October | 2009 | Bryan Joiner

October 23, 2009

True Phillies and Fake Yankees

I missed the baseball game yesterday (just saw the highlights. Yikes). Oh, the Yankees lost? Splendid. Lest I spew any pessimistic garbage about how they’re probably going to win anyway—which is true, even if only according to TEH PROBABILITIES—let’s ride this ALCS out to another game. 2004 did wonderful, wonderful things, my friends, and one of those is keep hope alive for the little guy against the Yankees. Sure, the little guy spends a ton of money, but don’t let facts get in the way. Anyone’s little next to the Yanks, like Conan O’Brien standing next to Shaq.

Whoever wins the series—and it will be the Yankees—will play the Phillies. Wild note about the Phillies: they’re the first team since the 2001 Yanks to make the World Series in consecutive years. A little mind-blowing, no? In basketball and hockey, it’s happened within the last two titles (hockey had a str8 up rematch last year). In football, it hasn’t happened since The Trits® threw down on the Iggles in 2004 and, as a result of their victory, I threw up in a bucket on camera, which was subsequently broadcast on Manhattan Public Access TV. Some things are better left unseen, though I feel bad for the alien spaceship cruising Orion’s belt that only gets MNN and is destined to pick up the signal in 400 million years. Not as bad as they’ll feel for me, I’m sure.

(One thing that should be noted about these aliens—or ones with a full array of channels—is that the switch to digital cable is going to seriously impact their ability to watch TV. Or will they be able to see even more channels with the rise of satellite TV? Or will they not see because the satellites are pointed at Earth, whereas old-fashioned signals broadcasted out from Earth? Is it that simple? And if not, how much bullshit is it that these future aliens can get the NFL package and I can’t?)

An… y… how… this Philies team has the possibility of becoming an iconic team, the type of which that even your mom knows who Chase Utley and Ryan Howard are. The Yankees, it should be noted, are like this every year. Given their outsized payroll and ego, the Yankees are always the self-fancied cock of the walk, each one trying to get their “true Yankee” cred. When people say player such-and-such “couldn’t make it in New York,” they usually mean that the player was unable to deal with the garbage of being booed mercilessly in the hazing process of becoming a “true Yankee,” the title of which, once bestowed, allows you not to be booed right up until the fans decide to yank it away. Which can be at any time. My boss, without a shred of irony, told me yesterday that A-Rod had finally become a “true Yankee” in this postseason. In his sixth year on the team. It’s not just that my boss is wrong in principle (he is), he’s also wrong on the facts. By trying to be Jeter Junior, A-Rod wore himself out, physically and emotionally, to the point where he corkscrewed himself into oblivion come playoff time. It was only after disowning that nonsense that he’s managed to absolutely rip it in October. A-Rod hasn’t become a true Yankee—he’s transcended it.

Of course, the label is silly and self-gratifying to begin with. The thing about the Phillies is that the fans have unconditionally loved them since April, and embraced newcomers along the way (Pedro Martinez and Cliff Lee) like new members of the family. That’s true love, in the best sports sense. The Phillies may not win the World Series, but they know a good thing when they see it.

5 Comments

October 22, 2009

Content vs. Promotion

Minor League Baseball teams are masters of promotion. Last night, I was watching an episode of Man vs. Food where Adam Richman traveled to three separate minor league stadiums to sample their gimmicky food items. I saw him eat a bacon cheeseburger with a fried Krispy Kreme donut bun in Sauget, Illinois and a five-pound, five-cheeseburger Super Burger in Grand Rapids, Michigan, before I changed the channel. You’d never see these food items at a major league ballpark, not leastwise because healthy-eating groups would have a field day (One can only imagine Mayor Bloomberg’s reaction if the Yankees started selling a five-pound burger. He’d outlaw all stadium food, and spend $20 million to do it.) You see it in minor league stadiums because minor league baseball needs to give fans every reason possible to come to the park to watch something that is an inferior product.

