FilteringCraig

Last night Jen and I finished watching the fifth and final season of the Six Feet Under boxed set. I have to say that it was a glorious five seasons. I didn’t know much about the show prior to jumping into it, but after watching it, I have to say that it is one of the best television shows that I have ever watched. The story lines were consistently good. The acting was consistently stellar. There were truly funny and sad moments. Most importantly, the show wasn’t afraid to make you feel a little bit of discomfort through its legendary dream sequences. On top of all that, it had some of the best use of music in a TV show ever.

In the early seasons of the show, the producers used relative unknowns in the music world to create the soundtrack. So you can imagine my surprise when we are watching an early episode of the show and a song by local Cleveland heroes Coinmonster came screaming across my television’s speakers. Coinmonster is a band from western Pennsylvania that came to Cleveland to play all the time and I must have seen them thirty or forty times in my life.

Coinmonster aside, the producers used the song “Lucky” by Radiohead in one of the turning point scenes of the entire series during a cathartic bonfire where everyone burns the remnants of a garage sale that held symbolism to a lot of their problems. They poked fun at the stupidity of drugged-up people using “Transatlanticism” by Death Cab for Cutie. They used a song by The Arcade Fire. Finally, they used a relative unknown, Sia, whose gorgeous song “Breathe Me” capped the entire series.

The music was just a small part of it, but it is very representative of the entire series. Everything worked on some level. They were never afraid to back off of something that wasn’t working. They used some incredibly creative storytelling devices, including the use of premonitions from dead people that showed up as figments of each character’s imagination to give them an insight to their own thoughts. It was a brilliant way to make each character’s psychology more apparent to the viewers at home, kind of like a less heavy-handed version of Tony Soprano’s Dr. Melfi.

Speaking of Dr. Melfi, I am trying to figure out where on the list of TV shows in my life that Six Feet Under fits. The things that really works in its favor is how it maintained a consistency in characters. It developed them naturally for five seasons. Finally, it didn’t stick around too long.

So, I don’t know where exactly Six Feet Under fits into the list of my favorite TV shows of all time, but it is way up there. That list includes all the shows listed below, although I am sure I am forgetting at least one. Also, one item that I have excluded is Band of Brothers because it was a mini-series, but it should almost be included as a one-season TV show.

The Wire
Lost
Six Feet Under
Battlestar Galactica
The Office (British)
Weeds
Dexter
The Sopranos
NYPD Blue
Entourage
Smallville
The 4400

Highs:

• Buckeyes crush Northwestern

• Indians clinch the AL Central for the first time since 2001

Lows:

• Derek Anderson and the Browns’ offense fails to show up for the first half in Oakland

• The Browns miss the game-winning field goal

My brother and I had a blasphemous conversation this morning about how much nicer Sundays would be if we didn’t hitch our wagons to a bad bandwagon. Sunday was a gorgeous day here in Cleveland and we very well could have enjoyed the day in any of 100,000 ways. Instead, we geared up and got nervous for a football game that ended up crushing my spirit.

I don’t have any kind of conclusions, and I don’t see myself abandoning football anytime soon, but it does lead to a lot of “what it” scenarios. What if I could just wait until the weather turns permanently nasty in Cleveland toward the end of October before I started paying attention to the Browns. By that time, the team would be about half way through their schedule (depending on the bye week) and I would know just how excited (or not excited) to be.

Anyway, I don’t see it happening, but if I ever decide to take back my life from the dredges of Cleveland sports, I think I will start with my Sundays. Now I will just have to think of a way to convince my wife to give up the Colts.

Maybe when Peyton Manning retires…

Different categories and a lot of bad scenes.

Sorry for all the videos lately, but this stuff is just too funny.

I am not sure why anyone would play this “game” but it sure is funny as hell to watch. Small kid gets blindfolded and tackled by a full-steam-ahead charging kid who is oversized.

We all know Bill Simmons is a homer, but I am at the point where I can’t take any more of his commentary defending the the Patiots franchise after they were caught cheating. I was just going to let it go, until I read his column on Friday where he even went to the lengths to say that we should be talking about the miracle of Bills injured player Kevin Everett, as if NFL talk on two topics are mutually exclusive and somehow talking about the Pats negates our amazement at the recovery of someone who had risk of being paralyzed. That is where I start to lose my mind. He is constantly trying to find justifications and called the penalty against Belichick and the Pats “excessive.”

