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