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 "Nothing Good Ever Came Out Of Delaware" Quizo Update

So, yesterday sucked on a number of levels.

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

God I hate Sergio Garcia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for nothing, Delaware.

JLK

Your Year in Review Quizo Update

Hello, good morning, and a hearty first-email-of-2008-how-the-fuck-are-ya to all the folks out there in Quizo land. I hope everyone's holiday - pick and choose whichever you may or may not have celebrated - was as filled with awesomeness as mine was. We're back tonight for the first time in three weeks and I hope y'all are rested up and ready to game it up - I came up with the speed round on Friday night and it is fan-freaking-tastic. I've been threatening to do this one for a long time and now I'm finally pulling the trigger. It's going to be great.

As it is the beginning of a new year, I am going to fully embrace the zeitgeist and present a quick "Best Of" for 2007. All entries are entirely subjective. In the event that you should disagree with any of my choices, please refer to the Palestra Jon Rule.

VIDEO GAME OF THE YEAR: A lot of choices, to be sure. Bioshock is creepy and beautiful; Rock Band is, well, it's goddamn Rock Band; Halo 3 I played once and regarded as just as phenomenally stupid as its predecessors but sure is pretty; in the end, though, the choice is fairly obvious: Portal. Why? Any game that has a psychotic, pathological liar artificial intelligence telling you "any contact will result in an unsatisfactory mark on your official testing record, followed by death" has to be it. Absolutely the most fun thirty bucks can buy. Remember: the cake is a lie.

BOOK OF THE YEAR: I read so many goddamn books in a given calendar year - and limiting ourselves to strictly regular books here, not comics, we're talking about a hundred-something on average - it's tough to narrow down a list, much less remember everything I actually read. In trying to compile even a top ten list one book kept jumping to the front of my mind, which more than anything I think means it probably should rank at the top: William Gibson's "Spook Country." Over his last few books the mad prophet of the future has matured into a deliberative surgeon cutting into the present, stripping away the outer layer of meaningless crap that covers everything to show you what the world is really like. Plus Gibson is one of the few writers who actually makes ME feel inadequate; his prose is so pristine and delicate it will - to steal a phrase of his - make your teeth hurt. That has to count for something.

ALBUM OF THE YEAR: This one is less tough since in the entirety of 2007 I bought precisely two new albums, and as much as I love Kylie Minogue "X" is certainly not her strongest effort. "Magic," Bruce Springsteen, der.

TV SHOW OF THE YEAR: Fuck you, David Chase. Fuck you sideways. Combine that gigantic Charlie Foxtrot with 24 going completely off the rails almost from the beginning, Lost bungling its first 6-8 episodes, the inexplicably-popular Heroes continuing to be one of the worst television shows I've ever seen; and 30 Rock, despite it's constant hilarity, being sort of all over the map, the straight-up best show on television was - and still is - Battlestar Galactica. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you are stupid for not watching it. Weeks or months or years from now you will watch it and say, "oh my god, this show is incredible, I can't believe how stupid I was for not watching it," and I will agree that yes, it was pretty fucking stupid of you. WATCH THIS GODDAMN SHOW.

COMIC BOOK OF THE YEAR: Dear Mr. Lucas - please read The Sinestro Corps War to learn how to make space opera awesome. It has everything your crappy Star Wars prequels lack: interesting characters, great dialogue, a compelling villain (several of them, in fact), and a plot you don't have to excavate out of a Mayan ruin to understand. Basically it will knock your socks off for every page from beginning to end. Short of reading this fantastic story - basically the only good comic published in what was a shockingly dismal year for the medium across the board - please never make anything ever again. Signed, The World.

MOVIE OF THE YEAR: Seeing a lot of great movies over the last year makes this a tough choice, but the problem is I still haven't seen a whole bunch of the big "prestige" movies yet. In terms of provisional choices, though, I actually ended up with a tie between Gone Baby Gone and, in what came as a shock even to me, Eastern Promises. Odds are you haven't seen either of these movies yet (few people have). I've talked about Gone Baby Gone before, which you'll now probably have to wait for the DVD (February 12) to see if you haven't already, but I got the Eastern Promises DVD over the holidays and holy shit it's incredible. I mean, WOW. I don't know when David Cronenberg became an actual mature filmmaker but Jesus Christ on a flaming pogo stick this is an absolutely flawless film. It is top to bottom perfect. You will not be disappointed.

