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.

---------------

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.

American iPod

I love the TV show American Idol. I don't just like it, I really really love it a lot. My affinity for the show straddles the line between sincerity and irony. On one hand, there's no way I can really really sincerely love it, because it's stupid. It's three no-talents judging a bunch of even-less-talents on nothing but whether or not the person has a good singing voice. Oh sure, Simon Cowell talks about "image" and "stage presence" but when's the last time they passed a person with a mediocre voice onto Hollywood? It's really a big karaoke contest, so how can I truly like it?

But I'm not going to lie to you, I get excited when it comes on. I don't get excited about most TV shows, but this is truly "event television" in the strictest sense of the word. It combines the best of reality TV, which is trainwreck-quality drama that is memorable, but fleeting, since the good contestants move on and the bad ones are dismissed. Since the idiots are sent packing, we are done with them and don't have to deal with any elongated plots over the course of several episodes. It's like the awkward one-night-stand without having to deal with the "walk of shame" since the no-talents are gone before you can tell the guy you're sorry.

On the other hand, it has the purest "reality" competition you can get, which is singing. It's not like contrived contests and games they have on other reality shows. On AI, everyone gets one shot to impress the fickle and inarticulate judges. They usually don't, and we as an audience can wonder how in the world these people can think they are talented.

I know that I don't have a great singing voice, but once in a while in the shower, I will belt out a song that sounds positively stunning to me. I know my friends wouldn't have the heart to tell me that I suck, but you would think that before I went on a singing competition, I would sing into a tape recorder or something first to see if I was fooling myself. After all, your voice sounds different in your head than it does to other people. Still, watching people cry makes me laugh because it's obvious these people don't give a shit about being great singers, but rather about being famous.

If I were going to use a personal parallel example, it would be this: imagine they had a competition for young writers (and by young I mean pushing 30 years old). Well, I have a blog, so that makes me a "writer" doesn't it? (Just as singing at home makes the AI contestants "singers." I just realized how many "quotes" I've used in this post, and I'm not even done yet.) So I enter this writer's competition. And of course, since I can barely complete a coherent sentence, Simon tells me I'm "dreadful" and Randy says "that was terrible dude" and Pauler says "you gave it your best shot but it's not right for this writing competition."

In this example, I would, myself, just say "oh well." It doesn't mean I would stop blogging. I don't do it for any kind of accolades (although, let's face it, it's only a matter of time before a seven-figure, five-book deal comes my way), I just do it for myself because I like it. This is how these failed singers should look at it: maybe I'm not good enough to be a professional singer, but that's okay because I love singing. I'm going to continue singing for myself because I enjoy expressing myself through the beautiful and timeless art of music.

But this doesn't happen. Instead, if I were a typical AI (or in this case, American Blogger) contestant, I would storm off stage crying or swearing (usually not both), saying, "Simon was intimidated by me. Randy doesn't even know a gerund from a dangling participle. Paula was really nice, though, she said I was good enough but they wanted someone with snappier prose."

This proves to me that we as a society are not breeding artists anymore, but budding celebrities. If these people truly cared about art, they would... well first of all, they would start writing songs and learning the craft of creating good music. But after that, they would not give a crap what three judges said, they would still continue to sing and be happy with it. But people want to be famous first, artistic second.

This brings me to the thing that frustrates me about American Idol, and why it makes me more and more in love with my new iPod than ever: the songs on American Idol are generally terrible. Maybe "terrible" is too strong a word, but all the songs are culled from the same style of subpar pop music that has relegated modern radio to elevator music status. It's always something by Whitney or Celine or Mariah. I don't think anyone would say these particular women sing the best songs, even if they do have the best voices.

I should say at this point that I'm by no means an underground or artsy-rock fan. I don't like bands that are weird for the sake of being weird or bands that use a lot of feedback or go out of their way to shock people. What I love is great songwriting, with decent lyrics, good melodies and even a good chorus. And in today's music scene, there are some great great bands writing great songs. Whether it's the Flaming Lips or Iron & Wine or The Shins or Stephen Malkmus or the late Elliott Smith, we are finally coming out of the terrible mid-90s funk (and I don't mean like Parliament funk, I mean like a rut) that caused mediocre groups like the Wallflowers and Matchbox 20 (sorry Jaime) and Sugar Ray to flourish. Songwriting is back and I couldn't be happier about it.

But you wouldn't even know about this modern rock revolution from American Idol, where apparently no music exists outside of R&B crooning. I understand that indie rock and backpacker hip hop don't have a great translation when it comes to singing, but to me they are far more interesting than the heartless crap they sing. Once in a while you'll hear a good Stevie Wonder song on there, but for the most part it's gutless high-register voices singing witless, hokey songs.

So by the time I'm done watching an American Idol episode, I find myself pining for my iPod more than ever before. If you haven't seen an iPod, they are only the greatest invention music has seen since Napster. It's the size of a pack of cigarettes, but thinner, and it can hold like 2 weeks worth of songs. At press time I currently have 2,398 songs on mine. Not all of them are good, in fact, I'd say less than half of them are very good. But the beauty of the iPod is that it has a built-in rating mechanism by which you can rate a song from * to ***** so you can delete them later if you want to. It ranks your highest rated songs, logs the last time each one was played and how many times it's been played, categorizes everything for you... I better slow down, I'm getting excited. Anyway, if you have a spare $300 laying around, go get one. Now. I'm serious. Oh, you should have a computer, too.

But the iPod is so magical because I can put thousands of songs on there. And I have everything from Leonard Cohen to Aesop Rock to Johnny Cash to Company Flow to Mercury Rev to Radiohead to Madvillain and so on and so forth and whatnot etc ad infinitum. I don't list all these bands to brag or to somehow show how diverse my musical tastes are. I'm doing it to prove that when I hear "I Will Always Love You" or "My Heart Will Go On," I can't wait to throw on the iPod, because I crave the diversity that awaits me. It's the kind of thing where I wish they would ask me to select the music for one episode. It would be like the week when they did all Elton John songs in season three, except they would be songs I like, not songs I picked. I figure, maybe if a lot of people watch American Idol, and a lot of people would be exposed to the music on it, maybe those people would hear something they've never heard and those selfsame people would go to the record store the next day and purchase those albums by those great artists and it would become profitable and more artists would be encouraged to make great music. I could be wrong.

What was my point? I don't even remember. I think it's that I love my iPod. Did that come across at all?

Oxy Moron

[Ed's note: I'm gonna level with you, kids. This N.O.C.W.I.T. entry is gonna be gross. If you have a weak stomach, you may want to skip it. It discusses dealing with acne in a frank, some would say profane, manner. There it is, you've been warned.]

When I was in junior high, I developed really really bad acne. From about 7th grade until about my senior year of high school, my face was filled with red blotches and shiny pimples. I know everyone gets it, but I'll bet I got it worse. True story: when I was in 8th grade, a kindergartener asked me if I had chicken pox. I got this acne medication from my doctor that dried up my skin and made it flake off. I would routinely have to shake dead skin out of the folds of my text books in junior high.

Now it's not as if I was a social dynamo to begin with. It wasn't like I had a whole lot else going for me either, so I can't blame it all on the acne. I didn't have a personality, wasn't smart, was scrawny (I say it like it's a bad thing), had a huge nose for my face, and unmanageably thick and straw-like hair. And this was after I got the braces off.

