He was on the court at that moment at Bzzzzzzzzzzzz, the yellow jacket!! 🤣🤣🤣🕺🕺🕺🕺
January 31, 2005: One of the most amazing Buzzer Beaters of all-time. In an NCAA Division 3 game, Guilford College’s (@GuilfordMBB) Jordan Snipes hits a 85-foot, 5-inch buzzer-beater to beat Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va. pic.twitter.com/Yf2g57czy9
I just watched Rock 'n Roll High School. Which I also dvr'd, so I
can watch it all day very day if I want. I also see it's coming on tv in
2 hours again anyway. Boy, watching tv has really changed, ain't it?
Remember when you were a kid, and if you missed a special or a movie you
had no idea if you'd ever get to see it again? "Well, that's that!" you
pictured the tv execs saying after the movie was over as they loaded it
into a cannon and shot it to Saturn. When I was in 8th grade my friend
Ryan told me that he had Rock 'n Roll High School on VHS at his house -
I hyperventilated for days, counting the seconds til I could get over
to his house for a viewing. Of course I get there and...had been taped
over. Devestated. My one chance ever to see my gods on film for 2 hours,
gone forever.
Then three years later I saw that the flick was
coming on tv one night. FINALLY!!!! Monday night at 7pm, Channel 35. To
use a phrase I would later coin, I'm SO there! Of course that Monday
we ended up having an extra long football practice cause we had gotten
our asses handed to us the previous Friday...IN A SCRIMMAGE. Not even a
real game!!! Our Coach was furious, and I remember it rained and we ran
and ran and ran our guts out. The whole time, I'm going crazy, knowing
I'm missing my movie. Run run run, hand on the line, tweet tweet run run
run. I also remember we sent Coach even more off the edge earlier while
watching the game film by erupting into laughter when we watched James
Beverly intercept a pass and start running the wrong way. Comedy ensued
onscreen, we laughed, Coach was pissed. Tweet tweet. Hand on the line.
Finally
we get sent home, I'm begging my brother to drive like a lunatic,
hoping to catch ANY of what's left of the movie. Burst into the house
soaking wet, 10 minutes of the movie are left, I turn on the tv and...no
reception. Like scrambled porn, could barely see through the snow
onscreen to even be able to tell the Ramones were back there somewhere.
Heartbroken. Can still see that gotdam screen. And now here we are...I
can watch it now, I can watch it later, I can load it onto a computer
and stick myself into the I Just Wanna Have something to Do car
scene. Shit's changed.
I don't know why the show ended, I'm sure it had its reasons, but the 7th & final season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show is just as funny as the first; incredibly, Ted Baxter is even funnier this late in the series.
We are the World is a fucking embarrassment of a song - exponentially so when compared with its sister song, the poignantly triumphant Do They Know It's Christmas? - but this new doc on Netflix showing the making of is a pretty fun, informative watch with enough backstage nuggets for anyone to enjoy nibbling on.
As president, under an Xmastime administration I will make it against the law for adults to use the word "poop" with other adults, punishable by immediate & curiously angry execution.
The Beatles played together in public for the last time ever. INSANE how tight they are despite barely knowing the songs at all, much less rehearsed them. Unbelievable. 😢😢😢😢
Walking to the train this morning I was simultaneously thrilled with how overcast it was while somehow berating myself for not being "present" enough to enjoy it; on one hand I got depressed wondering "what if this is the last perfectly overcast day I'll ever get to see and I'm not enjoying it enough?" but then cheered myself up by thinking "well, imagine if I had thought the exact same thing on any previous date, say February 26 1986, wouldn't I have been thrilled to know that one day in 2024 I'd be thinking the same thing? So maybe this can happen for me again in 2062?"
I don't know if I'm even making sense to myself anymore. Hmm.
[XMASTIME NOTE] I moved to Brooklyn 25 26 years ago this past January; throughout the year I'll be noting things, no matter how small they are in reality, that I remember & associate with those first few days/weeks/months of living in the greatest city in the world.
