All new stuff

Welcome to the ‘10s, or something along those lines. It was a nice little break for the Christmas/New Year. Granted I didn’t take any actual time off (I’d greedily taken all my vacation already), but everyone else took time off, so that was pretty much the same as me taking time off. We got to see the Pops again. This time M managed to get front row seats on the top balcony. Having gone to the Pops for several years in a row now, we’d decided these were the best seats for the money. Way back in March or something M patiently waited for the tickets to go on sale. The day of the sale she logged on a few minutes early (just to see if she could) and bought the tickets. The scheduled time to begin didn’t seem to matter much. Fast forward to the night of the Pops the guy behind us demanded to know if we were season ticket holders. He’d tried to buy the tickets right at the designated start time and was unable to (they were sold already, sucker) and needed an explanation. I can imagine him sitting home and fuming for 9 months waiting for the day he could confront the people who got his seats. Unfortunately he was just a little guy and he ended up with 4 much bigger people sitting in front of him. Merry Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, M and I had done some last minute shopping that day in the Prudential and Copley Malls. During a lull in the shopping, I decided to stop in a jewelry store to look at a watch I’d seen in a magazine. A helpful salesman saw me enter and asked if he could help me and as confidently as I could muster, I said “do you carry the Yachtmaster II?” (I don’t know how you communicate II or III instead of 2 or 3, maybe it’s in the snobby tone) I didn’t need to say the ‘Rolex’ Yachtmaster II, for some reason he just knew what I was looking for. I flipped through The Economist a few weeks back and saw one of these for the first time and I made M take a look because I thought it was a particularly handsome watch. Now I’d done some minimal research to see if this was even a possibility, but at $30k+ this was not the case. Regardless, I gladly took hold of the shiny chunk of Swiss craftsmanship. I mentioned some of the features to show I knew what I was holding and the salesman asked if I would be talking it home today. I laughed and said he’d have to take my car in trade, to which he replied that they offered a sort of ‘sign and drive’ option for people who were expecting big bonus checks or something. Then I casually asked what he charged for the watch, and then threw out a range that I was expecting and he said I was dead on. I took his literature and went back to my shopping, telling him that I’d be back when that check arrived. An hour or so later, M arrived and I wanted to show her what I’d found. The salesman immediately recognized me and waved me right over. M was unimpressed. That was when I noticed the watch didn’t have a date feature. I don’t know what else it did, but for that much cheddar they should include a date. Earlier in the month M and I went to the New England Auto Show. While we looked seriously at cars we could ostensibly one day afford, we spent a good amount of time in the big boys toys, pretending to drive to our various vacation homes. In one such car, the Audi A8, another man was sitting in the driver seat, looking unimpressed. We chatted briefly and I informed him that I much preferred the Lexus LS and again named some things I liked about it. He said he agreed completely and offered me his card and told me to come on down for a good deal on a Lexus LS. He was a salesman and was scouting the competition. While it’s good to know that I can pull off either the “I have so much money, I dry myself in a towel made of $50s” or the “I am ridiculously irresponsible, take money I don’t have” look, I don’t know what I will do with my newfound powers. Christmas weekend was a long one, but in a good way. It was the three days of Christmas, minus the turtle doves and partridges, pear trees etc… M and I did a ton of eating (ok I did a ton of eating, M was very well behaved), including at least an entire pound of nuts (or more). We’d made 3 lbs of spiced nuts to bring to various get-togethers and I ate lots of these nuts at every event and then for days after. I know I abraded my tounge from scraping nuts residue off my teeth. It’s only now healing. We participated in a few yankee swap-type things and ended up with decent kit from these. I have to send the anonymous shout out to the saint who rescued me from the snuggie. The traditional gift giving was also a big hit. One of the more interesting gifts I received was a talking alarm clock. You say hello to the clock and it responds and then you do everything you would normally do with an alarm, but without pressing buttons, only talking. At first this seemed cumbersome and I sort of wanted the old war horse I’d had for 15 years, but now I’m loving it. It’s kind of cool to call out across the room and get the temperature or change the time. I am also now the proud owner of an espresso machine, which changes things considerably. It uses little espresso cartridges, so I am spared the grinding and packing associated with the mess and hassle of espresso machine. Now, armed with my (also new) milk frother, I can make as many triple grande lattes as I deem necessary. I’m not giving up on coffee in any way, but I think I’ll be having a few more afternoon espressos in the future. Soon I can stop shaving regularly and start wearing skinny clothing and forming opinions on everything and gesturing a lot with my hands and driving a little scooter around.

