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Fall TV. The best that could happen is that you find a show that you really like, and who knows? Maybe it'll be an all-time great. Then you get to say, "I was in on the ground floor of that bitch!" Or, maybe it'll be a really bad show, but bad in a notable way. Then you get to say, "I was in on the ground floor of that bitch!"

So I make it a point to always give shows a tryout. Not all of them, since time constraints (MLB wrapping up, NHL getting... up, etc.).

The first one up to the plate this season is "Hawaii Five-0". Don't be alarmed if that sounds familiar. Yes, it is a remake. If you don't like remakes, I don't blame you. But I figured I'd give this one a shot since it has both Scott Caan (bastard son of James Caan and a mystery woman... my bet is it's Mercedes Ruehl) and Alex O'Laughlin (last seen on "Moonlight". Don't ask). It also has Grace Park. DO THE MATH ON THAT ONE.

We're three episodes in, and unlike "Lost," which cockteased for like 20 episodes, Hawaii Five-0 (let's just call it H5O from now on, as in water) has pretty much fallen into a groove. That's not necessarily a good or bad thing. It makes my job easier, though.

H5O is your standard cop drama, WITH A TWIST. Unlike other cop dramas that usually happen in places like Los Angeles or New York or Bismarck, this one happens in Hawaii, and boy don't you forget it! No, you won't be allowed to forget it. And this is ultimately what makes H5O forgettable.

Let's turn the clock back three years to the 60s and 70s, and onward into the 90s. It was not uncommon back then for TV shows to, when they didn't have anything better to do, to have a "______ GOES HAWAIIAN!!" episode. I think it started with Gidget. Thanks a lot, Sandy.

Everybody seemingly got in on it, actually. Tiny Toons. Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers. Fucking Green Acres. Family Matters. Saved by the Bell had a MOVIE set in Hawaii. What the hell, Twin Peaks had a Hawaiian episode?

The whole point of these episodes was, well, to be filler. Easy filler. The gags write themselves! Write in some luaus, some tiki gods, volcanoes, hulu skirts, fire dancers, Japanese surprise attacks, etc., and you have an episode! Sometimes shows got away with it and actually had fun with it, but mostly a Hawaiian episode is just repetitive garbage.

That's basically what's going on with H5O. It's a cop show that's permanently stuck in a Hawaiian episode. Sure, it's not as flat-out obvious as Urkel Goes Hawaiian, but it's the only real interesting thing that's going on with H5O.

Cop dramas are basically falling into a rut. If they don't have a unique angle (CSI, NCIS) or strong characters/dialogue (The Mentalist, L&O: Goldblum!!), then they're pretty much expendable.

H5O doesn't have strong characters. I want to like O'Laughlin's and Caan's characters, but all they do is trade bitchy dialogue. They don't seem to have much chemistry. They're always sniping at each other, then making half-hearted attempts to mend the damage. Rinse. Repeat. Apply deodorant. Take a shower. Rinse and repeat again. Apply more deodorant. Realize that it's actually 5 in the morning. Go back to sleep. Wake up at 7:30. Go take a shower. Wash, rinse, repeat. Apply deodorant. Go eat breakfast. Find out there are no Lucky Charms. Throw a temper tantrum. Arrive late at work. Punch out your boss when he asks you why you were late. Leave work. Urinate on your most-hated coworker's car. Peel out in an angry hurry.

The supporting cast range from eh to ugh. Daniel DAE KIM, last seen wasting his life on Lost, shows up and actually plays a Korean character! He also seems to have perfected his English. He also doesn't do much of anything on the show. Grace Park is hot as shit but doesn't do anything, either. There are also like some other cop characters but they're never doing anything. Perhaps Hawaii is such a chill place that nobody commits crimes.

