Jay Hawks/Moutain Hawks and other March 18, Midwest Conf. Games

In the March 18th match-up of the Kansas Jayhawks against the Lehigh Mountain Hawks, the Mountain Hawks have a distinct advantage of being a real animal.  However, I must resist the temptation of underestimating something simply because it does not exist.  Take, for example, The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, Steve Pribby Moots, and dinosaurs.  And also, because that deranged little bastard mascot of theirs looks like some cross between Heckel & Jeckel and the Chuckie doll from the Child's Play films, I am rather intimidated by it.  Perhaps it would lure the unassuming mountain hawk to it and then stab it in the neck with a straight razor.  And so, I'm picking Kansas over Lehigh.

A slightly more interesting match-up, I'd say, will be played earlier that evening, when the 8-seeded UNLV Rebels go up against 9-seeded Northern Iowa Panthers.  As you see, I'm sure, I like to illustrate my predictions, but to do that, I first need to settle on avatars for these two teams.  You may know the UNLV logo represents themselves with a Yosemite Sam-lookin rebel, but I prefer a more James Dean style rebel, so I'm crossing the two and representing UNLV with the cracked-out, bearded incarnation of Joaquin Phoenix.  As per the panthers, I have chosen to use the same image on the wikipedia page for Cougars a.k.a. Mountain Lions a.k.a Catamounts a.k.a. Panthers for every team in this tournament represented by a cougar, mountain lion, catamount, or panther.  And in the pairing of Joaquin Phoenix vs. a Cougar, I pick the cougar.

In the game of Aztecs vs. Volunteers, despite their gumption, strength in numbers, and access to various tools, I have to wager the Volunteers will be massacred by the angry Aztec gods, whose precise mathematical calculations have astonished mathematicians for years.

In the pairing of Georgetown and Ohio, my money is on the bobcats to nom up the hoya.

Keep checking in for daily posts and predictions!

NCAA Championships Kick-Off

It's that time of year again, when everyone forgets about foreign disasters and stops poring over cached photos discovered in the storage garage of a recently apprehended serial killer and turn on Basketball.  That's right, this week kicks off the 2010 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, and tomorrow marks the most exciting and talked-about game of the whole tournament: the Southern Division 16th-seed play-in game, in which, this year, the Eagles of Winthrop will take on the highly-favored Golden Lions of Arkansas-Pine Bluff.  Will the winning team defeat Duke and perhaps win the Championship (held this year in Indianapolis, in honor of the Colts losing the Super Bowl) on April 5?  Only time will tell.

Concerning this all-important first game of the series, most people have favorited the Arkansas-Pine Bluff Golden Lions (pictured below with Darren Aronofsky) to advance onto the Salient Sixty-Four over the Winthrop Eagles (also pictured below) and I am not one to go against this prediction.

Some have suggested that the Eagles have an extreme advantage over the Gloden Lions with their ability to fly.  However, I do not think this defrays the great size advantage lions have over eagles.  Also, to cite precedent, I think we all know cases of a cat eating a bird, but the other way around?  Surely never.  Also, examine the detailed image below of a Golden Lion presented to David Lynch at the Venice Film Festival in 2006.

 

As you can see, just like the eagle, the lion is winged too!  This levels the playing field, just as it would to cut off the eagle's wings, or to make them fight underwater, and both of these two scenarios would result in wins for the lion, or perhaps a tie at the very worst in the second instance.

And so I say with relative certainty that the Golden Lions are a lock, but only time will tell if they should go on to win the Championship.

Keep checking in to This Blog Will Change Calder's Life for more NCAA predictions!

Great Mistakes

I finished reading Deadstream, and it has easily secured itself as the worst thing I've ever read.  I don't even know what would be number 2, because I've never read anything before that was written so poorly that it made me angry.  And I think I know why.  I did a little research on Xlibris, the publisher who had ostensibly paid this guy to print his book, and discovered that they don't sign contracts with authors , but they charge for any crazy zealot on the street to have his manifesto printed.  Needless to say, they do not copy edit.  So we can all rest assured that a book like this would never be published by any respected publishing house.  That said, if you find, it read it.  But don't buy.

Also, anyone who opts to take the "knowledge is power" road over the "ignorance is bliss" option must read A People's History.  I've only read the first two chapters and feel a great weight of guilt.  Guilt for our treatment of the original inhabitants of this land upon arrival and for the long period (1619 -1863) during which we depended on slavery (that's 244 years of legal slavery, 147 years and counting of emancipation.  Not a great track record for a country whose first major political document states that "all men are created equal").  Also, in the earliest years of our colonization, the first settlers were struggling even to survive.  They occasionally resorted to cannibalism.  It was those first slaves brought over in the early 17th century that saved them.  It is stirring to discover just how heavy and deeply-rooted the foundation of slavery is, upon which the American empire is built.  Zinn cites that, in Virginia, at the end of the 17th century, one-twelfth of the population were slaves.  By 1763, it was fifty percent.  He asserts on the first page of chapter two that "there is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as in the United States." (23)

Books by the Foot!

