Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Back in the old neighborhood, I had a pal named Frankie who taught me an early lesson about negotiating. Any time he saw someone had a pack of gum, or some Skittles, or some Twizzlers, he’d say “Lemme get three pieces of gum” or “Gimme a handful of Skittles” or “Can I get four Twizzlers?” In all my days, I never gave up three pieces of gum, and I never saw someone hand over four Twizzlers, but Frankie always got something. His thinking was, nine times out of 10, he’s going to get something out of the deal. And who knows, maybe he’d get lucky and someone would give him the whole absurd amount he asked for. The point is, when he entered a negotiation, he put his pie-in-the-sky, best-case-scenario offer out there, and it eventually, most of the time in an instant, got negotiated down to a mutually agreeable deal. What Frankie never did was say “Gimme only one piece of gum.” And it was unimaginable to think he would say “You’ve got some gum. Want some more? Here.”

Which brings us to the president, who this week announced a pay freeze for federal civilian employees. You can go ahead and read that whole article, but here are the five most important sentences:

The pay freeze will save $2 billion in the current fiscal year that ends in September 2011, $28 billion over five years and more than $60 billion over 10 years, according to Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and the government’s chief performance officer. That represents just a tiny dent in a $1.3 trillion annual deficit but it offers a symbolic gesture toward public anger over unemployment, the anemic economic recovery and rising national debt.

Mr. Zients said the president made the announcement on Monday because of an approaching legal deadline for submitting a pay plan to Congress. But by doing it now, the president also effectively gets ahead of Republicans who have been talking about making such a move once they assume greater power in January. Some Republicans have gone further, proposing to slash federal worker salaries.

Actually, I lied about those being the most important sentences, because President Obama had a nice quote at the beginning that offers some important context: “I did not reach this decision easily. This is not just a line item on a federal ledger. These are people’s lives.”

So look at what we have here. We’ve got people’s lives, we’ve got almost purely symbolic political gestures, and we’ve got an attempt to preempt something the Republicans were undoubtedly going to do anyway once they formally took control of the House.

Huh?

The most important question here is, what’s preventing Republicans from going ahead and actually cutting federal civilian employee salaries once they take all their seats in the House? This is where the little anecdote about Frankie comes into play. There’s nothing compelling President Obama to do this now. It’s anti-stimulative. No one is clamoring for it. The midterm elections are over, so any perceived political benefit will disappear, like tears in rain, by the time any of the president’s political capital needs to be cashed in. It’s quite literally an example of the administration’s confounding habit of negotiating with itself before even coming to the table with Republicans.

In a sensical world, our liberal, Democratic president would sidle up to the negotiations with Congressional Republicans and say “We’re not going to deny thousands of middle class Americans the salaries they’re entitled to in the middle of the tough economic times.” Then Congressional Republicans would cackle like the aliens from Mars Attacks, and in the end, you’d come out with a compromise. Probably the same federal pay freeze we’re looking at now. But maybe you’d get something better. The point is, you wouldn’t have pissed away your leverage before the discussions even started. Because ask yourself this: does Darrell Issa sound like a guy that’s going to be satisfied with Obama’s voluntarily offered pay freeze? Dude thinks BHO is a socialist, so anything the president does must be an underhanded attempt to push the country further to the brink of Marxist revolution in the streets.

Ezra Klein of the Washington Post today offered another model for negotiation that (probably) wasn’t devised outside the Quik Chek on 38th Street in Bayonne.

“The best negotiator I ever came across was [former Reagan and Bush chief of staff] Jim Baker,” says Paul Begala, who served as an adviser to President Clinton. “He began every negotiation with this sentence: ‘Nothing is agreed to till everything is agreed to.’ So no one can pocket anything, and no one suffers for making the first move.” To many Democrats, Republicans have simply proven the wisdom of Baker’s strategy: They keep pocketing these gains without giving the White House any credit, while both the Democrats and Obama take lashings from their base for being insufficiently principled and tactically incompetent.

