I keep waiting for the social media trend to fizzle.  I keep thinking this will happen because it feels about as meaningful as jam shorts and snap bracelets and both of those faded within a school year, even though I kept wearing jam shorts for about three years after they were no longer cool.   If I’d been betting on the demise of Twitter and Facebook I’d have lost a considerable fortune but no lack of success in betting against these two trends would have discouraged me from betting against another recent trend;  female-only exercise classes in public places.

It used to be, way back in the early 2000’s, that women were embarrassed to go to the gym, and generally sat around talking about they hated going to the gym where they’d be ogled by “meat head” guys.   My wife, and every other woman I’ve ever talked to about the gym before 2010, professed the fact that she was “grossed out” by working out in the sight of men.

In fact, this sentiment was so pervasive, that no less than three national companies were started devoted to providing women with their own, female-only gym experience.  This new breed of gym was about 400% more expensive than the comparable coed gym,  was free from “sketchy grunting men”, and offered most of the same equipment, though nobody really ever knew because their wife or girlfriend would say “do they have that machine at your gym that does those thingies” and when you’d say “your lats?”, they’d say “I have no idea, are lats in your legs? I don’t think we have that one.  Is yours purple?”.

 If you’re a member of a gym, or live near a park, you’ve probably already become acquainted with this new phenomenon whereby large groups of middle aged women, who in years past, wouldn’t have been caught dead on a beach, or wearing anything that showed any skin, have taken to engaging (apparently by their own free will) in very large, very loud, group workouts, in public, usually under the strict command of a very large and often tattoo covered man who (if you happen to get close to them because one of your dogs ran into their circle at the water fountain) they proudly proclaim “totally kicked our ass”.

Near our house the women mostly run around carrying tree stumps and paint cans and tires and one another with the trainer walking slowly behind and yelling at them.  Then they gather at the most visible point in the park and do some kind of modified push-ups.

Initially I thought it must be specific to my park that women were paying $30 per session to wear tights in public while being screamed at but I recently witness 13 or so similarly clad women doing jumping jacks on the roof of the neighboring building as I and three hundred other people looked out from our desks.   This week, I was floored  when I arrived at my gym (full of admittedly sketchy, grunting men) to salsa music blaring over the speakers upon a crowd of women ranging in age from 19 to 72, who were proudly prancing around in the middle of the gym, at rush hour, engaging in various forms of borderline erotic dance moves, about 85 feet away from a large room generally dedicated to such shenanigans.

I generally fancy myself a person who is at least partially aware of what is going on in the world but will be the first to admit that I’ve been sleeping on this apparent feminist uprising.  Even though I’m late to the party I’m glad to see it.   I assume like most exercise phenomena it won’t last, but my hope is that it will remove the stigma of co-ed gyms, at least long enough for us to cut our family gym budget by about 80% and allow us a chance to figure out if the blue machine at my gym is the same as the purple one at hers.

When I was in high school I always complained about being bored.  Now that I’m older I realize that I would have been bored living anywhere because it wasn’t so much that there wasn’t anything to do in Vermont, but rather, that aside from blaming one’s lack of popularity on one’s ten year old foster brother being allowed to roam free at soccer games and pretend- bite my female classmates, there wasn’t anything to do for any 17 year old.   

Where we lived, one of the main things to do was drive our cars in oddly-shaped  laps around the town, mostly in search of other teenagers. Sometimes, we would see other teenagers and would stop and stand near their car and discuss how there were no parties going on.  Sometimes we would discuss throwing eggs at cars, which sometimes lead to actually throwing eggs at cars, specifically, the car driven by an older kid named Andy  who for some reason, nobody respected, even though he was pretty nice.

Sometimes, after making several laps without spotting so much as any person between the ages of 14 and 27, we would do a different loop around my neighborhood.  This loop gave us an opportunity to shoot paintballs at a truck owned by a guy who one of my friends believed may have been involved in the theft of his dirt bike seven years prior, and more importantly, a chance to break the Clarendon Street Record, which involved driving as fast as possible down an arrow-straight residential street in whosever 130 horsepower Japanese economy car we happened to be driving, and then talking about how much faster we could have gone if we had been driving one of any number of cars which we believed to be “sweet”, such as Dusty's absentee father’s Mitsubishi Diamante, which allegedly had a sunroof.

