Ornamental Memories

I’m having a hard time catching the Christmas spirit this year. I’m just going through the motions. My blogfriend, kb, put up a funny timetable of the stages of Christmas. The pace of the season makes it hard to just sit back and relax.

The one Christmas ritual that I find most comforting is to just sit in the dark and watch the lights blink on the Christmas tree. It just lets the tension of the day ooze away. Last year I wrote a post where I made a tree out of pictures of our ornaments. Most of the ornaments are souvenirs from our vacations. Since then we took our marathon cross-country round trip and added a few ornaments to the tree.

The St. Louis Arch was a blast. That was also where we saw the Budweiser Clydesdales including one that was very glad to see us.

At the Grand Canyon, there is a building done in the architectural style of the local Native Americans called the Hopi House. Inside they sell various crafts and souvenirs from local Indian. The condors like to hang out right outside as well.

This Alamo ornament is actually prettier than the real thing. After all, it was only a quirk of history that turned this particular mission into a national icon rather than one of the other ones in the San Antonio area.

Perhaps that is part of what I find so relaxing about watching Christmas tree lights. Knowing that there are so many memories hanging from the branches.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: What memories do you have on your tree?

Looking Golden

I love it when people agree with me. Not many do, but the Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation shares at least a few opinions of mine. The Golden Globe nominations were announced today. While most of the news stories will lead with the Leo vs. Leo and Clint vs. Clint drama in the movie department, I want to look at the television nominations because I have some dogs in those fights.

Alec Baldwin got nominated for Best Actor (Comedy or Musical) as the over the top exec in 30 Rock that torments Tina Fey and Sarah Paulson from Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is up for Best Actress (Drama) for playing JesusGirl, a martini-swilling born-again love interest for Matthew Perry. These were both winners in their respective categories in my Studio 60-30 Rock Face-Off a few weeks back. Sadly, neither show drew a Best Show nod, so the final verdict will have to wait for Emmy season to see if either show can get recognized there.

Other highlights:

• Matthew Perry got an acting nomination for a TV movie, but the halo effect from his fine work in Studio 60 may help him.
• If you want a Best TV Actor Comedy nomination, it helps to be on NBC Thursday nights. Each show in the newly reformed Must-See-TV-Lite block got one nomination. Alec Baldwin is up against lead-ins Zach Braff, Jason Lee, and Stephen Carrell. Only Tony Shaloub is on another night or network.
• Heroes trumps both S60 and 30R with nominations for Best Drama and Best Supporting Actor for Geek God Masi Oka.
• The Best Show On Television, Battlestar Galactica is completely shut-out once again despite other cable shows like Big Love and Weeds getting multiple nominations.

The Golden Globes are the "fun" awards show since nobody, except the people with careers riding on it, really take it seriously. And maybe Drew Barrymore will show up with her Golden Globes again.

MetaComicBlogging

There are ways to tell when a trend is over. It makes the cover of Time magazine. Your mother takes it up. And it becomes a punchline for the comics.



The egotism required to put your words unsolicited out on the internet attracts a certain naive narcissism.



I have no idea how many people in the real world have a blog or read a blog, but some comic strip writers think just putting the word 'blog' in a punchline is a sure fire gut buster. Like this one:


Hey, I wrote about my ACL repair surgery. That’s a cheap shot.

Mining the same bloggers-have-no-readers vein is this Pearls Before Swine.


I have to thank fellow Achenboodler and erudite blogger in her own right, kb, for passing along that last one. And least I think I should thank her. Maybe she was telling me something.

There is another Time maxim that states it takes three examples to prove a trend. If this brief sampling is any indication, blogging will join the pantheon of lame comic strip jokes along with blinking clocks on VCR's and making up stuff on your Christmas newsletter. Because it's so original and it never gets old.

See you in the funny papers for more Ouroborosean blogging about comics about blogging.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Post or describe your meta-blog-comic sightings.

My MySpace Friends

I'm trying to win an iPod Nano. The very popular podcast Keith And The Girl has torn a page from the broadcast radio playbook and is giving out prizes to loyal listeners. The rules are really easy:

1. Have a Keith and The Girl logo in your MySpace picture.
2. Keith and The Girl must be in the Top 4 on your MySpace page.
3. A Keith and the Girl clip must be on your MySpace music player.
4. Have more that 20 MySpace friends.