The only person who actually seems to have a personality is Caan's character, Dano. His name isn't actually Dano. It's probably Dan, but fuck if I remember any of the characters' names. No prizes for guessing if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

So yeah, Dano has moved to Hawaii from New Jersey (though he doesn't really have a New Jersey accent... should've made him come from California) with his daughter. I dunno why the mother let her daughter live in Hawaii but there you go. Dano is appropriately bombastic and he still has the sleezy charm he had when he was on Entourage.

The problem is his buddy, Alex O'Laughlin (not his character's actual name, but wouldn't it be funny if it was?), is, like, he's a human plank of wood. His character's background is that he was in the special forces, or something (the explanatory flashback has him riding in with poorly equipped Navy SEALs, but he's not in any kind of uniform, so uhhhh), and then he does something stupid that causes his dad to get shot by a white terrorist. And he's all mad about that. Then he comes to Hawaii to be a cop.

Conveniently, in the first episode, he tracks down the guy who killed his dad and arrests him. Yeah.

It's not that O'Laughlin is like this brooding mope. He's just lacking personality. He picks fights with Dano because he doesn't like his antics, but he's not particularly angry at Dano or anything. It's hard to explain. The point is he's not a really mysterious guy, he's just so poorly written than not even the writers are sure who the fuck he's supposed to be.

I won't even get into the stories in the episodes I've seen so far. They're pretty standard fare. Nothing particularly clever happens in any of them. The action scenes aren't anything special, either.

So what the hell was CBS banking on to carry this show? Its setting. Yet, ironically, the setting really has nothing to do with the show. It could just as easily take place in Brooklyn or Campeche or Novosibirsk, just change up the background characters, maybe change the weather a little, and force Daniel Dae Kim to learn Russian. It won't matter. The only tangible thing the setting does is it a) gives the characters an excuse to fight the Triads/Yakuza and b) give the characters excuse to go surfing. And really, b) isn't even remotely exclusive to Hawaii, it's just that that's the only thing you can do up there (other than kayak in lava or something).

It's not that Hawaii can't be an interesting place. Really, Dae Kim's and Park's characters probably could carry the show by themselves if it bothered to focus in on their backgrounds more instead of the dunderheaded leads. But the show is so completely lacking in imagination that I really wonder why anyone bothered.

Incidentally, I have no idea if the original show is anything like this. Bizarrely, the title cards have that same goofy intro theme, but the show is not really light-hearted. Certainly not on the level of NCIS: LA.

If they wanted to remake the series, maybe it would've been better to set it in the 70s again? No, no of course not, the setting's not the problem. This show could take place in a land that's literally made out of chocolate, and it could have an all-star cast and shit, and it would still be a dud. It's the writers. Nothing more needs to be said.

So when you return to the United States, now sporting a horrifying blend of cockney/Birming'm in your accent, you'll know to give this shit a wide berth.

Hawaii Five-0? More like, Hawaii not a Five, but a 0!!! YES FINALLY I GET TO USE THAT JOKE.

In Pursuit of the Typing Angel

The record I hold is 96 wpm. That's words per minute for the uninitiated. Now that is a score. If you're writing something up and you're on a roll, you can churn out 15 pages in 30 minutes with that bad boy. I should know. I did it once. :breathes on knuckles: :rubs knuckles on shirt:

In elementary school, they attempted to teach us typing skills. Well, they attempted to teach ME typing skills, but by the time I hit the third grade, their recommendations actually retarded my skills. Yes, I remember being forced, FORCED, to glue all five of my fingers to the start positions. After I came in near-last in my first bout of typing racer, I said FUCK THIS, got sent to the principal, came back from the principal, then dominated everyone by going rogue.

How did I do it? Simple. I had a shitload of high-quality practice. I played Sierra adventure games.


Back in the late 80s and early 90s, Sierra churned these bad boys out on a fairly regular basis. Sierra adventure games usually had the player control a dude (occasionally a dudette) in a psuedo-3D environment. You would walk around areas using the arrow keys (num lock off if you were pro), and to interact with the environment, you'd have to type out commands.

