Why are you so loud?

“Growing up in working-class neighborhoods unfettered by Victorian notions of proper forms of speaking, we competed with others in our class to be heard. A sure-fire formula for success was volume, frequency, and ostentatiousness in speech. In the middle-class environment of the university, such tactics are frowned upon as wholly inappropriate. Consequently, we both daily struggle with conforming our voices to the dictates of appropriate speech while at the same time holding true to our backgrounds.”
--Stephen Muzzatti and Vincent Samarco “Reflections From the Wrong Side of the Tracks: Class, Identity, and the Working-Class Experience in Academe

“Why are you so loud?”

While you might think the question has always been asked of me, I was never aware of the fact that I spoke too loudly until I came to college. Entering graduate school has only increased the frequency with which I am asked this question.

Until recently, I had always tried to answer this question in the individualistic, medicalized, and hegmonically bourgeois acceptable form that I so despise being offered in response to any other question.

The story actually fits the individualistic mode quite well—I was born temporarily deaf and have had problems with my ears all my life, notably when I was 8 and a bad sinus infection left my left ear drum shattered and destroyed my eustachian tube, which makes it very difficult for me to hear myself. Not to mention a long career in the louder musics, which while it may not have done a great deal of damage, has certainly not helped my hearing situation.

However, only upon reading my old friend Muzzatti’s account of growing up in a working-class neighborhood (and the education system you enter because of your neighborhood) did I finally apply the sociological training I'm wasting my life on to my own situation. While I'm sure my individual medical history helps explain my high-volume speech, it doesn't explain my "aggressive" speaking style.

Of course, "aggressive" is again the label applied by those educated in nicer schools, where everyone politely waits their turn to be called on, and you don't have to have the windows open with traffic and construction going on 15 feet away because you have air conditioning to deal with the heat, and you don't have to deal with the cacophony of students being constantly disciplined, etc.

So I guess one could argue I'm just a product of an upbringing that not many folks in higher academia share. Or I'm just a boorish ass. They're both plausible.

Molly Ivins, R.I.P.

The reports of Molly Ivin's death are sadly not greatly exaggerated.

With the usual caveat that I don't really agree with her on everything she says (she always had way too much faith in the Democratic party), it was always fun to open the newspaper once a week to see what she had to say. Growing up in a very conservative small town, it was difficult to wade through all of the Robert Novak and Pat Buchanan op-ed pieces (yes, the Fort Dodge Messenger, in addition to poor spelling and grammar, regularly ran articles penned by the Great White Hope) and still have faith in humanity, but Molly always had something interesting and fun to say. On top of that, she proved that not everyone from Texas was...well, the kind of person you'd expect to be from Texas.

She died of cancer this morning at only 62 and will be sorely missed.

I'm fighting terrorism as hard as I can...

As always, the Simpsons have made my point far better than I ever could. Here's a verbatim quote as best as I can remember it of Homer discussing the new anti-bear patrol the city enacted in a fit of hyperbolic fear after a single sighting of a bear in town. (Let it be noted this occurred long before 9/11. They're just prescient that way.) Anyway, the following conversation took place between Homer and Lisa (from the seminal 7th-season episode "Much Apu About Nothing"):

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol is working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: [clearly not understanding the term "specious"] Thank you, honey.
Lisa: By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Hmm. How does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work. It's just a stupid rock!
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But you don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: (pause) Lisa, I'd like to buy that rock of yours.

The point, to ram it home even more ham-fistedly, is that just because something is not happening does not mean that what we're doing is preventing it. Take homeland security, for example. We've had no terrorist attacks since it was created, but a logical person could argue that this is because terrorist attacks against America are extremely rare (there are really only 3-4 such acts in that past 100 years).

But you'd be wrong to think they're doing nothing, for our homeland security forces are busy at work protecting us from promotional stunts for trippy late-night cartoon shows.

This reminds me well of a situation my pop was forced to endure only a few years back. In the super-afraid-of-our-shadows year or two immediately after 9/11, my father, humble local high-school chemistry teacher in No Where, IA, was forced to take three days away from teaching to undergo Homeland Security training on how to recognize a nuclear weapon.

It's simply impossible to list all of the reasons why this is fucking ridiculous, but they range from the fact that most people in Iowa don't even know where Fort Dodge is to the fact that I know for damn sure no one in that town has the wherewithal to spell the term "nuclear" correctly, let alone build such a device.

But in the end, I suppose this should make us all happy, for it proves that we have no starving children, or uninsured workers, or any other cause that we need to use that money for. Meanwhile, I have this rock that I think Homeland Security officials would be very interested in purchasing...

I bet my sociological winning percentage is at least .657

Unfortunately, sociologists are obsessed with rank. I say unfortunately because we know better than that. Ranking people on things as qualitatively impossible to compare as educational and professional achievement is not only an incredibly suspect practice in every field, but we of all people should know better. There is little more than depressing than spending your undergrad career learning that standardized tests in no way predict academic performance, but instead are only correlated with parental income and are used in a variety of racist, sexist, and classist* ways to reproduce current power structures, and then have to take the GRE to get into grad school.

But it most certainly does not stop in admittance. In grad school we're all ranked against one another such that we may fight each other like wild dogs for limited funding. Then we jockey for position to get the best job, and then begin the life-long process of tearing down those around us to make ourselves look better by comparison, though some profs who shall remain nameless are much better at this than other profs who don't, say, talk to students like children or write them really nasty e-mails that they have to apologize for a couple of days later on regular occasion. And it's not just individuals, but institutions as well. For example, we here at the U are trying ever-so-desperately to crack the elusive top-10, so that we may all feel better about ourselves, I guess.

In all of this, though, very little is ever said about what determines these various rankings. How do you compare undercover ethnography at a weaponry convention to something like the highly complex statistical models run by a guy named Stinky? I certainly could never run those equations and programs (or even understand them), but I also like to think he'd have a heck of time doing what I do.

The point is, you can't really compare them. It'd be like comparing apples and cats, both of which are pretty useless to begin with.

Perchance this is why baseball seems to be the preferred sport amongst academics (if such a thing indeed exists), and not just because it's the nerdiest of the major sports. In baseball, you can clearly compare and rank players. You can figure stats for everything in existence, from batting average to earned run average, to my new favorite, the Win Probability (for an excellent discussion of win probability and a calculation for every player in professional baseball, check out this site). These kind of things make it quite easy to rank baseball players. For example, I know that Joe Mauer is a worthwhile backstop because he boasts the best batting average in the major leagues and a pretty darn good fielding average. I think I'd take him in a draft over Ken Caminiti, and not just for the drug reasons, and pretty much everyone would agree with me.

So until they find me a Sociological Win Percentage (S.W.P.) that can calculate the likelihood of an individual coming through with a clutch publication when a department really needs it, or who can finish a book that can bring home the sociological pennant, I don't think I can give any credence to the bullshit that will determine the rest of my life.

But when they do come up with the S.W.A., I'll be in line for some phat-ass paychecks, because we all know I'm the most clutch sociologist this side of Howie Becker.


*Ironically, while bemoaning a society that doesn't recognize class-divisions, the spell-check on blogger refuses to acknowledge "classist" as a word...at least it's not just sociologists who are blind, I guess

Time to learn how to be a man

Whenever my pop and I are about to do some stereo-typically masculine activity, like working on the car or chopping wood, Dad will always preface it by saying "Come on, time to learn how to be a man," which is really funny, given that my dad always eschewed your standard masculinity constraints. It was more his way of making a mildly funny joke, but also a bit of a commentary on the way most fathers around our parts acted toward their children.

Well, this weekend I took another great stride toward learning how to be a man. A few friends and I went up north not too far from the ol' Wozniak farmstead to go ice fishing. I don't know what it is about going up north that I love so much; maybe it's just the lure of childhood memories or maybe it's some sort of odd, Jeffersonion desire to re-connect with the land, but in any case, there's very few places on earth I'd rather be.

But more to the point, we spent a small amount of time ice-fishing, the first time I had ever done so without my pop. And I realized much to my chagrin that I had never learned how to take a fish off a hook, seemingly a big part of fishing. All these years I had just aimed the end of my pole and the attached fish at Dad and he's take it from there.

Seeing as no one I was with was willing to fill-in the paternalistic care role, I was forced to finally learn to do for myself. And although it was my good buddy's husband instead of my dad teaching me how to do it, I couldn't help but feel that I had taken a significant step in the right direction.

