Tangentially about the World Series

The reason why that video is there is extremely esoteric, even for this blog. It has something to with the mild resemblance that the singer has with San Francisco Giants closer Brian Wilson, what with the eyes being too close together. It was either this or something about Spoon and Mike Fontenot. So that's one "storyline" to watch, somehow. But what else?

The Josh Hamilton situation. I am deeply ambivalent toward Josh Hamilton. His success can represent victory over terrible addiction that can occur when the crutches a person has relied on for life are yoinked out unexpectedly (ie, he descended into drugs after he moved away from his parents and lost the ability to play baseball because he got hurt). There are parallels to be drawn between him and giant-headed recovering addict Don Gately, my favorite character in Infinite Jest. Maybe later. But on the other hand Hamilton's story of redemption through not trusting oneself with bills larger than a 20 also reflects the deep financial inequalities that exist in America. Like, if this guy couldn't hit a baseball 450 feet, he'd be dead and/or homeless I suspect. He's a meathead. Not to mention the whole God thing he's got going.

-0-

The Giants haven't won in a long time. It is an interesting fact that the Giants have not won a World Series since leaving New York. They are kind of even cursed, I read the other day on ESPN.com, what with the WS earthquake and the terrible 2002 loss to the Angels and Barry Bonds. I should be more hostile toward them, considering they knocked "my" team out in a series of bitterly contested games that could have gone either way. And said defeat prevented me from seeing any playoff games live this year. I didn't even care if the Phils made the World Series, I just wanted to see Game 7! FUCK* Anyway, yeah, go Giants. National League woo! Witnessing a friend's pure joy at seeing the Giants in the World Series makes me realize how jaded the Phillies recent string of success has made this town. "How quickly does the world owe you something that you only knew existed 10 seconds ago?"

In closing, this sentence I read on Deadspin earlier today: "I've heard from pretty reliable sources that Pat Burrell dresses up as The Machine, in full gimp decorum before games." You're goddamn right he does.

*That ticket is so getting burned in some sort of ritual sacrifice at some point.

Check out this dog

I like to think the owner of this dog is like the Ukrainian guy from Everything is Illuminated. "Many women want to be carnal with me, because of my premium dog." You know who trains their dog to do parkour, or "freestyle walking" as I derisively call it? Ukrainian hipsters, that's who. You see what happens when you remove the oppressive Soviet boot from these people's metaphorical necks? YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS?!?

Gorillas were observed to play tag. Biologists said that gorilla taggers acquire some form of “advantage” by hitting competitors, and then preserve that advantage by running away, but it was not clear whether gorillas could be deemed conscious of the rules. Chimpanzees conducting border patrols kill the infants and seize the territory of other chimpanzee groups. Zoologists described two new species of pancake batfish living in the Gulf of Mexico. Cetologists found that female humpback whales seek out their girlfriends summer after summer. The death of as many as 500 million trees in the Amazon in 2005 was blamed on a single storm, and the recent death of as many as 500 penguins who washed ashore in Brazil remained unexplained. “What worries us,” said one Brazilian scientist, “is the absurdly high number of penguins.”

-guh?

It makes me appreciate the Phillies more somehow

Somehow because of the immense appreciation that already exists for the Phillies in my brain. With any luck they will be the most dominant hometown team a Philadelphia homer will ever see. Filled with great baseball, irrepressible and clutch and dirty and other adjectives. The Reds were called the Little Red Machine* this year but not any more. Also the Phillies color could also also be considered red, with the hats and all. Perhaps 'Little Red Machine' is a play on the actual team name and baseball history, but people who say that have never read The Giver.



The subject of the title of this post though is the prologue of Don Delillo's novel Underworld, and the raw enjoyment I derived in reading it. Delillo's prose is certainly more fun than 900 pages 15th Century Spanish in translation, i.e. Don Quixote. Anecdotally: I ripped through the 60 page Underworld prologue in one sitting the first time. And there is likely another reading coming before the end of the baseball playoffs. And then another some day in December when I really miss baseball. Televised baseball is everyday and then not at all, cold turkey.

