Christ's Vicar in the Air

This article from the Times talks about the Pope and abortion. Big surprise: he's anti-. And he'll excommunicate politicians who backed a measure legalizing them in Mexico. Question 1: will he excommunicate those who voted for such politicians? Those who vote for such politicians in the future? Those who provide aid and comfort to such politicians?

But these geopolitically religious questions get in the way of a larger question. The Times says the comments were made "during an airborne news conference aboard the plane carrying him". Now, we all know about the Popemobile. But what do we call this fantastic vehicle of Papal Transport? The airplance that can return the Prelate of St. Peter's Basilica to his Rome dome home? That can speed to court a Pontiff plaintiff? (perhaps there to deliver his sartorial wisdom with a vestment testament) That can, with altitude, make the mitre mightier?

Pope Force One.






(Though we also would have accepted VHoly See-25)

Pronunciation Realization

Where do you place the accent in the word "Caribbean"? Per se, I normally accent it as ca-RIB-be-an. But, I realized, in reference to the Johnny Depp vehicle, I pronounce "the Pirates of the CA-ri-BE-an". And when I think about it, I realize that doing so makes the phrase iambic (yes, with a femine rhyme, which is why there's an extra syllable on the end). Why?

Robert Frost said writers in English have a choice between two meters: strong iambic and weak iambic.

I guess readers in English only have those two choices, as well.

Opt-what now?

I just signed up for Consumer Reports. Spending $26 so I can save money. That's why I spent 5 years in college.

But as I'm signing up, they have this form item:

We occasionally send e-mail notification of special ConsumerReports.org events and updates or news about other Consumer Reports activities or products. If you do not want to receive such notices let us know by checking "Opt out."

Opt In
Opt Out

Now, I appreciate the ability to marginally reduce my spam load by telling them "I'd rather not, really." But they are using standard terms of nerdery and cred and nerd cred to make it appear that they get it.

When they don't.

And what's worse, the UI is unclear. Presumably, if you don't want to be bugged, you'd prefer an opt-in system, in which case, then you want to opt-out--

Look Consumer Reports. Let's get past the pleasantries. I'm giving you 26 dollars and a spam email address. You're going to give me some information on camcorders I want to buy, you're going to sell said email address to anyone who will pay for it, then you're going to give it away to anyone who can't. This isn't an affair of the heart; it's a shoddy electronic information passing encounter of prostitution.

Foster in Stereo (R)

Since so pitifully little of my work at The Onion - A.V. Club has made it into the web edition, I took the liberty of constructing a rudimentary page to host my articles to date. (I read and write HTML at a third-grade level). See it here:

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze2788s/

At least it's not a members-dot-aol-dot-com page (quasi-sequitur: Stephen Glass used an AOL domain when constructing a bogus page for Jukt Micronics as part of the tapestry of fabulism he called a journalistic career.)

Hopefully, you'll read some of the stuff there and think: "Ah, of course he hasn't had time to post at The Enfranchised lately. The man is working toward a Pulitzer."

You Can Do Better: Rolling Stones

In this article, we find out that 300 horses are to be sedated as a Rolling Stones concert happens next to them.

In this edition of You Can Do Better, we invite you to to Do Better in comments.

Punchlines:

• Normally the 300 doses of horse tranquilizer at a Stones concert are for Keith Richards.
  
• So this is why Serbian Gangsters threaten you with sleeping with the horses.
  
• Some pun on the song title "Wild Horses".
  

Snakes in a Plain... old office building.

My, who's that handsome blogger over at the official Google Blog?

Oh, it's me!

I mean, it's I.

Fucking predicate nominative.

Discovered Clerihew

Reading Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (an excellent book for those who wanted to know more than they wanted to know about... poetic meter and poetic form), I read this example of graffito (absurd singular not added, but in the original):

"Soldiers who wish to be a hero
Are practically zero.
But those who wish to be civilians,
Jesus, they run into the millions."

Fussell introduces the poem to point out the value of Trochaic substitution. Jesus, in the fourth line, is a trochee (its first syllable is stressed, as opposed to an iamb in which the last syllable is stressed). This draws our attention (as does the fact that it's a the-tiniest-bit-naughty interjection). (Fussell doesn't mention that soldiers, parallel at the beginning of the first line, is also a trochee; the omission makes me wonder if he doesn't pronounce it as an iamb.)

