Exhibit 11.2

This post probably won't be about cake or crullers or any baked good, really. So that's an improvement already.

I just wanted to point out some things.

Carlin has started his eighth and greatest blog, Fake Interviews With Reputedly Famous People, which, as you may have guessed, features fake interviews with reputedly famous people. They continue to get better. I fear the day when this blog is abandoned like so many others and leaves only a disturbing picture of David Duchovony left for future generations.

I don't care if that's not how you spell his name. I'm not about to look it up.

Joe Posnanski's blog features a poll on who is the lesser actor between Tom Cruise and Kevin Costner. As I type this, they are exactly tied with over 2,100 votes cast. My opinion: Costner is the far inferior actor. Now, if the question was which guy I would rather have a beer with or have a catch with or have show me how great he is at baseball, then sure, Costner all the way. But we've been given a question, and that's the question we have to answer. Ignoring the question at hand in favor of choosing the better-honed public persona is how we ended up in this mess.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to trying to convince myself that the Batman I'll see four months from now on DVD will be just as good as seeing Batman at midnight tonight in a theater. It's an argument I'm losing.

Exhibit 11.1

Heather and I made more chocolate chip cookies.

(I know you're thinking that we live in some magical, cookie-filled paradise. You're mostly right).

Really we just had some standard chocolate chips lingering about and decided to give the old Tollhouse recipe a go to see if it could stand up to our adventures in Cookie-of-Record-approved deliciousness.

Um, no.

They weren't bad exactly. The first one even tasted great if only because their mediocrity made us think of how good cookies could be, sort of like how watching any other third baseman makes a person think of George Brett (no? just me?). Perhaps for the first few bites we were even able to fool ourselves into thinking the flat, sparsely chocolated discs were those other cookies.

In the end, tasteless crumbs stuck to the tears running past our mouths as we shouted recriminations.

Or maybe I'm just misremembering.

Exhibit 10.27

So Heather has started to review things on Yelp--you can see her reviews here--which I think is really fascinating and strange and scary. Apparently this started when some previously unknown archnemesis posted a negative review of a treasured family dining spot which she felt the need to defend.

(This, incidentally, is how I feel when reading this review of the Sands Motor Inn in North Platte. Two stars? Oh, you're on my list Kristopher R. If you weren't some lone warrior pointlessly trying to establish a Yelp outpost in North Platte circa 2006, I'd show you up by giving that nonexistent restaurant at least four stars just to balance out the universe.)

Anyway, it's a short fall from defending restaurants to laboring over just how many stars to give to the mediocre Thai place where we eat. It's fun to have conversations like this:

Heather: What if they read it?
Adam: Yelp in Lincoln seems to be you and one other person.
Heather: I hate that person so much.
Adam:
Heather: Three stars.
Adam:
Heather: Two stars.
Adam:
Heather: No, three stars.

The correct answer is two stars.

Exhibit 10.26

So when not rambling about controversies I don't really care about, I sometimes write about stock photography. Apparently, I'm not alone. Slate is on the case here.

Exhibit 10.25

Not content to play it cool like their benign, cookie-perfecting brethren, the New Yorker has decided to throw a grenade into the relative calm of the mid-early-mid election coverage with their most recent cover. Naturally, people are upset.

The problem isn't that it's unidentifiable as satire or that it's a prima facie ploy for attention, but that it's satire without an obvious referent. The necessity here is that we know the New Yorker is joking because they're the New Yorker, not because there is one consistent, universally identifiable image they are mocking. At best it can be said that they satirizing a problematic conservative meme but their method of doing so confuses the issue by using imagery that, with the exception of the fistbump, is completely from the artist's (rather than the public's) consciousness.

It's a perfectly reasonable response to see this image's heresy (the flag burning) and its stereotyping (poor Michelle) as trumping whatever chuckles, if any, it gets. Mostly there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what role the New Yorker plays in our culture. I think most of us would agree that this image is not so obviously satirical that if it were, say, on the cover of a conservative magazine like the National Review, we'd all recognize it as funny rather than horrific and offensive. If the same image could be used to make exactly the point it's supposed to be satirizing, is it successful satire? And is that 'THE NEW YORKER' up top capable of turning the fear, hate, and racism of the image into a joke all by itself?

It is for me, but that's probably not good enough.

When this image is plastered all over the news tonight--as Mr. Remnick et al. surely knew it would be--the country will be left to make a decision about this image without benefit of an enlightened dialogue on the subject. What discussion there is will be about the controversy, thus effectively removing any element of satire before most Americans get the opportunity to even see the image. Katie Couric isn't going to turn to look at this image as it hovers over her tiny shoulder and laugh tonight. No, she's going to talk about it in an even, grim voice and we're all going to study this like a Jim Crow-era cartoon (except for me, I'll probably be playing Civilization or baking cookies).