I just saw an ad here on my very own blog for "Books by the Foot." It's for designers trying to fill a bookshelf for aesthetic purposes or to make some jackass's spare room look like an office. I bet they've got some pretty interesting titles...

Memoriam

Whelp, two of the authors I mentioned in my post on Tuesday died on Wednesday. Howard Zinn, author of the People's History of the United States (among many other works) at age 87, and J. D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye (among many other works) aged 91 years. It is fascinating to me that these two magnificent Americans, each making a huge impact on American culture, and each having made some impact on the other, will be eternally bound in sharing their date of death, despite one being a notorious recluse and the other an outspoken political activist. As a small token (and in keeping with humanity's tendency to appreciate someone's work after they've passed) I'll be moving these two works to the top of my list. The remaining 30 pages of Catcher, which I started two years ago, and the remaining 671 pages of History, which I bought this summer and by which I am terrified.

So watch the Upright Citizens Brigade episode entitled "The Little Donny Foundation" and listen to the song "Down" by Pearl Jam to honor these two great men.

Start with a Bang

In my attempt to work my way through a wall of accumulated books (a small wall. A modest wall) I naturally decide to start with my most recent acquisition: A novel by Bradley T. Platt from the small publishing house Xlibris, entitled Deadstream. It is by far the most poorly-written book I have ever read. Apart from occasionally omitted apostrophes (which is sin enough) the tense changes constantly. The narrative is in past tense, but every scene of dialogue is in present. Either this is a really bizarre and ineffective choice, a casualty of trying to overhaul an entire draft from one tense to another (with grave oversights), or neither author nor editor knows the rules of tense. In certain instances, the tense changes midsentence. "...she says in disbelief as she felt the words blurt out." (56) This is the sort of thing that gets ironed out in a peer workshop for a 100-level creative writing class. I will also point out how poorly that same passage is phrased. How do you feel words blurt out? And do words even blurt? I'd say a person blurts words: words don't blurt themselves. This book is full of irritating errors like this.

It was the low-quality British literature being shipped overseas the the New World that upset James Fenimore Cooper into becoming the first American-born novelist, and look what that made him: famous enough for American couples 200 years later to name their sons Cooper. Perhaps in the year 2200, "Harpe" will be a mildly popular boys name, and all because I spitefully wrote a response to a book I didn't like.

One can hope.

It was my grandmother who lent me this book, which deals with heroin trafficking into Michigan through Canada and a boy whose mother commits suicide. I think it was the fact that the author is Michigan-born and living in Chicago that made my grandma think of me. This is what I take away from reading it: if this can get published, anyone can get anything published if they are persistent.

In Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on their Craft by Mike Sacks, Ben Karlin (writer for the Daily Show and the Colbert Report) writes, "The best advice I ever received was from my first boss at the Onion. He believed you needed three things to be successful in comedy, but I think it applies to almost anything. First, you need natural talent. Second, you need skill development. Third, you need ambition. Everyone's ratio is different, but the most successful people have all of them. It helps to have a fourth thing, too, but I don't know what it is." (147) Maybe it's good grammar.

Gettin Bizay

To my handsome, vivacious, and - above all - faithful readers,

We've walked through the fire together here at TBWCYL, and during its regal 2-month tenure, you've doubtless found yourselves healthier, wealthier, stealthier and no less than 2x more attractive than you've ever been before. It will satisfy you to hear that after 60-days of atrophy and one night of sleepy retooling, this blog will resume changing your life. In the coming months, I hope to enable all of my readers to leap on top of one-story buildings.

My new format is inspired by the 50-some books and plays I've collected over the years and have either never read (Papillon, Live from New York, Leaves of Grass), have started reading and abandoned (Purple Hibiscus, Catcher in the Rye, Cures), or am currently reading (Mountains Beyond Mountains, Kill Your Idols, The People's History of the United States [oof]). As I bushwhack through these volumes on my bookshelf (also including Bob Dylan's Chronicles, the Truth that Leads to Eternal Life, and the Complete Works of Shakespeare) I will regale you with quotes, criticisms, Earth-shattering insight and deep emotional responses, all the while grappling with my own insecurity as I struggle to get my book of dirty crosswords and my Holocaust "memoir" published.

It'll be like Bridget Jones' Diary meets the New York Times Review of Books.

So don your waders and trudge with me through my swamp library. What do you have to lose (other than time wasted reading yet another potentially-worthless blog)?