There basic ones, like LOOK, or TAKE [object], or FUCK. FUCK usually didn't do anything but the Sierra guys were creative enough to admonish you for your nasty language.

The three main franchises were Police Quest (pictured above), King's Quest and Space Quest. Pretty fairly obvious what motifs were going on in those games. Sierra games were challenging in two ways:

1) They could be esoteric as hell. Here's an example of a puzzle from Police Quest. It's a fairly simple one, but if you screw it up, you lose:

When you first get your police cruiser, you have to literally walk around it in a circle to perform your car check. Then you can get in it and safely drive away. Failure to walk around it will lead to the car getting a flat tire as soon as it pulls out of the police station, and your game is over. Yup. Mercifully, this puzzle comes near the very beginning.

(Of course, Police Quest was written to reflect real-life police procedures, so if you were a cop, you wouldn't be caught off-guard by some of the shit you'd have to do in the game to progress.)

And that's only a simple example. Try to get through a game like King's Quest without a manual, and you are up shit creek my friend. And we were expected to get through those games WITHOUT shit like GameFAQs (though for a small fee you could call Sierra's tipline).

The other challenge w-- oh, forgot I'm doing the number thing

2) Typing speed!!


Once in a while you'd run into a situation in the game where you needed to think fast. Sometimes it'd be as simple as a monster appearing on screen, and you'd have to just run off the screen to get away from it. Other times, though, you'd have to do something, which meant you'd have to type something, and fast!

I remember the early days of trying that shit out. Uh oh, the Labion Terror Beast has appeared, and there's no escape! I better THROW CUBIX RUBE! Uh oh, hurry up, he's coming!

Hunting and pecking was not gonna cut it. Yes, in more than a few areas, Sierra brought the pain, and if you couldn't at least type at 30 wpm, you were deader than dead.

And that is how I really honed my typing skills, through sheer survival. None of this "type the words in to make your car go faster, but avoid mistakes!" When I was 6 years old, I was in the trenches, learning not just typing itself, but words and rudimentary sentences. I'm pretty sure Sierra did more to improve my syntax, spelling and vocabulary than my kindergarten teachers did. Sorry Sr. Margaret Mary!


The ultimate test is depicted above. In this scenario, Roger Wilco (you) is stuck in a trap. The floor panel is slowly sliding away, revealing a vat of acid for you to fall in. The only chance you have is to use your plunger on the near wall (but not too early, or else Roger's grip weakens and he falls in) and hang on for dear life until the trap deactivates.

The first time I encountered this trap I-- well, I freakin' died because I didn't know what to do. But the SECOND time I encountered it, I figured using the plunger would work. Except the game wouldn't take PUT PLUNGER ON WALL, STICK PLUNGER TO WALL, PLUNGER WALL, USE PLUNGER, JUST FUCKING PUT THE PLUNGER ON THE WALLL FUCK YOU as acceptable answers. But I think it was that particular moment that my fingers finally, through sheer panic-induced survival instincts, memorized the location of the keys and became automatic. After that scene, my typing became less a conscious act and more an extension of my thoughts, no different than speaking or giving the finger.

This method of training, though, is pretty much completely gone from the video game landscape, which I guess is not a surprise. Sierra adventure games persisted throughout the 90s, but they became a bit less challenging in certain key respects (Space Quest 3 would pause the game and summon a command prompt whenever you started tpying, removing those tense life-or-death speed-typing situations). Then they became outright point-and-click adventures, which introduced their own challenges.

Modern games still force players to use hand-eye coordination and logical thinking, but the death of the command-line adventure game has dismantled an overlooked way of teaching kids typing skills. Now that texting is here to stay, kids don't need to spell properly and shit. You wouldn't get anywhere in King's Quest if you kept trying to TK TO WTCH. Then again, kids don't need proper syntax anyway, so screw them.

So that's at least ONE thing my generation has over the next. I look forward to running into those bastard whippersnappers on the battlefield someday. Then we'll see who's laughing when it comes time to USE PLUNGER ON WALL.

