Cubs At The Break

We're a little over half way through the baseball season, and I've been very remiss in my update on the status of my favorite team, the Chicago Cubs. And there's one very good reason why; they stink. They've been bad on an almost epic scale, and may post the worst record in franchise history. For the first few months of the season they were no fun to watch, as the offense struggled, the pitching was a roller coaster ride of agony, and Starlin Castro and Bryan LaHair were the only two bright spots on the team. The last few weeks, however, have seen an uptick in both the teams intensity and record, and I'd like to place all that on rookie Anthony Rizzo, but the truth is just about everyone on the team is performing better. Except LaHair, of course. Bryan, a 29 year old journeyman who's getting his first real chance to start in the big leagues (I think he played for the Hebrew Oilers a couple seasons ago) started out on fire, earning a trip to the All-Star game  and kudos in the national press. But of course he's come back to earth recently, and I'm about to get a Kickstarter campaign going to hire Glenn Close to wear a white dress and stand up during his next at bat. Knock the cover off the ball, kid.

Rizzo, the much-heralded rookie who came over in an off-season trade with San Diego, has been pretty amazing in his first few weeks as a Cub, although I dread the inevitable "Rizzo The Rat" headlines in the Sun Times when he signs with the Mets as a free agent in 2018.

It's nice to see Ryan Dempster on a contract/trade me to a contender drive, putting up 27 consecutive scoreless innings over his last few outings. I'll miss that guy when he's gone, he's a class act, plus his daughter was born on the same day as my son, so it'll be real cute when they get married in 20 years. I'm setting up a play date for the off-season.

New manager Dale Sveum is...well, it's hard to tell what he is. He's been handed a bunch of fringe-y players, and you'd like to think he's getting the best out of them, but with a .388 winning percentage it's hard to make that claim. Still, he hasn't snapped and killed anybody in the dugout yet, so good on him.

I've got my stomach all tied up in knots just thinking about this crap, so I'm going to go snort some Valium and try to stay positive about the second half of the season. At least they're not in last place.

Here We Go Again

I wanted to get this one in under the wire, get my prediction on record, and since first pitch is less than 20 minutes away, it'll be thank-fuck this is quick.

I've been a Cubs fan since before I was born. I was fortunate to have a grandfather with the good sense to root for the Cubs, even though he grew up in Arkansas and was closer to St. Louis than Chicago. He infused his love for the Cubs into my dad, who instilled it in me. Now I get my hopes crushed every year, and if nothing else it has taught me to be resilient in the face of setbacks.

This year, I'm predicting a sub-500 record, the pitching should be o.k., but that offense looks terrible. 78 wins, if they're lucky.

Now Is the Summer of Our Discontent

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures."

Richard III

The months from November to March really do their best to kick me in the ass (or punch me in the nose, take whichever Breaking Glass lyric suits you better). It always seems like everything stinks just a little bit more and I know why I feel this way, it's not a big mystery why these months bring me down, it's because I hate cold weather and I hate Christmas and I hate snow and I hate icy roads and I hate not being able to feel my toes for 5 months. So there.

Of course, like an idiot, I've lived my entire life in the middle of this Great Country of Ours, places where it's really cold in the winter and really fucking hot & humid in the summer a lot, too, thank you very much. Why didn't I ever move to somewhere like California or Arizona? Who the hell knows? A great man once said, "I am the most capricious zephyr, blown upon the wind I know not where." That about sums it up, I think.

Plus there's less light this time of year, and when I had a job, it really didn't help my disposition to wake up when it's pitch black outside, and drive home when it was already dark, that lack of sunlight disorder sure feels like it's real to me. Bleh.

To top it off, I'm supposed to be writing something for a friend of mine and it's just not coming along the way I want it to, and I've been sick so I've been putting off fixing it, but now I'm feeling better so I REALLY need to go in and fix it, and my wife had some minor surgery on her hand, so of course it makes it difficult for her to help with the boys for another month or so, so yeah, Winter can just fuck right off.

There is reason for being positive though, since my cold cleared up and I was pretty productive this weekend, and I recently finished reading the Harry Potter books, which was good fun, all thanks to my local library. Mary Shelley's Frankhole came back on Cartoon Network a couple weeks ago and has been loads of laughs again, and we're inching ever closer to the day when baseball starts again and I can turn this blog into nearly daily bitching about the Cubs. Hooray!


Original blog entry title? "Winter can go fuck itself". I don't know, maybe I should've gone with that instead of trying to class this place up a bit.

