one?

Michael: Come on, you asked me for $5,000 so that you could invest in a Franklin CD. Now, I assumed that you were talking about the mutual fund and not a compact disc of you singing to your hand.

Me, Danny and Javen

Nobody Cares What I've Been Drinking while Bojanglin'

Click here for more pics.

All Aboard the Pain Train

Okay, so here was my weekend...

(For the first leg, from Toastie's, Danny's and Jitter's early start, click here.)

Friday, June 1: Syracuse to Philadelphia

+ Willie and I leave about 10:45 for Philly. Driving is very smooth, little incident into the city itself.

+ Willie and I get lost about .5 miles away from our hotel (which would be the first of several times on this trip). We go into the airport and then end up driving around the ghettos of S.Philly for about an hour. We eat pizza off the hood of my car.

+ Willie Moe and I look for something to do, so we go to the McDade Mall in Suburban Philly. To call it a mall might be stretching it, but we use the restroom and plot our next move. While in the KMart at the mall, we find out that Sandra Day O'Connor had just resigned, and outside, within the last 5 minutes, a torrential downpour had erupted. We look out the window, and sure enough, it's cats n dogs.

+ We are soaked as we go to a McDonalds to ask to look at a phone book to call the hotel. The lady behind the counter says they don't have one. Willie calls information, where we get the address, 1600 Bertram. Turns out there are two Bertram Roads in that very section of Philly. We spend an hour driving up and down the wrong one. We cross railroad tracks while the lights are flashing and the safety arms are down: it is exhilarating!

+ We get to the hotel, open up the rooms and each take a dump. Shortly thereafter, Jitter, Danny, Jeff and Toastie show up, and boy can they make an entrance! They bring beer so we get the party started (even though I did sign that "No Parties" waiver at the front desk). Phelpsy soon shows up, then Javen (who suddenly has the new nickname G-Baby), Tucker and Dunford after that. Just the ten of us.

+ We eat some cheesteaks, change and cab it to Chickie's & Pete's where we have more beers and the most delicious cheese sauce I've ever had. We are all drunk and began singing TV theme songs (as is our specialty) outside the restaurant. We were all completely stumped on the first line of "Parents Just Don't Understand" and kept confusing it with the first lines to the opening song on "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air." I was afraid we would have our Philly passes revoked. Our cabs showed up very late, and we all got back to the hotel and crashed.

Saturday, June 2: Philadelphia to Baltimore

+ We wake up, slightly worse for wear, and without food. We all drive to the park and do some tailgating with the frisbee and a few beverages. Phelpsy, while usually correct, did miscalculate the traffic, as we were to the park in 15 mins flat without any rush. He had figured that Live 8 would have brought traffic to a standstill, but it was in a different part of town. Still, better to err on the side of caution I guess.

+ The ten of us go to the Phillies-Braves game. Beautiful day. Beautiful stadium, Citizens Bank Park. Willie and Phelps get "Build-a-Phanatics." Great cheesesteak (with provolone, though Phelps prefers the Whiz) and very good beer. They had Red Hook, Anchor Steam and (oh my!) Victory Hop Devil! Where were we? A baseball game or a brew-fest?

+ Phillies win. We leave the stadium. Some weird knock-kneed guy cuts off half a dozen people on the way to the restroom, including yours truly. We get pictures at the stadium and in the parking lot, then head back to pick up cars at the hotel, then we bid a fond adieu to Phelps, and the City of Brotherly Love.

+ Straight shot to Baltimore, under 2 hours. Nice drive. We get to the hotel, where we put all our stuff and plan. We think of going to a place to eat, but the local joint is packed. A limousine nearly takes the front end off a minivan in the parking lot. We buy beer and head back to the crib.

+ We are all hungry, so we go to Ruby Tuesday's, home of the Buy-One-Get-One-For-A-Penny special/scam. We rack up huge amounts of beers, and are seated in a very reasonable amount of time.

+ The poor waitress ("...that POOOOR WOMAN...") gets the punishment of serving the 9 of us, and on her 3rd night working there no less. We are relatively well-behaved, though we do get strange looks from a group of old people. ("This man is an attorney, so you better be careful" said one in a half-joking way.) We all eat nice meats, except for Toastie and Dunford, who load up on salad. Toastie becomes jealous when he sees all the meats that he turned down.

+ Dan starts feeling badly, then stands up to go to the restroom, but hits his head very hard on the lamp hovering over his head. "Are you okay?" asks the waitress. Danny replies, "Yes, I just don't care to hit my head when I stand up." He says it out of frustration, not to be mean. However that doesn't stop the entire table from doing an impression of Dan screaming at the waitress and recreating the moment. We finally leave (probably followed by a sarcastic standing ovation from the Ruby Tuesday's staff).

+ Not everyone is feeling well, so we head back to the hotel. I am in the mood to go out, but no one else is. I get pouty and bitchy about this when it becomes clear that no one wants go to out. But I have my own reversal of fortunes when I discover the game of Dang-It! (later renamed "Frisbeer"). The object of the game is to knock other people's beer cans down with the frisbee. This would result in a "Dang-It!" where the person whose beer you just toppled would have to finish it. This led to a great evening of clean fun, though we were ordered off the front lawn of the Red Roof Inn by an angry staff member there, who threatened to call the cops. Since we're not allowed back in the state of Indiana anymore, we decided this was not a good idea.

+ We went inside, and partially, I assume to spite the man who kicked us out, got even more rowdy, downing more and more beers, and getting more and more rambunctious. We created the Uber-bed, which was the act of pushing the two queen beds together to create one giant collosal bed. Lots of homoerotic subtext going on, but nothing happened. Seriously.

+ Toastie took his shirt off and began the most hilarious pantomime in the history of the world from the outside of the hotel. (At one point, we open the door only enough to hear him say, "What do you want soundbites?" only to slam the door on him.) He did the classic "falling down the stairs" routine. Epic. This is all a little hazy but there is video available.

Sunday, June 3: Baltimore

+ We wake up for another game of Frisbeer, this time with perhaps a hint of regret. We don't all remember what happened last night, but we know it was probably less than pure. We lifted Toastie's ban on the Bob Evans chain of restaurants and chowed down.