The record was held by a fairly clean cut and prematurely professorial guy called Dan who allegedly drove his father’s white Camry 80 or 81 miles per hour.   The belief around town was that one of my brothers also had a near-record in a gray Corolla, but this story was never confirmed, and was often confused with another story about when he attempted to break the record on a weekend afternoon and one of the neighbors called my mother to complain in either a loud voice or a New Jersey accent, depending upon my mother’s mood when she tells the story.

In 2000, I nearly lost my life in pursuit of the record while a passenger in my friend’s car, a recently-purchased Audi, which was genuinely fast, but which we regarded as approximately a lot nicer than it was.  One evening we went for a ride and several times my friend took corners, mostly alongside a river, at speeds that were usually reserved for things attached to a rail.  I was genuinely petrified, but disguised my fear in a zealous appreciation of his driving, in much the same way some of my classmates at college paraded fanatical heterosexuality in hopes of masking their appreciation of men.   

That night, after watching some dreadful movie, my friend urged me join him for a try at The Record.  I resisted, allegedly on grounds of fatigue and on actual grounds of fear, but ultimately agreed to one shot at fame.   Though his car put forth a strong effort, my friend was unfamiliar with the rules, which involved taking one’s foot off the gas several hundred yards before the end of the street and eventually, pressing the breaks to avoid smashing into the living room of the house that sat on the side of the street that ran perpendicular to Clarendon where the people who lived there were watching Letterman.  While blaming me for the accident was enough to make his parents dislike me forever, it surprisingly did not change the fact that his vehicle was imbedded in the front of a house or that he lost his license for 18 months, and he ultimately moved to Manhattan, where even people with clean records don’t have cars.

A few years back, I broke the record to surprisingly little fanfare while I was staying with my parents after my first year of law school.  The record fell quietly, during a private ceremony involving my motorcycle, which easily broke the record in 3^rd gear, leading me to believe it may even be faster than a Diamante.  It didn’t feel as good as I thought it would and until now I haven’t shared the accomplishment with anyone.  Mostly because I didn’t want to disappoint Dan Hall, but also because the only chance I had to tell him was when I saw his brother at a bar, but he was wearing overalls and looked pretty weird so I decided to take a few laps instead.

The other day I was riding in the car and found myself listening to what sounded like Top 40 songs and was temporarily suspended in a place where I simultaneously liked the music I was hearing, but also knew there was something strange about it. It was catchy, and had all of the general lyrical qualities associated with dime-a-dozen romantic radio garbage (“you are everything” “I need you” etc.) but it had a distinct overall crappiness and badness to its fit and finish that made it clear that it was not conventional music.

As I listened further, I noticed that my gut feeling was correct and that this music was Christian music, or more accurately, Overtly Christian Music.  I call it this because there are plenty of songs which have spiritual undertones, or even overtones, but which never include the word “thee”. 

A few years ago a friend of mine who works in music publishing told me that the Christian music market, while moderate in size, was very profitable.  I can believe this because I was raised in what I would call a "pretty religious family" which meant that in our comings and goings we often crossed paths with "zealot isolationist families" who sent their children to Seventh Day Adventist school even though they didn't know what Seventh Day Adventism was.

By the time I was in middle school, we started going to a Presbyterian church, which is the O'Doul’s of Protestant denominations. The starkest difference between our old church, where they sung hymns that likened being a Christian to being in the military off of overhead projectors, and the Presbyterian church is that at our old church, people who got divorced were asked to leave, and at the Presbyterian church, the only woman who stood up to say she was sad that “the gays” had gotten the right to be ministers in the church never returned when she realized nobody agreed with her.

One of the main advantages of being part of a religious family that was not uber-religious, was that I knew kids who were subjected to considerably more restriction than I was in terms of their general day to day living and I was frequently in a position to feel cooler than them because I was allowed to listen to music that didn't suck.

Occasionally, the kids who were only allowed to listen to bad Christian bands that nobody had ever heard of would try to turn the tables by wearing a tee shirt to school bearing the image of some alternative looking guy with a headband and try to pass it off as conventional. This trick would never work in the days of the internet but back then, I will admit that there were one or two days that I coveted Matt Nelson's tee shirt bearing the names of some White Rappers for Christ.

This decade's version of Overtly Christian music stays true to some of the many themes that marked the genre in its early years. These themes are: letting oneself be at the mercy of God, asking God to take oneself, apologizing to God for one's shortcomings, reminding God that you are nothing without God, and  imploring God to grab hold of some part of your being and make it clean. 

