Last one in is me

I'm probably the last person on the planet who listens regularly to independent music and had not really heard Sufjan Steven's Illinois album until today. Obviously I had investigated it a couple times, but in every case I had decided that it didn't seem to appeal enough to me. Then I just downloaded the whole thing from eMusic (gotta kill those 90 downloads somehow). Put it this way: I've already listened to the whole thing three times today. And I don't generally do that.

I'm sure if you know who Sufjan Stevens is I don't have to tell you this, but on the off chance that there's someone out there who might be even more woeful than I was, you've gotta give this thing a shot. It is, I must stress, almost surreally good. You'd think that an entire album themed around a state would be a total clusterfuck, but in fact it holds together like crazy. It begs to be listened through all the way - and while I have to say the first half is better (it's certainly where the best full-length songs lie), it's all excellent.

Stevens cheats a little bit on the theme; tiny instrumental bits that are really just codas to full-length songs get their own names (such as "Let's Hear That String Part Again, Because I Don't Think They Heard It All the Way Out in Bushnell") just so he can work in another reference, but that's obviously a minimal complaint at best (except when it comes to eMusic, where 22 tracks does kind of chew up the old download count). The full songs are uniformly great, with a handful being, in all seriousness, instant classics. This has to be considered a top five album of the decade so far for everything it accomplishes. And yes, I know everyone else in the world already realized this (the album was #1 on Metacritic for 2005).

Top five songs:

1. Casimir Pulaski Day
2. Chicago
3. Jacksonville
4. Come On! Feel the Illinoise!
5. Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!

"John Wayne Gacy, Jr." is actually a good song too, but it creeps me out too much to be top five.

Pic

I mentioned pictures of Alma's gifts. Here's #1, the US Soccer sweatshirt, as seen on me today.


I'll get a picture of me in the jacket later, perhaps once I've shaved and stop looking so much like a mental patient wandering the grounds.

Study: America Ready for Football

NEW YORK (AP): A landmark research study conducted by the sports network ESPN has finally confirmed what previously was only suspected: America is, unquestionably, ready for some football.

The study, a survey of more than 80,000 visitors to the ESPN.com website, found that not only is America ready for some football, but that we are overwhelmingly ready as a nation. Fully 87% of voters polled described themselves as "ready for some football," compared to just 13% who said they were not ready, a ratio of nearly seven to one.

The poll was conducted in conjunction with ESPN's launch of their new Monday Night Football telecast, taken over from ABC after the end of last season. Operating under the assumption that Americans were ready for some football, ESPN and the NFL decided to broadcast two games back-to-back on the opening Monday, a rare occurrence.

"We suspected all along that the people of this country were ready for some football," said Mike Tirico, the play-by-play announcer for ESPN's coverage. "We were, however, surprised and delighted at just how ready they were."

Not a single state in the union was not ready for football, though some were better prepared than others. Leading all states in football readiness were North and South Dakota, each with 92% of their voting populations declaring that they were adequately prepared for football. Lagging behind the pack was Wyoming, whose voters were a pathetic 80% ready. Reached for comment, Wyoming senator Craig Thomas said that the results were "in no way representative of our great state's readiness for football." Thomas pointed to the low voter turnout and speculated that a large percentage of people in the state who were, in fact, ready for football were simply not signed on to the internet at the time of the poll. "[They were] probably outside, getting ready for football by doing other manly things like barbecuing or playing football themselves," Thomas added.

In order to accurately measure the true readiness for football, ESPN plans a postgame poll with the question, "Were you ready for some football?" Analysts say they expect the number to drop slightly in the wake of a lackluster Redskins-Vikings tilt.

(Multimedia: View America's football readiness prior to Monday night's games.)

Is "FirePatFitzgerald.com" taken yet?

I'm kidding, of course. But rough loss for Northwestern today. I know New Hampshire is a very good I-AA team, but they are still a I-AA team, and this was a home game, and it's not like the final was 21-20. Ugh. Doesn't bode all that well for the Big Ten slate, does it?

I promised you a fall movie preview and here, just a couple days later than I would have liked, is the BigFlax.com Fall Movie Preview. I'm linking it here because it's pretty long and I didn't want to squeeze it onto the blog page.

Because I hadn't made a post in a while, I hadn't gotten around to mentioning the two great presents that Alma got me for my birthday. One is a US Soccer hooded sweatshirt with Claudio Reyna's number on it; the other is a Manchester City warmup-type jacket, which is totally awesome. I can go as Stuart Pearce for Halloween now! Perfect gifts from the perfect girlfriend. I will eventually get the pictures that delayed this entry and post them here, but I still haven't gotten a chance to take them yet. Maybe tomorrow/later today.

