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January 11, 2004 - January 17, 2004 Archives

January 11, 2004

MULTITASKING

I was being interviewed on the radio while the Eagles were apparently frittering away their chance to make it to the NFC Championship. I was chatting away about talk radio on WWZZ/Washington's "Girl Talk" (stop laughing- I was the token male guest, dammit!), and about half of my brain was engaged in lively conversation and the other half was watching the Packers kick a go-ahead field goal and screaming "MISS IT MISS IT MISS IT AAAAAAAAAAUGH damn." But then, after I finished the interview, a miracle- a 4th and 26 right-up-the-middle pass to Freddie Mitchell who BARELY got the first down, then several near-disaster passes and an almost-sack that ended up with an Akers field goal, then, in OT, Brett Favre's worst decision ever, a blind bomb that appeared aimed at nobody in white that got intercepted and led to another Akers field goal, this time to win it.

This team is not all that good, actually, but they have what's way more important than being good. They find ways to win even when they suck. They dodge bullets, manage to get past their QB being sacked EIGHT TIMES, lull the opposition into mistakes, shake off embarrassing miscues, survive. And that's all you need to do in the NFL- survive.

Two more, guys, just two more. Keep dodging.



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January 12, 2004

CURB THIS

Okay, I gave it another shot. I watched "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I wanted to love it. I really, really wanted to love it.

I didn't love it.

It's still not the case that I don't "get it." I do. Larry David, the character, is supposed to be an unlikeable, sad jerk whose embarrassment and discomfort is supposed to be funny. He's supposed to be irrational and self-destructive, George Costanza in Hollywood. Yes, I get it.

Still not funny.

This season's opener involved Larry's karaoke performance somehow making Mel Brooks think he can take over the lead in "The Producers" on Broadway, with subplots involving Larry's wife's years-ago promise to let him have sex with one "other woman," run-ins with a guy in a wheelchair, a head injury, and fights with a doctor and a lesbian couple. This could be the setup for great hilarity, and I think there might be something terribly wrong with me for being the only person of my acquaintance (other than my wife) who doesn't find the result within a mile of amusing.

I'm not averse to the humor of embarrassment. David's own work on "Seinfeld," pushing his doppelganger George to the brink of self-immolation time and again, was hilarious. "The Honeymooners" depended on Ralph's humiliation, the utter futility of his existence, his inability to realize it until slapped down again. There's been nothing funnier on TV in the past decade than the completely oblivious David Brent on "The Office," doomed to pay for being the world's biggest un-self-aware asshole, shot down at every turn, failing miserably at almost everything. But on "Curb," Larry's just... unpleasant. Not funny- there's nothing funny about an extended screaming jag directed at a guy in a wheelchair crossing the street in front of his car, nothing funny about taking poorly-veiled verbal shots at a doctor because the doctor told him not to use the office phone, nothing funny about Larry refusing to shake Ben Stiller's hand after Stiller sneezed into it. The bits want you to stare at them like a roadside accident scene, but they're more like flat tires.

So I just can't, as a former boss of mine once used to tell her stand-up comic charges, find "the funny" in this show. I still think it may mean there's something wrong with me. Virtually everyone I know seems to be sold on the genius of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." I can't see it.

Maybe it's funnier in high definition. I'm not giving up yet.



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January 13, 2004

JANUARY

Pumping gas at the Costco, I leaned against the car and idly looked towards the Sam's Club next door. (Yes, they're next to each other. No, I don't know the logic behind it) There were a couple of stray palm trees, and the sand-colored wall glistened in the sun. And that's when I realized- it's about 75 degrees, the sun's beating down...

... in January.

It's January.

It's not gloating. I spent the greater portion of my life thus far freezing in January. But today, the decision to move southwest seemed so... you know... right.

Ask me again when the next quake hits.


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January 14, 2004

GET YOUR EUPHEMISMS WORKIN'

FCC Chairman Michael Powell, in his campaign to get everyone on earth to have a reason to disagree with him, came out today at the National Press Club in favor of ratcheting up indecency fines for broadcasters "tenfold," and he's also throwing his weight behind efforts to ban even the incidental, non-sexual, slip-of-the-tongue use of the word "f-ck." His rationale is that all of this dirty stuff is, well, you know...

No, actually, I DON'T know.

I've told you this before- I'm not the kind of person who uses a lot of obscene words. (Look at the edit above for confirmation) I KNOW them all, I just don't use them, because, well, something in me won't let me. I think I have a preset limit, like a gift card or a pay-as-you-go mobile phone. Can't do it. And I do tend to think that people who can't go more than three or four words without dropping f-bombs or s-bombs are not as bright as those who don't. You don't NEED to say those words all the time. But there ARE times where they just say what you're trying to say in the most efficient, effective manner, just like Yiddish is sometimes the best way to say something even if you don't understand the language- it just SOUNDS right. And there are times when it's involuntary.

