Kaufman Wikipedia Update

King wrote a column today regarding his Wikipedia entry.

I'm proud to say that, despite much editing between yesterday and today, my addition to the Wikipedia entry remains.

The funniest thing about all the edits is that, at some point yesterday, there was a line in the entry saying King had once advocated the elimination of second base.

This, of course, isn't true, but it's very funny, as he actually has advocated eliminating field goals from football and eliminating free throws from basketball.

Most recently, this line has been added...

Under the stage name the King Teen, Kaufman was the singer for the Smokejumpers, "purveyors of hampster-slappin' punk rockabilly in San Francisco from 1996-2000."

Apparently, it's true. King's apparently the "Most Christmas Lovin' Jewboy Since Irving Berlin.™" Do you think he loves Jesus more than Kinky Friedman?

The Wonders of Wikipedia

How fast do entries change on Wikipedia?

From King Kaufman's column today (posted around noon):

Don't know who or why, but someone has created an article about me at Wikipedia.

The article says, in its entirety, "King Kaufman is a sports journalist for the online publication salon.com. He currently resides in St. Louis, Missouri." I have to say: That's pretty accurate!

By the time I read his column (about 15 minutes ago), his Wikipedia entry had expanded to this:

King Kaufman is the daily sports columinst for Salon.com. Kaufman grew up in Los Angeles but currently resides in St. Louis. In addition to covering the major American sports leagues and international events such as the Olympics and the World Cup, Kaufman's columns often deal with issues related to the state of American sports. In these columns, Kaufman addresses what he views to be serious problems within the world of sports. Some specific concerns of Kaufman include publicly financed stadiums, performance enhancing substances, the inequalities and hypocrisy in the NCAA, and the poor quality of television sports announcing.

His articles feature light-hearted humor, typically with a degree of self-deprecation. A former Angeleno, he enjoys relating stories of his fond memories of the Dodger games he listened to as a child.

Annually, he tracks the performance of NFL prognosticators, himself included, along with his son Buster, the "coin-flippinest 3-year-old in North America", who flips coins to randomly predict the outcome of (presumably) closely-contested games.

Kaufman has proposed changing the rules of nearly every organized sport, including the removal of field goals from American football, and the elimination of free throws from basketball.

I decided to add a line of my own.

Kaufman is a frequent critic of sports announcers who use shoddy statistics or generally do not care about the sport which they are announcing. He has particular distaste for coverage of Major League Baseball on the Fox Network, including the playoffs, World Series and All Star Game.

Tom Petty Opening Lines

Finally, one of my promised Petty posts.

The Onion A.V. Club posted their 14 Classic Tom Petty Opening Lines. It's a great topic. Probably part of why I love him so much is that so many of his songs pull you in with just a few words. I want to comment on a few lines from their list and a couple others they missed....

"She was an American girl / Raised on promises" (from "American Girl," Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, 1976)

Any discussion of Tom Petty songs starts here, at the beginning of his career, and still some of his best lyrics to date. That line, as simple as it is, creates a familiar image, with that faint hope that shows up in most of his music.

By the way, as the link Dara sent to me this morning shows, this is not a song about a suicidal girl in Florida. I could have told you that. It's right there in the lyrics. "She couldn't help thinking there's a little more to life somewhere else." While the girl clearly wants to get out of her rut, she doesn't want to kill herself.

"You think you're going to take her away / With your money and your cocaine" (from "Listen To Her Heart," You're Gonna Get It!, 1978)

While using the name of a drug is an easy way to get attention, this line is more than that. Most of Tom's great songs are about relationships. They're either about heartbreak (whether he's the initiator or the victim) or desparate attempts to save relationships. While not everyone relates to the cocaine part, most men can relate to a cool guy trying to take your girl away.

"Well, the talk on the street says you might go solo" (from "I Need To Know," You're Gonna Get It!, 1978)
"We got something / We both know it / We don't talk too much about it" (from "Refugee," Damn The Torpedoes, 1979)
Well it was nearly summer / We sat on your roof / We smoked cigarettes / And we stared at the moon" (from "Even The Losers," Damn The Torpedoes, 1979)
"Oh baby, don't it feel like heaven right now / Don't it feel like something from a dream" (from "The Waiting," Hard Promises, 1981)
"You better watch what you say / You better watch what you do to me" (from "You Got Lucky," Long After Dark, 1982)

I'm not typically big on love songs, but I like songs that actually examine relationships, which is what all these songs do.

