Complacency and the Infinite Blandness

 Just as the best jazz is no longer made in New Orleans, hip-hop became Uhmerica's dominant form of pop music by quickly outgrowing the bounds of its birthplace.  But that hasn't stopped the East Coast Bias machine from cramming mediocre New York rap music into our ears at the first sign of competency.  Case in point is the proclamation of Jay-Z as the "greatest rapper alive".  Jay-Z is really the most agreeable rapper alive, elevating the innovations of others to mainstream status and reaching the widest audience possible. 

Nobody Has Ever Told Us That We Couldn't Root For The Saints

We weren't aware, but apparently there exists a country club that only extends membership to fans of Historically Good professional football teams.  In it, monacled Steelers and Cowboys fans clink chardonnay glasses as supporters of the Seahawks and the Panthers serve them hors d'oeuvres.  Cheeseheads and Bears fans shoot a quick 18 holes as Chargers and Buffalo fans hand them drivers.  When a Giants fan finishes their backstroke laps, a Ram diehard is there to hand them a towel.  Bigotry is accepted within this country club, as long as your team is old, and at one point won a few Super Bowls.  When a Historically Good team wins the Super Bowl, it is the rightful return to form of a storied franchise that re-affirms established hierarchies in the National Football League.  When one of those flash in a pan teams with a crappy logo prevails, it is an aberration that hopefully won't repeat itself.  These teams were never included so to actually win, but merely to serve as deserving losers, destined for a weekend at Six Flags rather than Disney Land.  To those fans of Historically Good franchises who consider themselves members of this exclusive country club, we speak on behalf of all Saints fans in making these statements:

It Was Our Duty To Please That Jury

Long before Reality TV made it cool, the courts system has been shoving randomly-selected strangers into confined spaces and seeing "what would happen".  However, since the results have always been unimaginably boring, jury duty has yet to be picked up by a network.  In order to secure 8-12 unbiased souls to judge the fractures of society, hundreds must be assembled.  But only a few will be needed as actual jurors.  All in all, being on jury duty is like being a part of Gideon's army, where doing something as inconsequential as drinking water the wrong way will earn you an early trip home.

Glorious, Odifourous Paper

photo by josh

A lot of traditional-media ink has been spilt over the long-ago death of vinyl and its current plaid-clad life-support.  Such large packaging and warm sound!  Album art meant something, and our couch was like Roseanne's!  Now, those who transmit profitlessly from our mothers' basements must find a new dying music medium to be irrationally nostalgic about.  Take a guess!  Here's a hint: you can cut them into guitar picks, or reflect sunlight to send messages in Morse code with them!

We Were Thinking About Commenting On The Mayoral Elections

But everything we would have pointed out has been written much better by someone else.  Derek Jeter, you are no longer the most overrated New Yorker.

Just Your Standard Blue Screen of Death

So, we were enjoying an evening of watching the Saints go to 7-0 on MNF, not by turning to ESPN -- but by clicking on sketchy Justin.tv links -- all while downloading torrents from Mininova -- when everything shuts down and goes into an endless reboot cycle.

Bacon is More Played Out Than The Bomb Squad's Copy of Funky Drummer

Foodieism has taken this country by the chokehold, with a full-fledged TV network, magazines, and multitudes of blogs devoted to it.  And this culture has come to one crystal-clear conclusion: 

Dr. Oz Should Be Held Liable For His Resveratrol Shilling

From the same nationwide talent search that brought us Dr. Phil, Oprah has introduced us to Dr. Oz. His bits follow two formulas: a 'gross-out' in which he squishes goo out of diseased organs, and an energetic summary of the New York Times Health Section.

You Can Sanitize Our Cold Dead Bodies

In the late 1990's it was realized that smelly goop could be sold to germophobe suburbanites.  Immediately thousands of already healthy people began spreading hand-sanitizer all over their hands and letting it dry in ambient air several times a day.  One of our worst memories of high school is remembering the same girl rubbing in the foul, acrid gel every English class, without fail.  After all, its not clinically obsessive/compulsive if everyone does it, right?

