Morning Always Comes To Soon

Back in college, I had the IFC and Sundance channels. I used to be able to turn on the TV and watch great indie films (and mediocre ones too) that were for the most part, unknown to me. Now, I rarely watch indie movies and when I do, it's because I sought out a particular flick rather than stumbled upon it on TV. I miss watching indies. This isn't to say that mainstream movies are garbage but it's nice to get a change of pace every so often, a different perspective on things.

In the past week or so, I have seen a few trailers for movies that I want to see but probably never will. In particular, this movie, Medicine For Melancholy, looks good. Being that it is set in San Francisco and involves bikes, love, class and race, it'll probably be one of the ones I make a point to check out. And let's just hope the trailer song is an indication of the rest of the soundtrack. "Meet Me By The Water" is my favorite Saturday Looks Good To Me songs and it fits the trailer perfectly.

Respect

There have been a lot of changes in Tampa and today, the Bucs released a few players including one of my favorite players of all time, Derrick Brooks. This news comes as quite a shock. The team was in need of some new blood and a fresh start after last season's crap show but this is a little hard to swallow. I always hoped he would retire as a Buccaneer and end his stellar career in Tampa - other fans are in an uproar about this too, understandably - but it wasn't meant to be. I guess with a new coaching staff (I'm going to miss Monte Kiffin probably even more than Gruden) and a new philosophy (no more Tampa 2?!?), these types of moves are inevitable but it's sad to see a guy like Brooks go. His presence in the locker room and in the community, in addition to his contributions on the field, should make him an asset to any team in the NFL, so I'm sure he'll be getting some offers really soon.

Sick Wid It

Jeffrey posted this video on Gchat and I was compelled to make some comments... First of all, why do they keep saying "kids"? I'm pretty sure kids don't play *beer* pong. I realize that some people say "kids" and mean "people" and/or "young people" but this made the whole piece pretty funny. It seemed like they were trying to get Little Timmy (why is it always "Little Timmy"?) to stop drinking from the cup. Also, you know comedy is afoot when morning TV show hosts(?) get to say things like "sharing cups" and "spit swapping". Add in some talk about balls, in a spring break setting and the outcome is laughter, or at least snickers. And, um, doesn't that lady-host know the entire story is about not drinking from the cup? You may argue she's playing dumb, like in a PSA commercial way but I think she was just being clueless. She wanted to drink from the cup. Finally, one of the doctor's tips should have been, "throw the ball with an arcing trajectory to have the best chance of sinking your shot."


P.S. I always thought the water cup was the stupidest aspect of a really, really stupid game. I think it's common sense to know that the filthy cleaning water isn't doing anyone any favors.

I Don't Know What You Heard

I want to talk about soccer right now. While Arsenal have managed to string together a "nice" run of unbeaten-ness, it includes three straight 0-0 league draws. For one of the so-called "Big 4" teams that's desperately trying to get back to 4th place, that's unacceptable. Without going into any details or analysis, let's just say a lot of work needs to be done. Even with all the talk about how center midfield is the major problem, we haven't been scoring many goals (aside from the 4-0 Cardiff win, which doesn't make me feel a whole lot better about the squad). Anyway, Henry has been gone for a while now, but it's times like these that Arsenal miss him. Any team would miss someone who was one of the best in the world in his prime. Just watch this video I stumbled upon the other day, and listen to the ridiculous song. Awesome.



On the plus side, it's good to see the defense playing more assuredly. Almunia has been better in goal, but he still hasn't shown the steadiness of last season. The successful but short-lived return of Eduardo was nice. Hopefully, he comes back soon. Arshavin's performance in his first game as a Gunner showed a hint of things to come (once he gets in top shape). And knowing that Fabregas, Walcott, Adebayor and Rosicky come back from injury soon also provides a positive outlook.

So it's not all bad I guess. I'm just hoping it doesn't get any worse. I'm looking forward to getting to see the Champions League game against Roma tonight, but I'm worried that we'll struggle to find ways to score. Without Arshavin and the injured bunch, it could shape up to be a typically disappointing 2008/09 Arsenal game but I'm trying to think more positively than that...

In other news, my second favorite soccer team, Valencia, is struggling over in La Liga. Like Arsenal, they're sitting in fifth place and threatening to fall further away from Champions League contention. Like Arsenal, they are losing and tying games they should win. Like Arsenal, they have injury problems and a general lack of roster depth. Like Arsenal, they can't seem to score on a regular basis. Like Arsenal, they are missing passion and urgency as we approach the end of the season. Like Arsenal, there are issues higher up in the club, with the Board and with the President. Like Arsenal, they have a few promising young, inexperienced players that questionably sit the best behind shaky veterans. The similarities are kind of eerie.

