YOU GO LIVE IN UTAH

Viva la Corruption!

2009-07-13T08:58:00.000-05:00

Dude, get me the eff out of this country. I am in Mexico and I would like to not be in Mexico anymore. Here's the deal. We got to the airport three hours early for our flight due to reasons beyond our control. We got to the check in desk and they said my mom needed some special card (no explanation why) and that she would have to go to ONE CERTAIN bank downtown to pay a cashier and get a receipt to bring back to the airport to get the card to go through immigration and make our flight which is chronologically impossible. Homedude Immigration guy was cute(ish) so I asked to talk to him in a private office then got all girly (am wearing low cut halter dress because my entire body is one big sunburn) and doing the puppy eyes thing friends make fun of me for doing and asked him if he could pretty please help us out with two twenty dollar bills in my hand. He (and I am not even joking) patted my head and said "for you, I go to the bank later today to take care of it. Give me the money and I will give you the card she needs" and then fucking put his hand on my shoulder. Whatever, it worked and we're at the gate now waiting to find out what new creative ways Mexico has in mind for fucking with us. My poor mom was sobbing outside immigration but the good news is that I am now the most badass, officials-bribing daughter of all time. One particularly debauched St. Patrick's Day with my friend Chrissy ended with me screaming I was a "good daughter!!!!!!" Prophecy fufilled. I know it's 105 at home right now but I am covered in heat rash and sunburn and I haven't brushed my hair in two days. Seriously, get me the eff out of here.

Kick 'em When They're Up, Kick 'em When They're Down. Etc.

2009-06-30T13:51:00.004-05:00

It’s not nice to dogpile. But sometimes it’s necessary.

There’s quite a furor building over Dallas Morning News music critic Mario Tarradell. He has long championed cookie-cutter modern country artists as well as MOR cheese rock, though he should receive credit for championing rock en Espanol, I suppose. This hasn’t bothered me because a) I don’t read the Dallas Morning News anymore and b) I really don’t care about music critique, music journalists or 95% of music that’s being discussed or reviewed these days. It’s hard to get worked up over something that essentially doesn’t exist in your world. I actually thought that Thor Christensen was still writing for DMN, if that gives you any idea of how out of touch with the paper’s entertainment section I am.

So apparently our buddy Mario wrote a little rant about how Gywneth Paltrow introduced Radiohead as “one of the most influential artists of all time” at the Grammys last year. If there are two names that make me doze off while driving and drift into oncoming traffic almost instantaneously, it’s “Gwyneth Paltrow” and “Radiohead”. I liked Radiohead a lot up to OK Computer. They’ve lost me since. I still stand by my assertion that the Radiohead/Spiritualized show that I saw at Fair Park Music Hall in 1998 was the best concert I have ever attended. I think they are a little too critically exalted these days but I can’t deny that, for better or for worse, they do seem to be a huge influence on today’s music. I have nothing to say about Gywenth Paltrow other than her hair always looks very shiny.

But Tarradell’s Radiohead comments unleashed a shitstorm on the DMN website, with commenters overwhelmingly defending Radiohead’s honor. Then Mario’s fingers found the strength to type this:

The Beatles are one of the most influential bands of all time. The Eagles are one of the most influential bands of all time.

And then also…

The Eagles?!?! Oh, I dunno, try EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY ARTIST AROUND NOW. They pretty much ALL list the Eagles as an influence. And that's just for starters.

I have never gone from half-heartedly nodding in agreement with a maligned rock critic to hoping that they experience a lifetime of incontinence and night terrors so quickly in my life. If you are serious about those two statements, Mario Tarradell, then you are the problem. Let me try hard here to not mince my words.

THE EAGLES ARE THE WORST MUSICAL GROUP/BOIL ON THE GROIN OF ALL THINGS CREATIVE, ARTISTIC AND GOOD….OF ALL TIME. *

*(Except for Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good”. That song rules)

I wanted to be in your corner, buddy. Well, maybe not but I could at least see where you were coming from with the “C’mon guys, Radiohead aren’t THAT amazing!” bit. Then you mentioned the Eagles and did not also mention the words “bland” or “contrived” or “obnoxious” or “inflamed anal fissure” in the same sentence. And now you are the enemy. Saying that the Eagles are the biggest influence on modern mainstream country is like bragging that pestilence-carrying rodents were the biggest influence on the Bubonic plague.

You say that the Eagles influenced every country artist around today? Therein lies your problem. I couldn’t have said it better myself, actually. I have often wondered when country music took the 90 degree turn to Pro-Tools, studded bandana wearing purgatory. When did country artists stop trying to sound like Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and Waylon Jennings and Bob Wills and Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn and Hank Thompson and Buck Owens? If what you say is true and modern country artists are in fact influenced heavily by the Eagles, I think I have my answer.

Music taste is subjective but please, Mario Tarradell, do you really think that the current crop of mainstream country artists (you mention that Shelby Lynne and Brad Paisley were two of your favorite concerts last year) are something to write home about? Artistically innovate? Anything but Pro-Tools, spray tans, southern accents and 19-piece backup bands? I have no problem with entertainers that exist purely for entertainment. That’s what anyone from American Idol is. I also don’t have any problem with you knowing your readership and playing to them. We’re in Dallas, Texas after all. I mean, it would be nice for a Dallas newspaper to instead give props to artists who are true to the roots of country music, as so many of those roots are right here in Texas. But I long ago realized that was too much to ask for.

But really, Mario Tarradell, you have a forum upon which you can do one of two things. You can either use your allotted space to explore and critique music outside of Top 40 modern rock radio, modern country or Tina Turner. Or you can serve up the KFC Famous Bowl of rock journalism that you whip up each week. Patton Oswalt calls the Famous Bowl a “failure pile in a sadness bowl” and I now know that your music leanings can be classified as much the same.

I would like to end with the most astute commentary on the Eagles and the skid mark of a legacy that they have left on the underpants of modern music, courtesy of a DMN commenter:

Posted by Brad @ 12:55 PM Thu, Feb 12, 2009
People who like the Eagles...have kids who like Nickelback.

Please Just Remember

2009-06-26T09:47:00.002-05:00

I've been remarkably serious and psuedo-intellectual for the past few weeks on here. I promise it will come to an end soon. Please hurry, football.

In the meantime, I beg of everyone to remember this. When you're talking about the recently celebrity trifecta of deaths (Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson), please just remember one thing:

At least they all will get to have a proper funeral. Attended by hundreds or thousands and watched by millions. At least their family will have the right to attend this funeral and see their final resting place. At least the family will know when and where the burial will occur so they can properly grieve. At least the family will be free to, if they so choose, wear black in mourning or put up pictures or even a simple black banner to mourn their loss. At least the families will not be told that they cannot have any sort of ceremony or memorial for their deceased relative. And finally, at least the families will not be forced to move from their home(s) for no reason. Please don't forget that.

2009-06-25T18:15:00.003-05:00

Michael Jackson died an hour or two ago. Let me get this part out of the way...

It's sad when ANYONE dies. And especially for the family and friends they leave behind. And he was suspiciously young to go out on a cardiac arrest. And I really do hope that all his superfans are gonna be ok.

Now, for the rest....

I have never liked Michael Jackson's music. Even when I was a kid and he was mega popular. Then came all the allegations and charges, of which he was found not guilty. I thought he was a severely developmentally stunted boy-man who clearly was not too mentally sound. But I'm not here to talk smack about a man who has just died.

I am here to say that I find it ironic, hypocritical and almost insulting that MTV is wall-to-wall Michael Jackson videos right now. Even as a non-fan, I will admit that they might owe their very existence and success to him and his early videos. However, MTV hasn't cared about music in at least a decade. In fact, I'm pretty sure that MTV joined Leno and Letterman and all the other media that were so happy to report all of his troubles and failures. So now MTV has time-warped back to 1985 like they're not the network that has forsaken music videos for The Hills and Paris Hilton's BFF?

I like seeing videos on MTV. I do wish they were videos by an artist I dug but it makes me nostalgic for my childhood. I guess it just bothers me that the guy was the butt of a million jokes for the past decade and a half and the moment he dies, the same media that clowned him so hard are getting ready to carve his likeness on the moon with a laser beam.

Rest in peace, Michael. I wasn't a fan of yours and hearing your music exclusively for more than an hour has already driven me to the land of Tivo but you were a troubled soul and I appreciate that. For everyone else, please don't make me listen to "Don't Stop" on an endless loop for the next week.

PS - My friend Adam in London just made a really good point. "We got at least 2 weeks of this. The Iranian leaders are gonna be able to do whatever they want now!!!" I guess Neda and a potential revolution in a volatile Islamic country tired of tyranny and oppression by religious zealots just isn't as sexy as "Dirty Diana".

Those Crazy Tehran Nights! AKA: Today's Guest Blogger...My Mom

2009-06-23T16:58:00.005-05:00

Backstory: My mom's family lived in Tehran when she was a child. They fled (in the middle of the night in a van, no less) when the Iranian people were becoming increasingly resentful of the Shah. So growing up, I always saw all these photos of my mom's "normal" childhood in a house/compound surrounded by 10 foot walls. And you can barely step in any direction in my grandmother's house without one foot on a Persian rug.

So in light of what's happening in Iran right now, I asked my mom a bunch of questions about the Tehran she remembers. I also asked her (being a history major and all) to dumb down the exact chronology of the Shah/Ayatollah deal. I knew the basics but was a little rusty. I thought I would pick tidbits from my mom's response and use them. Then I realized that my mom is far more funny, educational and interesting than I am. So please welcome the Old-School Iranian Blogging Stylings of My Mom:

First a set up.

After WWII Britain was awarded Iran as a protectorate. They proceeded to suck all of the oil out of the country and it made the Iranians mad, go figure. Britain left but that put the country in turmoil. They briefly had a president who wanted to nationalize the oil industry but then Eisenhower was president and saw an opportunity to spy on U.S.S.R. However, the Iranian government was a little suspicious of colonial powers and weren't too hot on the idea of just trading one oil sucking protector for another. So, the C.I.A. engineered a revolution to put a pro American in power. Hence, the Shah and Americans in Tehran.

Colonial powers brought in schools, roads, clean water, hospitals, etc. They also brought a challenge to theocracy and traditional ways. This set up the society for division. Young people, especially rich young people who were educated abroad, saw the opportunities that westernization brought with its freedoms, art, and secularization etc. This was a challenge to the less educated, less wealthy who remembered the foreigners with their money and immodest ways. They were supported by the religious right who lost power with the Shah who wanted to limit the number of wives, bring in western technology and in general challenge the power they held.

