The world has moved on.

This content will remain here for posterity, but from here on out everything new is going to be at:

http://whatsthatedgar.wordpress.com

Hope to see you there.

JLK

Employed? Is this a... what day is it?

So, here I am on a Monday, and for the first time in four years I'm not trying to wrangle up a weekly website/e-mail update or thinking about trivia questions or speed rounds or anything like that. It's a strange feeling, one both pleasant and unsettling at the same time. It will take some getting used to.

A couple people have very kindly said that they will miss reading my insane ramblings on Mondays, and to those people: thanks. That's really very gratifying. I'm glad you enjoyed reading them; for the most part I enjoyed writing them. To answer the question posed by some of those same people, and a few others: though it is exceedingly unlikely I will continue to update this place every Monday, I intend to have some sort of web-writer-ish-presence going forward.

This place will change, obviously. The title needs to get fixed, and the sidebar items need to reflect the fact that I am no longer in the trivia business. There is a growing part of me that wants to migrate this entire thing over to WordPress, which in my limited noodlings I have found interesting. Those changes will roll out of here over time, and as they happen you will be sure to know about it.

For those who simply cannot bear to go completely without the written-word insanity I am psuedo-famous for, here's a little tidbit - a tease, if you will - from what I'm working on now:

"We have more than a dozen titles on general automobile repair, a complete set of service books for the Chevrolet 2005 model year, an entire shelf on the maintenance and repair of heating and air conditioning systems, two antique hardbacks on grandfather clock design written in German and a Star Trek technical manual, but to date we have not found anything pertaining to the upkeep of analog weather forecasting equipment."

JLK

Your Last Quizo Update

Well, folks, after just under four years and 180 games I have come to the end of the Quizo-hosting road.

I realized yesterday that I started this gig around the same time that Battlestar Galactica came on, so ending it the same time the show goes off is a nice sort of symmetry reminiscent of a classic Greek drama or, well, Battlestar Galactica.

(By the by, if you weren't deeply moved by the Galactica finale, I'm sorry, but you're doing it wrong.)

Four years ago I heard the Dark Horse was trying to start up a Quizo game. One Saturday morning I was there watching Chelsea and I said to James, one of the owners, "hey, I hear you're looking to have Quizo." I just wanted to know what night it was going to be.

James instantly responded, "do you wanna do it?"

I said, "yeah, sure" just as quickly.

That's how all this started. The entire exchange took less than a second.

I'll tell you what, back then I didn't think this thing would last four weeks, much four years. That first night I think we had five teams. Even though their house was robbed that day - seriously, the place got broken into, stuff was stolen, the police were called, the whole shebang - my parents came down to play. Their team name was "We Wuz Robbed." Some of the other players on my Quizo team from The Bard's, Stupid Sexy Flanders, also showed up. The other three teams were poor random saps sitting at the bar that I pressganged into playing. I certainly had no idea what I was doing. The entire game, all four rounds, took less than 45 minutes; I was so nervous I just blazed through the entire thing like I was The Flash. Those first couple weeks were pretty dire. We hovered in the two or three team range for weeks.

Then, after maybe a month, something just... happened. To this day I don't know what brought it on, but people just started showing up. Whole bunches of people. Suddenly we had regular teams: the Darg Whores, the De-SEPTA-Cons, and what is still my favorite team name of all time, Suck it Trebek. When Dr. Dan from Suck It Trebek (which would later morph into Das Boot) and Marty from the Darg Whores asked me if I could make up a special Lord of the Rings trivia round so they could determine which of them was a bigger Tolkein nerd - I am not making this up, this actually happened - and the De-SEPTA-Cons asked if they could play in it too, I knew we had something pretty cool going.

In four years of doing this I have witnessed an actual fistfight over shouted-out answers, quit smoking four times and restarted smoking three times, crowned two Quizo Tournament Champions, grumbled every Monday afternoon about "making the Quizo," and, most awesomely, seen three marriages between Quizo teammates. That last bit, especially, is just about the greatest freaking thing ever.

I hope to see most of you tonight (get there early!) because I am going to try and make my last Quizo one for the ages. If I don't see you, let me just say that it has been an absolute blast and I hope you had as much fun as I did.

Thanks for a great time, everyone. See you on the other side.

JLK

The End of the Line

For those who weren't at the bar last night, I made the unfortunate announcement that after four fantastic years next Monday (the 23rd) is going to be my last Quizo at the Dark Horse. Between my job and going to class at night and my wretched human body's need to spend one-third of its existence sleeping, time and circumstance have conspired against me. Something had to give and unfortunately that something was doing Quizo.

I hope a lot of you can make it on Monday for one last hurrah. See you then.

JLK

Your Pyrrhic Victories Quizo Update

It's tournament time, folks, and I'm sort of going back to my old ways. We all remember how I single-handedly caused Kansas to finally win the tournament last year through the judicious application of not doing a bracket and wearing the same t-shirt every time they played, but I figure that won't work twice. This year, then, I'm back with brackets and all that junk. I will bet money on Kansas, I will lose money on Kansas, and all shall once again be right with the world. Unlike last year, when for my money only maybe 3 teams had legitimate shots at winning, this year's tournament field looks a hell of a lot more wide-open. My earliest rough guess would say that any one of 9 or maybe 10 teams have a totally reasonable chance. Kansas unfortunately is not one of them, but as they say in French, c'est la vie.

All is not wine and roses in March Madness land, however.

A friend of mine got tickets to the first two rounds at Wachovia this weekend, and I'm trading him one of my US Open tickets for one of his tournament tickets. So that's, you know, pretty awesome, right? Going to the fucking tournament. March Madness in person! Rock and roll, right?

Wrong.

Because the NCAA are an organization so thoroughly venal and corrupt that they make Italian football look like the George Washington Appreciation Society, Villanova - who while talented are quite possibly the most overrated program in basketball - got a 3 seed and will play their first (and presumably second) tournament game at the Wachovia. So aside from the fact that the selection committee has ridiculously handed Villanova quite literally two HOME GAMES (Nova plays a couple games a year at Wachovia), I now find myself in a situation where I have paid money to watch Villanova play basketball against a team that is not LaSalle.

This is not a tenable position. I mean, it's not as bad as it might have been if, like, it ws St. Joe's playing a tournament game here. I'd probably have to legitimately kill myself in that case (or, more likely, someone else), but the fact that St. Joe's sucks has obviated that this year. Still, going to watch Villanova? On purpose? It's a good thing I normally shower three times a day already.

In other sports news, I caught a good chunk of the CA Championship yesterday where - and even I have a hard time believing this one - Phil Mickelson, Chokey McChokerson himself, couldn't even live up to the cruel nickname that I gave him because I hate him so, so much. Take, for instance, the 12th hole. Phil shanks his drive so far to the right that his ball stops under this hideous spiked little bush that looks like the mutant offspring of a palm tree and a pineapple. Phil, who I learned is right-handed and golf is the only thing he does left-handed, I guess because he's an even more gigantic douchebag than I originally thought, has to hit the ball with his club backwards because the bush-monster is where he would normally stand. Phil manages to whack that ball about 20 yards before it hits a tree and lands in the rough. He hits his third into a greenside bunker.

I saw that and said, "oh, baby, the choke is on."

Baron von Chokenstein remarkably only bogeyed that hole, and then rattled off a string of pars that would, eventually win the tournament. I watched this dumbfounded.

Motherfucker can't even CHOKE right. He choked on his choke. That is so freaking meta that if someone I didn't want to be crushed by a falling space station did it I would actually be impressed.

Also, finally, there will be an important Quizo-based announcement tonight, so be sure to stick around for that.

JLK

Your "Who Watches the Watchmen?" Quizo Update

I saw Watchmen this weekend, and I've got to be honest: I kinda wish I hadn't.

Now don't misunderstand this as some sort of misplaced nerd rage at the thought of someone making alterations to my beloved Watchmen. It's not particularly my beloved Watchmen to begin with.  The comic book cognoscenti (if such things can be said to exist) have long since anointed the original The Official Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, and I've never much agreed with that point in the first place (also I don't see what's so great about sliced bread). While I can certainly see and admire the skill with which it was crafted I can easily think of about two dozen comics I would rather read than Watchmen.

If you aren't of a particularly comic-booky stripe, look at it this way: anyone who talks about how much they love Watchmen, like really LOVE it, should be greeted with the same wary circumspection as someone who talks about how much they love, like really LOVE, the collected works of William Faulkner or Stanley Kubrick; i.e. as a preening, self-important intellectual jerkoff. The former because Alan Moore makes William Faulkner's lifelong attempt to create dense and impenetrable literature look like a Mister Rogers lesson about the joys of sharing, and the latter because Watchmen in particular is a quintessentially Kubrickian work, a piece of literature that is so far detached from human emotion you wonder if its creator actually possesses any. Watchmen is a comic book about comic books, as skillful a bit of deconstruction as you will find outside of Derrida himself, and anyone who professes to "LOVE" something like that is not to be trusted, for they have clockwork where their heart should be and a soul emptier than the vast reaches of outer space.

But we're not talking about my problems with the original or how much I hate a certain woman I briefly had a thing with years ago.

Actually, in terms of the film's direct relationship to the book –i.e. the script – I was very pleasantly surprised. I thought the cut was excellent; I never sat there wondering why a certain scene was missing or why certain other scenes were shuffled about in the way they were. Alex Tse and Solid Snake did, frankly, an excellent job taking an extraordinarily long and complex book and translating it into a coherent story of movie length, even if it was a little overlong. That's okay, we endorse long movies (c.f. places in the All-Time Top Five for Gladiator, The English Patient, and Lord of the Rings). No, there is no quibble to be had as regards the script.

In fact, and I said this coming out of the theatre, the things the movie gets right it gets exceptionally right. The Comedian, Rorshach, Nite Owl, Dr. Manhattan: all dead solid perfect, both in casting and performance. They are great. They are super-great. (Well, they only got Dr. Manhattan half perfect, a little bit on that later.) The "look" of the film is also exactly right; though the movie's apparent need to exactly replicate certain panels from the book becomes increasingly annoying (especially after, like, the HUNDREDTH TIME) it does an excellent job rendering the world Dave Gibbons painstakingly created. And the change made to the ending, which out of a spoiler sense I will not reveal, is fantastic. Really, it's the best thing in the movie. The original ending to the book is INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID and the way the movie changes it is better (and improves the overall story) in about ten thousand different ways.

However, while the movie gets the right stuff very right, unfortunately, the things it gets wrong it gets REALLY fucking wrong, and those things vastly outnumber the things it gets right.

The wrong things in the movie are, to an extent, a death by a thousand cuts, but there are three that pretty much define it:

First: Dr. Manhattan looks stupid. I mean the EFFECT looks stupid, which is frankly amazing. Spend the fucking money, for god's sake. The most important character in your movie looks like he stepped out of a Playstation 2 game. In a world where we had Gollum seven years ago there is absolutely no excuse for this.

Second: bad casting will quickly ruin your day. I can almost forgive casting Malin Akerman (ALMOST). Laurie doesn't do a whole lot other than bitch about Dr. Manhattan and get her kit off anyway, and if that's your game, well, Malin Akerman is a good choice (for the getting her kit off part, at least). You can learn to grit your teeth and get through the parts when she talks. However, when your main villain, your antagonist, your Blofeld, your Colonel Kurtz, your Hannibal Lecter, is not only terribly portrayed (complete with wandering accent!) but is actually wimpy and slight and effeminate, your movie is undermined beyond a recoverable point. Imagine if you were watching Star Wars and Darth Vader suddenly turned into a prissy, whiny little bitch. All right, fine, imagine Lucas didn't already fucking DO that, and now imagine he was like that from the start. Would you think Star Wars was that great anymore? Of course you wouldn't. The lessons are, respectively: actresses famous for getting naked aren't usually that good (bar Kate Winslet, of course), and just hire Jude Law already.

Third: Zack Snyder is an idiot man-child. I have gone on at length about the complexity of the source material, and suffice it to say that Snyder may not be the best person to shepherd difficult material through the filmmaking process as he seems to believe that film is not so much an entertainment medium as it is a way to physically assault the audience. Snyder's sensibilities (such as they are) are actually very well suited to something like 300, where both book and movie basically boil down to "KILL THAT FUCKING GUY RIGHT NOW! Okay, you're done? Good. Now KILL THAT OTHER FUCKING GUY RIGHT NOW!" If you're Zack Snyder that kind of material is right up your loud, obvious, subtlety of a 20-pound-sledgehammer, did I mention loud and obvious alley.

If that's what's up your alley, however, an intricate examination of Cold War socio-political theory, the essential nature of morality, and the insidious ways in which power corrupts may not be the movie you should be making. So instead of a complex and thoughtful adaptation of a complex and thoughtful book we get a movie whose narrative plunges forward so fast it blows past itself then comes to a dead screeching halt, all the while covering up the action with songs that are either wildly inappropriate or painfully clichéd, and are all excessively loud, and goes on to repeat that cycle for THREE GODDAMN HOURS.

(Here's a hint, Zack: when your movie is already pushing the 150-minute mark, slow motion is NOT YOUR FRIEND. Seriously, fucking stop with the slow motion. Christ.)

After the movie I was trying to think of another example of such a legitimately great book that got turned into such a terrible movie, and at the time I couldn't come up with anything. The next day my father suggested Starship Troopers and Dune, and they're good examples of that specifically. (I am open to more suggestions, by the way.) Thing is, though, they aren't as disappointing as Watchmen because, unlike Watchmen, they have zero redeeming value. Every single aspect of them is completely and utterly terrible.

At the end of the day the real shame of Watchmen is not that it's dreadful – because, oh sweet zombie Jesus it is buckets of dreadful – but that with literally three personnel changes the movie could have been fantastic. Get yourself Jude Law, get a director who can do big stupid action stuff AND at least look up the word "nuance" in the dictionary, someone like Chris Nolan or Gore Verbinksi or Paul Greengrass or SOMEONE, and hire an actress who can both act AND look good naked, throw them in with everyone and everything else you've already got and BANG! You have your next Dark Knight. You have a legitimately outstanding movie.

The shame of it is that this thing, this wretched, misbegotten, twelve-fingered bastard of a movie is now and forever THE cinematic version of Watchmen, and it could have been so much better.

JLK

Your Snow Day No Quizo Update

Well, look at it this way, now you have an extra week to get ready to prevent Alias Pseudonym Undercover's three-peat.

JLK

Your Broken Promises Quizo Update

Some of you may recall that I was a little peeved when the Academy Award nominations came out this year. The snubs of The Dark Knight, Revolutionary Road, and Bruce Springsteen seemed like they were pointed at me personally. The Dark Knight and Bruce are understandable enough (I am me, after all), but I feel it is important to note here that when I am sitting here saying that Revolutionary Road – a movie I didn't like very much, based on a book I like even less, directed by a man I want to murder so I can steal his wife – should have been recognized, it's a fair bet to say that it is pretty freaking good and that given these slights the Motion Picture Academy's status as a barometer of quality is, at the very least, questionable.

My idea, then, was to stage my own one-man boycott of the Oscars. In a great fit of pique I came up with a plan to watch The Dark Knight during the telecast, thus giving my pathetic little protest some ironic heft. I am not a Nielsen family, of course, so my protest would be unrecognized, unrecorded and largely meaningless, but there are times when it is important to do the right thing whether it will be recognized or not. This was not one of those times. There is, however, value yet in adhering strictly to one's principles, even if your principles are idiotic and that value is nothing more than getting to tell everyone about it after the fact.

So last night I sat there, not watching the Academy Awards for the first time since I was ten years old. I thought, this will be nice. I can make some headway into one of the four books I'm reading. Maybe play a game. Organize my shelves. I'll get to bed early. This will work out nicely for everyone.

I am proud to say that I managed to successfully not watch the Oscars for almost a full ninety seconds before the compulsive part of my brain said, "hm, yes, excuse us, we really do admire your courage and tenacity and how astoundingly principled you are and all that, but if you don't turn on that Oscar show right this fucking second we're going to hop on the next train to Nervous Breakdown City."

I said, "okay, now, see here, I promised myself – "

"ALL ABOARD!" the compulsions said.

I muttered, "fine," and turned it on just in time to see Hugh Jackman start his bit.

As I watched him do his first number my brain said, apologetically, "you didn't really want to watch The Dark Knight again anyway." And that's true, I didn't really. While I can think of faster ways to commit suicide than watching The Dark Knight over and over again I cannot come up with any that are quite as painful. Spending three-plus hours watching an Academy Awards that have all but publically admitted they bear no meaningful relationship to popularity OR quality is, in the end, preferable to spending that same three hours watching The Dark Knight, which I am now fairly certain is the real-world equivalent of Snow Crash, a multimedia virus that worms its way into your brain and turns your synapses to mush.

During the first commercial break I actually picked up the Dark Knight DVD and, in a Schindler's-List-Brokeback-Mountain moment, stared at it and said out loud to myself, "why did I BUY this?" The more I think about it the more I can't help but conclude that I could have spent that twenty dollars on something that actually makes me HAPPY. True, with alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes off the shopping list and gas prices climbing again twenty bucks doesn't buy me as much happiness as it used to, but at least we can be sure that unless I had spent that money on bootleg DVDs of the complete filmography of Joss Whedon I wouldn't want to kill myself quite so much after watching whatever I bought with it.

Two important things to note here: a) Microsoft doesn't recognize "filmography" as a word, which is stupid because it totally is, and b) do not worry about looking up stuff about Joss Whedon in the expectation I will ask questions about him tonight. I will not. Though now that I think about it a "list ten Joss Whedon lines that make you want to stab paring knives into your brain in the vain hope that it will make you un-hear them" speed round has a certain poetic beauty to it.

Oh, and, Kate: congratulations on finally winning. We are all very proud of you. Don't you think your husband looks incredibly gay with that beard? I'm just saying. Something to think about.

JLK

Your Long Drives Quizo Update

I have mentioned in the past that I listen to NPR. That fact is a little weird even to me, but then again a lot of things are weird to me that the rest of the human race finds perfectly normal.

My being an NPR listener is more an accident of geography than politics. I’ve heard it said that the target audience for NPR is over-educated liberals, to which I would respond that if you are someone who believes that a person can be “over-educated” please identify yourself so that I can beat you to death with a Louisville Slugger and then hang your jellied corpse from a telephone pole with a sign that says “this is what we do to people who disdain knowledge.” Seriously, motherfucker, I am the child of schoolteachers and I will kill you with a bat.

Anyway, where was I? Ah, right, NPR. So, yes, the reason I listen to NPR is neither because I am a liberal (my politics are, most of the time, in a scary place well past liberal) nor because I am approximately 140,000 times smarter than the rest of the population. It is also not a consequence of my deep, abiding humility.

No, honestly, I listen to NPR because years ago I had a job that required me to commute every day from Northeast Philadelphia to a small town called Livingston, NJ. Livingston is about 20 miles west of Newark and as near as I could figure the only things in the whole town were a Borders, a Best Buy (where I bought, oh God, Star Wars Galaxies) and my office. Back in the pre-iPod era I drove up there every day for four months, and between Exit 6 and Exit 10 the radio landscape is a vast wasteland. The only thing I could pick up on my car radio at the time was an NPR station out of somewhere in North Jersey. It was on that commute that I got hooked on the BBC specifically; the World Service’s unique blend of information and condescension is the closest thing to me being on the radio since… well, since I was on the radio in college. So ever since then I’ve tended to listen to NPR in the car and, interestingly, almost nowhere else. It’s more than just a habit/compulsion anymore. There are things on there I legitimately enjoy – the wicked, black humor of the Marketplace Morning Report is a personal favorite – but I’m not going to lie to you, there are a couple things about NPR that absolutely annoy the hell out of me.

First and foremost, as I have mentioned in the past, is the traffic report. The traffic report on NPR isn’t useless. It transcends useless. Compared to the traffic report on NPR, useless is something so incredibly useful you can’t possibly live without it. The sheer paucity of useful information in the traffic report used to make me wonder why they even bothered until one day, as I sat in a gigantic traffic jam on I-95 that went completely unmentioned by NPR, I became convinced that the NPR traffic report exists solely so, like, one guy who lives in a rotating series of homes in the hinterland suburbs can get to and from work at WHYY.

This morning, on the way to work, the 7:30 traffic report, I swear to God and the man Jesus presented here verbatim and in its entirety, was: “there is an accident at the intersection of County Line Road and Cherry Lane. Everything else is fine.”

You’ve gotta be fucking KIDDING me.

Now, thanks to another very long drive I used to make regularly – from Northeast Philadelphia to Lehigh University for the year and a half I went there – I know that the intersection of County Line and Cherry Lane is in FUCKING SOUDERTON. If you don’t know where that is – and for reasons I will detail in a few seconds it is perfectly understandable if you don’t – Souderton, in addition to being the hometown of Jamie Moyer, is thirty-eight miles from the Dark Horse. THIRTY-EIGHT MILES! To give you some perspective, you know what else is 40 miles from the Dark Horse? The dead-smack-middle of the Pine Barrens. Do you care about the traffic out there? Can you even name a ROAD out there? I can, but once again that’s an area I’ve driven through about 9000 times in my life to and from the shore. No normal person listening to a Philadelphia radio station cares about traffic 40 miles away, at least not to the exclusion of all other traffic in an area of approximately FOUR THOUSAND, FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX SQUARE MILES.

Worse yet, when you add the cheeky little tag of “everything else is fine” – so painfully obvious a lie that George W. Bush himself could not sell it successfully – those 18 words evolve beyond uselessness into a mind-shattering horror of Lovecraftian proportions. It is not so much a traffic report as it is Cthulhu himself snaking one of his slimy tentacles through the airwaves and rending your brain into jabbering insanity.

It has been my direct experience that the traffic report is the only portion of NPR that relays blatant factual inaccuracies at every opportunity. The actual informational content of the reportage gets no complaint from me. After all, where else am I going to get a seven-minute shame-spiral on just WHY my health care is so much more expensive than, you know, every other major industrialized nation on every planet within 500 light years of here? No, I have no issue with the fascinating and depressing things I learn from NPR every day.

I DO have an issue, however, with the fact that NPR stories do not appear to be edited by anyone with any kind of remotely advanced training in English composition. I know this person does not exist because if they did, the rough draft of 9 out of 10 NPR news stories would be sent back to the reporters and producers with “WORD CHOICE, FOR GOD’S SAKE WORD CHOICE” scrawled across them in the editor’s blood.

I freely admit this is something I am obsessive about beyond a useful or even rational point, but it nonetheless still drives me up a wall. This morning, at one point, when I heard the NPR news anchor refer to the Gettysburg Address as one of the “most iconic speeches in American history” I literally shouted at my empty car “YOU CANNOT USE THE WORD ‘ICONIC’ THERE!” I know what he meant, of course. But that’s not what he SAID. “Iconic” is the 100%, absotively-posilutely ass-wrong word to use there. It is a visual descriptor. It is an adjective that describes how things LOOK. A speech cannot be iconic for the same reason that Starry Night cannot be ear-splitting. The English language DOES NOT FUCKING WELL WORK THAT WAY.

A little later one reporter was talking about “the rhythm of the evening meal” and I wanted to stab something, not because the word doesn’t mean that but because it’s just WRONG. It is an excessively-prosaic choice when you are talking about, as they were at the time, an epidemic of childhood obesity. Yeah, when I’m trying to convey the importance of a public health issue I want to talk about the “rhythm of the evening meal.” Christ. I’m not sure who should be shot first, whoever wrote that line or whoever thought it was okay to go to air. Stop writing. Seriously, just fucking stop. You’re going to hurt yourself.

This sort of thing happens on NPR all the time, probably because their rubric falls just slightly outside the strict boundaries of just-the-facts-maam Columbia-style journalism. And I’m fine with something a little more colloquial, but come ON, people. The Doctor was right: words are powerful. They’re magic. If you won’t or can’t use them properly, please, put them down and leave them to those of us who can.

Because, frankly, I think we can all agree that the less pissed I get the better off we all are.

JLK

Your Shattered Dreams Quizo Update

I had this whole piece planned that I was working on, and then I got the news that Chelsea fired Phil Scolari this morning, and you know what? Right now there isn’t a joke I can come up with that is a bigger joke than the Chelsea Football Club.

I was in a really good mood this morning, too. I was going to talk about how even though I was sick all weekend and LaSalle lost to St. Bonaventure, which despite evidence to the contrary I am pretty sure is a fucking high school in North Jersey, I was happy. I was happy because through a random twist of internet browsage Friday afternoon I learned that Farscape was on iTunes, and that even after the unfortunate loss of my complete DVD collection (the first TV show I ever collected on DVD in fact) and those DVDs subsequently going out of print (thus preventing me from replacing said DVDs) being sick for a weekend wouldn’t be that bad because I could spend that weekend watching for the first time in years my ABSOLUTE MOSTEST FAVORITE-EST TELEVISION SHOW FUCKING WELL EVER.

God, I was so happy. Blissfully, deliriously happy. On the list of Things That Cause My Brain To Release The Most Endorphins, number one is winning money at poker. Number two is Farscape. I am not kidding. And because I was sick I had spent the last three days doing nothing but sleeping and watching Farscape. When I woke up this morning I wasin as good a mood as I have been in at least four or five years.

Then the cockpunchers in SW6 said, “hey, we haven’t stuck a shotgun in our mouth in a while, let’s do that.”

I’d been saying for the last few weeks that hiring Scolari might have been the wrong move but I fail to see what firing the manager at this point in time gains us, unless there’s someone else out there that we KNOW is going to get snapped up later if we don’t grab him now. Mancini? Eriksson? Can we somehow get Mourinho back? Are we asleep at the wheel? Is there anyone even AT the wheel?

You know, I don’t even give a fuck anymore.

JLK

Your Random Acts of Happiness Quizo Update

Random thoughts from around the horn this week, folks, and for once we’ve got more good news than you can shake a stick at.

