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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Sometimes life sends you an omen. Like our TiVo finally screeching to a halt on Friday, just a few hours before the NCAA ‘Sweet 16’ basketball game I desperately wanted to watch.
And sometimes, we ignore those omens. Like when I hooked my laptop up to the TV, streamed the game over our internet connection, and watched anyway.
Only to see my team’s collective ass handed to it on a hardwood platter, in one of the saddest displays of barely basketball since the wheelchair kids took on the neonatal ward patients at the local hospital. The preemie kids might have even shot better in the first half than my team — though, of course, they don’t rebound especially well. You don’t go banging down low in the paint when your soft spot hasn’t grown over yet. It’s just common sense.
The point is, my team is now out of contention for the national title, as has eventually been the case every season since I started this site.
(Come to think of it, they did win a championship just a couple of months before I began. Holy hell, maybe I’ve been jinxing them the past few years.
Or maybe they need to run the half-court offense more efficiently, work on their free throw shooting and do a better job of denying the pass into the high post on defense.
Yeah. I think I’ll go with door number two in this case. If the universe is conspiring to shoot my team in the foot because I’m over here making tasteless jokes and being snarky a few times a week, then I don’t know how the hell the system works in the first place, so screw it.
Also, look at Jim Belushi. He’s tasteless and snarky all the time, and a huge Chicago Cubs fan. If the ‘jinx’ thing were true, then they’d never have a prayer of winning anything again, either.
I mean… wait. Oh, shit.)
Anyway, my annual interest in college basketball has now waned to nothing. I’m proud of the team this year — for a squad unranked in the preseason and picked to finish 8th in their conference, making the round of 16 is nothing to sneeze a skyhook at.
Still, it’s always sad when the team you live and die with finally floats belly-up on the surface of the water. So before getting out the skimmer and flushing the memory of this season altogether, I thought I’d take a look back at the disappointments of Marches past. Feel free to check them out, but I warn you — it’s not pretty. Where the hell was this blogging idea of mine back in March of 2003?
End-of-Basketball Season Posts, with Selected Representative Quotes in Which You May Sense Some Subtle Pattern:
March 25, 2004: Yes, I’m Bitter — But I’m Right, Too, Goddamit
“I really wanted to care about basketball this weekend, and now… well, now I just don’t. Not until October, at least. And CBS does suck ass — Billy Packer’s a big fat weenie, there’s nothing good about Jim ‘Nancyboy’ Nantz, and I’ve got Clark Kellogg’s ‘flush with flava‘ right fucking here.”
March 19, 2005: It’s March — and I’m Mad!
“So, no basketball talk around here this weekend. The sport is dead to me. Dead. At least until next fall. March Madness can suck my ass.”
March 16, 2006: A Maddening March
“Which means, I don’t frankly give a polkaing Pekinese posterior what the hell happens to any other fricking team for the rest of this lousy, time-wasting, poopy tournament.”
March 13, 2007: Tournament? What Tournament?
“So, I’m out. As far as I’m concerned, basketball is over, at least until the fall. I’m not watching any stupid games, I’m not filling out any stupid brackets, and I’m certainly not listening to any more stupid Gumbels. I’m in full-out boycott mode. March Madness can suck it from three-point range.”
March, 2008: On blogging hiatus. Team didn’t make tourney. Would’ve been ugly and profane. Again.
Christ, I love hate college basketball. When does baseball season start, already?
My weekdaily walk from my car to the office takes me past a large condo complex. The building has been undergoing renovations for what seems like decades — it’s like they decided to install those newfangled ‘electrical fixtures’ at the beginning of the last century, and just never stopped updating. They probably said, ‘As long as we’re here, we might as well wait for granite countertops and security systems and fiber optic cabling to be invented, and install those, too.‘
They get high marks for forward thinking. But several million points off for having units left unoccupied while the contractors twiddle their thumbs waiting to install food synthesizers and holodecks and voice-controlled garbage disposals in all the condos. At some point, you just have to decide you’re behind the times and sell to old people. Not every place can be ‘trendy’, and there’s no shame in taking octogenarians’ money.
