Exhibit 12.3

So after posting this about horrible mid-late 90s pop-rock which found its way into heavy rotation, sometimes even to this day, I figured I'd find and examine some other examples. I limited myself to things not on this A.V. Club list though there are some good ones there too.

"Hey Leonardo (She Likes Me for Me)" - Blessid Union of Souls



Best Lyric
There were a lot of options here--including a Tyson Bedford reference--but I've got to go with the following bizarrely uncertain passage wherein the singer seems to be under the impression that women would like him if he hung out with Steve Buscemi:

She likes me for me
Not because I hang with Leonardo
Or that guy who played in "Fargo"
I think his name is Steve

"How Do I Deal" - Jennifer Love Hewitt



Best Lyric
This song may not have been popular anywhere else, but they played it incessantly in the town I went to high school, even 10 years after the song came out. Anyway, this song is off the I Know What You Did Last Summer soundtrack and it's fun to imagine that instead of singing to some generic boy, she's actually singing to the killer. To me, that's the only logical choice:

What the hell I have to do
How do I deal with you (How do I deal with you)
How do I deal with me (How do I deal with me)
When I don't even know myself
Or what it is you want from me

Um, Jennifer, he wants you to die. You're the one who's making it difficult.

"Absolutely (Story of a Girl)" - Nine Days



Best Lyric
Tough to say, but I think the song shows its true colors when in the middle of an otherwise pro-this girl ditty the singer becomes an asshole boyfriend for a few lines:

Now how many lovers would stay
Just to put up with this shit
day after day
Now how did we wind up this way

Oh, I get it, this is about your guilt. Gotcha.

"You Wanted More" - Tonic



Best Lyric
After many attempts to define the word love, our lyricist gives up:

I gotta pick me up when I am down
I gotta get my feet back on the ground
I gotta pick me up when I am down

[Solo]

I just hope the lead singer was able to put working as a janitor in this video as experience on his resume. (Okay, that was too mean. I have a soft spot for Tonic for reasons I've never cared to explore).

"Something's Always Wrong" - Toad the Wet Sprocket



Best Lyric
This song features indecipherable verses which culminate abruptly in very trite thoughts:

Again
It seems we meet
In the spaces
In between
We always say
It won't be long
But something's always wrong

Bonus points should be given for this band name leading to one of my favorite Futurama jokes. Bored, exasperated Lela, "This Toads the Wet Sprocket." Ouch.

Everything You Want - Vertical Horizon



Best Lyric
I'm not even going to look. I'm under the impression this song gives people cancer.

"I'll Be" - Edwin McCain



Best Lyric
Again, I just can't do it. My guess is the best lyric is whatever one made you play this during the father-daughter dance at your wedding.

"Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" - Paula Cole



Best Lyric
Seeing as how this song has a sarcastic, feminist message that America chose to ignore, it's easy to take the lyrics at face value and find them funny:

Why don't you stay the evening
Kick back and watch the TV
And I'll fix a little something to eat
Oh I know your back hurts from working on the tractor
How do you take your coffee my sweet
I will raise the children if you pay all the bills

Also funny for featuring an odd performance from Paula Cole in the video. She actually looks worried most of the time like people aren't going to get it and her spot on the Lilith Fair is going to be in jeopardy.

Quick Hits!
"Hanging By a Moment" - Lifehouse. I have nothing to say about the song except to commend the lead singer's earnestness in the video. Well done. You could learn from him, Ms. Cole.

"Kryptonite" - Three Doors Down. Fun fact: I got sucked into watching the entire video when I went to find the link.

"Bitch" - Meredith Brooks. I did not get sucked into watching this little gem off of Satan's party mix.

"Missing" - Everything But The Girl. Okay, so this one is on that A.V. Club list, but I feel like it deserves to be mentioned twice.

"(Any song off of New Miserable Experience)" - The Gin Blossoms.

"Truly Madly Deeply" - Savage Garden. Any Savage Garden song would work just as well. I couldn't even make it through thirty seconds of this video. The lead singer just creeps the hell out of me. Plus, the horrible.

And I'm going to stop. I have now successfully avoided writing anything today. Hoozah!

Exhibit 2.5

One of my front car speakers sounds like it's blown (or whatever speakers do), and so I've faded the music all the way to the back so I don't have to listen to the crackling. It makes every song sound like someone whispering in my ear.

Exhibit 1.20

So I'm getting ready to play in a company-sanctioned basketball game, and all I can do is imagine myself posting people up and beating my boss off the dribble. There are two problems with this 1) I've never been good at basketball and 2) I've done nothing in the years since I last played basketball to make myself better. In fact, all I've done since is pretty much binge drink, smoke briefly, stop smoking but start drinking more Coke and coffee, cut back on the binge drinking while increasing frequency and overall alcohol consumption, and sit in a chair without engaging in any physical activity. In other words, the math I should be working with here is 7th grade Adams Middle School select-league player Adam Peterson + Age, Alcohol, and Athletic Apathy= DNP - Vomiting. That's a box score joke. If you're reading this--and again, you're not--you probably didn't get that.

But why is it in my mind it all seems so easy, as if the last time I played basketball I was Danny Manning and I just need to shake off some rust. If you could see how pristine my crossover is in my mind, you'd swear I'd actually done it once without kicking the ball into the third row. And even though I know I'm no good, there is still this cognitive dissonance there to make it seem as if I somehow could be good. I mean, I haven't played in a decade, theoretically I'm just as likely to get better as I am to get worse. It's not as if practicing ever helped me.

