Whose Shake Is This!!?

Somewhere, there is a Dreamland where everything is perfectly clear. There is sufficient and essential information, but not too much information, and the language used to express it is crystalline and eloquent and truthful. In that Dreamland, we are informed, enlightened, and more richly entertained because we take the time to savour the richness of it all. Savouring the richness of it all, after all, is the reason time even exists.

Unfortunately, the world we live in is naught that Dreamland. The signal to noise ratio has become precariously askew. The is too much information that is increasingly superficial and ultimately uncommunicative. It all become mere verbiage. It is a frightening prospect…to dive into a morass of verbiage where depth that does not exist. There is so much of it everywhere…from the fascism of Facebook to the puerility of Twitter to the constant thumbing of text-message jargon to the increasingly hysterical infotainment that masquerades as journalism. Words are everywhere, pretending to communicate, but falling so far short of their quixotic notions that someday I’m afraid words will lose their power to communicate, and more frighteningly, words will lose their charm.

I suppose I’m guilty of this as well, but I try very hard not to be guilty. I joke about never letting the facts get in the way of the truth. But I hope I’m broadcasting a clear signal. And I hope that you can seize back the time that our world is constantly stealing from you. Time is all you have and if you don’t take that time to savour the world around you, if you constantly hurry from one little thing to the next little thing, if you are too busy to take the time, then you will lose and may have already lost, more of the wonderful world around you than will ever accomplish in it.

The only real place were speed is needed is at the racetrack. So step on the brakes…ease off on the throttle….slow down, in other words. Welcome to Dreamland. The speed limit here is strictly enforced, by RADAR!!  26 miles an hour, chumplin. No faster.

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Netherlands 0   Spain 1

Nothing can console the sad Dutch fans who saw their lads lose to a more skillful Spanish squad in what was perhaps the ugliest football match of all time….perhaps the ugliest sporting event of all time ((although there are several hockey games that could fall into that category)). Referee Howard Webb appeared as the match commenced to allow the lads to have at it…he didn’t call it close at first…but the game quickly got out of hand. That’s when Webb reigned them in, started calling it tight. That’s the rain of yellow cards began, and pretty soon it was downpour. The Dutch were clearly out finessed by Spain, so they resorted to what they know best….thuggery of the sort that would have given even the Philadelphia Flyers of the 70′s, the nefarious Broad Street Bullies, pause. So the Dutch gooned it up and a record 14yellow cards were handed out, including a red card to John Heitinga for his second yellow card, but no red card was shown to Nigel de Jong for a kick-punch to Xavi Alonso’s ribs worthy of the most brutal and ugly homo-erotic MMA match.

All that said, the strategy almost worked for the Dutch. Arjen Robben had several breakaway chances. But he couldn’t capitalize on the efforts of his goon squad. In the end, it was Andres Iniesta (yes, THAT Andres Iniesta =P) who cashed in on Spain’s finesse. Spain reminded me more of the Edmonton Oilers…a squad of pure skaters with precision passing. Now Iniesta is no Wayne Gretzky, but he came through when it counted, like Gretzky’s lesser known scoring partner, Jari Kurri, with a superbly crafted goal in the 116th minute.

It was an ugly game. And while Spain deserved to win. It was as ugly and terrible as watching 6-3 Cleveland Browns/Buffalo Bills tilt , game 15, in the horrible December of a brutal NFL season.

The consolation game on Saturday was so much better. And some interesting developments from that match are after the break.

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I’m almost tempted to borrow a technique or two from the late, great Edgar Rice Burroughs that was used to great effect in many of his novels. such as Beyond The Farthest Star where, the words of Tangor were automatically typed before his eyes as if by ghostly hands; or as in Lost On Venus, where the words and experiences of Carson Napier came to him telepathically and Burroughs’ only role was that of a mere scribe. I sort of like that little conceit. It’s charming and ancient and if what I write is not to mine or anyone’s liking, I can blame it all on ghosts.

With the World Cup final approaching, and by the time this is read by some or many or anyone, the carnage of that beautiful game will be in the books, I thought a few ghost stories would be in order. It’s a summer anime tradition—either telling ghost stories around a campfire, or a kimodameshi–or both. It should be another of those laws of anime, but apparently isn’t.

But I’m fully capable of conceit without resorting to one. So what I tell, what little I will tell, will no doubt be more than ghostly or ghostlike….wispy and immaterial….hopefully reveal the soul of something, but more likely the words will wander around like zombies until someone clubs them (or me) in the head. Here we go.