When the shah was ousted the extreme right took over. Theocracy reigned. If you want a comparison think medieval Europe during which they had kings (Ahmadinejad) but the real power was the Pope (Ayatollah). Europe during the Renaissance struggled over who was going to be top dog, the king or the Pope. The king ruled but he could be excommunicated by the Pope. Most law was cannon law drawn up by the Catholic Church (Shari'ah).

You now have several factions and coalitions. There are not just two groups who hate each other but several groups who have agendas that cross age and religious lines. Young people who appreciate western freedom and technology. Young people who want to control their own destiny without foreign interference. Older people who remember the days of the protectorate and remember it fondly and those who remember it not so fondly. There are always the fear mongers among the religious right who lead the less educated and ignorant into believing that if they allow a more secular leader in power all their daughters are going to start running naked down the street, their women will start talking back and driving cars, drugs and alcohol will be running in the public water supply (which would actually be an improvement in the water supply)and Britney Spears will bring her tour to Tehran.

So, in answer to your questions as to whether Americans are loved or hated the answer is yes. It just depends on who you talk to. When we were there some people would shout curses at us and some wanted to live with us. It was one extreme or the other. There was a reason we had 10 foot high concrete walls around our houses and dogs to patrol the compound.

Walls were necessary because people would steal everything. One maid tried to steal Wayne (her little brother/my uncle). There was little police protection and some people were desperately poor. Also, there was hostility to foreigners. The only thing that protected foreigners were walls, dogs and the Shah. Probably the dogs were the most effective for keeping us safe since the "unclean" dogs scared them more than the Shah or the police.

I only got to go to Isfahan, Persepolis, Mount Damavand and the Caspian Sea. There were no Holiday Inns so traveling was difficult. The only hotels were in Tehran. There weren't many small towns. It was either city or deserts, rural Bedouins living in tents and herding sheep. The rural people were very scared of the foreign "devils" with the exception of a few who were fascinated by the unusual. Ask your grandmother about being stranded in the desert over night. (Note: this was after crash landing a US Army plane that my Army pilot grandfather and nurse grandmother were using to fly to a little romantic weekend getaway in the desert while experiencing mechanical problems. Ah, the old days!)

The weirdest thing in my mind was the ancient ruins of Persepolis, the 2500 year old capital of the greatest empire of the world at one time, just sitting in the middle of the desert without a soul around it. No fence, no guards, no museum. It felt a little like being an alien visitor to a dead planet.

Women did not drive, vote, and only the very elite women were educated. For the most part in public they wore chadors. The Shah's wife did not wear a chador but covered her head a lot like young Iranian women now. Exceptions were for children and foreigners. My mother never wore a chador. In their homes women wore whatever they wanted and some could afford very expensive Parisian fashion.

The Shah tried to limit men to 4 wives and encouraged only one. He divorced his first wife to marry the second. That didn't go over well but some educated in the West were monogamous. Ironically the poorer and less educated the more likely there were more wives. Some of this had to do with the snowball effect of being poor, marrying and having children, needing to marry again for another dowry and another person to work to earn money for wife number one and the children. Wife number two having children so the need to marry again, etc. This was the cycle the Shah was trying to break.

The foreigners were more than just oil workers. There were ambassadors and their staff, oil executives and workers, importers, exporters, military, assorted consultants, engineers, teachers, medical staff, etc. Foreigners were encouraged by the Shah and welcomed by those who supported the Shah but hated by those who hated the Shah.

The American school was large and included not just Americans but also the children of any English speaking parent and a native or some natives who worked for American companies.

Neither Big Nor Clever

2009-06-17T13:00:00.005-05:00

(This picture was actually one of the first Google image search results for the phrase "neither big nor clever")

One of my favorite sayings or phrases of all time is “neither big nor clever.” I’ve never heard an American use it and it’s a damn shame that there’s not an American equivalent to it. It's almost exclusively used to describe behavior when drinking or the next day. I first heard this phrase when a dear friend of mine in the UK used it to describe his behavior while drinking and the repercussions of said behavior. This friend was the drummer in a band who, for a brief period of time, ruled the world. Well, maybe not quite. But they had sold millions of albums and were on constant MTV rotation and EVERYONE knew their song and they were being transported to venues via helicopter. Then that all kind of went away and my friend was left in the uncomfortable situation of wanting to live every night in some sort of bacchanalian fashion but his appetite for vice quickly overtaking his professional success and fame. He was a mess. In fact, the first time he ever used the phrase “neither big nor clever” was to describe a night which started with some drinks and ended up with him falling face first on a stone floor and paramedics rushing to the scene. That was clearly neither big nor clever.

Let me state something as an absolute fact: I like alcohol. I like a drink. Or more than one, even. I have done embarrassing, violent, illegal and awful things when I have had a few too many. This is not some puritanical rant from a teetotaler. But I feel as if I am reaching my tipping point for celebrating and enabling the destructive behavior of the over-served. It’s, for a lack of a better term, neither big nor clever.

Maybe this whole thing started with my dislike of the movie The Hangover. I really didn’t like that movie. I found it to be incredibly predictable. When people balk at the fact that I didn’t like the movie (seriously, there HAS to be someone besides Tom Gribble who agrees with me!), I try to explain why I didn’t like it. The jokes weren’t that bad but the whole setup is so self-congratulating. I understand that a lot of people dig the movie because of the commiseration they feel with the characters over having to piece a night back together or doing the walk of shame or trying to find out where exactly you are. But if you think that kind of stuff makes you unique, interesting, dangerous or rebellious, you are sadly mistaken or you are under the age of 24.

In a search for old pictures which I feared may have been long lost, I ventured back to the Land Before Time AKA Friendster the other day. I created my Friendster profile when I was 21 (tweaking it occasionally to reflect how hip and ironic I thought I was). Now, I didn’t go to college but I consider my Friendster profile to be a document of my “college years.” One of my first professed interests was “booze” and, rough estimate here, 80% of the comments (sorry, testimonials) had some reference to drinking or something that was brought into our vernacular through drinking. I was screaming to the world about how awesomely badass I was because me and my friends, we were sassy! And we could drink a lot! And it made us do silly/stupid things! Check us out!

I cringed when I read all of that, like how people cringe over the fashion choices of their youth. I reminded myself that I was in my early 20’s, a period of time in everyone’s life in which you were put on the earth solely to drink and make mistakes. If you’re lucky, you retain enough memory from those mistakes to tick them off the Great List of Mistakes that are an initiation rite for all non-Mormons. But then it made me realize that I knew a lot of people who had crossed that threshold and still considered the bruises, sloppily signed receipts and car dings to be badges of honor. If not badges of honor, at least something sort of cute.

Then I started thinking about another friend of mine. He lives here and works at a bar at which we all congregate. He has been sober for nearly a decade. He didn’t go to jail or anything. He just stopped drinking. Again, I’m no fan of the wagon but this guy always manages to be fun and loose and interesting and non-judgmental despite the fact that he’s drinking Sprite. He tells tales often of the kind of things that he used to do when he would drink. I think I remember one story where he slept on a neighbor’s lawn only to be woken up by a water hose as the neighbor watered his lawn on a sunny Saturday morning. And I kind of realized that everyone’s got great “man, I was so drunk…” stories and they’re fun to tell and fun to hear. But there’s some point where the scale tips from “funny” to “sad” or even all the way to “pathetic”. It’s a delicate balance.

I started thinking about the drinking stories that I used to hear when we were younger and the ones I hear now. I’m usually the baby of the group and my social circle have generally all turned the corner to 30. Oh, how we used to regale each other with tales of making out and dancing on apartment roofs or having impromptu swimming parties. And we were young and that seemed fun and harmless and I still generally regard it as such. But now the drinking stories have gotten darker. Someone got hurt, someone had to go to the hospital, someone’s got a DWI and lost their license. Stuff with serious consequences and repercussions. And then it becomes like when a stand-up comedian comes out of the gate with decent material then slowly starts bombing before your eyes and all you can do is let out a nervous laughter of pity and slight disgust.

I don't want to sound as if I am being judgemental and I stress that my list of mistakes and blotto moments is comprehensive. But I guess I just don't wear it as a badge of pride and it bothers me when others over the age of 25 do. It's as if their poor behavior is somehow performance art because they are intoxicated. If I have a few too many and behave poorly (which I am wont to do), I couldn't imagine waking up and wanting to proudly regale others with my tales. I can't imagine being strangely self-satisfied with the sordid details of my behavior.

In a search for a better context or definition of the phrase “neither big nor clever”, I came across this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3618972/We-British-will-never-learn-that-a-hangover-is-neither-big-nor-clever.html

It expresses everything I feel about the subject. Britain has allowed some drinking establishments to serve alcohol for 24 hours straight. No last orders. No closing. Luckily, they have regulated who can and can’t stay open indefinitely. Which is why a city like New Orleans repulses me. I sent my friend in New York a postcard from my one and only trip to New Orleans that was a detailed list of why the city of New Orleans should fall off the map and drift far into the Gulf of Mexico, never to be seen again. And this was pre-Katrina! As photographic proof of why I dislike the city so much, I submit to you this. Scroll down to the “after the show” pictures to see exactly what I mean:

http://deadbrian.tripod.com/todnola.htm

And there it is. It’s my closing credits for The Hangover. See? And guess what? It’s truly neither big nor clever.

Today and This Summer in General are Taunting Me

2009-06-15T14:32:00.008-05:00

I woke up this morning missing a dear friend of mine terribly. I think about this friend all of the time. When they're around but moreso when they aren’t. I miss this friend. I hang around others but that just makes me remember how much I miss my one true friend. That friend is football. And today it’s really bad.

I guess because the NBA season is over, I now know that the worst part of the year is dead ahead of me. It’s going to be 100 degrees for the next few months and the only option for entertainment I have is base…YAWWWWWWWN…ball. I don’t want to turn this into another rant about why baseball bores me to tears. Different strokes for different folks. Horses for courses. Etc. Instead, I want to write a love letter to my distant and faraway friend, football.