Now if I have children someday I can teach them how to be men. Or at least take their fish off the hook for them.

Where's my Steve Van Zandt?

I've often joked that I'd like to be Art Garfunkel more than anyone else in history. While he contributed basically nothing to the project (look at any Simon and Garfunkel album and he co-wrote one song, at best), he is half of arguably the most famous musical duo of the 20th century.

But I was never that serious, it was just a play on the fact that I'd rather cruise through life living off the success of others than do anything meaningful myself, an overly-cynical expression of my youthful angst, I suppose.

However, the other day, I realized I don't want to be Art Garfunkel. I want to be Bruce Springsteen.

The earth-shattering realization actually came to me while listening to a John Frusciante solo album. For all intents and purposes, Frusciante is the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But nobody outside of music nerds knows who he is; rather, everyone knows who Anthony Keadis is, the man who brings nothing to the table but meandering and meaningless lyrics.

Much the same can be said of Springsteen, though not to the same degree. I mean, I love the Boss as much as the next fella, but we gotta admit, if it weren't for Steve throwing down on some good lead guitar. Bruce pretty much just brings the heartfelt lyrics and gruff and tumble good looks, all of which I love, but without the rest of the E Street Band, he'd be just another dude in a coffee shop strumming the guitar.

So I've determined that I can pull that off. I'm ok with the pen, I can strum a few chords, and if I can grow facial hair someday, I could have grizzled good looks as well. All I really need is a much more talented by not a attention-starved band mate to carry me to glory.

Back in business...sort of

Been on a big break from blogging lately, but unlike most things in my life, this one is not due to laziness. Rather, of the many new improvements to blogger, the fact that you can apparently not use it anymore on a Mac is by far my favorite. As such, I can only blog when I'm at the office, and I'm not at the office during break, so you see my predicament.

I survived going home to No Where, IA, but it was a close one. I mean, I really love spending time with my folks, I just wish they lived somewhere else. What probably hurt the most about going back there (besides the complete cultural vacuum) is the fact that I really felt like Zach Braff in Garden State. I had it all--the emotional emptiness, the use of anything I could ingest to take me from reality, the hanging out with old friends who can best be described as friends of geographic convenience, all of it. Except, of course, for the cute girl to fall in love with and teach me the meaning of life while pulling me from my existential angst. All in all, it's kind of a kick in the pants to have a life that so closely parallels a mediocre-at-best movie that's ruined by the third reel.

But I did get some kick-ass presents, and as we all know, the accumulation of material objects is the only point to my life, so I'm happy now. I'm now the proud owner of digital camera. And before you think I'm so very bourgeois now, I'll let you know that the last camera I owned was a 110 millimeter that required the external long-packs of flashes that came 8 to a stick. It goes to show you how old-school I am for a 24 year old.

My pop also fixed the giant hole in my dash in the way only he can. It really is a work of beauty, but you simply have to see it to believe it. Maybe I'll post a picture of it with my fancy new digital camera, but for now, suffice to say that that man can do anything with a 2x4 and spare parts.

Oh, and in current events, we just lost the 3,000 American and God only knows how many Iraqis. And the anti-war movement was right about everything. But certainley pulling out troops out now would be foolish, because the invasion is doing so much good for them and the Iraqi people.

They just take and take and take

So this past weekend, my friend Sheryl, who needs constant reminders to lock the door when she exits the car and yet often forgets anyway, forgot to lock the passenger side door after exiting my car.

Well, some opportunistic folks helped themselves to my car stereo whilst I slept. Now don't get me wrong, I don't really care about the shitty car stereo, but they also took the cupholders.

The fucking cupholders!

What are they going to do with my cupholders?!? Were they in the process of taking the cd player (which they honestly couldn't re-sell for more than $5--I'm sure of it) and all of sudden they thought about how thirsty petty theft makes them? Or in addition to the vast number of CDs they have but have nothing in which to play them, they similarly have a great number of drinks but no place to set them?

The irony, of course, is that the cupholders were poorly designed, so if you actually put a drink in them, it would bump into the buttons on the stereo and randomly change songs and setting whenever you hit a bump. So being the eternal wide-eyed optimist that I am, my first thought was "Well, they took my stereo, but at least now I can use my cupholders without them being annoying and messing with my music."

And that was when I noticed they were gone, and a single tear rolled down my cheek.

Of course, in tribute to both my eclectic musical tastes and the current age of internet downloads, the 2 dozen CDs sitting in the back seat were untouched, but at least they were nice enough to tear out my glove box as well, so that I found a bunch of old cool stuff I had tucked down in the bottom of it that I may never have found had they not been so nice as to do that for me.

And fortunately, this all happened but a few days before I have a nice 4.5 hour drive home for the holidays. Oh, and the drivers-side seat in the car is broken so that if you lean any weight on it, it just falls over. I guess what I'm saying, is that it's a traditional Wozniak Christmas this year.

Quality down-home video production

Two great friends of the blog have recently finished a couple of great video shorts and got them up on youtube. I know the ol' tube has gotten a great deal less fun now that they've removed all of the copy-righted materials from the site, but this is the original reason it was invented anyway: for friends to show off their ridiculous video projects to those who live far away. Enjoy the finest Iowa has to offer below. I would suggest viewing the Ritz if you only have a moment, but even though Meatsloaf is about 9 minutes long, they will most likely be 9 of the best minutes of your day.

Enjoy!

The Ritz:


Meatsloaf:

Students say the darndest things...

I tried posting this before, but I've found that one of the new and improved features of the stupid new beta blogger that they made me upgrade to is that it no longer works on Macs, which is very convenient when all you have at home is a Mac. Yep, it's definitely a huge upgrade. Why is it that people can never leave well enough alone? Why are we constantly getting pointless upgrades that serve only to make life more of a hassle? Ah, but before I sound like too much of an elderly curmudgeon, on with the post I originally wrote at home and then was published as a blank entry.

I recently finished grading somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 term papers, which was not a task I looked forward to, for many reasons. There's the obvious reason that I don't particularly enjoy spending a solid week doing basically nothing but reading student papers. But more so than that, I was scared of the papers themselves. I've graded papers before, both as an undergrad and a grad student, so I was long ago disabused of the notion that college students can write. For example, in the short essays on their midterm, this was a popular response:

Question: Define the term "secret deviance"

Answer: Secret deviance is deviance that is secret.

Brilliant! You know, when you read things like this, it's almost insulting. I mean, did they really think a response like this would garner them many points? Well, everything garners some points, because I'm a softie, but not very many. It kind of blows the mind. What was the thought process? Were students sitting their thinking "All right, I wrote the word down again and added two more words and made a sentence out of it. I nailed it!"?

Well, it turns out the term papers were much, much better. Though I'm sure some sort of ethics code prevents me from reprinting any portion of them here, I wish I could, as they were some pretty amazing essays. The assignment was to write about your own deviant career over the years and do the obligatory sociological explanation of it all. But what these folks wrote about was pretty amazing. Many of the students in the class have been through so much more than I'll ever see, and they seem to have come out of it pretty well.

So I guess that's the trade-off for academia--spending all weekend grading papers instead of having fun, but ending up with much more faith in humanity. I guess I'll take that.

Help stop military recruiters in the Twin Cities

Those plucky young Youth Against War and Racism (YAWR) kids are back at it again. This time, they're making a concerted effort to get military recruiters out of their high schools, or at least to limited their currently unfettered access to students.

But they can't do it alone! That's where you come in.

Central High students have been campaigning for over a year now to get military recruiters out of their school, but recruiters have no far only stepped up their presence. That's why the Central High chapter of Youth Against War and Racism is making the following demands on the principal, school board, and superintendent:

1) Restrict military recruiters to the Career Resource Center and prevent any unsupervised contact with students.
2) Stop military recruiters coming to Central more often than any other post-secondary or job recruiting program actually comes.
3) Ensure that YAWR gets seven days notice before recruiters can enter school grounds.

Central High students presented these demands to the last meeting of the St.
Paul Board of Education, and what we're asking you to do is to join with us to hold the Board accountable to address our demands at the next school board meeting on December 19th. Here's what YOU can do:

1) Show up to the meeting at 6:30 pm on December 19th and show your support. The meeting is located in the District Administration Building at 360 Colborne Street in St. Paul.
2) Send out an announcement to your friends asking others to come show support.
3) Write the school board, principal, and superintendent a letter expressing your endorsement of these demands and send us a copy at against.war@gmail.com so we're aware of it.

