Leap Day

Long-time readers of this blog should know that I mostly only post on Leap Day because long-time readers of this blog are me.

When I reread my last Leap Day post, I was surprised to find that actual measurable amounts of effort appeared to go into it. I can't say I totally followed what I was getting at, but there sure were a bunch of sentences saying some stuff.

Four years have gone by since then and I can say definitively that I've become a better writer. I now use a lot more exclamation points and since most of my writing takes the form of articles for an internal newsletter at work, I rarely have the chance to write anything that might be considered interesting. That's good! By sticking to empty platitudes and cliches, I get no furrowed brows and very few critiques. People are happy to let my writing wash over them like a lukewarm shower in a motel. It's serviceable if you absolutely have to clean yourself up or, if it's the last day of your work-mandated conference and the networking events are over, you can just ignore it completely and wait for the familiar water pressure at home. What I'm saying is, no one reads what I write unless they absolutely have to or are actively avoiding being productive (I can verify this. Statistics from mass email services are great for providing a window into how many people just don't give a fuuuuuck).

Writing with personality in my own voice even in a short burst like this reminds me why I don't do it anymore. It's hard! And this has to be posted before midnight! And I hate editing!

This is me pressing publish and hoping I don't find any typos four years from now.

We are the world

Some people point out that Americans cover and discuss European tragedies much more extensively than those that take place in other countries. The rest of the world suffers heartbreak too, they say.

And they're right. Today, Rob Ford died and I'm sure Canadians everywhere are mourning his passing. Or celebrating. I don't know their customs.

Leap Day

I have to tell you, there's a tremendous amount of pressure on me right now.  I've posted on every single February 29th we've had since 2008.  That's an eight year commitment to writing down some words on a particular day and I've met that commitment a full three times.

It's true that my previous Leap Day posts have not demonstrated any sort of literary talent or journalistic integrity on my part.  Both posts, as I examine them now, appear to have been rushed to publication in order to meet my obligation.  I'd like to apologize now for their poor quality.

With that in mind, let's take a look back to see where I went wrong...

Friday, February 29, 2008

I posted a link to an article in The Washington Post about leap day.  I went on to note that due to a quirk in the way my blog was set up, it looked like I'd published on February 28th.

Nothing about this piece excites me.  I'm quite frankly bored by what it has to offer.  There's no joy.  No verbal swag.  It's cement poured into a square on the calendar I figured needed to be filled in.  I didn't even bother to put a footprint down to make it my own.

Don't get me wrong.  I applaud this post's yeoman-like effort to stand stoutly and unwavering in place for eight years without complaint in order to memorialize one of the latest days in February ever recorded.  It's not its fault that I crafted it poorly and without thought to how it would be viewed all these years later.  Unfortunately, time has not been kind to its content.  I suspect that if I remember to look back on it again in 2020, it may actually have crumbled into dust.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

I recounted a conversation I had with a friend and told the tale of how it jogged my memory to write something on KC in HD.  Then I noted that $5 footlongs from Subway would no longer be a thing in 2016.

This piece holds up significantly better than my previous attempt.  I managed to work in a brief narrative and introduced another character into the equation.  It's not easy to juggle so many personalities in a work this succinct, but I did it admirably.

Perhaps most impressively, I correctly predicted the fall of the Five Dollar Footlong.  Earlier this month, the sudden collapse of this great American icon prompted headlines across the country.  It's difficult not to look back at my post today without thinking of the author as a wise seer boldly proclaiming what's in store for a lesser noble, that, yes, people have heard of, but are also embarrassed to say they know.

And yet, while brevity is the soul of wit, I must admit that I let myself down in 2012.  Again my post failed to prompt any sort of discussion.  No one took note of it and I can't say that I blame them.  Racism and sexism are still alive and well in America today and my writing did nothing to quell their incessant, raging fires. 

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Should someone have stepped in to offer assistance?  Yes, probably.  My friends never stepped up to share the burden and important figures like Bill Gates, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Donald Trump didn't pick up the phone to set me on the right path.  But in the end, I must shoulder all of the blame.  I should have been better. You deserve better.

But not this year because I've already written this.

Leap Day

It was a day like any other until...