In a game that is based on money, how can he sit there and say that the Pats’ measly fines were excessive? Belichick could wipe himself with $100 bills for the rest of his pooping life and not miss a dime of it. How is it that money is an excessive penalty? The draft picks hurt more than the cash, for sure, but nothing is taken care of THIS SEASON. I know we can’t make a fair comparison to the NCAA, but they take teams out of contention for post-season play. Would it be too much to ask for the commissioner of the NFL to do something that impacts the current season, in which the Pats were caught red-handed?

To add insult to this whole thing, Simmons has the balls to criticize Mangini for blowing the whistle on something that was directly hurting his current team’s chances and then shaking Belichick’s hand after the game. WHAT DO YOU WANT HIM TO DO? He stops the illegal practice and has the unbelievable gall to (gasp) act with some semblance of good sportsmanship by shaking hands with the person who was committing a violation to the rules of the game? How DARE he? Mangini should be applauded for being such a good sport in a situation where the Patriots deserved none of his respectful handshake.

Finally, Simmons proclaims the following in his final step toward unreasonable homer justification:

[quote]If we’re going to stick an asterisk next to the ‘01, ‘03 and ‘04 Pats, don’t stop there — it needs to extend to Elway’s Broncos (cap cheaters), DeBartolo’s Niners (cap cheaters), the ’90s Cowboys (drugs and hookers), the ‘86 Giants (coke), the ‘85 Bears (Tony Eason was on the other team), the ’70s Steelers (steroids) and pretty much everyone who ever won a Super Bowl.[/quote]

Drugs and hookers are players getting away with something on the personal side of the game. So are steroids. So those don’t provide proper comparisons to what the Patriots did. Throw these pieces of “evidence” right out of the window. Add to that the fact that Shawne Merriman was suspended last season for 4 games last season, which follows the guidelines of punishing a cheater and his team in the season in which the violation occurs and we have something of a precedent.

I will give Simmons a little leeway on comparing the Pats to the cap violators who knowingly cheated the system to keep good players on teams that shouldn’t have been able to afford them, but there are two big differences. First of all, there was a different commissioner in place before when those other violations occurred. In today’s world where fans are paying as much as they are for a very expensive game, the stakes are higher than they were. The stakes continue to rise with every season as the costs go up and as there are more and more options for the fans’ dollars. This thing is about business as much as it is about the Hall of Fame in Canton.

Secondly, the Pats got caught during the season in which the violation occurred. It is one thing to punish a team in the season in which they were caught and quite another to punish a franchise for the sins of players, managers, coaches and executives that might have already moved along.

To bring it back to the Pats, I think the commissioner of the NFL had a chance to hand down real penalties to people who committed violations during the season in which the violations occurred. In this respect, he has failed to punish the Pats appropriately. Think about it from this perspective. How many teams do you think would mortgage their future for a good shot at winning the Super Bowl today? How many would mortgage the present and take a chance that they won’t be able to make it to the Super Bowl? This is why the loss of future draft picks doesn’t impress me much.

And don’t even mention the financial loss. Those fines are basically meaningless.

I won’t end this with something silly like saying I will never read Bill Simmons again. He is a talented, entertaining writer and podcaster. Saying that I would put some kind of ban on him would be really silly. He doesn’t hide the fact that he is a fan, and he made his name by talking Boston sports first and foremost, so I get it. I just think in this case with the Pats and their cheating scandal, he doesn’t get it.

For the first weekend of the NFL season, Jen and I headed to Boston to see some friends, specifically commenter Chris D. on this site. He was my college roommate and was also in my wedding party when Jen and I got married. It was really great to get back to Boston for a weekend to see everything and everybody.

While I was in Boston, we had a chance to meet up with some college friends, one of my high school friends, Joe, who is turning into an academic monster with a doctorate at MIT and a post-doc at Harvard. (Yes, he is smart.) We also had occasion to have dinner with good friend of the website Mister Crunchy, who was a friend of mine in meatspace before he was an internet friend.

Anyway, the real highlight occurred on Friday night. We were going to do a big old-fashioned casual hangout at Chris D’s place, complete with beer and pizza. So, a bunch of people showed up, Chris ordered the pies and then Chris, Joe and I left to go pick up the pizza at Coolidge Corner.