- Speaking of sticks, the Devils are currently in first place in the Atlantic Division on the back of an 8-game winning streak that includes victories over the Bruins and Penguins. Brendan “The Answer Is Still Right Even If You Don’t Know It” Shanahan has 3 goals in 5 games on his latest comeback tour and backup goalie Scott Clemmensen has an more-than-respectable statline of 22-9-1 2.29 GAA .920 SV%. Cries of “Marty who?” will not be tolerated.

- Chelsea’s sickening loss to Liverpool yesterday means that our challenge for the Premier League title is now essentially over. So that’s, you know, one less thing to worry about.

- With my attention to the entire absurd day-long media circle-jerk limited to movie trailers, the halftime show, and a non-rooting, academic interest in the game itself my reaction to it may be a little dispassionate, and while I can’t speak to yesterday necessarily being the best Super Bowl ever it was a damnably entertaining football game (unlike, say, last year’s snoozefest). While he is clearly a moron of the widest stripe Ben Roethlisberger is a pretty damn good quarterback, and it is a testament to impressive time management that Omar Epps managed to coach a team to a Super Bowl victory while co-starring on House.

- Yesterday saw certainly the best Super Bowl HALFTIME ever. Thanks to the vagaries of my class schedule I am sadly forced to attend the last Springsteen show ever at the Spectrum, which is an event I am sure Bruce will not choose to commemorate in any way. If you did not experience 12 minutes of pure, unadulterated joy at halftime last night you are a defective human being and should be sent back to the manufacturer for a replacement, with a note to make sure they put a soul in this time.

- On the movie trailer tip, did anyone else have a strange reaction to that GI Joe spot? It gave me the entertainment equivalent of drinking milk just before it goes sour; yeah, you can definitely eat your cereal and you’re not going to get food poisoning or anything, but something about the taste is just slightly incorrect. They should have just made a Snake Eyes movie since that’s all anyone really wants to see anyway.

- As you may have been aware, my desktop computer contracted a case of cancer of the RAM a little while back. Unfortunately in the last month or two this metastasized and got into the motherboard, network connections, and finally about two weeks ago into the hard drives. Once that happens it’s really just a matter of time, so after weeks of heart-wrenching, last-ditch attempts at saving it, I stopped chemotherapy and radiation treatments and got a new computer. At least I THINK what I got is a computer. It may in fact be some kind of sentient technological lifeform accidentally thrown back in time by some future civilization too advanced for us to comprehend. You know, kinda like the Terminator, if the Terminator sat under my desk and had to listen to me shout “OH MY GOD THIS COMPUTER IS AWESOME” over and over again.

I was having a hard time believing the performance levels I was getting out of my new machine, so I devised a test to see just how far I could push it before one of us begged for mercy. So, yesterday morning I was running World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, both with every graphical option and performance slider jacked all the way up. Each game coasted by at a cool 60FPS and never hitched for a single moment.

Oh, incidentally, I was running these two resource vampires AT THE SAME TIME.

Understand, if you are not necessarily a computer gaming-type person, that my new computer performing this well is roughly akin to successfully riding a unicycle on an icy street in the dark while juggling live chainsaws and chairing a Senate Finance Committee hearing. My new computer is so powerful that, if left unchecked, it could subjugate humanity under its silicon bootheel. I will be using it to check e-mail and kill elves. God, I love America.

JLK

Your Unintentionally Short Quizo Update

Sorry about this, folks. I had planned on a very nice piece today
dovetailing my career as a standup comic, my experience this weekend
at an Atlantic City car dealership, and how the Academy Awards are now
a complete farce.

Unfortunately I just got handed a large pile of work that needs doing
RFN, so my normal word-shenanigans will have to wait. See you tonight.

JLK

Your Transtional Period Quizo Update

I am not going to speak at much length as to the Eagles loss yesterday. There is precious little to say. By any objective measure a season in which your team reaches the conference championship is an unqualified success. That the Eagles defense chose said conference championship to be terrible is unfortunate, but it is no more than that, and life goes on. 

A team that everyone had written off as hopeless two months ago was ten minutes from the Super Bowl. As I have said here previously regarding the Eagles, and as I have recently taken to saying to the Chelsea fans who are wailing and gnashing their teeth at our current dip in form, there is a distinct difference between not winning everything and not winning anything. I'm not saying that professional sports are some lame equivalent of "everyone gets a trophy day" at the local under-8s, but success is not a binary proposition. There are shades of grey between total success and total failure, and if you are really so dissatisfied at being no worse than the third or fourth best in the world at something I would politely suggest that you will find life in general to be an increasingly frustrating enterprise.

Put another, less prosaic way: the Eagles made the NFC Championship for the fifth time in eight years, and if you don't think that's pretty fucking good you are wrong and stupid.

I admit that I was fairly distraught for a little while after the game yesterday until I changed my mood in a manner I will describe shortly, but if you are still writhing in agony over the outcome and are in dire need of feeling better I suggest you go grab yourself a copy of Friday's midseason premiere of Battlestar Galactica, which will cheer you up by the virtue of reminding you that there are things far, FAR more depressing than the Eagles losing the NFC Championship, foremost among them Friday's midseason premiere of Battlestar Galactica.

I will avoid major spoilers for those who have not yet seen Friday's episode, but suffice it to say that it brings the concept of a really depressing hour of television to places I didn't think were possible. There are sad and/or depressing episodes of TV to be sure; the finales of MASH, China Beach, Deep Space Nine and Quantum Leap immediately spring to mind, but Friday's BSG blows right past depressing into pure, downright existential despair.

There is a moment from the episode, and you know what I'm talking about if you've seen it, where things are happening and everything is bopping along and then suddenly you shout "HOLY FUCK!" at your television and you realize that more than any show currently on television BSG is seriously playing for keeps. It was never silly sci-fi twaddle to begin with, but these last ten episodes are a shift in the show's essential question from "how do we survive in a dangerous and complicated world?" to "would the last person who even bothers to draw breath anymore kindly make sure they turn the gas off before they go?"

Much like being down on the Eagles, not watching Battlestar Galactica is wrong and stupid.

Now, personally, I lifted my post-game malaise by hitting my Netflix pile and popping in a movie. My choice ended up being "Michael Clayton," which now means that I have finally seen all of last year's Best Picture nominees just in time for THIS year's on Thursday morning. The movie was good enough, I suppose – that George Clooney is quite dreamy after all – but I can now state with certainty that 2008 was a pretty meager year for Best Picture nominees. Between the "good-but-meh," almost perfunctory well-made-edness of Michael Clayton, the hideously overrated Juno – and I mean HIDEOUSLY, I don't know in what kind of fucked-up parallel universe this paper-thin wisp of a movie is a Best Picture nominee, and don't even get me started on what a cruel joke that Best Screenplay Oscar is – and the baffling pointlessness of There Will Be Blood and No Country, the fact that Atonement did not win Best Picture in a walk is something of a mystery to me. It is the flat-out best movie of those five in a walk, and as you might have guessed, deviation from this point is – say it with me – wrong and stupid.

For the record, my guesses at Best Picture this Thursday are Benjamin Button, Slumdog, The Dark Knight, Frost/Nixon and Revolutionary Road, the last of these because a) I hate Sam Mendes and b) the world hates me. It never ceases to amaze me that I am one of the only people who recognizes the fact that Mendes needs to be shot and soon, not just for continuing to make his ponderous, overwrought, God-I-wish-I-was-doing-anything-but-making-movies movies, but for the fact that he is keeping Kate Winslet from the rest of us. So, yes, he needs to die. Or at the very least go back to the theatre (where he is actually quite good) and stay there. And also become gay.

JLK

Your Own Personal Jesus Quizo Update

I have said in the past that I am not a particularly religious person. This does not mean that I disdain the beliefs of others, or hold the view popular among the more snobbish of the intellectual upper-crust that religion is some sort of aberration of the prehistoric human brain (hint: if you think that, you are a more obnoxious douchenozzle than Tom Coughlin). There is an important distinction between "not especially religious" and "utterly lacking a spiritual dimension;" the first accurately describes my exceedingly-peculiar worldview, the second does not.

The proliferation of religion across the human experience is a fantastic example of the old Star Trek idea - REALLY old Star Trek, in fact - of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination; the myriad ways of expressing the unexpressable and trying to give meaning to our bewildering existence. The fact that we have so many different ways of telling essentially, the same story - this is where we came from, this is where we're going, and this is why you shouldn't kick your neighbor in the shins along the way - has always astounded me.

The stunning array of messiah figures we as a species have managed to create for ourselves is where I draw the line, though. It is the point where the belief in the divine transcends philosophy and becomes something lesser and sillier. There are so many it's damn near impossible to keep track, really, and frankly as alphas and/or omegas go I have to say the choices are all pretty lackluster. I don't care whether your cardboard bucket in the Baskin Robbins cooler of messiahs is labeled Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Vishnu, Zeus or Rocky Road. When your personal chips are down, none of these guys are going to come through for you.

No, at the end of the day, when we face the dark night of the soul and all hope seems lost only one being can TRULY save any of us, and that savior is Jack Bauer.

24 is back, and as always it asks us pressing, important questions: how far is going too far in the defense of your country? Do the ends really justify the means? Is it okay to do something bad to prevent something worse? Is every other employee in the federal civil service a terrorist mole, or have we gotten it down to 35% or so? How does someone as blindingly untalented as Janeane Garofalo still get work?

That the show chooses to definitively answer some of these questions (respectively: infinite, yes they do, oh hells yes) and leaves others to the careful consideration of its audience (respectively: departments critical to national security require a bachelors in being a mole or equivalent work experience, blackmail photos of Hollywood executives with transsexual hookers) just speaks that much more firmly to 24's commitment to stimulating intellectual curiosity.

Also to spending 24 hours a year watching Jack Bauer be the absolute baddest motherfucker who ever lived (which, I think, is a quality you want in a messiah). Jack Bauer occupies the number one spot on my list of People to Never Ever Piss Off, and that's AHEAD of Batman and Jason Bourne. Some may argue this point, to which I just laugh and say, "bitch, please." You put the three of them in a room together, and Jack would just look at Jason Bourne, shout "WHERE IS THE BOMB?!" and while Jason was fainting Batman would then cause his own spontaneous death to avoid being questioned by Jack Bauer.

The moment in last night's premiere when Jack says the words "let's have this conversation again," I swear that was the scariest thing I've ever seen.

Much has been written about the stupidly long wait since Season 6, and I have to admit I wasn't really feeling it. Once I started watching I quickly got into a 24 groove (which allows the brain to filter things like the fact that almost all lines not spoken by Kiefer Sutherland are not so much lines of dialogue as lead bricks made of human speech) but I wasn't, like, INTO it for that whole opening sequence. I wasn't into it until the first time the clock appeared and I heard that distinctive C/D diatone "beep... BOOP... beep... BOOP" and this warm, fuzzy feeling rushed into my body and I thought, "this is what it's like when you shoot heroin after going without for a week. This is what being a drug addict is like. [pause] OH MY GOD IT'S GREAT."

Jack is back, and it is about damn time. I would say "thank God," but Jack already kicked your god's ass. Fucker wouldn't tell Jack where the bomb was. Never the smart play, that.

JLK

Your Close to Death No Quizo Update

I was all set to do the 2008 year in review today.

Then yesterday I woke up with a head cold that has, in addition to driving my tissues-and-throat-lozenges costs through the roof, reduced me to one functioning nostril. So, sadly, there will be no Quizo tonight. I will see everyone next week.

JLK

Your "It's a Goddamn Christmas Miracle" Quizo Update

Before we get to the meat of this week's missive, a quick request: is anyone today going to be very near the Utrecht art supply store on Broad Street? I need something from there and am not able to go into town to get it. If you can do this favor for me, I will grant you a great largesse this evening, bearing in mind that vis a vis the distressingly-specific item I require the usual true Grail/false Grail rules will apply. Please drop me a line if you are able to conveniently swing by the place.

Anyway, onwards.

The phrase in this week's title was actually spoken by me twice in the last four days. The first came on Christmas day, when for the first time in recorded memory everyone in my family got perfect gifts.

Now understand that buying gifts for my parents is alternately an exacting and excruciating process. Shopping for my mother is the former. While her tastes are so complex as to make the Minoan labyrinth look like the straightaway at Daytona, if you can hew close to certain high points - cozy British murder mysteries, Magnum PI, and the collected works of Sinbad - you're pretty much okay. Shopping for my father, on the other hand, is one of the greatest exercises in futility known to man. The house is littered with stacks of books, movies and various gadgetry that were gifts for Christmas, birthdays, Father's Days, etc, that lie unwatched, unread and unused. Not that he is rude about receiving such things, he just never seems to DO anything. Like, ever. It's quite amazing, really; my father is probably the best-read person I have ever known and I have NEVER SEEN HIM READ A BOOK. So getting gifts for Dad is quite tough as it's an amazing chore to get him something he will actually lay hands on more than once.

This year I decided to obviate both of these problems by getting something that they would BOTH use to great extent: a new television, a big flatscreen hi-def job. I had a very nice one picked out and bought up, and on Christmas I had a friend with a hatchback (so as to fit the box on the back deck) give me a ride over to the Death Star to pick it up. This was at maybe 10AM on Wednesday morning. You may recall that early on Wednesday there was a bit of bother with an ice storm, but by 10 it had gone away and everything was clear. I, however, on the way to the car, managed to find the only remaining patch of ice in all of Northeast Philadelphia, slip on it, and bang up my knee pretty badly. It didn't seize up completely until later in the day so I managed to get the TV home all right, but when my knee DID seize up later that night I was presented with a considerable problem.

Since I had long since decided to present the TV as a Santa-style come-downstairs-on-Christmas-morning-and-oh-my-god-there's-a-TV-there! sort of gift, I was left with the difficulty that once my parents had gone to sleep (at 2 in the bloody morning), I now had to not only hook up a brand new large LCD television and dispose of the old one in complete silence, but I had to do all these things on one leg. The fact that I managed to complete this Herculean task should not be understated. That part in and of itself was a minor goddamn Christmas miracle, but it did unfortunately mean that I was basically immobile on Christmas Day.

Come the blessed morn I woke up and, not wanting to ruin my Santa Claus moment, laid awake in bed for a solid two hours waiting for my parents to go downstairs so I could hear the great gasps of surprise and joy. After lying awake for two hours I heard them both go downstairs and, not hearing any gasps of any kind after about ten minutes, I hobbled my way down the stairs.

"What the FUCK?!" I said. I gesticulated wildly at the new television. "No reaction? Seriously? NOTHING? Brand new big-screen TV and it gets NO FUCKING REACTION?"

"Actually," my mother said, "it fits in with the room so well we both walked past it the first time without noticing."

"WITHOUT NOTICING?" I was still shouting, I feel perfectly reasonably.

"Without noticing, well, this is funny," my father said.

It was at this point that I stopped shouting and wildly flailing my arms about long enough to realize that in front of the Christmas tree was a complete set of brand-new golf clubs with one of the oversize decorative bows that we normally hang from the living room light fixtures stuck to it. As my father just got a new set of clubs, I just received a new golf bag from them for my birthday last month, and my mother does not play golf, these were clearly for me.

I wistfully handled the bow, looked at the TV, and said, "I should have thought of this."

"It's sure as hell not three coats," my father said.

Eventually the full-on present-opening commenced. I ended up with the clubs - which are, amusingly, decked out in white, black and orange - and a GPS for my car. My mother got the camera she's been dying for from my father. She gave him a plane ticket to go Spring Training again this year. They both got an astonishingly awesome TV from me.

Once we had coffee and breakfast, I looked at them and said, "is it just me or did everyone get absolutely perfect gifts this year?" This has never happened before, not even close.

We all agreed that everyone had.

"That," I said, "is a goddamn Christmas miracle."

My second utterance of that phrase in the last few days came last night around 7PM when I finally accepted the fact that the Eagles were going to make the playoffs in what has to be the most incredibly unlikely way possible. I had read on some football website that going into Sunday the Birds had something like a 5% chance of making the playoffs. They might have beaten the Cowboys, sure. And the Bears or the Vikings MIGHT have lost, just slightly maybe, and there was a very poorly-packed snowball's chance in hell that the Buccaneers would blow it as two touchdown favorites against the Raiders, but there was basically ABSOULTEY NO WAY IN THE ENTIRE MULTIVERSE that all three of these things would happen.

By kickoff at 4:15 not only had both the Bears and Vikings lost, but the Bucs somehow DID blow it to the Raiders, and as the game was starting I sent around a text to my friends urging them to contribute to a fund that would allow us to send Al Davis a quart of fresh human blood as thanks for opening a playoff window for the Eagles. (Come on, you know he's a vampire. Or that he at least bathes in the stuff.)

The Eagles had a window. The stars had all aligned, save one. They just had to beat the Cowboys and incredibly, unbelievably, the Eagles would make the playoffs. It was going to be rough, though. The Cowboys are no pushovers. They're still a fantastically-talented football team, and the Eagles policy of "never cover the tight end" would only make someone as good as Jason Witten even more dangerous. And, hey, Tony Romo can't dick it up in December forever, can he?

About 90 minutes later, after Pacman's second mistake in 90 seconds had given the Eagles a total of ten free points, I sat there open-mouthed, staring at my television in disbelief. Eventually I found words and said aloud to my otherwise empty living room, "you've gotta be fucking KIDDING me."

As halftime struck I called my father, in Florida with my mother to visit his aunt.

"The Cowboys have basically quit," he said. "The game is pretty much over. But don't discount Andy Reid's ability to fuck this up."

"Even he would have to try pretty hard to blow this one," I said.

"This is the Eagles," he said. "Never forget that." So I went to watch the second half, waiting for the Eagles to blow their lead and return to normalcy.

When Merrill said, "there's a timeout on the field! The score is, and we are not drunk, 34-3 Eagles!" I realized that this was actually going to happen and I was possessed by a strange euphoria.

After the game ended I just sat there, not quite comprehending the ridiculous sequence of events that had led to this point. I looked over at the tree, all lit up, thought about a happy family with perfect gifts, two weeks off from work, and the Eagles in the playoffs on a new big screen TV, and just smiled and again spoke to the empty room:

"It's a goddamn Christmas miracle."

If all those things happening at once aren't that, folks, I don't know what is.

JLK

Your "Psychotic Christmas Shopping Extravaganza of Doom" Quizo Update

It's Christmas week! And let me just say that it is about goddamn time. For, in addition to the holidays, Christmas week brings with it Christmas Quizo tonight, featuring an entire evening of holiday-themed questions and me giving out presents (I'm sure we all know by now what "presents" means).

I am a big fan of Christmas (check the website entry for last December 25 for more details on that) and the people around me are also big fans of Christmas because it is the time of year in which I act the most human. There are precious few times one can basically be guaranteed I will be in a good mood and so many of them are conditional - requiring a Chelsea win or a really good episode of Doctor Who or top set aces against two pair - that the people who have somewhat stupidly chosen to be friends with me enjoy it when the more insane aspects of my personality take a back seat and I act like a normal, sane, happy person for a week or two.

However, the "normal, sane, happy" part doesn't happen until one freakishly abnormal thing takes place: my annual Christmas shopping trip. The whole thing started out as a sort of quirky Christmas tradition, but as I got older and my obsessive-compulsive tendencies became, well, full-blown obsessions and compulsions, it became something much more insane.

The first year back in high school when I had a car at Christmas, I went to Willow Grove Mall the Sunday beforehand to do my Christmas shopping. Since even back then my gift-giving practices were a little overzealous I did this weird thing where I went around to different stores in the mall not buying anything, just making notes on my Christmas list about what might be good for the various people on my list. Once I had good lists for everyone I sat down in the food court and make final determinations on who was getting what, then went around getting everything. Yay for shopping.

The next year, by some weird calendar hoodoo, I ended up going shopping at Willow Grove once again on the Sunday before Christmas. In a VERY weird coincidence, and one that basically would turn my Christmas shopping into an OCD ordeal for the rest of my life, I actually ended up parking in the same space in the parking lot I had the year before. And, once again, I went around to various stores in the mall marking down possible gifts for people, even adding a couple stores this time, before buying anything.

The year after that I was sitting around on the Sunday before Christmas, just minding my own business, and I had the sudden thought that MY BRAIN WILL EXPLODE IF I DON'T GO TO WILLOW GROVE RIGHT FUCKING NOW! I zoomed the hell over there, and when I arrived saw that the space I had used the last two years was open and knew that I HAD to park there. Once I got inside I HAD to go to an even-larger number of stores than the previous year and not buy anything.

This, my friends, is how compulsions are born: your brain tells you that something completely irrational is absolutely necessary, and you agree.

Over the years this entire process has turned into a regimented set of rules for Christmas shopping, which cannot be deviated from lest a nervous breakdown ensue:

- It happens at Willow Grove Mall on the Sunday before Christmas Eve (thus obviating the need to shop on the 24th should Christmas fall on a Monday).
- The same parking spot must be utilized, way off to the side in the lot behind the Ross.
- A complete circuit of EVERY store in the mall will be undertaken while buying nothing, only making notes. This circuit will begin at the Limited (or whatever it is now) across from TGI Friday's, continue through the entire first floor, including department stores, and then move up to the next floor, where this circuit is repeated until the third floor has been covered in its entirety.
- The key to the "looking" part is so that every single gift possibility for every single person on the list is exhaustively researched, insuring that the eventual choice is the "perfect" gift. You cannot possibly have missed something if you look at every single shelf in the entire mall.
- After the note-taking circuit is complete, lunch is taken at the food court.
- When lunch is complete, the "buying" circuit begins, once again on the first floor, and then moving up to the third floor.
- If the buying circuit takes more than three hours - it often does - dinner is taken at TGI Fridays (an unfortunate if necessary choice). Oreo Madness will be ordered.
- Once the buying circuit is complete, the presents will be taken to the Fox Chase Cancer Center charity wrapping station to be professionally wrapped. The charity wrapping people will receive a donation equal to double the quoted price rounded up to the next multiple of ten dollars because it's charity, for fuck's sake.

This is how I have done my Christmas shopping for the last 14 years. On average it takes six to seven hours to complete. At its worst, the year I was working at the water company and making scads of money and buying presents for everyone I had ever met in my entire life, it took thirteen hours. I am not making this up. If you don't believe me you can ask Reg and Nick tonight. Over the years I have, in my generosity, decided to inflict my Christmas shopping insanity on various friends and they have been victims the last couple years (though no one has ever made it through the entire process). I actually do this shit.

At least I DID do it, until yesterday. This year was different because of my acquisition of the delicious service known as "Amazon Prime." If you aren't aware, this is a thing you can get from Amazon that gives you free two-day shipping on pretty much everything. I call it the "you'll never shop in a store again" deal, and I am an unabashed endorser of it. When you combine free two-day shipping with Amazon's price difference from retail (usually the 30-40% range) and throw in sales tax as the cherry on top, we're talking about a difference of a couple hundred dollars. That's too much money to do my shopping the old way.

"All right, brain," I said. "I don't like you and you sure as hell don't like me. But we need to think of some way to work this out."

"MUST DO SHOPPING AT WILLOW GROVE! MUST USE PARKING SPACE! MUST MAKE NOTE-TAKING LAP!" my brain said.

Lousy compulsive brain.

Eventually I hit on what I thought could be an important loophole: the key underpinning of this entire process is the buying of Christmas presents at Willow Grove Mall (and the parking space, but that's easy enough). As long as THAT necessity is fulfilled, I thought the rest of it might sort itself out. So, I thought, if all I have to do is actually spend the money at Willow Grove, then I...

This is why, if you happened to be at the food court at Willow Grove Mall around noon yesterday, you might have noticed a distressed-looking man sitting at a table in the food court, chugging can after can of Mountain Dew while pecking away at a laptop.

Yes. I brought my laptop to the mall and did my shopping on Amazon there. And it worked! My shopping got done and I didn't have a nervous breakdown.

As Dexter would say: the code is fulfilled.

See you tonight for Christmas Quizo, which should be a lot of fun. If I don't see you, enjoy your holidays.

JLK

Your Felonious Quizo Update

In a funny coincidence, I actually had TWO completely different friends going off to cut down a Christmas tree this past weekend. Like, actually go someplace and chop down a live tree, as opposed to the rest of us who just go to the place with the light bulbs strung up on clothesline and buy a pre-cut tree. Seriously, when did strings of bare light bulbs become the international symbol for "buy Christmas trees here" anyway?

Speaking to one of them after the fact, I said, "how did the murder go?"

"What murder?" he asked.

"You murdered your Christmas tree. I'm asking how it went."

"It isn't murder!"

"Sure it is. The tree is alive when you get there. It's dead when you leave. Murder one, man."

"Well than what does everyone else do? Is that murder too?"

"Oh, no. Cutting down a live tree is murder. Buying one at a lot is just disposing of a body."

I love Christmas.

A reminder, folks, that we are on at our special Monday night football time of SEVEN (7)(VII)(sept)(sieben)(zeven)(siete)(syv)(sette)(that's Homer Simpson, sir, one of your chowderheads from Sector 7-G) in the PM. That should set Drago straight...

JLK

Your Overly Emotional Quizo Update

I was a Netflix subscriber back in the day, and if you are any kind of movie-loving (or even liking) person Netflix is just ten kinds of awesome. Then, a few years back, after enjoying the bountiful fruits of Netflix’s generosity for a good while, I got a DVD burner in my computer and Netflix became about nine million kinds of awesome. Having Netflix, a DVD burner and a little program called [REDACTED] essentially turns your desk into the movie section at Best Buy, only without having to go to the Death Star. It is entertainment perfection.

