Liveblogging the Oscars, 2010

Red Carpet Prologue

I'll be the first to admit that the Oscars are an overly self congratulatory handjob to the film industry (which I love with every fiber of my being), but the Red Carpet show takes the cake.

5:12 - Steve Carell waved to the camera, and without even thinking about it I automatically waved back. He just seems so nice, y'know? Or maybe it's just that HD seems so realistic.

5:15 - Sarah Jessica Parker and Cameron Diaz both look horrible! God damn you HD for making hot women less hot!

5:18 - Whoopi Goldberg dressed as Cleopatra, the Mona Lisa, and the Statue of Liberty? And she's advertising... Diapers? Stop ruining the one good award show, Sister Act!

5:20 - I think those are the exact same accountants from last year.

5:21 - Steve Carell and Tina Fey sharing the same space. Make out. Make out. Make out. Tina Fey, incidentally, is looking way better than just about everybody else.

5:22 - Miley Cyrus looks really awkward on the Red Carpet. And what are you even doing at the Oscars, Miley Cyrus? This is a celebration of high quality acting and directing, not giving 13 year olds their first boner.

5:22 - Holy shit, it's The Dude in a tuxedo! Oh, wait, that's Jeff Bridges. "I'm all Gucci'd out!" He's definitely high.

5:24 - "So, Kate Winslet, you're just here for the party tonight, right?" "I'm actually here to present the award for Best Actress." BOOMTOWN. Suck it, Red Carpet interviewer!

5:26 - "So, Meryl Streep, what's your favorite thing about the Oscars?" "Getting inside." Clearly you forget, sir, that this is Meryl Streep, not the star of Twilight. She does not have time for your antics. She has to go win all awards, ever.

The Actual Ceremony

5:30 - What, we're starting with all the Actor and Actress nominees? Whatever happened to having the hosts tell jokes?

5:31 - Oh, nice of them to escort all the nominees to their seats.

5:32 - NPH. NPH!

5:33 - Thank you. Thank you Oscars, thank you Hollywood, thank you America. Thank you for making my life worthwhile.

5:40 - Katheryn Bigelow is quite a DILF, if you know what I mean.

5:41 - This "Oh look, there's-" routine is running a bit long, even if Steve Martin has got some real zingers.

5:44 - Hey Penelope Cruz. Lookin' good tonight, HD notwithstanding. Give me a call after the show.

5:45 - Yeah, Matt Damon in Invictus, OF COURSE Nelson Mandela wants his country to win the World Cup. Why would he want you to lose?

5:47 - Come on, Stanley Tucci, why do you look so uncomfortable after the scene where you try to rape and murder the girl? You did read the script, right? Did you think nobody would find out?

5:48 - Christoph Waltz just said Uber Bingo. On top of your well deserved Oscar, you have also won my heart.

5:50 - That speech about The Blind Side is exactly what I mean when I say "overly congratulatory handjob."

5:56 - If Steve Carell covered for Cameron Diaz with that joke on the fly, then good job, sir.

5:59 - Well, I shouldn't be surprised that Up won, but I was really pulling for The Fantastic Mr. Fox, if for no other reason than to give an award to a movie that isn't made in a computer. Pixar is the Meryl Streep of animated films.

6:00 - Hey Miley and Amanda, the prom called - it wants its dresses back.

6:03 - And the winners for Best Original Song are Truman Capps and Mike Whitman for "My Dick Don't Work."

6:04 - "I love you more than rainbows, baby." Now there's a man who loves his rainbows.

6:11 - Pretty huge savings at Bi-Mart. Two candy bars for 99 cents? I'd probably go with a Twix and a Payday. This bears further consideration - I'll get back to you later on this.

6:13 - Robert Downey Jr. and Tina Fey are doing a better job than the hosts.

6:14 - Read faster, Tina Fey!

6:15 - The Hurt Locker wins - good job. Let's keep this up, shall we?

6:19 - "THOSE AREN'T PILLOWS! AUUUGH!" Why didn't that movie win an Oscar?

6:22 - Wow, a lot of those John Hughes child actors didn't age so well. Except for Matthew Broderick, who looks like a teenager with grey hair, sort of like... Ooh, Samuel L. Jackson!

6:30 - I agree with what you said, John Lassiter - young filmmakers should just try to tell good, entertaining stories. Have you ever heard of a show called Writers?

6:35 - "Yo, Roger Williams, I'ma let you finish, but here's what I think you should be saying!"

6:38 - Thank you, Ben Stiller, for giving me nightmares. That said, far funnier than anything Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin did. "Don't worry, I brought a hairnet."

6:42 - Good job, Star Trek - this is really science fiction's year at the Oscars.

6:43 - Jeff Bridges will now introduce the newest Best Picture nominee, The Dude's Oscar Adventure.

6:50 - I can't say much about Best Adapted Screenplay, being as the only one of them I saw was District 9. Watching the Academy Awards when you haven't seen most of the movies is like watching the Super Bowl when you don't know any of the rules. Next year, even if I have to drop out of school, I'm going to see as many of the nominees as I can. Damn you, Academy, and your countless nominees.

6:53 - Hey, they gave Roger Corman an award! Now that's what I'm talking about! If nothing else, he at least deserves a year's free dinners at Qdoba for his impressive body of work.

7:00 - Wow, An Education looks good. Sure wish I'd seen it.

7:06 - Sigourney Weaver has aged so damn well. Can we get her a role on Cougartown?

7:09 - Keanu Reeves definitely didn't get the joke about clotheswhores. "Whaaaaaat?"

7:18 - Finally, Alec and Steve have a solid bit with some good chemistry! To borrow a phrase from the Internet, I loled.

7:19 - "Love to dare us/love to scare us?" God, why don't you go romance some whiny high schooler?

7:22 - Horror montage: Thank you for using a lot of scenes from The Shining and doing an Evil Dead shoutout. That said, I had to look away for the second half. Way to string together all the big shocks one after another.

7:23 - Can we have Morgan Freeman narrate the boring awards every year? This is way better.

7:28 - Sci-tech winners? NEEEEEEEEERD ALERT!

7:30 - Classy, Quentin. Just go on ahead and keep pumping your fist after the promo for your film. This is why they don't invite you more often.

7:35 - You're not going to show clips from each nominated film for Best Cinematography? Excuse me, but that's arguably the most important tech Oscar there is! It determines the look and tone of the movie, you assholes! No, no, let's just gloss it over so we can have a musical number from The Frog Prince and a tribute to 50 years of movies about cars.

7:41 - Hey, Quentin, they showed a shot from Kill Bill in the montage honoring recently deceased Academy members - are you going to pump your fist for that, too?

7:45 - So Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, huh ABC? I guess that means, in support of this bold attempt to fight obesity, that you'll stop showing ads for McDonald's and Snickers?

7:48 - Is he trying to interpretive dance an IED?

7:52 - And the award for Best Original Score goes to Michael Giacchino for Star Trek. Duh.

7:53 - That said, great speech, Mr. Giacchino. Just a really fucking good speech.

7:54 - Avatar won Best Visual Effects. In other totally obvious news, Chipotle Tabasco is the best Tabasco.

7:57 - I was really hoping that Will Arnett would appear and totally ruin Jason Bateman's presentation. "Oh, I guess I need a new flint... But where did the lighter fluid come from?"

8:05 - This just in: The Academy hates dolphins.

8:07 - Steve and Alec, why weren't you as funny during the opening as you are during the cutaway segments?

8:14 - Well well, Quentin, are you going to be an ass?

8:15 - Yes.

8:17 - "I would like to thank the Academy for not considering Na'vi a foreign language." Sick burn, brah.

8:20 - After the Avatar promo, James Cameron was just sort of sitting there nodding, as if to say, "Yep. I made this."

8:24 - Julianne Moore has Jessica Rabbit hair going on right now. Incidentally, I've seen her naked in multiple movies.

8:29 - Thank you, Tim Robbins, for totally blowing all the other speakers out of the water.

8:32 - The Dude abides.

8:35 - People are never going to stop calling you The Dude if you don't quit saying man, man.

8:38 - McDonald's, are you marketing to deaf Hispanics? God, you guys work all the angles.

8:46 - Yep, everybody's saying nice stuff about everybody else. Not much to blog about here.

8:48 - Congratulations, Sandra, but this doesn't make up for The Proposal and All About Steve.

8:53 - If Tarantino wins Best Director, he's going to make a real ass of himself. Just wait.

8:55 - Good job, Katheryn Bigelow. You directed a really good movie. Enjoy the hell out of that award.

8:58 - Best Picture. Make me proud.

8:58 - The Hurt Locker. And you did.

Truman Capps is glad that they gave the award to a movie he saw that wasn't Avatar.

Whipping It Out

Never search 'whipping it out' on Google Images. Hence, pic unrelated.

Attention blog readers, Oregon Marching Band members, Taco Tuesday patrons, and assorted other friends of the library:

Some of you may have noticed my rather lackluster attendance at Taylor’s these past several weeks, particularly on Tuesday nights. I’ve been made aware of your anguish primarily by a weekly barrage of text messages and voicemails demanding to know where I am, which usually get far less coherent after dollar wells start at 9:00.

In the past, when pressed to know what I’m doing on those nights that is more important than watered down drinks and tacos most likely made from roadkill, I’ve told you that I had “a thing.” And in this regard, I was telling the truth, because on Tuesday nights I do have “a thing.” I have always been reluctant to tell what that thing is because I fear that it will make me look nerdier than my posts about Dungeons and Dragons, marching band, speech and debate, and Battlestar already do.

On Tuesdays, I attend a critique workshop for fiction writers – primarily, science fiction writers.

It’s difficult to admit this because amateur fiction is usually not associated with successful, well-adjusted people. The ‘guy writing a novel’ is usually the depressive alcoholic staring at his typewriter, bitching to his friends about constant rejections from publishers and making mental lists of the best possible ways to kill himself.

Barring that, he’s the quiet, mildly retarded janitor living in a tiny room at the YMCA, and only after he dies do family members discover a rambling 15,000 page manuscript about angels fighting dragons in space or something, punctuated with anti-Semitic rants.

Or, worst of all, he’s the guy who, shortly after his spectacular murder-suicide, is discovered by the police to have written multiple insanely violent stories detailing his plans to take revenge on the people who wronged him.*

*As if to prove my point, as I write this, a girl in the Duniway Center is telling her friend with absolute certainty that, if the people who made the Saw movies weren’t making movies, they would be “doing that stuff in real life.” The tone of her rant seems to be that anybody who writes something remotely violent is using that as an outlet to avoid going out and murdering people himself. She’s also said a fair amount about her Christian faith, but I don’t have the heart to mention that the Bible has a seven-figure body count.

None of these are stereotypes I’d like to be associated with. If my hobby were oil painting, or architecture, or teaching English to inner-city Hispanic children, there would be nothing to be ashamed of. I’d probably make T-shirts. To acknowledge that you spend most of your time making up fake worlds and situations and writing it all down for your own enjoyment is to basically admit that you never grew out of having imaginary friends and pretending that the white floor tiles were hot lava.

And then, to acknowledge that the fake worlds and situations you make up involve lasers and spaceships is to admit that even among your imaginary friends, you probably weren’t the most popular one.

And to admit that you gather with other people with the same inclinations to share this stuff is like telling your parents that you and your friends all watch porn together. And last night I submitted my first story to this group, a novella about love in the context of robot sex, which further cements my attachment to this stigma.

Sharing my fiction with others is a lot like whipping my dick out in public. The chances that everyone will be thrilled with what I’ve got to show them are miniscule; I tend to assume that they will be shocked and disgusted, and will perhaps have me arrested for it. For that reason, I seldom if ever do it, and never in front of children.*

*That said, the manuscript I submitted was really long.

