And the Maurice Clarett era just gets weirder and weirder...

A few observations from a day of watching crazy-ass wild card games:
The 49ers won despite the presence of Jim Mora Sr. on the sidelines wearing their cap. Did anyone else figure that the guy who issued him a sideline credential for a playoff game will be fired tomorrow?
Jeremy Shockey and Dan Campbell might restart the old NFL tradition of going and winning the tag team belts in the off-season, possibly calling themselves the New York Wrestling Giants.
Part of why the 49ers won in spite of Mora on the sidelines is that the Giants signed 41-year-old Trey Junkin to do their long-snapping this week and he promptly choked. Does anyone else have the impression that the secrets of long-snapping are like the formula for Coke--only a set number of people are allowed to know them at any given time? If so, Patrick Mannelly may soon be killed by elders wielding, well, probably wielding footballs--footballs that can be thrown through their legs at tremendous speeds!!

From the guy who allegedly wears a shirt that says, "Joe"...

The online version of a dot column today...

Mom and I went to see Two Weeks Notice today. This is notable because it is the first movie I have seen with Mom in an actual indoor theater since the original release of The Empire Strikes Back. Of course, it is only the third time in that period that Mom has seen a movie in a theater in that time--interestingly enough, all in the last 12 months and all starring Sandra Bullock. I have no idea what this means, I just pass it on FYI.

Wow, what a bland pair of wild-card games we got today--though perhaps it was necessary after the crazy tension of the Tortilla Chip Party Bowl and its multiple overtimes. Actually, all I care about this wild card weekend is that the Oranges are once again exposed, and the Steelers get to symbolicly do the Flaming Thumbtacks that which the Tacks did physically to Tommy Maddox a couple of months ago.

My latest read was Thomas McGuane's Nobody's Angel. I'm not sure how this made the Chronicle list (which is here in case you've joined our blog already in progress) as this is a bland book that didn't do anything for me. The protagonist is a career army officer who has returned to the family ranch in Montana, where he tries to figure out whether he will live out his life there or move to Spain for no apparent reason. I just never started to care about anyone here, and so the drama that unfolds when our hero starts sleeping with a married woman with a potentially volatile husband never really engaged me. Not recommended. The only nice thing is that this book marked 25 down for me on the Chronicle list, i.e. halfway to my new goal of finishing 50 of the list.

Bill and I discussed on Wednesday whether that day's downpour was a symbolic washing away of 2002, or a nasty-ass omen for 2003. Only time will tell.

If environmental activists are serious about reducing methane emissions, they should start a full frontal attack on the traditional New Year's pork and sauerkraut dinner. 'Nuff said.

I start a new temp job Monday at the local university. Watch this space for the blow by blow.

I am writing this during the halftime show of the Orange Bowl. If I remember these correctly, it should be ending by about next Wednesday.

I had a quiet New Year's. In my experience that's the best kind. DEK and I watched The Black Six New Year's Eve afternoon. I was expecting fourth-rate blaxploitation; I got sixth-rate blaxploitation. It made Dolemite look like Citizen Kane. OK, maybe Citizen Ruth. Premise: Six NFL players play a motorcycle gang that may or may not care about anything, and then they have this big climactic fight with a white motorcycle gang who killed one of their brothers, and they may or may not have won the climactic fight and/or died. The last scene makes the final scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail seem decisive and relevant.

Then we went to an alleged party that turned out to be a very small get together with a few friends (total attendance: 5), watched some movies, and played a game of redneck trivia that I won due to my knowledge of 18th century British literature. I crashed at Bill and Terri's, and Bill and I had New Year's brunch at the Olive Garden. All in all, it was a quiet celebration; whenever I've tried a more elaborate one, I've always ended up miserable, so this is the way I like to do it.

What the hell's a Coraghessan?
My latest read has been Budding Prospects by T. Coraghessan Boyle, who wisely goes by T.C. nowadays. I had some reservations about this book because Boyle teaches at USC, and I learned through the grapevine there that he has a miserable reputation as a human being. But I had read The Road to Wellville years ago and enjoyed it, so I went ahead anyway.

Here is the opening paragraph of the book:
"I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. About the only thing I didn't give up on was the summer camp. Let me tell you about it."

I liked him immediately.

"Summer camp" turns out to be a scheme proposed by a sort-of friend to grow $1.5 million of marijuana one summer in rural Humboldt County California with three guys. Boyle describes the paranoia, original glee, and ultimate disappointment of the project with a manic energy that really caught me up in the adventure. This is a unique take on the traditional story whereby people start on an escapade with high hopes, continually lower expectations until they are as low as can be had, but ultimately achieve some sort of satisfaction (a) from completing a project, even a hopeless one, and (b) from an unexpected source--usually (and in this case) a person of the opposite sex. Taking this plucky, Algeresque story and placing it within the framework of an illegal activity is a bit original, by for the most part the joy is in the humor and style.