[Side note: It seems like I've never been able to get it all right at the same time. I was a weird kid, then I got normal. Then I got braces. I got the braces off, but then I became a bit of a fat kid. Then I dropped the weight and the acne kicked in. Then the acne goes away and I gain like 50 pounds in college. Then I get glasses. Then I drop some of the weight and get comfortable with my body type, and I start getting thinning hair. It's like I've always been half-dork -- some might say more than half.

There was one, shining one-year period when I was a senior in high school that was like the eye of the nerd hurricane: the acne was going away, I was 180 lbs, no glasses (even though I probably needed them). If I had only had a personality, I would have been a real catch back then. Ah well...]

But when it came to the one thing that set me apart from my peers at that age, it was the acne. I was never ostracized by my classmates or anything like that, since many of them had it too. Actually, only my bitch sisters and asshole brother used to tease me about it. But I took it, knowing full well that about the time mine started clearing up, those idiots would get it. And they did.

Acne was my mortal enemy for a long time. It was cruel, tormenting condition of the skin caused by dirt and oil. When Noxema and Clearasil and Oxy 10 and all the other acne-cleansing products didn't work, I would sometimes have to practice "vigil-acne" justice. (Haha! Man I'm clever!) I would pop 'em. I would pop the zit out of 'em.

Some people enjoy popping plastic bubbles, I enjoyed popping zits. It wasn't just the perverse pleasure of squeezing all that disgusting stuff out of its fleshy foxhole, or watching the volcano-like eruptions signifying the end of a blemish. It was sweet revenge -- hell, it was the only possible revenge -- against this dermatologist-mocking syndrome that had kept me at a disadvantage all those years. After all, my looks are my livelihood!

There were two particular instances where my Charles-Bronson-in-Death-Wish-like hatred of all things oily and putrescent would produce a most-satisfying result. I would like to tell you about both of them right now. If you are squeamish, you may want to skip to my I Hate Jared from the Subway Commericals entry or something.

The first incident took place in my health class at Fairport High School in 1994. Back then I was a T-Shirt 'N' Jeans guy, unlike the nattily dressed fashion plate I am today. I wore a black Vancouver Canucks baseball cap and a black t-shirt that day. There had been an immense, Mount St.Helens-size pimple right at the base of my skull. I knew what it was. There was a large bump there, but it had a putty-like fluidity about it. It was enormous. It actually gave me a headache, this monstrosity. I had been fanagling with it for a few weeks, and I was wondering when it was gonna pop. They always pop, but some take longer than others.

This day, I thankfully got to health class early, before most of the other people did. I set in the second-to-last seat in my row, and the guy who sat behind me (I think his name was Mike, but I wouldn't swear to it) hadn't shown up yet. My hat was on, but right under the snaps was this bump, making the hat uncomfortable to wear because they were rubbing against one another. I placed my two middle fingers on either side of the bump, first massaging it, then tapping it slightly. I wasn't sure if it was ready yet. I decided to test it out. With my two middle fingers flanking the mountainous lump, I pressed in, against my skull, as if I were fastening two snap-on buttons. To my great surprise, my head exploded from the back, shooting a rocket of pus behind me. It looked like the Zapruder film. I never did hear it land. Thank the lord that my classmate Mike had not been sitting behind me, because explaining that one would have been difficult. He has no idea how close he was.

The relief I felt is indescribable. It was like opening a release valve. You could practially hear the "sssssss." One side effect: there was (I'm not kidding) a small hole in the back of my head after that. In fact, when I'm shaved bald you can still see the scar. A small amount of blood actually flowed out of my head and into my hair. Luckily, I just turned the Canucks cap backward, with the brim covering up the blood, and washed it off after class. Very smart on my part. My head is not just a breeding ground for acne, folks.

The second incident took place at the Art Museum in Philadelphia in 2000. There was a very promiment pimple I had had for probably 8 or 9 years on my forehead. It sat dead-center, about an inch and a half directly above my nose, and it was the one blemish on my otherwise relatively smooth (and growing) forehead. This zit had been my albatross for years. This thing was so deep that no amount of cleaning or buffing or attempted-popping could get it out.

In early 2000, I had had enough. One day, when I was alone, I took the business end of a corkscrew (it was the sharpest object I could find at the time), went to a mirror, and dug into this thing. It was as if I were trying to excavate a corpse from a grave. Not that I've ever tried to do that. I was unable to fully remove the blemish, but I must have jostled something.

I was visiting my friend Tony in Philadelphia. We went to the art museum and did the "Rocky" thing at the top of the stairs and it was all very amusing to us. Inside the museum, my head began itching or something. I touched the pimple that I had been trying to dispose over for the better part of a decade. I used the same technique I had used before -- the pressing toward the skull -- except this time it was with my index fingers. It wouldn't budge. I tried again; nothing. One more time, with all the force I could muster, and with an inward "wedge" motion, using my fingernails, I gave it one last try. And to my delight, at long last, it finally popped. No longer would I have to deal with this distracting piece of flesh marring my otherwise perfect face. Okay, yes, it bled, and yes there is a small scar there, but it's not half as distracting as it once was.

So there it is. Kids out there with acne, fear not. You'll get the best of it eventually. These pimples may arrogantly sit on your face now, but they don't know that one day, they will meet an untimely demise.

The Best Songs of 1978 - 2002 (Now With Extra Bitching!)

Back in 2002 VH-1 came out with a list they called "The Best Songs of the Last 25 Years." This was back when television (and most of pop culture) was list-crazy. Call it end of millennium obsessive compulsion, which I now have.

I guess they settled on 1978 and after so they didn't have to make another list riddled with the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, the Bee Gees and all the usual players. So for trying to branch out a little, I gave VH-1 some credit.

However, I was so infuriated by some of the choices on the list that I made a song-by-song critique as sort of a catharsis. I am posting the list, with my comments, strictly for posterity. Feel free to ignore it.

But first, the legend (and no, I'm not referring to Tom O'Connor):

After each song is a "YES," "NO," or "MAYBE." This indicates with whether I agree (YES), disagree (NO) or am ambivalent (MAYBE) about each selection.

$ = Sellout song; a song a group used to deviate from their fan base for more money
@ = Anthem of the times; landmark of its year/movement
! = Overrated even in its own time, but perhaps more so now
* = Outstanding songwriting
& = Much better available songs by same artist

Let's begin then:

1. Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit" (YES. Although I think the song is unbelievably overrated at face value, there is no denying it’s influence. I would not put it at number one, but I recognize its importance, even while acknowledging that it’s not as great a SONG as people think. ) @!

2. Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean” (YES. Phenomenal. It was timely at the time, but it’s still grooving now. It’s amazing how good his music was back then.) @

3. Guns N’ Roses, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” (MAYBE. It was the first one, but “Paradise City” was more rocking, “Welcome to the Jungle” more influential and timeless, and “Patience” better written. It’s a good song, but not #3.) &

4. Eminem, “Lose Yourself” (YES. I’m skeptical of mainstream rap so it took me a while to come around to this song. But if you listen to the lyrics, this is truly a transcendent song, in both content and structure. Eminem is a virtuoso here, and he has never quite duplicated it.) *

5. U2, “One” (MAYBE. Again, is this really their best? I would put “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Angels of Harlem” above this. But I’m not a Bono-head, am I?) &

6. Run-D.M.C., “Walk This Way” (YES. Effectively ushered rap into the mainstream. Not only culturally significant, but it’s a great tune. A moment frozen in time, if you ask me.) @

7. Prince, “When Doves Cry” (YES. A hallmark of electronic music. The lyrics are a little odd, but that’s part of its charm.) @
8. Whitney Houston, “I Will Always Love You” (NO. If ever there were a more corporate attempt at manufacturing feeling and emotion, I’ve yet to see it. This song is a travesty.) ! &

9. The Police, “Every Breath You Take” (YES. The fact that it’s overplayed aside, this is a gem. Haunting. But it is incredibly overplayed, and I wouldn’t put it top ten.) @ *

10. Madonna, “Like a Virgin” (NO. “Material Girl,” yes. “Papa Don’t Preach,” sure. I’ll give you “Borderline” if you want. This one is her most vapid and least fun.) &

11. Van Halen, “Jump” (YES. One of the best keyboard solos this side of Rick Wakeman, and DLR in his prime. An icon of 80s hair rock.) @
12. Alanis Morissette, “You Oughta Know” (YES. Maybe this song was about Dave Coulier and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the lyrics are way too obvious. But few songs capture the bitterness of a bad breakup like this song. And it is catchy.) @

13. TLC, “Waterfalls” (NO. Just because this was catchy and obvious doesn’t make it a good song. It’s more of a guilty pleasure) !

14. Sinead O’Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U” (YES. I gotta say, it’s a great song. Her rendition is very heartfelt, so much so that I can’t even let her bullshit get in the way of that.) *

15. Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” (YES. A great song, bombast and all.) @

16. No Doubt, “Don’t Speak” (NO. Preposterous. In the top 20? I could have expected “Spiderwebs,” but this pompous crap?) !

17. Def Leppard, “Photograph” (MAYBE. It’s a fine song, but is it really a standout from a lot of the arena rock of the 1980s? I would have expected “Pour Some Sugar on Me” for them.)

18. R.E.M., “Losing My Religion” (NO. Thematically it’s a rip-off of #9, and it was massively overrated when it came out. No hook, no chorus, pretentious as it gets. If you absolutely must put an R.E.M. song on there, make it “It’s the end of the world…”) !

19. Public Enemy, “Fight the Power” (YES. Although it’s hardly their best song, it’s the most accessible and the one they’re known for. “Don’t Believe the Hype” and “Night of the Living Baseheads” are better, less obvious songs, but this one made them look like revolutionaries.)

20. AC/DC, “You Shook Me All Night Long” (YES. The fact that it’s overplayed now shouldn’t overshadow the fact that it’s a really good song.) @
21. U2, “With or Without You” (MAYBE. I must say I think this song is overrated, although I think I may be the only person to think so. They have much better out there.) @ &

22. Cyndi Lauper, “Time After Time” (MAYBE. Cyndi plays it pretty straight with this song, but “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is her true best.) &
23. Prince, “Little Red Corvette” (MAYBE. When you think of Prince songs, this isn’t the most memorable of them. “1999” is more influential, “Raspberry Beret” more catchy.) &

24. Celine Dion, “My Heart Will Go On” (NO. Is there anyone who wasn’t over 13 years old and a girl in 1997 who truly thinks this is a good song? Pathetic, VH1, pathetic.) !

25. Rick James, “Super Freak” (YES. A terrific groove. He’s a pretty horrible human being, but it’s a great post-disco song.) @

26. Bon Jovi, “Livin’ on a Prayer” (YES. It’s between this and “Wanted Dead or Alive” but when you compare this song to their recent output, you forget how hard these guys rocked, once.) @

27. Grandmaster Flash, “The Message” (YES. It’s the first rap song with any kind of social commentary. The beat is one that has become legendary.)

28. Britney Spears, “... Baby One More Time” (NO. Seriously, who’s making this list?)

29. Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the U.S.A.” (YES. This probably should have been listed higher if only for its cultural impact the year it came out.)

30. Janet Jackson, “Nasty” (MAYBE. Very popular, kind of a cool song, but all of Janet’s songs run together somehow.)

31. Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Doggy Dogg, “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” (NO. It was popular, but it was one of the worst songs on “The Chronic” and turned rap into shitty synthesized crud.) $

32. Pearl Jam, “Jeremy” (YES. The apogee of their songwriting and a hallmark of the era.) * @

33. Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got to do With It” (YES. A great pop song of the ‘80s that Tina lucked into.) @

34. Peter Gabriel, “In Your Eyes” (MAYBE. Again, do people really love the song, or is this because of “Say Anything…”? I prefer “Sledgehammer.”)

35. The Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight” (YES. From a purist’s standpoint, this is a travesty since they didn’t even write the lyrics, but this is a great song.) @

36. Joan Jett, “I Love Rock ’n Roll” (YES. The fact that a female singer can sound this hard is awesome.)

37. Alicia Keys, “Fallin'” (YES. A smash, even though it looks destined to be a one-hit wonder.)

38. The Clash, “London Calling” (YES. Completely underrated. I wonder if the “gurus” at VH1 would have even put this on if Joe Strummer hadn’t recently died.) @

39. Tom Petty, “Free Fallin'" (MAYBE. Hmmmm… I don’t know. This was popular in its day, but I don’t think it’s stood the test of time to be considered an outstanding song.)

40. Michael Jackson, “Beat It” (YES. This song is still as fresh and fun as it was when I was 8 yrs old.) * @

41. Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Under the Bridge” (MAYBE. The song is well-written, and a nice departure from their thrashing they-wish-they-could rap junk, but I’m not 100% sold.)

42. Blondie, “Heart of Glass” (YES. You gotta have one Blondie song on here.)

43. The Go-Go’s, “Our Lips Are Sealed” (MAYBE. “Vacation” should probably be here. It’s actually a decent song, but dated.)

44. Gloria Gaynor, “I Will Survive” (YES. Even though it’s been played out because of the ‘70s revival, it’s still a fantastic tune.) @ *

45. Aerosmith, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (NO. You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.) $ ! &

46. Queen and David Bowie, “Under Pressure” (MAYBE. This may be more of a case of the tail wagging the dog. It’s a good song, but honestly, if the exact same recording were made by, say, Men at Work, would people really tout it this highly?) &

47. Shania Twain, “You’re Still the One” (NO. This comes from that terrible time period where ballads were all the rage. This one does not stand out in any way.) !

48. Naughty By Nature, “O.P.P.” (YES. One of the first cases where a legit rap song became popular. It has playfully sexual lyrics and a great hook.) @

49. Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin'” (YES. An anthem of the 1980s. Sweeping, soaring, timeless.) @ *

50. Lenny Kravitz, “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” (YES. Another throwback to hard rock’s glory days. Rockin’ and even the message isn’t heavy-handed.) *

51. George Michael, “Faith” (YES. Great song, one of the great songs of the late-‘80s. Catchy and cool.) *

52. The Rolling Stones, “Start Me Up” (YES. A killer riff, provocative lyrics. It’s old school and it feels like a classic from the ‘60s.)

53. Marvin Gaye, “Sexual Healing” (MAYBE. It exemplifies mediocre R&B of the ‘80s; it’s an okay song, but if it were anyone else beside Marvin Gaye singing it, would it be as popular?)