Emily: oh

hey

it's leap day

right?

yep

sure is

the internet says so

Me: yep

i will mark the occasion by doing nothing special whatsoever

...and then I remembered! I have a blog. And on that blog, I have certain traditions. One of them is almost never posting anything. Another is posting on Leap Day.

Hi. Remember, today is the last day you can get any footlong for $5. I highly doubt this deal will be available to you in another four years.

BREAKING: Lincoln Defeats South... Beach

DeShawn: 11 points. LeBron: 8 points.

Dododo, dododo.

Am I the only person who looks at the Large Hadron Collider and thinks, "This is SportsCenter"?

Angela Lansbury don't give a fuck cause it's her birthday

Tomorrow (October 16th) Angela Lansbury turns 85. For her birthday, I'd like to honor the lady who starred in one of the few hit shows that incorporated punctuation in the title without stooping to use a clichéd colon or exclamation point.

With that in mind, I present you with Murder She Wrote In Da Club, an amusing (if not altogether convincing) mashup of 50 Cent and the Murder, She Wrote theme song that I've been waiting to repost until the time was right.

Listen Here

The artistic genius behind the song can be found here.

...And here's a picture from what was no doubt an epic crossover episode of Murder, She Wrote.

Now that's hot... he wrote.

Sorry.

The last bad poem before the author went on to do great things

It's that time when I'm in bed
Yet sleep is not what's in my head
I want to write importantly
To tell the world how it should be
But there's no time to snoop, to sleuth
And make my writing tell the truth
Instead I've got to compromise
Truncate my thoughts. Tell big, bold lies
A shallow rhyme won't interfere
When my tone is insincere

I wrote all these words for you

Every once in awhile, I feel a tremendous urge to create something... creative.

I get extremely antsy. I tap my feet a lot. I write a lot of short sentences.

Then I get to work. I open Notepad because my motivation may disappear if I wait for Word to wake up, brush its teeth, and amble its way past the various windows in front of it.

My piece needs to be funny and insightful... like a YouTube cat video directed by Paul Krugman. My mind races to come up with an interesting way to turn a phrase that doesn't sound forced. I gnaw at the inside of my cranium with my brain mandibles.

Will my audience understand my jokes if they aren't explicitly explained? Should I insert a parenthetical dissertation on the meaning of my joke? Or should I dress my explanation up in a beautiful Sunday dress and take it dancing until people forget what the original point of the sentence was and therefore hopefully don't realize I'm using it as an excuse to oversell my punchline because I think they might be dumb?

Then the nagging suspicion that I've probably only succeeded in confusing my audience begins to take hold. I insert more ambiguous pronouns just to be certain. Are "brain mandibles" something my average reader can relate to? Do I need to replace it with something more mundane? Is it possible I've just made up a phrase that doesn't actually mean anything in any context?

Then I come up with a topic for my piece. Mostly this is only important because I'll need to write a title.

All this - this angst - went through my head, of course, when I sat down to write this totally unrelated poem for you, dear reader:

Oh mud on my shoe,

You do not enhance the aesthetic qualities of my Sambas.

And yet you insist on calling my footwear home.

Did you know I'd be too lazy to clean you off?

Is that why you chose my shoes?

Maybe I'll just put you in my closet

And wear my Pumas.

Masterpiece.

Too young to go stale

The worst thing about writing is trying to remember what I've already written. Did I already make x comparison? Did I use y joke in z post last year? Have I already used these letters for variables I may need to bring up later?

It's an excercise in futility in the end. You'll probably recycle a thought or borrow a simile from your previous work and not even know you did it. A lot of times I throw in a key word that I already used in the previous sentence without noticing and it totally kills any rhythm. If I can't remember what I wrote literally 21 words ago, the odds that I'll be able to write a full paragraph without plagiarizing myself at least three or four times can't be good.

I read a few posts recently on a big sports blog ripping apart a national columnist for whipping out a favorite phrase over and over again like a dirty, smelly security blanket and I thought, "Thank God no one reads anything I write."

There are certain trends and flourishes I use that I already know about and that will probably accompany my writing forever. Flourishes like periods. I really like using periods. I know. It's cliche.