Those who argue that promotion is more important than content on the Internet could learn something here. Superior products sell themselves. Major League Baseball has an advertising budget, to be sure, and has blistered the airwaves with their “Beyond Baseball” commercials this fall. But they do it because they’re competing against other forms of entertainment for dollars—not other forms of baseball. Geographic factors aside, Major League Baseball does not need to worry about Minor League Baseball stealing its market share. It’s just not happening.

But wait, promotion junkies might say: what if Minor League Baseball had Major League Baseball’s advertising budget? Then the playing field would be even, except it wouldn’t: MLB would still have the product. MLB has long been accused of not selling the game well enough in the “hip-hop era” (I can’t believe I just used that term), yet attendance is up and while food at the ballgames is a draw, it’s not the draw. There are easier ways to get Shake Shack than to go to Citi Field. There aren’t really easier ways to get five-pound burgers than to go to a West Michigan Whitecaps game.

It’s the same on the Internet. As my friend Dustin, a comic strip artist, wrote in response to my previous post, here’s the phenomenon of Digg, in a nutshell:

Let’s say you get on the front page of Digg. I’ve done it a few times. You get 3,000 Diggs, it translates into 100,000 hits in one day. You’re like WOW, fuck yeah, this is awesome! The next day you get maybe 15,000 hits. The next day 3,000. Then it gets smaller and smaller and next week you are back where you started. That’s the thing with social media. It doesn’t build your fanbase unless youre constantly generating content that does well. It just gives you spikes in traffic.

Those Diggs are like the Krispy Kreme burger. They’ll get people to come to your MiLB game despite its obvious inferiority, but eventually the popularity will wane. (A result of a Lipitor scarcity, perhaps). That’s why MiLB are constantly running ridiculous promotions, like one in Pennsyvlania where 800 kids stood on the field as a helicopter dropped 100 pounds of marshmallows and 100 pounds of candy toward them. Or the one from 2008 where the Quad Cities River Bandits of Davenport, IA (hey, I’ve been there!) offered free season tickets to anyone who got a team tattoo. For Minor League Baseball, promotion is a full-time job because the product is inferior. The promotion is the product. If you’re starting a blog and have an inferior product, yes, you should focus on promotion. But the better solution would be to spend most of that time creating better posts.

UPDATE: The minor league hijinks are not, it seems limited to baseball.

2 Comments

October 22, 2009

Birth of a Salesman

Slow day today, so I’m going to follow up on some ideas I read on my friend Jeremy’s blog about writers-as-brand-creators. This will be a break from PHILLIES WIN!-type baseball talk, but I promise to get back at it soon. I fell asleep last night at 9:45 and didn’t get a chance to write any of this down.

Jeremy uses the story of an appellate lawyer who committed suicide as a jumping off point to discuss “how most jobs are really sales jobs, even the ones that don’t seem like they ought to be. And if anything I feel like the new economy only intensifies that.” I was already nodding along with him, and then he hit this:

I think what doesn’t get acknowledged as much is that it’s hard and sometimes tiring. Maybe you don’t want to be updating three blogs, two Twitter feeds, and a Facebook page seven times a day, forever. Maybe you don’t want to have to come up with value you can add to the world every day. Maybe you don’t want to have to think about networking and new leads and selling yourself.

But more and more, I think the world is moving to a place where to be successful, we have to.

These are really interesting observations to me, especially in terms of how I thought a/my writer career would play out and how it has. The fundamental shifts in the industry have occurred right as I was trying to enter it, making it as difficult to navigate as the God-fractured ground at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There were rats, dad.

Growing up I read stories of how people 50 years prior had walked into newspaper offices and asked for jobs and were dispatched to Queens with a pencil and paper and—ta da!—30 years later they were Jimmy Breslin, or something. I knew that had changed by the time I had a professional job, but I definitely underestimated how much it had changed. Being a reporter didn’t involve working really hard to get to the point where you could find your place in the firmament, so to speak—it’s now about figuring out your place in the firmament, then working hard, and then establishing yourself. You’ll notice that I haven’t done it as of yet, but I only recently realized that generalism is no excuse for a lack of posts.

