C.H.U.D. Roundtable

2006-12-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

MORE LISTS!

In the interest of good government and responsible citizenship and all.

Five songs in which the live version is preferable to the recorded version

“The Further I Slide” – Badly Drawn Boy
“There Goes the Neighborhood” – Sheryl Crow
“Life, In a Nutshell” – Barenaked Ladies
“Black” – Sarah McLachlan
“Round Here” – Counting Crows

Five best Beatles songs, IMHO

“Good Morning, Good Morning”
“Hello, Goodbye”
“You Never Give Me Your Money”
“A Day in the Life”
“The End”

Five best Beatles albums, IMHO

Revolver
Magical Mystery Tour
Rubber Soul
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band
Abbey Road

(Note on the previous sections: for some reason - e.g. “Rocky Raccoon” and the criminally awful “Glass Onion,” among others - I detest the White Album. I understand that you might disagree, but my best advice to you is to stop hero-worshipping every fucking mastubatory track the Beatles ever put to tape, relisten to Abbey Road, remember what a good record is, and stop judging your preferences by quantity. The White Album sucks, almost from start to finish. Abbey Road is damn near perfect. Thank you.)

Five great albums to fuck to

Maxinquay – Tricky
Mezzanine – Massive Attack
Blue Wonder Power Milk – Hooverphonic
The X-Files – Fight the Future – Motion Picture Soundtrack (trust me)
Dummy – Portishead

Five best Trip-hop albums

Maxinquay – Tricky
Mezzanine – Massive Attack
Blue Wonder Power Milk – Hooverphonic
Post – Bjork (provided this counts as Trip-hop)
Dummy – Portishead

Five 80’s songs I’d like my band to cover

“99 Red Ballons” – Nena (currently covering)
“The Promise” – When in Rome (in the process of covering)
“Bizarre Love Triangle” - New Order (Frente did it better than we would)
“Downeaster Alexa” – Billy Joel (hmmm….)
“Groove is in the Heart” – Deee-Lite (provided any one of us could pull of the Bootsy Collins work, which we can’t)

My five favorite XXI Gun Solution songs to play

“John Hughes”
“Big Ideas”
“Summon My Jesus”
“There is a Light”
“Tidal Girl”

Five kick-ass band names

2 Skinnee J’s
My Bloody Valentine
Rocket From the Crypt
M.C. 900 Ft. Jesus
Spacehog

Five kick-ass album titles

Blonde on Blonde
Ritual De Lo Habitual
3 Years, 5 Months, and 2 Days in the Life of…
Dookie
…Is Dead

Five great albums which, knowing you, you probably don’t own

This is Hardcore – Pulp
The Remote Part – Idlewild
Isola – Kent
A Carefully Planned Accident – NaNuchKa
Lovesongs for Underdogs – Tanya Donelly

Five albums to drive through rural countryside at unsafe speeds while blasting

Transatlanticism – Death Cab For Cutie
Fever to Tell – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Slanted and Enchanted – Pavement
Foo Fighters – Foo Fighters
The Bends – Radiohead

Five albums to play on a Sunday morning while making coffee for your one-night stand

Andy Worhol – The Velvet Underground and Nico
New Adventures in Hi-Fi – R.E.M.
Give Up – The Postal Service
I Tried to Rock You But You Only Roll – Leona Naess
The Life Pursuit – Belle & Sebastien

Five cover-songs that are better than as performed by the original artist

“Respect” – Aretha Franklin (originally by Otis Redding)
“All Along the Watchtower” – Jimi Hendrix (originally by Bob Dylan, and even the Dave Matthews version is far superior)
“Come On Eilene” – Save Ferris (originally by Dexie’s Midnight Runners”
“Hot to Handle” – The Black Crowes (originally by Otis Redding, again)
“Shameless” – Garth Brooks (originally by Billy Joel, but damned if Garth didn’t do it far more justice)

2006-10-26T13:47:00.000-04:00

The IF I HAVEN’T HEARD IT, IT’S NEW TO ME Awards, 2006

Because music defines life, and critics define music, and street-cred defines critics, and illiterate retards define street-cred. These are the awards for new music that has enthralled me over the past year, whether or not that music was actually introduced in the last year. In actuality, why should it matter? Music stands on its own. It doesn’t require timeliness for greatness, and if it does, then it wasn’t great to begin with. People still buy up Floyd and the Beatles, while critics discuss the production values of the new releases, but Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon were put together on tape.

Maybe it’s just me. I’ve worked in recording studios, and my brother records and mixes for a living, but I’ve never head the ear for it. It’s like the “Magic Eye” paintings from the mid-nineties. I could never see them. All I could ever see were the details, and so I’d pore into the details, trying to discern from them what the picture was supposed to be. With music it’s the opposite. I can’t hear the details, only the overall, probably best described as the mood. The mood hits me immediately, and just as quickly grabs hold of my gut. I’m serious, music dictates my mood and personality probably more than anything else. When I was a kid, and in a sour mood, I’d make myself listen to Aerosmith’s “Amazing” simply because I knew that it would immediately turn me around.

I compile this list not for technical awards, as I don’t get them anyway, but to praise those who’ve altered my outlook the most this year, whether through a simple four chords or wall-of-sound. So here they are, and again, they might not be new, but they’re new to me.

BEST NEW GENRE

J-Pop

It isn’t just about the uber-cute girls acting uber-cutely, or about the lightning precision of fast, fun, ludicrously complicated guitar riffs, or the nonsensical videos, or the simple fact that if I can’t understand the words, I can’t hate them. I mean, it’s all of these things, and the girls play a big part, but mainly it’s the unabashed enthusiasm and energy. In America, music seems divided into the two camps of excited-but-devoid-of-talent (all of pop) and gifted-but-detached (all of indie.) The last U.S. album to really capture the best of both worlds was probably Pinkerton, and it’s been a long time since then. I blame Clearchannel, but then again, I’d blame Clearchannel for the Khmer Rouge if I could find the slightest justification.

Maybe it’s just the result of a culture of manners and demureness, that the youth would seek to rebel by wearing their hearts on their sleeves, and at the same time be so damn chipper about doing so. All I know is that it’s wonderful. I know a lot of people get put off by the high-pitch of the female vocals, but it’s just like when people first heard the distortion in “Tomorrow Never Knows.” You just have to get used to it as another instrument, and you’ll be hooked. People who refuse to get into J-Pop (and even more so, J-Rock) are missing out on something great on account of snobbishness. I can walk down the street now, and there’s a very specific smile I’ll catch every once in a while that clearly expresses, “I’ve just been listening to something from Japan.” If you’d deny yourself that smile, well, it’s your loss.

WORST SONG

Black-Eyed Peas – “My Humps”

This one was easy, as it’s maybe the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s not even laughably bad. I’ll happily listen to “Dominic the Christmas Donkey,” but if you put “My Humps” in the jukebox, I’ll gnaw my own leg off to escape. I’d heard the hype, I’d read the articles, and you know what, there’s a lot of earlier Black-Eyed Peas stuff that I liked, though I was pissed at the watered down “Let’s Get it Started” version of “Let’s Get Retarded.” Hell, I even love “Where is the Love,” particularly for it’s war-protest video, so I downloaded the song (the most-downloaded song in downloading’s auspicious history, even beating Eiffel 99’s “Blue”) expecting the worst, in a laugh-myself-silly kind of way.

I can’t listen to it all the way through. I mean, like, physically. That’s never happened to me before. I can listen to music from Shatner, Pat Boone, and ever Steven Segal, but I can’t listen to this song without finding some way to stop the madness. It’s like a vomiting air-raid siren. It isn’t even the words, which are the stupidest ever put to music for sure. It’s that the music itself is cringe-worthy. I’m going to try to listen to it again right now, just as a test.

…

Okay… I made it. It took effort, but I made it. I turns out the best thing that “My Humps” has to offer is a piano interlude at the end that would make you roll your eyes and groan if you entered a restaurant to hear somebody playing it. Above this is a refrain of “So real,” repeated ad nauseum, which in this song doesn’t take very long. Now, I’ve tried to defend the phrase “keepin’ it real,” before by trying to define what it means in a cultural context. I still think it means acting naturally despite outside (read: white) influences, but this throws it completely outside of my realm of comprehension. Are Fergie’s breasts real? Her ass? I don’t think anyone listening to this song would care, much less someone performing it, so that can’t work. I’m just stymied.

I said I wouldn’t talk about technical issues, but hear me out. Somebody had to listen to this song over and over and over and over and over again in order to get it to release. They had to fiddle with every second of it down to the sample rate. If that engineer didn’t kill himself in the quickest way possible, then we should investigate in order to make sure that he’s in the best psychiatric care available. In fact, maybe he did, or just coked himself to the gills and got through the process as quickly as possible. It would go a long way towards explaining why the song sounds as god-awful as it does.

A couple of years ago, when I was back in Oklahoma for some holiday or another, I was entering the mall and a girl of about thirteen offered to go down on me for a cigarette. You feel the bile running up your throat right now? So did I. That’s about the level of “sexiness” that the phrase “my lovely lady lumps” afflicts me with.

I hate this song.

BEST NEW ARTIST

The New Pornographers

I know they’re not new, but that’s never stopped the grammies. When I first really listened to them this year, my main question was, “How are they not the biggest band in the world right now?” My friends responded socratically, “You think teenagers would get into this?”

Good God, I certainly hope so. In my day, we were brought to enjoy the Flaming Lips, Portishead, and everything that Perry Farrell had to offer. Then of course, Clearchannel ruined everything, because they hate music, life, their listeners, and really everything else besides money and themselves. The New Pornographers act like a commune determined to create only the most innovative pop music – organically grown, of course – that Canada can produce. There’s nothing there that a thirteen-year-old couldn’t get down to. Neko Case comes across as a pre-Starship Grace Slick, and every song is like a new idea, perfectly realized. Merlin of 5ives.com mentioned “Slow Descent into Alcoholism” as one of five pop songs he’d love to hear performed by a marching band, and now I can’t hear it any other way.

Their lyrics are deliberately inscrutable, which I think is all the better for the teenagers who should be listening, as they’ll just input whatever their hormones are feeling as the meaning anyway. This works great on “Letter from an Occupant,” particularly when Case goes into the rapture of “When all sensation’s gone!,” but I think there’s still something there. Listen to “Chump Change.” It might just be me, but it seems like nothing so much as the boy in high school watching all of his crushes lose the innocence that made him love them in the first place, while understanding that they have to grow up sometime. It’s peppy, and painful, and simply great.

There’s a plague on/ There’s a rat-tailed ensemble/ burying all of our heads in the sand.

Girl, don’t stay/ Just throw it all away/ There is you, and then there is your body.

BEST HIP-HOP ACT

Atmosphere

I wish I’d had this blog years ago, so I could put 2 Skinnee J’s in this slot, but c’est la vie. I don’t speak the language of Hip-Hop, so I can’t say much, other than that “Trying to Find a Balance” is kick-ass and haunting, especially when you know the back story.

They love the taste of blood/ Now I don’t know what that means, but I know that I mean it/ Maybe they’re as evil as they seem/ or maybe I only look out the window when it’s scenic/ Atmosphere finally made a good record/ Yeah, right, that shit almost sounds convincing/ The last time I felt as sick and contradictive as this is the last time we played a show in Cinci.

At their last Cincinnati show, a girl was beaten and raped while they were on stage. Atmosphere will continue to be haunted by that, and will let us know about it. Big ups, as the kids say.

BEST RE-PURPOSING OF THE BEATLES

JUDY AND MARY – “Brand New Wave Upper Ground”

Everything I said about J-Pop above, but much more Pixies-ish. YUKI, the lead singer (and no, I don’t know why the Japanese choose to spell English sometimes in all caps) is fully capable of punking out at Karen O’s level, but also brings a level of sweetness to the proceedings, even when she has the seven dwarves crawling out from her crotch as in the video for “The End of Shite.” In this, she out does herself with her post chorus “AHHH-Ho” refrain.

Then, it does something none of us were expecting. She takes that wailing and, at the song’s apex, melds it into a call-and-response of “Come together! Right now!” I love the Beatles, but this is even better than when they used it, and sounds much more like a demand to NOT BE IGNORED. Maybe because she’s just a bad-ass Japanese chick who’s live through more than any of us and we just gotta obey.

BEST RE-PURPOSING OF OASIS

Asian Kung-Fu Generation – “E”

At this point, I probably have more AKFG on my iTunes than any other band. Every song hits, which is an improbable achievement considering that they all sound the same. I have three albums, out-of-sequence, lined up in my playlist, and it just sounds like one long song with infinite movements. I swear, I don’t think they even change tempo even once. But I never get sick of it.

Towards the end of my playlist (which is, actually, their first album) I get “E.” Asian Kung-Fu Generation is like fucking in the back of your car, in high school, on a sugar-high, and the end of this song is the simultaneous orgasm. If you’ve listened to my playlist, then you’ve been hearing them for roughly an hour and a half – not a bad performance, young man. And then the ending solo comes… the solo from “Live Forever.”

I wonder how many people even noticed, but I, for one, learned how to play lead based on that solo, and I know it by heart. I can’t reprimand them for ripping it off, though. As they say, good artists borrow, great artists steal outright. AKFG makes such a better use of this beautiful line, bringing it to apotheosis and then some, that I just listen to it over and over, and get the same high from it every time.

BEST BAND YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF – WILLIAMSBURG

NaNuchKa

A 2/3^rd’s Israeli band led by one of the most beautiful women you’ve ever encountered, seemingly unconcerned with whether or not you understand their structures, but fully concerned with kicking your ass until you enjoy it anyway… I’m not describing them very well. They’re like if the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s and Yes got mixed up in a train wreck. Like if Coltrane and the White Stripes had a thumping, mutant offspring. The end-of-the-world plus the girl you had a crush on in sixth grade.

All you need to hear is “Mediterranean,” and you’ll know what I’m talking about. A tensely quiet song about the Middle East “ticking like a time-bomb,” erupts into Yula (the beautiful woman) screaming her chorus of LA-LA-LA’s in a sight both gorgeous and horrifying.

BEST BAND YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF – NOT WILLIAMSBURG

Normandy

Okay, so they’re just baaarrreeely Not Williamsburg, but they deserve a place here anyway. Vin Dee (previously of Arbor Day) has pulled a Billy Corgan-style megalomaniacal fiat to make sure that his new project is as perfect and drama-free as it can be, and the results are in. They are, to put it lightly, positive.

Normandy (named after Vin’s father Norman – get it?) sounds essentially like the radio-friendly record that Pavement would have put out after Terror Twilight, with all the rawk that suggests. Her Eyes Don’t Water is indie-rock at it’s most sincere and get-up worthy, and Sweatshop Dance Party is everything that its name implies and more.

BEST SONG FROM THE GUITAR HERO BONUS TRACKS

“Story of my Love” – The Model Sons

Um… Congratulations.

FUNNIEST ACCIDENTAL BRILLIANCE

“How You Remind Me of Someday” – Nickleback

I’ve provided a link. Just listen to it. Each song alone epitomizes everything you hate about rock, but together, they form something that I can’t stop listening to. It’s like two circus geeks wandered alone through the Sahara until they finally found each other and bred this beautiful genius child. Or, at least, a child who wouldn’t flunk Kindergarten and make the other children cry upon seeing its face.

FUNNIEST ACCIDENTAL BRILLIANCE WAITING TO HAPPEN

When somebody does this with Tom Petty’s “American Girl” and The Strokes’ “Last Night,” they’ll be forever my hero.

BEST VIDEO

“When You Were Young” – The Killers

It loses a few points for being taken off of YouTube at behest of the label (and in spite of all the economic reasons to let it stay up there)

(I’m going to put as an aside here that I don’t know anyone who has ever found legitimate use for the “insert” key, and that if it for some reason needs to stay on keboards, then it should at least be relegated to the furthest corner away from everything else. Or to hell. That would work.)

but it’s beautiful and audacious at the same time. “How so audacious?” none of you ask. Well, for one thing, by adding a minute-and-a-half long intro just to show our heroine in the hills of Mexico, and then making the song good enough that we forgive you, The Killers. And beautiful in the moment when the bridge reaches its crescendo and the girl runs out of her house from her cuckolding lover, to visions of them getting marriend on the same street.

Sorry if I’m being sentimental, but that’s just something, right there.

BEST CLASSIC I’D NEVER REALLY LISTENED TO BEFORE NOW

“Gimme Shelter” – The Rolling Stones

It’s my own fault, I know. But it’s great, and I never would have paid it any mind if not for the trailer for The Departed.

BEST SONG

“JOY” – YUKI

You probably have to see the video to fully understand this one. Right around the time of this release, YUKI lost her first child to SIDS. I don’t know what the timeline was, but I like to think that the video came after.

It’s a sparse electronica song, and yet there’s more to it than that. Watch the video. It’s shot in a bare, cavernous grey warehouse of a room, populated by faceless men wear full-body black suits, and yet there’s more to them than that. Watch the video.

It starts off bleak, like the song itself, and yet it’s called “JOY.” I don’t know Japanese, and I can’t hope to understand the lyrics, but I like to think that she’s saying to her child that, even though he’s gone, she has joy for having known him. Or in the case that the child was still alive when she wrote it, just Joy for her newborn son. Either way it’s tragic, but here’s the thing. This song, out of the bleakness and sparcity, creates a powerful emotion. And it isn’t joy.

It’s hope.

This song is the aural equivalent of the end of The Shawshank Redemption, but with no set-up involved. Hope springs eternal. YUKI will continue hoping, so if any of us don’t, then the shame is ours.

BEST ALBUM

The Life Pursuit – Belle and Sebastian

You know, those twee little Scottish pussies who play music for art-school kids to cry to? Turns out we were at least partly wrong. The Life Pursuit finds Metcalf and Co. flexing their rock muscles half the time, and just having fun for the other half.

The more closely I listen to this album, the more I can’t even believe that people could arrange sound like this. The opening track, “Act of the Apostle Part I,” creates one of those soundscapes so perfectly intertwined that I can’t even guess as to what the instruments are half the time. It’s not that it’s dense, but just that everything compliments everything else, in an composition unlike any other song before it, and yet it’s still pop.

“Another Sunny Day” follows, and it’s essentially a country songs, as sung by Scots, with church bells, escalating background vocals and a relentless up-tempo belying a story of a love gone wrong. “White-Collar Boy” is just as bouncy, with lyrical brilliance that just makes you laugh out loud. “You’re a warden’s pet/ she’s a screaming suffragette,” and, “She said, ‘You ain’t ugly, you can kiss me if you like’/ Go ahead and kiss her, you don’t know what you’re missing.” Maybe you just have to hear them.

“The Blues are Still Blue,” is, as the name would imply, a little blues tune, but again up-tempo and almost Beatles-esque. “I left my lady in the launderette/ You can place some money non it, you can place a little bet/ That when I see my lady, the black will be white and the white will be black but the blues are still blue.” “Dress Up in You” marks one of the only down-tempo songs on the record, but it’s heartbreaking in its understatement. All of B&S’s tracks tell a story, and this one is simply of a woman who’s best friend has gone on to stardom and left her behind, with all the jealousy and resentment and lingering love that could entail. “I’ve got a boyfriend/ I’ve got a feeling that he’s seeing someone else/ he always had a thing for you as well.”

Which brings us to the album’s strongest track, which would have been Best Song if I weren’t keeping myself from being redundant: “Sukie in the Graveyard.” There’s something about Belle and Sebastian that just makes it seem like nobody else could have done their songs, and that they could do nobody else’s. “Sukie” is funk-rock, and lives up to the genre, but is about as far removed from the Red Hot Chili Peppers as you can get. This is where they really show that they can bring it, and I don’t know if they were trying to prove something or just thought it’d be fun, but they succeed with valor and gusto to spare.

“We Are the Sleepyheads,” a super-speeded anthem with cascading la-la-la’s is followed up by “Song for the Sunshine” a laid back little funk-ditty. “Funny Little Frog,” the record’s first single, is cute and fun and stands up to everything else, with the added bonus of rhyming “poet” with “thro-at.” “To Be Myself Completely,” I could take or leave, but it fits nicely with everything else.

