Exhibit 1.4.24

Review of the Plains States' Shapes

Look, I don't want to get into a big thing here about what is and is not a Plains state. These are the Plains states as far as this exercise is concerned. Does it make any sense that Iowa is one but Minnesota isn't? No, no it doesn't. And what about Eastern Colorado? Well, since Colorado pretends there's no Eastern Colorado, we will too. But what is Eastern Wyoming if not the Plains? Why it's a desolate dust and despair factory we'd all be better off without.

So in no particular order:

Oklahoma


Okay, so Oklahoma is pretty cool looking. This brings us to our first and probably only real conclusion from this exercise: panhandles are cool. Unless they're Florida's. Then they're the worst. But otherwise: cool.

Oklahoma also has the jagged lower edge which sort of makes it look like a whisky jug God broke and is using to fight off Texas. And by sort of I mean: this is happening.


South Dakota


The best thing about South Dakota is that little Minnesota tumor on the eastern border. I don't think any of us would be surprised to wake up twenty years from now to look at a map and find the tumor had metastasized to cover most of the Black Hills.

I'm really not sure how in that metaphor Minnesota became cancer while South Dakota became an otherwise healthy body. There is nothing healthy about South Dakota except its appetite for the distasteful.


North Dakota


Or Kansas. Who the hell knows. Let's just say that if this outline came up on a geography test, the answers would range from "Ontario" to "The capital of Oregon is Salem."


Nebraska


I could talk about how Nebraska's shape is the country's best fusion of natural geography, history, and panhandle, but that would be to ignore that the greatest achievement of Nebraska's shape is that it somehow connotes motion while the state itself remains stuck in 1938. And eastward motion at that.

I mean, it's a great shape, but it sort of does look like the entire state is a 1992 Chevy Lumina minivan hoping to take a permanent vacation outside Virginia.




Kansas


Nope, wait, this is Kansas. You can tell because if you go east enough you find some personality.

(As a Western Kansan, even I'm offended).

I know a guy who has a tattoo of Kansas on one arm and a tattoo of Oklahoma on the other (presumably to let everyone know he hasn't so much lived places as he has lost a fight against luck) and the tattoo of Oklahoma is instantly recognizable. The tattoo of Kansas, however, was a hand spasm away from being Colorado. My thought is, if you need to add tiny wheat fields and tornadoes and Judy Garland to make your tattoo recognizable, you were probably better off just getting Danny Manning's face. Which, by the way, would make for an excellent state itself:I say, we carve out this shape in the middle of Kansas, give the rest of the land away, and tell the Missouri River we're not going to pushed around by its whims anymore.


Iowa



This, actually, might just be Danny Manning's face in profile. I don't know. It's just a good thing Kansas and Iowa don't share a border because otherwise, we might have trouble. Danny Manning-related trouble.

Iowa is rightly proud of being the face in the Mississippi's dumpy little person though as a child I always thought that person was probably Chef Boyardee. This didn't dampen my enthusiasm any, just made me slightly disappointed when I moved to Iowa it wasn't full of ravioli but fervent Ron Paul supporters.

Let's face it though, Iowa is basically Ohio turned on its side and told to keep quiet unless it has something to say about John Wayne.

Exhibit 1.4.23

The French

So I accidentally typed in the French address for Amazon.com (amazone.com, apparently) and this was the product splashed all over the homepage:


What exactly are they planning?

Exhibit 1.4.22

Thoughts on the Dolphins Firing Tony Sparano

Because I'm either going to tell you like this or I'm going to tell you when you want to talk about politics or books or something. It's better this way.

It's better this way, this firing. Sparano is a good guy, by all accounts, and a good coach by my estimation. He could be a great coach in the right situation. Will he ever get that chance again? I don't know. I sort of doubt it given the names out there and the fact that he's never been an NFL offensive coordinator or (officially) a play caller. Seems like he either gets a head coaching job this year (unlikely) or signs up as an offensive line coach somewhere at which point he's at the back of the line for a head coaching gig. It could still happen for him (I mean, it happened to Chan Gailey) but I'd say the odds are 70/30 against.

