how about that stranger things? if you're one of the six people who haven't seen it yet, worry not, no spoilers here so don't sweat reading on.
the show is crazy well-done. the story. the mood. and particularly for season two, the music. it is doubly poignant for me as i was the same age as the characters in the time it was set. i may have also, like the characters, been on the edges of ...
are you ready for some football??? !!! if not, the folks at amazon and netflix have the elixir you require in two top-flight documentaries.
first is ALL OR NOTHING. this one was for-sure made possible by the decades of great ground work done by NFL films and the hard knocks folks because it is like a grown-up, evolved version of hard knocks AND has lots of the heart-wrenching moments offered by the classic NFL films offerings.
my favorite quote from this series was:
if it is to be, it is up to me.
(possibly the longest obscenity-free string of words ever put together by bruce arians—he was quoting a preacher which may explain that.)
the second show is LAST CHANCE U, another documentary about the highest performing junior college football program in the nation. i avoided that initially thinking it was tv series but the second i heard it was a documentary i popped in to try it out. i did not regret that decision. holy smokes was it well done.
my favorite quote from that series was:
don't let someone else's misbehavior affect your peace of mind.
(last chance U coach quoting ghandi maybe—i don't recall who they credited).
and if you're not ready or into football, then watch netflix's STRANGER THINGS. anthony and i got watching that and were quickly joined by others in the family given how stellar it was.
as a rule i try to not watch tv. like any. but dang are these show makers making it hard. while there is an astonishing amount of dreck being churned out daily for our DVR equipped masses, the top flight stuff that finds its way to press is truly top flight. crazy impressive how good some folks are at this business. granted, it is equally curious how poor some of the other stuff is.
the last seven days floated more innovative ideas before me than any other week in the history of troy. a few you may have heard or seen as well, assuming you too are not enforcing a news embargo, but a few will be new to you.
item one told of "the coach that never punts or kicks off" (video) but instead runs on every fourth down and only does onside kicks. it seems he read this study by some harvard prof who has the math to support the approach, and this coach has seen a great deal of success from it. i'm confident i'm not the only one wondering if this is all true, as it seems to be for skill levels found in the sub-college ranks at least, i'm left wondering how has no one seen this before?
for the second item, a friend over lunch told me of a teacher at his kid's school who has his students learn the lessons at home via web videos (e.g. what is the pythagorean theorem?) and do their homework in class where, if confused, they have access to the teacher and others learning the same concept. when i mentioned this to marty she had heard of it, being in the industry and all, and said the practice is called 'flipping' the classroom. given all the great web fodder out there, casesinpoint, i can see this as being a highly profitable approach, especially if it means my kids not having to turn to me for help with things i didn't understand the first time around.
the third bit of inspiration i bumped into came from the mother of one of my former students. she told me that when her three boys were young they got very little television. she policed this in the following way:
each boy would pour over the weekly television listing that came in the sunday paper where they circled two hours worth of television from the offerings.
the marked up schedule would then get posted, like on the fridge, for reference. then everyone knew when they had to be home for tv, being the pre-tivo age, and the boys would look forward to their windows of time.
alternately, and probably more importantly, they could look at the movie section of the same paper and direct their two hours at a theater movie instead of television.
i can just imagine the excitement and anticipation surrounding this ritual and how it would make special something that for must of us has become a completely numb and expected part of life. i'm anguished i didn't learn of this practice ten years ago. i find it beautifully thoughtful, inspired even.
the last item comes from my own desk. perhaps all the innovation happening around me moved me to keep up. the everyday problem i held in my hand dealt with alex and the time we spend together. it's not that our time together is strained, it's just not as vibrant and easy as i would describe my relationship with my other kids. as such, i sat down to reflect on this and inside ten minutes came to the conclusion that i was trying to push alex towards things i wanted him to do instead of leveraging one of his many interests. when i considered how i would feel if someone did that to me, i concluded i would think:
1. that the person was an ass.