It's great to have a style until someone cracks your formula and every subsequent bit of writing borders on self parody. I call this the Christopher Walken Effect. At one point Christopher Walken starred in movies like The Deer Hunter. Then every comedian on the planet developed a spot-on Walken impression and suddenly nothing Walken said could be taken seriously anymore. Thus Walken found himself relegated to making movies like The Country Bears and taking on parts where he was married to John Travolta. Now Walken wanders the Earth from talk show to talk show, lending his unusual cadence to poems and song lyrics not written with him in mind while the audience laughs. With each self-deprecating performance, he reinforced his vocal notoriety until he was stuck in an infinite loop the likes of which only William Shatner and Deep Movie Trailer Voice Guy can truly understand.

Sometimes it's easy to identify the things you overdo. For instance, I used get violently nauseous when I tried to write an entire piece without at least one reference to an early 90s cartoon show. Luckily, when I reached my teenage years, I ninja kicked this bizarre mutation to the curb. Turtles.

But I think it's inevitable that eventually everyone becomes stale. It happens with TV shows all the time. The formula gets old, but the show has formed its boundaries and it's impossible to break out of them by the third or fourth season. It's tough for writers to decide that, hey, maybe Jack Bauer had a really lighthearted day and spent it goofing off with his friends eating ice cream and getting into non-explosion related trouble. Like maybe in one episode his hands get sticky from all the ice cream and his gun gets stuck to his hand while they're at the baseball game.

Sometimes people just go with what sells. Fans get used to one thing and encourage the writer to keep pumping out the same dreck. Reading the Redwall books was great when I was little until I realized I could rip out a couple pages from one book in the series and glue them in another and the result would be only mild confusion on the part of the reader that all the characters had suddenly assigned each other new nicknames. The way I remember it, one third of a Redwall novel was descriptions of food. The rest was rodent combat culminating in a showdown between a young hero mouse and a pirate.

I think getting stale is usually an accident... mostly a byproduct of getting lazy and not spending enough time broadening your repertoire, but sometimes also just a result of our frustratingly limited brains.

Anyway, I think there's some kind of pride to be had in going stale. You probably didn't mold for one. And for two, enough people paid attention to what you were doing that they got tired of you.

I hope they write, "We read everything he had to say and then some" on my grave.

The very hostile caterpillar

I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships and my friends. My family used to call me a social butterfly which a) I don't think describes me at all and b) is possibly one of the worst terms I've ever heard.

Especially when applied to a guy.

Guys aren't supposed to be butterflies. Guys aren't even supposed to take notice of butterflies unless they're under a microscope and then mounted because maybe this particular guy isn't a very good hunter, but dammit, he needs something to put over his fireplace.

When I hear "social butterfly," it makes me think of someone nervously interacting with everyone and trying desperately to make friends with each individual at the cost of getting to know anyone. That's not me. I know who I get along with. Unfortunately, that's not everyone. In fact, it's not even half of you out there. A lot of you are too old. Some of you are Dallas Cowboys fans. At least one or two of you have flicked me off in traffic.

And some of you just rub me the wrong way. Guy I don't know nodding and winking at me knowingly when an attractive girl walks by: I will leave you hanging when you try to fist bump me later. Girl I've never met before asking me lots of uncomfortable personal questions and then rolling your eyes when I don't answer: I will probably accept your friendship request on Facebook later, but rest assured I will do so VERY RELUCTANTLY.

My ex-girlfriend used to insist on being friendly with everyone. She'd tell me sometimes that some of her friends were friends of convenience who she probably wouldn't hang out with under other circumstances. Every time she told me this, a different part of my brain would not-so-spontaneously combust. I could not wrap my head around the idea that she was friends with people just for the sake of being friends and this was ESPECIALLY difficult to grasp with bits of my skull exploding. One time after a particularly nasty grey matter eruption (thesaurus in action), I had to relearn how to smile. Not that anyone noticed... and actually it's possible I forgot how while I was busy not making friends with people and generally being grumpy.

It wasn't hard for her to make friends and that made the whole thing that much more confusing. She just wanted to fit in. Now I'm not saying that she would have joined the Nazi party if she lived in 1930's Germany just because everyone else was doing it, I'm just saying that she's my ex-girlfriend, so I've got a lot of mean, irrelevant things to say about her.