This sort of pressure doesn’t exist with nonfiction blog entries, because at the end of the day this is just commentary with dick jokes thrown in. Fiction, on the other hand, is really a window into my mind, and I try to keep the curtains drawn on that window as much as possible.

This first story, I imagine, is going to be the most nerve wracking for me to show to people, because I still don’t know if it’s something to be ashamed of or not. I was recently looking over some of the Perfect Dark fan fiction I wrote in middle school, for example, and discovered that at the time I had little or no sense of propriety. In one of the stories, a character decapitates an enemy, sticks a hand grenade into the severed head, pulls the pin, and throws it at a crowd of oncoming adversaries, killing them and showering them in their departed friend’s brain matter. And that’s one of the good guys.

At the time, I had no idea that there was anything wrong with that, and what scares me is that maybe the story I’ve submitted is full of similarly reprehensible stuff that I don’t have the good sense to know is reprehensible yet. I could’ve just handed off a manuscript that paints me as a misogynistic sociopath without knowing it because the only other person to read it was a misogynistic sociopath himself (thanks again for the notes, Mike).

But that’s the benefit of getting my work out in the open while I’m alive, rather than waiting for someone to find it in a long-unopened drawer after I’ve died – at least this way, if it makes me look like I’m crazy, I’ve got the opportunity to defend myself.

Truman Capps would like to point out that J.D. Salinger probably had this same insecurity, to the point that he seldom went out in public for fear of inadvertently whipping his dick out.

Forensics

Tonight, at the Philadelphia Civic Center: Green Man vs Green Man!

Oh, how I remember my days on the speech and debate circuit.

Near the end of my 8th grade year, the high school sent a registration packet to my house, and I sat at the kitchen table and poured over all of the upcoming educational opportunities that waited in the hallowed, asbestos coated halls of Sprague High School. The course catalogue, more than any of the preparatory speeches my middle school teachers gave me, convinced me that high school was truly a much bigger deal than I had expected. No more fucking around with homeroom and arts and crafts – in high school, shit was going to get real.

There was a series of classes devoted to teaching the art of auto repair, which took place in the school’s dedicated garage, wherein students used highly dangerous power tools and tinkered with donated cars. The classes were called “MECH TECH”,* because in the fast paced world of auto repair you just don’t have time to say whole words.

*I’m reasonably sure Mech Tech X was the name of a Japanese giant robot fighting schoolgirl porno game.

There were the CAD – or ‘Computer Assisted Drawing’ – classes, wherein, to my knowledge, students just sort of fucked around with computers all day. I had plenty of friends who took these classes, and they all regaled me with stories of the crazy, gross pranks they pulled on each other while spending large amounts of unsupervised time drawing pictures of houses and cars with computers.

There were the Seminary classes, wherein the Mormon kids got to go to the little LDS church next door to the school and do basically the same stuff the CAD people did, only with the Book of Mormon instead of computers.

And then, there was a class called “SPRAGUE FORENSICS”, and for whatever reason, that was the course code that I copied onto my registration sheet.

In retrospect, maybe I was unaware that ‘forensics’ is also the name for speech and debate – perhaps I thought I’d be spending my afternoons crawling through blood spattered tenement murder scenes with a blacklight in search of ever elusive semen. Lord knows that would have been more enjoyable than Algebra II.

Public speaking, much like the Academy Awards and ice dancing, is one of those events that probably shouldn’t be competitive because in most regards the judging is, at best, arbitrary and based on personal taste. Sure, it’s usually clear who won in a debate round, because those are competitions between two people. However, I did not do debate, particularly because I have a lot of difficulty walking into a room knowing I’m going to have a fight with someone.

I competed in the soft-pitch individual events, primarily After Dinner Speaking, which is pretty much six minutes of stand up comedy. So imagine judging that – who’s the better comedian? Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Murray, or Conan O’Brien?

“Oh,” you whine. “They’re all good in different ways!”

Well, competitive public speaking doesn’t work like that. You have to decide which one is best, no matter how hard or completely random that selection may be.*

*Of course, it’s easy to pick the worst: Jay Leno.

Regardless of how I did in the competition, the speech tournaments themselves were always interesting. Many of the skills necessary for success in public speaking were also taught in high school drama programs, the result being a few hundred drama kids crammed into an empty high school on a weekend, along with a roughly equal number of reserved, well read, and usually Asian public policy debaters. There were also a handful of guys like me who were only there because they wanted to win trophies for telling stupid jokes.

The personality clashes were always a lot of fun to watch, as well as the comingling between drama kids from different schools – who, I am convinced, are without a doubt members of one of the randiest high school subcultures. My senior year, one of my friends on the speech team made out with at least one girl at every tournament he went to – in some cases two (but never, apparently, at the same time). Say what you will about speech people being nerds; at least we were nerds who made out with other nerds.

I bring all of this up again because this weekend I judged at the University of Oregon debate tournament, at the request of my high school speech coach. Being at a debate tournament again really brought me back – legions of high schoolers clad hastily appropriated and often mismatched formalwear, drama students pairing off and going in search of dark corners, debaters earnestly reading political science books and trying to forget that they’re in high school.

My school’s speech team now is almost entirely bereft of people I know, save for a few seniors who were freshmen when I graduated. Two of them are Zach Johnston and Kehl Van Winkle, whose name I promise I did not make up. Both of whom made a point of asking for a shout out in my next blog, which is not normally the sort of thing that I do, but my word count was running low and I’m short on ideas at the moment. Let’s just move on to the conclusion, shall we?

I usually make a point of saying that while I hated high school, band and speech team were what made it worthwhile. But taking a second look at speech team, I realize that while it was a great time that supplied me with plenty of experiences I’ll never forget, it’s definitely not something I’d do again. I can’t say I miss spending hours and sometimes days sitting around a high school or community college cafeteria, wearing a $30 blazer (which would later make its television debut on Writers) and waiting for yet another round of sketchily judged competition.

That said, I’m sure that if I had been the one pairing off with overly aggressive drama girls, my opinion on the matter would probably be very different.

Truman Capps sometimes goes into these blog entries thinking they’ll be more relevant than they actually are.

Don't Fuck Up

Doing his one job well.

During football games – yes, football, the wonderful, uber-violent sport that, unlike basketball, Oregon is actually good at – when the opposing team tries for a field goal and misses, the band heckles them pretty hard for it.* “YOU HAVE ONE JOB!” We yell. “AND YOU SUCK AT IT!”

*Of course, we heckle everyone pretty hard about basically everything. During a free throw at the last basketball game against Cal, we yelled at Cal’s shooter that he was the reason his parents got divorced. He missed the shot.

Because that’s the placekicker’s job – somebody holds a ball in front of him, and he runs up and kicks it. The circumstances of what the ball does afterwards might change, but otherwise his entire scholarship is riding on his ability to kick a ball a long distance with some degree of accuracy. The parameters for success and failure are clearly and blatantly defined, and unlike Charlie Brown, you know the person holding the ball isn’t going to psych you out and pull the ball away at the last second, causing you to fall down amidst the sound of a drumroll and a slide whistle. Kicking is your life.

I mean, hell, how sweet of a gig is that? I admit, it’s probably not easy, but you’ve got nothing to concentrate on besides honing that one skill. If I got a full ride scholarship to do one specific thing, you damn bet I’d get incredibly good at it – unless it was math or watching American Idol, in which case all bets would be off.

Like a placekicker during football season, life for college football players after the football season is pretty simple: Don’t fuck up. Pass your classes and don’t fuck up. Basically, do what pretty much every other student on campus does every day of his or her life.

Now listen to me very carefully, Oregon football:

In the off-season, you have one job, and you suck at it worse than basically anyone has ever sucked at anything before.

-Jeremiah Masoli, the quarterback whose name we were all so delighted to rhyme with ravioli and e-coli, along with wide receiver Garrett Embry, whose name doesn’t rhyme with anything, were accused by members of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity of stealing two MacBooks. If these allegations are true, it would be a profoundly pointless move on their part, seeing as the athletic department already provides MacBooks to athletes. Nobody’s been charged with anything, but Embry was mysteriously kicked off the team.

-Running back LaMichael James was recently arrested for assaulting and strangling a student who police accused of being his girlfriend. He is now facing domestic violence charges and is prohibited from returning to his Springfield home or setting foot on campus because he is now not allowed within two miles of the victim. He’s currently couch surfing as the athletic department tries to figure out a way for James to pass all of his classes without being able to physically attend them – because if he fails, he’ll be ineligible for his scholarship, ineligible for spring training, and thus ineligible for football next year.

-Backup linebacker Kiko Alonso was arrested for DUII several days ago, for which he was promptly booted off the team.

-In response, wide receiver Jamere Holland posted an inflammatory update on his public Facebook profile attacking Coach Kelly (arguably the last decent man left in Oregon football at this point) for kicking Alonso off the team for “weak shit” – because apparently, driving drunk and endangering the lives of others is ‘weak shit’ in the fast-paced world of Oregon football. He concluded the update by inviting readers to quote him, which they did, all over a series of widely-read sports blogs. Perhaps as damage control, in his next update Holland expressed his desire to “block whites as friends and have only blacks,” because a little racism never hurt anything. He, too, was kicked off of the team.

-Rob Beard, a placekicker, who even during football season only has one job, was recently the recipient of a severe beat-down after he joined a late night brawl in support of a former teammate. In the course of the fighting, he reportedly attacked a 19-year-old girl, for which he has been charged with misdemeanor assault.

-In retaliation for Beard’s beating, defensive end Matt Simms sought out one of the students responsible for the attack on Beard and punched him, knocked him to the ground, and beat him. Simms, also, has been asked to leave the team.

I agree that everyone makes mistakes. I agree that there are plenty of good, responsible young men in the Oregon football program.

But at the same time, come on, guys! What are we, the University of Washington football team in 2000? I mean, thank God we’ve already got the nation’s sympathy after that asshole at Boise State punched LeGarrette Blount, because otherwise everybody would think we were all a bunch of thugs!

[Blount punch gif]

Oh, wait.

Every day, thousands of students fulfill all of their academic and extracurricular obligations without fucking up. Sure, some of them do, and they’re punished for it, and the argument will no doubt be made that student athletes make mistakes, just like everybody else.

But student athletes aren’t like everybody else – they’ve got beefy scholarships and a blinged out, Borg cube-shaped study hall on Franklin Boulevard as incentives to make them come to the University of Oregon and succeed, both on and off the field. Athletics invests all this money in them because student athletes are representatives of the University – they’re supposed to be the best of the best.

Instead, we’ve got drunk driving, domestic abuse, gang fights, and retaliatory beat downs. It’s like the entire football team is Robert Downey Jr. in the late 1990s.

When Jamere Holland publicly wished that white people couldn’t view his profile, he suggested that he was “misunderstood.” I’ve got to say, I find that the most offensive part of this whole situation – that non-athletes or the University or white people just don’t get these football players; that we should cut them some slack.

There’s no room for misunderstanding here. Like the placekicker, your job is simple:

Don’t drive drunk. Don’t choke your girlfriend. Don’t steal stuff. Don’t punch people. Don’t talk shit about Big Balls Chip. Don’t be a racist.

Don’t fuck up.

Truman Capps hopes not to be choked by an Oregon football player in the near future.

United We Stand

Wait... What? That doesn't even... What?

When I was a senior in high school, the teacher of my college writing class attempted to foster intelligent debate among students about hot button political issues of the day. This was a noble goal, but she had apparently forgotten that this was Sprague High School – where, during the 2004 election, I heard a girl say that George W. Bush should win because, “He’s so much better looking than that John Kerry guy.”