I'm not sure where this obsession with mortal imperfection came about but it's a troubling trend and might have something to do with our inability to balance a budget.  If you attend a church, take a gander at some of the lyrics of the “old standards” as my mother would call them, which are the songs that were playing when the world was made.  There is scarcely a mention of human frailty and much more of a focus upon God's ability to save the wretched, and heal the wounded and socialize with different breeds of Angels.  This may be due in part to the fact that these songs were written by God himself, but I think it's more about the fact that today's lyrics would sound cheap even if accompanied by a harpsichord.

About once a week something happens that makes me threaten to move back to Vermont.  Usually, the something that happens is getting stuck in traffic or getting a letter that says I can’t renew my car registration until I pay some kind of excise tax to the City of Boston, which is different than the one I already paid to the State of Massachusetts.  Sometimes I just get annoyed at having to pay exorbitant rent to live in a place where a bagel costs four dollars. Sometimes, such as when my car gets towed, I threaten to move to Los Angeles.

In Boston, like many urban areas, parking is in short supply.  Such short supply, that one of my friends recently paid more than a million dollars for an apartment which came with two parking spaces.  This wouldn’t seem to be too much of an aberration except for the fact that the spaces are located conveniently in the basement of the building, which is located approximately one mile from his actual house.

We have only one parking space at our house, and frequently, for one reason or another, we end up parking our car on the street to make room for a company car, friend, or relative.  One of the risks involved in parking on the street is having someone smash the grill on your car in a way that your fiancé doesn’t notice, but that makes you lose sleep, but the other, central concern, is that of parking tickets.

In my family, there is a specific process that we take the minute we get a parking ticket which involves trying to hide the ticket from one another, in hopes that it will go away on its own. When it fails to go away on its own, we eventually remember it when we get another copy of it in the mail along with a notice that tells us it has increased because of our failure to pay.

Sometimes, such as when you are given a ticket for parking in a space with signs that are confusing, you can dispute the ticket at city hall by engaging in a simple process of taking a half day off of work, going to city hall, sitting on a cold cement bench, and eventually being told by someone who is either a lawyer or not a lawyer that the ticket was properly given.  While you seldom win these contests, they do present a great opportunity to act very off put, or potentially slam your fist in indignation just before you pay the fine.

One big deal in Boston is street cleaning, which is, as far as I can tell, a racket between our fat bozo mayor and some of his cronies who run tow lots, to raise lots of money which they can then spend on going out to dinner.  In a city like Boston, street cleaning makes about as much sense as Sarah Palin and in reality, happens very infrequently, despite the fact that all city streets are wiped clean for 8 hours per month specifically for this purpose.

Once in a great while, during the two four hour periods designated on the signs, an old-looking machine will plod down the street with a brush that sometimes rubs the ground and pushes dirt, pine needles and dunking donuts napkins into the street, where they are blown back against the curb by passing motorists three minutes later. Very occasionally, the same machine drops a stream of water on the pavement, which is probably supposed to turn the dirt into mud, but which instead, leaves a damp skid often associated with dragging a leaking bag of trash across the floor. 

Whether or not the city actually engages in this mission critical activity, the tow companies are there, waiting for the clock to strike the magic hour where they can begin towing unsuspecting excise, income, property, and sales tax payers to a lot, which is usually located 17 miles from their home in a neighborhood where nobody pays any taxes.

Today, when our car was towed we immediately traveled against the flow of traffic to a neighborhood that contained many cars with tinted windows.  When we arrived, the mayor’s buddies informed us that they only accept cash, which we went to fetch at a laundry mat that looked like it would achieve its best use as a crime scene.

Just as my fiancé emerged with sufficient cash to free our Volvo I determined I had forgotten the keys.  Tired, unshowered, and grumpy, we made the 40 minutes schlep back to civilization along with the 400,000 or so poor saps who make this awful commute each day.  An hour and a half of traffic jams may sound like an awful thing to most of you, but I consider it practice for California!

My wife and I got a Wii for Christmas.  In addition to being about a dozen years behind the people of Japan, I realized that I am not even the first member of my immediate family to get a Wii.  Oddly, that award goes to my brother Seth, who has no cable television and did not own a cell phone until 2009 but who acquired a Wii in the same inlaw-related process by which I acquired mine.  In what is sure to be another record, ours is the first video game system owned by either my wife or me in a combined 53 years of living – most of which took place during an era in which some of my friends had subscriptions to Nintendo-specific magazines. 