54. Goo Goo Dolls, “Iris” (NO This song is pure bloated crap. The lyrics are not too bad, but the bombast combined with its constant airplay makes it unbearable.) ! $

55. Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (YES. Though I prefer “Burning Down the House” this is the one that has more of a lasting image.) @ &

56. Sheryl Crow, “All I Wanna Do” (YES. Fun, folky, wry lyrics. Represents the best of ‘90s pop.) * @

57. Eric Clapton, “Tears in Heaven” (YES. Beautiful, heartfelt, a real touchstone of the time. The reason behind it makes it that much more heartbreaking.) * @

58. The Notorious B.I.G. feat. Puff Daddy & Mase, “Mo Money Mo Problems” (NO. It’s essentially a remake of “I’m Coming Out” with some very suspect lyrics. Any song where the video made more of an impact than the song is sad. I mean, jesus, Ma$e?!) $

59. Meat Loaf “Paradise By the Dashboard Light” (MAYBE. I really don’t like Meat Loaf as a rule, but this song is very popular and has made a bit of a comeback. It’s certainly better than the schlock Loaf put out in the ‘90s.)

60. Santana feat. Rob Thomas, “Smooth” (NO. Endless radio play does not make it a good song. This was an especially weak time for music, considering it was the only thing they played for about a year.) ! $

61. Backstreet Boys, “I Want It That Way” (MAYBE. I can see where they’re coming from, but it’s not as good as “As Long as You Love Me,” but at least it made the list and nothing from fucking N*SYNC did.) & $

62. Pretenders, “Brass in Pocket” (MAYBE. This song is somewhat Special [Spe-cial!], but it’s also a little bland [bla-nd!].)

63. Beck, “Loser” (MAYBE. Not Beck’s best, but sure captures the spirit of it’s time.) & @

64. The Knack, “My Sharona” (YES. Timeless, blasts out of the speakers. Fun and pulsating.) @

65. Nelly, “Hot in Herre” (NO. Great club song, but so worthless. Let’s be serious.) !

66. Squeeze, “Tempted” (YES. This white R&B is better than the fruit of another… or something)

67. John Cougar Mellencamp, “Jack and Diane” (NO. Overrated song, simplistic and pretentious. John Cougar doing more of his “I’m a common person just like you” stuff.)

68. Chic, “Good Times” (YES. Fantastic, extremely influential.) @

69. Mary J. Blige, “Real Love” (YES. This was a darkhorse, but a beautiful song; the best R&B had to offer in the ‘90s.) * @

70. Culture Club, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” (NO. Blasé as it gets.) &

71. Dave Matthews Band, “Crash Into Me” (MAYBE. It’s well-written, it’s unique, but I like “What Would You Say” better.) &

72. John Lennon, “(Just Like) Starting Over” (NO. This song just sucks. Pseudo-‘50s garbage. Just because it was after a long absence doesn’t make it good. If it weren’t Lennon, it would never have made the top 5,000 list.) & !

73. LL Cool J, “Mama Said Knock You Out” (YES. It’s the last great rap song of the pre-’92 era. Rugged, pulsating, driving. Take that Moe Dee!) @

74. Hall & Oates, “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” (MAYBE. Yeah, I can go for this. I like “Private Eyes” better, though.)

75. The Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated” (MAYBE. It’s not their greatest showcase.) &

76. Eurythmics, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (YES. A proto-techno landmark.) @

77. Missy Elliott, “Work It” (NO. I hope to god you’re kidding… we’re talking about 25 years here. What an insult.) !

78. Green Day, “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” (NO. Simple-minded, not well-written. This was written to be a graduation song, and I know because it came out when I graduated – and it still failed to capture any emotion of the event. You’re telling me this is better than ANYTHING Billy Joel has done since 1978?!???) !

79. Destiny’s Child, “Say My Name” (NO. The epitome of shitty lock-step mid-‘90s R&B.)

80. Duran Duran, “Hungry Like the Wolf” (YES. Well-written and melodic, with a killer chorus.) @

81. OutKast, “Ms. Jackson” (MAYBE. If this poll took place 5 years from now, it wouldn’t get a sniff. But the craft is there, it’s a good song.)
82. Soft Cell, “Tainted Love” (YES. Unique, and it was a massive hit.) @

83. Band Aid, “Do They Know It’s Christmas” (YES. But where is “We Are the World”? Encapsulates the Rockers Care 1980s.) @

84. Radiohead, “Creep” (MAYBE. “Karma Police” is a better song, but this one is the on they’re known for.) @ &

85. Eminem, “My Name Is” (MAYBE. Time will tell; this is a very catchy, fun rap song. Great beat. I think there are better rap songs they could have used.)

86. Tracy Chapman, “Fast Car” (MAYBE. Very well-written, but do people still revere it 15 years later?) *

87. The Who, “Who Are You” (YES. Love the synth and the harmony. A radio staple.) @


88. Metallica, “Enter Sandman” (NO. Shame on Metallica, pandering to MTV, with stupid Freddy Kreuger lyrics. Where is “One”?) $ ! &

89. Pat Benatar, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” (MAYBE. This is one of those songs that is a good movie-trailer song, but doesn’t really hold up that well on its own.)

90. The Police, “Roxanne” (YES. Well-written, rockin’, harmonic.) @

91. Melissa Etheridge, “Come to My Window” (MAYBE. A very good pop song; I can think of 100 better ones.) @

92. Salt-N-Pepa, “Push It” (MAYBE. This is the best they had to offer, but it’s still a dumb song) @

93. Nine Inch Nails, “Closer” (MAYBE. Seminal, ubiquitous, somewhat irritating.) @

94. Cheap Trick, “Surrender” (NO. “Mama’s alright/Daddy’s alright.” This song is just alright, not top 100.)

95. Oasis, “Wonderwall” (MAYBE. Nicely written; I’m probably taking points away because I hate the video/Gallaghers so much.) *

96. Beastie Boys, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)” (NO. It’s simplistic, no one really likes it except white rock media. So many better songs from them. A novelty at best.) ! &

97. Devo, “Whip It” (YES. This song has stood the test of time for its absurdity and distinctive 1980s sound) @

98. Hanson, “MMMBop” (MAYBE. Catchy and fun, but top 100…?) @

99. Norah Jones, “Don’t Know Why” (YES. A beautiful song that will become a standard someday. The top of its genre, whatever that genre is.) *

100. Madonna, “Ray of Light” (NO. This is an insult. There are about 10 other Madonna songs that could be here. This was Madonna unsuccessfully trying to reinvent herself; it was a blip.) $ &

Throwing Jared Under the Train

I'm watching the pregame for the Packers and Vikings this afternoon, enjoying the amusing banter between Howie and Terry. I'm even enjoying some of the funny commercials for fine companies like Staples and Burger King and FedEx. Just when I'm thinking, "We really are in golden age of commercials," onto my screen comes my arch nemesis.

Fucking Jared.

You know Jared. He's that guy who used to be really really fat, but then he ate 2 Subway sandwiches per day and walked a mile to the Subway restaurant and lost something like 280 lbs or something. I think they started the marketing campaign in like 2001.

At first, I found his story inspiring. A really fat bloated tub of cellulite who started eating more healthily and changed his life. He lost enough that he was even able to find a woman to marry him.

It's as if they were marketing directly toward me. All the appeal was there: I already love Subway sandwiches, I hate fat people and I'm inspired by people who change their lives by dropping pounds. Happy Gilmore himself wouldn't have been a better spokesperson at first.

But the Subway people never took into account the possibility that maybe they should have ditched this marketing campaign long ago. Jared's tale was all well and good when they would just show a picture of his previously fat ass and then flash forward to his new thinner, but still collossally dorky frame, eating a delicious sub from Subway. Very nice, I'll have a Veggie Delite with low-fat mayo because of you, Jared.