For the first few weeks of the semester we would debate about issues like gay marriage and the War in Iraq – a sort of cage match between the conservative, hyperreligious, generally poorly informed students who made up 85% of the class and the liberal, hyperangry, generally poorly informed students who made up the other 15%. The conservatives would state their case and trot out Bible verses for support, while the liberals would fervently and angrily retort, using evidence gathered from a number of liberal blogs. This back and forth would continue until, inevitably, a girl would start crying and everybody would start to feel bad. Eventually, one of the members of the conservative camp had her parents talk to the principal, who made our teacher put an end to the debates, and we spent the rest of the term learning how to write college application essays.

Shortly before our debates came to a close, someone representing the conservative cause trotted out the phrase, “United we stand, divided we fall.”

And all I could think was, Does she know she’s basically quoting Pink Floyd right now?

The general spirit that I remember from 2006 was one of Republican frustration with the Democrats’ unwillingness to cooperate with their highly reasonable, well thought out plans regarding foreign policy, the environment, and taxes. I remember that at one point, Democratic stonewalling got so bad that someone tried to introduce a resolution to weaken or dismantle the filibuster, prompting a liberal-sponsored ad that ran multiple times during The Daily Show, showing a tiny animated megaphone named Phil-A-Buster exhorting viewers to support the sacred right of Congressmen to stall and block democracy for as long as was necessary to get their way. I also have some vague memories of Phil-A-Buster doing battle with a gigantic evil robot, so I might be confusing political activism with Transformers (it would not be the first time).

I remember that my parents and I, as well as our liberal friends, took pleasure in the efforts of the Democrats to block Republican legislation. It felt like a David and Goliath situation at the time, which was cool for us, because Goliath is always the bad guy. I never went to Sunday School, but I doubt that when children were told this story there was ever anyone who was disappointed when the giant didn’t totally squish the little guy. Nobody went to see Rocky and rooted for Apollo Creed. When we watch Star Wars, you never hear anyone cheer when the Empire blows up a planet full of totally innocent people. “Oh yeah! Take that! Fuck you, Alderaan! That’s what you get for being peaceful people who have no weapons!”

Now that the Democrats are Goliath, we’re starting to see that politics is perhaps the only situation in which you want to see the little guy get his ass handed to him. The Democrats, who only a few years ago were vehemently stonewalling, are now struggling to get anything done in a Congress deadlocked by a minority who are really, really good at vehemently stonewalling.

And I can’t help but think, Man, if Democrats were that good at stonewalling, maybe we wouldn’t be in Iraq right now.

Congress is so divided at this point that it can’t really get anything done. Part of this is due to the fact that while the Republican Party is about as cohesive right now as a bunch of trashed international studies majors trying to walk to Burrito Boy at 2:00 AM, the one thing they can organize is vehement opposition. Part of this is also thanks to the fact that the Democratic Party is comprised largely of robots whose sole mission in life is to fuck literally everything up (for reference, see John Kerry in 2004 and the election of Scott Brown).

I’d like to go find the girl from my college writing class who said ‘divided we fall’ and see if she still agrees – that is, if she has time between tea parties. The fact is, unity always sounds like a novel concept to whomever’s in power, because logic dictates that when the time comes for compromise, it’ll probably be on their terms.

That being said, I don’t think this division is going to make us fall. America has always been at odds with itself – that’s kind of how we roll – and this is definitely not the worst it’s ever been. “Divided we suck” is, I think, a far more accurate description of the current state of affairs. Congress being unable to enact any new policies isn’t going to bring about America’s downfall; if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that killing terrorists is good, and that’ll never stop happening. However, so long as Congress stays divided, issues like healthcare, big business, and the economy won’t get solved by either party. They’ll just stay where they are.

They’ll keep sucking.

Truman Capps doesn’t like it when he writes political stuff either – blame my Communication and Democracy book and its message of “THE REPUBLICANS ARE THE SOURCE OF ALL THE WORLD’S EVIL, FOREVER.”

Letters To People

There comes a time in every man’s life when he is too busy studying for an exam to put the necessary thought into writing 1000 words on the same topic. On those days, he writes brief letters to people he’s encountered over the past few days, offering helpful advice or, in some cases, just saying hey.

Dear Unit 4,

What’s up? I’m in Unit 3, right next door to you. You know that wall you pound on, for whatever reason, at times that no human being should be awake and pounding on things? It’s actually my wall too.

I’ve grown quite fond of this wall. It, along with its three brothers, work tirelessly to keep the roof from falling on me. It’s always there when I need something to lean on. And, most importantly, it separates me from you and those undisciplined savages you call roommates, for which I am eternally grateful.

So it pains me to hear the abuse you constantly mete out against my wall – both because it keeps me awake at night and because it’s an awfully mean thing to do to my good friend, the wall. So please stop doing it, or at least do it between 10:00 AM and 5:00 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when I won’t be around to hear it happening. Asshole.

This may seem bossy, but I pay good money for that wall and I believe I have some right to decide what happens to it. For example, I even have a poster hanging on it. It’s a reprint of a fake oil painting that shows humans and robots fighting with swords. No, don’t think about it too hard – you wouldn’t understand.

Holla back,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Dear England,

Hi there – it’s me, Truman. Cheerio, I guess, right? I’m the guy who applied for a visa because he was doing an internship in England, and then decided he didn’t want to do the internship and thus did not need a visa, and as a result asked for his $247 visa fee back.

It’s totally cool if you don’t remember me. I’m sure lots of people apply for visas to come visit you. You’re like the beautiful, cultured girl at the dance with really, really bad teeth.

Anyway, I was just a little dismayed to find out that my $247 visa fee was nonrefundable. You see, in America our economy isn’t doing quite as well as yours right now, and $247 is a lot of money – even if it’s actually my parents’ money. I’m sure that in England, $247 just grows on trees, but in my country, we believe in a hard day’s work (also, credit cards), and money is a little harder to come by.

All I did was go up to Portland and get my biometrics taken – a half hour long process. And, I mean, I would get it if the biometrics appointment had been really thorough – I had prepared for a cavity search, although I’d rather you don’t ask me exactly how I prepared – but all it was was some Asian guy gently taking me by the hand and fingerprinting me. Don’t get me wrong; his hands were soft and he was exceptionally gentle, but it didn’t really feel like $247 worth of biometrics.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I’d like that money back, because in America we believe in payment for services rendered, and right now I paid for a visa and possibly a cavity search and I haven’t got either one. Although, that being said, you’re definitely sticking a finger up my ass in the figurative sense, so… Thanks, I guess? It is the thought that counts, after all.

See you in April,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity

Dear Sarah Palin,

God, Mrs. Palin… Thanks so much for just being you. Don’t change a thing. Not a blessed thing. You might think that this is sarcasm, given the things I’ve said about you on here in the past, but you have no idea how serious I am right now.

A lot of people got all riled up when they found out that you’d written notes on your hand with a Sharpie in order to answer soft-pitch, preselected questions at an event populated entirely by your most fervent supporters, who had paid you more than most working families in America make in a year just to show up. I don’t understand it – I feel like those are the same people who are totally blown away when Charlie Sheen says something smutty on Two and a Half Men. I would expect nothing less from you, Mrs. Palin.

Sarah.

Your career has been nothing but a series of bad career moves. Remember how Chevy Chase’s big thing was falling down back in the Saturday Night Live days? That’s kind of what you do now – you fall all over yourself, time and time again, and your stock only rises. You sank McCain’s campaign thanks to your interview with Katie Couric, you crapped out on your state halfway through your term in office, and now, in the leadup to your inevitable candidacy in 2012, you’re aligning yourself with birthers and teabaggers, completely alienating the moderate Republicans and independents who do most of the electing in this country.

Please, please, please, don’t change a thing. I’m telling all my friends to pray that you win the nomination in 2012. Hell, bring on Glenn Beck as your running mate, just for good measure. I feel certain you’ll win a solid 25% of the vote – which I’m sure in your world is a landslide victory.

I like you just the way you are, Sarah Palin.

Love,

Truman Capps
Internet Celebrity.

Truman Capps hopes that if his British host family happens to read this, that they understand that the comments about bad teeth and work ethic were all satire. Y’know, like Faulty Towers and The Office and stuff.

Lincoln City

Well, thank God we weren't going to camp.

The market for terrible horror movies is, apparently, huge. If you go to one of those websites where they let you watch bootlegged movies for free online and type in a reasonable query, like The Hurt Locker or Afro Sluts IV, you’ll most likely end up with a list of formulaic, bargain basement horror movies produced in the last decade, such as:

The Hurter
Locked In The Trunk II: The Trunkening
Afro Sluts From Hell
BloodDrainer

You know what I mean – movies shot on a camcorder that was on sale at Best Buy and edited with Dad’s copy of Windows Moviemaker. Apparently the cheapest type of movie to make is the teen slasher, perhaps because in most cases it doubles as softcore porn, and thus significantly broadens its audience.

Every genre of film and television has its own set of cannon fodder, a set of stock extras who can be mowed down in droves for dramatic effect but keep coming back for more. Star Wars has Stormtroopers, Star Trek has Redshirts, Battlestar Galactica has Colonial Marines, 24 has everyone at CTU who isn’t Jack Bauer, Seinfeld had all of Jerry’s girlfriends, and What Not To Wear has shy, overweight women from the Midwest with no fashion sense.

It’s like they have cannon fodder recruitment in a warehouse somewhere, and all these unemployed people come in and look at presentations from every genre, like a career fair in which every career will inevitably get you killed before the end of the first act.

Horror movies employ college students, particularly horny ones, as their cannon fodder. At the cannon fodder career fair, I can see the horror movie people advertising free booze, condoms, camping supplies, and tuition at schools like “the prestigious University of Dreyskull” as a means to get sexy young people to come be massacred, preferably while naked.

At the moment, I’m spending Valentine’s Day weekend with nine of my band compadres in a wonderful beach house in Lincoln City belonging to one of my friend Jefe’s relatives. Of the ten of us here, eight are couples sharing bedrooms. We got a great deal on the house, and were left the keys to the liquor cabinet. The potential for hedonism here is endless. The potential for serial killers? Double endless.

In the movies, drinking and sex are always punished, sooner or later, by gruesome and bloody death at the hands of a deranged maniac or, in some cases, amorous trees. The one person to survive is usually the one who doesn’t drink or have sex – hopefully, if a serial killer does find his way into the house, he’ll appreciate how little sex I’m having and be willing to look the other way on all the White Russians I’ve been knocking back.*

*However, I’m also sort of the wiseass of the group, and the wiseass is usually one of the last ones to die, gruesomely, usually at the most unexpected time. “Oh man guys, I can’t believe we made it out of OH SHI-”

College hijinx, which until recently I’d thought I was going to miss out on entirely in college, are only magnified by proximity to a major body of water. The other night, in the midst of revelry, I got a hold of a camcorder and took a couple of the stupid videos that make up roughly 95% of YouTube’s content. The ocean may or may not have been peed in. We have yet to build a pyramid out of beer cans, but the night is young.

The reason I believe the hijinx stand out more in Lincoln City is because once you get out of a college town, it becomes clear just how crazy some of the stuff that gets taken for granted in Eugene actually is. A good example of this was the other night, when I ran down to the local supermarket in search of a ping pong ball so my friends could play beer pong.

“Have you got any ping pong balls here?” I asked the friendly looking man at the checkout counter.

“’fraid not.” He said, with a sympathetic smile. “Guess you’ve got a beach house with a ping pong table, huh?”

“Uh…” I muttered, slowly remembering that outside of the college community ping pong balls have uses other than being thrown at cups of beer. “Actually, we’ve got a bunch of Milwaukee’s Best and some red cups.”

“Oh.” The man said, his smile disappearing. I could practically hear the shards of his destroyed innocence smashing onto the ground. “So I guess you’re going to play some… Games.”

