Mascots (and Pac Man's Better Half) Near the Amusement Park

A friend was kind enough to take me to Coney Island tonight for a Brooklyn Cyclones game. They beat the Aberdeen IronBirds 12-6. I spent a solid part of the night -- and I wish I was lying as much as you do -- playing Ms. Pac Man. They had the arcade game on the concourse, and the fan who has the highest score at the end of the season will win the machine. Being a Ms. Pac Man junkie for most of my life, this seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. When I heard that the high score so far is 568,000, I realized that it was an opportunity perfectly worth passing up. I consider myself pretty good at the game, but that score is unattainable. Still, I took my shot (gotta have my fix), and I reached about 160,000.

Oh, and there were mascots. (The baseball was fine -- lots of offense -- but minor league games are often as much about things like video games and mascots.) This is Pee Wee, the "younger" of the team's mascots:


Pee Wee's costume has seen better days. He looks like an old favorite doll that you find flattened in the back of your closet when you're 19.

And this is Sandy, Pee Wee's older brother, or whatever. I think they're seagulls?


And this is Sandy about to devour me. This was not staged:

Who Needs a Vacation, Anyway?

Apologies for the blurry shot, but this was the arrivals board at the airport today:


That third column, the one in yellow, says "canceled" from top to bottom, and the departures board didn't look much different. After a week of very spring-like weather, today winter returned with a vengeance, as if to say, "Easy now, there's a reason they're playing baseball in Florida and Arizona for the next few weeks." Oh, right.

So, after six incredibly pleasant hours at the airport, my flight, one of the only four or five that, for some mystifying reason, they left open as "possible" for much of the day, was officially called off. An announcement followed that, due to the flurry of cancellations, all flights to Dallas were booked through Monday.

I miss a friend's wedding because of this turn of events, which is very disappointing. Funny -- I hate to fly even when I never leave the ground. The day's only saving grace was the half hour of Ms. Pac Man I squeezed in at the terminal, wowing a few adolescent onlookers who were waiting to leave for Chicago. I note this only because I thought this post needed a label...

Listening Advice

The shuffle function is not the way to go if you want variety when listening to iTunes (or your iPod). For some reason, it never quite gets the balance of genres right. It also repeats artists way too often. So here's what you do: Arrange the music alphabetically by song title. Click on any song, sit back, and enjoy.

I have no idea why, but I find myself skipping past tracks far less often using this method.

You're welcome.

Good night.

ASWOBA Radio

I just discovered, via Pop Candy, a great site that allows you to make playlists of songs and share them with others. Like, you. Each playlist is 45 songs, which seems like a bit much, but you're probably stuck to a desk for hours anyway. I don't know how to put the playlists in a particular order -- it seems to be playing the songs randomly -- so apologies for any problems with pacing, etc. In any case, my dream of playing DJ for my readers comes to fruition, I think. See if this works:

(Update: I've had some trouble getting the first song to play. But if that happens, clicking on "next track" on the right-hand side of the box below seems to help. OK, that's the last -- fourth -- time I edit this silly post.)

Some Changes

OK, this post itself has changed from when I first published it about 30 minutes ago. Blogger has some cool layout changes, which I instituted, but now I've reverted back, because the block quotes were all screwy, and the whole thing looked harder to read. What I have done is added labels to many posts. One of the things I like about the new template is that it lists the labels on the right-hand side of the screen, so you can browse more easily by subject, but for now it's not worth the ugliness caused by the block quotes issue.

Assigning the labels was kind of fun, actually (thus the one on this post below). One day I hope to label all the AP headlines and archives of the day, but that's going to take a lot more time and, I'm not going to lie, maybe some meth.

I wish I could say the label "Favorites" was based on an extensive nationwide poll, but those are just the posts I like most. I spared you all the label that would have had the most entries: "Random, forgettable crap."

I Wanna Be Mike Skinner. Man, That's Just About As Funky As You Can Be.

Adam Duritz bonds with humble fan, considers writing decent song.

Duritz attends premiere with Mary Louise Parker, beautiful actress about whom he will soon write a cringe-inducing song.

UK rapper Mike Skinner has a pint while trying to figure out how to write about fame without turning into Duritz-like creature.