As someone from the plains, I'm never one for underestimating "the public" but I think it's a legitimate issue here. Had this been the cover of Mad Magazine, we wouldn't have an issue, but for a magazine that's likely to have diverse and even contradictory connotations to those who don't regularly read it, placing such a problematic image on the cover without only the magazine's name as context risks quite a bit. We already know how this ends, of course, and now that familiar black THE NEW YORKER header is going to loom quite a bit darker for many.

The real question here is why they didn't find a way to use this image--which I think is actually quite funny in the proper context--in a way that was actually, you know, satirizing something. If, say, this image had been on the television screen being watched by two scared looking farmer-types, suddenly the joke is on the media and the rubes.

It's perfect. If we know anything about the New Yorker, it's that they hate the rubes.

Exhibit 10.24

As the next step of this blog's continued devolution from hard hitting literary and political analysis to masochistic sports blog to smiley-faced cooking blog, this post is about cookies.

The Times occasionally takes it upon itself to decide what the best recipe for _______ is and recently they've turned their gaze to chocolate chip cookies. Their quest is detailed here which I'm redundantly linking to despite the fact it has inevitably been emailed to you by your grandmother. The recipe--a chronicle of cacao ratios and refrigeration times--is here.

Not wanting to miss the most recent cookie zeitgeist like we missed the Cakester fad, Heather and I already took a stab at these and I'm here to tell you they are nothing short of incredible.


In the oven they seemed threateningly puffy, the sort of lonely, doughy cookies that you see at a school potluck, but by the time they were done they'd settled into the perfect ratio of crispy outside and chewy inside.


Plus, look at that presentation. I wasn't sure about the step calling for a brown table cloth, but the Times really came through.

Stay tuned as this blog continues to decline in coming weeks until it's nothing but artwork done by Australian children:


Crikey!

Exhibit 10.23

I don't have a favorite professional basketball team, mostly because I don't like the sport. While this small handicap has never kept me from casually following a team before--hello, Chicago Blackhawks--I've begun to feel like I need to hop on a bandwagon lest I find myself alone with Spike Lee and, faced with a dearth of other conversation topics, have to talk about Crooklyn.

So I'm thinking about jumping on this new Oklahoma City team's bandwagon, but I can't decide if it's worth it. The case:

Pluses
Kevin Durant
Good G.M.
What is sure to be an ecstatic fanbase
Closest team to Lincoln (well, more or less tied with Minnesota anyway)

Minuses
Team did more to destroy Seattle than the movie Singles
Will undoubtedly choose a horrible name/color scheme
No history at all
All the players are going to hate OKC

Those are some pretty daunting minuses. I know we're all thinking this, but rooting for this team will be a little bit like rooting for the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic. It's a compromise solution springing from tragedy, nobody inside or outside the organization wants to be there except for a select few, and there's a distinct feeling that sooner or later everyone is going to come to their senses and we'll all go home.

That said, it's a pretty compelling opportunity to grow with a new team that isn't going to have the collection of stiffs and bad contracts of an expansion team. This whole thing might come down to the mascot. If they pick the Thunderbirds, I'm out. If they pick The Fabulous Thunderbirds and feature Jimmie Vaughan on their jerseys, I'm back in.

Exhibit 10.22

Stock Photography Review

They say you can judge a society by how it treats its worst citizens, and there's no reason to think this isn't a good way to judge stock photography as well. Here are some examples of how stock photography handles the sick among us because they are anonymous consumers of products too.

You can't really get much worse off than this lady, who appears to have caught all the diseases. As she uses her non-branded computer to check the Internet for possible cures to Headache/Stomachache/Pregnancy, she swallows pill after pill, no longer caring if she ends up like her cousin:


Oh, poor Tiffany. If only they hadn't made her pills in the same color scheme as her favorite variety of Good & Plenty...

By the way, that photo is pretty much perfect if you're trying to sell...

A) Nothing
B) A Way Out
C) Durable Brown Plastic Pill Bottles


Gerry wasn't sure how to immortalize Grandpa until he saw a newspaper ad seeking models for stock photos...

I'd like to think that whoever took this photo was really excited about cornering the market on corpse photos.


There's nothing really remarkable about this one except for the fact Tiny Head here was probably actually sick the day they taught fake coughing in his San Bernardino Community College acting class. It was his one chance to get an 'A' which would have saved him from a life spent acting, poorly, like he was actually sick.

Of course, then there are the lucky models like this kid:


Somehow he lucked into his own series of stock photos taking place in a dystopian future where tracking done by forehead barcodes has replaced traditional parenting.

