What a relaxing, stress-free weekend

For a weekend without any football whatsoever, this one was pretty good all around. I spent Saturday morning at the Frick Collection, followed by a relaxing afternoon current-events discussion with some friends at a local, independent coffee shop.

It was a good weekend for the players on my favorite football teams. Chad Henne and Hart went to that Oasis Hot Tub Gardens place in Ann Arbor, where they relaxed their aching body parts in the healing, rented waters while members of the softball team fed them dates and Haribo peaches. On Sunday, they went to Cafe Zola for brunch with Jamar Adams, and stayed until 3:30 talking about the presidential race, whether there should be a student regent and making fun of Hart for liking Johnny Tremain in seventh grade. Hart planned to get revenge by introducing Adams as "The Silversmith" when he tapes the player intros for ABC later this week.

Meanwhile, the Browns spent their weekend as a team. First they went to a place out in Lorain County and played paintball on Sunday. Then Monday night they had off so they could go to Lola in Tremont where they rented out the place for a team dinner of local, northeast Ohio ingredients expertly prepared by chef Michael Symon. (They all made Brady Quinn pick up the tab; Derek Anderson made sure to get his table a magnum of the 2000 Ch. Lafite Rothschild). They all went home in anticipation of their usual Tuesday off day.

Braylon Edwards plans to work out, then have a sensible lunch, and maybe put up that birdfeeder he's had sitting in the garage for a month. Kicker Phil Dawson is planning to drive his kids to school, then go to Panera for a sandwich and finish his book (Time Traveler's Wife) for book club. Coach Romeo Crennel is going to a benefit luncheon with his wife, Rosemary, who works with disadvantaged youth. Joe Thomas is going fly fishing in the Rocky River. The steelhead are running great this time of year.

The age of turbulence

Christ, I can't wait for this season to end. Not just because of my Michigan-related psychological issues, but because of the entire freakshow. I'm sick of Lou Holtz, Pat Forde, Charlie Weis's smug fucking face, Bill Callahan and his imminent standoff with the ATF, the many fucking retards who attended my university, and anything remotely affiliated with Les Miles. I'm sick of Kansas rising, Hawaii being discussed as if it's legitimate (Michigan deserves to be in the national title game as much as Hawaii deserves to be in a New Year's Day bowl, let alone a BCS bowl), the words "Darren McFadden," shitty Big 12 teams, shitty Big 10 teams, hollow SEC teams being discussed as if they're worth of respect, and Les Miles. I'm sick of Holly Rowe, ESPN's list of 100 greatest college football players, Paul McGuire, Brady Quinn hawking Gillette (boycott Gillette), Perry Farrell's glitterpants, that footage of Matt Ryan puking on the sidelines, and Les Miles.

People once thought Ken Lay was a genius. Recklessness catches up with everyone eventually.

ESPN needs to stop. Lou Holtz's pep talks are amusing only in the way that it would be amusing to put an Alzheimer's patient onstage at a comedy club and let 'er rip. That is, they're painful and sadistic. You forget that this sputtering punchline was once a leader of men, a great coach, now willingly dropped before a camera in order to make an ass of himself in service of our entertainment. Lawyers and court-appointed guardians must inject themselves. Someone who loves him must intervene. Old people should be allowed to live their golden years in dignity, not turned into the announcing equivalent of a snuff film. This is what Howard Beale would have been like if he had no rage.

Dear Pat Forde: Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood.

Ninety-five percent of the people coaching, announcing and analyzing this sport fall into the category of hypocrite, half-wit or liar.

Also, this is my own fault, but I know more about Houston Nutt and the Arkansas booster-and-recruiting follies than should ever, ever be expected of a native Midwesterner who's spent his last eight years in the Northeast. I would like to wire my brain to a magic robot/computer and let it remove massive quantities of memory, including everything about Houston Nutt and Mitch Mustain. Why the fuck do I know what Houston fucking Nutt told a guy when he was in high school and what Razorbacks' parents think? Did I ever even care? Not by a long shot. But I know anyway. Fuck, I'm surprised that I didn't go through the FOIA requests and the documents that were produced and assimilate them all into massive spreadsheets just for shits and giggles. I should be put down.

While we're at it, let's also void every memory of Dennis Franchione and his stupid-assed secret newsletters. Why do I know? Why did I read those things? I cannot tell you. Something to do with a USC ballcap and the word "guff." I want all of that shit wiped clean.

