The One that Got Away

I'd like to take a minute and talk about my ex.
I was in love. I thought we'd be together forever.

You know how sometimes you name who your free pass would be? Like if you could get an exeption to sleep with one other person? I said Christina Hedricks. My ex said some guy they new.

Wait a minute, that's fucked up! I know that guy. But my ex consoled me. Together forever. It was the happiest year of my life.

Until my ex became, well, my ex. And left me for the other guy.

I try to ignore them, but they're everywhere, and they're so damn happy. I can't turn on the TV without seeing them. And living in Indiana is harsh, because everyone is so happy for them in this state.

I have become incredibly jealous, and I just want to punch that smug smile of off his chubby face.

You see, my "ex" is Brian Kelly, and the other man is Notre Dame. And I am a Cincinnati fan.

In the midst of Cincinnati's 12-0 season in 2009, Brian Kelly left, right before the Sugar Bowl to become the coach of Notre Dame. His dream school.

I was angry when it happened. I know understand that if you're the new coach at Notre Dame, you've gotta start recruiting as soon as possible, you're the coach at Notre Dame after all. And Tim Tebow was gonna destroy Cincy at the Sugar Bowl anyway. It hurt when he left, but it was business.

Brian Kelly got off to a rough start at ND, and jealous as shit, I started dating Brian's little sister Butch.

I mean seriously, Cincy gets Kelly from Central Michigan, then he leaves for Notre Dame, so Cincy hires the next Central Michigan coach? It's like dating an ex's sister.

So needless to say, Butch was never the one. I was sad to see Butch go, but it was never true, 12-0 love. Not like Brian.

Next thing I know, Brian and ND have a 12-0 season of their own. Brian is named girlfriend of the year by the AP, and now, they're going to the national championship.

What sucks is, I have realized the truth.
Notre is where Brian Kelly was always destined to end up. It's a perfect fit for him, as the perfect season demonstrates. He's happy (which he never truly was at cincy), and the two of them are going to have a long happy life together.

...Just don't get used to this every year: When OSU is Bowl Eligible, Cincy's evil stepsister Ohio State and it's buff new boyfriend Urban are going to kick your ass, as I laugh passive aggressively.

 So Cincy is single again... and we've already shacked up with this guy:

Yes, Tommy Tuberville is a good coach, and went 13-0 at an SEC school, but he's a crazy person. He's that girl at the bar with too much eye makeup and an upper body covered in tattoos.

Yeah, when people in Taiwan are talking about how crazy an American football coach is, you know he's crossed a line:


Also, Taiwan thinks Cincy is a football juggernaut! Yay! Someone likes us!


Anyway, every wild child has to slow down at some point. We're basically buying Tommy a big house and telling him be a housewife.


Will it work? Who knows; but it's about time Nippert Stadium got more seats.

The best relationship advice I ever received was given to me by Yorick Brown, in the comic book series "Y: The Last Man":
             "Go out there and get your heart broken into, so it's ready when you really need it."

Any heartbreak, in an actual relationship or with upwardly mobile football coaches, isn't permanent. Your heart isn't broken beyond repair, it's just in a process of being broken in. One day, you'll find the one. And when the one comes along, your heart will be ready.

Is Tuberville the one? I can't answer that. All I know is that when Cincinnati football finds it's coach that will stick with them, we'll be ready.

Till then, Bearcats basketball has Mick Cronin. True Love

A Ode to an Autumn Day

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;

Ok, Shakespeare, I'm gonna stop you right here. 

For the life of me I can't understand why a woman would want to be compared to a summer's day. You are more lovely and more temperate? Well duh. I've never found 90 degrees and humid lovely, and certainly that doesn't fit the definition of temperate. 

 And I'm not just saying this because I am covered in a layer of flesh and fur and am always hot. Also, can you picture summer day's in the 16th century? I can't imagine mosquitoes and malaria and sweating in your pantaloons was hard to top with one's beauty back in Shakespeare's day. 

Everyone remembers Vivaldi's take on spring, lovely and romantic, and winter is a dramatic close while autumn is playful and folksy. Do you remember summer in the Four Seasons?