Basic summary: Jackie Gleason vomits on Frank Sinatra's shoes while Bobby Thompson hits 'The Shot Heard Round The World' among other things. The other things include a kid who jumps the turnstiles and paper falling from the upper decks and J. Edgar Hoover. And now I've done more research, via a google image search, and the prologue was actually a separate thing, at one point, called "Pafko at the wall" until it became the Underworld prologue, at which point it became "The Triumph of Death" which is the name of the painting that J. Edgar Hoover is looking at because it fell on him while Gleason was vomiting.



Whatever, Delillo loves him his crazy style. And the ideas are funny/poignant. I'm no literary scholar, but I've certainly read enough to post about him on the internet. Airborne Toxic Event ain't just a LA indie band. So as jarring as it may be to jump from 1951 baseball to some broad painting 230 bombers in a post-cold war USA desert, you know its going somewhere. Like, I trust this author. There are going to be sudden changes in setting, and tangents about waste and sex and death and crowds and whatever else, but at the end, the audience is going to know what happens. Which really is kind of important when trying to tell a story.



*It's possible I'm remembering this wrong and the nickname was something less demeaning.

Recently learned there is something called "shoegaze" and the thing I don't like about it is that I like it. What I don't like though is the blatant unfinished nature of this video. What the fuck, have some professionalism YouTube user "ezekieldas" if that is your real name.

This guy

I've seen this before, it's internet old for sure. But now seems like the correct time to put it here. Most recently via something called internet k-hole.

From the archives 2

I was checking the tracker for the first time in a while and May 2007 is wildly* popular. So I clicked on it and it's a fair representation of this blog, like it is before I was aware of post-modernism.

But May 2007 was some halcyon days, I can admit drunk, what with the "deathmatch listoff" and the thing about Starship Troopers being underrated, with this lead:

The 1997 film tells the tale of Johnny Rico, Dizzy Ibanez, Doogie Howser, Denise Richards and Gary Busey's son -- among others -- as they travel across space to train for and fight the inevitable giant insect war of the 23rd century.

*4 hits

edit: Pistol whip foreshadowing!.

Important college football coverage

JUST AN VAUGHN

Now is as good a time as any to write about Northwestern University football. The team's record is 5-0 after escaping Minnesota's off-putting new outdoor stadium. Outdoor football? In Minnesota? On television? That shit fucking blew my mind into pieces.

Anyway, yes, the "cardiac cats" as they are sometimes known, less so now than before their coach died of a heart attack. Jesus, I always do that, with the Randy Walker jokes, anytime I try to write something about Northwestern's football team. Suppose it's better to put it out there now, relatively near the beginning, move on and possibly delete this graf later. "To let the weight off my spleen, as it were."

The team itself? I'm not sold, despite the record which has come against the likes Central Michigan and Vanderbilt. It will be fun to say things like "They won a game on the road against the SEC" out of context. QB Dan Persa, the pride of Bethlehem, Pa.*, has ably filled in as Mike Kafka's heir apparent, now that he (Kafka) is dealing with the inescapable bureaucracy that is the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback situation.

I think its very important to point out Northwestern's style of play on offense here. They play super fast, comparable perhaps to the old 90s Buffalo Bills of Jim Kelly and Super Bowl losses, shotgun spread. Which perhaps could help explain Northwestern's inability to win a Bowl game. Too much pressure on the defense and what have you. The aforementioned Kafka attempted 78 passes in the Outback Bowl last January, for example. Although convenient, I wonder why that game has a wikipedia page.

Hmmm, what else. Nothing really. Do the students still do the thing where they shake their keys before kickoffs? I always thought that was stupid, like, look at how affluent I am! I have keys! Anyway, I'd be remiss not to link to this after a win over Minnesota. Likely the weirdest thing I've ever published.

*Although, to be honest, he's no Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here. And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As “network neutrality” gets bargained away—to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it—the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink. And as they do, we will return more to the world where success depends upon permission. And privilege. And insiders. And where fewer turn their souls to inventing the next great idea.

-Aaron Sorkin is terribly overrated, unless you are over 40

For Sheikh Jabbar, desperate times required desperate measures. He arranged a meeting with Colonel John Tien of the US Army in which he asked for weapons and ammunition for his men to take on al-Qa'ida. At that point, they numbered in the dozens; eventually the forces, later known as the Sons of Iraq, swelled to 100,000. The Awakening had begun.