But then the Subway people made a fatal mistake: they allowed the prick to speak. At first, it was no big deal. Jared seemed like a dorky guy who just wanted others to eat better and get in shape like him. He would hold his enormous pants up to his newer body and say, something like, "I can thank Subway for the fact that I'm not a fat fucking bastard anymore," or whatever. But since then, Jared's aw-shucks charm has given way to a very unlikable Jared.

Have you noticed it? First of all, he has that problem with speaking. His pronunciation and diction are fine, but the way he speaks is irritating beyond belief. He has that incedibly annoying sibilant "S" that makes sentences like "So stop into Subway for a small soda and a tasty sweet chicken teriaki sub" unbearable to listen to. Neighorhood dogs agree.

Also, every time he speaks, his mouth opens up to twice the normal size of a regular human being. Have you noticed this? When you speak to a friend or co-worker, your mouth probably only opens up as much as it has to. But when Jared speaks, his lips contort as if he were attempting to stretch them out. You know when you have a bag of balloons, and you pull one out, and before you blow it up, you stretch it out a few times to improve its elasticity? Well, Jared does this with his mouth every time he talks on television. It looks like Drew Barrymore and Mary Jo Buttafuoco have joint custody demonic possession of his mouth and are trying to pull it in opposite directions. Seriously, how this douchebag found a wife is beyond me.

Oh, and don't even get me started on his recent condescending attitude. Okay, I get it, you lost a shitload of weight from eating healthy sandwiches and whatnot. It doesn't mean you have the right to talk down to me or any other person watching television at that particular time. There's one where he starts talking about McDonald's, I think it might be their Chicken Selects. Jared starts talking to me as if I'm a stupid fat idiot for eating them. He's like, "You know, you shouldn't eat them. They've got a lot of fat in them, and if you eat them you'll look like I used to. So you're stupid if you eat them. Are we clear? Have I made my point? You get the picture? You laughing now? Yeah, I thought so, fatty." I mean, can you ever get into a conversation with this guy about something where he doesn't mention how much weight he dropped by eating Subway? I doubt it.

I'm sure what Jared is thinking is, "I used to be a fat nerd. But now you can't say that! I'm not fat anymore! You are! You're fat because you eat that delicious... I mean, that unhealthy swine! You're an idiot if you don't eat Subway sandwiches every day of your life! Look at me, every commercial I'm walking with a tray carrying a healthy Subway sub and a diet drink, and I'm a somebody! I'm a somebody!!!![begins weeping]" It's all becoming very uncomfortable to watch.

Even if Subway's revenue has jumped 300% (which I'm sure it has) due to Jared's story, when are they going to realize that no matter how much thinner this guy is because of eating their subs, he is a terrible salesman. He's actually making me want to eat Big Macs and gain weight just to spite him. That way I could say to him, "I may be a fat bastard, but I'm still cooler than you. And I'm not even cool!" I'm hoping it would cause him to gain it all back. That would be hilarious. That dude's a dick.

I Got To Be On the TeeVee!

People always say that before Christmas is a busy time, and I suppose that's true, although when it comes to shopping I tend to confine all my purchasing to one or two days. Most people like to spread the shopping out over several weeks, or even months. To this I say, "F*ck you!" It is for this reason that credit card companies and large producers of goods are able to push the start of the "Christmas Season" back to got-damn Hallowe'en. And yes, I will use the olde english spelling of Hallowe'en, thank you very much. Just be glad I didn't use the term "All Hallow's Eve" because I do it, I swear I will.

Anyway, I could get into the benefits of compressing Christmas shopping into 2 trips, lasting a total of about 16 hours, but I'd rather quickly run through the events of the last 7 days or so. Now for you this laundry list of activities may seem humdrum, but for someone like me whose nights usually consist of doing Tai Chi in front of a mirror like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now, this week was positively humming with activity. Here goes:

Friday (Christmas Eve): Had the day off. Spent the afternoon at KJ's moms's place. Beat KJ and her sister Donna at the Saturday Night Live Trivial Pursuit game (naturally, I rarely lose, except when playing Dan Banazek). That selfsame day, drove to Rochester to see my family. My brother and I blocked everyone else out of a crab-dip breadbowl. I explained to my aunt (who is sort of a nun, but not really) about rap music. We ate and played the Trivial Pursuit, '90s edition, which my sister Eileen and I dominated (naturally, since that sonofabitch Dan Banazek wasn't there this time either).

Saturday (Christmas Day): Got an iPod. The rest of the day is a blur set to a soundtrack of nearly 900 songs.

Sunday: Bills beat the crap out of the 49ers. Jitter, Javen and TT come to town from Buffalo, where they had gone on a wing tour. Very nice time at the Change of Pace. Everyone got a little tipsy, and I got to talk to my boy Dave for a couple hours. We talked about college and Transformers and all sorts of stuff. Didn't get as wild as I had expected, but it was fun.

Monday: After work was another blur as I explored the true depth of the iPod's value. This topic should be a blog by itself. I now have over 1,000 songs on the damn thing and haven't even scraped the surface of it's capacity. Good lord what a technological leap forward this thing is.

Tuesday: V-Day. We had an early basketball game after work, and we came to play. Our team, the Change of Pacers, went up against our arch-nemesis, Chadwick's, or as we have dubbed them, Chumpwick's. We have a history with this team/bar, both on and off the court....

Change of Pace is about 2 or 3 miles away from Chadwick's, but Chadwick's is within walking distance of my house. So back in August Toastie and I went there, and Willie met us there. Willie came in and ordered a drink. The bitch bartender looked at his ID and said, "I can't read this, you have to leave." Will has a Massachussets ID, and he doesn't drive, so his ID is a little worn out, and the date of birth is feint, but readable. Regardless, the one thing on the ID that is absolutely readable is the year of birth. And that year of birth is in the 1970s. Now, I don't profess to be a master of mathematics, but in the year 2004, if someone was born on, say, December 31, 1979, the last possible day of the 1970s, that person would be ... right, 24 years old, well over the legal alcohol consumption age. The bartender would not let Will drink, to which Will replied, "How come I've been in hear a hundred times and they've served me before?" The barkeep only said, "You haven't been here when I've been working." So she made Will stand outside while Toastie and I finished our beer. We vowed never to return to this Yankees-Steelers (???) bar.

But that's not all...

In our first basketball game with Chumpwick's in Novemeber, they acted like a bunch of assholes. First of all, we only had 6 people, and one of them, Cliff, went down with a knee injury in the first half, which meant we played the entire second half with only 5 players, and I am out of shape. They are not a more talented team than us, but they were showboating the entire second half because they opened up a big lead on us. They have mostly a couple of fat white guys, one tall black dude, and a couple of gold chain-wearing, chinstrap-brandishing, lanky wiggers who try to zig in and out of the lane for layups. None of these fuckers can shoot, they hook the arm every chance they can, and they were talking shit. But the last straw? At the end of the game, with less than 5 seconds left, they had a fast break. Toastie ran down to try to stop the ballhandler. Another team member jumped in front of Toastie and blocked him from getting to the defender, as the ballhandler slam-dunked it. This was with a 30-some point lead with 2 seconds left. Total bushleague move. The ref waived it off so it didn't count, but it just shows the kind of bullshit character that squad has.

