Saturday while I was driving around running errands there was a story on one of NPR's financial programs about how a new round of banking regulations are kicking in next month, and banks offering "overdraft protection" -- i.e. a service whereby they'll cover an ATM withdrawal or point-of-purchase debit sale that would technically overdraw your account, for a fee -- will have to allow customers to opt in or out of such an amenity. Sounds fair to me: Back when I was young and irresponsible -- you know, a couple years ago -- I would do something dumb like go to the grocery store the day before my next paycheck was supposed to clear and buy a twelve-pack with what I thought were the last twelve or fifteen bucks in my checking account, only to find that it was actually more like my last seven or eight bucks, and my account was technically overdrawn, and my bank was going to charge me an additional thirty-five bucks for covering the purchase I otherwise wouldn't have been allowed to make. Now, you can blame irresponsible bookkeeping on my part, and you wouldn't be wrong, but still, had I known that in exchange for avoiding an embarrassing rejection at the checkout counter, I was going to end up buying a $47 twelver of beer, I might've declined that little feature.
Well, now my bank has to give me the option to do so, which I fully intend to do -- and here, incidentally, is what I found on the home page of my bank when I logged on to check up on some recent transactions this morning:
Ah, yes! That overdraft coverage, which is so awesomely convenient! Whose enrollment is fast, easy, and free (except for the $35 or whatever they have to pay if they actually buy something too rich for what's in their account)!
Look, I'm not stupid -- I know the real lesson here is don't spend money you don't have. (Getting smacked with overdraft fees is one way of learning this. Burying oneself under ~$15,000 of credit-card debt within a few years of graduating from college is an even better one.) But it seems like the old version of automatic overdraft protection encourages people to spend money they don't have, and like all those supposedly wonderful credit cards we gorged ourselves on in the '90s and early 2000s, which let us spend spend spend until we realized they'd snuck a bunch of arbitrary interest-rate hikes into the fine print, it lures us into thinking we can spend without consequence -- at least until the nasty surprise of a rate hike or overdraft charge smacks us in the face once we turn the corner.
Banks bitched and moaned about this rule change before it got passed. Me, I like having the option of turning down something that looks too good to be true. Hey, I don't have a problem with someone trying to profit off of the stupidity and/or irresponsibility of the American consumer -- lord knows that's a growth industry these days, and one of the few we have left -- but they should at least be honest about it.
Like I said yesterday, the past 48 hours or so -- thrilling wins by the U.S. and Slovak soccer teams, a match to end all tennis matches won by Georgia alum John Isner -- have been about the happiest that sports have ever made me outside of the four or five glorious months we call "football season." It's true that most of my awesome sports-related memories are intimately tied with some great success on the part of the Bulldogs -- or the Washington Redskins, in the pre-Snyder era when they still had successes -- but I've been privy to some pretty amazing non-football achievements that made my heart swell with pride to be an American, a Georgia fan, or perhaps just someone who happened to have a TV and a cable connection and be in the right place at the right time. This +5 is dedicated to the heroes who made me snap out of my pigskin-and-beer-induced trance and made me realize that there are other sports in the world, not an easy thing to do in and of itself: My Five Proudest Sporting-Related Memories That Had Nothing To Do With Football.
October 5, 1991: Braves claim their first division pennant in nine years Confession: While I'm a ripe old 32, I'm not one of those Atlanta-area Gen-Xers with massive archives of miserable memories about how bad the Braves were in the '80s. We didn't move to Georgia until the summer of '91, right before I started high school, and I don't have many memories of paying attention to baseball period before that. But not long after we moved down to Columbus, my dad had some sort of job-related doctor thing up in Atlanta that included tickets to a Braves game, so off we went to Fulton County Stadium. The Braves were leading the NL West for the first time in forever, but only a game ahead of the Dodgers, with two games to go in the season; we got to watch Smoltzie pitch a complete game of pure ruthless efficiency, downing the Astros 5-2, then hung around while they showed the Dodgers-Giants game on the Jumbotron. I don't think a single person left the stadium as the LA-SF game wore on, and when the Giants corralled LA's final groundout to clinch their own 4-0 win, the place exploded even louder than it had when the Braves had won. A photographer took our picture as we walked triumphantly back to our car, and somewhere, in some newspaper's dusty archives, there's a picture of little 13-year-old me with the foam tomahawk someone had handed me on my way into the stadium, waving that thing like I'd caught the winning out myself.
October 28, 1995: Braves win the World Series It took another four years before the Braves won the Big One, of course, but I remember exactly where I was when it happened: in the TV lounge of the lobby at Oglethorpe House my freshman year at UGA, surrounded by pretty much every single one of my neighbors, watching I think it was Marquis Grissom tear across left-center to catch the final out. When it finally happened, when all those years of disappointments and achingly close missed opportunities gave way to a Series title, the entire room poured out and I remember spending the rest of that evening engaging in copious amounts of underage drinking whilst wearing my Braves boxers on the outside of my clothes. Good times.
July 23, 1996: Kerri Strug vaults on a bum ankle and wins the gold for the American gymnastics team We caught a couple of events when the Olympics were in Atlanta, but we watched the team gymnastics competition from home, and saw the whole drama with Kerri Strug's ankle and the one last vault she did to clinch the all-around team gold for the U.S. for the first time ever. Considering that she had to be taken straight from the Georgia Dome to a hospital afterward to be treated for tendon damage, I think Strug's hero status was well-deserved, as were her "Saturday Night Live" cameo and appearance in one of the funnier spots from the golden age of "This is SportsCenter" ads.
March 16, 2008: Georgia wins the SEC basketball tournament I don't have the clearest memory of where I was when this went down: I think I'd driven home from Birmingham to Columbus that Friday night -- through a hellacious thunderstorm, of course -- and woke up the next morning fully expecting to open up the Ledger-Enquirer sports section and read about how the Dawgs had been unceremoniously bounced out of the tournament in the second round by Kentucky. Instead, I got to read about how the second-round game hadn't even been played because of a tornado that tore through downtown Atlanta -- ripping a hole in the roof of the Georgia Dome in the process. So I got to watch two games on Saturday -- the first a Georgia victory over Kentucky (their second straight overtime win), followed just hours later by an equally improbable win over Mississippi State. Keep in mind that, in the most delicious irony of ironies, this all happened on Georgia Tech's basketball court, where the entire tournament had been moved because of the damage to the Dome. And the following afternoon, the Dawgs -- who'd been the sixth seed in the East at 4-12 in the SEC, 13-16 overall -- knocked off Arkansas to claim one of the least probable NCAA tournament berths ever. They lost in the first round to Xavier, of course, and less than a year later Dennis Felton was out of a job, but still, this was one of those miraculous weekends that could bring a glimmer of pride to even the most beleaguered program. (Of course, now that Mark Fox is in charge and recruiting like a madman, the Hoop Dawgs are gonna win so many of these things that the fan base gets bored and starts taking them for granted like asshole Kentucky fans. Book it.)
