The Worst Commercial on Television

Posted on April 25, 2013 by Tom Garrett

I’ve written and spoken often about my concerns regarding the social norms of younger Americans.  There’s a fairly stark line of demarcation between those who made it through their formative years without the influence of the internet and social media, and those who were already texting and e-mailing before they were out of puberty (which more or less covers most of the current population under 30, and certainly those under 25).

I saw a commercial recently which not only underscored my preexisting fears, but fostered new ones.  Here it is:

To recap: There’s a nice family dinner in progress.  A soft-spoken, late-middle-aged woman begins to tell a story about shopping at the market for items related to her now-aged pet cats.

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Hey, It’s Not the End of the World

Posted on April 18, 2013 by Tom Garrett

One of the temptations of our disposable and wildly narcissistic modern culture is to presume that whatever is happening now must be more important than anything that has happened previously—not only more important because it’s happening to us, but also objectively more important.

WallStreetBomb

The 1920 Wall Street Bombing

This happens all the time in a sports context when athletic endeavors filter through the hyperbolic prism of modern media.  A great game becomes the greatest game. A bad error becomes the worst error.  The best basketball player of the day is immediately compared to Michael Jordan (until the new new best player of the day comes along).

As I’ve said before, nothing can be a “3” or a “7.”  Everything is a zero or a ten.  Otherwise, why bother?

Likewise, a recurring theme in contemporary political and news-related discussion is how little people actually know about the basic history of our nation—even among the educated segments of our citizenry.

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The Fatal Mistake

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Tom Garrett

In the aftermath of the bombing of the Boston Marathon, about which many details are still unknown, several thoughts immediately came to mind as the limited facts trickled in.

BostonSunsetThe first was that it immediately reminded me of the London Underground bombings when I was in a study-abroad program in England in 1999.  There, a paranoid schizophrenic terrorist created makeshift bombs (this sort of thing wasn’t common enough back then for us to have a fancy term for it like “IED”) that included a large number of nails in order to maximize injury (and fear), particularly among various minority populations.  He set bombs for three straight weekends in April before he was caught, killing three and injuring 139.  Four of his victims survived but lost limbs.  Sound familiar?

The second thing I thought of was how adept I’ve become at desensitizing myself to these sorts of events.  That’s sad in and of itself, of course, but that instinct emanates from an even darker place beneath the surface: I accepted it as a given a long time ago that a nuclear weapon will inevitably be detonated on American soil at some point during my lifetime.  I often wonder whether our collective psyche will be able to recover from the various horrors that event will entail, the specifics of which I won’t go into here, to say nothing of the massive death count that would dwarf anything we’ve ever seen.

Naturally, I hope and pray that I’m wrong.

But there’s something else, too.  As with any terrorist attack, there are always folks on Facebook and Twitter who are quick to label the perpetrators as “cowards.”  I believe this to be a huge mistake—a mistake that matters when formulating a crucial understanding of the enemy we face.

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SitCombat: The Final Battle

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Tom Garrett

This is the end.

SitCombatB2Unless SitCombat reformulates around different shows, this will be the last regular edition of the feature. Archer’s season concluded tonight, leaving only one show left to evaluate. Less than a minimum of two programs quite obviously means no competitive aspect is possible.

The Office, of course, will continue destroying what’s left of its legacy with another few episodes before it wraps for good in May.

As I said last week, after the return of Boom Mic Guy, I’m now openly rooting for The Office to make even worse writing decisions down the stretch.  Just go full-on train wreck.  Gratuitously kill off Dwight in a farming accident.  Have Jim and Pam split up.  Randomly turn a character gay. Better yet: Inexplicably turn Oscar straight.  Crash and burn.

Either way, this is The Office’s last chance to get a win against another show.  Ever.

This was SitCombat for April 11, 2013:

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SitCombat: 4/4/13

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Tom Garrett

SitCombatB2SitCombat’s days are numbered.

This week is the first of a two-part season finale for Archer.  Once Archer’s finished, that removes the competition for The Office.  No competition, no SitCombat.

I may still write a series finale piece on The Office, but that’s TBD.  For now, SitCombat has two more rounds until it goes to that great, big blog in the sky.

Ok, that makes no sense, but the point is that The Office has only two more chances at SitCombat redemption, something that has eluded it for several weeks now.

Here, then is the belated edition of the weekly clash, postponed by my 4,000+ words on a wrestling pay-per-view.  Yep.

This was SitCombat for April 4, 2013:

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Twice in a Lifetime (Part Two)

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Tom Garrett

DolphZigglerWHCWhen we left our heroes in Part One, Dolph Ziggler had overcome a loss earlier in the evening (as well as months of an inexplicably middling push) to capture, at long last, the World Heavyweight Championship against an Alberto Del Rio depleted by a post-match Patriot Act Lock, courtesy of one Jack Swagger.

Ziggler’s triumph (which, of course, may be a figment of my imagination) will set the stage for the most important moments of this year’s WrestleMania.  The six participants in the top three matches on the card include two men who wrestled last year in an “End(?) of an Era” match, and two other men who are wrestling each other a second time after last year’s “Once(?) in a Lifetime” match.  One of those three matches pits a man who gave a tearful, pseudo-retirement speech last year after losing to the very same opponent he now faces at WrestleMania in a, uh, retirement(?) match—an opponent who, after his victory, announced via Tout(?!?) that he was finished(?) with WWE and had “nothing left to prove.”

