When Parker Brothers came out with the iconic Monopoly game, little did they know — OR DID THEY? — that the game would have a profound impact on Sussman men, as the thrill of collecting properties, wheeling, dealing, and stealing is almost as blissful as illegal drugs. Once the rush became too much, the board game had to be sealed away in a safe location where nobody would find it: somewhere in the attic.
The competitiveness has also leaked over into a travel-size version of Monopoly, with all of the fun and none of the math. Monopoly Deal is the real estate game everyone loves (…?) in card form.
Maybe that’s all we needed. Perhaps the board game was simply too intense, and a card version of the classic game will alleviate everyone’s temper, soothe the soul, and bring world peace from Baltic To Boardwalk.
Ha. Nope.
The four major issues with playing the game are:
1. I win too much. Early on, I would beat my girlfriend (at the game! at the game!) and she would want to play again. I was getting fed up with the winning streak, and want to, y’know, get back to blogging. But it was always “just one more game.”
2. Unwritten rules. Once you know the game and get your head around the cards and the rules, it’s a breeze to play. You can probably finish a game in 5-10 minutes, which is about how long it takes to set up the board. But the delay lies within extenuating situations. Can you use buildings on a monopoly to pay rent? Can you move buildings onto other monopolies? It doesn’t mention that in the manual, You raging whore!
3. I lose too much. Genghis Khan once said, “It is not sufficient that I succeed — all others must fail.” That’s basically the greatest feeling in the world in this game, to wipe everyone else out of their properties and money and be left with everything. (EVERYTHING.) But to lose a game? Well, that just sucks. Earlier today I lost two games in a row, as a result of bad hands, and I actually threw my cards down before I was about to lose and forfeited. This is a first in Monopoly Deal history, but it’s not unprecedented in the Sussman tribe to concede in glorious fashion.
4. The light blue-railroad wild property is 4M. Seriously. What’s the deal with that? It should be 2M.
And here I thought we were all being environmentally friendly, or environmentally more than friend-ly, known as “green.” (Alternatively, “dendrophile.”)
Your dryer uses electricity. That’s bad for the environment, provided there is a more sensible way to dry them. How about the clothesline? The gentle breeze dries the clothes in the most efficient fashion, and even gives it a natural smell that everyone can love.
Unless you care about the value of your home. Jeanne Bridgforth, you are our messenger!
They’re unsightly by most people’s standards. It gives an atmosphere of decline. You don’t sense you’re in a well-heeled neighborhood when you see people hanging their laundry out to dry.
Someone, please, explain this to me. The clothesline is one of those symbols of a simpler time. Next thing you know, the “white picket fence” is going to be frowned upon because it doesn’t match someone’s brick façade.
I’ve watched HGTV shows and they always talk about wanting to be in this neighborhood or that neighborhood, but I’ve never seen someone bitch about a neighboring dwelling. If anything, a decent house next to a crappy house makes your location look better by comparison.
I know condos, like the one I live in, are all about unity and similarity, so they disallow them. But, stay with me here. Everyone has DIFFERENT COLORED CARS IN THEIR DRIVEWAY. Everyone has different types of flowers and assorted sortables on their balcony. Gasp, an oversight! Should everyone have a white car? When will we all receive our mandatory lilac plants?
Sorry, I’m not seeing the outrage over clotheslines, and I don’t even use one, because I am lazy and the enemy of the environment.
It’s the most popular type of programming on TV. What, you’ve never heard of planned premise television? You may know it better by its street name, “reality TV.” It’s such a great name, because the name implies, hey, this is real! Average people always have celebrities dropping by, doing wild and unpredictable things!
Got three hours to fill and you hate syndicated television? It’s one of the easiest shows to pitch, produce, and popularize. All you need are the following key ingredients:
A low budget
People desperate for attention who are:
a. Not famous
b. Once interesting
Someone to come up with wacky and interesting premises
Now, there’s bound to be hours and hours of boring footage, but nobody ever needs to see that. Just clip off the 30 minutes where people absolutely lose their pancreatic fluid because Brandy is acting like a total skank for no reason!!! (Actual reason: there’s a fucking camera on her.)