Some movies I’ve seen recently:

Public Enemies - not my favorite Michael Mann film, but very watchable. Starts kind of slow.

Avatar – See this in a 3-D Imax theater if you can. Really cool.

-Someone named Stephen Lang has a pretty significant role in both Avatar and Public Enemies. I’d never seen him before, but he’s apparently a big actor on the stage. I liked him better in PE.

Transformers 2 – This is on a lot of 10 worst lists. I disagree. Bad, but there are many worse. Picking on Michael Bay is too easy. Do some real work, critics…

District 9 – original, gritty, shocking. The more I think about this, the more I like it.

500 Days of Summer – another original, new film. I don’t think I could classify it as a comedy, but it had funny or cringe inducing moments.

Extract – Not as funny as I’d hoped. My least favorite of this bunch.

New Year’s eve was an mostly uneventful night. I avoided exploding pyrex this year, but what would New Year’s Eve be without a kitchen spectacular? This year I made a Stromboli. First, because they are delicious, and second because I made it myself and no one can tell me to save some for the guests, as had been the case many, many years ago. M and I carefully selected the ingredients, then I roasted some garlic and made a special olive oil with the garlic. Carefully I rolled out the dough and twisted up a delicious masterpiece of meats, cheeses and vegetables. Into the oven it went for a nice slow cook. After a while I started to hear some sizzling and went to investigate. A thick orange slick of grease was leaking out of one end and sizzling as it hit the oven rack, so I rotated the Stromboli to make sure that end would no longer droop. Sizzling turned out to be the least of my worries. I started to hear a new noise coming from the oven. Sort of like someone punching a pillow. When I opened the door, I saw bigger drops of grease falling directly on to the heating element and exploding into fireballs. The punching pillow sounds were grease bombs going off in the oven. Of course a huge plume of smoke came pouring out and M and I were forced to open the doors and windows into the 15 degree night. Luckily the Stromboli was not permanently injured. New year’s was not the only night of cooking disaster though. During Christmas dinner I confidently bragged that I hadn’t had a big disaster in a long time because I had such good instincts and knew how to fix most things. Cue the ticking time bomb for Sunday night… M and I decided to host some friends for dinner. We were going to make a roast beef of some kind, asparagus risotto and a banana pudding. The banana pudding was to be a copy of the magnolia bakery recipe that we’d enjoyed so much when we were in NYC. I figured it was just bananas, pudding and banana bread. M strenuously objected to this and suggested we seek a recipe out. We found one that involved mixing pudding with ice cold water and letting it sit overnight, which we did. Come next morning and we still had a giant bowl of runny muck and no pudding. After a little research we figured we could cook the pudding and that did the trick. The banana pudding turned out to be fantastic, by the way. The dinner itself left something to be desired. I defrosted a tri tip roast, which I originally purchased for the grill. And that’s where it should have stayed. This was not suitable for a slow cooker and came out like sliced roofing shingles with only slightly less flavor. This was another online recipe and I am forever swearing off recipes that do not come from trusted sources. The internet is full of talentless hacks who think they can just throw anything up there. See the previous 2 pages for proof.

Christmas Came Early

Yesterday, while M and I were fighting through the barbarian hordes at the local Target, I had a strange sense of calmness. This serenity was not brought about any new tea I had been drinking or some meditation course I started, but rather because I had a new toy that I was excited to try out. No, I didn't get that flatscreen TV, PS3, 65 Shelby Cobra or Breitling Superocean Heritage (you listening, Santa?), but rather a snow rake. What is a snow rake, you ask? It's 14 feet of telescoping mayhem, made in New Hampshire and designed to scrape the snow off your roof. We had some ice dams last year that damaged the neighbor's condo and this year I don't want any funny business. M was kind enough to call ahead to the local Home Depot and reserve one for us. I was worried that our roof was too tall to use a snow rake on. The pictures online always showed a lower roof as the example, but when we picked it up, I was not disappointed.