February 24, 2010: Slovakia beats Sweden in ice hockey to advance to the medal round of the 2010 Olympics Just like I really get into the World Cup despite not being much of a soccer fan, I like Olympic hockey even though I don't follow the sport much otherwise. And with the NHL being littered with bad-ass Slovaks, I figured the motherland had a great chance at a medal in Vancouver (after having smoked the rest of their group in the first round in 2006 but getting bounced by the Czech Republic in the first round of the knockout stage). SVK began the 2010 hockey tournament by getting whacked again by the Czechs, but then stunned the world with a shootout win over the Russians, and closed out group play by pounding Latvia 6-0. They dispensed with Norway in the first round of the playoff, but that only meant they'd earned the right to face Sweden, the defending Olympic champions, in the next round. Instead of folding, though, the Slovaks scored on a power play in the second period and never trailed from there, and my boys were headed to the medal round for the first time ever as an independent country. (About that: Yeah, there was no medal. Not this time. But it's happening four years from now, oh yes it is.)
Ahh, memories. And now the Ten:
1. Pet Shop Boys, "Always" 2. Fatboy Slim, "Right Here Right Now" 3. Moby, "Natural Blues" 4. A Tribe Called Quest, "The Pressure" 5. Deee-Lite, "Power of Love" 6. Pet Shop Boys, "Legacy" 7. The Streets, "Don't Mug Yourself" 8. The Pixies, "Crackity Jones" 9. Ween, "Piss Up a Rope" 10. Duran Duran, "Save a Prayer"
Your turn -- your Random Tens and/or favorite non-football sporting memories go in the comments, if you're so inclined.
So let's recap: In the past 24 hours, I've gotten to see
· Team USA advance to the knockout round of the World Cup -- winning their group, no less -- on one of the more thrilling goals that's ever been scored;
· the longest tennis match ever played, which was won 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68by a Georgia Bulldog; and
· Slovakia, in its first World Cup as an independent nation, advance to the knockout round via an amazing 3-2 victory over the defending world champions -- in the process sending the loathsome, preening, flop-artist Italians home in disgrace.
I didn't know it was possible to be this happy so far away from football season.
Though I have next to zero interest in soccer generally, I've always gotten really excited about the World Cup, because it's sort of like an Olympics for one sport: People from all over the world come together in one place to (mostly) put aside political differences and compete not with guns and bombs but with sheer athletic prowess, and some people win and some people lose, but the hope is that everyone does so with a real love for the whole idea of competition and a respect for sportsmanship. (Well, except for the French maybe, but you never know what you're gonna get from them.)
Sitting there in my cube, though, surreptitiously checking the action on the FIFA MatchCast and being less and less slick about it as the game wore on and got increasingly tense, I was reminded not of any specific Olympic memory but of the 2006 Georgia-Georgia Tech game. An agonizing defensive struggle, packed with numerous great plays but an even greater number of missed opportunities, and it looks like the good guys are going to be hanging their heads right up until the last minute, when a talented but maligned player goes in for an amazing score.
It even felt the same way to be watching it: Just like in 2006, I was away from the actual action, keeping track of it on a few seconds' delay -- but there was a group of people watching the game on one of the big-screens on the opposite side of our floor, and in the 91st minute of the match I heard a huge cheer go up from that side of the building. Just as I'd heard a huge cheer when the Americans knocked in their disallowed goal in the first half, and just as I'd heard a huge cheer go up from Sanford Stadium, right down the street from our tailgate spot, when Staffy hit Massaquoi for that TD pass. Wait a few seconds, and then boom, the little soccer-ball icon popped up signaling Donovan's goal, and it was party time for the rest of the day. (Yeah, it was a weird way to be watching the game, but let's be honest, it wasn't like I would've understood the game of soccer any better had I been watching the action unfold on TV right in front of me.)
So congratulations, Team USA. And everyone say a prayer for similar miracles today for Slovakia, who need a win over Italy to have any hope of following the U.S. into the knockout stage.
And actually, while you're at it, say a prayer for American tennis player and damn good Dawg John Isner, who will be resuming the longest tennis match in history at some point later on today. If I weren't pulling for Isner so hard, I'd say just let him and Nicholas Mahut both advance to the next round and take on their opponent two-on-one -- it almost seems unfair to make someone lose at this point, and besides, after playing seven hours of tennis yesterday they probably only have enough combined physical stamina left to equal that of one healthy player (if that much). But Bulldog Nation's pulling for you, John -- just keep acing those serves, and stay hydrated, for God's sake.
My apologies for posting having gotten off to a slow start in this, the blog's first week of, uh, re-emergence. I moved into my new place over the weekend and have been trying to get shit straightened out, which yesterday included sitting all morning in a half-empty house waiting for someone to turn my water on, only they never came, because who cares, my time's important because I don't have, you know, A JOB or anything.
Ahem.
But anyway, I've still been on the grind, which included posting the annual college-football composite ranking over at EDSBS. This, as you may or may not recall, is where I dig up the unofficial "preseason" rankings put out by folks like Phil Steele, Athlon, ESPN.com and the like, and combine them into a single top 25 ranking that gives a reasonable preview of where teams are going to be ranked in the official preseason polls that'll be submitted by the sportswriters and coaches in a few weeks. As it stands now, this summer's composite looks-a like this:
1. Alabama 2. Ohio State 3. Boise State 4. Texas 5. Florida 6. TCU 7. Nebraska 8. Iowa 9. Oregon 10. Virginia Tech 11. Oklahoma 12. Wisconsin 13. Miami 14. USC 15. Pittsburgh 16. Arkansas 17. Florida State 18. North Carolina 19. Georgia Tech 20. Penn State 21. Oregon State 22. LSU 23. Georgia 24. Cincinnati 25. Auburn
Full analysis is over at EDSBS, but the salient nugget for Bulldog Nation is that the Dawgs do check in down there at #23, which may seem like an insult if you've been following Senator Blutarsky and his Steele-sourced glimmers of hope for why Georgia could be in for a pretty promising year -- but then again, if you saw Georgia crash and burn against Tennessee and Kentucky last year and are still having PTSD flashbacks of our threadbare secondary and -16 turnover margin, you might be happy just to be nominated.
And then over at Dr. Saturday, I'll be throwing occasional assists this week to the lovely Holly, who's flying solo while the good Doctor is on vacation. My first contribution is here, a rumination on the Mountain West's chances at earning BCS status now that they're losing Utah to the Pac-10; it's meticulously researched (like everything else I do, duh!) but probably not as fun as Holly's post on the new spiderweb Lane Kiffin has managed to flail around in. OK, look, I know the guy beat the pants off us last year, but since then he's led a very schadenfreude-friendly (schadenfriendly?) existence; I wouldn't say he has a reverse Midas touch, exactly, but he does seem to have a very particular kind of bizarro Midas touch, the kind where everything he touches turns to DERP.
Also, I've been pulled in to contribute to a new project SBNation is doing -- they've been rolling out a number of "regional" sites over the past few weeks, and the Atlanta site goes live this week; I'll be posting a couple times a week on Georgia football. So keep your eyes peeled.
Further updates as developments warrant. Now I gotta head out so I can swing by my new place and see if I can actually use the crapper there yet. Fun!