Here is the contact information for the various officials:

Superintendent Meria J. Carstarphen
Administration Building, 360 Colborne St., St. Paul, MN 55102
supt.carstarphen@spps.org

Principal Mary Mackbee
Central Senior High School, 275 Lexington Pkwy., St. Paul, MN 55104
mary.mackbee@spps.org

Board of Education (and all members)
360 Colborne St., St. Paul, MN 55102

Individual board members' e-mails:

Elona Street-Stewart, Chair - elona.street-stewart@spps.org
Tom Conlon, Clerk - thomas.conlon@spps.org
Anne Carroll, Director - anne.carroll@spps.org
Al Oertwig, Director - al.oertwig@spps.org
Kazoua Kong-Thao, Vice-Chair - kazoua.kong-thao@spps.org
John Brodrick, Treasurer - john.brodrick@spps.org
Tom Goldstein, Director - tom.goldstein@spps.org

To contact Central High YAWR, call Shane Davis at 651-587-6923 or e-mail shane89@gmail.com

Am I the luckiest man alive?

Last night after a good rowdy couple of hours of socialism, the comrades and I headed to the bar as per tradition. And while there's always bar trivia going on, I've always just been content to shout out the answers at random, thereby either helping those who didn't know it, or hurting those who did and were hoping that others didn't. Or, on the rare occasion when I was wrong, doing the exact opposite. Regardless, I'm sure it just served to annoy everyone, and I'm cool witht hat.

But last night, I thought it was time to put my hat in the ring and prove that I could play more than the spoiler. And wouldn't you know it, me and 3 comrades, also known as Team Totally Tubular Radical...to the Max (the first round of questions were 80s themed), took home the championship amongst some stiff competition.

The prize? A Miller High Life t-shirt. Now, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't drink High Life if you paid me, just because I've neevr typically enjoyed horse piss. And I certainley don't want to wear some stupid dude-bro-esque beer shirt, but this one I will wear with pride, for it marks me as champion of trivial knowledge.


The Miller High Life girl raises her glass to the champions of trivia

Call me crazy...

but I believe the toaster is the laziest appliance in the house

The healthiest state in the Union

The United Health Foundation has just ranked Minnesota the healthiest state in the Union for the fourth year in a row.

We were discussing this today in class when Uggen made the point that Minnesota continually ranks so high because we are one the best states at insuring everyone, although we’re still far behind where we should be.

I’m not a Minnesotan by birth, though I’ve got plenty of connections and now live here. And even though I’m not typically one to be very rah-rah about anything a government does at pretty much any point (I know, I know…so cynical at such a young age), but I must share the Gunnar Nelson Look-Alike contest winner’s opinion that it does fill one with a fair amount of pride in their little corner of the earth to have such distinctions heaped upon them.

It’s not a unicorn…

It’s a horse with a sword on his head and he protects my hopes and dreams


Although I actually have a fondness for unicorns (my moonshine is labeled “Uncle Jesse’s Unicorn Shine”…and I still sleep with a stuffed unicorn I’ve had since childhood…and, well that’s enough about my unicorns), I too have felt the sting of having one’s fragile masculinity attacked for keeping a journal.

But all that aside, lately I’ve been wondering what my journal says about me. I mean, I lead a fairly interesting life. I’m not exactly climbing mountains, but it’s not a too rare occurrence for the FBI to wake me up in the morning, and I always seem to end up in the oddest situations. Which I understand doesn’t necessarily mean I have a very interesting life, but I think it’s fair to say that semi-interesting stuff happens to me on semi-regular occasion.

Anyhoo, the point is that none of this is reflected in my journal. Leafing through it out of boredom the other day, I realized I have basically nothing in there except for women-related things. Like if I’m having girl troubles, or I run into an ex, or some such thing. Like that’s all that happens in my life.

So I got to thinking: what does this say about me? Reading it I just had the most horrible feeling about myself, like I’m an over-weight secretary with a hunky firemen calendar up on my cubicle wall that goes home every night and cries herself to sleep with a carton of ChunkyMonkey and wishes she wasn’t always just a bridesmate.

Well, ok, maybe I’m not quite that bad, but I do need to get out of the house more often…

Peace: 42, Giant Evil Weapons Manufacturer : 0

Very short court day yesterday, as all charges were dropped before we even got in front of a judge. But the victory was much larger than that.

As for the background of the story, Alliant Tek Systems, headqurtered inEdina (of course, very little manufacturing actually goes on there, it's just a nice tax-haven location), is the world's leading producer of illegal weaponry. For instance, they were the clever folks who "discovered" how deadly depleted uranium was and began using it in weapons that vaporize the enemy and leave their nation poisoned for the rest of existence (DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years). Up until this, people had been foolishly throwing it away. Silly idiots.

But that's just one of many weapons they produce. But the one great point of consistency in their productions is that every weapon they produce is illegal under international law. Every single one. And we're the criminals...but that's another story.

Anyway, over 13 months ago (so much for a speedy trial), myself and 41 other people who are part of AlliantAction showed up at the corporate headquarters to ask the board of directors to stop breaking the law and to tell the employees that they are all facing conviction under the Geneva code (remember, since the 40s you can't just say you're following orders anymore). Needless to say, they weren't too happy with us being there and removed us from the parking lot (we couldn't actually get inside the building, of course).

Now, in a bit of local history, up until this point, the offense had been an aggravated misdemeanor, which meant you could get a jury trial if you so well pleased. Now the problem with that is that hippies tend to be good orators (it's about all we can do), and juries have a pesky problem of being swayed by "logic" and "compassion for fellow human beings." So Alliant, along with the city council, changed the ordinance to be a simple misdemeanor, meaning we could now only have a bench trial. Judges aren't really as easily swayed, since they're on the payroll of the city, which is on the payroll of Alliant.

Well, since they were playing hardball, so were we. Usually in a situation like this, people such as us will stipulate to the facts, which essentially means we admit we broke the law, but we're arguing that we're justified in doing so. Well, this time we refused and said they'd have to subpoena every employee who saw us tresspass and every officer who made an arrest to come in and identify us. Well, seeing as they would have to pay 20-some officers overtime for what looked like a trial that could stretch several weeks, they cited monetary constraints (although they probably just didn't have a good case) and dropped the charges.

Not ones to give up, we have now set up a page on the group's website where we'll print the testimony we would have given, and the city prosecutor has agreed to take our concerns to Alliant and urge them to come to a city council meeting where we air our greivances.

Now, I know this will change very little, but you can do radical pacifist peace work your entire life and never get the city prosecutor of a wealthy suburb to (begrudgingly) agree to put the screws on the most powerful corporation in town. As far as I'm concerned, this is probably the biggest victory I'll ever see in my lifetime of activism, so I'm feeling pretty damned good right now.

So, hey, cheer up my friends. If we can win this, certainly you can win just as much, if not more.

The only way to defeat our robot over-lords

With this perfect paradox:

P1: The statement is only funny if said by Sinbad.

P2: Nothing Sinbad says is funny.

Q: If the statement is said, will it be funny?

Man, their fucking logical robot brains would explode with the implications of even attempting to answer that question

My life at the kiddie table

Another Thanksgiving come and gone, and I've yet to sit at the big people table, but I get ahead of myself. You see, Thanksgiving has always been celebrated on my mother's side of the family. My father was the oldest of the three boys, and only one of them had a child, and he has since passed away (God rest his soul), and the other is a bit of a recluse, only available to you when he wants to be available. As such, it would have been a rather cozy affair.

My mother, on the other hand, was the youngest of 9 children, almost all of whom had children of their own. I, being her youngest child, am the youngest of the whole lot. Hell I have cousins who have children who are only a few years younger than me. These second cousins, or cousins twice removed, or whatever they are are even starting to have their own children, so these third cousins twice removed (does anyone know how they actually figure out these labels?), these gradnchildren of my cousins, are already coming. So I'm not the youngest person present, but young by my family's standards.

As such, I've yet to make it to the big people's table. At 24 years old, I'm still stuck sitting in a plastic half-chair, awkwardly eating my turkey at a table my knees don't fit under, with the sparkling conversation only infants and their angry young parents can provide.

Now my brother is only 2.5 years older than me, but he avoids all of this mess because he's married, which grants him some level of maturity, so gets big people table access. Even his wife, who I would like to point out is younger than me, also gets big peopple table love.