A bit Slate-heavy the last couple of days, forgive me, but the site also had a review of The Streets' forthcoming third record today. (For clarity moving ahead, The Streets is basically one guy named Mike Skinner, pictured above.)

Everything I've read mentions that the album focuses on the trials and tribulations of life post-fame, and I agree with Slate's Jody Rosen that this is usually a bad sign. I'll leave aside judgment on this particular record until I've heard it. (Rosen likes it; other assessments have been more mixed. Many critics raved more about Skinner's second album, A Grand Don't Come for Free, than his first, Original Pirate Material. I felt the follow-up was a slight disappointment, if only slight -- the lyrics, key to Skinner's appeal, seemed less inspired to me on Grand, but its best songs were more mature and fully realized than the best on the debut. Long story short: I'm bracing myself for a letdown.)

But about fame: What could be more boring? I remember when Counting Crows hit it big -- a band many of you probably despise. The reason I liked (and still like) "Mr. Jones" is because the song sympathetically but critically addresses its subjects, people desperate for stardom because of a craving that stardom could never fill. The song's power, if you think it has any apart from a pretty good hook, comes from the intersection of their striving and the meaninglessness of that striving. Even if you think the message is still too obvious, the song gets its point across by plainly expressing the dream of its characters. When Adam Duritz sings, "We're gonna be big stars," you're not supposed to think, "Yes, and then they'll be happy!"

Duh, right?

The rest of the first album was full of hand-wringing, depressive but pastoral/rustic, existential love songs. Then, the follow-up album was lousy with caterwauling about dating movie stars and life as a rock star, expressed in solipsistic blather like this:

I was out on the radio starting to change
somewhere out in America
it's starting to rain
could you tell me the things you remember about me?

Yes. I remember you were a decent songwriter.

(Luckily, Duritz recovered, within reason. He's still a self-dramatizing sad sack, and you have to like that to like him, but the band's last, Hard Candy, featured some really good songs alongside some mediocre ones.)

Anyway, the most irritating thing he did around the time of the second album was change the lyrics of "Mr. Jones" to reflect his own stardom. Toward the end of the song, instead of singing "When everybody loves you, that's just about as funky as you can be," he sang "When everybody loves you, that's just about as f---ed up as you can be." Nothing like a sledge hammer to drive home a point. Poor baby.

The point of all this rambling (and there was a lot more of it than I had planned, so: sorry, sorry, sorry) is that Mike Skinner has been appealing -- way more than Duritz, obviously -- precisely because he sings about everyday activities like playing video games and making out on the couch with your girlfriend and drinking pints with a few rowdy friends. I'm eager (anxious, rather, given how much I've enjoyed his work) to see if he can pull off this next move.

Oscar Blog

8:00 -- I feel an overwhelming amount of gratitude at this moment to whoever invented the blog. I can't believe I get to annoy all of you as if you were sitting in my living room with me. (OK, I live in New York, so that's a bit flowery: as if you were sitting in my room other than my bedroom with me.)

Not sure quite how this will work, but it should be fun. My opening thought is that, if there's any moral justice in the universe, when we collectively turn in for the night across the planet, no one stares at their ceiling with a hotter-burning sense of self-hatred than Billy Bush.

Let's do this.

8:10 -- Is Keira Knightley there with Jack Nicholson? If so, I'm going to spend the rest of the night trying to determine if that's disgusting or impressive. Or both.

8:14 -- Stewart's scoring, in my book, at least. His joke about L.A. being an "atheistic pleasuredome" was great, and this gay cowboy montage is killing.

8:18 -- As I suspected, Bad Movie Club is going to be way more productive than me tonight, and Jason is doing what he said he would -- listing movies in which you can see presenters and nominees naked. He's a national treasure, he is.

8:19 -- Best Supporting Actor. Jake Gyllenhaal has to win this award. Anything else would be absurd. Drumroll... Clooney. Good lord. This could be a long night. Although, it sounds like they've started the music to boot him off the stage before he's even started his acceptance speech. So that's pretty good.

8:22 -- Clooney's been gracious and funny. Now he's turning political. Pass the Maalox.