All are of course welcome to discuss any surely-farcical deviations from the above, but remember the rule.

I'll see you tonight, then.

JLK

Your "Has Anyone Seen My Lighter?" Quizo Update

No, seriously, I just sat down to write the e-mail and it's nowhere to be found. What the deuce.

So how was everyone's weekend? Aside from temperatures 20+ degrees above normal - global warming, bah, what's that - I hope everyone had a good time.

I was at a wedding on Friday which was primarily notable for the actual wedding itself - I am not making this up - lasting less than three minutes. I'm serious. It was at one of those riverside mansion places up in Bensalem. We're sitting in folding chairs out on the lawn (like you do), there's the whole little collapsible-arch-thingy for the ceremony, a guy is off to the side playing vaguely classical-type music off a Powerbook - you know, a wedding. The Pachelbel Canon starts playing and the bride/groom/assorted hangers-on start walking up the aisle.

This is where it gets weird.

The wedding party gets up to the arch-thingy, the priest guy says "dearly beloved..." and at this point a helicopter starts flying directly overhead. The mansion we're at is maybe 800 feet from the junction of 95 and Woodhaven Road, so I'm guessing it's a traffic copter. I can barely make out the proceedings - I catch an "I do" here and there - and almost before you can finish buttoning your jacket from standing up when the bride passes they're walking back down the aisle. Done! Married! It's taken you longer to read about it then it did for the actual wedding to occur.

I turned to the guy standing next to me and said, "you've gotta be fucking kidding me."

I wasn't timing it myself but I am informed by reliable sources that the entire ceremony, from dearly beloved to walking back down the aisle clocked in at about two minutes and forty five seconds. After I got past the initial shock I said, "this is the greatest wedding ever."

Of course, it did not go all super-nice, as at the after-party after the regular party I had to say to the groom, "yeah, before you go on your honeymoon, I need you to make sure that your Dad doesn't think I'm a giant drug addict." Now you have to understand that for many years now the groom's parents have, to put it charitably, scared the living shit out of me. They are very intense people; I am fairly certain that if his mother concentrated very hard her gaze could actually shatter plate glass. Before the ceremony I ran into his father at the men's room sinks and, trying my best to both be pleasant and seem brave (they can smell fear) I said, "so how we doing?"

He said, "eh, pretty good. Can't wait until I can get a drink, though."

"Well," I said, "some of us are luckier than others on that score."

For the first time I can remember in the last seven years he looked at me as though he did not want to eat my liver and said, "that's right, you don't - how long now?"

In a rather catastrophic example of totally blowing the coverage, I said, "eight years since I stopped drinking. But, you know, I still do massive amounts of cocaine to keep myself limber."

The liver-eating look came back, and I thought "FUCK!" very loudly.

Saturday night, of course, was the Springsteen show, and I don't think anything needs to be said about that.

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...

...

Oh, come ON, you didn't really think THAT was going to happen, did you?

Going to a Bruce Springsteen concert is something of an odd experience if you aren't used to it. It's a bit like being in the chorus of a musical. Everybody knows every song in its entirety, but you only have to sing certain parts at certain times. You have choreography to remember, which is slightly different than what the leads are doing. Everybody knows who the real star of the show is, but damn if you don't still feel like you're an important part of it. And he played Thundercrack! FUCKING THUNDERCRACK! OH MY GOD HE PLAYED FUCKING THUNDERCRACK!

I am going to restrain myself at this point because if I don't I could go on for literally thousands of words about the amazing transcendent awesomeness that is a Springsteen concert. If you are not an especially religious person - and "not especially religious" is a pretty accurate way of describing how I roll with such things - a live Springsteen show is as close are you will ever get to pure, unadulterated joy. It is, truly, awesome. As they said on the Office, if you don't realize that it's awesome, well, you just need awesome lessons.

For a taste, most of the concert can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=cgb77&p=r

And, finally, I am publicly calling out Cum From Behind and The Darg Whores, both of whom have been notably absent the last few weeks.

JLK

Your Belated Quizo Update

Yes, there is still Quizo tonight. I have, until now, been unable to send out the e-mail.

Anyone care to guess WHY?

Here's a hint: it's not anything nice, like the Phillies, or the new Springsteen album tomorrow, or me going to see Springsteen on Saturday.

There is a distinct chance that by the time I get to the bar tonight I will have told my boss to go fuck herself.

JLK