So that's the rake. He's pretty ferocious. I was able to scrape a good 18 inches from the gutter and not kill myself in the process. I am officially an old b*stard now that I get excited about snow removal tools.

Here's the scene that greeted us today before I went out to clean the cars. The wind whipped the snow into some crazy-type drifts on the cars. M's car had the best high top fade I'd seen since the days of Kid N Play and Big Daddy Kane.

M and I also did all the Christmas wrapping yesterday, hence the need to go to Target. We tried to cheap it up and went to a Christmas Tree Shop the night earlier and we scored a ton of wrapping paper, but it turns out what we got was not the kind that's any good for wrapping (some of it was see-through. Seriously?) and not all that useful. So we wandered off to the Target to face the folks who were either stocking up for the coming snowpocalyse or Christmas shopping laggards. We got the paper and largely survived. Damn you Christmas Tree Shops. Well, not completely - you did have one of the more magical wrapping tools ever made. I will not spoil the surprise here though. Now that I am married and have family members expanding their own families through a variety of means, my Christmas list is growing like never before. I guess this is a none-too-subtle way of saying that the days of B going crazy for his peeps are over. Lord Bountiful has too many gifts to buy. Nobody's getting scratch tickets or secondhand rollerblades, but it's good stuff nonetheless.

Everybody's got one

AN An excuse, that is. Here's a meager list of them for why I haven't been posting:

II h I haven’t been home. I now spend a lot of time in Toronto. It’s not quite as cold as I had been led to believe. There are some funny accents, but nothing worse than what I hear on the train every day when I’m home. It’s a big international city with major sports teams, world famous landmarks and a long history. But they lack a food specialty. No one has a single signature restaurant to recommend. I’ve had some over the top burgers and a solid steak or two, but that’s about it. If you’re going there, eat before you go. When I wasn’t in Toronto, I was in Peurto Rico. That was ridiculously nice. Apparently I suggested going there after M and I got back from Spain. We had been rained/snowed on for a few of the previous trips and we wanted a hot sunny place. I was going to recommend Honduras, but then they had a military coup. Mexico’s gangs were killing everyone in sight, we’d already been on a cruise, so why not a pseudo-state that used the dollar and has direct flights from Boston? A week away from work, right before the winter sets in was a great idea. Unlike Toronto, PR has plenty of national dishes. They’re all fried, come with beans, rice and plantains and are delicious. Car rentals are cheap and the cars are exceptionally crappy so you don’t have to worry about denting them. The beaches were empty to the point that if we saw another person – anywhere in eyesight – we considered moving because the beach was too crowded. I wish I didn’t sound like a giant tool there, but it’s true. San Juan has some wild folks, though. Loud, bold, gold encrusted, flag-waving, craziness. M and I boned up on our reggaeton music before we left just so we’d have a hope of fitting in. Yeahhhh right. When I wasn’t up North or down South, I was in Connecticut wooing my bride for her birthday. I remembered M enjoyed tudor-style architecture and came across a B&B in a giant old Tudor mansion. I called to make a reservation and had a little difficulty understanding the innkeeper, but I was distracted and let it slide. Then when I called to confirm I realized there was something wrong with this fella. I had a really hard time understanding him. I kept picturing a chimp attack-style disfigurement that prevented him from speaking, but I kept this fear away from M, lest she start to have doubts. I mean, an innkeeper is the perfect job for a horribly disfigured person – you’re self employed, your work comes to you, you stay inside all day. I’m not being cruel. When a relatively normal man answered the door you could have heard my relief. A speech impediment is no big deal. Missing faces, sad to say, are an impediment to romantic weekends. In addition to all this there were multiple Thanksgivings, a multi course kosher/vegetarian/gluten Halloween dinner for 12 that actually tasted good and some other good stuff that I am sure I am forgetting.

I’m scared. Look at this mask M and I got in PR:

Add this to the masks we got in Venice and you’ve got a lifetime of terror hanging on the walls of only one room.