Avocado's number

I suppose I should be thankful that Chicago isn't Washington, where the price to pay for what has to be the nation's cleanest subway is a set of ridiculously overbearing transit cops who treat 12-year-olds and pregnant women like threats to national security for, respectively, eating a french fry on a station platform and talking too loudly on a cell phone. But sometimes I see people on the CTA and wish a cop would just bust in and take them down. I thought the guy eating a Corner Bakery salad on the train the other day was going to be my champion for the year, but that was before yesterday on the bus.

I was sitting in the back row of seats. This woman is sitting "across" from me (in the back right sideways-facing group of seats). She pulls out - and I swear to you that I am not making any of the following up - a plastic knife, a plastic spoon, and an avocado.

Yeah.

First she uses the knife to cut the avocado into sections around the pit. Then she starts scraping pieces out with the spoon and eating them. And by eating, I mean "flinging at her mouth with a motion that made it look like she was trying to hack out her own uvula." I may never see anyone with an uglier eating style.

Eventually, she eats the top half of the avocado. But before she can go to town on the bottom part, she pulls out a packet of thousand island dressing. For real. And proceeds to pour it gingerly over the remaining avocado half, and then spooning out and eating that part.

I guarantee you this woman thinks she was eating healthy.

At some point, the pit - which she left in place even though you can't eat it - went flying and rolled down the aisle. She gave chase and changed seats in the process, dropping the knife on the floor where she had been sitting. Shortly after taking up residence in her new seat just shy of the stairs, a piece of avocado made its way to the floor of the aisle as well.

A little while later she moved up a bit further, to a forward-facing pair of seats just shy of the middle of the bus (this was a double-long bus with the accordion middle). When the bus eventually got to her stop, she stumbled to her feet, spilling something on the floor in the process. As she got off the bus, I saw - she was drinking from an open beer.

This probably explains the whole thing. Considering that a single Michelob (this woman's beverage of choice) is nowhere near enough to get anyone stumbling-from-your-seat drunk, she was probably half in the bag by the time she boarded in the first place, which no doubt led her to think that her little avocado shenanigans actually made perfect sense.

So, let's recap. By the time this woman got off the bus, she had left reminders of her presence in three separate spots in the aisle - the plastic knife at the back, the avocado piece just short of the stairs, and the beer spill up near the middle. I wouldn't want to be handcuffed for eating a candy bar, but if anyone deserved to spend a few hours in jail over eating on public transportation, it was our drunken, avocado-loving friend here. I suppose it could have been worse - she could have been eating durian - but among produce readily available in this country I can think of few things more ridiculous or annoying, save perhaps a grapefruit.

The most hilarious present

Way back when I first started working at my current company as a temp employee, there was one day, no more than a few weeks in, when I was in the convenience store downstairs and decided, on a whim, to get some beef jerky. I hadn't eaten the stuff more than a couple times before in my life, but it was one of those "what the hell" moments.

When I brought it upstairs, for some reason it evolved into a running joke in the Graphics department. First, Chris, my boss, decided that this was "a totally Flaxman thing to do," even though this was the first time they'd ever seen me eating it and I'd virtually never had it before in my life. Then, everyone was suitably amused by the name "Jack Link's Premium Cuts," leading to that being a running joke for weeks. The idea of "meat snacks" hung around even longer, especially when it transpired that another Graphics part-timer ate beef jerky nearly every day (although somehow he almost totally escaped being joked with for it).

Time went on and there was something of a diaspora from the department. I ended up in QC; one of the graphics specialists, Chris (not the same person as my boss), became a team leader; the other part-timer got full-time employment somewhere else.

Today Chris (former GS, current TL Chris) came over to my desk to drop off a promotion to be proofed. I had sent out an e-mail earlier informing everyone that I would be leaving early because it was my birthday. Chris wished me a happy birthday and surprised me a little bit by knowing my age. Then he announced he had a present for me and pulled out...

...a Jack Link's Premium Cuts Barbecue Beef Steak stick. With a bow on it.

I mentally rolled my eyes a little bit in the company meeting the other day when the CEO was going on about what a fun place this is to work... but really, it's far more true here than it would be in a lot of other work places. I laughed for about five minutes after Chris handed me the jerky - it was such a perfectly-timed, hilarious callback. Good times.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some jerky to eat.

People cannot tell how old I am, example #11,734

[I ask my boss if I can leave a little early tomorrow because it's my birthday.]

Boss: Oh, it's your birthday! ...26?

Me: Nope.

Boss: 27?

Me: Nope.

Boss: 25?

Me: Nope.

Boss: ...28?

Me: Nope.

Boss: ...you're only 24?

