Five Awesome Things About The Super Bowl

by Jeff on February 8, 2010 · 1 comment

in Things I Hate

Go Saints, and all, but the really awesome things about last night’s game have nothing to do with football.  As anybody off the street knows, the real story of the Super Bowl is the ads, some of the most expensive spots on TV each year and the result of millions and millions of dollars in research, creative and production expenses. Millions of millions. The Super Bowl Ad is its own mini-industry.  Think about that and weep as you recount some of the biggest and most awesome hits from the 2010 Super Bowl.

1. Frequent pauses to explain random Internet culture references to co-viewers.  “No, mom, that’s Tay Zonday. He wrote a song called “Chocolate Rain” and put it on YouTube and he became kind of Internet popular, which is the kind of popular where you get booked on Jimmy Kimmel but not the kind of popular where most of Kimmel’s audience knows who you are.  No, that isn’t the bird from Cinderella.  That’s Twitter. Well, Twitter is….” [Incidentally - Vizio wins this year's distinction of Best Ad of the 2008 Super Bowl].

2. The ignition of a pantsless trend in advertising that will likely continue unabated for a few months until CP+B do a Burger King ad where the King has no pants on and there are five suicides directly linked to that TV spot.

3. Discovering that the secret to the Who’s longevity and relatively good preservation is an almost total lack of energy in their performances.   Watching Pete Townshend lazily windmill his arm around his guitar was like having my heart turned to stone.  I think next year, the Super Bowl should abandon the concert format entirely, and have the halftime show be a midfield reading by Dean Koontz or selections from Les Miserables performed by cats in 18th century French garb.  A giant TV screen displaying Facebook updates about the Super Bowl for 25 minutes. Wolves turned loose in the stadium. Anything.

4.  Another trend for 2010? Hating women, all of whom are joyless tyrants preventing men from taking control of their own adult lives.

5. Danica Patrick. Is it just me, or is she in every goddamn ad that didn’t feature Megan Fox or Betty White? Also, see #4 re: those godawful GoDaddy commercials that make me feel like I need to take a shower after each time I see one, just so that I stop feeling icky. We can show those all day long, but can’t show implied making out between two guys just once?  I mean, granted, it’s not something I’m chomping at the bit to watch, but really CBS?

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Book Store Ruminations – Salinger

by Jeff on February 5, 2010 · 2 comments

in Things I Hate

So J.D. Salinger passed away. I certainly am not pretentious enough to call Salinger an influence, but I believe that reading Salinger was influential on me as a writer. While I don’t think that anything he’s published is ‘bad’, my favorite of the stuff out there is 9 Stories, followed by the Glass stories, and then by Catcher In The Rye, perhaps more a reaction to me having read Catcher first than a knock against its quality.

My favorite Salinger-themed anecdote, though, has precious little to do with his writing or his storied reclusiveness.

When I was in high school, I worked at a bookstore.  I hated every moment of it, except for getting to borrow books and snag stripped books for free. The main reason I hated it? The customers. The dumb, dumb customers.  I suppose to be thematic, I should call them a bunch of goddamn phonies.

I remember one customer came in to look for a copy of The Catcher In The Rye.  But couldn’t remember the name of the book. Or the author. Or the plot. But she read it in school and wanted a new copy.  How did I know it was Salinger’s novel? Well, the only thing she remembered was the cover. It was red, with yellow letters on it.

Only one book matches this description:

the_catcher_in_the_rye

“Catcher In The Rye,” I say.

I retrieved a copy of the book, but unfortunately, we only had the white, striped cover that the current generation of high schoolers knows and loves.  “No,” the customer tells me, “this isn’t a red cover.” No amount of assuring the customer that this was the same book, she would not stop insisting that she needed the red, currently out of print, version of the book.  Was it for a bet, maybe? A scavenger hunt? An oddly specific bedroom role-play scenario?

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LOST

3 February 2010

So LOST is back, and I’m pretty excited for the final season.  My pal Aaron is even more excited than I am, which is why we had this conversation about the show earlier today, which is based on my seeing about 30 minutes of the season premiere.  Light spoilers for those 30 minutes follow.

Jeff: Man, [...]

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UGC Week: Project Mixtape: Soundtrack

1 February 2010

C says, “Compile a 15-song soundtrack for your life so far.”
What would a movie of your life be like?
That’s the first question that I landed on when I started tackling this post.  Trying to imagine what kind of soundtrack requires a knowledge of the movie; is it a sweeping, strings-lush instrumental score, 80s covers by [...]

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Victory!

1 February 2010

I have a few more UGC Week stragglers that I’ll be hitting today or tomorrow.
But right now, I have some Important News to share.
My iPod successfully synced with my laptop yesterday afternoon.
Most of you might not think this is a big deal. You have iPods and laptops and they connect with each other maybe once [...]

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Friday Cover Songs – The Worst Covers Ever

29 January 2010

Some of you still think cover songs are bad. I imagine these covers are part of the reason why.
This take on Europe’s “The Final Countdown” may be the most terrible thing ever perpetrated on state fairs.  I find it more amusing than I should.

A close second to the above is this battle of the bands [...]

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UGC Week: Tunes

28 January 2010

Bill says, “Recommend bands we should listen to and give us reasons why we should.”
I think by dint of listening to a lot of music, a mistaken notion that I am smart about music exists among a lot of my friends. I don’t pretend to be; I just like what I like and I don’t [...]

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UGC Week – Iambic Pentameter

27 January 2010

Caroline wants to know, “Do you know any poems by heart?  Are there ones you were forced to memorize/ones you decided to pick up on your own?  If you do have these floating around in your head, what do you use them for?
If the memorization thing doesn’t apply, tell me about a poem you wish [...]

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UGC Week: Respectfully, No

27 January 2010

Perry demands: “Describe various acquaintances as comic book characters without explicitly saying who each is supposed to be, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to determine the secret identity of each.”
This is fun for nobody. An interesting mental exercise, to be sure, but one that is preloaded with divisiveness.
First of all, there’s the [...]

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UGC Week: Blackest Night and Seige

26 January 2010

Bill says, “Blog about comics. Like, compare/contrast Siege and Blackest Night.”
I generally try to avoid the nerdiest of nerdy comic stuff here, saving it for Alert Nerd, but I do what my readership commands. Because I care.
I have, in fact, written about Blackest Night in a meta kind of way, a few times before. [...]

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