Three years in the making

The problem with making an awesome album (say, Chutes Too Narrow by the Shins) and subsequently getting somewhat famous (say, by getting name-checked in a popular indie film, which, for example's sake, we'll call Garden State) is that anticipation starts building for your next album (hypothetically, for our purposes here, called Wincing the Night Away). And if you happen to take more than three years between releases (three years, three months, and two days, to be exact, in a speculative sort of way), well, you run the risk of having the hype swallow up your next album before it even has a chance to spread its wings.

Unsurprisingly, this is exactly what happened with Wincing the Night Away (which is, in fact, the name of the Shins' third full-length). People expected - well, I don't know what they were expecting. "New Slang" eleven times, maybe? At any rate, Wincing is experimental, complex, musically rewarding, and in just about every way the equal of the albums that preceded it.

Those who had gotten too used to the fairly straightforward guitar pop on Chutes (not that there's anything wrong with that; I'd probably put Chutes in my top ten favorite albums right now, although that's a particularly nebulous list) may have forgotten that Oh, Inverted World contained plenty of sonic experimentation - just think about "Your Algebra" and you really don't even need to call up a second track. As such, you'd think that Wincing wouldn't come as such a surprise, but it does, at least at first. The opening track, "Sleeping Lessons," initially contains no guitar at all and features some amount of distortion on James Mercer's voice, but it eventually breaks into a rollicking final section that establishes the album as something you have to keep your ears open for.

"Australia" and "Phantom Limb" are much more straightforward tracks that wouldn't have been out of place on Chutes ("Pam Berry" is quite a bit different but it's less than a minute long and so barely counts), but everything shifts a bit with "Sea Legs," which almost sounds like "Moby f/ James Mercer" or something, rather than a Shins song. With Wincing the Night Away, however, Mercer proves that it's no longer immediately obvious what a Shins song should be. "Red Rabbits" has a quirky sound, but it's not one that is quintessentially "Shins" (if indeed a band can have a quintessential sound after three fairly distinct albums) - nevertheless, it's one of the best songs Mercer has written to date. This is followed by the insanely catchy opening riff to "Turn On Me," another immediate Shins classic deservedly broadcast to the world on a recent episode of "Late Night with David Letterman."

The album loses a small amount of steam towards the end, which is probably the worst thing that can be said about it. "Black Wave" sounds like "Your Algebra" all grown up, but much like the earlier song, it has a whiff of filler about it - compared to most of the album there are surprisingly few words (they don't start until 1:08 of a 3:19 song, the shortest full track on the album). "Spilt Needles" is another song whose sound will probably surprise casual Shins fans, though it's another (like "Sea Legs") that proves surprisingly good on repeated listens, once the shock has had a chance to wear off. "Girl Sailor" and "A Comet Appears" are both more standard-sounding tracks, closing the album with a sense of familiarity.

The sound of the Shins may be shifting once again, but they've never sounded richer than they do here, nor has Mercer sounded more confident. He may not be a tremendously accomplished vocalist, but his voice is distinctive and well-suited to his labyrinthine, often impenetrable lyrics. As usual with the Shins, however, puzzling out the lyrics is only half the battle, and Mercer has crafted track after track of gorgeous melodies to please even the most spoiled ear. "Phantom Limb," well-chosen as the first single, and "Red Rabbits" stand out, but every track has at least a few moments of transcendence to its name ("Pam Berry" is a possible exception, but this is understandable as it's mostly just an interstitial).

I complain slightly on every Shins album that Mercer didn't see fit to give us more than ten tracks (as already covered, Wincing has 11, but one is less than a minute long), but it's hard to be too upset when the music flows so well and has been so well-crafted. If three years and ten tracks are what Mercer needs to deliver albums of this quality, it's hard to argue with his recipe for success. Wincing the Night Away may not immediately surpass its predecessors, but it stands with them while representing a confident step forward at the same time. To draw a Beatles comparison as I am apt to do, if Oh, Inverted World was the Shins' Please Please Me and Chutes Too Narrow their Hard Day's Night, then Wincing the Night Away jumps over Beatles for Sale right to Help! Whether the Shins, like the Beatles were, are capable of even bigger and better things remains to be seen. James Mercer probably isn't going to be changing the very face of rock music at this point, but then, no one in 1965 was likely to have seen The White Album coming, either.