But what he doesn't mention is that this is a Clerihew. And an excellent one at that. Because there is no prescription for meter, poets in the form cannot fall back on anything and have to find utility in the arbitrary; this anonymous has.

AKA the Testicle Tax

This image (which, if it's broken down, described a $1645 rebate for people willing to buy a Ford Mustang with an Automatic Transmission) is supply and demand at its barest.

What is the problem here? Simple, it's:

1. A Ford Mustang with
   
2. an automatic transmission.
   
   

If you're driving a sports car, don't be piloting a shuttlecraft where you occasionally give it some guidance to increase thrust or to fiddle with the cruise control or maybe a bit more to the left there, eh horseless carriage? If you're not too busy handling my hands-free bluetooth call to my manicurist?

Ford should just come out and call this incentive program what it is: a pussy rebate, for those who want to the veneer of a macho set of wheels that needn't hold up to fine inspection because they do not, in fact, have any friends who will be riding shotgun.

At least, not any that don't have to be inflated.

Pour Moi?

This story has everything going for it. The chair-throwing hard-work attitude of Bobbby Knight pushing for the nonsensical, Dan Rather-esque shouting of pizza-seller Dick Vitale, to get the latter into the College Basketball Hall of Fame. It follows up on Bobby Knight's redemption (at least in my eyes): the NBA recently decided that pros have to be out of high school for one year, which has pushed the LeBron Jameses of the world to college for one year of a degree they *know* they won't finish, and Knight has been the only college coach to talk about the harm this is doing to student-athletes. Before, anyone who came to college only *thought* they might not finish college, y'know, if they had a few good seasons. And this really is a good tale: Dickie V belongs in the College Basketball Hall. He is the voice of March for many people.

But he's that voice on ESPN, the same outlet that's running this story. Without disclaimer. And I realize this is an AP story, but ESPN, can't you please say "full disclosure: Dick Vitale is an employee of ESPN". Because when you don't, you endorse a story, a pity, a sympathy that, if it were followed up on, would benefit you. You'd get to do a special on DV, maybe a retrospective, best of commentary on ESPN Classic, and a reality TV show where DVitty goes back to school to finish up his degree and find his lost love on ESPNU (look, Rodney Dangerfield's dead, you can steal his part and Terry Farrell is still hotter than Perry Farrell).

So, ESPN, shill away: you're a Disney company, it's kind of your job. But also make it clear that you're Dick's Vital employer when you do.

Eventual Gander: British History for Dummies

[Review of British History for Dummies by Sean Lang]

There are times in history when one ought to be a fan of a certain publishing house. Scribner's Sons in the 20's. City Lights in the 50's. And now, For Dummies. Now, I'm sure that the For Dummies series prompts scorn and derision for some of their titles. I can only hope that Computers for Dummies reads something like this: "This is a mouse. You use it to do the obvious thing on your computer. When it breaks, you should do anything other than call your 'smart grandson' who does, in fact, have something better to do than help you digitize your photos of cats in front of a background of animated cats trying to hump other still life cats." I might be worried about my grandma taking offense at the previous sentence if not for the content of the previous sentence.

But the For Dummies books on Humanities and Social Sciences are awesome. The actual dummies, the ones who learn things just for grades, flock to Cliffs Notes. This brand, that in the technical realm caters to liberal arts majors on a deadline ("Our co-op newsletter needs to be out by Tuesday and it's not getting there 'til you learn Adobe Illustrator!"), caters, in the humanities realm, to liberal arts majors looking to have more info to masturbate out in casual cocktail party conversation. And so they find wholly competent authors who have a nice, cheeky sense of humor to write it. All the while giving you the facts without the pesky parts of textbooks. Y'know, the quizzes, the forced diversity ("minorities were important too during this period; check out this sidebar that shows a woman/black/poor person who had an interesting life story that is a sidebar because it doesn't fit in to the main story"), the repetition for students skimming a chapter introduction 3 minutes before class.