Just out of curiosity, how does the Nobel Committee decide whether to award prizes in new categories? 'Cause if ever there was a reason to award a Nobel Prize in Beatboxing, this would be it. I mean, come on, this is at least as worthwhile as the Chemistry prize. (Stupid chemistry. "Oh, look at me! I mixed a bunch of chemicals in a bottle! Where's my million dollars?" Hmm, I don't know, can you do the sped-up music from Super Mario World? You can't? Then I guess you don't get a million dollars. [/realtalk])
The blog may have been offline for exactly three months, but that doesn't mean the world just ceased to turn on its axis during that time. A lot of stuff happened, some of which I might've liked to discuss on here, and now that HJS is more or less fully operational again, now's as good a time as any to go over that stuff, just to make sure we're all on the same page about stuff. (By which I mean you're on the same page with me, since you haven't had me around for the past few months to tell you what you should think and feel about everything.) So here's a quick refresher course -- Five Things I Probably Would've Posted About Over The Past Three Months If The Blog Had Been Up:
I got a job The most recent development, obvs, and the catalyst for the blog going back up to begin with. My sidebar profile is accurate -- I am indeed a paid lackey for a Fortune 500 company now, albeit one that treats its employees very well and has given me a fat benefits package. I'm not gonna tell any of you assholes where I work, for fear that one of you is gonna do something like order 50 pizzas and have them sent to my office, but suffice to say I'm a working man again, and very happy to be one. (OK, I can't keep a secret: I'm a hired assassin for BP, taking out whistleblowers in the Deepwater Horizon case. Did you know they actually have hitmen on payroll? Although on my business cards it says "Information Security Specialist.")
"Justified" and "Community" are two of the best shows on TV Being unemployed obviously gave me a lot more time to watch TV, but in the case of "Justified" and "Community," that may have been a good thing. "Justified," the show with Timothy Olyphant as a federal marshall assigned to return to his hilljack hometown in eastern Kentucky, would probably have been worth watching if it'd just been Olyphant showing off his considerable bad-ass skills and shooting people for an hour every Tuesday night, but instead the show surrounds him with a whole cast of well-drawn characters with unpredictable nuances -- including Walton Goggins as Olyphant's Neo-Nazi-turned-backwoods-preacher bête noire -- and works equally well as both drama and action series. "Community," meanwhile, started kind of slow but got steadily funnier as it went along, and launched into overdrive with the "chicken fingers" and "paintball" episodes toward the end of the season -- seriously, whether you have to get them on Hulu, Netflix, your cousin's DVR, or a pirated Chinese DVD out of the trunk of someone's car, watch both of them ASAP -- and as far as I'm concerned is now appointment viewing on Thursday nights, particularly with "The Office" appearing to sort of go off the rails. Joel McHale's character is poised to join the pantheon of Awesome TV Douchebags whom I'm increasingly trying to model my life after.
I don't get the iPad Like everything else Apple makes, it's real purty, and it's a fun toy, but am I that far off in describing it as a really big iPhone that can't make phone calls? Which is not to say I wouldn't gladly take one if it were offered to me, but I can't see paying five or seven hundred dollars for what is basically a toy. (I can only see myself paying three hundred dollars for a toy, specifically the Lego Taj Mahal, which you're damn right I'm gonna go out and buy now that I have a job again.)
I'm glad conference expansion ended up not being all that big a deal As many things that I find nonsensical and infuriating about how Division I-A college football is currently set up, I didn't really want things to change so radically that we ended up with maybe only four 16-team "superconferences" around which the entirety of Division I-A was supposed to revolve. Not that I necessarily had a lot of faith in the idea that a "Pac-16" would work, though, because by more or less adding an entire division of the Big XII to its roster, the Pac-10 would've been opening itself up to the same problems that caused fractures in the Big XII: Just as that conference tacked on a bunch of Texas schools in an effort to expand and have a conference-title game, causing Nebraska to feel slighted enough in the proceedings that they eventually bolted for the Big Ten, the "Pac-16" would've had two completely different divisions -- the old Pac-8 on one side, and a "Red Dead Redemption" division (to borrow Spencer Hall's phrase) full of schools with little or no connection to the Rose Bowl or any of the conference's other traditions, but whose money and TV markets still would've become the conference's new power center. (Not to mention, of course, that anything that distracts people's attention from the superiority of the SEC is unacceptable.) In the end, the Big Ten and Pac-10 went to 12 teams, and the Big XII survived by shrinking back to 10 -- which is ridiculous, sure, but no less ridiculous than making Texas A&M fans truck their asses up to Pullman, Wash., or Corvallis, Ore., for conference games.
I'm really touched by how much y'all appeared to miss this thing I'm gonna try not to get too maudlin here (or, conversely, let myself get too big a head about any of this), but when you're a blogger of any kind -- but particularly an unemployed one who sometimes finds himself struggling to come up with a reason to even get out of bed in the morning -- you sometimes wonder if anybody really cares what you have to say, and if it would matter all that much to anyone if you just stopped doing it. Well, I was pestered with enough "When are you putting the blog back up, assbag?!?" queries over the past three months to know that quite a few of y'all did care, and while some of you were bigger dicks about it than others, the concern still meant a lot to me. And now that things seem to be getting back on track in any number of aspects of my life, I feel like y'all are owed a debt of gratitude for making me feel important during a period when it was hard to find reasons to feel that way. So thanks to all of you, and I want you to know that just because I'm a working stiff again doesn't mean I'm going to be any more mature, or any less of a douche, on this blog going forward.
So here's to better times ahead. For everyone. And here's the Random Ten:
1. Stevie Wonder, "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" 2. Beck, "Debra" 3. The Chemical Brothers, "Playground for a Wedgeless Firm" 4. Ebn-Ozn, "AEIOU Sometimes Y" 5. The Smiths, "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" 6. Beck, "Modesto" 7. The Romantics, "What I Like About You" 8. Gnarls Barkley, "Surprise" 9. DJ Shadow, "Changeling" 10. Paul McCartney, "Live and Let Die"
So: Anything you've been wanting to get off your chest for the past three months? Throw it in the comments, along with your Random Tens if you've got 'em. And happy weekend.
OK, maybe not my dad. My dad's not so bad. But maybe my granddad, because seriously, I bet Joe Barton's kids live like fricking kings.
I didn't do a lot of egregiously bad isht when I was a kid, but I did get in a heap of trouble when I was 18 for throwing a party while my parents were out of town, after having been explicitly instructed not to. The party was a real rager -- 50-something people, underage drinking, smoking, people running around naked in the backyard, a true suburban Columbus classic -- but it wasn't the party itself my parents were mad about. Hell, I cleaned up so well afterward that they didn't even find out about it until nearly a week after they'd gotten back. What they were mad about was that I'd lied about it, and lying being about the worst thing you could do in my family, they brought the hammer down on me: Lost the use of my car for the rest of the school year, grounded anytime I came home from UGA, probably forfeited my monthly allowance somewhere along the line. About the most severe punishment I got for anything I did as a teenager, now that I think about it.
If Joe Barton had been my granddad, though, he would've bitched my parents out and apologized on their behalf for being so mean to me.
