I waited so long to respond to Dawn Summers’ challenge that she has resorted to trying to coax Ferrari out of retirement. That means it is time to respond to get with the meme.
I have to “name five things that people with whom I generally associate think are really cool, but that leave me cold”. I was having trouble coming up with five things, and I was thinking about recasting the meme, but damn it if Karol didn’t beat me to the punch. So I’m back to just answering the question. In no particular order:
Citizen Kane: I can’t tell you how many people have told me what an amazing movie this is. How it was ahead of its time and in many ways ahead of ours. But it is boring. Boring boring boring. I would fall asleep watching this movie even if I knew I would be tazered every time my eyelids drooped.
Knowing a lot about new music: This is very similar to one of Dawn’s selections, but I don’t mean “new music.” I mean the obligation to keep up with it. I am getting older. I know this and acknowledge it. When something new bubbles up to my consciousness and it meets my tastes (which would probably take in a lot of the stuff I don’t know about), I embrace it. I just don’t have the energy to keep up. Cooler people will keep me informed about what I need to know. Along these lines, Modest Mouse wasn’t bad, but for a few months they were more ubiquitous than Starbucks and I’m not sure that they deserved it. I feel bad for the people so in the know that they were force fed Modest Mouse for a year before giving in and preaching the gospel.
Buffy: I watched episodes here and there. I enjoyed them. But if you listen to the people who really like this show, you’d think that Joss Whedon invented writing.
Derek Jeter: He is an excellent hitter and a very smart baserunner. He has put up all-star numbers his whole career and is likely to continue to do so. Unfortunately, he is treated like the second coming of Honus Wagner. What that meant was that the real second coming of Honus Wagner had to move over to play 3d base while St. Derek of Ann Arbor Kalamazoo stayed at shortstop. Even though, by every defensive metric (however crude they are), Jeter fields like his glove is made of anti-matter. It isn’t that he boots the ball, he just has the range of a lamppost on grounders. (He can chase down a popup, but I never said he wasn’t an excellent athlete.) With A-Rod - a legitimate Gold Glove shortstop - on his right, Jeter was able to cheat up the middle enough to start actually fielding grounders to his left and had his best statistical season in the field last year. He is a great player, but the reason he has more rings than Liberace isn’t his “heart”; it is because he has spent his whole career in the middle of a lineup of equally great players.
Party Poker Blogs: This is the one that is likely to get the most hate thrown my way, so I want to be clear: this isn’t a slam on Iggy as a person or as the blogfather and I’ve made this section extra-long (uber, if you will) in his honor. Iggy has done more for the poker blogging community - hell, to create that community - than anyone. He has co-written a book to make playing poker more profitable. He has set up blogger tournaments online and - amazingly - in Las Vegas. He linked to me when I started my silly poker writing and sent some a lot of traffic here (which I squandered). Everyone who has met him in person attests to the fact that he is a great guy. None of that makes his uber-posts readable.
Even if you want to link to something in an uber, you can’t. Why would you? If you see something interesting in item 31, do you want to send your own reader to skim the first 30 items? You can’t even scroll through that much material. It would be almost forgivable if it were original content. Instead it is a series of extended quotes from other sources with minimal commentary and a lot of bonus code pimpage. Also - and I hate to say this - Confederacy of Dunces is one of my favorite books; Iggy has been spelling Ignatius wrong for years. Every time I see that ‘o,’ a part of me dies. I can only hope that Pauly will protect me from the hordes, even though I suspect he disagrees with me.
I’m not looking to bring down the wrath of the community, so for anyone out there: If you want to sign up on Party Poker or Full Tilt Poker, use bonus code IGGY.
And here’s a bonus sixth: Originalism/Strict Constructionism. They aren’t the same but they share a lot of the same flawed logic. They are more malleable than their champions let on and frankly, even the founders wouldn’t have wanted a Constitution interpreted solely by either of these infantile metrics. They were smart enough to know that they couldn’t predict the future and chose a limited document so that it would be flexible not fixed. I added this bonus sixth thing just to note that I have conservative friends and I respect them. Even though they are almost always wrong.
On whose doorsteps shall I light this flaming bag of crap? I choose asphnxma because I don’t know why Dawn didn’t; Pauly, because he actually has opinions about everything, can probably knock this off in 10 minutes and I don’t link to his non-poker blog enough; and Alceste because he doesn’t know me and might as well hate me, he doesn’t post enough and I like reading his comments over at Karol’s site (and I want to see if he even notices).