That's like the Star Wars of the stock photography world.


My god, these two look horrible. What happened to them?


Ah, of course.

Exhibit 10.21

Congratulations to Royals All-Star Joakim Soria.



Stats

23 SV
37 IP
41 K
1.22 ERA
.730 WHIP
349 ERA+
1 Old-Timey Beard

Soria didn't even have to grow that beard, it actually jumped from Abraham Lincoln's face once it found a worthy suitor.

Too soon?

And did I mention his intro song is "Welcome to the Jungle"? Or that his nickname is "The Mexicutioner"?

Yeah, he's pretty much your favorite player.

Exhibit 10.20

For reasons I can't even begin to conceive of, I've joined Facebook. By my count, I'm probably the eighth to last person in the world to take the plunge into this seedy world of walls and graduation years. I'm cold and alone. People keep poking me. I'm scared.

If you too want to be a part of this humiliating embodiment of man's decline, join me. Or friend me. Or whatever. I don't know. It's probably best if we all just forget this ever happened.

Exhibit 10.19

The Raw Shark Texts

Sometimes I'm easy. If you write a novel that quotes Murakami and Calvino, features an ethereal "conceptual shark" as an antagonist, and includes an underground world of people who explore unspace, well, I'm probably going to enjoy your book. If the last quarter of the book is more or less a retelling of Jaws, all the better. Steven Hall's debut novel has all of these things and quite a bit more in a quick 450 pages. I might try to review it at length soon so I'll keep my thoughts here brief.

I loved it.

Okay, less brief:

The plot - it probably won't do any good to describe it to you. Not that it's difficult to follow, exactly, just that its delightful oddity might seem over-the-top out of context. Here goes: Eric Sanderson wakes up in his house without any memories. The prior Eric Sanderson has foreseen this occurrence and arranged for a series of notes, letters, and mementos to arrive. These are less than helpful since the prior Eric Sanderson doesn't seem to remember much more than our Eric Sanderson because a conceptual shark--called a Ludovician--has been eating his memories. And it's coming back.

You know, that old story.

It's hard to express just how well the conceptual elements are handled. The shark isn't a shark...but it's totally a shark, peaking its fin above the floor of his consciousness and hunting Eric Sanderson down until it has eaten everything except his pointless human shell. Part of the beauty of the book--both as an object and as a concept--is that it visualizes its language-based terrors as pictures crafted out of words. It's pretty incredible to see a novel--a thriller no less--so singularly focused on thought and language and culture that it's impossible to describe the book without touching on how those elements form us as people.

As you might have noticed, it's a highly original book. Still, it's not always perfect. The language seems to erode as the pages go on, possible because the author (like this reader) might have preferred to spend the entire book in his dark, theoretical underworld rather than pushing the plot toward the Jaws reenactment. Also, the ending seems to want us to question the reliability of the narrator, but of course every reader is already doing that given his condition. The thing is, most if not all readers will decide that they don't care if he's crazy as we're people looking for a good story not detectives trying to find what's real in a world of impossibility. It's more fun to believe in the shark than it is to doubt it, and risking our faith for a wink seems pointless if not disrespectful.

Besides, we know which side the author falls on. The world here is too remarkable to dismiss so easily.

Exhibit 10.18

So some guy from Wisconsin also named Adam Peterson allegedly killed someone and has possibly killed two others. Jesus.

A few thoughts here:

1. Welcome Wisconsinites visiting from Google. I'm not that Adam Peterson. In case it wasn't clear from the last post, I wouldn't murder someone named Marino. Kiss someone named Marino? Maybe...

2. After getting knocked down a peg by this kid, I'm now the 109th most well-known Adam Peterson in the country. I think I'm behind an unusually personable tax account from Cleveland and the president of the Northwestern Michigan Orchid Society.

3. I've covered this before, but seriously, what's wrong with the Petersons? In the last three years alone we've killed more people than bird flu. Just once I'd like to turn on the news, hear about a murder, and not have to think, "Please don't be a Peterson. Please don't be a Peterson. Please don't...damn it!"

4. Why can't a Petersen kill someone to take the attention away? They're the ones that are really nuts.

Exhibit 10.17

So there is now definitive evidence that Dan Marino is the greatest quarterback of all-time. I don't understand the math, but I'm just happy there is now a number that tells me what I already know. Sort of like how Christians and Pixies fans know that God is seven.

That number: 8,593

Needless to say, that number is bigger than seven. Take that, God/Elway/Ross Gload.

Exhibit 10.16

Speaking of the book club, it's almost my time to pick a book. It's been agreed that it can't be anything that one of us has already read, so I'm looking for suggestions.