That is, it is perfection until Netflix notices that you are going through movies at a truly prodigious rate and while it is certainly POSSIBLE that you are watching 40-50 hours of movies and TV a week and that your life consists of nothing but watching DVDs and trips to the mailbox, it is highly UNLIKELY that you are doing these things. Netflix, not being stupid, realizes that you are almost certainly just taking all the discs they send you, making quick copies of them with [REDACTED] or something similar, and shipping them right back. Netflix will then say, “listen, jerkoff, we’re in the movie rental business, not the turning-your-computer-into-Best-Buy business,” and Netflix will stop sending you new DVDs as soon as you send your used ones back.

They will, in fact, not send you new DVDs for quite a while after you send your used ones back. This is a practice known as “throttling” and, frankly, it makes perfect sense. It does, however, chop Netflix down to being only two or three different kinds of awesome. When you would send in a DVD and get the next one in your queue a day later that is pretty freaking great. When you send in your last DVD and the next one in your queue doesn’t arrive for almost two weeks that is, suffice it to say, less than great. Over the course of two weeks I could just save up the change in my pockets and buy the actual DVD, thus obviating the need for Netflix. So once I got on the “this guy is a DVD-burning douchebag” list at Netflix I cancelled the service. We had had our fun, and I had no regrets.

However!

A couple weeks ago, the “Netflix on Xbox 360” service was rolled out and the prospect of streaming HD movies on demand was too much for the feeble, movie-addled part of my brain to resist, and I signed up once again for Netflix. After going through the requisite signup motions I headed directly for the “HD On Demand” section of Netflix and found precisely ONE movie – Sidney Lumet’s “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead” – I wanted to watch.

ONE MOVIE. ONE FUCKING MOVIE.

“Well,” I said to myself. “It looks like there’s a new Best Buy opening up in Mayfair.”

This attitude would actually subside somewhat. I had a very cool experience shortly thereafter where a writer whose blog I read recommended a movie I had never heard of and, quite literally, three minutes later I was watching it on my TV, all without ever getting up from my desk. Even though the movie wasn’t in HD that is pretty freaking cool, you must admit.

(The movie in question here is Shane Carruth’s “Primer,” which I, like the Kung Fu Monkey, heartily recommend.)

Eventually I tossed some actual DVDs into my queue, mostly Oscar bait I had missed the past 4-5 years because I was doing shows over the Christmas period. The first one to come in was “Atonement,” which I sat down to watch on Friday.

Atonement is an interesting film inasmuch as it has three distinct parts. The first is the opening 30 minutes or so of the film, which are absolute death. It is painful to watch. At one point about 20 minutes in I texted a friend of mine who I knew had seen it and asked “the movie does stop being… THIS… doesn’t it?” She assured me that it did. Those opening scenes are truly horrific. They are completely unbearable and have almost no stylistic relationship to the rest of the film; at the time I summed up the first half hour as “imagine Jeeves and Wooster if it wasn’t funny.” Half an hour of watching the idle rich of inter-war England cavorting on a country estate. I wanted to kill myself.

Then, about 35 minutes into the movie something happens, and it transitions into the second part and becomes something else altogether that is tremendously, stupidly great. It’s fantastic. I loved it, and not just because it has Keira Knightley (though that certainly helps). The second part is this war-slash-romance, and when one considers that two of my all-time top five favorite movies are Casablanca and The English Patient, Atonement has now become something that is clearly right up my street. Just as the movie is chugging along and I am completely entranced by it in a very 17-year-old-girl kind of way, we come to the third part. This happens as I am watching the film approach its end saying, “this is awesome! True love prevails! Woohoo! This is the best movie since – SPLOTCH!”

The splotching noise is the sound made when, about five minutes before the credits roll, the movie hits you in the back of the head with the flat side of a 20-pound sledge. I’m sitting there watching it and, when this happens, I quite literally shout “WHAT THE FUCK?!” at my television. Now it’s not a stupid ridiculous double-twist ending like “Deckard is a replicant,” nor is it as jarring as the end of Million Dollar Baby – which I once famously reviewed as “the cinematic equivalent of a trip to a very relaxing if slightly meandering spa, where after 90 minutes of deep-tissue massages and hot mineral baths the cabana boy stabs you in the eye with an icepick” – but after how emotionally invested the film gets you the last five minutes just suck all the joy out of your life and the film ends up leaving you hopeless and broken and wanting nothing so much as to crawl under the covers and softly cry yourself to sleep.

Overall the movie is still freaking amazing, though, and it’s certainly a damn sight better than No Country. Stupid Oscars.

I mentioned my thoughts on the film to a friend of mine the next day, and he said, “what do you expect? Jesus, look at you. Your favorite movies are Casablanca. Gladiator. The English Patient. And now you like Atonement so much. It’s like you’re sexually attracted to misery.”

We had a good laugh at that until I said, “wait, now that I think about it that actually explains a lot.”

JLK

Your "I Really Hate My Birthday" Quizo Update

I get asked often why it is I dislike my birthday so much. It’s simple, really:

If every day is just another inexorable step towards our demise, birthdays are signposts along the way, reminding us that we are that much closer to the end of the road.

This year I took the first-ever step of getting a “birthday present for myself.” This is not something I have ever done on my birthday or Christmas – a “present to yourself” being not a present after all, but just another thing one spends money on – but after Chelsea’s unfortunate loss to Arsenal yesterday I was feeling especially morbid, so on a previously planned shopping trip to the Death Star I said, “you know what, the hell with it,” and got myself something for my birthday. My choice of self-present was Call of Duty: World at War (aka Call of Duty 5). Now I enjoy Call of Duty 4 as much as the next person, but CoD5 surpasses its predecessor in three very important ways.

Firstly, while CoD4’s story about fighting terrorism and rogue states and the fragility of the modern political order was very surprising for both its excellence and how depressing it was – one must give respect to a game where one of your characters gets quite literally nuked halfway through it and the other quietly bleeds out at the end – as far as wargames go there is little that compares to the visceral thrill of fighting Nazis. What can I say? I’m a sucker for the classics.

Secondly, CoD5 has the most uses of the word “fuck” in a video game since… well, ever, actually. I can’t think of one that comes even close, and looking back on it CoD4 would have been greatly improved if every time a grenade went off or one of your squadmates got shot or you looked at a bush someone shouted “FUCK!” or some variation thereto. It’s like someone took the screenplays for Saving Private Ryan and Scarface and mashed them together.

Thirdly, CoD5 points out that CoD4 suffers from a distinct lack of Kiefer Sutherland. I’m playing the first level yesterday and the first time your sergeant starts talking I went “OH MY GOD JACK BAUER!” and knew that the rest of the game could be awful (it is not) and I wouldn’t care and that because of the presence of Kiefer would love it forever. Kiefer Sutherland is like the butter of entertainment: he can make anything taste better.

JLK

Your End of the Line Quizo Update

We now join our regularly-scheduled Quizo update, already in progress.

- is freaking ridiculous,” I say. I told my father over and over again that I don’t like going to Caesar’s, that bad bad things happen at Caesars, but now I find myself not only at Caesar’s, but in a walkway suspended several stories ABOVE Caesar’s, blindingly turning my head to and fro trying to find my father so I can a) give him his stupid Koffee Kake, and b) get the fuck out of Caesar’s.

When’s he going to start talking about it?

“I’m on the walkway,” my father says.

“Dad, there’s like five walkways,” I say. “Telling me you’re on ‘the walkway’ is about as helpful as the traffic report on NPR.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” I say. The problem now is that not only am I at Caesars where bad bad things happen, which is enough to start giving me a panic attack in and of itself. I am also trapped in a glass walkway hanging over Pacific Avenue, which brings with it fears of heights, enclosed spaces, crowds, plexiglass, strangers, unsafe construction, gravity, and having cars driving under your feet. By now all of my neuroses are fighting each other for supremacy. I start to think it will be like Highlander. They will compete for The Prize, and there can be only one. I’m rooting for fear of unsafe construction.

He has to mention it eventually.

As I can feel what is most definitely a panic attack coming on I realize that given how often I go to Atlantic City a well-developed fear of unsafe construction will actually end up being quite

Come on, he can’t ignore it forever.

debilitating…

I’m sorry, can I help you?

We were just wondering when you were going to say something about the game.

Game? What game?

You know. Yesterday.

Game yesterday? Oh! You mean the MLS Cup Final. Oh. That was a great game. Really fantastic. I mean, I know I’ve knocked the MLS in the past but that was actually quite something. It wasn’t the Liverpool-West Ham FA Cup final or anything, but it was definitely the most entertaining MLS game I’ve ever seen. You gotta give up the love for Hey-Dude. Fantastic game. Loved it.

No, er, we don’t even know what sport that is you’re talking about there. We mean the Eagles game.

The what?

The Eagles game.

I’m sorry, I don’t know what that is.

Yesterday? The Eagles played the Ravens?

Ee-gulls? Is that some kind of sports team? I really don’t know what you’re referring to here.

The Eagles!

Was it on at the same time as 24 last night? Because that was pretty good too. Not great, I mean, not like season 5 great, but it was better than the end of last year.

The Philadelphia Eagles! Our football team! They got embarrassed by the Ravens yesterday! You had to watch at least part of it!

I’m really sorry, but I honestly don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Football? We don’t have a football team yet. It doesn’t start until 2010. I’m already signed up for season tickets.

AMERICAN football!

Sorry, I got nothing. “Eagles?” Never heard of them. Unless you mean the band that they mention in The Big Lebowski. “Man, I really hate the fucking Eagles!” Heh. Classic.

Ed Reed had the longest inter -

YES! FINE! ARE YOU FUCKING HAPPY? I admit it. I watched it. At least, I watched it until the end of Kevin Kolb’s second series. By then the MLS final was about to start and I couldn’t stand to watch anymore. It was like the end of a Lifetime movie, sitting by my young wife’s hospital bed as she died of Congolese Cattle Influenza or some other disease that Could Happen To Your Family, doing my best not to cry as she bravely tries and fails to cling to her last breath. Because the days of enjoying football are over. Oh, they’re over.

We have entered a new era, people, and let me be the first to say to all the Eagles fans/racist fucks in this city: congratulations. You got what you wanted. Welcome to life after Donovan McNabb. It is a dire, fetid swamp full of poisonous lichen and vengeful mediocrity. The sign over the gates of hell reads “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” If there were a gate to this place it would read “be careful what you wish for,” though I suppose at the end of the day the underlying sentiments are largely the same.

Come on, now, that’s very negative.

Eagles fans are about to learn that the difference between not winning everything and not winning anything is like the difference between having robot-assisted micro-laser brain surgery and having a drunken veterinary assistant perform your appendectomy with a tuning fork. The next few years of Eagles football will be the latter. This isn’t so bad, though, since with the tuning fork around you’ll be able to keep your screams of agony from watching the Eagles on perfect pitch.

Okay, that’s some awfully unpleasant imagery, don’t you think?

The future, people, is bleak.

You’re very pessimistic, you know that?

Well, all right, not all of the future. There is one good thing to look forward to.

Oh, thank God! What is this impending ray of sunshine?

It’s next year. The first Sunday in February, 2010. Super Bowl Sunday.

I’ll be sitting there in front of the TV in my Chicago Bears #5 jersey. With my feet propped up in a recliner I’ll be popping some (non-alcoholic) champagne, smoking an expensive cigar, calling every single person who ever said they wanted Kevin Kolb or Jeff Garcia or AJ Feeley or whoever to start for the Eagles. I’ll be calling every one of them and laughing my ass off.

You are such a horrible person.

And then the next year, I’ll be doing it again.

single gunshot

THUMP

Remember – the price of getting what you want is having what you once wanted.

JLK

Your Growing Malaise Quizo Update

You ever have one of those stretches where everything lands in that grey, squishy space between right and wrong? Where things aren’t “oh my god this is awesome!” but they aren’t “oh my god this is terrible!” either, they’re just sort of “oh my… uh… yeah… so, that happened.” I’m sure we’ve all been there a time or two, had periods where everything is just comfortably mediocre, where our life events are like buying a new shirt and then getting home and realizing it’s half a size too big and taking the tags off and wearing it anyway. On the great sine wave of life we’ve all had times like these, those times between the highs and lows where things just hover around zero for a while. And for the most part we shrug these things off because, hey, that’s life. You take the good, you take the bad.

That is, if you’re most people.

You ever have one of those stretches where everything is mediocrity and squishy greyness and you overreact to it so outrageously, so vehemently, that you actually cause dangerous spikes in OTHER people’s blood pressure?

Let’s take a look back at this past weekend, shall we?

Friday – “this is a criminal waste of valuable resources.”

I normally play poker on Friday nights. This is a good thing. I legitimately enjoy the company of the people I play poker with, and it forces me to interact socially with other humans, which, I’m not going to lie to you, is something that given the choice I would probably opt out of in general. This past Friday I did not play poker for two reasons. The first was that it was raining.

Now, before we get carried away here, let me invoke the words of the great John Sullivan concerning rain: “it’s just rain, I’m not gonna melt.” No, my mortal fear of driving at night in the rain comes from long, long ago, back in the ancient mists of forgotten time when I, for a fleeting moment, was a student at Lehigh University. For some reason I was at a book signing at a Borders on Lancaster Pike and I had to drive back to Bethlehem in my old car – dubbed The Millenium Falcon by my friends not just because we were giant nerds but because as my then-roommate put it, “it’s big, it’s fast, and it breaks down at the worst possible times” - in the middle of the night on an unlit highway in a furious rainstorm and the only tape in the car was a collection of JG Thirlwell remixes of “The Downward Spiral.”

Suffice it to say, folks, that this is what we in the theatre call “EXCEEDINGLY BAD.” I got back to my dorm quite literally shaking with fright and nerves, and ever since the idea of driving at night in the rain has caused a fear reaction in me similar to what gazelles must feel when they hear that first lion’s roar out on the savannah.

Now I HAVE driven under these conditions – just not happily – but the weather was only half of why I didn’t go out. The other half of why I didn’t play poker on Friday night was because the expansion pack for World of Warcraft had come out the night before and I, in a remarkable combination of self-aggrandizement and stupidity, decided that the confluence of release date and weather was God’s way of telling me to stay home and play WoW on Friday night. So I did. Until about midnight, when I suddenly stopped playing, looked at my monitor, and said, “what the fuck am I doing?” This began a brutal series of self-recrimination wherein I spent a solid ten minutes chastising myself with thoughts like, “what the hell is wrong with me, I should have gone to the poker game, this is dumb, I don’t even like this game that much anymore, I’m certainly not very GOOD at it, there are a billion other things I could be doing with my time, I hate the world,” etc etc. Eventually I calmed myself down by firing up FIFA 09 on my 360, dialing the difficulty all the way down to the easiest level, and pounding on some Korean team with Chelsea (final score 14-1). I’ve said many times that you can play World of Warcraft or you can play video games, and I think I may have finally chosen the latter.

Saturday – “I guess Tosca isn’t for everyone.”

After some comical shenanigans involving birthday parties, air fresheners, and his fluid concept of time, Nick and I made it up to see Quantum of Solace on Saturday night.

Yeah.

Let me just state in my typical hyperbolic fashion that the only thing worse than a bad movie is an okay movie that could have been great. And don’t misunderstand me – Quantum of Solace could have been great. It could have been really great. In fact, the way to have made it great is so simple I can hardly believe no one did it. All you needed to do was have someone walk up to Paul Haggis, who co-wrote the screenplay, and say, “look, Paul, we know you’re hot stuff now. You’ve got the Oscars and the money and whatnot and that’s great for you. It really is. We couldn’t be more proud. Fantastic. But, Paul, we’ve got to be honest with you, if you come anywhere near another James Bond script again we’re going to break every one of your fingers one by one with a ball peen hammer. I hate to put it that way but that’s really how we feel about it. Nothing personal, of course. We love your work. Love it. We’re big fans. Now if you could do us a huge favor and just fuck off and write another script about race relations or euthanasia or whatever social issue you just discovered this fucking week actually exists and leave the James Bond stuff to those of us who know what we’re doing, yeah, that would be just fantastic. Yes, fuck off, thanks. That’s a good lad.”

How do you go from such a tight, well-written, perfectly-constructed film like Casino Royale to the messy, spineless, occasional-flashes-of-brilliance-but-otherwise-incoherent Quantum of Solace? You hire Paul Haggis to do a rewrite. God, I hate that guy. I hate him so much. This isn’t a case like Die Another Day, which was just absolute garbage from beginning to end, this movie actually had a couple REALLY excellent bits in it. Daniel Craig and Judi Dench continue to be utterly fantastic – I would watch a 2-hour movie of just M and Bond talking about, like, life issues and stuff – and there are moments where the film transcends the typical Bond-movie glop that Haggis tries to drag it back into which keep it just barely in “real movie” territory. Because, let’s face it, even the best of the old Bond movies – and this is coming from someone RAISED on them – are really fucking stupid, and I’ll take an okay “real movie” with James Bond in it over a great “Bond movie” any day.

You know your movie has problems if Nick – who, though he is like a brother to me as much as anyone who I am not actually related to and who I would probably kill if offered enough money to do so and thus is really more like a half-brother or a distant cousin or something, has zero artistic or aesthetic sense whatsoever – asks after seeing it “why was that scene in the movie?” When people who have no knowledge of screenwriting WHATSOEVER can identify structural flaws in your screenplay that is when it is time to get a new writer.

Daniel Craig is still awesome, though.

Sunday – “Mike, this is a case of the terrible versus the pathetic.”

In a similar vein to the conclusion of my thoughts on Quantum of Solace, when my FATHER is summing up his thoughts on the Eagles game with an impression of the Comic Book Guy – “Worst. Football Game. EVER.” – your football team has SERIOUS FUCKING PROBLEMS. You can’t beat the Bengals in SEVENTY-FIVE MINUTES of football? Seriously? SERIOUSLY? THE FUCKING BENGALS?

As an unabashed Donovan McNabb fan I will be the first to admit that he had what was probably his worst game since his rookie year yesterday. But, hey, here’s a thought – if D-Mac is having a bad day maybe we could, I don’t know, what’s the word for it, oh yes, RUN THE FOOTBALL! YOU HAVE BRIAN WESTBROOK! GIVE HIM THE FUCKING BALL!

The Eagles ran the ball 18 times yesterday. They threw it 58 times. You cannot play football this way. I don’t care if you have the worst running back in the NFL let alone the best whose talent is being wasted by that pass-happy fuck with the headset, you CANNOT BE A SUCCESSFUL TEAM PLAYING FOOTBALL LIKE THIS.

Merrill said it best, I think, when he opined about halfway through overtime, “if there was ever a game which neither team deserved to win, this is it.” If you are the Eagles and not only can you not beat a bunch of meatsacks like the Bengals but you actually come a hairsbreadth from LOSING to them a couple times, things have to change. That is it. The Eagles should have blown this team out by 30 points. Instead they tie, and only because Shayne Graham was the first kicker to miss a field goal against the Eagles in something like 800 years. You almost lost to the BENGALS.

Andy Reid has to go.

Monday – “Is it safe?”

I got word from Oprah’s yesterday on their choice of speed round topic and I have deemed it perfectly acceptable. Actually I think it’s kinda neat. I look forward to what I can do with it. So make sure to put a stop to them tonight, because though they get to pick a speed round after winning three times in a row, if they pull back-to-back three-peats everyone will have to address Palestra Jon as “El Jefe.” And no one wants that.

JLK

Your Lengthening Lists Quizo Update

Since I am of an age where it is commonplace to get married – as evidenced by the fact that I have attended, by my count, 11 weddings in the last three years – I will occasionally be asked when I plan on joining the cult of wedded bliss.

“Well,” I usually reply. “How much time do we have?”

The usual response here is one of confusion and/or surprise, as even my psychiatrist’s question-answer is something of a jarring non sequitur.

I will continue, “because, you see, I have a list of 842 reasons why the answer is ‘never’ and I just wanted to know how many of them we’re going to be able to get through before you have to go home for the night.” There aren’t actually 842 reasons on the list, there are really only 6 or 7, but the number 842 SOUNDS very imposing and effectively conveys the severity of my feelings on the subject.

After spending a long day with two of my recently-married (to each other) friends, though, this weekend saw an unprecedented three – count them, THREE – additions to the list.

Reason #843: the price of wedding rings. I was as aware as anyone else on earth that engagement rings are freakishly expensive. The “two months’ salary” rule is a ridiculous fallacy, of course, but one expects to pay a hefty sum for an engagement ring. That’s just part and parcel of the deal, unless you’re one of the lucky ones like me who should the unlikely need arise plans to either a) hope your mother gives you the family engagement ring, or b) surreptitiously swipe it out of her casket at your mother’s wake after she wanders into a very dark place and is eaten by a grue. But up until Saturday I had never even thought of how much the wedding band costs. I mean, I figured it wasn’t nothing, but when I actually heard the price I would have spat out my milkshake were it not for the fact that I wouldn’t actually have the milkshake until about ten minutes later. Seriously, folks, we are talking about truly outrageous numbers here. I mean, you drop however many thousands of dollars on an engagement ring as a way of saying, “see, I love you so intensely I am willing to forgo so much money that I will subsist on nothing but tap water and Quaker instant oatmeal for the next few months.” Spending the kinds of money we’re talking about on wedding rings is a way of saying, “okay, now we’re BOTH completely broke. I hope you’re fucking happy. Pass the oatmeal.”

Reason #844: “filling the registry.” Given my well-known idiosyncrasies/psychoses about gift-giving in general I have always found the entire idea of the wedding registry a bit unseemly, but on a practical level I understand the need for it. However, much like the hidden/obscene cost of wedding rings, the registry also has a seedy underbelly, and you find yourself wading through it after the wedding when you go to get all the stuff on your registry that no one bothered to get for you. This was the specific part of the day that had been used to sucker me into the whole process since a long time ago, as part of a lifelong litany of things we think but do not say, I once unfortunately uttered aloud the words “I find furniture shopping to be vaguely masturbatory.” Word to the wise: the fact that you get quasi-sexual excitement out of buying a sofa is not something you want your friends knowing, since they can basically make you do whatever they want by saying that they will walk you through the Macy’s furniture department at some point along the way. And so I went along on the registry-filling trip on the strength of the promise that in the course of the filling we would go look at dining room sets (when the time came, in fact, we would not).

Now my love of shopping is well-known. I am a fan. It is one of my few reliable pleasures. Some people self-medicate with alcohol or needlepoint or golf. I am terrible at golf, lack the manual dexterity for needlepoint and suffice it to say tried the alcohol thing with fairly disastrous results, so now I find myself in a position where the one thing that is guaranteed to always lift my spirits is spending money in a retail setting (which frankly creates its own problems, just less so than Absolut). But registry-filling is to shopping what, ironically enough, weddings are to parties. It takes the basic idea and sucks all the fun and spontaneity out of it by having too many rules and regulations and shit you HAVE to do, as opposed to true shopping (and a good party) which is about unbridled self-gratification. Registry-filling is not shopping. It is the evil twin of shopping. It is the bastard nine-fingered half-brother of shopping. If you don’t think so, try sitting in a Macy’s at 9:30 on a Saturday night trying to track down a specific duvet cover while wondering if the nice bridal registry lady’s pen would go all the way into your brain or if it would just get stuck in the middle of your eyeball somewhere.

Reason #845: getting married turns you into a woman. And I don’t mean in that interesting, get to meet Jodie Foster sort of way. In the midst of all this quasi-shopping we split up to cover more ground and my friend and I, lets call him… say… “Nick of Oprah’s Book Club,” were searching for several (again very specific) towels. We’re looking around searching for “chocolate” and “midnight” towels, the words “brown” and “blue” being I suppose too blasé for Macy’s, when we come upon a display of towels that, to my trained eye are about 98% as good as the ones they’re looking for but cost half as much. Trust me, when you shower three times a day towels become quite a sub-specialty.

“Are you totally 100% set on the other set of colors?” I ask. If there is anything less important in the entirety of God’s creation than what COLOR your towels are I could not, and still cannot, think of what it could possibly be.

“I dunno,” Nick says. He puts his hands up on two stacks of folded towels that are just about at eye level. “I really like these white ones, but the sea green is such a nice shade too. Hmm.”

I stare at him.

“What?” he asks.

“So,” I say, “were you just never going to tell me about that vagina of yours, or what?”

While Nick was gamely laughing at himself I noted aloud, “of course, Reg is nowhere to be found and I’m helping fill YOUR wedding registry, so I don’t think I like what that makes me.”

We’re almost out of time, so let me just add that in addition to undergoing sexual reassignment in the last month, Nick and Oprah’s will be going for their third win in a row tonight, so let’s all show up and try to put the brakes on that.

Also - oh look.

Someone put a clock on my desk.

Perhaps I will manage it.

That would certainly be something we’ve never seen before.

JLK

Your "World Fucking Champions!" Quizo Update

So.

How was YOUR week?

Mine was okay. I did some stuff at work that I can't talk about, beat The Force Unleashed (the dark side ending is delicious), picked up the new LA Confidential DVD, watched Supernatural, showered a lot. You know, the usual.

There was something else, though... what was it... eh, I'll remember it eventually.

Anyway, about The Force Unleashed. Once I realized that the Death Star was the end of the game I...

Oh, wait! The Phillies won the World Series! THAT'S what I couldn't remember. That whole thing.

I hope you were able to take at least some part in the festivities on Friday. It was... you know, I've searched for words to describe it since then - searching for and finding words generally being, you know, my thing - but honestly, all I've come up with whenever anyone has asked is, "it was really something." (Kudos to you, by the way, if you can successfully navigate the elaborate-yet-grammatically-perfect hedge maze of verb tenses I cultivated in that last sentence.) And it was. It was just really something.

Any good trip planner knows the key to a day in any city is to leave your car where you're going to end up, so I drove down to the pub at 8:45 on Friday and met less traffic than I might at 7 on a Sunday morning. I made it door-to-door in about 20 minutes, which on a weekday is a record that will stand for centuries. Once I hit the street I grabbed a cab and told the driver, "get me as close as you can." As close as he could get me turned out to be right smack in front of the Gershman Y. I'm out on Broad Street on the day of the first championship parade in 25 years and I am right smack on the ropeline. Sure, I'll have to hold this spot until my friends arrive, and in total I'm going to have to stand up for something like four hours straight, but I'm wearing sneakers. I'm on the ropeline! The only way for me to be closer to the parade is if I were batting cleanup for the Phillies. It's all good.

