He Couldn't Get Any Lower

Or could he? I had to read the article to be sure.

Because what ESPN.com said happened to Lawrence Taylor could be taken in more than one way.

That's low, man.

Uninterested? Only If You're Disinterested

I'm a bit of a language geek. Which is not to say that I always write or speak in perfect English. If I did, that last sentence would have been part of the first sentence.

But I have my bugaboos. So does Ben Yagoda over at Slate.

Yes, I know that language changes over time and some things that we consider perfectly acceptable would have left folks in prior centuries aghast. My main concern is the same as Yagoda's, the few words for which we have no proper substitute.

"Literally", of course, is the granddaddy of them. To me, anyway. Yagoda avoids its discussion. Maybe it's too obvious. Or too painful.

As Yagoda points out when discussing "disinterested", there is no exact synonym for that word. (Oddly enough, in a prior paragraph, he points out that "impartial" means roughly the same thing.) But this is even more true for "literally". Please try to name a synonym for it. Once it loses its meaning, we have no single word left to express this concept. This is where language's evolution becomes devolution.

Wipe Your Butt With Our New Poll

If you know me, you know how much I love polls/surveys. Not taking polls, but dissecting them. This one isn't even worth dissecting. It's idiotic on its face.

Polls are supposed to be information-gathering devices. This information can be used for marketing, customer service evaluation, testing political winds, etc. Sometimes a poll that's taken for a legitimate purpose is still illegitimate. Check these out if you want to know what I think about polls/surveys that do this.

But Charmin's poll is clearly not intended to gather useful information. It's only purpose is to get people who just love to have their opinions heard to click on an advertisement. It's so transparent that I can't imagine anyone clicking on it. I'd be curious to see the numbers on how many who saw the ad just couldn't resist pulling the trigger. And what they clicked. "Ooh, is Charmin extremely new and different or just very new and different? It wipes my butt in such new and different ways. But just how new and different? I'm torn."

Slime Machine

Okay, so one of the dangers of Netflix streaming movies is that you have no risk but your time when you decide to watch something. Before, when you put a disc in your queue you were at least committing to having a physical object in your house. If you couldn't choke it down, you put it in the red envelope and had to spend a few days waiting in shame for its replacement, preferably something of greater cultural value than "Dude, Where's My Car?"

With the streaming thing, the threshold for a queue add has been drastically reduced. Hey, I'll just watch it for a few minutes. If it's really that awful, I'll just turn it off and go on to the next thing. Instantly!

This is fine in theory, but when you have certain obsessive-compulsive tendencies it can be a trap. Some of us absolutely cannot watch a movie or TV show in which we have even the slightest interest if it has already begun. (Yes, just like Alvy Singer.) And we do not begin to watch or read something that we do not eventually finish. I once slogged through 600-odd painful pages of "The Alienist". Hey, maybe it'll get better. (It didn't.)

Which brings us to "Hot Tub Time Machine". (You can follow the link if you want a full synopsis. Not bothering here.)

I'm about the target demographic for this film. The soundtrack was the soundtrack of my teenage years. If nothing else, I figured I'd chuckle a few times and enjoy the soundtrack. Which I sorta did. Not just the obvious choices (Men Without Hats, Spandau Ballet, Serious Moonlight-era Bowie) but the few inspired oddities, both truly awesome (The Replacements!) and awesomely cheesy (Nu Shooz!).

It's a total guy movie, which is not really my thing. But I can enjoy it if it's funny enough. In that department, it's a coin toss. I'm not quite sure if I wasted an hour-forty or if the few chuckles and titties made it a better bet at the time than another episode of "Torchwood" (which is still there waiting patiently for me, thank goodness).

But what really concerns me here are the morals we're meant (or not) to take away from this cinematic enterprise. And at this point we'll give the obligatory HERE BE SPOILERS!

The film, to its credit, doesn't cast its main characters in a flattering light. We pity them but we don't really like them. But that's what made it harder for me to swallow the ending, which we'll get to in a second.

