Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

I’m working a sorta kinda large-ish project, but in the meantime, here’s a couple cool things that I think you guys would really enjoy!

# A great little essay on dumplings, social networks, and the paradox of cool.

# Here’s Matt Taibbi with a typically smart take on organized labor, using the NFL Players Union, of all things, as his example.

# If you think this isn’t my new favorite song, you obviously haven’t been reading this blog for very long. [Via]

# Some people will be standing in line at the Post Office on April 15. Odds are, I’ll be standing in line at Brookline Booksmith.

Sorry, gang. I got into a serious mood to clean up tonight, and I didn’t want to lose momentum. The bad news: the long post I wanted to write tonight didn’t get written. The good news: my desk is finally clean! Here are some cool/interesting things for you to look at.

# I’m always interested in stories by writers who bond with their families over Giants games, but as I was reading this one I sort of felt it was falling short. And yet by the end, I had managed to get a piece of dust in both my eyes. So I don’t know. Just judge for yourself.

# Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know about my staunch belief that parking is the hub on which the entire urban experience rests. Here’s another Times piece, this time about the perils of free parking. Expect more of this from your favorite blogger.

# Boston has a lot of squares. Would you believe that not all of them are square-shaped?

Here’s a few links to some of my favorite posts, which, if I actually wrote about them individually, would incite an insurgency of readers furious that I don’t actually produce original content any more. We don’t want that. Try to enjoy yourself.

# Looking back, I’m a little surprised that I actually had so much to say about that stupid “wedding procession to the Chris Brown song” video. I just got into a flow, and it all came out. Sometimes I wish I had more critical-thinking type things to say about Internet memes, since I’m probably more qualified to write about those than anything else. Maybe I’ll try harder in DD&U.com’s second year, eh?

# I’ve had occasion to write a lot of posts titled “Sad news,” unfortunately. It’s morbid to say that I have a favorite, but I liked re-reading this Les Paul remembrance, if only because he was such an amazing guy. Go down and turn the video on, then read.

# A Zelda Warriors post, within a Zelda Warriors post? I’ve just blown my own mind. I got a bunch of sports-related stuff off my chest here. As I write, I’m actually having a conversation about how much I enjoy watching professional athletes show each other up, so don’t think I don’t live what I write.

# This post on MTV’s Jersey Shore actually got me a completely random link on a blog on nj.com. I almost felt like a real blogger!

# Finally, I know it was only a few weeks ago, but in case you’ve forgotten: Paste.

The increasingly unaptly named David Foster Wallace Fortnight continues with a few links that have been accumulating for a bit. Click on the “David Foster Wallace” tag below for earlier installments.

# My buddy Reeves, who also read Infinite Jest last summer, did a little project over at his blog, Meanderings. (Which, if you’re not reading, you should.) It was called Infinite Words, and basically all he did was transcribe all of the masterfully crafted phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that he marked down in his copy of the book. As you can see from the picture on that first post, there were a lot, enough to categorize. (The full list of posts is here.)

I expressed to Reeves my envy, that he came up with this idea first. But then I hoisted up my copy of the book and realized that there was no organizing principle behind the words I underlined, the phrases I highlights, or the pages I dogeared. To say nothing of the notes I left on post-its, the backs of envelopes, and in the margins of wholly unrelated magazine articles. So while I had every intention of promoting, so to speak, the Infinite Words concept, I suppose I didn’t have the foresight/intellectual discipline at the time to sufficiently record the things I liked. Oh well. Here’s a miniature version of well-crafted sentences that stuck with me from IJ.

38–39
On the grade-school beauty of Mildred Bonk: She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape.

142
Hal Incandenza, from an academic paper on the future of the action hero: We await, I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.

203
One of the things you’ll learn in rehab: That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

228
Joelle van Dyne, star of the eponymous film “Infinite Jest,” on the finished product: Joelle’s never seen the completed assembly of what she’d appeared in, or seen anyone who’s seen it, and doubts that any sum of scenes as pathologic as he’d stuck that long quartzy auto-wobbling lens on the camera and filmed her for could have been as entertaining as he’d said the thing he’d always wanted to make had broken his heart by ending up.

268
Teddy Schacht’s self-awareness, and quite possibly my favorite line in the book: Like most very large men, he’s getting comfortable early with the fact that his place in the world is very small and his real impact on other persons even smaller. . . . He’s one of those people who don’t need much, much less much more.

309
One of amateur tennis radio announcer Jim Troeltsch’s more creative reports: Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d’oeuvre and bit down 6–4, 7–6.

