Based on the episode “Dear Boy” from Season 2 of Angel.
My name is Andrew, and I have a confession to make: I was once a fan of professional wrestling.
It’s March 20th, 1999. I’m twelve years old, and I’m at an arena in Austin, Texas to see the World Wrestling Federation put on a show. My dad marvels at how Kane, a wrestler who’s billed at seven feet tall, towers above his competitors. He’s graciously tolerating this event on my behalf. I don’t realize it at the time, but this show is largely a dress rehearsal for Wrestlemania 15, which is only a week away. Still, I’m dressed for the occasion.
I have a foam championship belt slung over my shoulder. I’m wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses I picked out at the corner drug store. I’ve taken a magic marker and drawn a pair of long sideburns on my prepubescent face. I do my best impression of his demeanor, his strident presence, his swagger. I’ve spent hours looking in the mirror, trying to keep one eyebrow raised over the other. I have every one of his catchphrases memorized and ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice. It’s all I can do to imitate my favorite wrestler — The Rock.
“Why are so few of us left active, healthy, and without personality disorders?”
– Rorschach, in Alan Moore’s Watchmen
One of my theater teachers gave me some advice before I performed a particularly bizarre piece on stage. He said, “Make the character’s reactions real. No matter how wild the situation or how crazy the setting, you have to make the audience believe that this is how someone would react.”
It’s easy to get caught up in the fantastical world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sure, creator Joss Whedon lays down some important ground rules for his universe, but at its heart, it’s still a fantasy world where the chosen few do battle with demons and monsters and bloodsuckers in a quiet California suburb. Through five seasons of Buffy, Whedon & Co. populated this world. They gave it life as a place where the mystical reigns above the everyday. Then, in Season 6 they decided to turn it completely on its head.
They changed course and put their focus on how the folks battling supernatural threats handle the fallout of that fight in their everyday lives. The mythic elements of Buffy–the monsters, the spells, the magic–were all still there, but they took a backseat to giving the audience one, big, season-long reminder — that the story of Buffy Summers is supposed to take place in the real world.
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A long time ago, in a sweet serene dale,
Dr. Seuss wrote “The Lorax,” a wonderful tale,
About truffulas, Oncelers, a thneed and a plan,
And of course of a small, squat, mustachioed man.
Then some big-shots in Hollywood liked what they’d seen,
And decided The Lorax should be on the screen!
They would spare no expense, they’d promote cross the land,
So that furry and orange could be their new brand!
They put ads up on billboards that list all their stars,
Hawking toys, meals, and t-shirts, and gas-guzzling cars,
And the latter is what has folks all up in arms,
The hypocrisy rankling, And raising alarms,
While the irony of it’s not lost on yours truly,
There’s something else that I find much more unruly.
The ad’s contradiction is worth some distress,
But “The Lorax” is part of a much bigger mess.
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I recently finished watching all of Downton Abbey, and with all the shifting alliances and dramatic turns, I felt compelled to whip up this Character Alignment Chart.
Click the picture above to see the full-sized image.
I was struck by a BloggingTheBoys article asking Who Were The Luckiest NFL Teams In 2011? I encourage you all to read the article if you haven’t already. The short answer is that comparing predictions based on a teams points scored and points allowed versus actual wins and losses indicates that teams like the Packers, Chiefs, and Broncos were fortunate in that they amassed more wins than their on-field performance would predict. It also suggests that, conversely, teams like the Vikings, Eagles, and Dolphins were not in Lady Luck’s good graces this season. Our Fair Cowboys were in the middle of the pack, as the 11th unluckiest team with a -0.6 variance. But beyond 2011, one of the other statistics mentioned by BTB writer One.Cool.Customer really caught my eye.
For most teams, these numbers tend to change from year to year. But not for all. The Cowboys have had a negative variance for the last three years in a row. No team has had more successive years of ‘bad luck’, with the Texans and Panthers the only other teams to also have had three consecutive years with a negative variance.