The trouble is that I don't get a hold of my friends until about 10:30, and even that took calling one of our mutual friends in Connecticut and having him call someone ELSE in the group to then have THEM tell... let's call him, say... "Kevin of Clementon, NJ" to TURN ON YOUR GODDAMN PHONE!

About three minutes after I have to initiate the third-party call I finally get in touch with Kevin. "Yo, we got a great spot, we're up at Locust, come on up here," he says.

"I'm right on the ropeline here, man. Is your spot better than this? I mean am ON the ropeline," I tell him.

"It's great! Come on up!"

I march up to the Doubletree to find that Kevin and Company's "great spot" is, in fact, four people deep in a crowd that is ten people deep going half a block down Locust in both directions. There is no way I am going to get anywhere near them, much less see anything of the parade when it passes.

I call Kevin.

When he answers I tell him, I think quite reasonably, "you're a fucking idiot!"

"Why?"

"Because I'm on the other side of the goddamn street and this is as close to you as I'm going to get, dumbass," I tell him. "Get everyone and come back down south of Pine. I'll be on your side in front of PTC. There's no one down there." When I had headed northward the sidewalk in front of the Philadelphia Theatre Company was barely populated; there was no reason to believe it wouldn't still be so ten minutes later.

"What's PTC?" he asks.

Jesus fucking Christ. "Just walk south on Broad until you see the big guy wearing a Phillies sweatshirt who LOOKS JUST LIKE ME."

On my way back down to the part of Broad Street that was not already teeming with a crushing mass of humanity, I walked behind three Phillies fans, one of whom delivered this assessment of the Phillies World Championship experience: "Yeah, it's great that they won, but I'm sick of listening to my girlfriend talk about how cute Cole Hamels is, man. All the time. 'Ooh, look at Cole, he's so hot, look at Cole Hamels, isn't he cute, oh, he's so adorable.' Man I wish she would stop with that shit." Pause. Pause. Pause. "He is pretty, though." I am not making this up.

I eventually found a spot between the Symphony House and PTC that had nothing but a very short couple between me and the ropeline, looked wistfully across the street at the family now setting up lawn chairs in the spot I once had, and figured standing behind a bunch of short people wasn't all that much worse in the grand scheme of things. Kevin and Co. arrived a few minutes later and, frankly, we stood around waiting uneventfully for about three hours.

Eventually the parade started, and as that first part of it came into view, the horse-drawn carriage, I squinted at it in the distance.

"Is that Chase Utley?" I asked.

"I think so," Kevin said, though in reality we were both shouting at the top of our lungs. I readied the camera on my phone (more on that in a bit) and the carriage got closer. When it was about half a block away the person riding in the front stood up to wave to the crowd and once I saw how large he was, I'm not going to lie to you, folks, I got a tear in my eye and said, "that's not Chase Utley."

Call me a damned sentimental fool, but I thought having Pat the Bat lead the parade was a beautiful touch.

The parade continued; the first truck stopped with Harry Kalas RIGHT in front of us and the fans went berserk, shouting "HAR-RY! HAR-RY!" Ryan Howard and Chase Utley went past and waved happily (Chase Utley, perhaps, delighting in his soon-to-be-executed evil plan). Jamie Moyer looked overwhelmed. Matt Stairs threw candy to the fans. I gamely took pictures with my camera. Everyone in the crowd waved and screamed and jumped for joy.

I have never been among so many people so happy in the same place. I doubt very much I ever will again. For that matter I doubt -I- will ever be that happy again. It has been noted that I am not someone to whom unbridled joy comes easily. On Friday it did and then some.

Once the parade passed and everyone else - I still cannot believe this - just started following it down Broad Street, we booked it over to the pub. We were lucky enough to get there when it was still basically empty; by the time the rally at the Bank started the place was packed to the gills. The people in the pub clapped and pounded the bar as they showed highlights from the playoff run on television - the double play to win the division, Utley's brilliant pump-fake, Lidge falling to his knees - and cheered every player as they made their entry into the stadium. You had trouble hearing a lot of what was said on the TV over the yelling and clapping and cheering.

When Chase Utley stood up and ensured that Phillie fans will love him forever (moreso than they would have, at least) the bar went completely berserk and the day went from something already fantastic to one of those special things that you will always remember exactly where you were and every single person you were with when you heard Chase Utley say "world fucking champions!"

The party continued - I was at the pub well into the night - and in the midst of the bedlam I realized two things:

Firstly, in all the confusion I somehow set the camera in my phone to the "ultra-ultra-small" setting - at one point I even remarked to myself that 211,000 pictures seemed like an awful lot for my memory stick - so all my parade photographs are the size of postage stamps.

Secondly, days like that, whether you're surrounded by a million people on the street or a hundred people in a bar or your family in your living room, days like that are why sports matter, and why they matter to us. It's not about whether your team wins or loses or whether your favorite player makes the basket or stops the puck or hits the double that scores the winning run in the World Series. It's about the person standing next to you, about sharing the highs and holding each other up in the lows, about how we are stronger and most importantly better together than we are apart.

World fucking champions indeed.

JLK

Your On The Brink No Quizo Update

Okay, I know we had planned to do the whole charity thing tonight, but we've hit a bit of a snag.

You've seen the pictures on the news, from when the Phillies won the pennant last week and when the Eagles were in the Super Bowl and things of that nature, from the intersection of Cottman and Frankford? You know, that spot where thousands of local residents pour out into the streets to celebrate? Yes, well. I live about a block from there. It's very lovely. We have lawns and trees and small children and a Santucci's and everything. I was out in the middle of the intersection with everyone else for the pennant win last week and it was a damn good time.

However, while I live a scant block or so from this soon-to-be party central, the difficulty is that said party central is BETWEEN I-95 and my house, so if I were to come down to the pub for a Phillies win tonight it would quite literally be physically impossible for me to get home afterward.

I noticed on my way in to work this morning that the cops were already setting up to block off the intersection - a good idea that was first implemented last week, thus preventing the traffic chaos that accompanied the Super Bowl - and it looks like they're going to be pushing traffic back even farther than before. We endorse this idea as well; the more space thousands of people have to and scream and yell and enjoy each other's company the better.

I discussed this fortunately unfortunate turn of events with some folks at the pub yesterday and got a couple offers of couches to crash on downtown, but to those folks I give the same answer to people who ask me if I want to go camping: I appreciate the offer, but I sleep in a bed, thank you very much. So I will be homebound tonight and we won't be having any Quizo, normal, charity-special or otherwise. I know we are all saddened by this, but hopefully it will be worth our supreme sacrifice.

And, though we do not under any any ANY circumstances use the P-word until such an event is a finite certainty, should a P-word-type event take place - and I cannot emphasize enough to Fortune, Loki, and the restless spirit of Cole Porter that I am NOT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM STATING OR EVEN REMOTELY IMPLYING that such a thing WILL happen - I imagine there would be some sort of side-event at the Dark Horse which might - OH PLEASE GOD I SAID MIGHT DO NOT SMITE US O LORD! - involve me buying lots of drinks for people.

I'm also thinking about "liveblogging" the game tonight, as the kids call it. I will probably discard this notion as far more work than I ever care to do, but if more than two people express interest I suppose that would force me into it.

One more, people. One more.

JLK

Your Pixellated Quizo Update

Let’s talk a little bit about video games in a midly-serious, intellectualized way.

I am an avid player of video games and have been since the halcyon years of the eighth grade when my father told me I could get a Sega Genesis if I saved up the money to pay for half of it, thus teaching me both the value of fiscal responsibility and the value of splitting the cost of expensive shit with other people. I would not necessarily consider myself a “gamer,” though, since in my estimation most people who self-identify as “gamers” should also self-identify is “gigantic douchebags.” There is a mindset among a large percentage of the gaming population that the only purpose of playing a game is to win as decisively as possible. Suffice it to say that between going to a snooty prep school and growing up watching LaSalle basketball the burning need to win at all costs is not something that has been imprinted onto my psyche.

This is not to say that I am not the competitive type – I am, just not when it comes to video games. Back when I used to regularly play in good Quizos – we’re talking Johnny Goodtimes, the old Callahan’s in Mayfair, and, where I started out lo these many years ago, back at the New Deck – I was an absolutely unbearable teammate. I would flip out over missing a single question and argue answers for hours after the game had ended. Now that the only Quizos I play in, and only occasionally at that, are known as “the moron Quizo” and “the milkshake Quizo,” well, I’ve mellowed out somewhat on that score. At the exceedingly-rare serious Quizo game, though, I get very unpleasant. And, beyond Quizo, I’ve said before that the ultimate goal of my theatre company is the Sith-like subjugation of the entirety of Philadelphia theatre (complete with stormtroopers). So I still have a nasty and dangerous competitive streak in me, but it doesn’t extend to video games.

This is largely because I only get competitive about things that I actually have a shot at winning, and I realized a couple years ago that for however much I love playing video games the fact is that I’m not very good at them. In point of fact I am pretty terrible. I have the requisite hand-eye coordination to be able to play games with a greater degree of skill than, say, a lemur, but not much more than that. This, however, is okay.

It’s okay because I have long viewed video games as more of a narrative medium than a competitive one. At the end of the day video games are just a vehicle for telling stories, and my brain has been hard-wired since infancy to seek out and hoover up as much story as I possibly can. My parents are directly responsible for this; I regard the banning of sugary cereals and their constant insistence that books are great as the twin triumphs of their child-raising efforts. Thanks to them I’ve grown into a perfectly sane adult who is obsessed with Star Wars and gets nauseous at the thought of Lucky Charms.

It’s because of these things, though, that my video game tastes are strangely fractured (and that my favorite cereal is, seriously, Cheerios). When you lack the coordinative ability to frag at will first-person shooters are depressingly unamusing, so it is hardly surprising that the only ones I enjoy are those with a really strong narrative behind them like Half-Life (which has a great story I could not explain to you or even myself if I tried for a thousand years) and Medal of Honor (singlehandedly winning World War II = the most awesome story of all), both of which can be played extensively without getting your skull caved in by a 12-year old. (Someone is going to suggest “what about Halo” here, to which I suggest, “no, seriously, shut the fuck up.” Comparing the single-player in Halo to these games. Take the goddamn Bowie knife out of your skull and get back to me.)

I don’t go much for so-called action games with the noted exception of The Force Unleashed, which is currently at the top of my playlist. I’ve said before that The Force Unleashed is a great Star Wars movie (better than at least 50% of all extant Star Wars movies, at any rate) trapped inside a terrible game. That sentiment has lessened somewhat as I’ve gotten further into the game since once you get a full set of powers the game becomes stupidly amusing – never underestimate how joy-inducing it is to kill eight stormtroopers with a single button push – but the fact of the matter is that the story is SO good I don’t especially care that the game is bad because I’m not in it for the game. Twitchy cameras and sluggish targeting might matter to someone whose sole purpose for playing TFU is to jack up their gamerscore by another thousand points, but to me it’s just something that slows me down as I plow through to the ending (not the END, the ENDING), which I am starting to suspect is not going to be that happy.

Obligatory side rant: how fucking sad is it that the writing and acting in a video game are like TEN HUNDRED BILLION times better than the last three movies? Case in point if you aren’t aware of the game: the main character (Darth Vader’s Sith apprentice) communicates with people via a droid that turns itself into a holographic projection of whoever is on the other end of the line. After one time when he’s talking to Vader, after the call ends the droid collapses in a heap and says “I hate being him.” And the main character looks at the droid, and is suddenly very sad, and says, “I think he does too.” Those two lines have more real emotion behind them than every second of the first three movies put together. Congratulations, George. You spent 10 years, $400 million, and used a thousand people to make three movies that aren’t as good as one game that 30 people made in eighteen months. EPIC FAIL.

Anyway.

Mostly my gaming taste tends towards RPGs and sports games, and sports games are really just narrative vehicles anyway. Playing NHL or FIFA or whatever isn’t “can I somehow defeat my computer opponent/jerkoff guy on the internet?” It’s a story, and you’re waiting to see how it ends. Can Kansas win back-to-back BCS championships? (Yes.) Will Chelsea stretch out their six-game winning streak? (Yes.) Can Tiger break his own record at Pebble Beach? (Yes.) Will the Devils ever lose by fewer than 5 goals on Martin Brodeur’s day off? (No.) Despite the national media’s constant attempts to make them so I don’t believe that ACTUAL sports are a narrative event, but firing up NCAA Football on 360 is creating a story as much as sitting down to write the screenplay to Rudy.

And, as those of us of the gaming sort know, RPGs are basically just 40-80 hour movies with occasional gameplay bits in between scenes. The story rules still apply – I will grit my teeth and ignore reams and reams of terrible gameplay if the script is good enough (and I have). There are people, serious RPG-players, who complain that they hate Final Fantasy VIII (one of my all-time top five favorite games ever*) because “the gameplay is broken.” To that point, I remind them that A) it’s a freaking RPG, the gameplay (while in this case definitely broken) is irrelevant, and B) you KNOW the gameplay is irrelevant, and you actually hate it because it’s a love story and you’re an immature jackass. Admit it. ADMIT IT. YOU HATE IT BECAUSE IT’S A LOVE STORY. ADMIT THAT YOU ARE AN IMMATURE JACKASS. ADMIT IT!

I’m sorry, I still get a bit worked up about that one.

Also, there was something about baseball this week, but I was too busy trying to destroy the Emperor. I’ll have more on the World Series shenanigans tonight.

JLK







* In no particular order: Final Fantasy VIII, Half-Life, NFL 2K5, Final Fantasy Tactics, StarCraft

Your "It Is An Honor I Dream Not Of" Quizo Update

A couple quick things before we get to the meat of today's missive.

- Attendance last week was excellent. Keep it up.

- Inasmuch as tonight is Game 4 of the NLCS, I'm not sure what the crowd situation is going to be like at the pub. If it gets stupid crowded with non-Quizo Phillies fans we can move to one of the other rooms, surely. My preference is for the Rigger Bar since I'm pretty sure that we will still want to watch the game as well and the TV coverage in there is much better than the restaurant.

- However, if vast numbers of teams are not coming tonight, PLEASE let me know so that plans can be made accordingly.

- On the good news front, it's been a very big couple days for Oprah's Book Club. Nick and Regina got married on Saturday (to each other, I mean, more on that in a bit) and today is Palestra Jon's (of the rule which bears his name) anniversary. To Oprah's from all of us at Dark Horse Quizo, congratulations, good luck, mazel tov, may the Force be with you, whatever benediction you prefer. I'm a fan of the Mandalorian "shoot straight and run fast," but that may not be quite the feeling we're after here. But, all in all, good on them.

Now, then, to our main attraction:

Since, as we all know, the motto here at Quizo Central is and has always been "Safety First," we're going to return today to our occasional series of seminars on drastic and dangerous life events.

This week's topic is "how to survive going to two weddings in one day."

- Firstly and most importantly - this really cannot be stressed enough - do not wait until the day you are attending two weddings to buy the shoes you are planning on wearing to two weddings. For while your brand-new shoes may be very impressive in their own right, and when combined with your brand-new suit and shirt and tie, all selected and coordinated specifically for the two-wedding day, make you resemble nothing so much as the reincarnation of Burt Lancaster himself, and we're talking like vintage 1955 "I just got finished sleeping with Ava Gardner AND Lana Turner and, my oh my, what's your name, sweetheart?" Burt Lancaster, wearing brand-new shoes to two weddings in one day is a CATASTROPHICALLY BAD IDEA. Doing so will cause your resemblance to Burt Lancaster to rapidly erode, as it is a known fact that Burt Lancaster was in possession of both his feet, and after a couple hours of wearing brand-new wingtips the only thought in your entire head - overriding your base, lizard-brain lusting after food, sex, lower taxes and oxygen - will be a burning desire to chop off your own feet with a rusty axe.

- Have backup. This is valuable in several respects. If, for instance, you tear the price tag off your brand-new tie a little too vigorously and rip out one of the moorings of the little tie-holder-label-thingy, while driving to the first wedding you can call your backup and say, "you got any safety pins? What do you mean you threw out all your safety pins? How the fuck can you throw away anything as fantastically useful as safety pins? (This exact sentence was actually spoken by me.) Fabric glue? Will that set in time? Okay, fine, bring that." Or, when partway through the first of two weddings in one day, you can say to your father, "if you don't get me a pair of golf shoes that look like wingtips I'm going to chop my feet off with a rusty axe." If your backup gets snippy, you can remind them that pain overrides family and that once you start chopping off body parts it can be very hard to stop.

- While buying nice new Burt Lancaster-izing clothing for two weddings in one day is endorsed, if you are buying your clothing at someplace you have never shopped before be sure that you actually look at the prices of the clothes you're buying, so you can avoid situations such as tearing the price tag off your brand-new tie a little too vigorously and, while wondering how you're going to fix the little tie-holder-label-thingy, glancing at the too-vigorously-removed price tag and realizing that you have paid more for a tie than you normally do for a shirt, and that you normally pay pretty handsomely for shirts to begin with. This realization is closely followed by a feeling of growing horror while you try to calculate how much you paid for the new shirt from this place, then wondering whether the guy at the gas station on the way to work on Monday morning will accept the change from your cup holders as payment.

- While the bucolic location for the first reception might make you think that everyone will be very relaxed and easygoing, always remember to be very, very careful when surrounded by large groups of Germans. This advice applies pretty much anywhere, really. And for god's sake, whatever you do, don't mention the war.

- Your desire to end the lives of certain guests at the reception is not something you should vocalize.

- At the first reception, if your father has been hopelessly addicted to the bride's grandmother's pastries for the last 40 years, telling your father that the dessert tray is a collection of pastries made by the bride's grandmother and that they are out and ready to be eaten is a surefire way to guarantee that you do not get to eat any of said pastries.

- Silk suspenders do not have the same kind of "give" in them as the cheaper, elastic suspenders you may have worn in the past. This means that things like going to the bathroom take exponentially longer as you will spend several minutes trying, Houdini-like, to extricate yourself from them, since after you realize that you could have made a car payment for what you inadvertently paid for said silk suspenders you will find breaking your own back preferable to doing any damage to the goddamn things.

- Wearing contact lenses for the first time in almost a year is recommended if the first reception is outside on a beautiful sunny day, as it makes the wearing of sunglasses possible. Trying to drive from one reception to another in the dusk of twilight while wearing contact lenses for the first time in almost a year is not recommended, as the combination of your eyes adjusting to your slightly-different vision and the tricky, shifting light of the immediate post-sunset period will make driving in under-lit suburbs much more exciting than it really needs to be.

- When arriving at your friend's parents' house for the second reception, do not trip over the SAME GODDAMN TRICK DOORSTEP THAT YOU HAVE TRIPPED OVER EVERY ONE OF THE HUNDREDS OF TIMES YOU'VE GONE INTO THAT HOUSE FOR THE LAST TWENTY FUCKING YEARS! Seriously, don't do that.

- No matter how much your new clothing makes you resemble Burt Lancaster, the sentence, "you look so much like my ex-girlfriend that I really thought you were her, but when you walked past and didn't punch me in the face I realized you weren't" is, despite how 100% true it may be, not the first thing you want to say to someone you've just met. Even at a nighttime, outdoor reception, where the darkness makes you resemble Burt Lancaster that much more, saying things like this clearly mark you as "not relationship material."

- Get your friend who lives out of town and is thus marrying a woman you haven't met yet to introduce you to his new wife BEFORE he is drunk.

- If you once watched one of your friends drink 26 beers in one night, offer him a ride home BEFORE people start playing beer pong if you want to leave the party any time soon.

- And, finally - whether your belief tends toward Jehovah, Vishnu or the Lords of Kobol, never let anyone think that you don't thank God every day that you have the friends you have.

JLK

Your Divided We Fall Quizo Update

Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed the show from Pat Burrell yesterday, since it’s pretty likely his time as a Phillie is rapidly nearing its end. They’re sure as hell not going to pay him no 15 million bucks next year, and unless he’s willing to return for a lot less money he’ll be plying his slow-footed trade elsewhere come 2009. The Phillies re-signing The Bat certainly isn’t out of the realm of possibility – the numbers I most commonly hear bandied about are that the Phillies would be happy in the 5-7 million range – but I wouldn’t exactly ratchet my hopes all the way up.

For some inexplicable reason I have been a large fan of Pat the Bat ever since he arrived in Philadelphia. No one is quite sure why, although it might have been because I finally found a Phillies starter I could beat in a footrace. It certainly wasn’t for his, er, shall we say, extracurricular activities, which anyone who has been to a bar in the tri-state area the last 10 years can tell you a detailed story about. It’s interesting to note that since his engagement and marriage the Bat’s form has gotten much more consistent. Since the Bat had spent his previous years prosecuting… how to put this… an extremely exhaustive search for his one-and-only it makes perfect sense that his newfound contentment should provide such a soothing influence.

I, for one, am pleased by the fact that Pat the Bat has actually expressed a desire to stay in Philadelphia. I hope he does. They might replace him with someone who has actual speed, and that would make me sad.

Prior to the series I had predicted Phillies in 4 – I’m always right, in case you hadn’t heard – and I like the Phillies over the Dodgers and ManRam in 6. Beyond that, I shall not speculate.

While the Pat the Bat show and the attendant series-clinching goodness was going on, however, there was some OTHER sports stuff that involved a word just a single vowel away from “clinching” going down at the Linc. My thoughts on that debacle are documented elsewhere on the tubes (I’ll point you to it if you’re really interested), but suffice it to say that prospects are not looking good on the American football side of things. However, when one considers that Chelsea beat a very talented Aston Villa squad yesterday and the Phillies moved on to the NLCS, the Eagles’ buffoonery aside yesterday still has to count as a positive sporting day.

Moving on.

Last week while the House and Senate dithered over which version of the atrocious bank bailout bill to pass, this little exchange went on amongst the countries of the EU:

EU: The US banking crisis is going to spread over here! Sacre bleu! We must do something!

Ireland: Okay, we’re going to fully guarantee all deposits in our banks. That way our citizenry won’t run on them and cause a massive depression. Jesus fucking Christ are we sick of depressions in this country.

Greece: Hey, that’s not a bad idea. We’re gonna do that too!

Germany: What? What? You cannot do such a thing! This plan will destroy European banking! Nein! Achtung! Guten morgen!

Ireland: Okay, have you READ a history book? We really don’t handle hard times very well. We have this bad habit of “everyone dying” when this sort of shit goes on, and the United States isn’t exactly the “cheap starving refugee labor” market that it used to be.

Germany: You cannot! Ich bin ein Berliner! Mein lamen!

France: Perhaps if all the great nations of Europe got together and talked about this we could figure out a way to fix le market terrible!

Germany: Ja!

Italy: Si!

UK: I say, capital idea.

Spain: Hello? Hellloooo? Is anyone home? Hellllllooooooooooooooooooooo? (no answer) Fucking France.

France: So, how shall we prevent les disaster economique?

Germany: Well, we’re going to… er… (mumbles) have our federal government fully guarantee all bank deposits.

Ireland: I’m sorry, what was that?

Germany: Hm? What? We didn’t say anything.

Spain: (pounding on door) HELLO?! WE’RE STANDING RIGHT OUTSIDE, WILL YOU PLEASE LET US IN? HELLLLOOOOOOOOO?! (muttering) Fucking France.

It’s like a soap, only if Erica Kane had nuclear weapons. (And I spoke more German.)

Two more things to note before we go: one, Quizo attendance the last few weeks has moved past “just short of disastrous” into “actually disastrous.” I don’t know what the story is there, but we need to get some more bodies back on a regular basis and pronto. On a similar note, Alias Pseudonym Undercover is once again going for their third win in a row tonight, so please show up and stop them. It is a statistically-proven fact that the more teams there are the less likely it is that one specific team will win, or something. I don’t actually really know a single goddamn thing about statistics, but it sure sounds plausible.

JLK

Your Less Than Relaxing Quizo Update

I'm back to work at the Death Star factory today (supposedly, at least, we'll see what happens when I get there), once again giving me the joy of going to work and not having to talk about it. I thoroughly enjoyed my little vacation and could totally get used to this six-months-on-one-month-off thing.

Sadly I cannot say I thoroughly enjoyed the Phillies winning their second division title in a row this Saturday because I had to watch the game with the horror of the annual block party raging outside. Let's see, an event that makes it impossible to park within 500 miles of my house that has children running around screaming up and down the sidewalk and concert-loud music blaring until ungodly hours of the night, all amplified by the strange acoustics of this block bouncing all of that noise directly into my bedroom window as though I was actually sleeping (or trying to sleep, as it were) smack in the middle of the street.

Dear god, there are few things on earth I hate more than the block party. When I get back to the office today I may "accidentally" hit the red button just to alleviate the aggravation.

JLK

Your "Why Is That Watermelon There?" Quizo Update

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine this weekend, and at one point she mentioned that she was fairly upset that over the next couple weeks she has to do a great deal of traveling for work. Something about three states in two weeks. I thought this was a pretty trifling stretch; when I drove cross-country I did 11 states in 8 days. It would have only been 6 but I was trapped in a hotel in Oklahoma City for three days by an ice storm (the tale of said trip being a long story unto itself).

However, in a rare moment of trying to be helpful, I said, "well remember, no matter where you go, there you are." Words to live by, those.

"Yeah," she said. "Hey, what's that from? Is that like Zen or something?"

"No," I said, "it's from Buckaroo Banzai."

"Are you sure? I thought somebody like Buddha said that."

"No," I said, trying to maintain my composure. "It's Buckaroo Banzai."

