Super Bowl

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In the pregame show, CBS pointed out that all-star grounds crew members from across the NFL had flown into Houston to tend to the turf. Well, the All-Stars didn't do all that impressive a job as players in the secondary were slipping and sliding everytime they tried to cut. Fortunately, the poor traction didn't overshadow an exciting game.
The Super Bowl was my first extended exposure to CBS HighDef, rumored to offer the best production values of any of the major networks in the HD game. Even projected onto a massive screen, the CBS footage confirmed everything I'd heard. The shot of Reliant Stadium from across the parking lot was so sharp and vivid I could spy loose change on the sidewalk. Awesome.
The sharp picture came in handy during the halftime show that ended with Justin Timberlake revealing Janet Jackson's right breast. When it happened, a few of us screamed with both horror and pleasure.
"Omigod! What was that? Was that a breast?!"
"Holy ----! Is this on Tivo? Rewind it!"
I have a hard time believing it was truly unrehearsed, but if it was, it will go down as one of the funniest and most bizarre Super Bowl halftime bloopers ever, and if it wasn't, well then thank you Justin and Janet. I look forward to seeing the footage on the Internet shortly. This begs for one of those shorthand movie scenes in which some detective or agent stands over the shoulder of a video computer analyst, analyzing some grainy video footage.
Detective: "Zoom in here. Okay, now clean up the picture a bit. Wait, rewind a bit. There, freeze it! Now zoom in again, right there."
Video analyst: "Dear God! Is that Janet Jackson's breast? Then the murderer is..."
Detective has already sprinted out of the room.

Big Willie Style

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Bill Simmons linked to a Miami Herald series following Miami's top high school linebacking prospect Willie Williams as he visited Florida State, Auburn, Miami, and finally Florida on official recruiting trips.
After you pick yourself off the ground and wipe the tears of hilarity from your eyes, you realize why the same schools seem to repeat in college football year in and year out. Willie's experiences are sure unlike any of my recruiting trips to college campuses.

Review: Spellbound

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Spellbound.
Definition, please.
A documentary released in 2002 (yes, that long ago). It follows eight children as they vie to be the last cute kid standing (i.e. the last cute kid to screw up) in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Can you use it in a sentence, please?
Spellbound is funny, charming, touching, and suspenseful, though all those words are wholly inadequate because they're too damn easy to spell.
Can you use it in another sentence, please?
As the pool of competitors in Spellbound is whittled down from nine million to one, our sympathy for the vast, eclectic people of this nation (all linked by this odd manifestation of the American Dream) grows in inverse proportion.
Okay, one last definition. Please.
Spellbound. How I felt as I watched this documentary. Spellbound.
S-P-E-L-L-B-O-U-N-D.

This entry may cause diarrhea, nausea, baldness, paralysis...

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One of this week's New Yorker articles that's posted for free for a week online is this interesting read on dietary supplements. An odd side effect of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act is that supplements you buy at the local drugstore are marketed with all sorts of extravagant claims while drugs you can usually obtain only from a doctor are advertised on TV in the most cryptic, uninformative manner ("Ask your doctor about Levitra," says the voiceover, while an old man and woman ride horses down the beach).
Do a little digging and you'll find that most pills advertised on TV seem to deal with high cholesterol or erectile dysfunction. Some hearty soul put the top remedies for the latter through their paces for Wired magazine this month in a piece titled Hard Drugs.
The bravery of journalists always inspires.

Golden Globes

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It's too bad Salon doesn't blog about awards shows live. It would make watching said shows much more enjoyable. Salon's latest blog about the Golden Globes is pretty funny, but how does the author, who obsessed over all numberous actresses' flaunted, er, vaunted boobs, avoid making a pun on the word Golden Globes?
And just who is the Hollywood Foreign Press anyway, and how can you sign up?

Quantifying the slope of the money/happiness curve

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In this list of 10 popular misconceptions, I found some reinforcement and quantification for something I've learned over the years: having lots of money won't necessarily make you happy, but having too little money will likely make you unhappy.
"Money magazine columnist Jean Chatsky polled 1,500 people for her book You Don't Have to Be Rich and found that more money makes people significantly happier only if their family income's below $30,000, but by $50,000, money makes no difference."

Surprised again

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My friends got me yet again. I was all set to see Jason Falkner and Travis on Friday night, followed by a steak dinner at Morton's, courtesy of one unfortunate loser of a variant of credit card roulette. Peering out of my office into the rain-washed night, I was about to pack up and head to the Moore Theater when I saw the unopened envelope icon on my cell phone. My voicemail contained a message from Jason, garbled by poor reception.
I called him back. What was up? I'd see him at dinner later that evening?
Yes, yes, but first, he was wondering if I might be able to swing by. Jamie and Sadie had made me something that they wanted me to see, and it was perishable.
Sure, I was on my way out and could swing by right away.
Actually, Jason was on the East side, headed home. Could I hold up and come by at 8:30?
Well, I'd miss some of Falkner, but since Pete was going to be late, why not? Couldn't let down Jamie and Sadie, especially if they had spent time baking (I was guessing) something. In hindsight, as I review the sequence of events in my head, the conspiracy comes together coherently, like Tom Cruise finally connecting the dots in Mission: Impossible in a series of flashbacks.

