My iPod started acting ill today, and now I’m in the middle of restoring the factory settings. Since I have to completely re-upload all of my music, photo and backed-up files, I got some time to write. First, the news:
• At first today, it really annoyed me that the entire media-swilling world spent the day rending its garments and pulling out its hair over Michael Jackson. (It’s 10 p.m. here, and the funeral is still the top story on CNN.com.) But then I thought, “Parts of the U.S. have been doing this for more than 30 years for Elvis, so this is really nothing new,” and I felt better about our modern era — or worse about past eras, I can’t decide.
• I’ve been asking people for a percentage: how many people watching Michael Jackson’s funeral know who Robert McNamara is, and they have to understand that he was far more historically important than MJ. The common response is less than 1 percent, but I would think it’s actually up around 4 percent. Call me an optimist.
In fairness to that other 96 percent, I did call him “George McNamara” at lunch today. But to burnish my own history-nerd credentials with an even bigger bit of nerdness, I was also thinking of McGeorge Bundy at the time.
If policy now tilts too far toward deficit cutting, some argue, that would treat job creation as an option the nation somehow cannot afford, in contrast to “must haves” like tax cuts for wealthy Americans and unpopular foreign military entanglements.
True, but you also can’t ignore the fact that those tax cuts and unpopular entanglements were put in place, and now they are indeed making the job creation that much more financially difficult. I fall reluctantly in line with the spending advocates — I don’t think now is the time to pay down the deficit, because government spending at the moment really is a big portion of the money flowing into the economy. But if things do turn around, raise my taxes. It sucks, but it’s better than betting our economic livelihood on the whim of the Chinese government.
And on to frivolous stuff:
• I’m sorry to see the Penguins lose Rob Scuderi to the L.A. Kings, but they were right not to pay what the Kings paid. The dude is good, but not $13.6 million good.
• I got a Lollapalooza ticket for Sunday, August 9, hombres. Jane’s Addiction original lineup? I am hella there.
• This past Friday I went to see The Hangover. Verdict: four phats. Definitely some gross humor; definitely a weird Zach Galifinakis; and most likely worth seeing. (Though don’t take your parents.)
Even stranger, the movie featured both Heather Graham and Mike Tyson in prominent roles. Why is this strange? Those two were both guests at a 2004 arts-benefit party at the Guggenheim in NYC attended by yours truly, who by all rights should not have been there in the first place. (I’m pretty sure this Heather Graham photo is from that very night.) Mike Tyson is somehow even scarier when he wears fur, and I even made eye contact with Ms. Graham — or as I have no right to call her, Heather — for a full second.
The moral here? I really should have been offered at least a cameo appearance as the third part of that party trifecta, Hollywood.
I tuned in for periods 2 and 3 of today’s NHL Winter Classic game, which saw Chicago get destroyed by the Red Wings in a comeback victory. (The Red Wings are always pulling this garbage against my favorite teams. Jagoffs.) The game didn’t have quite the finish that last year did, and I naturally wasn’t as invested without the Pens playing, but the ‘Hawks have long been my second-favorite team (years before I had ever thought of going to school in Chicago) and so it was good to see the game played just a mile up the road from our place.
In any event, I’m mad geeked about the fact that the Winter Classic is turning into the first hockey success story in years. This year gets an A for weather and an A for the matchup and team effort, but a B- overall because the Penguins weren’t playing and Detroit won. Those are both ridiculous reasons to downgrade the game, but then this blog exists at my beck and call, so you’re out of luck in your efforts to hate on my conclusion.
Bonus Sarah Palin note: I meant to write during the election that while the G.O.P., the American populace and the human race didn’t get much out of the idea of hockey mom Sarah Palin as VP, the NHL certainly did: For the first time in a nation where no-talent sportswriters have made hockey the go-to sport of ridicule, the same voters who treat sports that aren’t baseball or football as pastimes for gay foreign terrorists were defending hockey with all their American-purist might.