"I could have sworn I saw that on a TV show once – "

"NO!" I shouted. "It is fucking well Buckaroo Banzai!" I couldn't believe she was arguing about this with me.

Then came the words that really got my blood boiling.

She said, "what the hell is Buckaroo Banzai?"

(gasp)

(sputter)

Once I regained my composure at hearing such a shocking utterance, I started shouting again.

"You've never seen Buckaroo Banzai?"

"Uhm… no?" she said.

"You've NEVER SEEN The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension?

"Uh…"

"Red Lectroids? Planet 10? The Oscillation Overthruster? Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems? NONE OF THIS RINGS A BELL?"

"Okay, please stop yelling."

"How can you be an adult human and not have seen Buckaroo Banzai? What kind of sick childhood did you have?"

"I didn't – "

"Did your parents beat you with a leather strap when you were a kid? Chain you to a radiator in the basement? Did you subsist on rats?"

She finally got me to stop shouting when she said, "okay, see, this is why we never dated."

"Yeah," I said. "It's also why we never will." Though I'm not sure we were talking about the same thing by that point.

Never seen Buckaroo Banzai. What kind of hideous, twisted society allows that to happen?

Okay, so check this shit out: last week I was driving home from the Sev one afternoon and as I went past the front lawn at Lincoln I saw there were a bunch of kids out there playing CRICKET. I swear I am not making this up. They had the white sweaters going and everything. I mentioned it to someone I know in England who is a cricket enthusiast and noted that the closest equivalent would be for her to drive past a grade school over there one day and see a bunch of kids playing a pickup game of Your Garish American Football in full pads. Cricket. At Lincoln High School. I can't live in this world.

In other news, the Oxford English Dictionary reports that they will be adding a new word to their next edition:

Met (verb): to have a lead and subsequently lose it, to play poorly under pressure, to perform below expectations. See also "choke (verb)" and "Mickelson (douchebag)."

And I just found out that tonight's Flyers-Devils game isn't on television, so after the Buckaroo fiasco and Chelsea failing to beat United yesterday, that's just one more thing to be pissy about (as though I needed more). Oh well.

I suppose it's not all bad news. After all, the US won the Ryder Cup (yeah, stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Europe!) on a golf course that appeared to be a scale replica of the Appalachian foothills, there's a pennant race that the Phillies are actually winning, and last night I was able to do my favorite dance: the safety dance!

Yeah, okay, I'm sorry about that, it won't happen again...

JLK

Your Insider Information Quizo Update

Okay.

There have been some complaints about last week's speed round.

A small smattering (is that redundant?) of these complaints were about the topic of the speed round, to which I say, "shut the fuck up." As I noted on the top of the sheet, for more than three years now we have done the Eagles starting lineups every goddamn year the first week of football season. EVERY. GODDAMN. YEAR. It is not often that I am so depressingly predictable, but tradition is one of those things I tend to get prickly about. And so we will continue to do the Eagles' starting lineups the first week of football season, until either I die or the entropic heat death of the universe. I, for one, would not take bets on which will come first.

Then there are the complaints about a certain team's performance on the speed round, and allegations of - GASP! - cheating.

Now on the surface I can see how having an actual member of the Eagles fill out your Eagles' starting lineup speed round could be considered an unfair advantage of sorts. However, after consulting the Royal and Ancient Rules of Quizo I made the determination that having the answer to a question tell you that he is, in fact, the answer to a question does not constitute cheating in the strictest Quizo sense. (It is, remarkably enough, considered cheating in chess.) It's certainly not a "whoever wrote this paper doesn't know anything about Kurt Vonnegut" type of situation. So, we congratulate Pelti and Drago on having the foresight to happen to sit next to Stewart Bradley last week.

But we certainly have big things on tap for tonight, one of which will at the very least prevent a repeat of last week's shenanigans, unless the St. Joe's Hawk (curse his black soul) ends up drinking next to Das Boot.

First and most important it is vitally, dreadfully, fantastically important that everyone remember that tonight is a special Monday Night Football Edition of Quizo, which means that we will be starting at SEVEN (7)(VII)(sept)(sieben)(a David Fincher film) in the PM, and that you also remember that the speed of MNF Quizo would put the Flash to shame. We do this partly because I would not want to subject our loyal Quizo brethren to the horror of trying to answer trivia questions while surrounded by hordes of obnoxious Eagles fans, and partly because I want to get home in time for the game. So, basically, I'm a giver.

Second and almost as important - more, perhaps, to some - Alias Pseudonym Undercover, fresh off Brian's summer exile in Delaware, will be going for their third win in a row tonight. I must implore you to not let this happen, as these are guys you do not want choosing a speed round. Or, I dunno, maybe you do, since the look on their faces when they see what I do with whatever ridiculous topic they pick should be well worth the trouble.

JLK

Your Back In The Saddle Quizo Update

Notes from under the floorboards this week:

- So, yeah, the Eagles are pretty freaking good. I wouldn't get too wild just yet - the Rams are not, suffice it to say, a full set of examination papers - but if the Birds can beat the Cowboys next week I think we can be legitimately optimistic. DeSean Jackson appears as though he might be the real deal, and HOLY CRAP Asante Samuel is awesome. The Eagles aren't going to win by 35 points every week, mind you, but a man can dream.

- After playing the first 10 hours or so of Half-Life 2 probably 3 or 4 times in the last couple years I picked up The Orange Box a couple weeks back and I am determined to get through the whole thing this time. I just got to the part where the game moves from cool and intense to freakishly weird (super gravity gun!) but I have this nagging feeling that the game isn't actually GOING anywhere. This is at least partially because by this point in the first game you at least knew what the hell was going on, whereas now as near as I can tell I'm just flinging furniture at aliens for the hell of it.

- On the TV front, I am finally caught up on Supernatural and Friday Night Lights and have moved on to Rome, which is probably not as hilarious a show as I am finding it. I dunno, I just think it's funny that around the whole backdrop of the Roman revolution and Julius Caesar destroying the Republic there's these two guys who basically stumble around through the whole thing accidentally causing all of it. The show is great, though, don't get me wrong. It's hard not to be when you've got a hell of a cast - sweet zombie Jesus James Purefoy's Marc Antony is a freaking ANIMAL - and you're basically making a 13-hour version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar crossed with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Also being by FAR the most expensive show in television history helps. If I was spending $8 million an episode I'd probably make a pretty good show too.

- For those interested in such bookish, nerdly things, Brad Meltzer is going to be at the Chester County Book Company on September 17 and Neil Gaiman is going to be at some secret undisclosed location that is almost certainly the Center City Borders on October 1. The Meltzer deal should go quite well, that store is very nice and the the crowd fit very well in there. Plus Brad is very cool. The Gaiman thing, I dunno, man. The last time I went to a Neil Gaiman signing two thousand people showed up, and I'm pretty sure even half as many people at the Borders on Broad Street would cause the building to explode like a microwaved potato. Unless there is some other gigantic super-Borders around here that I am unaware of (hint: there is not). And Neal Stephenson's new book comes out this week. Yay! The sun? What's that?

- I caught on TV this past weekend the director's cut of Aliens, which I'd never actually seen (that cut, at least). The extra stuff doesn't do a whole lot for me, honestly; the bit with the colonists at the beginning, meh, and frankly the movie wasn't any worse off without ten minutes of footage about robotic machine guns. Yes, they're Aliens and yes, they're trying to kill us, Jim, WE FUCKING WELL GET IT. Two things did particularly strike me after seeing it for the first time in maybe ten years. For starters, for how much we remember it as this super-intense non-stop action blowout, it actually takes a LONG time to get going. Here's a trivia question for you: how far into Aliens is the first shot fired? Answer: NINETY-FOUR MINUTES. The second thing that you realize: that unlike a lot of things, Aliens IS just as good as you remember thinking it was when you were young. Going into it I actually expected to be a little disappointed, thinking it couldn't possibly live up to my memory of it as a drunk, obnoxious film student (as opposed to the sober, obnoxious Quizo Guy I am now). It does. No movie called "Aliens" really has any right to be that good, but it is. Interesting side note: after watching it I went online to read about it and found this whole exegesis about how Aliens is an allegory for the Vietnam War, right down to the fact that the Colonial Marines' vehicles and stuff were specifically designed to look like US Army equipment from Vietnam. Wild, huh?

- Finally, after an abortive attempt at Quizo last week, there is a rumor that my parents will show up again tonight. That is, to the more disturbingly competitive amongst you, some kind of enticement for some reason. It's not so great for me; all it means is that I have to listen to my father complain about the geography questions, which over ten years of playing Quizo with him I have never once seen him get a single one of right. For some real fun tonight, ask my dad what he teaches. For some more fun, ask him how he got the splints that are currently on two of his fingers. When you are done I will be waiting in the usual spot to receive your pity.

JLK

Your "Yes There Is Quizo" Quizo Update

Okays, folks, we are definitely on for Quizo tonight at the usual time and place.

Today's e-mail is very short because I have to get to a party, but let me just ask:

You know how when you buy orange juice, you shake the bottle before you pour it out? I wonder, if for the first 3/4 of the bottle you DON'T shake it, is the stuff that's still in there, like, super-juice?

These are the things I worry about, which is vaguely worrisome in and of itself.

JLK

Your Short and Sweet Quizo Update

Okay, the word I got from Colin yesterday was that Paul is doing a lot better and should hopefully be back next week. So that's, you know, good. We ended up sending some kind of fruit and basket combination; I can't speak to the details other than that I did not think it was hideously ugly. I have no visual aesthetic whatsoever, though, so you might want to take that with a grain of salt.

One more quick thing before I go this week: Did you know that the Spanish province Castellon, when translated into English, actually means "Chokesville?" True story. Just ask it's most famous resident, Sergio Garcia. I also hear Phil Mickelson likes to vacation there.

Your TOTALLY SERIOUS NOT KIDDING AROUND Distressing News Quizo Update

Some of you have heard this already, but if you have not: I found out Sunday that Paul Sherwin, our outstanding bartender, had an emergency appendectomy late last week.

He was fine last Monday night, I know!

As I understand it (from Paul McCloskey, aka "my boss") he went home feeling unwell one night last week and the next day had to get rushed to the hospital and into immediate surgery. He's home now, is recovering, and is going to be okay, but it was complicated in some way and it's going to be a week or two before he's back.

So tonight at Quizo I'm going to collect let's call it ten bucks a team (that sounds reasonable) and send Paul... I dunno, flowers, a fruit basket, donuts, whatever the fuck you send someone who is convalescing from emergency surgery, from all us good Quizo folks. If you have suggestions as to what is appropriate - or better yet actually KNOW - please send that along. Also, if you can't make it tonight you can Paypal me whatever you'd like and I'll toss it into the pot. Paypal sucks, I know, but it's the only option I can think of that is ready to go on short notice.

Sending something nice, once we figure out what that is, seems the least we can do.

See you tonight, then.

Your Olympic Spirit Quizo Update

When I got home from my last day at the Death Star factory on Friday, I was a little bummed until I remembered that, hey! It's the first day of the Olympics!

I am a stupidly big fan of the Olympics. They say that the Olympics are sports for people who don't really watch sports, but I say, "screw that noise." I love the Olympics. It very nicely fits in with the gorging, hoovering way in which I consume entertainment. You really cannot underestimate the awesomeness of being able to essentially do nothing but watch sports for 16 days straight, and now with my days suddenly, shall we say, much more wide-open and NBC's multi-channel 24/7 coverage I can do precisely that.

Plus you get to discover all kinds of neat things in the process. Watching the US Women's National Team at the Olympics was what originally got me interested in soccer - thanks for that, ladies - and this weekend I discovered "team handball." If you haven't seen it, team handball is best described as either "soccer with hands" or "lacrosse without sticks." When you first start watching it you think it's kinda stupid, but then the more you watch you realize it's actually pretty damned cool.

There is, however, a downside to these weeks of decadent sports consumption.

While I love the Olympics, I hate - hate hate motherfucking HATE - human interest stories (possibly because, as a number of my exes have suggested, I may not be human). And that's under normal, non-Olympic conditions. During the Olympics the prevalence of these mind-numbing tales soars to unthinkable levels and I feel a distinct urge to murder something every time an Olympic announcer starts talking about the heartwarming (occasionally heartbreaking) story of Steve Grabowski's rise to OH SWEET MERCIFUL CHRIST I'M GOING TO THROW A ROCK THROUGH MY GODDAMN TELEVISION. This shit is not what I came to watch. I came to watch people throw javelins and swim really fast and crap like that. I don't care how they got there. I DON'T FUCKING CARE. Worse still, I don't know anyone who does. Have you ever been watching the Olympics (or in fact any sporting event) with people, and when the stirring music (which used to be, I am not making this up, the theme song from The Adventures of Brisco County Jr) someone says, "hey, shut up man, I wanna hear this guy's life story?" No. Of course not. No one ever has. This is what causes the "sports for people who don't watch sports" criticism, and whoever thought "this is how we should cover the Olympics" should be shot, then drawn and quartered, then tarred and feathered, then shot again for good measure.

I have really grown to hate these bits of "the athlete's story" during the coverage. I mean, seriously, the worst hack writer in Hollywood couldn't churn out melodrama like this if their life depended on it. If the sports media, and especially NBC, is to be believed every single athlete at the Games has had to endure senses-shattering hardship to reach their shot at Olympic glory:

"Johann Jones' road to the triathlon was a rocky one. Born without arms, legs, or a sense of smell, he spent his first fourteen years in a specially-designed propulsion pod that allowed him to move around and feed himself through a complex series of eyelid-operated mechanical arms. On his fourteenth birthday he began the perilous trek up Mount Everest to meet the mystic who, it was claimed, could teach him an ancient Eastern method of limb regeneration, but because the Nepalese government refused him a permit, he had to climb the mountain without the use of his pod. So Johann spent a grueling 9 weeks ascending the tallest mountain in the world, pulling himself six inches a time with his tongue. When he reached the top the mystic taught him how to grow new arms and legs, but the limbs were weak and flimsy and the bones in them would break in a stiff breeze, so he spent the next four years of his life learning how to walk and eat and turn pages of books inside a special wind-free warehouse outside Area 51 where the only human contact he could have was via webcam with his fiancee, a heroin-addicted ex-prostitute he met at a bus terminal who gave up her life of sin after taking a shine to a poor disabled boy... with dreams of Olympic gold."

Then, as if that weren't enough to drive a normal person to depths of insanity that would make Hannibal Lecter sit back and say, "hmm, interesting," comes the buildup just before the event itself, which only becomes bearable when the story completely breaks down as the athletes in question fall flat on their faces.

"Can this young man, who has already broken his own world records three times in this event, fulfill his Olympic dream today, his birthday? If he wins the moon will be renamed in his honor, the European Union will disband and make him the leader of a new Holy Roman Empire, and after his coronation he will be treated to wild sex orgies with the Russian Women's Tennis team twice a day, and... oh... er... guess he'll have to settle for the bronze, there, Bob."

The weight of expectation is a terrible thing, folks.

And it wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, if these stories which populate every possible interstitial second of, you know, ACTUAL FUCKING SPORTS weren't an obvious anomaly. Especially when the reality is that most Olympic athletes' stories are more along the lines of:

"Cloned from the cells of Bruce Jenner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Sven lived in an Olympic Athlete Training and Body Perfection Compound until he was thirteen, where he trained in every possible endeavor of human physicality in a strength and endurance regimen that kills nine-tenths of those who begin it - fifty percent of whom perish before they are six years old. By the age of fourteen he was a perfect physical specimen who repeatedly defeated both Batman AND Captain America in virtual-reality scenarios designed to push the human body to punishing limits and beyond. After graduating the compound he was handed over to Darth Bane who would teach him the finer points of the hammer throw, the event he was genetically-engineered to destroy every existing world record in, while training Sven to become a Dark Lord of the Sith. His limbs and organs were replaced with bionic devices that allow him to bench press 1400 pounds and run a 90-second mile, and his blood has been replaced with a substance we are told is not unlike motor oil, which both provides critical cooling to his mechanical parts but also keeps his new gel-circuitry techno-brain, capable of processing over 14 quadrillion calculations per second, well-lubricated. Suffice it to say, Bob, this should be an easy event for Sven when you consider that he can not only use his barely-human body and telekinesis to add dozens of meters to his throws, but also has the ability to cripple his opponents with Force lightning."

You know, now that I think about it, I wouldn't mind these stupid human-interest stories so much if they'd make lightsaber combat an Olympic sport.

JLK

Your "Always In Motion, Is The Force" Quizo Update

Let’s take a little walk down memory lane, shall we, to the events of last week, but not until after I throw some generalized questions out there at the teeming trivia masses.

Question the first: is anyone a botanist? Or do they know a botanist? I’m serious. I have a question about trees.

Question the second: I got Soul Calibur IV this weekend for 360. It is awesome. It might be the most beautiful video game in the history of Western civilization. I absolutely fucking suck at it. Can someone teach me how to not be awful at Soul Calibur? If you say “Use Yoda/The Apprentice” I will sell your intestines on eBay. Actually, not even eBay, on craigslist. That way you’ll know that some really skeevy, creepy dude from West Philly is going to have your intestines.

Question the third: continuing that theme, me and some pals are starting an online Dynasty in NCAA Football 09 (and, likely, Madden 09 when it comes out). Our style of play is best described as “casual sim.” We’re in it to have fun but we don’t screw around; if you’re one of those guys who puts a cornerback in at receiver and never punts and sprints your QB all the way out of the pocket no matter what play you run – in the parlance of the land, a “cheeser” – this is not the group for you. However, if you are the kind of person who, like me, would love to switch your team from a 4-3 to a 3-4 but doesn’t because “that’s not [insert school name here]’s defense” but you still laugh at yourself when you give up a 98-yard bomb TD, then come on down. I’m leaning toward a non-superpower conference – something like the Big East, the ACC, or C-USA – but if we actually get 12 people I would seriously consider the Big XII (obviously Kansas is taken). Let me know if you’re interested.

Now then, on with the show.

When last we left our intrepid band of Quizo adventurers we were… er… at Quizo. Yes. Well, we were at Quizo with the disastrous sports records speed round, which I honestly thought would have gone over better than it did. Fun was had, laughs were laughed, songs were sung, and so on and so forth.

Then came Tuesday, when I finally bought a shiny new car. Well, a shiny used car, but a newer car than I had possessed the day before (i.e. no car). By my automotive standards it practically is a new car anyway inasmuch as it is the first car I’ve ever had that, were it a human being, is not old enough to be a freshman in high school. At a scant two years young it is a more than an able replacement for my old car, which you will recall died in a rather spectacular manner after replacing my old old car, which died in a rather slow, agonizing, young-mother-of-three-with-inoperable-brain-cancer Lifetime movie manner.

On Wednesday morning, then, I had this conversation with my boss when he stopped by my desk:

Boss: Hey, I’m really sorry.

Me: Sorry about what?

Boss: (confused) Didn’t anyone talk to you?

Me: Nobody ever talks to me. (This is true; my desk is off in a corner literally surrounded by people from an entirely different department.)

Boss: Oh my god, I can’t believe [our super-boss] didn’t say anything to you.

Me: About…?

Boss: One of the finance people woke up yesterday and found out the program is out of budget. Completely broke. We have to let all the contractors go at the end of next week.

This is how I found out I am getting laid off. 16 hours after buying a car. And, because I am a contractor, without severance. Like you do. For a little while there I was fairly upset about this turn of events, and I still occasionally get moments of distress about it because, in a distinct change of pace, I actually really like this job. However, I am fairly sanguine about the whole process for two reasons. One, later that very day I got a call from a headhunter – who as a group I have been chasing away with sticks for the last 6 months, a behavior likely to change – asking me to interview for a job next week for the same salary I’m making now. And two, after some thought and calculation I realized that thanks to the largesse of our President I will be getting 9 months (possibly a full year) of unemployment benefits and that in those 9 months I can take the same number of day classes at Drexel that would take TWO YEARS to finish at night, so I am also strongly considering the possibility of going back to school full-time for a couple terms. So I have options, at least.

But then, in the wake of all this heartache and strife, came Sunday afternoon, and a Phil-tastic performance by Phil Mickelson on the final 9 at Firestone. Let me tell you if you didn’t see it, folks, it was CHOKE-FUCKING-TACULAR. When I’m feeling down – and, let’s face it, I’m a little down after all this – that damnable song is right, my favorite things DO cheer me up, and if there is a better or more favorite way to spend a summer Sunday afternoon than watching Chokey McChokerson give away a World Golf Championship on the last four holes of the tournament, oh Sweet Zombie Jesus I can’t think of it.

The kittens and their whiskers, though, they can go screw. I am not a cat person.

JLK

Your Lickety-Split Quizo Update

Sorry, folks, no real content today. I've got to be running all over the world and I won't have a second to write anything.

See you tonight, then.

JLK

Your "Why So Serious?" Quizo Update

So.

The Dark Knight.

Yeah.

…

…

Yeah.

I had a reaction to a film once, I want to say it was Traffic but it feels much more recent than that; I had this reaction where when someone asked me what I thought of it I said, “it’s the best movie I never want to see again.” Unfortunately I’m probably going to have to see it again, what with the whole Imax thing and a couple people who haven’t seen it for whatever reason. I’m honestly not that thrilled at the prospect of watching The Dark Knight again because doing so is a pretty unpleasant experience at best. After I got home from the movie I had a number of people IM me (at 4AM!) asking for my review and I told them all the same thing: if you’re in the mood for a relentless onslaught of nihilistic brutality, The Dark Knight is just what the doctor ordered.

Folks, this is not a happy film.

Don’t misunderstand me: The Dark Knight is an absolute masterpiece. And I’m not talking as a comic book movie or a superhero movie or a big summer action movie or whatever. It is a straight-up real-movie masterpiece. It is certainly and easily the best film released thus far this year; it is probably one of the best films I’ve ever seen, though I’ll have to see it a few more times to really make that judgment, which I really don’t want to do since watching it the first time elicited a response that is similar to what I imagine it would feel like if someone rearranged my digestive system with an electric mixer. The film is absolutely flawless – and I mean that, it’s perfect, there is not a single element even a micron out of place anywhere in the entire film – but you don’t so much watch The Dark Knight as the movie repeatedly and continuously kicks you in the head and stomach. Lighthearted or hopeful moments are very few and quite far between; the other 99% of the film’s running time drowns in a sea of despair and desperation.

And then there’s The Joker.

There is little point in saying much about Heath Ledger other than the fact that yes, he is quite excellent; others have heaped metric tons of badly-written praise on his performance without, I think, very much understanding of it. In my case it is enough to say that he (and, in fact, the entire film) was good enough to immediately push past the annoying left-brain analytical barriers that automatically go up when I consume entertainment; I wasn’t dissecting every aspect of his performance while I was watching it and a) for me, at least, that almost NEVER HAPPENS, and b) I kind of wish I had, since I could have used some emotional distance between myself and the movie. Like a fractal of the film Ledger’s performance is note-perfect, and it combines with Nolan’s direction to create something truly unique. The Joker isn’t a character or even a person as much as he is a force of nature, a personification of chaos and anarchy that appears and disappears at will and leaves confusion and destruction in his wake; he is like nothing that’s ever been seen on film before and I doubt very much ever will be again.

My quibbles with the film are exceedingly minor, though, and are really a testament to how unbelievably good it is. My primary complaint is that the film makes me feel bad – and I mean feel REALLY bad, like the feeling you got the first time you saw Seven or Unforgiven – and the simple fact of the matter is that a lesser movie wouldn’t have that kind of effect. If there were any justice in the world and if things like this really mattered it would be a lock for a Best Picture nomination; suffice it to say that will probably not happen but that in the future that decision will be sorely regretted a la Raging Bull or LA Confidential.

To sum up: The Dark Knight is a goddamn masterpiece. See it if you have not done so already. If you don’t think so, as a professor of mine used to say, well, the world needs ditch-diggers too.

Also there was something interesting at the Open this weekend, I think.

JLK

Your Interesting Times Quizo Update

As we are all aware, my car went and blew itself up a couple weeks ago. This hasn't been as great a nuisance as you might think, since I have learned in the interim that without Chelsea playing every weekend, aside from work and school it seems I don't actually go anywhere. To get to our respective works and schools my father and I are sharing his car until a suitable, explosion-proof replacement for mine is located.

I was initially quite worried that without a car of my own my social life would take a huge hit and suffer greatly; the knowledge that my social life is apparently nonexistent is both sobering and relieving. Initially I thought a mistake had to have been made someplace, but when I went back and thought about it I realized that aside from the occasional excursion to the cinema or the casino (the latter of which is more like work anyway) I haven't left my house to go anyplace that wasn't the office, the Dark Horse, or Drexel in something like five months.

I was minorly distressed by this until I realized that I had chemistry homework to do, and the feeling passed.

The only trouble is that not having my own car means that on the weekends I have to ride back and forth to and from the shore with my dad. I'm certainly not complaining about this - I will never complain about being driven anywhere - but if you've never done it a car ride of any length with my father is something of an adventure. I thought about writing an amusing anecdote about what it's like, but I think instead I will just relate the conversations we have verbatim.

It is important to bear in mind three things: 1) I actually got a ride TO the shore on Friday night with a friend of mine, 2) I hurt my back pretty badly on Friday, and 3) all of these happened over a 90-minute ride last night and they are word-for-word transcriptions, I swear to God.

Oh, and ALL CAPS indicates shouting.

Seriously.

On geography -

Me: Kenny was asking on the way down here on Friday night how I survive this drive, what with it being dead straight and dead flat and pitch black and all.

Dad: Yes, well, New Jersey has THE MOST BORING SCENERY IN THE WORLD!

Me: What about Florida?

Dad: More boring than Florida.

Me: What about the desert?

Dad: No, the desert has a stark beauty that defies boredom.

Me: What?

Dad: A stark beauty.