Now, as I've posted many times before, I was dangerously close to getting married at one point in time, and I as I contorted my body to fit on the oddly shapped couch that was by bed in my aunt's basement while my brother and his wife slept comfortably in a bed upstairs in the part fo the house that the central heat hits, I pondered how different my life would be if that had happened.

Would I be conferred all the legitimacy of an elder if I only had the social marker of marriage to do the work for me? I highly doubt I'd actually be any more mature. In fact, I could probably argue pretty effectively that marrying your college sweetheart serves only to stunt your emotional growth, but it seems like regardless of your age, married people are just assumed to be more mature and well-adjusted people. After all, they got someone to agree to spend their life with them didn't they?

So, anyway, I do't know if it would have made any difference, or if it would have even gotten me to the big people table, but you do start to wish you hadn't screwed up the one good relationship you've ever had, if for no other reason that it means you get off of the couch and into a real bed.

Let's Hear it for the Boy

Yesterday, the Baseball Writers Association of America named Canada's finest export, Justin Morneau, the Most Valuable Player of the American League, in what's sure to be one of the most controversial votes in a while, if not for the fact that it was given to a player on a team that's *gasp* not on the coast, then because Joe Buck's Boyfriend, a mildly talented player on a very expensive team, was denied his lifetime-acheivement MVP.

Now I don't need to point out that the good Doctor was the singular ofensive spark on the team with by-far the best record in baseball after June 8th, or that I'm sure that somewhere in the city right now Joe is taking him out for some congratulatory Jimmy Johns, because these are things everyone knows.

A lesser known story goes that when Justin met Larry Walker (the only other Canadian-born player to win an MVP) this year at the World Baseball Classic, Larry autographed a bat for him reading "To Justin: Make Canada proud." Justin lists as one of the greatest moments of his life. Perhaps someday soon, a young Canadian will be fondly remembering the time he got to meet the best Canadian player in Baseball, and the long line of cuddly-looking Canadian baseball players will be unbroken.

So to recap the Twins' season:

2 Silver Sluggers
1 Gold Glover
Batting champ
Pitching triple crown winner
Cy Young winner
MVP
Division title

Not a bad season for a team that was left for dead after May and whose entire payroll is outearned by over 20 individual players in the league. Now let's just hope we can get some starting pitching nailed down for next year.

Our boy on the Daily Show

Minnesota's newly-minted congressman Keith Ellison was recently on the Daily Show in one of the funnier clips I've seen in a long time. The clip is actually of an interview that Ellison had with CNN's Glenn Beck, in which Beck (presumably a liberal, becuase CNN is the leader of the liberal media) challenges Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, to prove that he isn't a terrorist.

To his credit, Ellison handles it well, with a brief response and a "did-he-really-just-fucking-say-that?" look on his face, but it can't help but make you feel a little depressed about the state of our nation when it is actually seen as legitimate journalism to make a U.S. Representative prove he's not a terrorist simply because of his religion.

I'd like to come up with some sort of snappy joke about it, but as usual, Mr. Stewart does a much better job than I could in the clip below:

Humorous random image

Immy-grants and me

I've never been one to bash un-documented immigrants, for the thousands of reasons anyone using "logic" can come up with. But over the past 8 months, I've gained an even deeper appreciation for why folks who want to come to our fair nation would be inclined to bypass the official process.

The word Kafka-esque is thrown around a lot these days (isn't it?), but if you have ever dealt with immigration in any way, you'll know what I mean. If you haven't, watch Brazil, and then you'll begin to understand what it's like dealing with the INS.

To put it all in context, my brother came back from Thailand last spring with a fiance. Since he works a real job and can't always be shuttling her back and forth to the immigration office, (conveniently located in Burnsville, because we all know how common it is for recent immigrants to own dependable vehicles) this fell upon me. Highlights include the day they canceled the application process because they forgot to send her a letter telling her about her next appointment, which she then didn't show up for for some reason (probably because she didn't know about it), and then sent her files to storage in D.C., even though they are not supposed to do that until 2 months after closing the file. So who do you think was responsible for paying the $150 fee to retrieve the files that shouldn't have been sent off in the first place, and even if they were supposed to be sent off, should not have been sent for at least another 45 days? At least, in their defense, we also got an extended stern lecture about how their mistake was somehow entirely our fault.

I could tell many more such ridiculous stories, but it would take years to document them. All told, it took my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, and myself (total number of college degrees held between us: 12) two years and well over $2,000 to complete the application process for a greencard.

But it all came to culmination today as Nok finally received her 2-yr. green card, not more than 15 minutes ago.

Of course, that means that in 2 years we have to start the process all over again, but for now, we can at least breathe a sigh of relief and relax for a minute.

But do me a favor, will you? The next time you hear someone complain about "illegal" immigrants, punch them in the face for me, please.

I know what you're trying to do, you bastards

In google's contuining attempt to own the entire damn internet, they have even infected my humble li'l blogging site. In logging in, I was informed that I could now enhance my blog with all these cool and easy to use features (presumably, slicing and dicing a variety of fruits, vegetables, leather shoes, and exhaust pipes while staying razor sharp is included), and the only requirement is that I "log in with [my] google account."

Well you know what, motherfuckers, I ain't got a google account. So don't go acting all normal like I don't suspect that what you hide as an innocent assumption is really a brilliantly devious way to get me to sign up for yet another account I don't want/need.

No thank you, google jerks. I'll continue using the shitty, hard-to-use, featureless version to blog, thank you very much.

Making football more (or less) interesting

In my continuing efforts to be "with it" and understand what all the damn kids are talking about these days, I finally joined a fantasy football league this year, making me possibly the last person in America to do so.

Now, I was already a big football fan. I usually take less credit hours in the fall because I know I'm not going to get anything done on the weekends, despite my best efforts. If there' football on the t.v., I'm just going to be watching it. It's a sad truth. Though, at least I haven't started spending friday nights watching high-school game telecasts on pblic access...yet.

But fantasy football makes you a fan in weird, unpredictable ways. I've found that the attention on single-player performances instead of teams has this weird double effect. In one way, it makes the game so much more exciting. Take last night for instance, in a game I could not care too much less about (seeing as if the Vikings get anywhere near the playoffs this year, it won't be in the form of catching the Bears and winning the division), I was ecstatic seeing Devin Hester tie Nathan Vasher's record for the longest TD in NFL history. Why? Because in my league, special teams TDs count as defensive points, and my normally stout Bears D had given up too many points this week. Especially in light of how I sat out Chad Johnson on the best damn day any receiver is ver going to have because he had been underperforming lately.

So as you can see, fantasy sports makes the other 14 games that don't feature your team more exciting. But the it hit me when my mother (an avid Packers fan) called to brag about the local game. I realized I had absolutely no clue how bad the Vikings were this year. A team without a marketable superstar is useless to fantasy owners, and so I had been paying the amount of attention they deserved: none.

This from a guy who used to be able to name both starters and first-string backups for both sides of the ball, and now I don't even know their record.

It's an interesting paradox, but one that I think will be resolved by the fact that the high scoring 612 Murda Squad is very likely to make the playoffs and put a big ol' payout in my pocket, whereas the hapless Vikings will be lucky to stumble backwards into a first-round playoff loss.

Meanwhile, the countdown to July 27th has officially begun...

Which old witch? The wicked witch!

I know this doesn't change anything at all, but he's finally gone, and damned if it doesn't feel good.

Feelin' on your duty

You can vote today, probably. And if you can, you probably should.

Just remember that voting is such a miniscule part of the political process that it should largely be viewed as a formality one does during breaks in trying to make actual change.

Today would also be the anniversary of the day when two Caroline Panthers cheerleaders were caught (allegedly) making out and fighting in a bathroom stall.

I'm not too sure how to connect these two phenomena, but they seem to go together in some odd way...

The "hard" sciences ruin everything

We in the "social" sciences are often looked upon as not real scientists. We're told that wat we do is play around with social settings, not cold, hard, "real" science. Now, obviously anybody with critical thinking skills (which would exclude most of those in the "hard" sciences) knows that this is simply not true. We can test social "reality" (if such a thing exists) just as well as physicists can test physical "reality" (again, if such a thing exists).