Granted, not guessing across the widest range, but he already knew I was younger than he was - which basically means it took him as many guesses as possible to get to the right age.

My parents sent me a couple packages today, featuring a t-shirt for each of my recently stalled collections (subway maps and Hard Rock locales), a framed photo of ever-adorable Flaxniece Aurora, some Borders gift cards (I always look forward to those), and a check, with a few other things thrown in. I'd say this is exactly the kind of gift haul one should expect (and want) from one's parents at this point in life - nothing lavish (especially as you reach the point where you can buy yourself that kind of gift), but various smaller things that show they still know what you like. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

News and notes

To start off: although I did fantasy baseball with a group of friends for a couple years in high school, I can't recall ever having done a fantasy football league with people I knew in real life before. That's changing this year with the league I'm joining along with Rudnik, Nemo, and a number of "bloggers and regular contributors." We seem to be looking for an extra person to join, so if you'd like to give fantasy football a shot (or if you want to add yet another league) let me know. Fair warning: the league is not contested for free (unless you're an IRS agent, in which case it is).

Next: What is it with candy companies and picking a new random ingredient to add to half their products every six months? Everything goes to white chocolate, or five different products add caramel, or everything goes to dark chocolate. The latest trend, implausibly, appears to be marshmallow, at least at Hershey's; both Take Five and Reese's Cups have added a layer of marshmallow to their mix. With the Take Five it works okay; Take Five is already a kitchen-sink kind of candy, so it's not like it's so ridiculous to stick something else in there. As far as Take Five variations go, though, the peanut butter is always going to be the champion.

Here's the problem I have with marshmallow in general, though - its flavor is surprisingly overpowering. Eating the peanut butter cups, it was virtually all I could taste - and why am I getting peanut butter cups (and all the subsequent fat) if I can't even taste the peanut butter? I guess if you enjoy a fluffernutter this might be the candy for you; I've never had one myself, so I can't say how accurate the comparison is. But while the caramel addition to Reese's Cups worked amazingly well, for me the marshmallow fell flat. If you're going to impersonate a sandwich, why not put a little layer of grape jelly into the cup or something? Actually, that doesn't sound like a terrible idea. You can use it, Hershey's, but I want credit.

Future: there's a Fall Movie Preview coming when I write one. Which I'm planning for this weekend, but who ever knows with me.

Store! Eeee-mail.

I've gotten a couple e-mails from CafePress telling me I have 14 bucks in my account that I can use for products, or whatever. At first I didn't think much about it. But then I realized that I only marked stuff up by a dollar - meaning that I somehow sold 14 things to people who were not me. Two of these were my aunt and one was my dad, but that's still 11 sales to non-Flaxman family members. This girl from Connecticut whose last name is Flax bought a Big Flax Cafe t-shirt back in 2002, and some guy from New Jersey whose last name is also Flax bought a "Please Die" shirt and three Big Flax Cafe shirts in October 2003 and April 2004. The even weirder thing about the latter is that he bought one BFC shirt six months after the other two. Did a relative see him in the shirt and tell him to buy them one? Did he wear one so much that it wore out? These are the kinds of questions I need to know the answers to. Could Mr. Flax still be lurking around my page?

Then in December 2004, this guy from Iowa bought - get ready - a BFC shirt, a Please Die shirt, and an I'm Sorry, Do You Live in This Suite mug. What? Was he dressing up as me for Halloween? I think I recognize the name vaguely, like he was someone I encountered briefly at Northwestern or in some similar locale. But does that justify such purchases?

Finally, I sold two more Please Die shirts - one to an old NJ neighbor, and the final one in January 2006 to some woman from Colorado who I'm quite sure I don't have even the slightest connection to. Bizarre. Though I'm glad to have the money, thanks! (Oh, I almost forgot to mention the mug that Rich Goldberg bought a few years back. I knew about this one before, but I feel like he'd leave some faux-huffy comment if I didn't mention it. And now that I've mentioned him, perhaps he'll be all happy.)

Annoying discovery: CafePress finally clued into the fact that the Big Flax Cafe design is an unauthorized spoof of the Hard Rock Cafe logo, and subsequently suspended my ability to sell it. Since I doubt I have much legal recourse (and frankly, I don't have the desire to "fight the man" on this one), if you haven't already bought your Big Flax Cafe shirt like the five other people in the world who have one, I'm afraid you're SOL. The weeping may commence.

(Incidentally, what would you do if you saw someone on the street wearing the shirt and it wasn't me? Wouldn't that be totally bizarre? Well, except if it were my dad. But what if it were this Iowa guy, whose name isn't even Flax? I suspect I would do a lot of pointing and yelling.)

