Some Shit Brent Wrote

Wow, remember when I used to update regularly and on time?

I'm participating in the Adrenaline Film Festival, wherein I have 72 hours to write, shoot, and edit a five minute short film with my group. That's what we've been doing today, and that's what we'll be doing until Saturday, instead of sleeping or writing this blog.

Fortunately, Brent Jones, who neglected to do his part and update while I was in DC, was kind enough to send in his update a day or so late, which I held onto out of spite up until I needed it. So now, for your reading pleasure, some shit Brent wrote:

What does it mean to be an American?

While I'm not completely sure, I can tell you what I did last night as an anecdotal example.

Author's Note, #0: I consider being late part of being American.

Like most of us who got out of high school, in the literal sense of leaving and not returning to the building, AND in the figurative sense of seeing past weed as a cool social taboo, the desire to program one's personality for the sole purpose of getting BJ's, and not letting 'school spirit' dictate the color water you drink (Yes, at the remarkable institution yours truly and his truly [Truman] the school color of orange made it's way into the pipes, into the water, and into our dying livers), the wanderlust of travel dictates where we will go to expand our minds, our hearts, and our knowledge of foreign and exotic reefers and blowjobs. This led to the tale of my spring break in San Francisco, a girl named Betty, almost dying, and a hangover that won't go away.

*Author's Note, #1: I attend a University in Salem, Oregon, the location of my alma mater (latin for "nourishing mother, and now you can't say you didn't learn something, ya nappy ho) and my hometown, meaning I didn't move for shit, and as such the rest of this tale will make increasingly more sense, corruption of innocence to come!

*Author's Note, #2: In keeping with the times, recognizing that there are those among us who cannot receive blowjobs, either due to not being lucky enough to have their baby-maker on the outside or having had an even more unlucky accident involving meat grinders/dogs, feel free to substitute "fellatio" or "a gentle massage to make you forget your worldly woes" in exchange for nob-nibbles.

All of this started at a rogue-ish diner chain that sticks its signs up and down the I-5 advertising STEAK DINNERS (FOR MEN), reinforcing the notion by slapping a burly black bear upon the establishment, making it The Black Bear Diner. For those who don't know the visage, think of Denny's, but with more steak, less class (if possible), and a sign reverent to those grandfathers blasting down I-5 to the fishing hole with a wad of chew slouched in each cheek who don't yet need viagra. Always looking for a new way to prove ourselves, my cohorts and I figure stomaching The Black Bear Diner will be a feat of manliness unrivaled, or slightly better than a third gas station Hostess™ run.

*Author's Note, #3: As was kindly mentioned by his royal-ness T. Capps esq., I'm an English major (who doesn't read or know grammar) and I would like to take a moment to talk about the film plot-arcs of Q. Tarantino mofo., who utilizes a technique of tension building by having two people with swords or three super models with a fast car do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING for 2-30 minutes at a time. This builds a subconscious tension in the mind of the viewer as the "something has to give" vibe makes you cringe despite the smooth dialog and obvious foot fetish shots. This means, dear reader, that you should be at the height of tension at the moment, felt between the The BBD and my Nissan full of bros. Even this interlude is a mere ploy to drag out and milk that tension-tit.

We sidle on in and there is honest-to-the-G'man-himself hatrack in the foyer. No? Not impressed? Well at that moment I was getting pretty damn tired of wearing this hat that I willingly put on that I could have left in the car, so I was so stoked there was a location to put it so that I could A. have it stolen by gun-toting granpas, or B. forget it. When I threw my bonny cap up there with the rest of the fools, I couldn't help but notice a bonnet upon the pole that was some bizarre mix of cowboy and punk rock, with a miniature bucking bull pin and at least 4 bands called "The *insertobscuredomesticappliancehere*s" that I h'ain't never heard of. Thinking no more of it, I was seated, though quickly moved to the bar as it was bro #2's turn to drive, meaning it was gin & tonic time fore this weary traveler.

And that's when I saw her.

*Author's Note, #4: Cheesy, I know. But seriously, you know there are times when the truth is stranger than fiction? While being aware of that worn sentiment's cheesiness as well, the author would like to remind the fair reader of it's belligerent truth, as well as begin the reason why Sunday's update was ill-timed, to those who actually care [Truman].

*Author's Note, #5: Did you know Truman "The Man Himself" Capps used to go by Scott? Ya, I know right bro! Exactly.