For a year or two when I first moved to Brooklyn I was my buddy Keith's silkscreen assistant; on an early Saturday morning we'd meet at his studio down on the lower East Side and start working on silkscreening a few posters before hitting the Ear Inn for that first 10:30am beer. Anyway, one of Keith's friends ran Akashic Books (now printing money forever for having published the now-iconic Go the Fuck to Sleep book grrrr I am so jelly) and had just realized what I believe was their first title, The Fuckup by Arthur Nersesian. Keith gave it to me & I rolled my eyes at it but I couldn't help but crack it open and it drew me in like a moth so perfectly, as in the fact that in January 1998 it seemed to have been written perfectly for me & about me:
This is the darkly hilarious odyssey of an anonymous slacker. He's a perennial couch-surfer, an aspiring writer searching for himself in spite of himself, and he's just trying to survive. But life has other things in store for the fuck-up. From being dumped by his girlfriend to getting fired for asking for a raise, from falling into a robbery to posing as a gay man to keep his job at a porno theater, the fuck-up's tragi-comedy is perfectly realized by Arthur Nersesian, who manages to create humor and suspense out of urban desperation.
I read it thrilled to the warmed-up bones on frozen winter night at 232 Ainslie Street with Rrthur (YES ladies, THAT Rrthur) and Mrs. Rrthur, fresh from moving to Brooklyn USA with everything & nothing in front of me all at once.
We couldn’t get the Olsen twins to come back for the Full House reboot but we’ve somehow managed to convince the most famous person on the planet to pretend to date a football player for a year to MAYBE help Joe Biden with an election okay sure why not.
I can't believe it's 2024 and still nobody's explained to me why Obama never used this for a campaign song, inserting his name into it. I mean camon guys what was happening on the goddam bus all year?!?!?!!?
Lou Reed went 22 years between the first Velvet Underground album and his New York album, is this the greatest number of years between a great artist’s two greatest albums? 🤔🤷
I don't consider myself to be a man of great wisdom and I don't think anybody ever looks to me for advice but as I see all the young people in my life growing closer to adulthood there's one piece of advice I would like to pass on to them: whenever you're at some event standing around with your guy friends and someone wants to take a picture - maybe you're at a wedding, for instance - and you find yourself wondering "should I pretend I'm fucking (insert friend's name here) from behind for this next picture?" the answer is always a resounding "yes".
I hate to think there’ll ever be a day I don’t cackle with glee every time Nate from my superslice LET IT ROLL podcast expresses utter disgust at Brian Jones 🤣🤣🤣🤣 - XMASTIME
Let it Roll has been my favorite podcast for about 4 years now so this is fucking devastating.
Treat yourself TO ITS ARCHIVES for what I believe is the most intoxicatingly thorough & definitive series devoted to the history of popular music via rock & roll that at least I've ever been aware of. Here's just a small example of the breadth of these episodes within a single season:
Super-tantalizing bit from this week's episode re: why do they still keep putting "HIGH or LOW wattage" instructions for microwaving things? Has anyone EVER actually considered these, ever? #eggfoowhat
You people know how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE me some Family Ties - all-time great sow, and Alex P. Keaton is in the all-time great sitcom character pantheon, probably behind only Archie Bunker and Geroge Costanza and Del Boy Trotter..
Meanwhile, you people also know how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE Pluto TV. And one of the MANY! reasons I love Pluto TV so much is they have an entire channel devoted to Family Ties. They always start with he very first episode, play every episode in sequence through the finale, and then they start right overall over again from the beginning. That means that with 176 episodes the entire series is run and then started over every 88 hours, or about twice a week. The good thing about this is that if you love the show you'll love being able to just drop in & out whenever you want and enjoying it as much as you like, while the bad thing is you start to see small patterns you otherwise wouldn't. So I've noticed a few things upon my now several re-watches without meaning to rewatch, just a few things off the top of my head that I will share with you now. You're welcome, Earf!