Anyway, is there a rational reason to be annoyed at social butterflies? Probably not. It's a good instinct. People like that get good jobs and probably run into good people eventually. And I know I've got quite a few social butterflies among my friends. Let's face it, they're very nice people.

Still, I take close friendships very seriously and that whole butterfly thing probably isn't ever going to take root with me. Not just because I'm a dude and thus can't relate to butterflies or because I feel compelled to include something about explosions in everything I write in a very un-butterfly-like fashion.

No, it's mostly because I want my friends to matter. What is the point of thinking about explosions constantly unless you've got someone relevant to discuss it with? What's the point of having discussions about explosions unless you've got someone to reminisce about it with later? What's the point of reminiscing about talking about stuff blowing up unless the person you're reminiscing with really matters to you?

When I'm old and senile, I don't want to look back at my life and think, "Well, that certainly was an interesting, but forgettable cast of revolving characters in the long-running TV sitcom that metaphorically represents my life!" I want to think, "Hey, I wonder what happened to that guy who played my best friend in seasons 8 through 79. Oh, that's right... he's right here next to me talking about explosions."

An expanded tweet

Here's the problem with Twitter: It makes me even lazier than I already am.

Why flesh out a fleeting thought into an entire piece of writing when I can instead spend 15 minutes struggling to fit it all into 140 characters while trying not to cop out and turn whole words into single vowels? I suppose it forces me to write snappier sentences, but the fact that I've lost the patience needed to sit down and write a paragraph is troubling. At some point someone drilled into my head that paragraphs should generally be at least four or five sentences. I have to cheat to attain those kinds of lofty numbers. Here is a fifth sentence.

At any rate, Twitter was advertising a book for awhile that was a collection of the world's most humorous twitter posts (I refuse to call them "tweets" in this entry. I can use an infinite number of characters in this unrestricted space so there’s no need to shorten that phrase. In fact, let’s just go ahead and call them "user generated Twitter character strings").

Okay, I'll admit: If I was using Twitter, that gratuitous parenthetical comment wouldn't have made it to print and you'd remember what it was I was trying to tell you before I interrupted myself which was this: Twitter made a book of funny Twitter quotes (that's right, you may have noticed I used double colons in that sentence which is a rare grammatical feat. It comes in handy when you're being needlessly wordy and probably also if you have rectal cancer or have to take a really big poop).

The whole thing is 140-character quotes with the Twitter brand slapped on each sentence. That's it. That's the glue that holds the book together. If you traveled back in time, renamed the project "The Hilarious Book of Really Short Sentences Often with Awkward Abbreviations," and tried to get a publishing deal, someone would probably point out that that's a really awful title. Then that person would go on to tell you that "really short sentences" is not a theme, it's a stupid handicap on your ability to collect funny things. It's like opening a pet store and shaving all your puppies before you sell them.

Sometimes it helps to throw in a little fur even if you have to deal with the occasional tangle (parenthetical or otherwise).

You never send flowers

I have never received a love letter. Not one. Not even a really heartfelt "A" or "H." It confuses and hurts me that no one cares enough about me to write their feelings down and hand them to me instead of telling me face to face.

Maybe all the girls I meet just think I'm really environmentally conscious because they noticed I recycle so they didn't want to waste paper. Also email's out without buying carbon emissions offsets and let's be honest, have you seen the price of carbon these days? It's used in practically everything.

Or maybe I'm missing something.

-A few of my friends have received love letters. If I could use only one word to describe them it would be "girls." This is probably one of those skills you have to be born with. It's kind of like in the NBA when a general manager says, "You can't teach height" so they draft the guy who's seven feet tall instead of the guy who can dribble and speak the same language as the other guys on the team. But really, it's more like in the WNBA when a general manager says, "You can't teach girl" and drafts a woman who can't dunk instead of Michael Jordan.

-My ex-girlfriend received a love letter once. She is a heartless, soulless human husk. I can't hope to achieve this. Lobotomies are illegal in the United States now and I am a law abiding citizen.

-That one guy in that one movie I never saw got a love letter. He was really hot. I would probably have to work out a lot to look like him. One time my friends and I got in my car and drove to Taco Bell, Burger King, and a Chinese restaurant to get food for one big dinner. It was a crazy night. I will probably never look like that one actor.