What makes matters worse here than with Arsenal, is that in addition to issues on the pitch, Valencia is in utter financial ruins. They just announced that they will rent out the stadium for parties and events, and have the players make appearances for an extra fee. Do the players want to do that? Some of them do. Why? Because the players haven't been paid in weeks!!! How can we expect two of Spain's best players, David Villa and David Silva, to stay with a team that doesn't win and doesn't pay their salaries? There are new rumors every day that one or both of them are linked with moves to bigger, more stable clubs and I can't blame them if they jump ship this summer.

I hate to say it, but if Valencia loses those players I might not follow the team anymore. Now, I haven't been a Valencia fan for that long. Truth be told, I started following them after seeing Silva play a few excellent games for Spain last year and I jumped on Villa's bandwagon around that time as well. Being a "young" Valencia fan whose initial interest in the team was the Davids, can I be blamed for turning my back on the team if and when they leave? The answer from most people's perspective is "yes" and I don't in turn blame them for thinking that. I'm just a rare breed of sports fan, but I am a fan even if people think otherwise. For now, I'm hoping Valencia can keep this season alive, avoid selling Villa and Silva, and get back to their winning form from a few years back. Like Arsenal.

Blow

It's unfortunate how much time and money were probably wasted because of a misunderstanding. I know airport security has to be extra careful and thorough during inspections. Can you imagine how awful it would have been if that bike was a pipe bomb and it went off because it was thought to be just a rock band's sticker? As the saying goes, "better to be safe than sorry". The funny thing about this story, if there is anything funny about it at all, is that I assume someone who makes pipe bombs probably wouldn't label them as such, especially if that person was trying to get one of them on an airplane.

When Our Bodies Finally Go

Yes, I will probably see this movie.

The Lonely Stoner

This video is super fresh. It was put together by the same guy who worked on the "Good Life" video with Kanye. I still like this version of "Day N Nite" much better than the remix. The lumbering beat seems to fit the mood of the song nicely, while the synths and beat changes in the remix are just generically techno. I don't know why that one got more attention but it took off in Europe so I'm guessing the synths were big in the clubs.

Take A Good Hard Look

Like I mentioned a few posts ago, I'm probably going to be catching up to "old" stuff over the next couple weeks (or at least posting things a few days late) so here, watch this video again (for the fourth or fifth time, possibly).

"I'm On A Boat" has been riding the Internet waves for the past week or so. I thought about skipping over it but I feel the need to touch on one key point that all the blog posts and Incredibad reviews have overlooked. Yes, similar to other Lonely Island songs, it's kind of really great. What sets this apart though, is that it's almost a real rap song. Replace a couple of the cutesy, silly lines and a few scenes in the video with something slightly less ridiculous and what do you get? I think you get a song that wouldn't be out of place in the current hip hop world. With Lonely Island songs like "Dick In The Box" and "Jizzed In My Pants", the lyrics are so goofy and out of bounds that it's easy to see that they are jokes. The lyrics in "I'm On A Boat", while still goofy, are actually not too different from the over-the-top bragging in several recently popular rap songs. Rapping about boats has been done time and time again. If this was a song by T-Pain (who is a cartoon character anyway) and say, E-40 or Luda or Three 6 Mafia (obvious stylistic similarities to Three 6, no?), it might only be funny because the rappers were actually being serious. As it is, "I'm On A Boat" is definitely outlandish but then again, so are a lot of rap songs that top the charts.

Martian

Like I mentioned last week, I'm behind with these posts. Here is more Little Wayne, this time his interview with Katie Couric from a couple weeks ago. While watching this, I laughed out loud at least three times (when they quick-cut to a straight faced JT saying, "I love Lil Wayne" and nothing more, when Katie Couric and Wayne were holding hands at the bowling alley, and when Weezy said, "If you need an example for how to live, then you just shouldn't have been born"), I wondered why Miss Katie didn't ask harder-hitting questions (she touched on Wayne's sizzurp and weed usage, and his kids, upbringing and father but she didn't attack him as I thought could have happened), and I was mildly uncomfortable throughout the whole piece. It's nothing special but interesting enough.

Take It On Down The Line

It's album release day and I'm at work waiting for some CDs to arrive from Amazon (N.A.S.A.!)... In the meantime, here are two of my favorite songs right now courtesy of Paste Magazine's sampler.

Kyle Andrews - Sushi


Heartless Bastards - The Mountain

I Be On That Kryptonite

Who cares if he used his left hand, he still can jump really, really, really, really high.