Right off the bat, there are exactly two types of episodes to avoid like Reagononics (sorry APK!):
1. any Jennifer-centric episode (yawn) 2. any episode in which Elyse has an acoustic guitar (dear God)
Whatever the record for the number of "best-of" episodes a sitcom can have, this show has it; these people were physically incapable of walking by a Christmas tree without pulling out the ol' family slides and sitting down and looking at them for 22 minutes.
Alex doesn't seem to have any friends - he inexplicably just hangs arounds his parents kitchen all the time even in his early 20s - until they suddenly need one for any random episode and then we're supposed to somehow know/believe they've been intense friends for years & years, be it James, his "arch-nemesis!" who we're supposed to get worked up about over his rivalry with Alex whether it's the best grades or a young lady or working at a suicide prevention hotline yet is never seen or even mentioned in any other episode, or Greg, Alex' "best friend" whose death does kick off maybe the greatest episode of the entire series but of course was never mentioned before the episode or after the episode, just like James, so.
The whole "omg Nick is a nightmare boyfriend for Steven Keaton's daughter" thing was funny in the beginning but we're supposed to believe Steven keeps up his boiling rage at Nick for like the next 4 years? Really?
Which also begs the question, why was the penultimate episode all about these two making up anyway? After 4 years of playing the nonsense for laughs we're gonna waste an entire episode right before the finale to clean it all up, with a serious "we understand each other forever now" moment? Really?
I think it was a trope of sorts throughout the 1980s but Alex's sudden passion for getting the rest of the world to appreciate some old blues musician in one episode is a bridge too far into ridiculousness for anyone who's known Alex P. Keaton for more than zero seconds.
Again, why on Earth would Alex keep living in that house?
The fucking kitchen stove, I mean ffs this family had the greatest stove/range in the world for a decade and not once did anyone actually come close to using it.
Nick is in long line of characters that start cool but just get absurdly dumb, like Trigger from Only Fools and Horses or Kevin from The Office.
This show broke the record for whatever the record for “mom goes back to work and oh my the world is ending at home!!” episodes is, and every single time it was a couple rolling eyeball sesh. "This week Alex, a 21 year-old college junior, has his world torn apart when his mother goes back to work, turning the household upside down ohooooooooooooo my!!!"
I don't know why it popped into my head but I just realized that on my next birthday I'll be twice as old as I was when I not only moved to Brooklyn, but when I moved into 100 Metro 😲😭😲😭😲😭😲😭
I've been screaming about Reality Bites for 2 days now - don't ask - oh wait, you didn't - and I've always loved the movie trope of "guy sleeps with insanely hot girl and then desperately tries to leave in the morning despite her pleas"; I wanna have a character whose modus operandi is the next morning when the girl's like "sooooooooo....you're probably leaving now, huh?" he giddily replies, "leave now, I'm on the lease baby!!"
You people have heard me blather on & on for decades how much I love The Equals, rock's best overlooked band ever, so you'll excuse me while I curl up for some Eddy Grant love for the next 11!!
I remember this moment happening and of course bawled like a baby but now that it's all these years later wouldn't it have been even more incredible if they didn't announce the announcement before it starts, to just let it play and organically hit the folks for whom it's gonna hit? 🤔🤷♂️
Derek Jeter using Bob Sheppard's audio in the 2010 All-Star Game is still one of the coolest moments in baseball history. pic.twitter.com/1HqXEuRZqO
What's the percentage of great books that start with an incredible first line?
"It was the worst of times, it was the best of times." -A Tale of Two Cities
"The town of Hamilton-ffrench was founded in the great year of our Lord 1640 and although it had since been through every single one of this country's biggest events, be them bloody wars or spicy scandals whether national or, more importantly and with far more dire consequences, local, one Saturday in the most recent June felt like the one moment all of those days had been leading up to over the past four hundred years: the Boyce/Taylor wedding." - The Wedding Parties
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” - The Metamorphosis
I've noticed that throughout his case with E. Jean Carroll Trump always screeches with outrage that he didn't rape her b/c he couldn't remember ever meeting her but never seems outraged at the idea of raping anybody in general. He's never outraged at being accused of such a thing like a normal person, he's always just like "I dunno, I've met a lot of people over the years 🤷♂️."