And then, in “Act of the Apostle Part II,” we get a real taste of the preciousness they’re known for, but in such a powerful way that it still gives me chills. A Hammond organ opens with a neat little riff, before the bass comes in and takes over, in the mildest way possible, continuing the story of our wayward girl from track one. The drums and piano come in so subtly I only notice them because I’m writing this. Then, midway through, the voice trails off to silence, filled by rising synth-strings for a good ten seconds, before the piano rolls into the opening of part I. Except it isn’t. It’s the same song, to be sure, but completely reimagined, and yet it chills because it seems so familiar, and gives me overwhelming feelings of inferiority as to my own musical prowess.

“For the Price of a Cup of Tea” is one of my favorites, but I can’t say too much about it that I haven’t already written. “Mornington Crescent” is the album’s other down-tempo song, and ends things on a dreamy note, not overly optimistic, but sweet and hopeful.

My friend Chris mentioned the other day that this record is the perfect thing to wake up to. I couldn’t agree more. It’s the aural equivalent of waking up in someone else’s bed on a sunny Sunday morning and smelling coffee and sausage cooking from the other room, while you have no reason to get out of your pyjamas for hours. Buy this album. You already love it and just don’t know it yet.

And for those wondering why I’d do this post in October as opposed to, you know, late December or early January, it’s because today is my birthday. I’ve been a legal driver for ten years now, though seven or eight of those have been spent in a city with no use for a car and extortive fees for parking. My mom called to wish me a Happy Birthday this morning (and inadvertently wake me up, while all the time asking why I didn’t sound more excited.) Apparently 26 makes me ineligible for the draft, which is nice. Anyway, this is the start and stop of years for me. So you get the list today. If I keep this up for another year, maybe you’ll get another one then and I can legitimately call it “annual.” But knowing me, I wouldn’t ho

2006-10-17T18:31:00.000-04:00

Over the last few weeks, as I've strutted and fretted my way through being really no closer to finished with my law school application process, I've realized a few things about television. First, that I've been stuck in too many P.A. positions as a result of taking any job that I could, and thus will likely remain too typecast to make an upwardly-mobile career out of it. I had my suspicions, which was a big part of my reason for applying to law school in the first place, but there it is.

Secondly, though I know I can't really go back to it for a while, and I'm not backing down from my current plan, I still love it. I love the work, I love the people, all of it. It's the hectic, creative-solutions-on-impossible-deadlines thrill of film, but tempered by professionalism and some semblance of a routine as to how things get done.

Thirdly, and this is what's important, is that we're now, truly and finally, in the golden age of the medium. Not only do we get to live through it, but it's being aimed at our demographic as well. And considering we got the same treatment for alterna-rock, hip-hop, and video games already, I'd say we're one lucky generation of pop-culture consumers. Sure, Freaks and Geeks and Arrested Development were killed before their time, but never before now would we have had such shows to begin with. Family Guy was cancelled, and then brought back because we demanded it. HBO has taken up reigns to create the most daring series they can and to just let their auteurs run with their visions, trusting for maybe the first time in the medium's history that the audience will get it. And all the other networks are busting their asses to follow the example.

Over the last month or so, I've been introduced to three separate shows, two of which are regularly cited as the best on air, and the third of which is quickly moving to that place itself. And honestly, all are better than 99.9% of all that has come before.

so as a public service announcement that's between five weeks and two years late, I give you...

THREE POPULAR SHOWS TO WATCH RELIGIOUSLY

Hurley asks for advice on that "not so fresh" feeling

LOST (ABC, Wednesdays, 9:00 EST)

I know you're probably already watching it ("you" being "someone outside of my actual tiny readership, most of whom aren't") but I didn't give it a shot until about three weeks ago, imagining it to be, essentially, a trashy fictionalized retelling of Survivor, which is actually how it was originally pitched. J.J. Abrahms and the rest of the production team didn't get involved until after a new treatment was put together, and it shows. What's there now is the human drama of people not only surviving their present circumstances, but also the guilt and shadow of their previous lives. One of the running themes (and there are many, which are all handled deftly and are never too heavy-handed) is the idea of a chance at rebirth on the Island, and how difficult it is for people to accept the opportunity. Those who do (notably Charlie, Locke, and Mr. Eko) suffer fear and trepidation from their fellow castaways, while those who don't (Kate, Sawyer) experience similar downfalls as they did back home. And as it goes on, all fall somewhere in between. Charlie gives up the smack, but keeps a stash of it around just in case. Sayid falls in love, and aims for nobility, but his soldier/torturer instincts still kick in in the clutch. Sawyer gives up the con, but can't change the way he generally deals with people. And Jack, well, Jack sees himself as too much the hero to see the need for change.

Most interesting of all of these are Sun and Jin, the married Korean couple, and one of the few pairs who knew each other before the crash. Sure, Rose and Bernard have been married, but not for very long, and they're barely seen twice a season, and Boone and Shannon certainly had a life-long history, but, well... (sniff)

Sun and Jin's history is of a beautiful courtship, across class and social boundaries, which would've played out as happily ever after if those boundaries hadn't kept coming back for vengeance. Jin gives his entire life for Sun, and they truly love and cherish one another, but the things he must do for her father break him down, and he begins to resent her, though he never relents on his duty to her. Still, what evidence Sun has of Jin's dealings lead her to fear both him and her father, and so she makes arrangements to leave, after having learned enough English to make it in the states. But then Jae, her English teacher, shom she almost married before meeting Jin (and finding out that Jae had a lover in New York) starts an affair with her. It's as understandable as any affair could possibly be, in that she was already leaving a dangerous husband to begin with, and Jae wanted to remain honorable to her. I could go on and on, as there's much more to this story, but once the two get to the Island, there's nothing holding them back from recreating what they had before, and indeed they do, in bits and spurts, but now the machinations of class and society are replaced with the truth of what they did in Soeul, and the past is constantly nipping at their heels.

That's just one of dozens of interwining stories that lay the background for a primary tale of mystery, science, and religion that raises five questions for every one that it answers. ANd it manages to never contradict itself. A marvel of craftsmanship and beauty, and with something to say beneath all the hype. In otherwords, a helluva lot more than CSI is capable of.

Key moment: in "Walkabout," as Claire gives a memorial service for those dead from the plane crash, using whatever little information could be gathered from the fuselage. The tear in your eye comes roughly the moment when she reads off the late-fees that one member had at his video store, because that's all that they know about him.

Also, the light turning on in the hatch. For anyone who hasn't seen it, I won't say aymore, but it's a masterstroke that sends chills down your spine, and can actually make you believe in life again.

My site, I get to pick my girl, dammit.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (Sci-Fi Channel, Fridays, 9:00 EST)

Alarmingly similar to Lost in all aspects except for setting we find the little Sci-Fi show that could. A disclaimer/qualifier: as a general rule, I tend to hate sci-fi, for much the same reason that I tend to hate westerns. Genres based on setting (space - future; Western U.S. - mid-1800's, etc.) devolve into a dependence on those settings in order to hang limpid stories of people shooting at eachother. Now I love good action - I'm one of the few people who loved all three Matrix movies - but I just hate bullshit like The Fifth Element, where the only point was to dress up a godawful story with flashy ships and Milla Jovovich wearing approximately five pieces of scotch tape. Moreover, I positively loathe Star Trek, in which nothing has ever mattered, and the whole point has been to spout geek-rhythms for the hive mind to spout back. The problems are made-up, and have no relation to anything in real life, and are solved with equally invented solutions with no bearing to life as it's lived. And in general, everything works out, because the federation is good. Fuck you, Star Trek.

BSG is more in league with Gattaca or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that it remembers that Sci-Fi was originally created as an allegory for the world in which we live, rather than an escape from it. It too involves survivors dealing with their present situation, and how they can't run away from their pasts, and focuses on the human level of things. The season 2 opener features a desperate man standing up for the safety of the traitorous woman carrying his child, a high-ranking military pilot standing up to a military coup, even though he dissaproves of the actions of the deposed president, a dying man on an enemy-occupied planet who's happy to simply being hearing birds again, and prayer between a prisoner and her guard.

It also includes Sharon AKA Boomer AKA No. 8, a Cylon (machine; enemy) who has only ever known herself as human, who returned in the season 1 finale a hero, only to have her robot instincts take over just long enough for her to shoot the fleet commander. She spent the first season in self denial about her true nature despite all the evidence against her, using the entirity of her willpower to keep fighting for the human race, and when the evidence got to be too much, she tried to kill herself to prevent the possibility of hurting anyone. Now she's held in a cell and beaten for making sure that she didn't kill the commander, an act that her greater consciousness never would have committed. She's as tragic a figure as you'll find on the tube, and too many people will never see her in action on account of it being a "sci-fi" show.

Key Moment: "33" President Roslyn, after spending an entire episode subtracting numbers from her whiteboard tally of survivors, gets word from Billy, her assistant, that there's yet one more update.

"How many do I subtract?"
"No, it's an addition this time. A baby was born... a boy."

As Billy leaves, Roslyn erases the final digit (a 2) to replace it with a 3, and then breaks down crying.

Also, the victory in "Hand of God," with all the swirling celtic score that entails.

Saturday Night Noir

Studio 60* (*plus another part of the title that I refuse to acknowledge) just aired episode number five, and is two seasons behind the others in establishing just what story it's trying to tell. To be fair, the other two shows I discuss here are as high-concept as it gets, and this one is about the new hands in charge of a late-nite sketch comedy show, so this one is bound to be a little more freeform. Also, it's in the rare position of being good enough to have the small flaws become jarring at times.

For one thing, the show was on paper an almost exact cross between SportsNight and The West Wing, which meant that we had no idea what to expect from it. What we got was exactly that cross, seemingly with the Sorkin/Schlamme team having no idea what exactly to do with it. Slowly, though (hopefully not too slowly for NBC) the picture is coming into focus, as Matt and Harriet dance around and towards each other. Then there's the other story of Jordan McDeere fighting the demons of crass commercialism to try to redefine the network as high class. Unfortunately, those are the only two stories we've got right now. Bradly Whitford is almost non-existent after just five episodes, though he's supposedly the main character, and D.L. Hughley and Nate Corrdry are just comic relief so far. It's an ensemble show, and can't survive based on what's on the table right now, but it's also in it's infancy, so maybe I just need to have some faith.

I guess the problem is that, in SportsNight, the show's survival was always on the line. Likewise, in The West Wing, they started off with low approval numbers and then moved onto politics being a constant struggle, not just for survival, but for your soul as well. In Studio 60, they start off at the top, and then try to make a mountain out of the molehill of "quality comedy." Still, Sorkin's one of the best writers in t.v., so maybe this'll work itself out once they get tired of beating the dead horse.

The second problem, and I can't not mention it, is that the show-within-the-show isn't actually funny. This is true, though it's getting a lot better. The thing is, it's true for a very good reason. The big show is generally subdued and naturalistic. This doesn't really jibe with the manic nature of a comedy, particularly considering that the big story doesn't halt for the little sketches. Remember, the play-within-a-play in "Noises Off" wasn't funny either; "Itchy and Scratchy" hasn't ever been funny; and even as the sketch-writing gets funnier, it can only ever ascend to the level of "appreciably humorous," because the characters making the jokes and pratfalls are always in control. Comedy, like any other kind of acting, requires the suspension of disbelief. Hence, they need to keep beefing up the "News 60" segment, which is weekly, uses their two funniest actors, and acts more like stand-up than a real sketch.

Now, Sarah Paulson has proven herself to be a badass, layering what anybody else would've turned into a flat character with humor and humanity to spare. In order to give us a running arc, we've been a little bit browbeaten with the fact that Harriet's a Born-Again Christian and that Matt's favorite target is the religious right. Now I have several church-going, Christian friends, all of whom fall into the same "common faith doesn't mean that I buy into everything Pat Robertson says" camp as Harriet, and guess what? Nobody's shocked. I get what the show's trying to say, that Christianity and Liberalism aren't enemies, but in making such a big deal out of her faith every single episode they make her appear too much the exception and not the rule. Thankfully, the writers seem to get this, finally, and had her say that anywhere outside of Washington or Hollywood, nobody would find her beliefs to be newsworthy.

I'm still waiting to know more about Danny, Tom, Simon, Jeanie, and particularly Cal, the inimitable Timothy Busfield who actually will direct some shows this season, apparently.

Key Moments: "The Long Lead Story" I know it seems like I'm taking every chance to pan a show I'm telling you all to watch immediately, but there's a good reason for it. With Lost and BSG I came into them not expecting much, and was blown away. Meanwhile, I know, like, every word of everything Sorkin's ever written, and so my standards for Studio 60* were a tad bit higher. Plus I know what he's capable of, and in the off chance that anyone with the show ever reads this, I want them to know that they're doing a kick-ass job, but that there's still room for improvement. As far as the kick-ass, though, you need look no further than "The Long Lead Story," their best episode so far, and damn-near perfect from start to finish. And holy shit what a finish, as Harriet finds Matt on the catwalk, beer in his hand, watching the sublime Sting performance of "Fields of Gold" on just a lute. I don't even like Sting, but this was just gorgeous and perfect. I think I held my breath through the entire song, as the two ersatz lovers exchange small talk and big looks, and a thousand beautiful things that they say without saying, and though they don't kiss at the end of it, a kiss would've cheapened the moment. Instead, having her walk away, and the fade to black and credits at the end of the song, tells you everything you need to know, and tells you that the show is on it's feet and running.

Also: Give us a fucking Cal or Danny story already, dammit!

2006-09-28T01:40:00.000-04:00

A NEW DIRECTION!! FOR NOW, ANYWAY!!

Instead of posts, while I'm dealing with law school application processes, I'll be faking a web-comic. This is actually easier, trust me. I'm already relaxing between tests and tracking down old professors who want nothing to do with me by playing around on www.thesentencegame.com which is awesome. Basically, if you've ever played Eat Poop You Cat (I hadn't) then you know the gist. If you haven't, then what happens is they take a sentence supplied by whoever got first in line. Then, the next person on that particular game gets the sentence, and has to draw a picture depicting it, within an hour. (If you've got a scanner, great, and fuck you too. Otherwise, like me and most users, you'll have to learn PaintTM again.) Then, the next person gets nothing but the picture, and must write a sentence describing it, or if you're cleverer and/or more saucy, a funny caption. This process goes back and forth with new entries a few times, like PictionaryTM crossed with telephone.

What it means to all (two) of you is that I've got a metric shitload of drawings that I think are funny as hell, and their's no end in sight for new ones, so I might as well post them. SOme of them will accompany the prompting sentence, when that itself was funny and/or neccesary to comprehend the drawing. Others I will recaption because some of the people on this game suck a lot and I was just trying to make up for it.

And in honor of Chris Reid, who is doing everything he can to shepherd me through the whole law school thing, I'm naming the new comic...

MARS NEEDS WOMEN

Here goes...

On the prisoner's twelth day inside, the herpes came.

OMG! Justin Timberlake is rocking my face off!

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

"Nothing to see here."

Try as he may, he just couldn't stop beating the monkey.

"Gay powers unite! Form of: a Linux user!"

I've never seen so much cheese!

The eyes are windows to the woman's soul

(not a link, blogger just sucks.)

As you might imagine, comments are more than welcome.

2006-09-02T00:27:00.000-04:00

THE VERY FACT THAT I CALL IT THAT TELLS ME I'M NOT READY

So I come in from band (name: Merlin^2 and the 42 Dipshits) practice on my patio last night to find that Roommate 3.5 had just purchased Arrested Development Season 3 on DVD. As much as I worship the first two seasons, I’d held off on watching any season 3 episodes until they were on DVD, and I could see them in order and appreciate the surprises, and then when the DVD’s came out on Tuesday, I held off until I had money to purchase them, instead of stealing them. I know, I know, but in calculated risk situations, I try to err on the side of caution.

I watched the whole season last night, which only took about five hours seeing as the episode order was criminally cut from 22 to 13. This is most notable in “For Bristish Eyes Only,” which not only introduces a story arc that would otherwise certainly propped up the middle of the season, but it also the only episode to use a “previously on…” device to fill in plot elements that were otherwise left off-screen. Oh well, as has been said of MacBeth, “it is the shortest of his tragedies, and must have at one point been longer, but it stands as it is, perfect.” I would steal for more AD episodes, or at least pussy-out about stealing them and then wait until I had the money to buy them, but what I was left with in season 3 is about as perfect as T.V. has ever been in my lifetime.

I’ve seen and loved a lot of T.V. over the last decade or so. Family Guy, The Simpsons, and South Park are certainly near the top of my list, but animated shows catch a break. They’re cheap as shit to produce, and so you can stick one in any failing time-slot (or on any failing network) and wait to see if it hits. Also, the medium allows for a riskiness that live-action can’t really achieve without the finesse of Faberge, and also lets you get away with a much higher miss-to-hit ratio on the jokes. If Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin or Eric Cartman drop a stupid one, you don’t have to see Dan Castellaneta or Seth MacFarlane or Trey Parker mugging to try to make up for it.

The best live-action shows of my time have been SportsNight, The West Wing, Freaks and Geeks, and Arrested Development. Haters might mention that I’m leaving out Seinfeld. I am, though I like it. I adore NewsRadio, but I’m leaving that one off as well because, as much as they may have tweaked the sit-com formula, they weren’t as revolutionary as the shows I’ve mentioned before. SportsNight used the single-camera set-up for a half-hour sit-com two years before Malcolm in the Middle tried it, and much more successfully (if not in ratings than at least in any discernable measurement of quality.) Freaks and Geeks made an extraordinarily intricate and exact model of 1980-1981 with characters who were all of us, made the parents as true as the teens, avoided cliché like a plague, and alternated between laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreaking with rhythms so life like that the two could be mistaken for each other, and probably often were. I’ll bet for every moment that made me laugh or want to cry, there’s someone out there who had the same moments reversed. The West Wing is the only show on that list to have been successful, but it was the biggest risk of all of them, being the most expensive pilot ever produced, after having been turned down by CBS because television shows couldn’t have political leanings, New Yorkers were played out, and most of America couldn’t relate to Jewish characters. Still, it took a cue from ER, making its characters as expert and fast-talking as the actors could manage (and they had a phenomenal stable) but instead of rattling on about pediatric pancreatic shock or what have you, they were passionate about the Earned Income Tax Credit, or hate-crimes legislation, or the differences between upholding difficult laws and strutting while doing so, all while creator Aaron Sorkin (also of SportsNight) insisted that it was essentially a comedy with dramatic elements.

SportsNight was laden with references that most people wouldn’t bother trying to get and saddled with a grossly unnecessary laugh-track that chuckled at the oddest possible moments. The producers battled the network down to a minimal track for the second half of the first season, but it ended up just sounding like obligatory laughter and gave the impression that what was being watched wasn’t actually funny at all. (The track was gone completely in the second season, which is superior, but the damage was already done, and it was cancelled after 45 episodes.) Freaks and Geeks was promoted as an alternative to the unbelievably atrocious Popular, which makes about as much sense as labeling Watchmen as an alternative to Hagar the Horrible, or Jackson Pollack as an alternative to De La Vega. The marketing failed, and as good a drama as we’re ever likely to see about teenage life lost it’s chance because marketing execs didn’t think that kids would recognize themselves if they were faced with a mirror. Also, the show dealt with sex, drugs, and teen rebellion in a way that neither glamorized nor demonized them, but simply showed them as they are. It’s my opinion that execs aren’t dumb (some of them are, to be sure, and I’ve worked with them, but I’ve also worked with absolutely brilliant ones who work harder than the guys at NORAD) but they do have a tendency to believe that their audience won’t get it, and when faced with cold-hard numbers with dollar-signs attached, they’re all likely to cave. They’ve got no argument. Freaks and Geeks was cancelled after 18 episodes.

Still, last night I watched season 3 of Arrested Development, and the results are in. This is the best show that’s ever been on television. From running jokes that take entire seasons to pay off (see: George Sr.’s ignorance of the Spanish word for “brother” in “The One Where They Build a House) to it’s ability to build absurdity that wouldn’t even fly in animated form out of natural plot progressions that all make sense at the time (see: the end of Mr. F) no show has ever been handled as deftly. It’s no surprise to me that the same hands behind SportsNight (Ron Howard, Brian Grazer) and Freaks and Geeks (Judd Apatow, Paul Feig) were intricately involed in the proceedings. Also, there was quite a bit of common talent from NewsRadio. Just saying.

I can’t say enough about it really, but I owe you all (or is it just Tadhog at this point?) what I have, so here it is. There isn’t as much Kitty as I would’ve thought, and I had to leave out Pier Pressure at the last minute, but it’s the best I can do.

