free variable

I only saw about ten minutes of the Academy Awards, which included the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. As you may know, the screenplay for The Departed won. As William Monahan was taking the stage, the narrator said something to the effect of: “Monahan adapted the screenplay for The Departed from the Japanese film Infernal Affairs.”

I’ve always said that Andy Lau is one of the greatest Japanese actors I know, followed closely by Tony Leung. I also think that “Moo gaan dou,” the title by which Infernal Affairs is known in its country of release, totally sounds Japanese. (I’m no specialist, though.)

You don’t have to know much to read a teleprompter, and I suspect that you need to know only a little more to write the script for the Academy Awards narrator. Perhaps a good place to start would be “basic facts about films under consideration for major awards.” I have no particular affection for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — indeed, the only Oscars I care about include hollandaise sauce — but I’m embarrassed for them.

UPDATE²: UPI was repeating this bogus claim, but they’ve fixed it as of this morning. The original UPI text is below:

Panic honcho Steven Frank discusses why he bought an XBox 360. It’s a good piece, although I don’t see the disconnect Frank draws between being a Mac user and purchasing a Microsoft product. (The original XBox is a perfectly reasonable game console made great by Microsoft’s well-executed Live service; the current one is by all accounts much better. Neither has a “Start menu,” a “Clippy,” or any other noisome Microsoftisms.) However, his comments on the network experience are pretty good:

[XBox Live] has a “reputation” system that lets you moderate down obnoxious jerks, and moderate up fair, friendly competitors. It even divides the online experience into 4 neatly segregated skill sections, from “casual” to “complete assclown”.

I suspect that the improved feedback system and the support for cheap on-demand downloads of “casual” games will prove to be killer features for XBox owners in the coming years.

I’m sure that this impulse is not unique to Madison, but the tendency of small-market broadcasters to emphasize any local angle — no matter how affected or tenuous — on a news story is completely absurd. This is worst with sports news. Often, the local TV news will report on some random golf event simply so they can mention the most recent performance of “Madison native Jerry Kelly.” Madison news outlets report the results of many NASCAR races, but these results as reported by local TV seem liable to satisfy only those whose curiosity about the race is confined to how well Cambridge, WI-born Matt Kenseth placed.

Major, eminently newsworthy stories are smothered in a thick, sugary sauce of local flavor; pointless filler is propped up and given shape by a substrate of Madison-flavored syrup. Hypothetical examples include:

• “Slovakia has invaded Australia: we’ll have the ill-informed opinions of some folks who happened to be on State Street when our crew walked by after the break.”
• “Tahiti has been overcome by fairy tale monsters and is covered in a thick layer of magical ice. Tonight, we’ll talk to a little Waunakee girl who’s selling lemonade for Tahiti.”
• “Harald V has just received an honorary doctorate from Såfingenserduhar College in Nowhere, WI. For Harald, this honor is perhaps second only to being King of Norway.”

Celebrities who are famous in their own right are referred to by their connection to Wisconsin first and their claim to fame second, if at all. This morning, I heard the ESPN Radio announcer refer to “former Badger Chris Chelios.” Chelios has been a professional hockey player since 1983. ESPN Radio did not exist when he was still in college. Since then, he has played for three different teams and has probably been to the Olympics as many times as Bob Costas. One imagines that if we had to pick the most descriptive category in which to place Chelios, “former Badger” would not be terribly high on the list.

However, these absurdly contrived Wisconsin-related epithets pale in comparison to the ignominious treatment dealt to one celebrity by Madison local news. During the California recall of 2003, it seemed to be completely impossible for the local anchors to make it through an entire telecast without referring to one candidate, and always by a definite description: “UW-Superior grad Arnold Schwarzenegger.” This was the case even when nothing remotely newsworthy was happening in the California recall.

We shall defer the question of precisely how newsworthy the California recall was for Wisconsin residents even at its most relevant.

In many ways, the local treatment of Schwarzenegger eased a great mental burden for me. Indeed, I am always getting the famous actor, bodybuilder, and California governor confused with Arnold Schwarzenegger of York, PA, who did not go to UW-Superior.

I’m currently listening to Erhalt Uns Herr Bei Deinem Wort (BuxWv 185) from the album “Dietrich Buxehude: Organ Music Vol. 3” by Wolfgang Rübsam

The algorithms behind Amazon.com’s recommendations and banner ads have long demonstrated a flair for irony and subtle absurdism. However, as Steven Frank points out, Amazon’s recommendation code also appears to know that there’s always money in the banana stand.

I’m not remotely “up on the ludology literature,” nor am I an expert reader of contemporary art criticism in general. (Indeed, when I was an undergraduate I took a break from studying music history to read the Journal of Popular Music and almost gave myself a sports hernia laughing at a woefully pretentious paper analyzing the chord progression and music video of Madonna’s “Cherish.”) However, Chaim Gingold’s analysis of Nintendo’s WarioWare appears coherent, insightful, and fairly on-target: one major point is that WarioWare decomposes the traditional elements of video game play and isolates each in individual micro-games. The game then is able to parody and exploit genre conventions while remaining accessible and fun.