Oh, yes, it is. Try hitting your thumb with a hammer.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

(bang)

See? Involuntary.

But the bluenoses in Congress, and now Powell, along with established prudes Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, want to take severe punitive action against swearing on TV and radio. This is because it can have a horrible, deleterious effect on children which is... which is... which is IT'S OBVIOUS AND IF YOU DON'T SEE IT YOU'RE A PERVERT.

But I don't see it.

I knew what the F-word was by the time I was, oh, I'd say 7 years old, and I knew what it meant shortly thereafter. I remember a kid announcing it to us when we were hanging on the monkey bars at Lafayette School. The s-word was never a mystery. The a-word- also never incomprehensible. I knew all the words. Here I am, an adult, still knowing them all plus words I'll bet most people don't know and practices that have to be illegal in most states, but I don't say the words much, can't bring myself to write them, and don't practice anything I'd be embarrassed to admit. (The trapeze and closet-full-of-latex-and-leather are for decorative purposes only) So how did those words hurt me? They didn't.

But don't try to tell the schmucks (Yiddish!) on Capitol Hill that, nor is it anything more than a waste of time to tell the FCC anything of the sort. They're going to make saying rude words a crime. Oh, THEY all use those words, I guarantee it, but YOU can't. Kids, you see.

Too many bad laws and policies come from claims that they're "protecting the children." This would be a bad law, and the children, in this case, don't need protecting. I'll bet your kids know every swear word there is, and I'll bet that they didn't learn them from Bono or Nicole Richie. They learn 'em from their peers, who learn them from older kids, because it's a legacy passed down from generation to generation. They're only words. Let them be.



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January 15, 2004

NOTES FROM NUMBLAND

I'm in the dentist's chair right now, part one of what will be a weeks-long ordeal. Today, crown replacement. It took three novocaine shots to quell the pain.

Uh oh, here comes the drill again.

Excuse me.

OW OW OW OW OWWWWW


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January 16, 2004

PRESENT

There are days when you come to work all fired up, wired like you'd pounded down the Costco-sized case of Red Bull in one shot. You can't be stopped. You get everything done, keep going, fly through the day.

And then there are days when you just... show... up. You show up, go through the motions, stagger across the finish line, collapse.

This week was the latter. And now, I'm going to go away. After taking a beating from the dentist and from life for a few days, I think I've earned it.



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January 17, 2004

WELL, IT WAS GOOD THE FIRST TIME

I just wrote a long piece about Wal-Mart and the condescension of the elite media class, but you won't be reading it. Why?

I'd written it before.

I got pretty much to the end before I realized that I was repeating myself. The new piece wasn't a ripoff of the older column (a fisking of Steve Lopez' Costco experience), but the conclusions were pretty much the same- store serves a noble purpose, elitists don't get it. The numbers were different but the total was the same.

That's an occupational hazard of writing- soon enough, your experiences repeat themselves, your observations repeat themselves, you repeat yourself. It doesn't make the thoughts less valid, but this isn't a newspaper column, where, if you're like the guy who's the "star columnist" in our local daily, you repeat yourself over and over and over and because nobody actually saves all the columns for future reference, nobody'll be the wiser when you kinda tweak that column from a couple of years ago about your Scottish relatives, just as they may not notice that every third column is filled with reader e-mails (hey, why NOT let your readers write your column for you?). No, this is an archive, and if you read something and you think "hey, that sounds familiar," you can just do a quick search on the site and presto, evidence. So I can't get away with that.

Nor do I want to, and nor do most people who write these things, whether they're pure blogs or, like this, sort of rolling columns. This is a new medium, or, more correctly, a new form for an existing medium, and the challenge of being new and original and coherent on a daily (or, for some, several-times-daily) basis is well beyond what the columnists for print papers do. There's no deadline, sure, and usually no editor, but that just makes it harder- you have to hammer something decent out RIGHT NOW, right when the news is still hot, knowing that whatever you say will be right there on the record immediately, no further rethinking, no editing, and it's immediately time for the next column- no every-other-day deadline. Newspaper columnists whine about three-a-week schedules. Poor babies.

But this isn't being done at gunpoint. It's voluntary, and I like doing it. It's just that there's the constant knowledge that what you write not only CAN be compared to what you've written already, it WILL be. And that's why I highlighted all of my brilliant observations (including a deft invocation of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel) and hit "Delete." And that's why you won't have to read it.

Win-win.


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About January 2004

This page contains all entries posted to PMSimon.com in January 2004. They are listed from oldest to newest.

January 4, 2004 - January 10, 2004 is the previous archive.

January 18, 2004 - January 24, 2004 is the next archive.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

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