Despite my parents’ aversion to electronic games, my humble beginnings as an infrequent video game participant and the fact that I have never heard of a Play Station, I became, for a period of 3 months, the single best player of Tony Hawk Pro Skater in all of Bentley College. While rapid, my rise to greatness was not without its problems.  Most of the problems related to the fact that I was ignoring girls, not going to class, and sometimes forgetting to eat dinner or lunch because I was sitting in a beanbag chair alongside my roommate Josh discussing the plausibility of rail sliding the rafters of the warehouse, and whether or not such a move would be better or worse, strictly from a point-getting standpoint, than a traditional rail slide around the entirety of the empty pool and whether we would find the game more or less awesome if it were more realistic in the sense that "skateboarding the sport" is mostly underwhelming and more about counterculture and baggy pants, or tight pants, or whatever is the opposite of normal pop-culture at the time, than it is about doing awesome tricks. 

In the past month we have used the Wii a great deal, and by “we” I mean that I have used the Wii.  I have a battery operated lobster swimming around on my desk as proof that I won the bowling tournament we hosted on New Year’s Eve, a bruise on my elbow as proof that my wife doesn’t understand the intricacies of Wii tennis, and have played enough Tiger Woods Golf that I can readily shoot well below par at Pebble Beach, even with my 78 year-old avatar who I created to have near-fetal-alcohol-syndrome-skull-width, and excessive age spots.  If it were possible to play Wii effectively from a seated position, I would be worried about developing another addiction.

I recently had a discussion with a man in his 40’s about my addictive relationship with the few video games I’ve used, and was surprised when he advocated their extreme use by his children.  To support his position, he referenced an unspecified study or studies that he claimed showed that children who spent a lot of their time playing video games were more likely to succeed in math and science.  I have not read this study, but imagine it also concludes that the same children would not be good at sports, and would not gain the interest of women until such time as they stopped playing video games, or made enough money by being good at math to make people forget they were lame.

My Tony Hawk career came to an abrupt end in May 2000 when I threw up at around two in the afternoon and wasn’t able to say with certainty that my nausea wasn’t related to my having just played 9 hours of electronic skateboarding without rising for any reason.  Surprisingly, the video-game related guilt I felt on that day was second to that which I felt in 1998 when I was late to a hockey game because I got engrossed in a game of computer mini golf, which was not even half as fun as actual mini golf, with my older brother who was visiting for the holidays.  I was so late that I missed warm-ups and was forced to skate without a cup, having left it behind in my haste to reach the rink.  Despite my painful history, I don’t need studies, or even guys pretending they read studies about the value of videogames to convince me that they can do some good; especially for children who would otherwise be playing dungeons and dragons.  The Wii, for example, represents an unparalleled opportunity to bowl a 250 on behalf of a man whose arms are not connected to his body; an amazing feat, though admittedly not as transformational as a game that makes skateboarding seem exciting. 

Greetings from Vancouver!  Actually, I’m not in Vancouver, but neither are the Olympics, so who’s counting?  I did spend nearly 8 hours watching Sunday’s events with my wife and have provided a summary of the three events I found most intriguing.

Nordic Combine:

For those of you who think you missed this event, think again.  Odds are, you were probably watching it but had no idea that it was going on because the combination of ski jumping, and cross country skiing held several hours apart makes as much sense as a competition involving walleye fishing in April and ice climbing in February.  The announcers explained that the field of athletes from which to draw competitors for this event is surprisingly, extremely small.  The reason for the dearth of competitors, they said, was that one would need to live within 20 kilometers of a ski jump to have enough opportunities to practice enough times to be competitive on the World Stage which from the looks of it, is about three opportunities.  It also seems that one major deciding factor in one’s propensity to be a dominant Nordic Combine participant is having any interest whatsoever in using the ski jump even if it is, for example, 1.5 kilometers from one’s house.

Most of the athletes admitted to being bad at one or the other aspect of the event which is not surprising given that one is essentially a circus act, and the other is a test of endurance.  This year, an American won a silver medal – the first won by an American in the storied history of the Nordic combine. History would suggest that the event should explode in popularity as a result of this notoriety, but since the sport combines a boring type of skiing with flying 300 feet off a ramp like you were shot out of a cannon, all bets are off.