(The game itself is notable for being one of the few that carries Andrea’s imprimatur.)

Perhaps games like WarioWare are a workshop for the stripped-down, low-learning-curve, gameplay-focused emphasis of recent (and purported future) Nintendo products. The WarioWare formula distills a common Nintendo theme: remove all inessential features. Apparently, this dynamic works well in Nintendo’s upcoming soccer game, as per Vladimir Cole’s note on Joystiq today:

I’ve always felt that there was something missing with the FIFA line of soccer games. In their attempts at verisimilitude, they succeeded in reminding me of bygone misery playing the position of “defender” …. It’s not that the other games suck: they do a great job at depicting a game that is itself perhaps a little slow and boring…. [Super Mario] Strikers takes all the boring stuff out and gives more of what makes soccer fun: goals, tackles, and acrobatics.

Cole cites the game’s simple controls; accelerated, non-stop gameplay; and fast rhythm as key factors as to why it’s fun. I think this approach to designing games (whether for computers or for real-life play) is basically right; the interesting question is whether Nintendo will be able to make money at it during the next iteration of video game systems.

I’m currently listening to Blick’ ich umher in diesem edlen Kreise from the album “Tannhäuser” by Richard Wagner

ABC has been shilling their fall show Commander In Chief (which stars Geena Davis as the President) as if it presented some sort of revolutionary challenge to established order. Ads for this show have aired frequently during football games, and each focuses on how audacious ABC is for presenting an alternate reality that features a female president. This is a transparently ridiculous stance.

It would be audacious for ABC to present a political drama that didn’t rely on stunt concept work (“look! shockingly, there is a female president!”) or thinly-veiled, reductive riffs on current debates (cf. any political wish-fulfillment show). It would be audacious and unprecedented for ABC to present a television show that accurately depicted Christianity. Even merely targeting one or two standard deviations above the lowest common denominator might make for superior television. But creating a television show that presents some “fantastic” occupant of the White House does nothing revolutionary. (Indeed, by presenting the “female President” concept as a notable absurdity, ABC may be doing a small part to poison the well for women who would seek our nation’s highest office.)

If I were interested in exploring the unique concerns of elected talking goats in a dramatic work, I could create a fantasy world in which a talking goat was president. It would be dishonest, even by advertising standards, for me to say “this fantasy world is notably audacious, for it features a talking goat as president!” One fictitious universe is not substantially more audaciously constructed than any other, and the parameters of my fantasy world do not affect the real world at all. Certainly a talking-goat president is far less probable than a female human president. Does this make the talking-goat president concept revolutionary?

Also less probable than a female president: the teenaged president (e.g. Doogie Howser, Commander-In-Chief), the non-US-citizen president, the not-beholden-to-527s-and-campaign-contributors president and the recently-thawed-caveperson president.

It seems to me that any possible scenario for a political wish-fulfillment drama is roughly equivalent in terms of absolute plausibility. (Doesn’t the president on NBC’s The West Wing have a Ph.D.? Give me a break!) Why, then, is ABC treating the concept of a woman president as if it were a uniquely absurd, high-fantasy scenario — and as if this rather pedestrian premise alone should be sufficient motivation to watch what appears to be an unusually dismal hour of television?

Note to regular readers: I expect to dig myself out from under a mound of grading shortly, and regular blogging on non-mass-entertainment related topics will ensue. In the meantime, check out some crackpot comments — too few links to be spam, too little sense to be serious — here and here (scroll past legitimate comments).

Andrea’s cousins Tim and Luke introduced me to NCAA Football 06 last week. I didn’t play it, but I saw them play enough to note the licensed soundtrack, which includes “Debaser” by the Pixies, some track from the Pietasters’ “post-good” period (but still! The Pietasters! I saw them at the old 9:30 Club twice in 1994 alone!), Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, The Clash, and Guided By Voices.

Where was this selection of “EA Trax” when they were setting the playlist for Madden NFL 2005? Every down that I had to endure an aural crapfest of “Hoobastank” or “Franz Ferdinand” now stings all the more.

The moral of the story? If you’re old enough so that you probably should have outgrown ephemeral commercial music, you might fondly remember some of the songs in this game. Whether or not this is a good marketing move for EA remains to be seen — SI.com’s Stewart Mandel doesn’t think so.

I grew up just outside of D.C. and spent several of my adolescent years listening to ear-perforating punk rock, so I have a soft spot for the following ridiculous story.

Nike Skateboarding has angered D.C. area independent record label Dischord Records, according to the Washington Post. Their crime? Advertising their “Major Threat” skateboarding tour with a parody of (or homage to) the cover art for legendary D.C. punk rock act Minor Threat’s 1981 self-titled album.

How bad is it? You be the judge:

Note especially the shoes and the Nike logo on the fellow’s knee. (The Nike poster also features other not-particularly-subtle allusions that D.C. counterculture trainspotters can identify for bonus points.)

