Although in general I am right about everything and anything I think (as are you, my readers -- remember, the TBOE slogan is Our Opinions Are Righter Than Yours) occasionally an error slips through here and there. I blame the lack of coffee.
Dear sir, I apologize in advance for the nerdery.However, I must make a few corrections on your Top entry (for I am the world's biggest Top nerd...yes, such a thing exists). Firstly, Captain Cold never became Chillblaine, and thank god for that, because they were all having sex with his sister. They were a bunch of mostly-anonymous himbo thugs.Secondly, the "damned souls" the Top encountered at the end of the presidential storyline were actually soulless Rogues fresh from Hell -- Captains Cold and Boomerang, Mirror Master, etc. They didn't take him back to Hell, they just did something traumatic to him and left him an incoherent mess. He was actually taken to prison.Thirdly, your post is awesome and I enjoyed it very much. Especially the energy drink ad!
So, if you're keeping track, more or less every single thing I said about The Top turns out to be incorrect. In my defense, I will say this: (a) too little coffee, and (b) to quote my favorite philosopher:
"Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." -- Homer Simpson.
In honor of Lia's corrections, though, and because she called me "sir" and said the magic words (Your post is awesome), and because I've decided it's important to keep the World's Biggest Top Nerd on my side, I am going to give her a free book of her choice from my ever-growing collection.
Keep those comments coming! I've got two reader nominations coming up this week, too. You can leave comments here or email me at "thetroublewithroy[at]yahoo.com"
It's a SemiDaily List! I was driving home from Milwaukee yesterday, rocking out to the plethora of songs on my iPod (and by rocking out, I mean "singing along with Springtime For Hitler from The Producers) and on came the song Lily, Rosemary & The Jack of Hearts by Bob Dylan. You, like me, probably know the song by heart:
So I was then singing along with that, and I began thinking (always a bad sign) and what I began thinking was everyone is always thinking about what their life would be like as a movie, and who would play them, but nobody ever thinks "what would my life be like if it were a song by Bob Dylan?"
Nobody until me that is. Then I broadened out my thinking -- in part because I had nothing else to do, since I'd already eaten the apple I'd brought along for a snack -- and wondered what would my life be like if it were a song by some other guys who write songs about people?
And then I thought I bet that'd be a good way to waste about 3 hours at work tomorrow morning while also listening to cool music.
And, voila, here we go with:
The Best Versions Of My Life, According to Singer/Songwriters.
I'll start with the guy who is the undisputed king of songs about people, real or imagined, Bob Dylan.
Bob Dylan has written songs about people ranging from the aforementioned Jack of Hearts to Arthur McBride to someone named Angelina (twice!) to John Wesley Harding to even more, including singing with the Traveling Wilburys about someone named "Margarita."
Representative Song: "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Johnny mixes up medicine while Bob Dylan stands on the pavement thinking about the government, then various surreal things happen.
What Bob Would Probably Do With My Life: Dylan's songs tend to go one of two ways: exciting short-stories about interesting people, or weirdly-rambling cautionary tales about people mixing it up with the girl by the whirlpool. Since I've never robbed a stagecoach or been a Master of War, but instead ended up practicing consumer law my life would probably end up a hodgepodge of images with Dylan making a cameo appearance in the song, probably about the way the legal system messes up people's lives, a la the Hurricane. You'd listen to the song and think Now there's a guy who really took on corporate America, sometimes for as much as 5 hours a day when he finished surfing the Internet.
Then again, he might just try: People forget that Dylan once rapped -- so maybe Bob would turn my life into a free-flowing stream-of-consciousness rhyme with some fresh beats underlaying it...
Or I could have my life done up by Tom Petty, who also has written many a biographical song. The American Girl, the person who wanted to be a rock'n'roll star, the girl who's a good girl in Free Fallin' all help populate Pettyville, which now could have Population: me.
Representative Song: Before he went all mello lately (was it all those dances with Mary Jane?) Tom was a rocker, and nothing rocked out more than American Girl, which he liked so much he released it twice:
What Tom Would Probably Do With My Life: Tom's songs are all about how things that seem really great and heartwarming and nice and American are, in fact, horrible and awful and heartbreaking. Seriously -- go listen to one of them. Like this one:
Which, I'll note, I can play on the guitar. But I can't hit the high notes. Not anymore.
