Born on the Bayou

”Wish I was back on the Bayou.
Rollin' with some Cajun Queen.
Wishin' I were a fast freight train,
Just a chooglin' on down to New Orleans.”

I’m not sure if I can get across how excited I am for the New Orleans trip. Just talking to Tommy as he selected his flight on Sunday threw me into a hour of just thinking about how fantastically awesome the trip is going to be. If we were just playing in a BCS bowl against LSU, that would be pretty exciting. If just a few friends were going down to New Orleans, that would be pretty sweet as well.

But oh no, let’s combine. We’re officially up to the point where I can say there’s a lot of people I know going down somewhere between December 31^st and January 4^th, thanks to the relatively little trouble everyone had acquiring tickets through the lottery. I’ll be seeing a few people for the first time since spring semester, as they jet in from London, Dublin, Mexico City and Australia. There’s Bourbon Street, and the entire French Quarter, with apparently no real age restrictions. There’s jazz and blues clubs everywhere. There’s a casino – a real, true life, non-Indian-owned American casino that I can go to because I’ll be of age – two blocks away towards the canal. If we want to, Avants (who turns 21 the day of the f’n Sugar Bowl) and I will be in town early enough on the 31^st to go watch the high-flying New Orleans Saints clinch their first round bye against the Carolina Panthers.

(We’re not sure really how much that’ll cost, but I have a feeling this trip will reach the point where a phrase like “Seventy-five bucks for standing room only Saints tickets? What a deal!” will seem rather normal.)

Because I’m an idiot and don’t book airline tickets all too often – plus, I was just giddy to get roundtrip that got me into the bayou before noon on New Year’s Eve for under two hundred bucks – my flight leaves the morning after the Sugar Bowl at 5:35 in the morning. This seemed like a problem for about two seconds, until I realized that just gave me a legitimate excuse not to even consider going to bed that night. We’ll celebrate our covering the spread (doubtful, but we think positively here at the Blog O’ Fun!) until I need to hop in a cab and take the eleven-hour journey from the French Quarter to the airport. Also brightening the trip is some newfound information that Jess is also on my ungodly-early-arrive-in-Pittsburgh-still-drunk connecting flight to Houston, so I won’t be the only person in Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport at five in the morning.

I just have a feeling – since even a loss can’t soil the trip, since we’re all not only ready for it, but predicting it – that this is going to be one of those experiences we can look back on long after graduation and laugh about. Rob will get arrested, MacKrell will end up in a ditch somewhere and I’ll probably have to borrow money for a cab after I stick around the twenty-five dollar blackjack tables at Harrah’s too long.

It’s going to be an absolutely great trip, packed into the hotel room like a sardine can or not. I’d promise you all sorts of pictures, but I have the feeling that taking anything of value, like my severely underused camera, might be an extremely poor idea…

. . .so I’ll just go ahead promise you all sorts of pictures.

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I’m addicted to Amazon.com: You want to talk about fantastic timing?

I finish up my Irish final today and get back to the room. Start going through my e-mail, skimming the usual haunts and there’s an immediate knock on my door. It’s UPS guy with my Amazon.com order from two weeks ago! I chose the free, slow-as-sloth shipping, not factoring in the holiday season, but it came at the absolutely best time possible.

So now I have the first season of How I Met Your Mother, the new Phoenix Suns book by Sports Illustrated’s Jack McCallum and the Barenaked Ladies’ Christmas CD to help keep me entertained as I nap, write, pack and annoy those who still have work to do over the next three days.

I’m debating over what television series to soak in over Christmas break, with the Cost and Replay Values factoring in most. I think I have it narrowed down to either Scrubs, The West Wing or The Wire, but they’re all so damn costly. I think the best plan I have at this point is to fire up the Netflix subscription for a month and go crazy, or else find something I can watch online/download in an attempt to catch up. Any suggestions, or perhaps DVD sets to loan? I won’t have much time, but I will be making the most of the limited lounge time available.

