Your Thursday Regret: Billy Joel

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

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

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

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

Say it with me, folks: I was drunk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your "I Have Sworn Vengeance Upon Greg of Gym Shorts No Underwear" Quizo Update

This week's e-mail is going out a night early because I'm going to be busy all day tomorrow. More on that a little later.

For now, though, let me tell you another little story about the joys of shopping in New Jersey.

Last week I needed a new mouse and a cable to hook my iPod up to my laptop. I got myself over to the Ocean County Mall, where there is conveniently a B. Dalton - a subsidiary of Barnes and Noble, if you didn't know - right next to the Radio Shack.

Shopping at Radio Shack is always an excruciating experience - no, I don't want any batteries, just the mouse and the cable; no, I don't want the cable that lights up when it passes near a magnetic field, just the regular one; no, I don't want a replacement plan for a 12-dollar mouse; no, I'm not interested in new cell phone service; no, FOR CHRISSAKES I DO NOT WANT ANY FUCKING BATTERIES - but a bookstore (for me, at least) is a calming breath of fresh air after that kind of retail assault.

On a quick side note, in case you are wondering, they push them so hard because the retail markup on batteries is so high that it transcends into the realm of the obscene and the profane. Few people can even comprehend the high-level mathematics necessary to calculate said markup. Back in the 17th Century the Vatican tried to ban the teaching of that kind of math, calling it the work of the Devil. To give an actual, real-world example, back when I worked at the Death Star and employee pricing was store cost plus ten percent, the Jumbo Super Pack of 96 AA batteries retailed for about $75. The employee price was LESS THAN TWO DOLLARS. I am not making this up. This is why they want so badly for you to buy batteries. It is the retail equivalent of punching you in the kidneys and taking your wallet. It is as close as you can get to stealing in a legitimate economic setting.

Anyway, after escaping from the Radio Shack with my mouse and cable I headed into the B. Dalton and proceeded to browse for a solid 45 minutes. I already knew what I wanted - the Star Wars book which had come out back in August but I hadn't managed to find time to read yet, because I am both incredibly busy (up until recently, at least) and I am a gigantic nerd - but I basically checked out every shelf in the store anyway. You never know when you might find something else that looked interesting that you wanted to read. In point of fact I found about 14 things I wanted to read, but in the interest of occasionally sleeping and not spending 200 bucks at B. Dalton (that's WITH my discount) I just grabbed my Star Wars book and headed for the register.

When I got there the young lady working was very nice, polite, efficient without being annoying or prying - basically the perfect retail employee and the antithesis of the Cro-Magnon scum at Radio Shack. Also fairly attractive in a cute, bookish sort of way. Chicks with glasses...

Anyway.

When I handed her the book she said, "oh, this is great! You're going to love it. There's this great part where Jacen... oh, well, I'm not going to ruin it for you."

And she reads trashy Star Wars books!

Love at first sight? Could be, could be...

"Do you have a discount card?" she asks.

I tell her I do but I don't have it on me. I am well-versed in this drill, as even though I have had a Barnes and Noble discount card since roughly the time of the Crusades, since I lost in in a move years ago they have never bothered to replace it. I give her my phone number as per the standard lookup procedure, and congratulate myself for thinking of such a cunning way to give women my number, i.e. losing a bookstore discount card years ago.

"Okay..." she taps on the register a few times, then frowns at it. She gives me what can only be described as an odd look. "Is your..." she says. "Is your name... Goku?"

"I... what? No, it isn't. Goku?" I say.

Now, bear in mind, in case you aren't aware, "Goku" is a character from the anime Dragonball Z. He is a guy who walks around in an orange bathrobe fighting aliens, or something. I hate DBZ. I hate it. It is like the Criminal Minds of anime, giving the rest of the genre a bad name. How a character from Dragonball Z's name got on my account at Barnes and Noble is a mystery.

"Yeah, it says your name is 'Goku.' Is..." she reads my old address. "your address?"

"That's my address, yeah, but I can't figure how that name could get on there..."

My voice drifted off as I finally realized how it happened.

Greg.