Eating nothing but Wegmans pizza for a week will be tough but I guess not as tough as last year when Mike suggested that I let myself be attacked by sharks for some Egg Foo What?! publicity. #gregfooyoungindeed #efffoowhat 😲😲🦈🦈🥡🥡 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
I don't really know how or why but somehow over the last week I found myself on two separate occasions in a discussion about high school cafeteria pizza back in the 80's so here you go, people.
....based on audience response after out little dare on EGG FOO WHAT?! this week, it's starting to look like I may be eating Wegman's pizza for a solid (god willing) week after all. 😬😬😬😬 #eggfoowhat
Special shoutout to @filamentvoltage for really keeping an eye on the prize here. 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Bob Uecker turns 90 years old today, all I can say is thank you god for Bob Uecker. 🤗
Five Favorite Bob Uecker Quotes:
"Anybody with ability can play in the big leagues. But to be able to trick people year in and year out the way I did, I think that was a much greater feat."
"In 1962 I was named Minor League Player of the Year. It was my second season in the Bigs."
"I signed with the Milwaukee Braves for $3,000. That bothered my dad at the time because he didn't have that kind of dough. But he eventually scraped it up."
"I set records that will never be equaled. In fact, I hope 90% of them don't even get printed."
"Career highlights? I had two. I got an intentional walk from Sandy Koufax and I got out of a rundown against the Mets."
Five Favorite Bob Uecker Quotes from Major League:
"Heywood leads the league in most offensive categories, including nose hair. When this guy sneezes, he looks like a party favor."
"JUST a bit outside."
"So, here is Rick Vaughn, the one they call the "Wild Thing". So, he sets and deals. [Vaughn throws a wild pitch] Just a bit outside, he tried for the corner and missed. [Vaughn throws another wild pitch] Ball 4. [Vaughn throws another wild pitch] Ball 8. [Vaughn throws another wild pitch] Low, and he walks the bases loaded on 12 straight pitches. How can these guys lay off pitches that close?"
[after Hayes calls a shot to left field and flies out to left for the second time] "You know, he could be pointing at the left fielder."
Harry Doyle: "So a tough loss for the Indians as Pedro Cerrano doubles off a pigeon and is tagged out while administering CPR before the tying run could score. Funny game ain't it Monty? Monte: Well at least the bird survived. Harry Doyle: Who cares? It's a rat with wings."
"If that's not Shaquille O'Neal in left, that baby's outta here."
I don't consider myself to be a man of great wisdom and I don't think anybody ever looks to me for advice but as I see all the youngsters in my life growing closer to adulthood there's one piece of advice I would like to pass on: whenever you're arguing with a co-worker about something you're working on and want to 100% get exactly what you want in the end, at some point simply use the phrase "because to your point earlier about (insert some quasi-meaningless snippet they said earlier in the argument)" and they'll instantly start nodding because they've stopped listening; once they think you're complimenting them they immediately concede the point and you'll get what you want.
According to this, the first day people ever visited my blog was on November 22, 2005....I mean that's exactly 42 years after JFK in Dallas so you tell me? 🤔🤷♂️
This is the R.E.M. show Mike talked about going to on this week's EGG FOO WHAT?! episode. Not only is it an almost perfect time to see them live - June 1984, just as Reckoning was being released - but the actual quality of this recording is fantastic. Enjoy, and you're welcome Earf!
My mother worked at this library & I practically grew up in it so imagine how touched I am to see they’ve included my two novels in this HAHAHA just kidding of course they didn’t; as my mother’d say whenever I’d start whining, “nobody likes me everybody hates me I’m gonna go eat worms” 😜 🤣🤣🤣🤗
One of the more striking ways showing how different John Lennon & Paul McCartney's natural personalities are is how they talked to the press; Paul McCartney has famously retold the same stories word-for-word over & over for decades with startling discipline while John Lennon famously never said the same thing twice or even agreed with himself from one moment to the next. Musically it's also showcased in their classic double-A single Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane; McCartney's Penny Lane is a definitive "this is it!" statement on its subject while Strawberry Fields Forever bounces back & forth between "maybe I'm a genius or maybe I'm an idiot" not just within the same song but within the same goddam line.