Summer is the grumpy old man of the seasons. The violins are brusque, impatient, and forceful. It is the sound of a terribly humid day that turns into a flash flood.
Summer is kind of lose-lose: it's either too hot to go outside, so you stay in, or its raining too heavily, so you stay in. I don't know who Billy Shake impressed by calling them lovelier than a summer's day; yeah no shit, Shakespeare.

Now, autumn on the other hand, what a beautiful season that is.
The trees are a uniform green in summer. Autumn gives us browns, reds, oranges, and yellows. It's these colors that stand out that make nature for me.

If you want a sonnet that get's it right, here's "Pied Beauty":
Glory be to God for dappled things -
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
  Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                Praise him.

 Gerard Manley Hopkins is right, it's the dappled things that are beautiful in life: the fall colors, the freckles, the unexpected breaks from the monotony.

If I ever have a daughter, I am reading this too her as often as possible; it's the 19th century version of "Beautiful"by Christina Aguilera.
And if you keep up with my blog, you know there's a good chance my daughter will have freckles, because there's a good chance I'm gonna marry a woman who looks like Jean Grey...

Beautiful dappled autumn. I've done a fair amount of driving back to Ohio over the past two weekends. The first time I tried driving back, I got lost. Not a bad thing at all though, I got lost in beautiful Indiana fall foliage. Indiana is the garden of Eden in the fall- Brown county Indiana, the county next to Bloomington, has basically one town with 800 people in it. The town, Nashville Indiana, started as an artist's colony. And I can see why- the is the view from off the state route:

This is the best place in the world to be lost. I got a chance to stop and smell the roses, or rather look at the autumn leaves.


Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
No.
Too any and all the beautiful women reading this, I shall compare thee to something more beautiful by far; you are as exquisite, refreshing, and original as an autumn day in Southern Indiana.
And I just beat Shakespeare.

 

What's so funny 'bout Peace, Love and Community?

As you might have heard, Community was supposed to start season 4 today.

NBC has "delayed Community indefinitely". there are 13 episodes shot. We may or may not get to see them.
Now, if you are like most of the world you are saying "what's Community?". True, I've seen the ratings, and like only a million people in the world watch this show. However, that tiny group of fans are the most disproportionally vocal fans in the world; it seems the incredibly small viewership of Community is entirely composed of direhards. If anything were to happen to this show, NBC might want to amp up security.
Now feasibly, if you're reading a blog about Community, that probably applies to you.
But, in case you don't know community (or, like those of us you do, just like reading about it) I am going to explain Community to you. Everything that happened, at Greendale community college and behind the camera.

So, ok, why does everyone lose their shit over this show?
At first, Community initially was a sit com about a gang of misfits in community college who learn how to be a makeshift family. Initially, They spent about 3/4 of the first season developing characters and relationships in a community college environment. Then, Dan Harmon and the rest of the writers decided "Let's do whatever the fuck we want!".

Dan Harmon is important in this story. He's a crazy person but he's really good at TV.

Most of the rest of the show became homage episodes. You how Scrubs would do their Wizard of Oz episode or their 4 camera sit com episode, or when Psych did its Bollywood episode? Yeah, it's like that about once a season, and the whole show of the feel changes.
Except NO. They started doing this more frequently than "Community-style" episodes.

Here's a comprehensive (I hope, point it out if I missed any) list of all of the homage episodes in the last quarter of season 1 on:

• Buddy Cop Movies
• Mob Movies
• Action/Apocalypse Movies
• Fraternity Movies
• Wedding Episodes
• Astronaut Movies
• Biblical Epics
• Zombie Movies
• Mean Girls and/or Secret Garden/Lost (it’s a weird episode, with a trampoline)
• Bottle Episodes
• Conspiracy Thriller/Mystery Movies
• Claymation Christmas TV Specials
• Dungeons and Dragons/Fantasy Epics
• Mocumentary Shows (Modern Family/The Office, etc.)
• Election Episodes
• Pulp Fiction…but actually My Dinner with Andre
• A Clip Show, but comprised of previously unseen clips
• Spaghetti Westerns
• Star Wars
• Film Noir (Chang Noir)
• Something that can only be described as “The Timelines Episode”
• Ghost Stories
• Behind the Scenes Documentaries/Hearts of Darkness
• Glee
• Ken Burn’s “Civil War”
• Law and Order
• The “It Was All in Your Head!” Episode
• 8-Bit Video Games
• Heist Movies