Are you mental?

(Recent events have caused me to think in a slihtly English accent. That may bleed over into my writing. Do not be alarmed.)

One of the things that most fascinates me is psychosis. Mental illness. Being BOOOOONKERRRRRRRRS. I'm pretty sure the general reason is because I can imagine what it's like to be totally doffed. I like to think I have a strong imagination, so being able to channel nutsoids is, I think, a gift, because I get all the benefits of their different perspective of reality without all the trauma that goes along with it.

Why am I writing this? Because pretty soon you won't need to imagine what it's like to be a psycho. It'll be the reality. Yes, you guessed it, it's another POLITICAL BLOG ENTRY.

Delaware (remember them?) pulled a funny on Tuesday and nominated a proto-cat lady named Christine O'Donnell to the Republican ticket to the Senate seat once held by Joe "Joseph" Biden, the current Napper in Chief.

Don't know who Christine O'Donnell is? Well, in a nutshell, she is fucking nuts. Maybe she's not out and out psychotic, but she is certainly of below-average intelligence and probably very paranoid (they and anti-social types are the only people I'm sure I can spot a mile away). (Yes I am a doctor. A doctor of LOVE.) A more succinct description of what the hell is happening in Delaware can be found in this cute video:



That's just Delaware. The crazies have been crawling out of the woodwork all over, though, from Arizona's Jan Brewer claiming that drug dealers are beheading people out in the desert (they're not; those are just oddly shaped cactuses), to Sharron Angle in Nevada who thinks that social security is literally the devil. Literally. The devil. She thinks social security has cloven hooves and horns and answers to the name "Jay Leno."

New York, supposedly a bastion of LIBRULISM, is not immune. The GOP's candidate for governor is a delightful chap named Carl Paladino, a connoisseur of bestiality porn, among other wonderful subjects. Yup, opposing Andrew Cuomo is a guy who loves forwarding the kind of e-mails you get from grampy about that silly Negroid in the White House, and of horsedick.mpg. No confirmation yet that he has seen goatse, though, but I bet it'd be right up his alley.

Like syphilis, the Teabagger scourge is spreading from sea to oil-filled sea. There's no end in sight. We all hoped it'd be a temporary thing that would dissipate with the passage of the health care thing, but true madness does not respond to reality. Well, not in the way it's supposed to. Crazy people are wonderful in that any bit of contradiction just confirms how right they are. It's rare that nutty people have a House-like epiphany where they realize they do need help.

Am I saying that the country is actually spiraling towards collective psychosis? I'm not sure. I don't know if the people pushing the buttons of the Teabaggers are likewise true believers. My experience with such people tells me that the big shots could go either way.

If you had to know one thing about the United States, it's that it's really controlled by interests. Not people (although interests are of course made up of people). Interests. Semi-conscious entities. Any group of people is an interest: nations, guilds, unions, companies, Mickey Mouse Club chapters, ESL classes, Nose-picker Brigades, etc. The interests that control the U.S. are almost exclusively business in nature, not voters or any silly shit like that. And if it's one thing businesses love (aside from junkets to the Luxor), it's stability.

A quick glance at U.S. history rather proves that out. Even at the height of the Cold War, America's business class could reliably come down on the side of not being fucking retarded, even if many businessmen were crazed anti-communists willing to nuke the planet to get rid of the Reds. Verifiable shits like Nixon, Johnson, Reagan, Ford and Bush I, no matter how much of jerkfaces they were, would never let the country be destroyed or let its people be destroyed. So you were okay to feel safe with them.

(Although Reagan was probably probably borderline as he also had a nasty habit of swinging the country towards nuclear war with the Soviets, though he probably had no idea that he was doing that.)

(Also Clinton doesn't count because the Soviets were kaput and the U.S. was not seriously challenged by any foreign entity on his watch so he had no opportunity to seriously try something stupid. I don't think he would have, though.)