This is a textbook for people who want to learn, and want to have fun learning. Textbooks use a style that is dry, droll, and drab to make information easy to convey. Instead of dumbing down the words, Lang makes his style more interesting so you read closer. Consider the following chapter/section titles: "1066 and All That Followed", "Children of the Revolutions", "And What Have the Romans Ever Given Us in Return?", "Saxon, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll", "Who wants to be a William heir?", "Going Dutch", "Marlborough country", "Trouble Over: Brdiged Water", "The Battle of Warren Hastings". These are references to, somewhat respectively, an earlier satire of British History, Song Titles, Monty Python, awesome things, game shows, a good way to be told it's alright but you won't get laid, smoking, and historical occurrences themselves. I'm sure I've omitted several altogether awesome ones. And that made me pay closer attention. And that made me learn more.

The writing's funny, sure. In a wry, British manner, instructive itself. (In one passage about the revolts over Poll Tax, the writer notes that the disembodied head the peasants took was surely displayed on a vertical piece of wood using pole tacks). But all the cultural references make this book more admittedly a product of its own time than most are willing to admit. And it's short, a survey course, which means you get blasted with a lot, quickly. This is not a book to read a chapter or two of. If you want that, go to wikipedia. This is a book to read all of in one relatively fell swoop, so that you make connections you might miss if you read about single events. For instance, I had never quite realized that the Prince John who was the snivelling bastard in Robin Hood stories became the King John who, as a snivelling king, was forced by his barons to issue the Magna Carta. Let me know what connections you make.

Don't read this book because I recommend it. That perverts the purpose of this book. It is a book to be read only because you don't have to. The author made this book good; intent and intent alone can make it enjoyable.

It might make the Food Network, but how would they know?

You rarely think of the Amish as being gimmicky. Or, rather, they have their one gimmick, and stick to their schtick so thoroughly that you almost, for a second, think they maybe, just maybe they don't actually want to have fun. This lets you know that, in fact, they want to rage and be famous like the rest of us.

So, to the Amish: welcome.

To Don King: looks like there's a new (self-)promoter in town.

Dr. Foster's Dictionary: March 21, 2007

It's official. The distinction between high culture and low culture is no more. The Rubicon has been crossed...Il est fini....or, if you will, Git 'er Done.

If Borat didn't perform the coup de grâce, then certainly this Vanity Fair piece on British ex-pats in New York does. In the midst of his Anglo-baiting self-flagellation, A.A. Gill manages to comment on the "severe moose knuckle" caused by the British New Yorker's inproper deployment of American blue jeans. Let's see the entry and discussion from Dr. Foster's Dictionary.

moose knuck·le
[moos nuhk-uhl]
noun

1. A minor regional dysphemism from the middle-low American, having to do with the bifurcation and bulging of the scrotum and gonads, respectively, caused by a high-riding crotch seam on an overtight pair of pants. The sartorial phenomenon derives its name from its apparent similarity to the phalanges bones of the American moose. It relates also to the more widely celebrated "camel toe" phenomenon (though the taxonomic connection is vague at best: camels and moose come from two entirely different suborders--Tylopoda and Ruminantia, respectively--of Order Artiodactyla. What a gaffe!)

Since Europeans use "Elk" and not "moose" to refer to the relevant genuses, it speaks to the true thought-transforming power of globalization, as well as to Gill's immersion in American culture, that he uses "moose knuckle" instead of "elk knuckle" to describe a suffocating nutsack. Don't be surprised if William Safire has a thing or two to say about the affair in his "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine.

The Eventual Gander: Double Feature

Over the span of eight hours this weekend I saw two films: The Last King of Scotland and Zodiac. A few notes.

The Last King of Scotland: Overall a decent film. It manages to achieve the kind of rock'n'roll pacing of a McG venture* and the 360-degree grit of a Tony Scott flick without descending into gonzo garishness or cinemagraphic circle jerk (of course, it's hard to be blinded by the bling when you're filming in Uganda). Anyway, I said it was a decent film. But Forrest Whitaker's performance as Idi Amin will nevertheless gaurantee its permanence. For once, the buzz was right. Whitaker deserves not only this year's Oscar but next year's as well. His screen presence is more like screen omnipresence. He dominates every scene he's in, just as Amin himself did. Also, and this is kind of an aside. There is a 15 minute sequence involving Amin's beautiful third wife, a trio of African go-go dancers, and our young Scottish protagonist. Needless to say, my jeans have never been so uncomfortable (this even though I was unable to suspend disbelief enough to think that a 130lb Scot could please a Nubian Princess. The Scots have the endowment of the Irish and the lustiness of the English.)

