GateHouse— I rarely pay heed to news out of the world of Science, mostly because we’re in a recession, people, and I’m not made of heed.
But it’s also because such news often arrives in the form of sizable and startling-looking words, many of which contain prefixes (ugh), in periodicals that I do not subscribe to, such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society and Redbook. I also find it overly scientific, and the people who write it tend to be like super-obsessed with things like molecules and dark matter and large hadrons colliding, and I had plenty of biology in the 10th grade, thank you very much. If Science talked more about Facebook and quidditch, maybe we’d have something.
You disgust me.
That said, now and again Science produces some actual news that makes me sit up and call my momma, which apparently is something I have to sit up to do, as it is very hard to dial the phone while reclining. Last week Science announced that coffee not only provides your primary reason to get up in the morning (yeah, I said it, CBS’ “The Early Show”) and is literally the only reason I can complete all basic tasks between the hours of 2:30 and 6 p.m., but it has other, more additional health benefits as well, such as not-dying, which is a pretty good benefit, frankly. I’d like to see other beverages come up with a benefit like that. Looking at you, Mello Yello, what do you got in the way of extending the average life expectancy? What’s that? Jack squat? I thought so. Just sit there and be mello, loser.
Anyway, and it goes on for a while, but the study basically reveals that coffee is good at making you die less. Now, depending upon the kind of either human or Romney you are, this news will elicit one of two reactions:
“AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” (joyously, followed by tearful hugging of increasingly uncomfortable strangers at the bus stop)
“I guess that’s good news, but I’m not really a coffee drinker so” and it is here that I would stop listening to your boring mouthwords, because if you are not a coffee drinker I cannot imagine what further conversation we would remotely hope to have, as I would literally be half-listening to every fool syllable dribbling out of your face thinking, “You get out of my house you get out right now.”
GateHouse — Despite growing up in a reasonably comfortable Indiana suburb, I never really got into the music of Tupac Shakur. This put me in direct conflict with my younger brother, Dave; while I would spend my formative Camelot Music-stalking time making important purchasing decisions about Tesla and the “Wayne’s World” soundtrack and, God help me, that Styx album with “Show Me The Way” on it (I KNOW, I ALREADY KNOW), Dave was able to leverage his good grades and positive attitude, as well as our parents’ divorce, into permission to buy pretty much anything with a parental advisory sticker and an Intro on it between the years 1991-1994.
I bring this up because none of the girl-pantsed losers I listened to in high school would ever remotely be considered for immortalization in hologram form; you cannot be baked enough to clamor for an all-projection version of Tesla’s “Five Man Acoustical Jam,” which I owned in both CD and cassette form and which may be an inaccurate reference, as I’m pretty sure no one is Tesla has died yet. I should probably fact-check this point before emailing this column to my editors, but Siri is all the way downstairs. Hang on. “SIRI! CAN YOU COME UP HERE AND ANSWER A QUESTION ABOUT TESLA?” Ugh, nothing. These phones are so buggy.
Zoltan Kohari, known as the Slovak Batman, poses with a portrait of himself in his home in the town of Dunajska Streda. (Reuters)
GateHouse — So obviously everyone wishes that Batman was real, that both our valuable streets, as well as those in Detroit, could be kept safe by some crazypants vigilante with a black-metal baritone and a wellspring of dark psychological horrors he took out on Antarctic-themed umbrella-packing supervillains, SURE, I mean who WOULDN’T want that? I can’t think of a town in the world that couldn’t use more justice distributors in capes, except for Cape Town, South Africa, which is frankly overdoing it a little bit.
But you all TALK a big game, in your plush fluffy recliners watching the same four teams win NCAA games (aw, good for you plucky underdogs of Kentucky) eating made-up foods like “Triscuits” and “queso,” the latter of which isn’t even a THING, I checked with Siri. Who among you is man enough to actually make this fantasy happen, to slough off the shell of your hellish quotidian existence and bring Batman to reality? Aside from all those weird roving gangs of self-appointed Batmans who put on black sweatpants and childish face masks, get their mom’s permission and hit up the go patrol the brutal streets of Park City, Utah, or whatever? (Also, it’s Batmans. Batmen looks sillypants. If anyone from the AP Stylebook would like to debate this point, please email me at shutupnerds@gmail.com.)