9/11 of course happened and Everything Changed™. In the wake of that, we have two reactions. America's business class have become more belligerent and willing to do risky shit to chase a buck. In this case, risky shit means whipping people up into frenzies, quietly stoking or tolerating violent rhetoric against convenient targets, and convincing people that they must accept a lower standard of living. This actually makes sense if you look at everything in a certain way, but that's a whole nother blog post and I'm 52.75% sure you are not that interested in it.

The other reaction, of course, comes from average Americans, who have become more paranoid and prone to bizarre suggestion. 20% of Americans think he is a Muslim (and 43% just don't plain know what he is). You could say that they're being fed misinformation (or disinformation??) from the media, thus leading them to the wrong conclusions. At a certain point, though, if you keep telling a person the sky is puke green, and they come to believe it, they're just plain fucking retarded.

This is not really a pleasant thing to experience, the slow crazifying of the country. This is almost certainly going to lead to violence because like Buzz, we're not that lucky. I don't know what the end game will be, but I do know the people who are whipping this shit into action are looking at an end game where most American citizens are no better off than the wage slaves in third-world countries, while the elites live high on the hawg.

The funny thing is that may not happen at all. Crazy people have a habit of being a tad bit unpredictable, even when you can tell what they're thinking. Who knows? Maybe the Teabaggers will back down at the moment of truth. Maybe they will get bored and chase after something else. Maybe they will decide that violent revolution will be the answer. Of course, the Teabaggers are not a monolothic entity, but their driving craziness is pretty uniform.

If we are that lucky, though, hopefully they will simply lose, give up, and take to the typewriter to warn us of our impending danger from the Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy.

A Bleh Book: The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

Baseball is my second favorite sport (the first being gin rummy cripple-fighting). But I think baseball is one of the most polarizing sports to sports fans. You either love it or you hate it. There is no in-between with baseball.

So imagine my surprise when the head of NYU talks about baseball as a "path to God," and in his curriculum he lists a bunch of books that supposedly illustrate this. One of them is "The Universal Baseball Association," by Robert Coover.

I didn't really understand John Sexton's point about the theological aspects of baseball, and frankly I found an even more interesting angle to reading "UBA": Namely, the main character is a fan of franchise play. Sports franchise play.

Let me step out for a second and briefly go over what that is. You know those video games like MLB The Show, NHL '9x/20xx, or Madden? You know how many of those games have "Franchise" modes, where you play the game over a number of continuous seasons? Well, "UBA" is about that, except in the most bare-bones way possible.

The book is about the proprietor of one such league, but this is no video game he's playing. He's using dice. Dice baseball, which happens to be a hobby of mine, played in the 1960s (I didn't realize the book was written so long ago when I first picked it up). So this guy was playing franchise sports before there was even a single video game in existence.

Lemme step out again and briefly describe dice baseball: You roll the dice, and depending on what the numbers are, something happens (a hit, a homerun, a strikeout, etc.). You keep track of the game by writing shit down on scorecards and whatnot. It's more complicated than it sounds.

So I already had a keen interest in the subject matter going into the book. When you play franchise sports, be they dice-based or bit-based, you really get into it (if you're doing it right; most people quit after one or two seasons for reasons I'll talk about briefly). You watch the league grow, you might keep track of some records, of some stats, and if the game is well-balanced and stuff, it can sustain itself for a long period of time. If it holds your interest.

In order to really get into franchise sports, though, you need to have a really good imagination (and a really good platform to base the sport on, otherwise shit gets too wild to reasonably continue). When someone sits down to play a game of Madden, they play with all the familiar names, so they have no need to imagine what kind of virtual people they're controlling. Everyone knows who Peyton Manning is, what records he holds, how the team does with him playing, etc.

But what if the next season you played, Peyton was gone? Retired. Traded. Was killed in a hunting accident with Eli :clap clap:. In his place was Gorp Snrub, a rookie, generated by the computer and drafted to your team. At that point, the frustrated Colts player may drop the game, not wanting to go on with his familiar and popular player in exchange for a (ltierally) faceless replacement who probably sucks and has a swagger rating of only 55? Come the fuck on.