And that's only counting the episodes that go full on homage, so it leaves out moments like "Random anime Sequence"or "Breakfast Club Dance" or "Abed becomes Don Draper/Batman/A background character" etc. More on him in a second

Secondly, series star Ken Jeong has called Community "the live action Simpsons. There is no small part on this show". Here is a(n even bigger list) of all the characters of the ever expanding, Springfield esque cast. Everyone is a character.

• Jeff Winger
• Britta Perry
• Abed Nadir
• Troy Barnes
• Annie Edison
• Shirley Bennett
• Pierce Hawthorne
• Senior Chang
• Dean Craig Pelton
• Star-Burns
• Leonard
• Prof Duncan
• Prof Slater
• Prof Whitman
• Prof Garrity/Professorson
• Vice Dean Laybourne
• Prof Bauer
• Prof Kane
• Garrett
• Magnitude
• Vicki
• Fat Neil
• Vaughn
• Dr. Rich
• Pavel
• Quendra
• Todd
• Andre Bennett
• Elijah, Jordan, & Ben Bennett
• Gobi Nadir
• Dean Spreck
• Jerry thePlumber
• Annie’s Boobs (the monkey, but also her rack)
• Murray the AC guy
• Officer Cackowski
• Sgt. Nunez
• Nurse Jackie
• Mike the Bully
• Buddy
• The Black Rider
• Rabbi Chang
• The Changlorious Basterds
• Alan Connor
• Groundskeeper Joshua
• Levar Burton as Himself
• Luis Guzman as Himself
• French Stewart as Vinnie the French Stewart Impersonator
• Cornelius Hawthorne
• Prof Sheffield
• Prof Cligoris
• Prof Radison/ Mr Rad
• Subway
• Carl and Ritchie
• Gilbert Lawson
• And of course, Evil Abed.

I actually revised this list, trimmed the fat down to recurring characters/major guest stars.. This show has amassed more characters in three seasons than anyone ever.

This show messes with everything you know about TV. The major arc of the first season was a "will they or won't they?" plot involving Jeff and Britta. Finally, in the monumental Paintball episode, they do.


And then what happens, you ask?!
They become fuck buddies for a year.
Yeah, they did what no other TV couple ever did and finally resolved to not date, but still hook up. And you're not even mad about it.

Also, Abed is this show's secret weapon. In a world where every other episode is an homage, Abed is usually the facilitator.
Abed has Aspergers Syndrome and can't tell life from TV. The writers have not, are not, and will not ever be afraid to let him break the fourth wall.



and I can't possibly get into the plotline when he was on Cougar Town as Abed... whole nother can of worms...

Every episode ends with a tag that is, most of the time, better than the episode themselves



More importantly, this show has a cult following. And not just a cult following like "oh, a few people are really into Twin Peaks", no. There's a damn religion about this show, operated  by the fans.


For example, take last year, when NBC moved Community to mideason replacement. The world got crazy; there was a spontaneous riot outside of NBC's offices chock full of the most obscure Community lines ever. They took an obscure line (Six seasons and a movie) and turned it into a rallying cry.


This wasn't just bring back Firefly, these Community fans are nuts. Here's another example: the video game in the 8-bit video game episode? The fans made it a real thing.

Now, you may know, there was real life drama surrounding community. There's an epic Buzzfeed article describing it the only way I (or Abed) would understand it, via another TV show. Let me paraphrase it:

Dan Harmon and Chevy Chase got in a very public fight.
And the show took a fall ratings wise
The Community fans cried "Save it, NBC!"
And NBC said, ORLY? PROBLEM?
And we got a fourth season for Community. But it would air Friday nights at 8:30 after Whitney and Dan Harmon was fired. So, we should have been much more specific.