At HCC, It Is Important That You Answer the 'Optional' Ethnicity Question

While its no Polish Microsoft webpage, Houston Community College has some race-optimized advertising (ROA) for you.

So, You're Thinking About Going to Douche School

Every year thousands of university seniors are asked the same nagging question with increasing frequency as commencement approaches:  "What are you going to do when you graduate?" 

At Home With The Failbox 360

The Microsoft XBox 360 is the most unreliable gaming system(30-50%), plaguing users with the Red Ring Of Death, scratched discs, poor license transfers, and many more maladies we aren't temporally aware of.  So why in the world would Das Bloggy Blog buy one?

Rick'nBeebs -- An Unrequited, Long-Distance Bromance

The Next Human Genome That Should Be Sequenced

Between Craig Venter, Stephen Quake, and James Watson, the list of humans who have had their genome sequenced is short, and is focused on those who lead genome sequencing research. However, a long-term goal of genome sequencing is to identify sequence/function relationships so that we may one day achieve a Gattaca-esque dystopia -- where specific genome sequences with positive functions are built into embryonic DNA to create a race of homosapien 2.0 supersoldiers. The only real question is if the good guy will be a breakaway supersoldier, or an obsolete human castoff. At this rate, based on our current sequencing trends, our "improved" bio-successors will instead be a race of ego-maniacal, hyper-intelligent, creepy biochemists. And we ALL know, that in the future, feeble, hyper-intelligent biochemists will be slaughtered by their own cyborgs.

In Attack of In Defense of Food

We finally got around to reading Micheal Pollan's dietary blueprint, In Defense of Food. Its simple guideline of "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." rolls off the tongues of bloggers and message board responders as easy as '1st!' does from the keyboard of blog commenters. However, a cognitive dissonance and poor logic arguments exist in the later sections of the book.

Worst. TV. Show. Ever.

With the best of intentions come the most spectacular of train crashes, and in this spirit we will speak of our unfortunate life-portion lost to watching PBS's Spain: On The Road Again. While a show about the great culinary traditions of Spain seems like a no-brainer, leave it to this unlikely pack of entitled, pampered narcissists to overshare worse than a 17 year old LiveJournaler without leaving behind nary a scrap of actual substance. It's hard to tell where to start a systematic takedown of this show, as we've seen episodes of Laguna Beach that have killed less of our brain cells. We'd better go character by character.

The Future Will Be Full of Disgusting Cross-Contaminated Beverages

Recently The Consumerist had a fawning post about a new Coca Cola fountain beverage dispenser that has more than 100 flavors. We on the other hand were horrified. There is a lot to dislike here -- the slow touch screen interface sure to confound the technologically challenged, the loss of the time-honored childhood tradition of combining multiple flavors, the Skynet-esque computer ubiquity...

Introducing THE BROOKLYN BKLYN

We haven't posted here at DBB for awhile because we've been working on introducing our first commercial venture, THE BROOKLYN BKLYN. What is THE BROOKLYN BKLYN? It is the most Brooklyn thing Brooklyn has ever Brooklyned. Let us put it this way: we know the high rise developers are trying to turn Brooklyn into Anywhere U.S.A, full of Starbucks and Subways when you can just go to the deli and get a fucking tamale. And we know that trust fund posers are ruining the Brooklyn vibe that made Brooklyn what it is: a style that lazy Urban Outfitters designers can rip off and sell worldwide to people who didn't like high school. What happens when those very people graduate college, move to Brooklyn, and still wear clothes from Urban Outfitters? What will the Urban Outfitters designers design then? Have you ever watched a snake eat itself?!?

How to Defeat United Airlines' Kiosk Lies

We had a flight today going from LaGuardia to New Orleans, with a connection in Chicago. Upon our check-in, we were told that the flight had been delayed and I would miss my connection. The only available flight was one that connected in Denver, and took 11 hours to complete. A glance at the agent counter revealed an unmoving line full of frowny faces in the same situation as ourselves. So as to not get completely stranded, we accepted the Denver tickets and made our way back home. Of course, a simple Orbitz search showed many other United flights with much less Sisyphean connections. Changing our flight to one with a short layover in Philly, Charlotte, or DC should be taken care of by a simple phone call, right? Well, it did just take a phone call, but it was far from simple.

