Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- Back after a week off, with a kinda shortened column...but if you don’t ask, I can’t answer! First up, we will debrief on the now-two-weeks old Super Bowl before tackling elevator/hold music and then a modern proposal for a new kind of public floggings. Finally, Alex gets a little sentimental about old music… But before I do, a couple of notes...first, a super big happy congratulations to my littlest sister for finalizing her college plans this week. I haven’t always been as involved in her life as I wish I could have been, but I am tremendously proud of her and I am happy that I got to help her through this process. Second, special e-hugs to @Jholmsted, who has had a really, really shitty couple of weeks...I don’t like when my Misfit Momma is sad:-( Submitted by: {Um...I forget…} What happened to the Patriots? I forget who actually asked me this, and it wasn’t in these exact words, so I can’t even find it by searching. But, since my sportsball analysis is so insightful, it seemed rude not to answer. I feel like their “Let’s not tire ourselves out trying to tackle the other team” strategy was a bold one… This seems like a pretty easy answer: the Patriots had almost no success in preventing the Eagles from scoring. The Eagles held the Patriots to some field goal attempts early on and then forced one key turnover late and that was enough because their offense so thoroughly dominated the Patriots’ defense. The game MVP should have gone to the Eagles offensive line. Their quarterback faced almost no pressure all day long and their running backs found ample room to run. It is hard to think of a game of that magnitude where life was easier for a quarterback than the Eagles line made it for Nick Foles. It was a total white-washing along the line of scrimmage, which was enough to overcome the surprising success that the Patriots’ line had against what seemed a superior Eagles defensive front. The Eagles produced one game-saving play in the final minutes, but for the most part, a suspect Patriots line gave Tom Brady ample time to throw and ran the ball successfully throughout. The Eagles secondary played a very weird game of “let’s try to fool them by leaving receivers open by 20 yards”, too. The benching of Malcolm Butler remains an inexplicable mystery. They clearly couldn’t have been punishing him that badly, since he played on special teams, and he is unquestionably a better player than the guys who replaced him. His coverage ability has slipped, and he was not the same player in 2017 as he was in 2015 and 2016, but he is still better than the garbage they rolled out there in his place, and he has always been a very sure tackler, a skill that was sorely missing on this day for the Patriots. Bill Belichick does weird things, and they usually work out in his favor...but on this day, they most certainly did not. There were also two key catch/no catch calls, both of which went against the Patriots. In the bizarro world of the 2017 NFL season, it is kind of hard to say what should and shouldn’t be a catch, because the interpretation changes willy-nilly by the week, but the first one should have been called no-catch and the second one was correctly ruled a touchdown. The Patriots were the beneficiaries of a couple of questionable catch calls during the season (although NOT the Pittsburgh one, which was absolutely cut and dried according to the absurdly written catch rule), but on this day they drew the short end of one that probably should have gone their way. Also, I think that the audio problems with Justin Timberlake’s performance impacted them, as well. They didn’t get the emotional charge that they should have gotten from SexyBack... Submitted by: Lady Catherine What’s with crappy elevator music and phone hold music? Are we not suffering enough in those situations? People voluntarily listen to Fleetwood Mac, so I am not sure that I am going to get too hung up on elevator music sucking. Shit, Rex and Anne spend several hours a week waxing nostalgic over The Carpenters, Captain and Tennille and Kansas...Muzak isn’t nearly the worst of our problems! Phone hold music makes more sense to me...anyone who puts you on hold is probably secretly hoping that you will hang up before you talk to anyone, so the music is part of a strategy to make you miserable enough to hang up. If they started playing Quadrophenia, no one would ever hang up, their phone bill would go through the roof and they would have to explain why you’re not getting a refund because it is your own stupid fault that you screwed up whatever you don’t want to admit that you screwed up. Elevator music makes a little less sense. My guess is that it is supposed to be soothing because so many people are a little bit on edge in an elevator to begin with. Between a fear of heights and claustrophobia, you’re likely to have some torqued up people in any crowded elevator, so some mellow synthesized Counting Crows is probably in everyone’s interest. That would argue more for something you’d hear during a massage - whale sounds, or falling rain or the like - but maybe that stuff is too subtle. The muzak can distract you while you try to figure out whether you are listening to a sweet John Tesh-inspired reworking of I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues or Islands In The Stream. Before you know it, you’ve reached your floor! Some elevator-related notes: I work on a pretty high floor (by Boston standards, not by New York or Chicago standards), which requires a little bit of planning. Going to lunch at 12:05, for example, is a catastrophe, since the elevator stops at like 23 different floors on the way down, 14 of which are after it is full and no one else can get on. Same goes for getting