Think about it: design a test to prove gravity exists. I mean, we all know gravity exists, but can you prove it? No, you can't. You're probably thinking you can just pick something up and let it go a bunch of times and be done with it. But that doesn't prove gravity exists, it just suggests that for some reason that object is attracted to the ground. For the record, physicists still doesn't even know whay gravity works like it does (my personal favorite idea is string theory, and not just for its trippy, scientist-hippy implications).

The point is, you can no more criticise sociologists for saying that the effects of class are real even though we can't technically prove that classes exist or how they're reproduced (though we have some damn good ideas) any more than you can say gravity doesn't exists beause physicists can't technically prove it does or figure out why it works (though they too have some good ideas on the subject).

So, to recap: the "social" sciences are no less of a persuit than the "hard" sciences.

In fact, I'd like to suggest they're better. Take the case of vampires. You ask a sociologist about vampires, and we'll give you a great tale perhaps of the functions the notion of the existance of vampires might serve, or a reading of the cultural schemas that give birth to ideas of vampires, or possibly a meditation on the social forces that lead people to still give such power to the idea of vampires. That's just the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure other sociologists would give many other explanations and stories I can't even begin to think of.

But you ask a "hard" scientist about vampires, and you get some lame-ass description of how they'remathematically impossible.

Now where the hell is the fun in that?

R.I.P. Red Auerbach

Amidst all the hagiography surrounding the death of Red Auerbach these past couple days, there's one fact that no matter how much it's said (and it hasn't been said very much) really seems to be underplayed.

We all know the story of how Branch Rickey broke the baseball color barrier by hiring Jackie Robinson. There's been at least two movies made about it that I can think of off the top of my head, and I bet you'd be hard-pressed ot find a high-school history book that doesn't mention it.

But Red did so much more than that. Red hired the first black basektball player, fielded the first-ever all-black starting five, and hired the first black head coach. On top of that, he did this all in Boston, a town which hasn't exactly had the best history in terms of race relations. Baseball currently is about 17% black (the figure drops to 8% if you're only counting American-born) while basketball is roughly 77% black.

So why is it that a sport which has only a tiny fraction of black players still celebrates at every turn the breaking of their color barrier, while a sport that is overwhelmingly populated by black players makes almost no mention of when and where their color barrier was broken?

I've been pondering this quite a bit lately, but I can't seem to figure it out. Could it be that baseball is still "America's game" and as such, it's a bigger deal? Or could it be due to the fact that basketball has come to be seen as a "black" sport, so breaking the color barrier there doesn't seem as momentous?

What do you think?

Wozniaks playing poker?

Had a coulpe of rounds of low-stakes poker with friends last night and when the chips were all counted and the beers all drank and the smack all talked, my sister-in-law and myself had walked away with all of the money, making it a clean Wozniak sweep.

While this may not sound like much to the casual observer, as far as I can tell, this marks the first time that Wozniaks have won anything ever.

As such, I feel as if we should both pull a Jim Brown and retire form the world of barely-competitive poker while we are on the top.

Not that that's going to happen, but I just think it should be on the record that I was strongly considering it when I come home next week with no money at all.

Politics, politics, politics

For those in the Minneapolis area...

There's this war going on. If you still think it's a good idea, you are either A) someone who has experienced a massive head trauma, or 2) are George W. Bush.

You don't want to be either of those things.


So come on out tommorow to the state capitol in St. Paul at 1:00 for a huge rally against the war. If you're so inclined, you can hang around afterwards to attend a civil-disobediance training, put on by Youth Against War and Racism.

What else do you have going on on a saturday afternoon? There's nothing stopping you. Besides, it's going to be a beautiful fall day, so you may as well come out and enjoy the weather.

Plus this way, years from now when this is seen as a more idiotic debacle than Vietnam, you won't have to shuffle ackwardly and stare at your feet when your children ask you why you didn't do anything to stop it.

The screaming 13 year-old girl to their Beatles

Why is it that whenever you're in the presence of someone you truly respect, it is so very hard not to reduce whatever you have to say to the kinds of fawning questions a prepubescent girl would shout at a pop star?

Case in point, I went to a book-discussion/signing of "Destined for Destiny," the new George W. Bush autobiography, written with help from Scott Rikkers, Editor-in-Chief of the Onion and creative force behind weeklyradioaddress.com. It was a good and very entertaining presentation and a nice insight into what's undoubtedly the best printed satire of our time, the Onion.

However, when it came to the quesiton and answer session, I (as always) completely lost the ability to make an intelligent point. For example, one could have probed their decision to add a sports section, which like all good parody, requires a fairly deep understanding of the subject matter. Given that the Onion is read primarily by hipsters, punks, and bourgeois intellectuals (all of whom disdain sports), it seems like a pretty risky venture. But it's clearly done quite well by a writing staff that obviously pays a great deal of attention to developments in the sporting world. It'd be really interesting to hear the impetus for such a creation.

But instead, the best I could muster was some variation of "Man, you guys are so funny. How come you're so funny?" or something like that, to which he could only ackwardly mumble something and move on to the next person.

Sigh...

Oh Day of Days!

Happy Mole Day to one and all. Of course, those of you in the know have probably already had your celebrations, as the day officially starts at 6:02 in the morning.

For those who don't know, the mole is a unit of international measurement equaling roughly 6.02x10^23 molecules, a number which has become the base of most chemical measuring in the Western world. The number was discovered by the happy-looking gentleman, Amedeo Avagadro. Of course, you also know him as the man who hypothesized that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure have the same number of molecules, a quite revolutionary notion for his time.



The National Mole Day Foundation was founded 15 years ago in nearby Prarie-Du-Chien Wisconsin, by a highschool chemistry teacher and has since blossomed nation-wide. Growing up the son of a chemist, this was always a big holiday in the Wozniak household (sadly, I'm not joking). So make sure to have some mole-ases cookies (a joke that never gets old, apparently) and to hug a chemist, on this, their most important of days.



For more information and more hilarious pictures of the official Mole Day mascot, Burrow D. Mole, go to the official Mole Day website, moleday.org.

Handy party drink mixes

The Farmer's Breakfast
Ingredients:
Generous Helping of Jack Daniels
1 Egg
1 Unsuspecting West Coaster

Directions:
Pour half a glass of JD. Crack raw egg into it. Mix Thoroughly. Convince friend that it's a Midwestern delicacy that every drinks. Laugh heartily as he drinks it.

The Nation Sweeper
Ingredients
Jack Daniels
Bailey's Irish Cream
Kalua
International Coffee, French Sunset flavor
Grenadine
Whipped Cream
Chpped Nuts
1 Cherry (skinless)
The skin of the cherry, zested
Tangerine-Orange Listerene

Directions:
Mix JD, Bailey's, Kalua, Coffee powder, and Grenadine. Top with whipped cream and nuts, and a slice of cherry (using a whole cherry will overpower the flavor of the drink). Add cherry zest to the top. Serve with a shot of the Listerine as a chaser.

The Terrorist Sweep
Same as the nation-sweeper, but you sink the Listerene shot into it and slam it all at once.

Today's inspirational quote found scribbled in an old notebook

Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward--and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner

--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Finally, a practical application of mathematics

A disturbingly accurate assesment of my life, made by a young friend in math class:

Best Quotes from No Shame Weekend

--So I saw that new Bruce Willis movie 'Ho Stage' and there were no dancing prostitutes in it!
--It's called 'Hostage!'
--Seems to me you see a movie called 'Ho Stage' there oughtta be some Ho's dancing on a stage somewhere in it.

And then at my highly excellent party, Susan Fauldi comes up to me and says 'Hey Brett Deckers, isn't this just some macho fantasy in which business acumen is conflated with sexual prowess?' and I said 'Fuck no...darling' and then we fucked. But when Brett Deckers fucks you, he doesn't fuck you in the normal holes. No, he fucks you in a special hole only Brett Deckers knows about...

Your supposed Department of Mexicology is nothing but a fun house mirror. You hold up your distored view of Mexico and say 'this is Mexico.' Well for all of your fancy degrees and titles, you know nothing of Mexico. Mexico...is a woman.

I heard Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison had a suicide pact, but Johnny didn't keep up his end of the pact.

Dude, I heard the Tea bags there are about 100% THC...

Cover your breasts with something nice, like crumbled Oreo cookies, and your vagina with something not-so-nice, like rattle snakes

Just got back from BOBONS, the Best of the Best Of No Shame Theatre, and it was a damn good evening. Well, two evenings.