Co-opted Pagan Holidays are the Best

How was your Easter Monday? Dry? Did family members simply greet you instead of inviting you outside to see your water bottle? No water bucket traps set on top of doors, right? What's that? You didn't get thrown in a pond? In Poland, Easter Monday is celebrated as śmingus-dyngus, a day where it is OK to throw water on anybody, as if to cleanse the very shame of humanity from them. Or, because it is fun. We tried to find the quintessential Dyngus video on what the kids these days call The You-Tube, but really they are all the same blurry, forced motions involved in any family holiday.

Breaking Down the New Orleans Email SCANDAL

As we constantly refresh NOLA.com, looking for the stories that will have the most outlandishly racist comments, stories about some sort of email scandal within the city government kept showing up. Email? Haugh? Now, I'm not a member, but does that have something to do with the Whole Food?

Inside jokes aside, at first this looked too boring to read about, but after enough repetition we finally gave in and read enough to understand this tedious scandal. Since you have a life, we will simply give you the gist of it:

1. Stacy Head, known in some circles as a City Council member and in others as the recipient of the 2006 Mitch Landrieu consolation prize, wants to score as many easy political points as possible before losing re-election and running for a statewide office that a majority of white people vote for. So at a city council meeting she accuses Sanitation Director Veronica White of not sharing every address receiving sanitation service, even though she totally asked for it a bunch of times before. In the parlance of The Wire, this is known as "pulling a Carcetti". Veronica White says that she didn't and after having her job threatened without any good comebacks, leaves in a huff.
2. What could possibly get to the bottom of whether Stacy Head had asked for list before or not? Email! Enter Tracie Washington, activist lawyer, rabble-rouser, citizen journalist, provocateur, ironic Bill Jefferson-supporter, who puts in a public record request for emails sent by city council members, but not all of them:

   After all, her request did not apply to the three black members of the New Orleans City Council, only to their four white counterparts. Likewise, she sought the e-mails of the highest-ranking white member of the recovery office, Jeff Thomas, but not his boss, Ed Blakely, who is black.

   Washington declines to directly say why she sought only white council members' e-mails. That's "beside the point, " she said.

3. Veronica White cuts through all the bureaucratic red-tape, and goes above and beyond her duties as Sanitation Director. She personally goes straight to the IT department, gets the requested emails, and sends them to Washington. Logic may indicate that she wouldn't be so quick to fulfill this request unless she thought something incriminating would be in them, or maybe she is just still angry. Washington wants to put them online for the sake of government transparency, and totally has a Xerox machine that can scan to .pdf really fast ready to go. But then then some bureaucrat shows up and tells her she can't release them yet.
4. Nagin who has likely been under federal corruption investigation since Katrina, without nary a Pampy uncovered, isn't corrupt. But nobody likes having their email read by strangers, and seeing the writing on the wall he pre-emptively deletes all of his old email. Everyone has a new reason to hate on him all over again. We're guessing his day-to-day life is depressing like a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode lately. Another term as Mayor and he could probably give Joe Lieberman a run for his money in a Droopy Dog contest.
   

Leaked! -- The REAL Bobby Jindal Speech THEY Didn't Want YOU to Hear

Good evening, and happy Mardi Gras. I'm Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana.

Tonight, we've witnessed a great moment in the history of our republic. In the very chamber where Congress once voted to abolish slavery, our first African-American president stepped forward to address the state of our union.

I was also at one time a skinny kid with a funny name, so I grew up and made everyone call me Bobby. Like the tribal armband tattoo I got in the late '90s, it made sense at the time. I would have kept my real name if I had known it would become such a trendy political asset.