Grade: A

Cola nuts

First of all, a slightly belated birthday shoutout to my dad, who turned 35 for an unspecified number of times on Friday. I got him the new Shins album, which I also picked up for myself on Tuesday. A review of that is coming soon.

In the meantime, Drew and I did another pop taste test on Saturday, this time a test of colas (Drew, for some reason, was very interested in doing a cola taste test). It was more interesting than you might think at first, but ultimately it was kind of... well, why spoil it? The results of our endeavor are linked from the Soda/Pop Page.

Let them know why you're wearing the crown

Sorry, America. I wouldn't have been terribly upset had the Saints won, but you don't turn the ball over that many times, in a snowy Soldier Field, and expect to win. Or, evidently, compete. Grossman had another mediocre-but-inoffensive game while Jones and Benson ran all over the Saints and the defense looked much improved. Another two weeks off and I think this team is ready to silence all the doubters.

Although Bill Simmons' recent column was semi-complaining about everyone hating the Patriots, he makes a good point about the state of following sports in this country today:

Sports has evolved into a 24/7 event, between the instant highlights and internet coverage, thousands and thousands of Web sites and blogs, an infinite number of fantasy leagues, a never-ending slew of sports radio shows, sportswriters screaming at one another on TV and everything else you can imagine. Every game and event is digested and processed almost instantly, and then it's rehashed and digested again, and then it's beaten into the ground, and within a few hours everyone feels obligated to come up with their own unique angle on things -- even if it's extreme, even if it's insane, even if it's blisteringly nasty or vicious, even if it's completely nonsensical or inane.

This is totally, 100% true. There's just too much, especially in football, which in taking over as the new national sport has inherited the bloated following that comes with that mantle, magnified even further by the cable and internet age. ESPN.com uses video games to simulate possible outcomes of football games, and even writes recaps to go with them, as though the games have actually happened in any sense. Naturally, they're never right (the Bears were picked to lose both their playoff games, and the computer took San Diego over New England and NE over Indy).

But with all this coverage, people inevitably look for the best story and then not only run it into the ground, but seem to go after anything that might stand in its way. The best story was the Saints. They helped New Orleans recover from Hurricane Katrina, they have exciting rookies, Drew Brees had an MVP-like year, they'd never earned a bye before. They were the sentimental favorite. And I'm not blaming anyone for that. But why did "the Saints are the sentimental favorite" seem to go hand-in-hand with "the Bears can't win, won't win, forget it, they stink." It's like everyone forgot that:

(a) The Bears won 13 games
(b) In October, the exact same pundits were suggesting the Bears could go 19-0
(c) The Saints, a warm-weather dome team, were coming into Chicago in January
(d) The Saints' defense really wasn't very good

Dome teams don't always lose outdoors to better teams - just look at the Colts last week - but it seems to happen more often than not. People looked at the Saints' offense, the fact that the Bears' D had looked mediocre recently, and handed the Saints the win because they were the team that didn't have Rex Grossman. Which is all well and good except that they were also the team that didn't have Brian Urlacher, Adewale Ogunleye, Nathan Vasher, Charles Tillman, and the rest of that playmaking defense. You know who the Saints did have? Fred Thomas. How'd that work out?

People also continued to jump on Grossman, effectively handing him the blame for a loss that hadn't yet happened. They forgot, further, that Grossman actually has a very good arm and just makes bad decisions sometimes (because he's basically a rookie, still). No one seemed to consider that the situation favored Grossman not being put in a position to win the game - the Bears could afford to run the ball a lot and the Saints were likely to be affected by the weather. Yet every analyst on ESPN.com picked the Saints on Friday.