+ We saddle up for the Orioles-Indians game. We get to the ticket machine for the train into Baltimore, but for some reason the machine won't take Dunford's coins. Thank God we got there when we did, because the line queued up pretty fast once we got there.

+ We get on the train, which takes us right to Camden Yards. It's a beautiful stadium with a lot of old-style charm. We walk the interminable ramp to get to our seats, but decide to join Danny and Jeff down in left field. We make some friends, including a guy in a yellow Len Bias jersey and a guy who shouts "Go home, Indian!" to Jitter, who is wearing his hometown Cleveland cap. Tribe beats the Birds.

+ After the game we go to Fuddrucker's for some huge hamburgers and all conversation stops. Plenty of ballgame left, gotta pace ourselves. Jeff leads us into what we think may be the belly of Baltimore's Little Italy, but we end up in a well-lit bar district.

+ We start at a sports-bar type place, which really isn't our style, but we get a table and everyone sits down. I go to the bar to try and order a pitcher or two, but the bartender never even looks at me. I stand at the bar for literally 10 minutes and not a sniff. The place isn't busy. We say F this and leave. A waitress asks, "Leaving already?" to which Danny yells, "Well it would be nice if someone would take our $^%&@!% order!" A bit harsh? Perhaps, but we all felt his frustration.

+ After window shopping a couple of pubs, including one with a 25 cent ladies night (Bouncer: "It's 25 cents for ladies only. You guys got boobies?" Javen: "In a way.") We end up at a place called Reefers (I think?), which had a sea theme. We start off drinking $2 plastic cups, but realize this might not be the way to go. The $7 pitchers were much more economical. The place suits us perfectly. We have one entire side of the bar to ourselves, there is music playing loudly, but not so loud that we have to scream to one another. Suddenly ...

+ The music comes on, and then the words: Just two good ol' boys, never meanin' no harm... Reverse dang-it. We erupt into a 9-man chorus of the Waylon Jennings classic. We then get a string of very sing-a-longable songs, which is all we need. Amazing how something like that can suddenly light a spark. We have re-railed...

+ We start racking up pitchers. One after another after another. The barkeep says he is impressed by our binging on a Sunday night. He says the record for pitchers is 25, and if we get to 25, he'll buy us a round of shots. Upon reflection, I question the authenticity of this so-called record, as the only evidence of its existence was a hand-written sign that said 25. But the gauntlet had been thrown down.

+ While it may be true we spilled a pitcher's worth of beer on the floor at this place, we racked up 30 pitchers. Thirty pitchers for 9 guys is more than three pitchers a piece. And that isn't even counting the one we ourselves vetoed because Dunford gave some to some girls at the bar. Talk about integrity! We told everybody that Toastie was getting married the next day.

+ The rest of the night is a haze. I thought I lost my cell phone, then proceeded to send Willie a text message, even though he was standing right next to me. I think I ate a slice of pizza, but cannot be sure. I think we took a cab ride home, but am not positive, though I think we did because I kept telling Toastie in the cab ride that he better treat that girl right. And Danny said to the cabbie, "I don't care how you get home, just keep it under $25." Thank God he was there. Danny also pretended to break up a faux fight between Toastie and I. Good stuff. As Will said later, "That's what you call committing to the material."

+ On a personal note, I was so bombed that I couldn't fall asleep, so I got my iPod and sat outside the hotel room in the fresh air. I was either in my underwear or pajama shorts, but I don't remember which and I didn't care. I kept playing the theme song for "G.I. Joe" on my iPod, and I don't know why. There was something soothing about it, and it made me less apt to vomiting. It worked because I didn't puke. Go Joe!

Monday, July 4: Baltimore to D.C. and back to Syracuse

+ The next day was especially painful. We split up for our last journey to the same destination. This time it's RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. My head is spinning and even a Big Mac and fries is not helping. I get disoriented and have to call Javen to ask him how to get out of our hotel complex.

+ The drive is only about 45 minutes from the BWI area to the stadium, but one thing I never even thought of was the need for cash to pay for parking. It was $10 and Willie and I were flat broke. We had credit cards and post-dated out-of-state checks, but no cash. So instead of being able to park, we had to search for an ATM. I went to a gas station, but the man behind the bullet-proof glass said they didn't have ATMs. I went to a shopping district down the street, but the man in the National Liquidators said their ATM was out of money. These places are all in a relatively not-good section of town. Finally there was a Safeway with a working ATM. When the money finally came out I felt like a slot winner at a casino.

+ We finally make it into the stadium and to our seats. RFK is one of the old multi-purpose "cookie-cutter" stadiums that were all the rage in the 1970s, but are now being replaced with baseball- or football-only stadiums (see Veterans Stadium in Philly, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, etc). It doesn't have a tenth of the charm of the other two ballparks we saw, which is a good reason that D.C. should build a new stadium. Outstanding attendance, though.

+ There were about four Mets fans sitting a few rows ahead of us, and they were being really loud and obnoxious. They are yelling at girls and making fun of the beer vendors. Toastie started to get annoyed with them and started yelling, "Oooo, I'm so tough. I got my shirt off." Toastie and Jitter began countering every one of their cheers. So you would hear: (THEM) Let's go, Car-los! (US) Strike out, Car-los! They were pretty built dudes, but there were still 9 of us, so I wasn't too worried. Danny said to Toastie, "Dude, THEY are US when we're not hungover." While this is true, I realized that the difference is we are not mean-spirited guys, and we primarily act this way to entertain ourselves, not draw attention to ourselves. If attention comes our way, so be it, but it's a byproduct, not our goal. Mets end up winning.

+ Toastie and Will are clearly ready to head back to Syracuse. So we leave immediately after the 7th inning stretch. It's a 6 hour drive, but we find a way to make it in 8 hours, due to some clever wrong turns and bad decisions on our part. Still, the drive through Pennsylvania was much nicer than usual due to the backroads and scenery we were able to see, forgoing the usually nightmarish 4 hour death march up through Route 81. We got home about midnight. And then I started typing this.

Watch out now! 

For Your Inconsideration...

I believe it was the late Anne Frank who said, to paraphrase, "Deep down, I believe that people are good at heart." Keep in mind, she never worked retail. But seriously folks...

