Author: Stagger Lee

…and consider the situation the President is in, one step at a time:

1) From day one – literally, from the moment he was inaugurated – Obama has faced a unified front of opposition. Uniform and unbending, focused on one thing and one thing only: NO. For all the talk about “moderates” like the two idiots from Maine, or speculation around a Scott Brown, there has been no meaningful instance of any – ANY – Republican Senator breaking ranks to side with the Democrats. And make no mistake, the Senate is where the action is, because it’s the only place in the political system where a minority with 2/5 of the vote plus one has the power to dictate what can even come up for a vote.

2) In the face of this opposition, the only way to get anything at all done is to put together sixty votes in the Senate. And thanks to the huge wins in 2006 and 2008, the numbers were there once Arlen Specter defected – barely. With exactly sixty votes, the Senate Democrats were at the mercy of the most conservative of their members – so for all the talk about out-of-control liberals from the retarded media hyenas on the right, the Obama Administration has spent two years with the tune being called by the likes of Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln and Joe Lieberman. Forget about the wild-eyed radicalism of a Ted Kennedy (RIP) or Barbara Boxer or Al Franken or, hell, pick any talk-radio-boogeyman you like – inasmuch as the Democrats were falling in line, the ones doing the falling were the ones on the left, giving in to the most conservative Democrats just for the sake of getting something, anything, through the process.

3) If the left wants to lash out at some Democrat, there’s one target and only one: Harry Reid. Harry Reid, who did nothing to squeeze a loyalty commitment on cloture votes out of his caucus. Harry Reid, who chose to leave the filibuster rules intact knowing full well that the GOP had shattered the filibuster record in the previous Congress – and watched as they went on to shatter that record. Harry Reid, who had to pull out a miracle finish to beat an opponent who was advocating armed revolt against the federal government. Harry Reid, the man who shit the bed.

4) The GOP’s plan worked brilliantly. It was predicated on the absolute loyalty of their base, the absolute incompetence of the press and the absolute ignorance of the public. They were able to sandbag the entire political process in the Senate, the press duly reported that the Democrats couldn’t get anything done in Congress, and the public promptly punished them for their shortcomings.

5) Obama is now faced with a House in the hands of the enemy and a Senate that no longer has the option of begging together sixty votes – in short, the Congress is closed for business vis-a-vis the Democratic agenda. Any grand vision for the progressive future is officially dead on arrival.

6) Obama has two choices now. He can hew to the good line, thump the bully pulpit, raise hell at every opportunity – and hope against hope that his battle cries will get a hearing in the press above and beyond “President rages impotently while nation’s economy burns to the ground.” Or he can try to hammer out the best deals he can get, while he still can, and try to do something to move the needle while hoping against hope that things rebound in time for 2012.

Now, the usual suspects on the bong-watered granola-shaver left are screaming about a primary challenge, maybe Kucinich or Feingold or something like that. No. Grow the fuck up, hippies. The alternative to Obama isn’t Rachel Maddow, the alternative to Obama is Mike Huckabee. If you’re very lucky. If you’re not, well, let’s hope your visa application comes through before Sarah Palin gets sworn in.

Unless.

If everybody to the left of, I don’t know, Richard Lugar can somehow get it together and figure out who the problem really is, we might get somewhere. Obama’s not the problem, hippies. And the dirty fucking hippies are not the real problem, Mr. President. You know who IS the problem? The army of bloated redneck zombies known as Republicans. Put one-fifth as much firepower into shooting the zombies as each other, and maybe, just maybe, you can attract enough attention to move the needle on public opinion.

But for now, Obama managed to get the middle-class tax cuts extended, plus a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits and some other stimulus, in exchange for $120 billion worth of tax cuts for people who don’t need them or deserve them after the last ten years. It sucks, but that’s the price of doing business right now. That price may change later. Until then, everybody needs to take a deep breath, grow up, and focus on who the actual party at fault is here. Hint: it’s largely white and old with an annoying Southern accent.

Well, Google hasn’t been half shaggin’ busy this month, have they? Google Books was inevitable, and is quite frankly redundant in a world where I’m already stuck into Kindle for fifty books, but the rest of the week’s announcements merit some attention.