And in perhaps my favorite twist, Gene Wojciechowski wrote the following three columns:

December 18: "Least impressive 12-2 team ever"
January 14: "Bears are softest team in last four and should have lost to Seattle"
January 21: "Um, okay, I guess the Bears are good"

Well, sorry, Gene, and everyone else. Once again the Bears proved that you can bash them all you want, but when the time comes, they get it done. 39-14, no less, a game that wasn't even particularly close for most of the second half. The much-maligned offense got into the end zone plenty (helped by short fields thanks to the defense's forced turnovers) and the D looked great for most of the game. And now it's off to Miami.

Which means we have to spend two weeks listening to the talking heads say how the Bears have no chance in the Super Bowl because of the huge edge the Colts have at the quarterback position. Seriously. Can't wait.

The BigFlax Quiz Bowl Farewell Tour, Stop 2

As most or all of you know by now, this is the last year that Alma and I plan to play quiz bowl. It's just not that important to us anymore - I've stopped keeping my own stats, which should tell you something about my priorities. Interestingly enough, I appear to be playing some of my best Trash ever, which could just be because I'm older or could be because I'm no longer overly fixated on game scores and the like. At stop #1 of the Last Hurrah Tour, I put up 48.5 PPG at TRASH Regionals, good for third in individual scoring at the tournament and my second-best corporate TRASH showing ever (half a tossup per game behind 2003 Regionals). At stop #2, I put up 61.25 in eight round robin games at Ann B. Davis, also good for third place individually and my best-ever showing there. (Of course I'm not sure that those stats are exactly right - they rarely are - but it's probably close enough.)

As for the tournament itself, it went all right. We went 5-3 in the round robin with a couple tough losses - after starting off 2-0 by thumping one of the Pitt teams and squeezing past Eric Hillemann and Julie Stalhut's squad on the last question (with all due respect to Eric, he's got something of a Beloit Curse on Colby and myself, as his results against us in Trash are always drastically opposite to the tournament standings), we hit a tough packet for us and dropped a 220-210 heartbreaker to Illinois A. It's pretty hard to win a game when you neg four times - all we had to do was not neg and we would have won, even if Illinois had picked up the questions exactly as they did after we negged. But woulda, coulda, shoulda, after all. We rebounded with three straight routs, including collecting 16 of a possible 21 tossups against the other Pitt team in our bracket. Then we met the Michigan alum team (Traicoffs/Long/Erinjeri) and lost 280-250 on the last question, followed by our expected drubbing at the hands of the O'Reillys + Quintong (because if there's one thing the O'Reillys needed, it was adding one of the country's top ten players as a free agent), though we only lost by 130, the closest anyone got in the round robin (and one of just two games in which they didn't have at least 14 of the 21 tossups available).

At 5-3 and having lost to the three teams ahead of us, we got shunted into the middle playoff bracket, but that worked out just fine for us, as we rolled through it, including hanging more than 500 points on one of the Chicago teams in our last game, to finish seventh. Of my six trips to ABD, seventh actually is just the fifth-best finish my team has recorded, but that says more about the consistency with which my teams have done fairly well at the ABD than about this year. I thought we played about as well as possible and hit one rough packet at the wrong time - had we swapped the round in which we played Illinois A with the one directly following it, we probably would have won both, finished 6-2, and made the top bracket, and given how well we played on the playoff packets maybe we could have been top two or three. On the other hand, we could easily have lost to Hillemann's team, finished at .500, and had to cling to a top ten place. All told, I'm perfectly happy with how we played. It was, I thought, a solid question set (ABD usually delivers on this count), which is all I'll say as there is a mirror yet to come.

I used to sequester this stuff in the Quiz Bowl section, but since I'm not copying down everything for a full recap anymore, you're stuck with them here. Sorry. There'll be three more of these at most, and those'll be in March, April, and August (only the April one, TRASHionals, is guaranteed), so I think you'll live.