2. and that the person might be acting a bit like their own father.
these two lines of thought put a quick end to that. minutes after this epiphany i called bookguy, a fellow i knew to be a minecrafter (minecraft being one of alex's core interest at the moment), and asked for some advice. then, minutes after getting home from work, i sought alex out and after the usual check on the day i asked him if he could do me a favor. being the helpful man he is he of course said yes and gave me his attention. i asked him if he would teach me how to do minecraft like he does. his late in the day expression brightened more than a little bit.
if a doctor's mandate is to do no harm i think a father's mandate could be 'don't be a dick' because who wants a selfish dick for a father. i wouldn't be surprised to learn twenty years from now that those ten minutes of reflection might be ten of the most important minutes i spent in regard to my boy aleo.
those are four examples where things that happen everyday were re-thought and from those re-contemplations, life got changed. these thinking organs we got are pretty dang impressive. so think. think hard. improvement is everywhere.
the boys and i were watching star trek, the original, after dinner. we're slowly working our way through the franchise starting at the very beginning. we were piled up on my desk chair, me on the seat and the boys each sitting on an armrest leaning on me. during the show i passed some post-dinner gas. moments later a big fight broke out in the show. i commented on the suddenness of the melee to which anthony (7) said casually, "i think they're fighting because of your smelly fart".
i have a website idea for someone—a site that records funny things said by adults around kids, that the kids don't get, and no other adults were around to hear.
my contribution would be when alex and i shared the following exchange.
ALEX
dad, why do you call everyone 'bud'?
TROY
because don johnson already took 'pal'.
if you don't get the reference it means you did something more interesting with your friday nights in the late eighties than watching miami vice.
yesterday's mention of bella giving up television reminded me of a related story.
now that bella is older, about a year back, marty suggested we get a proper television so she could comfortably have girlfriends over and for gatherings, sleepovers and the like. our conversation quickly and excitedly turned into a top-down redesign of our living room, sketching out a remodel to take it from its present state--which is about two steps from looking like the monkey cage at the zoo (we're missing simply a swing-rope from the ceiling)--to a fully re-imagined space that included an L-couch, a wall mounted flat-screen, surround-sound, a stained-wood mantle, matching built-in bookshelves lining the walls, and new natural-wood, functioning french doors (note: these were recently installed). marty envisioned herself curled up under a fleece blanket watching some of the series-tv she's missed over the last decade. i imagined myself buried in the couch's corner, watching weekend football, wearing a pair of tired sweats, a fresh bowl of stove-top corn on my lap and a few logs popping in the over-sized fireplace. both marty and i were plenty eager to assume these relaxed positions.
a few weeks later while out with bella on our dad-lunch, i revealed this plan to her. instead of the shriek i braced for, i received an inflectionless response that she kinda liked not having a tv didn't want to get one. i almost reached over to her feel her forehead thinking she must have taken ill in the time it took me to utter my sentence. this sorta moving target is one of the core reasons parenting is often named the hardest thing you will ever undertake.
later in the day when alone with marty i began a conversation with the words, "you're not going to believe this but ..."
TROY
you're not going to believe this but when i told bella about our plans for the living room, she said she didn't want a television.
MARTY (stopped what she was doing and looked at me)
what?
TROY
yeah, she said she didn't want a television. she liked not having one. she said having one would change, ruin even, the tenor of our home.