For the longest time, I could not understand why people would actually watch these shows, because they were so horribly done. But as it turns out that’s exactly the reason they are so popular. People aren’t looking for cinematic masterpieces, they are looking for trainwreck TV, trash TV, and escapes from reality … in something called reality television.
But this time, let’s try to get people to stop using that phrase. Reality TV isn’t. Planned premise television has one. Every plot point on the show is contrived from somebody who makes money by making TV shows. (The way the show unfolds, of course, WILL BLOW. YOUR. MIND.)
You may remember a month ago, on an afternoon in which I had very little else to say, I gave you a hot upcoming preview of Battleship: The Movie. Fun was had. Hearts were broken. But at least it had some basis of reality.
There are no current plans to produce a movie based on the puzzle game Tetris, but IMDB is a wonderful beast on which you can start all kinds of wonderful rumors.
Hey, did you know they’re making a movie based on the video game Tetris? Isn’t that crazy? Boy, they’re really out of ideas. Let’s take a sneak peek.
* * *
NARRATOR: In a vast empty world, where people like it that way … their very way of life is being threatened … alien blocks. And the ONLY WAY … to avoid extinction … is to be very…
VERY…
ORGANIZED.
SHIA LaBEOUF: Oh no. They’re already here!
MEGAN FOX: What do we do?
SHIA LaBEOUF: There’s only one man who can save us.
[phone incessantly rings ... camera pans out to reveal a sleepy, disoriented man in a spotless apartment answering]
MARC SUMMERS: What the fuck do you guys want?
NARRATOR: Tetris. The movie. This summer, they’re going to knock …
Last weekend at my parents’ cottage, we were driving around on our pontoon boat and I saw a strange contraption floating in the water, near one of the other houses’ docks. It was unlike anything I had seen before. Legend has it that you climb up to the top and tilt your weight, and the tower dips you into the water and back up, because the base is heavy enough to counteract the kinetic energy of … actually, I’ll let Bill Nye explain it for you.
But it looked fun. I was curious how much it was. A hundred bucks? Two hundred? I went online to find this piece of equipment, which my mom said was an “aqua bobber.” And let me tell ya, times have changed, but prices haven’t. Not only is it just 30 bucks, but it went from a bobbing tower to a child’s swimsuit.
So other than these photos, there wasn’t a lot of information on the Aqua Bobber. By which I mean, there was NO information in it. Until I found the April 25, 1993 issue of the Toledo Blade, just lying around in my wine cellar, next to my baccarat table. It was talking about the revival of the Centennial Quarry in Toledo:
Perhaps the most unusual devices were the Aqua Bobber and Aqua Rocker, the inventions of two Maumee businessmen who introduced them at the quarry in 1965.
[...]
If the county ever reopens the quarry, County Administrator Edward Ciecka said that only some of those fun water contraptions would be available for use.
“Hanging off cliffs and plunging down a cable would not be looked at favorably from the standpoint of liability insurance,” Mr. Ciecka said.
I guess the world just wasn’t ready for The Aqua Bobber. Perhaps, on a whim, one day I’ll be able to try it out on that lake, late at night, with no supervised adults. And if that’s the case, then there are suddenly two ways The Layoff Beard could cease publication.
Everyone and their butler is going green in an international movement to stop global wa election Fraud in Iran. First it was Twitter, but now this guy — whoever he is — has facial hair that screams “equality.” It also screams “Giant Eagle is now completely out of food coloring.”
My first cognitive encounter with Buzz Bissinger might’ve been yours too. Or maybe yours was years before mine. Or maybe it’s today, reading this blog post.
About a year ago, on Costas Now, Bissinger made Internet and Deadspin lore when he took all the saliva in his being and sprayed it on the visage and ideology of one Will Leitch, the face of the blog, an invention hellbent on destroying journalism. He was villified on Deadspin. He was crucified. What else do you do with heretics? What’s that Spanish Inquisition invention where you enclose someone in an up-right coffin that has spikes bolted inside of the door? Deadspin readers and commenters did that to him too. And, as we all know, mob thought is never incorrect!
Of course, I talk as if I wasn’t a small part of the collective. He embodied the grumpy old man stereotype that scorned bloggers with chips on their shoulders (that weren’t remnants of an entire bag of Doritos they ate earlier that day) had such contempt for, because they represented the old, stale way of doing things. Now bloggers had their martyr, much like Joe The Plumber was derided for being the outdated average American and Steve Bartman was the face of the Cubs’ playoff collapse.