Whether you subscribe to the candy store philosophy (which I admit assumes, probably naively, good faith between negotiating parties) or the more politically savvy and realistic philosophy of Jim Baker, the truth in both cases is that you’re not negotiating with yourself.

Earlier in that post, Klein talks about various arguments from White House staffers for why the president has pursued this unilateral self-negotiating strategy. (Previous iterations include the $300 billion stimulus tax cuts, the discretionary spending freeze, and the expansion of offshore drilling.) One of these arguments is that these weren’t bargaining chips at all, but rather good policies that the president wanted to get credit for. As a flaming liberal, this is an infinitely more dismaying argument than “Obama is just a bad negotiator.” As his term goes on and the evidence keeps piling up, though, the most dismaying argument might end up being the most true.

So I just got back from an author event at the Brookline Booksmith. Matt Taibbi was doing a signing for his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America. A lot of mainstream progressive commentators will talk about how entertaining they find Taibbi to be, but there’ll also be some sort of qualifier about how hyperbolic and moralistic he is, how he fudges facts, how he contributes to a radical discourse. I won’t do that. If the dude is right about even half the stuff he writes about, we’re doomed.

It was a thoroughly depressing evening. (Taibbi even relayed the anecdote that when he was writing the book, his editor asked him to put together a “but here’s the good news,” which turned out to be so unconvincing as to be axed from the book altogether.) There are many reasons, but the overarching one is something he outlines in the book’s first chapter:

Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate will power to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power.

The financial crisis in particular, and the economy and power structures that enabled it in general, are just too damn complicated for the average person to comprehend. And that’s not me thinking the average person is a moron. It’s just huge, complicated, abstract, esoteric stuff. I don’t know if it’s fair to say that we can’t be blamed for ignoring it and allowing ourselves to be played by moneyed elites, but it’s certainly understandable that things like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations would go over most of our heads. How are we supposed to know what to do and how to act when even the people we elect to represent us don’t grasp the problem?

I obviously don’t have the answers. But I’m trying. There’s a short bit about securitization in a recent Rolling Stone piece that Taibbi wrote that I think is very helpful, and might help you intuitively think through some of the more insidious things at play in the world today. Some of you might be more familiar with the concept of securitization, but it’s at the heart of our recent crisis. Here’s the way it used to be:

In the old days, when you took out a mortgage, it was probably through a local bank or a credit union, and whoever gave you your loan held on to it for life. If you lost your job or got too sick to work and suddenly had trouble making your payments, you could call a human being and work things out. It was in the banker’s interest, as well as yours, to make a modified payment schedule. From his point of view, it was better that you pay something than nothing at all.

Once it became possible for thousands of individual mortgages to be packaged into AAA-rated securities, though, lenders began selling mortgages to banks, who pooled them together and sold them to institutional investors. Point being, the bond between lender and borrower was broken.

In many cases, banks like JP Morgan are merely the servicers of all these home loans, charged with collecting your money every month and paying every penny of it into the trust, which is the real owner of your mortgage. If you pay less than the whole amount, JP Morgan is now obligated to pay the trust the remainder out of its own pocket. When you fall behind, your bank falls behind, too. The only way it gets off the hook is if the house is foreclosed on and sold.

That’s what this foreclosure crisis is all about: fleeing the scene of the crime.

To make a long story short, the incentives are fucked. In the halcyon days of Mayberry, if you couldn’t pay your full monthly rate, it was in the bank’s best interest for you to pay whatever you could. Today, if you can’t pay your full monthly rate, it’s in the bank’s best interest to get you out and get someone in who can pay. If you clicked through and read the Rolling Stone piece, you’ll see that it’s become insanely easy for that to happen. Just imagine what kind of bad behavior that could encourage.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know where I stand when it comes to politics, so you can imagine my initial reaction to yesterday’s elections. But, you know, I’m bright enough to know that while yesterday was bad, it wasn’t the end of the world. I also know that the next couple years are going to be rough. So I’m down in the dumps.