The mental gap that suggests that if I haven't done something in a long enough time that means I have permission to start dreaming about maybe joining an adult league and winning the MVP, is a dangerous one. People make decisions by not analyzing past performance all the time and pretending that if someone was once good they will be again. It pretty much explains the last 30 years of Marlon Brando's career.

UPDATE: I have just returned from said basketball game and am nominally still alive. Ironically, I actually did play like Danny Manning. Only with a limp. And who ate too much for lunch. And who occassionaly called for a sub despite the absence of such subs. You know, the Danny Manning who played for Dallas. If nothing else, I'm pretty sure jumpshot won't be on our corporate reviews this year. Final line: 30 minutes, 2-3 from the field, 2 assists, 2 TO, 1 steal, 8 times I didn't run back down the court, and 11 fouls (give or take). I was probably not definitely the worst player.

Exhibit 1.19

It occurred to me this weekend that there is an entire genre of food that I spent most of my childhood eating that I rarely get to experience anymore: the potluck dish. Some of our--by which I mean mankind's--best entrees and desserts come in convenient and easily transportable squares which we march off under tinfoil to place on one of those long folding tables in a gymnasium somewhere. This never happens to me anymore yet it seems like I spent half my childhood deciding between two different tupperwares full of nearly identical pasta salad. Well, in honor of this, my list of the best potluck foods:

• Chocolate covered Rice Krispy Treats - The ultimate in half-assed mothering that beats out much more complicated desserts. Bonus points for when the chocolate layer is made with just melted chocolate chips. Negative points for when the Rice Krispy Treats have absorbed the stench of Kool Ultras.
• Enchilada Casserole - This dish always satisfies the obscure potluck rule that states all ethnic food must be made by someone of an opposite ethnicity. Senora Crocker is almost surely the originator of this recipe.
• Li'l Smokies - Traditionally made by someone's single father who owns a crockpot, two bottles of barbeque sauce, and nothing else. Plus, they always lead to one person bringing a quivering plastic spoon full of barbeque sauce up to their mouth after all the Li'l Smokies are gone.
• Au Gratin Potatoes - At least nine people will bring this . That's a good thing.
• Pumpkin Pie - As with the potatoes, multiple people will bring pumpkin pie and no one will be disappointed. It's especially great because it generally leads to two mothers staring each other down and carefully watching who goes for which pie first. I'm pretty sure several families at McDonald Elementary school were broken up because a father took a piece from the wrong pie. It was probably for the best.
• McDonald's Orange Drink - This may have just been a local thing, but it seems like McDonald's would provide a giant yellow cooler full of orange drink for every potluck between 1989 and 1997. I think it was just their normal Hi-C watered down, but it was delicious and deserves a mention.
• Cupcakes purchased at grocery store - See Smokies, Li'l. I don't know why cupcakes that come from grocery stores always have a giant cone of frosting that doesn't cover the entire top of the cupcake, but they just do. Even better when these have been placed in a dish to conceal their shameful origins.

That's hardly a comprehensive list. Feel free to suggest more. Oh, and no, I don't know why I'm writing about this either.

Exhibit 1.13

The most shocking thing about this whole bridge collapse--okay, maybe third most shocking thing after the relatively low mortality rate and the fact that the Royals and Twins played an hour after the bridge collapsed within a few miles of the stadium--is that more bridges don't collapse all of the time. We're talking about metal and cement structures spanning hundreds of feet in the air which are nearly constantly supporting the weight of hundreds of cars and passengers. These cars run on fire! The people in these flaming death chariots atop decades old structures built by the Irish or whoever are driving at 70 m.p.h. are within a few feet of other drivers, some of whom are probably drunk or on their way home from a drug deal.

I can't believe this doesn't happen all of the time. Of course, I can't believe gas stations don't just blow up sometimes . I can't believe more buildings don't fall over in the wind. And don't even get me started on planes.

I'm not even afraid to drive or fly, yet the world as I imagine it, the world we deserve, is a wasteland somewhere between The Road Warrior and Escape from New York. I mean, the President flies everywhere. Of course sometimes his plane is going to crash and some of those times his escape pod is bound to land in a prison. I mean, do you know how many prisons there are? It's simple arithmetic. This is why we have Snake Plissken in the first place.

This kind of rhetoric is just sad, however. And I like Hillary and agree with everything she has to say about funding for our infrastructure, but nothing is wrong if in the 21st century we are scared to drive over bridges. Bridges are in the air. We should, naturally be scared of them. We should be more scared of bridges than, say, cougars.

Don't get me wrong, it is a tragedy. However, we were also pretty lucky. So far only five deaths have been confirmed. The media hasn't been this upset over five deaths since that summer everyone was afraid of sharks. We got over that, and they even have super sharks now. They killed L.L. Cool J for god's sake.

Anyone on a bridge about to collapse has the right to think whatever they want, but I imagine at least some of the people in Minnesota weren't entirely surprised. They had always known the world could turn on them like this. The sort of people who looked at the Leaning Tower of Pisa and thought it was only the natural state of a building that old. On the bridge, people like that, people like me, probably had a stunning moment of clarity where they thought Of course this was going to happen. This is the Mississippi River we're trying to cross in explosion machines. What a fucking stupid idea.

I like to think the president in Escape from New York thought something like this too as his pod spun towards an island of trashcan fires and bloodied crowbars. And I'm sure the off-screen media was clamoring on about how in 1997 surely we should be able to build a presidential escape pod that can avoid prisons. We can't. We can't.