Of course, the fact that Nike — a company that generally appears to punk-rock types as wearing a bullseye — replicated such an iconic image with their branding conspicuously inserted is offensive to some people. Personally, I have a difficult time sharing in the umbrage of iconoclasts whose own icons are being profaned, so I’ll simply point out the following issues raised by this story that I found amusing:

1. Nike has a skateboarding division? How’s that working out?
2. What percentage of the people in the target audience for this skateboarding tour were actually alive when Minor Threat were still actively recording?
3. The spokesman for Dischord is named Alex Bourgeois — an unfortunate name indeed in the anarchosyndicalist world of the punk-rock business. (One wonders if M. Bourgeois has something to lose in addition to his chains.)
4. Minor Threat bassist Brian Baker is actually wearing Nikes in this famous photo. With no photoshopping required, couldn’t Nike just have licensed that picture?

By the way: the bald fellow in the Minor Threat photos is Ian MacKaye, who is currently half of The Evens. (Click the link for my brief thoughts on their self-titled album.)

The controversy surrounding Jose Canseco’s steroid allegations has not died down, as I had assumed it might. For those of you who’ve missed this, Canseco has a book out in which he asserts that everyone — from Honus Wagner all the way down to that Dominican teenager that lied about his age to play Little League — worked together to create a baseball drug culture of Studio 54 proportions. If you’ve ever watched baseball, this is unsurprising. Indeed, what could be surprising about a sport in which borderline-criminal, whiny jerks who barely graduated from high school get paid millions of dollars to scratch their crotches and hoist midgets in the air?

What is (sort of) surprising is that a perennial louse and generally shady figure like Canseco has been given a large chunk of daily news media coverage as a soapbox to make his blanket assertions, including two whole interviews on 60 Minutes. Of course, I’m sure that 60 Minutes has unimpeachable supporting evidence.

That’s the ticket. I’m positive that CBS News would never produce a story grounded solely in the baseless allegations of a bitter crank. (Even if the allegations are “fake but accurate,” as may be the case from time to time.) It also seems likely that the Oakland Athletics’ mid-80′s AL domination stemmed not only from the juiced-up nature of their players but also from some apparent technological advantages in the office-automation-software arena.

I generally don’t listen to commercial radio (with the exception of crack-like ESPN Radio), but Andrea likes some of the music on “Triple-M,” a station we have in town. (Since my charming, intelligent, and cultured wife enjoys this station, I should probably redact my earlier assessment of its probable target demographic.)

“Triple-M” has this unbelievably vapid morning show. (Andrea and I both agree on this point.) One gets the sense that “Zach and Kitty,” the hosts, are just as stupid as any other commercial radio morning show personalities, but — unlike their peers — are about as aggressive as refrigerated mayonnaise and ludicrously inoffensive to boot. I know this because the gym in which I used to work out played the “Triple-M” morning show every day. This imposed a rigid structure on my workout:

I could start to bench-press upon hearing another “daring” joke involving the word “whoopee;” I could move on to the treadmill when they read another fawning, unctuous letter from a listener who was SO HAPPY that their station ACTUALLY PLAYED obscure music by that edgy, hip Dave Matthews Band; and I could hit the showers when they started reading “zany” news items, glossing them with irrelevant and poorly-thought-out commentary.

This morning, Andrea gave me a ride in to the office. I turned the radio to the Unbelievably Vapid Hour with Zach and Kitty. After yapping at each other about how EXCITING it was that Sting would be gracing the Kohl Center with his presence sometime (and OMG TICKETS GO ON SALE THIS WEEK!!!), they moved on to their “zany” news item. Apparently, many people are angry about an “American Girl” story that makes Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood appear undesirable; Mattel has not backed down and is using words like “censorship.”

For future reference: If someone other than the government does it, it’s not censorship. That’s just how these things work.

In the book, the girl’s family moves from Pilsen to the suburbs; the girl’s mother claims that this is necessary because that part of the city is “no place to grow up.” This is really a non-story, and it’s not that funny; therefore, it fails on both the “substantial” and “zany” counts. Why are they wasting my time reading it when they could be playing some morose R.E.M. song for the fiftieth time? Cue the asinine editorializing:

Zach said: “Well, obviously I’d be happier about this if they had moved to Wisconsin.” [ed.: ?]

Kitty then started to say something smart: “Are we just saying that it’s OK to censor^* somebody just because they say something bad about the inner city?” Wow. I’m amazed. Are we actually admitting that unpopular speech shouldn’t be intimidated out of the public sphere by the most organized groups of thin-skinned lackwits? Unfortunately, apparently we are not. Kitty continued: “I mean, let’s clean up the inner city and then there won’t be anything bad to say about it.”

Andrea and I instantly started laughing. She wondered if Kitty planned to show up in some rough neighborhood with a broom and dustpan; I pictured a busload of Madison West High National Honor Society members heading south on I-90, singing the latest from Hootie and the Blowfish together. What on earth could it mean to “clean up” the inner city?