I' I’m glad we don’t have kids yet because the therapy bills would already be running. No eyes, unchanging expressions, surreal characters. I got spooked by a few weird pictures on the wall of my grandmother’s apartment. Imagine what these will do to a 3 year old! I just might put one on and chase a youngin around if I get the chance. Put another way though, and it seems like a less murderous version of trophy hunting. Back in the day a man such as myself would have spent a vacation shooting rare animals to make ashtrays, umbrella stands, combs and brush handles from their various appendages. Then I’d hang their heads in my study and swirl brandy in a cloud of cigar smoke while the ladies retired to the conservatory to gossip. There I’d regale my male guests with how I stalked and mortally wounded the great beast and twist my moustache with delight afterwards. Ah the good old days.

I I’m too busy reading. After my post about the great book swap, I realized my hypocrisy about attending a book festival and not being in the middle of an actual book. I took the opportunity of our trip to PR to start reading again. So far it’s been ‘Stupid White Men’ by Michael Moore who happens to be one of what he describes. I’m all for making fun of Dick Cheney, but Moore is advocating borderline anarchy. ‘The Cider House Rules’ by John Irving was one I had been putting off for a while. First of all it was huge – almost 700 pages. Second of all, I still had memories of a sappy Tobey Maguire movie trailer in my head, replete with the heavy voice over and inspirational music and old-timey clothes. I couldn’t imagine this was worth 700 pages, but it was and then some. John Irving writes a damn fine book. ‘The Road’ by Cormac Macarthy was an airport purchase. Cider was getting a little low, so I needed something to top off my tank and this looked suitably short. Plus there’s the movie with Viggo Mortensen (hopefully with less of Viggo’s viggo and more apocalypse horror) out that looks interesting. En route to Boston, the boozed up bunch behind me asked what I thought of the book, which I was really enjoying. I could tell this person didn’t do a lot of book-learnin’ and was fishing for someone to commiserate on her lack o’ unnerstannin of this here book. So I hedged and asked her opinion and sure enough, she’d quit halfway though. I give her credit for trying though. In her defense it was utterly lacking in transitions, names, explanations and continuity. And there was lots of cannibalism. Maybe it was all the human-hunting that put her off? ‘The Last Don’ by Mario Puzo was really frickin good. I carried this book around everywhere I went while I was reading it. Every chance I got , I was there in Vegas comping whales or in Hollywood bedding starlets or in the Bronx giving orders to take out people in the way of the Family. It was all old-school with that vaguely inappropriate accent that old guys speak with. You know, the one where you know they’re capable of saying something so outrageous and politically incorrect that you almost goad them into it because they grew up in another era and can’t help it, just so you can hear how the olden days were.

G G.I. Joe ate my brain. My god was this movie horrible. I love bad action movies. Transformers gave me goose bumps. Armageddon makes me cry. Fast and Furious and XXX made Vin Diesel a legitimate actor in my eyes. But G.I. Joe was just an inexcusable steaming pile of crap. I just deleted 15 sentences I wrote about everything I found wrong with it. Let’s just say I was embarrassed to be seen watching it. ‘The Cooler’ on the other hand was pretty slick. Alec Baldwin needs to be in more stuff. I was sad to see he ‘retired’ this week. Let’s hope this is a boxing champ style retirement and not a real retirement. I can’t get enough of Alec Baldwin making threats in his best monologue snarl. Good stuff. Maria Bello on the other hand – yikes. Between ‘A History of Violence’ and ‘The Cooler’ she’s got a solid 5 minutes of screen time of almost hard-core nudey footage going on. These flicks need a warning on them. Wait.. they do. I just ignore them. Maybe I shouldn’t be watching on the train… ‘House of Games’ – David Mamet’s directorial debut. The man can write the crap out of a screenplay, but this directorial effort was a little shaky. I think it was the actresses’ fault because I haven’t seen her in anything before or since. Big props for young Joe Mantegna and JT Walsh as con men. Since his death a while back, I had forgotten J.T. Walsh died in almost every movie he’s been in, but you can check it out. He’s one of those actors who dies in every movie he’s cast in. Gary Busey is another. Unfortunately neither of them makes movies anymore so we are denied this thrill. ‘Blood Simple’ is the scarily enjoyable original Coen Brothers’ film. These two are in my top 3 favorite director list, along with Michael Mann and Martin Scorcese and this film has all their hallmarks.