The best thing Bissinger could have done, I thought, was never speak of it again. Of course, he did the exact opposite, which in turn made my advice look horrible. He kept talking about it. More to the point, he just kept talking while being visible to the very demographic to which he cannot relate, and vice versa.
Today he was on The Deadshow With Drew Magary* and after listening to the entire episode, I found a man with extremely valid and useful perspective on sports and journalism. If you would have bleeped out the parts talking about his Costas Now appearance, and I would have forgotten his voice (a daunting task), I would have said, “Wow, now THIS is a guy the Internet needs more of!”
Slowly but surely, I’m starting to come around to this guy. Fine, here it is. I like Buzz Bissinger. I respect him and I agree with him. He doesn’t hate the medium, he hates the majority of shit that results from the medium. Without reheating the entire debate, what really seemed to be a pattern among all bloggers was a general threat to their Wordpress-powered manhood. This guy with a Pulitzer doesn’t like me or what I do! Well, that’s why newspapers are dying.
A lot of bloggers have some extremely thin skin. It’s probably because most bloggers are coming right out of college or haven’t done all that much journalism work in the past. They’re not used to generic criticism. But some of what Bissinger has been saying all along makes perfect sense.
Damn, he’s good. How did he convert me like that, with his reason and charm and that sexy smile?
When I heard that Sammy Sosa had tested positive for steroids, I thought to myself, “oh, that’s a shame.” I then thought, “well, who would have told anybody that?”
Seriously. Someone has to tell the reporter these things. They don’t just dig up the documents and report. They use sources, and they keep them secret. Because that’s the way that America works. Freedom of the press, long live the written word, and don’t try to censor me! (Or something like that.)
The lawyers who had knowledge of Sosa’s inclusion on the 2003 list did not know the substance for which Sosa tested positive. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified as discussing material that is sealed by a court order.
Why, hey, that’s the title of this blog post! SPOOKY!
Before we go any further, I absolutely understand the need to use sources to break important stories. Watergate wouldn’t have been a landmark victory for the Washington Post had it not been for W. Mark Felt, the anonymous source which gave some useful information to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. That’s great. Protecting sources is wonderful.
Now, obviously saying “Sammy Sosa did steroids!” isn’t anything remotely cataclysmic as Watergate, nor do I mean to compare the two to diminish the impact or the importance of it. And I’m not faulting the New York Times reporters for using anonymous sources, and I’m not asking them to divulge who they are.
Having qualified all that … who hell keeps putting this information out there?
Seriously, we see this phrase all the time in sports when talking about a potential trade, free agency signing, or whatever the hell is on an athlete’s mind. Every day it seems a person “with knowledge of the situation” or “familiar with the proceedings” is babbling onto a reporter that such-and-such wants a trade to Chicago, or whats-his-face is unhappy with the manager getting fired. Every damn day!
And there will be another example tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. But not the following day, because that’s Father’s Day, their day off.
These anonymous sources give the impression that these sports journalists have these inside sources, and they’re providing us SECRET INFORMATION THAT WE SHOULDN’T KNOW! And if “the man” found out who the leak was, he’d kick him to the curb like Norm McDonald and Artie Lange in Dirty Work. (And yes, Lange would just kinda walk off slightly annoyed instead of getting thrown out.)
The problem as I see it is that anonymous sources in sports journalism is becoming the standard, and business as usual. Anonymity adds to the intrigue of sport, which generates interest in the general public, and wedges a 5-11 football team into the news cycle during, say, the playoffs when they have no business being mentioned while great teams duke it out in the conference finals. Their star linebacker wants more money? How fascinating! By the way, who do you have in the Super Bowl?
This brings us to the Sammy Sosa story. An anonymous source, used in this case study, suddenly becomes a pretty big deal. The list of people who used steroids in 2003 was promised by the union to be a sealed document, and clearly it’s not, because we know Alex Rodriguez and now Sosa were on that list. How do we know? Anonymous freakin’ sources, of course. But no big deal! An anonymous source told us that LeBron James would named the MVP a few hours before it was formally announced. No harm done!
