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 Death By Metaphor Quizo Update

You know what I don't get?

Neo-Nazis.

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

The Nazis LOST.

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

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

Moving on...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked, “what do I owe you?”

“Fifty bucks,” she said.

Now then:

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

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

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

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

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

(It’s a long story.)

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

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

JLK

Your "So, That Happened" Quizo Update

Well now.

We certainly can't say the last few days have been.... INTERESTING, at the least.

Thursday saw the long-awaited return of Lost, even if it is - at the moment - for a shortened eight-episode mini-season. There is talk now that this may not be the case much longer, that the WGA strike may in fact end as early as this week. It's too late to save most of the admittedly-limited television that I watch - even a settlement tomorrow would probably mean there wouldn't be new episodes of Lost or 24 until the summer at the earliest, more likely fall - but a resolution soon should save Battlestar Galactica (which doesn't start airing until March) and when it comes to television as long as Galactica finishes its run everything else can fuck off.

But that premiere on Thursday! Great googly moogly. When Lost is on its game - which is still most of the time - it's no worse than the second- or third-best show on television, the the fourth-season premiere shows it. The show has so many levels of awesomeness it's oftentimes hard to keep up with them. It's the little things that make a difference. For instance: when Hurley is hallucinating in the police station, his vision of Charlie swimming in the mirror puts his hand on the glass and it says "THEY NEED YOU." Or when Jack and Hurley are playing basketball and Jack only gets as far as H-O, which are the 8th and 15th letters of the alphabet (c.f. also Charlie "standing next to the Ho-Ho's").

Did you also happen to notice - I did not until my second viewing - that in the scene in the cabin it's Jack's father in the rocking chair? Oh yes.

Admittedly if you don't watch Lost this not only doesn't make sense but probably sounds pretty silly, but if you do watch it's FUCKING HUGE.

[Soccer content ahead]

Saturday saw some... well, I would say something like "quality soccer action," and the games themselves were great, but the results kinda pissed me off. Spurs (aka "fucking Spurs...") scored early against Manchester United and then actually played defense for almost an entire game, something relatively unheard of. Of course, the key word in that sentence is "almost" as they allowed a goal at the very end of the game, preventing Chelsea from closing the gap on United and Arsenal.

And, of course, Chelsea also chose not to help themselves in that regard, with an absolutely gorgeous goal from Nicolas Anelka - really, you should try to find it, it's quite something - cancelled out by giving up a soft one to Jermain Defoe, meaning that instead of us winning and United drawing and getting closer to first place, Chelsea drew when United drew and Arsenal won, meaning that by the end of the weekend we're actually FARTHER off the pace now. Of course, we are in the League Cup final in a few weeks and Arsenal is, let's say, decidedly not, so that's something.

[End soccer content]

Then there was the Super Bowl yesterday, which was... yeah.

Even the most ardent football fan has to admit that yesterday's game was three quarters of utter garbage. I mean, really, ugh. However, as I semi-predicted two weeks ago, some combination of a) whatever hideous black magic the Giants have wrought, and b) the expiration on Saturday of Tom Brady's Faustian pact meant that the New York Football Giants once again managed to eke out a win against a clearly-superior team and - inexplicably - win a Super Bowl in the process. Suffice it to say I don't think anyone really saw that coming, as the odds against either or both of those things happening had to be slim at best. Of course, revelations that the Patriots, hereafter referred to as "Cheaty McCheaterson," had been plying their rules-snubbing trade as far back as the Super Bowl in 2001 could, I suppose, have had something to do with it on some cosmic level. Karma's a bitch, yo.

Round 2 of the Tournament of Champions tonight. Results from last week are on the website. Let me tell you how much fun compiling all THAT was...

JLK

Your Increasing Entropy Quizo Update

A friend of mine turns 30 today - happy birthday, Brian - and I was at his birthday party over the weekend and came to a strange realization.

There were, I dunno, maybe 15-20 people at this thing, including a couple married folks who had brought along their kids. It was about as grown-up a party as I've been to in a long time, no wanton stupidity was on offer like fighting with Norwegian shipwrights (my 28th birthday), or people drinking beer out of saucepans with straws (my 25th birthday). Suffice it to say this was not a party in which anyone would end up sleeping in a bathtub (my 30th birthday).

I'm at this party and I'm taking it all in; everyone is just standing/sitting around, talking with each other, eating Brian's Delicious Food - back when Brian and I and a bunch of other guys lived in a house in college the rule of thumb was that Brian's food was always delicious - generally having a pleasant time while the few little kids hung out with each other and did, I dunno, whatever the fuck little kids do at grown-up parties their parents take them to.

