HiR:tb Toots (@warwalker)
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By junior on February 18, 2008, at 9:09 pm Dear Lost:
It is with no regret whatsoever that I must inform you that our relationship has come to an end. Now it is time for you to go.
We have been seeing each other – off and on – for about two and a half years now. Oh, I remember well the heady flush of our romance when it was new and exciting. When I first met you, you struck me as unique and strangely fascinating. You sure were pretty to look at. We spent so much time together then. Those nights spent watching your Season One discs and getting to know your many hidden stories and secrets (through the flashback sequences especially) were so much fun. We laughed when Hurley said funny things and added the word “dude” to every line he said. We cried when Rose told the story about how much she missed her husband Bernard. The “mythology” bits of the story – the smoke monster and an erstwhile polar bear – were quaint and charming.
In retrospect, though, I think we both knew it wasn’t going to last. First, you changed. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, you stopped being about the characters and started to obsess about something called The Hatch and the alleged backstory behind The Others. At around that same time, you stopped coming around regularly – your episodes got repeated and you had nothing new to say to me. Quite frankly, I was already a little disenchanted with some of the things you were saying. I mean, seriously, this business with “The Others”? You know what that struck me as? That struck me as one of those stories I used to write in eighth grade English class, where the bad guys didn’t get a name because I couldn’t think of one before I handed in my composition. By the time Walt and Michael were being grabbed off a sea-faring escape raft by powerboating hillbillies, I was in full fledged doubt about you.
Remember what you did next? You invented about twenty more characters – the folks who had been seated in the Tail Section of Oceanic 815 – and then spent a season killing them off. I didn’t particularly like any of those characters. Some of them I quite actively DISliked, especially that Ana Lucia. I complained to Spouse that all Anna Lucia ever did was scowl menacingly and sneer threats at the camera. I opined that the pacing on the show was becoming aggravatingly glacial and that the plot was becoming cumbersome and juvenile. It seemed to me that you were very much making this all up as you went along.
It’s pointless to recapitulate the host of silliness that followed. Suffice to say that since around the time you killed off all of the Tail Section types, making the previous season a complete waste of effort. There have been exploding submarines and people kept as prisoners in a zoo; forced surgeries and exploding hatches; buttons that need to inexplicably be pressed lest the world come to an end; a soothsaying Scotsman and something called the Dharma Initiative. It seems like I haven’t had a clue what the fuck you’re trying to say to me for quite some time now. The one redeeming character that you did come up with – Mr. Eko – got killed too and I haven’t a clue why.
Your characters don’t say anything to one another anymore. They ask questions of one another, stare menacingly (and intensely, ALWAYS intensely) at each other – AND NOBODY EVER FUCKING ANSWERS. Interrogators inexplicably let their inquiries float off into space, unaddressed and unresolved. Everybody points guns at each other. Each episode begins with one group of people holding another group at gunpoint or otherwise as captives, frequently for no adequately explained reason whatsoever. Each episode contains a “dramatic” reversal where the people who were held at gunpoint to begin with end up taking their captors by surprise – and holding them at gunpoint. Sigh.
Anyway, I’m just letting my bitterness turn this into something personal. Suffice to say that I’ve lost interest. That was probably inevitable, given that I’ve lost the capacity to care about any of your characters. They don’t actually do anything other than react with intense stares and pointed guns to unspecified threats to their existence. So far from caring about your characters, I have actually started to kind of hate them. The last straw came when I watched this past Thursday’s episode – five days later, on tape, and only when I ran out of other TV to watch – and you showed me some shit about future Sayid meeting some guy on a golf course, making a bet about whose iron shot would be closer to the hole, then pulling out a gun and shooting him. You didn’t tell me who this guy was, or why Sayid was shooting him. It wasn’t particularly shocking to me, because there’ s more lead flying around this – ahem – deserted island than there was at Guadalcanal. It wasn’t particularly dramatic, because I long ago lost the capacity to be gripped by any sense of mystery on this ridiculous melodrama. Do you want to know what my reaction to this event was? I laughed uproariously at the absurdity of this hackneyed bullshit.