Without further ado…

C.H.U.D.’s Top Ten Arrested Development Episodes

They're still legally married, you know.

10.) Top Banana

“Oh Most Definitely!”

It wasn’t the pilot, but it started the show with style, and determined the fashion of humor and snaking plot devices that the show would take for the rest of its lifespan. While everyone could probably see the “There’s always money in the banana stand” *wink wink* to mean exactly what it turned out to mean from a mile away, the real humor comes from G.O.B.’s defiance at mailing the letter. At this point we had no idea which throw-away jokes would become important, and so, to me at least, it came as a genuine surprise that the letter was the most important McGuffin in the plot. Combined with Maeby’s “scam” on the banana stand (which in truth doubled their losses) and the truly triumphant manner in which Michael lets George-Michael burn it to the ground, and then pay it all off with G.O.B. backing out of frame on his Segway. Then you’ve got sublimity.

As a thought-experiment, picture the same plot in an episode of That 70’s Show, which I like. George Sr. = Red, Michael = Eric, G.O.B. = Kelso, George-Michael = Fez, and Maeby = Jackie. The relationships stay largely the same, so it’s imaginable. How would it play out? As a credit to the plot, it would be a great episode, but as better compliment to Bateman, Tambor, Cera, Shawkat, and Arnett, not to mention director Anthony Russo, it wouldn’t touch what “Top Banana” achieves here.

Side Note: this also includes Tobias’s “fire sale” audition, which must be seen to be believed. David Cross was apparently the only actor allowed improv in the show. This is where it shows.

9.) Afternoon Delight

“COME on!”

Aside from being the first instance of the immortal line from above, this gave us some of the most uncommon pairings in the shows run, most notably Michael/Maeby and Lindsay/George-Michael. It also had G.O.B.’s increasing values for his suits, and Buster using skill-crane tactics to save G.O.B. from the banana stand, only to plummet him into the ocean, but these duos are the reason it’s as good as it is. “Not Without My Daughter” aside, this is really the only time we get to see these, and they use them to reinforce on of the show’s main comedic themes: Sex infuses society and our subconscious, and that doesn’t change just because you hang out almost exclusively with your own family. This is, of course, probably the element that turned the largest number of possible fans away from AD, aside from the fact that if you came in at episode three you already knew that you weren’t getting half the jokes. (Sex and the City spent four of its six seasons on the same episodic navelgazing until getting in gear for the fifth and sixth, and yet somehow this show didn’t get the On Demand treatment that would’ve made it absurdly popular to newcomers, ergo there is no justice in entertainment.) Still, you couldn’t get the country behind twisted incest jokes long enough to tell them at the end that none of the hook-ups were actually incestuous after all. It’s a shame, because this show, and this episode in particular, proved that we can make all the “Family Entertainment” pablum that PAX will spit out, but none of it rings true unless it indicts our worst impulses and most horrifying inhibitions. Also, the two “couples” play their revelations of the lyrics to the titular song in entirely singular ways, proof to just how unique each character truly was.

Side Note: A stoned Lucille drives over a deafened Tobias. Earlier, she attacks Tobias after he comes to help her. These are the two most memorable of the tiny number of times these two interact together alone.

8.) S.O.B.’s

“The HBO won’t want us.”

“No. It’s Showtime.”

Every time an amazing show is cancelled, we all get pissed at the philistines who pulled it off the air, who never gave it a chance, who never got it. What we forget is that those same philistines took the risk and put untold millions into making the best show they could, which we received for free (provided that we have stolen cable or a good antenna. I suggest stolen cable. It’s cheaper and you get better reception. Plus cable.) “Save Our Bluths” continued the use of on of my favorite jokes from the third season (“…the O.C.” “Don’t call it that.”) added shots at every piece-of-shit show on FOX or anywhere else that was getting better ratings, had Andy Richter in five roles, utilized a live ending and 3D, killed off a character (an old racist woman we’d never met before) and brought in Ben Stiller, Zach Braff, John Larroquet and many others for non-speaking roles, and was still one of the funniest episodes even if all of that had been stripped away. Then it ended with an admission that if they weren’t that relatable, then it could hardly be blamed on the audience. I agree. It should be blamed on piss-poor marketing, constantly shifting time-slots, and a lack of marathon showings on FX that might have allowed new viewers to catch up. But I disagree that our Bluths didn’t deserve to be saved. Still, once they were (by Showtime) Mitch Hurwitz declined. After the finale, I’m not sure where they would have gone, but I would have watched. Oh, God, would I have watched every second of it.

Side Note: Hot Ham Water. Say it with me. Also, casting directors really do hate the gimmicky bullshit that Tobias tries to pull, which is not so much an exaggeration as it is a depressing understatement.

7.) Spring Breakout

“No, it’s like… you’re a flower, and I just don’t want to see you get plucked by one of these guys who doesn’t even care that you’re blooming.”

When the series was created, Hurwitz, Grazer and Howard wanted to cast the whole family around each other, so that everything would fit. Alia Shawkat was the first one cast, so presumably the rest of the cast was built around her. A hell of a responsibility for any actor, let a lone a teenage actress no one had ever heard of. Strangely, David Cross was one of the last ones cast (he was asked to play Buster, but opted instead for Tobias because he thought it would be a smaller role, and thus that he wouldn’t have to spend as much time in L.A.) This episode probably features her more than any other, even with the main plot of Kitty and the drinking contest and breaking Lucille out of rehab and George Sr. out of a motel room. Still, it’s Michael Cera’s delivery of the line above that sells this one. Sometimes AD would go sentimental to parody bathos, sometimes they’d do it to turn around and fuck with you, and sometimes they’d do it for its own sake just to show that they could do it better than anyone else. This was one of those times.

Side Note: “And that’s how you narrate a story.”

6.) My Mother, The Car

“I like the way they think.”

What better way to prove that you’re the best sit-com in history than by using the name (and theme-song) of the worst? Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar of Broken Lizard fame (and Dukes of Hazard infamy), this episode takes the simple and pathetic story of Michael trying to throw a surprise party for Lucille, and then spirals into a paranoid tale of lies and amnesia, unraveling at the end to be at heart about Lucille’s yearning for Michael to care for her and love her, while proving how singularly unworthy of anyone’s love she truly is. I had a friend back in high school who would open up his arms to you, and then shudder away just as y’all were about to embrace in a platonic hug. And he could do this over and over again ad infinitum, and each time you’d just believe him more. This is how Lucille is in “My Mother, The Car.” She’s the portrait of evil mothers, but you’ve gotta love someone that damn good.

Side Note: This is the first appearance of Lindsay’s SLUT shirt, which will be remembered as her official costume.

5.) Meet the Veals

“How would you like a banger in the mouth? Oh, I forgot! In the states, they call it a sausage in the mouth.”

“Actually, we just call it a sausage.”

There’s a piece of music in Arrested Development that I’ve never been able to identify. It’s only used for about two seconds, and it’s only been used twice, but both times were the very end of an episode when Michael had just inadvertently thrown George-Michael into an awkward sexual situation he wasn’t ready for. The first time is in the pilot, and the second time is here, almost two years later. That’s bad-ass, right there. AD got about the same mileage out of Ann as Family Guy gets out of Meg. That is, she’s not a bad-looking girl, but as long as everybody pretends that she is, it gets funnier every time. This episode might have the most funny exchanges, and I had to use “banger in the mouth” at the top or else lose all credibility, but the bit of, “Next you’re going to say I could be her sister.” “I would NEVER say that,” was a tough competitor. Bonus for using Ione Skye (she’s Diane Court!) as the confused, frustrated, horny religious housewife who thinks that secular and sexual mean the same thing.

Side Note: this is the first ever appearance of Franklin, and from the outset he’s treated as an actual person – an unruly friend of G.O.B.’s – rather than a puppet. Michael is, of course, the only one who ever looks at him as, you know, G.O.B.’s hand, and at the end, during the “Next week on…” part, Franklin appears to take over Buster as well, who seems shocked by what the brotha is saying to his momma.

4.) Key Decisions

“A sea of waiters and no one will take a drink order!”

At its heart, Arrested Development was the most bizarre of soap-operas, which again probably had a lot to do with why it didn’t catch on. I don’t think any of the jokes were really above the heads of middle-America or anywhere else, having grown up in middle-America and thus blessed with the knowledge that the people out there aren’t stupid. But the way this show dealt with the conceit that anyone watching had completely absorbed all information from all previous episodes could sure make you feel stupid if you waded into it mid-way through. To use another fetish of mine for analogy, it’d be like starting the Harry Potter franchise at Order of the Phoenix. You might enjoy it, but you wouldn’t understand the significance of muggles, dementors, Death Eaters, Avada Kedavra, or any number of other things, if you even got what they were at all. AD has always felt like an exclusive club for those who saw it from the beginning, and as such was not built for weekly, ever-changing time slots. It was built for DVD. “Key Decisions” was really the first to bring in the big guns of running jokes and story-lines; it was the last stop for the bus, and if you didn’t catch it by then, you’d be walking the rest of the way. It’s also easily the best of the first season episodes. It introduces Marta (in her first and most devastatingly beautiful incarnation), it has White Power Bill, it has Ron Howard’s brother Clint as Johnny Bark (“That’s why you never get out of the tree.”) and it has G.O.B. trying to chase down a jail-cell key with numerous varieties of liquor. And then it ends it all with a heart-rending moment played moments later for laughs, even as the emo soundtrack is still rolling. Pure genius.

Side Note: “I’ve made a huge mistake.”

3.) The Ocean Walker

“Well, as long as it’s not too deep…”

Nothing in the show’s run was as divisive as the Rita storyline (and I include Martin Short’s part in “Ready Aim Marry Me,” as everyone agrees that sucked.) Some people hated Charlize Theron’s English accent, which wasn’t great, while other people had other objections that I’m sure were petty and envy-based. Fuck the haters. Rita was one of the greatest things in the show. Michael is generally considered to be the only competent one in the family, and certainly the only normal one, but neither of these things are true. Michael is just as incompetent as everyone else, but only seems competent because of his devotion to proving how much better he is than the others, and his veneer of sanity masks a perfectionist attitude and self-centeredness that verges on delusional. Rita brings out the best that Michael could be, the man what he wants to be. Through her he stops worrying about work so much, he starts loving life, he smiles, and he falls in love. And then, George-Michael (and the rest of the family) discover that she’s retarded. I wrote above about how Freaks and Geeks could throw the switch between heartbreaking and hilarious with little-to-no turn-around time. This episode is the first time I’d ever seen someone manage both simultaneously, for twenty-threee minutes of uninterrupted glory.

Witness Rita screaming for the chance to go be with the man she loves as her uncle latches the “invisible locks” on the door. Witness George-Michael’s face as she turns on the Wiggles and starts singing and clapping along in the stair car, and then going to find his father at the hotel room, not wanting to break his heart, but knowing that Michael should know the truth. Witness Michael viewing George-Michael’s tape, his world and new-found hope crashing around him as he watches his fiancée eat a series of plastic grapes. Witness George-Michael trying to remind his father that he loves this woman, and that any problems are a matter of perception and, drawing an explicit – and apt – comparison to his own love for Maeby, while self-involved Michael ignores it all and focuses on Rita’s IQ. Witness how the whole family, who each have come to adore Rita, change how they treat her and act around her once they find out about her handicap (and fortune.) Witness her running off from embarrassment in a pink-blouse and inside-out wedding dress (Lindsay’s idea) and Michael then realizing that he can probably catch her after all, as she wouldn’t have won a silver medal in that Olympics. And then, once we know that as good as she would be for Michael, the Bluths would be no good to her, witness her walking out of Michael’s life forever, across the water in the swimming pool…

Side Note: …And then we find out that the swimming pool thing was another one of G.O.B.’s illusions, and the whole wedding goes to shit exactly as Michael’s first wedding did.

2.) Righteous Brothers

“You’re high!”

“You’re drunk!”

“Not this time!”

I’ve got to confess that I’m a sucker for George-Michael & Maeby. Thankfully I’m not alone. When I went to Virgin tonight to finally buy all the DVDs for myself, the check-out girl couldn’t shut up about it herself. And she felt a little guilty about wanting them to be together, which, I guess, is kind of the point. In this outing, George Sr. cuts Oscar’s hair to put his brother in prison in his place, G.O.B. cuts an album with Franklin, and Maeby cuts the Tantamount remake of Dangerous Cousins down in running time in an extraordinarily obscure call-back to G.O.B.’s increasing suit prices in “Afternoon Delight.” But then the damndest thing happens. Maeby kisses George-Michael, and the house collapses beneath them. They fall onto the couch and kiss some more, and afterwards it’s appropriately weird between them. X-Files fans waited for years and years for Mulder and Scully to get it on, even though the tension is what made it fun. Tom Cherones had Dave and Lisa get together at the beginning of NewsRadio so as to avoid that same syndrome. But rarely has anyone created a main romantic arc that everyone wants to happen, but which is also so wrong that you can’t get past the, you know… incest. Ann was an ingenious character, because she made a relationship with Maeby seem much more natural and cool than one with a devout and prudish Christian. And then Ann dumped George-Michael for G.O.B., but that’s another season. In “Righteous Brothers,” we get a kiss that literally brings the house down. That’s ballsy.

Side Note: Lindsay runs up to fight Kitty over Tobias, and gets floored with one punch. As she comes to, Tobias purrs that she fought for him, and then jovially informs her that he’s running off to Vegas with Kitty. Brilliant!

1.) Exit Strategy

“Didn’t he just say G.O.B. should be ashamed of himself?”

“No, but give it a little while. Somebody will.”

“Development Arrested” is the denouement of the series, but this is the real climax. Bringing some sense of closure to all stories except for the one that we didn’t know existed until the finale. I think I’ve probably mentioned in a few places already how this show runs on long storylines and inside jokes, but part of that is that it therefore just gets better as it goes along. At the beginning of the show, we had no idea that some of the throw-aways would actually be important to the future plot. By the last episodes, we understood that all of them were. It begins with Lindsay parroting Lucille’s “little fibs” to explain her alcoholism, and then moves onto every member of the family, save for Michael, finding a way out of giving a deposition in the trial once it’s finally arrived, and then moves onto G.O.B. getting arrested for accidentally inciting an anti-American demonstration in Iraq, while Lindsay and Lucille fake going into rehab and Tobias involves himself in a sting with Richard Belzer involving scrap-booking and Buster falls in love with a nurse who’s head-over-heels for him as long as he’s brave enough to not be around her or talking to her. Then there’s the bombshell. The literal bombshell in the hide-away room of the model home in Iraq housing all the Hussein look-alikes (including the scarred, presumably real, Hussein.) The moment we see the warhead we know that we’ve finally gotten to the heart of the story, and that we’ll know, after all this time, what George Sr. has been up to. And then we find out it’s a home-fill and within a minute and a half all of it has been explained to the simplest possible explanation with as little exposition as possible. By contrast, Alias needed forty-two minutes to explain half a season, with the commissioner just telling her everything on a plane ride. Roblems are solved, and everybody’s happy.

Except for Maeby. And George-Michael. Everybody had forgotten about Maeby’s birthday, and so George-Michael sent out invitations to everyone in her address book to get them to come, which inadvertently outed her to Tantamount. When she shows up, and George-Michael is the only one yelling (but not really yelling. He doesn’t do that) “Surprise!” she’s a little bit pissed at him, but more than anything she appreciates the gesture and is pissed at everybody else, including her parents, for not giving enough of a shit to come. Then they get drunk on fake wine, and George-Michael tells her that they may not actually be cousins, and they dive into second base “head first, like Pete Rose.” And it wasn’t awkward afterwards until Tobias showed them the “rough” pictures. Maeby is to George-Michael what Rita was to Michael. George-Michael is just better when she’s around. And if the end of “Development Arrested” satisfied our better angels about that one, then “Exit Strategy” gave us what we really wanted deep down.

Side Note: Gary Cole as the American cab driver in Iraq, who thus gives us the final link between all shows mentioned at the top.

(Expect similar features on the other shows in the coming weeks.)

2006-08-28T16:58:00.000-04:00

NOT SO MUCH FUNNY AS JUST REALLY REALLY LONG

(seriously)

This is as humorous as this one gets.

The High Fidelity Thing: 1983-1999

So I spent the last week simultaneously having no idea what to write about, re-reading a lot of the Emily archive at P-Boi, and doing my own stock-taking. I assure you that this process was both shallow and melodramatic, and those of you who were fortunate enough to have missed it should count your blessings. To those who were witness to it, well, I apologize. You know why.

High Fidelity is quite the astute movie (and novel.) Women love it because they see their men’s lives, and insecurities, and foibles, and self-centeredness, and wounded pride, and everything else, only exaggerated so as to make it work on screen. Men love it because they know that none of it is exaggerated. Still, as anyone who has seen it knows, the personal history of the women in Rob’s life is dead-on, and telling, and painful for anyone who sees the same sort of thing in their own past.

You ever get that thing where you remember some dumb-ass thing you said in 5^th grade, and you feel so embarrassed all over again that you can’t make eye-contact with your friends until another good song comes on to distract you from your thoughts? Because it happens to me all the time. I asked a few months ago how our opinions of our past actions are colored by our current opinion of our lives. My thoughts are that if you’re happy with yourself, it’s easier to laugh off the follies and mistakes of youth, and to think, “Well, even if it sucked at the time, if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be where I am today.” On the other hand, if you’re disgusted with yourself, then every dumb thing from the past just gives you more ammunition against your own dumb ass. (Nietzsche said that he who hates himself still respects himself as one who hates. I say, let that be the only time I ever quote Nietzsche.) Also, in place of the optimistic fatalism, you get regret. And anyone who’s ever been in a funk knows the best thing you can possibly do is to rue the day when everything went wrong. That helps loads, particularly because you’ll learn that in all of the events you can point to, the decision you made was either completely benign at the time, or else made with the best of naïve intentions.

I’m not depressed right now. I’m not even unhappy with my life, though I wish my cash-flow were healthier. There are a lot of things going on that I’m psyched about, so don’t let me get you down. I’m just feeling pensive, nostalgic, wistful, and other synonyms. I wish I were Edna Modes. I wish I could never look back because “it distracts from the now.”

I can’t do that though, so I’m talking. And when I talk, I talk about girls.

Jessica M.

Jessica M. was the first one, the pre-school crush/girlfriend. She lived in the neighborhood, which of course meant fuck-all to me at 3 years old, but made things easy for my parents. I don’t remember anything about her at that time, except for a vague – likely fabricated – memory of a grey faux-rabbit fur coat. Still, she was the first, so I guess she should get some kind of door-prize for that.

Susan B.

Also pre-school, though more important. Susie lived just down the street, and we would stay at each other’s homes when our parents were out of town. I remember Susie vividly, down to her roller-skates. It’s worth mentioning here that, even at that age, I viewed these girls very much as “girlfriends,” and was very attracted to them, even if I didn’t know why boys and girls were supposed to be attracted to each other. I once had to take a shower with Susan and her mother when I was staying over there one time. I spent the whole time staring up at her mother’s breasts (and I still recall the uncomfortable on her face, though she said nothing) but I made no note of any other… differences.

Still, I loved Susie in the way only a three-or-four-year-old who doesn’t know anything can. I stole a bracelet for her from Dillard’s once, because I didn’t know that I was stealing it. She made me tell my mom and return it. Another time, during a Davey and Goliath movie in Vacation Bible School, as we were all laying on the floor, I turned my head and whispered for her to give me a kiss. She screamed out a resounding, “No! Not here!” She was always smarter than I was, but you know what? I was more romantic.

Courtney R.

Once in Kindergarten, Jessica M. was around again, and so that was back on, I guess. We hung out a lot, but not nearly as much as I did with my guy friends Ryan and Owen, especially considering that I was old enough to go over to their houses on my own now, and Jessica’s was a little beyond my scope of the subdivision. Also, I was preoccupied with school, so I wasn’t thinking too much about girls. It should be known that this phase didn’t last long.

In second grade, I had classes with Courtney. She was from the next neighborhood over, which was far more ostentatious than mine (if you’ve ever lived in Houston, you know the type of subdivision I’m talking about) but now that I’m older, I like mine more. The homes were marginally smaller, but more nicely designed, and the streets were a beautiful tree-shrouded tangle that pizza-guys dreaded like the plague. It was like the west village to Courtney’s upper east side.