“Uh, yeah.” I muttered. I could tell that I had instantly been written off as yet another hedonistic college student – and perhaps earmarked as a potential target, if this particular supermarket checker moonlighted as a serial killer. “But I guess we can’t play beer pong, though, because we don’t have a ping pong ball.”

“You could play quarters.” He suggested, eager to be helpful.

I thanked him, but what I really wanted to say was, ”Yeah, quarters! Say, do you have any Huey Lewis tapes we could listen to while we play? Oh, hey, did you see that new Spuds McKenzie commercial during Dallas last night? Avoid the Noid, man!”

In the end, though, watching my friends try to create drop shots involving fire, I came to realize that hijinx were far more dangerous than any serial killer.

Truman Capps finds downtown Lincoln City to be one of the least appealing places in the world.

Stiller/Wilson

My philosophy on life is that, on any given day, I am a character in a comedy movie, and depending on my fortunes on that day, the character is either played by Ben Stiller or Owen Wilson.

Admittedly, into each life a little shit must fall, but by and large, in Owen Wilson’s movies his characters are generally lucky and well liked, whereas Ben Stiller has to slog through a few thousand gallons of misery in order to find his happy ending. Observe:

Owen Wilson

Bottle Rocket - Constantly in high spirits, finally realizes his dream of becoming a master thief, goes to prison (which reinforces his self-esteem).

Heat Vision and Jack (TV Pilot) - Is a talking motorcycle. Repeat: HE IS A TALKING MOTORCYCLE.

Shanghai Noon - Digs himself out of the sand with chopsticks, spends time playing cards, drinking, and boning Old West floozies, gets to be best friends with Jackie Chan.

The Royal Tenenbaums - Rich, wildly successful novelist, bones Gwyneth Paltrow.

Zoolander - Wins VH1 Fashion Awards, helps Zoolander save the day, participates in orgy with midgets and bones Christine Taylor, is so hot right now.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou - Acts on his dream of joining Team Zissou, bones Cate Blanchett, is on A Squad.

Starsky and Hutch - Bones Carmen Electra and Amy Smart at the same time.

Wedding Crashers - Bones enough hot bridesmaids to populate a small country, spends hours sweet talking Rachel McAdams at his friend’s expense, hangs out with Christopher Walken.

You, Me, and Dupree - Lives rent free with Matt Dillon, uses his pornography, gets his bone on with a Mormon librarian (female).

Marley and Me - Bones Jennifer Aniston. Apparently owns a dog, as well.

Ben Stiller

There’s Something About Mary - Gets his wang caught in his zipper, loses girl of his dreams, spends life being shit on, caught in gay rest stop orgy.

Mystery Men - Uses impotent rage as a means to cover up severe self-doubt and loathing, disrespected by coworkers, friends, cute waitresses, criminals, and the police, gets hit in the face with a shovel.

Meet The Parents - Misses his chance to propose to his girlfriend, receives nonstop disrespect from her father, is humiliated in front of family and friends, accidentally breaks a family friend’s nose with a volleyball, inadvertently fills backyard with sewage and sets wedding altar on fire, is suspected of being a marijuana user, loses the family cat, is forcibly exiled from the family home, only to later be detained by airport security.

The Royal Tenenbaums - Wife dies in a plane crash.

Duplex - Rents a high priced apartment with an elderly subletter who constantly torments and takes advantage of him and his wife, resulting in physical abuse, arrest, and the destruction of his recently-completed novel.

Envy - Misses the opportunity to invest in a friend’s business and become rich, earning the ire of his wife and sending his life into a downward spiral of slapstick disaster.

Along Came Polly - Catches his new wife having sex with Hank Azaria, has prolific diarrhea while on a date with Jennifer Aniston which results in the destruction of several of her cherished items.

Night At The Museum - Spends an entire night being bullied by cavemen, fossils, miniatures, and Teddy Roosevelt, realizes his agent cast him in a really terrible movie.

Tropic Thunder - Is the laughing stock of the film industry, alienates all personal connections, gets waterboarded by drug dealers and stabbed by a small child, murders a panda, which leads to an existential crisis.

Today was a definite Ben Stiller day. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Avatar

"Hi there. I'm James Cameron, and I'm sorry your girlfriend made you see Titanic. Please enjoy Avatar."

Arguably my least favorite element of science fiction is the presence of aliens. At the outset, this might sound like me saying, “My least favorite thing about fondue is all that cheese,” but in my defense, there’s been a lot of high quality science fiction about humans fighting and trying to coexist with other humans (or, in one case, robots that they designed – but robots are cool with me.) I just have trouble relating to the countless humanoid, bumpy-foreheaded aliens cranked out by the Star Trek franchise. I’m not as interested in their perspectives and their interactions as I am in those of humans. I guess I’m racist against fictional races that we might discover in the future. I’m like Archie Bunker, in space.

There are exceptions to this rule. District 9, while far from perfect in many respects, gets a pass from me because the aliens there are more of a Macguffin to show what huge pricks all humans everywhere are. The most recent Star Trek is okay in my book, thanks largely to Kirk’s buxom, grin skinned fuckbuddy. Most importantly, Alien and Aliens don’t try to make us empathize with a race of nonunion actors in heavy makeup, loving and appreciating every element of their culture. Rather, the aliens in these films are horrifying monsters that unequivocally must be eradicated, providing a means for a lot of interpersonal drama between space truckers and, later, space marines.

Arguably my favorite element of science fiction is the presence of space marines, mainly because they follow my long established equation that if you take something cool and put it in space, it only gets cooler. Space marines are usually psychotic, ‘roided up thugs, with the weapons and the means to commit incredible violence. I don’t have a boner for war or anything, but I know good storytelling when I see it.

So Avatar, then.

On the one hand, half of every trailer was full of space marines running around in giant robot suits with huge guns or flying around in helicopter things, which looked cool. But then, the other half of every trailer was James Cameron trying very hard to get us to empathize with twelve foot tall blue cat people with tails, which was difficult, to say the least.

Initially, my plan was to watch Aliens and Dances With Wolves on two TVs at the same time and save myself $9, but then I wound up coming home for the weekend and Dad bought my ticket instead. Ka-ching!

A major theme in Avatar is the notion of sight – the Na’vi greet one another by saying, “I see you,” metaphorical ‘seeing’ is how they communicate with their world, and the movie is full of so many close up shots of eyes that I felt like James Cameron was trying to teabag us with his thematic nuts.

It was fitting, because this movie is basically one big testament to the ability to see. Everything is fluorescent and vibrantly colorful, and the option exists to see the movie in 3D and IMAX, which I expect is a cheap alternative to heroin. All the hype about the movie was its groundbreaking eye candy – in effect, the movie’s hype became part of its thematic content. Every time one of the beautifully rendered CGI characters would prattle on about sight, I could ‘see’ James Cameron sitting at his computer writing the screenplay and chuckling.

“Heh heh heh. I am so fucking smart. I mean, would a stupid person have been married to Linda Hamilton? Probably not.”

And yeah, the movie was fucking beautiful. It was downright Nobel Prize quality gorgeous, crammed full of lush forests and glowing rivers and some of the absolutely most epic fight scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. There was a lot of great eye candy and there was a living, breathing, thinking story backing all of it up. Not that the story thought that hard, mind you – the way I heard it described was “Dances with Pocohontas in Space” – but light years ahead of something like Transformers 2. The screenplay, also, relied pretty heavily on Captain Voiceover.

Avatar was everything that a summer (er, winter) blockbuster should be – great eye candy with a decent amount of story mixed in. James Cameron has always been good at this sort of thing. I feel as though the founding fathers of cinema, if they saw Avatar, would be pleased that their brainchild had been used to such good purpose, even if it raised thematic questions about their flagrant racism.

But no, Avatar should not be a Best Picture contender. Why? Because it’s not one of the ten best American movies this year, God damn it.*

*Inglourious Basterds was cool, but it wasn’t one of the best movies of the year either. Neither was District 9, although it would definitely win for Best Cinematography had anyone thought to fucking nominate it.

This is yet another reason why there shouldn’t be ten Best Picture nominees – they’re started nominating movies from 2009 that got buzz, rather than the absolute best of the best. There’s a big gap between a good movie, like Avatar or Inglourious Basterds, and a great movie, like The Wrestler, which the Academy time and again refuses to acknowledge.

I want to think that they won’t hand Best Picture of the Year to Avatar, a movie filled with innovative and groundbreaking visual effects and essentially no new creative ideas.

But then I think about Titanic, and I start to get scared.

Truman Capps is perfectly content to let Avatar clean up at the MTV Movie Awards.

Rain

See, Dad, it's funny because this guy is a South Korean superstar named Rain.

Rain in Oregon is just a fact of life which all of us have, over time, learned to deal with. Some people deal with rain by calling it ‘liquid sunshine’. I deal with these people by calling them ‘idiots’.

To live in Oregon, you have to be able to appreciate rain to some extent. It is, after all, the reason spring and summer here are so beautiful – people from other states come here between May and September and think that Oregon is a universally beautiful paradise, oblivious to the fact that between October and April the rain quite literally does not stop, nor does it even take an OSHA mandated fifteen minute coffee break. My high school gained and lost a California-born band director in the space of six months due to this phenomenon, which preys on Sun Belters like a velociraptor with a gun that shoots Rambo.

Some Oregonians, however, take this appreciation of rain and turn it into more of an obsession, to the point that they actively frown upon people with hoods and umbrellas, saying, “What kind of Oregonian are you?” as they stand, hair plastered to their head, sodden clothes clinging to their body, in the middle of a downpour.

For them, please allow me to clarify: Just because I live in a wet climate doesn’t mean that I enjoy being wet. I’m sure that people from Phoenix don’t enjoy dying of dehydration. People from Anchorage probably don’t like being eaten by bears. I doubt that the proud people of Utah particularly relish not seeing 90% of most womens’ skin. People don’t move to places because they have a particular affinity for the local hazards or inconveniences. They move for jobs or good schools or lenient policies on marrying second cousins – hence why the Capps family has been in Oregon for a good half century.

Over the years I’ve adopted various methods of keeping myself dry, a game that became significantly more high-stakes once I adopted my current hairstyle in high school. Laugh all you want, but it’s a well documented fact that I look like a child molester when my hair is wet.* Even when it’s dry I don’t necessarily look like the sort of person you’d want driving a van near a school, but it’s a noticeable improvement.

*For evidence, please see the picture of me that ran with my Oregon Daily Emerald column last year.

Walking to school each morning back in the day, I had pretty limited options for keeping my head dry. I was at the time fundamentally opposed to hooded sweatshirts, as I felt that they made me look emo, as well as umbrellas, because I didn’t need to give people another reason to think I was gay. This left me with a wide brimmed waterproof rain hat, an ugly, misshapen, and potentially special needs cousin to the hat Indiana Jones wore. I freely acknowledged that it made me look stupid, but when my choices were looking emo with a hooded sweatshirt, gay with an umbrella, child molestery with wet hair, or stupid, stupid won every time. At that point, I had already given up on the notion of getting laid in high school, so as far as I was concerned I had pretty much nothing to lose.

Now that I’m in college, the hat is no longer a viable option outside of the occasional rainy marching band rehearsal – because, once again, it’s pretty hard to out-stupid 220 people walking around in the rain. My opposition to hooded sweatshirts has ended, but they still prove somewhat ineffective at keeping me dry as they absorb rather than repel rainwater and stay damp all day, which was the sort of thing I was trying to avoid by putting a hooded sweatshirt on in the first place.

However, college is a very gay-friendly environment (outside of the recent actions of some assclowns with a spraypaint can in the student union), which means I can finally carry an umbrella without fear. As it is, my alcohol preferences are exclusively gay (Smith & Wesson, anyone?), so the umbrella is really the final fabulous piece of the sparkling rainbow puzzle. Best case scenario, I’ll be mobbed by women who think I’m sensitive and nonthreatening. Worst case scenario, a bunch of assclowns will spraypaint a swastika on me.