As Dan Harmon's swan song while anticipating cancellation, he wrote a beautiful last scene the wrapped up ever plot line, kept every plot line open, and told the fans he loved them.


So whats the deal with the show now?

So then the show got picked up to be run by Moses Port and David Guarascio.

They've been writers on TV for years, most recently Happy Endings (which you should like, it's silly). Showrunner wise, their only "success" was Aliens in America, which ran on the CW for one year.

I have success in quotes not because it's a bad show, but because it only lasted a year.
Let me be clear: this was a wonderful show that no one watched. It compared the plight of Muslims in America to the plight of nerds in High School. That is the greatest one sentence premise for a show ever.
Seemingly, the transition to Greendale community college would be easy.
And nothing ever is.

A week before the Season 4 was gonna start, NBC announced that Community would not be on on October 19th. Delayed indefinitely was the diagnosis; they said it would be back, just not immediately. Apparently, reruns of The Voice would get higher ratings anyway.

• PRO: we won't have to deal with this Friday timeslot

• CONS:  WHAT DO YOU MEAN DELAYED INDEFINITELY?

• You can't air a Halloween episode in February!

• NBC hates us...

Also we are being deprived of a Hunger Games homage episode!


 However, if we learned anything through this, it's that the cast of Community, Moses and David, and somehow, the characters, love us.


Community will be back. On TV, on DVD, even if they have to do the rest on Netflix after it's been cancelled for 6 years (dream come true, btw), we will see it. Showrunners and casts say that they love their fans all the time. This is the only time I've actually felt it. This is true love that Joel and the gang has for us. Wanna know how I know they love us? Because no other lead actor on a show does this:
a guy on twitter said he couldn't wait for new episodes of Community. and Joel replied.

SIX SEASONS AND A MOVIE, although I'd be fine with either 4 seasons, or 6 with the last two on TBS...

My Favorite Mosque

I've brought this point up in my blog before, and maybe it's been the theme of my life ages 18-22, but you've gotta love your hometown. I know too many people that hate where they came from. And yes, maybe when you we're 18 you went off to college and found someplace better. And maybe you've calculated it all out and you can't ever feasibly sustain yourself in your hometown as an adult, you'll have to live elsewhere. If that's true, that's cool. But I get angry whenever I see people dissing their hometowns. That place, no matter where it is, was the backdrop for your childhood. It was around for and probably helped in the formative process. Your town made you the warrior you are today! Embrace it!

That being said, I love Toledo, and hate people who hate Toledo.

Toledo Ohio. Yes, it has it's faults. Like any non-Chicago great lakes city, the industry is drying up. And downtown Toledo, compared to similar sized down towns, is lacking...on the surface.

The series of bars on Adams St. are as good as any for a pub crawl that I've been. The food gives you Tony Packos chili, Calvino's Meat Beasty, and kielbasa, kielbasa and kielbasa. You've got the Old West End, The Toledo Museum of Art, and the World Famous Toledo Mud Hens. No matter where I go in America, people of heard of the Toledo Mud Hens- the quintessential minor league baseball team.

                                                    thank you M*A*S*H*

And we've also got what time magazine once called the best Mosque in America, the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo.

Picturesque and symbolic of Islam in America, the glittering dome and minarets stands off the side of the highway in a cornfield. When I lived in Cincinnati, my road home to Toledo was a straight shot north on I-75 until I merged on the outer loop of 475. This mosque stands at the split of the highways; every time I'd come home, the mosque welcomed me. Every time I left, the mosque waved goodbye. It's as much a sign telling me to change lanes as it is a smile telling me we missed you. Sure, I've never been inside the mosque and I'm not a Muslim, but this building is an irreplaceable piece of my hometown.

It caught fire on Sunday afternoon. It was ruled an arson, and currently there's no concrete word on when it will be inhabitable.

If you attack that mosque, a Toledo landmark, you've got a problem with Toledo, and you have a problem with me. Here is the person of interest. I'm putting this on the blog because I don't want him getting away with this.


