Artificial Cheese

There’s nothing like the light from a television to brighten an otherwise uneventful night.  But the choices have been similar for the past few years…Conan, Leno, Letterman…Carson Daly?  What is he still doing on television?

On weekends, the choices get much worse.  Paid programming, foreign cleavage on Telemundo, World Series of Poker…Carson Daly?  That’s strange.  Its generally somewhere between the cleavage and the poker that I decide to head to sleep.  But on this night I found a new face as I surfed the channels.

I couldn’t recognize him, but he was very funny.  He hosted a half-hour talk show with no monologue, one guest, and some skits.  The pace of the show was very fast, almost like a 1970s variety-hour type show but more organized, and only a half hour.  Sort of geeky, he laughed at his own jokes uncontrollably and poked fun at the entire process of making a talk show, like Conan O’Brian used to do.

When the show ended I caught the man’s name, Spike Feresten.   Looking at his IMDB entry, it would appear that Fox’s casting department as struck gold.  Spike Feresten has written for the Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, The Dana Carvey Show, as well as Seinfeld.

You’re probably asking, “How does writing qualify you to host a talk show?”   I don’t know how, but it does.  All I know is that I’ll be watching this show next Saturday, 12am (11 central), to see whether Spike Feresten is just a one-hit wonder or the real deal.

If there is one consistency with the Philadelphia Eagles, its that they perform well in the face of adversity…sometimes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that they only perform well in the face of adversity…usually.

In 2002, Donovan McNabb had one of the best games of his career. He played the game on a shattered leg. His replacement, Koy Detmer, frantically threw up touchdown passes before breaking his arm a game later. Any other team would have faltered under a third string quarterback, but the unproven A.J. Feeley became the fortunate benefactor of the Eagles’ bizarro-mentality, turning in a 5-1 record and leading the team to the playoffs. That team imploded in the face of optimism after Donovan McNabb returned from injury.

The next great success for the Eagles rode in on the coattails of gut-wrenching anticipation. Not anticipation of success, but the absorption of the slow poison dripping from the mouth of Terrell Owens. The Eagles had a great year, but the media and thus the fans just waited for the drama to set in. The Eagles did not truely hit top gear until Terrell Owens got horse-collared by Roy Williams and broke his leg. With Owens out, the media wrote off the team’s playoff hopes, and that’s when the Eagles performed their best. When Terrell Owens returned from injury is when the team finally lost in the Superbowl.

The following year was very uncharacteristic of the team. Possibly the worst year in history for the team in terms of injury and drama yielded a 6-10 record and a broken team spirit.

So a year later, they’re at it again. Donovan McNabb blows out his knee when the team is 5-6 and predicted to miss the playoffs once more. Surprise, surprise…Jeff Garcia steps in and leads them to the playoffs. The result is a city that doesn’t want to support one of the best quarterbacks in the league because the replacement always benefits from a revitalized team. The only controversy in this town is why Andy Reid can’t motivate his players without waiting for a fire to be lit by some uncontrollable event.

So next season, lets stop beating around the bush. Just hire some south philly thug to go Nancy Kerrigan on Donovan McNabb, and take out Jevon Kearse too just to speed things up. Otherwise, get a young fiery assistant coach from the college ranks to motivate this team when its not a life or death situation.

When you watch two movies on the same day, you can’t help trying to find similarities between the two. The two motion pictures featured in this Sunday Night Showdown are Waist Deep and Everything is Illuminated.

Waist Deep is an action/thriller starring the oh-so sexy Tyrese Gibson, and the equally sexy Meagan Good. The eye-candy makes up for the giant plot-holes and emotionally inconsistent acting. The movie starts with Tyrese’s son getting inadvertantly kidnapped by the Tyrese’s arch-enemy. The rest of the movie plays out like a Grand Theft Auto mission with a completely inadequate sex scene.

Everything is Illuminated should be qualified as drama but will be remembered for its comedy and imagery. The movie is based on a novel written by Jonathan Safran Foer, who serves as a character in this rendition. Foer is played by Elijah Wood, a Jewish manboy who likes collecting random things to get over his fear of forgetting the past. He teams up with a translator (Eugene Hutz, lead singer of Gogol Bordello) that speaks very broken english and the translator’s grandfather who serves as a driver. The mission is to find information about Elijah Wood’s grandfather and a mysterious woman named ‘Augustine’.

At first glance, these movies seem like opposites. I would even go so far as say that they are polar opposites, if it weren’t redundant and unnecessary. The main characters compare as a muscular black sex symbol and a weak jewish white man. Waist Deep is a high-paced action set in a seedy metropolitan gangland while Everything is Illuminated is a slow drama based in the colorful and lush Ukranian countryside.

