Author Archives: Andrew Bloom

College Sports and The Plight of the T-Shirt Fan

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Andrew Bloom

On November 24, 2011, Thanksgiving Day, the University of Texas Longhorns and the Texas A&M Aggies met on the gridiron for the final time. Amid the flurry of conference reshuffling in college football, the Aggies were opting to leave for the SEC, while the Longhorns had reaffirmed their allegiance to the Big 12, thereby putting an end to this annual grudge match for the foreseeable future.

Finger-pointing and recriminations abounded. The University of Texas was a Big 12 bully, hogging conference revenue and arrogantly ignoring the concerns of its peer institutions. Texas A&M was a turncoat and a traitor, destabilizing the conference in a jealous cash grab. But wherever you fell in the debate, this series, which stretched back to 1894 and had spurred on countless bonfires, hexes, brandings, fight songs, as well as 117 games and more than a century’s worth of football rivalry, was coming to an end.

The game was a sloppy one, full of mistakes, miscues, and turnovers on both sides. But those early stumbles gave way to a hard-fought, back and forth finish. In the fourth quarter, Texas A&M quarterback Ryan Tannehill threw a touchdown pass that put the Aggies ahead of Texas 25-24. With less than two minutes left in the game, that late score seemed to seal an Aggie victory as the sputtering UT offense took the field. Then, with the clock steadily winding down Texas quarterback Case McCoy capped off a few solid plays by scrambling for twenty-five yards to put the Longhorns in field goal range. As the final seconds ticked away, senior Justin Tucker kicked a forty-yard field goal as time expired to give Texas the victory. It was a fittingly thrilling finish for the last battle between the two venerable rivals.

As a Longhorn-supporter, I was enthused by the outcome of the game, and still feeling aggrieved that the Aggies were fleeing the conference. I took to Facebook, as one does to boast about accomplishments they had nothing to do with, and said, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, A&M.” Ryan, a friend of mine from high school who had opted for the sunny plains of College Station after graduation, replied, “Plenty of sports to compete in yet! Pleasantly, you are one of few t-shirt fans I know to chime in about tonight’s game.”

T-Shirt fans? Ryan obliged me with an explanation. T-Shirt fans are “people without a legitimate rooting interest in the game — people who never attended the institution.” I had never set foot in the student section. I had never come in as a freshman and learned the school’s time-honored traditions from the upperclassmen. I had never been part of the campus rabble cheering on their classmates. I had no official affiliation with the University of Texas to speak of, and therefore, I was not to speak.

Ryan had made his point clear. I wasn’t a real fan of the Texas Longhorns. I was just some guy in a burnt orange t-shirt.

Pity the plight of the T-Shirt Fan.

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Posted in Sports | Tagged Big 12, College, John Locke, NCAA, Texas A&M Aggies, Texas Longhorns | 3 Comments

I Found Jeff Winger’s Dad

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Andrew Bloom

It’s Dexter‘s Stan Liddy, played by Peter Weller. You may know Mr. Weller better from his role as Robocop. The picture of Joel McHale as Jeff Winger is from the Community episode “Investigative Journalism,” and the picture of Peter Weller is from the Dexter episode “In the Beginning.”

Posted in Quick Hits | Tagged Community, Dexter, Jeff Winger, Joel McHale, Peter Weller | Leave a comment

Liam Neeson Can’t Win

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Andrew Bloom

Something that struck me after watching The Dark Knight Rises.

Posted in Quick Hits | Tagged Bane, Batman, Darth Vader, Liam Neeson, Star Wars | Leave a comment

Am I the Only One Worried that “The Dark Knight Rises” Might Be Terrible?

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Andrew Bloom

Well, maybe not terrible, but not very good?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be at the midnight showing, wearing my Batman t-shirt, and cheering with anticipation like the fanboy I am. But I’ll also be bracing myself for disappointment.

The problem is that I’ve been burned before. The first X-Men movie told a solid, entertaining story that reestablished our favorite mutant superteam for the big screen. The second built on the successes of the first, and set those characters loose in the world the prior film had built. The end result was an engaging, well-regarded film that provided fans with the best entry in the series. Then, the third movie collapsed under the weight of too many unwieldy storylines, too many characters to reasonably develop, and too many extras jammed into an already bloated film. It was an unwieldy, schizophrenic failure of a movie.

The most recent Spider-Man trilogy followed a similar trajectory. The first movie retold Spider-Man’s origin story and set up the rationale behind his heroic struggle. The second explored that raison d’être, harvested many of the seeds that had been planted in the prior film, resulting in one of the most acclaimed superhero films of the decade. The third, however, was an unmitigated disaster. Again, it suffered from too many storylines, too little development, and an attempt to do too much in a movie that already felt overstuffed by the end of the first act.

So you’ll forgive my concern when I look at the current Batman franchise and see an initial entry that reenvisioned the caped crusader on the silver screen and managed to wash the taste of the Schumacher films out of the movie-going public’s collective mouths. I see a sequel that took both the character of Batman and the setting of Gotham City that had been established by the prior film, and mined them for all they were worth. The Dark Knight is not just one of the greatest, if not the greatest, superhero films ever made; it’s a movie that helped prompt the Academy to expand the Best Picture category to account for films that transcend their genres and set a new standard for what a superhero movie could be. Now, I see a third movie on the horizon, trying to live up to that standard, and I worry it’s headed down the same path as those other franchises.

