Centenary

World War I nerd here.

We’ve all read All Quiet on the Western Front and seen the Metallica “One” video. The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones episode “Trenches of Hell” sparked something in me as a kid. Since then I’ve been consumed with reading, viewing and trying to grasp the meaning of the First World War and the Western Front in particular. I’m still hung up attempting to comprehend the macabre idea of men throwing themselves headlong into shells, gas and machine guns, all for dubious national interests that ended the 19th century with a bang and opened the curtains on the bloody 20th. Futility, misery, bloodlust, bravery, strategy, nation-states, religion, gender, colonialism, technology, Americanism, literature, art, poetry–all these things are a part of understanding the world from 1914 to 1918 and drive questions about the human condition that can probably never be settled. It was a great existential irony that an era where rationality drove the culture led to this irrational charnel house.

I don’t have a personal connection to the war: my family were Irish republicans who had no love for the British Empire, so the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-1921 provides the family anecdotes. (That war itself would not have happened without WWI.) Maybe it’s a historical train wreck and I can’t look away: I did a report on Verdun in tenth grade after I learned that there were more than 800,000 casualties in that single battle. And the list of battles is long: the Marne, Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele, Amiens and Belleau Wood. Most of those aren’t known here in the U.S., but they are immense scars on French, British and German memory (and the French and Belgian landscapes) that have persisted even after the war generation is long gone.

Even more than World War II or the nuclear age, the First World War convinced the democratic leaders of Europe that nations couldn’t bear the death and destruction of modern inter-state warfare — Neville Chamberlain didn’t choose appeasement because he was weak — and that nationalism was something completely different from patriotism. Unfortunately these are lessons that too many Americans have forgotten, or that they never learned at all. Our “President”‘s failure Saturday to pay respect to the war dead was symbolic of a lot more than just his fake toughness; it shows a total lack of historical awareness, which is much worse.

So this Veterans Day, or Armistice Day as it used to be called, spare a thought for the Great War and what it means for today’s political world. We’re rapidly forgetting the lessons, and spending some mental time in No Man’s Land might remind us of the consequences for doing so.

And if you want to dig in to the subject, try either The Great War and Modern Memory by the great Paul Fussell or the classic The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. (Thanks, Gabe.)

My Friend Bob

Back in 2004 I was still a young dude adjusting to adult life in the biggest city, New York. My years there were some of the highest highs and lowest lows in my life, and it was a constant process of adjustment that provided plenty of weird moments and perspectives. After buying a new laptop, my trusty Toshiba “Big Blue”, I thought I’d try keeping a blog the same way a small handful of my friends had done. The tone was goofy, ridiculous and vulgar, but I also wrote the way I think: about anything and everything, spinning it around to get a look at all sides.

Individual blogging was still a small-scale novelty in 2004, and I had a higher-traffic blogger notice my site one day and start sending over some readers from Standing on the Box, a Gawker-promoted first-person blog about working as a bouncer in NYC. Eventually I learned the writer’s name was Bob, that he was a football fan and former D-1 player, and that he was going to be hanging out at a bar with another Internet-popular anonymous blogger and this guy if I wanted to meet up and hang out. Over a few beers in a West Village bar, we all shot the shit about blogging and all the lighthearted nonsense that came with it, and before long we were grabbing drinks on a regular basis with other blogging oddballs. Like I said, it was a novelty.

In time Bob and I bonded over more than blogging, though. For all the hugely interesting things that he did in life — playing D-1 football, Army tours in Bosnia, teaching and coaching at a top NYC private school, working with some of the most advanced strength trainers in the country, and then creating a well-written insight into the not-so-glamorous side of NYC nightlife and scoring a book deal based on that insight — he shared an underlying bog-Irish psychology that no matter what heights you reach, a vocal part of your consciousness still questions whether you really deserve to be there, even as you strive to experience, learn and process more and more of life. He was from Queens and I was from Pittsburgh, but whenever we discussed our respective experiences, I could count on a friend who had that same sense of awkward, romantic amazement at exploring the world beyond your origins.