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Miami Dolphins 21, New England Patriots 0.

From today’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback over on ESPN Page 2:

As to Miami tactics, Jason Taylor has switched this season to a hybrid defensive end-linebacker position, similar to the old "elephant" role played by Charles Haley in his heyday. Taylor has been terrific, and if Miami were playoff-bound, would be a contender for defensive MVP. On Sunday, Dolphins' coaches reached still further back into the past and let Taylor be a 1960s University of Michigan style "monster man," lining up wherever he pleased. New England blockers clearly could not figure out the rhyme or reason to where Taylor was, and he gave them fits all day. The reason New England blockers couldn't figure out the rhyme or reason to Taylor's movements was that there wasn't any -- Taylor was using his instinct to decide for himself where to line up on each down. Essentially, Taylor was calling his own plays. In the hyper-organized NFL, it's interesting to see that giving a top player the green light to use his instincts worked out really well.

Aw, you shouldn’t, Gregg. Really. Phin fans everywhere are blushing.

I’ll be up in Buffalo on Sunday to see the Playing Surprisingly Well Bills take on the Playing Surprisingly Well Dolphins in, at least as it was projected by Weather.com this morning, 47-degree weather! In the middle of December in Buffalo! Global warming, you might destroy the world for future generations, but I’ve got no qualms with you, friend.

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FTT 30405: Critical Theory and Existentialism in Relation to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: or, the name of the class I will most certainly teach if I ever end up as a professor somewhere.

Which is why it angers me to no end that they decide to finally have a class revolving around Buffy - the meh fourth season, in particular, for a Gender Studies Introduction to Feminism – and Tim and Patrick are both taking it. Tim came up last week, asking if I could send him Season Four when I got home, and Patrick’s taking it a step further, asking for the outright Sarah Michelle Gellar onslaught over Christmas break, getting his learn on for seasons one through three (For the record, seasons two and three of Buffy have to be two of the top ten or fifteen television seasons of all time. Truth.).

I’m happy a Buffy-themed class has finally sprung up, because there certainly are a great deal of scholarly-to-just-random works about the show – here here here and here, for example – even though I won’t be able to take it. Hopefully it’s a smashing success and gets offered up sometime next year, although I’m sure someone will complain and write a nasty letter to The Observer about how they’re forced to watch it. Still, the more people realizing the awesomeness of Buffy, the better.

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“California, we used to come…”: So I stopped watching The OC this year. You all did, too, I’m pretty sure, as nobody ever mentions it to me anymore and there’s a decided lack of “Happy OC Thursdayness” going around anymore. And that’s fine: it was so terrible by the end of last year, why in the world would anyone want to continue watching another season of it, especially when everyone was going to be so damn morose about Marissa dying.

Well, remember when I immediately fell in love with Autumn Reeser’s Taylor Townsend last year, bringing up how when she was on the screen, it made up for Mischa Barton’s decided lack of talent? As it turns out, killing off Marissa and getting rid of the horrid, soul-sucking Barton and hooking Ryan up with – wait for it – Taylor Townsend has saved the quality of the show. Sure, the ratings are still terrible as it goes up against the monstrosities of Grey’s Anatomy and CSI, and it’s likely to be cancelled, but hey, it’s good to know that I’ve still got it.

(How do I know The OC is good when I don’t watch it? Trusted sources, such as Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch and Alan Sepinwall, who runs a great television blog on the side of being the television writer for The Star Ledger.)

It pains me to have abandoned a show just when they did all the things I’ve ever dreamed of – kill Marissa, feature the ever-delicious Autumn Reeser as much as possible – but maybe I’ll make the point of catching up with The OC over break.

Attention anyone who’s ever watched The OC at any point in time: Please click this link from the past and enjoy. I posted it after TVGasm originally posted it, but in an attempt to find Marissa either attacking her keyboard or the pool furniture, I dug it up again.

