In the mornings, I, like every liberal-minded intellectual blah blah blah, listen to NPR for my daily dose of news. This week, both the public radio stations in my town are having their annoying pledge drives. It's wonderful that they are supported by the local folks, etc, and I'm not going to rail against the pledge drives, because they are important ways for the stations to function.
My particular membership isn't up until the Spring, so I pleasantly tune out of the pledge drives because they are all the things that pledge drives are. Apparently, I switched over to C-SPAN radio. This is probably because I changed the station in the evening, and C-SPAN's stultifying boringness is slightly dulled by the inclusion of peppy programming like 'Booknotes' or whatever in the evening.
Unfortunately, in the morning C-SPAN radio is shockingly, jarringly boring. Pre-7 a.m., they run White House briefings (which, in all honesty, have been interesting lately, because Scotty is getting his ears boxed). Then at 7, the C-SPAN program 'Capitol Journal' comes on. This is the show where a host reads parts of the newspaper over the radio (and on television, with the helpful visual aid of the actual parts of the newspaper) and then takes calls. Later, I believe, there are bland guests.
My major complaint, of course, is the stupidity. People call into the program, and are clearly among the stupidest humans ever to walk the earth. Their raw staggering idiocy, if harnessed properly, could power a nation, could launch a rocket to the moon, could feed the hungry. They are so mind-numbingly stupid, I have trouble believing that the program hasn't been hijacked by the Jerky Boys or Howard Stern.
Here's the functional problem with this. There are two types of people, apparently, who call in to this program. There are the shockingly stupid people, who appear to range across the ideological spectrum, though slightly biased toward the left, and then there are the probably stupid people, whose personal ideological right-wing biases are fueled by listening to the even more ill-informed people who I'm embarrassed to call liberals.
This is because, of course, the majority of Americans are actually more liberal than conservative (just check the rolling poll numbers in support of safe and legal access to abortion, which hasn't budged from 60% in a decade). They are just dumb, apparently, and calling C-SPAN at 7 in the morning. But they say stupid things (Bush bashing is fine, but it helps if you don't sound like a mental patient when you do it) which make the uppity conservative slightly less stupid person feel all high and mighty about how these dumb liberals are. One of these dumb conservatives argued the other morning that 'he supports freedom of speech, but these peopele shouldn't be allowed on the radio.' Um, about that first part...
In sum, cancel Capitol Journal, and save everyone a lot of trouble. There's plenty of dumb in the world, we don't need more.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Monday, October 10, 2005
Pearl-harbored by that half-a-sissy team from Dallas
Yesterday began like many, many glorious Sundays before. I didn't viscerally connect with a great orator at the local chapel or anything like that. Not that sort of glory.
I just meant that the old lady and I were roused from a restful Saturday night sleep by nothing in particular. My peepers couldn't delineate the difference between my toes and my dresser until I posted my see-betters on my anglo visage. I bare-foot it downstairs and brew a pot of heat, ostracize onions, potatoes, butter, evoo, and various salts from the rest of the kitchen into the frying pan, whilst listening to my wife from the couch speak onomotopaeiacally.
When we are home, weekend breakfasts are the only meals that I make. So my wife, who enjoys this emmensely, turns into a stationary, food-related Batman played by Adam West fight scene. Instead of "blam" and "zok", it's "mmm" and "mmmmmmm!" She's a veritable carbon-based pop-up book.
She's on the couch watching whatever involves Paul Newman. I'm in the kitchen bathing in diner vapors. It's the best.
However, it's only better during the 4-5 months when the Birds are playing. And that would've been yesterday, folks. Everything was in place: the aforementioned ritualized morning transpired. My wife ran out, or talked of running out, to get missing ingredients for Sunday sauce and meatballs.
The game was even at 4:15 against the Cowgirls, who everyone hates, save for the obligatory swollen, little-peckered gym dork that claims they loved the Cowboys ever since Roger Staubach was playing. Stop it.