Dear football,

How are you? I have been trying to keep up with you but it’s hard when you are so far away. I hear little bits and pieces here and there about you. I heard your OTAs went okay. You did them in the stadium at the school where my mom teaches. She sent me excited emails that she saw you the day you showed up. She even offered to try to take her camera outside and get some pictures of you for me. She’s not that into you but she knows how dear you are to me, so that was sweet of her. I know the draft wasn’t really much of an event for you, as far as the Cowboys were concerned. I have to confess that all the coverage of the George Strait show at Dallas Cowboys stadium was bittersweet for me. I obviously did not attend the show nor do I forsee myself being able to attend a Cowboys game at the stadium. But when they talked about how big that HD screen is and how George Strait had them open up the retractable roof halfway through the show, I started thinking about how much more amazing that would have been if you were around. I get a little sentimental sometimes but I know that you are well(ish) and I will get to see you again. I just wish that it wasn’t so long until you come back.

I don’t know if you heard but I was hanging out with basketball earlier this year. I mean, I know that you know I have always been friends with basketball. And we had some fun this spring after you left. Of course, I don’t ever expect much from basketball. I mean, I am loyal and everything but I always know that basketball will frustrate me and kind of just disappear abruptly sometime in early May. So, while I enjoy our time together, I am never too surprised when it’s over. And honestly, once it is over, I am usually to the point where I needed a break from it anyways. I have told people that before and they immediately point out that you have been a far bigger disappointment to me and how could I continue to care about you so much? I don’t really know how to answer that.

Even when you kick me in the teeth and steal my wallet and take my keys and drive my car headfirst into a cement wall and then piss on the burning wreckage with a middle finger in the air (Eagles 44 - Cowboys 6), I am still sad to see you go. Even if I am disgusted with you and I tell everyone that you are a puss-filled blight on all mankind, I still want you to hang around a little while longer. It’s not like that with me and basketball. By the time basketball goes away, I think I will enjoy seeing it again next year but was glad it didn’t overstay its welcome. My friend Manny (he misses you too!) and I were talking about developing a debilitating narcotics habit which would cause us to be unconscious for most of the summer, so we didn’t miss you so bad. Then we could go to rehab and emerge healthy and happy and ready for your return. Then we decided that was probably too extreme.

I don’t have the highest expectations of you when I see you again at the tail end of summer. I feel certain that you’ve gone downhill a little. I know you have that new big house. Too bad about your other vacation home getting blown down by the storm. You really should always check out your contractor. But I guess you don’t need that lecture from me, huh? I expect that when I see you again this year, you will have put on some extra weight and look a little older than you really should look. I heard that money is tight right now for you. It’s tight for all of us. But I have faint hope that you know how to make a dollar stretch in rough times. You know that everyone’s gotta come together, especially in tough times.

And that should be a little easier since I heard that you finally had a malignant tumor removed and sent to Buffalo for testing right after you left. I was so relieved to hear that. I kept telling you that thing didn’t look right. I know that you are stubborn but…Jesus, I can’t believe it took you that long to wake up and realize that thing was dangerous.

When I was a little kid, I used to make my own countdown calendars for every beach vacation my family took. And I would cross off each date with a big fat marker and write little slogans over the dates like “Hooray!” or “Almost beach time!” or “Beach, here I come!” I was thinking the other day about making one for when you return. I still have those Cowboys plates I bought two years ago when you left after the game against the Giants. They were on clearance. I said last year that I would hang onto them until the Super Bowl but they still sit there unused. I don’t want to put undue pressure on you. But I think it would be fun if we ate off those plates this year. Either way, I miss you. Be safe and hurry back soon.

Have a KAS! I know mine will suck without you.

LYLAS,
Amandacobra

PS - My iTunes just randomly played "Patience" by Guns n Roses as I was typing this. I teared up a little.

The Great Flood of 2009 Wasn’t That Great, Actually

2009-06-11T15:22:00.001-05:00

For those of you that don’t live in Dallas, we had some storms come through yesterday/last night/today. And with them came what meteorologists call “literal assloads of rain” that poured down for hours and hours. For those of you that live in Dallas, you already knew this. And you can even comment about it once your power comes on. Mine is still off. My mom’s is still off in Richardson. My grandmother’s is off in Garland.

This is inconvenient when, say, you need to wake up in the morning for work and you rely on an alarm clock-type device to wake you up. Usually I have a backup in the form of trusty Mr. Blackberry. But Mr. Blackberry’s battery died sometime in the night. If you’re wondering, yes I do need two alarms going off to get me out of bed. And I set them for an hour before I actually need to be up because I hit snooze for an hour. When people go, “I’m not a morning person” I sometimes contemplate explaining to them the bartering with God and Satan and Buddha that I try to do each morning if they will just allow me to sleep for another hour. But instead I usually say, “Yeah, me neither” and shrug. I hate mornings. I want to dump mornings body in a wooded area where no one will find it. I want to give mornings a tainted Tylenol when it has a headache. I am not a morning person.

Add to that the fact that violent thunderstorms are like Ambien to me. Minus the somnambulism and sleep eating and sleep driving and stuff. So this morning, at the hour when I would normally be cursing the heavens for making me wake up and get out of bed at the ungodly hour of 7am, I was instead enjoying the nicest little bit of sleep I have had in months. Thunder was shaking the pictures on my bedroom walls and lighting actually hit the tree outside my bedroom window. All of which made me pull the covers up and smile and turn over and nestle deeper.

Then I figured out that I hadn’t finally tricked the universe into letting me sleep as late as I wanted to with no repercussions. Power out. Oh shit. Still managed to take a shower but then realized that all my clothes are dark and, ironically, so was my bedroom. The only candles I have are those Mexican/Catholic prayer candles which give off a nominal amount of actual light. So I dressed by candlelight this morning. Which explains why I am wearing a blue sweater, black pants (with something that looks like pink icing on the knee?) and yellow argyle socks (cleverly disguised by my knee high boots). I’m lookin’ gooooood.

Then I try to pull out of my driveway only to find that there is a car that does not belong to anyone who lives in my house parked in our driveway and blocking me in. Then I notice that a car that does not belong to our neighbors is parked in their driveway, blocking them in. Neat! I get to off-road through the yard to get around Captain Asshole in the Lincoln Towncar. I get onto Peak to drive to work from the East Dallas/Junius Heights area to Turtle Creek which normally takes about 10 minutes. 15 minutes at absolute maximum. But it’s pouring buckets so I figure this drive might take me 20 minutes. Somewhere just after I cross Ross Ave, I am stopped by yellow Do Not Cross police tape. Not that unusual a sight in the Ross Ave. area. But just beyond the tape, I see a minivan turned the wrong direction (Peak is one way) and submerged up to mid door in water. Ah, so you’re saying I should not go that way? Right.

Me and the six or seven cars behind me started doing a very awkward pas-de-deux (pas-de-sept?) of fifteen point turns to try to find side streets to escape onto. A couple of us choose some random neighborhood street. Bad call on our part. It eventually leads us to Washington. At the corner of Whatever and Washington, I see a shopping cart swim by my car. Normally, I am not one of those people who gets tweaked about a shopping basket hitting my car in a parking lot. For some reason, this morning I was swearing and threatening a painful and slow death to this shopping cart if it hit me. I may have even told the inanimate shopping cart that hitting my car would be the last thing it would ever do. Luckily, it took a last-minute stroke slightly northward and missed my front bumper by inches. It was at this point that I noticed that when I got into my car this morning, I had enough gas to get me to work under normal, non-Biblical End Times conditions. But with all this reversing and cart dodging and East Dallas sightseeing I had been doing, I was about to run out of gas.

Cut to the scene of me pumping $4 worth of gas as lighting struck all around me and a furious little debris stream cascaded between me and my car. Alright, surely this was enough punishment for sleeping in today, right? Get back onto the road and resume my slow crawl to the office. Because no one can see if they are even in a lane because of the downpour, the roads looked more like one of those baby races where they line up five babies in five lanes and then let them go but they end up crossing over into other lanes or just stopping in their own lane or eating grass or crawling on top of the stationary babies. That’s what Lemmon Ave. looked like at approximately 11am today. An extremely slow ADD-riddled infant race.

At this point, it had been 30 minutes since I first got in the car. I was on the last leg, the usually simple left turn onto Turtle Creek. Except Turtle Creek the road and Turtle Creek the creek had become indistinguishable. The two had become one and intertwined in a violent embrace. It was then that Turtle Creek decided to try to get my engine in on the party. My engine had been doing well up to that point. I kept promising it that oil change I have been meaning to get it if it could just put on some water wings and get me to work.

But then the asshole that is Turtle Creek got all up in it and….stall. As I sat in my car, pondering whether or not I was about to be donate my car to the Turtle Creek CAN academy, I hit the gas one more time. And somehow, my little Honda Accord That Could found enough strength to slowly pull us out of our future of spending the rest of the day filing an insurance claim and towards relatively drier ground. We were in the shit and that little Honda came through for me. Thanks buddy! Guess who’s getting some 40W for the summer?

After a few blocks of sputtering and coughing, the Accord finally shook off the shackles and righted itself completely. And then I got to work. Only to find out that everyone else was late and no one even noticed I was. So 48 minutes after I left my house, here I was. Sitting at my desk. Then I realized I was hungry and went to lunch.

The End.

Dear Brett Favre,

2009-06-10T11:44:00.000-05:00

Hi Brett Favre! How’s it going? I hope you are recovering well from your super-secret surgery you recently had. It is to be expected that a career of being pummeled by linebackers would leave one’s body in desperate need of some corrective surgery. But the fact that you had the surgery brings two thoughts to mind. The first one is about how a man of your age is probably not as resilient as you were a dozen years ago. You probably know that already. It obviously takes you longer to get up when you’re knocked down now. And you probably feel the soreness for more than just the next day after a game. But you’re older and you have earned that creakiness.

More importantly, you’ve achieved great things and this is the part where you retire gracefully without tarnishing all you accomplished. It’s not the part where you do a Jordan and decide to play minor league baseball. It’s not the part where you hint at coming back (AGAIN) to play *just one more* season of professional football. It’s when you sit on a beach in Mexico (now with less swine flu!) with your arm in a sling and the other hand holding a daiquiri with umbrellas and exotic fruits spilling forth from the souvenir glass that is so large it is an affront to God. This is where you spend the fall watching football from your overstuffed naugahyde recliner and calling Tony Romo queer when he gets sacked. This is where you shoot all those animals you love to hunt for and spend your weekdays chewing Red Man and making friends at the taxidermist’s.