Android 2.3 (codename: Gingerbread) looks pretty damn nice. There seems to be a bit of Snow Leopard-ing happening here: more features, sure, but the bulk of effort put on refining and polishing what’s there already. The UI is cleaner, the keyboard on-screen is greatly improved, the power management is supposedly quite a bit better, things like that. Some of the features are very impressive – built-in support for wi-fi sharing of your 3G connection, or SIP support for easy-peasy VOIP – but the fact that even Google concedes up front that carriers will probably strip those functions out should tell you all you need to know about what the weak link in Android is.

Samsung’s Nexus S looks like a treat, too. The latest “pure Google experience” reference phone comes with Gingerbread and no carrier tweaks, and can be bought unlocked…for the same $529 as the original Nexus One. The good news is that Google has gone to school on the bust that was the direct-sales model for the Nexus One, and the S will be available at Best Buy. You can also get it for $199 on T-Mobile – which is probably the way you should go; with no 850/1900 G3 or any CDMA support, the only reason to buy it unlocked is if you want to go month-to-month on T-Mob; even the unlocking isn’t that much of a feature when T-Mobile themselves will gladly unlock your phone 90 days into the contract. Feature-wise, it’s more or less on a par with the industry standard: gigahertz processor, dual cameras with 5.0 MP and HD video on the primary, 16 GB built-in storage. The curved glass of the AMOLED display is intriguing, certainly, and if the Gingerbread modifications to power management work out, it should be an all-day gamer on par with the iPhone 4. I think the guy at TechCrunch was right: it won’t make you throw your iPhone 4 in the sink, but it will absolutely make you want to move from any other Android phone.

The last thing is the Google Chrome OS-based device, netbook or whatever. I think this one is a year late; this time last year, a lean whippy cloud-based netbook for $199 would have been a game-changer. Instead, we’ve got a 12-inch netbook that will come along “sometime in 2011” with a browser-based and “web apps” and some sort of pervasive Verizon connectivity (though you can bet THAT will cost you – 100 MB a month ain’t shit if you’re using anything stronger than a smartphone).

Now, in a world where everybody wants tablets (and desperately wants Android to support bigger than 480×800 resolution), a netbook with virtually no storage and a working model based on permanent persistent Internet access may be a tougher sell. My question is how viable are “web apps” in a world where you have, well, a web browser? Apps make a lot of sense for a smartphone, because you have to repackage for a 4″ screen form factor and work around things like Flash and Java, but many of the things you’d use an app for on, say, the iPhone – Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Texts From Last Night – work just as well if not better as their respective websites. Then again, an OS designed to run in a browser may require an app-based solution to work effectively with a tablet – so now you have to wonder whether there’s a two-prong approach with Android and ChromeOS as competing visions of how to do tablet computing.

And then there’s the money angle – what are people prepared to pay for these things? I recall saying last year that there’s no reason Google couldn’t bring these things in for $200 or less. Obviously this was in a pre-iPad world, but I think the price point is still somewhat relevant – factor in the webcam and the 3G modem and you make up for the offset cost of cheaper RAM and Flash storage. If Samsung can deliver this for $199, then this is the purest vision of cloud computing yet: you have just enough hardware and software to run the interface, which in turn points out to the cloud for storage and apps and probably not a small amount of processing power; after all, you can do the heavy lifting elsewhere and just send the results back to the UI, which lets you get by with very little onboard CPU…

Google will probably still sell a million of these. It’s your grandmother’s laptop, basically – as long as the connection’s live, the OS is ridiculously simple and reinstalls itself at the first sign of a glitch, and everything else is a webpage. It’s definitely a unique vision for where computing is headed, spearheaded by the one company with the cash to burn on it and the most to gain from being your one-stop cloud for everything.

If/when Google and Facebook finally get together, brace yourself.

ETA: One big thing I missed initially: it looks like we’re going to be six months until these things ship to the general public. That’s six months for more tablets to ship, almost certainly including a notional iPad 2. We’re going to get the Chrome OS netbook fully a year and a half after the thing was announced. I’m not sure how big a bet I’d want to put on these things given that bit of information.

When I first moved to Nashville, there was a mall at every point of the compass and one practically under me. Rivergate to the north, Cool Springs Galleria to the south, Bellvue to the east and Hickory Hollow to the west, and Green Hills just down the road. And I spent a lot of the 1994 Christmas season darting between them.

Green Hills was closest, and hands-down the most posh. (Ten years later it would get Nashville’s first Apple Store.) It lacked a bookstore, but it was right down the road from Davis-Kidd and not far from Bookstar, so there were plenty of options for that anyway. It was there that I would duck into Mozarella’s, sit at the bar, order a loaded baked potato with potato soup, and get filled up quick while bypassing the half-hour wait for an actual table. For me, this was quite the innovation, which should tell you something about how thrilling my life was.