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I was almost too perfect too even expect it to happen, but it did. Dale Earnhardt Jr. drove the #3 Wrangler Chevrolet to victory in the Subway Jalapeno 250 at Daytona Friday night. It was a car that was an homage and tribute to his late father…a car his father drove to victory many times in his hallowed Hall of Fame career….a car Dale Sr. won two of his championships in. It was a car that Junior would drive for the last time, and never again. No more # 3 EVER!

So it HAD to go to victory lane. There was no way it couldn’t, and many ways it couldn’t. And remarkably, as the laps were winding down, Junior and the #3 car team found a way to win. It was a brilliant and wondrously emotional moment. It simply HAD to be. There no way that fate or god or Kyle Busch was going to keep #3 from winning the damn thing. It was a great tribute to the late Dale Earnhardt and the #3, which are 2 of the most enduring memes of NASCAR…and 2 of its most endearing memories.

Now the concept of meme has been greatly abused in this brave and terrible world of 4-chan and all that dross. But it still can be of some use other than for cheap comedy. So I got to thinking…maybe memes can be used for smart, intelligent and obscure comedy. Maybe memes or a reasonable approximation thereof can reveal a truth or two about the world that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. So I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if I stuck the picture of Junior in Victory Lane into a meme generator of some sort.

I thought about it and decided to use the Multi-Image Service at:  http://iqdb.org/ What IQDB does is search multiple anime image databases for images that are similar to the one you enter. Usually it is used by people who have an image and don’t know the source…what anime, manga, or hentai game the image is from. Or they’re looking for some similar type of image. So I thought to myself, why not see what comes up.

So on the first go at it, the picture in the middle, above, by artist Jitsu Hidari, was one of the images that came up. Now mind you, the similarity is more metaphorical than actual. The similarities that result from using non-anime/manga images usually ranged between 27 and 42%. I was pleased with the image you see above, and amused that some of the images that came up were on the filthy side.

But then the porch-light came on and I thought….aha!!! Diego Maradona is out there!!  And THAT’s when the curtain rose and the music began to play.  The results of this little skit, a tale in 6 parts, are after the jump. All images are what IQDB came up with as being similar to the source image. Every picture is worth a thousand words or more, and some of these pictures have a LOT to say!!

“Diego…..are you nervoushh!!”

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Germany 4    England 1

They played like dopey wankers. They were old, they were fat, they were slow, they were a bit too full of themselves as individual stars to play together as a team, and in the end, they were sent packing back to England by a younger, quicker German squad. Sure, Lampard got cheated out of a goal that would have equalized the match in the first half. But nothing in England’s play throughout this match and most of the World Cup gave any indication of team that could win, when necessary, at any cost. They had talent, but not the right talent. They had stars, but as well as Rooney, Terry, Lampard, Garrard and the rest play for their Premier League clubs, putting them together on the same team was not going to get the job done. They were star-crossed from the get go….from the John Terry/Wayne Bridge drama ahead of the World Cup to Wayne Rooney’s petulance on the pitch. And even though they showed some heart on occasion, they really honestly played like a bunch of dopey wankers.

England might have been served just as well or better if they’d sent an NPower League 1 team out there….the Milton Keynes Dons, or Dagenham & Redbridge. Heh. They might as well have…at least there would have been more team spirit.

But….it takes more than just team spirit to win…

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The more we know, the more we seem to forget. Even, and especially, if it’s the things we love the most. It seems ironic and counter-intuitive, but the more knowledge and passion we have, the more capacity we have to overlook something, be it minuscule or essential. I’m constantly forgetting the names of the main characters in the anime shows that I love…if you were to ask me right now to rattle off the names of the characters in Arakawa Under The Bridge or Angel Beats or ef-a tale of memories, I know I would miss quite a few of them. It’s the same lapse we have when we forget an essential birthday or anniversary…not that we actually forget it, but we are off by a day or two. So this week I suppose I will try to remember here, (some of) what I have forgotten over the past several weeks.

But before I forget and rush headlong into the tidal wave of more rhetoric, there is THIS:

Mexico 2   France 0

Ha Ha ha!! Take THAT ya cack-suckin’ cheatin’  fackin’ Frenchies!!  HA HA HA!!! All hail Javier Hernandez  whose goal in the 55th minute and Cuauhtemoc Blanco whose penalty kick at the 62 minute mark sent the fackin’ Frenchies packing.

¡¡Jodimos el Frenchies!! ¡¡¡¡HA HA HA!!!!

¡¡Cagomos en la leche de tu puta madre, Frenchies!! ¡¡¡¡HA HA HA!!!!

¡¡Los Africanos le joderán el culo, Frenchies!! ¡¡¡¡HA HA HA!!!!

I certainly didn’t want to forget about THAT!! And I know all of Ireland was cheering along with me. But I know I’m forgetting something….