This is where imagination comes in. Instead of having Gorp Snrub be just a random bit of pixels filling a role on your roster, what if you fleshed the little bugger out? Gorp hails from Scranton, PA. He went to college at Oklahoma. He's not married but he's not looking. He's nervous filling in for Peyton, especially since Peyton departed so suddenly. He's under a lot of pressure. The media is all up his ass. He looks like he's taking it well but secretly he hopes his teammates can support him.

I've never even seen Gorp before and already I've crafted a simple backstory for him. Now extrapolate that out over 10 seasons, with hundreds of other players getting the same treatment. NOW you're doing franchise sports properly.

In this way, franchise sports becomes less about playing the game and more about creating a world and populating it with diverse fictional people. Sure, there are archetypes you can have (the wild-eyed rookie who plays over his head and crashes in his sophomore season, the No. 1 prospect everyone expects to do well, but will he live up to his promise? the dark-horse guy who comes into the league late but becomes a valuable role player, etc.). But it's up to the player to keep an interest in these fake guys who will never exist, and if you stick with it long enough, you can have an entire league history to play with.

If this sounds like super nerd shit to you, well congrats. P.S. NICE PHOTOS, NERD.

So now that I have that dissertation out of the way, let's get to the book. The book is about one such nerdlinger who uses dice to act out his fictional baseball league, the UBA. But this nerd is HARD CORE. When the book opens, we're entering into the 52nd or something year of the league (though in reality it takes like three months to do a season, not a bad pace all things considered).

The nerd in question is J. Henry Waugh, a 56-year-old actuary or something. After work, he usually heads straight home to play dice baseball all night. It's his life, his obsession. And like a good franchise sports nerd, he acts out the motions of the league and its games in his head, creating a story-within-a-story narrative where the fictional players he created exist. They play the game, completely unaware that their every action is being controlled by dice.

On the first night, Henry oversees the completion of a perfect game pitched by the son of one of the league's greats. Henry's on cloud 9, seeing the fulfillment of a pretty nifty storyline. But then tragedy strikes. The next time the star player is out there, he's hit by a line-drive and killed. Henry faces a dilemma all franchise players face: Does he call a mulligan and roll the dice again? Or does he accept what the impartial dice say, and Damon Rutherford (the unfortunate player) dies?

The temptation Henry faces is akin to quitting a game you're losing in progress because goshdarnit, the fuckin' AI's cheating again and what the hell I meant to clear the puck not shoot it into my own zone, THAT'S FUCKING INSANE. NO. NO. I WILL NOT ACCEPT LOSING TO THE DEVILS LIKE THAT. FUCK THIS STUPID GAME I HATE IT.

Henry accepts the roll, though, and lets Damon die, which sends shockwaves throughout the league AND Henry's personal life. His relationship with his only apparent friend, an annoying fatass, becomes severely strained. His work suffers tremendously, to the point where he risks being fired. His love life, already barren, may become even more barrenererer. And worst of all, he's losing the will to keep the league going after all these years.

Henry's personal life eventually takes a severe tumble, but he fights through with the power of baseball (and by giving in to temptation and tipping the dice to get an outcome that allows him some release from his demons). The league survives, and we see in a super-long epilogue the league, 100 seasons later, doing... something.

At some point after Rutherford's death, the narratives in the book break down. I think the main culprit is Coover's writing style. If there's only one way to describe it, it's this: "Purple FUCKin' prose." All over the place. All. Over. The place. Every sentence feels like a run-on even if it's only three words long. Every word can be read in the voice of an overzealous vaudevillian. The book has been described as "Joycean." Having read enough excerpts to know what that means, I can say YES, it is Joycean, and if you like Joyce, you might derive some enjoyment out of this.