MARTY (after a brief pause)
well screw bella. i want a television. when she has a home of her own she can preserve the tenor of it all she wants.
this would be that target i'm trying to aim at picking up and moving again. and not just like moving two paces to the left but like moving in a fast and serpentining pattern that i'd need an uzi to hit, and as confessed before i'm working with a home-made slingshot. truth is, ninety percent of the surprises i contend with come from the two women in my life saying things i don't expect (and sometimes just the plain, darn opposite of what they said before). the other ten percent comes from the boys in my life doing things i don't expect, things like:
dropping toys down the neighbors sewer vent.
riding red wagons down hills while standing on top of them, surfer-style.
climbing trees so high you can't even yell loud enough for them to hear you screaming, "get down! now!"
or like, our six year old arriving at the dinner table with hundreds of dollars in his piggy bank and saying it's just his chore money from the last few months. of course when you combine (1) the fact that he gets fifty cents a week and (2) his brother and sister's banks are suddenly empty, his defense starts plummeting faster than his computer time over the next two weeks.
but at least with the boys, while i may not expect all the things they do, i do understand them. this is what makes raising men a more tenable undertaking for another man.
but moving back to the original topic, bella and television, don't think that the rapidity in which my daughter accepted stephen king's advice (mentioned yesterday
), which she encountered exactly once before mine (and having shouldered my advice dozens of times) has been lost on me. i see it. i see it most clearly. i also imagine it is not the last time she will accept notions from a fella new to our lives before she would take my own, identical, tested and trusted counsel. i'm sensible enough to see that coming and yes, i'm already saving money for the therapy i'm sure to need when the dark scenario actually happens for real.
and for any other people possibly fighting this fight, or other similar fights, with their small humans, i will share the closest i ever came to persuading bella to abandon her digital herion (without the assistance of a best selling author at least). the nearest my methods took me happened after we attended a school event (her induction into the national junior honor society--sorry, proud father, couldn't resist). before the ceremony began two students from the school performed for the audience, singing and playing acoustic guitar. they performed beautifully, so rife with confidence and composure, especially for two junior high age girls sitting in front of better than a hundred people. after the event the pre-show music came up in discussion. bella acknowledged who they were and said they were amazingly talented. i asked bella if she thought she would be as good as those girls if instead of watching shows on her computer time for the last two years she had practiced guitar. bella thought for a moment and said probably. i repeated her 'probably' and added had she done that people might be watching her playing guitar on television instead of her watching other people do enviable things on television. i watched her reaction, closely, and saw something happening but admittedly the success lasted about as long as a netflix login. that said, that brief moment is the closest i ever came to getting bella to put the media needle down.
i put two conditions on bella's reading of stephen king. the first was that we would have to read the books together. the second was that before we start, she had to finish reading his memoir, On Writing, a book i had given her several months earlier.
the only issue with the first condition is she said i'd need to find five hours a day to give to the effort. i'm confident i do not need to go into the nine kinda ways this was not going to happen so we quickly negotiated that down to a more realistic thirty minutes a night, and maybe the occasional hour depending on my schedule and the plot line.
regarding the second condition, the moment we concluded our time-each-day bargaining she turned and ran from the room. over the next several days every time you'd see her she'd have king's memoir on her; either opened for reading, stuck in her armpit if walking, or resting on her thigh if sitting. a brief aside—on the top of bella's reading log for the library's summer program, she added the words 'you can't compete' followed by three exclamation points. i, the library staff, and multiple summers worth of other kids in the reading program can attest to the undeniable truth of this declaration.
an unexpected bonus from sir king totally came when he slammed, viciously, television saying time spent watching was wasted, forever lost and offered no redeeming value, namely in this case, to one's writing skills. bella said she got that and was considering fully giving up tv and computer, replacing it with reading and writing. while my mind furiously staved off a that's-what'-i've-been-saying message bella continued on, "so who would have thought you and stephen king feel the same way about television. crazy." spared.
but, for any ground i gained on the television front, my dinner table suffered as he also says that if you really want to be a writer you cannot let things like social norms stand in your way and to properly hone your craft you might need to read during certain social routines. he named family dinners specifically. bella informed me, so i wouldn't be surprised, that she will now be showing up to dinner with a book or writing pad in hand and i couldn't protest because she was just following the advice of someone i told her to read. un-spared.