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7601 W. Hampton Ave.   Milwaukee WI

I just flew in from Pocono and boy are my arms tired. It was a hell of a week I’m here to tell you. If I ever had to live my life over again, I’d do it overseas I swear to God. And speaking of God, he sneezed the other day and I didn’t know what to say. But I guess it wasn’t all bad this week though….enroute from Pocono I stopped off in Milwaukee and did a good deed. I helped this Polish gentleman from Cudahy who locked his keys in his Buick…it took us about an hour, but we got his wife out just fine, no worse for wear. So a good deed done. Scout’s honour.

Alright alright…Pocono…the Gilette Fusion Pro-Glide 500 at the famed, triangle shaped superspeedway at Long Pond. And Mr. Pocono himself, Denny Hamlin won. He pretty much owns the joint and if my mother-in-law wasn’t so mad at me over squandering her money on the last race, I DEFINITELY would have put ALL of her money on Mr. Hamlin to win. And he did. And my mother-in-law would have been so proud. But…alas, I have no more of her money to invest in the sporting life.

But the beauty of the race was in it’s aftermath. And no, not the burnouts and the victory lane celebration. Nope. The beauty was on pit row after the race when young Joey Logano came steaming up in #20 Home Depot Toyota to That Lout Kevin Harvick’s #29  Shell/Pennzoil Chevrolet to have a few words with the lout. Words like: “Que le fait de baiser est votre problème baisant, l’imbécile ?!! Words like: “Mi a fasz van a kibaszott probléma, seggfej?!” Words like: “Bu da ne lanet sorun olduğunu, pislik?!” Words like:  “Was das Bumsen Ihr Scheißproblem, Arschloch ist?!!” Words like: “Kas fuck ir jūsu jāšanās problēma, asshole?!”   Words like……okay, you get the idea. Joey was completely justified in his attempt to have spirited chat with Harvick….although said chat was thwarted by older, larger and more brutal men. After a few words like: “Beth oedd y meddwl fucking asshole dwp?!” and: “Apa itu berfikir bodoh sialan brengsek?!” and a little faux bitch-slapping, Logano was led away to his hauler by a few cooler heads in his crew.

What made Logano so pig-biting mad was this. Harvick bumped Logano out of the way on lap 200….sending Logano in the wall and screwing up a potential top 5 finish. It was unnecessary on Harvick’s part since Pocono is a wide track with lots of room. But Harvick chose to do some thing stupid and unnecessary. Logano was able to recover somewhat, to finish 13th, but the damage was done. And Logano was more than justified in going after Harvick. I really hoped they would have been allowed to actually fight, even though Harvick would probably have kicked Logano’s ass. But that was not to be be.

Logano, however, won the war of words. With THIS gem:  “It’s probably not Kevin’s fault. He does what he’s told. His wife wears the firesuit in the family.” *ba-ding!!*  That was a wonderful remark.  Very clever considering the heat of the moment. Props to the kid for that one.

But somehow, that bewildered DeLana Harvick at first. The firesuit remark. Yes, she wears a firesuit at the track, unlike most of the NASCAR WAGs. But Joey was not commenting on her firesuit. He was saying that DeLana wears the pants in the Harvick family. And he said it in a clever and funny way.

But eventually, the lighbulb finally clicked on. And DeLana had some t-shirts printed up with I WEAR THE FIRESUIT IN THIS FAMILY. And now all is well, sort of, but….Kevin Harvick still wants to get in the last word.

Kevin Harvick: “Take my wife….please!

DeLana Harvick: “Oh Kevin, don’t be such a silly! You KNOW I wear the firesuit in THIS family.

Michigan tomorrow. England vs. USA in few minutes. In golf,  The St. Jude Classic has teed off with Lee Westwood at the top of the leaderboard. Someone will break 70 today. That’s a lot of clubs!

I’m not sure if this brief interlude between posts meant that I needed the time to absorb some vital or essential knowledge about motorsports, football, poetry, music which I hate, science fiction which I also hate, or whether this interlude simply resulted from laziness or a lack of courage. Perhaps all of the above. Or none of it. The NASCAR Hall of Fame inducted it’s inuagural class, a pantheon of spectacular brilliance: Bill France Sr, Bill France Jr, Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, and Junior Johnson, and I watched every moment of it. The All Star race came and went and vanished into memory with a tumultuous finish. Kurt Busch grabbed the glory and the Million Dollar Check. I went and grabbed (the next day at The Firehouse) a tall glass of ice and a bottle of Miller Lite for the quintessential Polish Victory Lap that is my custom when Kurt Busch wins a race. And Kurt’s younger brother Kyle, whose hopes of winning the aforementioned race were dashed during the final moments while racing his teammate Denny Hamlin for the win, when Hamlin squeezed him up into the wall, and a few laps later Kyle blew a tire and that was the end of it. Or would have had Kyle not threatened to KILL his team-mate Hamlin. (More on THAT in a moment)

So all of the above, and all the stars in the sky. All of that and the REAL Super Bowl…the UEFA Champions League Final. Last Saturday in Madrid. Barcelona 2  Bayern München 0. Yes…the glory and grace of the game, and the glory and grace of Venessa Redgrave in the movie Letters To Juliet. Nothing and everything to think about. I watched the countless stars as they vanished, like the words I’m writing now.