Bent over the bar and trying to take a $5 hanging out the bartender's left butt-pocket, something I'm guessing she had already tried, was a girl/woman of probably 23 or 24 who's hair beckoned to the sun, who's bosom boasted the fullest of fruit, and who's legs were kinda too short for her torso, but hey 2/3 ain't bad (right Meatloaf? Gosh, I wish we were too old for the reference…). When the bartender not-so-playfully slapped her hand away, assumably again, she turned back around and I had--in that window of time--teleported four seats down, set my water I brought over from the table (for no reason, other than DESTINY) right next to a predicted landing spot for her elbow, and I threw on a quick makeshift-cool look to my face, like I had been there 20 minutes already. For those faster than Cali's highway traffic, you now know who the punk cowboy hat belongs to. Almost as planned, she succeeded not in grazing the glass with her elbow, as to get a turn of her attention in my direction, she managed to slam that thing and burst it on the railing of the bar, dousing to retirement home escapees in what they thought was alcohol, though was actually iced water.
Skipping the ensuing scene, the result was minor chaos, the annoyed-turned-furious barman throwing punk cowboy out on her tush, and her apologizing only the way a drunk person can, and insisting she'd make it up to me.
Now, my bros, they're the bro-iest. They knew what was going on and for all intents and purposes, I was a stranger to them until having said otherwise. Chortling over their overcooked boot leather, one gave a playful wave as a slight grin snuck out across my otherwise 'alarmed' face as I watched the Texas misprint make for the doors.
After the moment, not letting too much time lapse, I headed over to the hatrack and took the punk cowboy hat.
Once in the parking lot, my gameplan had mostly stopped, as even Bobby Fischer couldn't have planned this many moves ahead (he's the chess player that, if living,who could beat Wilson the cocky robot that took down our other favorite nerd, Ken Jennings). Drawing from the impromptu barrel of 'oh no bro, it's fine's and 'ah naw bra it's cool's we stammered about out there for around 5 minutes, and I forgot what was being said back and forth in the moment, but it ended in a drunk hug (boobs!) and an unexpected invitation. I asked "Where are you going?" and she said the name of a place that at the time I only hoped was in California when responded with "Me too!" and after exclaiming how close it was, she apologized again for the gin & tonic (still actually water).

"Yeah, that's just so mean a' me, sorry so much."
"Oh, you know, these things happen, but I wish I had had a camera, that old lady's getting a faceful of gin probably sent her hear beating faster than since… a long time ago!"
"Haha stupid bitch what was she doing, sitting where I wanted to throw your glass!"
"Haha!"
"Haha."
". . ."
". . ."
"I'm Betty!"
"Ah… I'm… Brent!" (<--chance to use the fakename Sebastian Winters blown)
"Yeah, you know, I just really wish I could make it up to you."
"Nah, no worries, there will always be another gin and tonic. I mean, stuff's not exactly a rarity and you know how it is."
"And I was only halfway through my long island, what a dick that guy is! DICK!" The finger displayed can be easily assumed by this blog's savvy readership, as well as the none-too-pleasedness of The BBD's patrons who were thanking their cross'd stars their daughter was nothing like this.
"Yep, what a dick alright. …Anyways, glad I could bring you back your hat and all, I should probably get back and--"
"--wait what? Going? Now? Where?"
"Well, uh, into the place I'm not kicked out of I guess… though it's not like I was doing much there myself I guess (HINTHINTHINT)."
"Oh come on! I ain't done drinking yet (around 4:30pm), and I bet neither are you, now like I said, the place we're going (<--notice that) isn't that far and I bet there's a buncha gin there."

Blessed be heaven's stars which shine their might from the sky
Blessed be all below under the watchful shepherd's eye
In glory reign let your heart be akin to those, kind and good
In glory reign fill your life with goodwill and brotherhood

*Author's Note, #6: I understand getting in the motor vehicle of someone intending to take to the highway who just forgot their hat in a bar and got kicked-thefuck-out isn't the smartest move a man (or woman, or gender-ruined-by-dog person) can make. In retrospect, it was funny she didn't mention anything about my car, which I was about 50/50 on taking and leaving d'em bros to fend for themselves at The BBD. However, this was a time for emotion and becoming swept up in the moment--which I might not have been saying were I dead, but hey--free gin.