Your eyes/ears do not deceive you -- Barton apologized to BP for mean nasty Obama making them pay for the damage they'd inflicted upon the Gulf coast. And while he claimed to be speaking only for himself and not the Republican Party, he wasn't the only one: The Republican Study Committee -- a caucus that comprises nearly two-thirds of the GOP's current House membership -- echoed Barton's sentiment that BP being instructed to set up a $20-billion escrow account to pay spill-related claims amounted to a "Chicago-style shakedown." All of the usual talk-radio suspects -- Limbaugh, Hannity, Oliver North -- are using suspiciously identical "slush fund" rhetoric to criticize the account. Tea Party hero Rand Paul, of course, said it was "un-American" for Obama to criticize BP at all.
Look, everyone has the right to criticize Obama (or any other president) to their hearts' content, but how craven do you have to be to plant your nose in BP's anus so that you can trash-talk him? Are they so confident in their ability to retake Congress this fall that they figure they can afford to throw a pity party for the most despised corporation in the country? Or as one of the few entities in America whose approval ratings are almost as low as BP's, is this their idea of "climbing down into the crevasse"?
I have no idea. All I know is, the next time I get stopped for speeding, I hope I've got Joe Barton in the car with me to wring an apology out of the cop for pulling me over.
(Yeah, the political stuff's back too, dorks. Drink it in.)
I'm back . . . and you may all consider yourselves iced.
But more to the point, Hey Jenny Slater is back as well, rested and refreshed after a hiatus that ended up lasting exactly three months. I know you all probably hate the new format, but don't worry, I'll be tweaking it over the next few weeks. The posting, however, will be exactly as douchetastic as you remembered.
But never you mind any of that -- you've got some drinking to do. Bottoms up, schmucks.
I feel like I've written this post four or five times already -- "Sorry for the lack of posting over the last few weeks, here are some lame and only tangentially relevant excuses" -- but it may bear repeating once again, because I've come to a decision about the blog: I'm taking it offline for the next few weeks while I try to slam an adrenaline needle, "Pulp Fiction"-style, into my job search.
I've been examining and re-examining things that could make me a more viable candidate for the various jobs I've tried for recently, and without meaning to overdramatize this, when I'm potentially going up against several dozen candidates for a given position -- all of whom are just as desperate as I am, some of whom may be just as qualified -- even something as simple as this blog could mean the difference between making the final cut for an opening and not making it. I mean, though it may not always seem like this is the case, I don't go out of my way to offend people on here. And I don't think I've posted anything here that would automatically red-flag me as unqualified, unstable, or a threat to the security of the republic. But if a job came down to me and another guy with 15 years of writing/editing experience, and the hiring manager is sitting there thinking, "Well, there's this guy who dropped a bunch of F-bombs over a Georgia football loss last fall, and this guy who apparently has never done anything like that" -- I'd hate to think I missed out on a job over something that picayune. But it could happen.
And it's not like y'all are going to be missing out on much, at my current rate of production, at least. Between hunting for jobs and recent co-captaining gigs at EDSBS and Dr. Saturday, my output here has slowed down to the point where this blog has basically become a glorified Tumblr page, and I've been torn between being frustrated over that and really not being inspired enough to do anything about it. This isn't euthanasia, it's merely a hibernation, by the end of which this blog will hopefully emerge refreshed, re-energized, re-inspired and, God willing, written by a person with a steady income.
So Hey Jenny Slater goes behind the wall at midnight tonight (OOH DRAMA), and if you're really starved for my cranky outbursts in the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter or over at EDSBS or Dr. Saturday, where I hope to maintain a healthy contribution level during the interminable football offseason. I'm sure I'll also be popping up like a bad penny at Holly's joint. (I know what you're thinking: "Doug, if you're really so concerned about maximizing your employability, why would you allow yourself to be filmed singing along and doing a really gay dance to an Erasure song in your car?" All I can say is the heart wants what it wants, I guess, and at that moment my heart wanted to sing along and do a really gay dance to an Erasure song in my car.)
Thanks to those of you who have hung with this blog through the recent lean months, and I promise it'll be back eventually. For now it's time to regroup and light a fire under myself in a number of other areas. Your thoughts and prayers during that period will be appreciated, and when Hey Jenny Slater does come back, I will do my best to reward your patience by ensuring that it doesn't suck too terribly hard.
The "Onion News Network" has already put out dozens of pitch-perfect parodies of 24-hour news networks and morning shows, so it should probably come as no surprise that their piss takes on "SportsCenter" are seamless as well.
Stay with it through the stinger at the end. I hope some of these guys are getting acting jobs elsewhere; to be able to ape the tone of ESPN's reporters and anchors that closely speaks to some level of talent. (I mean, if Paris Hilton can still show up in movies . . . )
. . . Which brings me to the two truest, most brilliant, spot-on paragraphs I have seen written about American cinema in eons, courtesy of you-know-who and you-know-who's BFF:
Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side LIVIA: Oh, Sandra. I really don't know what to say about this nomination. You have brought me so much joy over the years, beginning with your bizarrely compelling performance across from a never-creepier Bill Pullman in While You Were Sleeping. You are glorious, and to be honest, I love you a little. However. That does not mean I will be endorsing you for Oscar gold. If they gave out Oscars for dyeing your hair blonde and acting like a bitch at football games, three ladies on my block would be Academy voters. Color me unimpressed. NASTINCHKA: This is the only remotely relevant section in which I can point out that the Tuohy's real-life daughter is eons prettier than that tramp-stamped little minx they put in the movie. Who de-hots an Ole Miss cheerleader for filming purposes? If they were going to get one thing right about this festering delta puddle of an adaptation, that one seemed like easy money.
I'll confess right now that I somehow still have not managed to see "The Blind Side," but I did devour the book -- whose author, outrageously, didn't get mentioned once on Sunday night -- and I've seen enough clips and promos of the film adaptation to be confident I got the better end of the deal on that one.
So anyway, all I'll say about Sandra Bullock's Oscar win is this: Not having seen any of the five films to receive Best Actress nominations, I can't say where Bullock's acting job should rank among them. My beef is that she got nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role to begin with. Had they filmed Michael Lewis's book completely accurately, Bullock's character of Leigh Anne Tuohy would only have been eligible for the Best Supporting Actress category. She plays an important role in Michael Oher's awe-inspiring transformation, to be sure, but the story isn't about her; it's about Michael Oher. Flipping the script to give Bullock a shot at a bravura leading performance basically turns the whole deal into Very Very Special White Lady Saves Minority Youth, and I think that trivializes the amazing story of what both Oher and the Tuohys accomplished.
Did race play into that decision at all? Ergh, I'm not going near that can of worms. Not knowing any of the filmmakers, I'm not qualified to say whether turning "The Blind Side" into Very Special White Lady Story was a product of any racial condescension on their part. But whatever the motivation, it sure seems like it made for a less interesting movie.
And no, I can't imagine a reason why they would've had anyone but the Tuohy's actual daughter in the Collins Tuohy role. As cinematic mysteries go, that's right up there with Rosebud.