8:26 -- Personally, I like when hosts beat a dead horse all night (I even liked Letterman's Oprah-Uma deal), and if Stewart's is going to be how Clooney gets laid more than he does, I'm all for that.

8:29 -- Hey, didn't they used to start the show with Supporting Actress rather than Actor? What's going on? And is this a gain or a setback for feminism? Discuss.

8:31 -- Ben Stiller's shtick as a presenter is almost a perfect microcosm of his last 20 movies: Funny for 30 seconds, then incredibly painful. (Oh, the award he presented is some technical thing that King Kong wins. A few stone-faced middle-aged nerds take the stage to accept.)

8:34 -- In accepting the award for Wallace & Grommit for Best Animated Feature, Nick Park gives a shout-out to Helena Bonham Carter, who was a voice in the movie. He just defeated her husband, Tim Burton, in the category. (Burton was up for Corpse Bride.) I think this might set up the first brawl at the Governors' Ball later tonight, if either of them seemed capable of throwing a punch.

8:37 -- Does it strike anyone else as odd that Dolly Parton is singing the song nominated from a movie about a woman who becomes a man, accompanied on stage only by her national-monument breasts? Also, the song seems to be composed of pleas to God and Jesus, punctuated by several series of "ooo wee ooo"s.

8:46 -- Celebrated playwright Martin McDonagh wins for a short-form film. There's an article about him in this week's New Yorker, but it's not available online. So I can't be as usefully interactive as I'd like.

8:50 -- Really, they're starting the background music as soon as winners get on stage. Ignoring the Tom Hanks joke about it earlier, I'm curious to see how they'll mark the moment when people should wrap it up. I'm hoping the quiet orchestration gives way to an auditorium-rattling "Back in Black."

8:51 -- Jennifer Aniston comes out to present for Best Costumes. That's the kind of demotion you get when you make lame movies based on something sacred like The Graduate. I used to love her so.

OK, fine. I still do.

8:52 -- Oy, this costumes woman can't speak. Where's the AC/DC, people?!

8:56 -- They're showing a montage of famous people, and actors who have played them on screen. It's not fair to just spring Lou Gehrig's "luckiest man" moment on me like that. A guy's got to be prepared.

9:00 -- The latest Star Wars movie (The Revenge of Indifference, or something) is up for a make-up award. This movie can't be honored in any way, can it? Drumroll... no, thank God. Chronicles of Narnia wins it.

9:03 -- Stewart makes fun of Russell Crowe. Then he acknowledges it will get him "pummeled later tonight," so I don't have to.

9:04 -- Wow. In introducing Rachel McAdams, Stewart makes a subtle joke about her recent refusal to appear on Vanity Fair's cover in the nude. Media nerds (aka, Gawker fans) must be excited. McAdams is beautiful, but boy, off screen she seems to have the charisma of bowling shoes.

9:06 -- Ah, Best Supporting Actress, my first strong opinion. Oh, wait, my second. Amy Adams, please. Though Michelle Williams was really great in Brokeback. Drumroll... (Wait, Frances McDormand looks nervous, as if she has a chance to win for North Country. That's cute. Oh, and Rachel Weisz is obsession-worthy.) Ok, drumroll... Rachel wins. She was good, she was. But still. See Junebug, if you haven't. Adams is great in it.

9:09 -- I'm not retracting my "obsession-worthy" comment about Weisz even though she just described someone as "brimming over with humanity." That's saying something.

9:14 -- I was about to make a crude joke about Lauren Bacall, but now she's having trouble (a lot of it, it seems) reading her lines, so I'll abstain. I've also hit the mute button, because it's too painful to hear. I'm listening to "Homeward" by The Sundays instead.

9:19 -- This series of fake attack ads by Best Actress campaigns is awesome. A touch of the Daily Show during the Oscars -- thank you, Mr. Stewart.

9:21 -- I'm with Jason at the Bad Movie Club, who earlier tonight suggested that theaters show these decorated short films (documentary and fiction) before features, in place of mind-numbing commercials. But it's WAY too good an idea to take hold in that industry.

9:23 -- Charlize Theron just asked, "What is truth? What is fiction? What is memoir?" and pronounced memoir, "mem-wah." She sounded like the priest from The Princess Bride. She's introducing Best Documentary. Grizzly Man was robbed out of a nomination. Penguins has to win, right? It does. The crew takes the stage holding stuffed penguins, and then tries to make a serious statement about preserving Antarctica. Choose one, guys.