I have no idea what Courtney and I talked about, save for that she and my new friend Stephen (from her ‘hood) both hated each other, but we kissed a lot – that cute little mouth-peck thing that single-digit kids do in the photos that come with your picture frames. I brought her a heart-full-o-chocolates for Valentine’s Day. Every teacher had to gush over it and make a scene. Apparently teachers, though they work with kids all day, every day, have no idea how much an eight-year-old can be mortified by something like that.

My brother, who was a senior, took Courtney’s rebellious older sister to prom that year. I thought that was funny. I found out years later that he had lost his virginity to another older sister of a girl in my class after prom the previous year. Just an odd note.

I went to Courtney’s birthday party that summer, and we had a grand time. We hung out a few other times, and then didn’t. I was doing swim-team and T-ball and hanging out with Ryan and Owen, so I didn’t think about it. When I got back to school, I found her as soon as I could. She looked at me with a pitying scorn that could only be described as preternatural in a third-grader, and told me that we had broken up as if this were old news. Apparently I’m the asshole.

Lauren O.

Lauren came to our school that year from France, though she had lived in the U.S. before, so she spoke better English than any of us and her accent was only noticeable enough to be irresistible. I was crazy about her. It’s worth noting that no one else was, nor did anyone else seem to even know she was there. I had the first of what could possibly be considered “sexual” fantasies involving her. I wasn’t masturbating, as I had no idea what sex involved, but I would go to sleep wishing for some reason that she were straddling me, and that we were just talking and laughing. On another side note, this is a great reason not to teach sex-ed too early. Every kid should get to have dreams this innocent and adorable.

I couldn’t talk to her. I should have had no problem at all, especially in retrospect. She didn’t have any friends in Houston, and I was wild for her, so why not? Because Courtney had shattered my confidence for that year right out the gate, and Courtney was part of the new popularity, to boot, and thus started a downward spiral that would last for far too many ill-advised years, and which there are arguably traces of to this day.

Allison B.

I also started to notice Allison that year, but because of my crush on Lauren I didn’t give it any real thought until fourth grade, when I wasn’t in classes with Lauren anymore. She was good friends with Courtney, so one might have good cause to ask what the hell I was thinking, but we should remember that I was ten and that I was too shit-scared of rejection to try anything anyway, so it didn’t matter in any case. I was never afraid of cooties, girls were never gross to me, and whenever Ryan or Owen (usually as a pair) would go into this line of reasoning, I would take the piss out of them. No, I was just afraid of rejection.

Now this is such a purely Texas occurrence that I can’t expect anyone else to possibly relate, but every February was “square-dancing month” in the P.E. classes Houston, and the boys were to politely choose their partners on the first day. While I surely wasn’t the coolest or most suave of my class, I was one of the fastest, and I ran like hell to get to Allison first. She said yes.

More than anything else, I remember how clammy her hands were. Not knowing shit, I just thought that some people must have really clammy hands. Looking back, I can remember how much she was looking around the room, how uneasy she seemed, how much she, well, would rather have been dancing with anyone else. But she was never anything but nice to me about it, to her great credit. If I had learned about Heartbreak and rejection a year-and-a-half before, this was Allison B. learning about the importance of politely saying, “no.” I wish I could’ve gone through my entire life and never taught that lesson to anyone, but we don’t get everything we want, and at least there wasn’t a scene. I gotta give her that.

Kristin O.

By fifth grade, my eyes were wandering to damn near half the girls that I saw, but it was all intellectual to me because I knew I wasn’t going to act on any of it. High upon this list was Kristin, who I’d known a little bit the entire time I’d been in school, but only spoken with a few times. As opposed to Courtney and her friends which now included a newly returned Jessica M., and who were by now leagues above me socially, Kristin was approachable. I didn’t know her very well, but I knew that I was into her.

One morning as Ryan, Owen and I were walking through the library to our first class, Kristin and her friends ran up to find me. We stopped.

Kim, Kristin’s best friend, stepped forward and asked me if I wanted to go out with Kristin. My heart skipped a beat. I opened up my mouth to say yes as Ryan and Own both jumped in front of me to yell NO.

Kristin walked off, crestfallen. I didn’t know what to do, so beholden was I to my friends, and so confused by the whole situation. I should’ve run after her and said whatever I needed to say. Even if I were going to deny her, which there wouldn’t have been a chance of, I should hope that I would’ve been nicer than that about it. But instead I just stayed rooted to my spot, watching Kristin walk off with her head in her hands as Ryan and Owen laughed.

I regret that one. I really, really regret that one. And it started one of the worst patterns of my romantic life.

Kelly D.

This is one of the biggies, the first to truly make the A-List.

As I finally left Yeager Elementary School, I was among the bottom rung, or at least near it. The neighborhood held a dance for us at the pool over the summer, which of course we all went to. Some of the older kids were actually dancing, but some part of us knew that we hadn’t earned that right. So we hung out by the pool tables, learning how to look bored so as to avoid taking risks. It was then that I saw a new girl. She wasn’t particularly my type, and I’m not sure I ever even learned her name, but who cared? She was new! She didn’t see me through the eyes of everyone who’d grown up with me. She was sitting between two girls who may as well have grown up in the womb together, both named Katy B., and both of whom detested me for no good reason considering that we’d never had a conversation throughout the six years that we’d gone to school together.

It was time to break out of the old mold, I thought, and the summer humidity and sugary punch gave me the impetus I needed to go up and ask her to dance. She smiled and half stood up before the Katy’s yanked her back down, proclaiming that she couldn’t. Looking back, I can see the karma in this, but at the time I just left. And once I got outside, I started to cry.

Crystalyn McCloud, the token black girl in our class and also far-and-away the smartest, caught up with me outside. We had never been close, really, but we’d always been friendly, and she was the only one to come out and try to comfort me. All I can recall is that she wanted me to know that, no matter what Katy and Katy were saying inside, that the girl had said yes first. All I was thinking at the time, however, is that it was no use. My reputation would follow me as long as there were people to tell it. I wish that Crystalyn had been there to say the same thing to Kristin, and I wish that I had taken her message to heart. It would’ve helped a lot with Kelly D.

(BTW, Crystalyn McCloud is the only name I’ll use in full here, and I hope I’m spelling it right, because if she ever googles her own name and finds this, I want her to know that I remember. And that it was an awesome thing that she did.)

Sixth grade was in it’s own school, Hamilton Intermediate, and we were the first class to attend there. Something like six different elementary schools were feeding into it. It was “semi-open concept,” which meant that we were put into one of seven large rooms called “pods” where we had most of our classes, and which were each divided by cabinets into four smaller classrooms. Houston schools are odd and experimental. Anyway, lo and behold, I was the only person from Yeager in my pod. I was able to get past my reputation after all, except for that niggling fact that I still couldn’t really talk to girls unless I had no interest in them.

Kelly was the first crush I had that I really think I could’ve been hospitalized for. I know that we had several classes together, but I only recall Pre-Algebra. The Teacher, Mrs. Bennett, had us seated in two sets of rows of seats, facing one another. I was facing Kelly. Kelly had grown up on Mrs. Bennett’s street. This is relevant.

Kelly had strawberry-blonde hair, a slight build, and the prettiest face I had ever set eyes on. Mind you that by this time I had built up a taste that ran counter to the “hotties” running around. They looked bland to me. I had no interest in them. But when Kelly wore her pink, short-sleeved shirt that connected the sleeves to the body but left the shoulders bare, well, that was just about the sexiest thing I had ever seen.

I guess I was a little bit obvious, because when Mrs. Bennett had to pair us up for groups, she started pairing me up with Kelly first. The first time this happened, I was dumbstruck. I searched in my disorganized backpack for any piece of paper to work on, while the whole class watched. When I finally came up with a crumpled piece, though unmarked, Kelly gently said, “I have paper. Don’t worry.” But the damage was done, on my end.

Still, with the knowledge of Mrs. Bennett and Kelly living on the same street, I started to research her phone number. It didn’t occur to me that if I were to call, I might as well just ask Kelly for her number directly. No, I looked at the Bennetts in the Houston Phone Book for street names. There were about thirteen of them. Meanwhile, Kelly’s last name took up three and a half pages. Ryan and I (we had grown apart from Owen at this point, with all the needless cruelty that could entail) diligently started our quest, before Ryan seemingly got tired of it. Over the next few days I kept checking street names against the two names, starting at the beginning. On the third day, Ryan gave me a call.

He had been hanging out with some other neighborhood kids who I thought didn’t give two shits about me, and had told them about the research. They wisely started at the back-end of the names and had a match on the seventh name in. I had the number.

I never called.

At the end of the year, the school threw us a dance during class hours. There were a lot of tears from the double-X-chromosome crowd. Half of us were being sent to Bleyl Jr. High, and the other half sent to Campbell. Kelly and her best friend were being split up, and of course Kelly was going to Campbell, so this was my last chance. I bided my time, because I’m a big pussy and I didn’t know what to do.

Then I saw Kelly dancing politely with this kid who’s name I can’t remember but who resembled nothing so much as a whiny chemo patient with bad style. I talked to him afterwards, cordially. He told me that he’d had a crush on her forever, and spoke of her in almost possessive tones. Here’s where I learned that if there’s one thing that will help me overcome my fear of rejection, it’s my sense of competition. I walked up to her and asked her for a dance in what would be the second-to-last song of the “night.” She said yes, but what she meant was, “It’s about damn time.”

We danced, my arms around her waist, her hands on my shoulders, and I know that we talked, but I can’t tell you what it was about. Probably Bleyl and Campbell. She spent the last song huddling and crying with her BFF, while I wished for one moment longer. It didn’t matter.

A lot of songs, movies, poems and what have you will talk about the one dance. The Garth Brooks song comes to mind. Whatever, the point is that my whole year had built up to that dance, and because I had no expectations of anything but the chance to have the dance itself, it didn’t disappoint. It was beautiful, and silly, and stupid, and it meant nothing at face value, but it was the difference between nostalgia and regret in this story. And for this one, that made all the difference in the world.

Kristen E.

Not to be mistaken with Kristin O. Junior High is a war zone, and as such I can’t blame anybody for anything done in the course of it, including myself. During seventh grade, I was rejected many times by girls whose names I can’t remember, and I rejected girls whose names I can remember. Once, Courtney R. called me over to her lunch table to tell me off in front of everybody for saying that we’d gone out when we were eight. I think I’d let it go an hour later. That’s how much seventh grade sucks. Still, on the last day before Christmas Break, I made a gentleman’s bet with all of my friends that some girl, any girl, would give me something before the day was up. During last period, as all the guys were giving me shit about it, since of course I hadn’t gotten anything, Crystallyn McCloud came up to hand me a candy cane. I really can’t say enough about her.

Kristen E. was a seventh-grader when I was in eighth, but we still shared a few classes. I liked her enough, but she was obsessed with me for some reason. I flirted all year, but never bit. This, too, will become relevant.

Jill L.

She had the look of always wearing a brand-new shirt. I asked her out on a date on the same day that my buddy Iain was asking his own crush out. Jill said yes. Iain’s girl didn’t.

My first real date. Jill said that she was bringing her friend Suzy, which I should’ve seen as a sign, but I brought along Iain. We had a decent time. There wasn’t a second date.

Allison J.

Artsy girl. Very short hair. I’m not sure just how I met her, because we didn’t share any classes, but we would talk about our art projects in the lunchroom sometimes (Bleyl in eighth grade was not just under year-round schooling, but under block-scheduling as well. I told you Houston schools were weird.)

As the Eighth Grade Dance approached, my mother made a pact with Ryan’s mother that we couldn’t go without dates. Neither of us were playing at that level yet, but Ryan is an oldest child, and didn’t know what to say, so he ended up not going. I’m a youngest child, raised by siblings, and claimed to be going with Allison, though for the life of me I don’t remember ever mentioning anything about this to Allison herself, as I didn’t really know her, and it was just a ruse so that I could go stag and hang out with my buddies Mike and Alex.

Still, soon after we got there, Allison found me. We danced all night, with me only showing minimal interest. I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing, quite frankly, and I had the odd sit-com feeling of being caught in my own lie but not being able to say anything about it. I just kept talking, all the while Allison’s repugnant friend hung just off to the side, pulling her away for brief whispered conversations.

Allison eventually went off to the ladies room, and Repugnant Friend to say, and I quote, “Allison’s just waiting for you to shut up for two seconds so that she can kiss you.” When Allison got back, all grins, I talked like the micro-machine-man for the next half hour. I didn’t find Allison unattractive by any means, but ever since the Kristin O. debacle I had found it in my best interest to gauge my friend’s reactions first, and they were nowhere to be found, especially with Allison at my hip all night.

Finally, she just pulled me off into a deserted hallway leading to the band room, shoved me up against the Coke machine, and devoured my face in what was my first real kiss.

This went on for a while, and I definitely started to enjoy it, until I came up for air to see the doorway to the corridor, which was all steel and windows, and every inch of the windows was covered with peering faces. As I started to protest, Allison pulled me around to the blind corner of the Coke Machine and continued. It’s still one of the best kisses I’ve ever had. And it was both of our first.

That night, Mike and I went back to stay at Alex’s place. I joked about the whole matter, and they laughed along with me, so that when I saw Allison on Monday I played it off like it was all nothing. That wasn’t the reaction that she was hoping for, but she was cool about it. I wish I hadn’t done that.

Jenny D.

Jenny wore a tiny silver back-pack and looked, now that I think about it – like an even sexier version of Kelly D. I used the same approach, though Jenny’s last name is almost unheard-of, so I got the number pretty quickly. This time I called, and left a message. And then I felt horrified for even trying it.

The next night, as my parents and I were eating dinner, the phone rang. My mom read the unusual last name off the caller I.D. and asked if I knew anybody by that name. Embarrassed, I said nothing. She didn’t leave a message.

Rachel O.

Over the Summer, my friends and I all went out to AstroWorld. While having a grand-old-time and generally making an ass of ourselves, Mike and Alex (and Joel and Nick) all kept mentioning this hottie that we kept passing, but I could never see who they were talking about. Finally, while in line for XLR8 or something, they pointed her out.

It was Kristen E. Naturally, I went over to say Hi.

She was there with her boyfriend David S., who was as big of a patsy as I’ve ever met in my life, and got my competitive hackles, I dunno, hackling again. We only talked for a few minutes, but David definitely got the idea that she was more into me than him. My boys were impressed. I had the go-ahead.

Ryan and I went to the homecoming game in the fall, and because I didn’t consider us cool enough to sit with the rest of the class lower down in the bleachers, we moved up. There we found Kristen and David. It was on, and I’ve rarely acted more horribly in my life.

We embraced for FAR too long. We talked for an hour. I demeaned David to his face. I talked her into kissing me, and we made out right in front of him. Soon, he moved them down into another row, away from me. I followed, sitting in the row right in front of her, and leaned my head back.

She stroked my hair for a minute before squeezing the top of my head between her legs and throbbing it into her crotch. This was a new one to me, and I can honestly say that I’ve never come across it since. This went on for an eternity, but if it were still going on, I doubt very much that I would complain. I don’t know what finally ended it, but when it did, I actually had the balls to ask if she wanted to run off to fuck somewhere.

She said that she would if David said it was okay. I half-expected capitulation, but David pulled the last of his dignity from the floor and said no, and we left it at that. Still, when Ryan and I got back to the Scout House where we were to sleep that night, I didn’t sleep at all, and when I walked home at six in the morning, it was my first taste of slinking. And it was something great.

That Monday, people I didn’t think knew my name were asking me about it. I didn’t pay attention to the game, but I guess it wasn’t anything too spectacular, because all eyes were on me, apparently. I know now that the context of the questions was, “Who was the hot girl you were hooking up with,” but my training in humiliation and paranoia took it as, “what the hell were you doing with her?” That afternoon, when I got home, she called me that she’d broken up with David, and asked if I wanted to be her boyfriend.

Against all better instincts, I told her that I didn’t think that was a good idea.

Rachel O. was Ryan’s crush, though as I’ve said, he knew even less than I did about what to do with that sort of thing. At the time. Ryan’s engaged now, and I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing. So there you go.

Rachel and I (and Ryan and Mike) had first period Health Class together freshman year. Rachel and I had spoken a couple of times, but nothing much. Still, when it came time for a project when the boys and girls were supposed to pair up for a family economics thing, she was first out of her chair and rushed back to me to ask if I would be her partner. She had curly blonde hair and a smile that could melt Stalin. This was cool enough to me that I mentioned it at home, and if you’ve learned anything from my Jenny D. story, it’s that I don’t mention much at home.

Rachel and I got into the habit of walking between fifth and sixth hours together, though I would always hang back once I crossed paths with Joel, who told me every single day that I was an imbecile for not just talking with Rachel another minute longer. Not in my mind, because in mind I never had a shot. I never asked her out, and that one’s another regret. In the last weeks of Freshman year, when I knew I’d be moving to Oklahoma very shortly, she asked me if I wanted to buy a CD by a high-school group named Timmy. She told me she had a crush on the lead singer and wanted a chance to talk to him again. I know now what a last-ditch jealousy ply this was, but at the time it felt like a Sam Weir/Cindy Sanders thing, and I said yes, giving her the ten bucks I had on hand.

Less than a year later she was shot through the shoulder in a gang initiation. She came out okay, but it freaked me out, most of all because I didn’t have contact information to call her and ask her about it myself. I still have the Timmy CD though, and I’ve got to admit that it’s one of the best albums I own.

Aimee L.

Before I move onto Oklahoma I should mention that after not seeing her once throughout all of middle school, I once again had classes with Kristin O. my freshman year. She grew up well, to say the least, and all of us guys in the theatre group (the aforementioned Joel, Mike, Alex, Nick and myself) were crazy for her. I started asking my friend Libby (not short for Elizabeth, BTW) and Libby said that I might have a chance there, but that I was doomed to be judged by the company I kept and, well, the guys were all assholes when it came to women. This is true, but they were my buds, so it was a Renton/Begbie type of thing.

In the last week of that year, the Drama teacher had a “lock-in” at the theatre, by which I mean that we all stayed at the theatre overnight but none of us were actually locked in. At one point, I went outside to find her laying face-down on one of these mesh-plastic picnic table benches. So I slid underneath the bench and asked what was up. She smiled. Her silver James Avery cross necklace was hanging down through the gratings. We talked, we flirted, I took her hands. It was all very sweet. When she said she had to go inside, I playfully held onto her hands and pulled her back. She laughed. This went on for another minute, and somewhere I missed the line where it crossed over from playful to aggressive and creepy, because she hollered a “Let Me Go!” that was anything but amused, and I’d fucked it up once again. Lenny and the mouse.

I knew that Bartlesville was my opportunity for as much reinvention as possible short of surgery. I also moved there in the early summer, and was five months short of a driver’s license, so meeting people wasn’t going to be easy at first. In August, I went to the FUMC with my mom one Sunday morning, and some lady from the church administration asked if I wanted to come to youth group that night. Clever ruse. I had certainly nothing better to do, so I went, on what turned out to be the night where there theme was to be as friendly and accepting to anyone new as possible. Being the only new person, I was hailed like a conquering hero, and immediately taken under the wings of Kyle and with-him-is-always-his-Katy. Kyle didn’t have any close male friends, and I really didn’t now anyone, plus he had a car, so this worked out well.

(Aside: Kyle is still one of my best friends on earth, and is the type of guy who bends over backwards for you if there’s even the chance that it might help. I daresay that he’s been a much better friend to me through the years than I’ve been to him.)

When school started that year, I found out that B’Ville is big on pouncing on the new kid across the board. As I walked into the Mid-High (9^th & 10^th grades), before the first period bell, a girl who I described then as “hot” and would describe now as “slutty” bounded up to me as soon as I was through the doors. I’m not sure I ever talked to her after the initial conversation, though I later found out that Kyle had fingered her in one of the church closets ages beforehand.