You longtime fans know I've always loved Tom Hollander, and his delivery of this Tom Holland stuff is just magnificently small 🤗 easy and legit hilarious. 🤗
I call this one, "Shitty Comments I Make in My Head That I Don't Actually Post Because I Don't Wanna Put Such a Thing Out into the World". Enjoy, everybody!
Why don't some suitcases come with some sort of harness/straps thingee so you can stick your toddler on it and roll right thru the airport like a goddam king/queen instead of being dragged down to the floor every 10 yards by the human anchor you decided to have? 🤔
This is the video mentioned in this week’s EGG FOO WHAT?! episode ...I MAY have mentioned once or twice during the show about being miffed my best comedy bits weren’t included. 😜🤣 A great day I'll always treasure, maybe one of my favorites. Maybe we'll have Rrthur (YES ladies, THAT Rrthur) back to go deep on the whole production (or just about how brilliant I was in it?) 😜 Enjoy!
All we really seem to be doing is MOVING the same money around paying bills to each other so why is there so much destruction (“That’s the problem with people” joke).
I intended to flesh out a short thesis re: why are we still constantly fighting wars and killing each other over a finite set of stuff that will just get shifted around & around over & over anyway. Of course I never got around to it because I'm lazy as shit and decided instead to walk around patting myself on the back for germinating about 1% of a cogent thought. But just now Neil deGrasse Tyson, probably auditioning for the role of Xmastime's Assistant, summed it all up a lot better than I ever could so YOU'RE WELCOME, EARF!
The first time you watch the series the Dr. Melfi scenes are important to focus on but upon any rewatching you can just skip over them and it's not really a problem.
When I was a kid, I was a dreamer. I'd rather dream about doing something than actually do it. I'd fantasize about being a great baseball player, but wouldn't bother practicing to actually become one. Ethan would hound me to play catch or take batting practice, or anything that would in some way improve my play, and l'd decline.
Then I'd slip outside without anyone noticing and it'd be the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 of the World Series with two outs, bases loaded, my team down by three runs, and me at the plate.
An excerpt from I knew I had to play it cool or I'd look like an idiot, so I acted like I was just moseying around the yard, taking it all in - stopping to smell the roses, as any ten year-old boy is want to do. I could see a diamond laid out in my mind, and heard thousands of fans in the stands chanting my name. I'd grab whatever stick was lying around and approach home plate, swinging my bat as if I didn't have a care in the world while casually looking to make sure nobody else was watching. Once I determined nobody was on to me, I’d focus on the upcoming pitch.
The same thing happened every single time once the pitch was delivered, as it never occurred to me to create some dramatic storyline - I never struck out to lose the game and then spent the entire off-season in agony, haunted by the defeat only to come back the next year for redemption, thus making the home run that much more dramatic. Hell, I never even fouled a few balls off; I was much too eager to be the hero, and besides, I had to orchestrate the entire production without anyone catching on, so time was of the essence.
But it was the home run trot that was my magnum opus, not the home run itself - swinging a stick in the air was easy; disguising an outlandishly drawn-out trot that anything more than a glance could easily tell was some jackass running around bases meant I'd have to be incredibly clever. I'd start easing my way towards first base, jogging slowly while pretending to be looking for something in the yard. Meanwhile, the crowd was going crazy - cool guys wanted to hang out with me, and every girl in the stands or watching on television throughout the country was swooning. I'd make it to first base and stop, pretending I'd seen something on the ground, swatting at the grass while looking all around. Seeing the coast was clear again, I'd start moving towards second base, maybe this time loudly muttering "what the..?" as if I'd spotted something out of sorts, as opposed to just being some idiot kid in the middle of the world's most ridiculous home run trot. This went on until I had triumphantly crossed home plate, which was about twenty minutes after I'd swung the bat.