Sometimes when I go to bed alone at night, I console myself with the thought that maybe there are hundreds of illiterate women out there who simply lack the words to tell me how they feel. If you meet one, please offer to transcribe her message. I will reimburse you later.

It's a live blog!

Given the fantastic success of KC in HD, I have extended the brand and helped create "It's a live blog," a website dedicated to live blogging.

I've already sunk money into this venture (ten bucks) so I am highly invested in its success.

What will we be live blogging about? Everything.

But so far that translates into one episode of American Gladiators. We hope to branch out soon.

Check it out: http://www.itsaliveblog.com

Mive most marvelous Marvel movies

When computers became advanced enough to reliably create realistic moving images of men in spandex crashing through brick buildings, Marvel knew the time had come to make lots of movies about nerdy guys getting really buff to beat up bad guys and then get moody about it afterwards.

Most of these movies were not very good, but five stick out as success stories.

Well, ok, only four do, but four doesn't seem like enough for a substantial list so I threw one more in there.

The movies that occupy slots 5-3 are all from franchises wrecked by truly atrocious third installments. I haven't re-watched any of them so I don't remember much about them. As such I will glibly gloss over them in a few short paragraphs.

#5 - Spider-Man
I'm pretty sure Spider-Man is the first in a series of movies that establish the origins of Bruce Campbell. There was also a guy in a red suit portrayed by a particularly athletic CGI gummy bear.

#4 - Spider-Man 2
Settles once and for all who would win in a fight between an arachnid and an octopus. Who can forget when Alfred Molina goes to the arcade and a radioactive claw machine bites him? In all, Spider-Man 2 was a good movie that might have been great if only Sam Raimi had thought to throw in more inappropriate references to past movies he's made.

#3 - X2: X-Men United
The touching story of men with two X chromosomes. Movie tagline: "Some call them mutants... others call them women."

#2 - Iron Man
Who knew Jeff Bridges could be so menacing? Better yet, who knew all it would take to make Jeff Bridges menacing was to shave his head? Bald is the new black hat.

I have only one substantial complaint against Iron Man: Samuel L. Jackson should not look like a pirate. I don't care if that's what his character looked like in the comic book. There are only two accessories on the planet that can make Sam Jackson look like he isn't capable of blowing up another man's head simply by shouting the F-word really loudly. One is an eyepatch. The other is a lightsaber (though to be fair, maybe it wasn't the lightsaber. Maybe it was the fact that his goofy jedi name sounded like a combination cleaning product/self-protection spray... Use it to combat grime on your windows or to fend off rapists! Mace Windu, new from Procter and Gamble!)

#1 - Captain America
It shouldn't take much to prove to you this is a cinematic masterpiece.

"But KC," you begin to ask me before being interrupted by a comma and a quotation mark, "how could you possibly know whether or not Captain America is a great movie?"

Well I watched parts of it on YouTube.

"Is a tiny pixelated recap of a film really enough to judge its greatness?"

Must one watch an entire sunset to determine its beauty?



This is a film about a guy who becomes a superhero not because he felt an overpowering urge to help people, but because he drove off a cliff and someone reminded him people used to make fun of his dad. This is a film about about a guy with a 12-inch vertical leap complimented by the incredible ability to teleport dozens of feet in the air using nothing more than very basic linear editing techniques. This is also a film about another guy named Christopher Lee who has been in some pretty cool movies, but who could never escape the typecasting that resulted from playing "Miguel" in this one.

In other words, this is a film that appears to have only a coincidental relationship with the comic book character it gets its name from. Despite this and the fact that the title does not contain a noun for the masculine gender, I assure you this is most definitely a finely crafted superhero movie.

Friends, I need only write three words to convince you to go pick this up at Blockbuster in the American Flag-themed vehicle of your choice: Reb Brown. You see? I only needed two. Truly Captain America is a film that surpasses all expectations.

Reb Brown, star of Space Mutiny and many other quality films that I haven't yet looked up, is a spectacular actor perfectly cast as the title character. Brown's emotional range is superb. He uses a variety of facial expressions to communicate things like, "Oh" and "I am studying your eyebrows intensely for mites."

