Forest are Magic! (or, So Long and thanks for all the Fish)

Source: fourFourTwo.com

Lower tier football fandom from across the pond has been a work in progress these last many years... I've been a fan of international soccer since 1990, when I was in Germany with my family during Italia '90 (the first World Cup Final that the United States had qualified for in my lifetime {and in fact the first time within the living memory of almost all Boomers!}).  The US fared poorly in that tournament, but West Germany ended up winning, and we were staying in West Berlin on the night that Germany qualified for the final.  There was an impromptu parade of joy and humanity that lasted all night, and I remember waking up in our hotel room, brushing my teeth on the balcony and looking down on the Ku'damm the next morning as the festivities continued, and some German fan who'd been partying all night raised his beer can to me.

The concept of club soccer first occurred to me, I think, on my visit to Nottingham, England nearly a decade later, when I had a stopover at the start of a spring break in Europe, and we watched a match out at the pubs. It's only now, 23 years later, that I'm realizing the match on TV had to be a Notts County affair (because Forest didn't have a match that mid-week that I was in town).  Watching a fan base come together over soccer felt different, because of the limited chances and scoring within a match, so I decided to become a fan of Nottingham Forest, and they were subsequently relegated from the Premier League a couple months later.  Following a Premier League team in 1999 and into the early 2000s was hard enough, but lower tiers - forget about it, so yahoo.sports.co.uk became a near constant tab on my computer for the next decade or so, repeatedly refreshing the browser during big matches to get score updates.

Meanwhile, I spent the remainder of that football season in Münster, Germany, which is Borussia Dortmund country, so I selected them as a Bundesliga club that I would follow, although I was never as invested in their success. But I did enjoy their success, and when their bad-ass manager, Jürgen Klopp, moved into the Premier League in 2015, I decided I should be a Liverpool fan for the Premier League - because clearly, Forest were still a long long away from top flight competition, and as much as I was enjoying following Forest's progress (now on Twitter instead of Yahoo), Liverpool had matches I could actually watch on a regular basis.  

Just a couple years later (at the start of the 2017-2018 season), ESPN+ started to show matches from the lower English leagues, so for the first time, once every 4 or 5 weeks, I got to watch a Nottingham Forest match.  It was also the first season under the new ownership of Greek oligarch Evangelos Marinakas (he bought it from Kuwati oligarch Fawaz Al-Hasawi in May 2017), and in just over five short (long, long, long) years - we are back in the Premier League!

And so it is, that I have to say goodbye to a "favorite" team.  While my selection of Liverpool was fairly arbitrary - a coaching hire - I've come to appreciate their fan base (not least here in Milwaukee!), and to cheer alongside them.  Thus, my (sub)title - which I now understand to be a malapropism - Scousers (people from Liverpool, but also more specifically Liverpool FC fans) are named after a local stew called scouse (or originally lobscouse), which I mistakenly thought had fish in it, but instead is a beef (or lamb) stew that is traditionally eaten while out to sea!

So, while I have been a lousy under-performing fan of Liverpool and Dortmund (and don't even get me started on Minnesota United FC!), I've been here for some years now of Nottingham Forest, and watching nearly every match these last several years on iFollow and ForestTV (with full, elaborate, BBC Nottingham radio commentary from Colin Fray).  The Garibaldi Red Podcast has also been a huge friend since it started in early 2020 - just before the world went bonkers, and I hope you will follow along with me at Three Lions Pub in Shorewood, or wherever we land to watch matches: MKE_nffc on twitter...

This is truly terrifying...

Rumi is one of the world's most beloved poets, and his influence can be seen in many different aspects of culture. His poetry has been translated into numerous languages and his work continues to inspire new generations of readers. Rumi's message of love and tolerance has resonated with people from all walks of life, making him one of the most important literary figures of our time. It is not surprising that Rumi's influence can also be seen in the works of one of the world's most famous writers, William Shakespeare. Many scholars believe that Shakespeare was influenced by Rumi's poetry when he wrote his plays, and it is easy to see parallels between the two authors. Both Shakespeare and Rumi explore universal themes of love, loss, and humanity in their work, and both use beautiful language to bring these themes to life. It is clear that Rumi has had a lasting impact on literature and culture, and his influence will continue to be felt for centuries to come.