Luge:

Luge is not a new sport by any means but is one that should be watched each time as if it was the first time.  Conveniently, the fact that it involves grown men who look exactly the same sliding down a tunnel on large ice skate wearing Adidas socks making no movements that can be associated with a living person makes it very easy to feel as if one is watching it for the first time, each time.

This year, sadly, a young man died while doing some practice runs for the main event.  The most unfortunate part of this accident aside from the tragic loss of a 20 year old boy, was the fact that the announcers spent the entirety of the competition talking about the fact that the death resulted in the shortening of the track by nearly two football fields, which changed the whole dynamic of the race from being a complicated sport about strategic thinking and quick reaction time into a race that involved indistinguishable men sliding down a tunnel on a large ice skates.  The leveling effect of the track shortening, according to the announcers, essentially reduced the competition to a “paddling” contest, which is the part where the guys use their hands to get started.

The highlight of the announcing was when they ridiculed a 38 year-old Italian for what they regarded as a “sloppy” performance which they noted was vastly different from his typical “precision accuracy” and then failed to mention that his “awful” run had netted him the best single time in the competition and a silver medal.  This run and related analysis was a strong reminder for all who were watching that luge is essentially a science fair project involving different sized marbles and a ramp.  

This year, the competition was won by a 20 year-old from Germany, but the most popular competitor was from India, who the announcers noted had formerly been part of India's storied giant slalom tradition but decided he wanted to try luge one day and since nobody else in India had access to a 2,000 foot refrigerated ice tunnel, he was able to be the worst at not one, but two, Olympic sports.

Biathlon:

This oldie-but-goody involves the highly correlated skills of marksmanship and cross country skiing.   My mother in law believes it was a sport that evolved from the Native American traditions of walking around in the woods and shooting things with a bow and arrow but I suspect it originated during the same brainstorming session where someone suggested the Nordic Combine, which in all likelihood, was the meeting where Winter Olympic Officials were talking about how stupid it was that the Summer Olympics got to hand out a medal for every time anyone jumped in a pool.

The biathlon is not much of a television sport because instead of focusing on the confidence needed to lay on the ground and fire a .22 while wearing a one-piece stretch suit on national television, NBC spent most of its time focused upon the variability of the snow conditions, which caused only one athlete to fall and zero guns to discharge.

My mother in law told me she used to think the biathlon was silly too, until she tried to write a check shortly after exiting a Pilates class, which I have not tried, but which is apparently very difficult.  If she could just figure out how to work snow into the equation I think the Olympic Committee might have a new addition for the 2014 games!  Look out Michael Phelps.

I grew up on the cusp of many things, technologically speaking.  I assume that the same could be said for any generation but I would submit that the discoveries of my youth were greater than those of my parents' youth, such as skim milk, and sneakers with ankle support. 

My seventh grade class, for example, had two computers that had the Internet, though only a few nerdy kids used it, and mostly they sent pen pal letters to kids in Germany.  In fact, computers weren’t really a big deal either.  A lady named Judy would come in to our class once in a while in third grade and show us how to make a green triangle named “Turtle” move around on a screen using only the keyboard, and one kid had a laptop which weighed approximately 38 pounds that he got permission to bring to school in 6^th grade because he was supposedly dyslexic but mostly because needed it to play flight simulator.

By the time I was in high school, email was fairly common but the students at my school took a while to grasp its ultimate value.  For most of my freshman year, people mainly used email to communicate with people who were sitting six feet behind them, ideally to send messages about certain girls’ reputation for promiscuity.  By sophomore year, we were able to use the Internet for more substantial feats such as attempting to download pictures of Cindy Crawford.  
 

During little league, one kid’s dad used a cell phone, which was pretty awesome because at the time, rappers were still talking about cell phones in their rap songs in the same breath as expensive cars.  I thought it was awesome, but I remember my mother and some other parents thinking it was “rude” and “ridiculous.”  My father was a very early cell phone user too, but he had a bag phone which his employer had given him, and which he kept jammed way under the seat, for use only in emergencies, such as the emergency when we had to call into WEEI while in Boston for a Celtics game and say that we were not supportive of the players’ union in the baseball stalemate, or the nightly emergency of having to call my mother to tell her he was on his way home, even though she already knew he was on his way home.