A couple months back I was at the Barnes and Noble where Greg, late of the team Gym Shorts No Underwear works. I was buying a DVD - a new copy of Gettysburg, as I recall. He was working in the video section at the time, we chatted a bit, and when he rung me up he mentioned that my discount card was about to expire and do I want to renew it? I knew that getting people to obtain or renew discount cards was a fairly big deal for folks who work at such places (having been one myself once upon a time), and he's a pal, might as well give him the sale rather than the bitchy old lady who works the front register at that particular store. So I toss him my licence so he can put all the information back in the system.

And, lo and behold, here I am at another B&N store and my name on their system comes up as "Goku."

I think, there will be blood for this.

"Oooohhhhhh, I know how it happened," I say, realizing too late that the whole "blood" thing may have seeped into my voice more than was probably smart.

"Do you want me to update it?" the cute bookstore girl who now obviously thinks I'm some sort of psychopath says.

"No," I say. "I'll take care of this personally."

So, Greg, as a great man once said, I will have my vengeance in this life or the next. We're talking the full monty here. Assassins. Ninjas. Boxes of plagued rats. Killer exploding androids. Orbital death lasers. THE WORKS. I am coming for you and yours and nothing can stop me. My beautiful moment with a chick I talked to for 19 seconds at a bookstore was ruined and I WILL HAVE VENGEANCE! VENGEANCE SHALL BE MINE, GREG, THUS SAYETH THE QUIZO GUY!

Unless Greg didn't actually do it, in which case, well... it's probably too late for that sentiment. Those orbital death lasers don't re-task themselves, you know.

In closing, note that one of the things keeping me busy tomorrow is the showing of the Battlestar Galactica movie at the Riverview before the game - gigantic nerd, remember - which MAY cause me to be SLIGHTLY late for Quizo tomorrow night. We're talking five, ten minutes tops, nothing of, say, Johnny Goodtimes proportions.

(Just kidding, Johnny is the best.)

See you tomorrow night, then, when I'll be on my post-Galactica high.

JLK

Your Poorly Worded Quizo Update

Not a whole lot to say this week - I want to get this done and down so I can go back to Guitar Hero 3. So, highlights:

- Perhaps in response to the Royal Flush I found myself against last week, the poker gods saw fit to award me a straight flush (to the queen) this past Friday night, my first in about five years. It followed a pretty good run of cards on my part, and when one of the people at my table asked how I kept getting such good hands I joked "I'm sleeping with the dealer," and when she gave me an odd look I was momentarily mortified while I wracked my brain trying to make sure that I was, in fact, joking.

- I was at a Halloween party on Saturday night, and such parties can be tough when you don't really dress up in costumes. After being repeatedly asked "and what are you supposed to be?" like I'm some half-witted six-year-old prowling the streets of Mayfair on Halloween night in a mismatched Eagles shirt and Phillies hat I started responding "I'm an optimist." No one seemed to believe that; not the sober folks at any rate. The drunk people just sort of stared at me blankly. Mission accomplished? I don't even know.

- During the Eagles game yesterday, Dick Stockton described Darren Sharper as - I am not making this up, this is word for word here - "the leading all-time interceptor of the active kind." I really miss the days when Merrill Reese was in sync with the television broadcast and we could just turn off the TV and turn on the radio and be spared such inane ravings. Merrill's tendency to occasionally Yoda up his commentary aside - I always loved comments like "and shaken up on the play is William Thomas" - at least I didn't have to listen to crap like that. Also, Brian Baldinger predicted the Redskins would hold the Patriots to "about twenty five points," which I suppose makes him slightly less than half right. Stockton and Baldinger may be the worst commentary team in football, and on a landscape that includes Boomer Esiason and the team of Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, whose combined IQ numbers something like 11, someone needs to make it so Merrill is back in time with the TV before I throw something. Give us Moose Johnston at least, please.

All right - La Grange awaits on the Playstation.

JLK

Your "One Shall Stand, One Shall Fall" Quizo Update

Let's spend a minute or two talking about the Transformers movie, which I saw last week.

Transformers is the greatest movie in the history of ever. It is the crowning achievement of all human endeavor and is the single most important piece of entertainment since the dawn of human civilization, if not before.

