A Month of Boring Things - Day Four: Marco Polo (game)

I've often wondered how many shattered senses of self-worth this game is responsible for. One (1), at least. Mine.









Rating: 3%

The Big Dance

It’s March, which means March Madness!®©™ March Madness occurs when paunchy men and women trying to impress men all over the country waste company time by filling out their “brackets:” choosing which college basketball team will shoot more baskets (or “hoops,” as it were) and which team will shoot enough baskets to win the national championship. It’s a better system than the college football BCS (which is basically a gravy train run by ATT, Tostitos, etc., and university administrators; if you’ve ever wondered why universities seem to put more emphasis on football than they do academics, just look at these numbers. Your 4.0 GPA doesn’t mean shit to anyone but Grandma.) because smaller teams, sometimes referred to as Cinderellas, actually have a chance. The downside is there are so many goddamn teams—sixty-four—and that guy Clark in the next cubicle keeps harassing you to get your bracket in on time, bro! Never fear. Viking Andrew is here to help you out with three count them three first round predictions.

1. Ohio St. vs. Siena: OSU looked pretty weak against Purdue, but Purdue has a good outfit this year. Still, I’d say the Buckeyes are in trouble; they have to play a form of limonite clay in the first round! Go with Siena, in the upset (unless OSU pulls it off and wins. Then, go with the Buckeyes).

2. Duke vs. Binghamton: Binghamton has an athletic program? How cute! Go with Duke in an absolute bloodbath .

3. UNC vs. Radford: The Tar Heels are absent their best player, Ty Lawson who’s sitting out the first round with an injured toe (this is basketball, after all). They looked pathetic against Florida State last week. Still, UNC has Tyler Hansbrough, who never closes his mouth, ever . Something about his dumb-face will help UNC past the first round and, in all likelihood, into the Final Four.

I’m out of time / room. Read my addendum in the comments section, and good luck everyone!!!!!!!!

Oh yeah: I hate basketball.

Rating: 46%

The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling

I regarded the Harry Potter series as the Cabbage Patch Kids of the literary world for several years, heaping scorn upon J.K. Rowling and her fans, until I actually read the books and realized how excellent they are. Rowling combines no-nonsense prose, vivid characters and addictive plots with enough escapist fantasy to make it fun, and sociopolitical themes (e.g. the persecution of werewolves, the racist pseudoscience of the "pure bloods" and the quislingism of the Ministry of Magic) of sufficient relevance and sophistication to keep Harry Potter a few steps ahead of the derivative pulp that has been riding on its coattails, so to speak, for the past decade or so.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a collection of 5 fairy tales in the style of the Brothers Grimm with a magical twist, interspersed with M.H. Abrams-style literary commentary supposedly written by Albus Dumbledore in. I like fairy tales, and I liked these stories. However, I think the notes basically act as filler rather than adding much to the story, and in my opinion Beedle is short to the point of laziness--it could have been good instead of quaint if Rowling had put more work into it. I have no problem paying CDN $14.50 for a hardcover book from an author I like. I'd rather not pay the same for 1/4 of a book, thank you very much.

RATING: 65%

(Image from mg.dailymail.co.uk.)

Starbucks

A lot of people hate Starbucks. They've been accused of using anti-competitive business strategies, like allowing certain locations to operate at a loss in order to run smaller, independent competitors out of business. They're also often disparaged, at home and abroad, as representing the metastasis of American-style consumerism--an aesthetically repulsive, morally dubious, homogeneous, tacky and inauthentic update on the same old mercantile "bourgeois" culture that populists and aristocrats alike have been hating on, in one form or another, since feudalism ended.

Permit me to digress for a moment: I have 2 coffeeshops in my hometown. One (let's call it "Rim Rorton's") has plastic booths and stools bolted to the floor, a 30 minute time limit in their seating area, and miserable employees who make minimum wage and wear humiliating fast food-style uniforms. The other ("B***** Street Cafe") is an independent establishment wherein a staff of slouching, moody undergraduate hipsters (who also make minimum wage) complete orders at their leisure, get stoned at work, and generally act like their customers should be grateful to get their coffee at all.