When I started college, computers were a very big deal, such a big deal that I recall one of the dads on one campus tour demanding to know if the college allowed students access to “data resources” through the network, which he regarded as very important.  After he made this statement he looked around at the rest of the parents with a very satisfied look but since nobody had ever heard of data resources, or a network, nobody said anything, and eventually my father asked if omelets would be available every day or just on weekends. 

At my school, students were allowed to use network resources, mostly to share music and pornography.  Napster was invented in the fall of my freshman year, which allowed the sharing of music among people who were not in the same place. This presented an opportunity for my roommate to stay up all night trying to download versions of songs he regarded as “sick” such as wordless piano songs played over constant base drum beats.  An offshoot of this craze was that Greg, the industrious geek on my floor, began burning CDs for residents for a mere five bucks, or approximately 14,000 percent profit.

Greg’s roommate was also a computer shark of sorts only instead of making obscene profits off of copyright theft; he parlayed his skills into expulsion from school.  As it turned out, sneaking into people’s computers and deleting papers, even if through a fake porn file which they voluntarily opened, was deemed unacceptable by the powers that be.

Near the end of my first year my Resident Assistant also fell victim to computer fraud of sorts when he bought web addresses relating to local universities and threatened to fill them with raunchy pictures unless certain large amounts of money were paid for their return. Incidentally, the president of our college did not hold blackmail of superior institutions is such esteem and he too was removed.

Today I’m just another member of Tech Generation but as I look on my childhood I’m glad to have lived during the transition.  Just imagine all of the trouble we’d have caused with access to data resources!

This week the Boston Globe contained an article about the second career of famed Red Sox pitcher, Curt Schilling.  Those who didn’t watch every game of the 2006-2008 baseball seasons and missed Schilling’s non-stop plugs will be surprised to know that Schilling owns a video-game production business that is, not totally shockingly, potentially going to be a massive disaster.  He started the business in the off-season following the 2006 season and cited his hard work on the endeavor as the central cause for his “100 pounds overweight arrival” at ’07 spring training, which was about as welcome a development to Sox Brass as the fact that he called his company “Green Monster Games”.

The story of the professional jock turned entrepreneur is not a new phenomenon.   In fact, 15 minutes of internet surfing will provide enough stories of profligacy and stupidity to plaster the interior of a half-built 80,000 square foot indoor soccer and rock climbing facility in suburban Boston, which incidentally, is exactly the prop used by former Boston Celtic Dana Barros in his "make most of my money dissappear" trick a few years back.  www.boston.com/sports/basketball/celtics/articles/2006/05/30/barros_attempts_to_rebound_from_failed_business_venture/

In the recent past Ron Artest decided that his one in a million physical gifts that allowed him to make 50 million dollars in 4 years while doing things such as punching his boss in the face, slapping his wife, and being arrested for starving his Great Dane to death were simply not enough and decided that his skills would transfer nicely into the world of music, specifically into the production of some of his own songs that he marketed from his car window on the way out of the players lot during the NBA playoffs and which he informed members of the media were "more of a priority" than his pesky basketball career. http://www.bvonsports.com/2009/11/23/ron-artest-music-/

By now most people have heard the story of the rise and fall of Lenny Dykstra who managed to retire from a successful career as a steroid user and baseball player with the Phillies with almost no money, then managed to make about 50 million by opening a chain of car washes, then somehow did enough investing or paid enough money to get CNBC’s Shameless Jim Cramer  to say that he was “one of the best stock pickers around” which lead to some network entering pre-production on a television series about the Lenny Dykstra Empire, which had to be cancelled before it aired because he managed to go broke in about 18 months by  employing said stock picking strategy and also putting most of his wealth into publishing a magazine targeted at professional athletes with articles about issues of wealth management which surprisingly didn't do very well.  Ultimately, he found out he was totally bankrupt when a news camera showed up at his house where he had no furniture or belongings  except a photograph of a German Sheppard which he claimed he was going to buy  for $10,000. http://deadspin.com/5302008/lenny-dykstra-lets-the-world-know-hes-flying-higher?autoplay=true

Bronson Arroyo also tried to walk and chew gum when he was a thoroughly underwhelming pitcher for the Red Sox.   He took a short-money arbitration buyout from the team and attempted to close his earning gap by capitalizing on his overrated looks and terrible guitar playing and singing to cut a record full of “almost exactly like the album cut only crappier” cover tunes which turned out to be a harder way to get rich than getting traded to the pathetic NL Central where a 165 pound frame and a 12-win season get you $25 million guaranteed.   http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6732328266441465611#