Holly directed me to this fascinating item from the Village Voice blog about music in strip clubs, and the most interesting revelation to me is that strip joints are apparently one of the main reasons really shitty mainstream rock groups like Nickelback and Staind hang on as long as they do. If titty-bar audiences like certain songs or bands -- no matter how obvious their awfulness might be to the general public -- then DJs snap up their records, the records cling to high chart positions, and the radio stations keep playing them. To me, this string of causation is almost as nefarious as finding out that the CIA hired the mob to kill Kennedy, or whatever the prevailing conspiracy theory is these days.
It's almost enough to make me want to take out a bunch of risky loans and open my own strip club, just to inject a better class of music into the world of adult entertainment. Hell, if I don't find a job soon, I may try applying for the job of strip-club DJ myself -- I've tried just about every other damn thing. This week's +5 is a taste of what I'd throw out there were I offered such a position -- Five Songs On My Strip-Club DJ Playlist:
Digital Underground, "The Humpty Dance" I've been to a strip club or two in my time -- yes, I know that's a shocking revelation -- and somehow I've never heard this song played. Not once. If I was a strip-club DJ, I'd remedy that real quick like, and could even rap the song live while the dancer performed (not that anyone would be paying attention to me, of course). This, incidentally, was the song I did when we visited the karaoke bar at the Imperial Palace during our big blogger trip to Vegas last spring. And I killed it, quite frankly.
Bell Biv Devoe, "Poison" Another song I can crush at karaoke, and another one I've surprisingly never heard at a strip joint. (My strip-club repertoire would have a strong '80s influence, which is another revelation that I know is just absolutely shocking to all of you.)
Pet Shop Boys, "Opportunities (Let's Make Lots Of Money)" Obviously there has to be a Pets song in there somewhere, but their catalogue is not exactly front-loaded with strip-club-appropriate songs -- it's pretty much either this, "Bet She's Not Your Girlfriend," or "It's a Sin," and this is probably the best-known of the three. Not to mention a great song to "make it rain" to, if that's what you're there for.
Isaac Hayes, "Theme from 'Shaft'" This is one of those songs that's so awesome I can't think of a situation it wouldn't be appropriate for, honestly. Strip club? Awesome. Bar mitzvah? Sure, why not. Funeral? Maybe it's a bit out there for you, but I'm going to make sure they play this as they wheel my casket out of the church.
Nouvelle Vague, "Too Drunk to F#&k" I'd save this one for the last song of the evening, by which time the song pretty much describes most of the patrons in the bar anyway. And just for the record, this wouldn't be the weirdest song I'd ever heard played at last call at a strip club; I was at a place in Birmingham a few months back where they closed out the night with Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy."
And now for the Ten, which may or may not come strip-club-approved:
1. The English Beat, "Can't Get Used to Losing You" 2. Beck, "Profanity Prayers" 3. Q-Tip, "Do It" 4. Public Enemy, "Bring the Noise" 5. Orbital, "Are We Here?" (Industry Standard version) 6. The Farm, "Rising Sun" 7. Pet Shop Boys, "Miracles" (Eric Prydz remix) 8. Sinéad O'Connor, "Famine" 9. Big Audio Dynamite II, "Kool-Aid" 10. Lyrics Born, "I Changed My Mind"
You know, with the Olympics having just recently concluded, it occurs to me how many good strip-club songs would also be great for figure skaters. The day a skater has the stones to select "Poison" or "The Humpty Dance" as her free-skate music, that's the day she locks up the gold medal, no questions asked.
Throw your own Random Tens and your own selections for music you'd play at a strip club (or, hell, music you'd dance to at a strip club) in the comments.
I don't spend a tremendous amount of time following ice hockey, but I've been watching a lot of it during the Olympics, as the Slovak national hockey team has progressed steadily through group play and now the single-elimination playoffs. Slovakia, of course, is the motherland of my mom's side of the family, and they've bitchmade Russia and Sweden so far on their way to facing Canada tonight in the semifinals. Win, and they would face the winner of U.S.-Finland in the gold-medal match; lose, and they still have a chance to pick up a bronze medal in the consolation match on Sunday. Either way, it would be Slovakia's first medal in Olympic hockey since splitting from the Czech Republic back in 1993.
The team's run in Vancouver has been a source of ancestral pride, but it's hardly the only thing Slovakia has to be proud of, so I decided to devote this week's +5 to the motherland: Five Things You Might Not Have Known Were Awesome About Slovakia.
The Tatras No, not the Ta-tas, perv. The Tatras are the mountain range that stretch across Slovakia's northern border with Poland and are the highest peaks in central Europe; having been to Slovakia about 10 years ago, I can attest that they are beautiful, and they're a part of the landscape just about wherever you go in the country. Maybe one of these days Slovakia will get to host the Olympics, and then we'll see who's got the raucous home crowds for hockey matches, Canada.
The Slovak resistance in World War II Slovakia actually had one of the more active resistance groups during the Nazi domination of Europe at the height of World War II, and mounted a two-month-long rebellion against the country's collaborationist government in 1944. Even though the "Slovak National Uprising" was eventually defeated by a large contingent of Nazi troops sent into the country, it continued guerilla operations for another six months and kept the Germans busy until the Red Army could roll in and rout the last of the Nazi occupiers from the country in March of '45. (Granted, the Soviets turned out to be not that much better from a dictatorial-occupying-power standpoint than the Germans had been, but you take your victories where you can find them.)
They have an American football team A few weeks ago, CBS's "Sunday Morning" did a segment about a league of teams playing American football in France and profiling some of the players who'd come over from the U.S. to play in it (one of whom, incidentally, was former Georgia QB Blake Barnes). Turns out there is an American football team in Slovakia, too -- the Bratislava Monarchs, who moved from the Central European Football League to the Czech League of American Football last year and went undefeated through their first regular season of CAAF play before losing to the Prague Lions in Czech Bowl XIII. (Yes, it's called the Czech Bowl. And yes, it is a league in which the Lions can win the championship. It really is kind of surreal.)
Tom Selleck Tom's father, Robert, came to America from Slovakia before World War II, and his son went on to star as Magnum, P.I., for eight seasons, thus providing thousands of young men of my generation with an inspiring life goal: to live rent-free on a breathtaking Hawaiian estate, drive around in a tomato-red Ferrari, squire around a choice selection of the island's hottest women, and solve murders. I'm still working on that one, of course, though I do have a friend in Honolulu whose couch I can crash on once I finally decide to kick that plan into motion.
Slovak chicks Slovakia meets the high standards of female talent set by the rest of the former Eastern Bloc, not only with the steady stream of supermodels they turn out each year but with a host of tennis players as well, such as Dominika Cibulková and Daniela Hantuchová, who was featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue last year. Slovakia spends a lot of time in the Czech Republic's shadow, but in this area, at least, they play second fiddle to no one.
The puck drops between Slovakia and Canada tonight at 9:30. I will be in front of the TV, and I'll have my jersey on.
