Heavy Hitters

I've been a fan of personal injury attorney's commercials for as long as I've been familiar with the genre. It pleases me to no end that there is apparently a production agency that has used the same slogan and jingle for different law firms in the Providence and Upstate New York markets. Here's one of the commercials for Syracuse's own heavy hitters Alexander & Catalano, and here's a commercial from Providence's Heavy Hitter, Rob Levine.

Must Love Dogs

Since I've tried to at least mention all of the movies I've watched this year, I'd be remiss to not finish the job before the new year. I was disappointed with V for Vendetta, which we watched a month or so back. I didn't like how the movie felt the need to spell out every detail about the plot to the viewers (sometimes, more than once). The story and setting drew a lot of obvious parallels to George Orwell's 1984, which hurt the movie since it's pretty hard to measure up to 1984. Of course, you shouldn't really trust the words of a critic who fell asleep before the end of the movie. It did clear up some confusion I've always had about Guy Fawkes Night, but I still don't really understand why the British named the holiday after Fawkes. Isn't that sort of like the US making 9/11 a national holiday and calling it Osama bin Laden Day?

I finally got around to seeing Hot Fuzz over Christmas. I liked it, though not as much as I liked Shaun of the Dead. I think Hot Fuzz may have been a bit too over the top for me. It's possible that I haven't seen enough action & cop movies to truly appreciate the depth of the satire in Hot Fuzz.

Finally, I went with my dog-loving family to watch Marley & Me after Christmas. It's pretty much a movie about a dog with a perfunctory mid-life crisis tacked on. Don't bother seeing it unless you really like seeing dogs chew on furniture.

Hub Cap

The great jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard passed away yesterday. He hadn't been very active recently and I haven't listened to his music in a while, but he was one of my favorites back when I was first getting into jazz. I don't have any of his recordings as a leader and I thought that Out to Lunch was the only recording of Hubbard that I owned until the LAT obit reminded me that he played on Coltrane's Ascension sessions, but my old college radio station had a lot of Hubbard's recondings on vinyl and I spun them regularly. One my favorites was Live at the Northsea Jazz Festival 1980, which is the only post-Blue Note Hubbard album that I've listened to extensively. He was truly one of the last of the great hard bop players.

Out Like a Lamb

The most depressing part of the Lions amassing the NFL's first 0-16 record is the realization that I grew up during the post-merger golden age of Detroit Lions football. The reason that is depressing is because the Lions' post-merger golden age of the 1990s wasn't much of a golden age. While they made six of their nine post-merger playoff appearances during the 1990s, they still only won one of those playoff games, never even made it to the Superbowl, and only had five winning seasons. The Lions record from 1990-99 was 79-81, which is much better than the 40-104 record they've managed to amass over this decade, but it's still a losing record.

Infamous Bowls

Some people complain about how the proliferation of huge restaurant chains has destroyed America's regional diversity. What these people fail to realize is that restaurant chains don't destroy regional culture; they demarcate it. Take Bob Evans for example. That middle American dining institution has no franchises in New England and only a handful of them in the other northeastern states (unless you consider Pennsylvania part of the northeast - PA is lousy with Bob Evans franchises).

I had kind of forgotten about Bob Evans until I was back home for Thanksgiving and saw a commercial advertising their answer to KFC's Famous Bowls. It's called the Chicken Fried Deep Dish Dinner, and it takes the KFC Famous Bowl and goes a step further by adding a biscuit into the mix. I've always been fascinated by the Famous Bowl. I'm convinced that the dish was created when someone at KFC headquarters walked into the test kitchen and demanded that the chefs create a new dish that incorporated all existing KFC menu items. I'm not the only one who is fascinated by the Famous Bowl either - comedian Patton Oswalt has carved out a niche for himself in the comedy world with his Famous Bowls routine. With Bob Evans' recent shot across the bow in the Famous Bowls Wars, both of us should have plenty of material to feed our Famous Bowls obsession for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, Back in Communist Russia...