Anyway, this game we had 6 people: Me, Will, Toastie, Toastie's Dad, Dino and Jaime. We were ready for these fat fucks this time. They tried to muscle us inside, we muscled 'em right back. They had no other game. Now that we have learned to play physical defense, they had no answer. Willie and Dino shot the lights out from 3-point range, and since they can't shoot from outside layup range (and even that is only about 50%), they got frustrated, yelling at the refs and trying to hold and hook and cheat. But this time, we beat them. This was our first legit win in the league, and frankly I don't care if it's our last. It was so satisfying to take our 5 core guys who have been there for every single game this year (plus Jaime, a newcomer who played great) and beat these pricks with solid, clean basketball.

Wednesday: We weren't able to retain our victorious mojo for trivia at Clark's on Wednesday, but Toastie did have a very nice young lady notice his Red Sox hat and strike up a conversation with him, which was nice. Everyone mocked her after we left the bar, but I thought it was nice. He should have said, "See you next Wednesday" but he wasn't thinking clearly. Apparently none of us were, judging by our score.

Anyway, Jaime got hungry for "buffalo chicken anything," so we went to Tully's on Erie Blvd to order up ridiculous amounts of fatty foods. While there, a reporter from the local Channel 9 news must have noticed my Syracuse University hat and came to our table to ask us if we had any opinion on the recent firing of SU football coach Paul Pasqualoni being fired. We threw in a few comments, and she said, great, we're going live in about 5 minutes. I went to the restroom to primp a bit, but I looked like shit. Unshaven and bloated. But I got to be on TV. And while I haven't seen the tape, I think I did pretty well. Most of the people they interview for things like this seem like they have not much to say on the topic or can't speak in the English language. So all I wanted to do was not freeze up on camera (put your hands out of your field of vision, that's the first rule) and speak as if I had any idea what I was talking about. I didn't freeze, so that was good, and I think I did alright in the speaking department. Whether I had a clue what I was talking about is up for debate, but at the end I got to give a little wink to the camera and that's all I ever wanted to do.

I was wondering if anyone would have seen me on the news, since it was the 11:00 broadcast and many people are asleep, but a bunch of people from work told me the next day that they saw me, so I was able to walk around with an arrogance about me that said, "I was on local television for nearly 3 minutes!" I think people respect that.

A Hodgepodge of Miscellany

I've been a lazy bastard and therefore haven't been able to put together a coherent enough thought to put together a proper blog, so I thought I'd just do some spitballin' and give a random sampling of the last few weeks inside my melon. I can't promise that it will be as brilliant as Larry King's USA Today column, but what young writer could be expected to reach the prosaic altitude of that literary jabberwocky? Wanna hear it? Here it go:

+ I have watched the movie Dodgeball at least 8 times in the last 14 days. I assure you I am not exaggerating. I saw it in the theater the second or third week it was out and I loved it. Then I rented it and all the good jokes came back. But after the half-dozenth time, I'm catching nuances I never really caught before. You probably think I'm an idiot, and you're not wrong, but I think Dodgeball is destined for cult classic status. Interesting tidbit: the director, Rawson Marshall Thurber, also directed the brilliant "Terry Tate: Office Linebacker" commercials for Reebok.

+ Our fortnight of dominance and Clark's Ale House trivia Wednesdays came to an end today. We had tied for first place the last two weeks, but tonight we were undone by a holiday theme with a positively bah-humbug team. We had some key mistakes, but we still hung tough. Plus, we got to drink good beer cheaply in a great bar. Team BoHall will return and we will be angry.

+ A CD I have been listening to a lot is The Creek Drank the Cradle by Iron and Wine. Apparently Iron and Wine isn't a group and isn't two guys named Mike Iron and Steve Wine. It's one dude (I think his name is Sam Beam) and his first album sounds like it was recorded as a 4-track demo, but the music and the songwriting is just gorgeous. Lots of songs with a folky southern sound that is not twangy at all. Just beautiful. It captures such a sense of loss and loneliness, but also faint hope. I don't have the latest album, Our Endless Numbered Days, yet, but I can't wait to get it. It reminds me, if this makes any sense at all, of "All the Real Girls," a beautiful film directed by David Gordon Green (and to a lesser extent, the same director's "George Washington"). Southern, but not fraught with down-home cliches or phony bombast. It's gentle and taps into real-life emotions. The south is only a setting for universal anguish in the film and the album, not a contrived character in and of itself.

+ I'm back into "black person" rap. For a while I was hardcore into the "backpacker" school, which basically meant white people rapping. Your Sage Francis, your Eyedea and Abilities, your Aesop Rock, Anticon, Buck 65, what have you. I still really like it, but for a while I was shunning the other stuff for this breed of whiteboy hip hop (and if you mention the letters M&M to me, I'll tell you to get the fuck out of my face, rookie). I was in a more cerebral place then, lyrically. Now, I'm back into the grooves and into the anger that I grew up with. It feels good to be back.

+ The new year always makes me feel cautiously optimistic. I feel so much hope, so much excitement every January 1. I'm not sure why, but I always have. 2003 was categorically great for me, so I knew that it had to take a downturn in '04, which it did to a certain extent. 2004 is probably the most eventful year of my life, in terms of major events, both good and bad. It's been a real whirlwind over the last 12 months, and I can't believe how fast it's gone. I really hope I can get my bearings back in 2005, because I feel very off-kilter right now, like I'm in limbo somehow. It's as if someone threw a ball up in the air, and right now I'm at the apex, only to come down on one side or the other. Sounds like a horoscope, I know, but that's where I am. I'm excited and terrified at what 2005 has lined up for me.

+ Arrested Development is clearly the best show on TV. Nothing else is even close, in my opinion. The episode a few weeks ago where everyone was walking like Charlie Brown with their heads down was comic genius.

+ Our basketball team had a strong showing the other night. We did lose by 15, but we were respectable in every phase of the game. Our defense and rebounding is much improved, our ball-movement is exponentially better, communication is improving. Here are our problems, still: only a couple of true shooters on the team, severe height disadvantage, some ball-handling errors (though that's been offset somewhat by our strong passing of late). We aren't getting bullied inside anymore, we're much more physical, and our transition game is improving, though still not great. We won our first game last week by forfeit, but we're improving and playing is starting to become fun again.

+ I think I spend far too much time in front of a computer. I do it all day at work, and then I come home and much of the time I'm back on it here. I'm not a computer freak or anything, but instead of watching tv or something after work, I find myself feeling much more at home at the keyboard. Maybe it's making me asocial and depressed to a certain extent, but I can't seem to stop it. I mean it's fifteen minutes until 1AM on a school night and I'm still on this damn thing, aren't I?

+ I'm going bald and I'm getting old. This makes Billy very unhappy. I have a good head for baldness, I'll always say, but I don't want to rush it. I wish I could afford Rogaine or one of those damn hair-grower products, but I'm sure I couldn't. This upcoming in a month and a half will be my last birthday in my 20s. That is a sobering reality for me. I remember my 20th birthday, never thought back then that I'd be where I am now, for better or worse. I'm too young for a mid-life crisis, but maybe I'm having one. Being out of shape doesn't help. I wish there was a way to hate food. Maybe if I start cooking it myself...

+ I have to be up in six hours, and right now, that doesn't feel like a lot. I wish I was already asleep...

This is little 1.5 year old Lily Mae Flanders. She is adorable, as if you couldn't tell already. 

The Big Six-Ugh

My moms had her 60th surprise birthday on Saturday, December 11, 2004. It was actually her actual birthday. Now, for most people, something like this would go off, as they say, without a hitch. Most people, of course, are not my family. I think before my relatives came off the boat, before they changed the last name to Shannon, it must have been Murphy, you know the one who had a law named after him. Maybe they wanted to sound less Irish, I don't know.

