Sunday, April 23, 2006

it's 5am, alicia and i are up late after a rousing random saturday. we began our day in shadyside at dean's, where alicia got a haircut. she may or may not have led the hairdresser to believe that i was her girlfriend, so that's good. we then waited for maybe forty minutes at the bus stop on craig street where we saw approx 9 billion couples enjoying late-afternoon dates. on the way there, a creepy man sidled up next to us as we walked down neville street and attempted to pick alicia up. however, he did not show the dedication to his endeavor that i think was necessary, as he mumbled most of his words. he asked us if we go bar hopping and if he could buy us a drink. then he asked if we wanted to go to a party -- but this invitation was after he already walked across the street away from us, so i'm surprised it made it the distance it did considering his volume problems.

we spent some time at barnes and noble (the highlight being the man we saw with a shirt that read "i am NOT a dinosaur") and ate dinner at eat n park. it was decided that i will attempt to get a job at the squirrel hill eat n park so i can hook alicia up with the hot waiter who checked her out at the salad bar and tossed her the skank eye while we waited to pay our check at the register. our next stop was alicia's apartment. as we walked through the parking lot, we stumbled upon my friend ian from high school. this is probably the weirdest oakland sighting i've ever had. i had not seen ian in about two years, so i was quite giddy. he doesn't even live in oakland so it's kinda weird to just run into him in the middle of a hospital parking lot. he invited us to his senior film showing at point park next weekend, which will probably be a ridiculously awkward high-school reunion. it was nice to see him, though.

spur of the momently we decided to go to buckhead's saloon with dan ruef and craig. it turned out to be horribly boring. we decided in the future to refer to this bar as "meathead's" because there were many meatheads in attendance, with their lack of necks and popped-collar shirts. the cover artist of the night played a bon jovi song and alicia got mad because she dislikes bon jovi. i drank two rolling rocks. mmm. we left, walked to downtown to catch a bus, but not before alicia called mark. he was at the matrix, and we would have gone in but the cover was $8 which is TRULY OUTRAGEOUS. so we came home. i passed out for maybe two hours, woke up, and here we are.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Alicia and i (clearly with nothing better to do) have decided to launch a myspace blog series of point-counterpoint arguments on various aspects of culture. the first in the series relates to the technology of tivo. alicia will take the affirmative position: why tivo is awesome; i will take the negative: why tivo is the worst.

I went home this weekend for Easter. Before arriving in Jeannette where we still enjoy the luxuries of extended basic cable, I stopped at my mom's house in Penn Hills. As we grilled hot dogs and drank Dr. Pepper, my mom's boyfriend Dale excitedly described to me the circumstances that led an English Premier League soccer player to do a series of backflips. He mimed the motion and then said -- "hey, i'll just show it to you." A series of water-drop sounding clicks through a menu later and we were watching the recording of the acrobatic feat of this spry young athlete from a week or so earlier. Dale then began reading off the values of the Tivo system: he could record any program he wanted, he could tell the Tivo which shows he liked and it would record them any time they played. The Tivo would even use its electronic brain to make educated guesses about shows you MIGHT like based on the ones that you tell it you like. Possibly most amazing of all, it enables you to stop and rewind up to a half hour back in a live tv show.

Sure, this seems convenient. I guess no one would rather fiddle with a VHS tape and make sure the TV is on the correct channel (the reason I have still never seen the final episode of Seinfeld). However, Tivo is essentially cheating. It blurs the lines between "sitting down to watch TV" and "sitting down to watch a movie or other form of entertainment not dependent on an outside schedule." Also, it can completely misalign your own schedule with that of the rest of the television-viewing public.

The whole point of watching on TV is the elusive quality the shows have. What's the point of releasing a tv series one week at a time? To get you to make it a point to sit down and watch that show. It keeps you coming back and in turn, keeps you seeing the commercials advertisers have paid to show. No one likes commericals, but without them, cable would be way more than $50 a month (which is outrageous anyway, but i digress). The point of Tv is telling yourself, "I'm going to sit down for a half an hour to watch One Tree Hill, and on the commercial breaks I am going to use my time wisely in such activities as walking to the kitchen to microwave some leftovers or go down to the washer to change the laundry, etc..." It is the existence of an external entertainment structure that you buy into. This is a different attitude than what one takes when they sit down to watch something pre-recorded. If I'm watching a movie, I've said to myself that I have two or so hours to kill. I do not watn to be bothered by commercials and if I desire to have a snack, I will hit pause. I will save the laundry for afterward because right now I am entertaining myself with the always lovable slapstick comedy of Jim Carrey. Tivo turns television into movies, which it is clearly not meant to be. If I am watching the Pirates game, I don't want to be able to stop and replay a questionable pitch. I will watch instant replays and/or suck it up because I missed it. Tivo sucks because it mixes these two separate entertainment options into a hodgepodge of viewer control.