The ten:
1. Thievery Corporation, "Encounter in Bahia" 2. Kraak and Smaak, "Squeeze Me" 3. Richard Cheese, "Butterfly" 4. The Pixies, "I Bleed" 5. R.E.M., "The Wrong Child" 6. The Farm, "Rising Sun" 7. Beck, "Ramshackle" 8. Erasure, "A Little Respect" 9. Alex Heffes, "Bukom Mashie" 10. Patton Oswalt, "Married & Single"
OK, so where are y'all's "people" from? Sing your homeland's praises in the comments (even if you can only trace them as far back as, say, New Jersey), and throw your own Random Tens in there while you're at it.
"Archer" is just reruns tonight and "30 Rock" is obviously being pre-empted by the Olympics, so I thought you might need some surrealism to tide you over until the morning.
I apologize for the relative dearth of new content on this blog over the past couple weeks. I blame it on a general malaise whose cause I'll get to in just a sec, though if you wanted to just translate that as "laziness" and leave it at that, I guess I couldn't argue with you. I would've liked to have had some news to offer on the ongoing job search, but there hasn't been much, certainly nothing meaningful.
In fact, I got kind of a nasty one-two punch in the last 24 hours: First, while I was filing my weekly unemployment claim with the Alabama Department of Industrial Relations on Sunday afternoon, a note popped up that this appeared to be my last week of eligibility for standard unemployment benefits and would I like to apply for the emergency extension that's been made available by the federal stimulus bill. I can't complain too much about that one, I guess -- after all, I'm lucky to have had that available to me at all, because it's certainly better to have it than not -- but still, that was a milestone I was really, really hoping I wouldn't have to cross. Then, this morning, I got the news that an opening I had applied for at Columbus Regional Healthcare -- and one that I was kind of excited about -- had been whittled down to two finalists, and I wasn't one of them. Ordinarily this wouldn't have been quite the punch to the gut that it was, since I've kind of gotten used to rejection over the very protracted course of this job search, but the thing is, my dad works for Columbus Regional, and if I can't even lean on nepotism as a way to land myself a job, then by that measure I'm actually less employable than Lane Kiffin.
Anyway. I've now been unemployed for more than seven months, during which time I've applied for probably around 100 jobs, some of them as close by as my hometown, others as far away as L.A. and Seattle. It has been an almost uniformly spirit-crushing journey, but one that has taught me a lot that I might never have learned otherwise. For one thing, I guess you could say that I've learned what it's like to technically be in a disadvantaged minority, and of all the things that suck about being in a disadvantaged minority, one of the worst is that people talk about you like you're not real.
The unemployment rate, the number of unemployed people, the number of jobs the American economy has added or lost in a given month -- these numbers get tossed around with a frequency that rivals football scores in the fall. And just like football scores, they are frequently used for the purpose of taunting and trash-talking. And until I'd entered the longest period of involuntary unemployment of my life, I had no idea just how demoralizing and infuriating that could be.
I've been rejected for around 100 jobs and on more than one occasion have barely scraped by in terms of paying my bills for a given month. So when I see a Republican Congressman or talking head crow on TV about how this Democratic bill or that Democratic bill have failed to make a dent in the unemployment rate, it really rankles me, as if they're actively rooting against my getting a job so that they'll have something to beat the Obama administration over the head with. It may be funny to you that the unemployment rate has stayed at such-and-such percentage in spite of everyone's best efforts, but as a member of that percentage, it's not much fun for me at all. And it's kind of shocking that these folks can't even take ten seconds to take a step back and observe just how joyous they look in proclaiming the news of my continued unemployment.
But the Republicans are hardly the only ones who don't get it. I get at least three e-mails a day from Media Matters or Democracy for America or some wing of the Democratic Party trying to pump me up and make me feel awesome that something the Democrats have done have created X number of jobs. That's great, and I certainly don't begrudge any of the people who've been able to snag one of those jobs, but obviously it hasn't trickled down to me yet. I don't know how to build fighter planes or bridges, and I haven't been to medical or nursing school, so I'm still out there looking. And looking. And looking. It's not like I expect someone to just drop a job into my lap -- though if any of y'all were thinking about doing that, you're welcome to do so -- but sometimes it seems a wee bit tone-deaf to get that excited about a supposed economic recovery when nearly 15 million people are still looking for jobs. Things might be getting better overall, but for me personally, I'm still in a deep recession, and the economy hasn't turned around for me until I'm pulling down a regular paycheck again. So it would be nice if fewer people in D.C. would act like all our problems are solved.
(The other thing I love is when one of those e-mails asks me for a donation because they just can't pass meaningful legislation without my support. You know, maybe I'm being cynical, but you've got control of the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress -- if you can't pass meaningful legislation with all that, then I doubt my five bucks is going to put you over the top.)
And believe me, I don't think for one hot minute that I'm stuck in the worst of it. I've got a roof over my head and two loving parents who have been generous enough to give me a soft place to land, and other than a mountain of credit-card debt that I freely admit I built all on my own, I don't have too many huge debts or obligations that are in danger of putting me under on a regular basis. But think about the people who have families, student loans to pay off, major medical bills for themselves or their loved ones, and who no longer have an income capable of keeping up with all this stuff. When you gloat over the success or the failure of an economic plan that's been passed by Washington, these are the people you're using to make your point. These are the people whose problems you're conveniently putting out of your mind so that you can score gotcha points against someone. And that is a shitty, shitty way for one American to be acting toward another.
We don't want to be your talking point. We don't want to be in your rah-rah press release. We don't want to be your billy club for you to bash the other side with. We don't even want you to turn around and offer us your pity, because that and two bucks will get us a tall coffee at Starbucks. All we want is the opportunity to go to an office or factory or store or whatever for eight hours a day and earn enough money to feed, clothe, and house ourselves. (Think about what little that is to ask: We're only asking for the ability to go do something most of us don't even like to do, and wouldn't do if we didn't have to.)
So keep that in mind the next time you're tempted to use me, or any of the 14,799,999 Americans as of last month, to score points against someone on the opposite side of the aisle from you politically. If you're going to crow about the failure of a given job-creation plan without offering any better ideas as an alternative, or crow about the success of a given plan without offering anything other than "Stay the course, our work here is done" as a follow-up, you may be helping yourselves but you're sure as hell not helping us. All you're doing is getting us really, really pissed off.
Rant over, because it's time to hit up the job sites again. And if any of them finally come up a winner, rest assured you'll hear about it here.
A plan is circulating under the radar in the Utah State Senate to share the holiday honoring civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., shot to death in 1968, with one of the country's most famous gun makers.
The plan is to rename the holiday, which falls on the third Monday of January, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr./John M. Browning Day, adding the gun manufacturer whose birthday also falls in January.
Is this going to be the start of a trend? Will the banks get a day off in October for Columbus/Remington Day? Will Presidents Day celebrate Washington and Lincoln and Smith and Wesson? Or do only black guys have to share their birthday commemorations with gun manufacturers?
