American Idle

Aw yeah, boi!!! It's music day here on Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk. Enjoy the haunting refrains of Alan Gillett as he sings "All Shook Up," followed by Emperor Penguin doing their smash hit, "Mysterious Pony." You now have your WTF moments for the day.

Game on!

I have a hockey puck sitting on a shelf above my desk today, a souvenir from last Friday night. This particular puck bears the logo of the New York Islanders on it. Almost ninety-six hours ago I got to see the Islanders play for the first time since 1991. That last game had been an exhibition game and played the day after my birthday. I had been looking forward to last Friday night since early November when I bought tickets to the game. And the 26^th finally rolled around so my friend Greg and I could go take in a game and enjoy a Guys Night Out.

We departed town about three and a half hours before the game’s start time. I thought we had left too early but as it turned out, our departure time was well-warranted. It’s a given that most of the roadways coming out of Atlanta on a Friday afternoon are parking lots as people try to get home. I hadn’t anticipated the highways coming into downtown Atlanta to be parking lots as well, but they were. It’s hard to believe some of the road signs when you’re traveling at 70 miles per hour when they say “Next 9 miles: 25-27 minutes,” but the signs were correct. I think it took about 25 minutes to travel the last two miles to the off ramp we needed to take.

Ironically, I guess, once we got to CNN Center/Philip Arena complex, it was easy to get food pretty quickly but it seemed it took about 25 minutes of wandering around before we found a place to sit and eat. As we roamed around looking for a table I took note of the crowd. I had assumed that given how many displaced Northerners there are in Atlanta, that I’d see a number of Islanders jerseys & shirts around. The number of people wearing Islanders apparel I could count on one hand, the place being awash in light blue Thrashers jerseys and other wearables. Suddenly I felt very much out of place, especially for someone who’s lived in Georgia for a long time. True, I will root for the Thrashers when I watch their games on television and I want to see them do well (it looks like they may make the playoffs this year). But I don’t root for them when they play the Islanders and I was there to see the Islanders, not the Thrashers.

We had great seats for the game, the lower level only six rows back and about 10 feet from the glass. I told my friend Greg in advance that we had good seats, but I don’t think he had any clue as to how good they were. We got to our seats and I turned to him and said, “See, I told you we were close enough to catch teeth when someone’s checked into the boards.” And we were (though a number of players were checked into the boards in front of us, we did not catch any teeth that night). It had been a while since I had been to a hockey game, so I was reminded as to just how small the playing surface really is. Television makes the ice look so much bigger than what it actually is.

The game started off very badly for the Islanders. Starting goalie Rick DiPietro gave up three goals inside of the first six minutes of the game. As the crowd rose to their feet after the third goal, I thought, “Shit, this is going to be a long night.” The chubby Thrashers fan to my left looks over and says, “Heh, maybe you’ll be able to stand up at the first intermission.” I explained my dual fandom of the Islanders and Thrashers, which put him on notice that he wasn’t going to get under my skin. He didn’t say much after that. Maybe it was my running explanation and discussion of the game to my friend Greg that told chubby I understood the game much better than he did, and that it wasn’t the equivalent of a greased pig contest on skates.

It has to be said that while Atlanta seems to be supporting their hockey team right now, with many games sellouts or near sellouts, the city is not a hockeytown in the truest sense. Look at cities like Montreal or Detroit. They take their hockey with deadly seriousness much in the same way football, especially at the collegiate level, is taken in the south. I know in New York I learned to skate long before I learned to play baseball or football. You can’t do that in Atlanta (or in most of the south). You go into a store and all of the skates have wheels on them as opposed to blades. There are a few places where you can go ice skating, but for the most part the only use ice skates get in the south are as decorations hanging on the garage wall.

After the Thrashers netted their third goal in under six minutes in the first period, the Isles pulled DiPietro (which received boos from the Atlanta crowd, now sensing a blowout and wanting more blood) and put Mike Dunham in goal, who did a much better job for the remainder of the game. Despite giving up three goals early, the Isles began to fight back. They scored their first goal during a Thrashers power play. I just laughed. “They scored a shorthanded goal on the Thrashers. Excellent!” The guy next to me looked to see if I was going to stand and applaud the goal, but I had just gotten comfortable in my seat. The thought occurred to me that perhaps that may have been my only opportunity to applaud an Islanders goal that evening, given how awful they had started the game. But I got to stand and applaud two goals during the second period. I missed their fourth goal that came early in the third period as I decided during the second intermission that the time was right to go find a souvenir or two to bring home to my daughter.