For those who don't know, No Shame Theatre started on the back of a pick up truck 20 years ago in the parking lot of the University of Iowa Theatre building and has since spread to over a dozen cities with a couple of international chapters. The only rules to No Shame are that all pieces performed must be original, under 5 minutes, and not damage the space or any of its inhabitants.

I came up through the much-less celebrated Cedar Falls chapter, but I think myself and fellow shamer Luke Pingel repped the CF pretty well. I would like to point out that the CF No Shame is now in its seventh season and going strong even though the 5 of us who started it are all long gone.

No Shame will always hold the most special of places in my heart. At the height of its run (for me at least) we played to packed houses of over 200 people a night, with kids in the aisles and sitting on the floor just to watch. Then the entire group would relocate to a college-y type party house to drink and regale one another with their humorous anecdotes. It reminded me of what I've heard Saturday Night Live was like during its prime.

The point is, No Shame will be the thing I look back upon most fondly when I'm an overwight middle-aged man who hates his life and desperately tries to re-live his best years. It was great to experience it again, as grad school leaves very little time for non-academic writing, and it's hard to find a venue like No Shame that lets anyone perform (with the exception of Open Mic nights, but let's all hope I never get that desperate).

All that said, though, there are underground rumblings of a Minneapolis chapter in the works, so keep your eyes open...

Big ups to the wounded harmoninja

A big shout-out to a good buddy, Ninja Master Sean (pictured above rocking out with Broken Arms, the world's premire political rock band), who just got back from Iraq via the intensive care ward somewhere in Germany and then Walter Reed out in dee cee. The big ol' welcome home party for him even got some good press, although it's funny to note they didn't deem it fit to publish his opinion of the war. Unless you count "mixed feelings" as his actual opinion of "it was a mistake from the start and we should never have been there."

But either way, after some scary weeks of only knowing that his humvee had been blown up and he was in intensive care somewhere, it sure is damn good to see him home and doing relatively well.

I'm reminded of what he told me once as we walked across a busy highway at 1 in the morning on a saturday night. I, being sober and quite scared, thought we should perhaps wait until traffic cleared. Sean, being a ninja master, merely replied "You go against the grain, Wozniak, and that's your problem. You see, some people go with the grain, and their life is meaningless. Some people go against the grain, and find meaning. But to truly live, you must realize you are the grain. For when you realize that, you become one with the universe. And if you are the universe, what can destroy you?"

Well, they ain't destroyed you yet buddy, but the universe sure got knicked up there for awhile.


Take care of yourself man.

Alternative Careers in Sociology, Vol. I

With apologies to Howzi, from whom I ripped off the idea

Last night I caught the Show Veronica Mars for the first time, a show that as far as I can figure out is about some spunky young lady who solves mysteries, ala Nancy Drew, but is bit more cynical and shows more skin than I ever remember Mz. Drew doing. Anyway, in last night's episode, there was a powerful guest spot from Dan "Homer Simpson" Castellaneta as a...wait for it...sociology professor. Now, for the record, he did not wear a leather jacket with tweed elbow patches on it, only to find out that it's supposed to be a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, thereby ruining a perfectly good jacket (correction, two perfectly good jackets!).

In the episode, the hard-assed sociology prof tempted his students into spending a weekend recreating the Zimbardo prison experiment (well, they didn't call it that, but 'taint to many people who did that exact study) with promises of not having to do the final paper. This got me thinking about two interesting ideas for teaching. The first would be submitting students to studies that would never pass the IRB instead of making them do papers I have to grade.

But the other thought was about how you rarely see sociology profs portrayed on television, or hear about sociologists in general. As Uggen recently pointed out, there are many famous sociology majors floating out there, form Dr. King, to Joe Theisman, to Regis, to Pete Seeger, and even the Gipper himself, Ronnie Reagan. While every list you can find wih a quick and easy google search turns up the same list of names compiled by the ASA a few years back, surely there must be famous sociology majors missed by that one list. It has now become my mission to find those people, and out them for the sociologists that they are.

The sad thing is, I'm legitmately kind of excited about this. Sigh...

Just a li'l more baseball

The magical season in 3 minutes.

Yet another homoerotic tribute

I know there have been 50,000,000 (roughly) posts about how miraculous the Twins season has turned out to be, and that I personally have already written several. Sorry, it's just been a damn amazing season. After we lost Puck this past spring, it was a huge blow to Minnesota. He was everything we value here in the Midwest: happy, content, loyal, and hard-working. Hell, he even had the short stature and imposing gut so common amongst the simple folks out here.

The only other guy who comes close to that is Brad Radke. He may not get the acolades of Puck, but he's been an amazing man over his career. You'll never see him in the Hall of Fame, and his jersey wont get retired. Hell, in 5 years, no one outside of Minnesota will remember him. But that doesn't mean he hasn't been great. He won 20 games way back in 1997 when the Twins won only 68 games all year long. Only if you're a devoted baseball fan can you understand how fucking impossible that is. It means that he won just under 30% of the Twins games that season. I'm no baseball historian, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone else who's ever accomplished that kind of feat.

But he, possibly even more than Kirby, is emblamatic of everything that is the Minnesota Twins. He's not a name most people recognize. He's not over powering. He just gets the job done. But most of all, he's the grittiest player in any sport alive today. The man has been throwing on a torn ligament in his pitching arm and a stress-frature in his piching shoulder all season long. Has he complained once? No. Like a true Midwesterner, he simply goes out every fifth day in the rotation and pitches a damn good game, and then spends the rest of the week unable to lift his kids or even shampoo his hair because his arm won't raise, no matter what he does.

But on game day, he does it again.

He's gone after this season. He possibly may not even pitch in the postseason. But again, it's in true Midwestern fashion: to pitch again he would have to have extensive surgery, and it just isn't worth it to him. He's said that he's on his way out, and if his arm falls off, than it falls off, but he's got a job to do on the field. Not to name names, but can you see Randy Johnson, Curt Shilling, Roger Clemens, Mariano Rivera, or any of the much, much more celebrated pitchers even comtemplating saying something like that? No, no you couldn't.

Possibly one of the most important games of this entire season was the third game of a 3-game sweep of the Tigers in Detroit with Brad on the mound. A day after we heard that Franchise was out for the season (and as such, would not get Rookie of the Year, even though he still deserves it. Quick: name a better rookie. You can't. Case closed.), Brad went out and pitched a gem of 7 innings against the best team in all of baseball. I think the most telling was after he walked off the mound in the 7th, Mauer came out and gave him a huge hug. Not the manly, half-handshake-half-hug kind of thing, but a genuine thank you to the cagey old man who's literally giving his arm to the Twins.

It was hard not to get misty-eyed watching Brad pitch last night. Sure, it was the Royals. But it was a huge game we absolutely could not lose, and Radke made sure we didn't.

So he may never get the awards or the accolades that he would have gotten if he pitched like this for New York or Boston, but his worth will be measured by the fact that for generations to come, everyone who pitches or even plays in Minnesota will have their toughness and dedication measured against Bradke.

And if you ask me, I'm pretty sure he'd be just fine with that.

Good, but not good enough

Torii finally breaks number 30 (firt time ever for him, first time we've had two of 'em there since '87), Justincredible/the Good Doctor knocks in another monster one, and the Chairman gets his average back up to .349.

And we're officially in.

For the 4th time in 5 years (I suppose it's time to begin contraction talks again).

Now, let's make the best stretch of baseball ever played even better by just going ahead and winning the division as well.



If you're in Detroit, that sound you hear is the footstpes of the Twins coming up behind you

Arrrrrrrrrrgh!

Though I be sure that ye already know, today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

So...uh...don't ye forget to talk like a pirate today, me hearties!

Sophomoric humor

Found humor is always the best...do yourself a solid and click here.

Sports, sports, sports, sports

So I've been blogging a good deal about sports lately (even thought I know they detract badly needed funding from the arts and sciences), but I suppose it's just a function of the time of year. The playoff race is heating up (poor Liriano looks like he's back to the DL), football has started, and more importantly, school has started, meaning nothing interesting happens to me, so I'm struggling to find things to write about.

But I found this little gem online today. Apparently the back-up punter (who knew such people existed) for Northern Colorado stabbed the starting punter in the leg in an attempt to win the starting spot.

Now that's the kind of Can-Do! attitude that I think we should be encouraging more of in our collegiate athletes these days. It prepares them not just for the game of football, but for their future career in the world of corporate leg-stabbing.