When I heard this contest, I knew my best shot would be on the first day, before everyone else got their webpages pimped up. Changing the logo was easy. I just clipped my face over the cartoon Keet and I was good to go. KATG was already in my Top 4 so I should get extra credit. The music player was tough to figure out because I hate music on webpages and had never done it to mine. Chemda in the KATG forums helped me out there.

Getting 20 friends was the tough task. I had about 14 friends and needed to six more in eight hours. I just sent friend requests to all sorts of people and got my list up to 21 in time for the drawing. I didn't win. They have given out about a half dozen more Nanos since then and I'm still waiting for my name to be called.

Next week (Dec 11-15) they are giving out a Nano a day in the Christmas run-up. I feel lucky. Since getting friends is a big part of the contest, I figured I might as well analyze my friends list, which is now up to 42.

Keith and The Girl is a very funny and extremely politically incorrect 'couplecast'. Keith is a stand-up comic. Chemda is "the Girl". If your name was Chemda, you'd go by "the girl" too if you expected people to say the name of your show. She is an erstwhile kid's party clown and an excellent singer. They have a lot of recurring guests that give the show the feel of a huge floating party. Patrice is their gossip columnist who is on most Thursdays and is the highlight of the show. Max is a young cute magician who is also very funny. SexyPotatoE (the 'E' is deliberately ironic) is their high-school intern that has a fund drive to buy herself a laptop.

Keith And The Girl And Friends
Keith and..	chemda	Patrice	Max	Sexy PotatoE	Sponsor A..

Most of my early friends were people that I met through my association with comic strips. Some are fellow comic strip junkies. Some are spoof sites. Some are legit promotional pages. I leave it to you to figure out which are which.

Comics and Comics Fans
Francesco	carol	Aldo Kelrast	Helen
David	Fencepost..	Sheraton ..	LUANN

A lot of friends from MySpace just accumulate. Since the contest started, I haven't been turning down friends requests. I've even made friends requests to people just because they were on pages of people already on my friends list.

Other Bloggers and Random Strangers
Liz	Kevin Zee..	SueBdynamo	Joe
Aj Davis	Samantha	Yaeli

There all sorts of bands and celebrities with MySpace pages since a few bands have ridden MySpace to fame. These are easy friends to get since the groups have people that do nothing but approve requests. Some of these are famous and some are up and coming. And Pela RAWKS!

Bands and Celebrities
U2	Pela	KIKI	Lisa Rinna	D.L. HUGHLEY

And last, but not least:

Dane Cook


Dane Cook is the hacky but wildly successful comedian that Keith and The Girl hate, but since he brags about how many MySpace friends he has, I figured he was easy pickings.

I also have a lot of other KATG fans in my friends list because of the contest. I'm not linking to any of them. Let them win their own Nano.

BlantantMySpaceWhoring™: You can be my friend, but if you win a Nano before me, I'm cutting you off my list. Ooooh, snap!

Wolverines!

“If there were foreign forces in New Jersey, Tony Soprano would be an insurgent leader.” – The Iraq Study Group Report

I beg to differ. If there were foreign forces in Colorado, Patrick Swayze would be an insurgent leader. The premiere right-wing paranoid fantasy of the 80s (and I call it that with the greatest respect) was the movie Red Dawn which described the guerilla war waged by a group of red-neck high school kids. In the film, a Soviet-Cuban alliance has moved up Central America domino style and finally invaded a gun-controlled United States.

Patrick Swayze leads a rag-tag group of Brat-Pack also-rans including Charlie Sheen, C.Thomas Howell, and Lea Thompson. They run to the hills and wage an escalating insurgency while the occupying army futilely tries to pacify the civilian sympathizers. I’m not the first to recognize the ironic parallels, but I am stunned more people don’t realize the tragic role reversal we have placed ourselves in.

As popular as Red Dawn was among Young Republicans in the 80s, you would think that a few of the neocons predicting rose-strewn parades through Baghdad would have remembered the moral of Red Dawn: Nobody makes movies with the jackboots as the heroes.

I don’t want to make any moral equivalencies. I subscribe completely to the benefits of Western Civilization and the entire post-Enlightenment philosophy from Hume and Locke on. We need to work for a world where individual liberty and democracy are the norm.

Unfortunately, we are not serving our cause well in the Middle East. Our behavior in Iraq from the well-documented incompetence of the CPA to the repugnant atrocities of Abu Ghraib to our continuing status as the monkey-in-the-middle target in an increasingly ugly tribal civil war has not put the ideals of our nation in the best light.