"People ask me what was the tipping point in Anbar Province," Colonel Tien said in an interview. "I would say 22 November, the day Sheikh Jabbar entered my tactical operations centre and said 'I want you to help me take back my neighbourhood'."

-well that's in depth article that would never be printed in the USA

RIP

Possible post idea: Dead comedians, in order

There’s a case to be made, of course, that soccer is uniquely adapted for the creation of Federer Moments. Unlike tennis, which augments the player’s physical capabilities with a racket, soccer takes an essential physical tool—the hands—away from the player and forces him to compete in a state of artificial clumsiness. Soccer thus emphasizes the limits of the body and the difficulty of realizing intention. When a player does something amazing, we’re apt to see it not as a superhuman feat (he made the ball travel 150mph!), but as a human victory over what’s essentially an everyday difficulty. If the crisis of having a body is that it’s resistant to our will, soccer exaggerates the crisis, moves what you want to do even further away from what you can do, then gives us athletes who do what they want to anyway. That may be why moments of beauty in soccer, compared to those in other sports, nearly always feel like consolations.

-Run of Play essaying Pele and David Foster Wallace is good

From the archives

So I was sitting here messing around with various and decided to click on some archives and see what I see. It's unpredictable even for me! And this post is memorable. That photoshop took a way long time for its quality, which is low.

A collection of shit

I decided to go through some of the things that never made it on here due to a variety of factors including lack of sobriety and the Philadelphia Eagles. The double line breaks indicate individual posts, originally, and this is in reverse chronological order. Enjoy?

SHUT THE FUCK UP
-This is the a title of a post with no content I saved earlier today. Likely related to explaining how to browse for files on a computer for several hours to some white beard who is going to Dubai. With any luck he will be imprisoned. YES YOU CLICK OPEN TO OPEN THE PICTURE.

There is the Jump-Off, the broadcast headquarters of Psychopathic house station WFukOffRadio (call letters WFKO), where a nude model will duct-tape a Juggalo to a stripper's pole and then stuff an Ecstasy pill in his rectum. (Later, the Juggalo will suck tequila from a beer bong and vomit.) There is the Spazmatic Hangout, a dry saloon serving Faygo and the official Juggalo energy drink, ICP's Spazmatic!™, which tastes like a melted freeze-pop mixed with cough syrup (text on the can: "Insane Clown Posse's Frothy, Freaky, Frosty, Refreshing Energy Freshness Can of Shazam!"). At seven in the morning, watermelon-smashing comedian Gallagher will be found there nearly passed out, smoking a joint.

-all kidding aside I kind wish I had gone to gathering of the Juggalos

Big Red Son
Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think
Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed
Authority and American Usage
The View from Mrs. Thompson's
How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart
Up, Simba
Consider the Lobster
Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky
Host

-A post about David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" got as far as this, a list of the essays contained therein

A link about something called "NutriLoaf"

Cars are dicks

"You just don't get it do you, you dumb fuck."

The strange thing about my utter lack of education in management was that it didn’t seem to matter. As a principal and founding partner of a consulting firm that eventually grew to 600 employees, I interviewed, hired, and worked alongside hundreds of business-school graduates, and the impression I formed of the M.B.A. experience was that it involved taking two years out of your life and going deeply into debt, all for the sake of learning how to keep a straight face while using phrases like “out-of-the-box thinking,” “win-win situation,” and “core competencies.” When it came to picking teammates, I generally held out higher hopes for those individuals who had used their university years to learn about something other than business administration.

-business school is fucking worthless

It would be nice if maybe soldiers could die without being subject to sick fetishization by members of the local media.

The biannual goats movie guide (part 1)
If you want to see something swedish
If you want to see something about a Jewish Nazi
If you want to see a spaghetti Western
If you want to see a stupid-funny R-rated comedy
-This didn't get very far, now did it?

Arcade Fire songs in order
Intervention
Rebellion (Lies)
Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)
Rococo
Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
No Cars Go
Keep the Car Running
Half Life II (No Celebration)
Wake Up
Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)\
We Used to Wait
Modern Man
Windowsill
Black Mirror
Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)
Crown of Love
-So incomplete/innaccurate!