You have more money than God. If God had ever played as a pro quarterback in the NFL. Your family is taken care of for life. Your wife has her foundation to run and her charity work to do so it’s not like she’s going to be in your hair all the time, asking you when you plan on cleaning out the rain gutters. As far as I know, you are not the center of any major ongoing litigation for which you would need to earn money to finance. I don’t think you have an army of secret kids for which you must pay monthly support. You gave up all the fun drinking and drugging habits that you used to have which can be a drain on the bank account. You could probably afford the nicest pontoon boat any Mississippian has ever seen.

But instead, you hint that you might come back for *just one more* season to be the quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings. America collectively rolls their eyes. It’s not that we don’t want you to play. We just think it would be, ummmm, better if you didn’t. You have a distinguished career. Or you did until you came out of retirement the first time to play one lackluster season with the New York Jets. You know, when people who previously thought you had gracefully retired at the height of your success, going out when no one could touch you. Then we saw you getting picked off and chased down by younger and faster guys. And all the sudden, you went from being Green Bay’s own Silver Fox to the Old Guy on the Jets.

I, as surprised as you may be to hear this, have never played professional football. So it’s fairly easy for me to say, “I’m too old for this shit. I have enough money to buy all the monster trucks I could ever want. I’m widely hailed as one of the best quarterbacks of the past 20 years. I would prefer to wake up on Monday mornings not contorted and bruised. Thanks anyways though. Deuces!” I guess there’s some deep love of not just the game but playing the game that you can’t get out of your system. Maybe you’ve got some David Carradine-esque desire to tempt death for thrills. If those two things are true, play some tag football in your front yard with your old college buddies or drive around without a seat belt on or eat raw oysters from the Chinese buffet or wear an Obama t-shirt to your next NRA meeting. But don’t add another ugly black mark to your legacy.

Also, Minnesota is full of people that talk funny.

Sincerely,
Amandacobra

This Year's Juno

2009-06-08T14:18:00.002-05:00

A quick jog of your memory: I HATED the movie Juno. A lot.

For a long time, I wondered if I would ever want to leave a theater more than I wanted to leave when I saw Juno. It was almost like a masochistic desire to be able to top that miserable experience with an even worse one. Last week, I saw Anvil and it was like the anti-Juno. I didn’t want the movie to end. I didn’t want the experience to be over which is pretty monumental considering how much I hate the movie-going experience.

But then yesterday, I finally got to match, if not top, my Juno-watching misery. I went to see The Hangover yesterday. It’s taken me over 18 hours to regain the ability to express my distaste for this movie outside of angry growls and exasperated sighs. What you need to keep in mind is a) my love and admiration for Zach Galifinakis has been very well documented here and b) Old School, also directed by Todd Phillips, is one of my Top 20 funny movies.

It’s easier for me to point out what I liked about The Hangover. I thought the Zach Galifinakis’s line about “Do you know if Haley’s Comet is tonight?” was pretty funny. I thought that Ed Helms’s “BOOM!” line towards the end was fairly amusing. That’s really kind of the sum total of high points from the entire movie for me. And those weren’t nearly high enough to redeem the staggeringly low points that took up 90% of the film’s running time.

The rest of the movie was made up of pratfalls, dumb physical comedy, “look at that hairy/fat guy’s bare ass!” shots and scenarios that manage (miraculously) to be both predictable and nearly impossible.

Congrats, Juno. You’ve been released from Joke Jail for time served. We’re gonna need your cell for The Hangover.

I Typed All This While Wearing a Monocle and Boy, is My Good Eye Tired!

2009-06-08T13:00:00.005-05:00

Oversimplification and synopsis: a musicologist/professor from Cornell wrote a big diss piece on the soon-to-open Dallas Center for the Performing Arts. He talked about his personal distaste for the actual architecture of the building. He also expressed his distaste for the entire landscape and city planning of Dallas. Then he talked about how this center would play host to rich oil guys in their Stetsons and their big-haired wives who drive in from the suburbs in their gas-guzzling automotive behemoths. The Dallas Observer’s Unfair Park ran excerpts from this essay. Then the gates of commenting fury were flung open as people rushed to defend their city from a snotty, big-city East coast librul. Ok, now you’re caught up.

There were only two things in the essay that vaguely insulted or annoyed me.

#1. That he took the “oil guys in Stetsons/big-haired wives” route. Rich Dallas society wives have caught up to at least the mid-90’s, style-wise and any glimpse of the charity gala pictures in D Magazine or Dallas Morning News would reveal that straight hair is the new curly hair. Sometimes their rich husbands wear cowboy hats but that seems to be a waning trend.

#2. That he the essay is drenched in condescension and essentially scoffs at the notion that Dallas, TEXAS could have a genuine appreciation for the arts and specifically something as hoity-toity as opera.

I hate that he used those two tired old tricks in his essay because he is essentially right. First off, the building and surrounding areas are not particularly attractive. It’s like half Nortel off-site IT training facility, half space-age hog rendering plant. And Christ on a cracker, it’s flat. It doesn’t help counter the criticism that Dallas likes everything to be sprawling, big, flat and wasteful. But architecture is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.

When he complains about the Stetsons driving in for the opera in their oversized vehicles, he’s right. It’s not an aberration. Dallas’s suburban sprawl combined with the general unpleasantness that is downtown Dallas has guaranteed that anyone heading into the Arts District will be there solely to do that and then get back in their vehicles, which stand a better than 50% chance of being an SUV or truck, and get the hell out of Dodge and back to their respective safer, better lit, cleaner communities. And I say this as someone who lives in East Dallas and enjoys opera tremendously. I am the minority and I know that. But I also realize that those rich, oily suburbanites are often the patrons and board members who bring operas, collections and exhibits which I highly enjoy to town.

This brings me to the often hilarious tug of war that I see happen monthly between local and national publications. I laugh and then shake my head when I read local publications and their coverage of the Dallas music scene, the Dallas restaurant scene, the Dallas arts and culture scene. There is ALWAYS some achingly desperate reference to a restaurant having a more exhaustive wine list than any comparable establishment in Chicago or New York. Or there’s a jab about the Dallas Museum of Art having a more comprehensive hinge collection (someone please tell me you got that joke) than even the Guggenheim or Getty Museums. It always feels a little like the younger brother at a family reunion trying to top his much more successful older brother’s professional achievements by reminding everyone that he IS next in line for the assistant manager’s chair at the Arby’s at which he works.

Likewise, national publications love to remind everyone of how Dallas really isn’t a real city and regardless of how much culture they try to import or fancy fusion cuisine joints they open, they will always be the big dumb oil city. In their eyes, nothing that happens in Dallas is actually credible, arts-wise. It’s Dallas after all! Real culture happens in New York and Chicago and (really?) Los Angeles. Dallas is just a two dimensional city full of adulterous Stetson-wearing rancher playboys and their game show hostess wives.

Dallas needs to stop trying so hard to be something it is not. Face it, Dallas as a city is merely the hub for a vast, sprawling network of suburbs. And in many ways, that’s Dallas’s own fault. They knock down anything that isn’t protected by a plaque and the National Registry of Historical Places so that we can have one more block of condos, sandwich shops and dog groomers. They have done everything they possibly can to suck the life out of downtown by failing to address a near-pandemic problem of homelessness in the area. They offer no incentives to anyone, specifically young people who could breathe life into the corpse, to move downtown. A few months ago, I wrote this piece about Victory Park and the failures therein, of which there are many. In it, I mentioned that the development could be saved by bringing in hipper or more youth-oriented retailers such as H&M, Marimekko, Urban Outfitters or even my personally-despised American Apparel. Well apparently the city of Dallas thought that was a good idea, but instead of Victory Park, they want to bring it to downtown. It might be a step in the right direction. My first instinct is to worry about parking for such an expansive retail plaza. But that’s what garages are for. Maybe this would be the first step in getting something going downtown. But it does at least tell me that someone somewhere is trying.

Which means that it’s officially tired and lazy for people outside of Dallas to use suburban sprawl, oil money or the unpleasant presence of George W to immediately write off the city and its inhabitants entirely. Yes, I think the Arts Center is kind of ugly. And yes, I was angry that Dallas lost the new Cowboys stadium. But it does say something when the city devotes as much time and budget to building an Arts Center and trying to bring in artists, conductors and exhibits from around the world.

In conclusion, please take note:

People of Dallas – Please stop doing things like leaving comments like these about a story on war protester Cindy Sheehan’s planned protest at George W’s house. Because here’s a quick sit rep on that: George W. Bush is still widely hated around the country and around the world. And it’s therefore assumed that people who would defend his failure of a presidency would be angry, dumb rednecks. Ergo, when you leave poorly spelled and vaguely threatening comments like those in defense of the most hated contemporary president of our times, you give them (“them” being stuffy East coast/northern liberals) more fuel for the fire. Please proceed to STFU.

People Not of Dallas – Might I remind you of the following things: The New York Post and New York Daily News, Staten Island, Long Island, bridge and tunnel people, Times Square, the Freedom Tower, the new Yankees stadium, Howard Stern and everything in Los Angeles other than the Griffith Observatory and the Getty Museum.

The Slap Bracelet of Online Social Networking

2009-06-05T14:19:00.001-05:00

I said I wasn’t going to be one of those cynical old bats who bitches about whatever new website or widget or thingamabob on the internet the kids love these days. But I was lying. I said that because I decided to get on board the Twitter bandwagon. I have now log-rolled off of that bandwagon in a spectacular fashion. It’s official: Twitter is dumb and pointless. I thought that since EVERYONE was talking about it and EVERYONE had one, there had to be something to it. There had to be some sort of appeal or practical use for the thing. Turns out there isn’t. I suspected that someone would have to be pretty darn chuffed with their own cleverness (or perceived cleverness) to be a habitual, hardcore Twitterer. Maybe there’s some exceptions to the rule but the fact that there are now sites like this one dedicated to outing the more obnoxious Twitterers out there.

Again, no one has yet been able to explain to me why I would want to Twitter or why I would be interested in other people’s Twitter. I get that it’s just a huge stage where people can tell the world how awesome they are. I get that it’s a way to constantly update the universe on what you are doing AT THAT EXACT MOMENT. But as this guy can tell you (in 140 or fewer characters, no less), if you are actually doing what you claim to be doing in your tweet while you are tweeting, you are probably putting yourself in some danger of sustaining an injury. Which is why when people tweet about “Swimming in the ocean right now…vacations rule!” or whatever, I think “Wow, you have a waterproof phone and/or laptop?” The only 100% true and honest tweet would be, “Am on Twitter right now, typing a tweet.”