No One On The Corner

"Tha Carter III" won 'Best Rap Album' at the Grammys a few days ago. That album is over-rated especially compared to the second "Carter" and in general, Lil Wayne is over-rated too. I like him almost as much as the next person who likes mainstream rap but I just feel like people hype him up too much. With all that hype, of course there is a backlash, as evident by this (old) clip. In Wayne's defense, some of these cuts were taken from mixtapes and the "jacking" is more paying homage to the song he's sampling and/or rapping over than stealing. Also, hip hop is all but built on making new music with other people's old music so who cares if he's using snippets of different rappers' songs? People who love Lil Wayne and people who hate Lil Wayne both need to tone it down a bit.

I Am The Real

This is the guy who made Santogold change her name to Santigold??? This is the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. If anything, Santi White is giving this guy some unintentional exposure with the name confusion. He should be elated. Danny McBride didn't have to change his name because there was another Danny McBride in Hollywood. Well, he added the "R." but he was filling out an official document. Santogold and Santo Gold probably don't sign up for things using stage names so who cares if there's more than one Santogold? In the end, Danny had the last laugh, on national television, and I'm sure Santi will have the same.

Freshmen!

This song is going to rule frat and sorority houses across America. It's not terrible I guess.

Mighty Ighty Ighty O!

These are much funnier than they have any right to be...

Wait A Minute

There's been a few things I've been meaning to post these past several days. Rather than posting a bunch of stuff at once, I think I'm going to trickle them out (or fail to post them at all) over the next week or so. And I'm only saying this so you know why I'm later than the rest of the Internet with these things, if that happens to be the case. So stay tuned, I guess.

Anyway, here's this comedian, Nick Kroll, on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Apparently, he's on the CollegeHumor show on MTV, which is sitting on the DVR, waiting for me to watch it. This set starts out somewhat weak but gets really funny. You should watch it:

AwesomeAwesomeAwesomeAwesome

This one

is the full song version of this one

which is just like this one

and they were both based on this one

I Think I'm Goin' Crazy

About a year or so ago, Arsenal topped the Bucs as my favorite team in all of sports. Since then, hours of reading about the Bucs has been replaced with hours upon hours of reading about the Gunners, even when I get to watch roughly a game every two or three weeks (far more than I ever got to see of the Bucs). It didn't take long to grow accustomed to the absurdity of the transfer window, manager and player gossip and pretty much all so-called "news" in the EPL and other top flight football leagues. While I got used to reading the latest rumors, which entirely contradicted the previous rumors, it has almost become too much to handle.

It all boils down to Arsenal's attempt to sign Zenit St. Petersburg's Andrei Arshavin, possibly the best Russian international at the moment. The Gunners "problems" run deep and while Arshavin might not be the answer to the most important questions at the club, he could definitely help us get back on track. As you can see, he's good, an ideal candidate to play Arsene Wenger's style of football and lift them up offensively during a disappointing season:



Over the past few weeks, the Arshavin saga has been off and on so many times, that I could have sworn journalists were just flipping a coin to determine what news to report each day. Now, knowing what I do about the transfer window, pointless gossip and unreliable sources, I should have avoided reading all soccer news until today, the close of the transfer window. Maybe I could have saved myself from this roller coaster ride of good and bad news. Sadly, predictably even, that's not the case. Today alone, the deal has been on and off and on again. Check out the running log on Gunnerblog. Ridiculous right? On the very last day to sign new players, there are still stories going around about the transfer being up in the air. Ugh.

The final news of the day is that the paperwork is in, after the original close of the transfer window which was extended because of the weather, but it won't be reviewed until tomorrow. Assuming there's nothing fishy with the documentation, I guess Arshavin is an Arsenal player. Yay. I'm just glad it'll be all over even if the deal falls through because this was far too frustrating. There were times when I thought Arshavin was exactly the player we needed to put us over the top and win the league. And there were times when I thought he was over-rated and not worth the trouble of dealing with the difficult Zenit representatives and Dennis Lachter, Arshavin's agent. In the past few days, I've grown hopeful of the transfer so this was supposed to be the happy ending to an exhausting story. But even after spending the better part of this morning refreshing websites and blogs, I still don't really know anything more than I knew yesterday. Or a month ago. So the deal is probably on but maybe not... It seems the exhausting story is the never ending story, a story that will hopefully end tomorrow, for better or for worse.

I think Arshavin's agent, who was a major part of the difficulties with this signing, sums things up nicely:

“It was completed in extra-time but we must wait for confirmation. In 16 years this has been the most difficult transfer ever.”