In a way, this is reassuring. In the new media landscape, writers will have been so singularly focused for such a long time that we’ll have experts on everything. The bad side is not so much that this practice discourages inquitisiveness among reporters and “reporters”—writers are, by nature, curious people—but that people might automatically discount writing that, say, a “sports guy” does about crime. (That is not an altogether random example.) On the flip side, building yourself as a brand allows you a lot of cross-platform opportunities, so I’m not sure that’s a good example. Like, if I wrote a really good sports blog, someone might let me write about movies. But I think I would always be known as the sports guy. Or “a” sports guy, I should say. The other title is taken.

Selling yourself isn’t new, of course, but I think Jeremy’s right that it’s taken more percentage of work time than ever before. That’s something that my friend Dustin echoed in his recent comic. Building a brand has become equally about the work you put in inside the medium and the work you do to promote yourself. Self-promotion has always had its advantages, but today, it’s about survival.

I mostly just feel what Jeremy was saying, is all.

UPDATE: As I watched Twitter this morning, MediaBistro tweeted about an article called “25 things I wish I’d known when I started blogging.” Number one is “Content doesn’t matter. Promotion matters.” MediaBistro immediately followed up to say most people would say that promotion is nothing without good content.

UPDATE 2: It would appear Tommy Friedman’s column from yesterday is also somewhat about this.

4 Comments

October 21, 2009

Chuck Klosterman, Bill Simmons, David Foster Wallace, Footnotes and Football

I wouldn’t say I was a fan of David Foster Wallace so much as I simply read Infinite Jest, a feat about which I was prone to brag. It was the worst type of bragging, too, in that I was completely passive-aggressive about it (that should probably say “am” passive-aggressive about it.) Whenever something came up that necessitated the “reveal,” so to speak, I would hold my information for a beat and really treasure letting it out of the cage—the whole time pretending that it meant nothing to me. I wanted my reaction to be like “Yeah, so what, I read it!” and in doing so, I’m sure it came across as the exact opposite. I’m sure it was, and is, annoying. I would have been better off just taking my literary d*** out, so so speak and laying it on the table, or bragging about it, Rushmore-style. I read a giant book. What did you ever do?

But yeah: I read Infinite Jest. The defining feature of Infinite Jest is that there are more than 100 pages of endnotes, which most people call footnotes. Reading IJ required two bookmarks and a constant reference-book like tossing of the middle section back and forth to see what DFW had meant by “the” in the thirty-seventh chapter. Once you got used to it, it was all very entertaining.

I mention this because I just read Chuck Klosterman’s wonderful book excerpt on football and Bill Simmons’ book excerpt on basketball, and they both use some sort of notation system (Off the printed page, they’re formatted as endnotes. I don’t know how they’ll be in the book, but is anyone going to care anyway?). Simmons has, in the past, acknowledged his use of “footnotes” as a direct homage to Wallace, whom he admired. They work in Simmons’ prose for the same reason they worked for Wallace—they appeal to the helter-skelter mind of the reader and the writer, allowing quick (or in DFW’s case, not so quick) tangeants on whatthefuckever. DFW was Twitter before Twitter.

Klosterman’s thesis is that football is a progressive game in a conservative shell. For all the talk about football as being the man’s man, grounded-in-tradition sport, everything changes all the time. The forward pass, instant replay, challenges, the spread offense, the Wildcat: anything that’s new is at first rejected upon some sort of anti-traditionalism basis, then copied ad infinitum. Isn’t the same thing Klosterman and Simmons are doing with footnotes?

The correlation might not be perfect, but here’s a snippet from Michiko Kakutani’s review of IJ in the Times (emphasis mine):

The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.

A decade and a half later, Klosterman and Simmons, two pop culture writers, have brought the form to the mainstream. For Klosterman’s part, he realizes that the faux-anti-innovation processes he’s witnessed in football are present elsewhere:

I had played football and written about football and watched it exhaustively for twenty years, so I thought I knew certain inalienable truths about the game. And I was wrong. What I knew were the assumed truths, which are not the same thing. I had brainwashed myself. I was unwilling to admit that my traditional, conservative football values were imaginary and symbolic. They belonged to a game I wasn’t actually watching but was still trying to see.

Over time, I realized this had happened with almost every aspect of my life.