That's it, Utah -- your statehood is officially downgraded to probationary status, with full statehood only being restored once this stupid-ass piece of legislation is voted down and consigned to the Smithsonian Institution's American Museum of Bad Idea History along with the Bay of Pigs invasion, New Coke, and the BCS on Fox. And if this thing does somehow get passed, you're being knocked back to a territory again. A territory! In case you haven't guessed, this week's +5 is Five U.S. States That Should Have Their Statehood Rescinded:
Utah Seriously, I'm having trouble figuring out what purpose this state serves other than being a Mormon barrier of puritanical morality standing between us and Vegas. Rescind Utah's statehood, annex them into Nevada (which they kind of almost were to begin with), and we'll have that problem out of the way, plus we will have reduced the amount of whining about mid-major conferences not getting automatic bids to the BCS by about two-thirds. On that note, I had a dream last night that I was on the sidelines at a Utah football game, and I was yelling about the Utah players chop-blocking everybody, and their coach came all the way over to my side of the field to read me the riot act about it. Screw you, Utah, for invading my subconscious.
Texas I can concede that the Lone Star State has its good points -- Austin, cheap airfares on Southwest Airlines, the cheerleading squads of its professional sports franchises -- but good lord, people, get over yourselves already. You fight one war of independence from Mexico, and all of a sudden you think you're hot shit, all "biggest state in the lower 48" and "you know, our constitution gives us the right to secede and form our own nation" and blah blah blah. Yeah, you think just because you managed to wriggle your way out of the crushing grip of a global superpower like Mexico, you're all ready to become an independent nation? Call me when you win the fight to secede from China or Pakistan or something. It's long past time we night to knock Texas down a peg or two by splitting it right down the middle and turning it into the third- and fourth-biggest states in the continental U.S. (Oh, and even now, Texas would be only the seventh-biggest province in Canada. I didn't want to have to whip that out, Texas, but you kind of drove me to do it.)
South Carolina My favorite beach, Edisto Island, is located in South Carolina about halfway between Charleston and Hilton Head, so this smarts a bit. But jeez, South Carolina, y'all have really been bringing the crazy lately. You had the Confederate-Flag-flying-over-the-state-capitol controversy, the Miss Teen USA embarrassment, the governor telling everyone he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when he was really jetting down to Argentina to nail his mistress, and, of course, everything associated with Bob Jones University -- and now you've got a state legislator proposing to ban U.S. currency and only allow the use of silver and/or gold coins. Yup, when you walk into a bar to buy your little airplane bottles of liquor, you'll only be able to use doubloons or pieces of eight, evidently. I did leave my heart in Edisto, so I can't bear to kick y'all out of the United States completely, but you haven't in any way proven the maturity level necessary to be a separate Carolina, much less an independent, self-governing U.S. state. I think we need to put y'all in time-out by absorbing you back into North Carolina -- which, to be fair, is not exactly a bulwark of sanity itself -- until such time as you can prove you're sane enough to govern yourselves.
Delaware I remain highly skeptical that anyone actually lives in Delaware; really, it's just a big tax haven for the credit-card companies that somehow ended up with its own license plates. I think we've only been allowing them to live this charade because they were the first state to ratify the Constitution, but so what? Would you give unlimited, uncensored commenting abilities to the worthless, drooling jagbags who leave "FIRST!!!111!!11!!" comments on your blog? Yank statehood away from them, annex the state into Maryland where it belongs, and make MBNA pay its fair frickin' share already.
Alaska Yes, the 49th state has untold natural beauty and some of the largest oil and natural-gas reserves in the Western Hemisphere. It's also got fewer than 700,000 residents -- fewer than the number who live in the Birmingham metropolitan area, yet with a far greater proportion of them who are, quite frankly, completely insane -- knocking around in more than 1.7 million square kilometers of real estate. Just for comparison's sake, that makes it more sparsely populated than any independent nation on earth and all but two of its dependent territories; even the disputed territory of Western Sahara is several times more crowded than Alaska. Plus the state is one of the biggest leeches of tax revenue in the entire country, sucking up a buck eighty-four in federal spending for every dollar they contribute in taxes. (And these are the people who complain the loudest about how much money the government wastes.) I think we can exploit Alaska's wealth of natural resources just fine without granting them the full privileges of statehood. You got a problem with it, go bitch to your next-door neighbors in the Yukon.
By my count, this plan puts us at 47 states, so I say we go ahead and give statehood to D.C., Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, just so we don't have to change the flag. Problem solved. No, no, you don't have to thank me.
And now the Ten:
1. Röyksopp, "Tristesse Globale" 2. Dimitri from Paris, "Sacre Francais" 3. The Fugees, "The Score" 4. Orbital, "Halcyon + On + On" (live) 5. Eric B. and Rakim, "Casualties of War" 6. George Michael, "Waiting For That Day" 7. Air, "All I Need" 8. Perez Prado, "Mambo #8" 9. Happy Mondays, "The Boys Are Back in Town" 10. Yello, "Oh Yeah"
Your Random Tens and recommendations for states that need to have their statehood yanked, either temporarily or permanently, are welcome in the comments.
Years ago, sportswriter (and #34 on the Most Loathsome List) Mitch Albom wrote some book called The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which supposedly was about a dude dying, going to heaven, and meeting the five people who had the biggest impact on his life and the person he became, even if he didn't know it at the time. I'd like to think that if that stuff actually happens, Jim Fletcher, the teacher whose funeral I went to yesterday, would be one of my five. But that's only if the afterlife is as Albom describes it, and since nothing else I've read of Albom's describes a world that exists in any kind of reality as I know it, I have to conclude (until shown otherwise) that he's full of crap about the Five People thing, too.
No, more likely we get sent to hell and have to confront the five people who played the biggest roles in turning us into the bitter, resentful, pissy people we became as adults. Then we have to hang out with them for the rest of eternity -- in a crowded chain restaurant in some tourist-trap of a town, with a waiter who can't get our orders right, seated next to a family who won't keep their obnoxious kids from running around and making noise. It's not a pretty picture, but it's more relatable, at least. And that's the inspiration for this week's +5: When I finally get around to writing my counterpoint to Albom, these are going to be the Five People I Meet In Hell.
Tom Cruise Ever since I was little, I've loved airplanes, and when I was young I desperately wanted to be a pilot. These aspirations came to a head in the summer of 1986, when my dad took me to see "Top Gun," the first movie I'd ever been allowed to see with a whole lot of cussing in it. Not more than a few months later, I took the Ishihara Color Plate Test and failed miserably, determining that I was red-green colorblind and thus would never fly for the military, NASA, or any reputable airline. A part of me will always associate Maverick with that disappointment; the other part of me will associate him with turning into a fucking loon around 2005. What happened to you, Tom?
Jennifer from the seventh grade The first time I ever told a girl I liked her, also not coincidentally the first time I got rejected. And by "told her I liked her" I mean "got her best friend to tell her," and by "rejected" I mean "according to her friend, she wrinkled her nose up in disgust." I've had an intense fear of rejection ever since, and am frequently a nervous wreck around women I'm attracted to -- except for Hooters waitresses and exotic dancers, oddly enough. Totally comfortable in those environments. I don't know why that is.