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Representing Notre Dame as well as anyone (and no, that’s not Kristen Bell): This will be gone by December 15^th, but for now, the delightful Ms. Katie Lydiatt is representing Notre Dame against the evil that is Oklahoma, with their vile skank cheerleader uniforms. I already told Katie I’m entering her in the Athlon competition next fall, which actually requires more than one random picture – look at how badly the West Virginia girl was represented, not that she had a chance against the Bruins – so this is just a meaningless practice run to work out the bugs.

So Blogger switched over to this new Beta thing which lets me add tags to stuff, meaning you can simply click on the tags over on the side and be privy to posts only relating to that type of information. You’ll notice them on the latest three posts or so, and I’ll spend some time over Christmas break going through and editing some tags into stuff in recent months, but there’s obviously a rather large problem in the fact that most posts are going to have a whole lotta tags. This one won’t be too bad, as I can probably get away with “Television”, “NFL”, “Traveling” and maybe a “Dolphins” or “Buffy” thrown in, but this might get sticky in some of the more rambling posts.

But, we’ll see how it goes and wing it. Good luck to everyone with the remainder of their finals, and this site may be humming for procrastinating purposes. You'll at least have a bevy of links to distract you from the finishing touches of the semester.

A Tribute to Big Ben

I enjoy the comments attached to this video from defensive Steeler fans, including "He will get it back next year. Everyone at some point has an off year. Not many QBs go to the superbowl there second year." and "Ben Roeth was #1 or near it in terms of YPA his first couple of years -- anyone who says he's "horrible" is just an idiot. This year's growing pains are a natural part of any QB's development -- plus I'd like to see how many QBs could have even played this year going through what he did in the off-season."

Again, no statistical support for this, but Steeler Nation is the dumbest fanbase on the planet. I love the Supah Stees.

1) Time Travel 2) Curing Cancer 3) Creating a successful television series

This was originally going to be one of my “Where does the time go?” sentimental pieces, as I can’t even fathom how we’re already halfway through this semester. It truly does seem like yesterday we were rolling down to Georgia for Labor Day weekend. The main point of it was going to be “Despite the fact it’s going by so fast, we still have a considerable amount of college left to learn/party/embarrass Our Lady’s University.” I’ll probably post what I was working on at some point in time, but I want to discuss a few other things first.

Some of my roommates were surprised, after stumbling upon an USA Today television ratings summary, that The Office wasn’t one of the top shows in the country. In fact, Steve Carrell’s beautiful piece of television art isn’t even in the top 20. When Grey’s Anatomy – your number one show on television – ran a clip show before it’s season finale last month, the freaking clip show blew The Office out of the water. Maybe you’d like to blame My Name Is Earl, the lead-in, but Earl got higher ratings last Thursday.

That begs the question: How the hell do you make a successful television series? Notice I didn’t even say a “good” television series. Making a good television series isn’t easy, but it’s doable. There’s a lot of really good television on in primetime, almost to the point that there’s no way enough of it will survive.

To make a successful series, you probably need to start with a “good” program. Reality television proves it doesn’t have to be overly intelligent or world-altering, but you better make it entertaining. If you’re a comedy, be funny, if you’re a drama, have interesting characters or engrossing plots: just make it good. But once you have a critically-acclaimed show that everyone loves, where do you put it? You have to have an already established show for your new baby to siphon viewers from, which is how shows like CSI (fed off of Survivor) and Grey’s Anatomy (took the ball from Desperate and ran very far with it) become so damn popular.

Let’s say you’re The CW Network, and you have the best show on television. We’ll call it Victoria Mercury. It’s got smart writing, compelling storylines and beautiful women prominently involved. However, the problem is, nobody gives a crap about anything on your network. How do you possibly promote it, other than stashing it behind the failing, ancient Gilmore Girls and hoping enough people are forced into watching the first two seasons on DVD that you become successful again? Without an established show to draw viewers in with, you’re in trouble.