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra was in town last week. Michelle has been interested in seeing their show for a couple of years, so we decided to check it out. I went in with pretty low expectations, but I still managed to leave disappointed. The Christmas portion of their show is built around a "true meaning of Christmas" narrative that is borderline nonsensical and difficult to follow. Mixed in with the narrative are heavy metal interpretations of popular Christmas carols and original songs. The original Christmas songs, with the exception of a couple that they played near the end of the Christmas portion of the concert, were awful. I don't understand why they didn't make better use of the existing body of Christmas music and fables that are already known and loved by the majority of western world. Creating new and compelling holiday music and stories is a pretty tall order. Based on the legion of fans who go to see their show every year, I guess the TSO has created a Christmas story that resonates with some people, but it didn't do much for either of us.

WTF?

As anyone who still has a job is probably aware of by now, companies are trying to minimize the costs of doing business during these lean times. I got an e-mail from management at my job last week outlining a number of cost-cutting initiatives that have recently been put into effect. The one that caught my eye was an admonishment for employees with company-provided mobile phones (a club that I am not a member of) to stop texting so much. I've always wondered why texting is so expensive. After all, a single text message is at most a couple hundred bytes worth of data. A voice call is at least thousands of bytes per second. Based on the five minutes of research I just did, it appears that it's because texting is such a cash cow for wireless carriers. By charging ridiculously high rates for text messages, carriers basically force anyone who wants to use text messaging on regular basis to buy an unlimited plan, guaranteeing them an extra $5-10/month per customer over the life of their contract. Carriers can charge whatever the market will bear, of course, but any business that is built on constantly ripping off its customers is setting itself up for fall when someone comes in and challenges the status quo. At the very least, once Internet-connected mobile devices achieve critical mass, text messaging is going to go the way of the CB radio unless the pricing model is rationalized.

Postscript:
I've been sitting on this post for a couple of days and wouldn't you know it - Google has gone ahead and added SMS text messaging to Gmail. I don't this is going to put an end to extortionate text messaging rates, but I'm still holding out hope that Google/Android is going to finally force some sense into the US cellular phone market.

Pipe Dream

I've created a couple new Yahoo! Pipes for Michael David Smith's writing on College Football Talk and Pro Football Talk. It probably would have been more useful to put these together earlier in the football season, but I never got around to it (which was just kind of dumb on my part, since it took all of five minutes to put these feeds together). Here's the College Football Talk feed URL and here's the one for Pro Football Talk.

Walk on Water

Google Maps is a great tool and it keeps getting better. Their public transit and walking directions are nice new feature. The walking directions are really cool because Google Maps will gladly generate walking directions for any route, no matter how ridiculous it might be. Here's a nice leisurely stroll you might want to take the next time you need to go from LA to New York but aren't in a big hurry. Google estimates that it would take you 38 days to make the 2800 mile trek (assuming you don't stop anywhere along the way).

Michelle discovered an interesting routing for her trip to Falmouth. The walking directions have you hiking all the way up to Boston, hopping on a ferry to Provincetown, and then walking all the way around Cape Cod. When we first looked at it, we thought that Google was suggesting that you walk on water from Boston to Provincetown. While it may sound like Google is copping out by including a ferry ride in the walking directions, I doubt that pedestrian traffic is allowed on the bridges that span the Cape Cod Canal, so there technically is no way to walk to Falmouth. Perhaps the next release of Google Maps will include a swimming option.

Flat Earth Society

The Flatlands Collective
Lilypad - Cambridge, MA
Thursday, December 4th

The Flatlands Collective is a group of Chicago musicians and the Boston-based Dutch saxophonist Jorrit Dijkstra. I'm pretty sure that this was the first time I've ever seen Dijkstra live. I've certainly had plenty of opportunities to see him play, but for whatever reason, it never worked out until yesterday. Dijkstra impressed me more as a composer and bandleader than he did as a soloist last night. In his defense, the music was structured in a way that didn't give the musicians as much of a chance to stretch out as a normal free jazz unit and the ensemble had a tendency to drown out the soloists, which may have been due to the acoustics of the room.

I really like the sound that larger ensembles are able to produce and the pieces that I enjoyed the most at this show were the ones that really made use of the entire group, especially, the horn section. It was also great to hear Frank Rosaly play again, after being so impressed with his playing the last time I saw him. I felt he shined as an accompanist the last time, but this time, I was more impressed with his solos. He used a lot of dynamic and rhythmic contrasts, which gave his solos a real lyrical quality. I was most impressed with clarinetist James Falzone. I had never even heard of him before the show so I had no idea what to expect, but I was really blown away by both the quality of his phrasing and the consistency of his tone.