On a personal level, I have long felt that the Giants are the luckiest teams in sports and 2011 was certainly no exception. The Giants finished with a positive variance for the seventh year in a row. The next closest teams are the Cardinals with four consecutive years and the Saints with three consecutive years. Only once in the last ten years (2004) did the Giants have a negative variance. The Giants are lucky on a metaphysical level that transcends rational numbers.
These statistics raise an interesting question. Is there anything more to these trends in “luck” than just random chance? Is there a reason why the Cowboys have been so consistently unlucky according to this formula when the Little Boys Blue have been so fortunate?
Here are five possible answers to that question.
Recently, I concluded the Top Five Terms Made Up By Yours Truly series with one of my favorite terms: Applecarters. In essence, Applecarters are people who love watching the when unplanned, unscripted, or unexpected happens. They love it when something “upsets the apple cart.”
Apparently, Grantland’s Hua Hsu is, in fact, an Applecarter. He did a great story on M.I.A. and the Impossibility of Selling Out, and described his expectations and excitement about watching pop star M.I.A. at the Super Bowl thusly:
As I watched M.I.A. at the Super Bowl, looking slightly awkward, I felt a sense of anticipation — or was it hope? Was she simply going to go through the motions? Was she going to look purposely stilted and bored, as though to lampoon this self-important event? Would she reach into the crowd and pull a scraggly 99 percenter onstage with her? There are those rare moments when you watch live television and you feel something is about to happen. You notice opportunities when things could go off-script — like when Mike Myers threw to Kanye West on the Katrina telethon, or any moment from a late-’90s Rage Against the Machine performance on MTV. At the end of her pro forma stint on a moribund new Madonna tune, M.I.A. looked in the camera and flipped the bird. Along the continuum of public controversies, a middle finger probably ranks somewhere between the S-word and the F-word, far below a cogent political statement or a bared breast.
Sounds like the yearnings of an Applecarter to me. Welcome to the club, Mr. Hsu.
Four years ago I explained Why I Was Glad To See The Patriots Lose Super Bowl 42, tracing much of my NFL fandom up to that point along the way. The article was the culmination of my path from being a fan of a particular team to becoming a fan of the game. There’s a great deal packed into a pretty expansive article, but the gist of it is this:
While I was a Dallas Cowboys fan from childhood, my NFL fandom really began in middle school, when I started to play football myself. Like all twelve year olds at the time, I was awed by rags-to-riches Kurt Warner and the St. Louis Rams’ “Greatest Show on Turf.” Accordingly, when the Patriots beat the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI, it irked me.
It seemed obvious to any kid at the time that the Rams were one of the best teams to ever take the field. Between the notorious Tuck Rule snowbowl against Oakland, and the Rams not playing like themselves for most of the Super Bowl, New England seemed undeserving somehow. It felt like these flukes allowed a pack of unwitting beneficiaries to deny a historically great team their vindication, and it began my distaste for the Pats.
In 2008, I wrote an article describing why I was pleased to see the 2007 New England Patriots lose Superbowl XLII to the New York Giants. The article not only described my joy at seeing the Pats denied, but traced much of the path of how I became a football fan. With the Patriots and the Giants meeting in the Superbowl again last night, I planned to write a follow up, analyzing the match up, the sentiments of a Pats-hater after another New England Superbowl loss, and the evolution of the game four years later. But I thought it would be interesting to revisit this article first and to take a look back at what it was like to see a team that almost had a perfect season fall just short.
Space…the final frontier. Only a brave few have had the courage, the fortitude, and the SAG cards to lead a crew into the far reaches of the universe. We here at The Andrew Blog decided to salute the five finest on-screen captains to ever command a space-faring vessel. There were only two simple rules: 1. The characters had to be in charge of their ships, whether they formally held the title of captain or not. 2. Only one captain per franchise; one of the biggest problems on spaceships is overcrowding. With those grand limits in place, we present to you the five best captains that the galaxy has to offer.
