If you regularly read this site, you probably know that I am a fan of the wildly underrated actor and former NFL defensive end Terry Crews. I am also a fan of the wildly underrated TV series Arrested Development.
Catsmeat, who is a reasonable man and also a fan of these two things, passes along word that Terry Crews will appear in the forthcoming new episodes of Arrested Development. I have nothing to say. Please don’t let me down, forthcoming new episodes of Arrested Development.
https://twitter.com/Ceetar/status/246601797068795904
Whoa.
Also, click over to Ceetar’s blog for the craft-beer stuff you’ll never get here.
https://twitter.com/IanBinMD/status/246604851797188609
The latter and it’s not even close. The Jets/Giants needling always just seems silly to me, since clearly the “New York” in their team names refers to the city, not the state, and East Rutherford is very much part of the New York City metropolitan area.
The Brooklyn thing is funny mostly because I’ve met a shocking number of people who actually live in Brooklyn and don’t even know that it’s true, and it’s just absolutely baffling to me that someone could ever move someplace without being able to locate it on a map. Plus I’ve got a lot of Long Island pride, in large part because I’m a troll and I know a lot of Long Island natives try to hide it or pretend they’re from someplace cooler. C’mon guys. There’s no place better for beaches and delis and good old-fashioned brodowns.
https://twitter.com/daxmontana4/status/246614412893499392
I don’t know; I’ve never really been a man of slight to medium build. Plus typically I don’t coordinate Halloween costumes with my wife or anyone, so I’ve never really tried thinking about funny group costumes besides the A-Team. Maybe your family could go as the A-Team, with the baby as B.A.?
I always just pick a different funny mustache man. I’ve been Burt Reynolds, Wilford Brimley and Magnum P.I. in the not-too-distant past. I really need a good skintight one-piece chessboard bodysuit so I can be Freddie Mercury already. Also, I should probably drop a few pounds first.
Have you considered being Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love and the naked swimming baby from the cover of the Nevermind album? Might be cold for the kid though, depending on where you live. Also, you need a swimming pool. Just brainstorming here.
I actually find this pretty endearing. He looks so shocked and lost when he wakes up:
Extremely vigilant TedQuarters readers might have noticed, in the last few minutes, the brief existence of a post titled “Audio Post” featuring a little play button. I was testing out the site’s new post-by-phone capabilities, which, it turns out, automatically uploads an audio recording of whatever I say when I call a phone number associated with the site. It’s pretty sweet, but I have no idea if or how I will ultimately use that functionality to improve this blog. Suggestions are certainly welcome.
Anyway, if by some chance you played the audio file in the post that existed for no more than a few minutes, you would have heard a recording of me saying, “Hi. My name is Ted Berg. My voice is my passport? Verify me.” That’s pretty much the de facto thing I say whenever an automated system prompts me to say something. It’s weird at the McDonald’s drive-thru but whatever.
That quote, if you’re unfamiliar, comes from the 1992 movie Sneakers starring practically everyone. The man who (sort of) said the line, Stephen Tobolowsky — Werner Brandes in the film and also Needle-nose Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day — has an article at Slate today about, basically, how cool that movie was and what it was like to make such a cool movie. And he’s right: It was a really cool movie. And Sidney Poitier is definitely a handsome man.
Via @EricBien.
This is a busy day, and slow getting started to boot. Sorry about the P.O.D.
Also, speaking of my mother and watersports, this is her favorite movie scene of all-time. We saw this in the theater and she laughed so hard I thought she was going to be escorted out. Fat people falling, foul language and dudes getting hit in the junk with stuff are pretty much my mom’s three favorite things. My mom has a Ph.D.
I don’t typically cover celebrity news here and I especially shy away from the basest form of celebrity gossip — that which deals with addiction, messy divorces, custody cases and the like — because though I realize it comes with the territory for celebrities, reveling in it feels a bit too much like celebrating bloodsport for my tastes*. So Lindsay Lohan’s slow, public fall from the heights of Mean Girls to the depths of her current state of being famous mostly thanks to some high-profile arrests and fame perpetuating fame has gone entirely uncovered by this site.
But now that LiLo’s plunge has, for perhaps the first time, taken her down into the world that this blog inhabits — both physically and thematically — I feel obligated to note the following news. And I hope for Ms. Lohan’s sake that she stumbles upon it and is somehow able to step back and take stock of exactly what it implies for her career and her life:
Late last week, Lindsay Lohan was spotted partying at an Upper East Side bar with Shane Spencer and Pat Kelly.
That the bar was four blocks from my home is funny only to me. That she was partying with Shane Spencer and Pat Kelly is universally funny.
Shane Spencer and Pat Kelly. Shane Spencer and Pat Kelly.
Oof, Lindsay Lohan.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be surveying my local pizza-delivery men and making sure they survived the evening OK.
*- So, increasingly, does watching football. But that’s not going to change anytime soon, so I rationalize it by saying that I use up my personal allocation of barbaric entertainment watching football and try to avoid everything on TLC.
NASA has announced plans for a new song by will.i.am to make its debut from the surface of Mars via the Curiosity rover.
The single, “Reach for the Stars,” will be transmitted on Tuesday to Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., as part of an educational event to share findings about Mars with students.