Nobody ever professes nostalgia for the stability of Vichy France and every Iraqi that cooperates with us, no matter how patriotic or farsighting, will be eventually branded a collaborator. Instead, the country will fall sooner or later (and my money is on sooner) into the hands of groups that will hate us for generations. And we will bear some of the responsibility.

Reagan described America as a lighted city on the top of a hill. We need to lead by example and use our soft power to spread our values. We also need to remember what they are and apply them globally regardless of how much oil the inhabitants are sitting on.

Some enterprising Farsi John Milius wannabe will someday plagiarize the Red Dawn script and make an uplifting film about brave students that killed evil Americans to liberate his country. That movie will make me sick to my stomach. In my movies, the Americans are the heroes. We need to act like heroes.

Blatant LinkBacking™: E. J. Dionne defends democracy in his column today.

The Last Waltz Foxtrot

I have talked about bad comics like For Better or For Worse before (well several times before), but I prefer to look at the comics that are good. I like comics that are clever and sly, like Sally Forth and Doonesbury and newcomer Watch Your Head. Newer, edgier comics like Pearls Before Swine and Frazz are making waves now. And despite the example of every loser strip in the Crappy Comics Competition, just because a strip is old enough to vote, that doesn’t mean it has lost its funny.


One comic that has stood the test of time is Foxtrot. This is a family comic that is not afraid to let it’s geek flag fly. It inspired my Comics Curmudgeon tagline. It takes chances on jokes that maybe 1% of its readership will get. I’m told that the binary in the cereal bowl reads “YOU NERD”. I’ll take the real nerds' word on it.

But alas, according to a press release, as of 2007, Foxtrot is going to Sundays only. The wear of actually being funny seven days a week as opposed to just phoning it in (we’re looking at you Guisewite and Davis) can be exhausting. It’s what drove Gary Larson and Bill Watterson to retirement.


Rather than quitting cold turkey, Bill Amend is slowing down. The history of success with this strategy is poor. Remember Outland anyone? Even the revived Opus will never touch the glory that was Bloom County. There is something about the pace of a daily humor strip stringing together a week of themed gags that deftly strikes the right balance between lame old school random gag a day strips like Beetle Bailey and B.C. and the interminably slow soap strips. The sequence of jokes makes the whole funnier than the sum of the parts. In a Sunday only strip any running bit would just become tedious.


Foxtrot is a stuck in amber strip where the characters never age, but the cultural references stay fresh. Over the years, Jason has geeked out over every nerd-boy trend.The strip often dared to break the fourth frame and go meta. Amend let us in on the gags and rewarded the reader that paid attention. Even the parody product names are hilarious.


My only hope is that the success of Aaron MacGruder has encouraged Amend to chase after those animated Boondocks Bucks. A Foxtrot themed cartoon could be some cross between The Simpsons and Clerks: The Animated Series. Or it could be Dilbert. Let’s hope for the best. I am going to miss Jason and Andy and even Paige at the breakfast table every morning.

Save the last dance for me.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Can a Sunday only comic be as funny as a daily strip?

The Wii Mii

We have a Wii! The best part is that I did not have to stand in line for 2 hours in the cold outside BigBoxOfElectronics™ like one of my coworkers. I had connections. My wife’s brother works for a computer game company, which in my son’s eyes, makes him the coolest uncle in the world. My brother-in-law used a connection at Nintendo to get Wii’s for himself, us, and two of his coworkers. No eBay auctioning for them. People want the Wii for themselves.

I am not a gamer, but my son is. Over the years he has owned the Nintendo64, Dreamcast, Gamecube, PlayStation 2, Gameboy Advanced, GameboyDS, Sony PSP, and now the Wii. We hypothetically asked him if he wanted a PlayStation3, and he said “meh”. Which is good, because those are not available at any price for anybody. My b-i-l says that he knows people that work for Sony that can’t even get one.

The killer app for the Wii is The Legend Of Zelda: Link Runs Around Some More. All I know is that my son can play it for hours. The other night I forced him off so I could play Bowling and try out the very cool Wii-mote. This TV remote looking device has a motion detector in it that makes it a little un-nerving at first. You just point it at the screen and the cursor moves around. No need to get carpal tunnel thumbing a little joystick.