I don't think that most people are good. I think that at least half the population are selfish, arrogant, self-absorbed, inconsiderate assholes who only show consideration or decency for others when it benefits them. Alternately, many people act selfishly, while trying to put across a facade of compassion and selflesness. It's better to look good than to be good.

I see it every day dealing with "The Public." I'd say ninety percent of the people I talk to every day are very nice or at least neutral/tolerable, but you will always get the person who has an axe to grind, a bone to pick, a [noun] to [verb], and "needs to get this taken care of." These people are less interested in getting results or getting things accomplished correctly, than they are about grandstanding and making sure you understand that they are very powerful and they will get what they want.

I understand what it's like to be a frustrated customer, so I know the urge to call up a company to start raising hell. But let's face it, if I'm doing that, all I'm doing is taking my anger out on some Johnny Pencil-Pusher (like myself) who didn't cause my problem, and can fix it 9 times out of 10 with just a heads-up as to what the problem is. Most of my transactions with companies have been resolved before I hang up. But to some people, actual results are secondary to playing "Whose D-ck is Bigger?"

A lot of conversations start like this: "Okay Bill, this is the 4th time I've called on this. I've been bounced back and forth and I keep getting the runaround. I need to get this taken care of, and it needs to be taken care of today. If you can't do it, then I want a supervisor. And if a supervisor can't do it, I want the president of the company. And if the president of the company can't do it, I'm going to call my very good friend Mr. Attorney General Elliot Spitzer and file a class action lawsuit against you. And I don't mean against your company, I mean against you personally."

While I am slightly flattered by all the attention I get in these conversations, we all know it's 99% posturing and 1% reality. Men are much worse than women in this regard, because men have to be macho. Whenever a man calls up, it's as if he's Homer (the Greek storyteller, not the Simpson), ready to regale me with a long narrative of his life. It's always, "Okay Bill. [Sigh.] Okay. Here we go, okay. Let me start this from the beginning. I hope you have time for this, because it's a long story. Okay, okay. Here we go. It was 1951 and I was born on a small sheep farm in Nebraska..." and it always ends up being a matter of $6.83 that could have been explained in the amount of time it takes to heat up a Hot Pocket.

But this is how people are, in all walks of life. My problem is much worse than yours. It's much more important that I get this than you get that. Whatever happened to you...That's nothing, listen to this. Everyone is entitled to a certain amount of self-involvement, but some people are so consumed by it, that they step over anyone they can.

I experienced three examples of rudeness this weekend. Two of them occurred in my car, one while I was on the shitter. Let me briefly recap them in random order, along with the type of assholishness they each represent:

1) Futile and Unneccessary Pride

Rage and I are coming from the mall, taking the back roads as we are sometimes wont to do. We are on one particular two-lane road, which will soon merge into one. The car in front of me is moving a little slowly, so I start to pass him on the left side. Instead of maintaining his previous speed and allowing me to pass, this stupid fucker speeds up, not allowing me to pass him. Keep in mind, this is about a 35 mph speed limit.

So I look at the driver of the green sports car in question, and it's some 19 year old, wife-beater-clad wigger with a shaved head, who keeps eyeballing me through his rearview. Fine, I say, I'm not in any hurry, if he wants to drive faster, more power to him. (Plus, I don't want to start a ruckus, in case Li'l Eminem has a gat in his glovebox.) But this little punk son of a bitch drives even slower than before. The lanes merge, and he's going a full 3 to 4 mph slower than he was, proving that this need for speed was only a matter of puffing his chest out. God forbid a 2002 Saturn should outrun his pimpmobile.

We come to a red light, which promptly turns green. White Chocolate decides to sit there, leaning back in his ride, one extended arm on the wheel, bobbing his head to music that isn't even playing. I could have played into his hands, showing my frustration by yelling out the window or leaning on the horn, but instead (somewhat in an effort to show he wasn't getting to me), I gave him a friendly quick beep-beep, as if to say, "Hey buddy, just in case you didn't notice, the light's green now. Thanks so much...." This guy wasn't really doing anything illegal, he was just trying to be slick, to prove Quien es mas macho. You win buddy.

At this point, I'm sitting at another red light, right up on this dude's ass. And in my mind I'm going through the fantasies we all have about the guy getting out of the car and coming back, and me grabbing his arm and rolling up my window so he couldn't get it out, and then snapping his arm at the elbow the opposite way it was supposed to go, and then dragging him for about five blocks hanging off the side of my car. Alas, it never happened.

But the light turned green, and I had to turn left. The punk bitch in question went straight, and unbeknownst to me, Rage rolled down her window and yelled "Douuuuuche Baaaaaag" so loud that I swerved a little. It was a pretty satisfying ending, I must say.

2) Valuing yourself over others.

This weekend was my dad's birthday, so I went to Rochester to visit him. I had to be back home Sunday by about 5:15, so I wanted to get on the road. As usual, I lost track of time, so I was a little late getting out of my house, and on the road. In other words, I was in a hurry.

As I'm taking the one-lane road to get to the expressway, which will take me to I-90 to get back to Syracuse, there is a small bit of blockage in the road. A car is facing one way, a motorcycle the other. They are both parked in the middle of the road, having some sort of conversation. There is no room to either side of them to pass.

Of course, I think to myself, these vehicles will disperse when I get closer so as to let the natural flow of traffic continue, perpetuating the utilization of the great infrastructure system that President Dwight D. Eisenhower envisioned some sixty years ago. Surely, when my presence was felt by these two motorists, the would either say good-day and be on their way, or at least move in such a way that would allow my vehicle's passage.

Much to my surprise, the cars stayed exactly where they were. At first, I assumed that they were so engrossed in their conversation that they did not sense my approach. I gave this possibility about 5 seconds before I realized that they would not move without some kind of auditory prompt. So I gave the customary double-beep honk, a friendly way of saying, Hey, there are other people on the road too, jackass. After the honk, the Asian gentleman on the motorcycle in my lane, slowly turned his head, in a manner that said, "Fine asshole, I'll move." His head did not turn as if surprised, but slowly, and with aggravation, which proved to me that he and the other driver were both well aware of my presence, but decided their little chat smack in the middle of Wickford Way was more important than my simply getting around them.