Zodiac: Wonderful. It is one of the signs of great filmmaking that the audience is kept in suspense even when they know what's going to happen. I went into Zodiac knowing most of the details--including the fact that they never made a charge in the case--and was biting my nails throughout its three-hour runtime. This is Fincher at his finest, but don't expect to see Seven or Fight Club, Zodiac is a different animal. Also, it's a nice touch that Fincher cast different actors to play the Zodiac based on different witnesses accounts. My one complaint, and it's fairly minor, is that Jake Gyllenhaal couldn't be bothered to change his rugged chic wardrobe or his perfectly unkempt ski-ramp haircut for a fucking 70s period piece. What, is his image under license with the Mid-00's Heart Throb Association of America?



*I debated whether to dignify that ridiculous moniker with a reference for about a half hour

Beware the Ides of March, and the other 30 days of it as well

If you are a dedicated reader of The Enfranchised, and you aren't, then you'd know we had it out over the topic of NCAA basketball once before (though my post is the only one in the series worth reading). Still, there might be a dribble or two of piss left for the taking.

I'll first note that I am of two minds about college basketball. On the one hand, I am bothered by the entire phenomenon. Part of this is personal--after four of my roommates were evicted from our choice F Street townhouse during my sophomore year at GWU, I was shipped off to an "efficiency" (one could write an entire post about the misnomic properties of this appellation) apartment in the very same dormitory that housed our illustrious Men's basketball team: The GWU Fighting Colonials. I quickly found them to be loud (quiet hours don't apply when nobody on the floor studies), spoilt (they all seemed to drive SUVs and imports when most others walked, and to have Playstation N's in their rooms when few others had even Playstation N-1's), and lecherous (it quickly became a tedium to have to break the news to them that my girlfriend was just that. The poor girl is Latin and voluptuous (not in the euphemistic way) and so attracts more black men than the subject of a hypothetical stereotype that won't get me in trouble with the NAACP).

On the other hand, when those selfsame Colonials fought their way into the top 20, and then the top 10, I became something of a born-again bandwagoner. I was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Colonial Army, and thought it the personal duty of every student and faculty at GW to make sure these boys had all the Powerade, pep, and pussy they needed to assure a good seed in the Tourney. But when starting Center Pops Mensah-Bonsu [sic] and company failed to lead the team into the sweet 16, I was crestfallen. They hadn’t even lost to some distinguished team like Oxford or The University of Chicago, but rather to a regional school in some North Carolina backwater (Earl University, maybe, it was Marquis or Baron U. It bore the name of some viceroy, of that much I’m sure).

So I did what any good sports fan would do if once-disappointed by his hometown heroes – I formed summary judgments about the intrinsic worth of the entire enterprise. So why worry at all about the mechanics of the tournament? Why not forget basketball altogether and have the respective team-members see who can construct a vaguer and more ridiculous major (Rural Sociology, anyone?) to appease those nettlesome academic-types who are always interfering with university athletics? I’m fairly sure GW could still compete at that.

That, or eliminate the automatic Ivy bid, distribute automatic bids by regions instead of conferences, recalibrate the S-Curve accordingly, and publicly clarify the role of Ratings Percentage Index.

Either way.

Pissing In The Wind: This Bracket Racket

This Sunday, the NCAA announces its field of 65.

That is, of course, an odd number. And as much as it isn't even, it's even less a power of 2, as tournament rosters are wont to be. This irregularity descends from a historical quirk. In every tournament, there are the 31 automatic bids and the 34 at-large bids.

The automatic bids go to the winners of the separate conferences. There used to be 30 conferences, but the august Mountain West Conference split from the athletic pantheon of the Western Athletic Conference, and in its infinite wisdom the NCAA decided both were, in fact, real conferences and both deserve automatic bids.

And then there are the at-large bids, or, as they're also known, the "Good Teams". You want to see Duke in the tournament? Of course you do, cause Coach K is K-k-k-krazy! And who wouldn't want to see UNC. Or Maryland. Or Boston College. Let's not forget Wake Forest's Demon Deacons, a team name up there with Pennsylvania's Fighting Quakers for absurdity. Of course, because all these teams come from the ACC, most of these great teams are coming from an at-large bid.

So why even bother with the automatic bids that are just warm-up for the teams that have been spending the regular seasons kicking ass and taking names?