Here are two pretty well-written pieces about two great ones we lost yesterday. Salon’s Steve Kornacki has a post-mortem on the political career of Nancy Pelosi, who I’ll be naming my second daughter after. And then here’s a piece on Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, a statesmen that James Madison could only have dreamed we would have 220 years after he helped craft the Constitution.

These are bleak times, precious readers. Every week brings news of another abridgment of what used to be ironclad, fundamental Constitutional rights. Tomorrow, if you walk around the block and pass ten people, at least two of them will be morons so dangerously stupid that they shouldn’t be allowed to cross the street without adult supervision. Collectively, we’re a bunch of ignorant, racist fools, all too willing to be demagogued to by craven, mendacious, hucksters. Meanwhile, our elected leaders, even the ones who promised to take action, feel the best response to the most profound threat to humanity’s long-term existence on this planet is political posturing and triangulation. Speaking of political posturing, the party taking best advantage of our collective dumbassery, which is poised to take control of at least one of the houses of Congress after this fall’s elections, is more concerned with revisiting a demonstrable failure of a political gambit in order to dismantle the most important piece of progressive legislation since Johnson’s Great Society than actually, you know, leading. If you were feeling even the most minuscule measure of hope that our most visible media watchdogs would illuminate all of this chicanery and treat it with the gravity it deserves, you should probably abandon it; they’re in thrall to the very establishment powers that we trust them to investigate and expose.

On the other hand, there’s this.

However, comma, if you’re interested in actually learning a little something about local zoning and construction issues in New York City, instead of just recklessly exploiting them for political gain, I definitely recommend this lengthy New York Times report, from the fifth anniversary of September 11, titled “The Hole in the City’s Heart.” It’s old, but it should give you a good flavor of the concrete problems involved in building anything near Ground Zero.

Will Lebron James spend the next three to five seasons delivering the multiple championships that we’ve all been assured he will someday win to Cleveland, ushering in a new golden age for the benighted former metropolis? Or will he flee, plunging clea bleak, post-apocalyptic nightmare future where unsold Travis Hafner bobbleheads are the only currency, and flames leaping from the Cuyahoga River are not a shameful sign of postindustrial decay, but rather a nostalgic reminder of the bright flame of hope that once burned in the heart of every Clevelander, before their Chosen One skipped town, their souls and innocence in tow? Tonight is the night we find out!

I’ve gone back and forth about Lebron’s um, decision to go through with “The Decision,” the hour-long program tonight where he’ll announce the team he’s chosen to sign a free agent contract with. On the one hand, it’s incredibly tacky. It’s always been one thing for ESPN and the rest of the national media to pick up this “Where will Lebron go” narrative and milk it for everything it’s worth over the past three years. But for the man himself to throw one final last tanker full of gasoline onto the flames with this self-indulgent bit of puffery? It’s unseemly, especially considering Lebron has yet to win a damn thing.

Then again, as you all know from my posts on guys like Manny Ramirez and Chad Ochocinco, I’m all about my athletes being entertainers. Sports are supposed to be fun and frivolous. They’re supposed to be spectacle. Is there a bigger spectacle than an hour-long, widely publicized, highly produced show dedicated to the type of announcement that Kevin Durant managed to make in less than 140 characters. As far as entertainment goes, Lebron can either make himself into a Rushmore-worthy mark of integrity and loyalty by sticking with Cleveland, or one of the biggest sports villains ever by stabbing his hometown team in the heart on the biggest stage imaginable. Either way, I’m writing a running diary of the thing. Here we go!

8:58 And Sportscenter is already reporting that “Sources indicate Lebron James will sign with the Heat.” I hope that doesn’t happen, or else ESPN will have ruined their whole surprise!

8:59 We’ll all be watching together, Linda Cohn just said. I feel like America is my whole family. Lebron James is bringing people together. Before he tears them bloodily apart.

9:01 Who is this voiceover guy, Zordon? Also, this bing logo in the “The Decision” chyron in the corner is pretty ill-placed.

9:02 Simmons touched on this earlier in the day, but I’ll reiterate: if Lebron, Bosh, and Wade are playing for the Heat, who else are they playing with? Hobos off the street? Guys that’ll play for mojitos?