Since I don’t hold myself to the same standards as radio personalities, I’ll use an amusing anecdote as an excuse to dive into a tangentially-related screed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Professional loudmouth Freddie Mitchell of the Philadelphia Eagles had half as many receptions from Donovan McNabb as Rodney Harrison. Unfortunately for Mitchell, Harrison is a safety for the New England Patriots. (Mitchell famously called out the Patriots’ secondary two weeks ago, singling out Harrison as someone he “had something for.” Perhaps he meant “a football, twice.”)

Mitchell, who has coined several nicknames for himself (including “Fred Ex” and “The People’s Champ”) had an entourage of hangers-on follow him around after the NFC championship game, carrying a wrestling championship belt. His coach forbade him from talking to the media for 24 hours after an outburst in the week leading up to the Super Bowl. However, in a display of sporting karma that would make Gregg Easterbrook grin, Mitchell was shut out for most of the Super Bowl and had only one inconsequential reception.

The sports world tolerates big talkers, as long as they produce, and perhaps the “People’s Champ” was just letting off some well-deserved steam. (Never mind that it seems unlikely that he had a month worth of steam to let off leading up to the Super Bowl.) Whether or not his outbursts are justifiable, then, could depend to some degree on how well he compares to elite wide receivers (many of which have also tangled with the media).

In his first four seasons in the NFL, Randy Moss had 53 touchdown catches. Terrell Owens had 30, Cris Carter had 21, and Michael Irvin had 20. By comparison, Mitchell has 5. In the crowded field of media-whore, talent-free NFL buffoons, “Fred Ex” makes Jeremy Shockey look underrated.

Madison locals may recognize some of the principals involved in this blogspot site; it is certain to bring joy and mirth to fans of approximately 97% of NFL franchises. It’s easy to hate the Patriots and the masturbatory prose spilled daily in their general direction. When the Patriots are the subject of NFL commentary — and, let’s be honest, when are they not? — words like “dynasty” and “genius” get thrown around like they were red-tagged at the Noun Outlet.

However, this Super Bowl presents a serious quandary for most football fans: do you root against the overhyped AFC team, or do you root against the overhyped NFC team? The Eagles may have a higher media-jocking loudmouth quotient than any other team in professional sports (even if you consider last year’s Heimlich-inducing, borderline criminal LA Lakers). Furthermore, one can’t overestimate the schadenfreude potential of seeing endless SportsCenter footage of Philadelphia’s classless, overweight, and brutish fans despairing at a loss. (These are the same fans who inspired the construction of a courthouse and jail in the old Vet.)

I’m hoping this one gets decided by a safety in overtime. Lots of interceptions, lots of blown routes, ubiquitous missed tackles, and perhaps not a few minor but unpleasant injuries. As far as I care, it could go either way, as long as the game is bad enough to preclude either “dynasty” or “destiny” from appearing in any postgame commentary.

It looks like the Scott Linehan (the Vikings’ offensive coordinator) is leaving Minnesota for Miami. Even given his penchant for calling gadget plays a bit too regularly, Linehan deserves thanks for putting together three years of explosive offensive game plans and inspiring the Vikes to execute them with highlight-reel performances. I wish the best of luck to him and his family in Miami. An interesting bit of Linehan trivia: actor Jim Caviezel is his brother-in-law, as detailed in this borderline-tasteless Pioneer Press article.

I was watching CSI with Andrea tonight (episode title: “Snakes”) and spotted an amusing error. Thanks to the magic of TiVO, I was able to pause the show and photograph this apparent prop mistake:

One doesn’t even need an enhance function to see that those Benjamins are not only obvious fakes, but are inscribed with the phrase “for motion picture use only.”

IMDB contains lists of errors and goofs in movies, but people purchase, rewind and rewatch movie. Television, on the other hand, is ephemeral. I wonder two things: First, how many errors like this are in any given episode of a popular TV show? (I noticed this because I happened to be paying attention at the right moment, but how many more mistakes are visible to the nitpickers?) Second, will the burgeoning practice of reselling DVD boxed sets of TV series (where closer scrutiny is likely) result in shows with fewer mistakes?

I promise this is my last post on the waxing gibbous of Randy Moss, barring some serious new development. Peter King wasn’t the only person who didn’t know what Moss’ motivation was, but apparently he was paying the Lambeau fans back for an established tradition. So claims Indy coach Tony Dungy:

I thought it was kind of humorous.

It’s not the kind of thing you want to see on national TV, but I understand what it was all about.

Anyone who has played in the NFC Central knows what that’s about. The fans in Green Bay have a tradition in the parking lot after the game where they moon the visiting team’s bus. It’s kind of a unique send-off.

Dungy is certainly qualified to make that statement: as a head coach in the NFC Central (of Tampa Bay) and as a defensive coordinator for Minnesota, he’s had a chance to see a lot of dairy-padded Wisconsin asses. Furthermore, he’s a family man and no libertine: the absurd Nicolette Sheridan/Terrell Owens episode drew his ire.

What do I mean by “serious new development” at the beginning of this post? Glad you asked. The local news here sponsored a poll: How should the NFL discipline Randy Moss? The choices were:

1. nothing
2. a hefty fine
3. a one game suspension
4. banishment from the league

Well, if 35 percent of Madison residents get their way, Moss is out of the NFL. (Personally, I won’t be happy with his reparations until Moss applies a hanky to every wet eye in Wisconsin.)

