The Friday Hot Sheet

Another week comes and goes -- this time with much more emphasis on waking up early and making sure my roomate gets to school on time and has a lunch packed. I'm more of a night owl, so dragging myself up early enough to ensure that his own dragging himself awake rituals don't interfere with getting out the door showing up before the late bell rings has been a real shift. We've done pretty good so far, but there's definitley room for improvement.

Which would be fine, if I hadn't gone and purchased one of these.

I lucked into finding a used/reconditioned one for a good price -- and couldn't really pass on the deal. Curren's been wanting one for a long time, and it's something we can play together. It's a ton of fun, especially when we hook up the Wii Sports and start trying to box each other.

Curren's aunt apparently has one of these, so he's had a bit more practice at it than I got in NYC or when my brother brought his down last Christmas, but we're quickly getting the hang of it. It kinda reminds me of this old TV show we used to have here called "TV Pow" where you would call in and play a space-invaders type of video game by yelling "POW!" into the phone whenever you wanted to shoot your lasers.

It is an incredible timesuck though. Maybe that's largely because it's the new new and we're all enamoured with it, but "just a little bit more" seems to turn into "way past bedtime" a lot quicker than you think it might. A fact that isn't helped by the fact that bedtime for me used to be whenever I just ended up drifting asleep on the couch.

Now, not so much.

So before the wiimote thing charges back up and we go another couple of rounds -- here are this weeks risers and fallers, and the buzz as it looks from here.

	Somali Pirates	How many movies does Don Cheadle have to make before we realize that this isn't just some quaint little folk hero story that just happened to finally screw up and piss off the US Navy? In my mind, stories like this (especially the sort of "cool" angle the whole thing was largely given before recent events happened) sort of points out just how sort of rudderless the media is right now. Newspapers are sinking, TV news is not only accepting the idea of adding spin into their stories, they're whole-heartedly pushing it. What makes The Daily Show so much fun to watch is the way it calls out news agencies on the way they report the stories we've already read in the morning. The idea being that you have the facts of the story in your head, but then you see the CNN's, MSNBC's, and FOX News Networks of the world report the exact same story and it sounds completely different depending on who you watch. Kinda like these Somali Pirates, who I guess were supposed to be like the new cool kids in school but now are the face of a call to action from these talking heads to ..what, nuke the Indian Ocean? I'm no war hawk, but in this day and age I'm frequently surprised by how much hesitation there seems to be when things like this happen. I'm not saying the old days were better -- but remember how stories like this used to be reported in the news? The anchorman would come on and say "US Military forces blew the shit out of some little boat yesterday. Here's why they did it." And then we'd debate whether that was the right move or not? Now you watch the news and it feels like all this waiting around is the military's way of asking me what should be done. And it's like, "Hey, isn't this sorta what I pay you guys for?" What happened to that Navy Seals commercial they play all night long where the footprints show up in the sand after the wave recedes back into the tide. Where are those guys?
	Last.fm	I have an iPod Nano with roughly 1500 songs on it. Songs I put on there personally because I like them. But what I'm noticing is that after having gotten all those songs on there and enjoying having them all at my fingertips to listen to and rock out with, that now I'm kind of running out of gas on them. Not that I don't like the songs, but that there's roughly 600-700 of them I either skip constantly or just don't play and then a remaining number that I just play to death. It's hard to believe I could wear out on that many songs at a time, but essentially what I'm craving is something like really, really different than the somewhat limited variety that I've created for myself on the iPod. So lately at work I've been just plugging the headphones into my computer and "getting lost" on Last.fm. I'll put in a general term to start a radio station, like "Funk" or "Reggae" and then see what it gives me. If it plays songs I've heard of I'll listen to them and enjoy, but if it presents me with a band/group/singer I don't know I'll put that into the station generator, and then just sort of repeat that process over and over until I'm completely off the beaten path. The results have been exceptionally cool (although I also suspect I'm just really hungry for new music to listen to so everything unfamiliar tastes yummy right now). I suppose you can do this on Pandora as well, but what I've discovered is that for rock, metal, and really old R&B (imho) Pandora is severely lacking. Last.fm is British, so there's like an overflow of old soul artists on here, and that is just fine by me. I've been discovering groups and singers that frankly I was simply too young to have ever even heard of when they were around, and as such it's almost like discovering an entirely new scene (that you know, happened like 35 years ago). Plus, much like Pandora and Rhapsody, the more you play the more it starts to see what you like -- and I've been treated to some very nice surprises in the past few days, especially in the form of a John Paul Jones solo record I was unaware of, and a project featuring Dennis Chambers, Billy Sheehan and John Novello that absolutley shreds. When I think back to the days where discovering new music meant hit-or-miss methods like waiting desperately for something that didn't sound exactly the same to come on the radio or taking part in blind mixtape exchanges on the Internet (even though those were fun), I feel really lucky to have the chance to use technology like this. It's not a flying car or a jetpack -- but it's pretty damn cool.
	Andy Samberg	I think there's a part of me that didn't want to like Andy Samberg and the whole Lonely Island gang. Part of me that didn't really want to jump on the trend wagon. I get that way sometimes. Old music is better, old movies are cooler, old comedians are funnier, that sort of thing. Problem is, these guys are funny as hell. Movies like Hot Rod, shows like Eastbound and Down, and this new Seth Rogan Observe and Report thing that is already getting a lot of hate from reviewers and watchdog groups for being too dark -- it's kinda hard to act like something's not funny when you're laughing hysterically at it. It's not perfection, and I can still poinit to examples of older comedians/actors/writers who I feel are more consistent and subversive, but there's no way in hell I can deny the sheer awesomeness of this clip, which I posted up on twitter earlier in the week but just can't stop playing, especially when the nitpickers at work start to get annoying.
	Pop Chips	Much like micro-brew beer, when you start taking a stand and declaring your love for a brand of potato chips that you can get at a major grocery store, you immediatley risk connoiseurs like Penn Jillete coming down on you and extolling the superior taste and quality of some tiny snackmaker that only sells 3-ounce bags of their product in a little convienence store somewhere in Delaware. Well that's great and all, but I'm not really supposed to be eating these things in the first place, so if I just happen to stumble across something at Target that blows a bag of Ruffles away it doesn't really mean I'm a luddite. All that being said -- if you like Pringles but (like me) can't stop yourself from eating an entire tube all at once, see if you can find yourself a bag of these instead. I've only found them at one or two places here in Jacksonville, but they are really, really good. I'm always open to new taste suggestions if you have any, but if you're looking for a new chip and can find these -- it's totally worth the effort.
	Texas	I guess I shouldn't call out the whole state just because of something stupid that one elected official said, but then I remember that everytime some a-hole in Florida does something retarded, the entire country thinks everyone in this state is that stupid. There's no doubt that as States go, Florida has an extra helping of dumbass on it's plate -- but we aren't the only store in the mall, if you know what I'm saying. Essentially the story goes that Republican Representative Betty Brown and the rest of the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans regarding difficulties people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have obtaining voter registrations and other forms of identification, at which point Representative Brown said, "Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt names that we could deal with more readily here?" at which point I'm pretty much like, "Check, please?"
	On My Planet	..This would happen all the time.

          

[Listening to:  Niacin - "Stone Face" ]