You can add one more to the list. As to the future of footnotes in pop writing, one need no look farther than Klosterman, again. If you like them, enjoy them while they last:

Twenty-five years ago, the read option didn’t exist. Coaches would have given a dozen reasons why it couldn’t be used. Ten years ago, it was a play of mild desperation, most often used by teams who couldn’t compete physically. But now almost everyone uses it. It’s the vortex of an offensive scheme that has become dominant. But ten years from now — or even less, probably — this play will have disappeared completely. In 2018, no one will run it, because every team will be running something else. It will have been replaced with new thinking.

3 Comments

October 21, 2009

A-Rod

I’ve probably written more about Alex Rodriguez than I have about any other athlete (last winter’s entry here). He has been everything a sportswriter could ask for: outgoing, vain, naive, foolish, and a hundred other celebrity adjectives. He’s been proud of all of them, even as his on-the-field performance—you know, his job—has suffered at the times it’s needed most. The stats tell part of the story. Until this year, he has been ordinary in the playoffs: not as bad as his critics say, but nothing befitting one of the best players in the game. Three years ago, he was benched against the Detroit Tigers when he was supposed to be carrying the Yankees past an inferior team. At the beginning of this year, he was outed as an incurable narcissist and steroid user in a book by Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts. It was the best thing that could have happened to him.

For years, A-Rod had been embarassing himself in increasingly ridiculous ways, and this March, the bubble finally burst. Short of being convicted of any sort of crime, the public’s love affair with the A-Rod foibles was over. People like intrigue, but they don’t cheaters (or what they consider cheaters, at any rate). So A-Rod fell into the background like only he could: he stopped talking, and started dating Kate Hudson. Only in A-Rod-Land can you start dating Goldie Hawn’s daughter and somehow become less interesting, but that’s exactly what happened.

Instead of being the incurable narcissist with the cerebral, psychologist wife whom he tried to please, he started a frivolous relationship with someone who actually appeared to like him. For all A-Rod’s popularity, he has always seemed very alone, trying to fill the significant gaps in his life with newspaper headlines and the plaudits of the baseball aristocracy. His bizarre fascination with cooler-than-thou Derek Jeter was odd, unsurprising evidence of this.

With a relaxed, simmed down A-Rod tearing up everything he sees at the plate, the rapport between him and Jeter has mellowed significantly. Every time something happens that’s good for the Yankees, it’s the two of them clapping and hollering on in lockstep. That is, unless it’s another one of A-Rod’s home runs. Then it’s only Jeter, clapping away on the top step for a teammate he finally respects.

It’s hard to talk about A-Rod without talking about Jeter, and I suspect that Jeter realizes how much he needs Rodriguez these days. Jeter is still a great player, playing at a Hall of Fame level, but the needy, nervy A-Rod threatens to suck the life out of a Yankees team with brutal efficiency. It’s possible and likely that the Yankees’ new additions have kept the clubhouse “loose,” and with Mark Teixeira and CC Sabathia working their magic, A-Rod feels like he’s just part of the club of elites instead of bearing the weight of the Yankees season on his shoulders. If Jeter was impervious before, maybe he was oblivious to how much the toll took not on Rodriguez, but the team as a whole. For the first time, it appears they genuinely like each other.

Make no mistake: if the Yankees win this title, it will be A-Rod’s World Series. Jeter will get “one for the thumb,” but the talk will all be about Rodriguez. He’s done so much to lead them there so far it’s almost inspiring to think that he might be able to keep it up. Just as Barry Bonds transcended his October woes to turn in a signature postseason, it appears A-Rod is going the same. The difference is that Bonds did it through methods that ultimately made him a villain (and perhaps not incidentally, he lost). A-Rod did it the other way: by finally becoming the good guy.

7 Comments

October 20, 2009

Am I Missing Something, Or Have The Sane Baseball People Gone Wacko?

Old-school baseball writers and announcers have, by and large, become a straw man for online critics, who broadside their often ridiculous generalizations with statistics and watch them try to wriggle out of them or double down on their assertions that Derek Jeter is “clutch” without providing any new evidence. This was the entirety of the idea behind the website Fire Joe Morgan, and spawned a new type of “journalism” — take down the stupid guy! Yeah!