It’s that that I’ll miss most about Bob — he passed away suddenly last weekend at age 43. I’ll really miss the surface-level fun: busting balls over wings and beers in some pub, texting about the NFL or hanging with Willie Colon, and hitting shows at NYC rock venues to hear some live metal. But most of all, it’s tough knowing that I no longer have that friend and fellow traveler who knew the importance of broadening yourself.

Rest in peace, Bob.

Your Best-Ever Buffalo Wings Recipe – Straight Out the Oven

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Website readaz: make these for the Super Bowl, or hey, for pretty much every meal. Using the oven results in a more evenly and thoroughly cooked wing — underdone chicken wings are truly disgusting — and also results in wings that taste more like seasoning and less like fryer oil. Can you dig it? CAN … YOU … DIG IT?

Phattest Oven Wings

2 pounds raw chicken wings
Approx. 4 tbsp olive oil
Tony Chachere’s Original Creole seasoning

Sauce
1/3 stick of butter
5 oz Frank’s Red Hot

Preheat oven to 350. Rinse wings in collander, pat dry and cut with scissors into separate drumstick and flat pieces; discard triangular end tips of wings unless you like to eat bones and feathers. Place wings in mixing bowl and toss with olive oil and generous portion of Tony Chachere’s: 3-4 shakes. Place wings on parchment-paper-lined cookie sheet and bake in oven for 70 minutes at 350. In a microwave-safe bowl, melt the butter in the microwave (30 seconds or so) and add Frank’s; mix together until blended. Toss wings in sauce until well-coated; serve with blue cheese dressing and celery sticks.

My prediction for today: Denver 20, Seattle 13

United Economy Plus, Seat Reclining, Cloud Storage, Spotify vs. Google Play Music

Steelers were robbed. You can’t say that without admitting that they were a terrible playoff team this season, but still: robbed.

  • I flew back to Chicago a few weeks ago in what was nominally a United Economy Plus seat, but it was exactly the same dimensions as a regular seat. According to the flight attendant, a lot of the older United planes aren’t refitted with the better legroom, rendering that Economy Plus seat just a regular old Economy seat with different labeling on united.com. I felt completely ripped off by a free membership perk.
  • Speaking of that, I don’t know if the general flying population has a high rate of seat reclination or if I just have some kind of magnetic talent that attracts seat recliners directly in front of me. On that last trip, I was reclined into on the way out to the O.C. and I was reclined into on the way back to Chicago. Reclining your seat is never OK. I don’t know why airlines even provide this feature, which is minimally beneficial to the recliner and maximally annoying to the reclinee. I’ll sometimes ask people to sit up if my knees are really getting crushed, but that feels dickish because reclining seats are a feature and not a bug. Get me out of this dilemma, airlines.
  • I’m in the process of moving the entirety of my digital files onto Google cloud storage so I can quit buying high-powered and high-cost home computers once and for all. This process is slow, only because even a rather small amount of files can take a long time to upload. But yeah, it’s nothing but tablets and smartphones once I’m done with this project, because the 90% of my digital life that’s already on web-based applications means I only open a laptop for the office life anymore.
  • Moving all these files onto Google gave me a chance to cheat on my beloved Spotify with Google Play Music. 20,000 songs can go up there for free, and I have but a measley 3,700, so uploading my MP3 collection was easy.**(That’s not counting the iTunes DRM files that I’m still kicking myself for buying years ago when I briefly owned an iPod. (Its memory died completely one month after the warranty expired.) Apple’s hatred of data proliferation will always be my prime beef with the company. Google lets you export your entire Gmail and Calender archive multiple times in any given day! Apple needs to quit trying to be AOL circa 2003.)I’d give Play Music credit just as a file repository, but I also gave the Google All Access pass a try for free for a month. It’s $9.99 per month, the same as Spotify, and roughly the same idea: add any song in the entire Google licensed collection to your own library, download it for offline play if you want, make playlists, create radio stations based on your tracks, and do all that other good stuff you can do in this golden age of music consumption. Google’s interface is cleaner than Spotify’s and matches up with the interfaces from Google+, Google Now and the like, so you got the consistency thing. I’m into that.