The motorcyclist makes a slow, half-assed effort to get on his bike, and drive ever-so-slightly out of the way, just enough so I could get out. He gives no sign of apology for inadvertantly blocking my way. As I'm driving by, the woman in the car to my right begins waving her hand at me. Since it was ungodly hot and I had the windows up and the A/C on, I couldn't hear what she was saying, but I could clearly see her face, and her mouth was saying, "Excuse me, excuse me." This was being said not in the spirit of "Excuse me for being in your way," but rather "Excuse me, can I have a word with you?" or "Excuuuse me, I was having a conversation with Evel Knievel over here and you have just interrupted it."

What's amusing is that this woman probably actually expected me to stop my car and talk to her. This woman is probably the type who busts everybody's balls at her job and is used to having people obey her. (You can just tell these things by looking at some people.) And if I wasn't in such a hurry, I may have actually stopped to say, "Listen to me you [string of expletives]...." But instead, I laughed and drove away. Who are these people? Seriously...

3) Lack of Common courtesy.

The most embarrassing bit of intrusion came when I was enjoying an evacation of sorts at work. There are two stalls at work: a large one with a turning lock mechanism, and a small one with a slide-lock. I always try to go to the large stall, because it is close to the wall, further from the urinals, and has more room to stretch out.

Full disclosure: I am not comfortable in public bathrooms. I have what one might call "stage fright." I need solitude and silence in order to pee with other people in the room. Which makes me extra angry when people at work either strike up a conversation with me when I'm taking a leak, or God forbid, start talking on their cell phones(!) to make appointments or talk to friends. (There are free courtesy phones that offer a great amount of privacy, moreso than the restroom would. Oh, and the little matter of a phone at everyone's desk?!)

So I already have a predisposition to using the restrooms at work. It's really disgusting when you think about it: all the males in the building getting rid of waste in just two toilets. And since our restroom is on the first floor, it gets the most traffic, not only from the employees who work on the floor, but also people from other floors coming back from lunch or coffee, visitors to the building, and various other types.

So imagine my surprise when I was sitting on the can, enjoying a nice game of solitaire on my Palm Pilot, lost in my own little world, safe in my own little cocoon, and suddenly, whooosh, the door flies open, leaving me sitting there with my pants down, and some guy I've never seen standing there.

Now this is a pretty common mistake, I would think, someone walking into an occupied stall, so it wasn't the even itself that bothered me; accidents happen. It was the context surrounding the intrusion. First: this is not a large bathroom. There are two stalls and the first one was empty. The door to that one was probably open, so it was fair game. I would think that in such a setting, one would see a closed door and think, There is a chance that stall may be occupied. I generally look for shoes in such a situation. If there are shoes, I usually take the leap of faith that someone is using that facility.

Now, the question that everyone asks me when I tell this story is, "Did you lock the door?" And I've told mostly girls about this, so I'm assuming that this is a common occurance in ladies' rooms. I thought I did lock it, but I didn't do a great job of checking it. Even still, I can't remember the last time that I was on the crapper, even with the door completely secure, where someone yanked on the door to see if it was open, only to find it locked. I don't think it's ever happened at work.

Second: When this guy opened the door, he showed no sign of remorse, apology or embarrassment. I don't know about you, but if I ever walked in on someone with their pants down, I would give them a "sorry" or "oh my God, I'm so sorry about that" or "I thought it was full, I'm sorry." Instead, I yelp out an "oops!" and the guy stands there for a full second. (I didn't make eye contact, thank God, because I couldn't look this guy in the face if I knew who it was.) Instead of apologizing, he just let's out a "huh," like an exhaling laugh, and closes the door. I would have settled for "excuse me" or even "my bad," but I just get a snicker.

Third, and this is the kicker: After he closed the door, this inconsiderate prick who barged in on me and didn't apologize didn't even use the restroom! I would think he would sit down in the next stall, since he obviously had to go. Or if it was just toilet paper he sought to blow his nose, I would think he would reach into the other stall and grab a handful of t.p. But instead, he does nothing of the sort. So at least I think, Good, this means the guy's leaving and I can get out of here and call my therapist. But instead, the bastard stays in the bathroom for five full minutes. He starts washing his hands, combing his hair, practically brushing his teeth. You would think this guy was scrubbing in for open-heart surgery.

The infuriating part of this is that I had to stay in the stall, completely finished with my drop-off, bored with my solitaire game, legs falling asleep. The right, honorable thing to do would have been for this gentleman to leave the restroom within 15 seconds of our unholy altercation, never to be seen or spoken of again. But instead, he camps out in the bathroom like Tom Hanks in "The Terminal," knowing damn well that I cannot, under any circumstances, leave the stall until he is gone. The fire alarm could have gone off, and I wouldn't have been able to leave until he was at least a mile away. It's an unwritten rule.

I guess my point is that all of these situations, while none were major to begin with, could have been diffused with a little bit of common courtesy and/or concession on the part of the parties involved. All three of these incidents appeared to be willful attempts to piss me off. And who the hell am I to piss off? Why would you even care? Why waste your time?

---

Current obsessions:

Movies: The Woodsman, Kinsey, Undertow

Music: Babbletron ("Space Tech Banana Clip"), Zero 7, Stephen Malkmus, Cannibal Ox, Rogue Wave.

TV: Curb Your Enthusiasm (again)

Web: billsinsider.com, wikipedia.com

Misc.: Crossword puzzles

Beer: Middle Ages Pale Ale, Magic Hat Hocus Pocus, Mercury Hef/Saturn IPA (homebrew), Sam Adams White Ale, Upper Canada Lager.

Zen Bastard

Okay, I'm calling it right now. If Phil Jackson coaches the Knicks, I'll eat an entire pepperoni pizza.* I'm talking all 8 slices. You can decide where we get it from. You know I'm good for it.

I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to have to do anything of the sort. But do you know why? It's because there is no chance -- none -- that Phil Jackson will be walking the home sidelines of Madison Square Garden. Do you know why? It's because they don't have any talent, or at least the kind of talent to which the "Zen Master" is accustomed.

You see, P-Jax has never had to build a team. He has never had to organically take a group of rag-tag players and turn them into players who shock the world by winning. No, Jackson (in both his coaching jobs) has walked into ready-made situations with underachieving players, and simply gotten them to play as well as they already should have been.