Why you've gotta love independent leagues

I was really not a big fan of sports outside of the pros. College is ok, high school recalls too many beatings, and amateur leagues are just that. You always have to kind of figure that if these people were really good at the game, they'd be getting paid for it.

But my opinion has been gradually changing over the past summer as I've been exposed to more minor league and independent league sports than I could shake a stick at. There's something quaint and homey about the indy leagues, and it is refreshing in a way to watch guys play for peanuts just because they love the game. Of course, this isn't to say that they wouldn't jump at a chance to play in the bigs, but unlike so many professional players, they continue to play despite making rather humble money for professional athletes.

And, again unlike the bigs, minor leagues and indy leagues really cater to fans. Tickets are reasonable prices, and understanding that the game (especially the game of baseball) can get rather boring without the story arcs of overexposed professional athletes, they do much more to keep the games exciting. While some people decry the Donut Burger and promos such as vasectomy night as cheap gimmicks that hurt the game, I'm sure the average fan appreciates the inherent humor of them.

But for me, it really comes back to the players. The guys are pretty universally just people who weren't good enough to make/last in the bigs and bring a kind of blue-collar ethic to the game. Case in point: last night, players from both the Saint Paul Saints and the Fort Worth Cats were arrested for brawling at a bar in St. Paul after the Cats beat the hometown Saints for the American Association League championship.

Can you even imagine pro players all going to a bar together after the game, let alone both teams going out together? And then, can you imagine them doing that after the world series? And then can you even begin to imagine them being so into the game that they get into a fist fight after the game?

Nah, me neither. Guess those guys who can't play quite as well may be the more entertaining players after all.

Just in case you've forgotten

Donald Rumsfeld discussing the possibility of invading Iraq in November, 2002:

"I can't say if the use of force would last five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."

Some congressional reps are moving to a vote of no confidence in Rumsfeld. If you want to sign a petition to encourage them to do so, you can go here.

Found quote in an old theory notebook

"After all these years of letting it roam free and unfettered in the wild, we can all rest easy knowing that we've finally domestictaed violence"

A confidential note to Bert Blyleven

It's pronounced per-ron-nah.

The T is silent.

The storm before the calm before the storm (the last storm is figurative)

OR...

"I like my beers cold, my cars fast, and my lips fa-laming!"

OR...

"First Homer Simpson steals my pig, then Cypress Hill steals my orchestra, and now Sonic Youth are in my cooler...get out of there, you kids!"




Yes, Sonic Youth opening for the Flaming Lips at the Minnesota State Fair.

I'll give you a moment to do a double-take, rub your eyes, and then snuff out the joint. For yes, these two bastions of alt/noise/psychedlia rock were in full force at the MN State Fair, even despite the torrential downpour that preceeded the show.

And it was a damn good show, indeed. Even my grizzled, rock-show vet older brother was amazed at how tight Sonic Youth sounded. Looks like in their older years these kids have put in a bit more rehearsal time. Even though Kim's voice sounded terrible (she must have a cold or something, because I've never heard her sound that bad), the group sounded pretty damn tight for what is ostensibly a noise band at many points. And in her defense, she's still pretty energetic (and foxy) for a woman of her age.

Highlight: Thurston and the guitarist who isn't Thurston (I'm obviously not that big of a Youth fan) playing their guitars by slamming their fretboards into each other and then rubbing their guitars wildly against one another.

It was just as sexual as it sounds.

Poor Magic Numbers. When it was announced that their equipment was "saturated" from the rain and that they would not be playing, the crowd errupted in cheers. Poor kids. But eventually, the Lips let them play two songs during their set, which actually probably gave them much more exposure than playing a full set to those few of us dedicated/bored enough to show up that early.

As far as the Flaming Lips show goes, it's hard for me not to sound like a fawning pre-teen girl at a Beatles/Backstreet Boys/currently-overinflated-talentless-pop-act show when talking about it. Their live show has been so hyped by now that I thought there was no way I wasn't going to be dissapointed by it when it inevitably failed to live up to expectations.

But I was quite wrong. The Flaming Lips stage show really does deserve all of the ridiculous hype it receives. Wayne is the consumate showman, and I can't believe how much time it must have took to plan it all out.

Though one beef I had is that setting up the show takes approximately 19 times as long as the actual show itself.

Higlight: The Lips seem to be really humble folk. During Sonic Youth's set, they simply stood stage side in full view, clearly enjoying a good band doing a good show. They gave up a portion of their show so that the opening act could get some stage time. And most shockingly of all, the Lips were right there setting up all of their equipment next to the roadies, lugging amps and heavy equipment that stars of half their stature would refuse to touch.

The only downside to it was the fact that every time Wayne stepped near the microphone, people thought the show was going to start, despite the fact most of the instruments weren't even on stage. The very loud cheers for no reason started to get rather annoying. But at least there was a humorous moment when one (hopefully) drunk fan yelled at them to "turn that shit up" when a roadie was doing a sound check on the bass.

All-in-all, I think the night was best summed up in the many times Wayne just stood at the mic, looked around, laughed to himself in amazement, and said "You know, there were never shows like this at the state fair when I was growing up."

2 Skinnee J's to the rescue!

Well, the science-huggers have finally succeded in stripping our tiniest and most loveable planet of its planet-hood. Mnemonics everywhere will have to be changed. Disney promotional tie-ins will suffer. But most of all, it is the children who will be hurt.

Fortunately, many years ago (well, okay, 1998) the band 2 Skinnee J's had already tackled this problem with their ground-breaking anthem Pluto:

With depravity,
I break lots of gravity
Blast past the atmosphere
To the last frontier
I go boldly through space and time
The sky's the limit,
But the limit isn't the sky
I break orbit by habit,
I ignite satellites and leave rings round the planets
A flying ace like that beagle,
Nevertheless this alien remains illegal
Cause their discovery don't cover me
The immigrants been left in the cold
To grow old
And disintegrate
Discriminate
Against the distant and disclaimers,
Cause small minds can't see past uranus
When i shun their race
Cause that's just a phase
And my odyssey runs in 2001 ways
And i can see clearly now like hubbell
Shoved off the shuttle,
Here's my rebuttal
It's a planet.

Who do you represent?
I represent the smallest planet
A tourney in this journey
Versus those who tried to ban it.


If you don't agree
Go see interplanet janet cause
The sun is star like
Pluto
Is planet.
So lend me all ears
And let me state my case,
About all the types of satellites we must embrace
Cause like parents'
Great-grandparents,
This planet was an immigrant,
To deport it's an offense.
It's an upstanding member of the solar system
Abide the laws of earth and make it a victim.
Of proposition
107,
When pluto spawns a moon it will apply to the heavens.
A dandy like judas of a chariot
If you demote this boat
Remote to a goat
It's like taking et's custody from elliot,
Support yours
Clearly put cause,
Simply put

Pluto is a planet. pluto!
Pluto is a planet. pluto!
Pluto is a planet. pluto!
Pluto is a planet. pluto!

Do it
For the
Children,
If not for yourself.
Pluto
Is a
Planet!

Please, won't someone think about the children?

There's a lot of crazy stuff on that internet these days

So I have this friend/improv director/math prof/"kinda" Jew (he totally eats cheeseburgers) who maintains a very quality website. Anyway, on this website is a message board, and as a favor to a friend, he put up a section of the message board solely reserved for "Discussion of dinosaur-related topics, including their extinction." Seeing as how no one had written on it at the time I first viewed it, I felt it was my civic duty to contribute to the nascent conversation.

Well, in one of many fits of boredom/real-life avoidance, I was perusing said dinosaur-related message board and found this post I had made low these many years ago. It was mildly amusing.

So I went to high school with a girl who was convinced dinosaurs did not exist. Her reasoning? No, she wasn't a creation scientist, and she wasn't an anti-scientite. Rather, she believed dinosaurs were a myth created by our government to make money through museums. When I pointed out that many dinosaur bones are in museums that are free, or require only a "suggested" donation, she was unfazed. In fact, several of our class mates jumped to her defense, and I was put to shame. Why? sell, it was most likely due to the fact she was very sexually attractive, and they (all men) presumably wanted to engage in various acts of sexual intercourse and/or heavy petting with her. However, by the time of our senior year of high school, she had become very fat and homely, but much like in a bad teen after-school special, had rethought her idiotic and vacuous earlier positions and had become quite an intellgent and engaging woman. She was no longer popular, though, but since she was so interesting to talk to, she and I actually became fairly close friends. Not like best friends or anything, but you know, school buddies. The kind that will sit by each other in class, or talk in the hallway, but not the kind that are going to call each other and hang out on the weekend. Long story short, this is why I'm offended by "No fat chicks" bumper stickers.