Of course, that isn’t always the case. When you look at the top twenty, the majority of shows grew from having some sort of power lead-in. There are non­-CSI and Law & Order exceptions, such as NCIS and Criminal Minds, but you can trace most everything else back to some greater entity that predated it. The two shows that I can’t remember coming from anything but major, major marketing?

Lost and Desperate Housewives, who emerged the fall of our freshman year in 2004 and took the television world by storm. Desperate, after slumping last year, is back hellastrong, third in the ratings and only a couple million viewers and two shares behind the monster it created, Grey’s. Why did Desperate get popular in the first place? It had the quality, tearjerking lead-in of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and then threw out a lot of beautiful women (mainly Eva – oh, Eva) and an interesting first season. People will try to deny it now, but the first season of Desperate contained some great moments and slightly-intriguing storylines.

Lost handled itself in the same way: huge hype, beautiful people, quality show (from what I hear), but something has terribly wrong this season: Lost is slumping. It’s lost a few million viewers from it’s second season premiere in 2005 and is only a few thousand viewers ahead of Criminal Minds. I’m not sure if you’ve ever watched Minds, but my mother is addicted to every CBS crime procedural, so I’ve seen a complete episode before. It’s terrible. My mom said the episode I saw was one of the worst, but I can’t imagine it ever being that good. Why is Lost flailing about so uncontrollably in the television winds?

Because while it’s a serial that requires viewers to tune in week after week, it’s not a serial that can actually solve it’s mystery and still exist: Once the show turns into Found, it’s series over. Shows like Desperate, Grey’s, Buffy, Veronica Mars and The Sopranos perhaps all have a season-long mystery or conflict they’re trying to resolve, but that can be wrapped up neatly at the end of the season so new, fresher pursuits can be made by the established characters. 24 almost was in the same problem as Lost, but they realized that if people believed all of that crazy, improbable stuff could happen within a single one-day period, they’d accept that in the ­24 universe it could easily happen again. Prison Break turned into Prison Broke, and while it’s not exactly a blockbuster hit, they made a necessary adjustment and didn’t lose that much steam.

Lost is stuck between revealing too much and satisfying fans into leaving, or trying to keep them trapped in with more and more mysteries. I refused to watch Lost because the established universe didn’t play by its own rules – there are slave traders and polar bears? – and because I knew stories of those that were burned by shows like Twin Peaks, Alias and The X-Files, where more and more mythology was heaped on and the show just collapsed under the weight of its own expectations. The longer you draw something out, the more exciting the revelation has to be. Invasion died last season, and shows like Jericho and The Nine appear doomed to follow in the same fate this season.

A well-written procedural, like Law & Order, CSI or House, doesn’t have to worry about such tie-ins. They can follow the same format every show, and as long as some emotion is attached to that episode’s case and the main characters remain interesting, people will tune in week after week.

So how in the world isn’t The Office more popular? It’s well-promoted, both on NBC and by word of mouth. It exists as both a procedural and a serial: you get much more out of every episode if you know the over-arcing storyline, but there’s still some pretty funny stuff a new viewer can identify with. It’s extremely well-written and manages to encompass some of the best comedy, along with some of the best dramatic sappiness, you’ll experience over the course of the week. It’s lead-in is a good show, but it’s facing stiff competition and probably the feeling from outsiders that goes along the lines of “I haven’t watched it yet, I won’t understand what’s going on”. While that was the case with something like Arrested Development, where someone who hadn’t seen the previous episodes would have no understanding of why David Cross was dressed up as a British nanny, The Offce is pretty accessible for anyone that’s ever been into the workplace. You have an idiot boss, lazy people and general malaise most of the time.