Have Some Human Dignity, For Free

Like a confrontation over a plush Mardi Gras throw coming to blows, Americans like nothing more than doggedly and irrationally pursuing a 'free' item. "Make some noise!" for a free, low thread count t-shirt that will never be worn? Shit, we'd stuff a lit M-80 into our trachea if that would catch the attention of the fluffy mascot with the shirt cannon.

Handling Tools

We're sure this article will get more attention than at our little damp, uninhabited corner of the internet, so we'll keep it brief. But we could not ignore this article from cnn.com, which includes more double entendres than a bad sitcom. They might as well as written an Onion article, and these researchers seem to be aiming straight for the illustrious Ig Nobel Prize. Princeton(!) researchers have proven, scientifically, that upon viewing pictures of women in bikinis, increased activity in the area's of men's brains that correspond to "handling tools" results. Something like that deserves to be quoted for emphasis:

New research shows that, in men, the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up when viewing images of women in bikinis.

People have reactions of avoidance toward the homeless and drug addicts, and the opposite for scantily clad women.

We have some good proposals of our own, you know:

• Upon smoking marujuana, is there increased activity in the part of the brain that controls desire for Doritos?
• Why do people not mind the smell of their own farts? Oh, did we just make your mind explode, NIH?
• Scientifically speaking, how bad of pizza will drunk people in the L.E.S. still pay $3 for at 2AM?
• Is there any experimental correlation between female attractiveness and male desire to carry large objects?

If any large governmental funding agencies are willing to fund these groundbreaking research ideas, please deposit the grant money directly into DBB's UBS account.

Did We All Forget How Much Tom Daschle Sucks?

Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to various Health-related cabinet posts, and some people seem downright wistful about him:

"It really sets us back a step," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. "Because he was such a talent. I mean he understood Congress, serving in the House and Senate; he certainly had the confidence of the president."

"I was a little stunned. I thought he was going to get confirmed," said Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the panel that would have voted on Daschle's nomination. "It's regrettable. He's a very good man."

"Tom made a mistake, which he has openly acknowledged," Obama said Tuesday. "He has not excused it, nor do I. But that mistake and this decision cannot diminish the many contributions Tom has made to this country."

We always remembered Daschle as the Senate majority leader that was so afraid of being seen as not sufficiently patriotic or tough on terrorism that he led his party to vote exactly like Republicans. Soon enough, with such spineless submissives like him representing the Democratic crème de la crème, people figured they might as well vote for actual Republicans. They lost the majority, and he lost his seat. Basically, Tom Daschle was Jay Bulworth before his crisis of concience in that inspired, shitty movie from the 90's. He was a bigger tool than Carson Daly and Matt Lauer combined.

And now, like that venereal disease you thought you took care of with an entire tube of Neosporin, he returns years later wearing the most douchey red glasses possible. Listen Tom, you are not Thom Daschle, respectable art curator. You're a scumbag lobbyist for the health care industry who would be one of the last people on Earth to effect real health care reform. You had to drop out of effecting fake-change because, rest assured, more shit than free limo rides would have floated to the surface. Tear down those glasses, get some comped Lasik, and keep popping klonopin every time someone says DeLay. A better takedown than ours was done by Matt Taibbi, an actual political reporter:

When Obama picked Tom Daschle to be the HHS Secretary, I nearly shit my pants. In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.

It's February, and we are already pretty tired of fake change we have no better option than to accept. As Bulworth himself once opined, "What are you going to do, vote Republican?" The obvious first choice for health care reformist, Howard Dean, must have turned down the fake-change czar nomination before it was offered to Daschlebbychleb. Either that, or Daschlebbychleb was owed a favor by Obama in some sort of Wire-ish scheme.