Three and counting

First of all, Drew insisted that I post final standings for the Bowl Challenge just so everyone knows that he officially won. So, fine. Here you go:

1. Drew (22-10)
2. Stan (21-11)
3. Rudnik (20-12, -6 winner score)
4. Flax (20-12, -14 winner score)
5. Dad (19-13)
6. Tyler (18-14, -1 tiebreaker score)
7. JQ (18-14, -7 tiebreaker score)
8. NJ Dave (15-17, -7 tiebreaker score)
9. Rich (15-17, no tiebreaker)
10. NU Dave (11-21)

Happy? Good. Moving on.

In sports news, my new hero is Greg Archuleta of the Albuquerque Journal, the only AP voter who cast his #1 vote in the final poll for the country's last unbeaten team, Boise State. (BSU finished #5 in the final poll; Florida, of course, finished first.) Could Boise State beat Florida? I don't know; quite possibly not. But as a team that won all the games they could, don't you think they should get a chance? If anything, a playoff system is more necessary in college football than in most other sports; in basketball and hockey each team plays every other one at least once, for example, and the same is true within each league in baseball. In college football, you're lucky if the top teams play two strong out-of-conference games. (Ohio State played one, against a rebuilding Texas team, and while Florida did play two bowl-winning teams, they also played Central Florida and I-AA Western Carolina, both of whom they slaughtered.) So the national title contenders probably aren't going to play, unless they're in the same conference, and yet the two best are determined by human polls and computer formulas, and not anything that happens on the field. It's getting pretty ridiculous. Ohio State/Florida was probably the best pick for the title game, but it was by no means the only reasonable pick, and that was so because these teams don't play each other. Set it up so that the contenders meet in a playoff and the eventual title showdown will be much more conclusive. I know some people value tradition over finality, but if that's the case you should be rooting for a return to the old system, where the big bowls had specific conference affiliations and if the #1 team was from the Big Ten and the #2 team was from the SEC, there was no way in hell they were going to meet. Now that's the way to be unsatisfied with an outcome!

In other news, this is a real website. I don't know whether to be impressed or alarmed. Doesn't it just seem really, weirdly, oddly specific? I mean, just burritos? Maybe I should set one up for bubble tea, or turkey sandwiches.

January 9 means it must be Alma's and my anniversary. Happy three years, baby! I know other people are reading this so I'll spare you too much mush, but it has to be said, over and over again: I love this woman.

Bowled over

Cincinnati and Southern Miss won, so Drew, at 22-9, takes the title in the Bowl Challenge. Monday's game is irrelevant, since everyone had Ohio State (and even if they didn't, the only person who could catch Drew with one game is Stan). Since it's Drew, the token of my esteem will probably be candy of some sort, although I should probably try and make it slightly more interesting than just handing him a bag of Skittles. I suppose we'll see.

Final Standings (prior to Monday's game)
1. Drew 22-9
2. Stan 21-10
3t. Flax 20-11
3t. Rudnik 20-11
5. Dad 19-12
6t. JQ 18-13
6t. Tyler 18-13
8t. NJ Dave 15-16
8t. Rich 15-16
10. NU Dave 11-20

Drew has sewn up the second-best winning percentage in Challenge history (if anyone ever tops Marc's 19-6 from 2001, I'll be pretty surprised). Meanwhile, though I hate to keep piling on Dave, his picks were kind of amazing. He started 0-7, then went 3-3 to get to 3-10... and proceeded to go on a 6-0 run, getting all the way to 9-10 before missing another. He then went 2-2 to get to 11-12 following the Cotton Bowl - and hasn't gotten one right since, dropping to 11-20 with an 0-8 run, which actually manages to beat his 0-7 start. Talk about being streaky!

Anyway, that's the Bowl Challenge for another year. I'll update the actual page after the title game, but this is the last I'll write about it here. And with good cause!