And while we're at it, what is the deal with those conference tournaments at all? Let's say there is a team from the Podunk Regional Conference that is good. Not great, certainly not a top 25 team, though maybe it's gotten some votes. They work their ass off to establish a solid record, get to the Charles Willamon (he was the first athletic director at East Bumblefuck University) Tournament, and lo and behold, there are actually cameras there! They're going to be on TV! And they lose! And even though they're obviously the "best" team in the 'Dunk.

This is all done, of course, because those fancy-shmancy TV cameras give the 'Dunk teams hell of money. At the cost of, y'know, screwing over their best child.

So, dear commentatrices, what's the way to deal with basketball championships?

Harvard sucks at basketball; Dinosaurs still dead

Harvard decided not to renew their coach after a 12-16 season. At, say, Duke, that would be a disastrous season. Coach K would be roasted alive and the Cameron Crazies would become the Cameron Cannibals. But Frank Sullivan, the coach, had an overall record of 178-245 in 16 seasons at Cambridge Community College. So, in fact, this year's .428 percentage was .8 percent *better* than his career .420 winning record.

How mercurial, dear Ivy League Bastion. Perhaps the Ivory Tower wants to get in on the game? Recruit noted intellectual players like J, Ph.D.? You get down with your bad self, Stanford of the East.

So how long has it been since they made the big dance? Will next year's seniors be able to gather round the campfire and tell the freshmen stories of NCAA tournament shenanigans? Maybe the red-shirted seniors? Let me get on my reading glasses, and peruse this article... It says that the last time the Crimson made the bracket was.. two thousand and-- Where is that?

"Harvard last made the NCAA Tournament in 1946."

1946?!

That's right. People who saw the Harvard team last ball it up weren't grindin', they were jitterbuggin'. Diplomats from the LEAGUE OF NATIONS watched the game (possibly). India was part of Britain. Bobby Bonds, father of today's elder statesmen of steroid question dodging, Barry Bonds was born. But hey, at least maybe some of the players were scouted for the League? Y'know, go pro?

Oh, wait, no. The NBA wasn't founded for another couple months.

So Harvard, here's my suggestion: Don't form a search committee for a new coach. Why bother? Instead, just let the intramural basketball team currently leading in the standings play for you at the Div I level. That way, you save some money, more kids get to experience the rush of competition, and it's not like you'll do much worse.

Maureen Dowd's Career And Other Cunning Stunts

Sports analogies are illuminating in a piece of writing when they recast complex phenomena--like the Democratic Primary--in the more immediately recognizable terms of positions and objectives, raw talent and charisma, the value of teamwork versus individual achievement, , underdogs and favorites, triumph over adversity, et cetera.

Maureen Dowd's latest op-ed gem, "Where Is His Right Hook?" manages to take a fairly common and straightforward species of sports analogy--'politics is like a prize fight' (or a wrestling match, or a dogfight...)--and make it almost completely incoherent.

A good rule of thumb in journalism (even op-eds) is that the headline, the lede, and the pull-quote should give the reader a fairly good idea what the article is about. In this case, the aforementioned headline set up the following lede:

"If Hillary is in touch with her masculine side, Obama is in touch with his feminine side."

and the pull-quote was....Well, I don't know exactly what the pull-quote was, because I threw away my copy and nytimes.com wants me to pay to read it again.* I'm fairly sure the pull quote said something like "he rolls over while she takes another shot", which is not only ambiguous across about a thousand contexts that the Times would no doubt find "unfit to print", but also brings the pronoun-to-noun ratio in the headline, lede and pull-quote up to 5:2.

Like I said, I can't be sure this was the exact wording of the pull-quote. It might have been a reference to Sex and the City--one can never be sure.

Her writing (and I use that term charitably) invariably seems like it comes straight from her adorable little diary in which she confides her deepest, darkest secrets along with notes about super-hottie Centrists, Third-Wave feminism, and bulk makeup orders.


*though, becoming a member of "Times Select" would allow me to root through their Op-Ed archives and reconstruct just how John Tierney managed to make Libertarianism fit on a postage stamp

March Madness

Stereotypes are idioms, and idioms sure can be useful. For instance, this weekend when I met a women's rugby player, I filed away that fact and all its connotations. And so when she mentioned she was Dutch, I was able to say with nary a pause, "ah, then it makes sense that you want to stick fingers in dikes."