I can't be the only one waiting with bated breath until the Avengers crossover movie Marvel has planned for 2011. Right now I'm trying to suppress a grin thinking about the inevitable scene depicting a crotchety, 63-year-old Reb Brown scolding a spry, 46-year-old Robert Downey, Jr. for using his rocket boots to kick up mud on the American Moped of Justice. Oh that Iron Man! He'd learn a thing or two about crime fighting if he'd had to face bad guys with nothing more than a plastic shield and the vacant, slack-jawed stare of a TV-show high school jock!

The movie critic critic: The Host, The Incredible Hulk, Kung Fu Panda

Welcome to an exciting new feature. For every movie I see, I'll post my analysis of a critic's opinion about that movie.

What you should expect from this exciting new feature: A full, nuanced explanation of a movie review based on an explanation given to me by the critic himself that is entirely fabricated. That is, I will write as though I have interviewed the critic about his review when in fact I have magically pulled the interpretation that follows from my behind.

What you should not expect from this exciting new feature: An opinion backed up by research or even a full reading of the movie review. It is much faster and easier for me to read blurbs and then make a mad dash to judgment.

The Incredible Hulk

"By the time the Hulk is battling the Abomination it's simply watching two special effects go after each other. Were Norton and Roth even on the set?" - Daniel M. Kimmel, Worcester Telegram & Gazette (review)

I would have enjoyed this film more had it been acted out with sock puppets. Also, every character should have been voiced by Rowlf.


The Host

"Can 93% of American movie critics be wrong? On the soft and squishy Rotten Tomatoes website, an amazing 70 out of 75 critics gave a thumbs up to The Host, a hokey South Korean monster movie that makes Godzilla look like The Godfather." - Thomas Delapa, Boulder Weekly (review)

I work for the newspaper from The Flintstones. I spent the majority of my review talking about stuff entirely unrelated to the movie I was supposed to be writing about, but when I finally got around to it, I boldly raised my voice in opposition to the unjust enjoyment reviewers experienced while watching The Host. If it were up to me, all monster movies would feature rubbery dinosaurs knocking over Playmobil sets.


Kung Fu Panda

"And honestly, it’s the most entertaining DW Animation project since, well, ever. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t formulaic or dripping with bullshit sentiment about how 'everyone can succeed if they just believe in themselves.' I don’t know where this started, but I don’t think it does any service to children to feed them that line of crap." - Pete Vonder Haar, Film Threat (review)

RAAAAAAR! MOVIE THEMES AIMED AT CHILDREN BAD! TEACHING CHILDREN SELF-CONFIDENCE BAD! CURSING IN A REVIEW OF A CHILDREN'S MOVIE BAD-ASS!

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Today's bonus discussion question: Should I have made a "HULK SMASH" joke somewhere in this post?

Christine Brennan knows more about being a national columnist than I do

This is follow-up to an earlier entry. Expect another piece on some of the issues raised in the previous post a little bit later after I've done all the legwork. You can read the first part here.

When I write things on my blog about people I don't know personally, I do so secure in the knowledge that they will never read what I've posted. I assume they are too stupid to use advanced Web 2.0 tools like Google. I'm veiled in an impenetrable cloak of Internet anonymity that allows me to disclose how much I hate other members of college basketball message boards without risking physical harm.

I rest assured that I'm completely untraceable... except when I'm not. Who would have guessed that putting my name in the title of my blog would prove my undoing?

On April 1, I wrote about USA Today columnist Christine Brennan. I titled it, "Do you understand what your job entails?"

"Ha!" I thought. "Take that, newspaper lady who graciously agreed to speak to my sports journalism class senior year! You thought you were talking to a group of timid college students. Little did you know you had a blogging superstar in your midst!"

Then I turned off my computer, sighed contentedly and waited for my readers (a strong, three-person support group, nearly half of which publicly admits to visiting my site) to pour over my latest offering. Brennan would never know how badly I had damaged her e-reputation, but my flock of rabid fans would.

And that's where the story ended. Or at least, that's where it would have ended if not for the fact that Christine Brennan owns at least one computer that is capable of using the Internet.

The next day I received an email from my professor. Brennan had found my blog and she wanted to talk to me.

Oops.