You were wearing cloth diapers when Staubach was a waning hasbeen, showing only sporadic glimpses of what he once was. The truth is you swollen, fake-ass, car salesman types that haven't figured out that way too much hair gel has never been and still isn't the way to go; started liking the Cowboys after "Aikmen and the cokeheads" won their second Superbowl. Frontrunning jerk-offs.
With that out of the way, yesterday at my house might have been a place that Sir Thomas More could have called home.
Well my friends, after a few short moments into the first quarter, Utopia turned into Oz. Not ruby red slippers and little terriers in lunchbaskets. Oh no! It's was the shanks and man-rape HBO Oz.
Watching the game, helpless, 5'8", and from my couch while my beloved birds got trounced was tantamount to watching Carrottop make out with my mom while he simultaneously hanged dogs. I wanted to cry and punch; but given my adult and accompanied-by-others-in-the-room-status, I managed to control myself.
So on this quintessential Monday morning quarterback...Monday, my every thought is bent on the 30-10 drubbing.
I have no answers and I don't wish to make excuses. I just wish that while the Cowboys were savoring the taste of beating the Eagles for once in like, five fucking years, that the God of Heaven and Earth, could have saved that earthquake for later and, instead, mustered some classic Old Testament fire and brimstone, jealous God type shit by opening up Texas stadium right at the 50-yard line star and proceed to swallow-up everything Cowboy. Golden calf part deux.
I just meant that the old lady and I were roused from a restful Saturday night sleep by nothing in particular. My peepers couldn't delineate the difference between my toes and my dresser until I posted my see-betters on my anglo visage. I bare-foot it downstairs and brew a pot of heat, ostracize onions, potatoes, butter, evoo, and various salts from the rest of the kitchen into the frying pan, whilst listening to my wife from the couch speak onomotopaeiacally.
When we are home, weekend breakfasts are the only meals that I make. So my wife, who enjoys this emmensely, turns into a stationary, food-related Batman played by Adam West fight scene. Instead of "blam" and "zok", it's "mmm" and "mmmmmmm!" She's a veritable carbon-based pop-up book.
She's on the couch watching whatever involves Paul Newman. I'm in the kitchen bathing in diner vapors. It's the best.
However, it's only better during the 4-5 months when the Birds are playing. And that would've been yesterday, folks. Everything was in place: the aforementioned ritualized morning transpired. My wife ran out, or talked of running out, to get missing ingredients for Sunday sauce and meatballs.
The game was even at 4:15 against the Cowgirls, who everyone hates, save for the obligatory swollen, little-peckered gym dork that claims they loved the Cowboys ever since Roger Staubach was playing. Stop it.
You were wearing cloth diapers when Staubach was a waning hasbeen, showing only sporadic glimpses of what he once was. The truth is you swollen, fake-ass, car salesman types that haven't figured out that way too much hair gel has never been and still isn't the way to go; started liking the Cowboys after "Aikmen and the cokeheads" won their second Superbowl. Frontrunning jerk-offs.
With that out of the way, yesterday at my house might have been a place that Sir Thomas More could have called home.
Well my friends, after a few short moments into the first quarter, Utopia turned into Oz. Not ruby red slippers and little terriers in lunchbaskets. Oh no! It's was the shanks and man-rape HBO Oz.
Watching the game, helpless, 5'8", and from my couch while my beloved birds got trounced was tantamount to watching Carrottop make out with my mom while he simultaneously hanged dogs. I wanted to cry and punch; but given my adult and accompanied-by-others-in-the-room-status, I managed to control myself.
So on this quintessential Monday morning quarterback...Monday, my every thought is bent on the 30-10 drubbing.
I have no answers and I don't wish to make excuses. I just wish that while the Cowboys were savoring the taste of beating the Eagles for once in like, five fucking years, that the God of Heaven and Earth, could have saved that earthquake for later and, instead, mustered some classic Old Testament fire and brimstone, jealous God type shit by opening up Texas stadium right at the 50-yard line star and proceed to swallow-up everything Cowboy. Golden calf part deux.
Sunday, October 09, 2005
It Pains Me
Okay, I don't intend for this blog to become a sports talk blog, mostly because I don't really know enough to compete with real sports talk blogs, or even fake sports talk blogs.