The original goal of my reading list was to read the whole damn thing, learn more about the West, and find new authors I want to read more of. Now my goal is to read 50 of the 100 because I don't want to spend 5 years on just this one list, and I'm well on my way to accomplishing the other two goals. Boyle is almost certainly someone I'll come back to. The best comparison I can think to make is to call him a slightly more highbrow Tom Robbins.

Usually this time of year makes me nostalgic, thinking back to the good and bad of the year gone by, trying to assess the year and make plans for the year to come. This year, my only reaction is: So long 2002, good friggin' riddance, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. I hope everybody's 2003 is better than my 2002...

Two more books down on the Western reading list. The Underground Man is a Lew Archer mystery from Ross McDonald. It's functional, but I prefer the hard-boiled amorality of Chandler or James Cain to the somewhat less cynical version here. With the L.A. locations and P.I. protagonist, I couldn't help but keep thinking this was a watered-down Chandler. But if you're more of a mystery fan than I am, it's probably worth a look.

The second book is Ethan Canin's The Palace Thief, a mid-1990s short story collection, with the title story the inspiration for the recent film The Emperor's Club. The book consists of four pages of about equal length, my favorite of which was the opener "Accountant", in which a middle-aged accountant with one last chance at a major business coup instead opts to walk off with a memento he believes that he is earned. The whole story revolves around the accountant's thinly veiled anger toward a former high school friend who has found great success with the hard work that he himself has put in. All four stories are strong, creating protagonists who are not easily likable, but through whom Canin demonstrates the small obsessions that stick with us and the brief, seemingly minor moments that haunt us. If one thing connects these stories, it is that their very different male protagonists make discoveries that bring both clarity and a type of disappointment that will linger, though not deep enough to bring on despair or catastrophe. Knowing the characters must continue to deal with these disappointments on an ongoing basis is perhaps the only truly depressing part.

I also took time out to read my second David Sedaris book. If you haven't read anything by Sedaris yet, run don't walk to the library or bookstore to pick up one of his essay collections. Yes, now. I'll wait...

Two commercial updates:
1. Thanks to Mike for sending along a link that might help explain Matthew Lesko, Superpatriot.

2. I figured out the third annoying commercial. It's the one where the guys are arguing over the relative footspeed of the $6 Million Man and the Bionic Woman, and then the woman driving pulls over and says, indignantly, "Guys, it's a TV show." To which I inevitable scream back, "NO, it was TWO TV shows!" If you're going to get indignant, get your facts straight, dammit!

P.S.: Yes, my mother pointed out that both characters started on one show, but then they very quickly each had their own, so I'm not conceding the point on this one.

P.S.S.: Yes, my 59-year-old mother could probably average 15 points a game at the right trash tournament.

PTA 1980

On a weekday autumn night in 1980 a 37-year-old mother, her 5-year-old son having just entered the first grade, went to her first and last PTA meeting.

On the agenda for that evening, the Association for the elementary school was to decide how to spend a $1,000 surplus that it had somehow accumulated. In truth, the meeting would not so much “decide” as it would ratify a proposal on the table to buy $1 Christmas ornaments for each of the 900-plus students enrolled in grades K-6. Only the lone aforementioned mother stood up with an alternate suggestion: wouldn’t it be nice, she proposed, if we could use this surplus for something educational, such as a computer. This naïve proposal met not merely opposition, but open hostility, and the proposer was literally booed back to her seat, while the main proponent of the ornament plan proclaimed her a Scrooge, while saying that for some of the poor rural district’s students, the ornament might be the only present they received that Christmas. It is not known whether any other parents or teachers secretly approved of the dissident proposal, but if they did they kept their heterodoxy to themselves.


For the 23rd consecutive year, the Wright family 2002 Christmas decorations include a flat, perhaps 6-inch tall, gold-colored ornament depicting two pajama’ed young children hanging stockings on a mantle. The annual placement of this ornament has long been accompanied by a chuckle, with mock teary outbursts of, “This might be the only present some poor kids might get this year,” and with laughing speculation that such poor kids might have actually been happier with no presents as all. This ritual was repeated for nearly 20 years, but in the last few years the placing of the ornament has gone by without much comment (though new visitors are still guaranteed to hear the whole tale); still, however, the now 27-year-old recipient of this $1 gift still insists on having the ornament on the tree, and insists on placing it himself. And at some point the recipient came to realize that, were he able to save just one of the family’s traditional decorations, he would have little trouble choosing the long-derided bauble with which he will forever associate his mother’s fruitless defiance—a cheap gold-plated ornament with the prominent inscription: “P.T.A. – 1980.”

I'm completely choking on sweetness and sugar right now. No I'm not talking about cookies or pie--mom insisted on watching the last hour and a half of Pollyanna today, and I now truly understand one more English adjective. Scariest part of the movie: Except when you get a good schnozz closeup, Karl Malden is the absolute spitting image of Brian Billick.