Early in the film, John Cusack laments that all they had in the 80s was "Reagan and AIDS", the two plagues that were at their grossest back then but continue to pollute our lives today. So one might reasonably expect that, if we were to deconstruct the thing, we might find at least a mild indictment of the values we had back then. The Gordon Gekko "greed is good" era was as slick, empty and one-dimensional as Oliver Stone's screenplays condemning it.

Well, here's what happens at the end. After spending most of the 80s flashback trying to do everything that they did the first time around in a perhaps-vain attempt to avoid the Butterfly Effect, they end by saying "fuck it" and doing whatever the heck they want. Rob Corddry's character even stays behind when the others return to the present in order to take advantage of his knowledge of the future.

I found this a bit depressing. Once the three other principals made their way back to 2010, things were quite different. For all of them. But not because, as in "A Christmas Carol" or even "Back to the Future", they did things better or were kinder people or worked harder as a result of reliving the past. They didn't have epiphanies. Their lives were better because they cheated. And the movie is okay with this. It actually celebrates it.

Rob Corddry is filthy stinking rich because he knew about Google and Twitter and Motley Crue before everyone else. Craig Robinson is well-off because he pre-empted his wife from cheating on him in the future and wowed an audience by teaching his band a Black Eyed Peas song from the future instead of lamely crooning "Careless Whisper", as he did the first time around. John Cusack meets a music journalist that he ends up with instead of brooding over the girl who stabbed him in the eye (and, as he learns, would have stabbed him in the eye either way).

To boil this down to one sentence, "Hot Tub Time Machine" teaches us that the road to happiness and wealth is insider trading. It isn't a repudiation of the 80s. It's a celebration of its worst aspects, which just happen to have exploded again in this decade. Rob Corddry's character is a dick at the beginning of the movie and he's a dick at the end. But now he's a rich dick. And he isn't rich because he earned it. We're supposed to feel good?

No. This left a very bad taste in my mouth. And it wasn't because of Salt-n-Pepa. It's a total glorification of corruption. And really, not funny enough to mask that fact. The characters in "The Producers" were much funnier and much more sympathetic. And they ended up in jail.

Overrated

I'm not a big fan of taunting. I'm talking specifically about sports fans taunting opposing players, coaches and, worst of all, fans. Although I do tend to frown upon taunting in regular life too. ("You call yourself a cabby? Any idiot knows you take 10th Avenue. STUCK in TRAFF-ic!" [Clap. Clap. Clapclapclap.] "STUCK in TRAFF-ic!" [Clap. Clap. Clapclapclap.])

I think it shows an ugly side of human nature that people would take more pleasure in the downfall of another than they would take pleasure in the achievement of their own team. As a born-and-bred New Englander and longstanding member of Red Sox Nation, I hate the Yankees as much as the next guy. But when the Sox beat the Yanks, I'm happy that the Sox beat the Yanks. I'm happy for the Sox. I'm not as concerned that the guy wearing pinstripes feels personal shame and humiliation.

So, I'm not really into the chants of "Yankees suck". Partly because it's so patently untrue that the whole enterprise smacks of wishful thinking and is therefore more than a little bit pathetic. The Yankees are, historically and currently, the least sucky team in the history of professional sports. Why else would we bother hating them? And "Jeter swallows" is downright offensive. I will say no more on it, lest it be dignified. (As if such a thing is possible.) I'd rather cheer my team on than attempt to degrade another, no matter how much I don't care for them.

Which brings me to today's real point of contention, chanting "o-ver-rat-ed" at a team that is being vanquished by another, presumably underrated, team. This is taunting, of course. But, even more than chanting "[the other team] sucks", it paints the chanter as a bit ignorant and as someone who is actually dissing his/her own team.

Listen. If the other team is overrated, that means that they're not really as good as the conventional wisdom holds. Which means that when you're chanting that the other team is overrated, you're really demeaning your own team. "Hey, those guys really aren't all that good!" So, now you're crowing that your team just survived a squeaker with a team that isn't very good? What does that say about your guys?