1048
An old friend on Orin Incandenza’s pick-up method: “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” Which in a way of course is being almost pathologically open and sincere about the whole picking-up enterprise, but also has this quality of Look-At-Me-Being-So-Totally-Open-And-Sincere-I-Rise-Above-The-Whole-Disingenuous-Posing-Process-Of-Attracting-Someone-,-And-I-Transcend-The-Common-Disingenuity-In-A-Bar-Herd-In-A-Particularly-Hip-And-Witty-Self-Aware-Way-,-And-If-You-Will-Let-Me-Pick-You-Up-I-Will-Not-Only-Keep-Being-This-Wittily,-Transcendently-Open-,-But-Will-Bring-You-Into-This-World-Of-Social-Falsehood-Transcendence, which of course he cannot do because the whole openness-demeanor thing is itself a purposive social falsehood; it is a pose of poselessness; Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know.

# “Become an agent of light and goodness.” Or, to use a term my predecessor left on a post-it on my computer, “All words should be true and precise.” These are less goals to be achieved, and more landmarks to keep in your sights, I’ve found.

# Below is a Monty Python sketch about a joke so funny, anyone who heard it would die laughing.

Anyone who’s read Infinite Jest knows that a joke so funny it kills sounds a lot like a movie so entertaining it kills. Are we dealing with a case of Infinite Theft? Meh. Probably not. But I’d be shocked and amazed if a guy as smart and witty and well-versed in well, everything, as DFW wasn’t aware of Monty Python’s entire oeuvre. What an homage!

# This is obviously excellent news.

# Fire up Boston Blazers! This radio spot has been coming up a lot on Pandora recently, and it’s an effing delight. These days, you so rarely come across a hokey, old-school style jingle. Bravo, Boston Blazers. Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun salutes you.

# I usually resist things that are so overtly twee as this, but I have a hard time resisting a cute girl and a ukulele. I’m not as big a Neutral Milk Hotel guy as I should be, and I think it’s not unfair to admit that Jeff Mangum has a lousy voice. It’s true! Which is a shame, because once you put his lyrics in the hands of a mellifluous voice, you realize how beautiful they are. Listen to “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” Gorgeous!

# Finally, give me a fucking break, Texas.

# I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

# More of this, please. I have a good buddy who finds this sort of behavior reprehensible. I can’t get enough of it. Firstly, as a colleague of mine would say, “This isn’t the effing Pentagon.” It’s football; it’s entertainment. Chad Ochocinco is an entertainer. Secondly, it’s not like Ochocinco called Darrelle Revis a bad father; he didn’t call him a tax cheat; he didn’t insinuate that he was a lousy tipper. He engaged in a little banter about the kids’ game that they both play once a week for millions of dollars a year. If Darelle Revis can’t handle it (and I’m positive that he can), he should get into another line of work.

Critics of players like Ochocinco and Terrelle Owens and similar blowhards sometimes argue about how these guys set a bad example, and that they show poor sportsmanship. I’m not going to address how sports figures shouldn’t be role models for anyone. And I’ll only briefly address how overrated the concept of sportsmanship is. Or, should I say, the concept that we should be looking to professional sports stars as examples of sportsmanship. (Which, I suppose, is related to the first point that I said I wasn’t going to address. Funny how that sort of thing happens.) The single-minded focus, egomania, and determination involved in reaching the pinnacle of athletic competition, in my eyes, disqualifies pro athletes from being any sort of examplars of what we’ve come to call “good sportsmanship.” I mean, think about how many wideouts Chad Ochocinco had to vanquish, at every level of his career, to get to the point where he’s the number one wide receiver for a playoff-bound team. The same goes for every pro athlete. They’ve undoubtedly had to do things that normal Joes like you or I would never even dream of attempting in order to get where they are; that’s why they’re pro athletes, and we’re normal Joes. All of this is to say, we expect them to be good sports, too? I think athletes should for sure receive positive attention when they display good sportsmanship; but we should come to expect trash-talking, boasting, and excessive celebration as something that comes with the territory, as opposed to something that we frown upon. This is just me talking, but I think as a consumer of professional sports and a patron on professional sports’ various advertisers, I’m owed a good show more than a bunch of juiced-up freaks trying to be good sports. Sportsmanship isn’t something that’s learned from watching dudes on TV: it’s learned on the actual field of play.

