This TV Will Not--NOT--Ruin My Life

First, a few housekeeping notes. Most importantly, I figured out how to arrange the settings so that anyone can leave comments, not just blogger.com members. It seems the reason that one previously had to be a member was because there was an arcane check-box selected that read, "Only members can leave comments." Once again, my own ignorance prevailed. Also, thanks to a suggestion from Rebecca, I made the posting text bigger, so that not only did I render the text more intelligible, but I serendipitously made everything look about twice as long as it actually is.

Now that I'm settled in, here's the long-awaited update on the TV: for those who aren't aware (being unaware entails never having been to my place in 2007 and that you're not my snooping, speciously normal landlord), in mid-January my roommates and I introduced a foreign televisual element to our indigenously primitive cove, a larger-than-reason 50" HDTV. My intistinctive reaction was to rejoice in its pornorgraphic potential, as well as to watch hours and hours of high-definition sports just staring at jersey colors and waterlogged faces. Now that those viewings have given way to "Living with the Kombai Tribe" documentaries and, unfortunately, little-to-no porn, I can officially proclaim that I've seen "Jarhead" 52 times, I avoided getting entirely vacuumed into the screen's glowing abyss, and that I've cried at least 5 times watching MSGHD tributes to Mark Messier, Adam Graves, Mike Richter, Brian Leetch, and Wayne Gretzky. Consequently, the conclusion to which I must come is that nothing, not even a funeral or a war, is as poignant as a number retirement ceremony at Madison Square Garden.

Aside from the TV, things are a little slower now that it's negative a trillion degrees outside. Which, speaking of vacuum, has created a social-intellectual void that can only be filled by metaphysics and directionless ontological speculation. Take this gem of a presupposition from my professor: "Having established the inifinite divisibility of being..." Well, that's a rather large thing to establish. That's like saying, "Having established that we will kill every man, woman, and child, who wants lunch?" It's amazing that normal human beings lecturing in sparsely-attended, hardly-attentive settings can make such wild and impossibly huge claims, and then take sabbatical years to check out lunar eclipses in the Turkish countryside. Is it just me, or are we all on the wrong career paths?

And, speaking of the wrong career paths, somebody we all implicity trust should be publicly elected to run the New Jersey Nets. Like Bill Simmons (my favorite writer) always says, every professional sports franchise should have a Vice President of Common Sense, whose sole task is to sit in a lounge chair and perfunctorily tell the real General Manager whether or not a proposed move makes sense. For instance, when Joe Dumars picked Darko Milicic over Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh in the 2003 draft, there should have been a Detroit Pistons VP of Common Sense to say, "Hey, why don't we hold off on taking this dubious teenager over three sure-fire stars."
Couldn't the Nets have used just that type of perspicacity this year? They're going nowhere, and virtually assured to lose Vince Carter to free agency after the season, yet insisted on keeping him around to play out the string instead of trading him to a contender for draft picks and salary cap space. The Nets also refrained from trading Jason Kidd, who needs just a few more months to elapse to achieve the vaunted, "Too old to play significant mintues, too injured to trade, and a huge blight on our salary structure" status. Still, the Nets didn't trade him, either. Am I missing something, or can we all agree that the Nets need a VP of Common Sense?

And finally, just like you'll see on ESPN.com, here are a few things I think I think:

1. Every house could use a Bunsen burner. Think of the practical applications: cooking shit, melting shit, killing shit, setting shit on fire, scalding shit, boiling shit, sterilizing shit, brightening up rooms (and shit).
2. The American Idol girls are way, way better than they guys. I haven't read any blogs or Op-eds about this, so this might redundantly rehash what's been said a million times over, but there are at least 3 girls who are hands-down way better than the best guy. If we're lucky, season 5 won't play out along egalitarian lines, and we'll get to see the best girls cat-fight to the finish.
3. We might be looking at one of the most amazing stretches of feature films in a long, long time. Starting with Borat in November, we've seen three very good movies (Reno 911! Miami, 300, and Zodiac), one pretty good ensemble effort (Smokin' Aces), and if the promos are any indication, the new WIl Ferrell-Jon Heder figure-skating comedy, "Blades of Glory," could move into the Ferrell top 3 (alongside "Anchorman" and "Old School," supplanting his limited role in "Wedding Crashers"). Every movie buff should be excited, especially since it's been a long time since Tom Hanks and Samuel L. Jackson were respectively churning out blockbusters every 60 days.
4. I am the only person who didn't see The OC finale and still doesn't know how it ended.
5. I am the only person who's never seen The OC, and couldn't pick out the main characters from a lineup of homeless people and incestuous rapists.
6. Call me apocalyptic, but I have the nagging feeling that winter will never end.
7. Call me unpatriotic (or even un-Jewish), but there's no way Saddam Hessein's execution should be on YouTube. I hate(d) him as much as the next guy, but there's something fundamentally inhuman about broadcasting death over the internet. It's the same principle that guides the media blackout on domestic execution (like Timothy McVeigh, etc), and should be honored internationally. Besides, if we want to see Iraqis die we can just watch the news. And there is the requesite attack on Bush.
8. Speaking of our president, Bush is absolutely living it up. He's on vacation more than half the time, he's a lame duck who never has to worry about working again--so he can virtually disregard his public condemnation--and his staff handles all his tough decisions, so in internal discourse he can pass the buck for the "botched war" public/media milieu.
9. Wait a second...does President Bush run the New Jersey Nets?


Stay sharp, GM Bush
DJ Discerning