Pot Noodle and a Wank

Firstly, a eulogy for an old friend: The Polyurethane Chariot. Take a knee, please.

After over ten years of service, it finally came time to euthanize my laundry basket. It was with me during the years when I didn't have a car ('90 thru '97), and I'd ride my bike several blocks to the Laundra-Queen with the basket riding on the handlebars, rain or shine. (You know how on the local news, when they segue to commercial and they show a little slice-of-life footage of kids sledding or a dog swimming in the river or whatever? I always secretly hoped a TV crew would see me riding my bike with my laundry basket on my handlebars and ask if they could film me for just that purpose. Never happened, though. Never even saw a TV crew.)

But the basket's most resplendently glorious moment &emdash;the moment in which it earned its moniker&emdash; came in about January of '96. After a long night of bacchanalia, after the bars closed, we decided a night of sledding was in order. Except that none of us had a sled. So we drove to our respective houses and grabbed our laundry baskets, and then me, Grady Gadbow, and Andy Smetanka, and Matt Farnham piled into Matt's car (the L'il Mule, a.k.a. the Mirthmobile) and headed up to Blue Mountain outside of Missoula with a 12-pack of PBR, which was the style at the time.

Sledding in a laundry basket is harder than it sounds. They don't slide all that well, nor are they well suited to conveying a 200-lb. drunkard. It only works if the snow is icy and hardpacked, and even then it's iffy. But what I remember most from that night, however, is the frozen jeans scenario. Walking around drunk with frozen jeans at 3:30 in the morning is probably one of the more excruciating conditions that a person can endure, drunkenness notwithstanding.

So anyway, that's why the basket is all beat to shit. At some point, as you can see, it's got a little reinforcement in the form of some string which kinda holds it together. Recently, Glenda suggested we put the basket out to pasture, you know, permanently. I had an emotional moment, then quickly realized that it's probably not all that healthy to cling so dearly to a goddamn laundry basket, no matter how fond a memory it conjures. It's all but impractical for household use, not to mention kind of an eyesore.

So, fare thee well, Polyurethane Chariot. May you find your eternal reward, friend.

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Today I begin my re entry into quotidian life after a torrid, perfervid love affair with the Season 1 DVD of The Office over the weekend. I knew from the reviews and recommendations that I was gonna dig it, but I had no idea it was gonna hit me like a bagful of baby shit on an El Paso parking lot. Unsullied genius at work, made doubly fascinating by the tsunami of quirky Britishisms. I should've been scrambling to the computer to cross reference shit at the American >British British >American Dictionary, but I really was pretty much ass-pasted to the couch from front to back of each episode. I'm real thankful for subtitles, too; I'd'a been cross-eyed trying to translate and decipher that shit on the fly, plus a good 60% of it would have whizzed right past me unabsorbed.

But I'm left flummoxed by this question: do they not have sexual harassment laws in the UK?

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Damn near as bewildering as The Office was the Season 1 (part 2) DVD of Curb Your Enthusiasm I had last week (via Netflix, you understand). As you probably know, it's original Seinfeld creator Larry David's first post-Seinfeld foray into TV (well HBO). I had a pretty brief but glorious Seinfeld phase, and it occurred a good two years after the show went off the air (I'd never even seen an entire episode until like '98). Like most people, by now, I've seen every episode like sixty times, so that any novelty has long since vaporized. And like so many of these things, it seems like Amurcan pop culture has evolved (ever so slightly) such that we're pretty much past the era where Seinfeld seems really cutting edge. In fact, it seems like that show percolated up through the mucky muck and saturated the culture to such a degree that shit that would have been considered Seinfeldian in, say, '95, is now universally accepted as SOP without being tagged as being Seinfeldian or anything.

So since Seinfeld absorption has run its course, can something as blatantly Seinfeldian as Curb Your Enthusiasm have any sort of appreciable impact? I say thee yes! I figure that while CYE and Seinfeld have a visionary and a general operating aesthetic in common, there must be something that sets it apart, because I can't imagine that, here in 2004, anyone is particularly starved for more of the Seinfeld schtick, since, like I said above, it's pert' near old hat at this juncture.

So what the hell sets it apart? Well, the obvious things are that it's mostly improvised and that they have a bit more leeway for ribaldry since they're on HBO. Those two things go a long way, I figure, in making the show so much more than just the "let's find some obscure but universally common little bit of cultural flotsam and conflate it into a phenomenon" pattern that was milked for so long on Seinfeld. That, and the fact that it's obvious, to the point of beguiling and charming, that Larry David is not really much of an actor, and he knows it. The fact that he knows he's not a natural thespian is what gives it the charming guile, I guess is what I'm driving at here. His conversational style is brusque, obnoxious, often rude and offensive, but you never find him intimidating at all, mostly just kind of an affable schlub (if you'll permit me an epithet from my native tongue, which is Yiddish).

Anyway, I watched each of four episodes several times, and when I finally decided to return the DVD to Netflix, it was like a good friend had left the house, leaving me feeling a little blue and lonely. The same will happen when I have to return The Office DVD, I'm sure.

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Do any of you ever read the consumer reviews on Amazon.com or the Netflix site? I've noticed a pretty clear-cut trend therein, particularly the people that review movies: the people that write favorable reviews of movies are usually pretty articulate and concise. But so often, the people that write the unfavorable reviews inevitably sound like the most illiterate rubes that ever walked the earth. Plus they use quotation marks and ALL CAPS way too often, sort of like the Zagat restaurant reviews. I love pans of films when done well. Writing an unfavorable review of a movie takes criticism to a whole 'nother level, I think. But these consumer reviews are painful to read, I tell you. Painful to see punctuation used so recklessly.

Here's an example:

"This movie tries to hard to be "cool". If your a sixteen year old boy with acne then maybe your the type of person who likes this garbage. Matt Damon makes me CRINGE!!!!!!! I cant watch him he think's hes a "star" and a "sex symbol"

Just something I've noticed of late.

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