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Posted in Movies, Superhero Movies | 4 Comments

Futurama and its Fanbase of Nerds

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Andrew Bloom

Futurama is a television show for nerds. Oh sure, its old cushy slot next to Family Guy on Adult Swim may have attracted a loyal cadre of frat boys and absurdist-loving insomniacs, but the heart of the fanbase will always lay with the poindexters and nerdlingers.

That’s why I was taken aback by the glaring scientific inaccuracies in the most recent episode of Futurama entitled “A Farewell to Arms.” For starters, the Planet Express crew chased after a pair of Fry’s lucky (and only) pants, that have been accidentally tethered to a weather balloon. As the trousers and their pursuers passed into the far reaches of space, the balloon popped. But instead of Fry’s pants floating listlessly in the vacuum of space, they tumbled gracefully back to Earth, managing to land a hop, skip, and a jump from where they were launched, entirely unscathed from their trip back through the planet’s atmosphere.

Even worse, the climax of the episode involved Mars passing so close to Earth that people could jump back and forth from one planet to the other, and suffered no ill effects in the process. There was no catastrophic event or gravitational catastrophe from the two large bodies side-swiping each other. Nor was there any issue with the fantastic speed that the red planet would have to be traveling, likely resulting in a collision that would have devastated much of the globe, let alone the denizens of New New York. The entire exercise prompted me to utter a personally oft-used phrase that was originally coined by Futurama itself – “Windmills do not work that way!”

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Posted in Other Animated Shows, Television, The Simpsons | Tagged Futurama, Lucy Lawless, Nerds, Science | 5 Comments

The Princess is in Another Castle: Braid, Roger Ebert, and Whether Video Games Can Be Art

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Andrew Bloom

“Video games can never be art.” – Roger Ebert

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to judge art. I came to the conclusion, admittedly a bit of a cop out, that judging art is an individual, subjective process. Certainly critics, laymen, and others can reach a general consensus about what does or does not qualify as quality, but in the end, each person has to judge for themselves.

That said, Roger Ebert is dead wrong.

It takes a certain amount of bravado, even for a celebrated film critic, to declare that an entire medium can never reach the pinnacle of artistic merit. It’s easy to point to Ebert’s age and believe that he mistakes the old days of fun if story-bare games like Pacman and Donkey Kong for the immersive, in depth, and often narrative world of video games that exists today. But I think that lets Ebert off too easily. At base, anything that tells a story can not only be art; it can be high art, and Ebert ought to know that.

Anything that uses carefully crafted visuals to evoke a particular sense or emotion can be high art. Anything that envelops the audience in a character, in a world, and transposes their experiences into a grand fictional adventure can be high art. In the same way that a great novel crafts a compelling narrative, in the same way that great visual art compels with color and composition, in the same way that a celebrated film brings the viewer into another world, a great video game can reach those same artistic heights. In fact, video games are uniquely positioned to do all three.

Which brings us to Braid, the 2009 game from Jonathan Blow. Blow is the yin to Ebert’s yang, a man who believes wholeheartedly that video games can be art, but who is relentless in his critiques of the industry as it stands today for failing to live up to its potential. Braid is Blow’s biggest salvo in this fight, and his example to the world of what a video game can be.

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Posted in Other Art and Culture | Tagged Art, Braid, Mario, Roger Ebert, Video Games | 12 Comments

The Ant and The Object

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Andrew Bloom

There was an ant, of no particular renown or distinction. He lived in an ant colony with his thousands of brothers and sisters. He, like many, spent most of the day venturing out into the world to retrieve food and building supplies for his colony. Early one morning, he came across an item so large, he couldn’t carry it alone. It was peculiar and unfamiliar. But something about it told him that it was extraordinary and would be useful to the colony.

The object was massive, and it was heavy, even for the strength of an ant. The ant called some of his siblings to help him lug it back to the colony. He couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Part of it was hard and molded. Part of it was shiny and gleamed in the sunlight above his head. Part of it was rubbery with little pads sticking out of it.

He and the others carried it back to the colony and laid it in front of his brothers and sisters. They all puzzled over what it could be. Various packs of ants were investigating the strange pieces and parts of the object. A group of the ants stood on top of a large circular pad at the top of the item. Suddenly, the entire colony floor was bathed in light, and a loud melody erupted from a collection of holes in the plastic.

The colony hummed with excitement. The ants swarmed all around the object as it showed an ever changing display of lights. They danced on its smooth silvery surface that reflected a million shades of a kaleidoscope. It captivated them, as they squirmed and shuffled from one mysterious surface to another. Then, as if by accident, the object began to rumble and roar. It shifted from one side of the colony floor to the other. In the tumult, it knocked a pile of ants onto a green pad near the mouth of the object that stopped the rumbling. In its place was a booming noise that the ants did not understand except to fear. But it was loud and clear in the small cavern of the colony.

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