9:03 Jon Barry just called Dwyane Wade the second-best player in the game. I think there should be a split screen of Kobe Bryant’s reactions to the bloviation that occurs in the next hour.

9:07 I swear to God, I almost bought that purple gingham shirt the other day. Of course, I don’t think Lebron is shopping at the Banana Republic factory store.

I’ve liked Joe Johnson ever since he made the Celtics look like they were playing pee-wee ball in the 2008 playoffs, but I don’t think he really deserved that contract.

9:10 I might be a homer, but I think what happened with the Celtics in 2008 was a fluky anomaly. Rondo and Perkins happened to coincidentally be effective players, and James Posey happened to be able to play clutch defense on everyone’s best player, and PJ Brown happened to be able to still walk. Lightning in a bottle!

9:11 Would it have killed ESPN to take the time to superimpose Lebron’s face onto some color unis? At least it would look dynamic and distract us for a second from what an effing farce this whole thing is. For a second.

Commercials = grabbing a beer. Great Divide Denver Pale Ale. Perhaps Lebron to the Nuggets?

9:15 Where would we be without “California Love”? ESPN would need to play the theme to The OC during All-Star promos, that’s where.

9:16 At 25, I wanted the option to earn jillions more dollars. I bet Lebron’s living room has air conditioning.

You know, I refuse to believe that Lebron would go through with this whole show if his operation was leaky enough that so many “sources” are sure he’s signing with the Heat. But I don’t know anything about anything.

9:20 Here’s a Facebook update from the Official Roommate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, a Cleveland native and Cavaliers fan:

ORODDU: really? this thing is sponsored by bing, the “decision engine” and “DecisionWater” (formerly known as VitaminWater)?? ridiculous

Ha!

9:22 I gotta tell you, I couldn’t care less what Lebron thinks about the process. We’ve all made tough decisions before. They suck! Get on with it!

9:23 Incidentally, I saw the giant sign that the Russian plutocrat owner of the Nets painted on the side of that building overlooking MSG the other day. It’s kinda hilarious.

9:25 I’m ashamed to say that I have a knot in my stomach. This could be the end of Cleveland, and the guillotine is dropping in slower than slow motion.

9:27 So it’s the Heat. Did you hear that crowd? Hoo boy.

9:29 “How do you explain this to the city of Cleveland?” Like this: see you in hell!

9:30 Will you still live in Akron? Ha! That’s a legitimate lol.

9:32 This is a time-stamped guarantee: if Pat Riley doesn’t walk downstairs at some point to coach Lebron James, I’ll eat my hat.

Look at all that Vitamin Water. It looks like backstage at a Gossip Girl fashion show.

9:36 Did you see that bartender in Cleveland? Holy smokes.

Mike Wilbon just congratulated Lebron for making his decision. I wish I was congratulated for doing things I’m supposed to do. “First of all, Timmy, congratulations for brushing your teeth this morning.”

9:39 I hope the fans will be respectful, but I don’t expect them to be. Interesting quote. I would change my mind about rooting against Lebron if he made a complete heel turn here. Drop the faux humbleness, mug for the camera more, show up to the arena in a black feather boa.

9:44 That’s right! Who knows how game 7 would have gone if Perkins didn’t go down!

One look at my Facebook news feed, and I’m already having a backlash against the Lebron backlash. I don’t want to hate on Lebron is hating on Lebron is already passe . . .

9:49 Was that litany of great teams a slap in the face of Mo Williams?

I kinda sorta don’t believe that they’re showing Lebron video of people burning his jersey. “How do you feel about that, Lebron?” Probably bad! Then again, nothing burns like an effigy . . .

9:51 I love this “to my real fans” stuff.

10:00 Alright, enough. Go Celtics.

America!