Unless you’re bilking them out of life insurance or false teeth cash. Then there’s a little shame. Possibly a lawsuit. Could be jail time. And plenty of crotchety old cane waggling. Which is something you never want to be on the business end of.
“They get high marks for forward thinking. But several million points off for having units left unoccupied while the contractors twiddle their thumbs waiting to install food synthesizers and holodecks and voice-controlled garbage disposals in all the condos.”
But back to the condos.
Lately, the owners of this perpetually-updated high rise seem to be concentrating on the outside of the building, rather than the inside. Perhaps they’ve finally exhausted all of the currently-viable options indoors, and are now ready for a few years of really cutting-edge landscaping to pull the whole thing together. Some kind of self-watering grass or flowers that bloom on command. Something overly expensive and complicated, probably.
(And I’m sure it’ll confuse the living shit out of any bees or butterflies in the neighborhood. Knowing this place, they’ll relocate those and install their own, anyway. It should only take a few more years to engineer bees that hum Yankee Doodle and inject aloe vera if they sting you. Why call it quits now, when a comprehensive paradise is so close at hand?)
I was walking past the place this morning, on the opposite side of the street, when I heard an odd sound coming from the condo yard. I’d never heard this particular sound before, and yet it was oddly recognizable. It was high-pitched, rhythmic and sounded a little something like this:
‘BWEE-ting! BWEE-ting! BWEE-ting!‘
By the third ‘BWEE!‘ or so, I knew it was the caution signal for some sort of vehicle backing up. The sound was sort of cute and whiny, so I figured maybe the landscapers had themselves a golf cart over there. Or, given where it was, some sort of sod-planting Segway. Or a Fisher-Price flower planter. Who knows with those people.
That’s when I turned to look, and saw the enormous mega-sized strip-mining-strength bulldozer gingerly backing over a section of the lawn. In no way did the dainty little noise coming out of it match the formidable size and scoop and wheels the size of hot air balloons. If I were an engineer installing the back-up warning signal on this behemoth, there’d be no wimpy ‘BWEE’ or ‘ting’ involved. If the real engineers had any sense of proportion at all, when this monstrous mound of machinery is thrown into reverse, a voice like James Earl Jones’ would bellow:
‘BACKING UP! BACKING UP! ALL YOU PUNY BITCHES BETTER HAUL ASS BACK THERE, BECAUSE I’M BACKING. THE HELL. UP.‘
Instead, the thing makes a sound like some battery-powered Tonka toy, and you’re supposed to know from that Tinkerbell tone that six thousand pounds of Caterpillar steel is bearing down on you. It hardly seems fair, frankly.
Of course, for all I know, that big hulking thing actually isn’t made of steel. I wouldn’t put it past those condo weenies to have equipment made out of aluminum over there, or some kind of inflatable bulldozer doohickey. Only the latest technology for those bleeding-edge folks.
Now, if they actually get tenants in there before the year 2048, I’ll be impressed. Maybe they can offer bulldozer rides as incentives. At least until it backs up and mushes someone who thought the sound was an ice cream truck coming down the street.
Me, I like the James Earl Jones idea. Dude could make a little extra cash with some voice work, and there’d never be another industrial vehicle backing-up accident again. Plus, think of the Darth Vader lines he could slip in, just for fun. ‘Luuuuke… I am… BACKING THE HELL UP!‘. Or ‘I find your lack of GETTING OUTTA THE WAY WHILE I’M BACKING THIS BITCH UP disturbing.‘
It’s just a win-win all around, I’m telling you. Why am I always the one who has to think of these things?
Permalink | No Comments(With baseball season approaching, I’ll likely be doing a bit more posting over at Bugs & Cranks in the next few weeks.
[For those interested, a big fancy site revamp is in the works over there, too. The new B&C v2.0 will be hitting the ground right around Opening Day, so stay tuned for that. Oh, whatever shall I wear to the red carpet premiere?]
As it happens, the party’s already started with yesterday’s posting of the inaugural Wednesday Walk Watch. Who can resist taking a walk the longest? Who’s got the twitchiest trigger this side of the Grapefruit League? And can anyone manage to post an on-base percentage lower than their batting average? All of this and more will be revealed in the Wednesday Walk Watch series. Once the season has the common decency to actually start, that is.