Me? I don't like Joyce. I'm p. sure that Coover's writing style made the book (242 pages in my edition) added 100 pages of pure nothing to the story. I understand why he did it, though. He was trying to recapture the way baseball was described in Ye Olde Earlier Dayes, where writers would drone on and on about PEPPER! ROUND-TRIPPERS! OH BOY THAT WAS TOPS!!! I suppose he does a good job of doing that, but it's irritating to have to slog through five paragraphs of that shit just to get to the next relevant plot point.

And perhaps Coover got so distracted by how he was writing the story that he kinda lost track of where his story was going at points. Henry's baseball world is a world filled with old-timey players with old-timey names, with an Adjective first name and more often than not an Alliterative last name. It's a world where the ball makes a plfuff sound when it's hit than a solid crack. But it's not a terribly fascinating world.

When the narrative switches to the perspective of the fictional players, not only does the purple prose go into overdrive, the story nosedives into layers of existentialist shit so hard that it scarcely comes back up. When the players are not on the diamond, they spend most of their time talking to each other. Or, I should say, they talk at each other, like cartoon cutups, making noises but not having any meaning behind them. They sing songs, they tell old tales, but nothing is actually advanced. It's like watching a real-life bar scene and expecting a narrative to unfold. But it doesn't because real-life bar scenes don't have narratives and stop looking for meaning in them. Also who pissed in the corner?

Maybe Coover's intention was just to capture the feeling that the fictional characters are going through, but I didn't get much of it. Perhaps it's the dilemma franchise sports enthusiasts face when trying to get others interested in their franchise (it's almost impossible as nobody else shares the same point of reference the creator does, and therefore can't understand why some things are important or whatnot). Perhaps the book is "postmodern," which is a term that is not yet clearly defined and therefore I won't touch with a 10-foot-pole (otherwise known as MY DICK, SCORE :hi-fives all the bros:). But any way you slice it, the fitional baseball narrative goes nowhere and ends up nowhere. I can't even begin to tell you what's actually going on in the final chapter.

Henry himself isn't that interesting a character, and his supporting cast are even shallower than he is. We're never really led to understand why he picked up dice baseball or why it became such an obsession. Coover, though, does understand the intricacies of maintaing and making the most of such a hobby, and he does a good job mentioning the league's various histories, greats and records. For someone writing before any of this shit was as established as it is today (and when everything had to be written down, no less), he really grasps the subject matter well. Or he did. I have no idea if Mr. Coover's still alive.

But the story, unfortunately, devolves into a whole pile of nothing. It's a good vignette, I suppose, but it's too damn long and too damn in love with its own damn purple damn pr-damn-ose. Unless you're able to sustain the travails of Joycean narration and you're really interested in gleaning some insight into how franchise sports players operate, I suggest you give this one a wide berth.

Now, play ball!


















It doesn't matter if I liked or disliked the book, I was gonna end that way.

What I like about Inception

Writing about dreams is hard. Depicting them in film/TV is even harder. That's my impression at least.

I know dreams. I can remember them quite vividly, so I can say from experience that usually writers don't really know how to frame them. I don't necessarily blame them, because if they depicted dreams as they usually are, it'd be extremely difficult to make narrative sense out of them.

But when you want to visualize a dream for the films, and you want to do it realistically, there's only one way to do it: vague. Vague vague vague. White borders at the edges. Characters switching positions without moving. People being recognized as who they are despite not looking like who they are. Places you recognize despite them not looking anything like what they are in real life. Difficulty moving. Difficulty thinking, but everything making sense.

With that said, "Inception" doesn't really depict dreams realistically, but it "gets" how they act, how they have no real form or purpose, how they just sit there, being born in your mind and dying if you can't remember them.

I used to think that dreams were just picture shows that my brain played while I was asleep to keep the night staff occupied. The poor janitor cleaning up my hippocampus after a busy day needed something cool to watch, after all. Apparently I internalized that idea so much that (and I may have mentioned this before) I actually had a dream end with a credit roll. Quintus Flufferstuff, you are the best director my mind's theater ever had!