  • An encounter two weeks prior at the PacMed cafe, when someone apologized for having to miss my party. I didn't say anything, but after Sundance it just faded out of my mind.

  • Perishable present? Jamie and Sadie had prepared sushi?

  • Jason said he was on the East side picking up his his LoveSac seat. I had visited Jamie and Sadie the night before and saw the LoveSac, still in its wrapping, sitting in the living room.

  • All the cars lining Highland Drive.

  • All the lights were out in Jason's house. It's usually lit up inside, especially if Sadie is up.

  • All the people wishing me happy birthday in the hallways at work. How did all these people know it was my birthday? Were the years so evident in my ravaged complexion?

  • Jon Voight, playing Jim Phelps, tumbling off the bridge in Prague into the river. That blood--he had faked it, hadn't he? He was the only one with the opportunity to pick off each member of the crew. And that Bible, stamped by the Gideons with the name of the hotel Jim said he had stayed at...


But I have to be honest and say I underestimated my friends and they got me. I realized everything the second I opened Jason's front door and saw the red eye on the camcorder in Jamie's hands. Jason took a big gamble, calling me so last minute, and damn if it didn't work.
But even then if I had in inkling about the party, I had no clue, none at all, that later that evening, when everyone sat me down on the living room sofa, that my sisters Joannie and Karen would walk through the front door with a birthday cake. It was the best surprise yet in what has been an escalating series of unexpected twists. To goof around with my sisters this weekend, what a treat! I'm not an easy guy to surprise, especially since I was bitten by that radioactive spider during a high school field trip, but it's happened to me a few times in the last week and a half.
Only with all the facts before me do I realize what I difficult customer I proved to be for all the party planners. Thanks to everyone who had to deal with all sorts of unexpected and late-breaking obstacles to pull it off. It was completely unnecessary and utterly cool.

The Herminator vs. Bode

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This week's New Yorker contains an interesting article about alpine skiing and the two men who compete for its throne, Bode Miller and Austrian Hermann Maier.
Maier dominated the sport before a motorcycle accident nearly severed his right leg at the knee. He made a miraculous comeback and was back on skis within five months, and his nickname The Herminator seems apt. He is depicted, in the article, as a skiing machine, treated by the most advanced doctors and medical techniques: a real-life Ivan Drago. Maier once challenged Arnold Schwarzenegger to an arm wrestling match and won.
Meanwhile, Bode Miller is depicted as an athletic savant (state tennis champion and soccer star) who brought enormous natural talent to the sport of alping skiing but never seemed able to capitalize on it with proper technique. He always ignored his instructors and skiied slightly out of control, leaning back, body flailing, turning late, usually crashing out of runs. Then, one day, a sales rep put a pair of hourglass-shaped carving skis in his hands, and he never looked back. Other professional skiers were too proud to use what were thought of as tools to aid recreational skiers, but the carving power of the skis was perfect for Miller's technique and vaulted him to stardom.

Comparing the candidates on key issues

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The NYTimes has organized, concise candidate profiles online. However, they should place the candidate's stances on key election issues into a tabular format. It would make a handy printout on a tabloid-sized page.
The Washington Post has an interactive Flash graphic covering similar topics but also adds a feature to compare any two candidates on any key election issue.
Both features are missing a page for Bush, though his views are shown on the election issue pages at the NYTimes. On many, it's pretty cut and dried where he stands versus all the Democratic candidates.

Review: The Company

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A fictional movie, yet it feels like a documentary: its plot is held so lightly in the hand it seems to slip through one's hands like sand, yet by movie's end we have a panoramic understanding of life in Chicago's Joffrey Ballet. On the other hand, the movie's dialogue and editing make less of an attempt at assembling into a linear plot or tracing a discernible dramatic path than even the roughest of documentaries. The movie feels like a multi-layered composition, dozens of stories overlapping, criss-crossing, starting and ending mid-stream.
Most of the dancing is beautiful, filmed in a gauzy haze, and the sounds of the fabric and human bodies as they slide and bounce against the stage are a feast for the ears. Malcom McDowell is humorous as the upbeat company director who delegates and deflects with casual aplomb, and Neve Campbell is convincing as one of the star dancers dealing with the demands of being a world-class dancer. The most organic movie one will see in years; those who go to the theater to be man-handled may be disappointed.