    HOWEVER, after trying it for a month, I’m sticking with Google Play Music as a cloud repository but using Spotify’s subscription service. For one, I’m tied in to Spotify, and all the material I’ve read says that transferring playlists is a pain in the ass. That’s a critique of Spotify more than it is of Google, but the Google critique comes into play because those playlists wouldn’t really transfer anyway: Spotify has a larger license than Google at this point. So all those Metallica tracks on my “Destroy All Workouts” playlist aren’t going anywhere when they’re not even available on Google Play. Today I was playing some Fugazi tracks and ran into the same problem: no Fugazi available other than what I uploaded myself. When the features are otherwise the same, this catalog limit is the current deciding factor. Spotify wins this round.

Best NU Wedding Cake Ever, Image Capture Everywhere, ACA and News Cycle, I’m Done with Hockey Fights, NFL Scoring, Master of Puppets

  • I’m on the plane to Orange County, Calif., and took in this Economist article about the ubiquity of digital recording. As I read it, part of me was doing the older-person “These broad changes to society are bad!” reaction, but I told myself years ago that I wouldn’t be one of those people who can’t deal with change, and I’m already accepting this idea. Part of that is because I already recognize how useful it is to have a digital life-augmentation device thanks to my smartphone — seriously, they are miracle devices on a historical scale — and we’re already finding an incredible number of uses for recording data, so images are no different. The other half accepts this because those who grow up in this image-capture reality aren’t going to know any different. To me, it seems horrifying that the most difficult times of a kid’s life (hey 7th grade!) are being captured for posterity, but the relative impact of living with that when all of your peers are also living with it is much different. It has and will forever be impossible to live two people’s lives, so there’s no way as a young kid to grasp what it would be like without ubiquitous recording. You read about this image-capture paranoia, then you look at the selfie epidemic: people adapt. I will too!
  • I’m with this blog post: it’s way hyperactive to think that the extensive ACA website troubles of 2013 are going to have a definite impact on the 2014 elections a full year from now. If they’re fixed sooner rather than later, nobody is going to remember this. A monster typhoon tore up the Phillipines just last week, and it’s already out of the news cycle this week. Presuming that the site is fixed by at least Q1 2014 or so, expecting modern America to care about something that happened a full year ago isn’t very realistic. I don’t really think short memory like that is a good thing, but it’s nonetheless a thing.That said, I certainly sympathize with this lady who had her insurance canceled. If you support the ACA, the proper response to her situation is “Man, I hope that gets fixed, as that’s a pretty big flaw” instead of “Shut up and accept that that extra $5,000 per year is going to a cause greater than your family budget.” There’s always a short end to the stick.
  • It wasn’t a single injury or fight or Ray Emergy idiocy that finally crystallized my opposition to fighting in hockey; it was this extremely calm and rational article in which I couldn’t argue with a single one of the points made. So yeah, I’m officially anti-fighting. And that’s coming from a major hockeyfights.com fan and web professional who occasionally cites hockeyfights as a website that delivers exactly what someone interested in hockey fights would want it to deliver. Sorry, hockeyfights, but I’m arguing that you should move your extensive informational skills to some other topic from now on.
  • Scoring is way up in the NFL in the past few seasons, thanks largely to the rules changes to protect passers and receivers, and even if it pains me to admit it as a dude from the supposed home of “blue-collar, lunchpail, smashmouth football” (never mind that the Steelers abandoned that a while ago), watching a high-scoring passing game is the best. It also makes me feel a little less guilty about enjoying pro football: take out some of the forceful, repetitive collisions from a run-oriented game and pro football becomes more of a game of athletic skill, with less of the downside of watching grown men give themselves traumatic brain injuries. You could criticize that from either end of the spectrum — “You’re still a heartless capitalist pig who enjoys watching men injure themselves for money” vs. “Football without the smashing of mouths is a game for princesses that just reflects how far America has spiraled into Kenyan socialism” — but the NFL and I both know that watching seven TD passes by the best athletes in the nation is an ongoing visceral thrill, so screw off.
  • After overdosing on Metallica in the wake of their being Spotified, I can confidently say that Master of Puppets is the best Metallica album. Consider that confidently said.