But after some time, I began to realize that these movies are superficially and …subdermally similar. The most obvious similarity would be the overall goals of the main characters. Both Elijah Wood and Tyrese spend the entire movie searching for someone. Just as Tyrese is armed with a pistol, Elijah Wood is armed with a photograph of his grandfather. Both embark on their respective quests completely dependent on their supporting characters.

The supporting characters also share some similarities in that they play antagonists at some points in their movies. Tyrese was initally betrayed by Meagan Good before she willingly helped him, just as Elijah Wood’s character was battling through antisemetic behavior from his supporting cast before they respected him. Through the course of the movie, both Tyrese and Elijah Wood won over their assistants through persistence and honesty rather than submission or compromise.

A week from now, I will probably not remember anything about Waist Deep as it was just another shallow action movie that didn’t try to cerebrally involve the viewer. But everyone has their opinions on movies. Some people don’t want to be intellectually stimulated by movies, and movies like Waist Deep serve as a satisfying escape from reality. For those that enjoy slow-paced dramas with subtly executed humor, Everything is Illuminated might be your cup of tea. The movie has some flaws in execution, and proves to be more abstract than it needs to be, but Eugene Hutz is reason alone to watch this movie.

The Nuggets sucker-punched their way into making the biggest NBA trade in years. Just days after their short-sighted brawl with the Knicks, the Nuggets filled the huge void left by suspensions with Allen Iverson.

The deal was simple, Allen Iverson goes to the Nuggets. In return, the Sixers get Andre Miller, Joe Smith, and two 2007 first round draft picks.

So who won? Everyone. In the short term, the Nuggets took their 108 point per game average and shot it through the ceiling. They now have the top two scorers in the NBA under contract including Carmelo the Flowery Enforcer. When the suspension-smoke clears they should be on course to the NBA finals. They’ll even trump the Phoenix Suns when it comes to sheer speed.

The Sixers won’t see their benefits for another three or four years. The degree of benefit, and Billy King’s job, will depend on one thing. Greg Oden. The phenom freshman center from Ohio State will be the target for the Sixers this entire year. Getting the first overall pick will be crucial for the future of the Sixers franchise.

For now I’ll say that Allen Iverson will be a snug fit in Denver, and won’t be the coach-killer that he has been in Philadelphia. I may find myself writing a ‘So I was wrong…’ entry on that statement, but I’ll stand by those words for now. Denver fans have a very exciting season in front of them.

Philadelphia fans should forget about basketball for a while. Spend some time with the kids, do some volunteer work, just spend your time productively for a few years. Before you know it, the Sixers will be right back in second place.

For more detailed analysis on the future of the trade from the Sixer’s perspective see this article on the mothersite.

I’ve never punched a man out of anger, and I don’t claim to be able to fight. However, if I were 6′8″, 250 pounds, and have been lifting weights since I was 15 years old, I would be ashamed of myself if I faught like a 7 year old child engaged in a hissy fit. So why is it that every professional basketball player in America fights like a girl?

The Nuggets vs. Knicks game today featured a “brawl” between the two teams. In hockey, a brawl means missing teeth, facial lacerations, bloody streaks across the ice, and many satisfied fans. In soccer, a brawl means rioting, small-scale wars and furious explosions, and many mysteriously missing fans. A “basketbrawl” is quite different.

A brawl in basketball is PG-13 at best, but should not be seen at any cost. Its too shameful that the country’s most physically imposing people punch like Swedish schoolboys. Take Carmelo Anthony in the aforementioned Nuggets vs. Knicks brawl, running around like he’s swatting flies on people’s faces. Its embarassing for Denver fans and large muscular people everywhere. Even Carmelo Anthony should write a letter of apology to his friends and family for punching like an alter boy.

So the answer is to stop. Stop fighting during basketball games. Not because fighting has no place in a competitive sport, but because you just don’t know what you’re doing.

In many Indian households AVS, the Asian Variety Show, serves as a glint of familiarity for many homegrown Indians who immigrated to the United States for one reason or another.  In the past, this program also acted as a catalyst for nostalgic thoughts.  I would sit with my parents sometimes as they would recount stories of their time growing up in India while the television played black and white Indian film outtakes of song performances.

But that has changed dramatically in recent years.  In purely subjective terms, AVS has become garbage.  To the eyes of a first generation American with Indian roots, its like 90s American pop culture vomiting into a bowl of Indian food.  When you look at it, you can’t tell where the curry ends and the vomit begins.  In objective terms, AVS has always been changing slowly to Americanize Indian pop culture.