When he began coaching the Bulls, they were already poised for dominance. They had the best player in the game (Michael Jordan) a rising superstar (Scottie Pippen, who I still think may be the most overrated basketball player of all time), and a solid cast of role players (Bill Cartwright, Steve Kerr, Paxson, Armstrong, Hodges, etc). They were coached by the over-his-head Doug Collins. Collins is a good man and a knowledgeable basketball mind, but he doesn't seem to have the killer instinct necessary to be a great coach (which was proven in stints with Detroit and Washington later on). So Jordan calls up management to get Collins bounced, Jackson takes over and the rest is, as they say, history.

But this is a team that used to play tough in the playoffs every year, but would always end up losing to the Pistons or the Celtics. It's not like this team was built by Jackson from scratch. It's very similar to the San Francisco 49ers in 1989 (this is football now, in case you didn't know). Coach George Siefert inherited the dynasty that Bill Walsh left to him, and won the Super Bowl in his first year in the league. Why wasn't everyone praising Siefert as a genius? He won another title in 1994, in the most parity-riddled sport on the planet. People, of course, may forget that Siefert went on to coach a team that was quite mediocre -- the 1999 Carolina Panthers -- and was fired due to some piss-poor seasons. Not a genius with no talent, eh George?

So as soon as MJ retires from the Bulls, the whole team smells blood in the water and leaves. Including Jackson. Was it because he was just plum sick of coaching? Well, he may say that. But I have a sneaking suspicion that he didn't want to have to coach without MJ saving his Buddhist-genius ass every game. Sidenote: the two years in the mid-1990s that the Bulls didn't win the NBA Championship, which years were those again? Oh yes, the two years that he didn't have Jordan for a full season. Weird!

So Jackson takes one strike-shortened year off from coaching so he can coach -- who else? -- the Los Angeles Lakers. They are a proud team who had fallen on hard times due to some dips in talent and poor coaching (Del Harris and Kurt Rambis coaching the erstwhile Showtime Lakers? Say it ain't so!)

But the Lakers luck out. They get a steal in the draft by trading Vlade Divac and someone else to the Charlotte Hornets for Kobe Bryant, and they land big-man and bigger-mouth Shaquille O'Neal, because he wants to be in Hollywood movies. (I'm still waiting for Kazaam II.)

Interesting, thinks Jackson. Two superstar players on an underachieving team. Pounce!

Long story short, blah blah blah, Lakers win 3 titles and Phil Jackson's absolute genius cannot be denied. He has applied the tenets of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" and applied them to the basketball court, and my god soon he won't have enough fingers for all those rings.

But a strange thing happened. The NBA -- actually doing something right for the first time in maybe a decade -- decides to bring back zone defense! No more illegal defense calls. (And how a sports league could ever justify calling any defense, which is strictly strategic in nature, "illegal" will never be satisfactorily explained to me.) Suddenly, the league isn't a bunch of one-on-one matchups with Jordan shooting over Craig Ehlo or Shaq dunking over Dikembe Mutumbo. Suddenly we have creative defenses that are able to isolate and contain one, or maybe even two star players, making it imperative that the team play well as a whole. Uh-oh.

Interesting that since this rule change in the 2002-03 season, Jackson has not won a championship, losing to the Spurs in '03 and getting flatly dominated by the dynamic team defense of the Pistons in '04. (And by the way, Ben Wallace, not Chauncey Billups, should have been the MVP of that series for neutralizing Shaq and allowing the rest of the team to swarm Kobe.)

So now Jackson, in a seemingly-new era of NBA where the old teams aren't dominating as much anymore, can't decide where to go. Will he go back to L.A., where Kobe, not Mitch Kupchak, is the General Manager. Jackson could go back there, but he doesn't have another Shaq, so that makes only ONE great player on the team. Hmmm...

He has also been talking about going to the Knicks, but I don't need David Aldridge to tell me that there is not a chance in hell that's gonna happen. Why? Talent baby. Jackson will never -- NEVER -- go to a team that isn't already bursting with talent. (This, by the way, is why I'm shocked he never went to the Cleveland Cavaliers, with their exciting LeBron/Ilgauskus combo.)

Who do the Knicks have? Kurt Thomas? Allen Houston? Starbury? Malik Rose? Sorry boys, but I don't see any top 25 players in that list. And that, folks, is not gonna cut it.

So I'll make my guarantee again: Jackson will not be coaching the Knicks this year. He'll probably just go back to the Lakers and take his $15 million and deal with Kobe and bang Jerry Buss's daughter and grow his Colonel Sanders beard and say pithy things about the teams he's playing against.

I'll say this, if he took the Knicks to even the conference finals with this lineup, even I'd call him a genius. But unfortunately for Knicks fans, no dice!

*Note: This offer is null and void if (before Jackson is hired) the Knicks trade for two of the seven best players in the league. Let's say that the seven best players in the NBA are Shaq, Kobe, LeBron, K.G., Tim Duncan, Dirk Nowitzki, Allen Iverson, and Tracy McGrady, randomly, but for the record in case it ever really happens.

Baseball Been Berry Berry Boring to Me

No one could ever accuse me of being unAmerican. I am the prototypical American in many ways. Besides being lazy and out of shape, I have a short attention span, an addiction to fast food, a love of technological gadgets, not to mention a blog. I speak only one language. My ethnic makeup is indeterminate.

No sir, no one could ever accuse me of being unAmerican. Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn would take one look at me in front of congress and say, "Next," not wanting to embarrass themselves at how Capital-fuckin-'A' American I really am.

I love my mom. I love apple pie. I don't love baseball.

[The needle on the record skips] What did he say?!

Most of my friends think I'm insane, but baseball just isn't for me. For my entire life, baseball has been practically shoved down my throat, and I have roundly expectorated it at every turn.

My distaste for baseball has waned over the years. It has gone from a white-hot hatred to a slight dislike over the last few years. I have learned to accept baseball as a fact of life. Rather than rue it's arrival every April, I have learned to see it as a harbinger of better weather.

At first I thought it was the sport itself I hated. I thought the slowness of the game and its crazy, arcane rules were what bothered me. I thought it was the fact that most games take at least 3.5 hours, approximately 90% of which is batters stepping back from the batter's box to adjust their gloves, take a few practice swings and squint up into the stands. I thought it was ridiculous, arbitrary stats like the 40/40 club. I thought it was the way they compare players at the same position by batting average rather than defensive ability. I thought it was 162 games that mean a lot on the whole, but to me are meaningless on a day-to-day basis. But I realized that these are not what bothers me about baseball, it was just the rationale I used to counter baseball fans' arguments as to why it's so superior to football (which is my obsession as far as spectator sports go).