Me: This isn't stark beauty?

Dad: No. This is verdant sameness.

On cuisine -

Dad: You know what the problem with being deaf is?

Me: Oh God.

Dad: If you're deaf you can't hear Sam Elliott's mustache.

Me: Er, yes.

Dad: You know, Sam Elliott? You can hear his mustache?

Me: (doing impersonation of Sam Elliott IBM commercial) "Peril masquerading as landscape!"

Dad: Yeah, that. Also, what's it called, "beef: it's what's for dinner." I guess that's better than "beef: it's slaughtered cow."

Me: Sam Elliott was also in Road House, the best worst movie ever.

Dad: Doesn't he kick Patrick Swayze's ass in that?

Me: No, they're friends.

Dad: They should get Sam Elliott to do that pork commercial too. You know, "pork, the other white meat." How the hell do you call pork white meat anyway?

Me: It's white... ish.

Dad: After you cook it!

Me: Well what the hell's the difference between red and white meat anyway?

Dad: It's some chemical... tannins! That's what it is! Red meat has more tannins.

Me: What?

Dad: Tannins.

Me: That's... that's the difference between red and white WINE, you idiot. Red WINE has tannins.

Dad: Just like... uh... red meat!

Me: You're making that up! Why can't you just admit you don't know something instead of making stupid shit up?

Dad: It could be tannins! You don't know!

(Ed. Note: it is not; the distinction between red and white meat is entirely arbitrary.)

ME: I KNOW IT'S NOT TANNINS!

Dad: YOU DON'T KNOW FOR SURE!

(pause)

Dad: They should get Sam Elliott to advertise other foods. (imitating Sam Elliott) "Rocky Mountain Oysters: it's not what you think."

Me: (laughing) OW! OW! It hurts when I laugh. Stop that. (laughing) OW!

Dad: "Headcheese: you don't want to know."

Me: (laughing) OW! STOP!

Dad: Oh, fine.

Me: (laughter abating) Ow that really hurts.

Dad: Like tannins?

Me: I hate you.

On urban planning -

Me: How come when we drive past this landfill it doesn't smell horribly bad?

Dad: They treat it with chemicals.

Me: Do you actually know that, or are you just making that up?

Dad: No, this one's true, they treat it with chemicals.

Me: What, do they just spray Lysol on it?

Dad: No, no, no. (pause) It's baking soda.

Me: Shut the fuck up.

Dad: They have guys who walk around with big boxes of Arm and Hammer -

Me: WHY CAN'T YOU JUST ADMIT YOU DON'T KNOW SOMETHING?

Dad: It's true!

Me: THEY DON'T USE GIANT BOXES OF ARM AND HAMMER!

Dad: THEY USE CHEMICALS!

Me: What, like tannins?

Dad: They put chemicals on the trash so it doesn't -

Me: EVERYTHING IS CHEMICALS WITH YOU!

Dad: They use them to -

Me: I can't stand this! When you don't know something you make up some weird shit about chemicals!

Dad: CHEMICALS ARE EVERYWHERE!

(we drive over a large bump in the road)

Me: Ow.

Dad: Would you like something for your back? Possibly a pharmaceutical chemical? "Cause we are liiiiiving in a pharmaceuuuutical world." Madonna should have sung that. It's catchy. That would have been a hit.

Me: I fucking hate you.

(BUMP)

Me: OW!

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: Pink Floyd

It is fairly common knowledge that back in the day I was a major consumer of alcohol. The popularly-tossed-about figure is "a bottle of vodka a day," and while that is a slight oversimplification it's close enough to accurate for our purposes (our purposes being, for this feature, a bizarre mix of nostalgia and mordant self-criticism). What is slightly less-known, or at least less-publicized, is that I was a recreational user of complex pharmaceuticals at the time as well, though certainly not to anything close to the same extent.

All the big words in that sentence were chosen with exquisite care. (Hm, there I go again.) "Recreational" and "complex pharmaceuticals" are the keys there - it was hardly a regular or even semi-regular thing, and your garden variety narcotics held no interest for me. I was a pills guy back in college, and when it came to pills I had one rule: up, up, gotta be up. This isn't that surprising when you consider the massive quantities of depressants I was ingesting at the time - taking Quaaludes on top of Absolut is not only a good way to ease yourself into hypotensive brain death, but it doesn't provide you with any sort of different experience; it's just more of the same. Plus, I don’t know if they even still MAKE Quaaludes. No, I was a stimulant guy, the more exotic the better. It is interesting to note that I don't directly recall ever taking stims while I was drinking, indicating that while my body was clearly trying to kill itself it apparently wasn't in any sort of actual rush to do so.

It is also distinctly possible that my taste for chemical enrichment did not extend beyond little while AWAKE! pills because one time around my 18th birthday I was at a party and I watched a guy drop acid. As I stood there drinking a screwdriver whose color was best described as a thin, pale, semi-transparent light yellow he proceeded to have what I still consider to be the Freakout of the Millenium.

This guy went BERSERK.

I've hallucinated before; never from drugs, just lack of sleep. I distinctly remember a class my sophomore year when I hadn't slept in about 40 hours previous and the print in my British Literature textbook turned bright red and started sliding back and forth across the page, and when I looked up the room was full of smoke. A few months back, driving home from New York in the middle of the night I started seeing cars and trees that weren't actually there. As hallucinations go they're kinda lame. The real problem with hallucinating isn't so much that you see all kinda of wacky shit but that moment when the conscious part of your brain realizes that you're seeing things that aren't there. THAT is what fucks you up, your conscious mind not being able to handle the disconnect between what you're seeing and what is real.

But this guy back at this party, oh my goodness, he just lost his shit. He was running around the room like his life depended on it, having shouted conversations with people no one else could see; he'd stop every few seconds and try to swat away imaginary insects from the air around his body; he'd clutch various limbs and body parts as though he were afraid they'd fly away. I believe the appropriate drug culture term for what he experienced is "a bad trip." No kidding. When he started screaming about "the monster" I finished my screwdriver, politely excused myself, and vowed never, ever, ever in my life to take LSD.

I have occasionally wondered in the years since if not ever taking LSD is what eventually led to the erosion of my love of Pink Floyd, but I'm pretty sure now it probably wasn't that. If acid usage and the concomitant flashbacks are necessary elements to enjoying a band I'm pretty sure the band wasn't that good to begin with.

The weird thing about Floyd is that unlike a lot of the things I've talked about here I can't remember what it was that made me actually like them in the first place. Back in high school I saw them in concert, for Chrissakes, and I have NO IDEA WHY. It was just one of those things you did back then. To an extent, I suppose, everyone discovers music - I mean really discovers that they actually have a musical taste, even if for most people it's laughably bad - in mid-to-late high school somewheres, and if you don't go hip-hop or country it seems that sooner or later, before you get to college, you're into Pink Floyd. It boggles the mind.

So I go off to college and I have all these Pink Floyd CDs. I did the whole bit with Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz around, I dunno, junior year or so, and even though I was still into Floyd I had long since determined that I really fucking hate the Wizard of Oz, so even drunk it wasn't as impressive as it probably should have been. I listened - looking back on it I honestly can't believe this - to Dark Side and The Wall OVER AND OVER AGAIN. What was I THINKING? At one point when I couldn't find my copy of The Wall I actually borrowed one from someone else and NEVER RETURNED IT. This is how much I was into Pink Floyd back then and looking back I really can't figure out what the hell I was doing.

There are still bits I like, to be sure. "One Of These Days" still works on some sort of primal level in a way I really enjoy (plus it reminds me of Life on Mars), and, since hearing it on the radio on the way to class earlier this week was what got me thinking about this whole thing in the first place, the line in "Run Like Hell" that goes "if they catch you in the backseat trying to pick her locks," as rock and roll metaphors go that's really just outstandingly good.

But honestly, my disillusionment with Floyd came into being a couple months back when I was driving someplace without my iPod and "Comfortably Numb" came on the air, and while I was sitting at a red light listening to it I just said out loud to my empty car, "what the fuck is this song about?" I couldn't come up with anything. My mind drifted as I drove - it was on Bustleton Avenue, I remember that, though God knows why I remember it or what I was doing there - and I realized I couldn't think of what a SINGLE Floyd song was really about beyond, I dunno, sounding neat.

I haven't done anything drastic like erase all the Pink Floyd from my iTunes - honestly Floyd sliding in my estimation must have started a long time ago because there isn't a whole hell of a lot of it in there, so at some point my albums disappeared for good and I didn't notice - because it's not like their music is offensively awful (like some other people we've talked about here). I just don't understand what I ever saw in it in the first place, and the fact that I am unable to determine my own motivations pisses me off more than anything else.

JLK

Your Brush With Death Quizo Update

Since our motto here at Quizo HQ has always been "Safety First," I'd like to present you with some information, gleaned through actual, firsthand empirical research that may prove very useful in your future.

Things You Don't Want To Be Doing When Your Car Suddenly And Inexplicably Blows Up:

1) Driving it.

2) Driving it to work.

3) Driving it to work on 95.

4) Trying to get yourself out of it while pulled over on 95 on your way to work.

Some important corollaries to this list:

1) When driving your car on I-95, if you hear a muffled "BOOM!" when you step on the accelerator and, immediately thereafter, smoke starts billowing out the front of your car and people driving past slow down to shout "your car is on fire!" at you, that is what we in the safety business call a "bad sign."

2) When attempting to assess any possible damage to your vehicle, always do so from a safe distance, as after a piston punches a golf-ball-sized hole through both your engine and your oil pan there will be hot oil and shredded metal everywhere.

3) A safe distance to observe these phenomena does not include directly underneath the car while it is up on a tow truck lift since, as tow truck drivers and mechanics will tell you, and I am quoting here, "hydraulics fail."

4) The time to be especially watchful for any and/or all of these signs of danger is within 7 days of paying almost $400 to have your car pass inspection.

5) When preparing to take your vengeance upon a cruel and heartless universe, stock up on ammunition beforehand. As a regular person you will have no problem buying bullets. Once you become known as "The Destroyer of Worlds" you're going to find it very difficult to get any kind of customer service at the ammo counter.

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: The One Where The Masses Rise Up Against Me

My family had some fairly serious money troubles when I was a really young kid. My parents, god bless them, were spending basically every cent they had (and then some) educating my sister and I, and that didn't leave a whole lot of wiggle room for anything else. As I got older things started to loosen up a little but they didn't really get completely cleared up until... oh, I'd guess sometime when I was in college or thereabouts.

Around Christmas, when I was very young at least, my mother wouldn't say anything, she'd just look worried all the time. As I got older my mother had a familiar Christmas litany. I swear she would say the EXACT SAME WORDS every year: "it's going to be a lean Christmas." She would say that in an attempt to cushion the blow for when that year's present haul wasn't as impressive as the previous year.

I didn't notice at the time but I now realize that every time she said that when my father was in earshot he would just smile, basically to himself. Somehow my mother never realized that every year, without fail, my father would go out on Christmas Eve in an orgiastic frenzy of present buying and every year, without fail, no one would be disappointed.

One Christmas present, though, that my father did NOT buy came when I must have been 8. Amongst a sea of other presents were two videotapes: one had the first three Star Wars movies on it, and the other had the first three Star Trek movies. Apparently the A/V department at my father's school had gotten their hands on a tape-to-tape recorder, and my dad went and rented all those movies and put them onto single tapes for me. I'm assuming they were recorded in SLP or "picture quality, what's that?" mode, though admittedly the crispness of said images is not that big a deal when a) you are 8, and b) your TV is as big as an RV but only has a 19" screen, thus rendering the quality of the tape pretty much a non-issue.

So I had these tapes. My memory of them is remarkably vivid: the label on the Star Wars tape was written in my dad's giant all-capitals block-letter handwriting, and the label on the Star Trek tape must have been written by whoever it was at Girard who made it; the handwriting was considerably smaller and more elegant than my father's. I had these tapes and, in probably the first instance of the obsessive nature with which I would inhale entertainment for the rest of my life, watched them over and over and over and over AND OVER again. My parents didn't mind - it is worth noting that when I was that age they weren't much older than I am now, and they were both long-time gigantic nerds to boot - and my sister was 6 and, I dunno, I guess she was around or something.

I was already a big Star Wars fan, even at 8. Empire was the first movie I ever saw in a theatre. I had books and action figures and all that stuff. My course as a lifelong Star Wars nerd was locked in around my fourth birthday. (Thanks a fucking lot, Mom and Dad.)

I don't remember specifically liking Star Trek BEFORE I got that tape, but I sure as hell did afterward. I went the same way as I did with Star Wars, vacuuming up as much material as I possibly could; if you think adult collectors of things like this are sad you should see it at that age; when you're 8 or 9 paraphernalia is like crack, and with the associated addict behaviors to boot.

In the process of my multimedia hoovering I learned basically everything there was to know about Star Trek at the time. It is worth noting here that this was before the days of the net and Wikipedia and whatnot where over the course of a couple hours you can, Matrix-like, download every vital piece of information about an entertainment franchise directly into your brain and have the equivalent knowledge of having seen every episode/movie/whatever without ever watching a frame of film/reading a page/whatever. I learned everything about Star Trek the hard way.

So in 1987 when I saw a commercial for "Star Trek: The Next Generation," oh, man, it was like the derrick drill hitting that oil field for the first time.

Nerd.

EXPLOSION.

I was instantly hooked on TNG, even though I distinctly recall telling my mother at one point during the first season that though I loved it and it was my favorite thing on television it still wasn't as good as old Star Trek. Still, I watched it with an obsession that would be pretty frightening were I to witness it now in a 9-year-old. When I would get grounded and sentenced to "no TV" my parents would have to make an exception for TNG because I would go completely BERSERK if I didn't get to watch it. It was the first time I was ever completely hooked on a television show. I'm pretty sure that TNG is still the only show where I watched EVERY SINGLE EPISODE at their first-run airtime. In the years since I've gotten pretty compulsive about watching Lost or Galactica but I still DVR them from time to time. Back then, though, I'm almost positive I watched 7 years of TNG eps the very second they aired.

The first seeds of doubt started with little things. Tiny things. Why does a Frenchman have a British accent? I didn't hit that one until I was about 14. What's the point of having shields if there's like 900,000 ways around them? Wow the holodeck and transporters seem to malfunction a lot. Wow there seem to be an AWFUL lot of these anonymous crew members who die with regularity. What the hell does Worf DO, anyway? "Security Chief?" What the fuck is that? The ship has enough firepower to blow up a planet and there's a GUY whose job it is to keep the ship SAFE? From what, the Great Green Arkleseizure?

But these questions occupied the back of my mind, a dark, humid corner where another voice sat saying "if Luke kissed Leia in Empire and they were revealed as siblings in Jedi then these movies aren't planned out very well, but that means..." which we now recognize as the first steps on the road to madness.

I ignored that part of my brain - the part asking distressing questions about Star Trek, at least - for a lot of years. We still had Trek movies with delightful regularity (if not delightful or regular quality) and TNG was, by all accounts, on television in full-blown syndication something like 45 times a week. Somewhere in there, though, there was this, I dunno, gap between when TNG was on everywhere three times a day to when it started its abortive, ill-considered run on Spike, when there was very little Star Trek to be had.

(Side note: what genius decided that it was a great idea to make STAR TREK the flagship show of what is, essentially, the Frat Boy Channel? That is one person, folks, who does not fucking well understand "branding.")

When TNG came to Spike there was this giant promotional push (like you do) and I sat down to watch - seriously, intently WATCH - Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time in several years.

After a few weeks I came to a conclusion:

It's not that good.

I'm sorry, folks, it really isn't.

Part of the reason it's not that good is because of the one part of it that is truly amazing: Patrick Stewart. Even if he wasn't such a great actor - and not to take anything away from the rest of that cast, but he's so far past any of them it's not funny - if nothing else Picard was the only character on the show who was REMOTELY interesting. Every other crew member of the USS Enterprise-D (that's right, goddammit, it's the Enterprise-motherfucking-DEE) is a bland cipher at best or a one-note joke at worst. Dutiful Riker. Naïve Data. Worf the Warrior. And the rest, here on Gilligan's Isle. Seriously, Troi, WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE ON THAT SHIP FOR? She doesn't do ANYTHING.

The actors - all of whom are quite talented, except for maybe Dr. Crusher, whose character was construed so narrowly as to be practically two-dimensional and thus provide no insight into the actress - are all trying very hard, but you can see in the first couple years the show straining against Roddenberry's vision of a perfect 24th century human utopia (which, while philosophically interesting, makes for acutely bad drama) and then, after he left, TNG became stuck in the rut that strain created. By then boring anti-drama had become part of the show's DNA and every time they tried to break out of it things came across as strange and off-putting. The Klingon civil war arc is so out of character for TNG it seems like it's from some other show entirely (possibly the later, exponentially better DS9), the late-seasons "romance" (a term used here in surely its loosest sense) between Troi and Worf is as clunky as Russian poetry, and even Q got tiresome after far too many appearances down the years.

This is not to say there aren't moments where the show, through some fortuitous alchemy of script and acting and direction, didn't pop and sometimes even take flight. The episode where Q flings the ship into the Delta Quadrant and we meet the Borg for the first time is remarkably good television, and the Borg's return in The Best of Both Worlds is as satisfying as any season finale/premiere two-parter I can think of. This is true DESPITE the fact that every Borg appearance on the show after are such horrific cock-ups that retroactively poison every instance previous, and that it would take First Contact to truly "make" the Borg. The one with Jean Simmons as Admiral Satie, the witchhunt-y episode (The Drumhead? Maybe?) is, to my mind, the best hour of pure acting (and probably writing) in the entire series. And "Cause and Effect" is a fantastic, just a truly fantastically-executed hour of science fiction, though it occupies a black space in my heart because, in what is surely the greatest irony in the history of the universe, it is the single episode of TNG I have seen more than any other; for a period of - I am not making this up - almost 10 years it seemed like just about every time I turned on TNG "Cause and Effect" was on. And John De Lancie, overused though he was, is still always a joy to watch with Stewart.

But those, and a few others, are really only a couple high points in what is an overall run of surprisingly depressed quality. One almost gets the sense that after 20-some-odd years between Star Trek and The Next Generation the time spent on TNG was the creators learning how to make Star Trek, at least on television. The fact that Deep Space Nine is SO good - and even ten years after it went off the air when I catch it I am STARTLED by how good almost every single episode of DS9 is, and how remarkable the whole series became - is some pretty strong evidence in that direction. Of course, the dreck that was Voyager and the first two seasons of Enterprise undermines that argument somewhat, but shut the hell up.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm not saying TNG is bad. It isn't. Especially if you compare it to some of it's contemporaries; it is more than probable that part of the reason we have such fond memories of Next Gen is because, for science fiction fans at least, the available alternatives were so unpleasant. It isn't bad. At times, even, it's pretty good, but on the whole it's just not nearly as good as we remember it.

And, of course, if I could just bring myself to not watch it when it's on, I wouldn't have to think about this so often.

JLK

Your "To Everything, A Season" Quizo Update

I watched the final of Euro 2008 yesterday, and as the day wore on and it became increasingly obvious that Ze Germans not only had no intention of winning but apparently didn't seem all that interested in actually PLAYING, I began to worry about what would happen if Spain actually won something.

Spain's failure to win a major tournament in the last 44 years transcends legendary. It's tough to make an analogy to some other sport that you non-football lot would understand; I cannot think of a single other team anywhere that has been so consistently talented and yet consistently managed to fuck everything up as badly as the Spanish have.

Well, okay, I can, kindasorta: take the last, say, 15 years of college basketball where Kansas has been a top 10 team every year and a decent favorite to win the national championship. Now make them even better - say one of the top 2 or 3 teams - and instead of the Jayhawks' standard second-round self-immolation, imagine they get to the Final Four every time and THEN try to set themselves on fire like they normally do but they even fuck THAT up and instead burn down the arena and all their fans. Oh, and take that 15 years and triple it. Kansas' now-broken string of underachievement is the only thing that's really close to the kind of cock-up-ery that has plagued Spanish football for FORTY FOUR YEARS, and in actually isn't really that close.

The beauty of Spain is that they don't just go out with a whimper. They come in as heavy favorites, perform well early, and then choke so spectacularly that even Phil Mickelson trembles in the face of their mighty chokage (or would, were he intelligent enough to comprehend the on/off switch on his television, never mind knowing that a country called "Spain" actually exists). The Mets' 7-game collapse at the end of last season? Imagine that level of choketacity, bottled up into a single game, and that your team did it EVERY TIME THEY PLAYED FOR YOUR ENTIRE LIFETIME. That is Spanish football.

So you get an idea of what we're up against with Spain when they're winning 1-0 with several minutes left. The texts started flying: "Does Spain have a choke left?" "Can they still lose this?" "Always be wary of the Germans." And so forth. The Germans had to come up with a miracle equalizer in the last few minutes, because to not do so meant Spain would win and, Christ, that obviously can't happen.

Then the final whistle blew, and I sat there watching the celebrations on the pitch.

But... but... Spain didn't lose. Spain won. That can't be right. Spain didn't lose, so ERROR ERROR ERROR! DOES NOT COMPUTE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!

Sorry, went a little Dalek there for a second... moving on...

A little while back I was walking past a bar in a casino after a mildly disappointing round of Texas-style Hold'em when a cocktail waitress I knew from another casino came by. We headed in, I bought some drinks, we got to talking, and at one point she looked at me like I had three heads.

"Are you actually enjoying this song?" she asked. Apparently I had been lightly bopping my head to the techno song that was playing over the bar speakers.

It is important to note that I cannot discern the words of this song, merely that I can hear the backing tracks and that I am aware of vocals which I cannot make out.

"Yeah, it's not bad," I said. "It's well-put-together."

She gave me an indulgent smile. "Are you sure?"

"Yes I'm sure," I said, and I began to launch into an exegesis on how to construct a good techno track.

She interrupted me about halfway into my second sentence and said, still smiling, "this is Miley Cyrus."

I said, "it's wha?"

"Miley Cyrus," she said. "You know, from Hannah Montana? On the Disney Channel? My niece loves it. She's eight."

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, trying to say something. What eventually came out was: "Yes. I see. Well." (pause) "Yes." (longer pause) "It's still put together pretty well." (pause) "Yes." (pause) "Fucking hell."

Flash forward a couple weeks after that. I'm on vacation at Disney World, it's our last day, and my family and I are at Epcot. They tell me repeatedly that I should do the Test Track ride while they go get lunch - there's no FastPasses left, but the wait for a single person is only 30 minutes (as opposed to 130 minutes for a group), and that gives them time to go eat in the restaurant in Mexico (which I do not want to go to) while I wait.

"It's worth half an hour," my father says. When we used to go when I was a kid I thought my Dad was something of a wuss when it came to rides, but after a) aging 15 years since my last trip, and b) riding Mission Space a few days before that and wishing afterwards that Poseidon would impale me on his trident and end my misery, my views on rides have gotten a lot closer to his. So on his advice I get in line for Test Track. This is actually going to be the only line I will have waited in the entire trip, so before they go to lunch I fish my iPod out of my bag.

Apparently the volume on my iPod is far too loud, since a few minutes later while I'm standing in line, a little girl in front of me who might have been 10 or 11 pokes me in the arm. I reach into my pocket to pause the iPod and say, "yes?"

She says, "are you listening to Miley Cyrus?"

"No," I say, far too quickly to fool anyone over the age of 13.

She actually looks at me with suspicion - her brow furrows and she squints at me - and says, "it sure SOUNDS like Miley Cyrus."

"No, no, no," I again say way too quickly, giving a laugh that, again, only a child of this age wouldn't recognize as pathetically fake. I reach into my pocket to pull out the iPod and surreptitiously hit the "Track Forward" button as many times as I can before pulling it out. "It's..." I look at the screen to see what's come up. "Motorhead."

Fuck.

"What's Motorhead?" the little girl asks.

Oh, FUCK!

"It's, er..." How to explain this to a ten-year-old girl? "Well, they're a band."

"Oh," she says. She pauses for a moment. "Do they listen to Miley Cyrus? They sound a lot like her."

I say, "I doubt very much that they do."

"Are you SURE you weren't listening to Miley Cyrus?" she asks me again, clearly not sold on the idea.

"Nope," I say. "Motorhead, baby!"

I put up the horns, albeit weakly.

The doors to the ride mercifully open at this point - the wait ended up being more like three minutes, though the longest three minutes of my life - and a voice in the back of my brain screams, "YOU HAVE SUNK TO A NEW LOW!"

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: Wacky Summer Jobs

You may or may not know this, but back in my college days one of my summer jobs was as a bouncer at a city pool. I am not making this up. The job had some silly title which I cannot remember, but the actual function of the position was to be a bouncer. To stand at the front gate of the pool and say, "you in, you out, you in, you there's no way, you in, you get the hell out." This was what you did for 8 hours a day. The pool I worked at for three summers had SIX of these guys and at least two of them were on duty at any given time during the day.

Now at this point a reasonable person might wonder why a pool would need a bouncer, let alone more than one at a time. If you are wondering this you have clearly never been to a city pool, which is a good thing. I will provide you with some context.

To get an idea of what a Philadelphia Department of Recreation pool is like, imagine a war zone. It helps if you imagine something from a Vietnam movie, because one of the overriding factors in working at a city pool is that you are sitting out on a giant concrete slab in the merciless summer sun all day and it is incredibly humid. So, say, picture the end of Platoon or the beginning of Apocalypse Now (you know, before the movie becomes an insane parody of itself). Okay. You've got your image? Burning heat, humidity turning the atmosphere into a wet sock, blood-sucking insects the size of a Saab flitting about, and Charlie always lurking on the fringes looking to drop a mortar on you? All right.

Now imagine there's a pool in the middle of that.

That's what it's like.