The upshot is that every time I spend time with you, I end up feeling like you’ve wasted my time and I’ve cheapened myself. I am angry at you, and I feel like you have broken promises you once made to me.
Whatever, I just don’t care anymore. So we’re done. I think it best that we not see each other again.
Oh, and by the way: it’s not me – it’s you.
By junior on February 13, 2008, at 11:24 pm  I took a bit of heat in the comments, mostly from loving family members, about my failure to accurately forecast the result of Super Bowl XLII. I was attempting to think of a witty and incisive comeback to silence my detractors but the Juniorbrain was not providing.
Instead, therefore, I took to surfing the ‘Net and found this article by Tuesday Morning Quarterback Gregg Easterbrook at espn.com’s Page 2. Consider a sampler smidgen:
Just before the season starts, every sports page and sports-news outlet offers season predictions — and hopes you don’t copy them down.
Jay Glazer of Fox Sports forecast Randy Moss would be “the year’s biggest letdown. Moss won’t be nearly as effective as was predicted. Not even close.” Moss set the single-season touchdown receptions record. Glazer thought Lovie Smith would be Coach of the Year and Drew Brees would be league MVP; neither of their teams made the playoffs. Glazer thought the NFC West would be the league’s toughest division; the combined division record was 26-38.
The Wall Street Journal forecast the Eagles, Saints, 49ers, Ravens, Cardinals, Broncos and Jets would make the playoffs; none did. Clifton Brown of The New York Times forecast an NFC championship of Saints over Bears; neither made the postseason. He foresaw the Packers were “likely to finish around .500;” Green Bay hosted the NFC Championship Game. Judy Battista of The New York Times predicted the Dolphins “may be better than last season” and the Broncos “will not miss the playoffs.”
My strategy now is to agree that I did some bad on that prediction thing, but as far as epic prognosticating failures go, I have much to learn. Click here to continue reading Prediction Update
By junior on February 13, 2008, at 11:00 pm Spouse and I just finished watching the last two episodes of The Wire (Season 2).
Awesome.
Episode 10 has this one moment, a plot twist that neither of us saw coming in the least until it was happening, and the twist was so sudden and shocking, so enthralling (even though it concerns one of my least favourite characters from the season) that we sat speechless and stunned while it unfolded in front of our eyes. The final two episodes of the season, representing a denouement of sorts for the year-long story arc, were two of the better episodes in the series so far. It just keeps getting better. Why haven’t I heard more about this show?
By junior on February 12, 2008, at 10:50 pm Shovelling again tonight – just enough to make a path for the dog to get in and out of the house – and by the looks of things, again tomorrow morning if we’re going to get the car out of the driveway and make it to work. I feel the pressure starting to mount nowadays – things are literally piling up at work and I am currently working in an area of physical desktop that is about 22 by 10 inches with Babelesque file piles starting to scrape the sky all around every other available square inch of imitation wood grain formica. I am juggling files and have many, many things on the go every day at work; constant multi-tasking has never been my thing, I’m more of a focus on one large project kind of guy and the number of figurative balls I am precariously juggling puts me progressively more and more on edge, as if each additional file added to the juggling act is not so much a ball, but a furiously revving chainsaw or a hissing and seriously pissed off King Cobra. The only solution to that work problem is to put in more hours at the office, and more hours at the office mean fewer hours at home – where there are still tasks to be accomplished in order to effectuate the Great Migration to Juniorvania March 14th, 2008.
To further ratchet up the sphincter-tightening factor, some of the folk I’ve had to deal with at work over the last couple of days have been of the very high maintenance variety and what that means is that it takes me three times as long to accomplish every simple little task as it otherwise would if i were dealing with rational and reasonable people instead (psst! If you find any of those types wandering around, point them out to me).