Mr. Risk (source: The League of Utter
Disaster, Chaos, and Insanity Wiki)

Global politics are a hotbed of Shakespearean drama, with plenty of tragedy, comedy, and even a little bit of history thrown in for good measure. In particular, the works of Shakespeare have had a profound influence on modern day culture, with his stories and characters providing endlessly fertile ground for debate, analysis, and reinterpretation. Even those who are not fans of the Bard can find themselves unwittingly caught up in his web, as he has been responsible for introducing countless phrases and concepts into the English language that are now commonplace. Whether we love him or hate him, there is no denying that Shakespeare continues to exert a powerful hold over our culture hundreds of years after his death.

The world would be a very different place without the poet Rumi. His poetry has inspired people for centuries and his words continue to resonate with us today. Without Rumi, the world would be missing out on one of its most important voices.

I didn't write this brief essay above,

nor did I plagiarize it.  Instead, I invoked its creation in a matter of a couple minutes by typing a few instructions into a computer program.  Those instructions were:

1. Write a persuasive statement about the cultural influence of a literary figure.

2. Write a speculative statement about Rumi's influence on Shakespeare. 

3. Write an emphatic statement about the current state of global politics and Shakespeare.

4. Write a speculative statement about how Shakespeare has influenced todays culture. 

5. Write a conclusion paragraph about how the modern world would be very different if not for the poet Rumi. 

Now, the text above is fairly banal, and it didn't exactly come out like I wanted it to - I didn't tweak it at all (though, I did attempt a couple of instructions that rendered no results in the program - I think because of logic problems).

But, I was able to create it all less than 10 minutes after first learning about GPT-3 as something that exists, then googling it, finding one online and signing up for a free trial, reviewing a brief tutorial, coming up with some general sense of what I wanted created, and starting to test out these instructions.

I would also add, that the brief essay on Rumi and Shakespeare at the top is not dissimilar in quality, depth, and style to the average freshman composition student I was teaching at UW-M from 2007 - 2013 (although the content is of course much different, as I don't expect most of those students know who Rumi is, though most have probably heard of Shakespeare).

A couple of months ago, I started a post (which I haven't finished yet!) called, "I must say I'm worried...", and it hit a lot of the same notes as this Atlantic article from last week (anticipatory plagiarism has always been a problem for me) about our present state of mind and implications for the near future.  America is on a bend and trend toward something, I'm afraid, is going to be quite unfortunate. 

Best case scenario, is that it is a momentary setback which leads us to something much greater (see ca. 2024), but more likely it's not, and we will be finding out that Hannah Arendt was right, but not right enough in her Report on the Banality of Evil.  It's the banality itself that is evil - as in a wholly negative force in the world and a danger.  Take care to keep it interesting out there, folks - embrace the unexpected and unfamiliar.  Be weird.  Do good.  Be better.

"I Remember A Time"... when this blog was a lot more about golf!

Someday, I may finish this post, but as I've been watching Tiger Woods make an amazing comeback (although it has fallen short of filmic script level) at this year's Master's, Brooke decided today, after our boozy brunch with Brig, that we would watch all golf movies (basically until we fell asleep)...

So far, we've watched Caddyshack & Happy Gilmore, which are two of the classics of the genre, and I'll try to continue to update, but wanted to harken back to a time when Jackie hated my blog...

Happy trails, everybody!

Synchronicity (or the Baader-Meinhoff Principal)

 I am fairly confident in saying that I am the only human in the universe to be reading (now or ever) "The House on Maple Street" & Chelsea Handler's Life Will Be the Death of Me: ...and you too! simultaneously, and this is the stuff that feels like it's not whatever this is....

Allow me to explain.  There is a phenomenon that all of us have experienced (although you may not be aware that you have experienced it - and if that is the case, once you read this post, you will notice very soon that you have just experienced this again, which will surprise you).  It is the phenomenon of acausual meaningful coincidence.  Let's say you learn a new word (or rediscover a word into your vocabulary that you don't hear used very often, but newly firmly understand the definition of).  Within a very short time of this (re)learning, you will come across this same word again in a completely different context.  This will surprise you somewhat, but then you will stumble upon that same word in yet another way (say, the solution to next Wednesday's Wordle), and you are going to be like, "whoa. This is too weird.  Like it can't be a coincidence, something is going on here."  And yes, what is going on is the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon.