I am so sick of hearing about Twitter. I am so sick of being assaulted with offers to follow people on Twitter. I am only slightly bemused when objects, buildings and fictional characters have a Twitter. I am annoyed that all news about or statements by celebrities, athletes or anyone famous is issued forth on Twitter. I am just annoyed by Twitter’s existence at this point. I just don’t see a future where Twitter is an established means of communication. It has a distinct Friendster smell to it.

And then I read this statistic in the elevator at work today:

Study: Top 10% of Twitter users do 90% of the tweeting

So I am not alone. The great wall of white noise that is Twitter is not, as I had feared, a mass exodus of humanity towards the rocky, jagged cliffs of 140 character or less human interaction. It’s basically just two or three people standing around screaming at the top of their lungs. I feel better.

Bold, Mostly Baseless and Almost Certainly Pointless Western Conference Prediction

2009-05-23T19:42:00.002-05:00

The Nuggets will beat the Lakers. The Finals will be Cleveland v. Denver. I say this as I sit on my couch, five minutes into the first quarter of the third game of a tied Lakers-Nuggets series. After Denver has just missed three easy layups.

I could be wrong.

DC, San Antone and the Liberty Town, Boston and Baton Rouge

2009-05-20T13:47:00.013-05:00

Chuck Klosterman keeps me up at night. And not in a good way. I just can’t figure it out. I’ve read all of his books except for that novel that he wrote because his first hack at noveldom in Chuck Klosterman IV was painful for me to read and I thought was surely just an exorcising of Creative Writing demons. On paper, Chuck Klosterman should be my hero. I should have posters of Chuck Klosterman on my wall with little comet shaped stickers around his head and I should, much like I once spelled out the Poison logo in lime green thumbtacks on my bedroom wall when I was 10, have some sort of CK logo drawn somewhere on a notebook at work as a secret tip of the hat to the Klos. But I don’t. In fact, there are times when I grapple with whether or not he is the most irritating and self-flagellating human on the face of the Earth or not.

It just doesn’t make sense. Again, let’s go back to his numbers. He’s a former small-town rock writer. Me too! He’s a sports nut. Hey, me too! He not only admits to being a slave to, but also genuflects at, the throne of pop culture which is something I am ashamed to admit eats away more and more free Amanda RAM with each passing day. He is so self-centered as to see parallels and life lessons between all his failed relationships and inner-neuroses and, say, the Lakers /Celtics rivalry. Yep, I think I am that important sometimes too. So why do I sometimes feel like I hate him so much?

I think he is a good writer. Not a fantastic, great, burn-your-likeness-on-the-moon type writer (typewriter?) but an amusing read. In fact, I love Chuck Klosterman IV because I think it shows what he actually is, a great magazine writer. Not a manifesto writer. Not the Thoreau of our age put into some sort of pop culture Cuisinart. He writes entertaining articles about things like why Mexicans love Morrissey and how bizarre it is to go on a cruise with Journey and Styx and their fans. My favorite part of IV is the part where he re-visits one of his first columns that he wrote as a music journalist back in North Dakota covering the Fargo scene. I get particular jollies out of it because, as a writer, it’s always incredibly humbling and laughable to go back and read something that your cocky, younger self wrote when you were pretty sure that you were the Carl Sandburg of local music media, only to realize that you were trying so hard that it’s kind of amazing that the pages of the weekly didn’t actually emit a groaning sound when opened.

I love the fact that he footnotes the more laughable lines from the piece and adds perspective from Six Years Later Chuck. Again, I find him to be an incredibly self-absorbed and self-congratulatory person so I’m conflicted over whether that bit of self-critique is actually humility or just a chance for him to stare at old pictures of himself and remark on what a handsome fellow he has always been.

Now comes the part where I tell you why I think I hate Chuck Klosterman. Other than his collected articles and bits and pieces of his essays, his writings are collectively like the literary equivalent of “The Heart of Rock and Roll” by Huey Lewis and the News. And I don’t mean that in a good way. I can’t fault Huey Lewis for finding a cheap gimmick and riding it like a hooker he cashed in his Harrah’s chips for. What’s the easiest way to elicit a reaction out of the largest number of people? Say the name of the city they live in. “Hey, that’s us! I know that thing he just said! I am familiar with that! I live in that city! I feel a bond with this artist and therefore find this song to be, inherently, kickass.” That’s what Klosterman does and it bugs the shit out of me.

“Words words words words words words (Band Name) words words words words (Failed, Kitschy Two-Season TV Show from the Late 1980’s That Band Could Be the Musical Equivalent Of) words words words (Name of Nintendo Game You Played in 4th Grade) words words words (Awkwardly Shoehorned-In Life Topic Which Could Be De-Mystified by the Aforementioned Pieces of Pop Culture Detritus). "

If you are a Chuck Klosterman fan, fine. But ask yourself, do you like him because you feel like his frame of reference is similar to your because he mentions songs that you know, bands that you like and movie characters that also annoy you? If so, do you (and it’s fine if you don’t, I just happen to) feel kind of like that’s kind of cheap? Like going to an old folks home and offering them pudding or a screening of Gone With the Wind just to lure them into the naptime room. And yes, I do sometimes refer to Chuck Klosterman’s work alternately as “the naptime room.”

Then there’s the dealbreaker. The fact that Klosterman regularly paints himself as Chuck Klosterman: Heartbreaker, Ladykiller and All-Around Pants Earthquaker. There’s something either laughable or disturbing about his instance on fitting in, at any opportunity, another mention of his ability to break the hearts of girls far and wide. I may be blowing that out of proportion and it might only be a minor theme in his work but let me just A/B his angle and the angle of someone whose work doesn’t make me stabby, Will Leitch. Despite many reprimands from some male friends (imagine a sports nerd version of the song “Leader of the Pack”, minus the fatal motorcycle accident, when you imagine this conversation) telling me that Will Leitch is no good and he roots for the Cardinals and he’s just a hayseed who got too much blogfame too fast and I shouldn’t think so highly of him, I dig Will Leitch. When I want to read something that I feel akin to, I read something like Life of a Loser. Not in some self-deprecating (that’s not the one where you poo on yourself, by the way), Sassy magazine grunge layout kind of way. But because I just can’t identify with Klosterman’s self-absorbedness and bravado about just how clever he is. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think Chuck Klosterman is the wittiest thing since Oscar Wilde bread because Chuck Klosterman thinks so already.

So maybe I’m in the minority here. Maybe everyone else gains some sense of comfort like when the Downy bear falls into the pile of freshly laundered and folded towels when they read a Chuck Klosterman book and hear him drum on incessantly about his life, his insecurities and how he is completely irreverent because he likes hair metal in a non-ironic way. But I think it kind of murders my soul a little bit every time I read it.

Let’s see if I can explain this in a more Kloster-tastic fashion. You know how we all know that song “18 and Life” by Skid Row? You know how when someone sings it at karaoke, everyone sings along because we all laugh about how we all actually like that song and know the lyrics to it? You know like how Ricky was a young boy who had a heart of stone, worked 9 to 5. * Well, you know that part about where Ricky had tequila in his heartbeat (huh?) and his veins were burning gasoline (ouch!) and he fired his six shot in the wind and shot a kid? That kid is my literary patience and Chuck Klosterman is Ricky. There, better?

* He worked his fingers to the bone.

Is There Room On There For One More?

2009-05-18T15:26:00.001-05:00

Here’s the pitch (pun somewhat intended) I got on Saturday night:

“Amanda, I am telling you, you’ve got to get into the Rangers! They need you! This season’s gonna be worth it. I’ll fill you in on the players and the back stories. It’s so good right now! Seriously, you’ve got to start watching them! (Name redacted) and (Name redacted) even started watching games! So Lackey returns from the DL (Hughley?) to throw two pitches and he throws one behind Kinsler then hits Kinsler and gets tossed from the game! They’re 3 and a half games up, Amanda! And they beat the Mariners! Just ask me anything you wanna know and I will catch you up! I really want you to get into this team!”

All of this can only mean one thing:

Well, Pack Up the Truck (Again)

2009-05-14T15:35:00.002-05:00

Another Mavs season over. And you know what? I’m not sad. I mean, yeah I would have loved to have made it to the Western conference finals. Or the NBA Finals. But come on folks, don’t be spoiled babies. We got our asses handed to us in the first round two years in a row. This time we got our asses (pretty much ) handed to us in the SECOND round. That’s improvement. Honestly, bitching over the fact that there was a bad call in Game 3 is pointless. It shouldn’t have been close enough to let a bad call decide the game. The season is over. I had fun. Mathematically speaking, there’s only 3 teams in the Western conference who are better than us. And that’s being generous to Houston. Don’t be sad sacks of poo, Mavs fans. Save that for Cowboys season.

And with that, I’m off to Frisco to witness amateur baseball at its most amateurish. The soothsayers at Taco Joint have this hot opinion about the outcome of tonight’s game:

Lessons We Should Have All Learned From Game 4 Last Night

2009-05-12T19:35:00.005-05:00

1. Antoine Wright can get elbowed in the throat and somehow HE gets called for a foul.

2. SOMEONE TIE JOSH HOWARD'S ARMS DOWN IF WE ARE IN A CLOSE GAME AND IT'S THE LAST MINUTE OF THE FOURTH QUARTER AND WE DON'T HAVE A FOUL TO GIVE AND WE DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT NEED TO FOUL ANY MEMBER OF THE DENVER NUGGETS.

3. Dirk Nowitzki would like you all to shut the fuck up about his ghetto, con-lady girlfriend already, please. To further illustrate this point, he will save us from playoff elimination. There, happy? Seriously, drop it now, ok?

4. Carmello Anthony is allowed to hit people in the face with no fear of being suspended.

5. Nothing brings me more personal schadenfraude than learning that the Birdman is not going to be able to make the game due to hot liquid waste spilling forth from both ends of his body due to a stomach flu. Just to think of the cold sweats and stomach cramping making his mohawk sort of just tilt to the side then fall forward in defeat like Glenn Danzig after eating raw oysters from a Chinese buffet, oh the giggles... Thank you, Tummy Shame Jesus.