My first period class was French, and I was sat behind a girl named Kelli S., the second of two people I still keep in contact with from that town, and whom my family still expects me to marry some day. Anyway, to the point…

We started Our Town rehearsals in short order. I was to be Simon Stimson, the drunken preacher, a role I’m uniquely suited for. Kyle pointed Aimee out to me, and she was indeed a cutie, plus she was on the debate squad, so for a nerd-girl fan like me, this was a great idea. Kyle had dated her for about nine months before dumping her on Valentine’s Day and starting something up with Katy. Apparently she dug me, so I waited way too long to ask her out to see, like, The Brady Bunch Movie or some other such bullshit. I can’t really remember what the movie was, because she brought her new guy, Landon, who of course I knew nothing about, to the movie with her. Imagine one cringe-worthy moment in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and then stretch it out to a full hour-and-a-half. The thing is, I can’t imagine that it was any fun for Aimee either, but she never got the lesson that Allison B. got back in the day on how to politely say no, so there we were. I imagine that Landon was pretty pleased with himself, however, so maybe it wasn’t a total wash.

Sara M.

Now it was Katy’s turn to try and hook me up. She pointed me to her friend Sara, who had mentioned something, and I asked her out in short order. We went to see Bulletproof, the god-awful and forgotten Sandler/Wayans joint. There wasn’t a second date. Katy later advised me that women don’t like piece-of-shit action movies and that maybe I shouldn’t have hugged my knees the whole time. Live and learn, I guess.

Kristi F.

Do any parents still name their daughters variations on this? Was this the de facto name given to immigrant girls who’s parents had died on the voyage over? I don’t get it. Anyhoo…

Kyle and I were put into the “Competitive Drama” class, which meant sixth hour was at the high school (11^th and 12^th grades) which meant I had class with Kristi, a senior who had that farm-girl-who-could-model-if-she-knew-of-such-a-profession kind of look, complete with the vacant stare. I blew through many a class chatting away with her, and though she was vacuous, to be sure, she was also a sweetheart and she made no question of her interest in me. Unfortunately, I didn’t start anything up with her until shortly before Christmas break. I lent her my stereo for the interim (her house was like nothing so much as the house in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? complete with the enormous, shut-in mother, though Kristi herself was a rail.

When I returned, she had bleached her beautiful brown hair, and had started seeing some dude named Jeremy that she’d grown up with. I didn’t care that much, to be honest, but a phone call would’ve been nice. Also, while I won’t reveal her last name, it was perfect as a description of this type of romance, if not a little cliché.

Melissa S.

Melissa was Katy’s older sister, also a senior, and much, much cooler than Katy herself (as it turned out, Katy kind of sucked a big one.) Melissa was the kind of girl who always got the private joke before you had to tell it. Once again, inaction on my part, though we went to a dance in February and could have been fucking on that dance floor if not for the fact that we were both hell-bent on leaving everything as tacit as possible. She got frustrated and moved on shortly after that, but we stayed friends. Melissa is the model for how all girls should act if they don’t want to come across as a gigantic pain in the ass half the time. Also, she created “Melissa’s First Law of Movies,” which simply states that any information you need to know within a movie will be provided by the time the movie is over, so shut up and let me watch already.

Anna

I’m having trouble picturing how I possibly went from February to August when I was sixteen without having any more stories to tell, but there it is. Oh, now I remember, I had a disgusting inflammation in my eye, and then a subsequent surgery that left my eye a solid blood-red for the coming months. Hard to believe I forgot that.

In August I went to a week at Dayspring, an Oklahoma Christian retreat. She was the first person I met there, and we were more or less inseparable through the week. On the fourth or fifth day, we set out a “prank” for Kelli, so that in the middle of a conversation, when Kelli turned away, she’d turn back to see us kissing. We pretended this was a prank. We were idiots.

Anna lived in Tulsa, and probably still does, so it was difficult for us to see each other. But about a month after Dayspring ended, she showed up in town for a night when Bartlesville was having a street carnival. I asked her out on the Ferris Wheel, and thus Anna became my first real girlfriend. Even after asking her out, I didn’t know how to make the move to kiss her, so that was put off until she was leaving, when she finally pinned me to my mailbox and made out with me for probably three glorious seconds, and I walked on air for a few hours afterward.

We talked every night about Counting Crows or Cowboy Mouth or how much we loved each other, because we really thought we did, and we saw each other every weekend. Anna’s friend Scott started dating Kelli, so this worked out well for all of us.

Anna was bizarre, which I neglected to mention. Beyond being dysgraphic, which is essentially bad handwriting as a mental problem, she was a total spaz, had chopped and died her cute-as-shit red hair into a short brown (not black) bob, and wanted more than anything to join the R.O.T.C. Her bedroom was a windowless disaster area covered in black-and-white splatter paint, with one dangling light bulb, so that it resembled nothing so much as the CBGB’s bathroom after a grisly murder. She always smelled like vanilla, though, and there’s a shirt I have back home that still smells like her.

After a weekend at her aunt’s place for Anna’s birthday, wherein she told me that she wanted to marry me some day, and my eye started wandering to Scott’s sister, who sort of looked and acted like you think of Ginny Weasley, I decided that it was time to drop the bomb on this one. It took me until Thursday, when I did it by phone, with Kyle by my side writing helpful comments on a note pad such as, “Ouch! Honest, though.”

Oh, and I used the name of her favorite song to break the news to her, because I’m an asshole and I wasn’t thinking clearly.

Beth W.

Beth was dating my neighbor Joe. I hated Joe. I liked Beth. Joe was cheating on Beth. Kelli and I went over to tell her this at one point, but it turned out that the family was more concerned with her missing brother, and Joe came around while we were there (Kelli’s Jeep was in the driveway, and there’s no way Joe wouldn’t have recognized it, having dated Kelli before.) That meeting was one of the more ill-advised of my ventures, but never before have I ventured so far into the W.B. than hiding from Joe in Beth’s closet while he discussed her missing brother Clint with her parents.

I did go on one date with her, while she was going out with Joe, so I guess I don’t know what that was really all about, but one day Clint came up to me in the hallway to congratulate me and give me his stoned blessing. We went to see Scream 2. There wasn’t a second date, but we were weird around each other from that point forward.

Rebekah W.

I mentioned to a friend that I was into Rebekah, and this friend did what she could to set it up. We were at a Drama tournament that Saturday, and a girl actually came up to me and said, because I remember it like it was yesterday, “Hi, I know I don’t know you, but you’re really hot, and I’m kinda horny, so do you wanna go off somewhere and fuck?” This girl was my type, too, but I said no, on account of I wanted to start seeing Rebekah. In retrospect, I’m a fucking moron, and no, I’ve never gotten that offer from a stranger since then, and certainly not from one so cute.

Rebekah and I start hanging out, like at school, and about a week and a half into me getting this thing on the road, Kyle says to me, “So, you’re okay about the kid?”

This was the first I had heard of this. The reason that I hadn’t heard of it before is that it was already old news when I moved into Bartlesville in 10^th grade. That’s how young she was when she had her daughter that I’d never heard about. Now, I have a lot of sympathy for this sort of thing now, and I’d like to think that I had some then, but that kept me up nights, stomach churning. I finally came down on the side of I Don’t Care. Alex in Houston had dated this girl Bethany, whom he liked quite a lot, and dumped her after hearing her rape story because he couldn’t handle it. I didn’t want to be that guy.

After a good date (As Good As It Gets. There isn’t much to do in Bartlesville) I was moving in to kiss her, but now I had no idea where she came down on hooking up. I mean, obviously she had a history, but one with consequences that easily could’ve acted as a sling-shot the other direction. I did nothing. That next Friday, when I went to find her, she was patching things up with her ex (not the father.) I got over it in a matter of hours. I think I was happy simply to not have to deal with it any more.

About this time Kyle and I got cast as Algernon and Jack, respectfully, in the town’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Kristi F. was cast opposite of me as Gwendolyn. She was still with Jeremy, who wasn’t pleased about this arrangement. Two minutes before dress rehearsal, he dumped her. She was a wreck, obviously, and came to me for support because nobody else really knew her. I didn’t try anything, because I’m not that much of a shit. Then, two days later, right before opening night, he storms into her dressing room to say that he’s going off to the army, and will you marry me?

She didn’t give him an answer. Once again she came to me for advice between shows. I told her to say no. He was a flake, he had no sense of timing, and above all that he had the eyes of a trained douchebag. I don’t know what she decided, ultimately, but I can tell you this. Both of those nights she was bawling off stage, but the instant she stepped on stage she left it all behind her like flipping a switch. That girl was a pro.

Ellen P.

I was into a girl named Ellen. She was Beth W.’s best friend. Nothing happened.

Still, during this time (over the summer) I was brought down to Houston for my friend Christian’s birthday. There are far too many stories from that weekend to go into, but when I first arrived, we went off for coffee with Christian’s friend Jessica M. We had a good time, after Jessica told me off for dumping her in preschool for Susan B. According to Jessica, I liked Susie’s white faux-rabbit fur coat more than Jessica’s grey one. I can’t believe she remembered that, but I’m glad that fifteen years later we were finally over it.

Leryn D.

I met Leryn on a tour of UCLA over spring break. Cute-as-a-button Jewish girl from Albuquerque who mentioned a summer theatre program that she was applying to at USC. I made sure that my family went back to U.S.C. so that I could pick up one of those applications. I followed her there, hung out, and soon came to realize that she had 99 problems and the bitch (me, I guess) wasn’t one. Still, that month over the summer was one of the greatest times of my life, even if I did start smoking there, and FWIW, that’s where I met Mariah, my oldest friend in NY, who may as well be my sister. So Leryn was cool, but it’s no big loss. And at least I got to hang out in her room as she was changing clothes that one time, and was able to watch surreptitiously in her closet mirror.

Laura S.

Another one for the All-Star board. For the first two weeks of school, I would go out to lunch with my friends Ben and Alicia, and Ben’s friend B.J., who calls himself Bill now but will always be a B.J. to me. Anyway, one day, B.J. wasn’t with us, and Ben wouldn’t go into it, so the three of us just went out to the Washington Café. We couldn’t have picked a worse (or better) place to go, as that’s where B.J. had chosen to break up with his girlfriend Laura, who sat right next to me in my next period class. Laura was a Junior, one year below me, and a cheerleader (and great singer, and great actress.) When she came in, she was crying, and so I decided on the spot that I was having a party that Friday, and I drew her out a cute little map of how to get there, and she laughed, and cheered up, and something was started.

Laura came to the party with her best friend Kyle G., whose whole name I would like to use except that he might one day find it and try to sue me for libel. Anna also made a surprise visit, and I cruelly embarrassed her in front of all my cronies, so that she left within minutes and didn’t try to come between me and Laura. Sorry about that one, Anna. Laura and I went cliff-diving, driving around, and sitting at home watching movies, and there through it all was Kyle G., hell-bent and determined to be the third wheel. After one football game, Kyle G. and I went across the street to her house, where her parents told us to just go upstairs and wait for her to get back. Once up there, Kyle told me that I should get used to the look of her bedroom. Another night after a play rehearsal, I ran over there, and her parents met me at the door, telling me that they were about to go pick her up from her job coaching gymnastics, but that I should probably go instead. I did (she was surely surprised to see me) and we drove around, talking about colleges and such. She mentioned that she wanted to go to NYU, and my early-decision choice was settled then and there. When we got back to her place, I kissed her on her doorstep and left feeling ten pounds lighter. Still, nothing felt better than the first time she just laid back into my arms as we were watching a movie. That was amazing.

We took to hanging out at “the precipice,” a little-known rock which overlooked the town. It was there, on one of the rare nights without Kyle G. present, that I held my breath, knowing that when I couldn’t release until I asked her to go out with me. It came out sounding about as stupid as that sort of thing possibly could, but she laughed and said yes with the inflection that said that we already were. From there, I bravely bounded into the world of feeling-up and going-down and all of that. Meanwhile, Kyle G. bounded into the world of hiding and surprising us during intimate moments. We laughed it off, though it was getting weird, and we said that we were in love. One night Kyle G. drove her over to my house. She was sobbing, but she needed to admit to me that she and B.J. had slept together three times back in the day. I didn’t sleep at all that night, my chest boiling with rage, but then when the sun broke, I was fine with it. She wanted me, not him, and in fact his breaking up with her was supposed to be a ploy to get her to be more obedient to him, which just backfired on him. I had won.

That Thanksgiving we did it, which was not without its complications, as my nerves were shot when the day finally arrived. It wasn’t good, but it was great all the same, and we kept practicing as winter came upon us, keeping one eye out my bedroom window in case my parents should drive up. We listened to a lot of Dar Williams and we came home at sunrise too many times to count. And I got into NYU, which was cool. My family HATED her, including my grandmother, but her parents loved me, and at one point almost bought me a card to say, “Thank You for making our daughter so happy.”

That Christmas I was an insufferable prick for two weeks in Crested Butte. The only time I was smiling was when I was on my nightly phone call to Laura, who was back in Bartlesville with everyone else. At one point I talked to Kelli, who wanted to “warn” me about her history with B.J. I told Kelli that B.J. had nothing on me and that I wasn’t concerned. Kelli was quite upset by this, but I didn’t give a shit about anything but getting back from Colorado.

On New Years’ Day, Laura was pissed. Seems at a party the previous night, Rob, another ex of hers with a notably small cock, had walked in, thrown a package of condoms at her, and left. I admitted that I had told Kelli, but that Kelli wasn’t a rumormonger and that it had to have come from somewhere else. No luck, I was responsible for sullying her non-existent reputation, and that was that.

I bought her a little figurine and barreled home at 90 m.p.h. on the last leg of the journey. I immediately went to see her in her basement, where she was waiting with Kyle G. She had written out what she wanted to say, and was gushing tears as she broke up with me, kissing me the whole time. Kyle G. just stared at me with a cold, unwavering gaze.

The next night, I was watching Sliding Doors with my friend Bione, and I asked her what had really happened at the party. It had gone down exactly as Laura had said, but when I asked if the information had come from Kelli, Bione simply shook her head very slowly.

Kyle G. Of course. Little Fucking Bastard. He had practically called a meeting.

Monday morning, in first period drama, I walked up right behind him, and told him off in the coldest, most measured tones, saying the meanest things possible. It’s worth noting at this time that Kyle G., while closeted, was as queer as a seven-dollar bill. I had thought that he simply was pissed off about being the third wheel, but as the picture came into focus, I realized that he simply wanted to spend more time around me, and catch me in the act if possible. I told him that I was going to destroy him, not for his crush, but for his tactics.

The rest of the day, I got the evil eye from his entire entourage. Laura called me up that night, angry, and told me that Kyle G. had gone home after my little rant, and was now committing himself for the next couple weeks at a psyche hospital. Good, I thought. Meanwhile, this did nothing to get me back together with Laura, who had started dating my friend Patrick.

Heidi G.

Heidi was a German girl who had lived enough of her life in America to not have an accent. She was beautiful, but almost disturbingly childlike. You expected her kisses to taste like peanut butter and jelly. I met her the previous year during a home tournament that we were throwing. She was like Kristen E. all over again, with me holding onto the leash while giving nothing back because I liked her but was too concerned with what my friends would say (she was two years below me.)

I actually did go out on a date with her in junior year, which required me to first take a driving test with her mother and step-father, which I passed, though I sat through a green light while chatting with them. That Christmas, her real father, who was convicted in Germany for drug-trafficking, kidnapped Heidi and her younger siblings and took them back to Germany. She left a note for her friends to let them know what had happened, and once in Germany, made a break for it to the embassy and arranged for their extradition back home. Throughout all of this she still seemed the little girl.

At the first tournament of my senior year, an overnight thing in Muskogee, Heidi stepped onto the bus with a guy I’d never seen before, and they sat in the back across from me. Never one to let my competitive spirit down, I jovially greeted them, “Hi, Heidi. Who the hell are you?” I found out that his name was Patrick, that he didn’t know anybody, that he was scared shitless of meeting new people, and later, that we had to share a bed in the hotel. He didn’t say anything the entire ride. I explained myself and apologized that night, and we became close friends.

Now it was early January, though, and he had started going out with Laura. We were cool about it, though, including when Laura invited us both down to her basement to “figure this all out.” We yelled a little bit, and got frustrated, and at one uber-tense moment of silence, Patrick let loose with a little, “I don’t wanna wait…” and we all cracked up. Patrick’s a good guy.

Throughout the spring, I set my sights on a number of freshmen girls because I didn’t give a shit anymore and they were less likely to have as many issues as where I was coming from. Where parents used to fawn over me, now I got icy stares. I’m surprised I didn’t get another driving test, or even the business end of a shotgun. Laura and I went to “Snow-Ball” together in February, as we had already settled on that, but as prom rolled around, I had to figure out what I was doing.

I’d been flirting with a freshman named Stephanie, who was smarter than most of my class by half and in far better control of herself. We ran lighting and sound for a independent production of The Diary of Anne Frank, and the second night she had dolled herself up completely for a night spent alone in a booth with me. I got the message, but being as good at doing nothing as I am, that was my plan. Laura caught on, though, and started throwing herself at me, though she was still with Patrick. And Stephanie was probably already going with my friend Tim, who was instrumental in Katy’s break-up with Kyle (the good one) and, well, the apocalypse was upon us.

While I was at U.S.C., Kelli had called me up one morning to ask me to the coming prom. I told her I’d have to let her know when the time came. Nine months later, I accepted her invitation, forcing her to drop whatever plans she had. Meanwhile, Patrick and Laura had broken up, probably because she was coming into her own as a little libertine, but they were all set to go together, and so on and so on. (BTW, Laura’s story now was that she and B.J. had been physically incompatible, and that though they had tried on three separate occasions, they had never actually accomplished the deed, ipso facto I was her first. I was happy to go along with that.)

Prom was a simple matter of standing in line for a picture and then getting the fuck out of there, but our group had a hotel room rented (by B.J., natch) with a hot tub and champagne, so we went there post-haste. At the room, everyone’s dates shifted one over, so that now Laura was with a freshman football player named Josh, whose father was the town sheriff, Kelly and Patrick were together, and I was with… Heidi.

I dated Heidi off and on all summer, but mostly off, as I was spending the better part of the summer sleeping with Laura on the down-low, as she didn’t seem to want to fuck Josh. Josh was none the wiser, until one night when she called me over, and by the time I got there, she was half asleep. We made out for a bit and then went to sleep. Josh, however, saw my car in the driveway late that night, and of course asked her what was up. Laura told him that she had woken up with me inside of her. I don’t need to tell you that this was 100% bullshit.

So Heidi’s sixteenth birthday came around, and she had a small toga party with her parent’s permission. It devolved into truth or dare, and then somehow into she and I alone in her driveway doing things that were surely illegal to do outside. A couple of days later, I get a call from her that her parents are out of town, and that her mom said she can do whatever she wants as long as she doesn’t have sex on their bed (a rule that Laura and I had definitely broken at my house) but that I should come over and fuck her because it’s time for her to lose it.

I get down there, and Heidi is acting… odd… in a way that I can’t adequately describe. We made out for a bit before she told me that we needed to go up to her room. Fair enough. Once there she pins me to her bed and demands that I kiss her. Note that she isn’t kissing me herself, which would have been fine, but demanding it of me. I play along by refusing and untying the strap on her shirt, which she quickly ties and then tells me to kiss her first. This exchange goes on for way too long before we finally get down to it, but she never stopped acting oddly.

As I was leaving, she looked at me with a sadness that didn’t exactly translate into longing, or regret, or any other obvious signal that I could interpret.

A few months later, in New York, I found out from Patrick that Kyle G. had talked her into it, and that she had him hiding in her closet watching the entire time. I threw up.

I wish I could say that things have gotten easier, but they haven’t. The older we get, the more misperceptions we acquire, the more scars we’ve got to account for, and the less we trust each other when we should just hurtle ourselves into romance with reckless abandon. It’s not that easy anymore. I wish I could go back to the day when it was just about a grey coat or a white one.

2006-08-18T12:02:00.000-04:00

SEXY FRIDAY!! KINDA!!

In retrospect, yesterday’s piece might have been a little inappropriate considering that JonBenet Ramsey was on the cover of every newspaper in the country for the first time in ten years. After much thought, I’ve decided that it would have been inappropriate in any case, so no retraction will be given.

That said…

Snakes on a Plane Day

Because the snakes are on the floor, you see...

That’s right. Today is the mid-twenties slacker holiday that we’ve been waiting our whole lives to be mid-twenties slackers to finally celebrate. Let’s just think of the grand simplicity, for one last time, before running into the theatres with rubber snakes and beach balls, hopefully turning this into the Rocky Horror Picture Show of our time.

There are Snakes. As opposed to their normal habitat, they are for some reason confined to a Plane. Samuel L. Jackson – as I understand it – is unhappy about this scenario (as are the Snakes, presumably) and will do whatever is in his power to remove them.