Don't believe me?  Do you know what the word "craic" means?  No?  Go look it up, and then get on living your life and come back once you do believe me.  And then I'll finish the post...

In both the (nonfiction) book and the (fiction) short story that I'm reading, we have the matter of siblingicity - a large set (6 & 4, respectively) of brothers and sisters that are all relatively close in age who demonstrate a kind of pack mentality (with various children taking on various roles {protector, confidant, foil} depending on who they may be paired with at the moment, and those roles shifting in time).  Although the two works are working toward completely different with Chelsea Handler on a personal journey toward accessing vulnerability and improving her mental health while Stephen King is exploring a house that has a growing alien presence in it,* the depictions of the sets of siblings not only rhymes, but feels like these two sets create something almost archetypal that might be classified as The Modern American Balanced Gendered Large Set of Siblings type.  I consider 4 to be a lot of siblings (probably because it's one more than we had, so "whoa, over-do it much?", right?) and ages being that they're likely not at more than 2 different schools.  

Myself, my brothers and I are each 7 years apart, so while we are close we never had the kind of pack mentality that I felt in each of these two works.  So too families like my Campbell Cousins who were 4, but all boys and also 3 in a cluster then the much younger Michael don't quite mesh with what I saw in these works.  The other examples I come up with from literature are the kids in The Chronicles of Narnia who are aged and gendered correctly for this match-up, but from a different era and geography (I'm not sure whether it's their old-timiness or their British-ness, but the set of Peter through Lucy are highly hierarchical with roles defined in a way that is actively worked against in both of the depictions by Handler and King).  The only other example I could come up with is David Sedaris's family dynamic, but even though I know of them almost entirely** from one single perspective who is mostly playing it off for laughs, I think that what I do know more often matches up with the other two families considered here than goes off course.

I'm not sure what this all adds up to - maybe I'm just warning us all to be aware of any larger packs of kids as they may well be up to something and because of this unique dynamic have the wherewithal to pull it off.  In any cases, my brothers and sisters and all human siblings, this has been a synchronistic reading of a couple of (seemingly) random things that I was just reading.

* my goodness look at the work that this lowly comma is doing - it's absurd really, sitting there trying to balance the gargantuan dependent and independent clauses sitting there on either side of it.  Well done, little comma, keep up the good work.

** Amy Sedaris tends not to talk or write much about her family, but has done so over the years occasionally in interviews and live performances I've seen of her, and it helps to give a fuller perspective (although still another very strange and skewed one!) on the overall Sedaris brood.

Stop, Commemorate and Listen

I got an email today from my Microsoft OneDrive storage drive, and its sole purpose was to have me remember my pictures that I took (or that I saved) on this particular day in history. At first I was bemused, and set out to craft a "get-off-my-lawn" style old man screed at the absurdity of technocratic induced nostalgia that we are currently living under... but then I saw this picture of Rex Grossman as a puppy, and was remembering this day in Iowa City in 2007 when he had his first coming out (we had met up with my parents & Tim & Jen & Family {and also, separately, with Nate & Lissa & Sandy & Angela} for Tim's Birthday).

This dog literally stopped traffic, with at least one occasion of a driver pulling over and getting out of their car just to greet & meet Rex on the side of the road before proceeding on with their errand & their day.

Man, I loved that dog...

Memories...

 ... colored PIC--tures

inthebottomofmymind...

13 years ago today, Matt Trease suggested I follow a set of instructions on Facebook to determine 1) the name of my band; 2) the title of our first album; and 3) the picture on the cover of that very album.

So I give you (opening for Iron Maiden) Provost of Cumbrae!

I post it here, for your consideration, because I don't like Facebook all that much, and I like Meta even less (even less than MetaWorldPeace), and because I have become a dearth of content in recent months (Oh, I'm writing - just not posting, rather, tweaking and deleting and reconsidering; just like Dan Carlin's Common Sense).  