Wait, seriously? We’re beaming music back from Mars and we can’t do better than the man responsible for “My Humps”? Isn’t Paul McCartney still alive? Could no one convince Kanye West that having the first song BROADCAST FROM MARS was a worthwhile enough pursuit to muscle his way in there?
And for heaven’s sake, did everyone just up and forget about David Bowie?
https://twitter.com/jeffpaternostro/status/236462847528411137
Samuel L. Jackson and it’s not even close. People read this site and assume I’m a pretty mild-mannered guy, but that’s only because I’m terrible at conveying my moods in print. Every single word written on this site is rife with unadulterated rage, and I don’t know anyone who could better capture that for an audiobook than a shouting Sam Jackson.
“THIS SANDWICH IS TOO SALTY! IT’S ALL CARLOS BELTRAN’S FAULT! YOU AND EVERYONE YOU KNOW SOMEDAY WILL DIE!” etc.
https://twitter.com/Devon2012/status/236462884358602752
Yeah, actually I do: Walk places. Everything’s pretty spread out in the suburbs, and you grow accustomed to getting in your car whenever you need to go anywhere. And I know plenty of people who do the same thing with the subway in the city: Charged with going someplace a mile away, they’ll consider the best subway to take, then walk a half mile to get to that train and a quarter mile on the other side.
You can cover so much ground on your feet. Manhattan, especially, is so much smaller than it seems. Walking is cheaper than the subway and typically more interesting, plus you get some exercise.
And to me, there’s almost no better feeling than when neighborhoods I’m already familiar with connect in my internal map. Does that make sense? I’ll be walking someplace downtown, south of the grid, trying to generally make my way east on the way home from a restaurant or something, and I’ll come upon a park or a building or a music venue I’ve been to plenty of times before and generally knew how to get to by subway but had never really bothered to situate in relation to other stuff in the city. Then it feels like the whole city is collapsing and I have a much better handle on the area. I like knowing where things are and how to get places.
I’ve been riding my bike a bunch lately. I’m not sure I want to recommend it because it comes with some risk, but it’s definitely the fastest way to get around. Very liberating. Shaves 15 minutes off my commute.
https://twitter.com/abadlani91/status/236463059672133633
There are plenty, but they’re all probably too weird to detail here. I do still want to ask Cole Hamels if he’s seen the embarrassing photos of Cole Hamels. I kind of suspect he has by now.
Depends on the distance of the fence, I guess. But if you’re swinging for a home run you probably won’t. I generally suck at softball and hitting slow pitching in general, but I think I made a breakthrough about a month ago when the only working batting cage at the place I went was the slow one. I swung so wildly and so far in front of the first pitch that I realized why the junkballer guy in Brooklyn baseball owns me: I get excited and don’t wait nearly as long as I need to. I’ve started trying to drive slow pitches to center field to correct the timing issue; I still end up pulling them a bit but at least I make good contact sometimes.
https://twitter.com/KevinTracey1/status/236471627255271425
If that’s what it takes to get people to Mars, then hell yes I’d watch it. Would I rather humankind’s first visit to another planet come from statelier designs? Sure. But it turns out we kind of suck at space travel. Maybe with the type of budget you could expect for what would inevitably become a worldwide television phenomenon we could make some progress.
It takes almost a year to get even unmanned craft to Mars, so it’d be funny if they launched but the show sucked and it got canceled after a few weeks. Now you’re stuck on this spaceship and you don’t get to be on TV! Sorry bub, you’ll have to settle instead for this all-expense paid vacation to Mars.
I like both of those stories, especially Bartleby — though I’d say that probably straddles the line between short story and novella in its length. My favorite short story, American or otherwise, is “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. It lacks Melville’s linguistic flourishes, certainly, but it’s no less enthusiastic. And I’m a sucker for both Vonnegut and dystopian-future stuff in general.
For what it’s worth, I also really liked O. Henry’s “The Cop and the Anthem” and Jack London’s “A Piece of Steak” when I was younger. Neither quite holds up the same way now as I don’t love O. Henry’s prose and London seems a little too blunt with his themes, but they both seem to fulfill certain requirements of short-story telling. I also always — and still like — Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady,” too.
I read a lot of fiction, something I don’t get into that much on this site. Actually, at home I pretty much exclusively read fiction, and have, for the most part, since childhood. Generally I read before bed, so I never feel confident reviewing or rehashing books if I might have dozed off during important parts. But for whatever it’s worth, anytime in the past that I envisioned becoming a writer, it was almost always as a fiction writer.
You know? I was for a while, but then I put up that suggestion box a few weeks ago and a bunch of people said they wanted more Q&As and mailbag stuff. So I figure one day of it a week — on Fridays when I’m generally scatterbrained and busy anyway — makes sense. As long as I keep getting good questions, I don’t see why I’d stop. They force me to consider things I probably would not if I weren’t prompted, and that’s welcome.
I reserve the right to ditch the Q&A posts when I feel they’re stale, of course. And speaking of this particular Q&A post: I thought for sure I had a third “rando” that I wanted to address, but now I can’t find it. So I’ll end here. Enjoy the weekend. Sandwich review tomorrow.
Tedquarters 