This analogy is remarkably apt. Most of the time - for about 7-7.5 hours a day, honestly - you do very little. You sit about, chitchat, maybe clean your M-16. The people you're with are pretty cool. You're essentially getting paid to hang out. You have fun. I was technologically inclined and managed to set us up with a working Playstation in the pump house so we were entertained (the pool version of opium in the barracks, I guess).

You can do this because most of the time a city pool is open it's running a program of some kind - swim lessons, adult swim, a slot for the summer camp, lifeguard training or whatever and as the bouncer you essentially don't do anything. You never need to really work the door for any of these things because the people who use them are remarkably well-behaved. Adult swim was the best. For two hours in the afternoon/early evening there were maybe half a dozen senior citizens getting their swim on and you could just sit around and smoke cigarettes and shoot the shit.

However, for an hour and a half every day, there was the unrelenting horror that was "free swim."

This means exactly what it sounds like. The doors were thrown open and anyone - well, almost anyone - could come in and avail themselves of the facilities. Trying to work the door during this period was sheer terror.

I started my first summer at Jacobs on the first day the pool was open. The gates opened for free swim, scheduled for 2:30 to 4:00. They were closed at 3:05 when a riot broke out. I am not exaggerating. There was an actual, full-blown riot. By the time it was over 6 police cruisers and 3 paddy wagons showed up. There were close to 20 arrests. As the pool staff watched from a safe distance, the Guard 2, a guy named Jim, said, "35 minutes. New record."

"Record for what?" I asked.

"Longest first-day free swim," another guard answered. I then learned that the riot usually started much earlier than that. This record would hold up for the next two summers I worked there, when both times the first free swim didn't even make it half an hour.

Now understand that a city pool is one of the most regimented, rule-bound, quasi-fascist environments you're going to find outside of a prison or Nazi Germany. The list of things you aren't allowed to do at one of these places is STAGGERING in its length. A strict interpretation of the rules essentially states that you are allowed to stand in place in the water and not move your arms and legs, if the lifeguards decide to let you in the pool in the first place. One of our favorite ways to control unruly crowds - and that's of the ones who got INSIDE, never mind the hordes of miscreants I would turn away at the gate - was to make them stand on the deck and not get in the pool. People hated that.

The fragile equilibrium of order amidst the thrashing chaos of free swim was mostly maintained only by the fact that everyone seemed to know that the cops responded to calls from Jacobs in about 9 seconds and that the staff - usually me and the other bouncers - would dial 911 at the SLIGHTEST provocation. Don't get out of the pool when we tell you to? 911. Throw a soda at a lifeguard? 911. Make the staff think that you MIGHT CONSIDER starting a fight with another patron? 911 double-quick. And it wasn't like we were abusing it. The cops loved us. They would tell us to call them for anything. And they meant ANYTHING. If you were a cop in the 8th District a call from Jacobs was an easy arrest and a painless way to keep your numbers up. Cops loved answering calls from my pool, and we sure as hell made enough of them.

The insanity would largely tail off towards the end of the summer - the worst miscreants were quite literally all in jail by then - but it would never entirely disappear. The fun of working the door never did. You haven't known true despair until you've stood at the gate of a city pool, looked at someone trying to get in for free swim, and said to them, totally 100% seriously, "I'm sorry, you can't take a parole bracelet into the pool."

I said that at least once a week for three straight summers.

To DIFFERENT PEOPLE EVERY SINGLE TIME.

JLK

Your No Quizo Update

I'm at Disney World! Go away!

JLK

Your Edge of Your Seat Quizo Update

My father and I have for a while now had an ongoing but civil disagreement - of course it's civil, because rule #1 is dignity, always dignity - as to the exact nature of the source of Tiger Woods' continuing excellence. He maintains that Tiger has made some sort of Faustian pact (c.f. Tom Brady, Dr. Faustus) in order to attain his golf prowess, while as we know I hold that Tiger Woods is in fact an android built by Satan, powered by the Dark One's unending hatred of the human race.

After this weekend's US Open, however, we have realized that were are both wrong and have come to the same conclusion:

Tiger Woods is, in fact, Satan himself.

No one but the First Among the Fallen could have engineered the kind of performance we saw at a BRUTAL Torrey Pines the last two days. Going into Saturday Tiger wasn't exactly out of contention, but he wasn't playing well - his gimpy knee was clearly giving him trouble - and then on the 6th on Saturday he took a tumble and further aggravated said gimpy knee.

Of course, this whole "injury" and "arthroscopic knee surgery" thing is obviously a clever bit of misdirection to distract us from the fact that Tiger is actually The Devil. What human being could, after further injuring a supposedly already-injured knee, go on to shoot FIVE UNDER FOR THE NEXT SIX HOLES ON the LONGEST COURSE IN GOLF HISTORY? After every tee shot Tiger grimaces in obvious pain, but it is not the pain of his "inflamed knee." No, it is the pain of maintaining the facade that he is human and not the Morningstar come to devour the souls of humanity.

This is a guy who, were he human (he is not), was walking around the course with an obvious limp, doubling over in (fake) pain after every shot and generally being - by his standards - wildly inaccurate off both tee and fairway, and STILL managed to force an 18-hole playoff for the championship today. Face it, folks. Tiger Woods is The Devil. It's the only explanation. Read your Bible. It clearly says in chapter 14 of 1st Kings, "and the Deceiver shall make an impossible 65-foot putt for eagle on 17."

Note that 1Kings 14 also tells us, "and on the third day, he of the sinister grip will make quadruple-bogey on 13 and prove that he is a gigantic fucking choke artist who sucks."

Tonight's game marks a number of semi-historic occasions as well. On the one front, Oprah's Book Club is going for their third win in a row, which is something I'm sure none of us want to see happen. On the other front, tonight will be Dr. Dan's (of Das Boot) last Quizo before he moves on to, I dunno, some kind of doctor thing in Arkansas. Dan's been a week-in-week-out regular since something like the third Dark Horse Quizo ever - back when his team was "Suck It Trebek," still one of my favorite team names of all time - and we are certainly disappointed at his departure. So we have Das Boot fighting to get a win at their team founder's final showing versus Oprah's Book Club looking to impose their hideous dynastic will on us all.

Hell, that's almost as exciting as watching Lucifer play golf.

Almost.

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: Billy Joel

For a very little while back in college I ran with this girl who loved Billy Joel. Like, LOVED Billy Joel. She had the whole shebang going: posters on the wall (odd, when one considers that he isn't that attractive), concert tickets alongside clumsy, blurred photographs matted and framed together under glass, and the entire top rack of a particle board CD shelving unit devoted solely to the complete Billy Joel discography and then some.

"And then some" meant cassette copies of every CD and a bunch of cassette mix tapes. Even in the deepest, darkest days of my obsession with the music of Bruce Springsteen (i.e. last week) I never had tape AND compact disc copies of his albums. Hell, since my music collection went all-digital back in like 1998 I haven't had a Springsteen CD (or any CD, for that matter) for more than a couple hours - buy it, rip it, and toss it was the name of the game, and I stopped buying CDs altogether in 2003 when I went 100% ITMS for music. But even back in college owning lots of CDs and displaying them proudly was something of an alien idea to me. Some people had trouble fitting their CD collections into their dorm. I had trouble fitting mine on my computer.

I was with this woman for a (thankfully) very short time, and her birthday happened to fall inside that (thankfully) very short time. While not as front-and-center as some of its contemporaries my psychosis about gift-giving is well-documented and I spent inordinate hours trying to determine what would be the perfect gift. Eventually I came to the conclusion that The Perfect Gift was a bootleg Billy Joel CD, but not just any old concert recording with terrible sound quality from the Indianapolis Coliseum, no, this one would be GOOD. One of those "import" bootlegs of a famous Billy Joel show, with high-quality sound (we used to call these "soundboard" recordings) and a real CD insert in the jewel case and everything.

I spent almost an entire afternoon canvassing used record shops for such a thing, and when I finally found one I deemed acceptable - I bought it at the old Record Castle on Cottman Avenue, which may or may not still be there, though ten-plus years on I have no memory whatsoever of what album it actually was - I paid a king's ransom of fifty dollars for it, an absolutely OUTRAGEOUS sum of money for me to spend on a gift at the time. Nowadays I feel like a heel if I don't spend at least that much on a gift (for someone in Gift Tier 1, at least: the parents, close friends, women I want to sleep with more than once), but back then, fifty fucking dollars! Great googly moogly. That was like a week's pay, and all for a woman who, looking back, I don't think I even liked that much.

Say it with me, folks: I was drunk.

But, in another phrase we should all be well-versed at saying along with me: I was right. It was, in fact, the perfect gift. It went over big. Huge.

So huge, in fact, that about a week later we stopped seeing each other. I was as distraught as one would expect from such a thing, though an alcohol intake as consistent as mine was back then tends to take all your emotional experiences, highs and lows, and just sort of smear them into one flattish line a few ticks below normal. I wish I could say I was so upset over the breakup - which really hardly could have been termed even that, the entire thing from start to finish went something like four and a half weeks - that I went and drank myself stupid, but I was already doing that on a regular basis to begin with.

In fact, the only unusual effect of the entire ordeal was that I couldn't listen to Billy Joel music for something like a year and a half afterward. It was the strangest thing. I wasn't the rabid stalker-person this woman was, but I had the double-CD greatest hits album and listened to it with some small regularity. I was a fan. But after the "breakup" (such as it was) I couldn’t bring myself to listen to a single song of his. I would change the channel on the radio when "Piano Man" came on. I would skip past "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" when it came up on Winamp. (Oh, god, remember Winamp? In the immortal whine of Luke Skywalker, "what a hunk of JUNK.")

And now, a decade on, when my musical tastes overall are essentially the same as they were in college - Bruce Springsteen, house music, and Frank Sinatra - now I still change the channel on the radio when "Piano Man" comes on (after cursing myself for leaving my iPod at home and being forced to listen to the radio in the first place), and I don't have to worry about skipping past "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" on iTunes (which thankfully replaced Winamp) because when it came on about 6 months ago, listening to it for the first time in years - with 6000 songs on your computer you can go a LONG time between plays - I had the sudden realization of, "this song fucking BLOWS," and deleted it along all the other Billy Joel songs on my computer. I've got 58 hours of Paul Oakenfold to listen to, I don't need this treacly, sentimental, overwrought shit.

Since this epiphany took place I have wondered a couple times if my current distaste for Billy Joel is really just a buried subconscious referent of the trauma - he said, with a snicker - from back then, or if I have actually grown somewhat and my tastes have experienced some small measure of maturing.

Then I remember a drunken conversation I had with a good friend of mine a couple days after the whole thing went pear-shaped:

"The only good thing to come out of all this," I said, "is that you know how much she loves Billy Joel? Right, well, now she's got that bootleg I got her for her birthday, and that is supposed to be some kind of historic shit or something, so she's never gonna get rid of it. And every time she listens to it, for the rest of her life, every time she listens to that CD, every time she hears a SONG on that CD, every time for the rest of her life, she's gonna think of me."

I took a long drink of vodka and said, "you know what that means? That means I win."

I still smile when I think of that little pearl of wisdom, so maybe there isn't so much maturing taking place after all.

Drop your bombs between the minarets!

Calculus Final?

Calculus Final, you say?

Here's how it went:

Over the wall.

Top corner.

Keeper's got no chance.

Back of the net.

And that, kiddies, is how you get an A in Calculus.

JLK

Your Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg Quizo Update

The walk from the building I work in to the building where I get lunch
is maybe 400 feet. I was one of the lucky ones who survived; the
walkway between the two structures was littered with the
rapidly-decomposing bodies of those who perished during the crossing,
victims of heat so intense that if one listens closely one can hear
even the trees wailing in their death throes.

It is too fucking hot, people.

I stumbled in the door when I got here to the cafeteria, exhausted,
drenched in sweat, alternatively renouncing the God who created both
weather and the humans who would so colossaly fuck it up and praying
to the same God to reach down with his merciful hands and snuff out my
life.

After all, when I finish lunch I'm going to have to walk back.

JLK

Your Thursday Regret: John Woo Movies

I have this thing where when I discover something I like - be it an author or band or television show or whatever, any creative sort of thing, really - I am consumed by a desperate need to immediately hoover up every single instance of it known to man. I am almost certain that this quirk goes back at least to my high school years, but for the life of me I can't remember a specific instance of it (Michael Crichton? Maybe?).

The first such instance that I CAN remember is when I "discovered" the films of John Woo. It would have been the summer of 1997 when I saw Face Off, which meant probably... you know, now that I think about it I can't remember where I saw it. Neshaminy hadn't opened yet and neither had the new theatre at Franklin Mills. The last movie I saw at the Orleans was the Star Wars special edition earlier that year, so... fucking hell. The old 10-screener at Franklin Mills, the one like way off to the side of the mall? Maybe? Crap. If we saw Face Off together, let me know if you remember where.

Anyway, the movie.

I watched Face Off on television not too long ago and god DAMN it was awful. I mean we are talking top to bottom just horrifically bad. Laughably bad.

And I used to LOVE this movie.

When I first saw it my reaction essentially boiled down to "slow-motion graphic violence is REALLY FUCKING COOL!" It is with considerable shame that I admit this, but I was entranced by it. They're shooting each other! And they're doing it SLOWLY! Ooooooooooh! How revolutionary! Looking back on it now - they're shooting each other. And they're doing it slowly. Who gives a flying fuck. Oh, and Gina Gershon sucks in everything. Not sure how I missed that the first time around.

When I got back to school that year, though, I made a mission out of tracking down and obtaining copies of John Woo's other films. Understand that back then this was a much more difficult proposition than it is now.

For starters, this was pre-DVD and, as best I can remember, before we had Best Buy in Philadelphia (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that score). Back then all you had was VHS, and in case you don't remember or aren't aware actually BUYING movies on VHS was fantastically difficult. In the jargon of the times and the business, VHS tapes were "priced to rent." It was not believed that there was much of a market for people buying movies on tape except for Disney movies and Star Wars, so if you wanted to buy a movie the day it came out - on VHS, mind you - it would cost you somewhere around $90-100. For one tape. I am not making this up. Then, usually about 6 months later, it would come out "priced to sell" for $15-20, and to get it you had to go to one hideous place: Suncoast Video.

These places were EVIL, and expensive as hell to boot. Plus this was before the days when anyone knew how to use the Internet for, you know, anything remotely useful, so it wasn't like today where even if, for some reason, you wanted to buy something in a physical store you could go on their website and see where the closest location with one in stock was. No, you had to call the store and ask if they had it. And then call another one. And then call another one.

Also, calling Suncoast Videos and talking to clerks who didn't know anything about anything, let alone movies, asking after video tapes - widescreen and subtitled only goddammit! - of obscure imported Chinese movies no one had ever heard of? FUN IN THE SUN, kiddies. Fun in the motherfucking sun.

But still I worked diligently, tracking down my WS/SUB copies of Hard Boiled and The Killer. My copy of A Better Tomorrow was dubbed because, if I recall correctly, there was not an NTSC subtitled version in existence at the time. When it came out on tape I bought my widescreen copy - getting widescreen tapes was actually something of a chore back then - of Face Off. And I watched them. And watched them. And watched them. And watched them. Over and over and FUCKING WELL OVER I watched those movies, spellbound by what I now recognize as ridiculously-choreographed, histrionic gun violence livened up by the occasional halfway-decent performance. My like-minded friends and I - whose names I will not reveal out of concern for their safety - would get together in one guy's room, let's call him... say... "Brian of Medford, NJ" and take massive amounts of Ritalin and watch Face Off and The Killer. Over. And over. And over. And over. AND OVER.

This is what happens when you take Ritalin recreationally. You play Final Fantasy VII for eleven hours straight and you really really WATCH John Woo movies. We would sit there and just stare at them, mouths agape, almost hypnotized. How one can get hypnotized by something paced and edited so frenetically and so very, very loud I do not know, but it can't be good for the brain.

I spent the better part of 3-4 years extolling the virtues of John Woo movies, a period which culminated with the release of Mission Impossible II in 2000, which I recall seeing in Manayunk with my then-girlfriend and sitting there just like I used to when me and my idiot friends were whacked out on Ritalin a few years before, my mouth stuck open, staring at the screen, entranced. I don't remember if she liked it or not, and by then the "I was drunk" excuse doesn't work anymore. It is a sad commentary on my relative maturity that I was so blown away by MISSION IMPOSSIBLE FUCKING II that I can't remember what was going on around me at the time. I actually dragged my father to see it with me (my second viewing) a week later and, looking back, I would like to retroactively apologize to anyone I dragged to a John Woo movie (i.e. my old girlfriend, my father, and some unknown party).

I don't remember when I stopped liking John Woo, but it couldn't have been much after that. Somewhere along the line I just stopped thinking that graphic violence on film was cool, and I honestly couldn't tell you why. The fact that the movies Woo made after that, even by both his standards and mine of the day, were uniformly awful certainly helps. But I look back on that time, realizing that I was practically an evangelist for these movies that I now recognize as twisted abominations of cinema, and I am legitimately ashamed of myself. I am not often wrong, but it is hardly ever that I am THIS wrong about anything.

Though, I have to tell you, after writing this, I find myself wondering how well The Killer holds up...

JLK

In Which We Welcome A New Feature To Our Humble Internet Abode

All right, I’m not promising this is going to be a long-running thing. Frankly I’ll be amazed if it lasts more than a few weeks because given the demands on my schedule – work, Quizo, school (two classes this summer), video games, football (that’s soccer to you), comics, a whole stack of those Blackwell “Pop Culture and Philosophy” books (I am currently sifting through the 24, Lost, Bruce Springsteen and Galactica editions), poker, going to the shore, and very occasionally sleeping – I am not exactly swimming in free time. Hell, if I get this off NEXT week I’ll be pretty goddamned impressed with myself.

That said, this is something that’s been on my mind for some small while now. I figure who better to share it with than my Devoted Reader?

Our new feature came from a conversation I had – I won’t get into the nitty gritty – but it boiled down to me dismissing an aesthetic choice one of my friends made as, “[X] is one of those things you think is great when you’re twenty that when you’re thirty you realize is really bad.” I’m not going to reveal X just yet since I’m going to want to talk about it if by some strange alignment of the planets this thing actually keeps happening for a while. But you get the idea. Things you think are great when you’re young and as you get older and wiser not only realize are bad, but you feel stupid for liking in the first place.

I had mentioned elsewhere on the internets that I was thinking about doing a feature like this but needed a better title than “things you think are great at 20 but realize suck at 30,” and now I think I’ve finally found one, and it even fits in with the general theme around here.

So, give it an hour from now, maybe an hour and a half – I’ll be working on the piece over lunch – and tune in to the first installment of “Your Thursday Regret.”

JLK

Your Out of Control Quizo Update

WARNING: LENGTH! Though this is still a pretty good story, I think. Definitely worth reading, but at 1800 words I’ll understand if you aren’t up for it, so:

TLDR version: This week’s clue is “Jaws!” Comic conventions are fun! 80’s music is nice! Hipsters should all be killed!

JLK

The full version follows:

As I said at one point this weekend: there is my scene, there is not my scene, and then there is the anti-matter equivalent of my scene, which, should it ever intersect with my scene, would cause the total annihilation of everything in the vicinity.

I spent most of this past weekend at Wizard World Philadelphia, a situation which can comfortably be labeled “my scene.”

Now, if you’ve never been, understand that generally speaking there are four things you can do at a decent comic convention:

1) Meet professionals/talk to professionals/express your undying quasi-sexual love for professionals.

I don’t really do this. Over the years you may have noticed that I am not the most outgoing person on Earth and talking to strangers, even strangers whose work I admire, does not exactly float my boat. In point of fact it rather sinks my boat. When it comes to social interaction, I am the Orca and talking to strangers is Jaws. The boat is clearly of insufficient size. Besides which it’s really somewhat impossible to have a meaningful conversation with someone in a loud, hot, hangar-sized room with 15,000 other people milling about, so actual face time isn’t really a consideration for me. I spend maybe 5-10% of my time at these things doing this. It does, however, lead into #2, which is...

2) Get sketches/autographs.

This is the big one for me. I just started the sketchbook two years ago and I tend to get sketches from guys who spend inordinate amounts of time on them so there isn’t a whole lot in there - I’ll bring it tonight if you want a look-see - but I have a collection of autographed books going back a LONG ways.

Upon reflection I’m really not sure why I do this, let alone spend so much of my time at conventions (roughly 75% of it) pursuing them. My pursuit of sketches and autographs is the direct cause of the one major downside of comic conventions: the intense, severe pain going to them creates. I am not making this up. As we are aware a back injury from the ancient mists of forgotten time (i.e. high school) has turned my lower back and left leg into largely-useless slush.

The problem comes from the fact that in a strictly technical sense I don’t buy “comic books” any more. The flimsy little things that cost 3 bucks (THREE DOLLARS!) and can be rolled up and used to lightly whack people in the head? Yeah, I get maybe 10 of those a year. What I do buy TONS of, however, are what we in the business call “trades,” i.e. trade paperbacks, which are permanently-bound collections of several comic books that are far sturdier and can go on a bookshelf. I have lots of these. LOTS.

Most people bring individual comics to conventions to get autographed. I bring trades. Lots of them. Basically the obsessive-compulsive part of my brain - which is almost all of it - has decided that IF a writer or artist is going to be at Wizard World I MUST bring EVERY SINGLE TRADE OF THEIRS THAT I OWN to get autographed. And, in recent years, due to some kind of strange economic quirk, more and more trades are being published in hardcover and I am an absolute whore for a hardcover book.

They are quite heavy.

Lugging around a bag full of hardcover books for 8 hours will do a number on a normal back, let alone the jellyfish that is the spine of yours truly. So, every day when I come back from the convention floor I pop a giant handful of painkillers, which tends to make me a little unbalanced mental-wise, and continue to slowly turn more and more into House every day.

Still, I do have a giant collection of autographed trades, and a book full of pretty sketches. What do you have? A family who loves you? HA! Fucking loser.

3) Socialize with other fans.

I have a handful of friends, maybe a half-dozen, who I only see at Wizard World Philadelphia anymore. Guys I knew in college, guys I worked with at old jobs years ago, stuff like that. And the best part is that not only do we KNOW we’ll see each other we don’t even PLAN it. Every year we just randomly run into one another at the convention center. EVERY GODDAMN YEAR. It’s pretty funny. This is basically how I spend the remainder of my time.

I do also occasionally break out of my introverted shell and talk to other fans, usually when I’m standing in line waiting for something and the pain in my legs and feet and back is crossing the wires in my brain. At one point on Saturday I was waiting in line to have Ethan Van Sciver autograph my copy of the Sinestro Corps War - which came out FREAKING AWESOME, I’ll bring that tonight too - and I hear this girl behind me going through her sketchbook with a guy I later learned was her (much) older brother.

All I hear from behind me is this little girl saying, “here’s Lee Weeks... Walt Simonson... Neal Adams... John Romita Senior... Jim Lee... John Romita Junior... Art Adams... Frank Miller... Matt Wagner...”

I turned around and said to the brother, “oh my god HOW OLD IS THIS GIRL?”

She looked up at me and said, angrily, “I’m ten!”

If you’re not a comics person understand that sitting there hearing this litany of artists who contributed to the sketchbook of a ten-year-old girl is roughly the equivalent of on the first day of your senior year of high school meeting this kid in your class who talked about how he spent the summer time-travelling back and forth between different eras in Hollywood having wild sex with Jayne Mansfield and Sophia Loren and Jane Fonda and Grace Kelly and Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe and, yeah, that scene with Sean Young in No Way Out, she got the idea after we did it fourteen times in the back seat of my car.

Her brother informed me that she knew who all those guys were, that even at her age she was a big fan, and that I shouldn’t feel too bad about it since little kids will always have better sketchbooks than grownups.

You think going to a comic convention is sad? Well, if you think that you’re a gigantic douchebag, but try going to a comic convention and envying a ten-year-old girl.

4) Attend panels.

I don’t do this at all; in the past I didn’t go because the 60-90 minutes I spent in the big conference room listening to people ask the STUPIDEST FUCKING QUESTIONS you’ve EVER HEARD was time I could have spent getting sketches and autographs, and the actual information content of the panels could be gotten on the internet the second I got home. Now that I am in possession of the super-phone I can actually get the same information off the tubes 2 minutes after the panel ends while I’m waiting in line for sketches or autographs. Panels at comic conventions are not an efficient use of your time. Do not go to them.

That’s pretty much everything important; there are activities I haven’t mentioned but if you indulge in those... oy.

There are, of course, things to do outside the convention. I have almost never done such things, but this year I broke the mold and, for the first time, went to an official “after-party.” This is where the scene-difficulty begins. When I was first invited to this “party” I was told it would be at a bar in Olde City.

Strike One.

As it got closer to it I was told that, in addition to being hosted by friends of mine, an independent comic company who I shall not name but whose books are across-the-board absolute trash would be co-hosting, and that they would be bringing their “booth girls.” If you don’t know, “booth girls” are a step up from prostitutes the way that Penthouse is a step up from Hustler.

Strike Two.

When I arrived I found a club roughly twice the size of the main bar at the DH with precisely two functioning light bulbs full of barely-legal children drinking Red Bull and vodka - or, as I call it, THE DUMBEST THING IN THE FUCKING WORLD YOU CAN DRINK - listlessly swaying to bad techno music spun by a prematurely-balding 20-something deejay wearing a Japanese baseball jersey and sporting oversize thick-framed hipster glasses that I realized, after inspecting closely, were not prescription. I ordered myself a ginger ale and the bartender gave me a dirty look.

Ooh, just missed the edge of the plate with that slider, Ball One.

I only stayed after the encounter with the bartender because I caught Alex Maleev walking around, looking about as happy to be there as I was, and we headed outside where I smoked and we talked about the upcoming European championship. Alex is a great guy. He hooks me up every year with a painting because I wear a Chelsea kit to the con.