I’ve been searching for music. No Kanye this time. Have you ever been watching something and heard a cool snippet of something and wished you knew what it was. I know there’s an ‘app for that’, but how often do you have your Iphone open and ready to fire up that app that tracks down music for you? That’s insane. By the time the stupid phone decides it wants to open and launch your app, that song will be long gone. I was watching Bad Boys 2 the other day and there’s a song that gets played every time Johnny Tapia comes on the screen. It’s not quite Crockett’s Theme, but it’s close. It’s a sort of reggaeton/cubano hip-hop jam. But I don’t speak Spanish so I have no idea what they’re saying. It’s not on the soundtrack, because the good music is rarely on the official soundtrack. I had to scour Youtube looking for the scene and fortunately there’s a whole world of people who agree at the swaggertasticness of this bit of music. Of course ITunes doesn’t have it. If I wanted to download the latest Creed crap I’m sure they’d have it, but I think the last 5 times I went to ITunes looking for something they had it twice and flawlessly let me down the other 3. Not to be outdone, I scoured the flearidden underbelly of the series of tubes and found it. No pirate bay or bittorrent though. All legit here.

200

According to the nattily attired center panelist at the ‘Thrillers and Killers’ discussion, somewhere around 200 people make a full time living as writers of novels. 200! In the united States, that’s less than a 1 in a million shot. It’s one of those figures that sounds so incredible that it must be true. He didn’t back it up with anything approaching fact or citation, but it passes my sniff test. I am somewhat acquainted with a man who has published several books. One was even turned into a major motion picture. He does not smoke cigars on his yacht in St Tropez. He works a regular job and this book thing probably gets him a nice check every once in a while. By the way ‘Thrillers and Killers’ was a session at the 1^st Annual Boston Book Festival that M and I attended last weekend. This particular gathering matched spy/thriller novelists with a terrorism expert from Harvard. M and I went to a few other sessions, which were overwhelmingly crowded. Maybe it was rain, maybe Boston is a book-learnin type of place. I know I saw a Ken Burns groupie or two (we missed his talk due to overwhelming crowds). The sessions all had their own themes, but for the most part it seemed like the discussion always went back to what it was like to be a writer and to describe each particular writers’ creative process. It seems that professional writing is not an easy thing, despite what I had secretly, deep down believed. I was a somewhat talented ‘english person’ back in the day. I went to schools where teachers saw I could read harder books and they sent me to the big kids’ section on the library. I read a lot of challenging books and I think I did a decent job of regurgitating what I read. Book reports were never something I dreaded. I was given much praise and encouragement (not from 10^th grade Mr. McCarthy though) and the cycle repeated itself. I got nice standardized test scores, got the awards, etc, and off to college I went. In hindsight choosing majors and classes by what time they were scheduled was probably not the best path, but it worked. I took a lot more English classes, albeit of the analytical, not the creative variety. Lots of poetry and dusty Milton ensued. Graduation approached and various older people started asking me if I was going to be an English teacher when school was over. Hell no, I was going to be an investment banker! (I think I covered this somewhere else). Or at least get something to pay the bills while I wrote by manuscript/novel/manifesto. I knew a movie script was 120 pages long – how hard could that be? I made a few hesitant stabs at it and realized I have no mind for dialogue. There’s something else I have