I toss these words off into the darkness like little stones skipping across the moonlit water.  Hoping against hope that they might rise up into the sky and shine there for at least one or two descending series of moments before dropping into the murky depth. After all, not many people take the time to dive into the deep water, to plumb the darkness for the sparkling treasure hidden there.

But lets go see what’s down there.

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I was, quite possibly thinking of calling this post Confessions Of A Man Insane Enough To Live With Beasts, but that title was already taken. I suppose most titles are already taken, or have been, at some point in time. Grand Prince of Monaco. Taken.  He handed the trophy to Mark Webber this morning. The Shallow Men? Taken. Clowntime Is Over? Taken, both by me AND Elvis Costello. So, in the end, I called this whatever I called it.  Most likely stolen from somewhere or something in the poetic universe. And most likely I won’t live up to it’s semiotic potential that always rides with me as I careen from here to there to somewhere.

I should be writing a poem about writing this. That would make fascinating sports journalism. Also, I should be writing this in some obscure and secret place, a little known state or county park by a river, at an intersection where the secret make-believe world overlaps with the anthropology and archaeology of the past. There, sitting on a boulder,  while the quiet suns ripples like knifeblades on the water below, I begin to write. And if not poetry, then a essay somewhat like this. There I am, but as invisible to you as the elves are invisible to you.

What gives me the most pause is that I’m leaving myself out on a limb. The soul of man, the soul of the poet, the soul of a sportsman or athlete…well that seems to carry more portent than I might be willing to live up to to. Able, I have no doubt about that…willing, well…that depends I guess on my soul. I suppose, however, since I called the shot, I’m duty bound to go through with it. I’m quite sure that when we finally reach the checkered flag, we’ll all be rather disappointed. But in sport, someone is ALWAYS left disappointed at the end. Might as well be us.

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Betty White vs. NASCAR

The Lady In Black did her level best to leave no one unscathed at last night’s Southern 500 at Darlington. Jimmie Johnson was swept up in her hateful arms on lap 180 by the intrepid A.J. Allmendinger whose brake rotor exploded.  That was good to see. It kept the deal interesting. The race roared to a thrilling finish with Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch and Jeff Gordon duking it out, 10-12 laps to go…..but WAIT!! Betty Freaking White is hosting Saturday Night Live and she’s so gosh-darned cute these days at 88 years of age….so the end of the Southern 500 vanished into “LIVE from New Y0rk, it’s Saturday night!” The ultimate clash of cultures!! Betty White vs. NASCAR. No doubt about the outcome of that, sorry to say. Sorry Denny Hamlin, Betty White takes that checkered flag.

But it was all good in the end, I suppose. Denny Hamlin, the stealth driver of NASCAR….so good and consistent that you tend to forget he’s even there, Denny Hamlin, scored an impressive and hard fought win. It was his third win of the season…and the fact that he’s recovering from ACL surgery on his left knee makes his accomplishments all that more remarkable. Last season, I didn’t even realize he made the Chase until he finish 5th in the points. This year, I’m definitely keeping him on my radar and in my peripheral vision. He tends to be overshadowed by his more extroverted and jovial teammate Kyle Busch. But as the season moves along, Hamlin will definitely be a man to watch. He is currently in 6th, 14 points back of Matt Kenseth.

Truth to tell, I would like to see the NASCAR season play itself out with epic storylines worthy of great German cinema. Bring on the Wim Wenders and Werner Herzogs!  I want passion and turmoil and beauty. Time and its terrifying wonder and mystery. I want the unexpected and poignant. And if NASCAR plays out the rest of the reel like it did last night at Darlington, I’ve got a good feeling that I’ll get what I want.

Jeff Gordon and Jeff Burton, if they spoke German, would sum up the Southern 500 thusly: “In Wieter Ferne, So Nah!” ((Faraway, So Close.)) It’s probably better to say that, than the English expletives their respective situations truly deserve. They share that fate with a few other prominent sportsmen this weekend as well whose fate was to finish close, but naught close enough.

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