At one point I caught a glimpse of said kids and was very violently hit with this wave of memories of MY parents taking me and my sister to THEIR friends' houses for parties when we were young. In fact, a couple people reading this will actually also remember those parties, from both the tall and short perspectives, so to speak. You know who you are.

It's Saturday night and I'm having pleasant conversation - well, as pleasant as I get in conversation, which still tends to involve a lot of shouting - at a party with people who brought their kids.

Then, the realization:

Oh, God, I have turned into my parents.

This knowledge didn't get any easier to take after I considered it for a bit. You may recall I was pretty sanguine about turning 30, but this one hurts. This one really hurts. This shit makes me feel OLD. My friends and I are (for the most part) respectable adults. We have responsibilities beyond (but not without) acquiring video games. We have to plan our social lives more than three hours in advance. We bring our kids to our friends' houses.

I've turned into my parents. Except for, you know, having two kids and a house and something like 5 academic degrees between them, but in all the ways that matter to my warped brain at this particular moment, I've turned into my parents.

My little Zen moment was broken when one of the mothers at the party - Christ I can't believe I can say that about people I know - came into the room saying "Kylie? Kylie?"

I immediately jerked my head up and said, "where? WHERE?!"

My friend Justin said, a look of absolute pity on his face, "not THAT one."

It turns out that she actually was looking for her daughter named Kylie and my hopes were dashed. Hey, stranger things have happened. I once saw Paul McCartney at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike; Kylie Minogue at a birthday party in Fox Chase isn't much more unlikely.

And, finally, there is hope that the Patriots' despicable unbeaten season can finally be stopped, since the New York Football giants seem to have acquired some sort of foul magic - voodoo, perhaps - that makes good teams turn to crap when they play the Giants. If you had told me four months ago the NFC Championship would have been between the Packers and the Giants and that, what's worse, the Giants would actually win I (and just about anyone else) would have laughed in your face and said that you were clearly insane, or at the very least retarded. Because, folks, I'll tell you what - the Giants are NOT THAT GOOD. They're not. But somehow they have managed to tap into the arcane energies of the universe to turn other teams that ARE good into total crap. The hope now is that whatever hideous black magic the Patriots have worked is not as strong, or that Tom Brady's Faustian pact expires on February 2.

One cannot live without hope, after all. So, you know, go Giants.

Wow, that hurt more than I thought it would. Think I sprained something...

JLK

Your Return to Normal Quizo Update

After the... shall we say... generally adverse reaction to last week's e-mail I have once again returned to our regular format, providing you with your weekly dose of sarcasm and misery. This is not to say that I don't hope people occasionally laugh - though recent evidence indicates I am somewhat deficient in that specific area - but misery is more interesting, most of the time.

A brief wrapup of recent events:

Saturday morning saw Chelsea beat Charlton 1-0, which when you consider that Charlton may be the worst soccer team in the entire world (including, like, the Wissinoming under-11s) is not that great a result, especially when Andriy Shevchenko could have had about 4 goals if he would only remember that the key to scoring is to not kick the ball directly at the keeper. Chelsea's win did put us a scant three points behind Manchester United, though that certainly wouldn't last ( c.f. Sunday morning, a bit later)

Saturday night was Johnny Goodtimes Quizo Bowl 3, which my team would have won if I were not such a goddamned idiot. There was a time when I actually played Quizo quite regularly, but since it passed recently I have apparently gotten out of practice and am now subject to pathetic mistakes that cost me and my teammates many hundreds of dollars. I would hang my head in shame were I capable of shame or guilt; as it stands I merely get pissy at my teammates for not catching and correcting my wrong answers.

Sunday morning Manchester United was playing at Tottenham, who have an excellent record at home (9 wins of 12) and with a draw would close our gap on United to 4. Hell, a win would keep it at 3. Of course, neither of those things happened, Tottenham got absolutely thumped AT HOME 4-0 and drive United's goal difference into 6 figures. I spent most of Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon muttering "fucking Spurs..." to myself until just before the Super Bowl when I did my back carrying laundry, preventing me from going anyplace other than my couch for the game.

Then, of course, the game came on, and the Sex Cannon's antics made all the pain go away. We love you, Rex - never change. Not one bit.

Then Peyton Manning won the Super Bowl MVP and I got pissed again because he certainly doesn't deserve it. There's no justice, I swear.

JLK