Deviations from or disagreements with these statements will not be tolerated. Freedom may be the right of all sentient beings, but if you bitch on Transformers in my presence I will kick your ass right off this planet.

And that's all we need to say about Transformers.

The movie was far and away the highlight of the last week, since the only thing that even could have competed with it (before I saw the movie, at least) was my trip to New York this past weekend to hang out with the New York Blues (the official East Coast Chelsea supporters' club), and that ended with me watching my friend Tim, who was at the time the single drunkest being in not only this universe but through several layers of parallel dimensions on either side of it, asking a prostitute if she knew where the Kwik-E-Mart was. You haven't been mortified until you've watched someone ask a hooker for directions to a fictional convenience store.

You'd think that the only single woman at the party leaving with you and your friend is a good thing, even when said friend's blood has enough alcohol in it to successfully clean your sparkplugs, but trust me - said friend spending a 30-block cab ride threatening to throw up all over you and said single woman and then, after said cab ride, walking up to said prostitute and saying, "hey, do you know where the fucking Kwik-E-Mart is? Come on! I know you do! Where - is - the FUCKING! - Kwik-E-Mart?!" is not repeat NOT a good thing.

This is my life, and it's ending one minute at a time.

Finally, if anyone would like to see the New York Red Bulls play the Los Angeles David Beckhams on August 18 for $25, please let me know by noon tomorrow - the aforementioned New York Blues are getting a group ticket thingy and this is, to my knowledge, the only way to buy tickets to only that game (and not, as they normally make you do, also buy tickets to three others).

That's soccer I'm talking about there, by the way, for those of us who haven't been paying attention.

JLK

Your Misinterpreted Symbolism Quizo Update

This morning we have a few random snippets from the last few days around the horn in an effort to bring some vague semblance of meaning to a random, chaotic universe.

- At work on Thursday in one of the many useless, interminable meetings I am forced to sit through I actually had to utter, totally seriously, the phrase, "I'm sorry, but I don't see our choice of software platform as a moral issue." This is the kind of crap I have to deal with during the day. And you wonder why I get crabby.

- Standing in the rear lobby of the Borgata (which is kind of like the Endor Shield Generator Back Door of the casino) at 4AM on Saturday a dealer friend of mine uttered, totally seriously, the phrase, "Frankie the Hat just cashed at the fifteen hundred stud, made thirty-six hundred, he woulda done better but that fuckface Darden outboated him on 7th Street," and not only am I vaguely horrified that I'm having this conversation at such an ungodly hour, but I briefly wonder where my life went wrong that at said hour I'm talking about SOMEONE I KNOW who is actually called "Frankie the Hat."

- I was still at the Borgata at 4AM on Saturday because, simultaneously, the bridge on the White Horse Pike was stuck in the "up" position, there was a gigantic accident at the Atlantic City toll plaza on the expressway, and there was - I am not making this up - a tattoo convention totally gridlocking traffic throughout the city, all of which combined to make it essentially impossible to leave Atlantic City before that ungodly hour. On another note, I have come to the conclusion that island living is probably not for me.

- I do not have any specific comments on the final episode of the Sopranos, but I did get a fairly complete recap of it from a friend of mine who did watch it and based on what I was told I agree with him that it does not sound exactly riveting.

- I did successfully vacation at the shore this weekend, and in between Jeeves and Wooster DVDs - FUNNIEST. SHIT. EVER. - managed to catch the back-to-back basic-cable airings of The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal which, shall we say, lose something in their edited versions. (For the record, I think Hannibal is a fascinating movie.)

- On the way home from the shore last night, I was stopped at a light in Pemberton when a car pulled up next to mine. Well, next to and just slightly forward of. While I was fiddling the radio between the Philadelphia and North Jersey NPR stations I heard some music coming from this car that made my head jerk up very quickly. Coming from this car was a song by a ridiculously obscure Swedish band called The Sounds that, to this date, I have never met a single other person who has heard of them. They're so obscure that I'm not even mentioning them as a clue to a question tonight as that would be unfair. To hear this band coming from another car in the middle of nowhere in Central New Jersey at 10 o'clock on a Sunday night is completely unreasonable. I looked to see who the other person in New Jersey to find - gasp! - a beautiful woman. Well, I assume she was beautiful. The combination of darkness and my viewing angle meant that all I could see was that she had blond hair and wore glasses. Suffice it to say that from the shoulders-up rear-three-quarter view she was quite attractive. And she had Pennsylvania plates! She was on her way home from the shore, just like me!