Would someone really have gotten in deep trouble had they leaked the LeBron MVP announcement? Here, let’s try this. If you leaked that announcement to the press, speak up. Tell me it was you, and let me announce you were the one who did it. Are you afraid you’ll get in trouble? Did you get in trouble? Or did the anticipation of the formal announcement make the leak that much more valuable?
I’m guessing the latter, because it’s not nearly as SCANDALOUS OR MYSTERIOUS if teams published those rumors on their own official web site. That’d give away the entire allure around everyday anonymous sourcing. And it’s not fair to say “Helen from accounts receivable heard that the general manager is getting a raise,” because of Helen from accounts receivable keeps dishing the tidbits out to Ken Rosenthal, then everyone will want to talk to Helen from accounts receivable, and then she’ll have to deny interviews, and then someone close to Helen from accounts receivable who wishes to remain anonymous will have to start leaking the news.
According to someone with knowledge of the situation, there will be a great promotion at the ballpark on Tuesday. I don’t know what, they wouldn’t tell me. You totally have to buy a ticket and find out!
It wouldn’t surprise me if teams kept on the payroll a secret Clarence Beaks-style employee whose sole purpose was to “leak” information to reporters, thereby getting controlled information to masquerade as hot, juicy news leads.
I, for one, have no idea what a topless bar is. I never learned that in school, or from my friends, or even from the boys in the grades higher than me. All I know is that they feature some kind of women dancing (like, the Mashed Potato?), and they serve alcohol.
And now all I know about them is that they might just have women dancing. Some fancy lawyer pants wants these places of business in Detroit to have their women cover up or they will not be allowed to serve fermented wheat/grape liquids.
Cover up? I guess that means the heating inside the buildings are broken down, and the girls are freezing out there as they dance. Well, hell, I am in favor of the ban then. Please think of the hypothermic dancers!
They want the dancers to also be at least six feet away from patrons at all times, which is understandable. What if one of them falls? You don’t want to risk the patrons getting touched. Especially if the dancers are cold, they might catch pneumonia. Now you’re spreading disease around!
And I guess they have “VIP Rooms,” where the dancers can spend some time with individual patrons. That’s just more disease spreading waiting to happen. Perhaps they can have baby wipes on hand so they don’t spread infection. I didn’t see this recommendation in the lawsuit anywhere. Maybe they forgot about it.
This is all so confusing. It would be easier to form an opinion on this controversy, if I knew exactly what a topless bar was.
I have nothing against hybrid cars. How could anyone1? They use up less gas, which is both cheaper and better for the environment.
The cars sell themselves, I’d imagine, if it weren’t for that damn price point. The 2010 Prius is a bare minimum $22,000. You can buy a Civic for $7,000 less than that. Of course, would you save seven grand just on fuel costs over 10 years? Well, maybe.
So it’s up to the ad wizards to get you to buy a Prius. Talk about emission standards! Talk about how much money you’re going to save! Talk about its features! Just have a bunch of kids dressed up as flowers wave around to new age music!
I’m kind of scared to drive one, if all the foliage is going to come to life and dance around me, like I’m in Toontown. What if one of the Flower Children decide to cross the road, and I can’t slam on the brakes in time? Now I’ve got some little kid’s medical bills and psychiatry visits to pay for, which absolutely will not compensate for the extra $7,000 I paid for a hybrid.
1 – I guess the only way someone could dislike them would be if someone were to drive them on a 70 MPH highway going only 55 MPH so they don’t use up any gas. And if there’s no easy way to pass them, then yes, I suppose pain could be wished upon the driver of a car. But even then, it’s not the car’s fault.
Written on June 15, 2009 | Posted in TV | 1 Comment
When Parker Brothers came out with the iconic Monopoly game, little did they know — OR DID THEY? — that the game would have a profound impact on Sussman men, as the thrill of collecting properties, wheeling, dealing, and stealing is almost as blissful as illegal drugs. Once the rush became too much, the board game had to be sealed away in a safe location where nobody would find it: somewhere in the attic.
So other than these photos, there wasn’t a lot of information on the Aqua Bobber. By which I mean, there was NO information in it. Until I found the April 25, 1993 issue of the Toledo Blade, just lying around in my wine cellar, next to my baccarat table. It was talking about the revival of the Centennial Quarry in Toledo:
