Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Literally!

Another example of the word "literal" being misused. Read it on a message board.

"The Left can see Man-made Global Warming where there is none, but can't see a deficit or a gargantuan national debt that literally has a hand on their throat."

Ha! I knew this deficit thing was bad, but I had no idea it had grown hands and whatnot.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Insanity!

I have reached the point where I can not bear the sight of my own disgustingness. Actually I reached it a couple weeks ago. So, after tipping the scales at an all-time high of about 207 pounds, I decided to attempt what has become an annual summer workout regimen. I did P90X each of the last two summers after ballooning up to about 200 each year, and each time it worked well, helping me shed 20+ pounds.

This time around, I'm trying Insanity. It's much more cardio-based than anything on P90X, and that's what this tubbo needs. Anyway, I'll be posting progress updates every once in a while.

So far, I've done one week, and I've lost 2.5 pounds. And I've wept a lot between asthma attacks. And my knee kinda hurts. But it's all good. The goal is to complete Insanity and then from there move on to a P90X/Insanity mixture and try to not to gain all the weight back.

Man, getting old sucks. What happened to the metabolism of my youth?

Friday, June 24, 2011

NBA Draft and the Snakefarm

Scattershooting a few random topics here...

NBA draft thoughts. Ok I don't really have that many, but I was happy for Kyrie Irving. I like him, basically for no other reason than because even though he chose to play for Duke, he almost played for A&M. He was the top recruit in the country, and on decision day he actually put an A&M hat and a Duke hat on the table before choosing the Duke hat. I don't know how much it helped A&M's perception in the eyes of other recruits, but it certainly didn't hurt. And in the last month now, Texas A&M has hosted on its campus arguably the best group of basketball recruits in school history. It doesn't mean all (or any) of them will sign with A&M, but it certainly means that A&M's profile in the college basketball world is increasing. And I like to think Kyrie Irving played a role, however small, in that. And because of that, I root for him. Here's hoping he has a solid career.

In musical news, has anyone ever heard the song "Snake Farm" by Ray Wylie Hubbard? Well I hadn't until last night. I heard some other awful band do a cover of it, and I like to think I'm open-minded when it comes to music, but man, that is the worst song I've ever heard. Who knows, maybe that's what they were going for when they wrote it, one of those songs that's so bad that it actually is awesome (like Rock Star by Nickleback, or The Star Spangled Banner), and I'm sure some people feel that way about it, but I just can't get there. It's just bad. Here's the actual chorus: "Snake farm, it just sounds nasty, snake farm, it pretty much is, snake farm, it's a reptile house!" That's it. No, really, that's it.

Jason and I were listening and immediately appalled at the badness of this song. The good news is it led to several minutes of awful jokes about what their other songs are like:

"Catfish farm, it just sounds watery, catfish farm, it pretty much is, catfish farm, it's a pond full of fish!"

"Butterfly pavilion, it just sounds peaceful, butterfly pavilion, it pretty much is, butterfly pavilion, it's a big mesh tent!"

"Salamander ranch, they're like snakes with tiny legs, salamander ranch, it's pretty darn icky, salamander ranch, it's near the snake farm!"

"Scrapbooking store, it just sounds precious, scrapbooking store, it pretty much is, scrapbooking store, they sell paper and glue!"

If you're not laughing at least a little, well, we can't be friends (I take my bad jokes that seriously), and it might be because you don't have the chorus and the rhythm in your head. It's definitely funnier if you sing our jokes to the music with a gravely voice and funny scowl on your face. Most jokes are like that though.

A God of love or a God of hate?

You've probably heard of the group of crazy lunatics otherwise known as Westboro Baptist Church (and channeling Linda Richman here, let me point out that Westboro Baptist Church is neither Baptist nor a church. Discuss.) They are the people that go around telling the world that God hates fags, soldiers, and well, basically everyone but themselves. They picket all over the place, whether at funerals, churches, businesses, etc. Recently they picketed in front of the Mars Hill Church at its Auburn campus. Mars Hill is pastored by a man named Mark Driscoll.

