Childhood Wish Fulfillment (and Why Movie Theaters Are Doomed)

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Tom Garrett

Tomorrow, December 18th, marks the release of the Neo Geo X, a handheld re-imagining of the Neo Geo video game system.

NeoGeoXPromoThe original Neo Geo (or, more properly, the Neo Geo AVS) was a home console designed and manufactured by SNK.  Introduced in Japan in 1990, SNK released it in the United States the following year.  A company called Tommo, in partnership with current Neo Geo IP holder SNK Playmore, will be releasing the Neo Geo X, a portable version of the original system that doubles as a console via the use of a clever docking station that replicates the look of the original AES.

Despite being a huge fan of video games when I was 12, I never owned a Neo Geo.  Then again, neither did anyone else I knew.  Or many other people in the country, for that matter.  And there was a very good reason for that.

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Culture Trumps All

Posted on December 14, 2012 by Tom Garrett

I was a political science major in college, and many of the upper-level classes in my major dealt specifically with electoral law.  American electoral law, British electoral law, continental European electoral law, comparative electoral law.  I studied systems used by democracies all over the world.

If there was one overriding, take-home message I absorbed from the very fine education I received in that area, it was that . . . electoral law doesn’t really matter.

Well, let me clarify.  That’s not precisely correct.  Electoral law clearly matters, but what I mean is that a nation can take any sort of a system it wants, superimpose it over an existing culture, and that culture will revert back to the old system (or a form of it) unless the change in electoral system is accompanied by a shift in cultural norms as well.

A concrete example may be found in many parts of the Middle East, where cultural tribalism and authoritarian religious fundamentalism informs nearly every aspect of life there.  Nations in which “democracy” has been infused by Western powers usually revert to non-democratic regimes, either through a form of theocracy, a thinly-veiled dictatorship, or some combination of the two.

I bring this up because I think the same holds true for the law of gun control.

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Christmas Shopping = Complete

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Tom Garrett

Divining gift ideas gets less fun and more difficult as we get older.  One reason for this phenomenon is that people get grandfathered into our gift-giving list for years after we stop seeing them on a regular basis.  Of the people for whom I’ll be buying gifts this year, over 50% of that elite group are in the same room as I am approximately once a year.

So, you can imagine my elation when I was browsing the featured books at Barnes & Noble this week, when the solution to this problem appeared before me.  There, front and center among the books in the biography section, was this Christmas gift panacea:

KeshaBiography

I purchased every copy they had.

So, friends and relatives, please be advised that you will be receiving the definitely-not-ghostwritten autobiography of 25-year-old waitress-turned-“singer” Ke$ha, entitled My Crazy Beautiful Life.  This 192-page tome is packed with dozens of exclusive photos from the road, as well as a detailed account of Ke$ha’s rags-to-riches tale.

But don’t take my word for it.  Here’s Ke$ha—in her own words:

In less than three years, I’ve gone from being the worst waitress in LA to living out my childhood dreams of singing my songs to people all over the world. Sometimes, it feels as if the last few years have encompassed a few decades. . . . You might have heard my voice on the radio, seen me onstage and on the red carpet, or in a music video, but that’s only a part of the story. In these pages, I’m revealing a more complete picture of what my life is really like. It’s not all glamorous and it’s not all pretty, but it’s all real. . . . I want you to come on a whirlwind journey with an all-access pass to My Crazy Beautiful Life.”

What more can you say?  If you’re not sold after reading that, I would humbly direct you to Ke$ha’s Wikipedia page, which astutely points out that “Ke$ha’s debut single combines yodeling and video game music, with its lyricism centering around alcohol consumption and parties.”

You’re welcome.

Merry Christmas!

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SitCombat: 12/6/12

Posted on December 7, 2012 by Tom Garrett

SitCombatB230 Rock won back its crown (with a wedding episode, no less!), turning back a decent effort from The Office and a mediocre League.  I hate writing these intro parts, so let’s just dive right in, shall we?

We get a bonus episode of The League tonight, so I have four shows to review.

This was SitCombat for December 6, 2012:

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30 Rock (NBC) – “My Whole Life is Thunder”

Tonight’s Episode: Jenna is none-too-pleased when she finds out that Liz got married so close to her own wedding, Jack deals with his ongoing mother-related issues, and Tracy tries to cheer Kenneth up after his break-up with Hazel.