But now I want to try and think of a good shirt to replace the old Big Flax Cafe shirt. Clearly people will just wander in and buy these things if you choose the right line. The "Are You Man Enough for the Avian Flu?" shirt hasn't sold any yet - and probably won't, besides to me (and even I didn't buy right away, though with the 14-dollar discount I have on the table I may yet).

------------------------------------------------

Dividing the post up, Rudnik-style. Not mentioned on the also Rudnik-connected (and mentioned in an earlier post) album release list is the new album from Weird Al Yankovic, Straight Outta Lynwood, which comes out on September 26. Al came off my automatic-purchase list - and you may laugh that he was ever on there, but I like Weird Al - with Poodle Hat, his fairly disappointing 2003 effort, but I like "Don't Download This Song" a whole bunch. (It's an original, not a parody, though it's clearly something of a style parody of "We Are the World" and similar numbers.) Check out his myspace page - one of the few times you'll ever hear me say that - to hear the song, along with "You're Pitiful," Al's James Blunt parody that Blunt okayed but his record label shut down, leading to Al putting the song on the web as a form of protest.

The question is, what are the odds the whole album is worth buying? I can get one track off iTunes, after all. There's no track list yet, but the myspace page mentions parodies of "Chamillionaire, Green Day, Usher, R. Kelly, and Taylor Hicks!"

Well, let's see. The Green Day parody is almost certainly going to be "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." There was already a parody of that on ESPN.com's "Shitty Sports-Related Parodies" page that had to do with Steve Francis (and yes, that's not the real name of the segment, but I really don't feel like looking it up and, frankly, this is way more accurate), so I'm a little burned out on the idea for a parody of this track, but at least I like the music, which is always a start.

The Usher parody is almost certainly "Yeah!" I'm not sure where you go with that, but if Al can do it, more power to him.

I know very little about either Chamillionaire or Taylor Hicks, but Wikipedia confirms that the former's "Ridin'" will be parodied, which isn't surprising. I'm not sure how you parody Taylor Hicks - does he have songs of his own to begin with? - but I'm guessing it will lean at least in part on a vocal impression.

Here's the one I'm worried about: R. Kelly. Considering the timing, I'd have to offer good odds that this will be some sort of "Trapped in the Closet" parody. And, well... how on earth do you do that? It's like Scary Movie 5 including a scene that parodies Snakes on a Plane. Even if R. was being totally serious at first, he's well aware by this point that the "Closet" songs are among the most ridiculous things ever. What's left to parody? There's basically no way you could ever make it funnier, and the original's middling musical value means it would be difficult to make a good song out of it. Sure, it could be a parody of "I Believe I Can Fly" or "Ignition (Remix)" or something, but "Closet" is clearly more timely, and while Al's parodies are not always exclusively of contemporary songs (recent parodies have included send-ups of current movies set to older songs, like "The Saga Begins" for The Phantom Menace being set to "American Pie" and "Ode to a Superhero" for Spider-Man being set to "Piano Man"), they usually are. (And you really can't out-funny "Ignition (Remix)" either, while we're on the subject.)

I realize it's probably too late, but Al, as a fan, I would go with something other than a "Trapped in the Closet" parody if that is in fact the direction in which you went. While I can see why you'd want to parody it, since it was the darling of every Best Week Ever viewer for weeks, I just don't think there's enough to be gained.

Anyhoo. I will be interested to see which songs make the polka parody, which has in recent years become my favorite part of any Yankovic album.

I think that's it for now. I really will try and finish some movie reviews this weekend.

Better living through earwax

An actual conversation that took place tonight:

Me: I guess I'm just a sucker for music with big major-chord flourishes, no matter what it is. Like Christina Aguilera's "Soar," for instance.

Alma: I have no idea what that is.

Me: ...you don't? That song I just downloaded?

Alma: Why would I?

Me: You were dancing to it the other night on the webcam!

Alma: I could barely even hear what it was!

Me: But you laughed when I started playing it! What did you think it was?

Alma: I thought it was that Christina Aguilera song you downloaded!

Me: ...yeah, that's what I said.

Alma: ...oh.

Me: What did you think I said?

Alma: I didn't understand the first part, it sounded like "Mark Belanger."

Me: What?? And how do you even know who that is?

Alma: What? That's a real guy?

Me: Yeah, he was the Orioles' shortstop in the 70s.

Alma: So, I didn't hear what you said, and just came up with a name that I'd never heard before, and it turned out to be a real guy??

A pretty weird coincidence, for sure, though I would say the odds are that somewhere in the deep recesses of her brain Alma had at least heard the name before. But she's right - of all the names to pull instead of "Christina Aguilera?" If she were going to hear some baseball player's name, she could have at least heard "Rick Aguilera." Or maybe "Teddy Higuera."