Speaking of wiping shit clean, I'm not listening to anyone trying to make sense of what's happening in college football, because all we're doing is standing around with massive fistfuls of shit, trying to shape wet, dirty feces into nice little sculptures that resemble something explicable. That's not a sculpture of a lizard -- it's shit, dude, seeping out between your fingers. Otherwise metaphorized (That's not a word? Fuck off.) a Great Dane pukes on Mom's kitchen floor after it lapped a two-liter of Diet Coke, and the Thanksgiving guests stand around the mess, declaring that they see an image of the Virgin Mary somewhere in the puke. And then they start praying and call the local media, and the next thing you know the Great Dane's mess of Diet Coke puke is being consecrated as holy. And then you're thinking, "Fuck, all that's there is dog vomit. Devotion will not change that. Why pretend?"

Mailer

He was never a great writer. None of his books may stand the test of time. A hundred years from now, it's possible that The Executioner's Song still will be read, the way people read The Jungle or Babbitt, not because it's great art but because it's accessible sociology about the era. Hell, Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart one-upped the original, and "The White Negro" feels dated in ways The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test probably never will.

This isn't the passing of a great writer as much as an occasion for the mourning of a kind of public intellectual that literally no longer exists. If you've ever seen clips of Mailer chopping it up with Gore Vidal, years before any of us were born, you get kind of a nostalgia for a time when men of letters strode the culture with outsized personalities and egos. They were celebrities. They set the terms of debate. They took their roles as public intellectuals seriously, and enjoyed the fame. They used it responsibly. I've never loved his writing, true -- Vidal, Wolfe and Joan Didion played the same game and eventually one-upped him. (Mailer stayed a step ahead of George Plimpton, but "The Paris Review" will outlast them both.) Mailer veered into irrelevance long before Harlot's Ghost.

Still, he strode bigger and grander than any of the young writers we're stuck with today. Norman Mailer crapped bigger than Jonathan Franzen well into old age, and from his grave, he always will.

The Pith! Oh, the pith!

While the nation's fortunes hardly turn on the strike by the Writers' Guild of America, it's still a labor action, it still has worth. Also, since the strikers tend to be rather good at pithy jabs, bons mots and, well, writing in general, the blog that has sprung up to chronicle life on the pickets is a rather good read.

Some mirthworthy nuggets from the lines:

CBS TELEVISION CITY: Big glasses, big heart

Genesee gate. Drew Carey sent us out ten pizzas today. As one writer put it, "The man gave up half his lunch for us!"

UNIVERSAL: We can do the Jurassic Park ride later
Apparently, there was a Teamster present who just happened to be visiting from out of state with his wife. Somehow he stumbled across the shoot and told his wife he wanted to join the picket line. She basically said, "Are you crazy?" And he answered something like, "We're Teamsters, that's what we do."


CHELSEA PIERS, NYC: All Jacked Up
"One guy from our group got hassled by some stockbroker-looking dude who was screaming 'Get back to work! I don't want 24 to be cancelled!' He was serious."
-Dyna Moe

I bet that guy was a joy to be around during the transit strike, too.

A note on the writers strike

While I'm showing solidarity during the writers' strike by not writing, that doesn't mean that you, the readers of Cole Slaw Blog, should suffer. Hence I've decided to allow my friend, Ohio Independent Moderate, a chance to guest post. His words are below. He would also like to add that he is NOT a Republican, but rather assesses each candidate individually on the merits, which is why he couldn't bring himself to vote for that flip-flopping Boston Brahmin, John Kerry, in 2004.

Hollywood is better off without you, lazy union commies

By Ohio Independent Moderate

Get back to work, you lazy, greedy bums. Oh, boo-hoo, you didn't get enough from DVD sales. Maybe if you had been smart enough to innovate, to come up with the idea of selling DVDs, then you would have a claim to it. But this, this is an outrage -- you're just trying to use your leverage to profit off the work of others. God, I hope the strike ruins all of your careers. Well, faster than they would have been wrecked anyway.

Hey, did you notice? Reality shows don't need you! That's right, the market has decided you're surplus to requirements, just like those money-grubbing autoworkers who ruined GM and Ford and forced all those jobs from my state overseas. Not to mention let all those faggoty imports clog up our highways. (And the grill of my uncle's F-250!) But at least the autoworkes they did real work, man's work. You just fucking ... write!