Regulation play ended with both teams tied at four goals apiece, which meant only one thing: free hockey! I paid for three periods of hockey and now we got an extra helping. My friend Greg asked how the overtime periods worked and why the teams played at four-man strength instead of the usual five-man teams. The Isles played really hard during the overtime period, taking some really good shots, but with just over two minutes left in overtime the Thrashers scored the game winning goal. It was not the outcome I had hoped for, but the Islanders came back from three goals down (not an easy feat by any measure, especially against a good team like the Thrashers) and forced the game into overtime. The chubby Thrashers fan next to me and I both agreed that it had been a good game. And it was good to see the Islanders play again in person, win or lose.

Adios, Barbaro

Welcome to the train wreck

And we're off! Yes, another season of American Idol is out of the gates, which means millions of hogs will belly up to the trough for more of the slop that passes for entertainment these days. Except on rare occasions, I don't watch the show. The only time it's fun to watch is in the beginning, when they show the auditions--everything from the truly good to the truly awful. Last week's debut of the show had plenty of the awful, more than should legally be allowed. And people watched it, watched by the millions. And why? The answer is easy. Americans love a winner, but we love watching people humiliate themselves in front of a national audience even more. It's reaffirming to our self-esteem to watch people, with their physical imperfections and inability to carry a tune in a bucket, parade themselves before the cameras and fail miserably. It's easy to laugh and point and say, "Look at that poor asshole" when none of us could do any better. And I'm no better.

Who puts these people up do to this? One miserable bastard said his co-workers told him he should go on the show, that he had a great singing voice. Another reason to never, ever, trust your co-workers. You'll only end up on a videotape loop playing constantly in the lunchroom where you work, or even worse, on You Tube. Another contestant's mother said she was impressed by her daughter's singing skills. We all soon realized that her mother is way too easily impressed, as her daughter had a voice that made me embarrassed for the entire human race. And then there was "Red," the questionably psychotic contestant that finished off the first show with his version of Queens' "Bohemian Rhapsody." His falsetto voice led me to believe that either Red is one of the last castratti, or he dressed that day with a strap normally used on the groins of bulls to make them more "lively" for a rodeo bull riding contest.

But for all the awfulness that was to be found on that season premiere of American Idol, none of the contestants, absolutely none of them, can hold a candle to the train wreck that Paula Abdul has become. I think that of all the bad performances that were broadcast last week, none of them comes even close to this jewel.

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Wanderlust

Boy, am I out of sorts today. The day started with me getting in to work late due to waiting around the house for someone to come around to give me an estimate on replacing the flooring in the kitchen and dining room at home. I should've just stayed home, as getting in late always throws me and my day off. And it's no comfort to know that the builder who constructed our house used the cheaper pressboard flooring instead of the sturdier plywood sheeting (the cheap bastard!). What that means is that the raison d'etre for staying home this morning was all for naught, as we can't have the flooring that we wanted put down without some additional work on the floor itself.

What's bothering me today is more than just that, and that realization smacks me as I sit here watching the interior of a century old building age before me. I've written about this before, so I'm writing about it again. Every now and again the latent, creative side of me rears its ugly head, wanting to get out and do something, anything, to satisfy that urge. And that urge is hitting me again. I do like my job and the people I work with, so don't misinterpret my comments to the contrary. But sometimes it's truly agonizing to sit at a desk all day, working on a computer, running the administrative show around these parts. Today is one of those days. The weather's not that great, but I'd rather be off taking pictures and practicing my digital photography skills. I'm not going to get any better sitting on my thumbs here at my desk, that's for damned certain. I guess it's a career mid-life crisis. My job has a lot of perks and cushy stuff that go with it that I really like, but it also has a shelf life--the odds are against me advancing in this department and school, and I doubt I'll be getting any promotions in job title any time soon. I've applied for three new jobs recently on campus and gotten call backs on all three. I didn't like any of them once I interviewed as they offered fewer creative outlets than what I have now.

There's a chasm right now between what I'd like to be doing and what I'm qualified to do. My wife gave me a 55mm-200mm zoom lens for Christmas and, dammit, I want to be outside today (and tomorrow and the day after and the day after that) putting it to good use. But I sit here watching an aging building get older. F*ck.

Mission Accomplished

No, no, no...this isn't about me landing on an aircraft carrier at taxpayer expense to announce that major combat operations in Iraq are over and that we won. This is nothing of the sort...not at first. Rather, I came home the other day to find a small, brown, non-descript box waiting for me at my front door. It was the new power supply for my home PC that I had ordered. It was a quick fix to install it, but it was definitely pucker time when I hit the power button for the first time. I was reasonably confident that I had correctly diagnosed the problem, but the "what if's" kept creeping into my mind. What if the power supply wasn't the problem? Who do I take it to for repairs? There was no f*cking way I was trusting it to the yahoos at Best Buy. But fate smiled on me for a change and I was greeted with the familiar beep my computer makes as it begins the boot-up process.

