Darrelle Revis is a football player

And Dan Dierdorff is the worst. Props to the Sports Guy for calling him out on this idiotic kind of broadcasting.

Time Warner Cable Sucks

A few of us were discussing this over email the other day, and it merits discussion in this larger forum.

First, a little background. Cable, phone and Internet are all packaged together in New York City. If you want all three, you pay Time Warner Cable about $200 a month (give or take a few bucks depending on whether you buy any premium channels, go without a phone, get an extra cable box for the bedroom, etc.). This is the only non-satellite option that is generally available to most New York City residents. And given that battling with a landlord over satellite installation would be about as much fun as jamming a PEZ dispenser into your eye, most people just go with Time Warner.

But here's the thing. Time Warner Cable sucks.

It is fucking terrible.

One of the contributors to this blog recently observed that "I hate [my cable box] more than anything else including terrorism." It's not big things. They don't superimpose turtlenecks over Emmanuelle Chiriqui (scwhing!schwing!) during episodes of Entourage or anything like that. But the little stuff adds up. The sound cuts out for no particular reason sometimes. If you tape one football game for more than ten minutes you lose every episode of the Daily Show that you taped last week. It costs a fucking fortune, etc. But such is life, right? You deal with it or you shop elsewhere. Well that's all well and good, but now they are just trying to piss me off. Because of the aforementioned problem of keeping a five-hour Superbowl on tape, my old cable box crashed. You remember the one:

Who would have thought I would ever miss you?

So we had to get a new one. I cannot find a picture of it on the web, but it is (a) bigger, (b) uglier, and (c) about a thousand fucking times worse than the old one. Micro League Baseball on Mike Gray's Commodore 64 had a better graphics array than the display on this fucking thing (side note: someone told me that the software changed regardless of the cable box; seems odd that it happened the day we got the new box, but whatever). The machine is about as responsive to the remote control as Mrs. Side Bar is to me on a Tuesday morning (zing!). And the fast forwarding. Dear god the fast forwarding. Like the old model, this cable box offers the user a choice between several different speeds of fast-forward. But it's really no choice at all. It either goes so slowly that you might as well watch the commercials, or so quickly that you jump 5-10 minutes into the program before you can get it to play at a normal speed again. How the fuck are the Mets already losing, the Phillies haven't batted yet? Oh wait, I just fast-forwarded into the middle of the 6th. Neat.

I think it's on pause.

I know this may seem like it is not a big deal, but I would be the first to admit that I watch a lot of television. And when DVR technology first came out, it was pretty amazing. But Time Warner has managed to make it so fucking tedious to use it that it just amounts to a huge step backwards.

Dear Lord Jesus, Thank You For Jay-Z

Holy fucking shit, Jay-Z's new album, The Blueprint 3, is so good I almost don't believe it. Every time I'm about to give up on rap music, Jay-Z comes out with a new album and this one is no exception. Let me just say this, is his song "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-tune)" the beat is supported the whole way through by a clarinet (it's possible that it's a saxophone). And it's not like, "why is there a clarinet on a rap song?", it's more like "why isn't there clarinet in every rap song?" I don't know what else to say. It's just so damn good.

Jay-Z aside, I don't really know what else to think about the rest of the rap world. As good as Jay-Z has been since 1996 is how bad the remainder of rappers have been since then. The exceptions, Eminem I guess, are few and far between. Even guys who were great at one point, let's say Nas or Q-Tip or Method Man, have been wack for years. I'm in a quandary of sorts in that I know I love rap music, yet there isn't any new rap music that I like even a little bit. I can name a hundred rap songs that I love, but none of them have come out since I was in high school. I know it's not that I've changed, because every time Jay-Z comes out I love it, and I can appreciate that Eminem was perhaps the cleverest rapper ever and threw down some great shit. I know in my heart then, that new rap music just sucks.

Hopefully they're just going through their adolescent phase, kindof like rock and roll in the '80s, before they blow it back up. Of course, for every Nirvana and Pearl Jam from the '90s there are a hundred Matchbox 20s and Nickelbacks sucking the life out of rock and roll.

Anyway, thank you Jay-Z.

Art Imitating Life?

Down goes Gmail!

This can't be good.

WHAT DO WE DO?! HOW AM I SUPPOSED POST THIS AWESOME SERIES OF MCFLYS IN MY STATUS BAR? OR THIS AWESOME AD FOR DUREX CONDOMS? COME ON, INTERNET, STOP FUCKING MY SHIT UP! AND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAMN DAY, TOO?! IF I DON'T SEND THAT EMAIL BY 6 ... everything will probably be fine, I know.

I'm also quickly realizing how addicted I am to my Gmail. I've got some things I need to do (which I need Gmail for), but ultimately they can wait. Still, all I can think about is FUCK YOU GMAIL! YOU KNOW WHAT? I'M GONNA GO USE FACEBOOK CHAT! DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU'RE MAKING ME DO?! FACEBOOK CHAT SUCKS BALLS AND SO DO YOU, FUCKFACE!

I should really try to get a girlfriend or something.

Blog Fatigue

Side Bar summed it up nicely:

I get bored of seeing the same thing on the blog, and when we go more than a few days without a new post, it sort of sucks. And that is particularly the case when the most recent post is (a) yours and (b) kind of shitty.

This post is my solution to that problem.

we can't be friends, E.