Olympics

The Olympics always make me cry. I know, weird. The first time I remember crying over them was in 1996 when Kerri Strug twisted her ankle but won the gold anyway. But I cry over much more mundane stuff than that, too, like when Ireland got its first swimming medal. I cry sometimes when people mess up and cry themselves, and I cry when they win and look really happy. At least I've never cried over beach volleyball. In fact I try hard not to watch beach volleyball, but NBC doesn't make this easy.

I'm not sure why this happens, since I'm neither a very teary nor a particularly empathetic person normally, and I grow more cynical about the Olympics with each passing four years. I didn't actually watch much of it this year, apart from tae kwon do, partly because most of the time when I turned on NBC they were showing beach volleyball, basketball, or, at one point, the early miles of the women's marathon. If I were to award a gold medal for tearworthiness, it would be to Su Li-Wen of Taiwan, who fought a bronze medal match with a bad knee, and came awfully close to winning before her Croatian opponent kicked her in the bad leg, then later scored during sudden death. She was a real trooper, but she was sobbing when her coach gave her a piggy-back ride out of the gymnasium. It's here, at around 44:00.

Bus odyssey part 2

The bus from New York City to Ithaca was also over an hour late, for no apparent reason. I lined up for it at around 7:30 am. Half an hour later a security woman came by and scolded us for not lining up single-file. "This line is in disarray!" she said. Once we finally started boarding a woman near me in line, wearing fashionable glasses and a green trucker hat, kept yelling suggestions at the Greyhound workers. "You're causing chaos here!" she said, and, "hey, security, how about bringing some order here?" I was torn between the vicarious satisfaction of hearing someone protest against the unapologetic crappiness of the bus experience, and an introvert's annoyance at the added tension she was bringing to the situation. What was this woman, some kind of Greyhound virgin? Did she actually expect anything different?

After we'd finally gotten on the bus a woman walked up to the Greyhound virgin with the kind of smile one doesn't often see at Port Authority at 8:30 am. She shyly asked trucker-hat woman whether she was Josie from Top Chef, and lo and behold, she was! A celebrity spotting on Greyhound! This made me feel marginally better about riding the bus, even though Josie had only appeared on a reality TV show I'd never watched, and seemed to feel that the hour was too early for recognition. Here she is wielding a knife.

Circadian rhythms

For about two weeks now I've had trouble sleeping. It takes me forever to get to sleep, and then sometimes I wake up in the wee hours and have to start all over again. I don't know why this is--I certainly don't have jet lag. It's as though my body has suddenly decided that it only wants to sleep in the afternoon. And no, insomnia detectives, my problem is not an excess of naps: I think I've taken a grand total of two naps during this sleepless phase.

The strange thing is that while I've been tired, I haven't really been more tired than usual during the day. Which leads me to wonder if I've suddenly started needing less sleep. I remember thinking around the time I started watching Heroes on DVD that if I could pick a superpower, I'd want to be able to go without sleep. Think about it--you could pack two lifetimes' worth of activities into one! But I also distinctly remember thinking that this would only be a good power if I could sleep when I wanted to, because I like sleeping. Hear me, careful-what-you-wish-for gods?

In which my tastes are called into question, and defended

Last night I was reading the Atlantic, congratulating myself on actually getting through a whole issue rather than just letting it contribute to the Leaning Tower of Pisa on my desk/nightstand like so many other publications, when I came on this article by Michael Hirschorn right at the end. As take-downs of pop culture phenomena go it's rather gentle. I think its fighting-est words are:

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting... Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility.

Hirschorn's article classified many things I hold dear as "quirk," namely:

• This American Life
• Arrested Development
• Napolean Dynamite
• Little Miss Sunshine
• Rushmore*
• The Royal Tennenbaums
  

Ok, so I agree with him about Garden State and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, but proof positive that Hirschorn was talking about me came here (in reference to This American Life):

It’s the sound of Austin, Boulder, Berkeley, Red Hook, Madison, Cambridge, Adams Morgan**—of people who tend to think of themselves as engaged, aware.

Oh the humanity! Oh the italics!

Hirschorn, by contrast, is a man of the people. You can tell because he enjoys Knocked Up and reality TV.

Upon reflection I realized I'm probably guilty not only of patronizing this unmoored quirk, but of propagating it: see my blog entries on signs for dogs, recording examples of risible punctuation, and roller-blading in a parade while dressed as a car.

Upon further reflection I remembered that This American Life does do devastatingly "important" shows, including some great recent ones on the Iraq war and habeas corpus. And I thought about the some of the pretentious schlock I've seen that came out of someone's earnest attempt to make something that mattered (see Crash, Babel), and concluded I'd rather have spent those couple of hours on some meaningless piece of engaged, aware quirky escapism. Because what's wrong with that, really?

