The Super Oscar Bowl
Well, the Niners will not be going to the Super Bowl.
If you doubt me, then spend three minutes surfing your Facebook feed.
So the Super Bowl will be played by the Denver Broncos and the Seatle Seahawks.
Which is great and all, but leaves me no one to root for. Cause even though I absolutely love visiting both cities, they'd be my top five in the nation, I don't like either football team. Screw Papa John's and the 12th Man.
Which sucks cause the Super Bowl to me is like the second coming of Thanksgiving. Food, Family, Football.
What equally sucks is that the Oscar nominations just came out with nine, count 'em, nine flicks in the best movie category, Joann and I haven't seen a single one. Not one.
Which is ridiculous.
We're pop culture junkies, yet we have to scroll all the way down to the best sound editing category before we even have a favorite.
Boo.
The Super Bowl and the Oscars are like my favorite American holidays. Nachos, and sliders, and fried cheese sticks and beer, and no one has to bring presents or pay special attention to the children.
But 2014 is going to be just a Meh year for both.
Meh.
Yet, I've decided to take this as a good sign.
The universe is specifically telling Me (cause somehow I consider myself that important) it's telling me that the time for frivolity is not right this second. I need to take every ounce of energy and focus on my goals. I need to draft S.M.A.R.T. plans and consider all entrepreneurial angles, I need to be more dedicated to my body and my self esteem, I need to concentrate, be serious, be pragmatic, productive and profitable.
There is no room for hot wings when you've got an empire to build.
This isn't the time for friends and family and farting about.
This is about hustle, and no pain no gain, maximizing income, minimizing costs, I need to be more machine now than man.
I need to be Darth Vader.
Well, wait.
Maybe a guy who gets hacked to pieces by his best friend and then gets hacked to pieces again by his own son thirty years later shouldn't be considered my spirit animal.
And, lets kinda face it, the Super Bowl is really about the commercials, and the Oscars, well, they're really all about the dresses, and if the Universe tells you things, then it will only go so far as to tell you eat and to procreate.
This stage I'm at right now, with this grand experiment, this chasing of the proverbial dream, itsn't terribly hard, but it can be horribly depressing, and if there's anything I need right now, it's a little frivolity, a little food, a little procreation, a little nonsense to balance out the ridiculous.
In fact, I think I'm gonna skip tomorrow's email campaign and take my girl out to a movie.
Fun With Global Warming Five
So it's January 17th, 2014
And the mercury is just about touching 80 degrees.
Biknini weather.
Now my liberal friends are throwing a Global Warming barbecue to celebrate man's destruction of the atmosphere by lighting food on fire using a solar cooker. I'd feel oddly hypocritical driving up there in my SUV, but you can take my V-6 when you can pry my cold dead hands off the steering wheel.
My conservative friends are concerned about what this drought is going to do to their lawns but excited for all the extra golfing they get to do in February.
I'm just pissed that there isn't enough snow to go sledding this year.
This will not contain a lecture on Global Warming, except to say that renewable energy is going to have to happen anyway at some point in humanity's history. Let's just get on with it shall we?
It doesn't matter to me how you feel about the subject, but for the sake of a good time, lets just imagine that Global Warming is real and consider some of the advantages that come with the rising tides.
Beach Front Property:
I live in the Sierra Foothills just above the state capitol of California. So, if the Pacific Ocean ever does spill into the Central Valley, my little half plex could be smack dab in the middle of the new Marin county and, ironicaly, won't be underwater any longer.
Polar Bears:
Sure they look all cuddily, but Polar Bears are extremely dangerous, pathological liars, and it's kind of time for Coca Cola to get a new mascot anyway, right?
Underground Cities:
Insurance companies will soon no longer cover any home built above ground in the hurricane zones, which will be just about everywhere. Think about it. And start imagining a new life of artificial lighting, spray tans and airport style people movers. Didn't you always want an indoor pool?
Mellow Noma:
Sick of the color pink? Me too. In fact I thinks it's about time that skin cancer awareness pushes boobies off their pedestal. (This is terribly unfunny, since melanoma runs rampant in my own genetic line, and will most likely be exactly how the universe shuffles off my mortal coil, but I just couldn't pass up the chance to say boobies. There, I've said it. Boobies.)
More Canada:
With all the ice melting, our great sister state will soon quadruple the land available to suburban sprawl. As America's greatest source of foreign oil, comedic actors, and IHOP condiments, the great nation of Canada will, within just a few genterations, be able to deliver ten times the wholesome goodness it's known for. And maybe, just maybe this quiet world power will be able to compete in the Summer Olympics and take home as many silver medals as China or the Russians.