Mike Tyson and Cecil Fielder shared a level of irresponsibility that make them hard to touch on the All-Century Cash Hemorrhage Team, but the all-time best athlete-turned –anything-other-than-sportscaster is Oscar De La Hoya, who for a brief period of time, decided that he wanted to be a leather-pants-wearing Latino crooner in the style of Enrique Iglesias only without the looks, or any ability to carry a tune, or even hit a note.  Through pure serendipity I happened to catch his performance of “Run to me” live on Tonight with Jay Leno in 2000.  This performance remains one of the funniest things I’ve seen in my life and thanks to the splendor of the internet, the music video it spawned can now be one of the funniest things you have seen.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d89IFcJD07A  Despite a level of creative/artistic badness that is virtually unrivalled, Oscar’s foray caused only minimal damage because he had enough sense to listen to his image counselors who told him that he should stick to throwing punches.

I get the sense that Curt won’t be so lucky.  I get this sense because Curt has never let common sense or the opinions of others assist him in not doing or saying things that are stupid.  I also get this sense because the Globe piece quotes Schilling as saying he has invested “most” of the money he ever made in this business such that his family will live or die, with the success or failure of the company he now (for some reason, probably the reason that the Red Sox sued him for a bazillion dollars) calls 38Pitches Studios.   All we can do now is wait, and be thankful this attempt at relevance doesn’t involve leather pants.

The Christmas Letter is one of the oldest human traditions and the product of the innate desire to share one’s accomplishments with others, even if they don’t care about you, or the fact that your daughter is one of the better cello players in her age group.  The first recorded example of Christmas letters was back in the Cave Man Days when nobody had thought of Christmas yet but people were sitting around thinking that they needed to take a break from chasing mastodons and throwing rocks at each other to ponder the mysteries of the universe, such as why they were walking around in the freezing cold with nothing on their feet.   In those days, some cave people had more than others, so the ones with extra animal heads would leave them on other people’s doorsteps, which was a perfect way to say “we have extra stuff” without being of any help or comfort to the neighbors. 

The tradition went along like that for a while but really took shape thousands of years later when Americans stopped worrying about wolverine attacks and typhoid fever long enough to be nostalgic and decided that others in the country would be interested to know how many bushels of wheat they were able to thresh without any machinery. 

By the time I came around, the practice was commonplace and each year our mantel was flush with cards from scores of people my parents knew, or had once known, including one from an acquaintance who offers 2,000 word essays each year that include the title of every book he read in the preceding year (complete with italicized parenthetical commentary!), detailed accounts of his visits to fellow college glee club members who live in New Jersey including the size and location of the hot tub in which they sat to discuss how much fun it had been to be in the glee club, a dozen or so awkward comments about his second wife and her gardening prowess, and ultimately, some uncomfortable information about his daughters dating men who already have children.  

With such a thorough introduction to the niceties of Christmas lettering, I was thrilled to begin my tradition in 2007.  At the time I had a live-in girlfriend and figured that in this day and age that was sufficient stability to warrant updating people about my life.   My rules are that the letter must contain at least one item that makes my wife uncomfortable, two things that make my mother uncomfortable, and as few facts or serious sentences as possible.  I found my first edition Christmas letter the other day while sorting old files and noticed that I ended the letter with a not-so-subtle dig at then presidential contender John Edwards.  Unfortunately I didn’t have any notion that he was cheating on his cancer stricken wife, or lying about fathering a child with a new-age skank so my cracks about his "son of a mill worker" shtick and “two Americas” jive now seem relatively benign.

I started the Christmas card tradition for the selfish reason that I hoped my card would prompt my friends to reciprocate so that I would be able to enjoy the scores of letters that have given me so much entertainment in my youth.  Sadly, I have not reaped nearly as many letters as I have sown, either because people think my letters are stupid, or more likely, because I’m not as nice as my parents and never gave some pain in the ass guy the impression that I liked him well enough that I wanted to get a letter from him about his second-wife and how nicely she sponge painted the garage (If I believed  in reincarnation I’d think she’d been an interior decorator in a past life!) after she sold her condo and moved into his when they decided to get married.

