Med Men II

However misguided, if during the first season you'd have asked me who would be the most upset about MLK being shot, I can't in good faith say I would've chosen Pete Campbell.

Minneapolis

The CC Club in Minneapolis to me is most famously the bar from Here Comes a Regular; here's an oral history of the bar. Amazing.

Peter Jesperson: A lot of times we'd close up Oar Folk at 10 o'clock and we'd all walk across the street for a drink. Even at the time people joked about it, but that corner was like the Haight-Ashbury of Minneapolis. The record store became kind of the nucleus of the scene and musicians, and a lot of people actually moved into the neighborhood to be close to the record store and the CC. It was really the center of the burgeoning Minneapolis rock scene.

 Tommy Stinson: I wouldn't know [if the song's about the CC], but it wouldn't be surprising. We spent countless hours and time hanging out there. When I hear the song, of course, sure, I think of the bar.

Any Connection?

One of the greatest commercials of my generation was the Be Like Mike campaign:

According to Wikipedia:

"Gatorade's 1991 "Be Like Mike" ads featured Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls, a North American basketball team which had just won its first National Basketball Association championship at the time. The ads began airing in August 1991 and the phrase "Be Like Mike" became household lingo in America. 

Rhythm of the Saints came out in October of 1990:

Oh, for Fuck's Sake Already

Now the internet is abuzz that ESPN should apologize for letting Chris Broussard say what he fucking said about Jason Collins.

What? What exactly would they then be apologizing for - allowing someone on the air whose opinion differed from theirs/? Thats a crime? Of course ESPN should come out and support Collins. Of course they should say Broussard's a tool. But to apologize for letting him speak? Really?

My 14-song Alltime Marah Best-of Track Listing

MAD MEN

The biggest LOL was when Peggy's realtor told her that the value of her apartment would quadruple when the 2nd Avenue subway was done. HA!

GOTHAMIST calls bullshit on the whole thing.

Great. Now Obama's Getting Blamed for Not Talking to Dead People.

This has been making the rounds via my Tea PArty firedns on Facebok.

Pretty Cool du Jour

Subways of North America

Craigslist

Buzzfeed wonders if this is the worst Craigslist job listing ever.

I have no idea if it is, but I do know that this is the best one.

Beatles Browbeat du Jour

Today's Beatles Browbeat asks if the rumor re: John Lennon letting Brian Epstein jerk him off in Spain once is true. Personally I could give a shit, and from what I've read it's impossible to take Lennon seriously as he pretty famously enjoyed bullshitting reporters et al anywayt. I do, however, think it's yet another mark of how amazingly huge The Beatles were/are that an entire movie was made based on that weekend. I mean, wtf?

Previous Beatles Browbeat HERE.

Xmastime Classixxx

1988. Sigh.

This boy wearing the same jersey for four years made me think of my junior season of high school football. In other words, they both stank. How bad was it? Incredibly enough, my junior season of high school football went worse than my junior season of getting a girlfriend. Imagine that. We got off to an 0-4 start. Not good. In fact, let's go to the yearbook for the scores:

EHS 0 Powhatan 42
EHS 0 West Point 20
EHS 12 Middlesex 34
EHS 15 Rappahannock 36

Hell, looking at those scores now they're a lot closer than I remember. We're talking about a season that went so badly that the yearbook, whose sole purpose of existence is to put positive spins on things (most crappy seasons are labeled as "rebuilding, lookout next year!" etc etc) had a one-word headline to sum our season up for all posterity: FRUSTRATION. Ouch! Luckily for us, a few pages later we topped ourselves with another one-word headline for the basketball season we had put together: DISMAL. Thanks, yearbook staff! Now my grandkids can know that Grandpa REALLY fucking sucked!!! Yaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!

Anyways, after the 0-4 start I decided I needed to do something to turn the team around. I thought about what I could do and figured well, anybody can turn their own game up and tackle and block better; ANYbody could stand up and be a leader for the team, bringing them home with a string of wins, carrying the team on his back with both physical and vocal leadership. Me? I decided the best thing I could do is wear the same t-shirt every day to school, declaring to everyone that I would not change it until we won a game. It was a black Joshua Tree t-shirt, if I recall correctly. Of course, if I don't recall correctly I guess I could say it was the blue wife-beater Emilio Estevez wore in The Breakfast Club. It's called lexicon, people. Anyways, I knew that this bit of black t-shirt magic was the key to reversing our fortunes. So day in, day out I wore it. To school. To practice. After practice, to the Chinn Dome. Home. Monday through Friday. I wore it on the horse farm, working all weekend. No, I did not wear it to church. I think we know how that would've gone over. Yeah, I wanted to win football games, but I also wanted to live long enough to see if Kevin ever got Winnie Cooper. We all make choices. Of course, the losing didn't stop.

EHS 6 Suffolk 20
EHS 5 Goochland 32 5? wtf?
EHS 26 Rappahannock 32 played 'em twice. I guess so they could make sure we really sucked that bad. Great.
EHS 16 Lancaster 26
EHS 0 W & L 32

The losing didn't stop, and my bold stance was getting less and less popular the more I, frankly, stank up the town.

Finally it’s the last game. Final game of the season, final game of some of my friends' playing careers (including Brothatime’s.) Long, national nightmare almost over. Just one more loss to endure. Putting on my pads before the game I found myself alone in the locker room, standing in front of a mirror. I was about to put on my shoulder pads and found myself looking at the t-shirt I had on. We had lost more games since I took my “stance” than we had before it started. I had been no help to the team; I had only made it smellier. I thought for a minute longer, then said “aw, fuck this shit” and took it off, throwing it in the trashcan and replacing it with a fresh, clean white t-shirt.