About a month ago I invested in a $3.99 umbrella at 7-11, one of the ones that shrink down so small that you can almost stick it in your jacket pocket. What I’ve found is that in spite of the umbrella’s low cost and shoddy workmanship, it has the remarkable ability to control weather.

A few days after buying the umbrella, I took it with me on my way to a party, on the off chance that it would rain. It didn’t, and after a few hours at the party I departed, thoroughly hamarettoed, having left my umbrella on the endtable by the door. The next few days were particularly rainy, and I spent a lot of time with the hood of my sweatshirt clinging, soaked, to my scalp. Eager to put an end to this, I went and retrieved my umbrella from the host’s house, just in time for a mild and dry week. That is, up until the day I forgot my umbrella when I left the house for class, resulting in a downpour of biblical proportions.

In The Tempest, Prospero created huge storms by waving a stick around.* It appears that I can do the same thing, only I just have to leave my stick behind.

*Thanks, Wishbone!

And when I say “my stick,” I’m referring to the umbrella, not my penis. Okay, admittedly one of my worst analogies, but it’s a real bitch writing an ending for a blog post.

Truman Capps hopes that his entire readership does not refer to rain as ‘liquid sunshine’.

Bacon

Courtesy of xkcd, the Internet's other favorite thing.

Nowadays, whenever people are bored on the Internet, they entertain themselves with Stumbleupon, an application that bounces users to a random website based on a predetermined set of user interests. I’m not sure if pornography is available as one of the interests, but if it were I could see that leading to a lot of hilarious situations at work or during a lecture.

“Woah, sorry professor! I was just kind of getting tired of taking notes, so I hit the ‘Stumble’ button, and I guess I forgot that I listed ‘boner jams’ as one of the topics I was interested in. Before you judge me, take a look at this picture and tell me if it doesn’t make you just a little interested in boner jams too.”

I myself am a fan of Digg, a somewhat older version of the same idea, wherein other Internet users vote on things they find interesting, which are then listed based on their popularity. After a year or more of actively using Digg, I’ve found that while the people of the Internet can’t agree on President Obama’s birthplace or whether Halo sucks or not, there are three things which they all vote for on Digg:

1) xkcd comics
2) Pictures of cute animals
3) Anything - anything - to do with bacon.

Yes, that’s right – bacon, apparently, is the solution to all the world’s problems, something that we all can unite behind in total harmony. Hardly a week goes by that an article doesn’t appear on Digg that somehow relates to bacon – be it a trendy new restaurant that serves bacon on everything, a new recipe involving egregious amounts of bacon, or a medical study which suggests that bacon might not be the single least healthy animal product that isn’t produced in the colon.

So it should come as no surprise that I, as both an Internet user and a human being, am a huge bacon fan. Mike loves the Portland Trailblazers; I just love bacon. If I owned a pro sports franchise, I would change the mascot to bacon.

“Well, the Nets crushed the Reno Bacon today. I tell you, they’ve got absolutely no defense, but just talking about them makes me hungry.”

The Ex Girlfriend, an ardent vegan, didn’t understand this mythical substance that my friends and parents and I would rave about. To her, it was like we were raving about Frankinsense. “I don’t get it,” she used to say. “What’s so great about bacon? What’s it like?”

It was like trying to describe what’s so great about green. I mean, bacon is more or less happiness in oblong, crispy form. Sometimes, it even tastes like maple syrup. How are you supposed to quantify that in words? You can’t even describe it with pictures, although it doesn’t hurt to try:

Wut.

When I embark on my little cooking adventures, I usually don’t prepare a lot of meat – not out of any health concern, but more out of the fact that I don’t have a lot of practice cooking meat. If I undercook some vegetables due to my own inexperience, they’re just a bit crunchier than I’d like – if I undercook some meat, I have a potentially much more serious problem on my hands. I mean, raw chicken, for God’s sake. To hear my parents tell it, you’d be safer trying to fry up a nuclear missile.

Part of bacon’s allure, though, is the ease with which you can cook it, which is why I’ve found it to be a great jumping off point in my experiments with meat preparation. Bacon is so thin that you don’t have to worry about not cooking it all the way through, and it’s completely socially acceptable to burn it a little bit and still serve it. If you burn a steak, it’s burned. If you burn bacon, it’s crispy. Some people like it that way.

I’ve come to enjoy just the very act of preparing bacon – standing vigil over a pan full of crackling meat and fat, flipping it, deciding what foods in the house I should eat with my bacon (the answer, of course, is all of them). Knowing that I have the power to create my own bacon is a really liberating feeling. It’s the one kind of natural, non ready-to-eat food that you know will taste good so long as you apply heat to it for some amount of time. You don’t need to season it or add anything to it. You just throw it in a pan and let the magic happen.

I’ve eaten most of the food in the house save for my four remaining strips of bacon, and I was going to go downstairs and fry them up when I realized I had yet to write today’s blog. Hopefully that explains why you read what you just read.

The doctor told Truman Capps that he has very low blood pressure, so the idea is to do everything in his power to change that before his next appointment.

The Pregnancy Pact

They look more like a crack squad of all-pregnant assassins, y'know?

I once got a bit riled up that black people had Black Entertainment Television, while white people had no channel of their own. My friends quickly reminded me that all the other TV channels could be considered White Entertainment Television, that black people probably earned their own TV channel through 400 years of slavery perpetrated upon them by white people, and that a white people only channel would probably devolve into racism pretty quickly, as groups of exclusively white people so often do.

So basically, I had what I thought was a great idea that nobody else had come up with, only to realize that nobody had come up with it before because it was racist. This sort of thing happens to me all the time.

The closest we’ll ever get to WET (got to work on that name…) is Lifetime, the women’s entertainment channel.* The programming here has a decidedly female touch – nearly every ad is for fat free yogurt or microwavable teriyaki that you can take with you to the office with only five grams of fat, and the only movies they show are Thelma and Louise, Pretty Woman, and Steel Magnolias.

*Initially, I also demanded that there be a men’s entertainment channel, until I remembered SpikeTV, which is pretty much World’s Wildest Police Videos and Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns, both of which would be fine if they didn’t act like sitting around watching Jean-Luc Picard was the most powerful expression of one’s manhood.

Every channel targets its programming and ads to an audience, though – there’s nothing wrong with that. Do you want to see Soul Plane? Then you turn on BET. Do you want to see ads for online dating services? Go to SciFi. What makes Lifetime so great is that they churn out countless Lifetime Original Movies, all with the exact same production value and, inevitably, the exact same proportions of melodrama, poor acting, and royalty free synth-pop in the background.

On Monday night, I was a pretty busy guy. I had to pull together a couple of presentations for two different classes in addition to studying for a midterm the following day in J396. So when I went down to the kitchen to grab something to eat, I didn’t intend to take more than a few minutes away from my work. But then, I heard Bret and Jack yell at me from downstairs:

“TRUMAN! GET DOWN HERE! PREGNANACY PACT ON LIFETIME!”

And suddenly, school was the least important thing in the world.

In 2008, a high school in suburban Massachusetts gained national notoriety when its teen pregnancy rate spiked to four times the previous year’s number. The principal made an unsubstantiated claim that several girls had entered into a pact to all get pregnant together, and afterwards no amount of factual evidence from any of the involved girls would dissuade the mass media that they had done anything but agree to all catch the same STD at the same time.

And honestly, who can blame the media when there’s a name like ‘pregnancy pact’? I mean, the principal didn’t say ‘pregnancy agreement’ or ‘pregnancy contract;’ he went right for the alliteration. He was probably a journalism major.

Lifetime, seeing the opportunity to throw together a movie with women in it, quickly jumped on the story. The movie, which premiered on Monday, was pretty much everything we could have hoped for – slow pacing, C list actors casting doughy glances back and forth, and a decidedly milquetoast debate about the ethics of providing contraception in school.

Lifetime makes these movies in order to put a lot of content out there in which women are strong protagonists, in order to make up for the bulk of mainstream entertainment in which women are relegated to the position of ‘squealing pair of tits.’* I can see why they do this, but if you’re looking for a film that casts women in a positive light, The Pregnancy Pact is not it.

*In case any women reading this are determining whether they want to sleep with me or not, both Firefly and Battlestar have a pretty good cast of female protagonists. This, I hope, makes up for the fact that I love The Shining, wherein all Shelly Duvall does is cook or be scared.

Essentially every woman in this movie is shortsighted and stupid. The protagonist among the pregnant girls, Sara, joyfully tells her boyfriend that she’s pregnant. Her boyfriend didn’t know about this pact – he’d been under the impression that he was merely boning a non-crazy girl. Her boyfriend starts to panic, and Sara rationally explains that they can get married and stay in town forever, just like her parents did. When he, a promising college-bound athlete, doesn’t like that idea, she seems confused, as though the willingness of her boyfriend to throw his life away was the one element of this plan she’d forgotten to consider.

At one point, an investigative reporter interviews a group of the pregnant girls, who gleefully talk about how their babies will be best friends all through school, “Just like us!” In spite of repeated warnings from parents about the difficulties of childrearing, they blissfully maintain their glowing opinions of motherhood, right up until they start having the babies and realizing that the only thing worse than having something huge come out of your vagina is then taking care of it for the next 18 years.

Seeing the girls realize what horrible mistakes they’ve made is as close as we get to any real resolution in a movie that consists mostly of huffy arguments and hormonally-charged tears. When Sara, eight months pregnant, goes to surprise her now ex-boyfriend at college only to see him with a non-pregnant chick, I couldn’t help but cheer. When we see the other girls in the pact miserably raising their bratty children, it was like the payoff for sitting through the past 90 minutes of their stupidity.

I just can’t shake the impression that the night before shooting, a bunch of chauvinistic men broke into the studio and altered the screenplay so that the ending would say, “Ha! Shame on you, women!” I guess it’s just difficult to make a movie about pregnancy without seeming sexist; Knocked Up was accused of making women look shrewish and shortsighted as well. That being said, pregnant women aren’t really known for being paragons of reason and clear thinking.

My hat goes off to you, Lifetime – in the future, maybe just show Soul Plane instead.

Truman Capps is going to make a documentary about the Oregon Marching Band called The Chlamydia Pact.

Subletting

Life partners.

I’m studying in England during spring term, which I’m sure will be rewarding and life-enriching once I’m there, but has been nothing but trouble so far. Maybe that’s the point of the program – they bury you with red tape and charge an exorbitant amount so that your last memories of America before you leave are of bureaucracy and poverty, and thus when you get to your foreign destination any homesickness or culture shock is overridden by your relief at not having to do any more paperwork or pay any more large nonrefundable application fees.

A lot of people spend a year abroad, but I opted to only go for the spring because that way I wouldn’t have to miss marching band in the fall or basketball band in the winter – so in case you were wondering, yes, nerdy exterior factors do determine literally every facet of my life. This is why I want my first car to be either a DeLorean or the Planet Express ship.

My choice to spend only one term as opposed to three in Merry Old England has thrown an even bigger wrench into the already wrench-laden works of convincing the University of Oregon to let me put a few thousand miles between myself and everyone and everything I know to pump near-worthless American money into a far stronger overseas economy. Namely, this comes in the form of finding somebody to live in my apartment.

My roommates and I took the plunge on the expensive apartment because last year we all lived in considerably less nice places – Jack and I in quads managed by the detestable Capri Apartments and Bret in a 30-year-old firetrap several miles away from literally everything. I’m not even kidding – his place could have been located in the middle of a poorly laid out subdivision at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and it still would have been closer to where everyone else lived, or at least decent seafood.