Seriously, what's your biggest workplace hazard? Sprained predicate? Maybe latte burns? You sit at your coffee shops and type away on your MacBooks and whatever, and you come up with ways for Desperate Housewives to entertain us. Like anyone couldn't do that. You know what, I hope this provides a chance for some hard-working young men and women. See? They're willing to work, unlike you guys. This is what's wrong with America, people can just not go in to work and not get fired. Those fucking studio execs are such pussies. If I were in charge, I'd fire all of you, then hire some young kids who really wanted to work. I'd have them write some good movies, too, like 300. None of this shit with the fucking talking rats in French kitchens (although I'm sure the part about rats in Paris kitchens was totally accurate. I bet they'd surrender as soon as the exterminator came.) What Hollyweird needs is a non-biased studio. We'd refuse to work with unions and then we could do some real movies. Like Petraeus. Oh man, Mel Gibson would be great in that. And maybe a thriller about the War on Terror. Or a dystopian flick in which a Young Republican, writing for The Corner, saves the world from dhimmitude. Caliphate: America would be a great name for it. Or maybe the United States of Mexico. And a movie about the Minutemen, too. That would be great.

Oh, this is totally what's going to happen. Hollyweird union slugs, you just made the biggest mistake of your lives. A real movie studio, free from all the stupid Hollywood shit! That's what we need to counteract all the liberal bullshit coming from Hollywood. Suck it, Michael Moore! I bet your a Meatchicken fan, too! HA HA! Tressel owns your ass! Or he would if he wanted to own 300 pounds of fat! Yeah, I said it, you're fat, Michael Moore, you Wolverine-lover. Ann Arbor is a whore!

Whoops, sorry. My cousin Wayne is a huge fan, and sometimes, I can hear his voice even when he's not here. Sorry about that, Wayne. Anyway, this writers' strke is the best thing to happen to Hollywood since Ronald Reagan. Fucking unions. They should be illegal. Or at least they should for limp-wristed girly men like fucking TV writers! Oh, thanks for Mr. Belvedere, assholes. Where would we be without you?

Food fraud

I'm the worst kind of evangelist. For the past six months or so, I've been doing the majority of my food shopping at a greenmarket. I do this because the quality of the produce and other goods is high and because it's all locally grown. And you should, too. No, really. It's going to save the fucking world.

Also, I enjoy walking home with a baguette in under my arm or a watermelon cradled in my elbow, but that's just me.

But before I can say anything about food miles, the rising cost of oil and the likelihood that we're all going to wind up having to eat local eventually, I should point out that I really have no standing to talk like this. None. I'm a food fraud. Eating local more has been nothing but a boon to me -- I could have done this for purely self-interested reasons.

There's a greenmarket close to me, closer than any good grocery store. And I hate grocery stores. They're fraught with peril. You're basically looking into people's cabinets when you see their carts. And looking into other people's cabinets is usually depressing -- a view of their sad, private lives. And even if you avoid that, there's maneuvering around people blocking your way, more despair when you see all the sad things they market to kids in the form of pink cereal and green ketchup and at the end you get to wait in line to hand over your hard-earned money, while the person in front of you argues that the crackers that just rang up for $3.29 each should really be 2 for $6.

And everything smells like celery.

No, I don't miss it at all. What got me going to the market regularly was the idea of food miles. Eventually, I realized that buying asparagus from Peru in August and blueberries from Argentina in February was really, really dumb. Why should my food have been places I haven't? And is that really a wise use of fossil fuels, to provide antioxidants to Manhattanites?

So yeah, I stopped supporting that, for the most part (I still occasionally duck into a megamart, but that's because olive groves and rice paddies and the like are rare indeed in the tri-state area). I also still eat out from time to time, probably more than I should.

But I've made the switch. In my mind, getting food means going to the market, not the store. And I would love to tell you how everyone should do this, so that food miles go down, pollution goes down, oil can get used for more important shit than trucking DiGiorno's across the nation, local farms stay farms and don't become subdivisions and retail, Frank Perdue punches out his hat, multistate e. coli recalls go the way of air-raid drills, Whole Foods stops peddling $7-a-pint Honduran huckleberries, and the obesity epidemic and terrorism are both solved at the same time, and the BCS is banned and all the conference commissioners are sent to pick iceberg lettuce for Big Macs in the central valley. But I can't, because I think I'd do it if none of that were true.