Bowie

     I was thinking about David Bowie the other night, not a rare occurrence, I like his music and as a matter of fact he’s probably my favorite artist in all history.  Before I had ever known how to even articulate a single thought on the subject of music, Bowie was already in my life, sneaking in every once in a while on the radio in the Central section of these here United States.  “Space Oddity” was probably first for me, a song about an astronaut was very right up my alley, so to speak, and that one slipped in through the cracks of Styx and Led Zep and Skynyrd and E.L. fucking O.  Then I started noticing that song “Suffragette City”, my first Ziggy sighting, and on rare occasions “Rebel Rebel” rocked my freaking world, loved it when that song came on.  Buying my first Bowie record is a firm memory, I had the FINAL CUT by Floyd in my hands, influenced by a cardboard stand-up they had of some guy in British Army uniform with a knife in his back, and I had it, waited in line, and just as I got to the counter, the dude behind it asked me if I could hold on a second while he changed the album.  I said sure, and as I stood there he put LET’S DANCE on his turntable, and as he came back to the register, the first lines of guitar work on “Modern Love” kicked off, and before he could take the Floyd from my hands I said “Hang on a second” and turned around, put Pink back where he belonged, picked up the Bowie from the “B’s”, laid my money down, and never looked back.  Thank you anonymous counter-man, for steering me in the right direction.

Anyway, the deeper I went into his music the more I loved it, of course, buying everything I could of his, taping off copies from friends who had stuff, taping stuff off the radio, reading magazine articles and interviews, all kinds of crap. I was pretty down on the stuff he did after a certain point, TONIGHT was a huge disappointment, NEVER LET ME DOWN did just that, and it wasn’t until Tin Machine that I really enjoyed one of his albums, then he went on a nice little run, putting out some pretty cool albums, but nothing really hit me the same way as his music from the earlier parts of his career.  My personal favorite Bowie period is from LOW to LET’S DANCE, just some fantastic albums and live stuff from him at that time, top of his game in my eyes. I liked a lot of his early albums, too, of course, but nothing topped SCARY MONSTERS for me, that’s just my favorite piece of work he’s ever done, top to bottom love the songs and can listen to that album or any song from it almost any time. 

Lately though, and by lately I mean the last, oh, 20 years or so, I’ve kinda fallen in a rut for a while when it comes to Bowie.  I had all the albums on cd, burned them into mp3’s, but after awhile I realized I wasn’t listening to the cd’s, and had started weeding out songs that didn’t strike my fancy at a certain moment, probably late one night where the term ‘weeding’ really applies, if you know what I mean and I think you do.  So I was down to about 40 or 50 tunes of his in his catalogue, and just leaving the rest to lay fallow in my memory, as the old folks used to say. 

Bowie isn’t the only musician to suffer this fate with me, but since he’s my favorite he’s the most prominent in my mind right now.  I was thinking about a question my wife asked me recently; “Do you still listen to cds?  I don’t see you take them out much and just wondered if you still just played them sometimes.”  This was a clever ploy on her part to get me to admit that I didn’t need all those thousands of cds and maybe we could get rid of most/all of them.  It’s ok, I’ve had the thought myself, I’ve schlepped boxes and crates of those things up and down stairs, in and out of apartments, for years, I’ve cursed their existence even more than my roommates, whether they be intimate or not, but let’s not get into that. 

I’ve thought about this often too, the way I listen to music now.  I remember sitting at the end of my bed, wedged between it and the stereo stand where I had my cheap little turntable/radio/tape player-recorder and all my albums, staring at the spines or album artwork and liner notes while I listened to whatever I was obsessed with at the moment, I’ll spare you the name-dropping type of thing here and just say I have the coolest musical taste of everyone I’ve ever met.  Or haven’t met.  Just trust me, if I like it, it’s cool, if I don’t, it isn’t, real simple.  And there isn’t a true music fan who doesn’t feel exactly the same way.  And like all music fans, I could tell when an album was missing by the way it messed up the collage of album spines; a color was missing, part of a picture was out of place, so I knew when someone messed with my albums.  I freak myself out a little bit when I think back to just how obsessive I was when I was younger…

Anyway, I don’t listen to music like that anymore.  Back when you played an album, you normally played it from first song to last per side, and usually both sides, cuz if you wanted to hear one song on an album, you might as well listen to ‘em all.  Plus, I was just too damn lazy to get up and move the needle from one song to another if I didn’t want to hear it.  Now, I just hit the ‘next’ button on my iTunes player and I can skip through my whole catalogue of music on my laptop, and I’m not sure but I think something’s been lost.  I’m not quite sure even what’s been lost, but that feeling is there and I’m inclined to go with it. 