Which is too bad because despite the conservative nature of his Dolphins teams--something I could live with if it didn't so often come long after there was nothing to lose--Sparano's players seemed to love him which is a rare thing in a coach that's not "soft." He's not a tyrant in the Coughlin school nor is he an absentee in the Caldwell school--instead he's the rare disciplinarian whose players respect him and played tough and smart and focused long after they would have tuned the Coughlins of the world out or realized Caldwell was an empty suit. With more talent, he could have been Coughlin or even better, I think. That's not to diminish Coughlin, just that I think a lot of coaches would lose a team after an 0-7 start and Sparano never did. Hell, they seemed to play harder for him once they realized they were getting him fired.

Sparano's loyalty did him in as much as anything which is terrible considering how little loyalty the front office showed him. But maybe his ceiling was reached, that's certainly possible. At some point, you've got to not only play correctly but you've got to play smarter and there wasn't much about Sparano's gameplans that suggested this was going to happen. A run-first, physical team will probably win again in the NFL, but it's not an accident that the Patriots, Packers, Colts, Saints, and Steelers have dominated the last decade. Even the Steelers, arguably the only team that fit the Sparano model, have gone away from the running game and opened up the offense. For better or worse, it's what the game is now, and only at the urging of the owner did Sparano even begin to move in this direction.

He ultimately didn't have the time or the personnel to take the team there, but there've been a lot of positive signs these past few weeks. Sparano made them look like they were a few players away but are they? I don't know. They've got one more hole now, and if they're sincere about Tony having been a good coach--and I think they should be--then they're going to have to do better than good.

But so far a lot of the names getting thrown around only make me think, Hey, Tony Sparano is available. Let's go get him.

Exhibit 1.4.21

In Which I Pretend to Live Blog an MRI

0:00 - O, I've done this before, nice man who put a warm blanket over me, no worries. Yes, please, strap my head down. I shouldn't be able to move. I'm not worthy of that responsibility.

0:01 - I hope some kind of Walking Dead scenario isn't happening outside.

0:03 - Some kind of Walking Dead scenario is definitely happening outside.

0:05 - Think, Adam, you can escape from this tube. There's got to be more than one exit.

0:06 - I'm going to die.

0:06:30 - Ahhhhhhhhhhh!

0:07 - Eh, screw it. I'm probably not going to die. [starts thinking about fantasy football]

0:10 - "Try not to swallow."

0:11/12/13/14/15 - [swallows]

0:20 - My favorite magnet cycle is the one that sounds like an old-timey typewriter from a newsreel.

0:21 - "Dateline, this tube. Look out, Mussolini, Uncle Sam's boys aren't crying anymore and have their swallowing problem on the run."

0:30 - I wish Fred Jackson and Matt Forte were still alive. I mean, to me.

0:40 - O, hi, nice man who put a warm blanket over me, just another hour? Why not make it two? Because screw Mussolini.

1:00 - "Baby, when I'm with you, it's like you're the MRI machine and I'm the injured high school sports star." - something John Updike probably thought.

1:01 - Can I tweet that?

1:02 - Na, probably not.

1:03 - But I can blog it. Totally.

1:10 - And emotionally I skipped from bored right past heroic and am back to fear.

1:12 - The zombies would probably just eat my legs but then I'd be a zombie and would totally have dibs on this nice livin' tube.

1:14 - I hope after this I get to stand in a long coffee line with a bunch of young doctors to remind myself that most of the doctors I know got into it because they really liked Grey's Anatomy and wanted to drive a Mercedes. I will? Great.

1:20 - Story idea: "Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, beep."

1:22 - Sudden urge to fight tube.

1:23 - Is that as hard as you can hit magnets?

1:24 - O, I assumed it's just take your daughter to work day. Little Olive is doing great.

1:30 - This one again? Great, no, I mean, I wouldn't want to be a huge one note cliche, but if you want to be Joe Cocker...

1:31 - No, I'm sure you're very advanced, but there's no getting around the fact that you're made by a company that builds electric razors.

1:40 - I don't know disembodied voice of the nice man who put a warm blanket over me, sometimes I think I have gone crazy.

1:45 - I'm moving! It's over!

1:46 - Nope, just moved down a little. Now back. Now down. It's just screwing with me. Shouldn't have brought up Joe Cocker.

1:50 - MRI machines would be cooler if at the end they just dumped you inside themselves into a portal where you ended up waiting for an Americano next to a high-pitched girl in scrubs telling her friend she never gets to go out anymore. Not because that would be so great but because it would make the experience more like Mario.

2:00 - I think the MRI ended ten minutes ago and I didn't notice.

2:01 - I should have stolen those socks as a memento.

12:38 - My god, I think, I think I love the tube.