It turns out my reason for disliking baseball is actually three-fold, and none of them really have to do with the sport itself, but more with their fans. (Let me preface this by saying that all my friends like baseball. I mean every single one of them, I think. I love my friends very much, and this is not a reflection of how I feel about them specifically, but rather the sport they love so much.)

When I was still trying to find a sporting identity, I came upon baseball first. I think the first sporting event I ever watched was the game where Pete Rose broke Ty Cobb's all-time hits record. Baseball was just simple enough for me to follow, much moreso than football or basketball or hockey at the time, yet it didn't interest me all that much. I tried. Good lord how I tried to get into baseball. All my friends at school were huge baseball fans, would trade cards every day and talk about players of whom I had no knowledge. As much as I tried to use baseball as a way into a certain social circle, it made me realize I would never cotton to it like I did professional wrestling.

My late Uncle Jim, God bless 'im, tried his damnedest to get me into baseball, and anyone else he met for that matter. He was the singular most hopelessly devoted baseball fanatic I've ever known, no contest, no argument. Anyone who ever met him would never question is undying passion for the sport. He was an encyclopedia of baseball; he knew the history of the game as any person could be acquainted with any subject. Every year, he would send my siblings and I all sorts of baseball paraphernelia (usually of the Philadelphia Phillies, his favorite team). With my little brother, it stuck; to this day he is a psychotic Phillies fan, picking up the torch my uncle left when he passed away a few years ago.

Yet curiously, his passion pushed me away. I've always been someone who does not react well to being force-fed anything. If I feel for a second that something is being overhyped, my mind immediately shuts it out. I hate hype, and even though this was just an example of someone sharing his passion, I don't think I took it that way. Perhaps I latched onto pro football as a counterpoint to the universal acclaim baseball had reached in my household and with my extended family.

So while my entire family would gather together to go to games (even major league games in Philly) or watch the World Series, I would attend, and I would be tolerant. But I never became enamored with it. Instead, I would count the months until August when NFL training camps started and I could begin my (some would say unhealthy) obsession with American football.

Feeling as if baseball was being forced on me led to my second observation about baseball fans (as I saw it): they were living in the past. My rationale was this: when I would watch specials about football (I continually use football as a comparison as it's really the only sport I know a fig about), they would talk about modern players, recent games and latter-day teams. Football, it could be argued in my worldview of the time, was a sport for the contemporary fan.

When I would see a similar special on baseball, however, it always had to harken back to the days of yesteryear. The days of Al Kaline and Jamie Foxx and Warren Spahn and Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale and blah blah blah. Any special program on baseball would begin with a camera panning across an array of old baseball cards with the likes of Mickey Mantle or Sandy Koufax, a faded pennant from the 1950s, along with a litany of other yellowing, decaying relics from the past, usually with a voiceover saying "The Giants win the pennant!" or a video clip of Willie Mays making that over-the-shoulder catch baseball fans are so fond of revisiting.

(It's worth noting that since the era of the juiced-ball, er, the neo-classic era of baseball, this has become less common. Since the Wild Card and the outstanding playoff baseball of the last decade or so, baseball fans have had a lot more recent examples of great baseball to point to. This doesn't mean that every above-average play that happens is "one of the five greatest plays in the history of sports" as Tim Kurkjian might try to convince you, but it's a start.)

This looking to the past, combined with an overly sentimental attitude toward the merits of baseball by the likes of Bob Costas, George F. Will, Mike Lupica and every other two-bit writer who wants to wax poetic about America's Pastime, made me really hate baseball. Does every person who writes about baseball have to pontificate about it as if talking about religion? Is every moment of a baseball game a transcendent, life-altering event? Can the sport itself ever be described at face-value, rather than associated with one particular writer's adolescence or loss of innocence? I once read an article that compared baseball to "a quiet piece of poetry on a summer's day." I wanted to vomit. To me this was the kind of disingenuous hooey that drove me away from the sport like snakes from St. Patrick.

What is truly ironic to me is that I probably appreciate the sport itself right now more than I ever have. I understand what is great about it. Strategically, it is a brilliant game. As a pure sport, there is a lot to love about it. I could never love it for 4 hours, 162 times a year, but maybe a couple times a week for about 70 minutes at a time. Maybe this is why I have been very interested in playoff baseball over the last 3 or 4 seasons (and not just because the hated Yankees haven't won the big one in that span); because every play matters in the playoffs, which can't be said for the almost meaningless regular season. Everything is magnified in baseball's playoffs, showcasing everything that is truly great about the sport. (This is another reason I think the Wild Card is incredible for the sport, it gives us a whole 'nother round of meaningful baseball.)

I have gone through the worm-hole friends, from a place of pure contempt, to one of pure contentment. My own personal Kubler-Ross progression has landed me here. I no longer hate the sport of baseball, although I do hate much about the organizational structure of Major League Baseball as a corporation. I still don't watch baseball, although I do follow it and know enough about it to be somewhat knowledgable in a mixed conversation. Now, when baseball is on and I don't want to watch it, I try to concentrate on the things I like: being with friends, eating brats and dogs, drinking, making lists of things in my head, drinking. Just because I succumb to baseball for the sake of social adherence doesn't mean I have kowtowed to it, or that I have to pretend I like it. I'm going on a three-day whirlwind tour of baseball stadiums thoughout the East Coast (Philly, Washington DC and Baltimore). Does that make me a sellout?

Heh heh ... no. It just makes me someone who enjoys the company of drunken idiots. It's just a coincidence that those idiots are also baseball fans.

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Current obsessions:

Music: Iron and Wine (still), MF Doom, Party Fun Action Committee, Rogue Wave, Melissa Auf Der Maur
TV: Arrested Development, Cheap Seats, Scrubs, The Office (lotta potential), The Perfect Upset (Georgetown vs. Villanova 1985)
Movies: Robots (surprisingly good), Vera Drake, Closer
Sports: NFL Draft this weekend

It's Oscar Time!