I really enjoyed some of the tunes the band played and some of them didn't do anything for me at all, there wasn't very much middle ground. Most of the time, however, it was a really good show.

College Humor

B.J. Novak (a/k/a Ryan Howard a/k/a "The Temp") was in town on Friday doing stand-up so we went and checked it out. The show was at Providence College so the audience was at least 95% college students. I still can't get over how young college students are these days, but it's nice to know that they enjoy the humor of The Office even if they haven't entered the workaday world yet.

We hit YouTube before the show to look for some examples of Novak's stand-up routine to decide if it was any good. As usual, YouTube delivered. Here's a couple of clips that we watched - both of which were included in his show on Friday.

Novak is pretty funny on stage. His humor is mostly observational and pretty nerdy, so it's right up my alley. He did bits about how pandas are endangered due to their aversion to mating(that's not the whole story, but it certainly doesn't help) and how everyone who appears in porn films is considered a porn "star". While I may never have technically told any jokes based on those ideas, I've certainly thought about it before, so we definitely have similar senses of humor.

After the show, he did a short Q&A session. The Office spoiler alert: Kevin is going to shoot up the office (with sexy results) before turning the gun on himself in the season finale. Just kidding - no juicy Office gossip was revealed. Although, he didn't say anything about Kevin not shooting up the office in the season finale...

Are You My Type?

I heard about Typealyzer today, a service that takes a blog URL, analyzes the content, and spits out a Myers-Briggs score. It's been a while since I've taken a Myers-Briggs assessment, so I don't remember exactly how I scored last time and I suppose it's possible that I have changed since then, but I'm skeptical of the ESTP score that Typealyzer assigned to this blog. I'm pretty sure that I was either an INTJ or an INTP the last time I took the test. According to Typealyzer, I am a "doer", who is active and playful, often full of energy; talking and joking. I may also be impulsive and have problems sitting still. Sounds just like me, right? This whole thing sounds kind of silly, but any business model that is based on converting the vanity of bloggers into profits probably has a halfway decent chance of being successful. Perhaps my blog is not active enough for it to deliver an accurate score, but I'm not completely sold on Typealyzer yet.

Chocolate News

Porter is my favorite beer variety, but it's not something I like to drink in warm weather. It's a bit too hearty for a day at the beach. When the leaves start to fall and days get shorter, I start getting in the mood for a nice porter, but I couldn't find any decent porter on my last trip to the liquor store. The only thing they had was Sam Adams Honey Porter, which isn't my favorite. I would up picking up some Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout. It was a bit pricey ($10 for a 6 pack), but when you consider that it has two and a half times as much alcohol by volume as Bud Light (10.6% vs. 4.2%), it's actually a pretty good deal if all you're going for is maximum amount of buzz per dollar. If you're more worried about taste, it's arguably an ever better value. It's incredibly rich, as you might imagine, but it's still very smooth and the high alcohol content is not overwhelming.

Trading Spaces

Trader Joe's recently opened their first store in the state of Rhode Island. We checked it out shortly after the grand opening and I picked up a loaf of their three seed and honey bread, and it is really good. It's the first bread that I can ever remember eating that has fennel seeds on it (the other two seeds are poppy and sesame). I think the fennel works really well, but I may not be the most objective observer, since I basically love fennel in anything.

Demographic Novel

After the 2004 election, there was a lot of talk about how Bush won 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in America and how the Republican's fecundity spelled doom for the Democrat's chances in national elections. After last night's election, there's a lot of talk about how the Republican's lost a lot of the youth vote and the college-educated vote and how this spells doom for the Republicans. While I'm fascinated by demographic trends, I try not to put too much stock into them. Pundits mine the demographic data after every election to explain why the winning candidate won the election, then extrapolate it into the future, forgetting how fickle the American electorate tends to be.