"She's a good girl / Loves her mama / Loves Jesus / And America too" (from "Free Fallin'," Full Moon Fever, 1989)

The A.V. Club article calls this song almost a sequel to American Girl, and I'm not quite sure I agree with it. But it is a very similar, and similarly effective, opening line, I'll admit.

"She grew up in an Indiana town / Had a good-lookin' mama who never was around" (from "Mary Jane's Last Dance, Greatest Hits, 1993)

He really does like the word "She" to open his songs, doesn't he? Again, a strong image, and you instantly want to know more about the girl.

Now, some more great opening lines to Tom Petty songs that the A.V. Club overlooked.

The most obvious one to me is also the simplest...

"I won't back down, no, I won't back down."

You don't even know what he's talking about yet, but the way he delivers this line in, d'uh, "I Won't Back Down" puts you instantly in his corner.

Some other opening lines from Tom Petty songs create those great images, like openings to powerful stories that instantly draw you in.

"My sister got lucky, married a yuppie" from Yer So Bad
"Two gunslingers walked out in the street and one said, 'I don't wanna fight no more.'" from Two Gunslingers
"Eddie waited til he finished high school, he went to Hollywood, got a tattoo" from Into the Great Wide Open
"Well I started out down a dirty road" from Learning to Fly
"I'm in love with a girl on marijuana, she said if i'm not stoned I don't wanna" from Girl on LSD

Others are just about pure human emotion.

"Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks" from Walls
"I got a room at the top of the world tonight" from Room at the Top

I could go on, but I'll stop here. Almost every Tom Petty song has a great opening line.

Spork

Sometimes, random thoughts pop into my head. Like, is there a long, detailed, wikipedia entry for "spork?"



Turns out, there is.

Apparently, sporks date back to medieval times. Who knew? I always figured they were invented by KFC.

It is believed that the modern spork, made of disposable plastic, was introduced by the fast-food chain KFC, then known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, for its popular coleslaw side dish, at some point in the early 1970s.

At least I was right about that part.

You suck.

That's right.



Ok. Maybe you don't suck. But I got your attention, right? Which brings me to this Slate article about the word "suck."

There's simply no better way than to express disapproval for things like Mel Gibson, Kirk Cameron, Progressive Rock, and Republicans than the word "suck" or "sucks."

In high school I had a teacher, who was actually one of my favorite teachers, but she went ballistic any time someone used the word suck. It's totally a generational thing. She failed to recognize how benign the word was to our generation.

That's pretty much the argument of the Slate article.

When I tell you that the new M. Night Shyamalan movie sucks (and man, does it suck), my mind in no way conjures up an image of a film reel somehow fellating an unnamed beneficiary.

Nor should this image pop up in your brain when you hear that the movie sucks. That is, unless you are obsessing over the word's origins and thus have fellatio in mind each time you encounter it. But such obsessing is silly. When someone says Bill Gates is a geek, do you picture him as a circus performer biting the head off a live chicken? Of course not.

Ok. So the image of Bill Gates biting the head off a chicken is HILARIOUS, but that's not the point.

Sucks is the most concise, emphatic way we have to say something is no good. As a one-syllable intransitive verb, it offers superb economy. Granted, some things require more involved assessments (like, say, James Joyce: I find his early work unparalleled in its style and its evocation of emotion, while his later writing became willfully opaque in a manner that leaves me cold). But other things don't require this sort of elaboration (like, say, John Grisham: He sucks).

Right on, again.

For proof that this escalating battle of raunch has been going on for years, I present a fantastic exchange (click here to listen to part of it) from the 1940 film classic The Philadelphia Story. Witness a mother and daughter debating the relative merits of vulgar intransitive verbs:

Dinah Lord: "This stinks."

Margaret Lord: "Don't say stinks, darling. If absolutely necessary, smells. But only if absolutely necessary."

I remember that! Ok, now I'm just quoting the whole Slate article and agreeing, so I'll stop.

Single Plane Theory

When I saw a preview for "World Trade Center" at the beginning of "Lady and the Water," a couple weeks ago, I joked to Dara about Oliver Stone's "Single Plane Theory."