I refuse to believe that Spouse’s illness is beginning to dwell within me. I perceive the runny-ness of my nose; I experience a gelatin-filled melon where my head used to be; strange and sometimes vaguely fluorescent mucoses are produced at an alarming and astonishing rate in various areas of my body, quite without any concerted effort on my part – and yet I am sworn to deny the existence of the foul virus. It is not the centre of my existence and experience in this world right now – though I choose to memorialize the absence of this state of being on teh Intarwebs for all eternity, or some reasonable e-facsimile thereof, herein. Frankly, there is some shit up with which I will not put.
I am exhausted and need to drag my bones upstairs and store them and the sack in which they are packaged between the covers for eight or nine glorious hours so that Mr. Sandman can grant me the strength to tackle the frozen white crystalline menace that stands between me and a place I desperately do not want to go to tomorrow.
How’s that for a pep talk?
By junior on February 10, 2008, at 6:11 pm It’s been a little busy around here this past week. Spouse and I were away the week before last attending a funeral in Northern Ontario. We got snowed in up there and missed an extra day of work as a result. When we got back to work, a couple of days went by and Spouse came down with a wicked cold and, as we later learned, a sinus infection. This thing has pretty much knocked her on her ass for three or four days, and I’ve been covering some of her work commitments as a result. Add a couple of snowstorms into the mix (with all the attendant shovelling required) and there has unfortunately not been either time or energy for me to blather on teh Intarwebs.
That is, until yesterday. Determined to chill a bit and get back some much needed energy, Spouse and I planted ourselves in front of the tube. What I am saying is that I spent the time I could have spent with y’all perched on my couch and drinking in the entertainment from my TV set. We had watched the first couple of episodes of The Wire Season One a few days ago; on Saturday, we put that baby to bed. We watched about eight episodes of the series, right up to the end of the first season. What an amazing bit of television. This show follows a major drug and homicide investigation into the Baltimore Projects subculture. It tells the story on both sides of the wire. It features some of the greatest characters ever invented on television – on the street side Bubs, Wallace and D’Angelo; on the law side Jimmy McNulty, Bunk, Lester Freamon, Kima, and Sgt. Jay Landesman. There’s also one of the great all time villains, Omar. The acting on this show is absolutely top notch, especially Larry Gilliard Jr., the guy who plays D’Angelo Barkesdale (a lieutenant in the drug-dealing organization) and Bubs, played by Andre Royo.
We loved this show so much, I was in the car this morning and off to the mall to get seasons two, three and four. I understand that season five, the final season of the show, is playing out on HBO right now. Writer’s strike aside, why can’t network TV produce anything half this good?
By junior on February 3, 2008, at 2:07 pm No time for reasoned analysis – there are still too many household chores and tasks to be completed before I can settle in front of the big screen and watch me some Super Bowl, but here’s my prediction, for what it’s worth:
Patriots 27 Giants 19.
Chicken wings consumed by me: 18
Pretzels (stick form): .5 bags
Fizzy drinks: 5
Blood-curdling screams directed at repetitious advertising: 14
Update: In case you’ve been under a considerably large rock somewhere, the Giants beat the Pats 17-14 on the strength of a very memorable catch by David Tyree (even if there probably was at least a Giant or two holding during the sequence in which Eli Manning escaped the Patriots offensive linemen) and an incredible performance by the Giants defensive line. For my money, the MVP of that game has to be Jason Tuck, the guy who had an all-world history first half and managed to sack Tom Brady twice in addition to hurrying him and knocking him down countless times (well, okay, somebody has counted them somewhere). Midway through the fourth quarter, Eli’s quarterback rating was a mediocre seventy-something and he was firing at something like a 10 for 28 clip with 1 TD and 1 interception – not exactly the stuff of legend. Granted, he led one of the more memorable drives in Super Bowl history for that final touchdown, but no way that drive happens unless Tuck (and his d-line buddies) lays it down like he did in the first half. There should be a rule that lines, be they offensive or defensive, are automatically eligible as a group for consideration as MVP – let those big, beefy corn-fed lads figure out for themselves how to share the truck later. The award too often goes to a quarterback simply because no other individual has a notable standout performance and the QB just happens to touch the ball most every play, so we remember his name. What was the deal with the conservative offensive play-calling from New England’s coaching staff? No shotgun, no hurry-up offence until late in the fourth quarter and very few attempts at a five-wide spread the field set even though the Giants were absolutely murdering them at what they were doing. I understand being confident in an offence that scored the kind of points the Patriots did this year, but it was way obvious to everyone watching that significant adjustments had to be made to the Bostonians’ attack plans in the second half, but no significant changes were forthcoming until the last series or two of the game. Too little, too late. I had this argument with a fellow in my office, but I think that despite the lack of scoring in the game (especially early) and despite some of the questionable coaching (see the lack of adjustments previously discussed), this was a game to remember. Did. You. See. That. Guy. Catch. The. Ball. With. His. H E L M E T ! ! !