Unfortunately, it has to be something that the local library has at least three copies of which pretty much means it needs to be something relatively new (past 2-3 years) and popular (like a book club pick), preferably already in paperback for those of us buying the book. Also, I don't think they'd go for a short story collection and I don't think I'd go for a memoir.

Books I'm considering:

The Confessions of Max Tivoli
Pros: Might be good or at least not suck
Cons: Don't know if I can handle another narrator with an alternative lifecycle

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Pros: Probably good, I actually want to read it
Cons: Not yet in paperback, not enough at library

Okay, I now realize those are the only two I'm really considering and one isn't even really possible. There are plenty of others, but none really meet the library requirement. You can check here. If there are less than three copies available, it's probably not going to work. It's amazing, even some of the biggest books of the last two years only have one or two copies in the entire system.

I would actually really like to read a classic, but none that I haven't read and are readily available really come to mind. Sigh.

So start suggesting already.

Exhibit 10.15

Forever

This is the first book that has made me really regret being in the company's book club. And it's not that it's awful, exactly, just that it's the sort of consensus book that any group of readers will inevitably gravitate toward. It's a bestseller. It's high-concept without literary pretense. It's got sex and violence and spooky. It's vaguely timely.

It's also pretty much bullocks. Our hero--a label I often use as a synonym for protagonist but here I literally mean hero-- is a young Irishman in the mid-1700s who finds out he's not Catholic or Protestant but some kind of ill-defined tribal/Gaelic thing. Oh, and Jewish. There's probably an offensive joke to be made given these surprising developments, but there's very little humor to be had in these pages as our hero is too busy being wronged and then avenging wrongs. After his father is murdered, our hero follows his killer to colonial Manhattan but not before befriending a mysterious slave. How to describe the slave...hmm...did you see The Green Mile? The Legend of Bagger Vance? No? Well, let's just say he's magical. And a negro. So, yeah, some kind of magical negro basically.

After avenging his father's death--for the moment, at least, we're told that his tribe requires him to kill any and all male heirs as well. This is remarkably nonsensical for revenge purposes but great for tying a plot together!--our wounded hero is saved by Bagger Vance who, without even asking, grants him eternal life on the condition that he never leaves Manhattan. Um, thanks, Bagger.

It should be mentioned that this is nearly half way through the book and the American revolution hasn't happened yet. This lallygagging through the beginning and ending of the story forces the novel to move quickly through the intervening centuries but not first without the obligatory cameos from George Washington and Boss Tweed. Mostly our hero, like The Dude, abides until the day Bagger returns to set him free. Eventually the book settles into post-millennial New York where our man has established a comfortable, anonymous existence as a sometime reporter, sometime playboy who mostly just seems miserable with still having to be alive. As the reader surely feels the same way, it would be nice if everyone just got put out of their misery a little sooner, but that can't happen until a scion of his enemy appears in New York, he meets a long prophesied woman, and something happens during the second week of September 2001.

It's that event, used here as a shameless attempt to insert drama into the languid final pages, that looms largest in the last section. The character literally can't take two steps without pausing to look at the majestic towers. I'm reminded of this Onion article. When not looking at the towers, the author fulfills his contractual obligation to J&R Music World by repeatedly mentioning the store. I'm not joking, he mentions the full name of the store at least 10 times, as if everyone in Manhattan runs around navigating by using J&R Music World as a point of reference.

"Well, just go eight blocks past J&R Music World and then take a right. Walk another four blocks to the north of J&R Music World, then take a right, walk eight blocks in the direction of J&R Music World, and then walk four blocks south and you'll have reached the J&R Music World. Seriously, they've got great deals on Sony Walkmans."

Okay, so maybe that wasn't a direct quote.

The worst part--maybe, there's a lot of competition--is that our immortal hero who has lived through 300 years finds himself nostalgic for Charlie Parker and Willie Mays. He laments that "the kids" don't know these bastions of American history. Apparently not even the immortal are free from white, middle-class, boomer nostalgia. I try not to swear on this blog, but seriously, fuck you, guy who wrote this.

On top of it all, the book ends poorly on a note of ambiguity. Basically we've spent 600 pages waiting to know if this guy is going to kill off the family of the man who murdered his father and if he's ever going to die and the book tells us...maybe. Well, maybe I think that's an absurd copout for a book that could have allowed itself at least one risky move. Apparently that part of the book was cut out to allow more space for condescension toward Africans and the Irish. I'd actually like to imagine that this is how the entire book was edited down from a 2,000 page manuscript to a scant 600 pages.

Should I include the scene where the character does something unexpected, the guy who wrote this asks himself. No, I should instead include the scene where the character draws prostitute vaginas.

I'm not joking. Sadly, neither was the guy who wrote this.