Seriously, if Jake Plummer can skate off with a $5k fine for extending his middle finger to a fan — actually an “obscene” act, by any definition — and game-ending cheap-shot tackles don’t draw suspensions, then there’s no way that Moss’ harmless antics should result in any lost playing time. The NFL’s stupidity, though, is boundless. We’ll see.

I came across Robert Weintraub’s Slate polemic against Brett Favre worship. Reading about sports in Slate is sort of like listening to Michele “Mee-Shell” Norris from NPR’s All Things Considered doing color commentary at a rodeo, but I read it anyway.

Favre is certainly a great football player and I have no reason to believe he is any worse of a human being than any other professional athlete with a history of womanizing and performance-enhancing drug abuse. However, I agree with Weintraub that there is no excuse for the continual petitions directed his way from sportswriters and commentators. (I’m not as sure as Weintraub is about the reasons for the genuflection.) An extraterrestrial whose only exposure to Earth was through the NFL might assume that “Favre” was a mighty dragon-slaying hero of old, or perhaps the household god of a large group of blaze-orange-clad snowmobile operators. Indeed, commentators talk about Favre in a manner usually reserved for the recently-deceased.

The Slate article was a bit vitriolic in places, but it was most on the mark in its skewering of sycophantic, unctuous Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King, who Weintraub calls “Favre’s Boswell.”

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading King’s column, you don’t know that it is perennially peppered with

1. self-consciously “insider” nonsense,
2. “coffee nerd” advice, consisting primarily of thoughts on which coffee-flavored milkshake is best at Starbucks this week*,
3. pointless anecdotes about his daughters’ flagging high-school and college athletic careers,
4. pathetic commentary on the state of popular music, and
5. King’s uncompelling political opinions.

Even worse, Peter King arbitrarily bolds the names of celebrities, making his column read like Parade magazine or the Onion’s Jackie Harvey. Finally, at least twice a month, King slips into a style reminiscent of a teenage girl’s diary, rhapsodizing about his latest encounter with Favre as would a shy girl after getting passed a note from the most popular guy in school.

* Man, I don’t even drink coffee, but I know that Starbucks is to actual coffee nerds what T.G.I. Friday’s is to legitimate food snobs, or what commercial classical radio (“Vivaldi and opera overtures, all the time!”) is to legitimate music snobs. Sure, it’s better than McDonald’s, but no “coffee connoisseur” patronizes Starbucks exclusively.

Randy Moss, as pictured pantomiming a moon to the Lambeau crowd in my previous post, provides the perfect knot to tie together the threads of media Favre-worship and Peter King’s slobbering gibberish. In King’s 1/10 column, he demonizes Moss in order to lick the wounds of his hero Favre:

Moss will be fined by the NFL. I guarantee it. I don’t know the amount. Maybe $10,000. But this was classless. Simulation-mooning Lambeau is like mooning the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Nonsensical. After the game, no one could figure out why he’d done it.

"It wasn’t mean,” he told me and a few other reporters at his locker. "I was having fun. It was more a fun thing than a hatred thing. My teammates loved it. I’m probably gonna catch hell, but the Green Bay Packers fans know: I don’t forget [shit].”

Evidently he was upset about things Green Bay fans had said to him on previous trips to Lambeau, though he didn’t elaborate. Whatever his motivation was, it wasn’t cool.

Moss “didn’t elaborate?” Did he need to? Perhaps King ignored the insults, obscenities, and signs hurled at Moss by drunken oafs wearing wild game on their heads. Perhaps King forgets November 14, 2004, when the University of Wisconsin tuba section — in a stadium-sanctioned display at Lambeau — marched across the field and mocked a sidelined Randy Moss? (That’s what I’d call “bush league,” and “classless,” Pete.) I don’t see how an individual player doing something goofy and perhaps vulgar (but not indecent) is any worse than having the official third-quarter entertainment taunt an injured player. Furthermore, as this web site points out, Moss’ “mooning” display is tame compared to most of FOX’s prime-time fare.

What’s really unclear is what precisely King was trying to say with his comparison between Lambeau Field and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Was he saying that both were extremely important to a fairly small percentage of the US population? That both were filled with people who were easily offended by cheeky gestures? That neither had ever known the slightest impropriety until a dastardly, fully-clothed athlete turned and bent at the waist and knees? I’m sorry, Mr. King, but once you elevate Lambeau Field to the level of any religious institution, you’ve lost any shred of credibility or perspective.

Moss is not rightly in trouble with the media because he is a malicious pre-felon or an iconoclast who has nothing better to do than tear down the “sacred” traditions of Lambeau Field. Moss is neither of these things — rather, he is a gifted, emotional player who works hard and has some stupid (but harmless, at least since 2002) outbursts when he is frustrated. Rather, Moss is in trouble with the media because he has called them out for their onanistic focus on his more-or-less inconsequential antics, telling them that they’ve blown things out of proportion.