I mean come on. If Homer were alive today he’d be all, “Shit. I’ve been messing around with lotus flowers when I could’ve had Sam Jackson on a plane with Snakes. Damn.”

(note: in accordance with the customs of Snakes on a Plane Day, Snakes on a Plane will not be italicized, as it is more a state of being than a mere title. Likewise, on this holiest of secular holidays, the word Snakes must always be capitalized, in reverence to them as our natural superiors, except for in the case of Sam Jackson (we hope.)

Random Snippet from the A.V. Club Interview with Samuel L. Jackson:

AVC: You're doing the voice of God for an audiobook version of the Bible. How does the voice of God differ from the voice of Samuel L. Jackson?

SLJ: Not very much.

Random Snippet from My Dream Last Night (For Real)

I, for some reason, end up at a conference table for last minute production work on Snakes on a Plane. This excites me very much as naturally it would. In lieu of payment at the end of the work, I’m rewarded with “Snake shoes” which allow me, for some reason probably tracing back to an old Weekend Update, to walk up skyscrapers.

Last Minute Changes to Snakes on a Plane

Andy Dick replaced with Samuel L. Jackson
Gratuitous nudity added (“for that David Lynch feel”)
Lot’s of “muthafucka’s” added back in (these were in the original script, but were cut after sounding “disturbing” when uttered by Mr. Dick.)
Plane given wings, no longer travels underwater.
Samuel L. Jackson character solves the Snake problem more violently, rather than with the chess-match diplomacy of the original script.
Snakes’ legs digitally removed after phone call from research department.
Whoever the hell changed the title to Pacific Air Flight 121 summarily fired and ordered to commit Hari Kari.

Best Review I Will Possibly Be Able To Leave the Theatre With Tonight

“That was worth missing the decisive Sox/Yankee game”

Worst Review I Will Possibly Be Able To Leave the Theatre With Tonight

“That was awesome! Let’s go see if we can catch the end of the Sox game.”

Top Three Reason to See This Film

1. Snakes
2. Samuel L. Jackson
3. Plane

2006-08-18T12:01:00.000-04:00

1. How lame is it that I waited ‘til day-of to finally hit this meme?

2006-08-18T12:00:00.000-04:00

2. How is this possibly the purview of “Sexy Friday?”

2006-08-18T11:58:00.000-04:00

3. Dude, how is this possibly NOT the purview of Sexy Friday?

2006-08-17T15:12:00.000-04:00

PRAGMATIC THURSDAY!!

First things first. It’s come to my attention that there already exists an (apparently quite good) band by the name Grizzly Bear. My mistake. As far as I know, The Condoms is still untaken, so have at it, though Dave suggests that The Reservoir Tips might be even better.

Anyhoo…

SOME PEOPLE PREFER ILLUSION TO DESPAIR

This child is all of us.

Santa Clause comes down my chimney every Christmas Eve, bearing gifts for me on account of my being a “good boy.”

Pros: Free presents, sense of magic and wonder.

Cons: Have to come to terms with large man breaking in and messing around in the living room all night.

Strains on Credibility: We’re omitting the question of the plausibility of the flying reindeer, as that’s obviously just part of a marketing image, like the Michelin Man. Time constraints of the single night suggest that there must be at least a team of Clauses to handle the workload. Seems at once not officially affiliated with the church, and yet reserves his gifts for Christian (and western secular) children, which is contradictory in and of itself and also begs the question of his perceived benevolence. Many homes have no chimney. The necessary endowment required to make this an annual undertaking must be massive, and likely cripples the global economy by being withheld from circulation. Apparently hates poor kids.

Verdict: Presents

A Nigerian bureaucrat named Bola Johnson will give me millions of dollars in exchange for my assistance getting his money out of an international tangle.

Pros: Money for very little work. Seemingly risk-free.

Cons: Involves helping foreigners.

Strains on Credibility: I bank through a small credit union, which one would think makes me not ideal for this kind of transaction, unless the whole purpose were to be covert. That very well may be the case, but do to the language barrier, I’m having trouble reading our correspondence for “tone.” Seems like the perfect use for a Swiss account, rather than a corporate American bank (or CU.) A quick Google search of my name brings up a D.C. law firm in which each of the partners has one of my three names. Was Mr. Johnson if fact trying to reach them as regards this matter, and is mistakenly corresponding with me?

Verdict: Free Money

Richard Gere once had a live gerbil inserted into his anus in order to stimulate his prostate for sexual gratification.

Pros: Fitting comeuppance for someone much richer and more attractive than myself.

Cons: Stuck with mental image in my head (in actuality, not as much of a “con” as at first suspected.)

Strains on Credibility: Not much to go on. Seems as though if a man’s rectum were spacious enough to admit a gerbil any freedom of movement, then it is also spacious for the remedy to be self-applied, which would of course spare the “afflicted” the public embarrassment of having the physician remove it, though the purported story says otherwise. Also, the smug reverence with which he practices his Buddhism makes it difficult to imagine a time in which he would have participated in such shenanigans. Likewise, a Beverly Hills doctor would probably appreciate the confidence expected from his clients, and has surely seen much worse, making it improbable that he would leak the secret. In truth, the doctor has probably come to expect nothing less from his celebrity patients.

Verdict: I’m gonna keep the mental image.

lilViCtiM13@aol.com is not an FBI agent named Gary.

Pros: Someone to chat with while I update my Sailor Moon fan site each night.

Cons: None to speak of.

Strains on Credibility: Sometimes uses slang a little awkwardly, but such is to be expected from a young girl just coming into her own, especially when trying to impress someone older. Wanted to meet at her house upon first “chat” (Unfortunately I don’t have a car, but I don’t want her to know that.) Is interested in explicit and specific details of my personal tastes that I didn’t feel entirely comfortable divulging. Again, probably normal for a curious young girl, but still seemed preternatural to me. Perhaps she is not as sweet as she seems? Is always online, even during school hours.

Verdict: Maybe I should buy a car.

Sexual Predators are suitable material for comedy.

Pros: My last joke is able to fly without evoking moral outrage.

Cons: You’re getting worked up over nothing.

Strains on Credibility: I have certainly been accused of inappropriateness before now, although that might lead one to the logical confusion that I’m unlikely to change my behavior based on your opinion of it.

Verdict: Send all complaints to lilViCtiM13@aol.com.

2006-08-17T14:49:00.000-04:00

1. Better building material – snow or tar?

2006-08-17T14:48:00.000-04:00

2. Better corporate logo - middle finger or mushroom cloud?

2006-08-17T14:45:00.000-04:00

3. Better high school mascot – hemophiliac or the crucified Christ?

2006-08-16T16:00:00.000-04:00

INANE WEDNESDAY... REMIX!

More Good Reasons to Hate Rob Thomas: Tips For Naming Your New Band So That We Won't Have To Put You Up Against the Wall When the Revolution Comes

This is not your band

As anyone who's been part of a band knows, the hardest part after convinceing your mom and dad that "you really, really will practice so let me get the fender please Jimi Hendrix played one so I'm gonna be awesome" is to get all of your friends to do the same thing, but with the less appealing, even pricier instruments like drums. Some people think that drumming, and being out of the spotlight and all, turns percussionists into dicks. Others of us know that friendless douch-bags are the only people who can be convinced into buying a drum kit for playing in your garage. Ahh, well. Six of one, as they say. Only they don't say that very much anymore.

Anyway, once you've got all the instruments in order and your cock-sure posturing down, the hardest task ahead of you will be to name your ragtag bunch, only you don't want to call yourselves "The Ragtag Bunch," because that makes me think of the Cabbage Patch Kids, which actually wouldn't have been such a bad band name before Bedford Avenuecorporatized skinny-boy irony, so it's a no-go now as well. Also there are probably trademark issues involved, provided that Xavier Roberts isn't cool about that sort of thing.

You might be saying to yourself, "but wait, sure writing the songs would be the most difficult part, not to mention playing them somewhat competently while doing that eyes-half-closed thing to show how heart-felt my impossibly vague and trite lyrics are." You would be wrong. Not only do you not have any talent, but you don't have enough perspective to even see that you've got no talent. Moreover, you won't care. You'll be singing about darkness and Stacy being the dawn of your soul as if it's a dadge of your emotional depth, only you won't use Stacy's name because you've never actually spoken to her, and you only formed the band in the first place so that you could tell her that you're a guitarist without buddies calling bullshit on you. Well, that and as a front for smoking pot, because you're hopping that if mom and dad ever venture past the noise barrier (a long-shot, as it involves them coming to terms with the fact that their son is really the one singing this shit) you can pass off the smell by saying that one of the amps just had a blowout. Come to think of it, maybe you can pass off the noise that way as well. Sure, you might get one member who bitches that you don't sound good yet, and need more practice, but you'll kick him out of the band anyway for killing your buzz. Hopefully it isn't the drummer, but it probably will be.

Getting back to the pointless topic at hand, what you name your band will determine the level of polite simle that Stacy gives you before escaping your grasp to give her real boyfriend a hummer in his Jeep, so the stakes are high. Not only that, but the terrain is rocky. Also, my metaphors are mixed. You can try to refer to my previous column's treatise on bullshitting, but remember, you're trying to bullshit cool, which as every teen movie ever has taught you, is virtually impossible. We're not shooting for great here. All we're going for is a name that you can say out loud with a straight face that won't involve five mullet-headed dipshit jocks immediately materializing out of nowhere to call you "fag." And considering what your image is already, this is order is tall enough.

So here we go. No crying. 'Cuz crying isn't Rock. Except when it is.

#1. The best way to attempt cool is to not even try

The Tao of Cool follows it's own rules similar to that of theoretical physics. That is, the mere observation of it is enough to change the outcome. When I was eight, my friend Ryan and I started up my first "band," which of course meant that all we did was sit in the park drawing up logos and thinking of great names for songs. Us being eight, and this being 1988, the best name we could think of was Techno-Wave. Clearly we had much to learn, and thankfully a couple of eleven-year-olds came by to see what we were doing and harrass us. They took some of our paper and made up a much better name and logo for us:

The Condoms (This was written on a crudely-drawn condom)

I'm actually a little surprised that no one has used that one yet. It's brazen, confrontational, and purely snot-punk, but it doesn't "smack of effort" in that category the way, say, Anal Cunt does. For what it is, The Condoms is a great band name, and one that still makes me smile. Techno-Wave is god awful, but you knew that, so maybe you could say that you're already halfway there.

You could, but I wouldn't. Think of yourself as Lenny in Of Mice and Men - that is, a confused, socially ill-adept lummox, and "cool" is the quivering mouse in your hand. Your instinct will be to cling to that mouse with every fiber of your being, killing it in the process. Yes you will.

Instead, attack "cool" the classic hipster way, by shunning it altogether, or at least pretending to. Remember, there's no good reason you'd want to hold a mouse in your hand to begin with, and the mouse is embarrased to be seen with you. Let it go. The hipster method says that you run so far away from "cool" that, in theory, you'll eventually go around the world and hit it from behind. This is dubious, to be sure, but in your case the chances are still better than meeting "cool" at it's face.

#2. Be careful with self-deprecation

This is now the theme for every garage punk band that never goes anywhere, and I can at least get why. If you name yourselves We Suck or The Wastes of Space, then at least you can answer your critics with a nice "I told you so," but I give it two caveats. The first is to remember the Stacy test. (For the remainder of this article, I will the - as far as I know - fictional name The Grizzly Bears as my generic control name.)

The Stacy Test

(Grizzly Bears version)
You: Hey! Stacy!
Stacy: Umm.. What?
You: Hey, I just wanted to see if you wanted to come see my band on Saturday. We're playing in my back yard!
Stacy: You have a band?
You: Yeah, we're called The Grizzly Bears. So you wanna come?
Stacy: Well, I'll have to see what Brandon is up to. I think he's in his Jeep right now.

(Self-Deprecating Name version)
You: Hey! Stacy!
Stacy: Umm.. What?
You: Hey, I just wanted to see if you wanted to come see my band on Saturday. We're playing in my back yard!
Stacy: You have a band?
You: Yeah! We're called The Worthless Crybabies! So you wanna come?
Stacy: Wait right here, I've got to get Brandon and four of his friends to hear this.

In high-school I played keyboard - very briefly - for a band called Ronald Chin and the Losers. Despite having the homecoming king and the most cred-tastic indie girl in town among our members, the name did what it was, I guess, supposed to do: prepare people for the fact that we sucked. The fact that we actually sucked didn't help much either, but the name did us no favors.

The second caveat I'd give you is that the guys in We Suck aren't deathly afraid of getting punched in the mosh pit, so they have a little more leeway with calling themselves whatever they want than you do.

#3. Don't use a number in your band name unless you know how. And you don't know how.

Think for a moment about two different bands: Train and matchbox twenty. They're simliar to the point where if they both put out a new single on the same day, I wouldn't be able to tell who did which song. Yes, they're both bad. That's not the point. The point is that while I simply don't like Train, and thus don't give them a lot of thought, I wish dispicable fates upon the members of matchbox twenty, particularly Rob Thomas.

I think it's the magic of the number. If they'd simply called the band matchbox (and maybe gave up that stupid convention about not capitalizing anything) I doubt I would have given them anymore thought than I did to Candlebox. But something about that non-sequiter bullshit "twenty" tacked on at the end reserved them a special place in whatever circle of hell Dante used to punish the talentless-yet-somehow-popular artists of the Medici era. It's just so calculated that it's unforgivable, like they called up the team in charge of marketing Crystal Pepsi.

Some bands manage to pull it off, of course, but I think that's because the number actually has a perceived relevence to the rest of the name. Ben Folds Five, for instance, is fine, as it alludes to there being five members of the band (though in reality there were only three.) Blink-182 doesn't play, because it doesn't mean anything. Blink-182 is also somewhat better than matchbox twenty, though, by virtue of using specific images to actually make a point (surely a subject for a future article) so the name doesn't seem like the product of pseudo-hip committee thinking in the same way, but it isn't good, either. Sum41 is on the fence. I don't hate them, because Guitar Hero drove that one song so deeply into my skull that I have to admit to enjoying it. Plus, the word "sum" implies a numbers theme, at least, so it's consistent, but it still evokes no images at all, I don't know what to expect from them. There's no personality to speak of. Seven Mary Three is, obviously, the worst, but it seems as though someone drove them out to the desert where they could detonate without hurting anyone, so no real harm done.

Full disclosure: My own ideal band name is The 21-Gun Solution, but that name at least works. The 21 is necessary, and it evokes a feeling of odd menace that you can't quite put your finger on. I know it seems to break this rule, but it doesn't. Remember, I know what I'm doing. You don't.

#4. The So-and-So & What's-his-Name phnomenon

Names within this formula always work for me. I don't know why, but look at it for a minute: Sam and Dave. Belle and Sebastian. Tegan and Sara. Even Hootie and the Blowfish. Regardless of what you think of them, you remembered that name from the first time you heard it, and it conveyed folksy whimsy. Say what you will, but you've never heard anyone say, "I thought I'd love Hootie, but they're just too jangly and precious. Where was the hardcore?"

My theory is not that this is a formula for success, though it at least works as well as The Grizzly Bears. No, Hootie aside, all of the bands in this formula are settling on the most stripped down, unmemorable possible name, but they're all great. So the only bands we hear about who use this convention break through on raw talent. Again, remember, you don't have that.

#5 Black Metal, Math Rock, and other obscure genres

As you can see, I'm branching out from simple names a bit here, but you'll hopefully get the point. Some obscure genres carry their own conventions for names. These genres also tend to be unlistenable, and yet painfully difficult to play. The point is that if you call yourself Pythagorus and the Angry Euclidians, people will expect you to play Math Rock, and thus not show up. This might be a good thing, as you can't play Math Rock and wouldn't want to anyway, but it still doesn't do anything for your image. Similarly, if you call yourself Mordred, or anything else from fantasy or folklore, people will expect Mortiis-style Black Metal, with all the Norwegian extremist racism and death-fetishes that are involved. People will move if need be to keep from accidentally stumbling onto that shit. Just stay away from Sci-Fi and Fantasy altogether, as it fails the Stacy Test more spectacularly that just about anything else. Look, I love Harry Potter to a degree that some might consider unhealthy, but if you name your band The Crumple-Horned Snorkacks, don't be surprised when Brandon and his buddies show up with bats. It's just the evolutionary instinct to thin out weaker members for the survival of the herd.

Other genres, such as indie-hip-hop and other experiments, tend to do things such as use Spanish names. De La Soul, Yo La Tengo, and Los Lobos are all great. If you have even a single "ethnic" member of your band, do this. Meatheads can't make fun of it if they don't know what it means, and they can't attack you on the Spanish front for fear of some vatos overhearing. But if you don't have any ethnic members (it doesn't matter what ethnicity, as long as it isn't your white ass) don't do it. People already think you're a poser as it is. Don't help them along. Also, if you think rock is tough, don't even think about trying alterna-hip-hop.

(An exception. A group of white kids in my high school had a fun little punk band called Tres Pesones, but they got away with it because everyone who saw them knew that it was a reference to their Spanish teacher's fabled third nipple. That was clever, so it worked. You aren't clever, so don't try it.)

And never, ever, use French. Again, the Stacy Test, and Brandon isn't scared of the Frech Canadians.

Your best bet is to just use the first plural noun that comes to mind. Think of The Strokes, The Vines, The Hives, or The White Stripes. That way, no one will care, but you probably won't get your ass kicked either, unless you really deserve it, which you might. There are aot of other rules as well, and I don't pretend to understand them all. Such as, why do Train and Jet obviously suck, but The Cars get a pass. I don't know, but more importantly you know even less, so go with what's safe, and if all else fails, use The Grizzly Bears. I won't call you on it, because I won't be there even if you do manage to get a gig.

I'd like to thank Progressive Boink for the inspiration for this piece. I promise I'll stop riding on everybody elses coattails soon, as I don't want to be thought oof as the poor man's ebaum, but for now think of it as training wheels and just be happy that I'm finally posting again.

Now, for the questions!

2006-08-16T15:58:00.000-04:00

1. You get to write a new campaign slogan for the politician of your choice. Awesome! But your mission is to subtly subvert the desired image of the candidate, without anyone catching on. What do you do?

2006-08-16T15:56:00.000-04:00

2. You get to create a new merit badge for the Boy Scouts of America. Awesome! But your mission is to subtly subvert the values of the organization, without anyone catching on. What do you do?

2006-08-16T15:49:00.000-04:00

3. You get to be a new recurring character on Sesame Street. Awesome! But your mission is to subtly subvert the entire message of the show, without anyone catching on. What do you do?

2006-08-16T01:33:00.000-04:00

HEY-HEY!! I'M BACK!

I know it's been a while, but after discovering a beautiful article on the time-honored art of collegiate bullshitting, I just had to return. And then Firefox quit unexpectedly after I'd written this for the first time, leaving me to write my thousand words all over again. Thanks Mozilla. You're still roughy a tousand times better than Internet Explorer.

(Firefox : Internet Explorer :: Flying in the Concord : Hitting yourself in the head with a rock until you can convince yourself that you've traveled somewhere pretty. The same analogy works even better with Macs : PC's. Especially Dells or Compaqs.)

Anyway, while I appreciate the article and all the good it can do for the future generations of dissaffected Communications majors, it didn't feel comprehensive. THere was something missing. Something only a graduate of NYU's School of You're Double-Majoring In Two #1 Ranked Programs But The Only Tricky Part Was Getting Accepted could provide.

Yessiree. This is the advanced tactics class. The article above only applies to those wishing to bullshit their way to a passing grade. This is for those who wish to bullshit their way to exceptionality, and amuse themselves while doing it. But first, a little history.

My bullshitting career really began in sixth grade. Now, some people who follow my life a little too closely for my comfort might pinpoint the date later, when I would skip out on Sophomore English assignments by hanging out with the teacher and having hour-long discussions about Ulysses or Crime and Punishment, neither of which I have ever read. Others might look earlier, to my popular fourth grade science project about which ninja turtle the kids in the playground liked most. Or anywhere in between, such as my eighth grade habit of falling asleep in class and then playing for a note to the nurses office when the teacher awoke me, where I would then sleep for another two hours.

All of these are fine examples, to be sure, but none compare to being in the presence of one Kyle Whatley, who taught me everything I know about continually interrupting the teacher or professor with sarcastic comments, but in such a way that makes it seem like I'm just clever above average and thus should be giving a little leniency with the plebian material that they have to teach the rest of these poor Gifted and Talented kids.