I don't care if it's lame or not, but I love the Academy Awards. I've watched them since I was about 10 years old, before I could legally get into the theater to see 90% of the movies that were nominated for awards.

It is a much higher level of award show. It stands alone above crap like the People's Choice Awards, Grammys, American Music Awards, MTV Video Music Awards, for two main reasons.

Firstly, it's a far more classy affair. Yes, all award shows are all masturbatory on some level, with mass self-congratulation running rampant. But the Oscars are just different. I don't know if I can put my finger on exactly why. Maybe it's the fact that everyone gets dressed up, hindering the rogue t-shirt-n-jeans element you are likely to find at any music awards show. The way the theater is lit is far more conducive to what feels like an intimate affair.

Secondly, and the reason that the Oscars are far more significant than any imitator is that the awards given out are legit. By which I mean that the awards and nominations given are the least spurious of any award show.

An award show, besides being a fashion show and a free commerical for any entertainment product that can be sold, should act as a time capsule, crystallizing the best of a given genre or field for future generations to review. This does not happen in almost any other award show.

The Grammys are the most egregious example of this. If you look at a random sampling of Grammy Award winners over the last 20 years or so, you will see that the Grammys not only play favorites (Sting, U2, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins) regardless of the overall quality of their work, but they also have a lousy track record of anticipating what music will last. Also, most of their awards to older or more established artists are more akin to Lifetime Achievement awards. For example, my favorite band in the whole wide world, Steely Dan, won the grammy for their 2000 album, Two Against Naturewhich was, inarguably, their worst album to date. (It's not a bad album, but it's the least good one they've ever made.) But if you look back, none of their great, legendary albums made even a dent in Grammy lore. I mean, for God's sake, Olivia Newton-John's "I Honestly Love You" was 1974's Record of the Year.

The Oscars, by contrast, is like a survey of great -- or at least excellent -- cinema. If you look at the nominees every hear for the last 30 years, it can be argued that close to 80% of the nominees for Best Picture are at least very good, if not great movies.

Here's a short list of the legendary movies that were either nominated for or won the Best Picture Oscar in the 1990s alone: Saving Private Ryan, Fargo, Braveheart, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, The Silence of the Lambs, GoodFellas. The Academy gets it. Even when there's a curious inclusion like The Full Monty or Chocolat or The Godfather: Part III or Jerry Maguire, they usually get it as close to right as can be expected by a mainstream industry.

The fact that the Academy Awards are not so bogged down in politics makes it as pure as something like an award show can possibly be. The Grammys (I use them as my whipping boy because of their sheer ineptitude) are about which record label politics the best, not what is the best music.

Having said that, I will now do a brief Oscar recap. I will rate each of the major categories on strength of category (ie. the overall quality of the nominees in comparison to past years, from one to ten), then my own ranking of each of the nominees. I will put an asterisk films/performances I haven't seen, but rate them on my overall impression of the actor, actress or film.

Original Screenplay (Strength of Category: 6)

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Winner)
2. The Incredibles
3. The Aviator
4. Hotel Rwanda*
5. Vera Drake*

Eternal Sunshine... was an excellent screenplay. In fact, I think the screenplay was better than the movie ended up turning out to be (though I loved Kate Winslet in it). The Incredibles was maybe the best-written animated movie I've ever seen, and The Aviator was very well-structured, although they could have left a lot out, and it was somewhat odd to have Howard Hughes be considered the underdog throughout much of the film. I heard that Hotel Rwanda wasn't that great a script, that it was more of a genocide-by-numbers script. And please, Vera Drake? Mike Leigh directed that, which means half the movie was probably improvised anyway. I don't think it should count.

Adapted Screenplay (Strength of Category: 8)

1. Sideways (Winner)
2. Million Dollar Baby
3. Finding Neverland
4. Before Sunset*
5. The Motorcycle Diaries*

Sideways was brilliantly-written; mature and funny and heartbreaking at the same time. It never took the easy way out, or made a cheap plot move (which can't be said for Million Dollar Baby, as good as that script is). Finding Neverland was also excellent, but I think it was the Barrie-Peter chemistry that drove that movie. I'm sure Before Sunset is outstanding, given the first film (Before Sunrise, naturally) and that Richard Linklater had a hand in writing it. I heard mixed things about The Motorcycle Diaries, and I find that the dissenting reviews of foreign movies are usually right.

Best Animated Feature (Strength of Category: 4)

1. The Incredibles (Winner)
2. Shrek 2
3. Shark Tale*

By all accounts, Shark Tale got an Oscar nomination because it was only the 3rd animated movie of the year. I found Shrek 2 forgettable, as I found the first Shrek. The Incredibles, however, lived up to its name.

Best Supporting Actor (Strength of Category: 7)

1. Virginia Madsen - Sideways
2. Cate Blanchett - The Aviator (Winner)
3. Laura Linney* - Kinsey
4. Natalie Portman* - Closer
5. Sophie Okonedo* - Hotel Rwanda

Okay, so I haven't seen the last three, but I know Laura Linney is very underrated. I know Natalie Portman is overrated as an actress (though she made a nice comeback in Garden State, in my opinion), and I know nothing whatsoever about Sophie Okonedo. Cate Blanchett was very good, but somewhat artificial, playing Katherine Hepburn. It wasn't an "impression" but it was an affectation. I preferred Madsen ever so slightly; the key to her performance was not how she delivered lines, but what she didn't say. I know that sounds corny, but her very presence drove the film to being so great.

Best Supporting Actor (Strength of Category: 8)

1. Morgan Freeman - Million Dollar Baby (Winner)
2. Alan Alda - The Aviator
3. Jamie Foxx - Collateral
4. Thomas Hayden Church - Sideways
5. Clive Owen - Closer*

Morgan Freeman finally got a well-deserved Oscar, and this was no lifetime achievement award. He was magnificent in Million Dollar Baby. Alan Alda is always so natural, and over the last decade or so he's played real scumbags, and he's great at it. I think Jamie Foxx was better in Collateral than in Ray, because you forgot it was him, which I did not do in Ray. Thomas Hayden Church was similar to Virginia Madsen in Sideways: maybe not the best actor, but an overall presence in the film that makes him invaluable. Didn't see Closer, but it was nice to see Clive Owen get some recognition; I saw him in a movie called Croupier a few years ago and he's a tremendous talent.