Rivergate, in the north, was the oldest mall – it had the same feel as Eastwood Mall back home. One level, old buildings, but it was a huge sprawling ramble of a mall. Hickory Hollow, in the west, was your typical bog-standard two-story suburban mall, while Bellvue, to the east, was a smaller more boutique-type mall whose exclusive stores started moving to Green Hills or Cool Springs Galleria, south of town and HUGE. It was still possible to leave the office at 4 and hit all five before they closed, even at the height of the Christmas madness, because I was just that bloody minded.

I think part of it was just that the malls represented a big chunk of novelty – a new town meant new TV and radio, new stores, new highways and byways to learn, and I wanted to just run around and soak up the difference, whether it meant Caster-Knott or Dillard’s for department stores or Boston Market for dinner or Lightning 100 on the radio or the Channel 4 local news or the pseudo-beltway of 440-to-40-to-24-to-65. New side-routes to learn (the “invisible beltway” of assorted pikes and parkways), new hole-in-the-wall dining (the taqueria on Nolensville Road), and to cap it all off, positioning such that a whole array of clear-channel AM broadcasts became clearly audible, from St Louis and Cleveland and Cincinnati and New Orleans. In short, instead of just being in a new and different bubble, it felt like the jumping-off point to a bigger and wider world.

Bellvue’s closed now, and Hickory Hollow and Rivergate are reportedly circling the drain. Nothing really stays how you left it. But it’s hard not to think of Christmas and not think of dashing through the malls, picking up the leather coat that became the Elk, splashing out on more Vanderbilt stuff just because I went there and I had room on the credit card – the only holiday where I went from the Herd back to the Argonauts without missing a beat and belonged twice over. And because surprisingly, Northern California’s mall scene is nowhere near what I would have anticipated all those years ago…

So here’s how it would look twenty years ago, before even the Bowl Alliance was a gleam in someone’s eye, and the Big East was a basketball league:

ROSE: Oregon vs Wisconsin. 1 versus 4, and a real banging matchup natch.

SUGAR: Auburn vs TCU. 2 vs 3, setting up nicely for the winner to be national champion if Oregon falls.

ORANGE: Virginia Tech vs Oklahoma, which should work out nicely for the Hokies.

COTTON: Arkansas vs Stanford, which ought to be an offensive barnburner.

FIESTA: Boise State vs, I don’t know, Ohio State or somebody, who cares.

NOWHERE CLOSE TO JANUARY 1: Connecticut, which at 8-4 shouldn’t be anywhere better than the Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl.

What have we learned, kids?

1) The BCS doesn’t make anything better, and has a way of screwing good teams while helping out those that don’t deserve it.

2) Conference champions don’t deserve automatic berths in BCS bowls just by virtue of being a conference champion.

3) The Big East, by virtue of adding TCU, may now be the equal of the new-look Mountain West (Boise, Nevada, Fresno State, Air Force, and San Diego State all have at least the same record as Connecticut).

4) The WAC is no longer of any concern for BCS purposes, seeing as how it’s filling out its gaps with teams that are still in I-AA this year.

5) This is the weakest season in years for the Pac-10 (which couldn’t fill its bowl allotment) and the SEC (which was supremely lopsided) – and yet their champions, probably for just that reason, are the two undefeateds meeting for the title…

6) …on January 10. There are bowls now scattered over a span of almost three weeks. This is ridiculous.

7) New rule: now that there are 12 regular season games, you should have to post 7 wins to be eligible for a bowl. Any bowl left without teams shouldn’t be played anyway. A bowl is not a participation trophy.

8) Once again, look me in the eye and tell me that what we have now is better than how it was 20 years ago.

January 9, 2008

…for the last couple of years, I’ve been repeating the trope that elsewhere in the world, when you ask somebody “Tell me about yourself,” they will start off with something like “I’m from Tokyo,” or “I’m Jewish,” or “I’m a Celtic supporter,” or “I love to knit,” or something like that, but that in America, they will inevitably lead off with what it is they do for a living. I don’t know where I heard this or I would cite it properly.