on at about 5:03 as everyone is leaving for the day. Without exaggeration, it is a one minutes ride at 11:55 and a seven or eight minute ride at 12:05. By 12:15, it is back to one minute. I’m not really sure why this building doesn’t have dedicated banks for every 10 floors like a lot of others do, but it doesn’t, so the wrong time can mean a VERY long ride to the street. I have also just realized that, when we installed the new elevator in our condo two months ago, I left out the music (and the ad-supported news feed)! This was, obviously a rookie mistake, and I am now wondering if I can correct this by putting a bluetooth speaker in there. Or, like, maybe an Echo or something… I’ll get back to you on this. Submitted by: Ingenious Firebrand Maybe we need more public discipline. What’s wrong with planning a special Presidents Day event where all the living presidents get to appear at a press conference and kick Rob Porter in the nuts? I think you are onto something here, and I have long felt that shame is an underutilized tool of social improvement. We don’t assign nearly the negative social status that we should to some basic afflictions like laziness and general “being an asshole”. The only problem I have with your plan is that none of the living ex-Presidents can kick very hard. George HW and Jimmy Carter are well into their nineties and can probably barely even operate their feet at this point. Bill Clinton and George W Bush are both in pretty good shape, especially W, but they’re over 70 and I just can’t see them really doing the kind of damage we are hoping for. At 56, Obama should still be able to deliver a powerful kick, but I have a hard time thinking that the guy who used to hit the hotel gym to pound out some 6 lb shoulder presses is going to actually bring any kind of force onto Porter’s nuts. How about this...Porter is given a choice: either he can wear a diaper and a bonnet while sucking a pacifier and repeatedly saying “I beat women because I have a tiny wittle penis” over and over again in a video to be posted permanently to Youtube, or he can challenge UFC Heavyweight Champ Stipe Miocic for the title. I will leave it up to him: take the brief physical pain and potential brain damage that comes from having his face beaten in, or admit that he is a coward and let every single person he ever meets point at him and laugh. Did you ever see the first episode of Black Mirror? Where the Prime Minister has to have sex with a pig on camera to save the popular princess? First of all, they should have just dared the hostage takers to kill the princess...elected officials aren’t supposed to be compromised to save anyone from a class of blood-sucking inbreds who haven’t had a job in 12 generations, but I digress. Secondly, I think this sort of thinking has real potential. If we let some criminals avoid other punishments if they submitted to some spectacular public humiliation, we can trim the prison population AND identify the people who are so especially depraved as to have almost no measurable self-respect. In 2005, William Jefferson of Louisiana was convicted of bribery in relation to having a bunch of cash hidden in a freezer in his office. We sent him to jail...but who really loses if we instead offer him the option of dressing as a fire hydrant and letting dogs pee on him for an hour? Dennis Hastert illegally structured transactions to hide the fact that he was paying off victims of his own sexual abuses. He went to jail, too, but maybe we could have avoided that by allowing him instead to make a Japanese bukkake video. Corinne Brown will likely go to jail this year for wire and tax fraud...how about a Cersie Lannister-style walk of penance? Shame is a powerful tool, folks, and we oughta be using it more than we do. ----------------- Alex’s random old song of the week I was feeling weirdly nostalgic this week, thinking about a regional mock-Congress thing that I did when I was a freshman in high school. Those of you that have followed me for a while know that I grew up in...a not great place. So, when three classmates and I went with a teacher to that fancy school up north of the city for two days, it was the first time that I ever really met kids who weren’t from the same place I was. Kids from places like Buffalo Grove and Naperville and Wheaton. And man, was that ever a culture shock… I made some friends, because that’s what I do...wherever I go, I make friends. And one of these friends, a girl named Amy from Naperville, introduced me to what I will affectionately call “White People Music.” I may have found Dave Matthews and Tori Amos eventually on my own, but Amy accelerated the process. More than anyone else, I associate Amy with The Black Crowes. And even more specifically, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, their titanic 1992 masterpiece of throwback guitar rock. It is, if you haven’t been paying attention, the best pure rock album of the 1990’s, stacked full of track after track of thumping drums, searing guitars and the inimitable voice of Chris Robinson. Hotel Illness is probably the best song on the album, Remedy and Sting Me the most radio-friendly, and the break in My Morning Song a soaring piece of chord progression that seemed like a window into a whole new world for me (in fairness, those suburban chicks had really good pot). But, since this is my column and I make the rules, I’m going to let Mr. Robinson scream himself hoarse in the pursuit of rending your soul via music: Sometimes Salvation. And never, ever forget: to lessen your troubles, stop hanging out with vultures and empty saviors...
1 Comment
Jack
2/18/2018 07:23:23 pm
Found this from your Twitter presence. Fun blog. Keep up the good work.
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