marty, the boys, and i (and a dog we were sitting) were on our way to a weekend hike. during the drive, i told the boys i'd seen the latest star trek movie and it was awesome. and as soon as we finished watching the original series (we're currently on 32 of 82) we could work our way through the movies (and then onto subsequent series).
after a quiet moment, anthony asked how spock was able to pinch people's necks and make them knock out. alex explained, circuitously, that it had to do with the way they, vulcans, were made and similar to the mind meld trick. marty reached across from her seat and feigned a mind meld on me while i drove. through a highly focused face she slowly relayed the words, "i ... wish ... i ... had ... a ... gigantic ... penis". hysterics were grand and since bella opted to hang back at the house, our groin-centric foolishness came without a severe group chastising from our twelve year old.
marty's comment sparked a memory in anthony of a dream he had a few nights back where he was being chased by hundreds of running penises (running as in jogging, not running as in dripping with disease). they tried to drown him in a lake of pee but he woke up before they succeeded. i told him i thought i remembered seeing an episode of leave it to beaver where the beaver talked of a dream like that. both marty and alex looked at me suspiciously. i shrugged my shoulders saying i've been trying to convince anthony to watch leave it to beaver but he's never shown much interest. he's still not asking to watch the series but i think i have him closer now that he thinks beaver too may have done combat with an army of rampaging, urinating penises.
i skipped out on a super bowl party this year to watch the game at home, alone. when marty returned from the party she said a conversation took place about my absence, namely that no one thought i cared about either of the teams enough to need to be alone and found it curious i didn't join marty and the kids at our good friend's party. marty confessed ignorance to my thinking and confessed it be just another one of her husband's quirks that isn't interesting or relevant enough to investigate further (in other words, there's lower hanging and better tasting fruit to be had).
after marty told me of the conversation i explained that i had come to a realization about super bowl parties. i likened them to going to see a really good movie, say like The Godfather, for the very first time, and for this viewing you're going to a public space to watch it with a bunch of other folks but the catch is this -- only half the people in the room are potentially interested in watching The Godfather. see the problem? a good football game, like a good movie, has the high potential of being a special, spectacular even, experience, and i like to reserve the right to jump and shout and swear like it were real life footloose in my study.
and yes, i do know this adds to the theory that i'm a peculiar and priggish ass.
but what makes me less of a priggish ass is that i'd love to share in dinner conversation with anyone in attendance, especially since i heard i missed a conversation about spanking (partners not kids) that i'm sure i would have thoroughly enjoyed ... just not when the super bowl or godfather is playing.
and, something else many could probably guess about me if asked. my favorite commercial ... the god made a farmer spot. i love me some thoughtfully blended words and imagery (i'm torn if i love the impassioned reading or the picture of the busted up thumbnails more -- too close to call).
kudos to the for sure QB killers of the 2012 playoffs -- luck, manning, brady, kaepernick -- no small line-up for the ravens. and as for my rooting for the ravens. my first nfl love is the pittsburgh steelers. my second is some fundamental and head-strong AFC-style defense.
and how amazing was it that kaepernick's interception was the first interception ever thrown by a 49ers quarterback in a super bowl. and that would be in six super bowl appearances by the team. montana and young were quite the butt-cuttin' studs, no?
before you find our turn of the century digital ziggurat. by most standards it would be deemed quite modest. i called it minimalist. in the reflection you can see our tv room which was considerably more modest than our digital investment. we called this cozy. and cozy it was, as long as you didn't have company. it proved perfect for a single person, upright or stretched out. two people, upright or ...
bella likes the show the voice. i tolerate the voice to spend minutes with my daughter. early on, i found the judges to not be judgmental enough which on a show about judging is a reasonably damning trait. i did like the blind facet of the competition though. as the competition wound on and the delta in performance and talent got tighter, i felt for the judges who were forced to decide between two closely matched singers.