I miss football already. Something tells me that this year’s “pitchers and catchers report to spring training” will be even less satisfactory to me than ever this year, and I seriously doubt that my Leafs will be playing any meaningful games for the rest of this season. Am I supposed to get excited about golf?
By junior on February 3, 2008, at 2:02 pm Just got back into town on Thursday night after attending the funeral up north; it has been a bad weather week pretty much all over Ontario, so travel has not been easy.
Apparently, western Canada got some pretty hefty storms earlier this week too; Spouse and I were talking to one fellow after the funeral who was telling us a tale of woe about his efforts to make it across the country in time for the service. This fellow lives in a small town in the interior of British Columbia; he’s a bit of a ski bum and a ne’er do well of sorts. He had obviously gotten his hair cut earlier that day and he was bemoaning his usual problems with securing tonsorial services: the town he lives in is small and he has to book ahead by two weeks to get an appointment with the lady in town who cuts his hair for $17. This is difficult, he said, because “who knows they’re going to have seventeen dollars in two weeks?”
By junior on January 27, 2008, at 11:08 pm We received some bad news yesterday morning: a very dear friend of ours, Rick Smith of Chelmsford, Ontario passed away suddenly. We expect to be out of town for a couple of days so that we can attend the funeral on Tuesday afternoon.
Cherish the time you have with loved ones; never pass up an opportunity to share a laugh with them while you can.
By junior on January 25, 2008, at 4:19 pm I got an email from Ticketmaster the other day, one of the thirty or forty thousand they send me every year asking me to attend everything from the Backyardigans (um, dude, I don’t have any kids, which would make it Michael Jackson creepy for me to be hanging around that show) to various military tattoos and quasi-sporting events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I do not make a habit of opening up the various missives launched into my inbox by my friends at Ticketmaster.
This particular email, though, intrigued me. The subject line read, “Toronto Maple Leafs.” I couldn’t believe that the Leafs’ ticket sales had somehow suddenly taken such a nosedive as to require active promotion and solicitation; why, then, would Ticketmaster be talking to me about my beloved Blue and White? I clicked open the email and all I saw, to begin with, was the graphic reproduced below:
 At first, I saw only the first three words in the graphic and I was convinced that Ticketmaster was throwing its considerable corporate weight behind some sort of grassroots political movement to extricate Mats from the seven circles of hell that must be life in the Leaf dressing room these days; I thought it odd that they somehow felt compelled to campaign for Sundin’s liberty, but Leaf fans are everywhere and many of us do love our Captain; perhaps, I thought, big 13’s predicament had moved one of my fellow Leaf fans in the big organization to become the Internet-meets-sports-fan version of Thomas Paine.
I actually felt quite let down when I realized this graphic was not part of a manifesto but rather an ad for a cheap piece of plastic swag tossed in to an otherwise disappointing bargain.
By junior on January 24, 2008, at 9:12 pm Walking to work today, Spouse and I passed a very large man who was animatedly talking to his own upraised right hand. I turned to Spouse and asked whether she had seen it. She had. I asked whether she thought it strange.
“Yes,” she said, “but he didn’t seem upset or angry. Just chatty.”
True enough.
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