Those bastards at Von Klein Property Management didn’t want to give me a 7-month lease, so before I leave I need to find somebody to live in my place. This is made particularly difficult by the fact that rent at my apartment is $598 per person, and most of the listings on the “sublets” section of craigslist are for $200, $300, or WILLING TO TRADE HANDMADE JEWELRY FOR RENT!!! :D Granted, my apartment has a great location and is absolutely goddamn beautiful, but it has been my experience that a lot of college students will gladly live in the utmost squalor if it means they can save some beer money.

After my first two listings went unnoticed, I took to trolling the “housing wanted” section in hopes of physically going out and dragging in a potential tenant. However, I was not at all prepared for what I would see.

I, like most college students, am self-centered, and naturally assume that everyone living in Eugene is a college student as well. Imagine my surprise when I saw posts from townies in desperate search of lodging. Some were merely looking for a vacant lot on which to park the trailer they live in, others are single parents of small children, and nearly all of them have pets, some of which are referred to as “life partners.” I understand that if weird shit were gold, craigslist would be Fort Knox – a densely concentrated repository of all the best the Internet has to offer – but even then, life partners?*

*If you die of a heart attack and nobody finds you for a few weeks, that so called “life partner” isn’t going to have too many qualms about chowing down on your corpse once there’s been one too many missed dinners. A real life partner wouldn’t do that – for example, I’m relatively sure Mike would abstain from cannibalism for at least a month.

I’ve entertained the possibility of contacting these desperate people and trying to cut a deal.

“Yeah, Von Klein doesn’t allow pets, but if you’re real good about hiding your (supposedly) domesticated skunk, I think we can work something out.”

“Single father of two, huh? Nah, it’s a pretty big room, I think all three of you could fit in here. Hey, so my roommates are fairly pro-herb – how do your kids feel about that? What? Look, I don’t give a shit if they’re in middle school, I just want to know if I’m going to be subletting to a couple of narcs. I’m trying to be a good roommate here.”

I’ve begun to try and find alternate uses for the room in case I can’t fill it with an actual person. For example, the public storage industry seems to be booming at the moment, and my room has been nothing but successful for storing my own shit. If nobody wants to live here, I can at least charge someone to keep their stuff in a climate controlled room with a lovely view of the alley. Barring that, I could build a still in here and just have Bret and Jack sell bootleg whiskey to pay for my end of the rent.

Yes, it’s illegal, but while crime doesn’t pay, I think it pays one hell of a lot better than shilling out three months’ rent for a beautiful yet empty room.

Truman Capps does not want potential buyers to see this and think that he’s desperate. He’s not. He promises.

Internet Safari

In my travels back and forth across the stormy seas of the Internet, I’ve seen a lot of ridiculous things, and I’ve made a point of screen capturing the best ones until I had enough saved up so that I could cop out of writing a full blog entry. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy. Apologies in advance for poor image quality - this blog isn't called Technologically Savvy Guy for a reason.

That's right, folks. 94%. It's science.

"...So in conclusion, I humbly refute your claim that the series finale of Friends was a cop out."

Only in Springfield. Only ever in Springfield.

Yeah! Fuck you, Mr. Smith!

Here's a hint: When threatening someone on the Internet, any fear you may have instilled in their hearts by saying you're a black belt is quickly undercut when you reveal that you aren't even old enough to qualify for a learner's permit. But wait! There's more!

"Shit just got real."

In this guy's defense, The Incredibles is a pretty good movie.

So, y'know, he seems like a pretty reasonable guy, right? Let's take a look at some of his favorite videos...

Uh...

I rest my case. Goodnight, everybody!

Truman Capps is probably going to end up on a conspiracy theorist watch-list for this.

Two On, Five Off

They ruined it, the bastards!

When I was in elementary school, I was a real Mario Kart 64 fiend. I’d race home from school every day, eschewing the childhood social events like sports or playdates that laid the groundwork for many of my classmates to get laid in high school, and boot up my Nintendo 64 to spend hours tearassing around Mario Speedway in hopes of shaving a few seconds off of my best time. Keep in mind that this was in the days before XBox Live and online stat leaderboards – I wasn’t in it for the glory. It was all for the sense of accomplishment.

Some time after I’d played Mario Kart into oblivion, I read about a new game, called Diddy Kong Racing, which took Mario Kart’s basic formula of cartoon animals teaching children defensive driving tactics and took it to the next level by adding airplanes and hovercrafts as available vehicles. I was thrilled by the fun potential this offered, and spent many 4th grade afternoons ignoring the teacher and daydreaming about playing this new game, eschewing the childhood building blocks of multiplication tables and fractions that laid the groundwork for many of my classmates to pass math in high school.

After a few months of anticipation, the game was released and I bought it, then raced home to play it. After an hour, I came to one definite conclusion:

This game sucked balls. I couldn’t quite put my finger on how – let me remind you, this game featured monkeys flying airplanes, so the deck was truly stacked in its favor – but somehow it had found a way to take a delicious pile of lemons and turn them into boringade.

This is the case in 90% of my life – I spend a lot of time anticipating something that by all means should be great, only to have it turn out to be disappointing, if not outright depressing. The Rose Bowl. Dating. The series finale of Battlestar Galactica. The list goes on and on.

Thus, when I was finally able to organize my schedule so that all of my classes fell on Tuesday and Thursday, essentially guaranteeing me a two day on, five day off week, experience taught me to expect that this would suck.

How could it suck? After all, I’ve only been wishing for a nonstop parade of four day weekends since I was old enough to bitch about having to get up early. The thing is, Diddy Kong Racing seemed like the answer to all my prayers as well. In my experience, the great things magically find a way of sucking.

I assumed that having four classes in a row would be so stressful that the rest of my week would be spent dreading the days on which I actually had to go to school. Or that I would have so much homework that I would scarcely be able to complete it all in my seemingly endless weekends, let alone go carouse with my friends.

So imagine my shock when, for two weeks in a row now, my schedule has been absolutely incredible.

Last weekend I got drunk (or, rather, hammarettoed) two nights in a row, and still had a day and a half to not do my homework and then six hours to rush through all of it.* At the end of the weekend I remember thinking, “Damn, this was a great weekend – too bad I’ve got a whole week ahead of me.” And then I realized that the next weekend was just three days away, only two of which would require me to even leave the house.

*This may not sound like much to you, but it was a pretty big deal for me. There just aren’t a lot of opportunities for me to be hedonistic anymore – you can only look at so much bizarre pornography before it gets sort of played, after all.

That this wonderful class schedule should coincide with my being newly 21 is an added bonus. The past two weeks have been a blur of friends’ houses, bars, liquor stores, and, occasionally, my classes, although I’ve been doing as much as possible to keep them from intruding into my five days off as I can.

There it is, though – right now we’re standing on the cusp of Week 3, when shit gets real. This is where the clusterfuck usually begins – classes have been going on long enough for students to have a knowledge base large enough to test, so professors begin tossing out midterms, and when you’re taking four classes like I am, they start to neatly overlap, one or two per week, until the end of the term. Guaranteed.

So really, to say that my schedule is the best in the universe is like calling a ship unsinkable before you ever go blazing through iceberg infested waters. You haven’t really tested it in bad conditions yet. I’m sure your ship is really unsinkable when it’s floating in the harbor, just as my schedule is when my classes consist mostly of syllabi and reading I’m not doing.*

*Except for J371, where I diligently do every scrap of reading. Incidentally, my professor for J371 knows about this blog, so if you see her around, do please give her a warm welcome and tell her how much reading I’m doing.

So maybe by next week this blessing will turn out to be the disappointment in disguise that I’ve been expecting. But if it does, I can always look back fondly on these two great weeks before the wheels began to fall off. This highly anticipated event at least warranted two weeks of joy, which is way more than Diddy Kong Racing ever gave me.

Truman Capps is disappointed that everyone else gets Monday off this week as well, because it makes him feel less special.

Late Night Logjam

Jay Leno doesn't do this.

It always comes as a shock to me that NBC remains America’s Least Popular Network™ in spite of the fact that they run all my favorite shows – evidence once again that I define good taste as “things I like” and bad taste as “Twilight and Sex In The City.” I just have trouble getting my head around the fact that the network that shows 30 Rock, Community, and The Office, three of the funniest shows on TV, could be trailing to CBS, whose entire programming lineup is David Caruso taking off his sunglasses and Charlie Sheen going, “That’s what she said.”

That being said, my preferred late night talk show is The Late Show With David Letterman, if perhaps for no other reason than that the man has been in business for so long that he can say and do basically anything he wants without any sort of repercussions from anyone of consequence. Most nights, I’m pretty sure that Paul Shaffer is drunk (and some nights, maybe Dave is too), but there’s just something fun about watching this golden god of late night television holding court on which baseball players have knocked up which B-list celebrity’s daughters.

I’m also a Conan fan (and how could I not be, since one out of three people I meet tell me that he and I have the same hair), but I don’t watch his show quite as often. When I do, I’m always pleased by the shenanigans I see, but it’s hard enough for me to commit to one late night talk show that conflicts with my rigorous pornography schedule, much less two. I tend to enjoy his clips on Hulu a few days after the fact, when Digg notifies me that some interesting shit went down.

So imagine my shock when Digg recently notified me of the following interesting shit: Jay Leno, who did a great service to American television by quitting The Tonight Show in favor of some 10:00 PM variety crapfest, is having the aforementioned crapfest moved back to 11:35, bumping the following shows back by half an hour and forever upsetting the delicate ecosystem of the late night talk show.

If it were anyone else rocking the boat, it probably wouldn’t be as frustrating. If it was The Neil Patrick Harris Show or Ten PM With Zooey Deschanel or The Teddy Roosevelt Comedy Hour, I would dismiss all of this as a bunch of hoopla. It is, after all, only a half hour. Maybe we’re taking this too seriously. After all, at the end of the day it’s just a bunch of old guys making jokes about how stupid Sarah Palin is.

But Jay Leno? Him?

To see a legitimately talented individual like Conan O’Brien lose out to a talentless jerk like Jay Leno is just one big slap in the face to people everywhere who like good things. It’s like if you entered a talent show and were doing a really great job and everyone was loving you, and then the judges turned around and gave the prize to Jay Leno because he’d have a TV show for a long time.

I’ll admit, I didn’t put a lot of thought into that analogy, but this shit is hardly fair to Conan.

In every Leno interview I’ve seen, he talks to his guests like there’s a big glass wall in between them. There’s just a certain disconnect – he seems somehow disinterested, as though he’d rather be fucking around with some old car than talking to this particular celebrity. And hey, who can blame him – there’s a fair number of celebrities I’d rather not talk to. But the thing is, sometimes I don’t want to go to marching band practice. But I still go, because it’s what I do. Likewise, interviewing celebrities is what Jay Leno does. He has no excuse to suck at it. The man’s entire job is to sit at a desk and ask beautiful people what’s going on in their lives.

Furthermore, one of his most famous segments – Jaywalking – consists entirely of tightly edited clips of him asking people on the street simple questions and laughing at them when they get them wrong. Is it bad that people don’t know who Hillary Clinton is? Yeah, probably. But even though they signed the releases and agreed to be interviewed, I feel like it’s kind of unfair to put their stupidity out there for the world to laugh at, as though we’re better than they are. If a stupid person gains a national platform, like Sarah Palin, then it’s open season, but when a big-chinned douche with a microphone approaches some innocent stupid person minding his or her own business, I can’t help but feel differently. Maybe some stupid people should just be left alone.

One of Conan’s most memorable sketches, on the other hand, is about a dancing guy with bulletproof legs who repeatedly gets shot in the chest. It’s high concept and doesn’t offend anyone – except for perhaps gay rights advocates, who said that the sketch promoted violence against gays and got it discontinued.