The truth is, I’m not drawing nearly as many letters as I would like at this stage of my life, and most of the ones I get are tasteful updates from my extended family who all subscribe to the “no pictures of yourself after you have children until they get married or have children” rule and who generally avoid too many details about their son’s lacrosse exploits. 

Thankfully, my parents are still pulling serious volume at home in Vermont which means that I get to relive my youth on my first ski trip of each New Year.  There’s something magical about The Christmas Letter; something reassuring about the fact that certain people’s delusions persist from year to year, and something amazing about the fact that the people who were in the glee club with this clown 40 years ago are still inviting him in their hot tub.  

When George Bush was in office, the State Of The Union was fun to watch for a number of reasons.  The first was that it allowed viewers all of the benefits of getting to see Dick Cheney's disgusting face and trademark grimace on national television for more than an hour without having to listen to any of his misplaced smugness or other bullshit.  It was also fun because it was an opportunity to see George Bush’s cognitive shortcomings in stark relief, such as when he tried to say polysyllabic words or when he used his patented "say something and then say "in other words" and then say almost exactly what you just said" rhetorical construction.    

What I love most, though, is that it is predictable.  It is predictable in that it is always split into three sections; the section that explains whatever the biggest issue of the day is, along with some reasons why it is either worse, or not as bad as the general public thinks, the section where the president introduces bold and seemingly ridiculous/irrelevant policy suggestions, and lastly, the section where the president yells a series of one-off pronouncements about things that excite his party.  

For Bush, the first section was all about war, the fact that we were attacked on 9/11, and how incredibly dangerous the world was, and how Jesus, or God, or someone had come down from the mountain and told him that he was to bestow freedom upon every person on the earth, as long as they weren't gay. The second section, contained his push for the colonization of Mars and immediate creation of hydrogen sport utility vehicles, and the last bit contained about a dozen or so references to how government should have a limited role, specifically the role of writing checks to private companies to do all of the work the government would otherwise do and lots of other work and non-work that the government hadn't done before.   

The minute Barack Obama was elected I started thinking about how cool it would be to hear him give a State Of The Union, mostly because of his “slow-lightning fast-slow” cadence but also because I knew it would be a rare chance to simultaneously have Joe Biden in front of the camera, and an absolute guarantee he wouldn't say anything that would make me want to hit him with a tire iron.   

In keeping with the formula, the first twenty minutes of tonight’s speech were devoted to jobs, specifically, their creation.  According to the President, the road to full employment is paved with $4,000 tax credits for small business, moderately harsh language directed at financial institutions, and an end to the partisanship and bickering that, along with no term limits and the fact that PACs and corporations can get weasely senators such as Joe Lieberman to do anything, have stifled progress.  

The latter half of the first section was devoted to health care, and included the president’s charming, self-deprecating and persuasive plea to his colleagues to continue the conversation, and his direct acknowledgement that he is “partially” to blame for the fact that most Americans don’t understand the nature of his proposed reforms.  One imagines that some other part of the blame known as  “all of the rest of the blame” could be placed upon Harry Reid, who, despite having an unprecedented bullet-proof majority, managed not only to be bossed around by a Senator from Nebraska, but also reached new heights of ham-handedness when he managed to disrupt his own pathetic progress on the matter by getting to spend an entire week trying to explain why he used the word “negro” in relation to the president in a year that was not between the years of 1860 and 1940.

In the “bizarre suggestion” phase, Obama did not disappoint, suggesting a three-year freeze on spending, beginning in one year, on everything  except for defense spending, health care, social security, social programs, programs for the blind, poor, elderly or pets or stimulus plans, or basketball courts in the White House.  Judging from ovation from the badly-dressed Republican delegation this proposal will be met with more support than his other suggestion, a way to change student loans that either makes them free, or partially free, or eventually free.    

Stage three was also by the book and contained requisite shout outs for the repeal of don’t ask don’t tell, childhood obesity and immigration which would have seemed important if they hadn’t been totally overshadowed by the presidents’ amazing interaction with his wife that confirms two things 1) the president and his wife do have sex 2) they will not be having sex tonight.   

It’s a new day America.  Sure we’re still fighting two stupid wars and pretending that the middle class still exists, but for the first time in at least thirty years, the guy in charge is certifiably cool.   

*due to today's early publication, there will be no publication on Sunday - the next column will appear Wednesday 2/3