9:26 -- J. Lo's description of Crash before its nominated song is performed perfectly capsulizes what was facile and annoying about the movie. Good job, J. Lo.

And this song. Eek. Between this and Parton's number, the category isn't wowing me. It's being sung by a woman who looks familiar. I need to do some quick research...

Ah, it's actress Kathleen York, but she sings under the name Bird York. I'm not kidding. Here's an excerpt from an online interview with her:

Music can be a less linear expression than film, though, depending on the part. The stranger the character or role, the better, and the more I find that I can get very creative expressing what I see as the "human condition." I have found that a lot of directors, and especially TV producers, want non-threatening versions of people, especially the female characters. I personally think that everyone is crazy, in one way or another (I actually have a new song called "Everybody's Crazy")...Anyway, I love any form of communication. I could be making a mosaic out of salt and pepper and paper napkin pieces on a restaurant table, and it could compete with the feeling of expressing a character or writing a piece of music. I don't see any separation in the forms of communication. It's all my heart hurling itself through the third dimension.

Kathleen "Bird" York, ladies and gentlemen.

9:35 -- I think Keanu Reeves is going to look really creepy as an old man. Just a passing thought.

9:40 -- We're in full self-congratulation mode now, with a weepy montage of scenes from "message movies" -- To Kill a Mockingbird, The Pianist, Born on the Fourth of July, and numerous others. It builds to a liberal-orgiastic crescendo!! And it also includes, much to my delight, a clip from The Day After Tomorrow, a popcorn-fueled cheesefest that involved the glacier ice caps melting and flooding New York City in the span of about 20 minutes. I wish they would include -- and Jason knows what I'm about to say -- a clip from Volcano, a movie in which Tommy Lee Jones and others stop the flow of volcanic lava through downtown L.A. by knocking down skyscrapers and leaving their wreckage in its path. By far the best asinine plot twist I've ever seen from Hollywood.

Awesome. Stewart caps the montage with: "And none of those issues was ever a problem again." I'm giving him an A so far, especially given the nature of the task.

9:48 -- Salma Hayek just seems to get hotter and hotter, and less and less proficient in English. It's a remarkable trajectory to witness.

9:51 -- Best Score, and John Williams is up for two of them. I'm just saying. But really, I think Brokeback deserves this. And it gets it.

10:03 -- It's past 10 o'clock, and we're only up to "Sound Mixing"? I need to work in the morning, people.

10:04 -- Jessica Alba just pronounced "memoir" the same way Theron did. What the hell is going on? Can someone please make an announcement to the crowd that the R at the end is not silent?

10:08 -- Quick note to my mother, if she's reading this: Mom, don't visit Jason's site. Please.

10:08 -- It's almost impossible to tell if Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin are: a) performing a complicated written comedy bit, or b) coked up to their eyeballs.

10:10 -- They're honoring Robert Altman. I haven't seen it in years, but I remember thinking The Player was one of the most over-rated movies I've ever seen. I've liked some of the rest of his stuff, though I Netflix-ed McCabe and Mrs. Miller recently, and thought it was a snoozefest. I write these criticisms as everyone at the Oscars gives him a standing O. The power of the blog!

10:22 -- Thousands of bloggers worldwide just simultaneously discovered that there's nothing to add about the performance of "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" on the Oscars.

10:30 -- Jennifer Garner nearly trips on her way to the mic. Does it make her less adorable? No. No, it does not.

10:31 -- King Kong wins for Sound Editing, and I think we're almost done with all but the major awards. One hopes. One desperately, desperately hopes.

10:32 -- Clooney's introducing the "In Memoriam" montage. This is always good. Mr. Miyagi...I'm welling up already. They end with Richard Pryor. Nice.

10:42 -- Jon Stewart is awesome.

10:43 -- I take it back about getting to serious awards. We're on Film Editing. Crash seems like a lock here, to me. (Weak) drumroll... Yep. Crash. Hmm, might this thing actually win Best Picture? So far, no real Brokeback momentum. More on my feelings about this movie (Crash) later.