Good Stuff: “You got married?!?  To what?” . . . “Hathanobody” . . . “I’m 42, Cerie.” “I don’t know what that is” . . . 80 Under 80 . . . “Backslash ‘Garbage File?!?’” . . . “She insists on traveling on Pearl Harbor Day to, and I quote, ‘show the Emperor we’re not afraid’”. . . “Do you have any idea where she is, little boy?” . . . “I told the black guy – no Brady stuff!” . . . Liz’s picture in the program . . . Jack’s three appropriate subjects of paintings: (1) horses, (2) ships with sails, (3) men holding up swords while staring off into the distance . . . “Apex Technical School puts students first…(turns to camera) and the perfect time to enroll is NOW!” . . . I loved that all the women at the Women in Media banquet went to the bathroom together and can’t figure out A/V equipment . . . “It’s all right! The lack of oxygen is making me orgasm!” . . . I think killing off Jack’s mom was the right call. It gave the character closure, and I think it was the right time to wrap things up from Elaine Stritch’s perspective . . . “Jenna! I mean…Liz” . . . “Where else but real life would a millionaire movie star care so much about a Hillbilly janitor that he would spend two days trying to cheer him up?” . . . Frank’s “APPROPRIATE” hat . . . “The man who, in 1984, wore a tuxedo so well that he broke up the Go-Go’s” . . . Reverend Gimp was definitely voiced by Lorne Michaels.

Non-good Stuff: The Jenna “Abusive / crazy male from my past doing something outrageous to me” lines are getting a little “mad-libby” . . . The Oprah stuff doesn’t really resonate with me.

Line of the Night: “Someone’s looking lovely today! . . . What a burn. I could have meant someone else…although I didn’t. She’s radient!” – Kenneth, trying to be mean (and failing)

Overall: Good show. I loved a lot of the little things, like Dot Com’s line about Apex Technical. I think ending the Mrs. Donaghy storyline is appropriate at this point in Elaine Stritch’s life, not to mention the increasingly-limited life of the show itself. There weren’t as many huge laughs as last week, though. This was a good, solid, all-around episode with lots of fun cameos, but the highs weren’t as high as the best shows that the 30 Rock writers create, possibly because a character, you know, died on the show.

GRADE: B

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Good Cause, Bad Slogan

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Tom Garrett

The burden of being Tom Garrett extends beyond my profound lack of social interaction, incompetence at parallel parking, and maintenance of an inexplicably-large retro video game collection (although it occurs to me that the former and the latter points may be hopelessly intertwined).

You see, I am nearly incapable of suffering fools.  I feel compelled to fight a lifelong war against stupidity, even to my own detriment, and even if the stupidity is unquestionably well-intentioned.  A picture posted by our local CBS affiliate on Facebook provided a helpful example of this peculiarity of mine.  The image was a promotional design crafted by the Salvation Army (a very worthy cause) that included a slogan that irritated and perplexed me.

Here it is:

SalvationArmyBucket

Ok, so, let’s talk about the problem with this.

The slogan says, “This is one bucket you don’t want to miss,” or, as I prefer to read it, “This is one bucket you don’t want to miss.”

There are two issues right off the bat.  One, it’s not readily apparent that this is a reference to basketball.  The Harlem Globetrotters logo is fairly small, tucked away in the lower-right corner.  Being a sports geek, I assume a basketball connection when I see “buckets,” but I don’t think most people would.  Still, this is a minor concern compared to the other issue.

The slogan is based on a false (or at least illogical) premise.  Namely, that there is a kind of “bucket” that one would want to miss.

The slogan is saying, implicitly, “There may be some buckets you want to miss, but not this one, because it’s for charity!  Missing this bucket would mean that your money wouldn’t get to the Salvation Army!”

As opposed to what?  Missing another kind of bucket that costs your team points during a basketball game?  Not missing that bucket is the object of the sport.

Stupid.

I’ve wasted enough time on this, and the fact that the imbecile who came up with the slogan probably makes two-to-three times my annual income is certainly little comfort.  But I’m happy I could provide you, my adoring public, with yet another glimpse into the dark chasm of my soul, and my undiagnosed autism.

And, of course, this all naturally reminded me of this:

BananaShack

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SitCombat: 11/29/12

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Tom Garrett

Hello there, SitCombat.  It’s been a while.

SitCombatB2It is nearly December, and, in these virtual pages, SitCombat makes a return that I can only assume will be triumphant.  A combination of some downtime for the shows, plus a week in which I didn’t write an article thanks to my political yammering, leads to this: “Dark matches” or not, The Office has won two in a row for the first time since . . . well, maybe ever.