While I’m glad Palin has turkey-trotted off the national stage for now, I really miss that brief period when even Southern rednecks were touting hockey as a game played by Real Americans™.
I believe that even if I supported anything about Sarah Palin, I’d still be really sick of seeing her everywhere I turn. Conservatives would compare Palin’s star power to Obama, but Obama’s ascent took a good two years and wasn’t compressed into a two-week news cycle. He’s also one of the two people actually running for president.
Another Palin-borne irony: after years of ignorant sports commentators decrying hockey as “not a real sport”, it’s now somehow true that being peripherally involved with organized hockey (even at the little-kid level) is considered a solid qualification for the Presidency of the United States. The NHL’s marketing department needs to jump on this with the quickness.
Part of the reason I was excited to get to the University of Michigan this year was the chance to go to a school with a real football program. Nevermind my conflicted loyalties from being born in Columbus and having attending another Big Ten school; this was supposed to be my chance to claim a piece of the action as the Wolverines crushed all opponents. Instead I get games like this, this and also this (which, though a win, was most unimpressive.)
While searching for a sound effect that would convey Michigan football’s limpness, I did manage to get seriously geeked from this:
↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A what.
Congrats to my cousin Dante and his wife Kari on their new son (and, simultaneously, their anniversary), who was born just this morning and is the first of the new generation in my family. Pitt, you just gained another fan.
What a bummer. They went down fighting to the very final seconds–I did the two-handed hair-grab and futile stare at the sky as the puck rolled past Osgood and across the goal mouth–but Detroit has just been too overwhelming this series. I haven’t seen stifling defense like that since the New Jersey trap era.
You know, I was all set to write the Pens’ obituary, and yet I should not have given up on those Frenchies Maxime and Marc-André. And, of course, Sykora with calling the goal. The whole thing was the shiznit.
Now they need to avoid coming back and blowing Game 6 by 8-0 or something.
And sorry to my new neighbors for bringing the celebratory ruckus.
We’re up in the new place after our three-leg, two-vehicle, 921-mile journey out to Illinois. Things are mostly unpacked, but more than anything I’m glad the moving part is over.
I managed just fine with the U-Haul truck. The testosterone highlight of the trip for me was when one of the movers asked me, “Who backed that [truck] in? You? Nice job,” when looking at the narrow alley behind our building. (That was without any guidance, thank you. I am pure steel.) About an hour later another of the tenants had to move her car out of the garage, requiring me to move the truck. I drove it down an alley nearby, thinking I could just drive straight through, but instead spent ten minutes turning the thing Austin-Powers style around a corner before I got out. Thus ended my truck-driving high.
While I now feel good about my own Teamster skills, I don’t get how U-Haul can rent bigger trucks than that one to the general public. A 26-foot moving van? A dude was driving one this weekend through Lakeview–he took a corner too widely, almost hit a bus, then had to back up in the middle of a six-way intersection. I thought cool over-one’s-head-on-the-road stuff like that is only supposed to happen in Third-World countries and New York City’s Chinatown-bus system.
Overall it was an unusually smooth move. The only things that broke were a cat-food container that fell out while I was unloading some extra boxes and a one-inch refrigerator magnet. I’m a little freaked out by how little went wrong. Apparently my payback has been the twogames in Detroit. The less said about those, the better.
• I’ve been asking people for a percentage: how many people watching Michael Jackson’s funeral know who Robert McNamara is, and they have to understand that he was far more historically important than MJ. The common response is less than 1 percent, but I would think it’s actually up around 4 percent. Call me an optimist.
• This past Friday I went to see The Hangover. Verdict: four phats. Definitely some gross humor; definitely a weird Zach Galifinakis; and most likely worth seeing. (Though don’t take your parents.) 
We’re up in the new place after our three-leg, two-vehicle, 921-mile journey out to Illinois. Things are mostly unpacked, but more than anything I’m glad the moving part is over.