But we’ve also gained a lot too.  When cd’s hit their second cycle and had artists who were now realizing, hey, I’ve got 70 plus minutes worth of space to fill up on this disc, I’d better come up with some more songs, well, let’s throw this piece of crap that would normally be on a b-side, and charge you 18.99 for the whole frickin’ cd, well, you can kinda see why people prefer to download one song at a time.  Who can you trust these days to come out with a full album of quality songs?   The cynical side of me of course says trust no one.  I wonder which artist will announce that they’re not even going to make albums anymore, just singles for sale online, and if you want to make an album out of those singles, well, burn it your damn self. Being able to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, is a good thing.

So to bring this very long and probably very boring post to an end, my purchase last year of a new laptop kind of made this whole question moot. I have enough space to dump virtually every cd I have onto my drive, and now, instead of having to save space for porn spreadsheets, I can have tens of thousands of songs  available on iTunes. I have an entire playlist of just Bowie that I can put on my iPhone and carry around with me for those boring family gatherings. I've re-discovered songs I hadn't heard in years (and on reflection, HOURS was pretty good, and TONIGHT wasn't as horrible as I remembered), and even though he's basically retired, it's almost like having new material again. Almost.

I Am Not A Geek

WARNING!! WHINY RANT COMING!!

In the past few weeks, two shows have caused me to review my claim to Geekdom; the BLIZZCON opening ceremonies on DirecTV, and the Spike Awards on the Spike TV cable channel.

I hadn't planned on watching the Spike Awards, since previous years viewings had caused me to wish I had spikes jammed deep into my eyes. Corny, clownish, and embarrassing, the past shows had all tried to be cute and funny, and failed miserably. This years was no exception, but there were a couple clever bits that sucked me in to watching for a few minutes. (Full disclosure; I dvr'd it and fast forwarded through probably 80%) One neat gimmick was, when a winner couldn't be there to accept an award, instead of just putting up a video on a screen of them giving a quick thank you speech, they would project the actors head on a head-shaped screen that would rise up out of the pool of water in the middle of the stage. Neat.

Blizzard is a video game company that makes World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. For the past several years they've held a giant convention in California that celebrates their games and gives cosplayers another excuse to break out that home-made metal bikini or foam sword. Blizzard likes to make big announcements regarding their games during the con, and they offer the whole thing as a pay-per-view event. Like all good pushers, they give you a taste for free in the form of the opening ceremonies, broadcast live with a couple of hosts sitting at a news-type desk offering commentary between the speeches that constitute 'opening ceremonies'.

It was during the Blizzcon show that I really started to get the feeling that I was even more of an outsider than I had previously thought. For years, whenever I would see some form of entertainment that I loved being mocked by mainstream society, I just figured that my fellow geeks felt the same way I did; a combination of anger and sadness. But the more I see people who ostensibly share the same loves I do participate in events and displays that I find atrocious and borderline offensive, I guess I have to accept the fact that I'm not even a part of that group. The attendees hooting and hollering at the Spike Awards were a freak show and generally behaved in what I consider an embarrassing manner, lapping up every lame joke at their expense. I wasn't really upset with the folks at Blizzcon, but the announcers were terrible. Would it be too much to expect professional broadcast types doing a professional broadcast, not stumbling through the tele-prompter or unable to execute even the simplest of ad-libs? Bleh.

The same thing happens around Halloween every year. I love horror movies, so October should be a great month for me, but with the excellent exception of Turner Classic Movies, those 31 days are generally treated as a joke on television. It's not often you see the genre treated with any respect. And don't even get me started on comic books, a subject often treated with ridicule and derision. The Big Bang Theory is one of the worst offenders in this area.

(I had a bit on the music I listen to here, but it basically boiled down to "everything I like is cool, and everything I don't like sucks, and if you disagree you're wrong, 'cuz I'm the coolest mutherfucker I know", so maybe I'll save that for a separate post. That'll be fun & polarizing.)

Looking back over this post, I realize it seems a bit whiny and pointless, but it's frustrating to see things I value treated as worthy only of mockery. Rant over, at least until my post on Ron Santo.

TMBG

My friend Michael is practically forcing me to write a blog post on the upcoming concert in Milwaukee featuring They Might Be Giants by tagging me in posts twice this week. Well, I'm going to cheat, since he did most of the heavy lifting with his first post on the subject earlier. His experience pretty much mirrors mine, except I've not gone back and filled in the gaps in my TMBG collection. So all my favorite songs of theirs will be considerably 'old school'. In whatever order they occur to me...