I had written primarily to criticize her for saying that she didn't often look at the reader comments under the online versions of her USA Today columns. Having been a part of an online newspaper in high school, I have strong feelings on the subject. The Internet has changed the way news media operates and I don't always feel that people who joined the industry when "dot com" sounded like editing shorthand for forgotten punctuation get that.

I read back over what I'd written after I received the email and wondered if perhaps I'd been a bit... overzealous. In hindsight, calling her "smug" and "cocky" might not have helped strengthen my argument.

Her offer to sit down and meet with me also failed to lend credence to the aloof portrait I painted of her.

We met at Politics & Prose last week to discuss what she took issue with in my blog. She'd already told me on the phone right after I'd written it, but I'd been a bit too shocked at the time to think to take notes. This time I was armed with pen and paper.

"We're not talking about the cure for cancer here," she told me after we shook hands. That put me at ease. It was good to know that my blog entry fell somewhere below matters of life and death on her list of important things to talk about.

We then got down to the matter at hand. I'm going to break into a pseudo-Q-and-A format here, which my old high school newspaper adviser would tell me is a very lazy way to do things, but hey, this is a blog and I'm not getting paid.

Where, in her opinion, had I gone wrong?

Well, to start off, she felt I may have gone a bit overboard when I wrote the following: "Did you know she gave Tony Kornheiser the ideas for many of his columns back when he actually still wrote for The Washington Post...?"

Fair enough. I was trying to be funny, but I guess I took what she said out of context. She clarified for me: "When I covered the Redskins, Tony and I talked about column ideas." That sounds similar to what I wrote, but there is a distinction. My statement makes it sound like she told him what to think. Her explanation defines her role as more of a sounding board. She was the Post's Redskins beat reporter and what I believe she means is that they would sometimes discuss what was going on with the team.

As for the main thrust of my post, Brennan agreed with my central point, she just didn't think she "was the person to make that with." As she noted, she had told our class she does her best to respond to every email that comes her way.

But what's the difference between comments and email and why does one deserve a response while the other sometimes gets ignored?

Here she reminded me of the way anonymous Internet tough guys work. She referred to the "food fight" going on in the comment section on several occasions. Under many articles, she said, the commenters end up attacking one another, leaving a messy argument she doesn't always have time to wade into.

"Even if I wanted to email Dirtydog37, how would I do that?" she asked.

I checked out the USA Today comment section briefly and even registered, but I'm not entirely sure if there's a way to publicly display your email address in your user profile. There's an option to send a message, but I don't know whether or not USA Today discourages its writers from using that feature. Dirtydog37, if you're reading this, email me. I've got her number.

I looked through some of the comments on her articles and the tenor of the discussion and the number of replies varied widely based, as one would expect, on what the topic was. Certainly there are instances of personal attacks ("She is a media Tiger butt kisser. She's also an Obama butt kisser as well. It's true about meida [sic], and especially media "chicks", they're Obama-girls and Tiger-girls"), but some of the articles produced fairly focussed replies that stuck to the issues she brought up in her column.

That isn't to say I don't see where she's coming from. In addition to her obligations at USA Today, her website describes her as a "commentator for ABC News, ESPN, NPR and Fox Sports Radio." That doesn't leave much time for anything else. "At some point you have to go, 'Where are the hours in the day?'" she explained.

I should explain that I wasn't advocating that she spend the day constantly clicking the refresh button on her column nor was I saying that I thought she should respond to every reader. I simply felt it was important to get a sense of what people thought of her writing and possibly to acknowledge the readers from time to time.

Clearly she does that. She even took the time to sit down with a recent college grad who essentially depicted her as an egomaniac based on one very limited interaction.

I suppose I can maybe cut her a little slack.

So did anything positive come out of what I'd written initially?

"Since our conversation [on the phone], I do look at the comments more."

Ha! Take that!

A man called inclement weather: Introduction

Most people have bosses with names like "Todd" or "Bill" or "Think of common female name to show I'm not sexist and can imagine a woman in a leadership role."

These are good names. They are normal names. They indicate a dependable upbringing and in turn a likely well-adjusted individual.

If your boss's name is Bowser, you are a video game character and none of this applies to you.

And if your boss's name is Storm, you should follow these steps to determine if your chosen job is the appropriate one for you:

1. Examine yourself for mutant powers.
Likely outcome: You are unable to shoot elemental projectiles or shape-shift in some way.
What that means: You are not an X-Man and your boss is probably not a white haired lady who looks like Halle Berry.