Wouldn't it be more uplifting to say, "You guys are a very talented assemblage of physical prowess and game management. And the team for whom we cheer has defeated you, making them even more awesome and reflecting their glory on us who wear the same colors as we cheer!"

I reckon that doesn't make much of a chant.

Smart Letters: The Cost of Energy

Free-marketeers who poo-poo renewable energy never ever ever discuss the costs to society that are never borne by the energy industry. Kenneth Miller of New York City lays them out succinctly. (It's the last letter on the page.) This is why subsidizing the oil industry is sheer madness and subsidizing renewable energy is sound policy. Vitally important, in fact.

The recent argument for nuclear power has been that it is the only large-scale energy source that is economically competitive with fossil fuels and that won’t contribute to global warming. But as the horrible disaster in Japan is making clear, nuclear energy comes with many hidden costs.

These are already manifest in the government insurance that is necessary to raise capital to build reactors and in the government responsibility for nuclear waste disposal. Add to this the government responsibility for the costs of disaster management and recovery and for decommissioning ruined reactors, not to mention whatever dollar amount you want to assign to the lives lost or ruined in disasters, and the real costs soar.

Fossil fuels also have the hidden costs of climate change, which will likely dwarf those of nuclear power, as well as the costs of oil spills and other disasters and myriad government subsidies.

If all of these hidden costs were factored in, we might find that renewables are by far the cheapest source of energy. 

Information Exploitation

It's too soon. We can't talk about it. No, it's still too soon. We can't talk about it. No, no. Come back to me in a little while. Yes, later. Much later. When you've calmed down a bit. I'm sorry, what were we talking about?

Jonah Goldberg seems to think that we shouldn't be referring to the recent and still unfolding nuclear disaster(s) in Japan as reasons why nuclear power may not be such a great idea. It's a tragedy. (Can't argue with that.) But it's still happening right now so we shouldn't "exploit" it for some sneaky awful political agenda. Like saving lives.

This happens all the time. Something awful happens, usually because of something the energy industry did. Some of us meekly raise our hands and say, "Um, excuse me, but doesn't this prove what we've been saying all along? That what we're doing here is inherently dangerous and harmful to the environment?" Then the captains of industry come rushing in to say, "No no, it's perfectly safe.*" *"As long as there are never any natural disasters or the hint of human error. Or terrorism."

And people like Jonah Goldberg are right there to back them up by claiming that anyone merely pointing out the fact of the disaster is using it for their own political agenda and therefore disrespecting the thousands/millions affected by said disaster. I guess if our agenda is something like "Nuclear power is bad because terrible shit happens so we maybe shouldn't use it so much" then it's considered tacky to say so when terrible shit actually happens.

But wait, Jonah says. You said yourself that shit happens. Shit happens! We can't stop doing everything because something bad might happen, right? So a few hundred people get their faces melted off. Hey, it could have been a few thousand. The system works! (Jonah actually makes this point, if a bit less in extremis. It's in the third-to-last paragraph.) Let's congratulate ourselves and build a few more nuclear plants. We're going to need them now that those other ones have melted down. But we'll need to build them somewhere else. Too much radiation already in that place.

Sorry, Jonah. But when we have preventable catastrophes like this it is the perfect time to bring up the folly of raping the earth for short-term gain. The truth does not take a vacation because it's inconvenient for you to look at it. We are not "thirst[y] to confirm...[our]...preferred policies". We are pained that we have to go through this again and again and again while people like you refuse to listen as more and more people die.

God Told Me That You're a Dick

Why is it that anytime anything awful happens some fucknut says it's God telling us something? Of course, exactly what God is trying to tell us is open to interpretation. But it's usually about gay people, atheists, liberals, New Yorkers, or gay atheist liberal New Yorkers. (Is there any other kind?)

This stupid little girl is just exultant over the incredible horror in Japan. Apparently, this was a message to atheists. I hadn't realized that every single person on the east coast of Japan was an atheist. But thanks for playing, girlie. I hope you don't have any atheists in a 150-mile radius of your house. Because when God comes a-calling for them, you and your Barbies are getting sucked into the maelstrom with them.

I'll give her a pass, though, because she's just a tot. Once she's all growed up and spewing the same nonsense (and -- I hate to be so pessimistic, but -- I'm fairly confident she will be) then we can hold her in something that doesn't resemble pity so much as contempt. Especially if she gets her own radio and/or TV show.

Like this shithead. Mr. Beck uses the old I'm-not-really-saying-what-I'm-saying bit, which I love. It absolves people -- at least in their own minds, and possibly the law's, in certain states -- of guilt. "I didn't really say that the people in Japan had it coming! (But I just did.)"

See if you can look in the mirror and say the following two things without telling yourself that at least one of them can't possibly be true.

1. "I'm not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes,"
2. "[T]here's a message being sent. And that is, 'Hey, you know that stuff we're doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.' I'm just saying."

So, God didn't cause the earthquake, but the earthquake that just happened is a message. But not from God. The message is presumably from the Avon Lady.

Oh, and of course Glenn Beck knows exactly what the message is. All that stuff you're doing is bad! Well, we're doing an awful lot of stuff down here, Glenn. Which of it exactly is the problem? I'm thinking that watching your batshit crazy show would be pretty high up, if I were God.

And is just Japan doing it or is it us too? Because if it's us, God missed by about 6,000 miles. Our god is an awesomely stupid god, apparently. One who has a lot of incredibly stupid and hateful followers.

Look Out for That Clock!

Every year, twice a year, we go through the whole Daylight Savings Time thing. And every year, twice a year, we hear people complaining about "losing an hour of sleep" (or gaining it) and how the time change screws up their delicately balanced internal clock. Hogwash. Really. It's complete nonsense.

Major changes in your sleep cycle can certainly wreak havoc on you. This is what jet lag is. Ask anyone who's flown to Europe or Asia. Or Hawaii. Or even coast-to-coast. But when we change the clocks twice a year we're only talking about one hour. Just one hour. "Oh, MAB," I can hear you saying, "That's still a time change! It messed me up!" Yeah? Okay, here's a question for you. What time do you get up to go to work on a normal weekday? For some, it's 6:00. For some it's 7:00.

Okay, now what time do you get up on a normal weekend day? I guarantee you it isn't 6 or 7 for the vast majority. It's probably closer to 9 or 10. ("It's Saturday! I get to sleep in!") So, unless you go to bed and wake up at exactly the same time every day, you are screwing with your sleep cycle far more drastically than this measly hour that switches but twice a year. And you're doing it every week.

That messed-up feeling you're having is entirely in your head. It's fed, of course, by perceived wisdom and even our media. I've seen "reports" on local and even national news warning people to be careful when driving after time changes. 'Cause you're so messed up. You'll definitely be groggy. So thanks for feeding the nonsense, American media.

So you didn't "lose an hour of sleep" last night. You probably slept as much as you would have anyway. This is why they do this on a weekend, when you mess with your internal clock all the time anyway. You lost an hour of watching TV, or reading cranky blog posts.

I have nothing to say on the merits of Daylight Savings Time. I don't care one way or the other what time we all agree it is. We can argue over whether it's better to have it lighter in the morning or in the evening. Go to it. But the discussion and accompanying grief about "gaining" or "losing" sleep is just plain silly.

It's just an hour, people. Get over it.

That Was One Hell of a Hockey Game

I like how the Boston Globe shows us the scores of the most recent games played by the local boys and their next opponent. It allows us to recap the recent history of rivalries and jog our fond memories of the last time, say, the Celtics played the Grizzlies. Good times.

Remember that freaking awesome B's-Canadiens game last time out? That was a statbuster.

I remember they pulled both goalies early in the first period. Everyone on both teams got hat tricks. It was a major boost to the local millinery economy. Let's do it again, B's!