I like Starbucks. They're friendly, professional, relatively consistent, and not too expensive. Sure, they're only asking, "How are you today?" because they want my money, but that's better than a "Fuck you, Jack" from people who are still taking my money. If Naomi Klein and Kalle Lasn wanted to serve me better coffee for cheaper, and maybe throw in a heartfelt hug or handshake and a hot meal for the homeless in the bargain, then I'd happily throw my $1.70 their way. In the meantime, I'll get my coffee at Starbucks, and I won't feel guilty about it.

RATING: 90%

(Image from www.therealestatebloggers.com.)

The Vocative Case

Thankfully, we don't have to worry too much about the vocative case in English, because our nouns don't change depending on what prepositional jigger they're paired up with. It's still there, though, even if we can't see it, and one thing we have to remember to do is use commas to set off any noun that we're addressing directly. This can be a person, as in the following example:

"I really think you should read more prose, Glenn, because H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Whisperer in Darkness' isn't a fucking poem."

Or it can be an object:

"How do you feel about being sat on by that morbidly obese woman, chair?"

Or a pair of abstractions:

"You're a painted whore, Justice, and you, Truth, are a metaphysical chimera."

You should also use commas to set off the construction you x when you're calling someone a name:

"You keyed my car, you piece of shit."

In old school English (which, if it's recognizable at all, is probably Early Modern English), like in the King James Bible, the vocative case is sometimes marked with an O, as in the following sentence:

"O God, thank you for creating Pan's Labyrinth, the best movie ever."

(This is not to be confused with the interjection "Oh!" as in, "Oh! Pan's Labyrinth was such a good movie that my balls are still tingling!")

In some other languages, like Czech, for example, it's a little more complicated, because the ending of the noun changes as well. My friend's name is Ondra, but I have to change it to Ondro in the following sentence:

"You're still my friend, Ondro, even though you slept with my girlfriend after you both got drunk at Skleněná Louka that time."

Some people lament the abuse of commas. Well, I say, "Don't forget--neglect is abuse too!"

RATINGS: Vocative case: Mandatory%
Smug, shit-eating editorial we: 2%, but using one all the time just seems so gutless.

(Image from realtorwives.blogspot.com.)

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a British artist who's famous for installation pieces featuring dead animals floating in formaldehyde that sell for exorbitant amounts of money. He also does "spin paintings," which are created by someone (not Hirst himself, but one of his employees) dripping paint onto a flat, revolving surface. His piece For the Love of God, pictured here, was fashioned from a real human skull to which he affixed 8,601 diamonds. Whenever I think of Damien Hirst, I'm reminded of the painter Rabo Karabekian from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, who "with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid" (Vonnegut 214). Hirst doesn't even paint most of his own pictures, and I think the idea of the mastermind conceptual artist taking all the credit for merely signing his name on the work of others, especially as some sort of "ironic" critique of capitalism and mass production, was fraudulent and boring when Andy Warhol did it 40 years ago.

Damien Hirst's work is smug, nihilistic, and morally and aesthetically repulsive. Moreover, I think his exploitation of dead people and animals for his own financial gain is blasphemous on a level that any thinking, feeling creature should be able to understand. He's not an artist, he's an artiste, and celebrity bullshitters like him are one of the main reasons why average folks don't visit art galleries.

RATING: 9%

(Image from myartspace.com.)

Canada

Canadian-Jewish author Mordecai Richler probably said it best:


"The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule." (Barney's Version p. 386)

Most Canadians are ostensibly polite and self-deprecating, but inwardly smug and sure that everyone else in the world loves us because we're not Americans. We also have free basic health care, which means that if we need hip surgery, we're free to get on a list and wait as long as we want.

It's not so bad living in Canada, if you don't mind the cold. There are almost no poisonous animals or natural disasters, besides snow storms, and we get most of the same T.V. shows that Americans do.

RATING: 69% (78% if you're Quebecois and you don't have lung cancer)

(Image of flag from Tizona's Weblog. Sorry for breaking the usual 1 paragraph format, but I suffer from chronic logorrhoea.)