Personal feelings aside, what should AVS be broadcasting?  Nehal has written an entry, Bollywood Blunder, in funksysteme.blog where he says:

“…people involved would be more interested in classic Bollywoood than the new, “Americanized” Bollywood. … So, it would be in the best interest of the majority for [AVS] to show less poser Indian material, and more classical art.  There is so much beautiful art and culture, but it is not realized in America because all we get to see is bastardized Indian/American (not American Indian) garbage.”

One important thing to keep in mind is that AVS is purely entertainment with a specific target in mind, which is our parents.  When it comes to anything pop-culture related in an entertainment industry, what you see is never a gauge of what people are, but what people want.  Its a media projection of a culture’s collective desires; devoid of its values, norms, and even respect for itself.

In the case of AVS, we don’t see an honest represntation of Indian culture, and that is not what we should be seeking from AVS.  We see the cultural id without the ego, exactly how the culture wants to see itself when their parents’ culture looks the other way.  Proposing that AVS changes its broadcast material is just hiding the problem rather than being aware of it.  It would be like solving global warming with global dimming, or adding a James Earl Jones voice over for Steve Guttenberg in the Police Academy movies.  He’ll still sound like a chipmunk.

So in conclusion, you should take Steve Guttenberg for what he is, and acknowledge that the voice is a problem that can’t be solved by James Earl Jones.

There was a time when I thought that I was pretty good at predicting results in the world of professional sports. I had a few successful sports predictions in the past that lured me into a false trust of my intuition. But over time I became fairly consistent in my wrongness, with sports and otherwise. Nowadays I don’t even feel the pain of inaccurate predictions…I just push out predictions without looking back at whether they’re right or wrong.

So in an effort to change my ways, I’ve decided to look back at a few public sports predictions that I made on this very blog. Lets start with my entry regarding Bob Clarke and his step down from the general manager role of the flyers, Demise of the Broad Street Bullies. In that article I said that the Flyers were starting a transitional period between the old NHL and the new NHL, and the loss of the last member of the Broad St. Bullies was a strong indication of that fact.

I also predicted that the Sixers would be the surprise of the league after winning their first three games convicingly, including one against the defending champions of the basketball universe.

So…Bob Clarke ended up rejoining the Flyers as the vice-president of something or other, and the Sixers lost 12 of their next 15 games. I guess I was wrong again. At least I have the guts to make predictions, unlike all you people who just read blogs all day and reiterate what other people say. You should be thanking me for even saying anything. You need me.

I’m tired of the blood banks playing the guilt card every time they need blood. I’m not bleeding people, why am I being blamed for the lack of blood in their bags? I don’t like the fact that people are dying and I could indirectly improve their chances of survival. But we should respond to their thirst for blood the same way we respond to our SUVs’ thirst for gas; by improve efficiency.

This can be done by taking the “bank” in “blood bank” more seriously. Lets start by saying that every bank needs an account. When you either give blood or withdraw blood you get an account. If your account has a negative balance then you need to donate. If you have a positive balance, then you don’t need to donate when you need blood.

There, we’re already breaking even. If we throw in some interest rates, tax deductions, loans, blood bonds, etc. we’ll see a Hemoconoical golden age in no time.

I’ve always been an avid video game player.  I try to stay on or near the cutting edge when it comes to hardware, including PCs and consoles.  I am starting to warm to purchasing one of the new consoles that were recently released.  When I was younger, the only thing standing in between myself and the latest and greatest was money.  My parents’ money to be exact.  However six years ago, I started noticing a strange trend.

I just couldn’t find what I wanted.  I would go to stores with wads of money in my hands looking for a product that was universally sold out.  After finally clearing the short hurdle of money, I had to find a way around the giant hurdle of availability.  As the decade moves on this is turning out to be less of an isolated incident and more of a trend.  Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo can’t make hardware fast enough to sate the hunger of the young gaming community.

I can understand that demand is greater than supply; its nothing new.  I can understand that the manufacturers need to start making money for themselves and those who make software for their systems, so they get the hardware out the door as fast as possible.

Now comes the part about what “I don’t understand”.  I don’t understand how the people fortunate enough to aquire one of these machines are able to turn around and sell them for thousands of dollars worth of profit.  Look up ‘PS3′ on eBay and you’ll understand what I don’t understand.  I’ve always thought that the cost of an item is determined by a simple equation that factors in demand, supply, and production costs.