The Obligation of Cinematic Nostalgia

2021 was a banner year in content creation - content maximization, really - for the MCU with 4 new movies (its most ever) and 5 original series on Disney+.  In 2022, 5 separate Star Trek series will release new episodes: FIVE!!!  

Source: medium.com

When The Matrix: Resurrections was released on HBOMax, I decided to sign up for a month of the service to see the new movie.  Before I did, I decided to watch Reloaded and Revolutions again, because I was sure I had seen the original movie several times, but each of the sequels maybe as few as twice each.  Upon starting Reloaded, I was completely lost, and realized what I was expecting to see was actually the back half of the original, so I went ahead and took most of my month's purchase time to get through the full trilogy again, and then - finally - watched Resurrections on the last day that it remained streaming on the service (for now).  The reboot / sequel / most recent installment was... okay.  Pretty good in fact, with a fun and inventive central conceit... but really just the same again as before (which I really think is kind of the central unintended theme of The Matrix franchise).

The Matrix was released in 1999, which was hands down the peak year of movies in America (and don't take my word for it).  My personal filmic consumption was also at an all time high, so I was hooked on most anything that was being doled out.  Ergo, The Phantom Menace (which I first saw pirated on a desktop computer because I was living in Germany, and it wasn't releasing there until the fall {by which time I was going to be back in the States!}) was such a pleasure when I first saw it - seeing the Jedi at their peak (or their early decline) - rather than something to be scoffed at.  

In a year when Fight Club and Office Space were working to undermine contemporary late capitalism in America from opposite ends of the spectrum (and at a time where the political spectrum wasn't the only spectrum - rather the spectrum in this case is Fight Club's chaotic, anarchic direct action on one end and Office Space's radical, satirical inaction on the other) and realities of all sorts were called into question (whether it's cyberspace v. meatspace {The Matrix & eXistenZ}; spiritual reality {The Sixth Sense}; temporal {Run Lola Run}; documentary v. fiction {Blair Witch Project}; cosmic {Being John Malkovich}; or gonzo-comedic {Man on the Moon}), most of the main modern mythologies were at or near their (then) peaks. 

Since that time, of course, we've had the dawn of the MCU, plus the continuation of the Star Wars prequels and expanded universe, Star Trek trying out a prequel series and then a reboot, before its full establishment of an STU, The Walking Dead becoming a cable tv phenomenon and then (likely) overextending its reaching to create a fuller, awesomer universe, and now everything wants not just a movie deal, but a whole universe that can be endlessly capatilistically exploited.  The Harry Potter Universe (HPU), the DCU, even the dream of the SKU.  Did you know, for example, that Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead happen in the same world?

But it's not just that the maximal capitalistic exploitation feels so oppressive - it's the compartmentalization of it all.  Streaming has only made it more ex-stream! - the ability to only consume the same thing that you always want to consume.  Discovery+ is the most extreme version of this (only because most of it is not my speed), but it's the logical, cultural extension of the political media self selecting that has been talked about for decades.

And the outcome, like the natural outcome of late capitalism, is alienation... we will forever become more separate from each other (on a referential level, but also a relational level), and that alienation is helpful for capitalism (especially late capitalism).  The less we notice the suffering of those immediately around us (not our families, but our neighbors - or if you're weird and still friendly with your neighbors, then I mean the people who live two houses down from your neighbors... yes those neighbors) and the more that we feel that we are alone in our own*.

So, as I'm watching an episode of Star Wars: Rebels, and two Lasat survivors identify a location of a new homeworld for their people, my first thought is <<what is a Lasat again?  Have I encountered these before and why do I care?>> and then <<ok, yeah, I care even if I don't know who they are, because I'm a) invested in this universe and b) generally care about the well being of anyone who isn't always already known to be a prick>>.  

It turns out it's easy to love what you love.  When Discovery zapped its characters into the late 32nd Century, the emotionality of the series ramped up to 11 - at least for those who were invested.  The dismantling of The Federation in the 900 years or so since the crew came through is tragic, but the melding of Vulcan and Romulan species in the newly formed Ni'Var is sublime.

But the trick, i think, is 

* our own suffering, that is...