no appetite for – revisions. Mr. McCarthy had a real thing for rewrites. He never graded a paper the first time it was turned in. He’d make some notes, hand it back and give you a second chance. What? No way was I doing that again! My first shot was good enough. So I’d hand that sucker right back at him and take my grade. The twist was that you could do this indefinitely. If you didn’t like your C, you could keep rewriting it until it was an A. I couldn’t be bothered. Apparently rewrites and revisions are quite commonplace in the professional writing world. After I’d write a few scenes down, I’d take a look at them and realize how bad they were, but the idea of re-doing all that work was too much. Maybe movies weren’t for me. Books are where I’ll make my fortune. I’m constantly eavesdropping on people, analyzing their situation, noticing interactions – all . with a running dialogue in my mind, connecting them in a grand plot or saving good interactions for scenes the next day or whenever I feel like it. Writing a book would be easy. Or at least, writing a few good scenes would be easy. Once I got a some killer scenes, the plot would take care of itself. I tried that – there are more than a few aborted novels filled with ultra macho action and violence tucked away on every laptop I’ve ever handed over to the IT guys. I really don’t care if anyone reads them. I usually run out of steam after the first 800 words or so. Then the idea of re-writing it? No freakin way. You may notice how long some of these blog posts are and realize they are way past 800 words – that’s dumb luck. And while I may rewrite a sentence or two or change a word, there is consistently zero rewriting done. So back to the 200. Who are these people? I saw three of them on this panel. One of them was a Yale law Professor – sounded like he had a decent day job. One had been recruited to work at the CIA at a young age but realized it wasn’t all spies and guns. The third guy, spouting statistics, seemed to be the only ‘normal’ guy, i.e. not already endowed with super skills/intelligence/determination that would correspond well to crafting a page-turning novel. Dan Brown? John Grisham? Dean Koontz? I know I make fun of these guys, but if that 200 number is correct, these guys are more obscure talents than professional basketball players. They’re rarer than billionaires (and if you’re JK Rowling, you’re both). Luck seems to have little to do with this. I’ve read business case studies that analyzed thousands of years of man-days worked by all sorts of business executives. These studies then asked the executives why they made certain decisions and what resulted from these. The end result was basically luck. You can’t ask someone who flipped a coin on heads 10 times in a row how they did it, nor, so it seems, can you ask many executives what the secret to their success is, since it’s all conjecture and mostly luck. None of the authors had similar stories. Some outlined their arcs, others waded in with the writing. It seems the secret to writing a bestselling novel is to somehow capture the attention of a good agent and editor and publisher who can then propel your book to the most shelves and hope lots of people buy them. Of course the internet makes this all the more difficult. Anyone can publish a book these days. Anyone can fling opinions around in an article and get noticed. Very few get paid and ever fewer make all their money from it. I wonder if this 200 ever get together like the Spartans from 300 and howl and chant to fire themselves up and revel in their virtuosity. That’s probably what these book fairs are, actually. Get a bunch of authors together, let them measure each other up and decide who’s got the most best sellers, who’s a hack, who’s a genius. Wave around a few glasses of Cabernet and quote philosophers and try to look profound. Sounds like fun. Doesn’t mean I don’t have a novel in me, but it definitely means I can’t quit my day job.