Meanwhile, today’s post is right here in your grubby little browser. Get readin’, cowpoke.)
I’m having a problem watching television.
Just a few weeks ago, the missus and I bought a new TV. Finally. Our previous set was from the last millennium, showing its age and in no way ‘HD-ready’. In fact, it’s safe to assume it was entirely HD-unprepared. I’m fairly well convinced that the television didn’t even believe in HD; it probably thought hi-def was just some sort of wild theory cooked up by the scientists to scare small child televisions. If it knew the truth, its antenna would shrink all the way up inside it.
” I’m fairly well convinced that the television didn’t even believe in HD; it probably thought hi-def was just some sort of wild theory cooked up by the scientists to scare small child televisions.”
The problem, however, is not with the old television. It’s gone now, off to that cathode ray tube playground in the sky. Rust in peace, old friend.
The problem also seems not to be with the new television. I haven’t had any troubles with it since I lugged the cursed behemoth up three flights of stairs because our local UPS driver is too damned lazy to do his job. The new TV sits there, like it’s supposed to. It turns on and off when you ask it to, like a good little electronic monkey. And I can almost feel most of my vertebrae again. So that’s not the issue.
And the TV itself seems to be on its best behavior. As soon as the set is on, sounds and pictures spew forth from it, as usual. All of the dancing, swirling pretty lights and colors that keep us entertained as a society so we don’t go doing crazy things like reading or talking or solving the current financial crisis. Hey, as far as I’m concerned, when Big Bang Theory is on, the world stops for a half an hour. If you need to show me something or tell me an important bit of news or ask my opinion on sustainable global fiscal management policies, you’ll just have to wait. Or catch me during a commercial; right now, Leonard’s building a go-kart or something, and Sheldon’s going to say something snarky about Heisenberg. You leave now. Very busy.
The problem comes a few seconds after flipping on the set. Just when I’m getting engaged in a show, when things are juicing up and looking interesting– everything goes away.
No picture. No sound. No juice. Nothing.
Then it comes back, with the action jumped ahead a couple of seconds.
And then gone again, the TV as black as the soul of an infomercial copywriter.
Then it’s back. And gone. Back. And gone. Lather. Rinse. And forget about enjoying your show, because the resulting time-lapse train wreck is virtually unwatchable.
Not that I mind the cutaways, exactly. I’m used to watching videos on the web — no, not those kind of videos, you hairy-palmed perverts — so I’m familiar with the lag you might get with video buffering, or a blip in the connection. But in the case of online video, the clip returns to whence it interrupted. It’s a little disconcerting, but you don’t miss anything.
Not so with the television trouble here — which is actually some kind of satellite trouble, or decoder box issue or inferior cable cockup, and I really shouldn’t be suggesting it’s the television’s fault. Although it was the TV that gave me a full-body hernia and repeatedly threatened to squash me like a ripe pudgy tomato every time I inched it up another stair. But I blame UPS for that. It’s not the television’s fault their doughy delivery tomatoes are all wussies.
Anyway, whatever technical snafu is going on, the upshot is that three to five seconds of live-action drama — or South Park poop jokes, or Iron Chef ingredient unveiling, or whatever it is we happen to be watching — is simply lost to the ether. The show winks out, and when it comes back, something’s happened and we don’t know what the hell it was.
And dammit, I can’t watch TV that way.
It’s bad enough when it’s some police drama or other. We get subjected to a lot of ‘And the murderer is–‘ or ‘Okay, okay, I buried all the bodies in–‘. And then we never hear the good bits. But if it’s CSI or Law & Order, that’s no dealbreaker. We always figure the bad guys will get locked up or shot or thrown off a building at the end, anyway, so why sweat the details? You catch a couple of witty one-liners and a labwork montage, and you’re good to go. The episodes are pretty much all the same; they just rotate actors and felonies around to make different stories. Police drama Mad-Libs. No biggie.