I'm kind of a poser, to tell you the truth, and it's for the reasons I cited below. I like to read about sports, because there is something lyrical and poetic about sportswriting, even if you don't like sports. Just read some Roger Angell -- oh hell, read his whole book and you can understand how someone who mostly doesn't give a toss about sports can enjoy reading about it.
So this weekend, trapped like a rat in the home of my wonderful inlaws, I was forced to absorb a lot of sports. These are Alabama people, and the college ball is something they care fiercely about. Fortunately, Alabama had a bye this weekend (they are 5-0, I'm reminded relentlessly), so attention turned to SEC rivals Tennessee and Georgia, who were playing in Knoxville. My father-in-law (Alabama, '73) is a good man with bad hearing who had the misfortune of buying a spacious home whose soaring ceiling seems to him to suck all the sound out of his television set. He is unaware, of course, that the sound is being perfectly transmitted to every corner of the house but his faulty ears. So up goes the volume. Louder and louder. The Bulldogs were threatened during the second half as the anemic Volunteer offense showed some signs of life. The volume went up. The Dogs seemed to put the game away, but minutes remained as dinner was set on the table. My father in law moved several feet from the easy chair to the eat-in-kitchen, and the volume was increased to accomodate the new distance.
Today was worse. The Falcons played the Patriots and everyone knew they would lose because Michael Vick wasn't there and blah blah blah. well, they almost won, with some boring old quarterback who won't have a real career until he gets traded in eleven years to some also-ran like Miami or the Jets. (Seriously, Gus Frerotte and Vinny Testaverde are still playing football? I'm shocked.) We watched the final few minutes of that game after the Inlaws returned from some grandchild bonding.
Then began the Braves-Astros marathon.
I had been sitting around inside the house because while the GPs were bonding with their grandchild, me and his mom were hanging out at the house since she wasn't feeling too hot. We watched some tv, which I regret because I had to watch SO MUCH MORE TV later on that same day. The Falcons finally threw in the towel and the Braves were about to put away this Astros game and move to a fifth game at home in the NLDS. They were leading 6-1, so I figured watching this dogshow end would be painless.
The crowd was noisy because the Astros thought they had some kind of rally going, and the actual sound coming from the tv was louder than normal, plus it turned out that the father-in-law was cranking it to hear the color commentary over my son's erratic and noisy play/forcing people to read him books. (He's very literary. Maybe he'll be a jackass blogger like his dad.) I've never seen a television broadcasting for sustained periods with the volume at 20. It was impossible to hear yourself think.
The Astros loaded the bases, hit a grand slam, then put up another homer to tie the freaking game. It had already been like an hour of baseball since the football game ended and this bitch was going into overtime.
As we all know now, the Astros and the Braves essentially played an entire second game after regulation, adding another nine innings to play and excruciating 18 innings of boring-as-shit baseball until Houston scored somehow or other (like I could give a good shit by this point) and the Braves were dispatched. We listened to the tenth-fourteenth innings at the house, two more innings in the car on the way to a restaurant where providence handed us a table out of view of the damn television and the spell was broken.
See, I can watch once football game. I can have a baseball game on in the background if I'm drinking beer and sitting outside and maybe barbecuing while talking to people about important things like, you know, earthquakes and the national debt. But I can't watch a football game and a baseball game and almost another baseball game not to mention twenty-four hours after watching another football game. That's ridiculous. It's torture, man.
So I feel for you and the Birds, Gees. Seriously, I was rooting for them because I like the gang in green and I think the Cowboys are a bunch of pompous pricks anyhow. I almost always reliable hate any athlete or team that gets the 'America's _____' moniker. People used to call Dallas America's team, which made me want to put lye in their cups, to tell you the truth. So that's a real killer there. I couldn't watch it, of course, because I was all full of sports. Completely. Full. Of Sports.
The only question I have now is this: will I be able to scrub from my memory thoroughly enough of this weekend of agonizing sports to cast half an eye on my beloved hometown Steelers (though I know nothing about them) as they play the apparently surging Chargers (who play where again?) tomorrow on Monday Night football?