# Less of this, please. I’m not going to bury Mike Leach, since I’m sure there’s still a lot of investigating to do w/r/t Adam James’s allegations against him. I’m going to speak, via setting up a series of strawmen, to the larger story of how college athletes in general are mistreated by a system that makes hundreds of millions of dollars off their free labor, and how what they receive in return is less than a drop in the bucket. Now, I understand that some people might see big-time college athletics (we’ll focus on football) as sort of trade school for the professional ranks, so theoretically their big payday is just deferred a few years down the line, and the stuff they have to put up with in college is well worth it. Of course, the number of college football players who actually make it to the NFL, let alone have productive careers, is so self-evidently and intuitively infinitesimal that I won’t even bother linking to or even looking up the statistics. (How’s THAT for argument?) Another argument is that athletes are compensated via the education they receive, sometimes for free. It’s great that some kids who might not get the opportunity to receive a college education do so via their athletic skills. But how compromised does that education get when practices and games and training take athletes out of the classroom, or the threat of losing one’s scholarship if one doesn’t do what one’s coach says (like, say, get locked in a storage shed) hangs like the sword of Damocles over the heads of marginal players.

In any event, college kids playing varsity sports are most certainly not equivalent to pro athletes, no matter what anyone says about the quality of play at the upper echelons of competition or the absurdity of the modern-day idea of the “student-athlete.” If Wade Phillips wants to lock Tony Romo in a supply closet, well, great: they’re both grown men, being paid millions of dollars. Tony Romo isn’t a kid. Adam James is. Ivan Maisel, in the article above, wrote “whatever happened to wide receiver Adam James regarding his treatment for a concussion he suffered in practice two weeks ago, it is clear athletes are less likely than ever to stand for mistreatment in order to be team players.” I hope he’s right!

# And finally, give me a fucking break, Alabama.

# Just brilliant. H/t EK

# From the annals of grudging respect: I never want to admit that the Red Socks do anything worthwhile, but this is a good project they’re engaging in. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a real thing, but there are still a lot of people, in the military and outside of it, who don’t treat it with the gravity it deserves. Good for the Red Socks. In this one instance, I wish them luck.

# Cool cool cool site called Covered. They have various artist re-interpret classic comic book covers. Here are two of my favorites.

# In honor of my younger self who, like every 6-year-old boy, was CONVINCED he was going to be a paleontologist, here’s a wacky story about a tiny tyrannosaurus they just discovered in China. It’s the size of a man!

I don’t want to say that I’m a lazy blogger, but I don’t know how to finish this sentence.

# Welp, humanity, we had a good run. Maybe it’s time to give the roaches a go of it.

# I don’t know the parameters of this contest, so maybe it makes a lot of sense that the lamest joke I’ve ever heard is the best joke in England. Is it bad that I groaned at all of the winners, but legitimately laughed out loud at the crackling gag?

# Here’s a rare interview with Jesse Lacey, lead singer of Brand New and crafter of lyrical miracles.

# My jaw almost hit the floor when I read this: the WWE is thinking of creating a channel to broadcast their classic matches and pay-per-views. I’m giddy with anticipation. Youtube is great, but this is the sort of thing that needs to be seen on my 57 inch TV. (h/t to the Sports Guy.)

More links!

# A defense of one of DD&U’s favorite shows, Real World/Road Rules Challenge. Not that I think it needs defending or anything.

# More on the absurd cost of higher education in America.

# More on the absurdity of the U.S. News college rankings.

# A tantalizingly brief piece on Boston’s defunct A Line.

# A nice remembrance of Satchel Paige, the most fascinating ballplayer in the history of the game. Did you know he once threw all three games of a triple-header, all complete game shutouts. With a broken leg.

Whenever I come across a video or an article or a photo that I think might be worth blogging about, I throw it into a draft e-mail and, ideally, click on it when I’m in a good blogging sitch and make the wordsmithery happen. As you can probably imagine, some of these links slip through the cracks. Not because they’re not good, but sometimes I just don’t get around to writing about them before something more timely comes up.

So this is me, clearing out my list of links, which I present to you for your weekend reading enjoyment.

# A not quite tongue-in-cheek documentary on Comic Sans, the most hated of typefaces. I’m not 100 percent sure, but it may have been produced by bu students. Still pretty ok, though.

# Here’s Walter Pincus on the troubles with journalism. Thesis:

My profession is in distress because for more than a decade it has been chasing the false idols of fame and fortune. While engaged in those pursuits, it forgot its readers and the need to produce a commercial product that appealed to its mass audience, which in turn drew advertisers and thus paid for it all. While most corporate owners were seeking increased earnings, higher stock prices, and bigger salaries, editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances.

I don’t necessarily agree with that statement, but far be it from to question a guy who’s logged as many miles as Pincus. Read the piece!

# Miles over at Now Is Not the Rhyme wrote a piece about the tricks that designers play with Photoshop, and the consequences that arise. I started writing a loooooong response titled “What is authenticity? An epistemological hermenutic of Photoshop,” which, mercifully, went off the rails before I could finish it. Read it, and then look at this, and just let things percolate.

# Neat drawings of different subway systems, done to scale.