The Onion is stealing my jokes.

Joe Lieberman is a Loser

I don't know that I really have that much to say here that hasn't been said by a million people before me, but I wanted to put my thoughts on record.

By now you've probably heard that Lieberman lost the Democratic primary in Connecticut and is running as an independent. In fact, he told everyone before the primary that he was going to do just this. Now, he's calling himself an "independent Democrat."

What a load of horse shit.

So here's my message to Joe.

Joe, you're either a Democrat or an independent. You can't be both. And since you decided to run as a Democrat in the primary, you should respect the Democrats in your state enough to get the hell out of this election.

If you wanted to run as an independent from the get go, I could respect that. But you didn't. You could've pulled a Jim Jeffords. You instead made a mockery of the Democratic primary.

So now, while I respect your RIGHT to run, I don't think you should. If you do so, you will lose almost any remaining shred of respect I have for you, especially if you keep throwing around that "independent Democrat" bullshit. And quite frankly, my respect has been waning for some time, especially when you pull stunts like blaming your opponent when your crappy website crashes.

Today's Quick Blogging

Kind of busy today. I'm going to get to those Petty posts I promised eventually. I promise.

But for now:

***** Did you ever wonder what it would look like if someone acted out Super Mario Brothers on stage, complete with people dressed in all black, against a black backdrop, trying to hide in the shadows as they carry mushrooms and bricks and stuff across the stage? Now you don't have to.

***** Today's the day when Connecticans (or whatever you call them) get to stick it to Joe Lieberman. Kos had a good write-up on the matter.

***** Speaking of Kos and Lieberman, I now see that Fox News putting up some of their hilarious joke captions on the screen in their discussion of the election. Wait a minute, those aren't jokes? Oh, I see.

***** Speaking of Fox News, they're hiring Dennis Miller to be a frequent contributor to HANNITY and colmes. Note to Dennis Miller... you haven't been funny since about 1990.

***** Now back to Snakes on a Muthafuckin' Plane. A funny interview with Sam the Man at Ain't it Cool News. Particularly funny is the part about, um, tits.

That should be enough to keep you occupied for a while.

My broken iPod

So yesterday, I went to hook up my iPod to my computer and, to my horror, it seems something is messed up inside my iPod and it no longer can find the music files, which means, of course, I can't play anything on it.

I bought it used on ebay a little less than two years ago, and it was probably a year and a half old or so at the time. So it lasted about 3-4 years total, which, given as much as I used it, is may about what I should have expected.

I recently bought both a new car and a new laptop, so I really don't see myself going out and spending money on a new one.

So I have a few options.....

1) Use my PSP as my portable music device. I have a 1 GB memory card which is enough to hold a decent amount, but obviously not the 16 GB or so of stuff that I had on my iPod. I still have that stuff backed up on my computer, fortunately.

Thing is, lately I haven't used my iPod to listen to music so much. I'm now subscribed to several podcasts through iTunes, and that is usually enough to keep me occupied through my commute and time at the gym. So the mass storage doesn't matter to me as much as it used to. A PSP is a little bulky for the gym, but it's doable, at least for the time I'm on the eliptical.

2) Let my iPod sit around for a week or so and see if it decides to start working again. Stranger things have happened. About a month ago, my PSP wouldn't play UMD's for about a week, I even went so far as to get the label from Best Buy to return it under warranty. When I was about to send it off, the PSP all of a sudden worked again and has worked great ever since.

3) Look into getting my iPod fixed, but usually when small electronics break, it doesn't seem worth it to pay money to fix it, unless it's really cheap.

4) Get a new iPod. But as I said, I don't think it's worth the money for me right now. And the video function on new iPods is meaningless to me since the PSP has much better video capability.

5) Get an old iPod. I saw a 20 GB 2nd generation iPod on eBay for less than $100 bucks. Much more affordable, but I could be running into the same problem in a year or so.

6) Get a smaller iPod or other MP3 device. The more I think about it, this might be a decent option. I'd have something I could use more comfortably at the gym, and would probably save alot of money. I imagine if I'm willing to give up the automatic syncing of iTunes and iPod, I could solve my problem pretty inexpensively.

Hmmmm.... options.....