For the question of The Office, I’ll just stick with my tried and true answer anytime a series I love dies or doesn’t have the ratings it should, such as Veronica, Arrested or How I Met Your Mother (which isn’t in any danger of being cancelled, but is not rewarded for being the second best comedy on television):

America is stupid. They don’t understand quality, and would rather watch the Reality Show Flavor of the Week over a decent reality show, like The Amazing Race, or a quality piece of programming like The Office. The Oscars won’t nominate the best five movies every year, the best teams won’t always play for the national championship and television will neglect, to the point of cancellation, two or three great series a year.

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I’m extremely excited for the idea that Notre Dame will probably end up in the Sugar Bowl this January, barring some sort of embarrassing collapse against UCLA, Army, Air Force, Navy or North Carolina. Beating Southern Cal would only assure us our spot in New Orleans, unless the dominoes fall the right way and we slip into the BCS Championship. But still, for not winning a national title, spending some time in New Orleans isn’t too bad of a consolation prize.

The Sugar Bowl is one of the later bowls, falling in primetime on January 3rd. It’s within driving distance, meaning that there’s the option of spending New Years in N’awlins and a few days of drunken wandering through the French Quarter before the game or the secondary option of New Years in Niagara, then taking off for the bayou. My Mapquesting tells me it’s around a sixteen hour drive, which is definitely doable in one day/overnighting. Again, I’ll be gleeful should we end up in the BCS Championship game (played in Arizona), the Orange Bowl (sweet, beautiful Miami), the Sugar or The Rose (while being the most expensive potential trip, it’s the freaking Rose Bowl, man), if I had to buy a plane ticket to fly to the desert for the Fiesta Bowl, no matter how nice everyone says it was in January for the Ohio State loss, I would not be a happy camper.

Thankfully, the predicted Fiesta Bowl game as of right now?

Boise State vs. Texas. Burnt orange and blue. Lovely.

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Have yet to see The Departed, although I plan on seeing it at some point in time before fall break is over. Somehow, despite it’s general awesomeness, it still isn’t favored for Best Picture, which confuses me to no end.

Another film that will be definitely worthy, yet not nominated?

November 3^rd, and the exposure of countless pockets of American ignorance, is almost here.

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It was a joy to settle in for an afternoon of NFL Sunday Ticket for the first day all season, since fucking Comcast hasn’t paid enough to the league to get this on their service yet. I’ve followed the NFL with less vigor this season then I have any other since I became cognizant enough of the world around me to memorize the divisional allocation in kindergarten (for the record, Dill doesn’t even know the divisions now).

I don’t like to do things half-assed, so I don’t want to go watching three games a week on Sunday afternoon – the majority of those involving the Colts, Bears and Lions – and stake a claim at being some kind of NFL expert. Sure, watching highlights and reading the Peter Kings and Gregg Easterbrooks of the world still help, but there’s nothing like watching a few drives from a team in crunch time and seeing for yourself if they’re the real deal.

Plus, the NFL isn’t nearly as fun since the Steelers won the Super Bowl, as nearly every broadcast somehow harkens to that dark February day. You’d think maybe this success would make Steeler fans smarter, but instead of their usual gusto, they were still worried about the Chiefs this Sunday. Why? Because they were using a back-up quarterback, perennially terrible wide receivers, a depleted offensive line and a banged up LJ against your stout run defense, allowing you to just put eight in the box and let Damon Huard try to beat you? Not to mention the Chiefs are consistently deplorable on defense and coached by Herm Edwards. What advantage did they possibly have?

And of course, after the 45-7 victory, it was all jubilation and redemption for Big Ben. “The Chiefs aren’t very good. Damon Huard is their starting quarterback. You need a good QB going against you to lose because it minimizes the effectiveness of the Blitzburgh attack. Why are you so happy and ignorant over this victory?” I ask, with only Terrible Towels slapping me in the face as a response.

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Coming up next time: The merits and demerits of Washington, DC; a finger-wagging at Grey’s; the NBA is almost starting! musings; Departed reaction; and eventually, someday, the complete breakdown of what makes Veronica Mars so awesome.