Don't Hate the Player. Hate the Game.

I finally started watching "Lost" recently after an extended discussion with Gerry about the qualms I had about the show. This is exactly the sort of show which should've appealed to me right out of the gate and I should be square in the show's target demographic.

Yet at the time it first burst onto the scene I didn't get ABC very well on my rabbit ears nor can I really be bothered to sit down at a specific time on a specific night to catch a television program. By the time it made it to DVD, "Lost" was such a huge phenomenon that I was put off by it. Add in my perception of the show's writers favoring obfuscation over plot development and I let the "Lost" ship sail without me.

Which I'm perfectly okay with in the long run. I'm not the sort of person who shows up late to the scene and says, "Oh, wow. I didn't realize how good 'Lost' was and it really is." The moment where it was fully in the cultural eye as something new and fresh and exciting is over and, like I said, I let that moment pass with out involving myself in it. There are advantages like being able to look up answers to the show's questions and being able to knock out a block of episodes in a row.

But I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. It's a good show and one which engenders complete fandom. The producers of the show know this and play up the bulletin board material. It's certainly in their favor to do so because the buzz helps their ratings. Then the fans respond with more obsession and the cycle feeds itself again. All in all, "Lost" is shrouded in an excess of mystique which is unfortunate because it is legitimately good on its own merits.



Instead of banging on a tired drum about how "things are popular based on hype and promotion now" (now being the operative word as though it's something new), I'd like to list things that make me happy which are underrated and underappreciated and need more attention instead of tearing down something else which does get a lot of attention. In no order and indeterminite quantity...

Cultural Studies

When I transferred back from St. Norbert to the University of Minnesota, I took a class in my last full semester from the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literatures Department. I wrote my senior paper in that class when I ran into a problem professor in the English Department capstone class. I ruminated on how if I'd gone to the University first I probably would've been a CSCL major.

And I've taken that into my post-collegiate life. I don't need to have a teacher assigning me books to read them. In fact, that's the point of a liberal arts degree; to foster a diversity of interests (because it's not the money). So I a lot of time in bookstores perusing their cultural studies section.

There I make discoveries like Klosterman's "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs" or the book I finished this weekend "American Nerd: The Story of My People" by Benjamin Nugent. The title is pretty explanatory of what the topic is but also of the slant.

This isn't like most cultural studies where a subject is examined from a distance. Nugent specifically weaves his own primary experience into the study and is thus able to cut into the "Why?" in much greater depth and detail. It also gives the narrative a definition and understanding a memoir usually doesn't have.

The Stretch of I-94 from Hudson, WI to St. Paul, MN

Driving from Minneapolis to just about any other major metropolitan area takes forever. The distance to Chicago or Milwaukee is about six hours and, unless you consider Duluth, Des Moines, LaCrosse or Eau Claire to be major cities, those are the closest metropolises to the Twin Cities. So if you're driving from the east on I-94 toward Minnesota, the last few hours though the farmland of West Wisconsin can seem interminable.

Then Hudson (on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin) rolls up and you are attached to a rocket. Quickly buildings, malls and cities grow along the side of the road as you burn through the half hour to St. Paul and then it's across the high-bridge over the Mississippi River and into the heart of Minneapolis. If you've been tired driving through the night from Chicago or points further, that last stretch is like a bolt of energy.

The Re-playability of Certain Videogames

When Mario Kart came out over 15 years ago, could you have predicted we'd still be playing it into our late 20s? I suppose the paradigm has changed as we've grown older (and because we've grown older) where you don't stop playing videogames after college. It also matters that videogames have become less about reflexes and knowing a complex order of buttons to mash (bastions of the young and otherwise unencumbered) and are now much more egalitarian and relating to the realworld. When you're playing Mario Kart now, you only have to rotate your hands right and left like you would an actual steering wheel. Still it's been 15 years and the franchise is still going strong because guys like me still want to play.

Cover Versions of Songs You Love

"Loooove... Love will tear us apart... againnn"

Cover Versions of Songs That Suck (But Are Awesome Themselves)

"Dooooon't Stop... BEE-LEEE-VVIIINNN"

Spending A Long Weekend Doing Nothing

Well, not nothing. After a spending Friday night and into early Saturday morning celebrating a friend and co-worker's birthday party, I drove up to Madison to see my friends here. Since then I've seen the new Indiana Jones movie (if something is magnetic, cover it with fabric and it won't be anymore), played "Race for the Galaxy", had some excellent pork chops, done yoga, went for a really long walk, played some of the aforementioned Mario Kart, had people over for dinner, went to the gym, finished reading the aforementioned "American Nerd" and typed on my blog. As Mary and I were walking over to the gym this morning, we were talking about how great it is to have just spent this weekend with no particular plans. "It's like you're actually on vacation," she said. Which is 100% true and exactly what you need to feel relaxed and not tired going back to work on Tuesday.