then one night bella and i watched two of the battles before bed. in each of the cases the pairings were quite close but in each case there seemed to be a clear winner. and in each case the person who seemed to outdo the other was voted off and sent packing. after this happened the second time i replayed what happened in my head and saw a pattern. in each case the person who gave the stronger performance was, in working up to the performance, also the more difficult to work with. they acted privileged and pouted when a decision was not to their liking (e.g. didn't like the song selected). the judges who had to make the call had to consider their smaller teams in the later rounds. they needed people who could work outside of their comfort zone, if need be, and were able to continue to give effort and more importantly positive energy to a situation that might be less than ideal. this is how these two people beat the more skilled competitors, by being versatile and continuing to work even when the cards didn't fall their way.
i shared my theory with bella. i rewound the show and pointed out the behavior i felt cost them the win. this is the sort of concept one can explain to a child, but without their own experiences and personal examples to lean on, i imagine it's hard for a young mind to fully embrace the significance of such a thing. thus, what a gift we had in this show, a show my bella is ravenously interested in. she saw vivid examples of people acting childish and then later suffering for their stubbornness downstream. cool way to discuss a nuance of attitude. i have new respect for the voice, and in particular for adam levine and chistina aguilara, for having the insight to not reward these prima-donna antics.
this unexpected moment also reminded me of an old, pre-republican, dennis miller bit. in it he said his father took him to a rated R movie at a very young age. in the movie one of the characters was killed which caused a young dennis to lean into his father and asked why that man got hurt. his father replied, "because he was a slack-jawed asshole and one day all slack-jawed assholes have to suck the pipe." i'm sure i'm botching the quote slightly but it is in the ball-park of what went down. i'm glad a found a more age-appropriate vehicle to share this message with my daughter.
we haven't seen much of the olympics. sad and curious. sad because i would have enjoyed much of what there was. curious because we were traveling when they started and always found ourselves in spots with great, sometimes multiple, large televisions. the problem we encountered--we were always out. and when we got back, we were often too spent to do anything but go to bed. of the nights we did watch, i observed something about the coverage: commercials, and lots of them. of all the ones i saw, the one below struck me the most.
alex is our consumer. when we travel and he sees commercial television, he has no defense for the highly fabricated and stylized advertisements that interrupt his shows (and that bella used to think were mini-skits so the shows actors could huddle and think what they should do next in their story). he watches with an open mouth miniature motorized cars make dramatic slow motion jumps over little plastic barrels. or he flashes an astonished face as kites easily do repeated loop-de-loops with a minor flick of a child's wrist. or sits mystified as a junior magician shows how to make an invisible worm writhe and wiggle (using hidden strings). after studiously taking in the presentation alex always says the same thing when it's done, "ohhh, dad/mom did you see that? i totally want one of those" to which marty and i always look away from our book or magazine long enough to reply "yeah it looked pretty cool".
the other day alex appeared at my desk and said he knew what he wanted for christmas. i turned in my chair, ready to listen, accustomed to such visits. ready for anything i told him to shoot. he said with an easy confidence that next christmas he really wanted a messenger falcon.
back in august i was contacted by an agency who licenses photos for commercials and film projects. the woman in the email asked if i would put her in contact with a past everyman winner as they would like to use her image in a chevy commercial. as i occasionally get these sorts of emails for everyman entrants, i thanked the woman for the inquiry and passed her info on to the entrant. i never heard anything back from either party and assumed my email for the entrant was dated. then last night while watching game six of the world series (amazing!!!), i saw a chevy commercial and in it i saw the photo i was asked about. few things could have made that game more enjoyable, but that surely rates.
marty and i finished watching lost last night. it only took us all summer to watch the final two seasons and we didn't finish a day to soon as the kids return to school on monday.