I’ve watched a lot of Vikings games, and last Sunday was the first time I’ve seen Moss celebrate a touchdown. He usually opts to toss the ball to a referee or to a fan in the stands. Less-talented, endzone-dancing loudmouths like Terrell Owens and Chad Johnson get a pass from sportswriters. However, Randy Moss — perhaps the best wide receiver ever to play the game — strikes a pose to cap Minnesota’s near-flawless win over the heavily-favored Packers, and suddenly he’s a terrible, terrible person. The perpetual fawning of Favre-worshipping knobs like King sets up a chain of dominoes, and the media’s inability to admit that they vastly underestimated the Vikes knocks them down. We’ll hear about little else this week in the sports press.

Other football news: in a move that recalls a rich man stealing sheep from the poor, EA Sports decided that owning the exclusive rights to the NFL wasn’t enough and that they needed exclusive video-game rights to the Arena Football League, too. The AFL commissioner claims that EA will help to “grow the AFL” and add value to the brand. Nonsense. There is no positive reason for EA to develop a game for a league that most Americans don’t realize exists; rather, this move is solely intended to extinguish an avenue of competition for Sega, 909, and Microsoft. If “AFL 2006” is really any good, I will recant, but I’m not holding my breath.

Well, the moon rises early in “Titletown.” If this is what 1-2 looks like, I guess I’ll take 1-2.

I bought a copy of Steven Ozment’s A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People and had planned to read it over break. (It has been well-recommended by nearly every public intellectual I respect, as well as some that I don’t.) However, after reading the introduction to Ozment’s tome, I received some rather lighter fare as a gift, and have been reading that for the last few days instead.

Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists: A Novel is a light, amusing tale. It is written in a sort of mock-children’s-book style and oscillates effortlessly between middlebrow and goofy modes of humor, setting a tone not unlike that of Douglas Adams’ oeuvre. Finally, Defoe’s tale manages to not take itself seriously without a self-conscious display of false modesty; one gets the sense that he has very little to prove. (Certainly, this is a challenging feat, given how difficult most young humorists make it look.) Recommended.

Ideally, I will have time in the next week or so to read the Ozment book and write up some brief impressions. We’ll see.

Most notably, Andrea gave me a Lapinator. This device is even better than the hyped-up web page would lead one to believe. I endorse it heartily.

At this time of year, though, the little gifts — sometimes from strangers — can mean a lot, too. I’d like to thank Don Muhlbach for “bouncing” a little present my way. To put icing on the cake, Brett Favre selflessly gave the ball away four times tonight, leaving the NFC North all tied up with the Vikings hosting Green Bay on Christmas Eve.

The Onion reviewed this yakuza crime film set, which looks good (if pricey). However, the Amazon recommendations on that page came up with a real gem: the Film Noir Classic Collection. This $37 box set includes restored prints of five classic noir films (er, “films noir”) with commentaries and extras. Perhaps I will get it and watch them over break.

In “tragicomic Amazon review news,” one reviewer of Kurosawa’s Stray Dog makes a few aesthetic judgements and “traces the development” of two “genre features:”

…The only problem I have with the film itself is the soundtrack. Sure, the music does its job, but this movie demands something cooler.

There are many modern day examples of this film’s influence. For example, the dinner scene is very closely related to that of “Lethal Weapon”, where the older cop invites his younger partner, only to show up tomorrow to a murder. Then there’s the taking of the cop’s gun to kill people, like in “48 Hours”. If you like either film, or detective films in general, then buy this movie. Good luck trying to find a video store that carries it for rental, but buy it despite the exorbitant amount for it. This is a very cool movie.

OK, man. I will concede that perhaps the soundtrack could have been “cooler” (Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” comes to mind), but you really do demolish your critical credibility by comparing Kurosawa to Lethal Weapon and 48 Hours in consecutive sentences.

This post marks my first test of the Amazon tool in the latest version of ecto. I just got Andrea a copy of ecto for Christmas, actually — and I highly recommend it to anyone who posts to a weblog, whether under OS X or Windows.

As part of a long-planned establishment of a “board-game culture” in the house (presumably to combat the “SportsCenter rerun culture”), Andrea and I have been playing Carcassonne lately. (I got it for her based on a recommendation from the Uncle Mark Gift Guide and Almanac.) It is one of those German tile-laying games in which you build cities, roads, &c., and is quite a lot of fun. As I understand it, it is simpler than the popular Settlers of Catan game (which I have not played), but it seems to offer several levels for strategy and can be played by two in about 40 minutes. I was on an early streak, winning our first five outings, but Andrea has walloped me in our most recent two games.

It’s time to get over my hangups and hone the cloister-building skills, I suppose.

Electronic Arts has bought exclusive video-game rights to all NFL teams, stadiums, and players for the next five years. I don’t see how this is a smart branding decision on the NFL’s part: with no competition, who’s to say that the product won’t suffer? If anything, the perennially-profitable licensed sports videogame market needs more competition, not less. Since a yearly iteration in the NFL videogame arena currently consists of removing deceased or incarcerated players from the rosters, underrating the Vikings, and coming up with a new trademarked name for the right analog stick (e.g. “Playmaker,” “Blitzmonger,” or “Defenstrator”), I shudder to think of what delightful “innovations” the new EA monopoly will bring us in the next half-decade.