Anyway, in advance of the protest, Driscoll wrote an article on his church's website that can be found here. He did a better job than I'd ever claim to do of demonstrating that the Westboro people are false teachers and are deceived and wrong.

I just wanted to add a couple things. If nothing else, who knows, maybe someone will stumble upon this and they are wondering if it's true that God really hates everyone except His elect, and that the Bible preaches hate (which is what Westboro's website explicitly states).

If you are a nonbeliever or an atheist, I can at least understand where you might have gotten the false idea that God is hateful. Let me assure you, that is not the case. The God of the Bible is one of love, greater love than we can imagine. In fact, God literally IS love. 1 John 4:8 specifically says that. In a less direct way, the first few verses of Genesis allude to it as well. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, talks about this in a sermon entitled "Before the Beginning," and describes how before we were even created, there was love. Anyway, you could write books and books and books on the topic of God and His love. In fact, many people describe the Bible as a whole as one big love story.

Another thing to mention is that in the article by Driscoll that I linked above, I saw a few people on a message board interpret his comments about Westboro's "crazy Calvinism" as a rejection of all Calvinist doctrine in general. That also is not the case. What Driscoll was declaring to be wrong was the extremist version of Calvinism displayed by the Westboro people, the belief that God actively hates everyone except His elect. That's not to say Driscoll is a Cavlinist- I honestly don't know- but his point in the article wasn't to debate Calvinism in general. It was to point out that this extreme version of it is not Biblical.

Finally, I don't understand their strange fascination with gays. Clearly their number one agenda is to tell the world that God supposedly hates fags. Their website is actually godhatesfags.com, in case they feared that people wouldn't know exactly what they stood for from simply perusing their website. Their logic is succinctly stated on their website as follows: "In Romans 1, the word "reprobate"is used to describe fags. Fags are reprobate. God hates reprobates. Therefore, God hates fags." So, in their mind, there you have it. Thankfully these Westboro people are a small minority. The truth of the matter is this. Forgiveness and eternity in Paradise are available to all. That doesn't mean all will be saved, but it does mean that there isn't one certain group of sinners that just "can't" be saved. Heaven will have murderers, liars, and adulterers (and that's just David). It will have people who struggle with vanity, selfishness, hatred, self-indulgence, homosexuality, jealousy, and every other sin. Why? Because we have ALL sinned. But for those of us that accept the free gift, all sin is forgiven.

Monday, June 20, 2011

Literally!

One reason I finally buckled down and started a blog again was so that I'd have a quick, easy place to catalog a few things that I always intend to write down but never do.

I enjoy the English language and all the ways to butcher it, both intentionally and not-tentially (there should be a word for that), and one of my favorites is when people use the word "literally" wrong. And it happens a LOT. So, I plan on noting them in the blog from now on, starting with this one that I heard Saturday.

During the U.S. Open golf tournament, a player hit his ball into a bunker and faced a difficult shot. The announcer said something like this:

"Difficult shot coming up here, but So-and-so is a magician around the greens. And he's going to literally have to pull a rabbit out of a hat on this shot."

I never did see the rabbit.

From March, 2011: A review I wrote about Jerry Seinfeld in concert

Here's my review of the night. Performance was at Bass Concert Hall in Austin.

First let me explain why I love stand up comedy. In my opinion, it is the most pure form of entertainment. Think about what it is for a minute. It's a person standing in front of a bunch of other people, and with nothing but his own self, he is expected to not merely keep the crowd busy, but make the crowd have fun. And he's not doing it musically or with any other gimmicks (well, some comics do, but I think those are not pure stand up comedians). Just his voice and his body. That is the essence of entertainment. It's why, for me, stand up comedy is the ultimate challenge. Supposedly public speaking is, on average, the number one fear of humans. Stand up comedy combines that with the added element of an audience that literally has an implicit challenge being extended: make me laugh, now!. So now the comic is doing public speaking and is expected to be funny to a entire crowd of people for whom humor is a subjective thing to begin with. And there's no way to just instantly be good at it. So as a comedian struggles through the process of going from bad to good, he endures and then overcomes what must be the most awkward feeling a human can have: a group of people staring blankly at you after you just said something you thought was funny but isn't. Plus they paid money to be there. I've listened to a lot of comedians talk about their early experiences and it always sounds so brutal, yet they fight through it. It's just an amazing thing to me. Anyway, on to the review.

The opener was Mario Joyner. I didn't know his name previously but I did recognize him. He's been in a lot of Chris Rock's productions and has been around on t.v. a little bit both as an actor and a stand up comedian. He did a couple Seinfeld episodes in the '90s and also had a part in Bee Movie, so I guess that's where the Seinfeld connection grew from.

He was very funny. He jumped right in and had no problem entertaining a crowd that didn't come to see him. I did find it interesting that like Seinfeld, he was very professionally dressed, wearing a suit. It seems that Seinfeld is old-school like that, the mindset being that we are professionals, so let's dress like professionals.

Back to Joyner though. He, like Seinfeld, uses a lot of observational humor. He joked about flying, cell phones, relationships, hotel stays, midlife crises, GPS units, etc. Standard comedian fare. However, I was impressed that he actually made all of these things funny. Some topics have been beaten to death in comedy, but his jokes were still fresh.

It was also clear that he was following Seinfeld's wishes in regards to his material. Seinfeld is a comedian who works relatively clean, and Joyner followed suit, leaving out a couple words that he uses on his CD. And of course there's no shame in toeing the company line for something like that (Joyner even made one joke about the fact that Seinfeld runs a very tight ship), considering how much money he must be making for his 15 minute set . That being said, he still had a bit of an edge to him, which I appreciated. I like clean comedy, but I also still like comedians to joke about non-PC topics. Like Seinfeld himself says, the whole job of a comedian is to make fun of stuff, so even while being "clean," there's still going to be the possibility that a listener can get offended, but that's often where the best jokes come from.

Anyway, Joyner pretty much killed it. Everyone seemed to love him. I'm not sure how long he performed, probably 15-20 minutes. When he finished, they didn't do the typical "opener gives a nice introduction to the headliner" type thing. He just waved, walked off, and a couple seconds later, Jerry Seinfeld came sprinting onto the stage with no introduction. It caught me off guard. But fair enough, it's true that he needs no introduction.

So after the huge applause died down, he opened with a couple minutes of local humor (making fun of the burnt orange (or as Seinfeld called it, "light medium brown" ) that dominates the University of Texas campus and the fact that it's called "University of Texas AT Austin," not just UT-Austin) before moving into his standard material. I always enjoy those few minutes of local humor. It's like a special little treat that is only given to that specific audience.

Most people know Seinfeld was a comedian before he was a t.v. star. The whole reason he got his sitcom was because he had already found his "voice" as a comedian. I always find it interesting to see comedians evolve and settle into their particular "voice". Look at Jim Gaffigan for instance. He's been funny for years, but the first time I saw him on t.v. several years ago, he didn't use that little "this is what the audience must be thinking" voice that is now a huge source of his material and probably the thing he's most known for. Watch Dane Cook's first Comedy Central Presents special and compare it to what he does now. He's still the same energetic, likable guy, but he settled into his storytelling style and now sells out huge arenas. Listen to old Brian Regan recordings. He has a much different sound and style than he does now, and like the others I listed, now that he found his correct comic voice, he sells out theaters rather than clubs. It's hard for a comedian to find the right style of joke telling for them. Go to a small comedy club in New York where the comics are just trying to make a name. It's painful at times, because you can see them trying to project some image, some style, yet it just doesn't work. For whatever reason, there's just something undefinable within the art of stand up comedy that has to be there, regardless of the quality of the writing, or else they'll never make it big. Part of it is speaking style, some of it is just their cadence, some of it is even something like what they wear, and what kind of facial expressions they use. It all needs to work together, along with solid material, for a comedian to really be successful.

So Seinfeld had already made his way as a comedian and had one of the most recognizable and identifiable styles of any comedian out there. Everyone knows that Seinfeld is the "what's the deal with ____?" guy. What's my point? My point is that even now, with Seinfeld having already reached the peak of comedian-dom, his comic voice is still evolving. He still used observational humor, but he doesn't quite do it the same way. One thing that stood out to me was that he is a little more energetic and loud than I've seen him over the years. Not obnoxious loud (not even close), but just not as subdued as he used to be. He also now seems to take advantage of his own voice (actual speaking voice, not the big concept of "voice" I've also been mentioning) more. In other words, there were a lot of times where he had the crowd laughing and it wasn't from a written joke necessarily, but rather from just adding a few synonyms to the last word of the last joke he told, and just delivering them in his own funny way, which is funny in itself. And that's a big part of what I was referring to with the "voice" of the comedian. If a comedian knows exactly how his own cadence and speaking style contribute to the humor of his writing, they can get more laughs out of the same material. Dane Cook gets criticized for this all the time (unfairly, in my opinion). People complain that he's not even telling jokes, he's just talking. Well, the audience is laughing, right? They're laughing because he knows when and how his speaking style is funny. So Seinfeld has mastered that too, and like I said, it's a thing that's still evolving for him as he gets older and writes new material. He has more of an "old man complaining" vibe now, somewhat replacing the "bemused man observing" that he used to be.

And his complaints are still as funny and perceptive as anyone working today. He's frustrated with Blackberry users and how they'd rather look at their phone than listen to you ("Do we even know what rudeness is in this culture anymore?" ). He doesn't understand our culture's new emphasis on hydration ("When I was a kid I'd take one swig from the school water fountain and run for 28 straight hours. What happened?" ) No one ever told him that when he got married, he would spend every single day discussing his "tone" ("Do you know that my own regular speaking voice, the voice that I am using to talk to you right now, is not welcome in my own home?" )

He had several jokes about marriage ("Being married is like being on a game show, and it's always the lightning round" ), 5 Hour Energy ("If you're so tired that you need five hours worth of energy, you know what you need? You need to go to bed!" ), and Pop Tarts ("When they invented Pop Tarts, the back of my head blew right off!" ). (p.s. Brian Regan still has the best ever bit about Pop Tarts. See it here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8kThoZpF_U)

He had jokes on fatherhood and how useless his role seems sometimes ("Even still, sometimes I see the kids looking at me and it's like they're about to ask me "I'm sorry sir, is someone helping you? Mom, the horsie ride guy is here, do we need anything?" ), Ebay ("Why spend time talking to my family when I can spend all night on the computer bidding on someone else's garbage?" ), and OnStar ("If my keys get locked in the car, forget a two cent coat hanger. I need to contact a hundred million dollar NASA satellite to take care of this problem!" ).

He did long bits about the complexity and hassles of getting ready to go out, public restrooms, coffee, why humans are obsessed with sitting, cremation and burial, and the fact that all material things eventually end up as garbage (deep philosophical truths in that one, if you care to go there).

Long story short, he was incredible. As I watched him I felt like I was watching a consummate professional who is one of the best in the world at his trade. He performed for over an hour, and it was the fastest hour of comedy I've ever seen. I think he's funnier now than he used to be, again not because he writes better material, but because I think he has a better understanding of how his personal touch can make combine with his written material to combine for something even funnier. His comedic voice wouldn't work very well on Steve Martin's stand up material and vice versa, but his mastery of matching his own style of comedy to his (genius) writing mean he's still the best in the business. And you know what? He never once used the phrase "What's the deal with...." I'm not saying that's good or bad, just saying I was listening for it and it never came. Truth of the matter is that he doesn't actually say that, as far as I know. A lot of that stuff (including the idea of him with his agitated voice asking "who are these people?!?" ) came from a Saturday Night Live skit that was making fun of him several years ago. Here's the transcript of that skit: http://snltranscripts.jt.org/91/91rstandup.phtml

So, the only downside of the show was that he did not do an encore. I know that sometimes on his tour he'll come back out for his encore and do a Q&A with the audience, and I was really looking forward to seeing something like that, but no luck this time.