To bowl, you swing your arm just like in real bowling. The difference is that you just have a little remote in your hand instead of a sixteen pound ball. In my first game, I lost to my son 117-108, which is about what I would bowl in real life.

The most fun was building my Mii, the little avatar that represents me. I know all the cool games come with infinitely configurable characters nowadays, but I liked building a little stick-like guy to represent me. I made sure to get the hairpart right and add glasses. I guess if I were vainer, I would make him a little cooler, but that’s not how I roll.

At less than half the price of a PS3, the Wii is plenty of game system for me. Get one of your own, and you too will go wii-wii-wii all the way home.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Did I make my Mii-guy dorky looking enough?

BooksFirst - November 2006

Books Read

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis
Spy: The Funny Years by Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen, and George Kalogerakis

Books Bought

Spy: The Funny Years by Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen, and George Kalogerakis
Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen

Comments

Michael Lewis is a journalistic genius. His first book, Liar’s Poker, is the undisputed classic of the 80s genre of Big Business Exposé. Proving that he is no one trick pony, he has written authoritative books on baseball and the internet among other topics. He brings a clarity and perspective on any topic that is technical, comprehensive, and enlightening.

This book is a little misleadingly sub-titled "Evolution Of A Game", suggesting a broad history of football, which it isn’t. It does give some overview on the metamorphosis of the left tackle into a highly paid skill position. From my perspective it also sheds light on how and why so many awful quarterbacks from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went on to success at other teams.

Instead, it is a case study of how Michael Oher (not his birthname, but the name he goes by), the large but quiet son of a ghetto crackhead, gets adopted by a wealthy football crazy family and gets Henry Higgens-ed into a star college football player. Not until the very end of the book does Lewis acknowledge that the subjects of the book are personal friends of his, and whether he admits it or not, that knowledge colors the slant of the story.

The tale is told as an O. Henry-ish happy ending about a poor kid that gets a big break. It could just as easily be a cautionary warning about the horrors and hypocrisy of the college football/NFL farm team industrial machine. Oher, whose elementary education was non-existent, gets tutored and dragged educationally through a segregation academy in suburban Memphis because he is big enough to win football games all by himself. Every (admittedly hypocritical and counter-productive) NCAA eligibility rule is abused and loop-holed well beyond recognition. As Lewis admits, nobody is out there searching public housing projects and taking in the future accountants of the world.

While some find this an uplifting tale of overcoming adversity, I found it a depressing acknowledgement of how much human potential is being ignored and abandoned in the slums of our very own country as well as the prevalence of the win at any cost rabidness that infects sports at every level.

The much lamented Spy magazine inspired me to entitle my blogroll "Blogrolling In Our Time". Their publicist friendly movie reviewer, Walter Monheit®, was also the subject of one of my very early blog posts. It turns out that Walter was a real person and a minor socialite in his own right. That is one of the many amusing anecdotes in this large and sprawling history of America’s snarkiest magazine ever.

I discovered Spy about two years into its brief life. After a few newsstand issues, I was hooked into a subscription. After reading it, I would bring each issue to work and donate it to the company library. All the running gags and celebrity exposés became office in-jokes. Then I changed jobs and at about the same time Spy vanished. I found it again years later a mere shadow of itself. The format was the same, but all the wit had been sucked out of it. It read like a high-brow Maxim without the cheesecake spreads (Much like Esquire in it’s heyday was Playboy for guys that really read the articles).

Spy: The Funny Years is borderline coffee-table sized and heavy enough to be dangerous to read in bed. The large pages allow for long full reprints of some of Spy’s epic stories. I had forgotten how dense and journalistic all that side-splittingly droll irony was. The hagiography of Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen is comprehensive, but ultimately lacks a narrative arc. That clubhouse “kids left loose with a mimeograph machine” attitude is described but never evoked. The frequent editorial footnotes leads one to wonder who actually wrote the book since the semantic flair of the magazine is sorely missing.

Carter and Andersen and a lot of the original staff have long been co-opted or assimilated into other magazines in such a way that the Spy DNA is apparent in nearly anything from the newsstand that I bother reading. They taught the world that snark sells, but it has been watered down and made publicist safe. That hell-bent-for-leather damn-the-torpedoes sense of they-didn’t-just-say-that lives on in only the most cynical websites like Gawker where advertisers and celebrities don’t yet call the shots.

In a way, Spy was doomed from the start. The candles that burn the brightest burn the shortest. I will always miss Spy.