And that gets me to what this hodgepodge creates: it throws the watcher off the schedule of everyone else's live TV viewing experience. For instance, I'm sitting here watching the Steelers AFC championship game. I'm waiting for Mike Vanderjagt to kick his field goal..he's lining up...he's doing that two step thing....the ball is snapped.... in the world without Tivo, I see the result of this kick with the rest of the world. However, in Tivoland, I stopped live action earlier to replay that awesome tackle made by Ben Roethlisberger. I said, I need to see that again! However, my live TV is now ten or fifteen seconds behind "real" live TV. So the ball is snapped.....it's in the air....and before I can tell if it's good, a car goes by outside, hootin' and hollerin. Unless it's the one Indianapolis fan in the tri-state area on this game day, the ending of this game has just been spoiled. Seconds later, after I already know the outcome, the ball flies wide right. This illustrates my second point: Tivo creates a viewer's own little entertainment world, misaligned from the schedule everyone else is on. It's like a little mini-version of time travel. After stopping for that one play, my live TV schedule is off for the rest of the night. Fifteen seconds doesn't seem like much but it adds up...ten here, five there and before you know it, shows are ending at five after like every channel is TBS or something. The essence of live TV is it creates a watching community: we're all seeing this as it happens. It may not seem like a big deal, but Tivo, my friends, Tivo = CHAOS. It's freakin me out, man. I don't believe in Tivo: it's cheating. Watch it with everyone else.

The end.

Did I mention I'm getting something like a B- in argument? And it's a comm class. Basically I suck.

Monday, April 03, 2006

plenty of things have happened since i last posted in this thing. i forget 80% of them. however, i will give you the cliffs notes version of what i can remember.

boston: best trip ever. some memories include: inventing the reverse birth sexual position, shooting the stink eye and tossing the skank eye, ordering a coors light at cheers because i am an idiot, dancing the "irish jig," throwing up after three yeunglings and a shot of southern comfort, peeing in the sand on the beach, hotel parties with kindhearted yet sleepy asians, mark's disappearing acts, moments of magical realism in boston commons (watching ice skaters in 70 degree weather), the doors as a motif, searching for an hour for wendy's, sitting outside a shady green door while the boys visited fenway park, riding the subway for the first time ever, alicia puking inside a bed, bath and beyond, nicknames nobody liked, and many other things i cannot remember but i wish i could.

it was pretty much the best time ever and i wish i could go back.

some other noteworthy events of march include: watching lots of basketball and mash while drinking PBR, a metaphysics test which i either failed miserably or aced but it's still up in the air, formal where i went from stone sober to puking drunk in record time (best tasting lethal punch ever), drinking on more weeknights than is really responsible and not feeling bad about it whatsoever.

i have become somewhat of a basketball fan recently, and i am very disappointed that LSU did not advance to the championship game. i have learned in life that the team i root for hardly ever wins. in fact, i can think of only one time that a team i like has won, and it was two months ago when the steelers won the superbowl. for instance, i always root for the "red team" on real world/road rules challenges. most of the time, this is the real world team. for the gauntlet II, it was the veterans team. the red team always loses. after pitt lost to bradley i resigned myself to feeling mostly unconcerned with the turnout of the rest of the tournament. then i caught some sort of interview on TV featuring LSU's team, and i decided glen davis is pretty much my favorite athletic personality in recent history. he just sat there with the dumbest look on his face. also, they showed clips of him dancing after a win wearing a yellow feather boa. he is more or less, as alicia said, an SNL character waiting to be born. anyone with a sense of humor should have rooted for LSU. unfortunately, that didn't pan out, and now we have florida and ucla. neither team has such potential for hilarity. all we have is ben howland and that guy that plays for florida with the hair. so when does baseball season start?