After Alex headed back in I finished my smoke and started back inside. When I opened the door I heard that the current song was Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” only with a really, really, REALLY bad techno beat tossed under it. As I stood there the DJ scratched the hell out of the track - why I cannot fathom - and it transitioned into the Outfield’s “Your Love,” again with a bad beat under it.

Understand that I am a person who LIKES techno music. I do not, however, like BAD techno music, and I really don’t like the combination of bad techno with classic 80s anthems.

Strike Fucking Three.

I can’t imagine I would have enjoyed a night like this even when I was as young as these people. This is so not my scene it isn’t even funny. I headed from there to the other after-party at the actual comic shop, which was much more my scene - i.e. a smaller-ish bunch of people hanging out, talking instead of shouting, mellowly drinking a beer or two - and had a hell of a great time there until an incredibly-drunk Mike Oeming decided to take everyone to Sugar Mom’s for shots and I decided that was my cue to go home.

It’s true - watching people drink in a comic shop IS more fun than watching them drink in a club.

I think it’s time to wrap this one up, and as a reward for reading this whole thing, one of the questions tonight will be, “what is AT&T’s symbol on the New York Stock Exchange?”

See you tonight, with my cool stuff in tow.

JLK

Your No Quizo Non-Quizo Update

There's no game tonight, as we're off for Memorial Day. Be sure to join us next week, though, for our traditional Memorial Day speed round.

This is the point where, normally, I would recommend going to a movie to enjoy your week off from Quizo, and so shall I here.

My advice?

Go see Iron Man again.

That is all.

JLK

Your "We Named The Dog Indiana" Quizo Update

This week marks the release of the new Indiana Jones movie, and in something of a departure from the norm around here this brings with it – and thus I bring to you – nothing but happy thoughts, though in a somewhat haphazard and disorganized way. I'm allowed to be disorganized. It is a known symptom of Indy Fever.

- Raiders of the Lost Ark was not the first movie I ever saw in a theatre* but it very well might have been the second. I remember seeing it down the shore with my father at a movie theatre that isn't there anymore and... GAH! I can't remember the name of it. If anyone reading this is from Toms River, NJ or its environs it was the one on Route 37 in the old Grand Union shopping center. It was a little two-screener set way back off an alley separating two parts of the shopping center. If you can tell me the name of the theatre I will totally give you an extra point tonight. Seriously, this will drive me nuts all fucking day.

Looking back, bringing me to Raiders was a remarkably atrocious bit of parenting on my Dad's part as it is CLEARLY not appropriate for a child of almost-four, though in the absence of a PG-13 rating or an internet to ruin everything for everyone he of course couldn't have known that. My memories of seeing the movie in general are a little vague save for two specific moments that stick out in my mind, both of which are being scared stupid by the spiders at the beginning and the German dude's face melting at the end. Oh, yes, I have very specific memories of watching the face-melting.

My sister was not there to see Raiders with us (it was just before her 2nd birthday) but a few years later she WAS at that same theatre when Dad took us to see Ghostbusters, where again my only actual specific memory of seeing the film was being scared out of my young mind by the library ghost and further proving that my father really had no conception of what was appropriate entertainment for small children.

- I didn't see Temple of Doom in a theatre. In fact, I've only ever seen it I think once, on tape at my cousins' house when I was about 10. I hated it, and even though I've owned it two separate times since then (three times when my new Indy DVDs come in this week) I've never watched it since, nor do I plan to. There are people who think that Temple of Doom is the best film of the three. No. Thinking that is wrong and stupid. Do not think that.

- I DID see Last Crusade in the theatre, again with my father, but this time at the now-destroyed Orleans 8, truly one of the worst movie theatres in the history of human civilization. At that point my father HAD a PG-13 rating to warn him that his 12-year-old son was probably a shade too young to bring along. He ignored it anyway. Later that summer he would take me to see Licence to Kill, both starting a lifelong obsession with James Bond that has cost me countless hours and dollars, and proving that ensuring normative psychological development for his only son was not exactly on Dad's "To-Do List."

- I learned this weekend watching an Indy marathon on Sci-Fi that we can add Last Crusade to the list of movies to which I know EVERY SINGLE LINE OF DIALOGUE.** For a little while there it was a bit of a mystery to me how I could remember the entire script when I hadn't seen the movie in probably four years (when my Indy DVDs mysteriously disappeared) until I remembered that when I was a kid McDonald's had a thing where they sold all three movies on VHS for something like 4 bucks a pop. My Dad got me the whole set and I watched Last Crusade every single day for something like eight months. I would say that's something you do when you're 12 years old, but honestly? If I had the time I'd still watch Last Crusade every goddamn day, though I'd probably throw in Raiders in heavy rotation as well.

- How many of you had the same tapes when you were a kid, bought by your parents at McDonald's? Raise your hand, you know you're out there.

- One of my favorite Indy moments came my junior year at LaSalle. Back then I was good friends with another film student named Tony. Tony and I were a lot alike - total movie nerds with very similar taste. We co-wrote a column about movies in the student newspaper. Plus, we both drank a lot, often together. I hung out a fair bit at the fraternity house Tony lived in, mainly because he had a bigger TV than I did and we could watch movies there.

Now understand that Tony was, for all intents and purposes, a giant. He was 6'3", pushing 6'4", about 280-something. This guy is a beast. He's HUGE. As such, when his fraternity would throw parties he'd get stuck working the door trying to keep the riffraff under control. When I was down there I'd stand outside with him a lot of the time because aside from us being friends it was funny to listen to this behemoth complain about having to deal with drunk freshman girls who were - literally - maybe a third his size.

On this particular night the party got out of control earlier than normal - we're talking, like, 9:30. People started pouring in and out and Tony started shouting "everybody get the hell away from the door!" One super-drunk guy standing in the driveway - god this was awesome - just randomly screams at the top of his lungs and runs straight at Tony with his shoulders down, like he's going to deliver a touchdown-saving tackle in the deep backfield.

Tony just stands there and - I SWEAR TO GOD - the screaming guy runs into him and BOUNCES OFF. Like bullets bouncing off Superman's chest. I swear to God. One second the guy is running and screaming like a banshee, and a second later he's lying on the ground about two feet in front of us.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Tony says. "You see the shit I gotta deal with?"

Tony takes one look at the guy on the ground, screws up his face in disgust, and kicks him in the stomach.

He turns to me and says, "fuck this. You wanna go watch Raiders?"

"Yes," I say. "Yes I do."

So we headed back to the lounge in my dorm and proceeded to watch Raiders AND Last Crusade, but not before arguing whose VHS tapes were in better shape.

After all, our fathers had bought them for us at the same time.

- What's my favorite Indy moment? Come on. After reading all this you still have to ask?

JLK





*The Empire Strikes Back
** Ghostbusters and The Big Lebowski

By the by...

Despite - or perhaps because of - yesterday's events I will still be wearing my Chelsea kit tonight.

Why? Fuck you, that's why.

JLK

Your "Nothing Good Ever Came Out Of Delaware" Quizo Update

So, yesterday sucked on a number of levels.

Before we get to the meat of this weekend’s suckage, let me just state that Sergio Garcia winning the Players is an affront to decent people everywhere, and I hope everyone is as shocked and appalled as I am. You thought it was bad when the biggest douchebag you knew in college was dating the hottest girl in your class and all they ever talked about was how when they weren’t playing GoldenEye together they were having constant, ridiculous, space-time-continuum-warping sex every waking moment? This is much worse, because Sergio Garcia is five thousand TIMES the douchebag that guy was, and furthermore and that guy didn’t get 1.8 million dollars for fucking that whore whose name may or may not rhyme with “Katie,” and now that I really think about it you both can go to hell and take your goddamn Facebook invites with you. No website will say we are friends because WE ARE NOT! Also, yes those pants DID make you look fat, and yes I DID start that rumor about you and the men’s swimming team so HA HA BITCH!

God I hate Sergio Garcia.

Strangely enough I do NOT hate Manchester United, who won the English Premier League yesterday morning. I was at the bar for the happening and was pretty sanguine about the whole thing. Chelsea’s shot was slim at best, though a couple of dodgy refereeing decisions – Manchester United? Questionable officiating? Inconceivable! – basically helped put to the sword our title ambitions this year. However, fun was had by all parties and the two teams will still meet in the Champions League final. And most importantly, as I noted at one point toward the end of the games, we’re both better than Arsenal.

After the game but before the weather turned into the sordid late-winter mess that it is now some of us were standing around outside when Brian of Alias Pseudonym Undercover informed me that he would be taking a Quizo hiatus for the summer as he temporarily moves to Delaware City to work at a law firm.

My immediate, instinctive reaction to this news was, “nothing good ever came out of Delaware.” This is a topic about which I feel very strongly and could go on about at some length, but lest these missives all get completely given over to my demented ravings about various ex-girlfriends, let’s move the narrative forward.

Brian tried to contest this point, but the best things he could come up with were “George Thorogood,” “S-corporations,” and “nylon.”

Let’s look at the difference just between neighbors here, shall we?

Best things ever to come out of Pennsylvania: The Declaration of Independence, Joe Montana, The Constitution, Gene Kelly, The United States, freedom.

Best things ever to come out of New Jersey: Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra, Frog Bog.

Best things ever to come out of Delaware: an ugly dude with a mediocre band, corporations that have more rights than human beings – it’s true, look it up – and the gunk that made silk stockings obsolete (if you weren’t aware, nylon in its original form is actually gunk).

Thanks for nothing, Delaware.

JLK

Your "Take the Good, Take the Bad" Quizo Update

Well, we’re here at the beginning of yet another attempt on my part to stop smoking, a little more than a year after my previous, forced attempt. As it stands I have been awake for several hours now without a cigarette and feel like I would probably need to kill only one or two people to feel good again, so I figure that’s a decent start. It’s not that I particularly want to stop smoking – in fact I do not – but I very much want to stop PAYING for cigarettes, so unless someone can come up with a foolproof way for me to mooch a pack of cigarettes every weekday (two packs a day on the weekends) it looks like this is the only way out for me.

Because – as I mentioned previous – I have an exam tomorrow night I have held off on picking up Grand Theft Auto IV, since I am fully aware that were I to get it when the game was released last week not a single moment of my free time would have been spent studying. Instead, I made myself into a paragon of academic virtue, bravely resisting the triple siren songs of virtual darts, virtual prostitutes, and a virtual Times Square (all of which are in the game) and devoted myself once again to the all-encompassing study of higher mathematics.

Okay, that isn’t necessarily 100% true. I took some time off this Saturday for what was originally billed as “POKER, STEAK, and IRON MAN.” I said beforehand, if you are a carnivorous heterosexual male that is a Saturday and a half right there. POKER, STEAK, and IRON MAN. Unfortunately, the gods of chance were once again on the side of the chowderhead fuckwits that now clog Atlantic City poker rooms (thus denying me 700-some dollars that were rightfully mine) and when we went out for steaks, I dunno, the cook decided he didn’t like the cut of our jib or something and EVERYONE at my table got their meat cooked dreadfully far less than their order – my medium well was medium rare at best, and other people’s medium rare steaks kept asking if they could go outside and chew on some grass.

Plus, between these two events there was an excursion that, at the time, I summed up as, “so, we’re heading back into AC, even though we don’t know how to get there from here, to find a bookstore, even though we don’t know where it is, to buy a book, even though we’re not sure the book actually exists?”

My friend Joe looked at me and said, “that’s the plan,” and then, after starting up his car, related to me the story of how he had just that week been notified that the people suing him had announced that they would not be pursuing the judgment they got against him for totaling his previous car on them.

Nervously eyeing the handle over the passenger window I replied, “this plan is sub-optimal.”

So, robbed at the poker table, disheartened on the book hunt – turns out the book did NOT, in fact, exist, though I did have to dodge a whole lot of non-virtual prostitutes up and down a very long and very windy stretch of Pacific Avenue to learn that – and sickened (almost literally) at the steakhouse, my hopes for a study break that would not leave me weeping and broken rested solely on the shoulders of Iron Man.

I was not disappointed.

The movie is amazingly, ridiculously, stupidly awesome.

I can’t wait to see it again.

If you do not love it you do not have a soul.

That is all.

JLK

Your Death By Metaphor Quizo Update

You know what I don't get?

Neo-Nazis.

And it's not just that Nazis are clearly, you know, evil. People have been making the evil choice for as long as there have been people. I make the evil choice all the time (though not THAT evil). No, what I don't get is why you'd want to be a Nazi NOW. I mean, aside from the obvious social problems it would cause - you can't really go to the bar on a Saturday night and when some woman you're hitting on asks you what you do say, "I'm a Neo-Nazi!" and expect any sort of success - I find it a strange choice mainly because, you know...

The Nazis LOST.

I mean, by becoming a Neo-Nazi you are basically saying, "I support a losing side." WWII isn't like the Super Bowl where if you lose you head over to the Maginot Sideline and tell Suzy Kolber, "well, we fought hard and tried our best, but we just couldn't pull it out late in the war. Full credit to them, the Allies are a very talented squad. They've got great depth on offense where they're very stong in the air and on the ground, and when we thought we were mounting a real comeback at Bastogne their defense just made a fantastic goal-line stand. They deserve to win. All we can do now is go home, process the loss, and get ready for World War III next year, Suzy."

No. This does not happen. If things like this did happen, during the last Super Bowl Bill Belicheck would have had to go back to his own locker room in the fourth quarter and blown himself up once he realized the Giants were winning. Which, admittedly, might not have been that bad. But really, if you're going to make the evil choice at least make one that has SOME measure of longevity like Maoist Communism or the Sith. Nazis have no game. None. And that head coach of theirs is NUTS.

Moving on...

I went to New York this past Saturday for a friend’s birthday. As my car is dying a slow, wheezing, sputtering death - I am convinced it has the car equivalent of pneumonia, as though there are communicable automotive pathogens - and I truly, truly despise taking the last train out of New York on a Saturday night, an exercise in misery if there ever was one, I convinced my father to lend me his car for the evening. My father's car now has in it the GPS unit my mother got him for Christmas - guess who installed THAT - and I have come to the conclusion that GPS is to cars what DVR is to television: once you’ve used it you can’t imagine living without it.

The best part about the GPS is when, after leaving, I realized that there was a backup on the NJ Turnpike stretching from Exit 6 to Exit 8. That’s about 14 miles of stop-and-go traffic, which we do not endorse when driving anywhere, let alone New York. I had to go against the directions of the Garmin, and I was talking on the phone to my Dad just after this happened.

“It got a little pissed when I wouldn’t get off at the Turnpike. It actually told me to get off at Neshaminy and make a U-turn to go back to the Turnpike before it recalculated for 195,” I said.

“Yes,” my father said. “She gets very strident if you don’t follow directions. Even confused sometimes.”

“She? You call it she?” I said. I realize that the GPS unit synthesizes a woman’s voice, but “she,” really?

My father said, “yes, she. I enjoy personalizing the technology.”

“It doesn’t have gender, Dad,” I said. “It’s not a Cylon.”

After waiting for almost 40 minutes to get through the Holland Tunnel – which, as I predicted, my car never would have survived – and then trying to hack my way through Tribeca Film Festival traffic in downtown Manhattan, I finally got to said birthday party. When I found the birthday girl she handed me a carton of cigarettes she had picked me up in England. Woohoo! Imported cigarettes! I loves me some Silk Cut.

I asked, “what do I owe you?”

“Fifty bucks,” she said.

Now then:

0.25 seconds after I heard that I thought, “wow, that’s a lot more expensive than the last time someone got me these.”

0.75 seconds after I heard that I thought, “actually, the local price is probably the same from last time and the amount I’m paying now is likely the result of the dollar’s severe loss of value against foreign currency the last several fiscal quarters.”

Unfortunately, 0.5 seconds after I heard that I SAID, “50 bucks? You’re the worst drug mule ever.”

It occurred to me in that moment that the differential between how I perceive the things I say – i.e. as a lighthearted, well-meaning joke 98% of the time – and how the people I am saying these things to perceive the things I say – i.e. as the cruelest utterance in the history of language – may explain a large percentage of my difficulty in dealing with other people.

I maintain that my innate need to make jokes all the time is the sign of a deep, altruistic desire to please others by making them laugh and brightening their day. Most of my ex-girlfriends would say in the moment just before they BECAME ex-girlfriends that I use verbal chicanery as a way to put up emotional barriers and keep people at a distance. In these moments I tend to say to my ex-girlfriends things like, “you’re too drunk to drive to your boyfriend’s house” or “what do you mean you and your boyfriend are getting married” or “it’s not my fault your fiancée is CLEARLY a homosexual.”

(It’s a long story.)

On the way home from the birthday party I was listening to an audiobook which is a different title from the deadtreebook I’m reading and for a moment around exit 10 I was suddenly possessed by this wracking feeling of guilt, as though I were committing some strange form of book-adultery. I then realized that I am dangerously close to completely losing my mind, if in fact being worried – seriously, legitimately worried – about “book-adultery” isn’t a sign that I already have.

Also, I have another calculus exam next week, so if you're gazing at the night sky this weekend and see a star suddenly wink out, that's just me studying.

JLK

Your Misunderestimated Quizo Update

Before we get to the meat of this week’s little diatribe, let me say upfront that Quizo attendance the last 2-3 weeks (since the tournament) has been just short of alarmingly bad. I understand we probably had a little post-tournament letdown and that last Monday was the tax deadline, but come on, people – let’s see a little enthusiasm for trivia, here. We’re definitely at the bottom of the curve these last weeks and we need to get back on the upslope.

This weeks transmittal is late because, as I mentioned, time has conspired against me. To some this may sound whiny and bitchy, and to those people I say, “shut the hell up.” This weekend was a classic example of me pulling myself in too many different directions at once and paying the price for it Sunday night (which, with my lack of access to GMail at work, is when I normally write the actual e-mail these days).

This death spiral of overextension actually started last week with the first exam in my Calculus class.

Now understand this is the first test/exam/inquiry of any kind I have taken in approximately… [checks calendar]… 9 years and the first one I have taken where I was not actually, physically drunk while writing said test/exam/inquiry in 13 years. I recall the last math exam I took where not only was I so completely and thoroughly drunk throughout the entire semester that I had almost zero knowledge of the subject material at the final - I now find myself wondering, in fact, why I bothered taking the exam in the first place – but I was blitzed enough while taking it that aside from actually answering (incorrectly) one question, the remainder of my examination on vector calculus consisted of several coarsely-wrought essays on various topics. At this great remove the only ones I can REMEMBER writing were about why the X-Files was great, why Metallica’s new album (new at the time) sucked and how they were total sellouts, and why OS/2 was a terrible operating system (which, similarly, was an issue at the time). For some of the shorter problems I just wrote random Simpsons trivia. I am not making this up. These were my answers on a Vector Calculus exam. This is what happens when you drink as much as I did back then.

Back to the present, for this first, actual test last week I was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past and to take this test – indeed, this whole school thing in general – and kick it in the junk. So I studied my ass off. I did problems left and right. I found a website that actually generates calculus exams – which is pretty neat – and did practice test after practice test after practice test set at the highest level of difficulty and complexity the site’s options would allow. I calculated limits until my fingers bled, a la Bryan Adams but not as cool (or Canadian, thankfully). At one point I was sure I had mathematically discovered a way to raise the dead. I studied the first three chapters of my textbook and the material therein until the sheer force of my calculus-bent will could destroy entire city blocks. I became the Jean Grey of introductory Calculus, able to wipe out entire galaxies with but a thought. I became as unto a god. Nay, I WAS a god.

Then I sat for the exam to find it was precisely six questions, five of which were about 1/1,000,000,000th as hard as the practice questions I’d been doing all week, and one of which was something I had inexplicably never seen before and thus had no idea how to solve. I finished the test in 12 minutes and got an 85.

Walking back to my car – where I had overpaid the parking meter by something like two hours – it briefly occurred to me that my time-and-effort-studying-to-test-difficulty ratio was slightly out of whack before my brain melted under the stress I had put it through for the previous seven days like a crayon in the back of a station wagon.

The stress of studying for the Exam to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Being when studying for “Hey, kids! Calculus!” was all that was really necessary left me in a sort of psychological lurch all weekend. My thoughts became reduced to the 21-st century equivalent of caveman grunts. At work on Friday all I could think was “weather nice. Get home. Galactica.” I picked up an Xbox 360 on the way home from work on Friday and I’m not entirely sure why. I honestly have no memory of deciding to get one, but there it sits on top of my DVD player anyway. It’s very nice. My Gamertag is Kozemp (duh!). Feel free to hit me up.

On Saturday I made the further mistake of going to the driving range and (in what is becoming something of a disturbing trend) hitting golf balls for the second time in 15 years and adding physical misery to my wretched intellectual state. Important safety tip: stretch before hitting golf balls. Also, if it has been many years SINCE hitting golf balls, going through an entire large bucket at once will make your hands, arms, elbows, shoulders, neck, back, knees and ankles feel as though they have been replaced with burning hot fireplace implements. Fucking OW.

After getting home from that, the entire rest of the weekend my thought process consisted of nothing beyond, “food. Water. Tylenol. Call of Duty 4. Supernatural. Sleep.” Occasionally I would swivel my chair to empty my ashtray. I’m amazed I remembered to watch my downloaded episode of Doctor Who. Seriously, I couldn’t bring myself (in a physical or emotional sense) to rouse myself out of that chair for almost two straight days. At 11:30-something last night while I was in the middle of another online FIFA match I realized that a) I had to go to bed soon, and b) I hadn’t written the Quizo e-mail yet. I went to bed hoping that I would be vaguely human enough in the morning to figure out a remedy for that. And here we are. I’m feeling much better now, thanks.

All things considered, though, there are worse things than overstudying, hitting golf balls with friends in the best weather in the history of the world, and having a leisurely weekend watching TV and playing video games (even if I didn’t seem to have a choice in the matter at the time). I could be a Democratic superdelegate, cause that’s looking like it’s going to be the worst job in the entire WORLD pretty soon. Hell, I’ve got it easy…

JLK

Your Keeping Priorities Straight Quizo Update

Once again this weekend Tiger Woods failed to win the Masters, and I'm not sure I can live in a world where, over the last 4 years, an average - AVERAGE! - Masters finish of second - SECOND! - is actually considered a failure. When was the last time YOU finished first-third-second-second four years running in the most prestigious golf tournament in the world? That's what I thought.

However, the important thing coming out of Augusta this weekend - well, the two important things - is that the two golfers I hate more than any others, Sergio Garcia and Phil Mickelson, missed the cut and choked it up respectively. It's okay if Tiger doesn't win as long as those two douchebags lose. Have you seen that commercial for Exxon Mobil - shilling for oil companies, nice work, Phil - that runs during the tournament. In it, Mickelson says - I am not making this up - "math and science are everywhere." Really, Phil? Math and science are everywhere? Thanks for the tip, you fucking dope. Next up on Phil Mickelson's Blindingly Obvious Life Tips: look both ways before crossing the street, and try not to eat rat poison.

God, I hate Phil Mickelson.

I have mentioned privately to some people that my new favorite show is Supernatural. Have you watched it? You probably haven't, since it's late of the WB and we aren't exactly their target demo. At the urging of a friend of mine I downloaded the first episode and let me tell you, folks: this show is MADE OF AWESOME. After watching the first episode I picked up the entire first season on DVD and I'm going through it now. I can't really recommend it enough. It's sort of the bastard child of the Dukes of Hazzard and the X-Files with a totally-apropos-of-nothing-yet-cool classic rock soundtrack. Plus I watched an episode last night that was totally inspired by Byberry, and I give mad props - MAD, I tell you - to any show that bases entire episodes on Philadelphia urban legends. It's no Battlestar Galactica (what is, after all?) but there are far worse ways to spend an hour watching television (c.f. the View).

Speaking of BSG (spoilers) - Baltar having his own HeadBaltar? GENIUS!

Oh, also, before I forget - KANSAS WINS! KANSAS WINS! NATIONAL CHAMPIONS MOTHERFUCKERS! KANSAS WINS!

See you tonight.

JLK

KANSAS WINS!




KANSAS WINS!



NATIONAL CHAMPIONS!

KANSAS WINS!

What's the word for slightly less than omnipotent?

A friend of mine was saying that she is actually PRAYING that Tiger Woods doesn't win the Masters this week. Like, beseeching God to prevent it.

I said to her, "that's pretty dumb."

"Why?" she shot back. She was getting quite agitated. "Oh, right, you don't BELIEVE in God. You don't BELIEVE in prayer."

"I - "

"Just because SOME of us choose to believe in something that - "

I managed to interrupt. "That's NOT what I mean," I said.

"Well what DO you mean?" she said, still pretty angry.

"I just mean that if God could stop Tiger Woods he probably would have by now."

"Oh," she said, then paused for a second. "You may have a point there."

JLK

Your Bullet Points Quizo Update

Couple quick thoughts from around the horn this week:

- Kansas not only won on Saturday night, but trounced an outstanding North Carolina team to earn a spot in tonight's title game. Clearly, my shirt is luckier than I thought. I will be wearing it tonight.

- Have you ever been driving along, and you see that like every car on the road is turning left when you're going straight and you think to yourself, "what do they know that I don't?"

- Even though I haven't seen it since it came out in theatres, Blade 2 is still pretty good. I watched it last night because it was on in HD. As was prophesized, once you get HDTV you will watch anything in high definition. I spent an hour watching cooking shows. So I guess it's true.

- The season premiere of Battlestar Galactica was made of awesome. It contained the most frightening information on television: there is a God, and Gaius Baltar is his prophet. Scary stuff. If you did not watch it, that was dumb. MADE OF AWESOME!

- Pillsbury Toaster Strudels are NOT, in fact, superior to Pop Tarts. Not by a long shot.

- Is "strudels" the plural of "strudel," or can "strudel" function as a collective noun? I dunno, my German isn't what it used to be (i.e. anything).

That's all for now, see everyone tonight when we're back to regular non-tournament Quizo.

JLK