Happy Independence Day, everybody. I’m not one of those scolds who’s going to tell you to feel guilty for engaging in jingoistic acts of revelry, seeing as how there’s so much suffering and injustice not only in the world, but in this very country. There’s two reasons for this, one of which I’ve already written about. For as bad as America may seem to its harshest critics, at home and abroad, it’s still a great place, and with the ability to be greater:

That’s what makes America great, that quest for perfection. Our history as a nation is pocked by almost unforgivable sins: genocide, slavery, war. I say almost unforgivable, because I believe that the American story is a story of redemption. (I guess we’re back to the redemptive power of change.) And whether the redemption is of the ancient crimes of European tyranny, or our own more recent ones, America is a place where that cleansing can happen, where things can be made right. Because even though their application hasn’t always been consistent, the words that actually are our birthright have never changed: that all men are created equal; that our union can be more perfect; that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish. The American story is a long slog; too long, in fact. But the slog inevitably leads to the same place. That’s the genius of America.

The second reason being, it’s America’s birthday, people. Wherever you are, you should probably find a place and a means to party. What I would ask, as I am wont to do on occasions such as this, is to take a moment to say a few words to the close and holy darkness for the men and women who are overseas, fighting under that flag you see above, as well as their families, who suffer in ways that you or I can scarcely imagine.

And so I leave you, treasured readers, as I make my preparations to go down the shore to celebrate America’s independence from the hated British, with the only rendition of our national anthem that ever really mattered. Be good.

While the invoice from my hosting company should have been ample reminder, I completely forgot that May 29 was the one-year anniversary of dangerousdirtyunfun.com. What a horrible blogger I am. Where’s the romance gone? Sure, at the start, there were rose petals leading from the door down the hallway and right to my laptop. Pretty soon, though, the posts got less frequent, the writing got a little skimpier, until finally I’m forgetting our anniversary. I’m sorry, dangersoudirtyunfun.com! Let me make it up to you with a special Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Event.

In the coming days and weeks (because let’s be honest, precious readers, DD&U doesn’t do week-long events), I’ll be going through the past year’s worth of posts, picking out some of my favorites, providing some commentary, basically playing around in the archives. I’ll do my best to provide some fresh content so this isn’t some exercise in blatant narcissism. But then again, you people will read anything I post, right? Right?

Anyway, here’s the oldest post I can possibly point to: the first one, from May 29, 2009! It’s extra cute, because I talk about all this crazy customization I planned to do on the site, and reference all of these old details that are long defunct. Ah, capricious youth. The most substantive bit here is the origin of your favorite blog’s title, which isn’t really that substantive, but hey! Cut me some slack, it was my first post!

Way back when I was a junior in college, I and a group of dear friends took a road trip out to sunny South Bend, Indiana, to watch the mighty Eagles of Boston College vanquish their bitter rivals, the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. On the way home, two of our group attained other means of transport home, so it was just Michelle, whose car we were in, Katie, and myself splitting driving duties. I remember being behind the wheel and blazing through Indiana in a pelting rain storm. I don’t recall how long it took us to get back to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but I do remember driving through the night, and trying to get some shut-eye in the backseat, which wasn’t necessarily easy.

So there we were, on the Massachusetts Turnpike, 15 or 20 minutes from home, going through a tollbooth. Michelle was driving, Katie was in the passenger seat, and I was in a half-catatonic state in the back. Michelle called our attention to an advertisement on the divider between toll booths. I think it was for Boston’s public parks. Anyway, it hyped up Boston’s playgrounds as “Safe, Clean, and Fun!” This wasn’t inherently hilarious. But then Michelle said “Of course they’re safe, clean, and fun. What are they supposed to say? Dangerous, dirty, and unfun?” This wasn’t inherently hilarious, either, but for whatever reason, be it the sleep deprivation, or maybe the residue of the copious amounts of fermented spirits I had imbibed hours before, I laughed harder than I ever did in my entire life. All the way home, I couldn’t stop laughing, gasping for breath, clutching the seat in front of me, wheezing “Dangerous, dirty, and unfun! Ha!” After that, the term became something we brought up in conversation, and it also became the title of the memorial mixtape of the trip that Michelle made for me.