The home stretch

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I don't have internet at home right now (thanks, RCN). Updating the picks has been hard enough, since I have to do it through the website's control panel (much, much harder than with a WYSIWYG editor), so I've been doing it more sporadically than I otherwise might have. That said, they should all be up to date now, and assuming I haven't miscounted, our post-New-Year's-Day standings look like this:

1. Rudnik (19-8)
2. Drew (18-9)
3t. Flax (17-10)
3t. Stan (17-10)
5t. Dad (16-11)
5t. Tyler (16-11)
7. JQ (15-12)
8. Rich (13-14)
9. NJ Dave (12-15)
10. NU Dave (11-16)

If Wake Forest wins tonight, Rudnik will have things virtually locked up; he'd go two games up over Drew and three over Stan and me. Drew would need Cincinnati and Southern Miss to win just to tie Rudnik (not that that's not possible, but obviously it doesn't leave him any breathing room as those are the only games they have different of the final four), while everyone else would be mathematically eliminated.

If Louisville wins, however, Rudnik and Drew would be tied at 19-9 with Stan and myself at 18-10 (I've included Tyler and Dad, who would be at 17-11 with a Louisville win, in the below scenarios, even though I calculate that they can't win at this point). The Sugar Bowl and title game are both non-factors in the race at this point, meaning it would all come down to the International and GMAC Bowls. So assuming Louisville wins tonight, the following scenarios could happen:

If Western Michigan and Ohio win:
Rudnik 22-9 (or 21-10 if ND wins)
Drew 20-11 (or 19-12 if ND wins)
Flax 20-11 (or 19-12 if ND wins)
Tyler 20-11 (or 19-12 if ND wins)
Dad 19-12 (or 18-13 if ND wins)
Stan 19-12 (or 18-13 if ND wins)

So we'd have a three-way tie for second, but since Rudnik had UWM and Ohio, he'd win going away. But what if he's wrong about both?

If Cincinnati and Southern Miss win:
Drew 22-9 (or 21-10 if ND wins)
Stan 21-10 (or 20-11 if ND wins)
Flax 20-11 (or 19-12 if ND wins)
Rudnik 20-11 (or 19-12 if ND wins)
Dad 19-12 (or 18-13 if ND wins)
Tyler 18-13 (or 17-14 if ND wins)

In this scenario Drew would win, and Stan would actually sneak all the way to second.

If Cincinnati and Ohio win:
Rudnik 21-10 (or 20-11 if ND wins)
Drew 21-10 (or 20-11 if ND wins)
Stan 20-11 (or 19-12 if ND wins)
Dad 20-11 (or 19-12 if ND wins)
Flax 19-12 (or 18-13 if ND wins)
Tyler 19-12 (or 18-13 if ND wins)

In this case it would come down to a tiebreaker between Rudnik and Drew. Rud has 48 total points, while Drew has 59. (I'd call that advantage: Rudnik.)

If Western Michigan and Southern Miss win:
Rudnik 21-10 (or 20-11 if ND wins)
Drew 21-10 (or 20-11 if ND wins)
Flax 21-10 (or 20-11 if ND wins)
Stan 20-11 (or 19-12 if ND wins)
Tyler 19-12 (or 18-13 if ND wins)
Dad 18-13 (or 17-14 if ND wins)

The final scenario, which involves me turning around my January 1 fortunes (2-4!) and getting all three remaining difference games right, would actually lead to a three-way tie atop the leaderboard. More problematic? Guess who has the same tiebreaker score. That's right, Rudnik and I both took 48 points (35-13 for him, 27-21 for me).

In the interest of full transparency I am announcing right now the resolution to this situation should it actually arise. (Of course, if Louisville, Cincinnati, or Ohio win, it becomes moot.) In the event of two players with the same tiebreaker score, the player whose score for the winning team is closer wins the tiebreaker. Should this fail to resolve things (say Ohio State wins 31-17, for example), the winner will be the player whose birthday is closest to the birthday of the game's MVP, much like the second tiebreaker (never used) for the Tournament Challenge.

(Troy Smith: 7/20; Ted Ginn: 4/12; Antonio Pittman, 12/19; Chris Leak, 5/3. Rudnik, with his March 20 birthday, would beat me in three of these four.)

So anyway: advantage Rudnik, for the moment. But it's not over yet.