Instead of play-acting like I was at a goddam tea party I should've just torn off around the bases, since some kid running around wouldn't have been noteworthy at all, and certainly wasn't as creepy as one casually milling about the backyard. The whole drama would've been all over with in about ten seconds, and hell, it turned out my family knew what I was doing the entire time anyway. My brother always caught on to what I was doing, and after pointing it out to my parents, they'd all have a good time laughing at how stupid I looked, struggling so hard to play it cool during my grand per-formance. I don't blame them, and to exactly nobody's surprise my brother went on to be a much better baseball player than me, having actually been playing baseball instead of prancing about the yard like a goddam idiot.
I like The Devil Wears Prada just fine but how is Anne Hathaway's character not fired about 4 minutes into the job? Everybody’s constantly telling her how thousands of other girls would kill for the job, she flaunts her lack of interest in fashion and then it’s not even like in the end her boss has some “oh from the comment I met you I saw the spark inside you and knew I just had to stoke the fire for it to emerge!” moment; there’s some vague “you should hire this girl even tho she was the worst worker I’ve ever been around” nonsense. So…why was Anne Hathaway even in the job for 30 seconds? 🤗🤷♂️
Will Greg make a deal with the devil at Wegman's? Will Mike get over his fear of the microwave? How did it take 78 episodes for 2 middle-aged white guys to get around to talking about R.E.M.? This may be the best episode in months!
Every other Beatle has gone out of their way to bitch and moan about how
Paul would nag at them to get back to work, dragging them back to Abbey
Road for yet another project. It's kind of funny whenever you hear Ringo
tell the stories over and over now, but what if Paul hadn't pushed them
to keep working so hard? There'd be no landmark Sgt. Pepper, no sprawling White Album. No bare-boned Let it Be, no majestic Abbey Road. No Hey Jude, Lady Madonna,
and on and on. Even if they had stopped in 1966 the Beatles' legacy
would have been cemented, but we'd be without such incredibly
cultural-shifting pieces of art - jut try imagining the world around us
without them existing as part of it.
SIDE NOTE: the whole post is worth reading for my brilliant Michael/Michael payoff in the photo juuuuuuuuuuuuuussssssssst sayin!
Apparently Ringo's a big fan (hi Ringo!) and agrees with me (about Paul McCartney, not my comedy brilliance):
You think you can no longer be jarred at all by Republicans' pathetic eagerness to bend the knee and kids Trump's ass but Tim Scott's performance last night shatters whatever the all-time record was. Jesus fucking christ, man. You'd think every piece of shit has to draw the line somewhere, but apparently not.
I know Mike likes to claim I don’t prepare for EGG FOO WHAT?! recordings so I thought I’d post my notes from last week here just to stick it in his face. IN. YOUR. FACE. MIKE!! #eggfoowhat
"Greta Garbo" is just one of those celebrity names I don't remember ever in my life NOT knowing, and yet since stumbling upon this article about her maybe 4 minutes ago I'm realizing I know pretty much nothing about her. I had a vague, gauzy sense of what she was, a Hollywood starlet during the movie studios' glory days, but other than that the only thing I thought I knew about her came from a verse in Ray Davies' eternally beautiful Kinks' classic, Celluloid Heroes:
Don't step on Greta Garbo as you walk down the Boulevard She looks so weak and fragile that's why she tried to be so hard But they turned her into a princess And they sat her on a throne But she turned her back on stardom Because she wanted to be alone
I've always taken Davies' words as being somewhat true but more importantly remarkably beautiful and poignantly (sort of) tragic no matter who the subject may be, but it turns out he was pretty dead on:
She was, Tennessee Williams thought, “the saddest of creatures—an artist who abandons her art.” People loved the mystery of it all; photographers were always chasing after her. But she wasn’t in hiding; she got out. One wag called her a “hermit about town.”
In the movies, she had always been able to convey a sense of hidden depths, of memories and emotions, never quite surfacing to be articulated. Were those feelings complex, interesting? We were persuaded they must be. The relationship to fame that she enacted in the last decades of her life was something similar: it looked profound, perhaps even spiritual—a renunciation of celebrity’s blessings as well as its scourges. But who knows? Maybe she was just tired of making faces.