6. HEY MAVS, LOOK WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON'T MISS HALF OF YOUR FREE THROWS!!!!!

7. Elephant in the Room time - Would everyone chill the fuck out. That means you, classless Mavs fans. That means you, Denver 'Roid Ragers. That means you, crazy-ass weave-wearing cat-fighting reality show, erhm, "personalities". The funny thing is the person I actually have the most sympathy for in this whole thing (oh yeah, besides the Mavs who are going to have to go to Denver wearing bulletproof vests) is Kenyon Martin's mom. If she talked shit to Cuban, whatever. If a Mavs fan poured a beer on her, in-fucking-excusable. To every other retard, failed rapper, half-shirt wearing former VJ, asshole fan, homophobic psuedo-tough guy who is turning this whole thing into one big "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!" scene, seriously STFU.

Thanks.

Love,
Amandacobra

Game 3: Soul Seppuku

2009-05-11T13:08:00.004-05:00

I went to my very first playoff game on Saturday. I didn’t get a noisemaker. A quick note on noisemaker etiquette here, folks: take the noisemaker or thunder sticks that are on your seat and your seat only. If at halftime, there are unclaimed noisemakers which are sitting in empty seats you can take those. But only after halftime. There should be no reason for me to get to my seat at tip and there be no object with which I can make noise. Anyways, back to Saturday. I was like a little kid, I was so excited. The place was packed. Everyone was clearly thinking “alright, we even this up at home and it’s anybody’s series to win.” Well, ok maybe we weren’t thinking that. Maybe we were aware of the fact that the Nuggets were killing us and the only chance we had to stop the bleeding was to use the first home game and the first home crowd and Dirk’s felonious lady troubles as motivation to finally eek out a win.

But the game was great. To see Chris Andersen foul out of the game was beautiful. While I’m not usually one for the jumbotron entertainment, the Mavs decided to go for the (inked) jugular by playing a taunting video called “Hey Mr. Overly Tattooed NBA Guy” which not only mocked the Nuggets (and specifically Andersen’s) love of body art, it also questioned whether Kenyon Martin’s neck tattoo of a woman’s name was wise considering that “girlfriends come and go.” The person I went to the game with turned to me after the video and said, “Oh my god, they’re gonna beat us by 70 now."

I remember when the fourth quarter started, I turned and said, “So this is where we blow it, right?” Because up to that point, the Mavs had kept it close. I think either team’s biggest lead was 6 going into the fourth quarter. Even better? By the first few minutes of the fourth quarter, not only had Chris Andersen fouled out but Nene had 5 fouls and Carmello Anthony and Chauncey Billups had 4 each. In short, the Nuggets were about to collectively foul themselves out. Sweet! And the crowd was finally getting into it. I’ve never actually been to a game where Humble Billy’s foreboding taunts of “deeeeeeee-fense” actually lead to the entire arena joining him in the chant. But on Saturday for the entire fourth quarter, we were all standing up and chanting and taunting and noisemaking our asses off. It felt really good.

Then a wheel started to feel wobbly when we started missing free throws. I don’t remember in what order the virus spread but in the last two minutes of the game, I saw Jason Terry, Josh Howard and Dirk split their free throws. The guy sitting (well, standing) next to me with his earphones in said, in a very grave and scary voice, after Jet missed his first free throw, “That will come back to haunt us.” I thought he was being a little dramatic.

Now I don’t really know how to explain what happened for the last 41 seconds of the quarter because, strangely, being there and seeing it myself was of no assistance in my effort to understand what the fuck happened. I would imagine it would be like standing on a street corner watching a car accident involving the ghost of Benjamin Franklin and Count Chocula. Nothing made sense. Everyone was confused.

I actually have the luxury of still not having seen the replays on TV so all I have to go on is what I saw with my eyes. I know that with 41 seconds left, we were up by four. I might have the order of these events transposed slightly but I know that Dirk missed an easy shot then the Nuggets were able to get the rebound and sail down the court for the easiest bucket ever scored in basketball ever. I started to see where Earphones Guy was coming from with his doomsday predictions about that missed free throw. Then, with less than 10 seconds left in the game, the Nuggets inbounded the ball and Carmello Anthony took his spot at the top of the arc. But we had a foul to give. Right? Then Anthony takes the shot and hits it. Everyone in the AAC take a little time out of their busy schedule of screaming obscenities to start to wonder aloud what just happened? Didn’t we have a foul to give? Why wouldn’t we have fouled him? Did Antoine Wright just LET Anthony take the shot?

Then we were told that the play was being reviewed. Oh ok. Good. This should clear some things up. Then we were told that the review was just to check that Anthony’s shot was indeed a three pointer, as it had been ruled on the court, and that his toesies weren’t on the line. Turns out they weren’t and it was and the Nuggets now lead 106-105 with 1 second left in the game. We all sat in our seats, stunned. And slightly amused by Josh Howard being physically restrained and dragged away by Mavs personnel. Then my stomach turned as I looked at the smiling face of Chris Andersen who was alternately gloating and trying to pick a fight with various Mavs staff while still on the court.

Was that Earphone Guy right? No, not really. It shouldn’t have ever come down to a three point shot deciding the game. But to watch three Mavs players split their free throws after a whole game of no Mavs offensive rebounding was crushing. And I don’t like the Nuggets but it seems pretty clear at this point that they are better at basketball than we are. I don’t like the fact that there is no class in this series. Who would have thought that a playoff series between Dallas and San Antonio would be so dignified yet the Dallas-Denver matchup would have all the dignity and class of Anna Nicole Smith mud wrestling Gary Coleman on the Howard Stern show?

The refs not calling the intentional foul on Anthony is inexcusable, mostly because that seems like me forgetting that I have to wear clothes to work or something. The refs had to have known that Dallas had the foul to give and that they were going to at least contemplate or attempt to foul whoever Denver was going to let shoot. However, Anthony could have hit all three of his free throws and then we would have to deal with what we really need to deal with. The fact that the Nuggets are playing more aggressively than the Mavs are and will probably seal the Mavs fate tonight by dealing us the death blow.

But it’s not just the Game 3 of this series that has got me blue. I can’t help but get 19 different kinds of excited when I see that the Rockets have beaten the clearly unbeatable Lakers and are up 2-1 in their series. To think of Kobe getting knocked out of the playoffs before the Western Conference finals gives me happy fingers. But then I remember how we beat Houston in that last game of the regular season and how that night, when the playoffs were discussed, we all talked about how Houston didn’t scare us that bad. And then I think of all the trash talking and city dissing that could happen were the Western Conference finals to be between two Texas teams. Sigh.

I haven’t given up. Yet. I had given up on Saturday as I sat outside the Old No. 7 contemplating ways to sever the brake line on the Nuggets team bus. But I will watch tonight with a limited, faintly glowing light-source of basketball hope. I don’t know what the Mavs are capable of but I don’t feel like it includes winning here then winning again in Denver. But I will have my noisemakers (that I have because some people are not noisemaker thieving bastards) and I will watch and if the season ends tonight, I will know that the Mavs got past the first round which is more than I’ve been able to say about the Cowboys in a decade.

JESUS! YOU HAVE TO BE FUCKING KIDD-ING ME!

2009-05-07T14:51:00.004-05:00

Ok, I need some sort of Mavs primal scream therapy right now and basically my blog was established for just that purpose. Do I think that the local (and to a lesser degree, national) media should be digging through Dirk's proverbial garbage can to find the used condoms (which apparently might not exist in this case) to dust for prints? No. Seriously, everyone back the fuck off. I have a set of noisemakers that I am shaking in your general direction, press. And commenters on Dallas Morning News, this is your wet dream of a story. Please crawl back down into the lowest level of protoplastic slime caves that you usually call home. Seriously, EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STOP ACTING LIKE THIS IS AN EPISODE OF MAURY.

Now that I have said that: ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? RIGHT NOW? REALLY? REALLLLLLLLLY NOT A GOOD TIME.

It was already not a good time for anything to distract you from the deep-ish hole you have dug yourselves into, Little Sad Mavs. But this is the last fucking thing you needed. You get distracted when someone at the concession stands has a laser pointer. You cannot handle a felonious baby mama situation. You are not the Nets or the Lakers or even the fucking Knicks for that matter. You don't do drama very well. I don't know the details of the case but Jesus Christ in Heaven why couldn't you have made this go away for a week or two until you either got thumped by the Nuggets or gained a little ground on them. You are down 2-0 in the second round of the playoffs. This is retarded shit that you should not be dealing with. I'm not one to lecture about where to put your naughty bits but if you know you've got some dirty water coming down the pipeline, you've got the money and resources to direct the flow. I hope I am wrong. I hope personal turmoil equals basketball sucess somehow. Yeah.

Mavs in 5.

I Love This

2009-05-05T16:39:00.002-05:00

I blogged about Stephen Fry's response letter to his 16 year old self a few days ago. The letter appeared in The Guardian and now they have printed (errr, published?) some of the reader's letters to their former/younger selves in response.

Seriously, this is like Valerian root and a hot meal from my mom all in one. It's nice to know that, minus a few Debbie Downers, the general school of thought is "Everything's gonna be okay."

Deep breath. And exhale. Thank you, Guardian.

Let's Win Game 2 for Dom

2009-05-05T13:15:00.002-05:00

Seriously, I don't like all the colorful character actors from my childhood checking out all at the same time. So hey, Dallas Mavs....let's not act like loose kitty cats out there on the court tonight. Let's win one for Dom. Below is the text message exchange between my friend Chad and I after I broke the news to him:

Me: Dom DeLuise died today. When will the killing stop?!

Chad: Oh dear god. What a profoundly funny man.

Me: Profoundly and rotundly funny man. RIP Big Dom!

Chad: Has Burt Reynolds made a statement? How about Mel Brooks? Gene Wilder?

Me: Who can make a statement at a time like this? I think the laughs he left us with is all the statement we need.

Chad: What was the cause of death? Morbid obesity or over half a century of closeted homosexuality?

Me: No official cause yet though your theory holds water. Did you remember that his character in Smokey and the Bandit II was a hitchhiking Italian gynocologist? I did now.

Chad: Touche. I watched Golden Girls last night and very nearly wept.

Me: Can we watch Steel Magnolias soon?

Chad: Yes. Perhaps we could watch some old Maude reruns...