Speaking of, it's March. To some of my friends who are interested in walking a mile in the other guy's shoes (and pants), that means it's March Manness[sic]. But for us here at The Enfranchised, it means it's time for basketball.

(For those of you a bit confused about my introduction and segue, allow me to quote Aristotle. In Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Ch. 7 Eth.1098a23-24, we find, "What is the difference between cunnilingus and dunking? You don't have to dunk to play woman's basketball." A bit awkward phrasing, yes. But remember that comedic timing was discovered at the same time as perspective in 2-D art, only in the Renaissance.)

And so, this month, we're getting into it. Sports sports sports here at the 'Franchised. College, Pro, PAL, men's, women's unisex, hot horse-on-horse action (if we find horses that play polo, y'know, on other horses. Come to think of it, that's Foster's assignment). You name it, we'll consider considering it.

In the Beginning Was the Nerd...Redux

Some extraneous thoughts that will not be running in my coverage of New York ComicCon in The Onion - A.V. Club this week:

-I moved out of my comic book phase about 10 years ago, but I must admit, spending time at this convention made me all kinds of nostalgic. The writing seems to be much better, and much more thematically diverse than it was even in '96, when I followed more mutant storylines than an episode of The Surreal Life.

-From the looks of it, these nerds are getting laid.

-In my story, I mentioned Eli Roth, the Lynchean auteur behind such masterpieces as Hostel, Cabin Fever, and Hostel 2. Here's something else I learned about him during his appearance at ComicCon: Roth takes a good deal of pride in being a young man of Jewish descent who has managed to crack his way into the tough world of Hollyood.

-Jon Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London, Animal House, Blues Brothers, Three Amigos! and Coming to America, was one of a panel of six legendary horror directors that drew about a tenth as many fanboys as Roth and the chick from Sorority Boys.

-Peter Mayhew, aka Chewbacca, turned me away when I asked for a quick interview. "No press," he said. Actually, his publicist said it. Mayhew himself shook his head and said, "GrrrrrrrreeerhrrWhrrrhrhrBuhhhhrrhrahGaaaaaaaaaaauaua"

That mother(superior)frocker!

Have you heard of the unlucky abbot
with a cock that was shaped like a rabbit?
 It fit in no one,
 till one day a nun
with a cunt like a hutch dropped her habit.

-D"vagina like a warren? No, that's not it..."an

Breaking News: Hampshiregate

The Democratic Party headquarters in New Hampshire were broken into!

Even the staid New York Times couldn't resist saying "Burglars have broken into Democratic Party headquarters. No, you're not having a flashback to 1972 and the infamous event [boring New York Times recounting of "facts" "sensically"]". So I'm just going to take this as a warm-up, a practice: write a few jokes, and then dissect them. Your (better) jokes in comments.

• "Will this lead to John Lynch's downfall?" (he's the governor of New Hampshire; yes I looked it up)
  
• "It was probably Candians." Look, I don't think it's funny, but The Leviathan will. Not because of NH's proximity to Canadians, but because some nationalities send him all a-stitches. E.g., "Luxembourgians". I can hear him laughing already.
  
• "Maybe it's Zombie Nixon!" Wait, is there any other kind of Nixon?
  
• "New Hampshire? Isn't that in Vermont?" Look, it's late. Here at The Enfranchised, it's timely, funny, sensical: pick 1.
  
• "Maybe it was the Libertarians." That's not a joke; it's a warning. Those libertarians are fucking fierce, and they're coming for you. Consider yourself alerted.
  

Like I said, your (funnier) jokes in the comments.

The Great State of New Jersey

Pride sometimes comes late.

So often politicians refer to the Great State of , when I was pretty sure they couldn't possibly mean it. Really? Ohio? I mean, I'm down with Dayton, but any state that has both Cleveland *and* Cincinnati? As a teenager, I filtered out "The Great State of" as propaganda.

Today, I found my faith.

1. From wikipedia's Hackettstown, NJ article: "It is believed that Hackettstown was named after Samuel Hackett, a prominent landowner who allegedly "contributed liberally to the liquid refreshments on the christening of a new hotel, in order to secure the name which, before this, had been Helms' Mills or Musconetcong".
   