I have a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that when they catch the man who did it, he'll say he did it for Jesus. Now, it's either pathetic or brilliant thing that I'm about the cite the movie Dogma as a theological source, but i think at this time, we all need to see this:


If you love Jesus, you don't burn things down in  his name. He's disappointed right now. I'm disappointed to boot. But no matter what, I love Toledo, I hope the arsonist is brought to justice, and I can't wait to come home and be greeted by a mosque.

RIP Steve Sabol

Dreams. We all to live the dream. We strive to hold dream jobs. Who actually gets to live a dream? Who actually gets to see their desires and ambitions and their subconscious play out in front of them?

I can think of one man who lived out his dream, and we just lost him- Steve Sabol.

Steve Sabol was the co-founder of NFL films. NFL Films is the reason why The National Football League stopped being a sport and became a national obsession.

Steve and his dad Ed Sabol created NFL films because they just wanted to document their favorite sport. So the Sabol boys filmed the big games. The real magic started on a -16 degree day in January in Wisconsin. Two football teams simply played a game on a frozen field.

Or at least, that's what the game would have been to lesser filmmakers. They turned it into a historical event.


Lambeau Field in Green Bay became a hallowed shrine: the mythical Frozen Tundra, as bleak and barren as the icy fields of Jotunheim. I can't watch the footage of that game without grabbing a blanket. Hell, I can't hear the phrase Ice Bowl without sneering and thinking Bart Starr is a warrior. An actual warrior; in reality, he's a man who played football in the 60s. That's what Steve Sabol did.

As the 60s progressed, the NFL gave the rights to its old broadcasts to the Sabols, as a posterity measure. But what it became was a guarantee that no game would go unforgotten or un-embellished. 

When Steve took over in the 70s, he had the brilliant idea to implement slow motion when filming games. Moments occurring in seconds of real time were minutes of glory when Steve got his hands on them:



 In the 90s, the NFL wanted to improve its appeal on TV, so it took a page from NFL Films and added slow motion replays to telecasts. This was the first step in making the NFL America's favorite TV show. It's the only sport I know that is more fun to watch on TV than it is live. And Steve opened the flood gates, and his vision for how the sport should look became the norm.

I would spend my summers as a boy watching Steve's work, dreaming of becoming an NFL player. If you've ever met me, I have neither the mentality nor the fast-twitch muscle to be a professional athlete. But, Steve made these people my heroes. And not just role model heroes, my warriors from epic poetry. The way Steve and the NFL Films crew captured these men captured not only my imagination, but their greatest moments.
Moments of joy:

Determination:

And the six thousand different emotions present in this still of Kellen Winslow:

I bet Greek children remembered Odysseus the way I remembered Joe Montana.


As an adult I think back and realize that Joe Montana was probably nothing more than another imbecilic jock that went to Notre Dame. But I just can think these thoughts, as true as they are. I could barely even type them just now; I dare I badmouth Montana, he threw the pass that became THE CATCH. And I know there was one man who made me believe the myths about these men, who made me a fan.

And I loved and respected Steve because that's all he was, a fan. He was a huge football fan that got to watch football all day. Need proof?


Steve wrote a hugely nerdy poem about the Oakland Raiders. If you know anything about the Oakland Raiders, they're the most sociopathic meatheads in a sport composed of sociopathic meatheads. He wrote a poem about them.
And then matched it to his footage of the Raiders.

And the Raiders adopted it as their team poem. Yes, Steve got the football team into poetry. By just being a nerd.

I was moved to hear that Steve Sabol died this week. But NFL Films will live on. The moments on film will live on. The struggles, the emotions, the myths, they live on. The men he made gods will live on. The sport will live on, and the love of the sport will live on. So in a way, he never leaves us. Rest in Peace Sabol.

Television National Convention

Maybe it's living most of my life in a swing-state, maybe it's growing up in a "Fox News is actually both fair and balanced" household, maybe it's just my paradoxical enthusiasm for apathy, but I get so bored in election years. The Conventions, now that they no longer serve the purpose of nominating anyone, they are now a TV special. I guess that works, because I love event TV. And no one in the recent years has been better at huge TV moments than Breaking Bad.

As much as I have been known to publicly declare my love for the direwolves and the ponies, when it comes to the summer season, I'm all about the rise and (mostly) fall of Walter White.