Chris double parked, and Joe and I went in to pick up the food. The pies weren’t ready. In fact, they hadn’t even received the purported order. After a little detective work, we figured out that Chris had accidentally ordered the food in Beacon Hill, which is a good 10-15 minutes away given Boston traffic. Thankfully, the Red Sox were out of town because we had to traverse the areas closely surrounding Fenway to get from Coolidge Corner to Beacon Hill.

We arrived at the restaurant in Beacon Hill and Joe and I went in to pick up the formerly hot pizza. We paid for it and headed back to the car. Due to the traffic considerations and the fact that Joe used to live in Beacon Hill, I gave him the navigator’s seat up in shotgun, and I took the back seat. So, I carried the pizza out to the car and because Chris had double-parked so close to the other cars that I walked to the driver’s side to put the pizzas in the back seat.

There was stuff in the back seat, so I pushed the stuff onto the floor of the car, put the pizzas on the seat and closed the door. That’s when Chris took off like a shot and pulled away. I saw the tail lights quickly fade away as they took a right hand turn off of the street we were on, and I was just standing there speechless with my hands in the air like Jason Lee in Almost Famous when he proclaims, “I’m only the lead singer!”

Cut to the scene in the car after about three blocks of furiously typical Chris D driving. Chris’ phone rings, and he sees my name pop up on his caller ID. He says, “Are you really calling me right now?” as he looks to the back seat of the car to realize that I am not there. He answers the phone.

Chris D: (laughing) Hello?

Craig: “I AM NOT IN THE F*&%ING CAR!”

Chris and Joe never realized that I hadn’t gotten in the car with the pizza. They didn’t realize it three blocks into their journey back to the apartment. Who knows how long it would have taken them to realize that I wasn’t in there without the aid of cell phone technology. If I had been really committed to the joke, I never would have called and taken a cab back to Chris’ place.

But it doesn’t end there. Chris and his “navigator” Joe couldn’t figure out, with all the one-way streets, how to get back to the pizza place, so they parked a couple blocks away and started honking the horn so that I could find them in the car. It was like a big, dumb, stupid game of Marco Polo, except without any water and with the two most educated people I know in the entire universe being unable to figure out how to get back to where they had just been mere minutes before.

Anyway, I found the car and we all headed back to Chris’ place for one hell of an ice-breaking story to start off the casual hang at Chris’ on Friday night.

I am not sure why, but lately, I have been thinking about the things that I can’t remember all that well. It is strange to me that I could have had all these things as a part of my life, and yet, I can’t remember any of the little details of what it was like to be in the situations. Here are some examples.

• I lived in North Royalton on street called Beaver Ridge Drive. I presumably parked my car and walked into the apartment on many occasions. Sometimes, I did so with groceries, I am sure. Yet, I can’t remember what it was like to drive up, park and go from the car to my apartment. I don’t remember any of the details. Did I have trouble finding space? Was the weather a giant burden because it was outdoor parking? I can’t picture what anything looked like as I was walking in the door. Yet, I must have done it over a thousand times in the 18 months that I lived in that apartment.

• I turned 16 at some point during my sophomore year of high school like every other kid. My brother was a freshman during my junior year, meaning that I must have driven him to school with me for two years of high school. Yet, I can’t seem to remember a single thing about it. Did we listen to music? Did I listen to Howard Stern? Did I ever stop for coffee? Did he ride home with me most days? I don’t remember any of the details of that time, and I must have spent hours a week for two school years enveloped in it.
• I spent a summer working at The Refectory in Chautauqua in upstate New York. I flipped burgers and made French fries. I spent a lot of hours working there that summer, and yet, I do not remember much of that job at all. How is it that I could spend so much time doing something like that and not remember it? I vaguely remember getting my forearms singed from the spitting grease on busy days, but I don’t remember anything specific about what it felt like, or what it looked like from my perspective as I stood there.

It just seems strange to me how things like these can be so prevalent in my life at one point, and yet, all that exists in my mind is some generic recollection of taking part. The details, feelings, and subtleties are all gone and forgotten. The details, feelings and subtleties are usually what guides me to form my opinions on things, and yet when it comes time for recall, all I have is an empty memory.

I am sure this post seems very random, but these are the things going through my head lately. Maybe it is time for me to detail more of the subtle details of my life just so I can read them later when I can no longer recall them directly.