He's an over-privileged boy
Who's careless with his words
His actions are the actions of a child
-And that takes us to the beginning of July, I'm done. This last one is a reference to this song by the way.

This fucking guy

Elsewhere in my brain, this blog is stagnating terribly and may soon be abandoned. But I don't want to act rashly, this thing has been a part of my life for more than four years for better or worse. If it has to die, it will be a slow, painful death. The problem is I have too much "web presence" for my liking, between this and the twitter and facebook and another "professional" blog. I am the online editor of a daily newspaper. Today I wrote a column chastising commenters.

But perhaps the goats will come back in vogue, you never know. I would like to get to 1000 posts before complete abandonment, just from a personal achievement standpoint. And we are getting close, a few more haphazardly posted YouTube videos could do it.

My daughter has come from Los Angeles to live with me. Rhoda is thirty-one, and she used to work in advertising, but now she’s a painter and a maker of other art that I’m not sure how to describe. Her field is bummers. Rhoda’s past exhibitions include leukemia-cluster art, floating-yuan art, water-rights art, and mental-health-funding-cuts art, which was piles of clothes painted bronze and rigged up with speakers that yelled. She has also made a lot of hand art and hair art. Eight years ago, shortly into her new career, while getting the hang of a radial-arm saw, Rhoda severed the index, middle, and ring fingers of her left hand. The surgeons reattached them, and Rhoda recovered nearly complete range of motion, but the shock of the injury caused some of her hair to fall out. She keeps her head shaved close now, a style that improves the plainness of face she inherited from me. Bald, she looks about fifteen years older than she is, but also terrifyingly smart and owlish, Lady Malcolm McDowell

-what the fuck I'm linking to the New Yorker now?

The juxtaposition of twitter is amazing, sometimes.

A perhaps inevitable post about DFW and tennis

Watching the U.S. Open tennis for potential brawls, then flipping television channels back and forth between that and a FIBA basketball game between the United States and Angola which was being playing in Turkey barely held my attention. I will say Gael Monfils was mildly amusing, in attempting a between the legs shot in the first set for no apparent reason other than style (pictured). It's unfortunate that shot failed and that he lost to Djokovic, at least from a personal ratings standpoint.

It's natural when watching tennis that my mind, which has read much David Foster Wallace, will start thinking about the things he wrote about the sport. Because they are very smart. There is of course the Federer piece, which is widely read due to its internet availability. And there are other essays too because the dude was way into tennis, having played it as an amateur youth. Many pages of Infinite Jest are dedicated to how pupils at a tennis academy constantly squeeze tennis balls in the hand at the end of their disproportionately larger forehand arm. Hypertrophy. I think "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" a book review/essay on Austin's awful autobiography is notable in its ability to break down the athlete-fan dichotomy. Or maybe the pro athlete-amateur athlete-fan trichotomy. Ugh.

Its easy to fall into the black-white assumption of superhuman-pro-athlete v. fat-idiot-fan. But as with all things stark comparisons fall short. Fat slobs like to throw footballs too, and much appreciation of sport comes from playing. Thus a middle ground, in which amateur soccer players like myself watch the World Cup obsessively and those with country club memberships enjoy tennis and golf I assume. Playing a sport gives one more knowledge regarding the intricacies of how the game works -- call it muscle memory maybe -- than one can ever get watching it on a brightly lit screen.

I don't know if this was a point Wallace made in his Austin essay, or if the point is adequately described here, even. There really is no way to know right now because I donated that book to a vacation home. Because it was called "Consider the Lobster" and the cabin is in Maine, a state known lobster. And also because of gin.

And not to put too fine a point on it, but who freaking cares? All great athletes are arrogant; some just hide it better on camera. The people ladling praise on the guy for saying shucks and thanking the equipment manager and generally being very Beaver Cleaver with everyone—"Durant always asks the [University of Texas] basketball sports information director, Scott McConnell, about his sons by name," the New York Times informs—evidently would rather use athletes as large vessels for vicarious moralizing, something to put down on the mantel next to the Precious Moments figurines, than admit we care about them only because they jump high.

-how dare you belittle media-driven idol worship