i was able to duck all the series-ending debriefs that happened when the show ended for real but i imagine there were plenty of groaning folks out there who were full of piss, vinegar and angst. i thought the series was exceptionally entertaining and other than when they started the time schism business looking a bit like the Lost version of new caprica, i'd say it is one of the higher caliber dramas ever produced for television. it earned, obviously, huge style points, was way big on creativity and mystery, and developed great, great characters and was just simply good, vibrant storytelling. but for all its mastery and reliability, the one area they proved most reliable and never wavered on was sawyer and his edgy nicknames. i can't recall how many of his quick quips earned a chortle from me but there were several.
and the intertubes, which is surely as reliable as an unsavory sawyer moniker, was good for an homage honoring sawyer's delivery and the writer's creativity.
once a year marty and i pick a show to watch together. we start at the beginning or wherever we left off and watch one episode a night until we are all the way through or caught up as much as is available. we watch at my desk, each in an office chair pushed up side by side in front of the laptop.
many of the nights i'll pop some corn. one night i noticed we each had a way of selecting our next piece of popcorn from the bowl. i watched her pick a piece or two and then sedately asked her how she selected her pieces. flatly, she said it was based on size. she then asked me how i picked mine (i guess i wasn't the only one that noticed our technique). i told her based on butter-coverage. then without further commentary, we returned to watching our show. this is marriage. knowing how and why your partner selects the pieces of popcorn they do from a bowl full of corn.
the show we are watching right now is lost. in a recent episode there was a scene where a woman had to leave her child, never to see him again. as the moment concluded i commented that i could never do that, walk away from my child knowing it was possible i'd never see them again. without looking away from the screen and between bites of popcorn marty replied that she could walk away at three in the afternoon. still without looking at me, she added it would be harder at night when they were sleeping and still and cute.
i was only momentarily shocked by this answer because i've heard people comment to marty how cute her kids were and they wish they could take one home. marty would tell them to come by tomorrow afternoon after two and before six because odds were fair that they could take one, two, and possibly all three home. this is another facet of marriage. knowing what time of day your spouse is most likely to give your children away in a fit of exhausted rage.
that's how you do more than just tv mr fitzsimmons
i'm not mad at jay that he went to 10:00. i'm mad at the guy that runs nbc that decided to take prime real estate that puts thousands of people to work and said we crunched the numbers ... you don't crunch numbers in entertainment ... you have balls ... you have a soul. guys like brandon tartikoff that used to exist. they would look at shows and they had a vision and they believed in talent. hbo, when they looked at larry sanders and said, you know what larry, do a show, here's the keys, lockup when you're done. do twelve episodes. if it's good we'll do another season. that's how you do tv.
comedy writer, greg fitzsimmons, speaking in an interview on the recent-ish late night host debacle (and the state of television in general)
during the purge of the home next door, our kids got loads and loads of stuff that the neighbors thought might be of interest to them. we're talking magazines, stickers, paper, magnets, curious shipping containers, and on and on. of all the interesting baubles that came into our house, this old school notebook with about ten pages left in it has to be my favorite.
will you pause this so i can go stuff pop-tarts down my pants
a few sundays back we had brunch at a friend's house. in addition to the usual fixings, the host made a two pound platter of bacon that was wicked good and that my people fiended on like we had never seen the food product before. that night while doing laundry, i found a soggy piece of bacon in the bottom of the washer that one of our children had stuck into their pants pocket. i was only mildly surprised because the week before i found the decimated remnants of three strawberries after doing a load of darks.
the one thing that saves marty and i from having everyone think we are starving our children is that they, our children, don't steal more food from people's tables and pantries because they are too glued to people's television sets to make the effort.
remember, not having a television doesn't make marty and i better parents, it makes our kids better kids.
it was on a thursday, August 23 to be precise, 5:42pm to be even more precise, that i carried our home's only television from the tv room to the basement. this was the first thing i did after arriving home from work. i did this namely because when i walked in the door and dropped my bag marty appeared before me and said, "i want you to put the tv in the basement" to which i said, "now?" to which s...