Getting a Cellphone Abroad is Something You Should Do

As much as going to another country is a chance to experience another culture, it is often a chance to travel technologically back in time. This was a time, prior to this decade, when entire Seinfeld episodes could be written around the comical adventures that ensue when direct communication was not available. Cell phones did not exist, and any hypothetical meeting up between two separate entities involved meticulous planning and unparalleled trust. The exact place and time of meeting had to be specified hours in advance and several contingency plans had to be discussed. Now of course, when you get off the subway hoping to meet your friend in the village the convenience of technology allows you to get a comforting text message along the lines of "sup brah still in brooklyn c u n 30 sorry". If you are traveling abroad and hope to have the same stress-free, informal meet-ups that you are used to, you need to get your cellphone to work abroad.

Pintxos and Friends

Few things are as narcissistic as blogging about how many hits your blog has been getting lately; nothing we're able to do is more pretentious than hosting a dinner party highlighting the cuisine of a region whose existence most guests are not aware. The centerpiece was these flag-evoking anchovy pintxos we were informed about here. To differ, we added spicy pimenton ahumado to our mayo and unfortunately over-roasted the peppers, making them harder to cut. FYI, we were able to find boquerones in NYC at Westside.
Since the phrase "Vegetarian Spanish Food" may have as well been created for a George Carlin bit about oxymorons, we had to freestyle for these inclusivity-themed pintxos. We incorporated an ancient secret of Spanish cooking -- using a shitload of olive oil -- to sauté two packages of oyster mushrooms with half an onion, roasted red pepper scraps, and thyme leaves. This was topped with a slice of brie and freshly ground smoked peppercorns. The brie was ommitted on two of these per plate so that vegans would have two less reasons to passively whine -- these were consistently the last two eaten before a new plate was brought out.
For the people who were too squeamish to let their palette wander like a butterfly in an open meadow we made these self-explanatory Castilian pintxos. More notably, we were actually able to bring with us from Spain our favorite olive, Campo Real. They are perplexedly sold nowhere in the United States that we are aware of; please turn the lights on for us if you know where to find the switch. They have a fresh, herbed, non-salty flavor for which there is no substitute.
The reason for the existence of the party was the purchase of a frozen octopus from the corner fish market. At 24$ we needed help eating this, and at the precipice of offending the uninvited the only reasonable choice was to invite everyone that we could think of. We wanted to see if we could recreate the pulpo a la gallega of our dreams -- contrary to the assurances of Bittman we were not. While certainly tasty, it was rubberier than the restaurant prepared version that hooked us in the first place. However, the Area 51-esque scenarios we encountered in cooking such a creature more than validated the attempt.
Like the fabled lost episode of your favorite TV show, message board denizens of Pintxos and Friends fan sites often say that the tastiest pintxos were the ones never brought out. This would be the bacalao pintxos we prepared from this recipe. While that sauce is very lacking in the flavor category, placing a piece of bacalao on the baguette slice and topping it with a pickled hot pepper made an irresistible combination. So irresistible that the possibility of our tipsy Friends eating too fast and choking to death on fish bones caused our inner risk-assessor to keep them hidden. However, based on the reports of sober souls with lifelong experience in navigating cod skeletons -- the few trusted with the task of tasting -- they measured up.

Fun With Google Analytics, Vol. 1

Much like Rakim rapping about how good he is at rapping, we are going to get a little meta-indulgent here and blog about blogging. We got our Jan 14th post about La Penya a mention on the pre-eminent basketball blog, TrueHoop, by wining, dining, and bribing. Of course, that is super-secret internet speak for sending a polite email. As you can see, the bump in traffic made all of our other posts look insignificant by comparison. We're definitely swimming in advertising revenue now at the DBB headquarters. In the blogosphere, it is a good thing when your individual country details look like CDC disease outbreak scenarios.

Perusing our worldwide acclaim led us to pinpoint another one of Google's well known Chinese government-placating policies. Hovering your mouse over individual countries on the map overlay will show how many hits in the last month you have gotten from that country. Conveniently, the country over which your mouse hovers is highlighted in yellow to further visually distinguish it. For instance, when we hovered our mouse over Taiwan it showed that we had recieved 2 visits from there. However, as you can see, more than just Taiwan was highlighted when we did this, a subtle reminder from Google as to just how far they believe Taiwanese autonomy extends.

