Remember all the strength of schedule talk before the season started? Some of it has proven out — NFC East isn’t just full of tough playoff contenders, it may have the best three teams in the NFL. Some of it hasn’t — AFC South is struggling due to injuries, but I still don’t call them easy outs.
Well, the Brownies originally had the third toughest schedule based on last year’s records, Steelers had #1. The only difference in the two were that Pittsburgh had 2 #1s, the Patriots and Chargers, where we had 2 #2s, the Broncos and Bills. Looks like those have shifted a bit — Chargers are probably still decent despite record, but I think there’s every chance we’re playing this year’s division winners. Yikes.
One of the coolest things we got for our wedding was wrapped pirate-style.
So it was booty.
My pal Jeff spent more time than I responding to the DFW news.
Probably a lot of you have read a lot of his stuff, but if you haven’t, you should. There are a great many things you can find on the Internet, and several collections of essays and short stories you can buy that are more than worth the ten bucks. I don’t believe there’s been another author with his ability to make words do his bidding. I had a strong connection with a theme that ran through all his work, which was an examination of sincerity in a world of detached irony and superficiality. Or at least an attempt to understand what sincerity meant in such a world, and to wrestle with the maddening infinite regression of how one conquers detachment when the very search for sincerity includes a detached understanding that a search is underway. I think the Bayesian voice in his head that viewed the world with a consciousness of the conditions that created it is a lot like mine. It was an immense help to me around the turn of the century to read his work and know from his writings that someone else was engaged in an existential wrestling match with modern society in the same way I was. His demons ended up killing him, but to a large degree his efforts on the page to battle them served to dispel my own demons, so I owe him a great debt. I met the guy once. He came to do a reading here in DC in maybe 1999. Afterwards, I got my book signed and me and my girlfriend almost had him convinced to go out and get a cocktail with us. He smiled at us and said he’d love to, then looked back to his handler in a pleading way and the handler grimaced. He turned back to us apologetically and told us he would love to get a drink, but had to spend some obligatory time with the organizers of the event, like a kid passing up a game of football for piano lessons. Anyhow, if you’ve not read it, it’s worth reading his Kenyon College graduation address from a couple of years ago.
Agreed, on all accounts.
More obituary. DFW!
I’ve read Infinite Jest a couple times, and while I’ve never fully teased out the plot it should be a testament to how much I love his prose and even the obvious themes that I tackled a book over 800 pages plus 300+ of endnotes more than once. Don Gately is one of the best literary heroes I’ve ever read and a poignant and vivid scene with him is the only time a book has ever made me cry. And Hal Incandenza with his isolation from humanity captured some of my personal ennui back in the mid-20s really well, expressing a feeling I’d never even identified on my own. Perhaps that isolation and sadness contributed to his suicide, and it’s tragic that his work made me and likely countless others feel less alone, portraying a generation’s problems communicating, without helping him.
Wow. Sad.
Andy Baio over at Waxy.org did an analysis of the new Girl Talk album.
This is interesting for a number of reasons:
- Greg Gillis went to the college I went to. No one “famous” does that.
- The raw data — 264 samples made into 9 new tracks — is pretty interesting aesthetically
- and legally.
- The use of Google Spreadsheets to share the data is cool, but in the words of the the old Joker: “Where does he get such wonderful toys?!” I really wanna know how such beautiful charts and graphs are generated.
- The Mechanical Turk stuff is interesting. I wonder if it would be efficient to have the crowd crunch my fantasy football data for me.