All I’m saying is that NBC is dead last in the ratings right now, and shaking up their late night lineup and abusing their talent is probably not a good way to get ahead. Conan O’Brien is like the smart, sexy girl NBC took to the dance, but right now they’re neglecting her in favor of some cheap slut who they know will put out. It’s straight up dick behavior.

Truman Capps doesn’t give a fuck about Carson Daily.

P90X

Man, ClipArt standards are just in the toilet these days.

Another thing that sucked about the Rose Bowl was how-

Oh, wait, I’m not doing that anymore.

Out of all the things that physical education represented to me back during my K-12 days, one thing I never associated it with was actual physical fitness. If anything, PE struck me as more a test of mental fitness, as it required the strength of character to run endless laps of the gym without committing suicide, survive dodgeball without acquiring PTSD, and then brave the inevitable accusations of homosexuality in the locker room.*

*On the off chance that my old nemesis Donovan is reading this, it’s been over five years since sophomore year and I still haven’t put anybody’s dick in my mouth, so I really have to disagree with the statements you made on November the 19th, 2004.

PE for me was like a game. The game was called, “How Little Physical Activity Can I Get Away With?” If by the end of one 80-minute period of PE you had not so much as broken a sweat, you had won. This was pretty easy to do if you played to win.

For example, when playing PE softball in middle school, one of my most cherished tactics was to wait at the absolute end of the batting order and stare at my watch, trying to will time to move faster. As people rotated through the batting order, I let them cut ahead of me in line, so that I could oftentimes get through an entire inning without having to swing wildly at a ball and then miss it. When the teams changed places, I would pick a random spot in the outfield and stare longingly at the chain link fence separating the field from the subdivision next door, and dream that perhaps everyone would forget I was there and I could climb the fence and run away. But not too quickly, lest I work up a sweat and lose the game.

Watching the jocks wholeheartedly excel at everything we did, I came to assume that I was the odd man out for hating basically every physical activity they tried to force down our throats. In all honesty, I probably would still be the same fat kid I was in elementary school had my growth spurt not given me suitable height to match my girth. Exercise just seemed like one big, unpleasant waste of time to me, which I thought put me in the minority as throughout high school I watched my classmates voraciously sign up for weight training classes.

The more television I watch, though, the more I realize that people who actually want to spend time exerting themselves and sweating are in the minority in America. Watch a full episode of Montel or Ellen* and you’ll be more or less cockslapped by commercials advertising easy ways to get thin without having to exercise.

*Shut up, Donovan! I’m not gay!

First off are the dietary supplements, which promise to employ all kinds of crazy science to make you thin. What’s more, they assure viewers that they can lose all this weight while eating whatever they want, without exercising (at about this point the screen is more or less flooded with footnote text explaining the highly specific conditions under which any of this information could be true).

However, when the dietary supplements have failed, then come the ads for exercise equipment. These ads make the grudging admission that there is no pill to make you lose 50 pounds while eating bacon with every meal. These commercials present the cold hard truth: To lose weight, you will have to exercise. Yet they are quick to point out that while yes, you do have to exercise, it can be quick and easy and involve little to no effort, although you might have to check dignity at the door. To wit:

It appears that everybody else hates the same things I do about exercise – it takes a long time and is often unpleasant. Yet at the same time, everybody wants to look good, so there’s a huge market for shortcuts. And as a fully-fledged lover of shortcuts, I can appreciate that, but at the same time, I understand that you can’t get anything good without doing something at least relatively unpleasant. I mean, does anybody actually enjoy drinking tequila?

Recently, though, a workout routine known as the P90X has gained a lot of popularity, and unlike most things sold on daytime television, it appears to actually work. I suppose the people marketing the routine decided that they’d forego finding a badass name like most daytime TV products and instead focus on results – this explains both why the name sounds more like the designation for an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and why YouTube is full of before and after videos of bookish anime fans with twelve-packs.*

*As a point of clarification, I’m referring to their abs, and not Mountain Dew Code Red.

The P90X promises its users a more or less perfect physique after three months of daily one-hour workouts, which incorporate cardio, weight lifting, yoga, nutrition, chainsaw juggling, and penis fencing as part of a fitness repertoire known as “muscle confusion.” At the moment, I would say “muscle confusion” is tied with “Book of Secrets” for the title of Stupidest Name (Object or Ambiguous Concept).

What this means is that now there is a certifiable method to become classically, traditionally good looking. No longer is it just the idea that one must “eat right and exercise” – now you just do these strenuous exercises every day, the way that you’re told to, and you’ll be all set. It isn’t a crapshoot anymore.

Before you ask, no – I’m not dropping a bunch of money I don’t have on exercise tapes that I won’t use so that I can get an impressive physique that I don’t need. It’s 2010, for God’s sake – sure, we don’t have robots doing all our heavy lifting yet, but there’s plenty of disenfranchised minorities who do more or less the same thing. The only reason a guy like me would invest three months of his life into such an endeavor would be to use his newfound fabulous body to pick up women, and the fact is, no matter how good I look I would still eventually have to talk, at which point I’d surely shove a toned and well muscled foot into my sculpted, ripped mouth.

I don’t know about you, but I think that me walking around with that sort of physique would really just be false advertising. Even after the P90X, I’m sure I still wouldn’t like exercising, but I’d have to exercise rigorously to keep up the new image that I’d made for myself. The thing is, a buff guy, by the very nature of being buff, suggests that he’s very interested in that sort of thing, whether he actually is or not.

I feel as though a thin guy in mediocre physical condition with abnormally thick hair doesn’t really lend himself easily to classification, and I guess I like that better.

Truman Capps will renege on all of this once his youthful metabolism gives out and he can no longer eat pasta every day and weigh 170 pounds.

Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part 5

Part 5: Wrapping Up The Suck

Blarg.

Worst trip ever?

Well, that’s really a matter of perspective. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the United States government more or less death marched tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands in the Deep South to what is now Oklahoma, an exodus that would come to be known as the Trail of Tears. That trip was probably worse than the Rose Bowl, as most trips to Oklahoma are. Rampant death due to starvation, dehydration, and heat exhaustion was probably also a factor.

Worst trip of my life?

Well, the camping trip to Eastern Oregon over the summer was pretty bad, although that was more due to rapidly deteriorating conditions between The Ex Girlfriend and myself than any negative aspects of the atmosphere, our chosen activities, or the fine, proud people of Boardman, Oregon. All excuses aside, in Pasadena there were no shrewish jabs at my failures as a boyfriend and a lot more hygienic places to poop.

Worst bowl trip ever?

Yeah.

Longtime readers (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!) will remember the many months I spent ranting about the band’s 2007 trip to El Paso two years ago. Our voyage to Texas was similar to the trip to Pasadena in many ways – we stayed in a hotel that was in the middle of nowhere, entertainment opportunities were lacking, and nobody was happy. At the outset, it would appear that Pasadena this year had quite a lot going for it compared to El Paso.

Keep in mind, this is what our uniforms USED to look like.

However, that’s just it – we went to El Paso knowing that we were going to El Paso. It’s tough to get your hopes up when your destination’s claim to fame is that it’s the front line of an increasingly bloody drug war. We expected a bad trip, we got a bad trip, won a football game, and came home.

We had nothing but the highest hopes for Pasadena. I mean, they call this game The Grandaddy of Them All. It gets higher ratings than the BCS Championship. Plus, they’d already done it 95 other times. With that much repetition, we figured they’d had the time to figure out how to make it fun for everybody – team, cheerleaders, marching band, and whatever poor souls come lower in the Oregon athletic pecking order than the marching band.

So maybe it was really just a mediocre bowl trip, but our hopes had further to fall because we’d expected the very best. I will say this – in El Paso, when we’d travel by bus from one gig to the next, we would look out the windows and think, “Good lord, I’m glad we’re not stopping here.” In Pasadena, we drove by an endless parade of awesome places where we wanted to stop and have fun, but couldn’t, because the trip dictated that we had to spend an hour sitting on the bus before going to do something not fun.

I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that this was anybody’s fault – everybody in the band’s staff did the best they could to make this a good time for us, but it sucked anyway. The matter was beyond their control. Sometimes a thing just sucks, and the Rose Bowl was one of those things.

Above: Another one of those things.

Were there good things? Of course – there were three of them. And in one way or another, these things made the trip bearable. Not great, but bearable. Observe:

Booze

They sell hard alcohol in supermarkets in California. I don’t think I should really have to say anything else – you can walk into a Safeway in El Segundo and just grab a bottle of Smirnoff from their impressive selection of fine spirits. And, due to the absence of a liquor tax, it’s a damnsight cheaper than it is here, too.

Oregon is the greatest place in the universe (and believe me, I’d know), but they’re really dropping the ball on this one. Oregon is supposed to be the land of hedonism, where people can pick up a bag of medicinal marijuana from a 12 year old prostitute, all while on their way to get an assisted suicide from a doctor who just happens to be totally gay! And yet the Oregon Liquor Control Commission seems to think it’s in the state’s best interests to tell people they can’t buy a fifth of Everclear from the same place they get their frozen waffle fries.

In-N-Out

Yeah, I don’t get it either – they print Bible verses on the shake cups, but the restaurant is named after sex. I guess it’s some sort of weird California thing.

The fact is, I got free In-N-Out twice on this trip, and while that doesn’t even begin to make up for a lot of the suck, I got the best damn fast food burger and fries money can buy, but I didn’t have to buy it with my money. After the parade, there was a whole box filled with extra In-N-Out burgers. I wanted to steal it and take it home with me and stick it in the freezer, rationing the burgers to myself one by one whenever I’d had a bad day.

Man, it doesn’t matter what you’re talking about – if you want to steal it and keep it in your fridge, it always sounds creepy.

The Rose Parade

I know, right? Why would walking six miles be one of the high points of Truman’s trip? Doesn’t he, like, hate all physical activity? I hear he sleeps in a vat filled with bacon grease.

Marching band is a pretty stupid hobby when you get right down to it – you invest crazy amounts of time in the cold and rain learning and rehearsing a performance which is often ignored by your audience and openly mocked by opposing fans. You receive little credit for your work, save for the occasional offhand mention at an alumni event or a quick human interest story in the local paper. And at the end of the day, no matter how much of yourself you put into this activity, people tell you that what you do is easy and then make a joke about American Pie.

During the Rose Parade, the sidewalks were jam-packed with legions of people who were screaming and cheering for us, dancing along to the music we played, and generally singing our praises – some of them were even wearing Ohio State colors. For as long as we were in front of the people watching us, we were center stage – the main event. Marching bands are part of the reason people go to the Rose Parade, and we were what they wanted to see.

And that’s why I love marching band. That’s what the people who aren’t in it – the people who call it a faggy activity for overweight nerds – will never understand. It’s about performing. That’s why I keep coming back, even after rehearsals in the rain and Midwestern slander and trips to Pullman and El Paso and Pasadena.

So yes, the Rose Bowl sucked. It was the Star Wars Episode 1 of bowl trips. But it was not without its minor perks.

Truman Capps fulfilled his sentimentality quota for 2010 way too early.

Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part 4

Part 4: The Suck Bowl

This picture makes it look way better than it actually was.

A lot of sucky things happened between Disneyland and the day of the Rose Bowl, our last day in Pasadena. We spent three hours being bussed to and from Santa Monica pier, where we played Mighty Oregon twice for a bunch of Oregon donors in the midst of a driving rainstorm, and then stood idly by while Supwitchugirl performed “I Love My Ducks,” and discovered that 70% of the people at this pep rally were over the age of 50 and, thus, were not aware of why these three gentlemen were famous, nor were amused by their antics. The following day I spent several hours hurrying up and waiting with members of the Yellow Garter Band, an experience made far worse by the presence of one Chelsea Fujitani, who specifically requested that I not include her in this series.