Exhibit 1.4.20

Things

* There's a new NOÖ Weekly available right here edited by Laura Eve Engel. I have a thing in it about being pope or something. It's unclear. But it's a fantastic issue anyway which you should check out.

* There's also a cool prose poem made out of lines from all the pieces at the NOÖ blog here.

* So these YouTube "Hitler reacts to ____________" things are more than a little tired at this point, but I have to give it up to the Royals fan who put this one together about the Royals signing Jonathan Broxton. It's really funny, all the more so if you're a Royals fan who enjoys jokes about those hydraulic adaptor commercials that blanket all the radio broadcasts.

* If you're not that--and statistically the odds of you being that are quite small--it's still got plenty of that nutty Hitler.

* I also have a couple of Sire (on)Lines in the new Jet Fuel Review. These are about the internet and Wal-Mart which, as you might imagine, put them in the latter portions of the manuscript despite my initial intention to call the project Sam Walton: Made in America and have it sold for $8.88 at over 7,000 retail locations worldwide.

Exhibit 1.4.19

O Gmail



I got these ads because, as best I can tell, the email thread contained the words "Old Woman," "Dress," and "Underwater."

Or it knows.

Exhibit 1.4.18

A Primer on the Rules of Cricket, Pt. 4



31. The bowler shall be allotted one villain. The villain shall be allotted one nemesis. The nemesis shall be allotted one savior. The savior is allotted nothing. None of these parties shall be allowed in the stadium nor made aware of the game of cricket under penalty of scheming.

32. Tuesday, being The Duke's day, shall be skipped in matches that go on longer than the time between an orphans breakfasts and all subsequent days reordered and renumbered in perpetuity or until the fifth ninth Monday of eighth September.

33. The gambling of shoes is required with the terms secured and held by a foreign national equipped with the proper deity and without want of a castle. Shoes shall be held in the castle with separate keeps to segregate the jodhpurs from the paddocks.

34. Upon the retirement of the butler, his wife shall be made aware of the affair.

35. After assessing the temperament of the bees, any player stung unduly shall be within his rights to engage a barrister and seek recompense from the opposing player nearest the bee at the time of trial.

36. Should fruit be provided oranges are not to be served until the conclusion of the most recent kerfuffle with the Boers.

37. The scuffle with the Boers shall never truly conclude.

38. In the yellow wicket a player may charge the officiate with "Possession" at which time the player will have three attempts to name the demon. Success earns the player the wizard's hat. Failure and the wizard gets to hold the player by the hand and walk him off.

39. The failure to exclaim "That's a feisty bowl of pudding!" after a particularly spectacular woogly results in the whip with no consideration given to the condemned's spleen.

40. Spectacularity is to be determined by the dowager whose whimsy is least beyond reproach. Regardless of the dowager, during the cascades, players are required to say "That's a feisty bowl of pudding!" in the ratio of sparrows to farthings.

Exhibit 1.4.17

Things I Hope People at This Coffeeshop Are Thinking About Me

* Wow, a Macbook. He must be doing art not updating his fantasy football team.

* Wow, a Macbook and iPod, he's stylish yet independent in a way we, with our totally purchased just to conform Macbooks, can only aspire to be.

* That probably isn't the J. Geil's Band we're hearing from his headphones.

* Let's bother him in this small, 2-hour window we have before he starts grading that stack of papers.

* I bet he's an individual who has thoughts on Barthes's Writing Degree Zero and thus making him write about it would be pointless. We'll tell everyone.

* He's in law school.

* I bet he snuck some whiskey into that double-caramel caramel macchiato because he just looks like that sort of guy.

* He probably doesn't want to talk about the Kansas City Royals, but I'm going to ask anyway just in case.

* His computer is angled slightly away so it will be impossible for us to read his short story which we were totally going to do if given a more advantageous angle by which we might have experienced his work that the world is apparently not ready for yet (geometrically speaking).

* Hard to believe someone with such a carefully curated homeless look doesn't have somewhere better to be at 1:30 on a Wednesday.

* Look at the way he doesn't even look up when people are walking by. He's really locked in...O, nope, he's staring at us.

Exhibit 1.4.16

Things

* So, um, it's been awhile. How about that.

* I had a long post on the Penn State scandal written up, but I decided not to post it. There is absolutely nothing else to say about that.

* Literally, the only thing to say is that it's terrible and then shut up.