Also accomplished was keeping my New Year's resolution of getting at least one of the DVD boxsets of the "Emergency" television series from the early to mid 1970s. I guess it was having the fire department show up at the building I work in that was the catalyst. One of our new faculty members burned some popcorn in the microwave. The resulting clouds of smoke triggered our fire alarm system, which resulted in a visit by the police and fire departments because someone with a Ph.D. can't microwave popcorn. Strangely enough, it was about a year ago when another new faculty member incinerated their lunch in the same microwave, setting the machine for thirty minutes when they meant to set it for three, filling the whole building with smoke and also tripping our fire alarm system. I plan on giving a brief lecture on Safe Microwaving at our next faculty meeting, as our microwave has survived two attempts on its life so far, and you know what they say about the third time being a charm.

Speaking of a detached reality program on television and people who don't know how to operate anything, did you catch our Commander in Chimp in his primetime special last week? You know, it's the one where he went before the masses to announce that in order to bring peace to Iraq he's going to send another 21,500 troops into the meat grinder that is Baghdad? Unlike the prior failed attempts to bring peace to Iraq, we have a plan this time to build infrastructure to help things along. Wait...wasn't that our plan almost four years ago when we went it? Didn't seem to work the first time we tried it, so what the hell...let's give it another go. Now dubya finds himself in over his head in a situation that the C he made in his international relations course in college ill-prepared him for. He's like a child who has broken his toy and thinks he knows how to fix it, but instead breaks it some more. The only thing throwing another 20,000 U.S. troops into the carnage that is Baghdad will result in is creating 20,000 more targets for Shia and Sunni militias to take shots at.

So why won't this plan work? Simple: Shias don't like Sunnis, and vice versa. Shias want some payback after years of abuse at the hands of the Sunni-dominated Baath party which ruled Iraq. The Sunnis think of the Shia as inferior and they should be ruled, not the rulers. Now throw in the Iraqi government run by prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia, who has been about as effective and useful as Rush Limbaugh's genitals. Al-Maliki is supposed to disarm the militias? Good luck! If al-Maliki tried to disarm al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, me thinks Nouri's days would be numbered.

So dumbya is sending in another 20,000 troops, and very quickly at that so that Democrats will look bad if they try to pull funding for troops that are already in country. But the bigger question here is, is our president learning? The answer is a resounding NO.

Das Leben ist manchmal merkwürdig

Haben sie überhaupt einen jener tage gehabt, in denen sie bedeckt im blut aufwachen, aber es nicht ihr ist? Es gibt eine grosse einbuchtung im vorderen ende ihres autos, die kettensäge, die normalerweise in der halle ist, ist im autoparkplatz und bedeckt auch im blut, gibt es einen grossen stapel des frischen schmutzes hinter ihrem haus, und sie haben keine erinnerung hinsichtlich, was die nacht vorher geschah? Ja, ich auch. Ist das ungewöhnlich?

Resolutions

It's a new year and it's the time of year where everyone and their mother makes resolutions for the next 365 days (or 358 as I write this). Naturally most of our resolutions involve some sort of personal improvement: I want to lose weight. I want to quit smoking. I want to get in shape. I want to stop sniffing glue. I want to ditch my spouse or boy/girlfriend for that cute but dumber than a bag of hammers co-worker.

But I'll have none of that. We all know new year resolutions are like speed limit signs; as soon as they're made nobody really expects to abide by them. I'm just as out of shape now as I was this time last year. I'm about the same weight as I was this time last year. So fudge making any resolutions, save one, of course. I promise to do my best, but I resolve to get the season 1 & 2 DVD boxsets of the old "Emergency" television series. That show was the shit when I was a kid and made me want to grow up to be a firefighter (instead of an underachiever). And if you were a kid growing up during the early 70s, you should remember that swinging opening theme by Nelson Riddle.

A New Year

To the three of you who read this, Happy New Year. Sorry I haven't posted anything of substance of late, but the holidays were kind of busy, especially with a trip to Disney World a few days after Christmas. For the uninitiated, around Christmas to New Years is one of the busiest times for the "Happiest Place on Earth." So the trip, for me at least, was like having one of those brown bears you pay to wrestle in some out-of-the-way tourist trap in the south that just sits on your head until you submit. Of course, I'll be writing about the Magic Kingdom soon--as soon as I get a new power supply for my computer at home to write and post with.