So Tom's song about my life would probably emphasize the hopes, the promise, the ideal road laying out before me when I was a young guy of 18, heading off to college, carrying my parents expectations of becoming first a doctor and then the president, and then winning a Nobel Prize or something. (You know -- a common American story.) Then it would take a jarring turn midway through, hit some minor chords, and I'd go to law school. The video would finish with a shot of Mom and Dad looking at my yard and saying "Couldn't you at least mow it once in a while?"
Then Again, He Might Just Try: Tom was in a band for a while there called "Mudcrutch," or is in a band called "Mudcrutch." It's not clear to me, since Wikidiotpedia (and here's why that name is so true) says that Mudcrutch is "best known as the forerunner to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers," but also says... in the same sentence... that the debut album by Mudcrutch was released in 2008, which is something like thirty years after the debut album from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
So if Tom didn't go the Man, You Really Let Your Parents and America Down route with my biographical song, he might, I guess, try bending space and time back on itself to release a forerunner song 30 years after the thing it's supposed to be forerunning.
Hey, how about Paul Simon, who's written a song or two about a person or two? Him and Julio, Him and Garfunkel, him and the 59th Street Bridge... I might have to meet him first, but Paul might be able to do my life justice.
Representative Song: It's hard to pick out just one, but since when have I shied away from a challenge, especially if that challenge keeps me from having to answer my office phone?
Everyone who's anyone would probably go with The Boxer as an epic tale of some guy's life or something, but I'm gonna mess you up and go with the girl that had diamonds on the soles of her shoes:
Nice, huh? I once taught myself all those African words at the beginning of the song. I don't know what they mean, but I knew 'em all. It begins awoo tri-you-lang-you-lang on john.
What Paul Might Do With My Life: There's two keys to a Paul Simon autobiographical song: One: home in on a specific detail about that person's life to make it an extended metaphor of, well, everything. A specific detail like how diamonds on the soles of someone's shoes could show their entire attitudes towards life and relationships, or how someone's being old may just relate, somehow, to the entire universe (as on "Old") or how someone might hear loud music from next door and remember their whole life:
I know that wasn't Paul Simon doing "Late In The Evening" but it was cool, wasn't it?
Step Two of a Paul Simon song is find the next kind of quirky music that America hasn't heard much of and ride it to fame and fortune. From the New York ska of Me & Julio Down By The Schoolyard to Ladysmith Black Mambazo on Graceland to that stuff on "The Rhythm of the Saints," Paul Simon has been a one-man imperialist force, co-opting world music to his own ends in a way that Peter Gabriel can only envy.
So my life via a Paul Simon song would pick out a specific detail about me, and set it to the next music. Let's just assume it would be a rock-inflected Polka with a male voice choir backing him up, and that the entire song would be about my Darth Maul tie.
Then Again, He Might Just: Sometimes, Paul got away from metonymy and went for a synechdoche, instead. (God, I hope I'm using those right or Mr. Schaeffer, my old English teacher, will have my head.) I mean to say, sometimes he dropped focusing on details and went for the big metaphor, like he did on the allegorical tale Pigs, Sheep & Wolves, which I think was a commentary on the legal system. Or maybe on meat. I'd love to show you the song, but the only video I could find is a terrible one on Youtube. People, if you watch your video and the sound is terrible, don't post it.
If you want to try to listen to it anyway, click here.
So Paul might just couch my entire life in a fable about animals. If so, I hope he chooses Vampire Duck.
And, finally, no roundup of biographical singer/songwriters would be complete without Johnny Cash, who treated us to musical bios of drunken Ira Hayes, a Boy Named Sue, and Jesus:
Heady company to be in. But I think my life stacks up favorably to my cohort. Or at least to Sue and Drunken Ira Hayes. Jesus has a better resume than me.
Representative Song: While Johnny sang about others sometimes, he mostly sang about himself, so at first, I struggled to decide which song best shows how Johnny would describe someone else's life. Then I remembered Sam Hall:
That is awesome. I love the cackle!Even better, on the later version, Johnny repeats the phrase: "Damn Yer Eyes!" I use that in meetings now at work.