   Long before all sorts of complex trips for Congressmen, New Jerseyans appealed to the common man by enabling his debilitating alcoholism. Bribery of the people, for the people, by our town's namesake.
   
   
2. Of course, no Wikipedia article would be complete without a droll recounting of statistics. So, let's learn about Teterboro, New Jersey: "As of April 1, 2006, out of a 2004 Census estimated population of 18 in Teterboro, there were 39 registered voters (216.7% of the population, vs. 55.4% in all of Bergen County)." This section is, I fear, written with tongue wholly unassociated with cheek. The only proviso is a caveat in the introduction of the article: "It is worth noting that the 2000 census failed to count any of the residents of the Vincent Place housing units who had moved into the newly built homes in 1999. The uncounted residents, including the Mayor and all four Council members, would help make up a projected tripling of the population enumerated by the census."
   
   
3. And then, there's my hometown, New Providence, whence we learn "In 1759, the balcony of the Presbyterian Church in the town collapsed. The lack of serious injuries was declared by Divine Providence, and the town was renamed to New Providence." Which is a crappy name for a town. But considering the original name was Turkeytown, even historical theological architectual failures are a great excuse to pick a new name. Just imagine if that name had survived until high school sports had been invented. "Well, the Turkeytown High Turkeys sure are turkeying it up today, those turkeys. Oh, and they're ugly."
   
   

In what other state can town naming and demographics be half as sleezy? We've taken something as boring as trash reclamation and made it a haven for Italian families most acquainted with cannoli, guns, guns hidden in cannoli, and cannoli guns.

Never again will I make fun of my home state. At least not until we do something stupid, funny, stupidly funny, or funnelly stupid (funnelly stupid is like the traffic flows around Garden State Parkway toll plazas).

Or this.

The Academy Is...

The Oscars happened. And it turns out that all Martin Scorsese had to do to win one was show Leo in the missionary position and hurl Martin Sheen off a building.

The Departed was as good as a movie gets without being a great movie. (Interestingly, As Good As It Gets is also probably as good as it gets without being great.) Its relative dominance confirms what everybody already knows about the Academy: popularity contest.

But it's not as bad as the rest of pop media. If the E! Channel is the House of Representatives, the Academy is the Senate. It's still about a layer of symbolic bullshit draped awkwardly over the concerns of a small group of moneyed special interests (in this case the studios and their PR teams, who lobby every bit as hard as Abramoff), but whereas the House is tethered to its constituency tightly enough that they have to hop-to with every fickle shift in the polling data, the Senate operates at just a bit of a remove. So the Senators (the Academy members, hear me out on this analogy) become less concerned with earning constituents' pats on the back as they are with earning their own pats on the back.

To wit:

Babel, yet further proof of Alejandro González Iñárritu's ability to convert three half-finished screenplays into an overlong "socially conscious" yarn via arbitrary (and usually implausible) connections. See also: Syriana

The Queen: Another opportunity for the Academy to remind everybody how much they loved Princess Di.

Little Miss Sunshine: Indie filmmaking by numbers. Somebody should tell these guys that if merely mentioning the names Proust and Nietzsche in a piece of writing were enough to make it intellectually stimulating, The Enfranchised would be bigger than The Huffington Post.

Letters from Iwo Jima: I haven't seen this one, but I'm pretty sure we won that battle, planted a big ass flag, and everybody involved went back to their business with much merriment. Truly inspirational.

and of course The Departed. Great source material, a taut adaptation, top-notch performances (including Alec Baldwin whose 'type' seems to have become 'playing against type') and slick direction. Only problem is that it's about a third as good as Goodfellas, Casino, Raging Bull, or Taxi Driver (or Brick, or Children of Men, or Pan's Labyrinth for that matter).

Hey, at least people will stop saying things like, "Scorsese doesn't hold a candle to Academy Award (R) winner Paul Haggis. I mean, did you see Haggis on Entourage?" and "Screw Scorcese, how about Academy Award winner (R) James Cameron. I mean, did you see Cameron on Entourage?)

The Enfranchised Moratorium: Britney Bashing

I propose a moratorium on making fun of Britney Spears.

It feels a bit like Johnny Lawrence continuing to pile up the roundhouse kicks on Daniel-san even after the rest of his skeleton-clad Cobra Kai compatriots think he's had enough.