But there are more important considerations here. What if I’m watching the Simpsons, and I miss the Mr. Plow song? Or Bear Grylls is about to shove some filthy giant bug or worm or eyeball down his gullet, and the obligatory ‘Oh, blimey!‘ doesn’t make it down the wire? Worst of all, what if Good Eats is on, with Alton in the middle of explaining how to brine a turkey and he tells us to add six cups of–
Well, six cups of what, dammit? Orange juice? Chicken stock? Absolut Cintron? Antifreeze? FOR THE LOVE OF THANKSGIVING IN SPRINGTIME, BALDY, WHAT’S THE SECRET INGREDIENT? DON’T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE AND WHIP YOU WITH A UNITASKER — I WANT ANSWERS, COOKING MAN!!‘
Clearly, it’s more stress than I can bear. Also, I’ve been cooking with a lot more vodka lately. Which mostly means ‘drinking it’, since I don’t know how to work the oven. Or the refrigerator. Or the microwave.
Also, evidently, the new TV. Either that, or the satellite box is yearning to join its old buddy up in obsolete technogadget heaven. It’s probably time to get a new converter-slash-TiVo doohickey.
Meanwhile, I’m taking advantage of the situation to watch some shows I just really, really hate. I figure this way when I miss something, I won’t really care. Also, I only have to see half the show or so, since the receiver keeps winking the rest away. Much more tolerable this way.
See, a lesser man might just forget about watching TV at all. Me, I’m turning it to my advantage. And I don’t have to read or talk or devise innovative budgetary strategies to pull the economy out of the crapper or anything. I just have to suffer through twelve minutes of Two and a Half Men, distributed across its regular thirty-minute time slot.
Say, maybe this ‘television problem’ isn’t so much of a problem, after all. Sweet.
Permalink | No CommentsI’m just winding up a five-day weekend. The missus and I are putting our house on the market soon — as I may have mentioned once or twice — and I wanted to get a head start on some of the backbreaking work involved there.
Also, there was college basketball to be watched. I’d be lying if I said I did less hoops-watching than back-breaking, but I got in some of each. The details aren’t important. Sixty percent to forty percent, eighty to twenty, ninety-nine-point-something-something to some-infinitesimally-small-number-usually-used-in-subatomic-calculations… what’s the difference, really?
And anyway, what I really needed was a short break from the office. I like my job. I work with good people. And the work is interesting and meaningful. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to run screaming from it sometimes and forget it exists for a few days. So that’s what I did.
“By noon on Wednesday, I was unshowered, unshaven, sitting at home in my underpants and frankly, a little hungover. And it was all downhill from there.”
Well, without the running. There’s no running in the office hallways. Strict policy.
And I didn’t do a lot of screaming, come to think of it. That’d be pretty disruptive. I may have let out a little ‘whoopee!‘ in the elevator on the way out on Tuesday, but that’s about it.
The forgetting it existed for a few days? I was all over that. By noon on Wednesday, I was unshowered, unshaven, sitting at home in my underpants and frankly, a little hungover. And it was all downhill from there. It was beautiful. I should have thought of this mini-vacation thing before.
Now that it’s time to go back, I’ve got some mixed feelings. Oh, it’ll be good to catch up on work email and office gossip and whose turn it is to pay into the coffee fund. But there are still those little things, those gotchas!, that will be waiting to suck little bits of soul right out of me, like they do to every office worker at one time or another.
And high up on my list of gotchas is the Email to Which You Cannot Possibly Respond. Or EtWYCPR, for short.
Not that short, obviously. But short-er. Barely.
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the Email to Which You Cannot Possibly Respond, please to be having a perusal through the archives, where I explained the notion in a post entitled No Reply Is Good Reply. That’ll clue you in to the phenomenon — and to why I’m not quite as punch-pleased as I’d like to be about hitting my old desk tomorrow. There’s always a chance of those EtWYCPRs is lurking in my mailbox, even now.
And now, I’m out of vacation days with which to avoid them. The horror.
It’s almost as scary as all that house cleaning-up work I managed to mostly not do while I was off work. Looks like the lesser of two evils involves Microsoft Outlook and a bit of patience and restraint on Monday morning.
Or I could sort through six-year-old boxes of knickknacks packed in the attic.
Hrm.
Hit me with your best shot, mailbox. Hello, office, here I come!
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