So that’s it. I just thought it was a fun term. Is there any inherent meaning or application to the blog? I don’t know. You tell me.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I, along with the Official Roommate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, play in a weekly cornhole league. (Cornhole, for the uninitiated, is a game a lot like horseshoes, except with beanbags and wooden ramps.) Well, last night was the championship tournament. What transpired was exactly what you would expect to transpire when two of the fiercest competitors in the history of lawn games pit their mettle against the best players the great metropolis of Boston has to offer.

That’s right, precious reader. The dynamite duo, Beanbag Puns Are Corny, is your Winter 2010 Social Boston Sports cornhole champion!

The greatest moment of my life.

After a cutthroat semi-final round, we were up against two of the most formidable cornhole practitioners I’ve ever encountered. Dudes were straight up assassins. I’m talking ringers on demand. After losing game one, we fell into a deep hole. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that there were several moments during that second game where I was convinced we were done for. But in moments like that, in the white-hot crucible of competition, the truly transcendent athletes find a store of will that, quite frankly, doesn’t exist in ordinary mortals. Suffice it to say, we were able to mount a furious comeback and complete a David and Goliath story that makes the Book of Samuel look like a writeup of a mid-July scrimmage in the Plattsburgh, New York Little League.

For that, we were given the right to sip the sweet, sweet nectar of triumph (aka Sam Adams Noble Pils) out of that golden championship chalice. And t-shirts that will forever identify us as cornhole champions. Success! Victory! Glory!

The vestment of a champion

As always, I’m writing about the Oscars because I like movies and I watch them from time to time, and I’m always trying to position Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun within the zeitgeist. I only saw a few of the nominated films, namely Inglorious Basterds and a bootleg copy of Avatar, so as usual, all opinions should be taken with the requisite grains of sodium chloride. And for previous Oscar commentary, go here!

8:32 How about a Harold and Kumar reference in the opening musical number? Fun!

8:33 Also, remember like, ten years ago when Neil Patrick Harris was nobody? Does anyone even refer to him just “the guy that was Doogie Howser” anymore?

8:37 I usually don’t like saying these things, at the risk of sounding like I’m the kind of guy that thinks women are objects, but Helen Mirren = hot. Yeah, I said it.

8:39 In our first movie, we were both born a poor black child. That was kinda funny.

8:43 This George Clooney scowling thing in the opening monologue is supposed to be a gag, right? Am I just not in touch enough to get it? Because I’m pulling my collar like crazy over here! Also, I didn’t see his movie, but I think Jeff Bridges is owed an Oscar after being snubbed for his betrayal as Dude Lebowski.

8:47 Ah ha! An actor nominated from a movie I actually saw! Christoph Waltz for best supporting actor!

8:48 Ding ding ding.

8:50 I don’t like Ryan Reynolds being all solemn and serious, introducing The Blind Side. This is Van Wilder, dammit! Chris Brander! Is this some sort of preparation for us to take him seriously as Hal Jordan?

8:52 Does everyone else have a The Bounty Hunter commercial on right now? And are you all weirded out that King Leonidas is now the go-to guy for soulless, forgettable action flicks and cookie cutter romantic comedies?

8:56 Does this Steve Carrel thing mean that Jude Law won’t be appearing on this broadcast? I’m a huge Jude Law guy : (

8:57 I like what they do with the cartoons. That is all. I gotta go for Coraline here, because it was written by a guy that writes comic books. Like, really writes comic books.

8:58 College Humor says what needs to be said about Pixar.

9:00 Is Miley Cyrus on stilts? Look at how tall she is!

9:02 Reinhart Wagner, nominated for best original song. Is he German?

9:04 Neither of these guys who won look like a “T-Bone Burnett.” I think the guy that said “I love you more than rainbows, baby” should be named T-Bone.

9:06 Why didn’t they make the previews for District 9 as good as that little montage? I probably would have seen it!

9:10 David Carr signed with the 49ers? Who’s our backup now? Sorry, this has nothing to do with the Oscar broadcast. It’s just a reason for concern.

9:13 I, for one, am thrilled with how Robert Downey’s career has panned out.