However, I was doing some rough math earlier while out on a walk. Figure the alarms start going off between 6:30 and 7 AM – let’s call it 7, because both phones and both wristwatches are bleating their hellish symphony while those chuckleheads on the tube are clucking away at the latest doings of that Spears whore, and if you can sleep through all that, you probably need to check into rehab yourself. So 7 AM. Figure you’re in the office by 8:30, but it’s not exactly quality personal time in between – shower, get dressed, try to figure out where you’re supposed to be this morning, maybe take five minutes personal time getting your coffee on the way in. Then 8 hours on the job, plus an hour lunch, which let’s face it, unless you’re out with the Rifles of the EUS at the pizza place, isn’t really quality personal time either. So home somewhere between 5:30 and 6. All in all, let’s call it roughly 10 hours a day sucked up with work, or at the very least, where work is looming unavoidably.

So home between 5:30 and 6, nothing to do for tomorrow. Now what? Figure about five hours to yourself, for your home life, for your lovely bride and a nice dinner and whatever TiVo caught for you, and occasionally you have folks over for a nice dinner or maybe you run out to an Adult Bible Study class (stop laughing. STOP IT) or who knows, maybe you just park yourself on the porch and smoke and make fun of people trying to parallel park in your street. Then off to bed sometime between 10:30 and 11 and thrash about trying to fall asleep knowing that in 7 hours, the cacophony is going to strike up again.

So on a typical weekday, work rules about 2/3 of your waking life. Weekends are better; you generally get the whole thing, which is nice. But in a typical six-days-and-on-the-seventh-he-rested, you’re putting in 50 hours for work and taking 55 hours for yourself, with 49 in sleep mode. (49-and-a-half if the priest is really droning at Mass.) So if work is taking up…calculator widget…47.62% of your waking life as an adult every week, it stands to reason that your job will be a pretty big part of who you are, right? I mean, being a Redskins fan is normally what, 4 hours on gameday plus maybe 10 or 15 minutes of website and news reading other days? Say 6 hours a week during the season when you’re really being a fan to the exclusion of all else, and in the off-season, probably 2 hours a week max unless you’re watching the draft, and if you’re watching the draft, you are a sad, sad little man. But even during the regular season, the Redskins, your pride and joy and a huge chunk of your life for the last, oh, 18 years (good GOD how has it been 18 years?) – the Skins take up right about 12% of the time that your job does.

So in the final analysis, your job cannot be something that contributes to your net total of misery. Maybe you have to cut the grass, which is godawful and is 2 hours of your life that you’ll never get back. Maybe you have to meet with the tax attorney – another 2 hours of misery. Maybe you screwed up and wandered into a theater showing The Thin Red Line – THREE hours you’ll never get back AND they fleeced you our of twenty bones in the process. But if your job is making you miserable, that’s almost half your waking life and two-thirds of your weekday pounding away at your soul.

So at the very least, you have to find a job that doesn’t make you wake up every morning going “Oh God, not again.” It doesn’t have to be your life’s purpose, it doesn’t have to fill your heart with joy, but at the very least, it has to be something you can just do without sinking into misery…

After almost a year of chucking and ducking and paperwork management and assorted bullshit, I have finally got all my retirement monies out of previous 401(k) arrangements and into a rollover IRA…with an actual professional manager running it. It’s mildly amusing to me to see “wealth management” in this guy’s business name, as the amount I’ve got him running probably amounts to a germ on a mite on a chigger on a flea on a hair on a wart on a frog on a knot on a log in the sea of finance.

If I’m honest, that’s unsettling right there. I was in grad school until age 25, then blew off the whole notion of “retirement savings” until I turned 33, got married, and got a full-time staff job out here. That’s a non-trivial amount of time to let something go – even a rudimentary index fund should have almost doubled my money by then – and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I don’t see how I’m going to be able to retire before 60 at least (and from the looks of things, they’re really trying to push that closer to 70). But then, twenty years ago I was just getting out of high school, which doesn’t seem like THAT long ago…which is disturbing. I want plenty of time for the money to build up, and plenty of time before I get old, but then, I want to be able to make something of my retirement when it happens…

Shit, this is going to get existential in a hurry. Better cut it off. What’s left over in the bin from NaBloPoMo?

The last time I finished November with three rivalry losses and a sinus infection was 2007. The Christmas season didn’t get much better after that. Part of it was the comedown of returning from London, Paris and York to my workaday job, part of it was realizing I’d caught the bait and switch and that said job was essentially two shitty part-time jobs slapped together into a single sub-contract, and part of it was just wrapped up in the Dysfunctional Family Christmas ™ that really bottomed out that December. All in all, it was a prime capper to the third-worst year of my life (and the only thing keeping it out of second was that I couldn’t drink in 1986), and the new Kanye West single “The Good Life” mocked me from my iTunes. If one of our friends hadn’t scheduled a cocktail party for December 28, I don’t know how I would have made it through the trip.