Christopher Nolan seems to embrace this idea to a certain extent in "Inception." Though the dreams are crystal clear (on screen) and have more logic than usual, the entire premise of the movie is much like the theater of the mind. I won't go as far as CHUD's Devin Faraci and say that the entire movie is an alagory of movies as shared dreams, but the pathos that Cobb (Leo DiCaprio) goes through as he navigates the ultimate dream heist rings true to me.

Most of the time, dreams really are just theater, actions played out over a very simple narrative. Sometimes the narrative and settings and cast change, but it's the same basic actions over and over again. You're getting chased. You're chasing someone. You're talking to someone. You're walking somewhere. You're trying to shoot someone. You're avoiding a monster closet.

But sometimes dreams take those elements and push them in a direction that surprises you. You're in a crowded room. Someone very familiar is there. You have to get to her. You can see her. You sense she doesn't know you're there, and you have to change that. This is the kind of thing that sticks with you long after the details fade away, and like a good movie, it's the best kind of dream to have, even if it is sometimes unpleasant (that one wasn't, by the way).

Nolan seems to understand this. Cobb experiences dreams the same way I described above (the graf right above, not the other one. Well, that one too but let's focus on the one I just wrote out). The real story isn't the shootouts, the inception, the rescuing of wayward dreamers. The real story is the reminder that just because something is fiction doesn't mean it ain't real. Cliched, I know, but it's the kind of message that can only be driven home when the audience realizes that it too can participate in this kind of drama.

"Inception" was a fabulous movie all around; not since "The Dark Knight" has a movie hit all the right notes. But what it does beyond being a merely great flick (such as "Cliffhanger" or "The Fugitive" or "As Good As It Gets") is push you. Not necessarily challenge you (some movies don't need to be challenging to get a point across). But it pushes your mind. In a verb, it inspires.

"Jurassic Park" was inspirational to me. "Heat" was. "The Dark Knight" was. And so "Inception" is. These are movies that open up doors in our heads and let's us see what it's like to peer into another world, a world that's fictional but rings true to us. It isn't like "Avatar," which is empty and pointless, like an educational children's toy that can only shout random facts at an inattentive toddler.

The best part is that "Inception" reminds us that, should we ever hit a rut or a block in our creativity, we can fall asleep, and any given night can have a movie play in our head that opens a door for us. The subconscious is an extremely powerful weapon against boredom. Use it well.

Random thought that occurred to me today while in traffic

When my grandparents dreamed about each other, did they see each other as they were in the present, or as they were when they were younger?

A Flat (but Good) Book

In a way, it's a shame this book was not bad, because then I could've called this tome "Flat Earth Snooze." Alas, it is actually good. Not great, but good.

If you like the news, and you should or else you're a dummy, then you probably have at least an inkling as to how fucked up it is. Misplaced priorities, chasing down hot leads over substantive stories, and a complete inability to break meaningful stories are the obvious answers. But "Flat Earth News" digs a bit deeper.

Nick Davies works in the (British) newspaper system, and he and his contacts have a huge litany of sins committed by the press, a press that is increasingly dominated by RUPERT. Davies is more focused on newspapers (or as they call them in Britain, tabloids). Actually, he rarely addresses TV news, but many of the points he makes in the book are salient to the TV news world as well.

Davies does a good job illustrating the crazy (and harmful) shit that goes down in news organizations, whether it's hijinks involving an Israeli defector or an asshole managing editor or dudes going through trash looking for leads. He also helpfully explains the drudgery behind "churnalism," the mindless pumping out of stories no matter how pointless, and the tedious process involved in getting them out.

The stories Davies tells and the issues he explores are interesting, but as I said, in the age of the Internet and TV, his focus on newspapers makes things seem a bit quaint. You have to really be a newsie to stay interested, and if you're not, it's hard to recommend the book. Still, it has important things to say about our news media, so be a good citizen and read it. READ IT.