True story.


Except for the part about "No fat chicks" bumper stickers. Those things are hi-larious!

Best motherfucking movie ever motherfucking made!

Passion. Romance. Suspense. Action. Comedy.

And...

Snakes. On a motherfucking plane.


Oh, and Kenan Thompson (that fat kid who used to be on SNick. Rememeber SNick? That's ok, no one does).

Now, I don't use the term "best-movie-ever-made-about-anything-ever," but in this case, I'm willing to make an exception.

It has everything you could ever want, even gender equality. How is this you ask? Well, in predictable horror/suspense fashion, the first to die were two horny teenagers. But in especially comical fashion, the first woman to die dies from a deadly snake bite directly on her exposed nipple. But not to appear sexist, a slimy gentleman is later killed when he is urinating, and a snake comes up out of the toilet to bite him, yes, directly on his penis.

I don't want to go further into it and spoil it for people, but all I can say is go see this movie. Right. Now.

When Sam Jackson finally utters his famous words about tiring of matron-fornicating reptiles on an aircraft to which the same hyphenated adjective applies, it is an extremely magical moment.

Why does Netflix think I'm an asshole?

Haven't blogged for a couple of days now--turns out I had a bit too much fun at my birthday. Or so I'm told, for I remember shockingly little of the night. Not in one of those bragging oh-dude-I-got-so-wasted type of ways, but in a more concerned, I-need-to-stop-doing-that way.

Highlight of the night (or so I'm told): there was apparently one point in which a pantsless Jesse had to be tackled by his older brother because he kept trying to bite someone he felt had wronged him.

Hmmm...when you write it in the third person, it doesn't sound as bad. But that's not the point of all of this.

The point is that Netflix thinks I'm an idiot.

I don't know how many of you use Netflix, but I recommend it if you're a movie-watcher. I usually don't shill for things, but I've really come to enjoy it. It has a huge selection, and doesn't garner most of its profits from murdering people like G.E.-owned Blockbuster does. Plus, you can be really lazy and only have to go to your mailbox to get movies.

My only problem with Netflix is that on its welcome page it recommends movies you might like. It actually does this in two columns. In one column, it tells you that others who have watched a certain movie also liked these other movies. For example, because my roomate put Syriana (which is a pretty good flick, all told) on the list, Netflix recommended Munich. Or because of Lost in Translation, it recommended Broken Flowers, because they're the same movie. These make sense--they are similar movies, and if you like one, chances are fairly good you'll like the other. Thank you Netflix, this is certainley a helpful feature when I'm looking for new movies to watch.

However, there's another generic column simply titled "Other Movies You Might Enjoy." Now, I suppose they should emphasize might, because I have no fucking clue how they came up with these. For example, they list The Notebook, a shitty fucking movie based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. Incidentally, if you don't know who Nichoas Sparks is (because you aren't a pre-teen girl or an over-weight house wife), you really should check out his stuff. It's hilarious in the way he takes trite sentimentality to an art form. But that's beside the point.

Why would it recommend this to me? Have I done somehting seriously wrong and my karma is being balanced out in the form on Netflix suggestions? Is it because I enjoyed the movie The Believer in which hunky young Ryan Gosling turns in an impeccably understated performance as a Jewish neo-nazi? Did they confuse my love of good cinema with a love of an actor who occassionally has to eat and therefore do terrible movies? Why, netflix?!? Why do you do this to me?

And if you think this is a fluke, please read the full list of movies Netflix thinks I would enjoy: The Corpse Bride, Just Like Heaven (starring that delightful Reese Witherspoon!), Flight Plan, Raising Helen, Scary Movie 2 (this one is possibly more offensive that The Notebook), Elizabethtown, and Wild Things.

How emberassing...

I was born at half-past 10, almost 'leven in the morning

As always, 5 dollars american for whomever can identify the random, yet applicable song quote without google



So, it is indeed my birthday. With a nod to Uggs for the nudge in the right lyrical direction:

Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,
Twenty four
and there's so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.

Love lost, such a cost,
Give me things
that don't get lost.
Like a coin that won't get tossed
Rolling home to you.

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that's true.

Lullabies, look in your eyes,
Run around the same old town.
Doesn't mean that much to me
To mean that much to you.

I've been first and last
Look at how the time goes past.
But I'm all alone at last.
Rolling home to you.

Old man take a look at my life
I'm a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that's true.

Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I'm a lot like you were.

What a difference an unbelievably amazing winning streak can make!

Oh, the Twins.

Could it really be only 2 short months ago I was subtly mocking them in a Minnesota-nice type of way by celebrating the fact that they had finally hit .500? And could it be only a month ago that they were still 10 games out of the wild card, so I was celebrating the fact that they had finally officially outscored their opponents on the year?

My, my, how things change.

Now we're not only playing the best ball I've seen any team play in a long time, we're doing it without Shannon Stewart, without Lew Ford, without Torii for a great deal of it, with a rotating cast of outfielders that would make any soap opera jealous, and now we don't have Liriano for awhile (though somehow, don't you just know we'll be able to carry on?).

Now after taking 2 out of 3 from Detroit in Detroit, we're finally where we belong.

And now that everyone in Minnesota is finally on board and acting like they've loved the Twins all along (though I don't recall seeing them at the dome when we were 8 games below .500), I think we can all agree that the wild card isn't enough. Let's keep this ridiculous streak alive and just take the Central crown. Ok?

Gone fishing...

...is all the marquee says now.



It turns out the rumors of the Vikings demise have not been greatly exaggerated.

The first place I ever whetted my whistle in Minneapolis, a scant 20 feet from my back door, with the best music you'll find in town, is now closed.

And suddenly the world is just a little less cooler than it was before.

End of Summer Depression--Vol. 1: Have I Passed My Best?

My very first-ever marquee...how cute

At the end of every summer, I start to get a little depressed. It's not just the impending school year (which I just realized I will have hanging over me every summer until I retire...sigh), and it's not the convenience of turning one year older at the end of every summer (only 6 shopping days left!), it's so much more. I think it's hereditary (more on this at some future date).

Anyway, I get depressed about all of the things I was going to do with my freetime that don't happen because of many things, but usually because of television and sleep. On my death bed, I'll be well rested and able to quote from a ridiculously large score of shows, but I don't think that will make me too happy.

Amongst other things, I didn't lose the weight I planned on losing, I didn't learn a single word of spanish, I didn't master either the mandolin or the dulcimer, and I've recorded exactly 0 songs. I wrote one half of a play, but I didn't think it was very good.



And then I have so many reminders thrown in my face. Liriano will probably win the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year, and he's fucking younger than me. Marx had written the Communist Manifesto and had it translated into seven languages by this time in his life. And I ain't done shit.

But at one point, I was in a band with dreams of global dominance, I was leading a movement we all thought was going to end the war, I was a regular feature performer in seevral theaters, and if you notice in the picture below, I had a ring on a certain finger that holds special signifigance in Western culture.



Has my life already peaked, with me not even quite 24 years old yet? Am I destined to forever look back and think that those were the days? Am I already the overweight middle-manager who hates what his life has become? Or am I rediculous for thinking these things at this point in my life? Sigh...I hate youth/young adulthood/quarter-life crises.

Not my research, but good reading

From the ever-irrepressible BillMon

"Until civilians -- frankly, I'm not sure how many of them are actually just innocent little civilians running around versus active Hezbo types, particularly the men -- but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it's not going to end, folks. What do you mean, civilians start paying a price? I just ask you to consult history for the answer to that.”

Rush Limbaugh
On the Qana Massacre
July 31, 2006


"We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal . . . As for what you asked regarding the American people, they are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and in other places."

Osama bin Laden
On His Fatwa Against America
March 1997


Well, we know who Rush agrees with. Who do you agree with?

Only 10 shopping days until my birthday...

A random google images search for August 11 turns up the following:











This all leads to the following conclusions:

A) Google image searches are fun

2) Drawings of weird futuristic-looking alien lizards are really nerdy

iii) Something about a gerbil in a kitchen utensil of some kind makes me smile