I'm kind of a poser, to tell you the truth, and it's for the reasons I cited below. I like to read about sports, because there is something lyrical and poetic about sportswriting, even if you don't like sports. Just read some Roger Angell -- oh hell, read his whole book and you can understand how someone who mostly doesn't give a toss about sports can enjoy reading about it.
So this weekend, trapped like a rat in the home of my wonderful inlaws, I was forced to absorb a lot of sports. These are Alabama people, and the college ball is something they care fiercely about. Fortunately, Alabama had a bye this weekend (they are 5-0, I'm reminded relentlessly), so attention turned to SEC rivals Tennessee and Georgia, who were playing in Knoxville. My father-in-law (Alabama, '73) is a good man with bad hearing who had the misfortune of buying a spacious home whose soaring ceiling seems to him to suck all the sound out of his television set. He is unaware, of course, that the sound is being perfectly transmitted to every corner of the house but his faulty ears. So up goes the volume. Louder and louder. The Bulldogs were threatened during the second half as the anemic Volunteer offense showed some signs of life. The volume went up. The Dogs seemed to put the game away, but minutes remained as dinner was set on the table. My father in law moved several feet from the easy chair to the eat-in-kitchen, and the volume was increased to accomodate the new distance.
Today was worse. The Falcons played the Patriots and everyone knew they would lose because Michael Vick wasn't there and blah blah blah. well, they almost won, with some boring old quarterback who won't have a real career until he gets traded in eleven years to some also-ran like Miami or the Jets. (Seriously, Gus Frerotte and Vinny Testaverde are still playing football? I'm shocked.) We watched the final few minutes of that game after the Inlaws returned from some grandchild bonding.
Then began the Braves-Astros marathon.
I had been sitting around inside the house because while the GPs were bonding with their grandchild, me and his mom were hanging out at the house since she wasn't feeling too hot. We watched some tv, which I regret because I had to watch SO MUCH MORE TV later on that same day. The Falcons finally threw in the towel and the Braves were about to put away this Astros game and move to a fifth game at home in the NLDS. They were leading 6-1, so I figured watching this dogshow end would be painless.
The crowd was noisy because the Astros thought they had some kind of rally going, and the actual sound coming from the tv was louder than normal, plus it turned out that the father-in-law was cranking it to hear the color commentary over my son's erratic and noisy play/forcing people to read him books. (He's very literary. Maybe he'll be a jackass blogger like his dad.) I've never seen a television broadcasting for sustained periods with the volume at 20. It was impossible to hear yourself think.
The Astros loaded the bases, hit a grand slam, then put up another homer to tie the freaking game. It had already been like an hour of baseball since the football game ended and this bitch was going into overtime.
As we all know now, the Astros and the Braves essentially played an entire second game after regulation, adding another nine innings to play and excruciating 18 innings of boring-as-shit baseball until Houston scored somehow or other (like I could give a good shit by this point) and the Braves were dispatched. We listened to the tenth-fourteenth innings at the house, two more innings in the car on the way to a restaurant where providence handed us a table out of view of the damn television and the spell was broken.
See, I can watch once football game. I can have a baseball game on in the background if I'm drinking beer and sitting outside and maybe barbecuing while talking to people about important things like, you know, earthquakes and the national debt. But I can't watch a football game and a baseball game and almost another baseball game not to mention twenty-four hours after watching another football game. That's ridiculous. It's torture, man.
So I feel for you and the Birds, Gees. Seriously, I was rooting for them because I like the gang in green and I think the Cowboys are a bunch of pompous pricks anyhow. I almost always reliable hate any athlete or team that gets the 'America's _____' moniker. People used to call Dallas America's team, which made me want to put lye in their cups, to tell you the truth. So that's a real killer there. I couldn't watch it, of course, because I was all full of sports. Completely. Full. Of Sports.
The only question I have now is this: will I be able to scrub from my memory thoroughly enough of this weekend of agonizing sports to cast half an eye on my beloved hometown Steelers (though I know nothing about them) as they play the apparently surging Chargers (who play where again?) tomorrow on Monday Night football?
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