Throwback Thursday: The Best of Days
So Orwell wasn't so good with dates.This being 1986 and Big Brother is nowhere to be found.
We're getting a little closer, what with 24 hour surveillance, having your cell phone track your location in real time and the simplification of language, LOL, but in 1986, there was virtually none of that.
Although, if I do remember anything, it's the size of the cell phone, that big Motorola hand job that weighed a good 73 pounds, used by one of the project engineers on this construction site. It would be the closest I'd get to cellular technology until 1995 when I got my first and only pager.
Now this day, this day was as fine as days get.
I always felt sorry for the other children. When they had to go to work with their parents, they had to sit in offices. They were handed printer paper and crayons and told to be quiet.
But when I got to go to work with my mom, I got to drive a fucking tractor.
I didn't say ride in a tractor, I said drive.
On a construction site.
(For the record, this was the site of the Concord Airport Plaza, Phase 2, which looked almost identical to Phase 1, except that the interior had to be designed differently because it was to house the credit division of Wells Fargo, and if you remember anything about corporate computers at that time, they needed a lot of space and a lot of air conditioning. In perspective, your cell phone now has more computing power than this entire building was designed to house. Google it.)
Littered with I-Beams and broken pieces of wood, and nails of every shape and size. There were pneumatic tools and porta-potties and unlimited cokes from the vending machines. The vehicles were American built and the men were made up of equal parts dirt and sweat and beer and calluses.
I love this picture cause you can see prissy little me at ten years old with my socks pulled up to my knees and my velcro shoes and my collared shirt sitting next to my mom in jeans and a T-Shirt and flip flops.
Flip-flops at a construction site.
She wasn't a rube, she just took not giving a shit to a whole 'nother level.
Sorry if your mom was boring and couldn't teach you how to drive a Bobcat, them's the breaks I guess.
Speaking of "breaks" the reason I grabbed this picture is because I've been thinking about the likelihood of inevitability.
Like, was it inevitable that I ended up chasing art instead of construction?
I absolutely adore building things and I hate bars for the most part, so how come that little boy there, who was so proud, that for twenty five years he could point out a building and tell people that his mom built that, how come he is now, at 37, plugging songs at open mic nights at the local dives and not sitting at a drafting table imagining entire cities?
The full tale would be silly, but there was a pivotal moment:
Among the classes I took my first semester in college was an elective called "Introduction to Engineering"
I wanted to be an engineer, but I didn't know exactly what kind, except that I knew to shy away from chemical engineering. Chemistry was not my cup of tea, but Physics sang lullabies to my soul.
So I got the text book as soon as the bookstore was open and plowed through it, intent on becoming top of the class before the class even began.
By the end of that weekend, I was pretty dismayed by how remedial it was. It was like the "Dick and Jane" book of engineering. "See Spot calculate angles. Triangulate, Spot, Triangulate."
I assumed, this being college and all, that the class would be more invigorating, or at least more hands on, or at least not a complete waste of my time.
And nope.
For four weeks, we got an introduction to the library and the Dewey Decimal System. Two weeks later we were being given instructions on how to write an introductory paragraph using the college format, which, I shit you not, required group work.
I can't stand group work.
At first, I had assumed I'd walked into the wrong class, happens all the time, but nope, this was introduction to engineering, I know cause I eventually asked, and each homework assignment was to read the next chapter in "Dick and Jane builds a kiddie pool"
Had there been just something. Anything. An interesting teacher, a guest lecture, a field trip, a pretty girl, anything, and I might have suffered throughout it long enough to keep that dream alive. I so wanted to be able to point to things and say "I build that"
But nope.
I dropped the class and never considered the field again. Especially once I met the chorus girls on the theatre side of campus.
There's more to it than that, of course, but not much.
Whatever twists and turns our lives take, whoever, whatever we become, is still pretty much beyond the power of our parents and way beyond the computing power of our cell phones (so far), so remember to lighten up a bit.
I'm not saying you should let your ten year old wander through a construction site or drive a Bobcat or take a sip off your beer, but if you did,
those would be the best of days.
Elves, Idols, and Seattle Football
Wait . . . Dad?Hmm?
Does is hurt to get stoned?
Certainly not.
No, I mean, do you think it would hurt if you were turned to stone?
You can't turn to stone. You can freeze and turn to ice. You could burn and turn to ash, but you can't turn to stone. It's impossible to turn to stone.
But would it hurt?
Yes. No, wait, I mean no.
Why not.
Well, pain is just an electrical impulse from your nerves to your brain. And since you can't send electricity through stone, you wouldn't feel any pain.
Wait . . . Dad?
Yes?
Can you make me a smoothie?
Sure. Gimme a minute.