Best Actor (Strength of Category: 9)

1. Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby
2. Johnny Depp - Finding Neverland
3. Leonardo DiCaprio - The Aviator
4. Jamie Foxx - Ray (Winner)
5. Don Cheadle - Hotel Rwanda*

Someday, Johnny Depp will win an Oscar. Ditto Don Cheadle. Both are dynamite. DiCaprio was surprisingly good as Howard Hughes. Jamie Foxx was good, but never transcended Ray Charles's spirit in my opinion; I was always conscious that I was watching Jamie Foxx doing a Ray Charles impersonation. Contrast that with great real-life portrayals in movies like Chaplin (Robert Downey Jr), Malcolm X (Denzel Washington), Lenny (Dustin Hoffman), The Insider (Russell Crowe) or JFK (Gary Oldman). Ironically, none of which won the Best Actor or Supporting Actor Oscar. Moreover, I thought Leo's Howard Hughes was a more compelling character than Foxx's Ray Charles, mimicry and technique aside.

I also would like to formally protest Paul Giamatti's second Oscar snub in a row (for Sideways, after last year's American Splendor), but who would you take out? Oh, and yeah, I bought Clint Eastwood's performance more than any of the other nominees; he was the perfect blend of toughness and heart.

Best Actress (Strength of Category: 6)

1. Hilary Swank - Million Dollar Baby (Winner)
2. Kate Winslet - Eternal Sunshine...
3. Imelda Staunton - Vera Drake*
4. Annette Bening - Being Julia*
5. Catalina Sandino Moreno - Maria Full of Grace

I just realized that Million Dollar Baby is so good because of it's acting, not much else. Swank is great at playing white-trash, and she was (like Eastwood) grit and vulnerability rolled into one. Kate Winslet was easy to fall in love with in Eternal Sunshine.... I'm sure Imelda Staunton was amazing, but I didn't see it. Annette Bening playing an aging British actress? I don't know, but didn't see that one either. Moreno was good in Maria Full of Grace, but not Oscar-good; every year they throw in one foreign or exotic-looking actor or actress. She is very pretty, but like many foreign films, her performances was more hype than actual great acting. I thought the pregnant woman in Maria stole the movie.

Best Director (Strength of Category: 6)

1. Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby (Winner)
2. Alexander Payne - Sideways
3. Martin Scorsese - The Aviator
4. Mike Leigh - Vera Drake*
5. Taylor Hackford - Ray

Clint Eastood was as sparse as he can get. It seems that after a lot of disappointing and forgettable fare in the 1990s (anyone remember Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?), he's got his proverbial groove back. Payne's shifts in tone from funny to serious to romantic to funny to heartbreaking were brilliant, and so sudden. Scorsese did yeomanlike work on The Aviator, but it's not quite up there with his 'A' material. Mike Leigh is one of the finest directors of the last decade, so I'll bet Vera Drake is top-notch. (See Secrets & Lies for Leigh's genius.) Hackford should not have received a nomination for this; he did what he could with what he had, but it's not a very good film.

Best Picture (Strength of Category: 5)

1. Sideways
2. Million Dollar Baby (Winner)
3. The Aviator
4. Finding Neverland
5. Ray

The problem with this year in movies is that there was not one single clear-cut Best Movie out there. There were several very good ones, but I wasn't wowed by really anything this year (unless you count Dodgeball, and you probably think I'm kidding). I give Sideways the slight (and I mean slight) edge over Million Dollar Baby, mainly because the "plot twist" in the latter's script still doesn't quite sit well with me. I feel that Million Dollar Baby had an edge in performance, they were about equal in direction, and Sideways had an edge in the screenwriting. But something in Sideways hit me. I don't know if it was being able to relate to the aimlessness of the main character, or the ambiguous-but-not-really ending. It's a great film, one that I feel will become a touchstone of modern midlife crisis, much like The Big Chill or American Beauty.

Ironic that Million Dollar Baby won the Best Picture Oscar where a superior boxing film (Scorsese's Raging Bull) could not. In fact, there are a lot of parallels between 2004 and 1980. A boxing film went up against a small drama (in 1980 it was Ordinary People). Scorsese was beaten by an actor-who-directs, being that Ordinary People was helmed by first-time director Robert Redford. (Kevin Costner's directing debut, Dances With Wolves, beat Scorsese's GoodFellas in 1990. And Rocky beat out Scorsese's Taxi Driver in 1976. Weird.) But it's a great film, and it's at its best on a small scale, when it's just the characters, though the boxing scenes are excellent too.

Ray was the opposite of Million Dollar Baby, a film that (I feel) failed in its drama and was at its best when Ray was rockin' the crowd. The musical numbers are the life blood of that film, but Ray's TV-movie-by-numbers plot failed to move or even interest me to a large degree.

Finding Neverland is a very good film, but it hinges completely on the relationship between Johnny Depp as J.M. Barrie and Freddie Highmore as young Peter Llewelyn-Davies. In fact, I would say that Highmore should have stolen one of the Supporting Actor spots. The direction is a little spotty, but the acting is magnificent.

The Aviator is a sometimes thrilling and always entertaining piece of pop cinema, but it's far too long (which is why I was a little surprised Thelma Schoonmaker, the film's editor, won the Oscar in that category). There's nothing to complain about it, but it (somewhat like Ray, but not nearly to the same degree) followed the events of Howard Hughes's life a little too literally. The difference is that where Ray tried to shoehorn his childhood into a story where it didn't belong, The Aviator was rife with subtext, from Hughes's impulsive nature, to his OCD, to his obsession with flying. Much more entertaining than I expected it to be.

I'm somewhat bothered in that, if you look at the number of major wins Million Dollar Baby got, you would think (say, ten years down the road) that it's one of the greatest films in history. It's a very good film, but much like Eastwood's Unforgiven twelve years before, it benefits from coming out in a weak year for movies.

Yes, it is stupid to give out awards for art. But I don't care. I will watch the Oscars every single year because I love them so much. I also usually do very well at "Oscar Pools" and picking the winners. This was a bit of a weak year for movies, but they probably picked close to the best of what was out there.

At least they're not the Grammys, what a crock of shit they are.