Apparently, Midway (makers of the no-longer NFL-sanctioned “NFL Blitz” series) are already working on an over-the-top football game based on a Playmakers license. Fans of the departed ESPN series — which depicted players on a fictional pro football franchise doping, committing felonies, and engaging in off-field debauchery and shenanigans — may recall that it was not renewed after the NFL Players’ Association complained and the league responded by commenting publicly that it would be an awful shame for ESPN to lose its NFL TV contract.

It will be interesting to see whether and how the other publishers compete. Intuitively, it seems that the bar for unlicensed football games has been set extremely high for about twenty years now, but the market is probably too big for one product to saturate it entirely (although, if memory serves, EA does have a substantial majority of market share). I’ve only played one unlicensed sports game in recent memory: Striker Pro 2000 on the Sega Dreamcast. It was a pretty marginal game (especially compared to the FIFA series), but I probably would have been more invested in it had I been able to play as a team I recognized and cared about.

The Vikings are continuing to disappoint. Unlike last year, they will probably make it into the playoffs, but to what end? I offer only two observations on their recent performances:

1. Where was last week’s Chad Hutchinson on last summer’s Rhein Fire squad?
2. The foolhardy first-and-goal Randy Moss option play in yesterday’s game (see here; scroll to “One that didn’t work”) resulted in an extremely well-thrown interception and has been the subject of a great deal of discussion in the sports media. Many commentators (including me) apparently have inflated memories of Moss’ passing ability: in a conversation with friends earlier today, I claimed that Moss had made similar plays well “ten times.” Not so. As a passer, Moss is 4 for 8 lifetime, with two touchdowns — sure, he has a 95.8 passer rating, but there’s no way any coach would consider that option play a high-percentage play for first down. (Moss has, however, only thrown one interception — yesterday.)

Frankly, this story rules. One is reminded of the substantially similar scene in 1990′s despicable Home Alone, but how delightful to see the equivalent of an absurdly contrived state of affairs made manifest by chance and stupidity! (Link via Joystiq.)

UPDATE: Here’s a choice quote, as suggested by Andrea, who greatly dislikes clicking through from short posts:

Back in March, Sandy Wilson was taking care of her three grandsons when a group of men attempted to burglarize her home, pointing a gun at the kids.

The children happened to be playing a video game called Grand Theft Auto at the time. The game has dozens of random police scanner messages, which blare out calls such as “This is the police! You’re surrounded!” Believe it or not, Wilson says the burglars heard that message and thought police were outside the door waiting for them.

I’m currently listening to Suite in e minor for two Theorbos; I. Prélude from the album “Corbetta & de Visée: Suites for Guitars and Theorbos” by Eric Bellocq & Massimo Moscardo

“No, the problem is that we had a Stonehenge that was in danger of being knocked over by a dwarf!”

The good folks at GetReligion point out that Harry Shearer has wasted no time making the absurd into the hilarious w.r.t. the Episcopal “druidic liturgy” flap. (Bonus points for anyone who can rework “Big Bottom” into a commentary on any other recent scandal, broadly construed, affecting the Anglican Communion.)

After the Vikings’ annual collapse at the hands of the despicable New York Giants, I was in need of some serious cheer. Fortunately, “serious cheer” came from the TiVo, which had recorded an NFL Films presentation about the Vikes’ legendary 1998 season.

In 1998, the Vikings went 15-1 — a feat that only three other teams have matched in NFL history — and set all sorts of league scoring records. Gary Anderson, their then-kicker, had a perfect season as well — until, that is, he missed a field goal late in the NFC Championship Game, which Minnesota lost in overtime.

NFL Films must have the greatest production staff in the world, since an NFL Films production makes even the ugliest plays look like world-changing feats of incomparable heroism and finesse. When the source material is strong, as in the 1998 Vikings season, the finished product is flat-out moving.

However, the real strength of this film was in the Stalinist editing. As the season went on, Andrea and I were gritting our teeth (she covered her eyes at points) in anticipation of the catastrophic choke that we knew was to come. Win after win, the tension in our living room increased and increased — until, after the penultimate playoff game, the announcer said “The Minnesota Vikings had had an historic season — and Gary Anderson had had a perfect year. Now they would play for the conference championship.” Then an NFL Films copyright notice appeared, and the presentation ended. The NFL certainly knows its audience!

I’ve discovered the Public Radio Exchange recently, which is some kind of digital distribution site connecting independent radio producers to radio stations. The upshot is that you can listen to a wide variety of pieces online; they also have a “podcast.” I listened to the first half of this piece on the “remix” movement. There wasn’t a lot in there that someone who’s familiar with the electronic music scene, the EFF, or Lawrence Lessig’s “free culture” project wouldn’t already know about, but it was a nicely-done piece.