Fixing American dependence on megamarts, processed food, and "happy motoring" (as Jim Kunstler would call it) isn't a huge sacrifice for me. I'd be willing to make some sacrifices, but so far, it's been all upgrade for me. So, yeah. Seriously, farmers' markets rule. Your money helps your local community, and not the bottom line of ConAgra. The food is better than you can imagine, and fresher than trucks and planes can possibly deliver. You're contributing to a better life for you and everyone around you. You're reducing traffic. You get to do things like walk home with a giant stalk of brussels sprouts, or honey made from hives on city rooftops. When gas is $7 a gallon, why pay for your Foxy brand lettuce to come from Fresno when you could get it from the next county over?

But what do I know? I actually like this shit.

Solidarity

2 S +



- RE


+

Bow before my prescience

HBO aired The Sopranos season finale again tonight. It was great revisiting the series's final scenes. The fights over the concluding restaurant sequence took too much oxygen out of the room. We were all so worked up about how the series would end that we forgot to pay attention to the fine points of what David Chase et al. gave us.

I've wanted to revisit the Tony Soprano death debate in light of some recent comments by David Chase. My post on the subject may be the most-read piece in this site's history. It still receives frequent Google hits and message-board links. My original observations included the following:

• Literally all that happened was people going about their business in a diner. That was it. People in a diner, shot very artfully, very tensely, in utterly mundane activities. Obviously we're waiting for something bad to happen. ... We expected something sinister -- that's the way these stories are supposed to end. Instead, dinner happened.
• This is, however, a microcosm for the problem with the Death Theory. It's based on pure guesswork (as well informed as it might be) rather than anything that actually occurred on screen. You buy into it, and you're required to take several leaps of faith unsupported by actual events. Leaps of faith, by nature, aren't rebuttable. If you believe that an entire subplot unfolded, wherein AJ was tailed off-screen by an assassin, it's hard to have a conversation grounded in what we know. Knock it down, and another speculative answer is always in the offing.
• There seems to be a certain impulse to find support (any support, no matter how thin) for a preordained, desired conclusion. As a result, the death theories rely heavily on wild conjectures (see above) and iron faith in thoughtful but unproveable guesswork about what may or may not have happened off-screen (in a series that never relied on Macguffins or off-screen twists) regardless of observable evidence.

I'm not always right. I completely mis-read the Duke rape prosecution. I was somewhat vindicated in thinking that the 2006 Michigan team shouldn't have a title berth.

On The Sopranos finale, I give myself an A+. Per David Chase:

Breaking his silence months after the HBO mob drama ended its run, he is offering a belated explanation for that blackout at the restaurant. He strongly suggests that, no, Tony Soprano didn’t get whacked moments later as he munched onion rings with his family at Holsten’s. And mostly Chase wonders why so many viewers got so worked up over the series’ non-finish.

***

Chase says the New Jersey mob boss “had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ’justice’...

“The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted HIS blood, after cheering him on for eight years.”

In the days, and even weeks, after the finale aired June 10, “Sopranos” wonks combed that episode for buried clues, concocting wild theories. (Was this some sort of “Last Supper” reimagined with Tony, wife Carmela, son A.J. and daughter Meadow?)

Chase insists that what you saw (and didn’t see) is what you get.

“There are no esoteric clues in there. No ‘Da Vinci Code,”’ he declares.

He says it’s “just great” if fans tried to find a deeper meaning, but “most of them, most of us, should have done this kind of thing in high school English class and didn’t.”

He defends the bleak, seemingly inconclusive ending as appropriate — and even a little hopeful.

A.J. will “probably be a low-level movie producer. But he’s not going to be a killer like his father, is he? Meadow may not become a pediatrician or even a lawyer ... but she’ll learn to operate in the world in ways that Carmela never did.

“It’s not ideal. It’s not what the parents dreamed of. But it’s better than it was,” Chase says.

Buffalo Bill's defunct

and what I want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death

We're on to you, Rudy

Can anyone photoshop an Indians hat onto a picture of Hillary?

Apparently, Rudy Giuliani is getting his ass kicked in the polls in New York right now by the woman who was all set to kick his ass in the 2000 Senate election, Hillary Clinton.

Awwww, too bad we know all about what a douche you are, Rudy! Also, your beloved Yankees just drove their Hall of Fame manager and shortstop third baseman out of town after a loss to the Cleveland Indians. The Hall of Fame closer may yet follow. Bow before my hometown.

Bow before the enlightened electorate of the Empire State!