So of course what do we do? Go out and beat Northumberland. 12-6, in fucking overtime. The final play ends, we had fucking finally won, sheets of joy rained over us as we piled on top of each other to celebrate. Briefly outside the pile walking around, drunk with happiness I found myself in front of my friend Will. Will was a senior, this was it for him. He was a ferocious middle linebacker, one of those 5’6” Rudy types that has no business being on the field but somehow makes 15 tackles a game; most with his teeth. He saw me, his face lit up even more and he jumped into my arms and we hugged the hug of victors. He was crying his eyes out even more than the rest of us, and for good reason.

The previous season we had won three games. Not good either, but for sure a hell of a lot better than one. But the thing about those three wins is that they were all the exact three games that Will happened to not be able to play in. And it’s not like it was one injury forcing him to miss three games in a row that we happened to win; they were three games scattered throughout the season that he missed for various injuries. He played in seven games, and we lost all 7. He didn’t play in three, and we won all 3. We being teenagers, naturally we picked on him about it every chance we got. We told him that young girls throughout the town were coming up with nursery rhymes about his curse on the team to jump rope to. At first it was funny; by about mid-season the next year it was no longer funny. Will was bothered by it to the point of talking of quitting cause of a curse, he was bad luck etc etc. Which we of course convinced him was nonsense. But by the time that final game came around, he was a wreck about it.

Breaking our victory hug he grabbed my jersey with both hands, tears streaming down, and bawled at me “It was your shirt!!! You never gave up on us, it's the shirt you're wearing and never took off, that’s why we won!!!”

Sigh. Never had the heart to tell him.

100 Metro, Beeyotches

Copyranter has The Best New York City Street Art of the Year, and my old building made it!

10. Crucified Mickey, by The New Apostle.

Movie I Can't Wait to See du Jour

The Coward:

Chris O'Dowd is in talks to join Adam Driver in Max Winkler's period comedy "The Coward," TheWrap has learned.

Set in 18th century England, the story follows a cowardly nobleman (Driver) who hails from a family whose men have historically come out on the losing end of to-the-death gunfights. When he panics after initiating a duel, he finds himself hiring a common criminal (O'Dowd) to stand in his place, though the scoundrel decides to improve his lot in life by stealing his employer's identity.

YES!

This Is By Far

One of my favorite 90s songs...

WELL Well Well...

Hey, whaddya know: Chief Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is starting to regret her vote that put Dubyanuts in the presidency:

Looking back, O’Connor said, she isn’t sure the high court should have taken [Bush v. Gore].
“It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue,” O’Connor said during a talk Friday with the Tribune editorial board. “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’”
The case, she said, “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation.”
“Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision,” she said. “It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.“

Counter-facutals are pointless..of COURSE the world would be different today if  the election hadn't been stolen  Gore had won. Maybe better, maybe worse, who knows.  And of course the more principals that are on their deathbed meeting their maker the more gee whiz, they MIGHT have fucked up confessionals going on. Hmm.

Bush being elected is  something the hundreds of thousands of people that have died because of his Iraqi invasion/panicking over 9-11  a joke we've all had to live with. Hey, get over it, people.

The saddest thing, to me, is that the 2004 election officially made me give up on rock 'n roll changing the world, since even Bruce pimping for Kerry couldn't move the fucking needle. Wow. People really are, in a word, terrible.

Society

If you were born the day the NBA allowed its first black player, you would be 62 today. So. Progress is a slow mistress.

More Jason Collins

We're all glad Jason Collins came out today but, while I made a joke about it earlier, there is some truth to the idea of my joke. I mean, it's not as if Lebron came out as gay - NBA owners would be lining up to chew his balls for the opportunity of signing him to a contract. Instead, we're talking about a guy whose main claim to fame so far has been his ability to bounce from team to team over more than a decade. So when articles start coming out "Will Jason Collins be on an NBA team next year?" the real answer is, in a word, "maybe." To the standard NBA team that could use his journeyman experience, maybe  Collins would be a good and economical fit…but would it be worth the publicity?

On the flip side, is the NBA now under pressure to make sure a team DOES pick up Collins, so that come next season the articles re: "nobody picked me up because I'm gay" don't start pouring out?

In the end (heh heh heh) Collins' sexuality doesn't really matter - a pro basketball player announced today that he was gay and yet the sun will still come up tomorrow -  but it's still worth wondering if a next step exists, and if that next step is for an NBA/NFL/MLB star to come as gay. 

Fuck the Jets

I've long declared myself to be Team Tebow. Today the Jets not only cut him, but of course Chris Christie  Rex Ryan couldn't resist being an asshole:

The coach who never seemed to like Tebow issued a statement on Monday that thanked him for being in shape, which coming from a man whose most salient comment in the last three years had to do with eating a "goddamn snack" seemed as backhanded a swipe as any. Rex Ryan couldn't run Tebow to the curb fast enough. Then he had to jump on his head.

I hope someone up in New England is waking up Bill Bellicek right now with this news, and next season the Patriots use Tebow as some sort of H-back and totally destroy the fucking Jets. Twice. The second time Tebow is eating some Twinkies in front of Rex Ryan whilst cutting his shitty defense to shreds.

Is George Harrison the Godfather of Kickstarter?

When asked why he was willing to mortgage his house and put in $4M so that Monty Python could make Life of Brian, George Harrison supposedly replied "because I want to see the film."

Eric Idle famously called it "the most expensive movie ticket ever bought.

Oh, George - original Tea Partier and now this? You are becoming more and more of an interesting cat!

Words du Jour

Radio Free Mrs. Xmastime:

"Poetry never feels like the sharpest tool. It’s not the knife, or the needle, but at some point it does open us, when we’re ready, when the world wants back in" - Ada Limon

"No no, I mean, that's great and all, don't get me wrong...I just wish it was a player anyone had even remotely heard of." - every gay person.