GateHouse — A few things about the NCAA tournament, which this year is being attended (and handled nicely, thankyouverymuch) by my Indiana Hoosiers, who have finally returned to the dance following a lengthy recruiting scandal in which the school hired a coach who was previously involved in a recruiting scandal and then came to Indiana and engaged in — this was weird — a recruiting scandal, a development which caused everybody in Indiana to gasp.
When this recruiting scandal happened Indiana — which, interesting story, had spent most of the previous few decades being coached by an overweight cartoon character with a spotty history of winning championships and not-choking people — lost everyone who ever played for them and spent many many years losing basketball games to schools that exist only online, such as the University of Phoenix and some people who met on FarmVille . So this is kind of a big deal, and please excuse my singing of the IU fight song, which is actually a new song, as we lost our original one in a recruiting scandal.
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1. Hey, guys! Guys in the office! Listen, I’m gonna be sitting at my desk this morning, just hanging around doing some work and drinkin’ me some coffee, so is there any way you could hit me up with some talk about how your bracket is doing? Really doing? I don’t mean just stats and wins and losses — those are boring and bourgeois NUMBERS, devoid of LIFE and FEELING and FEELINGS OF SELF-ASSIGNED SUPERIORITY. No no, I want to know how you did it, how you picked nearly 2/3 of your games right, what you were *thinking* EACH TIME.
Twice now, through no appreciable talent or skill of my own, I’ve been lucky enough to fly to New York City— at not very many moments’ notice — to stalk Bruce Springsteen. I did it last year when he performed on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” thanks to the success and unprovoked generosity of an old friend who books the musical talent and is inexplicably gracious to inveterate obsessives. On that first tripa buddy and I found ourselves, suddenly and without adequate warning, in a conversation with Bruce Springsteen about children, parenting and the community of siblings, a three-minute galactic improbability that sort of resulted in the birth of my second son. (Long story.)
I did the same last week (fly to New York, not have a son), due to a second lightning strike of luck and babysitting, and found myself once again in the lobby at 30 Rock swarmed by a buzzing mass of Bruce people and happily dazed tourists. As it turned out, one of the swarming people in our ticket line looked a lot like Seth Avett of the Avett Brothers, a band that I’ve stalked a fair amount as well (my Billboard review of “I And Love And You,” and me interviewing them at Bonnaroo in 2010). You know that thing where you stare at somebody like an idiot, trying to see if it’s really that guy, but you can’t tell, and the wifi doesn’t work so you can’t Google image him so you stand there like a hopeless yokel until someone else confirms the identity for you? You do? Great.
The show, of course, was a delirious joy. Springsteen made a babushka joke, which, as a dutiful Slovak, I’m pretty sure was written just for me (thanks, Boss). The ’80s-bandanna/LMFAO sketchwas a perfect sequel. There was a bit during a commercial break in which the zipper on Springsteen’s black leather jacket got stuck, and the short version is for three minutes off-air two women struggled to free a fake-panicking Bruce Springsteen from his clothes while Jimmy Fallon impersonated Bruce’s preacher-man persona and the Roots laid down what I think was polka music. I very much enjoyed writing that sentence.
Darth Maul, whose character development begins and ends with his evil Southwestern facepaint
GateHouse — Went to see the new, 3Dmafied version of “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” this weekend, and I didn’t hate it. I should’ve hated it. I didn’t hate it. What the hell is going on right now.
Like most “Star Wars” nerds and nerdesses, I have a love/hate relationship with “The Phantom Menace,” and by “love/hate” I mean “Just the hate, with a side of grilled This Sucks and a mug of What Is This Horse Poop?” I saw “Menace” in 1999 with a cadre of fellow nerdlingers (and, inexplicably, our fiances) and we spent the next two weeks struggling to think of nice things to say about it, fighting to justify the emotional investment we’d made, an investment that had been returned to us in the form of jokes involving flatulent space horses and the nuanced drama of intergalactic trade route taxation disputes.
It's shocking how much time was not needed to locate this image
GateHouse— You know what Facebook could use is an increased level of unprovoked information about people’s kids, and before any of you jumpy gophers who leave a Facebook tab up “at work” to pounce on posts/comments like rabid animals get all “snarky” and “sarcastic” and “busy with quotation fingers” I know I put kid pictures on Facebook all the time too; I am not saying that I never do it or you should never do it, particularly if hypothetically your child was all sweet pushing his baby brother around in a stroller or that baby has a particularly lively reaction to your eerily accurate Swedish Chef impression. I am just saying that oh my God seriously if I see another child I don’t know sitting on a toilet I am definitely canceling the Internet service of the elderly neighbor/nonprofit I’m stealing wifi from, which is either “rutner house” or “Beaufort County Orphanage” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys” or “linksys.”
