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 "Why Is That Watermelon There?" Quizo Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came the words that really got my blood boiling.

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

(gasp)

(sputter)

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

"You've never seen Buckaroo Banzai?"

"Uhm… no?" she said.

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

"Uh…"

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

"Okay, please stop yelling."

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

"I didn't – "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JLK

Your Witnessing History Quizo Update

A bit of business first, folks.

I heard from Greg last week, and he swore by the name of Gym Shorts No Underwear - which is either very intense or blasphemous to the point of "hey, look out for that lightning bolt" - that he had nothing to do with the shenanigans involving my Barnes and Noble discount card. I believe him, especially when he mentioned that apparently anyone with the requisite information can affect a change like that online. I have recalled the exploding androids and put my vengeance on hold for a while and officially exonerated him.

Now, however, in light of this new information, you're all suspects. I wonder if I can still hire, like, Pinkerton detectives to track down which one of you is responsible. Because when I do, oh yes, boom.

Moving on to the meat of our discussion this week -

Though, as a Devils fan, I have seen the Flyers play the Devils several times at the Meadowlands over the years, the last time I saw the Flyers play the Devils in Philadelphia was in 1987. When I was that age I wasn't the Devils Fan that I would eventually grow up to be; at the time I just loved sports and watched whatever my Dad watched, which was the Flyers. For some reason, though - and even 20 years on I remember that at the time my reasons were murky at best - I had this strange, irrational hatred of Ron Hextall. I couldn't explain it. I hated the guy. Even though at the time he was the best goalie in the NHL that year - as as a rookie - and the next season would go on to be the first goalie ever to score a goal, I hated the guy. I hated watching him play. My father will back me up on this. For some reason I COULD NOT EVEN EXPLAIN AT THE TIME, at ten years old, I absolutely hated Ron Hextall.

Then, towards the end of the season, I found out (can't remember how) that Glenn "Chico" Resch was going to play an upcoming game against the Devils. As I hated Ron Hextall and Pelle Lindbergh had decided to drive home blowing a .24 the year before I was a huge Chico fan. I loved Chico Resch. He was old school. I begged my Dad to take me to the game. I probably didn't need to beg. My father is the person who taught me one of the abiding lessons of my existence, "life is good when you have the hook-up." I'm fairly certain he got those tickets for free from somebody, one of the unseen thousands of people he knows that can get you anything at any time. Except Phillies tickets, he always used to buy those from scalpers.

(Seriously, a .24, who gets that drunk at PRACTICE? I wonder how many people my age around here learned that drinking and driving is bad directly from that Swedish fuck.)

My memory of the game is remarkably specific. It was a Sunday afternoon, the Flyers won 7-5, and Tim Kerr (who at the time I was pretty sure was God, no matter what the parish priest said) and Peter Zezel scored 2 goals each. Dave Brown won a fight. And Chico Resch played. It was awesome. As it turns out that ended up being Chico's last game. After the Flyers got bounced out of the playoffs one game from winning the Stanley Cup he retired.

I've always thought it was pretty cool that I was at Chico Resch's last game. That, however, has been eclipsed.

Flash forward to now when I am given an early birthday present: front row tickets for Flyers-Devils at the Wachovia Center Saturday night, which is just ten different kinds of awesome wrapped up in one. I'd never been that close to a hockey game before.

Here's something you learn sitting in the front row that you don't from watching it on TV or up in the upper deck: hockey is very, very fast - much faster than you can imagine - and INCREDIBLY violent. When you're that close to it we're talking, like, Saving Private Ryan violent. Our seats were on the face-off circle in the Devils' attacking end in the first and third periods. About a minute into the game Patrik Elias slammed Jim Dowd into the glass directly in front of me and I just yelled "HOLY SHIT" because it hurt ME that much sitting there watching it. You see all the stuff that happens behind the play and you get a sense of how unbelievably fast they are and how hard these guys actually go at each other and you realize TV does not really do justice to how tough a game hockey is.

Going into the game I was worried that the Devils - who are not exactly having a stellar year - would get plastered by the Flyers - who are - and I would have to sit there in quiet consternation, simultaneously watching my favorite team get demolished by my second favorite team while trying to avoid getting my ass kicked by angry Flyers fans. We actually somehow luckily ended up sitting in a row full of old people and half a dozen Devils fans, and of course the demolition went the other way, the Devils ran to a 6-2 massacre, and me and the other away fans down there were up and screaming and high-fiving each other the whole game.

And - and and fucking AND - the game was Martin Brodeur's 500th career victory. FIVE HUNDRED WINS! (And, Flyers fans, how many Stanley Cups? Is it three? I think it's three.) He will almost certainly surpass Patrick Roy's record next seaon and then some. The next contender isn't close (and is so ancient the Ancients on Stargate are actually modeled after him).

Best. Birthday present. EVER.

Chico Resch's last game and Martin Brodeur's 500th win. Witnessing history indeed. Well, hockey history, at least.

JLK