Part of today's X-Mas festivities (more on that later this week) involved watching VH1 Classic's day of Christmas videos, about which I can only say that they are no more or less screwed up than music videos in general, which makes them alternately highly appropriate or highly inappropriate for holiday family viewing. Some highlights--the early video era Squeeze's "Christmas Day", which was both one of the most religious songs and also the most mammo-centric video; seeing "Christmas at Ground Zero" twice, as only Weird Al could do a song simultaneously about Christmas, love and nuclear holocaust; Hall and Oates looking especially gay on "Jingle Bell Rock" in sweater-vests; and the always awkward Bing-Bowie collaboration on "Little Drummer Boy", a good song and nice version, but the dialogue on the video was more forced than Abner Louima's confession. I just couldn't get the image out of my mind, either, of Bowie taking Bing to Studio 54 afterward so they could get coked up and get oral sex from Mick and Bianca Jagger alternately.

I know, I have issues.

Three commercials that have been driving me insane in recent months/days:
1. ALF and Emmitt Smith. Not all of them, just the one where Emmitt says, "We both give a lot back to the community." HUH?!?! What kind of charity work has ALF THE FREAKIN' PUPPET been doing lately? Acting as a chew toy for homeless dogs? Being a warm winter coat for poor kids?

2. Matthew Lesko, superpatriot. Matthew Lesko, the free government money guy, was extremely annoying by himself. Now we should buy his book not just to help ourselves and Mr. Lesko, but to help out our country by developing our talents to the fullest. Troubling.

3. Dammit, I forgot the third one. Hopefully I'll remember for the next entry, which will hopefully also feature one or two more book commentaries, and a little (true) holiday story I've been working on.

Weird access stuff the last few days--a demi-power outage in the house, ongoing foibles with trying to get DSL set up, etc. Thus no posting in a few days. Not a lot to say now either I guess, though I will recommend this site for quick but fun daily puzzlers, and Quiddler in particular turns out to be a very good family game.

Rooting for a tie yesterday in Cleveland-Baltimore was interesting. "OK, it's 7-3 Browns. Go Ravens! OK, 10-7 Ravens. Go Browns!" In the early fourth quarter with the Ravens up 13-7 I said to DEK, "We need Awesome Phil from Dawsonville to be really good (2 FGS) or really bad (missed PAT)." Browns win, Browns win, which turns out to be the second-best of three possible outcomes. Steelers make it moot by beating the Paper Bucs tonite.

I saw Gangs of New York on Saturday. I knew in advance I'd be watching as a historian rather than a movie fan, and as historian I was impressed. My anachronism quibbles were very minor--mostly I suspect there were more Chinese women in Scorcese's movie than in all of early 1860s New York. (I'm thinking back to this very good book on the subject.) There are two things I particularly liked about this movie, things that many reviewers seem not to have liked. One is that the movie embraces the fact that it is more about spectacle than plot or story; I have no problem with this, and in some ways I prefer it for a period piece such as this one. Secondly, it is only a very small and vague spoiler to say that the climax of this movie illustrates something that movies never do--it demonstrates that sometimes we set up our narratives and our stories within our own narrow contexts, but they ultimately end up resolved not by much of anything that we do but by the larger context of where and when we are. It is a rare movie that sets up a conflict between two characters, and then resolves that conflict largely in terms of bigger events happening around them instead of a simple climactic battle. Some might find this anti-climactic, and on the wrong day I might as well, but it struck me as appropriate at the time.

If you really want to make your head explode, tune in to this ongoing VH-1 series on the '80s airing this week from 9-11 p.m., and sure to be repeated ad infinitum. Some scary stuff. It had me during the 1982 show when I was practically jumping up and down and pointing at the screen yelling, "Oh my god! I remember that!!" when they showed a 1982 PSA cartoon showing kids how to make healthy snacks by pouring juice ("orange, or grape, or pomegranate") into ice cube trays, putting in toothpicks, and freezing. My head has been hurting all day, and come to think of it that may be the cause.

Nasty, British, and short
My latest completed read is Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. This is a morbid little book about life for Brits in barely post-WWII Hollywood. The general idea is that the British community in Hollywood at the time had a tacit agreement that the movie business was the only appropriate business for expats, and community members under the auspices of the Cricket Club quietly attempt to force unsuccessful Brits to return home because their presence is unbecoming. Dennis Barlow, once the great hope of young Brit poets, now has a very unbecoming job--working at Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery. After his elder benefactor is dumped by his studio and subsequently commits suicide, Dennis makes arrangements at a very different final resting place--upscale Whispering Glades, a resting ground for the stars and well to-do--where he falls for makeup artist Aimee Thanatopolous, who herself is infatuated in a strange way with chief mortician Mr. Joyboy. The resulting love triangle is resolved in a particularly cynical fashion, which is par for the course for this book, and from what I've gathered for Waugh in general.

The fun of this book is in cynical black humor of a particularly wry sort, and the British, Americans, and Hollywood itself are all open targets here. If you require at least someone in your books to have redeeming qualities, then avoid this one. But it is a short, quick read, and is very much in the line of cynical Hollywood novels, but not so hard-boiled as say a Chandler or Cain. If this review hasn't scared you off, then it's probably worth a look-see.

Off to see the answer to why they let Dan Aykroyd in...