Because, you see, the key to exemplary bullshitting is that other swear-word your mother let slide on account of there being no other suitable synonym...

Smart-assing

Again, I warn you, this is the advanced class. The techniques I explain here will backfire badly if you don't know what you're doing.

In the world of ordinary bullshitting, you're hoping essentially to pass unnoticed along with all the fools who actually did their work. I'm familiar with this, to be sure. In my 11th grade English class, our grade was based upon a final fifteen-page report on an American author we had each chosen at the beginning of the year. I chose Joseph Heller. My friend Alicia chose Toni Morrison. Alicia read everything that Toni Morrison had ever written, and everything that she could find that had ever been written about Toni Morrison. I read a third of the way through Catch-22 before deciding that my efforts were better spent on breasts, checked out the library's book about Joseph Heller, paraphrased the criticism, and then copied the Bibliography, and notated the book itself for good measure. All told, my work took me about a day and a half, and most of that was pool-side, while Alicia spent months on hers.

When we got our grades back, we both got 970 out of a possible 1000, the two highest grades in the year. It's a measure of her good humor that she didn't kill me then and there.

Nonehteless, while that kind of "work" has it's place, at it's best it still only equals you to the Alicia's of this world. You want to go beyond the fold, and in order to do that, your brazen lack of effort must be matched by your brazen lack of respect for the subject at hand. And you've got to be funny. At least to teachers and professors, so the bar isn't set that high, but still...

In that same year, I had to take a Geography class, which was strange to me. Geography hadn't been a requirement in Texas, but it was in Oklahoma, so my class was filled with a bunch of people who had failed it the first one or two times around, and a handful of smart kids who had transferred in. One of my assignments was a report on Singapore. I spent about fifteen minutes online picking up the necessary facts, and then wrote a paper describing my "visit" to Singapore in a style that would make a Gonzo Journalist blush, including passages wherein I screamed questions at a Buddha statue or cut a native into pieces on order to determine his ethnic percentages. And then I wRotE tHE wHolE ThINg iN rAnDOm CApiTaLIZatiON liKE tHIs juSt FoR fUn.

The teacher adored it. She had me read it out loud to the class. I got an A. And then, when I visited her several years later, she still had it in her desk, her example of the best report she had ever received.

Lesson: Bullshitting may let you pass, but smart-assing can make you immortal.

So how do you do it? Here are the best tips I can give you.

#1. Be Funny.

I can't stress this enough. If you can't write funny, then any of this will simply come off as sloppy and disrespectful. Your goal is to show that you get the material so much that it's below you to even be working on it. The funny just brings the professor in on the joke, and if they laugh, they give up all notion of being pissed. They simply agree, "hehe. Yeah, I know this is simple, but I've got to teach it or else all these kids who are working would be lost." That's the promised land right there, and if you get there just once, you're golden. In my senior year English class, the teacher called me over to her desk to tell me that she'd been working the numbers for the last hour, but couldn't find any way to give me an A. I told her that was fine by me, as I'd already gotten in to NYU and I'd made kind of a public point of not giving a shit about her assignments for the last quarter. When I got my report card, I'd gotten an A somehow. I guess she figured out the numbers. And all I'd ever done was make her laugh.

#2. Don't Be Mean-Spirited.

This is really a corallary to rule #1, but it deserves mention that there's a VERY fine line between being a likable smart-ass and a loathsome asshole. I've crossed this line twice (both with male science teachers on their first day in a new school, incidentally) and never truly recovered.

The first time happened in seventh grade, with Mr. Brillon, a thin, slight man in his early thirties. On the first day, after he went through his syllabus and what he expected of us, he asked if there were any questions. My hand shot up first, and I asked his opinion on gays in the military, which obviously had nothing to do with anything. His response: "I was in the military." I hadn't figured him for gay. It wouldn't have been my instinct to even look for things like that. But even though he hated me from that point forward (and charged me with cheating on the final exam, which I honestly didn't do) I've got to admire him in retrospect. He answered my question with the exact mixture of clarity and ambiguity to make himself clear in his sexuality, and yet to not make it an issue, let alone an issue that anyone would ever bring up again in class. So right on, Mr. Brillon. I still didn't cheat, but I was an asshole in that one moment, and I give you mad props now.

The second time was in - again - 11th grade, with Dr. Purser. He was undeniably smart, though he opening speech about having taught Garth Brooks didn't really mean anything. Still, I was looking for my chance to test my boundaries, and he went into a thing about his "bell policy." See, Bartlesville High School would have signal the start of class by a series of four bells. Dr. Purser's policy centered around the idea that he wanted to keep kids from running into his class as the bells started ringing, and so anyone who got there after the first bell would be considered tardy. Once again, the teacher asked for any questions. Once again, my hand shot up. My question: "If we have less time to get to class, won't that make us just run faster?" He wasn't amused, and he never let up on me all year. This gets me to my third rule:

#3. Women Are Cooler About This Than Men.

At least if you're a guy. I don't know much about the subtle sexy hints that teenage girls can throw at male teachers and proffessors, but I'm sure they're powerful, in a dirty, dirty kind of way. I do know that throughout high school I was able to regularly skip class just by tossing my bag in my seat and saying, "I've actually gotta run," and it was always cool with my female teachers, but if I'd ever tried that with any men, they'd have held me down in my chair by force if necessary. Chalk it up to a competition thing. Finally...

#4. Take The Opposite Stance Of The Text.

This is the biggie, and combined with rule #1, can make you the star of every class you take with the minimal amount of effort.

In college, any real course will end with an essay exam. Here you have two options: either agree with the person or viewpoint mentioned in the question, or disagree. At first glance, it might seem easier to agree, as that's what you were taught, but this is what separates the common bullshitter from the smart-asser that will set the curve. If at all possible, it's better to be a setting-the-curve smart-ass than a middle of the road bullshitter, especially since being the smart-ass takes less work once you know how to do it. (Those assholes who turn in their papers first and then announce for the rest of the class to meet them at the bar when they're done are invariably smartasses. Join their numbers. It's more fun.)

The thing about taking the opposition on papers is that, first off, the professors and TA's that are grading them don't care what position you take, and have to grade at least a few dozen of these things. If you make yours interesting, it goes a long way towards good will. Secondly, if you disagree, there's the unconscious admission on the part of the reader (i.e. grader) that you know enough to disagree. Thirdly, disagreement shows a certain degree of passion about the subject (even though it's bullshit.) Take this over-the-top. Assert your opinion to the degree that your evidence and argument seem almsot secondary to the famous idiot that you're refuting. And lastly, when you disagree in an essay exam, no one expects you to quote or cite sources, as they weren't part of the curriculum. Annotations are for the baby birds that can't think for themselves. You're an independent mind whose thoughts are worthy of study And on the off chance that it's a take-home test, just skim through an on-line copy of Coriolanus and search by key-word. Nobody ever reads Coriolanus, but no T.A. or professor will refute Shakespeare, particularly if it's Shakespeare that they're not familliar with,, but one of their students (seemingly) is. The just end with a pithy summation (See #1) and wait to get the top grade in your class, while giving that same class the finger, while at the same time doing the least effort of anyone in the class.

With any effort, even some of the other students will see you as the genius among them.

2006-03-31T15:37:00.000-05:00

COURTNEY LOVE IS...*

...the smell of your paramour in your vomit-and-urine soaked babydoll dresses.

...buy one, get one free collagen injections.

...sharing your smack with the fetus.

...a macabre and ever-changing marvel of modern pathology.

...increasingly irrelevent.

...that itching, burning sensation.

...a train wreck, to a degree that stretches the bounds of the metaphor itself. Like if the train in question were carrying h-bombs. And crashed into Chernobyl. On "orphan day."

...never having to admit you killed your husband.

*inspired by "Get Fuzzy."

2006-03-27T17:26:00.000-05:00

DISTURBING HISTORICAL EVENTS, WITHOUT WHICH I PROBABLY WOULD NOT EXIST

Arranged marraiges

Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor

Irish potato famine

Battle of San Jacinto

English subjugation of the Welsh

Hatfield/McCoy feud

Diet of Worms (admittedly less disturbing in German. Or in context)

100 Years War

Parental Sexual Relations

2006-03-22T18:29:00.000-05:00

THINGS I ROUTINELY FIND MYSELF GETTING PASSIONATE ABOUT, WHICH IN REALITY ARE UNLIKELY TO AFFECT MY LIFE SIGNIFICANTLY IN ANY WAY

Abortion rights

The death penalty

Mario Tennis

Political graft vis-a-vis Indian casinos

Anticipatory warrants

Harry Potter's coming-of-age saga

Chinese censorship

Bush administration incompetence in dealing with the aftermath of Hurrican Katrina

The Red Sox

Women

2006-03-21T16:11:00.000-05:00

BIASED, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ALBUM REVIEWS - VOL. 1

Smashing Pumpkins
Siamese Dream
1993, Virgin Records

I'm the youngest-by-far of four kids in my family, and as such was always able to get away with just about anything through virtue of my siblings mistakes and accomplishments always being of greater magnitude. Even at times when I did have my parents on my ass, one of them would jump in to take the heat off. All of that ended in August of 1993, when my sister Emily moved to Dallas for college, just as I'm starting seventh grade. If you're keeping score at home, that's about the worst possible time in someone's life to have all parental scrutiny suddenly upon them. You're already going through what's likely the worst of the puberty pains, paired with just about the meanest grade that American schooling has to offer, so to throw in hawk-eyed moms and pops who can't remember how much Junior High sucked is just cruelty. It's amazing any of us survive.

I'd comment more on what my life was like that year, but to be honest I don't really remember any of it. I have knowledge of some things - there were drugs, and a lot of anger, and a lot of fighting with my parents and hating myself and what-have-you - but no experiential recall, save for one thing.

On Easter morning that spring - the spring of '94, I got Siamese Dream in my Easter basket. And somehow everything got better.

Start with the cover artwork, which is simply serene, complete with the back cover, the purpose of which seems to be to prove to the consumer that the girls aren't actually siamese twins, and thus weren't being exploited, if that makes sense. It's mystical and yet familiar, and is still my favorite album artwork to this day.

Winter is a bad time of year to get into music. It's gray and cold and lends itself too easily to widespread, low-key depression and listlessness. The societal attitude is just to duck your head and plow on through 'til thew warmer months, which doesn'tleave much room for appreciation. I have to wonder how many great songs fell by the way-side because the were unfortunate enough to be released in January. Ayway, the thaw had come, as it so often does in late March/early April, and it was sure-as-hell time for something new. The opening drumrolls of "Cherub Rock" and into the screeches of "Quiet"were alright - definitely good stuff, but not until "Today," came on did I stop dribbling the basketball in my driveway and just think to myself - Holy Shit. I had heard it before, of course, but never on my own terms. I think I restarted the song six or seven times just to hear how the intro went into the opening chords, and felt kiddy like a child with a new toy. This was mine. This was my own copy of this. I could do whatever I wanted to with this! Never before or since have I felt that kind of unbridled joy at just owning an album.

I hung out there on the driveway just floored. "Rocket" came and went with it's good intro and better coda. "Disarm" - which admittedly seemed a lot better then than it does now. "Soma," which passed straight through my brain the first time but is now arguably my favorite from the record. Then came "Geek U.S.A." Immediately, in my thirteen-year-old eyes, the crowning acchievement of all that was rock, and maybe all that was art as well. Four good songs smashed together to form one five-minute masterpiece of bombast... let me just say that I wish I could hear it again for the first time and not know what's coming around the corner.

But around the three minute mark, Corgan get's the closest to punk that the Pumpkins ever managed, and screams out "words can't define/ what I feel inside/ who needs them?" It's absolutely meaniongless, but I got it. I finally got it. It nailed what I had been feeling for the past eight or nine months and said "fuck it." And it gave me the permission to do so to. With that one stupid-ass, overwrought, pretentious line, I dropped all the weight off my shoulders at once, and smiled, for real, for the first time in a long time. That's the purpose of rock anyway - sometimes to anesthetize the growing pains, sometimes to get the kids to stop taking themselves so seriously, and sometimes just to remind us all that youth should be spent partying, getting laid, and otherwise expirimenting and experiencing while we can. And the older we get, the more we might be able to appreciate the music, but the less we'll appreciate the tunes. Because they're not meant for us.

The album isn't perfect, but it's close enough that I don't care. "Spaceboy" I could do without, and "Silverfuck" is just eight minutes of aural masturbation, but on the other hand, you have "Mayonnaise," with it's lushly sullen vocal melodies and the chord(screech)chord climax. It's just good. I still have my twelve-year-old copy from that Easter, beaten and scratched to hell and all-but-unplayable. I know Billy Corgan's a well-documented asshole, but I still have to thank him for this one.

2006-03-20T16:59:00.000-05:00

THINGS I HAVE LEARNED BY NOW

1. If somebody likes you because of how cool your car is, that person is probably ten years old.

2. The time at which you finally leave adolscence is the moment at which you stop pumping your fist and saying "yessssss...." as a positive exclamation.

3. Helmet laws for bike-riding children are depressing.

4. No one is going to like you any more or less due to your S.A.T. score.

5. About once a year, you should allow yourself one night all alone. Stay up as late as you can keep your eyes open and listen to every song you haven't thought about since you were fifteen.

6. Everybody's life sucked in middle school, and most people's through high school as well, so if you're going to use teenage trauma as an explanation for your actions, make it about something cool or constructive, and not as an excuse for acting like an asshole when you drink.

7. Ayn Rand is best enjoyed before you know anything else about philosophy, other people, or the world. This makes it good reading for high-school sophomores.

8. People who smoke grass aren't "the bad kids," but they aren't necessarily cool either. Particularly if they base their schedules around it.

9. Every genre of music, film, what have you has it's brilliance and it's dreck, and anyone who claims otherwise is simply afraid to expiriment for fear of tainting their image.

10. I suck with women, but I do a lot better when I trick myself into foolish confidence.

11. If you can get your parents laughing at your dirty jokes, you're probably okay with asking them for money.

12. Don't shoot the puppy.

2006-03-17T14:47:00.000-05:00

A Dozen Good Reasons for Irish Pride

1. Druids, man. Druids.

2. Never elected Hitler even once.

3. Irish folk music begat country americana, which in turn begat Rock & Roll. (Stop the train before you get to disco.)

4. Redheads.

5. National terror syndicate voluntarilly disarmed. Can Hamas be far behind? (Answer: yes.)

6. Said "fuck you" to the crown back before it was cool.

7. Redheads.

8. Home of 50 Fortune 500 companies, and now one of the richest-per-capita European countries. Incidentally, Americans of Irish heritage have fared better financially than Americans of any other heritage, so that's nice.

9. James Joyce, who made a name for himself recounting the time he jerked off on a beach.

10. Could probably annex Wales if we really, really wanted to stick it to the U.K., but we cool about it.

11. Boston, and by extension, the Red Sox.

...and 12. Took a ho-hum religious and nationalistic Holiday and sold it to the world as a glorious celebration of unnecessary excess, a feat that Mexico has yet to fully repeat with "Cinqo de Mayo." So big-ups Eire. May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.

2006-03-16T15:22:00.000-05:00

EXTRA!! EXTRA!!

Holy Shit Amazing Games.

2006-03-16T13:56:00.000-05:00

I LIKE MY WOMEN LIKE I LIKE MY COFFEE...

...Ground up and in my freezer.

...Prohibited by the Mormon Church.

...Served on a donkey's back and hand picked by Juan Valdez.

...Toe-up with liquor.

...No more than six servings a day.

...Traditionally enjoyed by Italian monks.

...At the center of a lawsuit with McDonalds after scalding my crotch.

...Primarilly as a place to dunk my donuts.

2006-03-14T16:33:00.000-05:00

DRINKS TO LOOK OUT FOR - VOL. 1

As your ambassador for the upcoming St. Patrick's Day (self-titled!) I consider it my duty to offer a couple words of warning or suggestion for the few of you who might choose to celebrate your Irish heritage... intemperately. As such, I offer up my first of many drinking guides. Share them with your family, and discuss the roll that drinking wisely could have in your life. IRISH CARBOMB (from Webtender)

Ingredients:

13-14 oz Guinness stout
1 oz Bailey's irish cream
1 oz Whiskey (Jameson's)

Mixing instructions:

Combine the Bailey's and Whiskey in a shot glass. Drop shot glass into beer. Should be finished immediately.

While I'm generally in favor of anything that incapacitates fratboys, it should be noted that this drink is responsible for 80% of the incoherent grunting and 100% of the Backpfeifengesichts (Ger.: "faces that cry out for a fist in them") on any given March 17th. Also, I like Bailey's as much as the next guy, but anyone bumping chests after drinking it, no matter what else it's mixed with, maybe needs to take a trip through Mexico the wrong way and learn a few things about alcohol.

Even worse, except not worse, because drunken fratboys are about the bottom of the barrel, are the women wo take this as their drink of choice for the night. Now, some people get chatty when they're drunk. Some people get belligerent, but women with Irish Carbombs only come in one flavor - weepy. Which means you can't really hit on them. Here's a helpful rhyme:

"If she's weepy, you're creepy."

In any case, I love St. Patrick's Day, but this drink is fully to blame for everything I hate about it.

SURFER ON ACID
Ingredients:

Mixing instructions:

Combine and shake well with ice and strain into a shot glass.

This one might not come up very often without your seeking it out, but that's not exactly the point. As bizarre as this one appears - and it is - the strangest thing about it is how it can taste at once like every one of it's ingredients, and have that be awesome. Still, you don't really want tis for yourself. What you want to do is take that sweet, kinda straightlaced, desperately-wants-to-do-something-to-break-their-own-monotony guy or gal that you work with and get him or her started on these. Make sure it isn't a schoolnight, because as the night progresses, you'll only have two rules. One, Ms. Straightlaced should have one of these in her hands at all times, and Two, everyone does whatever Ms. Straightlaced decides. If you end up in jail, at least you'll have a damn good reason for being there, and probably a good amount of company.

People just tend to be fun when they're drinking these.

VODKA CRANBERRY

Ingredients:

6 oz Vodka
Fleeting Remembrance of Cranberry

Mixing instructions:

Pretend to Stir.

Of course, my recipe is taken from the good people at Madame X on Houston St., where I recently attended a Charity Date Auction. Price of Admission was good for one Grey Goose drink, and I'm happy to say that they weren't stingy with the booze. Now I'm a beer man myself, and can genneraly hold my own fairly well when I'm working within those bounds, but who would I be to turn away a Grey Goose drink?

A wiser man, that's who.

I ended up accidentally winning the first auction, and then celebrated my winnings by following up the "cocktail" with two glasses of champagne. Then we moved on to the next bar. After five minutes and a beer there, a lovely friend of mine was kind enough to pour me into a ca with handwritten directions home from my roommate. I was later informed that those five minutes were about an hour and a half long. Now, I remember everything that I'm accused of having done in that hour and a half - I never black out - but it was all sped up like a whirlwind. And a mortifyingly embarrasing whirlwind, in retrospect. I will never touch this drink again for the rest of my natural life.

So that's it for this issue of Drinks To Look Out For. Tune in next time when I talk about something else that I haven't decided yet.

2006-03-13T13:07:00.000-05:00

PLACES LIFE WILL PROBABLY NEVER TAKE ME

WHITE HOUSE. This is probably good, as I'd have fun for about a week before getting bogged down in the minutiae and myriad legal issues over what I had done the first week. Still, I would like the Bully Pulpit, and I would sure as hell have fun at the debates (I picture my rhetorical style being lauded in the press as "pernicious" and "smart-assed.") I'd also dig having breakfast delivered to my room every morning and never having to pay for aynthing for the rest of my life. It's the little things.

Alas, I don't work in law, let alone politics. Also, even politically similar people tend to disagree with em as often as not. Plus I'm untelegenic. And I probably have a few skeletons buried somewhere, so this is a long-shot. Still, know that I would have brought back the fun kind of scandal, and would have happilly given a rfee foot-massage to whoever wanted one. And I don't really like feet that much, so that should mean something.