What Johnny Would Do With My Life: Johnny was at his best when singing about scoundrels: guys who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, or who beat people up because they were named Sue, or who told their wives that they were going out for the paper and would be back by noon, but they were lying and instead of getting a paper and coming back, they wandered through some kind of wasteland, maybe metaphorically:
So to get into a Johnny Cash song, I'm going to have to have done something bad and the world's going to know. This is tough for me, but I'm going to make a confession here, and hope that society will forgive me:
When I was about 8, my brother and I went to the mall with my Mom. Usually, we'd just wander around and look at the stream that ran through it and the goldfish that were in the stream. But on this particular occasion, we found ourselves at the "Marshall Fields" candy counter, and there on the counter was a package of candy.
We thought it was samples, and we took them... a lot, eating some and putting some in our pockets. We were headed back out to the mall proper when...the long arm of the law got us. A store security guard stopped us and told us that we'd been shoplifting and we were in a lot of trouble.
There. Now you know. Take it away, Johnny. Let's hear The Ballad Of the Unrepentant Candy Thief.
Then Again, He Might: When Johnny wasn't singing about desperadoes on the run through Mayfair Mall with pockets full of Frango Mints, he borrowed from other songwriters and sang of... well, death and pain:
So I'm really hoping he'll stick with the candy-stealing thing.
I don't talk about sports often on here -- but often enough, judging by the sports media folks who
Steal fromblatantly plagiarize copy write about the same things I do, only later.
The latest is Michael Rosenberg, a Detroit Free Press Columnist who today wrote a column called "It's Brett Favre's World And We're Living In It." In that column, Mr. Rosenberg develops some entirely new ideas, including:
Note: The links in those statements do not go to Mr. Rosenberg's article -- published May 13 at 12:47 p.m. EST, but to my posts, published much earlier than Mr. Rosenberg's.
Welcome, Michael Rosenberg, to the ranks of TBOE readers, and remember what I always say: Plagiarism is the sincerest form of copying.
If you're a sports fan, you probably thought it was over, for real, last week when Brett Favre said he wasn't going to play for the Vikings.
(If you're not a sports fan, then you probably said, just now, Brett who? But if you're not a sports fan, too, what's your deal? I'm not saying you have to be obsessed, but you probably ought to like at least one sport. Maybe Brockian Ultra Cricket.)
But it's never over with Brett Favre -- and thank God, because what else would people who like sports do for fun and entertainment right now, when the best thing sports networks can do is claim that people actually watch the NBA playoffs which are now entering their third consecutive year -- just two more and we'll have a champion!
It's a little-publicized fact that the NBA playoffs are so long that they actually overlap. Since they expanded to best-of-seven games (best of seven for no apparent reason) the NBA playoffs take, on average, 5.3 years. So the games that you're watching now are an amalgamation of several years of NBA Playoffs -- the 2009 versions, which just began, and all the prior years back to the 2004, which should be done any day now. This model has been so successful that the NBA, word has it, plans to eventually just say that every game is a championship, and award a trophy every week.
Which (a) I suggested long ago on my now-defunct sports blog, and (b) is what golf and NASCAR do already.
Anyway, it wasn't over, and Brett Favre The Greatest Living Quarterback (And Also Best Quarterback Ever) is still contemplating coming back to play another season. While I'm hoping that he does -- and, now, hoping that he does it as a Viking, because that'll help guarantee that my prediction about Packers' GM Ted Thompson's fate (he'll be fired on January 9, 2010) will come true -- I know that there will come a time when Brett hangs up the cleats and calls it a day on his football career, for real.
But I don't want to lose Brett, and the public doesn't want to lose Brett, and Brett doesn't want us to lose him, so as a public service to Brett and me and the public, I'm offering up, today, the Second Of The Best Jobs For Brett Favre When He Finally Doesn't Play Football Anymore.
Ms. Saberi was originally arrested, she said, for buying a bottle of wine on the black market. Iran then said she'd been arrested for not actually having press credentials, and ultimately charged with buying information about Iran's nuclear program. She confessed to that, although she recanted that confession later. She also had a classified Iranian government report on the U.S.' involvement in Iraq.
All of which leads to one inescapble conclusion: she obviously wasn't a spy. If being an uncredentialed journalist who is in possession of foreign government's classified documents makes one a spy, well, then, we're all spies, aren't we? Or, at least, those of us who are uncredentialed journalists in possession of foreign goverments' classified documents are spies.
Except Roxanne Saberi.