My Almost Entirely Non-Basketball Thoughts About Game 1 of the Mavs-Nuggets Series

2009-05-04T17:21:00.005-05:00

Bullet Point Uno - When it comes to Nenes, I will always take this one:

over the one that killed us on the court yesterday. Does the Brazilian, basketball playing Nene have a gay best friend named Dwight who regularly calls people out for being “awful” at fashion shows? No. Does Brazilian, basketball playing Nene get trashed in stretch limos and sing catty songs about frenemies? Nope. Does the Brazilian, basketball-playing Nene have a foundation called Twisted Hearts that vaguely might have something to do with helping abused women by having wine parties where everyone wears fancy church hats? Nuh-uh. Most importantly, does the Brazilian, basketball playing have a past that includes exotic dancing? You see where I am going with this. And you see why every time that big, dumb Brazilian scored each one of his career playoff high 18 points, I just thought, “What would Dwight do?” right now. Clearly this extended comparison between a person on The Real Housewives of Atlanta (way to rep the 404?) and a member of the Denver Nuggets has bored, confused or annoyed most anyone who reads my blog. On to Thought #2.

Bullet Point Dos - The Birdman:

I sent my friend Danny a text during the first quarter asking him to serve as my alibi when I can no longer contain my urge to do something painful and or causing great embarrassment to Chris Andersen. I suggested that he tell the authorities that we were at Bible study and he has absolutely no idea how Chris Andersen ended up wandering the streets of East Dallas in a daze with the words “Love Hole” tattooed across his forehead along with an arrow pointing down the bridge of his nose, stopping neatly at the tip.

Listen, I get that he had it rough. And I do actually mean this with all sincerity: I feel for him in that respect. I respect his athleticism and the fact that he wasn’t Luke Walton-grandfathered into the league. But three things:

a) Buy your mom a house, you fuckbag. I have read the articles and sure, there’s probably more to the story than what we have read but jeeeeez. Really? I’m not saying buy her a Gulfstream and a gold and diamond Jesus-on-a-spinner chain or anything. But seriously? I’m pretty sure 60 or 70 grand could buy you a decent place in Iola, Texas. But whatever, I digress

b) I hate birds and I don’t like the stupid faces you make when you block shots so you put those two things together and I become nearly apoplectic when you block a shot. Not because you blocked one of our shots (though that IS rather annoying) but because you act like you just did some crazy Space Jam shit and the entire ABC broadcasting crew gets paid by the “Birdman” apparently.

c) This is the most important one. This is the one that I feel like needs to be said. Despite all your hardships, Chris Andersen. Despite your struggles with substance abuse, Chris Andersen. Despite going undrafted and playing in places like China and Sheboygan or wherever else you played before Denver and New Orleans, Chris Andersen. Despite all of that….you simply MUST look in a mirror. Right now.
You always had all the elements of total tooldom inside you but you kept them in complete balance so as not to overpower the senses. Bad tattoos but loveably shaggy hair. Soul patch, sure. But always something to counterbalance. Now, you’ve let the douche go unchecked and all those awful attributes have aligned and come together to form you circa right now. I have seen guys walking through the West Village on “All-Drinks-Totally-Free-if-You-Throw-the-Sideways-Peace-Sign” Night with more self-respect and looking far less ridiculous than you do. Seriously, I almost want to like you. I almost want to think that you are out there on the court every night, looking like you do in some Andy Kaufman-level test of just how gullible and easily-riled we all are. Instead, I think you probably hang out with a bunch of guys that act like, look like or actually are Jeremy Piven when not blocking shots and making pterodactyl faces.

Bullet Point Tres – Why did the Mavs squad look like Kent State, 1970?

Seriously, every time I diverted my eyes from the screen for a few seconds (which was often considering how many times the Mavs were turning it over and missing shots), I would look up to see a Mavs player sprawled out on the floor like Basketball Jonestown was starting to happen. First Dampier went down. Then Howard. Then Dirk. I’m pretty sure at one point I saw Rick Carlisle out cold in front of the scorer’s table. So the Mavs are taking their cues from those fainting goats who warn sheep herds about approaching predators? Neat! This is a hyper-violent and contact-heavy series so far and I understand that explains at least part of what I saw. And I also understand the Mavs trying to get the call. But seriously, it was like a squad of Eduardo Najeras and Manu Ginoblis (minus Ginobli’s ability to hold onto the ball and/or shoot it). STOP FALLING DOWN, DALLAS MAVERICKS. Get one of those candles that gets excess wax out of your ears or whatever you must to do reset your internal sense of balance. Just stop being horizontal so fucking much. Nothing says “we came here to fight” like “I think I see someone’s keys under Section 102”.

I will be attending Game 3 in person. If you lose Game 2, I will bring a Wood Block with me to the game on Saturday. Apparently, Gitmo-level aural torture is a turn-on for the Mavs.

2009-05-01T17:19:00.004-05:00

Maybe it's the fact that it's the Friday of a long work-week. Maybe it's the fact that I am going to see my friend Dave Little later tonight play a set in which he promises to resort to bestiality within 3 minutes of the start of the set. Maybe I just will use any cheap old excuse to post something written by Stephen Fry. Most likely it's that last one. In case you have never met me and have only skimmed over this blog in an attempt to kill time until the correct bus comes, let me catch you up. I idolize Stephen Fry. He recently wrote a letter to his 16 year old self, a response to a letter that his 16 year old self wrote to his future self which he featured in his autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot. I am not gay and I hate to play that game where you co-opt someone else's thing, bending it slightly so you can ride on their cause coattails. As I have blogged about before, I have very close family and friends who are gay and before I made it to the end of this letter, I too had tears splashing across the keyboard. Also, being a poor and chubby teenager who only cares about theater class and The Smiths didn't make me Miss Popularity myself so I can feel his pain in some very small, miniscule way.

I should link to it probably so here's the link.

But fear not. Here's the whole thing, effortlessly plagiarized below for your reading pleasure.

Stephen Fry's letter to himself: Dearest absurd child

Just who was the young, arrogant and confused man to whom Stephen Fry recently felt compelled to write a long and heartfelt letter? Himself, 35 years ago

I hope you are well. I know you are not. As it happens you wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time that your future self had the decency to write back. You declared in that letter (reproduced in your 1997 autobiography Moab Is My Washpot) that "everything I feel now as an adolescent is true". You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."

Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.

I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether that love is for someone of your own sex or not. Gay issues are important and I shall come to them in a moment, but they shrivel like a salted snail when compared to the towering question of love. Gay people sometimes believe (to this very day, would you credit it, young Stephen?) that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay. As it happens at least 90% of their problems are to do with love and love alone: the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the missed reciprocity in it, the horrors and heartaches of it. Love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love missed, love denied, love betrayed ... the great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay. The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling, but it must be understood that love comes first. This is tough for straight people to work out.

Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature.They - poor normal lambs - naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander's words, "the course of true love never did run smooth".

Sexual availability, so long an impossible dream in your age, becomes the norm in the late 70s and early 80s, only to be shattered by a new disease whose horrors you cannot even imagine. You would little believe that I can say to you now across the gap of 35 years that we are the blessed ones. The people of Britain are happy (or not) because of Tolpuddle Martyrs, Chartists, infantry regiments, any number of ancestors who made the world more comfortable for them. And we, gay people, are happy now (or not) in large part thanks to Stonewall rioters, Harvey Milk, Dennis Lemon, Gay News, Ian McKellen, Edwina Currie (true) et al, and the battered bodies of bullied, beaten and abused gay men and women who stood up to be counted and refused to apologise for the way they were. It has given us something we never thought to have: pride. For a thousand years, shame was our lot and now, turning on a sixpence, we have arrived at pride - without even, it seems, an intervening period of well-it's-OK-I-suppose-wouldn't-have-chosen-it-but-there-you-go. Who'da thought it?

I know what you are doing now, young Stephen. It's early 1973. You are in the library, cross-referencing bibliographies so that you can find more and more examples of queer people in history, art and literature against whom you can hope to validate yourself. Leonardo, Tchaikovsky, Wilde, Barons Corvo and von Gloeden, Robin Maugham, Worsley, "an Englishman", Jean Genet, Cavafy, Montherlant, Roger Peyrefitte, Mary Renault, Michael Campbell, Michael Davies, Angus Stewart, Gore Vidal, John Rechy, William Burroughs.

So many great spirits really do confirm that hope! It emboldens you to know that such a number of brilliant (if often doomed) souls shared the same impulse and desires as you. I know the index-card waltz of (auto)biographies, poems and novels you are dancing: those same names are still so close to the surface of my mind nearly four decades later. Novels, poetry and the worlds of art and ideas are opening up in front of you almost incidentally. You spend all your time in the library yearning to be told that you are not alone, and an unlooked for side-effect of this just happens to be a real education achieved in a private school designed for philistine bumpkins. Being born queer has given you, by mistake, a fantastic advantage over the rugger-playing ordinaries who surround you. But those rugger-playing ordinaries have souls too. And you should know that. I know you cannot believe it now. They seem so secure, so assured, so blessedly normal. They gave Cuthbert Worsley the Kipling-derived title of his overwhelmingly important (to you) autobiography The Flannelled Fool: "these are the men that have lost their soul/ The flannelled fool at he wicket/ And the muddied oaf at the goal".

You look down at the fools almost as much as you fear them. The ordinary people, whose path through life is guaranteed. They won't have to spend their days in public libraries, public lavatories and public courts ashamed, spurned and reviled. There is no internet. No Gay News. No gay chatlines. No men-seeking-men personals. No out-and-proud celebs. Just a world of shame and secrecy.

Somehow, as you age, a miracle will be wrought. You will begin by descending deeper into the depths: expulsion, crime and prison - nothing really to do with being gay, but everything to do with love and your inability to cope with it. Yet you will, as the Regency rakes used to say, "make a recover" and find yourself at university, where it will be astonishingly easy to be open about your sexuality. No great trick, for the university is Cambridge, long a hotbed of righteous tolerance, spiritual heavy-petting and homo hysteria. You will emerge from Cambridge and enter a world where being "out" is no big deal, although a puzzlingly small number of your coevals will find it as easy as you to emerge from the shadows. Before you damn anyone for failing to come out, look to their parents. The answer almost always lies there. Oh how lucky in that department, as in so many, you are, young Stephen.