Overall, the shindig went very well. Nice turnout, my mom was genuinely surprised, and I could tell she had a really nice time. But before I get to that, let's just make a quick rundown of all the stuff that went wrong:

1) No one was there to open the door. Now, this seems like a small oversight on the part of the Monroe County Parks and Recreation Department. But when my brother called and said no one was there to open the place at 10:00 AM, we got a little uneasy. My dad began to slightly panic, and a slight panic for my dad is like a major panic for just about anyone else. My dad panics about not taking out the trash. I wasn't panicked, I was pissed. I'm not one of these people who gets all uppity and mad about things and calls places and asks to speak to supervisors and threatens to call lawyers and all that shit, but I left a very pissed-off message with the answering machine that they had at the county. My brother, a rookie cop, had to call in a bunch of contacts he knew from "the force" to bust into the place. I, of course, thought it would be so much cooler if he just shot the lock or kicked the door down, but my bro must be one of those "by-the-book" cops. When everything was over and we were cleaning up, I wish we hadn't mopped and swept up. If the county tried to charge extra for not cleaning up, we could have said, Well, we weren't even able to get in, how could we have made a mess?

2) We nearly started a small electrical fire due to a faulty fuse or something in a coffee machine. We're putting up streamers and balloons and crap and suddenly there is a loud pop. I look over by the kitchen area and see several bursts of fire like firecrackers. Someone got the smart idea to actually pull the coffee machine away from the wall, causing the plug to pull away from the outlet. The place was made mostly of brick, and there was a fire extinguisher close by, so it wouldn't have been horrific, but it gave the old folk quite a scare.

3) My dad was supposed to bring my mom at 1:00 so we could have a somewhat large contingent of people do the old "surprise" move when my mom showed up. Instead, he shows up at ... 12:15! My brother says, "Yeah, that's dad's car, they're here." We were still doing prep work and my dad shows up 45 minutes early. Well, turns out my mom's sisters wanted her to show up early so she could spend a little time with the family before all the other folks arrived, but it was a little weird to have this big empty hall and about a dozen people saying "surprise" when we were really the ones caught off guard.

Other than that, everything went very well. I saw people I haven't seen in several years. It was nice to see a nice mix of older, younger and middling folk. I think my mom really enjoyed seeing all these old friends and family members. My mom had a pretty serious injury a couple of months ago, and I think it took a toll on her psyche a little bit. But she was right in her element. My mom is a very sweet woman, and she's always been very good to me. It was nice that everyone was able to show her how much she means to them. To me she really doesn't look 60, either.

A funny thing my mom told me before most of the people showed up: "If I died yesterday [when I was 59], people would have said, 'Oh she died so young.' But if I drop dead tomorrow, they'll say, 'She lived a good, long life.'" Amazing how numbers can color our perception. I'm not even 30, yet that magic number approaches me like the crocodile in Peter Pan that swallowed the clock stalked Captain Hook. 60 years old is more than twice my life away. I can't even fathom that concept.

One thing I realized is that I have almost no capacity for sincerity. Here we were at a very nice event with a bunch of nice people who only came to wish us well, and I tormented them with out-and-out bullshit almost the entire day. Whenever someone would ask me a question like, "What are you doing these days?" instead of telling them what I did, I would make up some phony, preposterous story. And the story would always change. I'm sure I told someone I just escaped from prison. Male modeling was one I used. (It's funny when you look like me and you tell someone you've been doing male modeling with a straight face; their reaction is priceless. It's as if they can't believe it, but don't want you to know they can't believe it. So the look on their face starts as surprise, then morphs into a false sense of being impressed.) I told one very sweet lady with whose son I graduated high school that I never graduated. She had a befuddled, confused look until my mom swooped in and saved me, saying, "Oh Billy, you did so graduate." That's when it comes to bite you in the behind: when you say something that you know is totally ridiculous and yet the person you tell assumes that you would actually tell the truth about something and believes you. On one hand I felt kind of bad for being such a charlatan most of the day, but on the other hand I have to admit, I was on.

Another thing I learned about myself: beer and more than 1 slice of birthday cake will put me to sleep before 8 PM. Every single time.

Stupid Things I've Done: The Mayonnaise-on-the-Shirt Trick

I'm starting a new, hopefully recurring part of my blog today called "Stupid Things I've Done." I'm hoping that these things will be so stupid as to make you laugh, not just plain old stupid things, like the time I put a homemade pizza in the oven on a wooden rack, not thinking that wood burns and often catches on fire at high temperatures. That's not funny-stupid, it's dangerous-stupid.

Today's will be a mild example, but I think it's a good idea of what a complete imbeclie I can be. Enjoy!

Summer 1998

I was taking an English class at Le Moyne College, not having realized that I was exactly one class short to get my degree. It was the summer after what was supposed to be my senior year, and I stayed on campus for the summer to paint dorm rooms and take this one class. The class was called "Perspectives in Literature" with Dr. Novak, and to this day I would have to say it's the best class I've ever taken. It truly and sincerely changed my life. The class didn't make me smarter though, and I'll prove it.

One fateful summer day I went to class clad in jeans, a baseball cap and a white t-shirt. I don't remember what the t-shirt said on it, but like I said, it was white. The class was four hours long, and consisted of a woman with some sort of foreign accent (don't remember what kind, but I think it was German), a guy who was training to be a cop, a woman who I think worked at a grocery store, and myself. I'm no genius obviously, but I was like the ringer of this class. The class's participants were less a collection of scholars than people you would see at a defensive driving course for people who crashed into stop signs or something. I felt so bad that Dr. Novak, one of the most insightful professors I ever had, had to deal with this collection straight out of "Summer School."

Mercifully, the class was half over, so I headed down the barren staircase of Le Moyne's Grewen Hall down to the lower level where the Dolphin Den was located. The Den was the place where you could go and get pretty good, cheap food, watch some TV, play some old old video games, and sometimes study in peace. It was usually packed during the school year, but during summer, no one showed up.

Anyway, to speed things up, I ordered some sort of sandwich that had sauce on it. I think it may have been a chicken parmasean sandwich or something like that. It was delicious, I'm sure. But in the course of eating the sandwich, I -- as is my custom -- dripped some of the sauce on my shirt. My heretofore pristine, white shirt. Now, there was a huge red glob in the middle of my shirt, and I had to go back to class with it. There wasn't enough time to run back to my dorm and get a new shirt. Here I was, thinking I was the smart one in the class, and now I had a stupid stain on my shirt. I was gonna look like an idiot!

Quickly, I thought, how can I rectify this? I ran to the restroom and tried rubbing it out with a wet piece of toilet paper, but that didn't work. It just made a wet spot around the stain which further magnified it. How could I cover this up?! I've got it!

I went to a condiment station where one could pick out any of a number of items: napkins, straws, ketchup, mustard, salt, pepper. I saw my salvation; my embarrassment was to be spared by the Hellmann's company. Mayonnaise is white, I thought, and my shirt is white. White on white! It's perfect.

I went back to my table, a packet of mayonnaise and a napkin in hand, ready to undo the cruel past. I proceeded to rip open the packet of mayo, put it on a napkin, and ... wait for it... WIPE IT ON MY SHIRT. This was my brilliant solution. Hindsight being 20/20, I didn't realize two things about mayonnaise that I should have anticipated: 1) Mayo isn't really white when it's taken out of a jar or packet, it's actually closer to yellow. 2) Mayo is made of eggs and vinegar, and therefore not odorless.