Although she's kind of shady, anyway-- nobody seems really sure if she was Miss Dakota 1997, or 1998. With those kinds of questions about her, it's no wonder she was convicted.
Anyway, the job of "Not Being A Spy In Iran" is open now, and Brett Favre would be perfect for it: He's used to keeping people guessing about his intentions, he's comfortable dealing with the media and the constant swirl of speculation, and he's already made a lot of money (which is important, because I don't guess the job of Not Being A Spy In Iran pays much.)
We, the future graduates of the 2007/2008 school year, would hereby like to request that our grad hallway be relocated to where it originally has been for the past number of years. We all have shared the vision for the past 4 years of one day being in the grad hallway, all together and celebrating our last year. It has been a tradition for graduates from year to year to have lockers located on the basement floor grad hallway and we feel as if we should have been given at least some notice or some warning before the hallway was moved. The grad hallway isn’t just a hallway to us, it’s going to be apart of our memories and it’s an area where we can be by ourselves and share the laughs, tears and special moments. We will not give up on the hallway we have looked forward to for many years. Attached is a list of names of graduates and undergraduates who feel the hallway needs to be relocated to its original placement. We, the grads and undersigned undergraduates hope you will reconsider on the placement of the grad hallway.
Don't you get a lump in your throat just reading that? I almost stood and saluted.
Ms. Saberi's plight drew nearly 33% more worldwide attention than the deplorable state of Grad Hallways at Windemere-- and that kind of publicity is the kind of publicity that Brett Favre craves, and the rest of us want for him. Here's hoping Brett follows in Ms. Saberi's footsteps and becomes the next person who is Not Being A Spy In Iran.
There are a lot of instruments I would like to learn to play.
I'd like to play the bagpipes. I tried, for a long time, to learn how to play the bagpipes, because I own a real bagpipes (set of bagpipes?) (bagpipe? But there's more than one pipe...) given to me by Sweetie when I graduated law school. I then learned that there's a lot more to playing the bagpipes than simply blowing into a pipe and/or standing on a Scottish Moor waiting for Nessie to appear. A lot more breath, for one thing. Bagpipes take a lot of breath. And finger dexterity, which you'd think I have because I play piano and also used to know three card tricks, but I don't have it, or at least not the kind of finger dexterity you need to play "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes.
Learning to play the bagpipes also requires getting a "practice bagpipe" which is like a part of the bagpipes without the other pipes and the bag -- it looks like a recorder -- and practicing with that, and also requires that you learn how to assemble the bagpipes and fill them with something to keep the air from leaking out and rope them together, and in my case it required that I go to a guy's house in Madison 3 or 4 times for bagpipe lessons, until I gave up and now I don't play the bagpipes.
But I'd like to play them, is my point.
I'd like to play the harmonica, too, but that never worked out. And I want to play the accordion, and also the banjo.
And I want to play the xylophone, which is weird because the xylophone kind of freaks me out. It's a creepy sounding instrument, at best. Listen:
That's "The Nurse" by The White Stripes, and before you can say "Well, sure it sounds creepy because it's being played by that weird guy in The White Stripes, and he's singing about a creepy nurse," consider this:
That's "Sleepwalkers" by They Might Be Giants, a band not known for their creepiness, unless you count the rather creepy quality of their song "Someone Keeps Moving My Chair," in which a character has something spill on his brain and the Ugliness Men keep trying to bug Mr. Horrible... but it doesn't include a xylophone, so it comes off more as a playful song in which someone's visiting friend accidentally was killed:
So you see the difference? Xylophones + Sleepwalkers= Creepy song. Brain-spilling dead friends with Ugliness Men - Xylophones = jaunty little tune.
Lest you be unconvinced of how creepy the xylophone can be, let's consider an extreme example. Someone who could never ever be down, someone who's so up, so positive, that he virtually exemplifies all the qualities that we associate with "America." (Note: that's "America" in quotes, the "America" of apple pie and rags to riches and Westward Ho! and stuff, not the America that invades countries and wrecks world economies and puts Sean Hannity on TV night after night.) Let's consider: Neil Diamond.
Here's Neil at his most upbeat:
Nice, right?No Sean Hannity there. No way Neil could ever be a downer or creepy or weird or spook me out. Unless...