9:17 Molly Ringwold? Where’d she come from? I haven’t seen her since that episode of Family Guy.

9:17.5 Of course it’s a John Hughes memorial, so now I feel like a big jerk.

9:19 Breakfast Club, Shmreakfast Club, when was anyone gonna tell me that John Hughes wrote Home effing Alone? And Christmas Vacation!

9:25 Margaret Monroe of Washington, DC, has never seen Christmas Vacation. I thought the world should know.

9:34 Yup. Short films.

9:45 Wait a sec, 72 percent of America preferred their toilet paper over the roll? How is that even possible!

9:48 Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire was based on a book? How about that.

9:53 They honored Roger Corman? That’s actually kinda awesome. I know a guy that works for him nowadays.

10:00 This is a make-up Oscar for Mo’nique, after she was snubbed for her portrayal of Cherry in Beerfest.

10:20 Bride of Frankenstein was a pretty good flick. Thoughts?

10:24 I feel like it would be much cooler if they actually like, recorded an actual RPG blowing up an actual cop car in that scene from The Dark Knight.

10:26 Now, does every member of the Academy get an equal vote for every category? What the hell does some writer know about sound mixing?

10:32 I’m glad we don’t have to see those Yaz commercials that are solely about how Yaz is actually deadly poison. Girls falling into bathtubs with their clothes on is much more whimsical than “Our last ad lied to you about how harmful our product is.”

10:35 Is this a glitch? I feel like the cinematography category should have some like, examples of good cinematography. Right?

10:39 I like James Taylor, but they couldn’t get Sir Paul to sing the song he co-wrote?

10:45 Remember when J-Lo used to put out records? “I’m Real” with Ja-Rule is still an awesome song!

10:51 Those guys were spinning on their heads for like, 30 seconds! That was a crazy. Maybe this is a legion of extraordinary dangers. Also, thank you, Alan Moore, for giving us the “Group Noun of Extraordinary Plural Nouns” construction.

11:01 I’m a huge Matt Damon guy. I don’t care who knows it, either. Also, this Burma movie looks wicked heavy. Yikes!

11:02 And then a movie about slaughtering dolphins? WTF?

1103 Seriously, Hollywood. Can we get a documentary with some whimsy? I’m about to cry.

11:05 Awesome awesome awesome. The producer of the winning documentary, The Cove, is the same guy that played Lyle Corman, the critic from the Philadelphia Inquirer who gave Paddy’s Pub a scathing review on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. H/t to my roommate for figuring that one out.

11:10 I’m kinda rooting for Jeremy Renner. Not because I saw The Hurt Locker. But because I saw 28 Weeks Later, and I kinda liked it!

11:12 People might treat this like a joke, but good for the pride of New Jersey, Buzz Aldrin, for appearing on Dancing with the Stars. I’m rooting for him full-throatedly.

11:19 Here’s the thing about Avatar. You’re a human, so when you’re not in your avatar, it’s sleeping. Presumably because you’re awake and doing human things. Don’t you also have to be awake while you’re in the pod and you’re controlling the avatar? Because if you’re actually the mind giving agency to this puppet, don’t you yourself have to be conscious? So when does the human sleep? Did this get established in the movie? And I’m not talking about established in a “we have one scene where Jake is tired in his video diary” way. I mean was this problem actually addressed and resolved in a grown-up way.

11:25 What happened to Michelle Pfeiffer? Is she not a big star any more?

11:26 I don’t know if I’m digging this “co-star yap yap yapping about the nominee” thing. These are Hollywood actors here. They don’t need to be praised any more than they’ve already been praised!

11:32 We all saw this Jeff Bridges win coming, right? The Dude abides, right?

11:34 Oh hey, Julianne Moore was just on stage. She played Maude Lebowski!

11:48 Did the Academy just not want to have to decide between Meryl Streep and the girl from Precious?

11:55 Is it cool or funny or something that the woman that directed Point Break just won best director?

11:58 I guess James Cameron will have to console himself with his millions and millions of dollars. I should probably also get The Hurt Locker on-demand? People seem to think it’s a good movie.