The problem with this type of work is that the people doing it are starting to double back on themselves. They’re so concerned with what everyone else is writing that they’re missing the low-hanging fruit. There are so many observations that could be made about what’s going on in the baseball playoffs that aren’t being made by either the “traditional” or “new” media that the “observations” they’re making instead are ridiculous.

Take the play for which Jeter was heartily lauded by Joe Buck and Tim McCarver last night. Bobby Abreu hit a ball into the right center field gap, and took a wide enough turn around second base that he couldn’t get back before Jeter threw to first baseman Mark Teixeira, who had raced over to cover. On the play, second baseman Robinson Cano had stationed himself in front of Jeter, but Melky Cabrera’s throw went over Cano’s head and into Jeter’s glove. Seeing Abreu lose his footing, Jeter snapped a perfect throw off, to the delight of Buck and McCarver.

Was it a good play by Jeter? Yes. But did anyone ask why it happened, then or now? Everyone said Abreu screwed up—and he did—but they never asked why. If you follow the play, it’s easy to see that Abreu was so far around second that there’s no reason for him to think he could have gotten back if there was someone there. So one might ask: why would he do this? How about because the second baseman and shortstop were both in front of him? It’s incredibly likely that Abreu thought there was no one on the base, but there was Teixeira, who had raced behind Abreu to make the play you’re taught to make in Little League but gradually forget to do. It was a brilliant play, for sure, just not for the person who got credit for it.

If Will Leitch wants to know why people hate Joe Buck, that’s why. Also, he announces the game’s like he’s Jacob Silj. But my real pet peeve is Buck’s constant attention to what critics will say. He always unloads, “well, the critics will say…” and ping-pongs opinions on the game. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but he does the faux-equivalency thing the MSM is guilty of w/r/t political reporting. Just because there are two opinions does not mean they are of equal merit. STOP TALKING ABOUT WHAT PEOPLE WILL SAY ABOUT THE GAME, AND TALK ABOUT THE GAME. (Oh, and being better than Chip Caray doesn’t make him good.)

Unfortunately, Leitch’s buddy at Deadspin, Tommy Craggs, is not much better. An Angels fan took a video of Mariano Rivera spitting on the ball last night and got a overboard with his analysis… leading Craggs in the odd position of trying to argue against video evidence to try and make a point. Perhaps realizing the silliness of his endeavour, at the end of the post he said it would be “just about the coolest thing ever” if Rivera did throw a spitter—just in case, he, you know, did. Which he did. Craggs’ point, I guess, is that some random Angels fans on a blog are more worth making an example of than focusing a laser beam on the obvious:

1) That yes, Rivera threw a spitter.

2) Yes, it’s cool (I agree).

3) If Rivera is throwing spitters, it stands to reason pretty much everyone else is. So calm down.

Concerned with this? No, he’d rather tell you why your eyes don’t work. (Don’t worry, they work fine.)

I’m all for criticism (as you can see). But base it on what you see, and not what other people say. The game’s the thing. If you read something that’s tearing someone else down just for sport, just quit reading. You’re not going to learn anything anyway.

UPDATE: ESPN’s Amy K. Nelson tweets: “rivera spitball” No. 19 on google trends right now. so stupid.” Right, it’s stupid for people to be curious of things. The commissioner’s office also thinks you’re stupid, btw. They’ve just released a statement saying there’s no evidence he spit on the ball. I’ll assume they mean besides the evidence they have. Did Sammy Sosa have a corked bat or not?

Look, do I think the spitting thing is a big deal w/r/t fair play? Of course not. It’s silly and will pass, and I agree with Craggs that it’s even pretty cool. But it did, you know, happen.

UPDATE 2: Amen to new pals of this website Stupid Sports Blog for nailing this.

4 Comments

October 20, 2009

Booze, Baseball and True Love

You’re not going to believe this, but after yesterday’s blotto football-and-supermarket session, I’ve been in a lot of pain today (I’m writing this Monday night instead of Tuesday morning). I did however, interview a major league baseball player at work today, so I had that going, which is nice. Now I’m full of vegetable samosas that I apparently bought yesterday.