Here are some clips from other places that include a couple of the jokes he did.

Iphones and Blackberries: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYDA7__znfY

Kids: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqWLw0mOiV0

Um... hi?

Howdy, internet. I'm back. Deal with it!

Ok, I had done some blogging a few years ago, mostly for the reasons listed on the side of this blog, but at some point stopped keeping up with it, possibly because most of the time, it was read by literally one person. And that one person was literally me. Not that that should matter if I look at this as more of a journal to look back on when I'm older, but you know how it goes. If your blog isn't making you wealthy and famous beyond your wildest dreams and getting you preferred seating at Chili's, is it even worth it?

Anyway, welcome to my new blog. I'd like to think I will keep up with this.

So, let's talk golf. Yesterday concluded a historic (or "an" historic, if you're snooty) week of golf for Rory McIlroy, a week in which he set or tied 12 U.S. Open records and officially became the guy who the media will swear is the next Tiger Woods, at least until that 18-year-old Italian kid (Matteo Manassero) wins a PGA event next year.

Personally, I don't think this quite compares to Tiger's 15 shot victory in 2000, for  a few reasons. One, this U.S. Open course played very easy compared to most. A lot of rain during the week and a lot of heat the week prior left the rough manageable and the greens soft. 20-odd players finished under par this week, which is as many as the last ten years of U.S. Opens combined. The course was very tame, which means that really what Rory accomplished was that he played the best, most consistent golf (by far), whereas when Tiger won, he was way under par (12, to be exact) on a week when second best was three over. So not only is Tiger's 15 shot margin obviously superior to McIlroy's eight, the fact that Tiger not only subdued but dominated a course that no one else broke par on is far more impressive than winning by several strokes on an uncharacteristically easy course. People went low every day this year at Congressional. At Pebble in 2000, Tiger shot the lowest round on the course all four days. That is an insane stat that may never be equaled.

All that said, yes, Rory is undoubtedly the closest thing we have to the "next" Tiger. However, much like there really is no "next" Michael Jordan, there is no "next" Tiger. MJ and Tiger both transformed the games they play(ed) and in my humble opinion, even if more talented players emerge, no one will ever be able to impact the games the way those did. The media needs to stop trying to give these "next" titles. How many "next" Michael Jordans have we had? And none of them have even come close to what he did! The closest thing we've had, and I can't believe people argue this, is Kobe Bryant. He has had an amazing, unbelievable career, yet try this on for size:

Michael Jordan's career scoring average (playoffs): 33.4
Kobe Bryant's career scoring average (playoffs): 25.0

And there are plenty of other stats that are just as telling. Point being, he's not MJ. And Rory isn't Tiger. He certainly has a chance to be the face of the new generation of golfers though. I think he is bar none the most talented golfer, tee to green, in the game right now. His short game probably isn't like Tiger's and Phil's, but in all honesty, he didn't even need a short game this week. It's easy to look at the stats (he led the field in putting) and say that he won because his putter was hot. But that wasn't the case. He led the field in putting because he had far and away the best ball-striking week of anyone out there. For the most part, it was fairway, green, putt. And his approaches were often very close, which is what helped his putting. Not to say he didn't hole out a few impressive par-saving putts, but my point is that he won this tournament with ball striking. And he certainly slammed the door shut on any lingering memories of his Masters collapse. I think he's ready to start dominating and after seeing what he's done now at 3 different majors (let's not forget his 63 in the British Open last year, the lowest round ever shot in a major), I'd be pretty shocked if he doesn't end up winning 5-10 majors, and you'd have to say he has a shot at even more.

It was fun to watch. Thanks to Al Gore's glorious internet, I was able to watch every shot while I worked on Thursday and Friday and then watch almost every shot on the weekend. It really was something else. A truly historic performance.