This year looks brighter, football notwithstanding. I’m not going to be heading out of town for the holidays, in all likelihood, and the drama will be at arms’ length with my relations in the old country. I have a pretty good feeling about this Christmas season, although that may just be me being hopeful. Christmas is a season unto itself in my reckoning, set between Late Fall and Winter, and a time for ordinary service to be suspended in favor of lights, songs, James Bond flicks on the DVD player, and as much socializing as can be managed.

Christmas has always been a mixed bag for me ever since I got to be too old for toys. 1986 was particularly dreadful, because I literally knew every single present I was getting before I even went to bed on the 24th – and everything just felt empty. After that, my mantra was “I don’t care what I get, big or small or whatever, just surprise me.” Two years later, Christmas was movies and hanging out with my team and a riotous New Year’s party and I don’t remember a single gift I got except for a certain gray fedora that went on to be iconic for a year. 1994 may have been the best Christmas ever – me home from grad school in my big leather coat and a Vanderbilt cap while my girlfriend was out of town for two weeks and my high school gang was all back together, and school hadn’t yet gone pear-shaped, and we had the Internet for the first time and life was full of promise. Come to think of it, 2008 was pretty damned awesome, with the thrill of getting to leave my job for my current one and have three weeks to kill alongside a rack of great tunes and the sun shining on the green hills of California through December as Vanderbilt bore down on its first bowl game in twenty-five years and I watched Cal defenestrate Miami at AT&T Park through the haze of post-flu hangover.

So what about this year? It’s had its ups and downs, for sure. I remember in 2006, all I wanted was a dull moment after the whirlwind of…well, of the last ten or fifteen years, to be honest. I wouldn’t say 2010 was a dull moment, not when you start with Alabama vs Texas and drag your mother and her husband through five countries in two and a half weeks and get hailed on at a football game and bust out of the NCAA tournament on a shot you’ll be seeing on the highlights for twenty years and down a shit-ton of absinthe while watching the SAINTS win the Super Bowl and officially lift the ceiling on what your co-workers are prepared to believe about you. But it wasn’t nearly as chaotic as it could have been, and that’s more or less what I needed this time around.

There we go. I think I hit 500 words or so every day, which means I did about 15,000 words. It’s no NaNoWriMo, but that wasn’t on the cards this time out. Maybe next year – although if I had a nickel for every year I’ve planned to write my Great American Alt-History Novel for NaNoWriMo, I’d have 35 cents.

Merry Christmas to all…and to y’all a good night.

I was only vaguely aware of Police Squad! when it was on TV – I didn’t actually watch it, and I didn’t realize it was a spoof, so you can imagine how confusing the credit sequence was for me. I also didn’t see Airplane! until college at least (look, it was Alabama, what do you want from me?) so I was pretty cold coming into The Naked Gun over Christmas break in 1988.

We almost got thrown out of the movie theater. We were roaring. I mean, serious gasping-for-breath-Oh-God-I’m-gonna-die howling. I was literally, no lie, doubled over walking out of the theater, my gut hurt so bad. It was like I’d done three hundred crunches – which I pretty much did. Hell, years later at City Stages 1994, my buddy Ken was bewildered – “There’s no way Nordberg shot his wife!”

No human being alive before or since has made me laugh like that. Well done, Mr. Nielsen. People may argue for Barenaked Ladies or Molson XXX or Chris Jericho as Canada’s greatest export, but I was there and I know better and I say it was Lt. Frank Drebin.

A while back I made the observation that the universal signifier in TV and film for “this takes place in the future” is that everyone is wearing a long coat. Mind you, not the “this takes place right about now-ish” which used to be signified by Black President; this is the “this takes place 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE (go back and watch Max Headroom. Edison Carter? Long coat. The Matrix? Come on.) Even with the new Sherlock series from the BBC, they made our hero’s trademark a longish grey coat which is apparently reshaping men’s fashion this winter in London.

I don’t know how we wound up on the long coat. It’s a step up from spandex jumpsuits and shiny silver spacesuits with miniskirts (and come on, I don’t have the legs for it). And it gets away from the “everybody carries a death ray or a laser pistol or blah blah” that came from the fact that sci-fi was “Space Western” for a long time. (Firefly. Hell, they made their long coat the symbol of the fandom.) I think, ultimately, it boiled down to this revelation:

The future looks like the present, but different.