You've got to listen close, but the xylophone is there, and it's creepy. Which says a lot. When the King of Upbeat, when Mr. Forever In Blue Jeans wants to go all sadistic and psycho, he puts a xylophone in the song. As does everyone. Like the Violent Femmes, who used the xylophone in their song "Gone Daddy Gone." I wasn't able to find a good Youtube video of that song, but I did find a high school band playing a version of it
and while they don't have a xylophone, I think we can all agree that the feeling is the same -- you could either listen to a xylophone, or you could watch a high school marching band play a Violent Femmes song about love being gone forever. Either one.
And the xylophone only gets creepier the more you look into it. Like if you do a search to try to find other songs with a xylophone in them, because you're not sure your list (of five songs) is complete, you might find a band called "Gorky's Zygotic Mynci," which has a song called "If Fingers Were Xylophones:"
Which is really a weird image, and, oddly, there seem to be no xylophones in that song, but it's instructive, I think, that Gorky didn't choose to say "if fingers were banjos," or "if fingers were clarinets" or "if fingers were pianos," which would seem weirder, but, let's face it, the xylophone is weird, and creepy.
Cool, but weird and creepy. So weird and creepy that the xylophone manages to bring down a black-and-white scene from the 1930s, and everyone knows how funny those are, usually. If I told you there was a fat guy in a tux playing an instrument in a 1930's black-and-white movie, you'd be all like "oh, man, this is gonna' be good. I bet he gets hit in the face with a pie." But watch:
No pie. No humor. And the song sounds spooky, right? If you said no, then do this: Close your eyes. Play that clip again. Wait, do that in reverse, because you won't know where to click if you close your eyes first. Play the clip, then quickly close your eyes. But not right away. First read all this, because you won't be able to if you close your eyes.
So read all this, then play the clip, then close your eyes and do what this paragraph tells you to do, which is, once you close your eyes and listen to that clip again, to picture the most innocent thing you can imagine. Let's say a duck. Ducks are innocent, right?
Okay, go ahead. Click, close, imagine, duck.
Now, open your eyes. Did you imagine a duck with fangs, and glowing red eyes, maybe a duck with fangs and glowing red eyes outside your bedroom window, tonight, at 3 a.m.? Just sitting and looking at you and you're thinking did the duck wake me up, or did I just luck out and happen to wake up before this Vampire Duck killed me?
If you didn't imagine that, then answer me this: Am I weird because I did? And, now you're imagining that, aren't you? So click the clip again and imagine Vampire Duck outside your window.
Creepy, right? I rest my case.
But I still want to play the xylophone, and here's why: It's cool. I'm always on the lookout for a new way to be cool, and/or a new way to impress people at parties -- even though I never go to parties, and even though if you invite me to a party I'll probably make an excuse and tell you that I can't come, and if you force me into it I'll come but I'll probably leave early.
But on the offchance that I do ever go to a party, I like to have a repertoire of cool things ready to go -- card tricks, playing a couple songs on the piano, what-have-you. And since juggling isn't easy (I've tried that) and ventriloquism is on the way out (I can do that pretty well, actually - - it's not so hard once you know the trick) I need backups, and xylophoning is my newest possible backup.
Because look at this:
So. What was the deal with that German interlude, there at the end? That's a video of Ralph Held, the World's Fastest Xylophone Player, and he proves two of my points:
1. If you could do that at a party, people would definitely think you were cool, and 2. Xylophones are creepy, because even in that video, there was something off about it; it goes from a demonstration of superfast xylophoning to a Nazi propaganda film, just like that.
Anyway, though, you can imagine how great the Xylophone-playing-ability would be at a party, and the only flaw in my plan appears to be that xylophones are neither common, nor easily portable, so that the idea that I'd go to a party and simply sit down and begin xylophoning to wow people over is kind of silly...
Back when I had a sports blog (it's this now) I made no bones about the fact that Brett Favre is the best football quarterback ever and should be allowed to play forever, if he wants -- quarterbacking whatever football team he might want to play on, in the far-distant future, leading a team of renegade humans to an improbable Superbowl victory over the Battlin' Skynets, or over a team fielded by the Legion Of Superheroes, if that's what he chooses to do.
I even had a suggestion for the NFL, one they haven't taken me up on yet, but will -- let Brett play for all 32 teams, playing 1/2 for each team through the course of the season. How wouldn't that be a great outcome?