"Birdhouse In Your Soul"
"Kiss Me Son of God"
"My Evil Twin"
"Ana Ng"
"Don't Lets Start"
"Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"
Let's face it, all of LINCOLN
"I'll Sink Manhattan"
That last one, they did live on MTV's 120 Minutes when they hosted that show sometime in the early 90's, I believe, probably on YouTube somewhere, definitely on a video cassette buried in a box in the garage, but if I'm lazy enough tonight to not post any images, I'm too lazy to go look for links. G'night.

What I'm Listening To

Here's a little companion piece to the Summer Movies post I did an eternity ago, mostly about which podcasts I'm listening to. I'll throw in a bit on music at the end...

I'm a little surprised at how many podcasts I actually take in on a monthly basis. Most of these shows are weekly and last about an hour, and I can usually squeeze in a few during the day in between taking care of the kids and driving around doing errands. But unless I'm playing World of Warcraft, I have to give the 'cast my undivided attention; I can't concentrate on what's going on in the show and, say, read a magazine or surf the web. If I do that, I'll miss big chunks of the 'cast and find myself rewinding to hear what I missed. So I'm often dividing up each show, listening to part of it here, the rest of it there, etc..., which isn't ideal, but it doesn't take away my enjoyment, since the 'casts I listen to are almost always entertaining. These are all available on iTunes, and all are free to download.



THE B.S. REPORT It's a sports-related pod hosted by ESPN.com writer Bill Simmons. If you're not into sports, it's probably not for you. Also, if you're into sports, but not into pop culture references scattered throughout your sports, it's probably not for you.

DOUG LOVES MOVIES Comedian Doug Benson loves movies. Loves the shit out of them. His weekly show 'plops' on Fridays, and is usually recorded live in front of an audience at the UCB Theater in Los Angeles. He has guests (3 most of the time) that play the Leonard Maltin game, a kind of 'Name That Tune', but with movies. The guests range from awesome (Edgar Wright, John Lithgow, Paul F. Tompkins, Sarah Silverman, Scott Aukerman) to awful (Tig Notaro is terrible every time she's on), but Doug is almost always hilarious. My favorite show.

THE POD F. TOMPKAST One of the more...different shows here. You may remember Paul F. Tompkins from his time on MR. SHOW WITH BOB & DAVID (or not). I would never have guessed his podcast would be so damn fascinating and funny. It's a monthly show that started a little over a year ago, and it's worth downloading them all and listening to them in order because the show contains a serial called "The Great Undiscovered Project", featuring Ice-T, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Gary Marshall, John C. Reilly, The Cake Boss, and tons more...all voiced by Tompkins. That's just a small portion of the show, which also features bits from his live variety show, Paul's off-the-cuff ramblings, and a phone call to his pal, comedienne Jen Kirkman. I was shocked at how much I love this show.

WTF with MARC MARON Marc's a stand-up comic who's been doing it for about 25 years, along with a stint as the morning show host on Air America. I first saw him as the host of Short Attention Span Theater on Comedy Central back in the early 90's. He's kind of...dark. Anyway, he brings guests into his garage for interviews, usually fellow stand-ups. I was a little worried the show would get into the dreaded "what IS comedy?" territory*, but that's far from the reality of what happens. There are episodes that really surprise me, because I go in thinking "I'm really not that interested in this person", but Marc really pulls some cool stuff out of them. I'm thinking of guests like Ed Helms, Jimmy Fallon, Sandra Bernhard...nothing against any of them, but I never thought I'd enjoy spending an hour listening to them talk. My favorite's are the shows with Doug Benson, Kevin Smith, Louis C.K., Janeane Garofalo, and Demitri Martin. The Gallagher episode is a must listen.

THE SMODCAST NETWORK Kevin Smith's SMODcast shows are hit or miss for me. I love the original Smodcast, but that's because Scott Mosier may be the coolest person in the world. Kev & his wife Jen's show PLUS ONE is fun, but gets old real fast, as does TELL 'EM STEVE-DAVE. HOLLYWOOD BABYLON is a riot, featuring Kevin and L.A. radio personality Ralph Garman discussing all things entertainment in front of a live audience. I gave up on JAY & SILENT BOB GET OLD months ago, it just, well, got old.

There's a couple other shows I'll check in with occasionally, like SCRIPTNOTES, a screenwriting podcast, or the television-centric FIREBERG & ICEWALL, but those are the main podcasts I listen to.

Music wise, the only cd I've bought lately is Pickin' Up the Pieces by Fitz & the Tantrums, an awesome 60's soul-inspired disc that I can't stop listening to. And thanks to Mr. Trader, I've got a few TMBG albums to absorb as I get back into that band following their excellent show at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee last month. Still buzzing about that show...


*"Comedy is the ability to make people laugh without making them puke." - Steve Martin