slacker

Wow. What a slacker. This guy needs to update his blog soon or people will forget he's there.. Yes I am aware. I'll get something posted here soon.

How low can you go?

Back in the day there was a time when I was known to pull off some pretty low moves when I had a lot of free time to myself? Eat mac n cheese for breakfast out of the pot, wearing boxers, sitting on the couch? Check. Stay up all night playing Grand Theft Auto and go to work the next day? Check. Spend an entire day in a movie theater, watching back to back to back movies? Check. Last night, however, was a new low. M was out of town for a bachelorette party. I had tried to play golf earlier in the day and got kicked off the course because it was raining too much (I got a rain check). Wet and bored, I went up to visit brother M and his wife M and baby A. The in-laws were visiting and I was more of an intruder, but it was good to see everyone. Mainly I was trying to kill some time before 8:30, which was the kickoff of the USC/Ohio State game. I like the pro game a little more, but it’s a narrow gap. The energy of the college game is better and the better athletes stand out more, so you see more exciting plays. This was supposed to be a big one. On my way home, I listened to the thrilling Michigan/Notre Dame finish. Once home, I burst through the door, made myself a decent dinner (no mac n cheese in a pot) and headed upstairs to settle in. I started flipping through the channels and started to get a little nervous. No pre-game shows, no recaps of the days games. There was plenty of crap though. Simpsons reruns, Jeopardy, Access Hollywood and The Insider. Ok, maybe it’s on at 8, I thought. 8 came and went and the shows changed, but not for the better. Now I had ‘Law and Order: SVU’ (law and order is still on?), COPS (normally this would be fine, but I’d been waiting to see this game all day), Women’s Tennis (this turned out to be pretty exciting, as I just found out) and Nascar. I’m not going to go on a Nascar tirade here. I sort of like Nascar, It’s somewhere between hockey and basketball but below football, MMA and baseball in my decision tree of ‘will I watch this random sporting event?’. However, on this occasion, it filled me more or less with rage. Golf and Nascar have seasons that are WAAAAY too long, stretching from February-November, ending with interminable and mind boggling points/playoff/shootout (i.e. we can’t have a tournament, so we invented this to artificially generate excitement and try to have a champion of sorts). So this time of year is filled with pseudo-important events that everyone knows don’t mean anything, except to the sponsors who got duped into paying huge amounts of money on the premise that if you tell someone this is important, they will believe it (sorry that was sort of a rant). So there was a race on instead. That would only mean that the football game was on ESPN (the race was on ABC, parent of ESPN – if it weren’t on ESPN, then NBC and CBS should be fired for ignoring this game). This posed a problem – I don’t have cable. No worries, I’ll see if it’s online. It was on something called ESPN 360 – all I had to do was plug in some information about my ISP and we’d be good to go. Except my world-loser cable/isp company doesn’t get along ESPN. So no dice there. I tried telling ESPN 360 that I had a different ISP – no luck. It ws almost 8:30, I could see updates from the game as they were happening online. This was definitely not good. Then I remembered that we sort of get VH-1. I knew my TV had some tuning capabilities, so I looked up what channel ESPN was and went there – static. But I started playing with the tuner and I sort of got a signal I could see the score at the bottom, I could see players when the camera went close up, but the screen was really washed out and the sound was unbearable. Brent Musberger’s dulcet tones were scrambled like he’s been smoking Pall Malls for the last 60 years. Then things got really dark. No, literally. I turned off the lights. Maybe if it were darker, the contrast of the scrambled static with the dark room would make things stand out more. Sitting in a dark room, by myself, watching a static filled screen and believing I was seeing things… I think they made a movie about this. The irony and patheticness of the situation was not lost on me. Hey, at least I had clothes on. There was a time when I figured out that if you flipped back and forth fast enough between certain channels on the cable box, you could get the box to freeze for a few minutes and you’d get a salacious, albeit muted and somewhat shaky piece of cinematography that was particularly interesting to the teenage male, but I digress. Sitting watching static was not a noble end to a day that had thus far been relatively disappointing. I hadn’t really explored the online solution to this adequately. I know that you really can get anything you want online, provided you know where to look. It only took me a few minutes but sure enough, by 8:50, I was watching an ESPN HD broadcast from the LA area on my laptop, wirelessly, lounging on my couch. EPIC EPIC EPIC WIN. So much winsauce I was bouncing like a kid on Christmas. There I sat, until midnight, hoping the stream didn’t go down. I saw all the big plays, all the highlights. I love the internet. Last night, in my mind, the full potential of the internet was realized. Thank you DARPA nerds, thank you Al Gore, thank you anarchist hacker/freedom fight , whoever you are. And yes, it’s 10:50 and I’ve been watching ESPN’s Sunday football broadcast for an hour already. Life is good.

The Red Whale

Add this to the list of things I didn't know I wanted until I had it. M and I found this creature down in Hyannis this weekend. That's a Queen-size headboard beneath him, so he's not small. I think he's supposed to hang as a sign or weathervane. For now he's in the bedroom.

Fantasy (and real) football season is here. My teams are drafted. Now all that's left is to wait for the money to flow in. I'll spare you any long winded analysis. All I can say is that I'm excited.

The big thing bothering me today is my alarming proclivity towards fantastically crappy music. It seems that almost every time I hear a song and think "hey, this is different, I kind of like it" and then proceed to look it up, it's by someone I can't stand or admit to liking. Case in point Kanye West and Miley Cyrus. I've fallen so low as to purchase two Kanye songs on itunes, affirming his BS and giving him my hard earned cash. 32 year old men do not buy Miley Cyrus songs though. I will have to stick to Youtube for while until the songs are no longer interesting to me.