10:46 -- Wow. Best Actor. Snuck up on me, as much as something can sneak up on me over the course of three hours. Hoffman was so, so good in Capote, but I've talked myself into rooting for Ledger. I'm sure in vain. Drumroll... Hoffman. Predictable, and he was great. I can't complain. Too bad for Ledger, though, who would have won in another year, I think. (No one really talked about Joaquin Phoenix in this category, but he was phenomenal.)

10:52 -- Going to commercial, they just announced that John Travolta and Jamie Foxx are "standing by" to appear. That would normally be my cue to "run for the hills," but I can't miss the big awards. How many entertainers have outworn their welcome faster than Foxx? Have you seen his music video? Egad. I knew I was conflicted about getting cable for a reason.

10:57 -- Cinematography absolutely has to go to Brokeback. Nope. Memoirs of a Geisha. I have a bad feeling about Brokeback's chances for the big prize. Maybe a big surprise win by Capote?

The cinematographer winner just thanked his son, Axl. Must be a big G n' R fan.

10:59 -- Best Actress, presented by Mr. Foxx. It's easy to make fun of Keira Knightley, but I've heard she's actually really good in P&P. (Don't get mad, LFW.) Plus, she's flat-out gorgeous. I don't like Felicity Huffman, even though she was on the great, short-lived TV show, Sports Night. I think Reese wins this one, deservingly. Drumroll... She does.

She's very pretty, but that is the weirdest dent in the middle of her forehead. OK, that's an unfair thing to focus on at this moment. I'll focus instead on her bizarre insistence in her speech that June Carter was "a real woman" -- is this a dig at Felicity Huffman's character?

She profusely thanks Joaquin, which is nice. Then she thanks her husband, the B-team player in the marriage, Ryan Phillippe.

Oh, God. Now she's really prattling on about "trying to matter." Reese, you were great in the movie, now get off the stage.

11:08 -- While we're at commercial, just a thought about Crash. I'm not too worried that it will win Best Picture, because Matt Dillon didn't win (and if it wasn't going to be Gyllenhaal, it might as well have been Dillon). I'm actually starting to think it might be Capote. Anyway, the problem I had with Crash -- which I've probably written about before on this site --

(Interjection, sorry -- almost no one annoys me more, off screen, than Dustin Hoffman. What an insufferable jackass.)

-- my problem with Crash is not that it's a self-satisfied, pious piece of racial manipulation (though it is, at times), because I actually enjoyed watching it. But in the end, it's hard to swallow the ridiculously contrived coincidences that the filmmaker, Paul Haggis, relies on to push that piety. The performances were great, and the cinematography was impressive, but the total result was just too silly too often.

11:13 -- Brokeback wins Best Adapted Screenplay. If it hadn't won that, it would not only have been denied Best Picture, its nomination might have been rescinded.

11:16 -- Crash wins for Best Original Screenplay Full of Contrivances. There's still real drama building here for Best Picture. I suppose Best Director might tip the Academy's hand. That's up next.

11:22 -- Best Director. Drumroll... Ang Lee. Whew. That's a good sign. The guy's a genius, despite how he butchered my favorite comic book with The Hulk.

11:24 -- OK, they're bringing out the big guns for Best Picture -- Jack Nicholson. Drumroll... Oh, dear. Crash. I think that will look quite silly 10 years from now. But that's so often true of the Oscars, which somehow suck me into caring every year, despite their inherent absurdity. Oh, well -- Crash wasn't a terrible movie, but it was a deeply flawed and overly ambitious one, and I suppose there are worse things. Plus, now Dezmond can smugly crow in the comments section. Congrats, Dezmond -- you've been vindicated by the same group of people who honored Titanic.

I think that's a wrap. Stewart -- who, along with his Daily Show colleagues, was great -- will come back and say goodnight. He should do this every year, without doubt. Me, I'm not sure. I hope there were a few enjoyable nuggets for you. See you again tomorrow with regular blogging -- less real-time, but just as inconsequential.

Learning More About Me Than You Could By Reading the Entire Rest of This Blog

A Barnes & Noble cashier tonight when I placed my fantasy baseball magazine on the counter: "Wow, I think you're the first person to buy this year's."