And now some words on the baseball playoffs, I guess.

The only thing I do not want to happen this year is for the Yankees to sweep through the ALCS and World Series without much competition, stomping to a 1998-2000-style championship. I obviously don’t mean “sweep” in the traditional sports sense here, but one win does not a series make for the Angels, or, far more importantly, for me.

In the National League, I avoided paying attention until about thirty minutes ago. I’ve followed the action until now but haven’t really watched it, for fear of gorging myself on meaningless baseball. It was just: if the Yankees were going to romp whomever they played, the NL playoffs were something of a Bataan Death March. Given that I’m increasingly interested in Game 4, I guess that the Yankees loss has at least given me hope. Audacious, I know.

The Red Sox lost eight days ago, and during game two of the Yankees/Angels series—the so-called “classic” that lasted 13 innings—I turned it off after 11, realizing that I knew the outcome ahead of time, and that I hated both teams. But that realization was also a result of a day of booziness, and I realize that when I’ve had a couple and watch the Yankees, I’m immediately transported back to their glory years, expecting the worst. It’s a terrible way to live. In the light of day, it’s not so bad. My liver is excited for more of these “days” of not pounding back whatever’s put in front of me, as is my brain, my stomach, and everyone but my readers, really. You guys love some drunk posts, don’t you?

While we’re talking NL playoffs, a quick note on these Phillies. I’ve never seen a fanbase so dead-set on a repeat title that they have basically disowned their championship. I mean, they haven’t really, but they’re not using it as a hammer. They want this. For all the deserved teasing of Philly sports fans, there isn’t a much healthier attitude to have than to seize the moment. The only Boston team of the decade that inspired this attitude was last year’s Celtics, who were derailed by Kevin Garnett’s injury from what now appears to have been a very winnable title. Even when the Patriots did win back-to-back Super Bowls, they seemed inevitable, and the Sox’ 2007 campaign fell flat… but the Yankees won the playoffs. We don’t even need to discuss the hangover from 2004.

Like Celtics fans last year, Phillies fans are embracing the idea that the windows to win titles are small, especially in a sport as fickle as baseball. It’s one thing to put together good players, and it’s another to have championship teams. The alchemy between the two is mysterious and possibly apocryphal, but Philadelphians know they’ve got something good. Hell, they’ve waited long enough, they ought to know it when they see it. It’s kind of like true love, I guess.

UPDATE: Jimmy Rollins.

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October 19, 2009

Football Sunday: An Odyssey

For the first time this year, I headed out to the bar to watch the Patriots. And oh, what a decision!

From the friendly confines of O’Keefe’s on Court Street in Brooklyn, fivethirtyeight.com and I watched the late-afternoon games over Jamesons, alternatively splashed and on the rocks. There were also beers, but not until overtime of the Jets/Bills game. Which was later. These things take time.

For the first time this season, yr. author skipped the 1 p.m. games at home. After a long day on Smith Street enjoying the college football action—and arguing the merits of our public education system—I was football’d out by the time Vikings/Ravens rolled around. I was even man enough to head over the lady’s house for some Trader Joe’s Indian food and some HGTV. DO YOU REALIZE THE TYPE OF HOUSE YOU CAN GET IN CHICAGO FOR $600,000? I bet you didn’t, because you were sucked in by Giants/Saints.

(That is not an altogether bad thing.)

I came home in the “Feels like 36 degrees” weather only to head back out to the bar at 4:15, as Joe Flacco was setting his team up to miss a game-winning field goal. Nevermore, bitches! There was no place to sit at O’Keefe’s due to the preponderance of Eagles fans. One World Series isn’t enough, their demeanor said. It’s hard not to respect that. Then the Eagles lost to the Raiders. Then the situation changed.

John Doe has the upper hand. Or maybe JaMarcus Russell.

I was throwing back whiskey-and-waters as I watched the Eagles choke, and the Patriots exert their dominance over the hapless Titans. 59-0? That’s the biggest Patriot win in history. Tom Brady threw 5 touchdowns in the second quarter alone. That’s also a team record. Also: an NFL record. My favorite part was everything. But something ringed in the back of my head. A question.