2. Note whether your salary or hourly wage sounds impressive when you say it out loud.
Likely outcome: Announcing your income out loud elicits laughter from third parties or an involuntary, exaggerated clown frown on your face.
What that means: You are not making enough money and you have embarrassed yourself in public.

If your results match the likely outcomes above, consider the following: Your boss has a really stupid name. You have associated yourself with him.

I tell you this because I worked for a man named Storm. He was a strange character with delusions of grandeur and a shady past I've only just recently discovered.

He provided me with a job I would describe as simultaneously the worst job I've ever had and the most hilarious job I've ever had.

So join me - won't you? - on a journey of immensely bizarre proportions. Or, if you lack a time machine, please read my description of a journey of immensely bizarre proportions.

NEXT TIME ON A MAN CALLED INCLEMENT WEATHER: Signs of Stormy Weather! (I meet Storm)

Texas and Connecticut in the house

I was poking around my site numbers tonight and I saw the predictable locations: Silver Spring... DC... Silver Spring... DC... oh look, someone from Laurel. Shocking stuff really. I don't know specifically who these readers are, but I can make some educated guesses and the Florida visit (Hi, Nicole!) is fairly self-evident.

There were a couple that had me completely stumped though: Wallingford, Connecticut and Frisco, Texas. Who are you? Frisco sounded vaguely familiar, but I may have been thinking of Brisco County Jr. or quite possibly even The Count of Monte Cristo. Wallingford I've never heard of before in my life, but I'm sure it's a fascinating place full of... walls. It also makes me think of fording the river in Oregon Trail so I assume you know something of losing oxen where you come from.

I'd like to take this opportunity to say: Hey! There's no reason to be ashamed of visiting my totally awesome blog. It contains at least trace amounts of fun and many words that I claim are hilarious.

If you are long lost acquaintances from my distant Facebooking past, oh dears Wallingford and Frisco, you should definitely let me know so we can rekindle our no-doubt-once-vibrant friendship.

Perhaps you both prefer to remain unspecified readers. I apologize if I've just overstepped some privacy boundary. If you'd like to keep this all hush-hush, you could always call me on my cellphone and whisper your identities to me. No one else would know. I promise.

Of course, if you were random visitors passing through on your way to other corners of the Internet, you most likely will not see this and that is sad. I'm considering making road trips to your respective towns and plastering your public meeting spaces and telephone poles with printouts of my entries and big bold words up top that read, "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BLOG?"

Most extreme escalator challenge

I have a strange feeling many words have been written about this subject already, but I must succinctly add to the cacophony of dumbstruck voices.

When I see a man with six pack abs wearing a blue unitard boarding an escalator, my assumption is generally that he will make it to the top. He has the muscles to get him there and the tight clothing he needs to prevent snags.

This is why watching American Gladiators is so disappointing. When your competitors are too exhausted to run up a gently sloping travelator, it's time to come up with a new final act. There's no doubt that it's hilarious watching the pained expression on a grown man's face as he is gently laid to rest on a rubber mat after an agonizingly slow descent from a three-foot climb, but at the same time, it's sort of tough to swallow an ending where two physically fit contestants are defeated by the moving walkway we so often see children run across in the opposite direction at an airport.

The producers need to do something to give this at least the appearance of difficulty. I understand the contenders are tired after a grueling battery of tests against gladiators with giant tumors for limbs, but it just isn't satisfying. While I must admit that "travelator" sounds sort of like a vacation-bound Arnold Schwarzenegger and therefore kind of lends the event some action cred, I think in this case it's alright to force some company on well enough and make some changes. Let's at least douse the ropes in gasoline so when one of the competitors makes that shameful slide back down to the bottom, there's a chance the friction might cause the whole thing to light up.

Also, while I applaud the effort to more severely punish the competitors for not making it across the obstacles this season, a six-foot deep ball pit is somehow less terrifying than a wall of fire. These are two concepts that really don't gel all that well. For consistency's sake, you've got to go with one or the other.

I guess what we all need to take away from this is that if toddlers routinely use an element of your obstacle course, it probably won't look all that intimidating on television.