Travel and Gamification, NFL 2013, Tacos

August 2013 was the second time in three months that I left a blank monthly archive. Two out of three ain’t bad, unless it’s a non-updated website.

  • I’ve been traveling a lot this year for work. This isn’t always fun, but it has been a tremendous insight into the idea of gamification. I never knew of airline status as anything other than some vague preferential treatment for years and years, but now that I’m on the road all the time, this shit has become way too important.I finally made Premier Silver on United two months ago — admittedly that’s a pretty weak boast if you talk to any true road warrior — and the arrival of the silver-ish (in other words, gray) luggage tag tag in the mail felt like that time I got called back for the second round of Jeopardy! auditions. Now I’m one of those people who gets the special security line, Economy Plus seating and envious looks from exhausted tourists who know they’ll miss out on an overhead compartment spot. Whatever, haters: go fly into Charlotte-Douglas and John Wayne Airport week after week and they’ll throw you a bone, too.So the gamification part: no matter how trivial a task or a reward might seem, the desire for recognition and achievement is so strong that the people controlling that task/reward can really draw a lot of extra desire and effort out of the rest of us just by enumerating levels and badges. It’s one of the many psychological tactics out there in the world, and while I know appending the words “Premier Silver” to my boarding pass doesn’t mean anything at all in the real world, here I am caring about it anyway.

    I’ll take note of that again when I check in at my hotel tonight. Just eight more nights until Hilton Diamond status!

  • The NFL starts up again this week. Speaking of psychological control, I am well aware that Roger Goodell and the owners get away with a huge amount of ethically despicable behavior, yet I’m already right here eagerly consuming their product yet again this fall. I don’t quite know what to feel about this other than to point it out – if there’s some way to separate the fandom from the naked greed that drives owner indifference to both players’ mental health or the public’s finances, all while wrapped in a soggy blanket of fake down-home American grittiness, then I’m all for it, but I know already my fandom is going to win out anyway. If someone could figure a way out of this moral dilemma before the cheese for my nachos finishes up in the microwave, that would be great.
  • All I know about the tacos out here in California is that they are amazing. Why does a corn tortilla go so well with grilled seafood and lime? I don’t know, but I am eternally grateful to the person who found this out. You could really enjoy a life of tacos and ocean out here without much effort.

Late Publishing, Pirates, Belgian Beer

For the first time in more than six years running this iteration of my website, I have a barren monthly archive. (See history menu on the left side of a single-post page.) Sorry, June 2013. I only made July because I thought, “Hey, it’s the end of July and I’d be going two months without sending something into the blogging ether. Not OK.”

  • Baseball will forever be dull as paint, but I guess it’s nice that the Pirates are the best paint in MLB right now. People keep telling me “Hey! The Pirates are in first place!”, which makes me think “baseball”, which makes me think, “I could go for a nap right now. I’ll just finish reading this coverage of Steeler training camp before I hit the hay.” That’s what yinzers do.
  • Tonight I had a fantastic Belgian-style dinner at The Globe here in Garden Grove, Calif. Highly recommend it, and if you get a chance, also try some St. Bernardus ABT 12, which was awesome. I say that as a guy who doesn’t normally like Belgian beer either – too sour, but not Bernardus. Great name too that makes him sound like a more O.G. Roman version of the brandy-toting dog breed.

Matte Cars, Google Now, Penguins-Bruins

  • There’s a Maserati owner near me who keeps driving his ride down the street when I walk my dog in the morning. This is mostly notable because his car is painted matte black. I don’t know why peeps do this – when you go with a matte finish, you make your $130,000 car look like a 1991 Nissan Sentra, one you painted with black Krylon to hide the mismatched replacement door you bought at the junkyard.
  • I’ve been using Google Now on my phone … but I’ve decided I’m not into it. I only say that because I think it’s not all-encompassing enough – I use lots of different sites and applications to do things like read news or tweet, so until Google Now gets Big-Brother enough to read all of my digital activity and then predict the cards
    I need that way, it’s limited to my search and email behavior and therefore missing out on a lot of what I need in my day.
  • To prep yourself for the next series: go read 10 must-watch storylines for Penguins-Bruins. Then cheer for Pittsburgh.
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