Isn’t football bad?

It’s true: after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s article on the consequences of football hits, it’s hard to retain the same enthusiasm for the game that I did before. There’s basically a concussion on every play. We may not be long from a maximum age of 30. That the NFL is underwriting studies that may torpedo the league is the height of irony, but it was inevitable. The game is simply too violent to continue unabated. I think. But I digress, because Pats/Titans didn’t involve a lot of hitting, unless the football hitting the endzone after being spiked counts. Take that, “No Fun League!”

I will admit: I partook of everything that was advertised during the NFL game. “Tailgate tested? Tailgate approved!” Really, Miller Lite? THEN BRING IT ON! It’s the best way to enjoy the Pats, according to the people on TV. Saving that money to enjoy it at home, or just kicking back with an-ice cold soda? Humbug!

In the end, I schlepped my drunk ass after the game to Trader Joe’s, where I was too glassy-eyed to find Indian food, but I managed to buy $20 worth of pizza, burritos and french onion soup. It is, I am told, good value. Enough to offset the nearly $30 I spent on booze at the bar? Probably! Let’s face it: I’m going to drink either way, so I might as well make money on the back end. The Pats’s 59 points don’t carry over, but I can make sure my buzz translates into savings. I can apply that savings to things that really matter, like real estate. Don’t you know what kind of house you can get for $600,000?

5 Comments

October 18, 2009

Bryan Joiner does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Of all the posts I’ve written for this blog, the one that reliably gets the most return hits—even years later—is one entitled “Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle,” about a blog with something close to that name. Apparently, people who love crossword puzzle blogs also love to read about crossword puzzle blogs, which is something I never would have anticipated. In fact, having not read the post since I originally wrote it, I couldn’t tell you what’s in it offhand.

I will, however, read it now. Here it is, in its entirety:

I just noticed that I have been added to the sidebar at Rex Parker Does The NYT Crossword, a blog that tackles my the NYT XWord with far more skill and panache than I do — and wanted to direct anyone interested over there. If you like the puzzle at all, it’s worth a look. The drawings by Emily Cureton are pretty special as well.

In fact, I was thinking of entering the annual crossword tournament in Brooklyn just after reading the blog. On the same note, I took the annual Jeopardy! online test on Tuesday. It did not go so well.

I distinctly remember the fallout from this—”Rex Parker” himself (a pseudonym)—wrote a comment admonishing me to enter the tournament. I did not, partially because of the expense involved and partially because the train ride from Astoria to downtown Brooklyn is a pain in the ass, and one not worth it for someone of my skill level. The New York Times crossword puzzle gets harder as the week goes on, and at the time, it took me a long Saturday of staring into a mostly-blank grid, scouring through every esoteric index in my brain to fill even half the puzzle. Despite what sounds like a cordial and warming atmosphere, I would have been paying upwards of $200 to come and get squashed like bug.

Now, things have changed. I do the puzzle every day, and I’m okay enough not to feel like I’m throwing my money away. More importantly, I moved to within four blocks of the Brooklyn Marriott, which hosts the convention. It was a complete coincidence, as far as you know.

What I’ve learned about the puzzle, though, goes beyond common answers like golfers Ernie Els and Isao Aoki, who were blessed to be born with short, vowel-started last names. Last year my grandfather died, which was kind of expected and kind of surprising. He was 90 years old and had lived through a long list of illnesses that never outwardly bothered him. He just kept pulling through and pulling through, and it never seemed like the last time was ever at hand.

Well, the two things I remember about my grandfather is that he was always doing crossword puzzles and taught me how to play chess. Not only that, but the only time I would play chess was with him—I love the game, but it’s hard for me to reconcile the intimacy of the game with non-family members. I can play my brothers, but if I play someone else, it’s uncomfortable. I’d rather beat their ass in Scrabble, or get my clock cleaned in checkers.