As much as it begrudges me to admit, Chuck Klosterman was exactly right about Spears when he profiled her for Esquire all those years ago. She is (or at least was) the least self-reflective person in the history of the world. And now you are witnessing the end of that, the shitty consequences of living a decade as a product of your handlers and nothing more.

One doesn't have to be a consumer of tabloid stories to know that there is a difference between criticizing celebrity excess and kicking a 26-year-old girl from Arkansas when she's down. It's the celebrity fanboy equivalent of the madonna-whore complex that got us here. There are other options besides unalloyed reverence and no-holds-barred hatred.

Let's leave the poor girl alone, she has no fucking clue what's happening to her.

Feel free to let the door hit you

Apparently some coach I've never heard of (Ritchie McKay) at some school I don't care about (UNM:UArizona::UArizona:Cal Berkeley, and I bearly[sic] care about Berkeley) is on the way out. Fine, happens all the time. But look at the good-bye he's getting:

"I still think Ritchie McKay is a great man and a great coach," University of New Mexico Board of Regents member Jack Fortner told the Albuquerque Journal. "Somewhere, he's going to do great things in a program. And apparently, it's not going to be here at UNM. I haven't had a chance to talk to Ritchie and I will. He's got a great staff, and it's unfortunate that they won't be here either."

I can only imagine that Mr. Fortner was holding himself back. "And he's got a cute family. They'll go great on some university's christmas cards, unfortunately not ours."

"He has a great car, unfortunately he won't be driving it after we impounded it."

"And he has a great house, shame that it was recently rustled by goons."

C'mon, are you a Regent of a University or a Sopranos recurring character wanna-be?

And while we're at it, why do sports have to have so many layers of duplicity? Grow a pair, pull a Streinbrenner, and say, "he sure did suck here." Don't be a passive aggressive dick and go, "Well, he had a cute Scottish Terrier." 1) It's not germane, 2) have you seen an ugly Scottish Terrier? And why does every coach have to pledge allegiance to their current job? We see every coach pull a Nick Saban and say "I would absolutely, positively not leave my current-- Oh, that much?" and then Benedict Arnold himself (always himself) over to a more lucrative or prestigious position. Which is fine! It's what we all would do. It's what athletes do.

We put capitalism on a pedestal, alright that it keeps most of the population in coal mines because it puts a few of us on 20" spinners. So let's stop expecting professional coaches to be holier-than-y'all and instead realize that a coaching job in the SEC is going to be arousing and that coaches who get such offers will get Ayn Randy.

Every Man Is An Anachronism By Tomorrow's Standards

In her brilliant, insightful, terrifying, loathsome piece on the "Say Everything" generation, Emily Nussbaum explores the means and ends of the kids' penchant for internet self-exposure. She argues that my peers and I see LiveJournal, MySpace, etc, etc, as skin-thickeneing, interactive archives of our adolescence.

I bandied about vaguely similar arguments in my response to the Facebook Feed a few months ago (though, because I did so on a blog and as a registered facebook user, my invectives were gleefully hypocritical). Nussbaum shouldn't fret; she joins a long and distinguished list of scientists, philosophers, poets and critics who have blatantly plagiarized my work. Here is just a small sampling of the political and social trends and phenomena about which I was ahead of the curve:

-The Wire
-Scientology
-The fact that Dane Cook sucks
-Poker
-The fact that Dane Cook sucks at Poker
-Enthusiasm over Barack Obama
-Dissapointment over Barack Obama's
-The dire consequences of living the life designed for you by your handlers, sans even the most primitive self-awareness.
-To wit: Britney Spears
-Globalization
-Puggles
-Thai food
-Parker Lewis Can't Lose
-blogs
-lists
-the backlash against string theory
-the second, third, and eighth backlashes against Family Guy
-anal is the new vaginal
-Pixies reunion
-Colbert outdoing Stewart
-Meth
-the death of irony
-the death of work
-the death of privacy
-the death of Anna Nicole Smith
-the four-minute mile
-facebook girls who are obviously fine with you masturbating to their pictures
-bourbon is the new scotch
-the concept of a "Wiki"
-the concept of a "Wookiee"
-the concept of a Wookiee via the concept of a Wiki
-using the Snoop Dogg "izzle" patois in casual conversation
-this halloween costume (seriously)
-The coming apocalypse