Well now I snapped out of my moronic daze and realized what a fuckup I really was. I went back to class with this nasty yellowish blotch covering up a red blotch on my shirt and finished the last two hours of the class. No one said anything about the stain, but they noticed. They noticed...

This was fun.

A Couple Pics from the SU-St.Bonaventure Game

Toastie enjoying the game despite my incredibly hairy hands 

Jav, Willie, Me, Toast after the game 

Javen, Bill and Toastie after the game 

For Whom the Credit Card Machine Declines

As if going to the mall isn't bad enough, technology -- which is meant to make our lives simpler -- screwed me over today. Today, technology cost me $2.00 in ATM fees. You owe me, Technology! Pay up, bitch!

I haven't been to the mall since before Thanksgiving, and there's good reason for it. I hate the mall. And I mean I really really hate it. Not any specific mall, but all malls.

When I was a teenager of about 15 or 16, I loved the mall. And I mean really really loved it. I got my first job when I was 16. (I'm a late bloomer in a lot of things: didn't get my driver's license until age 18, didn't get drunk for the first time until later that same year. I've still never "done it" with another dude.) The job was at Richardson's Canal House in Bushnell's Basin in Rochester. I'm told it was a very good restaurant, the former owner even had a license plate that said "5 Star." She was a real bitch. She's not my boss anymore so I can say that.

My boy Cialini actually got me the job there. He and I worked like dogs at that place. We were dishwashers, but in addition to that very important task, we also mopped floors, broke down boxes, peeled green beans and all sorts of other skilled duties. The kitchen was always hot as hell, the waiters were assholes, as were some of the people that worked there. My boss, Dave, was a raging prick. In fact, one Saturday night when I came into work he yelled at me because I had left early the night because I had to take my SATs that morning. He said to me, "That's bullshit. I oughta fire your ass right now. [Long pause.] I'm not gonna but I should." Yeah, you're not gonna because your ass is gonna be down your only dishwasher for the night. To this day I wish I had said, "Go ahead and fire me, bitch. Go ahead." He never would have done it, he would have been screwed. That very same night he got violently ill and had to spend several weeks in the hospital. He ended up being okay, but I never saw Dave again. I put in my two-weeks notice the next week.

Anyway, I'm getting way off track. The mall. Yes, working in that hell's-kitchen was always worth it, because every other Saturday or so, Cialini and I would cash our paychecks and then spend the bulk of it at Camelot Music at Eastview Mall. Over the course of the 8 months of my junior year of high school, I wouldn't be surprised if I spent close to $900 on CDs and (mostly) cassette tapes. Mike and I listened pretty much only to rap music at the time, so we would snap up all the new releases, then go home and "dub" them off each other (this was before downloading and burning, young children). I actually would calculate my paychecks in terms of how many rap tapes I could buy with it. Back then, tapes were about $8.99, so with tax they were just right around $10, so if my check for the week was $120, I would think, "Wow, I can get 12 tapes this week!" CDs were usually about $17 back then. Of course, at chain record stores they still are. I had no idea you could go to a indie record store and get CDs for like $11. This is why I have three large plastic crates positively overflowing with cassettes. That's forward thinking, eh?

I was so obsessed with stretching my cassette tape dollar, that I became a cheap son of a bitch when it came to spending money on anything else. In fact, once I was at the mall with my brother Mike and his friend (I think his name was Rajit, sarcastic little Indian kid), and they were hungry, so we went to Burger King. It was right across the way from Camelot. I was the only one with a job, so I had the money. My brother and Rajit wanted hamburgers, so I said they could get hamburgers, but no cheese. (I swear this is true.) The cheese would have been 10 cents extra per sandwich, but I put the kibosh on the cheese. Rajit later found a dime on the floor after they ate, and he asked me, "If I bring this up to the register, do you think they'll give me a slice of cheese?" Punk kid.

Was there a point here? I don't know. But the point is, now the mall is the last place I want to go. Not only is it a soul-sucking place of commerce, especially around Christmas time, but it's filled with old, slow-walking people; gaggles of teenagers, girls with shirts too tight, boys with pants too big; loud obnoxious noises everywhere; and all that walking. I hate the walking. I'm always too hot, but I don't want to leave my jacket in the car. It's miserable, but yet I love to buy things, so what else am I going to do?

Today I went to a place that Willie, Toastie and Javen have told me about called Steve & Barry's. They said it was a treasure trove of t-shirts that were usually under $10. And I'm a sucker for "gimmick" t-shirts with wacky or ironic sayings on them. That they know of, there are two stores, one in Albany, one in Auburn. When I got there, I was positively floored by the amount of merch available, and how cheaply. If you ever have a chance to get to one, take it, especially if you are a t-shirt person. Not since the heyday of the soon-to-be-defunct Champion Outlet (moment of silence...) have I seen such reasonably-priced, awesome shirts. They have shirts that range from legit college logos, funny slogans, and the obligatory double-entendre shirts. ("Dick's Wood Shop," "Go Hairy Beavers," et al.)

I got 5 shirts: four for myself, one for someone else. The shirts I got for myself are one that says "I'm with Stupid" and has an arrow pointing upward, one that has the "Parental Advisory, Explicit Content" logo on it, one baseball-type shirt that just says "Buffalo" (awesome!), and one that says "Canada" with a logo of a hockey player taking a slap shot. For all these shirts, I paid $27.

Well... I tried to pay $27, but unfortunately, Steve and Barry were having a bit of a credit card machine malfunction. I have a check card from Visa that withdraws the money direct from my checking account. The credit card number is 4456 8.... that's not important right now. The problem is that the card "wasn't going through." Rage, who was with me, had a similar problem at the register next to me, but her's was cleared up on the second swipe. With me, the cashier had to call a manager over. Great.

I've worked in retail, and it's a very awkward situation when you have to tell a customer that their card didn't go through. The customer invariably will say, "There's money in there, run it through again," at which point the cashier will gladly oblige, only to advise the customer 15 seconds later that it declined again. Few retail situations are more awkward: for the cashier having to break the news, and for the customer having to be told he has no money.

I'm no stranger to credit card decline. In fact, many years ago when I made less money than I do now -- and I'm still no Michael Bluth when it comes to yearly earnings -- such an occurrance was routine. Every purchase I made with a credit card back then was a fingers-crossed game of chance. This is why many of the major credit card vendors still prefer that I don't use their cards for at least a couple more years.

But this time, I knew I had the money. I went to get an oil change earlier today and the card worked like a charm. LIKE A CHARM! (Good thing, too, because if that hadn't worked, I would have had to have walked home.) I frantically ran outside to check my account balance on my cell phone. Because even know I knew I had the money, I didn't know if I had the money. I punch in my account number, 3024 873... sorry, off track again, and yes, I did have at least a couple hundred bucks to play around with this month. But the people in the store don't know that. The cashier, the manager, the line of people who were waiting for my deadbeat ass to get out of line didn't know that. So I had to walk all around the mall looking for an ATM. (And by the way, I've never been to a mall with such a dearth of ATMs as the Finger Lakes Mall.) I took out the money, and walked back triumphantly to Steve and Barry's with cash in hand, as if to say, "See, haters? I got the money, bee-otch!" But I'm sure they thought I just borrowed the money or beat up some kids for it. I had considered just walking away, not only to save face, but to penalize Steve and Barry's for their faulty computers. But that "I'm with Stupid" shirt? Ha ha! It's priceless! And appropriate.