(Incidentally this is where my 8-year-old would roll his eyes and go, “Don’t listen to him, Dad’s being sar-castic,” not that I would put that on Facebook or anything EVEN THOUGH IT’S UNBEARABLY CUTE AND YOU SHOULD ALL KNOW ABOUT IT.)
And yet here we are, thanks to the Consumer Electronics Show, an annual gathering of people to whom I would normally ascribe a dumb, nerdworthy nickname like “coding goobers” or “zittlywankers” or “Parrotheads” except I’m sure that any one of them is capable of building a nanorobot 14 molecules high that could kill me in my sleep using an endoplasmic reticulum. If you haven’t read up on this thing take a look online; seriously, it’s like a “Star Wars” convention for nerds.
Well, make that nerds and their parents: Because of CES we will soon have access to a device that will weigh your Precious Little Angel and auto-fire the results to Twitter and Facebook, saving you the trouble of weighing your child on some vintage hand-cranked lead-painted off-the-grid scale from Service Merchandise in 1983 and using a whole separate app to bore everyone to tears manually.
GateHouse — If you have ever been a parent and/or subjected to one on Facebook, you know that child-rearing is filled with people doing strange and terrible things, such as affixing leashes to their children in theme parks, motoring to a Walmart at 10:45 p.m. on a Tuesday to purchase Harry Potter costume components or posting six-minute videos of sled rides on the Internet, and trust me when I say I have only done two of those things so I CAN CLAIM MORAL SUPERIORITY HA HA HA oh my God why aren’t more people liking this picture of my son’s Harry Potter costume.
(It also, according to the coffee shop at which I am currently quote-fingers working, makes grandparents do things like attempt to facilitate a conversation with a 6-year-old on a speakerphone in the out-of-doors because it’s not like anything could remotely not work in that scenario, which reminds me: If you take someone else’s iPhone and then throw it in a parking lot and then drive over it and back over it and then then drive over it again until it is dead is that still illegal?)
Anyway, because parenting is filled with strange and terrible things it is ripe for people selling stranger and terrible things, which brings me to the idea of the “Daddy Shower,” which I learned of via one of those caffeinated press releases (“THE LATEST TREND IN BABY SHOWERS!” it lies) that indicates that Brooklyn, Paris and Dubai have been secretly hosting underground Daddy Showers for months and is written in such a way as to indicate the author had been viewing adult human males for years with binoculars from behind trees but had yet to risk approaching one.
“Think baby showers are just for moms?,” it continues, addressing a problem that no one has ever complained about ever. “Not anymore!” And it is here that I offer ALLELUIA because seriously you guys I had just gotten through telling my friends “I mean it’s nice that we make more money and never deliver babies and have totally invented a way to wield phrases like ‘Strategic Content Financial Control Analyst’ as though they have any meaning at all, but dammit why do all the gurlz get to sit around rooms full of matching centerpieces opening presents for three hours at a time? INEQUITY!” And then I pounded my table importantly and sipped Scotch and I think harumphed? I can’t be sure, that was a really long sentence to remember.
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Springsteen’s father’s baby shower gifts: disapproval and detachment, and maybe a rattle forged from human pain.
All of these objects will one day fall out of space onto your house, but try not to worry too much.
GateHouse — I think if we can agree on anything, it’s that none of us have ever had to worry about satellite parts raining on us from space.
Oh, sure, there’s a lot we have had to worry about this week — George Lucas adding more stupid crap to “Star Wars,” panther attacks, our ridiculous doomed “government,” that stupid ticker on the new Facebook that just keeps yapping away about what my friends are listening to on Spotify which is about 500 kinds of obnoxious and also I need to talk with my friend Aaron about what is evidently some kind of Sunday morning Phil Collins fixation — to name a few.
But if there’s anything that brings us together as a people and binds us as humans, besides football, it’s the ability of the American people to band together, join their figurative hands and say, “None of us need worry about being whumped by plummeting space satellite debris, because when our broken space junk starts raining home someone with a computer will know what town it will be-crater.”
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, Paste, Billboard and brucespringsteen.net, a writer/editor at Nickelodeon's humor site NickMom.com, a syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse, a very slow runner and a father of two (the younger of whom has been personally approved by Bruce Springsteen) on the coast of South Carolina. Even longer bio/clips.