There are those, though, who continue to feel that Brett should not play football and who continue to take sports as seriously, or more seriously than, they take important subjects like politics and religion and the question of why "Quisp" cereal is so expensive. There are those fans who discuss and obsess over the fate of Brett Favre and talk about it apocalyptic terms, fans like "KidNotorious2001," who last year wrote this about Brett's retirement-then-not:
In closing I just want to ask who are the REAL Lemmings and Kool Aide drinkers here? Those of us who have been following the pack before Favre and will follow them after, or the Johnny come lately's who only know of the Favre years? Favre was foolish in leaving us and, to quote a famous Jedi, "Who is more foolish? The Fool or the fool who follows him?" FOREVER PACK!!
Kudos to KidNotorious2001 for cramming, into one paragraph, a nature movie, a reference to Jonestown, and an Obi-Wan quote. In doing so, KidNotorious2001 reached the pinnacle of human literature -- all future writing efforts will pale in comparison to that one.
I'm not like KidNotorious2001; I love the Brett talk -- if it weren't for Brett, what would sports fans talk about in May and June? Baseball's boring, and there's no other major sporting events going on right now, are there? (I'm not including this, as by "major sporting event" I mean "sports that people care about and which are not fixed.")
But I've also come to realize that there will probably be a time when Brett no longer plays football, and that will mean, too, the end to the speculation about which team Brett might play for and also an end to the comments by a bunch of Johnny-Come-Lately's (shouldn't that be "latelies"?) about how Brett Favre is going to bring a rain of fire and destruction down on the skulls of those who dare to want to watch him, or how he will someday lead us, wearing a jersey from the Vikings (or from the Raiders? Or Red Sox? Or maybe he'd play Hooker for the Wildeklawer Griquas Rugby Union? 'cause I'd like one of their jerseys) lead us to the promised land down the Yellow Brick Road through the Candy Cane Forest... or something. Look, it's tough to make up a religion on the spot.
Yes, that day will come that Brett no longer throws touchdown passes (or, as they're called in Rugby, in case he playes for the Griquas, "touchdown passes, mate") but he'll still need something to do and we Brettarians will still want our Brett Media Fixes, so it's in that spirit...
... and I'm finally getting to my point here...
... in that spirit that I have decided to plan for the future not by saving for retirement or working hard, but by helping Brett Favre find the perfect job for when he no longer wants to play football anymore.
And my first choice for that job?
Researcher at the South Pole UV Monitoring Station!
The NSF UV Polar Monitoring Programs network operates a UV Monitoring station at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Monitoring station -- located at the geographical south pole.
This job would be perfect for Brett. First of all, he's from the South, and loves it in the South. Well, what's South-ier than the South Pole?
Second of all, Brett always does better in cold weather. The average temperature at the South Pole is -49 Celsius, which in real ("American") temperatures is... really cold. (The other day, on Jeopardy, a contestant had to, for Double Jeopardy, calculate a Fahrenheit Temperature from a Celsius temperature. When did Jeopardy start requiring math?)
Thirdly, the season goes from September to March -- which makes it fit almost perfectly with the football season, which ends now in Mid-February. Brett wouldn't have to get used to any new rhythms.
From our perspective, as fans, too, it makes perfect sense. They could hook up a webcam and Brett could give daily reports to us on how the UV is doing down there. (I'm not entirely sure what UV is. I think it's a kind of penguin.) Media types could then obsess, yearly, over whether the South Pole ice is receding, whether it would come back in the winter, whether maybe the ice covering would try to obtain its release so that it could go play for a different continent, and Brett could appear on the cover of Discover magazine, with his own personal column in there just ahead of that article they have, every month, on how some telescope somewhere looked further than ever and found some "proof" of dark matter -- since scientists are still trying to get us to buy into that.
So, Brett, when that day finally comes up and you hang up your cleats and drive your bakkie away from the locker room for the last time, have your agent get in touch with ... um... whoever it is that runs the South Pole. And say "hi" to the Penguins for us!
Did you know there were three sporting events going on this weekend? In addition to the 135th (Really? Apparently so!) Kentucky Derby, there are, I'm told, hockey and basketball playoffs... but only one of those three will in any way capture anyone's interest. As I understand it, even the players are bored by the NBA Playoffs (a/k/a, The Neverending Story II), and I judge that by a snippet of an interview I overheard with Kobe Bryant, in which they asked him whether he watches the playoff games when he's not playing or practicing, and he said no, he usually watches something else.