Now, SitCombat is back in earnest.  Will Jim, Pam, and the gang be able to take a third win in a row?  Or will the pressure of actually getting the full write-up treatment be too much for the venerable NBC sitcom to bear?  I ask, of course, because my creeping mental illness causes me to believe that my nearly-anonymous writing affects the performance of television writers and actors on shows that were filmed months ago.

But enough about me and my wacky brain! Let’s make with the comedy!

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Good News / Bad News (Part Two)

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Tom Garrett

My name is Tom, and I’m here to help.

When last we “met,” I discussed the problems faced by the Republican Party in the wake of last week’s elections.  While I noted that the fallout from the elections and the challenges the GOP faces in the next decade have been overstated to an extent by the media (mostly because they’re in the business of overstatement), I also acknowledged that these problems are all-too-real.  I concluded by threatening promising to unveil my own 2016 platform as a willing savior of the Republican Party.[1]

Before I begin, a general point: Despite popular belief, the primary obstacle to Republican success in most areas isn’t losing an ideological war of ideas.  The trouble stems more from perception of competence / intelligence (something I discussed last time) and messaging, along with a handful of “albatross” positions.[2]  I tried to address those broad concerns as I crafted some of these planks.

Let’s get started.

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Good News / Bad News (Part One)

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Tom Garrett

“The Democratic Party has shown itself over the last four elections to be a very slow learner, and, so, it may take them some more elections to get a new vocabulary.” – George Will, election night, 1984.

In the modern American media, social and otherwise, everything is a “0” or a “10.”  Nuance is hard to come by, and hysterics on all sides feed a 24/7 news cycle that somehow became more ubiquitous (25/10?) as round-the-clock connectivity via smartphones and other mobile devices became the norm.

That’s why I think it’s important to evaluate what happened in last week’s election with the benefit of rational perspective.  It may be possible that the election results were neither the end of the country as we know it, as many at Fox News seemed to intimate, nor were they something to be compared to Ronald Reagan’s 525-13 landslide in 1984, as lefty Buzzfeed chief Ben Smith suggested.

The facts are these: In 2008, Barack Obama won 52.9% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes, carrying 28 states.  In 2012, President Obama won about 50.6% of the popular vote and 332 electoral votes, carrying 26 states.  He earned about 69.5 million votes in 2008 and won the popular vote by about ten million votes.  With a few votes still to be tallied in 2012, he has earned about 62 million votes with a winning margin of a little over three million votes.

On a scale from one to ten, in terms of a disaster for the Republican Party, this was probably somewhere in the four-to-five range.  Yet, as explained above, it’s being hailed as a ten (or close to it).

While I don’t think the situation is as dire as a lot of giddy pundits, there is some bad news to be doled out.  Let’s get to it.

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Election Day

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Tom Garrett

Today, we as a nation decide between the evil, plutocratic cult member who wants to take the country back to the 1950s[1], or the anti-American socialist Muslim who probably isn’t even eligible to be president in the first place.  Or possibly between two lying shills who are both in the pocket of the big corporations and who just want to keep the people down, man.

At least all of that is what I’ve gleaned from my social media interactions over the past four months.  Today, that all comes to an end, giving way to many more months of accusations of election fraud, unethical tactics, and tampering with voting machines.

Beyond obvious general interest in the actual outcome, there are several more specific things I’ll be watching tomorrow:

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Hell in a Cell: Live Blog

Posted on October 28, 2012 by Tom Garrett

I wouldn’t say I’m about to write a live blog of the WWE’s Hell in a Cell pay-per-view reluctantly, but it would also be fair to say that I wouldn’t have done so without the encouragement of my legion handful of fans readers.

So, thanks to that elite fraternity, I present to you my real-time (or close enough) impressions of one of the WWE’s non-major shows that still costs $55.  I add the following provisos at the outset:

1. Should I lose power thanks to our friend Sandy, all bets are quite obviously off.

2. While many live blogs have the most recent posts at the top, I’m not going to bother doing that.  It will read better for people who see this for the first time tomorrow (what can I say — I’m an optimist).

3. I’m missing the possible deciding game of the World Series, Sunday Night Football, Boardwalk Empire, and, most importantly, The Walking Dead in order to watch and analyze this pay-per-view.

In short, this show better f***ing deliver.

Let’s get to it.

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