So if the supply goes DOWN, and the demand remains UP, then the costs go UP.  Why are the retailers still selling these items at MSRP?  If demand is high enough to sell it for $10,000 on eBay, then why not at Best Buy?

I know the Media’s got you scared of Global Warming with their rising water levels and killer icebergs attacking New Zealand. Unfortunately, I have no words to ease your worries, because you should be worried. Our years of chugging around SUVs and running the air conditioner “just for the humidity” has finally caught up with us. I know we can’t stop, and don’t bother, because the killer icebergs are already en route to New Zealand.

But I think that there’s still hope. I’m not talking about putting our hopes in the hands of scientists or God or anything goofy like that. I’m talking about Global Dimming.

I’m sure we all know about Global Warming. We know about the Greenhouse Effect where the heat absorbed by the Earth is being recycled in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases from our cars. But I’d be surprised if you’re familiar with the term Global Dimming.

Global Dimming is the magical affect that particulates, aka aerosol particles, have on the sun’s rays. These particles become the nuclei of cloud droplets and actually block the energy from the sun. This causes a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate.

Is Global Dimming the opposite of Global Warming? Well…they are as much opposites as diet pills and chocolate cake. Global Dimming is responsible for a lot of the decreased rainfall and famines in the world. But if we are truly committed to stopping the killer icebergs, and we don’t want to spend time learning self-restraint, then get that aerosol pumping.

I’ve been alive 20-some years, and over that time I’ve had the opportunity to watch some young people get old. When I was younger, I had a more restricted view on the impact of age on a person’s career. Athletes, movie stars, television personalities…no one ever seemed to age. Michael Jordan was always Michael Jordan, Harrison Ford was always Harrison Ford, and Bob Barker was always Bob Barker.

Now that I have a few years under my belt, I have developed the ability to acknowledge a person’s scope in relation to time. I understand that people grow older, and I know how people can change as years pass. Most people simply degrade as time goes on, they begin to lose their abilities in whatever field they practice. Athletes retire because they can’t run anymore, TV people retire because they can’t fake their smiles anymore…but not film stars.

Actors and Actresses never seem to leave their professions with grace. So many of these film stars age only to mold themselves into caricatures of characters they may have played or personas they may have exhibited in their younger years.

Sylvester Stallone tried with Copland, but he can’t play a character that doesn’t have boxing gloves and a mouth full of novacaine. Sean Connery broke out of the James Bond type-casting only to fall into his loose fitting self-made Scottish/British/Irish hybrid capable-old-man character. Robert DeNiro never stopped playing slight variations of his Al Capone character from The Untouchables despite the great start to his career.

Al Pacino, an actor who was versatile enough to play Michael Corleone in one year, a cop in Serpico the next year, then a Cuban drug lord in Scarface, is now the same exact character in every movie he makes. Somewhere between Dick Tracy and Godfather III, Al Pacino turned into that raspy-voiced angry old man that makes it hard to take anything seriously.

What causes these actors to crawl into their familiar characters and never come back out? It could be just a sound business plan that guarantees income, but how could someone in such an artistic field think along those terms?

Its possible that I don’t have enough years to see exactly how people change their attitudes on such a matter, but it would be unfortunate to see the current generation of actors and actresses fall into the same pattern. Actors like Johnny Depp and Edward Norton could end up playing the same characters year after year…its just not easy to imagine.

This will be the first of many in the “So I Was Wrong” series, where I shamelessly admit to being wrong and make petty excuses to defend myself.

A short while ago I wrote at article over at funksysteme.org about the problems with the James Bond series of movies. The article was called James Bond 101 (read it here), and in that piece of writing I may have insinuated that Daniel Craig would make a bad Bond…and that he should be cleaning toilets…

…So I was wrong. Big deal, he was a really good James Bond. I made a lot of good arguments in that article and if you watch Casino Royale you’ll be amazed at how many of my suggestions were employed in the movie.

Tone down special effects…check. Dialogue over action…check. Less recognizable Bond girls…check. Unethical yet gainful treatment of women…check.

So I was wrong about one of them, no one’s perfect. Daniel Craig came across as a very convincing version of a young inexperienced James Bond. He made mistakes, he felt pain, but I felt certain that he would eventually grow up into that seasoned Sean Connery-ish James Bond that everyone seems to love.

Casino Royale was certainly a step in the right direction for the evolution of Bond movies. It doesn’t play out like those older Bond movies, but we need to keep in mind that if Goldfinger were re-released today it would be a total disaster. If you like my thoughts on James Bond, and want to read more, check out my newest article, Bond Growing Up, also on funksysteme.org.