SWIMMING THE ENGLISH CHANNEL. This has been on my "things to do before I die" list since I was a kid, but I don't know why. Probably just to say that I did. Certainly not for the fun of swimming in freezing shark-infested waters for a long enough time to have it be considered a "feat." That said, I think I could probably manage if if I ever did try it, if onl;y because I get good and stubborn in situations like that and am more than willing to sacrifice my own health and well being to make a stupid point, but for what? 1.) It's really really cold. 2. ) There are sharks. 3.) It's really really far, as far as swimming is concerned. Further then you'd want to swim. The only reason you'd do it is for a story to tell your grandchildren, and as far as the good-story-to-pain-ration is concerned, there are far better uses for your time.

GRANDKID: Grampa, tell me about the time you swam the English Channel.
ME: Well, it was cold, and far, and there were sharks, but I didn't really see them. Plus, I was swimming in a cage.
GRANDKID: You suck, Gandpa. I'm gonna go microwave some porn.

Or whatever the hell the hot new technology will be in forty years or so. Point is, the chunnel is faster and warmer, and there's always the chance that I could get into a bar fight on the TGV, which is a story even the most jaded four-year-old can appreciate.

TORTURE: Obviously, this is probably for the best, but I really think I;d find out a lot about myself, you know? This is unlikely, owever, as I don't know anything worth torturing me for, and my ace telegraphs this fact like it's glowing in neon. Again, probably for the best.

HOSTAGE SITUATION. Again, probably good, not jst because no one ever thinks, hey, you know what would make a fun night - a gun barrel pushed up against my temple just a little too firmly. No, that's reasno one for all the negative press that hostage situations get, but my bigger problem would be my knack for almost certainly making everything worse. I mean, obviously I've given this some thought, which means I've played out my ideal actions/reactions/what-have-you, and I've come to one conclusion - that unless you've got extensive Navy SEAL training, any preparation for this type of scenario is only going to make things more dangerous. Not just for me, but for everyone else there.

So it's probably good that it'll probably never come up.

DESIGNING AND BUILDING OWN HOUSE IN HAWAI'I. Starngely, this is probably the most likely of all of these, and the one I'm not quite giving up hope on. I got this idea when I was about seven years old on vacation there, that just about any acre of land on Maui would be prime real estate with the right design - in this case, a two-story "apartment' on giant stilts five or six stories into the sky. If this sounds impractical, realize that I currently live in New York, and thus am willing to give up money and space for location.

AERIAL COMBAT. I'm not even any good with this in video games, but I grew up with Top Gun, and these things stick with you.

PLANNING AND ORCHESTRATING A MEXICAN BANK ROBBERY. I feel like I would probably take pretty well to lawlessness as a life philosophy, but I don't really know where to start, and I think you've got to have a line on some skilled people to make these sort of things work. I also understand that you meet those people primarily in prison, which is the opposite of the allure of lawlessness, so I guess I'll just earn my money the boring way. Still, whenever I hear the Refreshments song , "Banditos..."

I haven't heard that song in some time, actually.

2006-03-10T12:37:00.000-05:00

WAYS IN WHICH MY HIGH SCHOOL EXPERIENCE DIFFERED FROM WHAT IS GENERALLY DEPICTED ON FOX AND THE W.B.

1. School at least a thousand miles from ocean.

2. Nobody ate lunch in the cafeteria, and to be honest, I'm not sure where it was. (We all just went out for lunch every day. It's more freedom than I have now.)

3. Nobody gave a shit how much money you had, really. As long as you put out, your social standing was assured...

4. ...until you got pregnant, at which point you were really screwed. These instances were rarely resolved in a very special two-parter, and in one case actually involved a Homecoming Queen nominee and her step-brother. I think she lost. Speking of-

5. We voted a homosexual - think young Big Gay Al - as Prom King, completely without irony. This as opposed to, you know, beating the shit out of him all the time, which never happened, even in Oklahoma.

6. There was no one standard place to hang out. I understand that this used to be driven by budget constraints, but I fear that after decades of "Arnold's" and "The Max," that the cliche is seeping into bigger budget shows as well.

7. The talent show, as much as there was one, was entirely meaningless and everybody knew it, especially the performers. There would never have been cause for a Standing Ovation, and it would have solved nothing if there had been.

8. We rarely went surfing (see 1.)

9. Skipping class was insanely, and could be done flagrantly and repeatedly with almost no risk of punishment. On certain days (4/20, etc.) the administration would try to set rules in place, but this just tempted the student body more. Again, there would be no reprisal.

10. Proms, and all other dances, were pretty ridiculous. Everybody only went to get their picture taken before running off to whatever was going on afterwards. The pictures were always awful, the picking-up-and-pinning-the-corsage was always painfully awkward, and the dates meant nothing anyway. Every girl had already mastered that She's All That trip down the stairs, which was fine, but the set-up always meant that you had the five minutes of conversation downstairs with the parents while wondering why the hell you chose the white tux jacket.

MOTHER: Ooh! I LOVE the corsage!
ME: Thanks! I should warn you, there'll probably be some accidental fondling as I pin it, but the embarassment from that will prevent me from doing anything intentional later, I'm sure.
FATHER: (from living room couch) What the hell is that jacket? Are you a ship's captain?

Nobody ended up hooking up with their dates anyway, at least among my friends. After Senior Prom, in the hotel room that we had somehow legally rented, everybody hooked up with somebody, but NOBODY WITH THE PERSON THEY CAME WITH. It was bizarre, and not just a little bit awesome.

10. The religious people weren't marginal 'type' character shunned by the rest of the crowd, but more often than not quite popular. Also, hypocritical.

11. Katie Holmes never slept in my bed, even when I asked really nicely.

2006-03-09T19:28:00.000-05:00

Words and Phrases Unlikely to Appear in a Script for the Children's Television Show I Work For

Realpolitik
Autopsy
Palestine
Ankle-bracelet
Heathen
Swinger
Mutually Assured Destruction
Bukkake
Plebian
Fetish
Orifice
Beelzebub
Apparatchik
Hangover
Crack-whore
Indemnity
Nationalism
Agnostic
Gnostic
Offal
Harlem
Relativism

2006-03-03T17:27:00.000-05:00

SEXY FRIDAY!!

Alright. Time for the first C.H.U.D. who's-hotter poll! I'm honestly looking to get an idea on what drives people's tastes, so be sure to rant and swoon as you see fit. Now then, who's hotter?

1.

...or...

2006-03-03T17:21:00.000-05:00

2.

...or...

2006-03-03T17:11:00.000-05:00

3. And for the ladies...

...or...

2006-03-03T17:06:00.000-05:00

EXTRA!! EXTRA!!

As if the song weren't awesome enough, the video is crafted out of happy or something. God I love Japan.

2006-03-02T18:58:00.000-05:00

UPDATE!! UPDATE!!

So I'm back, and I've backlogged (or back-blogged, or however the hell they would say it in Billyburg) to cover my tracks. It's better than ever, with a few changes.

FUN FACT: Billyburg is a mythical land where people use words that make me want to punch them in the mouth.

First Change - The scent. I thought the cucumber melon was pleasant and inviting, and indeed, to some, it was. But I've learned that some people are really turned off by cucumbers, for one reason or another, so I eventually caved. For now, I'm running a cinnamon-roll-type-thing, which seems to be working pretty well, but this will most likely change again as the weather gets warmer. Those of you without the technology will notice little, if any, difference.

Second Change - Dish Of The Day is on semi-permanent hiatus, because I just ain't all about the hate. In it's place I now have Extra Extra, which is pretty awesome and will be even better once someone tells me how to imbed video files.

Third, though not a change, I should mention that someone named Tadhog won the contest, which probably means that the rest of you simply weren't trying. I expect better effort from all of you in the future. Nonetheless, here is his reward.

Thank you all, and enjoy.

2006-03-02T18:54:00.000-05:00

PRAGMATIC THURSDAY!!

1. If you were opening yoour own restaurant, what kind of food would it serve, and why?

2006-03-02T18:53:00.000-05:00

2. If you were making a movie, what genre would it fall under, and why?

2006-03-02T18:52:00.000-05:00

3. If you were created an empire, what country would you take over first, and why?

2006-03-02T18:41:00.000-05:00

EXTRA!! EXTRA!!

2006-03-02T18:37:00.000-05:00

INANE WEDNESDAY!!

...Which I always think should be spelled with two "n"s.

1. If you had an Evil Twin, what would their dastardly plans entail?

2006-03-02T18:36:00.000-05:00

2. Which one of you would be hotter? I mean, conceivably you'd be identical (see what I did there with the word "conceive?") but come on.

2006-03-02T18:34:00.000-05:00

3. And the evil twin would really be you the whole time, right? And you'd, like, have the actually-good twin locked in a closet somewhere fudging your taxes for you, right?

2006-03-02T18:30:00.000-05:00

EXTRA!! EXTRA!!

I know that everyone and their ferret has already posted this, but on the off chance that you havn't checked it out yet, go to this article right now. Watch the video. If you're working, do it anyway. If your boss is right over your shoulder barking orders in your ear, and for some reason you're on my blog, do it anyway. Make your boss watch. I guarantee that, like the Grinch, Boss-man's heart will grow three sizes instantly. As will your own. If you''ve already seen it, watch it again. Look at me, I'm gushing.

2006-03-02T18:25:00.000-05:00

MORBID TUESDAY!!

In your humble opinion...

1. What would be the most Honorable death imaginable? (presumably excepting Christ)

2006-03-02T18:24:00.001-05:00

2. What would be the most humorous death?

2006-03-02T18:24:00.000-05:00

3. What would be the most memorable Rock-Star-Style death?

2006-03-02T18:14:00.000-05:00

EXTRA!! EXTRA!!

Owned! Boo-ya!

2006-03-02T17:32:00.000-05:00

SPIRITUAL MONDAY!!

From a universal, spiritual-but-not-religiously-adherent context, is there anything to be gained from...?

1. The Eucharist

2006-03-02T17:30:00.000-05:00

2. Keeping Kosher?

2006-03-02T17:28:00.000-05:00

3. Staging world-wide riots, attacking embassies, and killing people over cartoons?

2006-03-02T17:26:00.000-05:00

EXTRA!! EXTRA!!

Go For It!

2006-03-02T17:23:00.000-05:00

SCIENCE SUNDAY!!

1. Could somebody please explain this to me?

2006-03-02T17:22:00.000-05:00

2. If you were to create a clone of yourself, what kinds of things would you make it do?

2006-03-02T17:20:00.000-05:00

3. If we had flying cars, would you totally mess with your drunk friends when giving them rides home from the bar?

2006-03-02T17:17:00.000-05:00

EXTRA!! EXTRA!!

Sublime video. (not the band) Watch with the sound up, and if you can find a way to make it full screen, do that too. Also, turn the lights off. As for the product, Coworker Dave had a great idea to use these for a "car tag" game in Times Square.

2006-03-02T17:14:00.000-05:00

POP CULTURE SATURDAY!!

Okay, as I have recently had opportunity to sit down and watch t.v.'s Arrested Development, I have naturally developed an unhealthy obsession with it. As a result, I now have a Social Disease (not like the sexy kind) that prohibits me from discussing much else. As it turns out, I'm fairly comfortable with that.

Therefor, what is your favorite thing about...

1. G.O.B.

2006-03-02T17:09:00.000-05:00

2. Kitty Sanchez

2006-03-02T17:07:00.000-05:00

3. George Michael / Maeby

2006-03-02T17:05:00.000-05:00

EXTRA!! EXTRA!!

I have a cat and I still think this is hilarious.

2006-02-17T12:56:00.000-05:00

UPDATE!!

Cato has vigilantly (and righteously) stolen the contest lead from Socratic. As today is the last day of the contest, I expect unforseen filth from all of you. Scroll down to the last Sexy Friday to play!

2006-02-17T12:52:00.000-05:00

SEXY FRIDAY!!

This is Sexy Friday, not Pop Culture Saturday, so remember to be crude and superficial, okay?

Good. Here we go.

1. Most overrated celebrity?

2006-02-17T12:51:00.000-05:00

2. Most underrated celebrity?

2006-02-17T12:50:00.000-05:00

3. Which celeb do you think you might have a shot with if you ever had a chance to hang out?

2006-02-17T12:42:00.000-05:00

DISH OF THE DAY

Damn you, Will Shortz!

2006-02-17T12:35:00.001-05:00

PRAGMATIC THURSDAY!!

In tweny-five words or less (thereabouts) give your Doctrine on the ideal execution of the following political aspects. Or rip into other people's doctrines. It's like a streamlined version of the current opti-threads, but with more swearing, and T&A.

1. Foreign Policy?

2006-02-17T12:35:00.000-05:00

2. Economic Policy?

2006-02-17T12:34:00.000-05:00

3. Educational Policy?

2006-02-17T12:25:00.000-05:00

DISH OF THE DAY!!

Hehe. Fashionistas are dumb.

2006-02-17T12:07:00.000-05:00

INANE WEDNESDAY!!

Me Edition!

1. If I were an Ice Cream flavor, what flavor would I be? Would I be delicious? Would I give you brain-freeze?

2006-02-17T12:06:00.000-05:00

2. If I were to have another superpower, which one would you give me?

2006-02-17T12:03:00.000-05:00

3. Which is the better book title - "God, an Autobiography by Dawson Smith" or "Dawson Smith, an Autobiography by God"?

2006-02-17T11:36:00.000-05:00

DISH OF THE DAY

It was funny enough to see you try to prove that Scientologists aren't simple, gullible egomaniacs, while inadvertantly doing more to hurt your church's "cause" (money?) than any Hubbard-critic (literate living human?) ever could. Then, you found a way to get America to stand up for Brooke Shields, for crissake, simply by being crazy enough to call post-partum depression weakness, thus alienating 90% of your fanbase. Then you knock up Joey Potter and let the world phhotograph her dead-eyes mid-brainwashing. The NRA would be better off with Bernie Goertz as their spokesman than the Scientologists are with you.

Anyway, so it looks like your handlers let you off the leash just long enough for you to play online this week, where you semi-anonymously ranted at rumormongers and bragged about "getting rich while telling the truth." Then you shifted over to Wikipedia, where you battled with the moderator, trying to anonymously edit the College of William and Mary entry. Both instances were easily traced back to the same Paramount studios IP, proving the small, gossipy world of vindictive tech-geeks.

I'm guessing your publicist has given you an etch-a-sketch to occupy you by now.

2006-02-14T16:00:00.000-05:00

ACTUAL UPDATE!!

Well, the contest is going about as well as I could have realistically hoped (scroll down to Friday if you don't know what I'm talking about) with Socratic in the lead. As we all know that a Socratic victory cannot stand, I urge you all to foul up your mouths and do your part! Multiple entries are fine, as this is a half-assed contest, but that doesn't mean we can let Socratic win! Now be dirty, guys!

2006-02-14T15:59:00.000-05:00

MORBID TUESDAY!!

Your chance to pick a Dish of the Day!! Choose the mosts appropriate Karmic punishment and/or hell for your least favorite...

1. Politician

2006-02-14T15:57:00.000-05:00

2. Musician

2006-02-14T15:56:00.000-05:00

3. Athlete

2006-02-14T15:52:00.000-05:00

DISH OF THE DAY

Fuck you, Cupid.

2006-02-14T10:25:00.000-05:00

SPIRITUALITY MONDAY!!

The other night, as I lay asleep in bed, three thoughts all came to me more or less at once. None are very original, but I thought they were worthy of discussion anyway, so...

1. That heaven was an invention of ancient kings to make death at their service seem attractive.

2006-02-14T10:21:00.000-05:00

2. Likewise, that hell is an invention for ones enemies, to prove the absolute folly of those separate from us; the birth of religious nationalism as we know it still.

2006-02-14T10:17:00.000-05:00

3. That God's existence and benevolence is not contingent on either of these things.

2006-02-14T09:53:00.000-05:00

DISH OF THE DAY

Okay, this is an esoteric one, so I'm going to drop the sceond-person conceit. Essentially, as you can read in the article, Dana Vale, this Austrailian MP, is trying to block RU486 on the grounds that with all the Muslims in Austrailia, they can't afford to not to get every Christian baby possible.

Simply stunning.

2006-02-14T09:49:00.000-05:00

SCIENCE "SUNDAY!!"

1. If you could be/had to be a cyborg, what would your mechanical alteration be?

2006-02-14T09:47:00.000-05:00

2. I'm curious as to where my four or five loyal C.H.U.D. readers fall on the idea of extra-terrestrials, and I'm going to leave it just that vague.

2006-02-14T09:41:00.000-05:00

3. While helping my coworker decide on the paint for his new co-op, we came across a web-site talking about experiments in the emotional/behavioral effects of different colors. The experiment seemed fairly conclusive in the "different colors certainly have different effects" camp, but then ended with the statement that the effects were the same on a group of blind children as they were on the sighted subjects. This, of course, led us to conclude that the whole endeavor was bullshit, but it got me thinking, in what subtle ways might non-optic nerves be capable of sensing light?

2006-02-14T09:33:00.000-05:00

DISH OF THE DAY!!

You're here for three reasons. First, You're Comic Book Guy come to life. That irritates me. Second, you look like Bruce Villanch, if nobody even pretended to like Brusce Villanch. Third, back in my college days,, NYU had a screening of Mission to Mars. Not only did the movie suck, but the scheduled guest speakers from the film, knowing of it's suckage, flaked at the last minute, denying us the right to flay them. You then led an internet tirade against NYU for getting pissed about it. I realize this is petty, but then again, it's cold out, and the C.H.U.D.s need to fatten up while they can.

2006-02-13T16:42:00.000-05:00

POP CULTURE "SATURDAY!!"

What would be your favorite posible next career move for the following artists?

1. William Shatner

2006-02-13T16:39:00.000-05:00

2. Hulk Hogan

2006-02-13T16:37:00.000-05:00

3. Mariah Carey

2006-02-13T16:34:00.000-05:00

4. Tony Danza

2006-02-13T16:31:00.000-05:00

5. DJ Jazzy Jeff

2006-02-13T16:26:00.000-05:00

DISH OF THE DAY

I don't much care for your music, but I have a feeling I would hate you in person. Which is a shame, really, because apparently you like Meat Loaf.

2006-02-10T14:47:00.000-05:00

SEXY FRIDAY!!

Okay lads and ladies, it's time to step it up a bit. I realize that everybody who responds here frequents the opti-mates, but we don't need to keep the tones the same. Opti-mates lives in an immaculate tower. C.H.U.D. lives in the sewers. And so, the first Sexy Friday Contest!! Just write the dirtiest, most depraved responses you can think of. The poster deemed "most perverse" gets total props, which the American Commdities Exchange describes as "fuckin' WAY better than gold, man. You just don't get it cuz' you're all straight all the time." A ringing endorsement indeed. So, the contst begins...

NOW!

1. How deep is your love?

2006-02-10T14:46:00.000-05:00

2. I like my women like I like my coffee...

2006-02-10T14:45:00.000-05:00

3. You're a new Bond girl. What is your name? (And backstory, if you're feelin' saucy.)

2006-02-10T14:41:00.000-05:00

DISH OF THE DAY

My coworker has some new neighbors...

2006-02-09T12:21:00.000-05:00

PRAGMATIC THURSDAY!!

Spy-Bait Edition!

In honor of the new U.S. plan to perform sweeping dataveillence on seemingly all websites (including this one, and any that you might have) I devote todays questions to the brave men and women of the NSA, FBI, and CIA, protecting us from freedom-haters like the ACLU.

1. Would terrorists be able to non-violently destroy the U.S. economy with a few well-placed trucks chock-full of electro-magnets parked around the NY Stock Exchange? As I understand it, somebody tried that once, but that might have just been in a Dan Brown book I read. More importantly, could such an act truly be considered "terror," what with it's essential non-violent nature, or does terror now include any attempts to change a current system of power?

2006-02-09T11:58:00.000-05:00

2. In the movie Fight Club, Tyler Durden quips that, "if you mix equal parts orange juice and gasoline, you can make napalm." This is incorrect, as it's really more of a two-to-one ratio. The moral issue here is, are they in the right for not disclosing the true ingredients for homemade weaponry, or in the wrong for presenting falsehoods as truth? What about my part in correcting the statement? Was it wholly unneccesary of me?

2006-02-09T11:57:00.000-05:00

3. What's one example of a better, more cost efficient, less oppressive method of fighting terror, that maybe doesn't focus quite so specifically on monitoring activities of political opponents?

2006-02-09T11:53:00.000-05:00

DISH OF THE DAY

See above. Come and get me, Toady-boy.