If there is one premise above all others upon which wrestling depends, it is the brevity of the collective attention span of its audience. Continue reading →

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Twice in a Lifetime (Part One)

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Tom Garrett

WM29One could make a fair argument that, in retrospect, the last two WrestleManias were merely prologue to this year’s event.

2011 saw The Rock “guest host” WrestleMania, eventually (and inevitably) involving himself in the main event match between The Miz and John Cena.  That led to WrestleMania 28, where The Rock and John Cena met in a non-title “(Not-so-)Once in a Lifetime” match, won by The Rock.  That, in turn, took us to this year, wherein The Rock and Cena defy all logic by going head-to-head again, this time with the newly-minted WWE Championship Ring on the line.

Will we get a classic, thoroughly memorable WrestleMania?  Or will this year’s Showcase of the Immortals in New York / New Jersey merely provide even more foreplay in the ramp-up to the thirtieth edition of the event twelve months from now?

Let’s find out.

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Imbeciles React to Justin Verlander’s Contract Extension

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Tom Garrett

JustinVerlanderThe news last week that local athlete Justin Verlander had signed the most lucrative contract of any pitcher in the history of baseball met with praise and pride in the Central Virginia area.  The deal, valued at up to $202 million if he can spend $30 million in 30 days if an eighth year of the contract vests, prompted congratulations from most of the folks who weighed in online in response to the story.

Unfortunately, this being 2013, there was also a sizable contingent who had a very different take on the record-setting deal.  Here are some helpful examples in the form of comments posted on the local news stories related to the contract, along with my even-more-helpful responses:

Nobody is worth that much $, especially a ball player!! What about our servicemen, police, teachers???

They aren’t worth as much.  Justin Verlander has a unique skill set.  He does something very specific better than anyone in the world.  How many people on Earth can be MLB pitchers?  A few hundred.  And, of those, Verlander is the best, or at least one of the five best.  How many people in the world could potentially be teachers, soldiers, or police?  A few hundred million.  If not more.

Verlander is also a revenue-generator on a level that teachers, soldiers, or police, individually, never are.  On top of that, Verlander is paid by a private-sector organization, while soldiers, police, and non-private-school teachers (which is to say, most of them) are paid by the government using taxpayer funds. Continue reading →

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Understanding Scalia

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Tom Garrett

ScaliaLibraryJustice Antonin Scalia authored a Supreme Court opinion published today that curtailed certain kinds of police searches using drug-sniffing dogs.  The holding in Florida v. Jardines was that such searches are unconstitutional and a violation of the rights secured by the Fourth Amendment.  Scalia notably lead a 5-4 majority that included “liberal” justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in opposition to the “conservative” minority that included Chief Justice Roberts and justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy (along with Stephen Breyer).

Don’t expect to hear all that much about this decision in the days to come.

No, the primary thrust of the Scalia-related coverage over the next week will be what an intolerant, ignorant monster he is.  He’ll be roundly criticized for his judicial philosophy by people who have never so much as read the entirety of the Constitution.  A few choice quotes will be bandied about by certain websites as grist for their ideological mill.

So, I write today to defend a man whose intellect I unashamedly admire—a man who really needs no defense in the first place.

Perhaps the most-talked-about exchange during today’s Supreme Court Prop 8 oral argument (and certainly the one of most interest to me personally) was this one, between Justice Scalia and Ted Olson.  It’s somewhat-lengthy, but worth the read.  I’ll comment at the end:

MR. OLSON: The California Supreme Court, like this Supreme Court, decides what the law is. The California Supreme Court decided that the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of that California Constitution did not permit excluding gays and lesbians from the right to get married-

JUSTICE SCALIA: You — you’ve led me right into a question I was going to ask. The California Supreme Court decides what the law is. That’s what we decide, right? We don’t prescribe law for the future. We–we decide what the law is. I’m curious, when -when did — when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted?  Sometimes — some time after Baker, where we said it didn’t even raise a substantial Federal question? When — when — when did the law become this?

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Let’s All Make Fun of Tom’s Brackets (2013 Edition)

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Tom Garrett

Part of the aging process (I won’t go as far as to say “maturing”) for me has been letting some of my sports fandom fall by the wayside.  I’m down to about two sports now: MLB and the NFL.  However, there was a time when I was well-versed in the world of college basketball.  I could have named the starting lineups for most of the top ten teams, or at least the ones east of the Mississippi, and I certainly knew the head coaches of just about every school in the top 25.

ncaa-logoToday, my interest in college basketball pre-March is minimal at best.  I follow the University of Richmond, and I’m vaguely aware of how other state schools are doing.  VCU is essentially ubiquitous at this point, and knowledge of their performance will seep through whatever informational filters any Richmond resident has, even if one tries to avoid it.  Trust me.

To be fair, it was easier to keep track of college basketball when the best players often stayed for four seasons, and always stayed for at least three.  Likewise, a single conference conveniently included almost every D-I school in the state when I was 15.  That also helped.

Filling out a bracket and entering NCAA Tournament pools has become more “expensive chore” than “fun game” over the last decade.  Yet, despite my lack of knowledge and interest, I feel like my actual chances of winning haven’t decreased a bit.

Such is the absurdity magic of March Madness.

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