If I had stepped through a wormhole on Thanksgiving day and appeared to myself sixteen years ago or so, my earlier self would almost certainly have looked at me and said I was obviously from the future. Same Timex Ironman watch, but mine is sleeker and more rounded and has inverted Indiglo – but in almost all other respects is the same. Even the color scheme is basically identical. Same Birmingham Barons cap – but instead of a white B on a black cap with a red bill, the whole cap is black and the while B is trimmed in a red halo, and the hat is a low crown instead of the classic big square Fred McGriff front. And of course, the long coat – my green oilcloth engineer’s coat is just right for the look even before throwing the obligatory cyberpunk mirrorshades into the mix (yes, I picked up another pair of the Oakley Halfwire 2.0s in Ice Iridium). Give me something slightly futuristic for a sidearm, like a 5.7x28mm FiveseveN (the Battlestar Galactica pistol from season 2 on), and you’ve hit all the highlights. (And then give me a couple of Daleks and some polycarbonate-shattering bullets for the gun. Sometimes you just need something you can kill with a clean conscience.)

For the most part, the Sony Ericsson phones always did a good job of looking just barely futuristic. Maybe it was the font of the corporate logo compared to the Sony or Ericsson brand logos by themselves. My little white Nokia conveys the look well, especially since it’s got no carrier branding at all, while the MOTOFONE F3 is so damn thin (try a third of an inch thick) and so wild with the e-ink display that you can overlook its 1996-ish feature set. Come to think of it, the laceless Converse One Stars in gray canvas have the appropriate retro-future look.

This can be a trap, of course. Look at something like E.E. Smith’s legendary Lensman series in the 1930s, the forerunner of the whole Green Lantern Corps concept – they have planet-destroying weapons and faster-than-light travel with NO COMPUTERS AT ALL. DSL in the late 90s frequently came with the burden of PPPoE, because the providers treated it as just a faster species of dialup – notions of what you could do with a persistent high-speed connection were beyond them until people found their own application (Napster sold a LOT of broadband in 1999-2000). When Gibson’s Law is invoked (“the street finds its own uses for technology”), the rules can change in a hurry.

But by and large, if you assume the future will look pretty much like today, you’re not far off. Just make sure your coat is long enough. Meanwhile, my signifier for the future? A gender-swapped version of “Baby It’s Cold Outside”…

My Redskins bar is going away. I don’t know if I went into detail on that before, but the short version is that Dan Brown lost his lease. The rent went up, the property owners screwed him, he is bailing out. I left him a shot of Gentleman Jack and my card, and I hope to be there the night he opens his next place. Don’t know what the options are, but none of them are good (see last Sunday’s post for details).

So what to think about today? I’m still half lit and I have civic duties to discharge in an hour or so…

Well, mash-ups. I have been fascinated forever with the idea that you can cram two songs together and make more than the sum of the whole. I think the first one I got was in fall 2000, Eminem and Britney Spears, with the rap from “The Real Slim Shady” over the music of “Oops I Did It Again.” Which was just fine. But hell, years before that, I had visions of putting the rap from the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Til Brooklyn” over Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” and if I knew one damn thing about ProTools or Garage Band or whatever, I would have done it already. Hell, “Mama Said Knock You Out” is just begging to be dropped over the beat from MC Hammer’s “It’s All Good” and there’s a remarkable overlap between Elton John and Billy Joel for an engineer with time and patience (trade beats and lyrics between “Keepin’ the Faith” and “Just Can’t Wait To Be King” and you can get two for one). Hell, some of the stuff that came out of Glee is just begging to be used as Quake music – how many kills could I have gotten to “Halo/Walking On Sunshine” back in the day?

Screw it, it’s Christmas time at last. Granted, there’s as many depressants flying around as in 2007, but inshallah there’s more of a coping mechanism now. Not to mention I DON’T HAVE TO GO TO TALIBAMA THIS YEAR. That ought to do for quite a bit. When you can bag the old country off in ten minutes on the phone instead of six long days in person where you have to drive out to find a cell signal, your life is much improved. At least we’re not bothered with bowl games at this point…sheesh.

BTW, yesterday’s raveout about Vandy scored multiple recs at Anchor of Gold. I may be drunk, but I’m not crazy.

And I’m not coming up with another hundred words just to pad it out to five hundred. Hit me up tomorrow.