*cited as an example of good quirk
**this is where I live

Buffy

Yesterday I watched the final two episodes in the Buffy the Vampire series. It doesn't sound like a great way to spend a gorgeous Saturday afternoon (hey--I went outside, too), but it seemed momentous, given that I'd been slowly making my way through the series on DVD since January 2005.

So what am I going to do tomorrow? Maybe I'll set the world on fire. Or maybe I'll start on the other 213 DVDs in my Netflix queue. The possibilities are endless.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Behold: My feelings about called laughter have been brilliantly captured by The Onion.

100%

I heard a McDonald's commercial a few nights ago that ended, "With 100% beef, nothing beats a Big Mac." I'm no expert on burgers, but isn't being 100% beef really the least you'd expect? Do the other fast food restaurants cut their beef with, say, horse? Soylent green? A "secret ingredient"?



As a side note, this is my eighth post to carry the "food" tag. I guess this is marginally better than blogging about my cat all the time, which is what I feared when I started this adventure. Still, perhaps I should try harder to develop my other interests... like drinking.

Winners and losers

Just a short rant about TV. Why are networks still making tired sitcoms with tired ensemble casts (hot women, loser-ish unattractive men, and their smartass kids) and tired laugh tracks? I ask because, as a fan of Comedy Central's always-fresh Daily Show, I was interested to see The Winner, the network show that Rob Corddry left the Daily Show to star in. I think I caught the pilot on Sunday, and boy was it dull. Also it's set in 1994 for some reason (a very minor plot point in the pilot revolves around the O.J. Simpson police chase), as though to hearken back to a time when shows with laugh tracks could still be considered good--original, even. Or maybe innovations such as cell phones and email make things too complicated for the writers. Despite a few good lines and Corddry's brilliance at playing a clueless loser, I expected better.

Contrast this with, say, the Sarah Silverman Program, another brand-new addition to the TV landscape. Like The Winner, Sarah stars an unlikable, clueless narrator. Also like The Winner it features highly improbable plot lines, but Sarah takes absurdity to a different level. In one episode, she adopts a 10-year-old daughter for a day and grooms her to win a talent competition; meanwhile, Sarah's gay neighbors are arrested and harshly interrogated by Homeland Security, during which they snickeringly brag about leaving a bomb in a police car. Turns out that... well, I wouldn't want to ruin it. There will be plenty of chances to see the episode as Comedy Central re-runs it ad nauseum. My point is that the writers of the Sarah Silverman Program understand that in eschewing likable characters, plot arcs, and believability, they've stripped the show's appeal down to being consistently, knee-slappingly funny. Which it is. (Warning to sensitive viewers: the following clip would not be allowed on network TV).



And lest you suppose that being on a network constrains The Winner to breaking out the same old laugh track, please take 30 minutes on Thursday to watch 30 Rock on NBC. I'd review it, but I did promise a short rant.

Canadians

Today G.R. made a disparaging comment about how I hadn't blogged lately, which was nervy of him considering we're lucky to hear from him once a week. Rather than point this out I just said my life's been too boring to blog about lately. But that was before I arrived home to find a package from G.R.'s homeland, containing this awesome t-shirt. It's exciting if you're lazy, and you were a chemistry major, and especially if you only ordered it last week and selected the cheap shipping.

I don't want to sound prejudiced here, but is anyone else a little unsure of how to classify Canadians? They're a strange hybrid of foreigner and not-foreigner, fitting in well here apart from their superior enunciation and flappy heads. You can't teach them new words like "faucet." But once in awhile they say something that reminds you they do in fact hale from a different culture.

For example, today I had a drink after work with a Canadian friend who's lived in the U.S. for six months or so. We were talking about Al Jazeera; a friend of hers just moved here from Toronto to work for the new English version. Apparently all the non-anchor personel at the English Al Jazeera are British or Canadian because Americans don't want Al Jazeera on their resumes. There was an article in the Washington Post today that this friend thought was strangely biased against Al Jazeera, too, which led her to ask me, "Why are Americans so freaked out about Al Jazeera?"

To me Americans' automatic Al Jazeera-disliking reflex is such an obvious fact of life that I probably would never have questioned it. It would be like asking why cats hate vacuum cleaners (although a friend of mine thinks cats' ancestors were terrorized by a prehistoric feline-sucking Hoover, ingraining that aversion in their genes, so maybe that's a bad example). I could have said that post-September 11 Americans fear and despise all phrases that begin with "al," but I went with the less rascist explanation and said that the only time we ever hear about Al Jazeera is when Osama bin Laden releases a video, so of course we think they're the network of terrorists.

Here's my plan for salvaging America (and its reputation): Those of my readers who are not stealing cable should email their providers and ask them to carry Al Jazeera. We'll kill two birds with one stone: America will get more news of foreign lands, and we'll show the world we're not afraid of all things "al."