* Check out the new Wigleaf for some amazing stamp stories, including one from me that's about, I don't know, pilgrims or something. Who knows. What I do know is that the others are awesome and that I'm very happy to be there among them.

* Anyway, it's a very cool issue and a very cool concept. You should definitely buy the book from Mud Luscious here. Do it.

* This new Drake album is The Weeknd's best album ever.

* Maybe I like the Childish Gambino album better, but nothing on there is as good as "Freaks and Geeks."

* Fantasy football update: The Cal Drogo and Mike Kafkaesque are both in 2nd place.

* Grading update: I'm not doing it. I'm doing this.

* I'm barely doing this.

Exhibit 1.4.15

Tattoo Ideas for Someone Else Sorted by Decreasing Likelihood


W.A.S.T.E. symbol



Retweet Icon



Alfred Hitchcock Presents on Lower Stomach



Dino from the Flintstones Playing an Upright Bass



Sitar Diagram



Sheet music for "Up Where We Belong"



Facebook Homepage Which Will Never Ever Change

Exhibit 1.4.14

Checking In

Let's see what's going on in my old hometown these days...

O for god's sake. This is terrible!

East Fifth does not need new pavement.

Exhibit 1.4.13

Stock Photography Review
Sadsack Businessmen



To honor Mathias Svalina's I Am a Very Productive Entrepreneur--and at the long ago suggestion of one Jimmy Stockham--here are some some sadsack businessmen. But first, you should be sure to pick up Mathias's book which is amazing and entrepreneurial and portable and here. I read it months ago and my favorites have stuck with me long after I should have been paying attention to other things like teaching or writing or whatever it is I do.



"Things are going to get better, Robert, things are going to get better. You've got French cuffs and this is going to be okay."


"Makeup can make my cheeks shine, my lips pop, and my hair porcupine, but it can't make Vanessa come back."


"Why did I start a private architecture library? Nobody went to the one at school and nobody is going to this one either. I don't even know what an architecture library is."


"When they find me, I'll have to say something cute like 'I've got motherboard issues.' Not the truth, not yet."


"More like a notary sad."


"When there was only one set of footprints, it was because I was claiming you as a dependent."


"Dress for the job you want, they said, but I'm still here at the front desk and no closer to that handjob."


"Hey, Cindy. Cindy! Are you having emotions?"


"Okay, keep it together. She might still want to buy the steak knives. What was her name? Vanessa something?"


"I hope it's a nice day outside and not one of those this-hellish-white-landscape-is-a-metaphor-for-how-I'm-dying-inside days. O, goddamnit."


"Every year I find a way to ruin the company Christmas party, and firing everyone to hire Prince to perform may have been the best way yet."


"Stay calm, Robert, this is happening. We always knew it would. O God. Think of the cuffs."


Bonus! Submit your own caption for this one in the comments:


And don't forget to buy Mathias's book at SPD.

Exhibit 1.4.12

How I Know My Phone Is Dying




* Keeps launching Pandora on the Warren Zevon station

* Only works on speakerphone so that god can hear its cries

* Like a Grandpa in the old folks home, no longer recognizes grandchildren/car charger

* Shows complete apathy over whether or not it's on ringer, vibrate

* Calls you in my pocket so you can decide

* Clock only updates when unlocked, phone only unlocked when someone needs me hence--also like grandpa in the old folks home--thinks it's Tuesday, September 24, 1978

* This doesn't explain why it now receives text messages by Pony Express

* It was made by a company that has been bought, spun off, and no longer exists

* It still exists, but only that--nothing more

Anyway, I'm sorry to see it go. It was a good phone.

Exhibit 1.4.11

Today in Confusing Stock Photography




O, The Huffington Post. You're the world's number one purveyor of slideshows about bad stock photography and bad stock photography.

Also, not so good at the irony.

Exhibit 1.4.10

Wok



I need you to know that I now own a wok.

It's like my best friend.

I call it Wok-uin Phoenix.

My fridge is full of leftover noodle and rice dishes.

Sometimes I season the wok just for fun.

I say the word patina a lot.

I don't blog.

I keep hoping lightning will hit a tree so I can carve a wok paddle out of it.

When I'm watching baseball and here the word "walk" I get up and make stirfry.

I nod at Asians.

I judge people based on the amount of fish sauce they have.

I think about whether or not fish have woks.

I'm already thinking about buying a better wok.

I'd name this one River Phoenix.

I couldn't do that to my wok.