The excerpt started by talking about DJ Danger Mouse’s fantastic “Gray Album” Beatles/Jay-Z mashup (download it if you haven’t!) and ended by observing some old antique-dealing duffers’ reactions to a show of New England antiques that had been “remixed” (presumably into statements against Western hegemony) by design students.

I really find the word “remix” grating if it’s applied to some medium other than music, but it appears to be here to stay.

The broadcast was most interesting, though, in the middle, in which a classics professor from Rice discussed the cento, a genre in which a new poem is made by taking arbitrary lines from other old poems and rearranging them. As far as I can tell from a cursory googling, the cento lives on today as a marginal genre for hacks, a cutesy pub stunt for puffed-up nerds, or a rhetorical technique for certain rarely-photographed opinion columnists. This prof, however, focused on the cento of the late Roman empire. He gave an example of a poet named Ausonius, who rearranged lines from Virgil into a passage that was racier than da Ponte’s Don Giovanni libretto. Pretty cool.

I got this in my e-mail this morning:

“endures torture in the name of his beliefs?”

“maintains his faith and finds redemption?”

I’ve apparently forgotten how much Jesus of Nazareth modeled his earthly life after Northrup Frye’s rubric for comedy; clearly, the Gibson film must elucidate this lesser-known aspect of the Passion narrative.

I haven’t seen this movie, but it seems probable that the DirecTV blurb writer hasn’t either, or is at least shockingly unfamiliar with the subject matter.

I haven’t posted about baseball this postseason. Even though I despise the Yankees and they seemed to be on a collision-course with the most catastrophic foul-up in the history of the sport, I avoided posting about them. I have been careful since there is a near-perfect inverse correlation between me posting a prediction about a sporting event and that prediction not being borne out by reality.

Evidence from last year: here and here; if baseball is too provincial, see a bonus NFL Europe example.

My desire to prognosticate is further tempered by a lifetime of Minnesota sports fandom and an attendant finely-honed sense of the existential absurd. However, now it’s safe to render judgement. To paraphrase the famous MasterCard ads, there are some things that the largest payroll in baseball can’t buy, apparently. Take that, Croesus!

Speaking of ads, I’ve identified a ludicrous trend in home-electronics-superstore TV spots. The current Circuit City line of ads (featuring The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” — if you watch televised sports in the US, you’ve probably seen it) seems to be insinuating that there exists a class of people who are desperate to spend large amounts of money on top-shelf home electronics, but have no idea what they want and are panicking at the prospect. This is absolutely insulting to one’s intelligence: who could possibly want to spend four figures on a television without a very good picture of why he (in these ads, it is nearly always a “he”) was doing so?

In my opinion, though, these Circuit City ads are in conversation with the ridiculous, prurient Best Buy ads that feature an implausible combination of events:

1. Some chowderheaded customer is perilously close to making some absurdly foolish decision, like buying the wrong digital camera, microwaving tinfoil, or wearing a Vikings jersey in rural Wisconsin.
2. The customer is approached by a helpful, kempt, and nametag-wearing Best Buy employee who can speak in complete sentences. The employee does not hide or pretend to be talking on the phone or working in another department. (“Sorry, I’m in ‘produce;’ I know nothing about TVs.”)
3. Before attempting to sell the hapless customer a warranty, the employee asks some leading questions: precisely why do you assume that the tinfoil needs to be microwaved, etc.
4. In a bizarre “fantasy” sequence, the Best Buy employee appears in some crucial non-store product-usage scenario with the customer. (Some recent ads have featured a customer actually inviting a salesman into his home, which is the sort of exposition — so one assumes — that might appear regularly on late-night pay TV.)
5. Even more inexplicably, the salesperson offers critically helpful advice to the knuckle-dragging lackwit customer, preventing a microwave fire or La Crosse Lager-soaked beating.

These ads, while absurd, may portend good news for America: after all, if these drooling idiots who need to be told by Best Buy or Circuit City employees how best to spend their own money on luxury items have significant market appeal, then the economy must be a hell of a lot better than Peter Jennings says it is. After all, you aren’t worrying about whether to get a plasma TV or an LCD when you’re standing in a Soviet breadline.

My foresight-based sports commentary is spotty at best (examples here and here), but I’m pretty sure about the contents of this post. Judging by the look on his face whenever the camera found him during Monday Night Football, Mike Sherman had only one thought running through his mind: “Would I rather be an offensive coordinator in Phoenix or Tampa next year?”

UPDATE: Easterbrook points out that the Packers were held to 35 yards rushing, at home.

I’ve posted earlier about the flagrant and willful violation of Nyquist’s theorem by every procedural crime drama ever. Well, Bruckheimer has outdone himself this time. Tonight’s episode of CSI: Miami (“Under the Influence”) featured a CSI technician using “special software” to zoom in on a standard digital photograph in order to see the reflection of a killer in the subject’s eyes. Fortunately, in a nod to whatever ludicrous alternate reality in which the “enhance” feature is possible, the technician indicated that it would take a while in order to use the “special software.”

The take-home lesson? If you need to do something impossible, just give the “special software” some more time. About 20 minutes of CSI-time should do it.