I was certain at this point that I had finally found the girl of my dreams.

This feeling lasted approximately 0.85 seconds until I realized that a) I still knew absolutely nothing about this woman other than the fact that she liked a band I liked and had her car registered in the same state as me, b) the last couple women I thought were the girl of my dreams turned out to be closer to Hannibal Lecter than Helen of Troy, and c) I refused to meet the girl of my dreams in a car in New Jersey, and especially not on the Pemberton end of 38.

Still, I was vaguely wistful when she peeled out of the light at about 400 miles an hour with "Queen of Apology" blaring out of the car windows.

- During a Rite Aid trip over my shore weekend I saw an endcap display for an actual item called "ear lobe tape." Now, the fact that "ear lobe tape" exists is frightening enough. The truly scary thing is that THERE WAS ONLY ONE LEFT. In a weekend full of frightening adventures, the fact that multiple people are walking around Ocean Gate, NJ with their earlobes taped to their skulls is the most frightening thing of all.

JLK

Your Suit Up Quizo Update

Late last week I was having a conversation with someone whose taste I vaguely respect, and she started talking about the show "How I Met Your Mother" and how it was OH MY GOD FINALLY coming back with new episodes this week and it's about damn time and hey, what did I think of it?

"I dunno," I said. "That's on Monday nights, and it came on after I started doing Quizo, so I've never seen it." (Obviously.) "And besides, isn't that a... [shudder] sitcom?"

I received quite the nasty look at this.

"You have to watch this show," she says. "It's hilarious. It's GENIUS."

I am dubious to say the least.

Then she says, "How I Met Your Mother is the new Coupling," and I say, "hold the fucking phone, now, let's not say things we can't take back."

The original BBC Coupling (not the bastardized, horrifying American version) is a personal favorite of mine, and is one of the best-written television shows in, like, ever. Calling a show with Doogie Howser MD - I know that much about it - the successor to that is high praise indeed, and not something to be said lightly.

"Come on," she says. "I just know you can do some kind of thing where you use your phone to control your computer and download it."

"No," I say. "I can't exactly do THAT." This is actually a lie. I can totally do that. I'm just not going to pay through the nose for data charges over my phone to download a show I've never seen before. That's only for emergencies like when I'm out on a Saturday night and I forgot to tell my computer to download Match of the Day.

When I got home, though, I told my computer (with, you know, my fingers) to download the first season. By the time I woke up yesterday morning I had finished getting it and watched the first episode.

Now let me tell you two important things I learned yesterday.

1) How I Met Your Mother is, in fact, a very funny and quite awesome show and is, I daresay, a worthy successor to Coupling in both quality and spirit.

2) With appropriate breaks for eating (two meals, I slept until about 12:30 yesterday), showers (3), and catching an inning or two of the Phillies (I think I throw harder than Jamie Moyer), it takes about nine and a half hours to watch an entire season of a sitcom.

In my defense, it was raining for at least a couple minutes at some point yesterday.

So the second anniversary of Quizo is coming up, and there's some consternation as to how we should go about this. My original plan was to have a big thing in the restaurant, but then I found out that the golf outing stuff actually spills into the restaurant, which means we're pretty much pigeonholed into the Rigger Bar. This is not a terrible option, though I don't love it. Now if we really wanted the restaurant or the Main Bar we would have to wait until the week after next, which is NOT the actual anniversary, which makes every OCD bone in my body (that is to say all of them) quiver in fear and loathing.

Being the kind and generous person I am, though - stop snickering! - I'm going to throw it open to you folks. Do you prefer the rigger bar next Monday - in what will essentially be a semi-private Quizo - or do we wait a week and have a fully-public event in the main bar?

Choose, but choose wisely. For as the true Anniversary Quizo will give you life - and, along with drink specials, a VERY outstanding something extra - the false Anniversary Quizo will take it from you...

JLK