It may seem silly, in fact I know it's silly, but I love considering fantasy within the confines of reality. Little things like could elves really fire arrows that fast, but there aren't any elves, but if there were, then they'd be magical and could do anything, but could they really? And the answer of course, is yes and no.
Yes, elves could certainly shoot that fast. Humans can shoot that fast, look it up on YouTube, so of course elves could shoot that fast.
Can Evangaline Lilly shoot that fast? No. Then Tauriel shouldn't be able to and neither should Legolas, if you're into boys. And yet, and yet, I totally buy into the fact that Jennifer Lawrence can shoot that fast.
Why?
Better editing? Less intrusive CGI? No wigs. I mean, c'mon, how could you make an eight foot dragon look touchable and yet make Orlando Bloom look like a poorly rendered cartoon?
I don't know what it is about wigs that drive me crazy, but an actor in a wig, looks to me like an "actor" in a "wig". All I can think about is how itchy and uncomfortable that actor must have been all day long, and my suspended disbelief drops like a pain free stone.
And CGI just looks terrible. Go ahead and augment, but lighten the load. Less is more.
If you're gonna lie to me, make it a good lie, make it reasonable, ground it in reality, make it fair.
That's the word I've been thinking about. Fairness.
I've been thinking about it cause the Niners are going up against the Seahawks this upcoming weekend. I won't bore you with a lot of football speak, but even though I love Seattle, I really dislike their football team. And it's not because they're division rivals, though there's that, it's because I really hate the 12th Man.
Let me explain:
You see, the crowd at their home stadium is so loud that it makes it nearly impossible for the opposing team to call plays. I mean, unless you're the Eagles, the home field advantage is always a plus, but the Seahawks are something ridiculous like 26-1 in the last few seasons. It's an advantage so powerful that the crowd is referred to as the 12th Man (A football team has 11 players on the field, if you absolutely needed that reference, and the crowd makes twelve). They're also referred to as "The Legion of Boom", but calling the stadium "ThunderDome would be taking it too far.
Now, I'm not Pollyanna. Every team cheats and lies and steals and when it comes to competition with billions of dollars at stake, it would be downright stupid not to maximize every conceivable advantage. But, to me, it just doesn't feel right that their excellence is predicated not on how good they play, but how poorly the other team plays.
Getting in your opponents head is one thing. Using cryptography to decode your opponents play calling system, fine. Go ahead and rough the kicker a little bit, but hammering them with 126 decibels just doesn't feel right. It just doesn't feel fair.
I'm crazy, right?
Maybe just the very idea of that much screaming gives me the heebeegeebees. I don't like noise almost as much as I don't like wigs.
Truth is, the Seattle Seahawks are a good team, but are they better than the Niners? Most likely in Seattle, but anywhere else, who knows. If it's a lie, make it a good lie.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to an American Idol commercial I saw as the Legion of Boom was terrorizing the Saints.
Harry Connick Jr. said something about Idol being the place where superstars are born.
Which is about as unreasonable as an unpalatable lie can get.
First of all, Kelley Clarkson is pretty much the only Idol to move mountains. (Okay, I'll give you Jennifer Hudson for crossover appeal too.) But everyone else? Thousands of hours of air time, millions of eyes and ears reached, water cooler subjects for months, and the best Clay Aiken can do is hosting gigs that Ryan Seacrest turns down.
Now, granted, I can't watch it, cause I know first hand the pain of the anonymity of cattle calls and the agony of being ridiculed alone on an empty stage, but, you know, to each his own.
And a ton of my family and friends love those shows. Which is probably why I don't get invited to dinner very often.
But what boils my blood about the show and all of the shows like it, is that the truth behind those shows is actually pretty amazing, almost beautiful.
You see, no one in those shows are "Discovered"
They're sourced.
A&R people are sent across the country searching for solo artists who haven't broken yet. Private auditions are set up, contracts are signed, photo shoots, video shoots, hair and make-up, all done away from public view.
(Those cattle calls, along with the call backs are part of the marketing campaign selling the American Dream, and for the comic relief factor)
The discovered artists then get the best management and development that money can buy. They're handed a real career, boosted by massive exposure. Win or lose, they're sent touring across the globe, and if they're relatively smart with their cash, they'll never have to worry about health benefits again.
It's exactly the kind of business that the music industry should strive to be.
Finding good artists and using the machine to take them to the next level.
I would totally watch that show.
Cause I like my elves without spray tans, and my football on the field, and I'd like to believe that the journey of an artist has far more entertainment value than the hustling of lottery tickets.
And if I were to turn to stone, I don't need the pain, in fact,
I'd like to go out thinking how pretty Uma Thurman is tonight.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)