Newt Gingrich They say that most people get more conservative as they get older; if you're curious as to why I haven't, you need only look to this guy, who set out to prove everything George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm was spot-on almost from the minute he took over as Speaker of the House in 1995. I mean, my politics have always leaned to the left, but it was this dicklick who really hardened me from a liberal-leaning bleeding heart into an angry, bitter commie pinko. Seriously, nailing a Capitol Hill staffer even while you're impeaching a sitting president for getting blown by an intern? I hate to think my political motivations have devolved completely from "make the country and the world a better place" to "wipe the smug grin off [insert political opponent here]'s fat-fuck face," but if they have, Newt's historical footnote of a Speaker tenure was probably the point where it started.
Quincy Carter If the stuff I write about Georgia football frequently comes across as morose and fatalistic -- even when good things have happened, as if I'm sitting there biting my nails, just waiting for the other shoe to drop, like a Michigan fan -- His Quincyness is the reason. One of the top recruits in the country in 1998, scored a major coup for Georgia by backing out on his commitment to Tech and coming to Athens, was touted as a sure-fire superstar -- and then proceeded to pile-drive his career into a pit of interceptions and head-slapping mental errors. Instead of starting slow and then maturing into a fearless field general, Quincy led us to nine wins as a true freshman and regressed steadily from there, to the point where he didn't even take the field in the last four games of what would turn out to be his final year. They say that was because of "injury," but I suspect it had more to do with the "Pineapple Express"-caliber weed stash he supposedly had in his possession. Either way, it doesn't matter -- from that point on, every win, no matter how amazing, and every blue-chip recruit, no matter how highly touted, has been a source of joy and anxiety in equal measure. And don't even get me started on the Redskins.
My boss when I worked in Atlanta After a mostly ineffectual year in Lynchburg, Virginia, at my first job out of college, I was offered a job in Atlanta and jumped at it the way the Uruguayan rugby team probably jumped at their first taste of non-human meat after being rescued in 1972. Everything went fine for a year or so, and then somebody lobbed through the window a grenade marked "office politics": the investment company that had been brought in to keep the place afloat started making major changes, a brief power struggle ensued between that company and my company's founder, and my boss, who'd been dating said founder nearly the whole time, went a little nuts. That experience taught me that any job, no matter how much you might love it at first, can devolve into "I'm just doing this to be able to pay my rent" at any moment and without any prior notice. Tell 'em, Biggie.
And now the Ten:
1. Pet Shop Boys, "Vulnerable" (Public Eye dub) 2. A Tribe Called Quest, "Description of a Fool" 3. The Chemical Brothers, "Where Do I Begin" 4. Pet Shop Boys, "Being Boring" 5. Röyksopp, "Remind Me" 6. Neon Heights, "Again" 7. Deee-Lite, "Build the Bridge" 8. Toto, "Africa" 9. Michael Jackson, "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" 10. Patton Oswalt, "Death Bed"
Your turn! Throw your Random Tens, and/or the five people you're likely to meet in hell, in the comments thread.
There are a lot of things the world needs more of right now -- renewable energy, diplomacy, decent-paying jobs, non-surgically-enhanced boobs -- but above all, what we need more of is smart people. Specifically, smart people who aren't afraid to be smart. And we need one more than we did Monday, because one of the best of them, Jim Fletcher, died of a heart attack that night. Mr. Fletcher was my humanities and AP English teacher my senior year of high school, and was probably the greatest teacher I've ever had, at any level.
Because of Mr. Fletcher, I know about Greek culture and all the things they did that still influence us today; I know about the ways in which Western culture and art was preserved throughout the Dark Ages when any kind of written historical record or learning was at a premium; I know how the Renaissance got started and how it morphed into the other artistic and cultural movements that came after. I can walk into an art museum, look at a painting, recognize what style or "ism" it is, and understand how that reflects what society was going through at the time it was created. Mr. Fletcher not only taught us about all those things, he taught us why they mattered.
But I don't want to make it sound like he was some effete snob who shut himself up inside his house with his classics, completely disdaining everything about modern culture. At the end of a long unit on the Dark Ages, he showed us "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in class; for those who were interested in learning more about the 1960s while we were reading Slaughterhouse-Five in class and discussing that decade's various cultural upheavals, he invited us over to his house to watch "Easy Rider" and "The Graduate," which was the first time I saw either. He rarely shied away from discussing difficult or controversial topics in class, because for all his sarcasm and irascibility -- which, to be sure, became the stuff of legend throughout the Columbus teaching community -- he gave us credit for being strong enough to handle that stuff unless we showed otherwise.
If we did show otherwise, of course -- whether it was by making a stupid comment in class or just getting caught napping in the back of the room -- we'd get called out for it in the most ego-shriveling manner possible. I can't recall a single time Mr. Fletcher yelled, or even raised his voice, at anyone; he'd just shake his head and mutter something about one of us needing to ride the short bus to school. "Wetumpka Tech," i.e. the only college we'd get accepted to if that was the best we could do, was another one of his favorite catch-phrases. He enjoyed verbal sparring with his students from time to time, but I rarely saw anyone get the better of him, and I can't recall a specific instance in which I enjoyed that privilege myself.
But in spite of the legend that had been built up around him over his 26 years at my high school, that kind of acidity wasn't his standard teaching M.O. It was OK if you didn't understand a concept the very first time. It was even OK if you didn't like a book or a piece of music or a style of art we were discussing in class. The only thing that was guaranteed to not be OK was not caring, was not wanting to know more. Differences of opinion were perfectly fine in his classroom, often even encouraged. Apathy was the biggest no-no.
That, even above all the other things Mr. Fletcher gave us, was the most important -- the belief that knowledge was a good thing to have, that an awareness of one's history and culture was important, that willful ignorance was to be ridiculed, not celebrated. You'd think that'd be an obvious virtue, but look around you at all the people who go into life with a "Don't confuse me with facts when I've already made up my mind" attitude, the people who condemn anything the least bit edgy or challenging as dangerous to society, the people who'd mutter "faggot" if you tried to spark any kind of conversation about art or literature. There is a certain segment of society who not only don't know anything more about the world around them than the prejudices and assumptions they've already created, but whether because of fear, laziness, or resentment, they don't want to know anything more. But Mr. Fletcher did his part to help mold entire generations of kids in Columbus, Georgia, who were worldly enough to resist that.
Mr. Fletcher leaves behind a wife, kids, stepkids, and grandkids who are all going to miss him very much, but he also leaves behind hundreds, maybe even thousands, of former students who remember the gifts he gave them vividly enough to know what the next few generations will be missing. That may be the saddest thing about all of this -- the fact that the kids who come through Hardaway after us will never know what it feels like to be made smarter by James T. Fletcher. That was a pretty special privilege.
The word "elitist" gets thrown around a lot these days, so much so that it's started to lose any meaning. And the people who seem to be throwing it around the most are the ones in that group I mentioned earlier, the willfully ignorant who don't want to know anything more than what they've already decided. I'm sure they would've found Mr. Fletcher to be irredeemably elitist, too, had they ever met him, but Fletch didn't think he was better than other people based solely on their taste in art or music, their appearance, their political convictions, or any of that. The only people he thought he was better than were the people who didn't care enough to want to know more. If that makes both him and me elitist, then I plead guilty on behalf of the both of us. But I think it's the kind of elitism the world needs more of, and for helping to create more of it, Fletch has my gratitude.
