Also, Football

Apparently there was a big soccer (football) game a few days ago.

Dear Americans, can we agree to stop talking about this like we understand it? I'm pretty sure the average seven year old ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD understands European League Whatever Soccer better than the most educated of us, so let's butt out, lest we sound foolish.

Dear Europeans, we will try and ruin stuff like this for you. Sorry about that. If you're good sports about it, we'll send you Lady GaGa, and take back Madonna.

Canon

As far as I have been able to discern, all fiction ever created exists in the same canon, and I'm not certain I can be convinced otherwise. Thus reading a book or watching a movie has, for me, added urgency. I paced while watching 1995's Clueless, knowing that a young Paul Rudd is only two years from incineration at the hands of Skynet - that was, until the old John Connor sent back the T-800 to save a young John Connor from the T-1000. Didn't turn out great in the long run, though.

It gets kind of confusing when you factor in the idea that somehow Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and the more recent update Pride and Prejudice Zombies somehow have to exist contemporaneously, with plots that have implications on one another. Honestly, I find a concept as difficult as this much easier to wrap my head around then trying to keep track of the hundreds of thousands of independent timelines created by various writers throughout the centuries.

This renders tone completely irrelevant, and makes lots of works enjoyable on a whole different level. "Top Gun" is still pretty much "Top Gun," but now at least some of the fighter jocks at Miramar went to Annapolis with Pete "Dead Meat" Thompson and Lt. Topper Harley. I mean, just because they wouldn't let you-know-who into the Academy because he's Pete Mitchell's kid, doesn't mean that Tom Kazansky didn't have Jim "Washout" Pfaffenbach as his lab partner in plebe-killer chemistry. Hell, now that I think about it, they probably had Dr. Jack Ryan as their history teacher. Pretty rad when Samuel L. gave him that "Purple Target," I wonder if they still talk about that at reunions...

In other news, my girlfriend finally made me watch Gossip Girl, and I am happy to see that this Chuck Bass character is making it okay to be a dandy again.

Not to mention I am skeptical of all the hullabaloo over this ad campaign, as everyone I went to college with is fully aware that the most interesting man in the world is (by a wide, wide margin) the one-time chaplain of our alma mater. The Chaplain's exploits include (in no particular order):

-Swimming at the Berlin Olympics
-Traveling in a Zeppelin
-Getting arrested with Martin Luther King, Jr.
-While in the military, ditching his unit for a day and avoiding its mysterious fate
-Also while in the military, accidentally sinking a U.S. destroyer. ZOOPS

So, suck it Dos Equis.

Also, let me just say that I know plenty about the concept of Filibustering, thanks to The Source. However, before I did such research, the brilliant poetry of the idea of filibustering and what I imagined to be its creation was staggering. What happens if a guy staggers a little bit? Do people start to freak and psych him out? Do congressmen sense their coworker going for the filibuster, and try to sheepishly sneak out before he begins? Do they lock the doors? Do congressmen know it's coming when they see aides go to lock the doors? Is there a secret signal? YES so many thoughts. The idea that someone's power of sweeping oratory and rhetorical gesture and pure intestinal fortitude can grind the wheels of a bicameral legislature to a halt! If we imagine that this was a purely American invention, who came up with it? Was this some sort of concession to Adams? DID THE FOUNDERS NOT FORESEE ITS TERRIBLE POWER??

And that is all.

Radmobile

Taken from The Source:

• In the 1992 comedy Encino Man, Brendan Fraser's character Link loves to play Rad Mobile, so much so that when he takes a road test he speeds and drives wildly.

Thus "Rad Mobile" has for me turned into the adjective "radmobile," which I reserve for things with a radness so great that they are worthy of being described as "national treasures." The spoken word into to the version of "The River" on Springsteen's Live 1975-1985 album is radmobile. The U.S. hockey team winning in Lake Placid is radmobile. "90,000 Tons of Diplomacy" Nimitz-class carriers undergoing sea trials is radmobile (see image above.)


And then I found an anonymous Yahoo Answers post about a kid whose boarding school banned a whole bunch of books, and in response, started running a wildcat library out of his dorm room (hat tip to Metafilter.)


Now this tugs at the heartstrings in a lot of ways; I love resourcefullness like this, I love intentiveness, I love defiance, and I love that this at least sort of reminds me of the film Toy Soldiers. But most of all, I love George Orwell. I re-read "Politics and the English Language" weekly. If you ban the works of George Orwell, the universe will conspire to place under your care the most clever and morally outraged student since Val Kilmer in Real Genius. And he will fuck your shit up.


Because George Orwell is the definition of radmobile.

Mad Libs News

I wake up pretty early. Not real early (I think you have to wake up with a 4 in front of all the numbers on the clock to qualify for that) but pretty early; I get to watch the news channels before the talking heads shows (um, MJ) all start, which means I get MSNBC's First Look.

YES.

At 0530 they haven't quite figured out what is or isn't news yet, so they pretty much just check out whatever the top-rated Youtube clips or the biggest stories on Digg are. For instance, this morning it was reported that an Australian Man, While Surfing, Saved a Baby Kangaroo, From Shark-Infested Waters.

Later they reported that a Chinese guy, while practicing kung fu, saved a dragon from an oncoming tank. And after the break, a guy from Kentucky, while playing his banjo, saved a jackrabbit from a moonshine explosion.

In other, non media-propagated ethnic stereotype news, those Libert Financial commercials about responsibility are ambiguous and confusing, and pretty much the most depressing things on tv, Jim and Pam proved on the season finale why the US version of the Office is somehow the most uplifting thing on television, while the British version (Christmas episode notwithstanding, hope you're still going strong Tim and Dawn!) just makes you feel uncomfortable being around British people.

Monsters. In My Pocket.

So one time in England a bunch of people were experiencing "mass hysteria" over the appearance of the so-called "Beast of Exmoor," some sort of non-native big cat terrorizing the area. In order to calm everyone down, the English sent in a battalion of Royal Marines in order to capture and/or kill said Beast.

The British sent in Royal Marines. To capture a ghostly Puma. In Exmoor (which is to say, it's not running around Pickadilly gobbling tourists, and the Marines can presumably do some rad squad-action shit.) FUCK YES.

According to The Source, this shit happens on a weekly basis in England. Now, I grew up in the shadow of the Pine Barrens, terrified of the Jersey Devil, and rightfully so. Mainly because, as is so often the case, the areas we think of as thoroughly explored and urbanized are either 1) not that at all, or 2) were, but shit changed. For an example of number 2, see the Ramapo Mountain People. Mainly, there is this list.

Now far be it for me to elevate The Source to a position of higher science than it is, but if only 1 or .5% of creatures on that list actually exist, HOLY FUCKING SHIT THE SASQUATCH IS GOING TO EAT ME.

Yes Joc, the boogeyman is real, and he will not be deterred by the high incidence of crime in your neighborhood.

And Liz, stop bugging the English, they have enough to worry about, what with Royal Marines running after various Phantom Cats every odd weekend.