And that is why, as long as politics are TV, TV should be politics; and I'm nominating Walter White and Jesse Pinkman for President and Vice President. Bitch.

Now that would be a convention for the ages!

The TV party nominates Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. All the other fictional characters show up to watch the speeches. The crowd goes wild with their chant, "I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS", which is a better slogan than "WE BUILT IT".

See, I'd be more comfortable with Mitt Romney if he told me he was the danger.

The wife of the candidate is one of the first keynote speakers; Skyler White had a speech planned, but it became a spontaneous freakout:



Theon Greyjoy, delegate from the Iron Islands, will come through out of nowhere on why this election is do or die:



Will MacAvoy's speech was supposed to be inspiring, but quickly goes off the rails. However, it becomes profound very quickly, and we're all the better for it:



The first huge speech is Vice President nominee Pinkman, who, as always, gives a scene stealer of a speech,this time, about whats next for America

 ...and proceeds to get his mic cut due to profanity


Abed Nadir from Community is the Ron Paul of TV; huge grassroots (cult) following, but too weird to speak at the convention. So of course, they pic the Rand Paul of TV, Jeff Winger, who always gives a rousing speech:



...but eventually just gets weird himself, and he just makes you want Abed/Ron.



Don Draper is the Chris Christie of this convention: the dude the overwhelming majority of the convention wants to be the nominee but won't run for "personal reasons", gives a classic.



Clint Eastwood may have spoken to an empty chair...

But Ron Swanson points a sawed-off shotgun to it:



and we all listen as he demands more bacon and eggs on the platform:



And because we need a former President to speak, deep into the convention, former President Jed Bartlet, gives an impassioned speech

Before the big dog steps up to bat: Walter White.

As his speech starts, he stumbles a bit:



But then he recovers, assuring us we have nothing to fear...


but fear itself. And Walter White is fear. Walter White is the Danger. Walter White...is the one who knocks




Now that's a ticket I can get behind.

Somebody that I Used to Cover

Gotye.

He's that guy.

Early in 2012 we all became acquainted with "Somebody that I Used to Know". It was really weird, and totally not pop radio sounding, yet it was all over pop radio. It's the most unlikely number 1 hit of the past ten years- or at least since Hollaback Girl.

(This is here to remind you we all listened to a song who's bridge was nothing but "This shit is bananas". )

Gotye, as is status quo in New Artist-Modelville, rose to popularity with his YouTube video going viral- then funneling that into the real world. It's a classic video- paint, nudity, Kimbra

And I'm not gonna embed that video; I'm sure you've seen it. But I'm also sure you saw that other video that went viral at about the same time.




The Walk of the Earth "Somebody"was so popular, there were people who thought they were the original. N00bs, of course, but still people believed- that's how big it got.

At that point, the floodgates didn't just open; the dam broke like Jean Grey was stuck in the lake.

"Somebody that I Used to Know"got the YouTube treatment.
A PS22 cover



An a Capella group cover

A shredding metal guitar cover

Another pop artist's cover

An angry nerd version


Candyrat records one dude and a guitar I study to this shit...cover


Even a professional European choir tearing it up in epic style cover

The song occupies a unique shared stance in our pop sensibility: not every pop song becomes a meme, and not every viral video becomes a bonafide pop hit. Gotye is in the center of the Venn Diagram, between fun. and Bed Intruder.

There are so many videos out there. It's impossible to watch them all.

WAIT.

Gotye has watched them all?
And compiled them into a supercut?



Holy shit, Gotye.

Apart from the obvious labor of love, this is an unprecedented event for YouTube. Sure, you put out a pop hit and there will be covers on the internet, but Gotye, like a proud father, watches these videos of his own song. And he spent what had to be hours making his own video of our videos.

This is the creator marveling at his creation. This is an artist saying that he likes it when the little people from the peanut gallery tweak his work. This is Gotye being so honored by the masses that he made them a giant thank you letter.

He is officially, the nicest man in pop music.

And by the way, here's the list:
http://gotye.com/reader/items/original-videos-used-in-somebodies-a-youtube-orchestra.html#blog.html