Carefully crafted to keep me docile

January 7th, 2007 by Tuffy

Welcome to the second week in January. This is the week where the Council on Keeping Tuffy Unproductive has scheduled a series of events, each more exciting than the last, to keep me pounding the RSS feed like I know the RSS feed likes it until it spits out another morsel of goodness. Here’s what I’ll be totally geeking out about this week:

* The Television Critics Association gets together every year around this time to berate, cajole, and even occasionally praise those who make the idiot box soothing and difficult to disobey. It’s called the TCA Press Tour. I’m not a huge television fan (give me five more years of couch potato training), but some of the best critical journalism comes from television writers. I’m not sure why that is, per se. Perhaps editors are too busy and let something as ‘unimportant’ as television criticism slide. Maybe there’s a standard set by Tom Shales that demands snarkiness. Whatever brings me this bounty, some of the best on-the-spot writing takes places this week.

When they all get together under the influence of free booze and recirculated hotel air in Pasadena, these people (and a few others) bring the noise, the funk, and the cattle prod:

Tim Goodman
Aaron Barnhart
Lisa de Moraes (call me)
Phil Rosenthal

* The Chicago Bears, bless their souls, have decided not to suck this year. They will be playing some time next weekend, depending on the outcome of today’s NFC game. One day next weekend will be lost in a haze of booze and regret. The other day is when the Bears play.

* CES is here! Every gadget-loving capitalist pigdog will be taking notes for 2007’s Christmas list. I will help you plan ahead for my gifts; start setting aside money now.

* Speaking of Buying Me Shit, Macworld arrives and the anticipation for Apple’s new cell phone/home media center/video touchscreen iPod/leper healing device may kill me by Tuesday morning, when all of the new devices will be announced (or not, at the whim of King Steve). I look forward to brand new ways to view my porn collection.

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That’s a long time to set up a joke

January 5th, 2007 by Tuffy

“Listen, I like to be called “governor” or “the boss”. I don’t like “ma’am”; I’m not the bloody queen, so take your pick.” - Helen Mirren, “Prime Suspect 1″

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Thermodynamic miracles and new beginnings

January 1st, 2007 by Tuffy

Darrent Williams, 24-year-old cornerback for the Denver Broncos, was shot and killed New Year’s Day around 2 a.m. local time outside a Denver nightclub. I’m afraid I don’t know much about the player and certainly know next-to-nothing about the man. Apparently, he was just the kind of offbeat entertainer and character I like to watch in sporting events; I just told a friend very late last year that I wish there were more characters in sports.

Because I’m a lousy choice to eulogize the man and the player, let me instead ask politely that you consider not turning away from this story. Yes, it’s a black man shot outside a nightclub. Yes, it’s an athlete involved in gun violence. It’s intellectually lazy and emotionally stunted to assume the pattern allows any of us to not care.

Brian Crecente is a writer whose blog work I discovered late this year, so I missed his loss early this year when his 18-year-old niece was murdered by an ex-boyfriend last February. I stopped to consider her life last weekend when he mentioned her death again, taken far too early for far too common reasons. I did the same thing today when I woke to the news of Williams’ death.

I don’t disagree on the need for a strict definition for ‘tragedy’ for the word to have any impact. I don’t truly believe someone’s inability to get into their desired college or their significant other being caught dick-deep in OPP-land counts as a tragedy.

However, I often wonder if the exposure in the last hundred years or so to more legitimate tragedies caused by industrialization and brought to our doorsteps by the accessibility of information should force us to raise the bar on tragedy or accept there’s far more tragedy in the world than humans can possibly cope with.

In Watchmen, Alan Moore posits that each life is a true miracle in its making, lost in the sea of miracles. If this is true, perhaps we drown in a sea of tragedy (and surely the destruction of a miracle is a tragedy) if we stop paddling long enough to consider the immensity of it all.

This is what I think about when a tragedy may have occurred. Man, I’m getting old fast.

As I attempt to sharpen my writing tools and mental acuity through this little slice of vanity, I hope I remember to take a few minutes to consider each story and each person before I speak. I might still be wrong, but that’s a different burden for another day.

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