But don't kid yourself. For millions of teenagers around Britain and everywhere else, it is still 1973. Taunts, beatings and punishment await gay people the world over in playgrounds and execution grounds (the distance between which is measured by nothing more than political constitutions and human will). Yes, you will grow to be a very, very, very, very lucky man who is able to express his nature out loud without fear of hatred or reprisal from any except the most deluded, demented and sad. But that is a small battle won. A whole theatre of war remains. This theatre of war is bigger than the simple issue of being gay, just as the question of love swamps the question of mere sexuality. For alongside sexual politics the entire achievement of the enlightenment (which led inter alia to gay liberation) is under threat like never before. The cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand of religion and absolutism has fallen on the world once more.

So my message from the future is twofold. Fear not, young Stephen, your life will unfold in richer, more accepted and happier ways than you ever dared hope. But be wary, for the most basic tenets of rationalism, openness and freedom that nourish you now and seem so unassailable are about to be harried and besieged by malevolent, mad and medieval minds.

You poor dear, dear thing. Look at you weltering in your misery. The extraordinary truth is that you want to stay there. Unlike so many of the young, you do not yearn for adulthood, pubs and car keys. You want to stay where you are, in the Republic of Pubescence, where feeling has primacy and pain is beautiful. And you know what ... ?

I think you are right.

Round One: Owned

2009-04-29T12:50:00.000-05:00

First off, I would like to thank Mark Followill and Bob Ortegel for outing and shaming the Wood Block Guy on TV last night. I also want to thank Bob Ortegel for saying the phrase, “Mark, you can steal my thunder any time!” It made me giggle.

The Mavs beat the Spurs in five games which was one less than I had even allowed myself to dream they could do it in. More amazing to me was the fact that ESPN’s humourously named Accuscore prediction widget, up until game time yesterday, still had the odds of San Antonio winning the series at something like 72%. The lesson? Do NOT take ESPN’s Accuscore to Vegas with you. But it kind of amazes me how “meh” the rest of the country still is about the Mavs. Don’t get me wrong. I prefer it that way. I like being the team no one cares about. I like having low expectations.

But aren’t we and the Lakers now the two Western Conference teams that got it done in five games? And didn’t the Lakers get it done against the #8 seed Jazz while we took down the San Antonio Spurs, the #3 seed? And didn’t we do it without a huge showing (until Game 5 and even then I would argue that “huge” would not be totally accurate) from our star players? Don’t we have the Sixth Man of the Year? Haven’t the Mavs gone on a 10-3 streak here at the end of the season which puts them alongside the Lakers and Cavs for that same time period? I’m just trying to figure out why the Mavs shouldn’t get a smidge more respect than they are getting. Again, I’m not complaining. I like it when the Mavs have to prove stuff.

To finally break the cycle of getting bounced from the playoffs in the first round in flagrantly embarrassing fashion seems like reward enough for me. But now I have a little bit of bloodlust and I want more. I’m not gonna lie. Denver scares the beejesus out of me. Let me rephrase that. This year and with Chauncey Billups, Denver terrifies me. In the previous two seasons, I remember going to Mavs-Nuggets games and the most entertaining things I could hope for would be a Dirk-Najera handshake or someone holding Boykins’ car keys over his head after the game was over. But now the Nuggets are good and that scares me. Which should make for good, albeit tough, basketball.

I was also astonished at how sportsmanlike and gracious both teams were after the final buzzer last night. And how very little taunting and “Suck it, Spurs!” I did last night. Even Mark and Bob commented on how friendly the atmosphere between the two teams was after the game. Which can only mean one thing. Manu Ginobli is the troublemaker. He’s the bad seed. I knew it.

Lee Greenwood Was Right. I Am Proud to Be An American.

2009-04-28T13:29:00.005-05:00

I have been accused from time to time of being an anglophile. That’s wholly inaccurate. It’s true that a lot of things that I like originate from the United Kingdom. Stephen Fry is my leader. I am pretty sure the list of things I would do to James May if allowed ten minutes in a darkened room with him would violate any and all Terms of Use of Blogspot. My entire sense of humor was formed by Black Adder and Fawlty Towers as a kid. I still find the best “Awwwwwwww, snaps!” ever uttered forth to be this exchange from QI on the subject of how beetles (sorry, bugs) were discovered to have the ability to dye food red:

Alan Davies: “Yeah, but how did they find this out. Did someone just start crushing up bugs in their food one day and….”

Stephen Fry: “I think one only has to imagine that one day one of these bugs or beetles crawls in with the maize they are pounding and suddenly they go, ‘Oh, good lord, I love this pink polenta!’”

Alan Davies: (in a Speedy Gonzales accent) “You mean, ‘I love this peeeeenk poleeeeeenta’?”

Stephen Fry: “So you’re assuming this happened after the Spanish colonization of Mexico then, are you?”

Seriously, THAT’S a zinger! But outside of Stephen Fry and James May and lunches consisting of Pimm’s Cups and those sandwiches with corn in them (I don’t know why but they’re good), I’ve been to the UK a lot and it’s not that great. The weather is fun for a day or two then it becomes a total kick to the junk. Everything is expensive. It’s actually a pretty grim place. After only a few days, I find myself missing things like sunshine and reasonably priced anything and non-chicken or kebab storefronts. Here’s what cracks me up though. The smugness of Britons about how trashy, sensationalist and tabloid-y Americans and American culture is. Pot, kettle, you’ve got a lot of mutual darkness to discuss.

Sure, America can lay claim to things like TMZ, Perez Hilton and (though we’ll split the credit/blame for this one with Australia) Fox News. And yes, American press laws allow photos of children, including the children of celebrities, to be published which only encourages ass-monkey paparazzi to chase down and scare kids to get pictures of them which they will then sell to websites who will use the pictures to evaluate whether or not that particular child is hot or not. I will give Britain credit for banning the publication or sale of photos of a celebrity’s child (or any child who is involved in a crime or trial).

But where Britain takes the high road in avoiding some celebrity trash journalism (and one might even argue that’s just down to a much smaller number of celebrities residents in Britain which, in turn, leads them to cover the WAGs of footballers), they have a sub-genre of trashy journalism that never fails to blow my mind. It’s the most manipulative, incendiary and cynical kind of journalism I know of and it happens every day in Britain. It’s the LOOK AT THESE FAT PEOPLE AND OR/IMMIGRANTS AND/OR GENERALLY LAZY PEOPLE ON BENEFITS beast and it rears its head daily in the UK papers. I suppose a comparable issue would be the illegal immigration debate here in the States but the more nationalized health care and public aid becomes in a country, the bigger the font and the larger the target of hatred becomes at those on the receiving end of such benefits.

Here’s just a few recent examples of some clearly un-sensationalized stories about families on benefits.

The one about the mother of triplets

The always restrained Daily Mail called this one “The Real Telly Tubbies”. Classy.

It’s always fun to watch the four horsemen of the trashy UK news apocalypse (The Daily Mail, The Mirror, The Sun and the News of the World) quickly look for any ties between any relevant and perhaps truthful story about suspected terrorists who bent rules or overstayed their visas (which doesn’t get the public too worked up any longer) to the much more sexy “UK TERROR SUSPECT WAS LIVING ON BENEFITS AND PLAYED NINTENDO ALL DAY WHILE YOU WERE OUT WORKING HARD TO PAY FOR HIM TO SIT BACK AND EVENTUALLY TRY TO KILL YOU WITH A BOMB!” story. Now that the boogety-boo of “war on terror” and “extremists” and all those other buzz words that will be to the 2000’s like “dial-up” and “cappuccino” was in the 90’s have lost their edge, the UK press has had to find another way to MAKE EVERYONE REALLY MAD ABOUT THIS BENEFITS THING!

Enter my absolute favorite way to kill two birds with one stone. There’s an underlying issue here which is a completely valid one. There has been an Americanization of the United Kingdom (and the world, for that matter) even in the almost 15 years since I first went to London. A huge part of that has been the explosion of McDonald’s and KFCs (Holy Baby Jesus, they love their KFCs in Britain!) and any other chain that was big enough to take a risk on expanding overseas to provide cheap, deep fried food to the jagged-toothed English masses. This is such a hot button issue with a lot of people in Britain. And it goes beyond the Super Size Me argument here in America. Let’s put it this way: I can destroy a Big Mac with my mouth. But generally I think that fast food is a horrible food option unless it’s eaten as a rare treat or a “eat or die” sort of choice. In England, it goes beyond that. It’s not just an issue of health v. convenience. It’s seen as choosing the evil, awful fat American death burger over your dependable, loving old English grandmother’s home cooking just because it’s cheap and easy. It’s the reverse Benedict Arnold. That sounds dirty. And to them, it is.

So if terrorists/immigrants are not getting the traction they used to, why not use fat people who eat at McDonald’s as the next target of benefits abuse hatred? Doesn’t that make you ANGRY, good upstanding Britons? That’s your money being spent on health costs and housing benefits for these obese people who, on top of it all, got that way not by eating the always healthy staples of the British diet such as scotch eggs and bacon butties but by eating American fast food. Doesn’t that make you livid? Come on, get that xenophobia going! Start getting that mixture of smug superiority and righteous indignation to a rolling boil! It’s these tacky, Burberry-wearing chavs who are too lazy to work and are squandering YOUR hard earned tax pounds! I mean, it was okay when they were spending it at chip shops because that’s good British lard-based fried sustenance.

It kind of makes me proud to be an American when I read these articles because it reminds me that as much as Britain may claim to have finally completed the task of shaking off the shackles of the rigid class system they clung to for so long, they have come nowhere near close to doing so. The implied meaning behind all these articles is not “we’re worried about abuses in the benefits system” but “look at these lower class people and how stupid/gross/poorly-educated/nutritionally retarded/obese/unattractive/lazy they are!” On a weekly basis, I see someone purchasing food with a Lone Star/WIC card at the grocery store and a lot of the time, it’s not the soundest of nutritional choices. It’s white bread or juice boxes or something else containing the words “high fructose” or “hydrogenated” or “enriched”. Do I get morally enraged that, not only am I helping pay for their food but that my money is going towards nutritionally unwise foods? Nope. Because I am from Georgia and there are three foods that I never went more than a day or two without eating during my childhood there: butter sandwiches on white bread, bologna sandwiches on white bread and biscuits in a bowl of buttermilk.

So keep aiming for that whole “transcending classism” thing, Great Britain. Baby steps. Tiny, obese, overfed, benefits-abusing toddler steps.