In the Hipster Hierarchy, there are Minions and Minionmasters

While we've got one hour now before the melatonin kicks in and we are too tired to even rail against the hipster hierarchy, we do have one hour to rail against the hipster hierarchy. However, instead of railing, let us instead make casual observations from afar, as hipsters themselves are wont to do. In the hipster hierarchy, there are minions and minionmasters.

Visca La Penya!

The basketball junkies we here at Das Bloggy Blog, few things hit us as hard as when TNT became no longer free on Time Warner. Gone were the carefree musings of EJ, drunk Charles, and the Jet -- our only outlet for non-exploitative professional basketball would be ABC. Yeah, that ABC ... the channel that seems to show samey Celtics, Lakers, or Cavs games every week. So when we had the opportunity to see über-prodigy Ricky Rubio in an ACB Spanish League game, we were more than willing to navigate Catalan websites and wander aimlessly in suburban malls in order to figure out how exactly to make it happen.

DKV Joventut (or simply La Penya) does not play in Barcelona but in nearby Badalona. They play at the old Olympic gym located near the Gorg Metro stop, on the L2(purple) line. It's hard to picture a top D-1 team, let alone the original Dream Team, playing at this grafittied, corragated steel canister. Getting tickets (25-30 € each) is as simple as showing up 1-2 hours before gametime and waiting in line at the ticket counter. The ticket counter, which accepts cash, is to the right of the main entrance. The windows to the left of the main entrance seem to be for will call tickets purchased online.

We saw the Dec. 28th game against Baloncesto Fuenlabrada, featuring Alaskan Brad Oleson and a still invisible Nicholas Tskitishvili. Entering the stadium, it becomes difficult not to keel over and writhe on the floor in pain at the greatest cultural difference between a game in Spain and the US: no alcohol is served. The club seems to be more than happy to make its money from the relatively hefty admission -- merch and food sales are really at a minimum. So after picking up a popcorn and a San Miguel 0,0 we took our seats and watched the game. And yes, there is a dance team.Bon Nadal, indeed. The game itself has a few notable differences than what we're used to:

• The dusty court leaves the players sliding around like they are in a rec-center in June. We think there are may be more people cleaning the sidewalks outside than a court in which millions of invested €'s compete.
• For all the talk of the 'Euro two-step', the crowd is quick to stand and call for a traveling violation when the ref neglects to. Meanwhile, in the NBA, LeBron can calmly explain why he should be allowed to take three steps.
• La Penya's answer to Thundersticks are nasal sounding plastic horns favored by fans young and old. If you are a sensitive soul bring earplugs and aspirin -- you are going to find out what it is like to spend 2 hours inside a bagpipe.
• Besides having the beverage menu written with the former(!) President in mind, hooliganophobia also manifests itself at the end of halves. A shielded tunnel wheels onto the court while the players are escorted off by police in riot gear.
  

La Penya fell way behind at the beginning of the second half, playing a trapping zone whose mystery was easily solved by passing to a wide open corner 3. The star of the team, Rubio, and its most dominating player, Jerome Moiso, didn't start; although its best player, Louisianian Demond Mallet did. In crunch time, all three took the court -- their best play being to simply loft a pass inside to Moiso. Their furious comeback was instigated by a press that created turnovers and contested shots. The play of the game was definitely a lackadaisical 1 on 1 break in which the DKV player dove to floor with minimal contact; scooping the ball towards the basket was merely an afterthought. That the 'shot' actually went in meant nothing -- he just wanted the foul call! La Penya, 86-84.

Unfortunately, Rubio was never even given the opportunity to create fast break magic -- he was intentionally fouled every time he received a quick outlet pass. In the half court he was able to get assists and layups often, and when ably defended showed a Ginobili-esque knack to jerk his head back quickly -- this delighted the referee's whistle like nothing else. When he and LeBron are playing for D'Antoni in 2010, the Knicks will be quite the unstoppable force. "Hi, I'm Mike Tirico, and this is the only team that ABC will ever be showing!"