NBA, if you can't even get the players to pay attention to your games, you're doing something wrong.
And the less said about hockey, the better.
But the Kentucky Derby manages to capture America's attention every year, as news reporters and Matt Lauer mention the Kentucky Derby, and mention some horses that are running in it, and also mention hats and mint juleps. Horses, hats, and mint juleps, plus inexplicable pairings of celebrities, are all anyone really knows about the Kentucky Derby. Well, that and that Tobey Maguire won it riding Seabiscuit, who was played by Seattle Slew in that movie about horse racing.
And seeing the mention of hats and mint juleps on the news this morning, I thought two things to myself. I thought:
1. Why doesn't someone make a hat shaped like a mint julep and in doing so reduce the number of inane news stories by 50%, and
2. There must be something else interesting about the Kentucky Derby, because how could it last 135 (Really? Apparently so!) years unless there's something actually interesting about it.
So I set to with my keen investigative skills and found
The 3 Best Things You Want To Know About The 135th (Really? Apparently So!) Kentucky Derby!
What's wrong with "Home of the Kentucky Derby?" Louisville, where the Kentucky Derby is held, really needs a slogan. If you go to the official Kentucky souvenir store (which you'd do if you wanted to convince people you went to the Kentucky Derby without actually having to go to the Kentucky Derby), you find bumper stickers featuring such thrilling, incentive-building slogans as: Hmmm. That's your selling point? But the people of Louisville may be slogan-challenged. Their other effort is Louisville: Do Something Original, which seems incongruous given that Louisville this weekend will host the 135th (Really? Apparently so!) running of a horse race -- and aren't all horse races more or less the same?
The adoption of Do Something Original is itself something of an irony, given that there was, for a while, an effort to promote as a slogan and bumper sticker the phrase "Keep Louisville Weird," ... which was a slogan first used by Austin, Texas, and then at least three other cities before Louisville got around to its own Weird Maintenance.
So maybe try: Louisville: Do Something That's Been Done Many Many Times Before?
Here's an event that takes a little longer than the Derby. The Kentucky Derby is over in about a minute or so, if my memory serves me (and by memory I mean I don't really care and have never watched the race itself, so what's the big deal?). That's hardly a good reason to head to Louisville, weird though it might be kept. If you're going to draw people in, you've got to give them more than a minute or so of entertainment. (That's the lesson I learned when my Off Broadway One Man Show, "A Minute Or So Of Entertainment" folded after only two matinees in 1997.)
Louisville is all over that, though. They've got just the hook for you if you're one of those people who insists on watching something that takes longer than a sneeze: The Falls Landing Foundations "100 Years On The Ohio River," a re-enactment of the founding of Louisville. And more. To quote from that site:
To aid our fellow history buffs, we provide "The historical re-enactors' EVENTS DATABASE" for all to post or peruse events. Historical events range from 1492 to the end of the Civil War.
So if you're lucky enough to be in or around Louisville beginning on May 15, 2009 -- just two weeks away, so book now! -- you can watch Louisvillains re-enact the history of Louisville from the year Columbus set sail through 1865.
Bring snacks.
Alas, Poor York, I Knew Him Not At All... No Whodathunkit?! would be complete without giving you, the casual observer/possibly medication-needing reader of this blog information on which famous people are associated with that event, and I won't let you down. While Louisville boasts of such famous favorite sons as Muhammad Ali, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Thomas Edison, and Tom Cruise (who lived there for a bit as a teen), by far the most famous and fascinating person to hail from Louisville is:
York.
York, as everyone knows, was the uni-named slave that Lewis & Clark took with them on their famous expedition to recapture the Fountain of Youth that was secreted inside the Alamo. (I'm a little sketchy on history.) York is probably best known for the eponymous opera -- "York"-- that was written in his honor. I wasn't able to find any songs from the opera, but that website gives you a rundown of the plot... complete with SPOILER ALERTS!
Not to ruin it for you, but apparently, in the third act, Lewis & Clark get into an awesome lightsaber duel, and then later on, all the ghosts of all the characters come on stage and sing while the ghosts of William Clark and York reconcile.
And, yes, one of those two actually happens in that opera. You know which one I'm hoping for.
Also, York was named after his father, so technically, he was York, Jr.