Now that I've railed against this practice, I'm going to engage in it. Returning to the exit poll results, the 66% of the 18-29 year old vote that Obama captured is the highest percentage any candidate has captured in any age bracket over the past eight elections. Since I'm just north of the 18-29 age bracket, I find the difference between my age bracket, who supported Obama 53% of the time, and the 18-29 bracket really interesting. I can think of a few probable reasons for the youth's embrace of Obama. They were probably excited by the "newness" of Obama and the Obama campaign also probably did a good job at reaching out to the youth vote. George W. Bush's unpopularity probably gave Obama a big boost in their eyes since for most of the people in the 18-29 group, the only presidential administration of their adult lives has been Bush's. The thing that I think really separates the under 30s from the 30+s is Ronald Reagan. I doubt that very many people under the age of 30 remember much of anything about the Reagan years. The youngest voters in this year's election would have been born after Reagan left office and the oldest under 30 voters would have been just turning 10 when Reagan rode off into the sunset. The Republican party can continue to hold up Reagan as one of their standard bearers, (though I question whether this is true anymore), but it's unlikely to inspire anyone who was born after 1980.

While demographics are hardly destiny, that doesn't mean that Obama's victory isn't indicative of any sociopolitical change. I think it's important to remember that it was only 40 years ago that George Wallace ran for President as a third-party candidate on a segregationist platform and won 13.5 % of the popular vote (8.6% of the electoral college with 5 states: AR, LA, AL, MS, and GA). Wallace won 31% of North Carolina's popular vote in 1968; 40 years later, Obama won 49.67% of the popular vote, and may have won the state, though at the moment, it's still too close to call.

We should probably spend a little less time trying to figure out if America is a center-right country or a center-left country or whether or not the Republicans can appeal to voters outside of rural areas and the states of the old Confederacy. These kinds of questions assume that all voters are ideologically consistent within their chosen (or given) political caste when in fact most are anything but. The changes in America's politics are driven by the changes in American society. When politics get too far ahead of or behind society, political realignments happen. The changes that have happened in American society that made it possible to elect a black man as president have been bubbling up for a long time and yesterday, American politics finally caught up.

X-Men 4: Halloween

Happy belated Halloween, from the X-Men

I wound up on pumpkin carving detail this year. I think it was one of my better carvings. After Michelle did such a good job last year, I had to step up my game.

Perhaps even more impressive than the carving is this photo that I snapped - a hand-held 1 second exposure with no noticeable blur.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Did you hear the one about the sheep beauty pageant held for the men of Saudi Arabia?

Working Studs

I'll always remember my introduction to the works of the late Studs Terkel, who passed away yesterday at the age of 96. I was in sixth grade and browsing the stacks at my middle school library when I noticed a book called "Working Studs". Needless to say, I was surprised to see such a subversive work of non-fiction at a middle school library until I took a second look and discovered that it was the classic "Working" by Studs Terkel. This remembrance of Terkel, which aired on NPR yesterday, includes Terkel recounting a time that one of Jerry Falwell's minions called a library in Georgia to complain about a pornographic book called "Working Studs" by someone named Terkel. I guess I had the potential to be a great moralizing ignoramus from a young age. If only someone would have recognized that and nurtured me down that path.

I've never read "Working" (or "Working Studs", for that matter), though I did read this book during a lapse in employment several years ago. It's written in the same style as Working and bills itself as something of a modern day remake of the classic. I gave Michelle a copy of "Working" for Christmas last year, so I'm sure I'll get around to reading it once the statute of limitations on reclaiming a gift that you gave someone else expires and/or I ever finish "Infinite Jest".

Bohemian Rhapsody

We visited Fall River for the first time yesterday. Visited may be a bit too strong of a word, we got off the highway downtown and went to the Factory of Terror haunted house. I can't say that I was all that frightened by it, and having to evacuate at about the halfway point after all the lights had been turned on and all the actors had broken character due to a false fire alarm didn't really help. Afterwards, we had dinner at a nearby Portuguese restaurant, where I sampled Sagres Bohemia (a Portuguese beer) for the first time. I'd definitely have it again should the opportunity present itself. As the Wikipedia entry states, it's a Dunkel style beer, so it's a dark beer and slightly sweet.

Most Valuable Fan

As I've mentioned before, I don't go to very many baseball games, but when I do go to a game, chances are one of the teams will make it to the World Series. I didn't go to any ballgames in 2006 or 2007, but I went to two baseball games this season, and one of them was a Phillies game. The other one was a Red Sox game, so had the Sox managed to complete their comeback in the ALCS, I would have been two for two this year. Of course, the Phillies game that I went to was an exhibition game, but I'm still going to count it in my streak.