When my grandfather was not playing chess, though, he annihilated crossword puzzles. He was a quiet, mischievous WWII veteran and I’m a babbling, occasionally bumbling post-Draft city boy, and I have the exact same hobby. It’s certainly not an intentional homage (as much as I love my grandfather); it’s just something I love to do. To that end, I get upset whenever I hear crosswords or their constructors described in critical terms, which can happen. Everything that has an obsessive subculture can foster these sorts of things, and in truth, it probably makes the end product better over the long run. But for me, puzzles have always been about joy, and I think most puzzle lovers are in my camp. This year, I’m going to find out for certain. I’ll be the guy at the tournament with the smile on my face from start to finish. I probably won’t be the only one.

If any of the readers of this blog also like crosswords, today’s NYT puzzle is one of the finest Sunday puzzles I’ve ever seen and well worth your time, FWIW, and the partial inspiration for this post.

October 16, 2009

Into Thin Air

UPDATES: About 20 minutes after I posted this, I was sent the Balloon Boy Game. I know what I’m doing all morning. And then there’s this, which is just awesome—the Balloon Boy adventure as the Fresh Prince song, in Facebook comments. h/t TA.

The Balloon Boy story didn’t make sense from the beginning.

“URGENT,” a tweet from the Europe-based Breaking News Online blared over my Tweetdeck, “Six-year-old stuck in a hot air balloon near Denver.”

I wasn’t sure how that was urgent, to me, sitting at my computer in New York. Still, I pointed my browser over to CNN.com, where I saw a photo of the UFO-like spycraft floating east across Colorado. The whole thing sounded horrifying: a six-year-old kid had gotten into the inflated apparatus, unhitched it from the Earth, and had flown away? It sounded like a tragedy, or at least TV movie, in the making.

Doubt started to creep in when I heard the TV newsers describe the dirigible. I alternatingly heard that the compartment in which 6-year-old Falcon was stuck was made of “thin plywood” and then “cardboard,” leading the TV announcers to speculate that “he may have fallen out.” I came to a different conclusion: if the cab was that flimsy, how would the thing take off in the first place? Wouldn’t he just fall out the bottom?

But no. His brother had seen him elevate, flying far, far away. The ship kept going, and police needed to find a way to stop it.

I took an informal poll on Twitter, searching for solutions to a problem that sounds like something you’d hear at a job interview for a consulting agency. A six-year-old is stuck inside of a helium balloon. It will explode if ignited, and if it lands too hard, he will die. How do you save him? Responses included a net, a harpoon, and a Patriot Missile (that one was helpful). I thought that if a helicopter could get above the balloon, and match its speed of roughly 30 miles per hour, they could drop light weights on it and gradually bring it toward the ground.

Not a perfect solution, I know. But it was something.

As the drama unfolded, we learned more about the family. They were featured on ABC’s Wife Swap twice, the premise of which is that you’re a crazy family that will do anything for money. Why is it okay that America’s most family-focused network features a show that is directly inspired by ’70s-style key parties, and no one seems bothered by this? Of course, maybe a wife swap would have helped in this case, because maybe a replacement spouse would have pointed out the folly of keeping an INFLATED HELIUM BALLOON LOOSELY TIED UP IN THE YARD WITH A CABIN BIG ENOUGH FOR A SIX-YEAR-OLD.

But I digress.

Soon enough, the balloon crashed in a dirt field. Cops and paramedics were on the scene in no time, and found no kid. He wasn’t there, and they soon devised an alternate theory: Falcon hadn’t flown at all, and would reveal himself soon enough. This is, of course, exactly what happened. Within a couple hours, he was found in the attic of his house, napping through the drama. He was the one who had the good sense not to watch. We could learn something.

On Larry King Live last night, Falcon inadvertently put his dad in an odd position when he said that he had been instructed to do something “for the show.” Dad got defensive and tried to explain it away. Cops are now looking into the whole episode as a hoax, but what does it matter? The damage has been done. That’s two hours of my life I’m not getting back and frankly, I’m glad the kid’s okay, physically speaking. Psychologically, who knows. Maybe this was just a huge accident, and his parents are just as down-to-Earth as the rest of us and have an explanation for everything. I’d just be surprised if it wasn’t flimsier than cardboard.

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Month: October, 2009