Damn you, Chelsea Fujitani, and the horse you rode in on.

But the fact is, there’s only so many ways I can say, “We were told to hurry, and then we waited for a long time” and have it be funny. But that’s really what the first three days of the trip were – hurrying, followed by waiting, accompanied by a great deal of fatigue. Rather than describe all of this, I’m just going to jump ahead to the last day of our trip – the day that we rose at 3:00 AM to march six miles down Colorado Avenue, play at the Rose Bowl, and then finally go home.

Let me begin by saying this: The Oregon Marching Band is, musically speaking, one of the finest marching bands in the country. Where other bands coerce 300 people into playing as loud as possible for as long as possible, we prefer to play a balanced, in-tune sound, which resonates more clearly and is louder than an unfocused one. It’s science. It was about the only thing I learned in Physics 152, mainly because when the professor said it, I thought, “Oh! Scientific proof as to why the Oregon Marching Band is so damn good.”

The thing is, in the Rose Bowl, we were going up against Ohio State University’s marching band, which is widely known as The Best Damn Band In The Land. That name is not to be taken lightly – they pretty much are. Ohio State’s band benefits from its placement in the Midwest, where Big Ten football fanaticism breeds similar enthusiasm for football programs at the high school level, which in turn results in more people willing to participate in high school marching bands, who in turn want to participate in college bands, Ohio State’s in particular.

"HAAAAAANG ON SLOOPY, SLOOPY HANG ON! O! H! I! O!"

Ohio State is the largest school in the country and has had a solid football program for some 50 years. Their band has been right there alongside the football program since before the Spanish-American war, building traditions and rapport with fans. Over time, they’ve become the most famous marching band in the world. Kids in Ohio learn how to play the tuba in elementary school just so they can one day have the chance of dotting the ‘i’ in Script Ohio with Ohio State’s marching band. Every year the band holds auditions from an applicant pool in the hundreds to determine which 225 lucky people will be included in the band. Out of this 225, only 192 march on the field at pregame and halftime – the others are alternates, who, on a weekly basis aggressively challenge other members of the band on the basis of musical knowledge and drill precision in hopes of earning the right to perform on Saturday.

The Oregon Marching Band takes everyone who shows up and knows how to play an instrument.

It’s like we were Flight of the Conchords and they were Bruce Springsteen – Flight of the Conchords are highly talented and fun, and a lot of people love them, but Bruce Springsteen is an American goddamn icon. It’s practically unfair to compare them.

And yet, both in the Rose Parade and at halftime, there we were. Their band had rigidly straight lines and every single member in step, wearing crisp black uniforms with double Windsor knotted ties. We were clad in Nike’s unconventional uniforms and playing the crap out of a show that was musically deep and challenging. However unfair, fans made the comparison, and the result has been a lot of trash talk on YouTube from mouth breathing Midwesterners trying to tell us that we’re no good at what we do.

These people are idiots, and they have no idea what’s going on – after all, they choose to live several thousand miles from the nearest ocean, in a region that is prone to blizzards and droughts and apparently has crappy weed. They also elected Bush a second time.*

*That being said, everybody I met from Ohio State’s band was nothing but polite and courteous. This is in stark contrast to the Oregon Marching Band, where we are proud to be assholes.

It didn’t help that the team didn’t fare so well either – it’s one thing to get shown up at halftime, but when your team gets pretty soundly beaten, especially after 75% of the country expected them to win, you really don’t have anything to say to the Buckeye hecklers.

I mean, what happened this year, Pac-10? This was supposed to be the year that we dethroned USC and showed the aforementioned Midwestern mouthbreathers and porch sitting, banjo playing, Downs-syndrome having SEC folk that people west of the Mississippi knew how to play football.

Tim Tebow.

Instead, we turned right around and acted like we didn’t know how to play football, going 2-5 in bowl games against out of conference opponents. I mean, really, Arizona? Losing is one thing, but a shut out? Maybe that used to fly back when you were in the WAC in the 1970s, but this is the Pac 10. If you want to go back to the WAC, be our guest – word of warning: nowadays they call it The Boise State Show.

I know I haven’t really given any specific concrete event that shows why the day of the Rose Bowl sucked, but I’m trying instead to paint a more emotional picture that shows where my mind was on the first day of 2010. The marching band I love went up against the one band in the world that is quantifiably better than we are, while the team that I love (and the conference that I support in spite of its constant abuse) lost out bigtime. Keep in mind, by the time we’d lost the Rose Bowl, everyone in the OMB had already been up for 15 hours and walked the equivalent of ten miles. How would you feel?

We loaded the buses, dejected and worn out, sat in the parking lot for the customary hour, and then set off for LAX and our flight home. When we arrived, we were issued our boarding passes on the curb and found that the security line stretched out the terminal and down the sidewalk as far as the eye could see. We trudged down to the end of the line (which was in Malibu) and spent an hour and a half waiting to be screened for explosive underwear before boarding our flight.

One of the interesting things about fatigue is that it fucks up your head. While I was standing in line, my friend Darren came up and started talking to me. Looking at him, I knew who he was – I knew that I’d known him since I was a freshman, I knew he played clarinet and that he went to high school in Keizer – but I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name. I had to discreetly check his luggage tag to figure out just who the hell I was talking to. Even more sad was the fact that if, at that moment, you had asked me the names of all twelve Cylons on Battlestar Galactica, I probably would’ve remembered at least six.

Oh yeah, like you'd forget HER name.

Sorry Darren – it wasn’t you, it was me.

Another funny thing about fatigue is that once you’ve gone four days on perhaps twelve hours’ sleep, you start to fall asleep without even knowing you’re falling asleep. As the trip wore on, I discovered that if I sat still without actively engaging my mind for a few seconds, my next sensation would be waking up several minutes later – to my knowledge, nobody stole any of my internal organs during one of these lapses in consciousness, but for all I know I could be unwittingly running on one kidney.

This proved troublesome on the plane. Shortly after the pilot announced that we would be landing in Eugene in about twenty minutes, I made the mistake of not thinking about anything for a few seconds. A moment later, I was jolted awake as the plane shook violently, the engines screaming and roaring in my ears. Something had gone wrong – they always say the most dangerous part of a flight is right before landing, right? – and I was going to die. I could hear the news reports already:

A plane carrying the Oregon cheerleaders exploded earlier today in the skies over Eugene, killing everyone onboard. A candlelight vigil for the fallen cheerleaders is being held outside of Autzen Stadium. In lighter news, the Oregon Marching Band was also on the plane! Hey, how about those uniforms, am I right?

One hand shot out and clutched my seatmate’s arm in a death grip, while the other wrapped itself protectively around my face. I desperately hoped that if, after my death, I encountered God, he wouldn’t be a prick about the whole life of atheism thing.

“Truman,” my seatmate, Jefe, said to me, putting his hand on my arm. “It’s okay. Everything is okay.”

Fool! I thought to myself. We’re all going to die, can’t you see that!? I turned and looked out the window, expecting to see pristine Oregon farmland growing larger and larger as the plane hurdled towards it.

Instead, I saw the Eugene Airport terminal and other runways, which is apparently a common sight when the plane lands.

Yes, that’s right – I had fallen asleep for a full 20 minutes, only waking up during the commotion of the plane’s totally safe landing, and had made the, in my mind, highly logical assumption that the time to kiss my ass goodbye was at hand.

Rolling up to the gate amid the laughter of my peers, I knew two things: 1) This was so going in the blog, and 2) This had been the worst trip ever.

Tune in tomorrow for the wrap up in Part 5!

Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part 3

Part 3: The Happiest Place On Suck

We departed for Disneyland straight from our rehearsal site on the same day that we got to L.A. – this was before we’d even so much as seen our hotel. While blazing down the highway en route to Anaheim, the staff member on our bus informed us that CNN was at Disneyland and would be taping our scheduled performance, but because we had fallen behind schedule we had to get off the buses in uniform and ready to go, like a crack squad of Airborne Rangers who know the Thriller dance.

In Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt makes a point of explaining the many disadvantages of fighting in a basement.

”You know, fightin’ in a basement offers a lot of difficulties. Number one being, you’re fightin’ in a basement!”

Changing on a moving bus presents similar difficulties, especially when everyone else around you is changing as well. Forget shame or dignity – we are, after all, a marching band, and have precious little of both to begin with. Logistically speaking, the act of changing involves a lot of flailing around and awkward movement, and when a busload of 40 or so people all do it at once while the bus is traveling quickly over California’s somewhat poorly maintained highways, the result is an orgy of half naked people elbowing one another in the ribs while trying to pull on yellow and green spandex.

But we hurried to get dressed, and in record time the entire band was in uniform and ready to go. After another half hour in transit, we reached Disneyland, where we were herded off of the buses like cattle and aggressively prodded into pulling out our instruments and warming up as quickly as possible. And then we were off, running at a good clip through Disneyland’s backstage, a vast expanse of warehouses and prefabricated trailers, most of which smelled like reindeer poop as a biproduct of the recent Christmas festivities (seeing as Disney has made its entire fortune on gigantic animals, I wasn’t surprised to find that at least one part of the park smelled like shit).

Let me tell you, nobody backstage at Disneyland looks even remotely happy. Most of them look like janitors on their lunch break – and in many cases, they were. I suppose whether you’re in a bad mood or not, you’d be inclined to frown a lot on your lunch break at Disneyland, just to get it out of your system before you went back to work eagerly informing tourists of the intergalactic safety regulations all lifeforms must obey on Space Mountain.

They rushed us into a small open area behind a large gate and strictly informed us that we were now “on stage” and needed to be quiet. We heeded this advice and got ready to make Disneyland more magical in the way that only an overdose of school spirit can.

We waited, “on stage,” speaking in hushed tones, for a full half hour. By that time, we had gotten an idea of what kind of trip this was going to be, and had dubbed ourselves the Oregon Standing Around Waiting To Do Stuff Band (or OSAWTDSB). Finally, roughly an hour after being told that we had a very tight window to make everything work, we went out in front of Cindarella’s castle, played a ten minute set, marched a short parade down Main Street USA, and were finished.

Then, we were free to hang out in Disneyland for four hours.

Now, let me say this before I say anything else: Disneyland is the greatest amusement park in the world, hands down. They take their job more seriously than anyone else in the business – they are the New York Times of feeding corn dogs to fat people from Indiana and then putting them on machines designed to make them vomit.

All that being said, I just don’t enjoy amusement parks, so while the four hours at Disneyland were the high point of the trip for most of the band, for me it was more of the suck.

I wish that I did like amusement parks, but roller coasters are a pretty big no-go for me. My life is scary enough without them – getting on an airplane puts the very fear of God in me (as my seatmates on the trip found out) and I’m also prone to night terrors (as my roommates on the trip found out). External forces in my life make me want to scream enough as it is; I don’t need a machine to give me more reasons to do so.

I also have difficulties with crowds, and it just so happened that we were visiting Disneyland during their busiest time of year. I got shoulder slammed by several French-speaking tourists, which struck me as remarkably ungrateful after everything my people did for them in World War II, and more than one plastic-lightsaber wielding child hit me in the back of the knee like I’d just walked onto the set of an episode of The Sopranos.

However, life had given me garbanzo beans, so I did my best to make hummus. I went on the rides I had enjoyed when I went to Disneyland in elementary school to see if I could recapture some of the magic of my youth. Pirates of the Caribbean had more or less turned into Johnny Depp – The Ride, but I was pleased to see that Star Tours had not incorporated anything from the new movies, in a rare case of George Lucas making a choice that wasn’t a creative disaster.

We returned to the hotel and went to bed roughly 22 hours after we had woken up. Fortunately, we were able to snag a full four hours of sleep before we had to get up for rehearsal the next day.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 4!