Think back to the last time you had 4 cups of coffee w/ sugar in a row, downing one after another (or three sips of four loko). Now try to remember, if you can, what it does to your brain. The closest thing to a feeling that I can pair to the effect is like being able to feel individual brain cells popping, like snapping bubble wrap. Keep in mind, dear reader, I had only 1/3 a glass of water to drink. About now this cell-popping was all of what my brain was doing, barely thinking of conversations as we blabbed on, me giving the appropriate response to her on-beat questions, as the bigger concerns such as staying in one lane and trying to decide the best method of bailing out (curl into a ball, or the superman?) preoccupied the majority of my mind's RAM. Not once, but twice and emergency jerk of the wheel kept us from giving a graze to a semi, and encouragement for brake usage kept us from kissing a few bumpers. I blathered at length about the masculine-est things I think about from my time spent in Japan, acting like I wasn't slightly terrified, inbetween her regaling me with details of her 3 weeks horseriding/backpack trip (http://www.ridingtours.com/horseback_riding_destinations/California.cfm, as she told me, with an emphasis on "viticulture" meaning you ride on horses to wineries and avoid the DUIs by being on HORSES which is BADASS). I couldn't resist the thoughts that I was caught up in some kind of government plot, that I was going to wake up in the matrix or be dead within the hour. This is not the sort of thing that happens to your average bro. But what do I know, while I may be a know-nothing college kid not yet versed in how the older half lives--she was obviously a little older, and maybe this is what older people just did. I wouldn't have believed half the shit I did in college if you told me in my orange, lead-water-filled Salem high school, so this could be growing up, this could be a symbolic move from young adulthood to adulthood-adulthood. Of course, this was all absolute bullshit to convince myself this wasn't going to end in my death.
When we turned off the 505 and on towards Madison, apparently a place that matters, I had resigned myself to death and resolved that as long as it was her cute face and big boobs that would take me there, s'all good bro.
Now, a true gentleman doesn't kiss and tell, but when we rolled into Rose's Island western(ish) bar, we totally made out across the console.
I was furiously texting my bros who requested updates like giddy little girls awaiting the newest Avril Lavigne single, giving them the scoop and making sure back up was a possibility in the worst/best case scenario of the matrix subplot coming true. But hey man, go with it, roll with it, and slam that gin & tonic she stuck under your nose faster than she can toss back vodka crans. Something about drinking almost seemed to sober her up and we talked like people instead of co-sonspirators in something. I guess after having made out (like a lot, despite the gear shift sticking too close for comfort in my thigh) it cemented that we didn't need to impress each other. We could be reasonable, so long as I could throw my arm over her shoulder more than what was necessary and she could keep her hand on my thigh.
Turns out she was a dealer at a casino not faraway, which adds to her badassed-ness of the previously mentioned classy drunken horseback riding she had finished, but she was going to work tomorrow to steal money from bored suckers she wouldn't see a penny of, outside of meager wages (apparently not enough for her own horse, having not gotten over the I-wanna-pony phase of growing up) and I told her of my life intentions of going to Japan, waiting to hear back from JET. I was just as impressed by her having made living in the foothills of North California sound not terrible at all as she was with my international eye towards heading overseas. She had her fun gallivanting through nature and heading down to San Fran to throw her pretty self into sweaty moshpits, and I was doing this which was fun enough. As the conversation extended we drank slower, and unsurprisingly, I think we found out that we both just thought the other was crazy and went with it, and now we were coming to the realization we were both like way normal. But, you know, it was okay, and I was fine with it, though conspiracy theory would have been cooler, this was kind of the thing that should happen at least once.
A surefire let down, for you and me both dear reader, her having to work tomorrow meant no sleepovers, though she did pay for my bar tab and we did make out again in the parking lot. She also still lived with her parents. In keeping with the independent streak of a strong wanderer, when she offered me a ride somewhere, I said I was close to San Fran and a friend could give me a ride, and I was just thankful to have met her, which was most likely the truest thing I had said since actually meeting her. She really was quite nice, and there's an open invitation for another gin & tonic on my way back.
Watching the red lights on the back of her Jeep-y 4x4 thing take off left me with a sense of some kind of accomplishment and the immediate realization I was nowhere and my bros would most certainly be playing League of Legends in Richmond by now. Walking around made me realize just how much drunk was left in me, so resisting the casino's temptation, I bought a romance novel from a K-mart to see an example of the night I wouldn't have, though didn't mind, and the bro-squad took their dear-sweet-goddamned-fucking-time in getting to the junction despite functional directions, and I didn't end up getting in until after 11pm, meaning I didn't have the night I expected of last minute blog writing about some rock concert in Japan and making un-funny inside jokes for Truman's blog,

but hey. Free gin.

Brent Jones attends Willamette University and went to a Jewish temple for the first time the next day. Although a poet by profession, such jaunts into prose so long as wanna-be Cowboys like Betty make writing (and being late) worth doing. Getting in trouble is a fake idea, and as long as you're happy you're doing something right. Sorry Tru-Tru, I blog late for you, but in the reverse situation I'd hope you'd choose jugs & gin too, bro. Also, I didn't get *my* hat back from The BBD.


DC, Part 2

When we moved from Salem to Portland, my family sifted through all of the crap we’d accumulated in our garage over the past ten years. The beermaker my parents had only used once, long unused and mouse-gnawed Christmas decorations, a few thousand of my old kindergarten and elementary school assignments (my motor skills have not improved appreciably since then) – we quickly realized that for years we’d taken everything in our house with no purpose but at least a little sentimental significance and just chucked it into the garage.

Because sure it’s useless, but you can’t throw it away, right? That would be wrong! So put it in the garage. If you ever want or need that thing, you know right where it is. It’s in the garage!

That’s the Smithsonian in a nutshell. It’s America’s garage.

There's some dusty exercise equipment in here too.

America has no use for The Spirit of St. Louis...

The first plane to make a transatlantic flight, and we named it after a city in Missouri?

...Fonzie’s jacket...

He was hilarious on That 50's Show.

...or any of the trillions of moon rocks that NASA brought home throughout the 1970s. I mean, really? Moon rocks? I feel like we gained a lot scientifically from the first one, but ever since then astronauts have just been bringing them back to show to women in bars, just in case the line, “Hi, I’m an astronaut” doesn’t work well enough.

But we can’t just throw this stuff away, because it’s all a vital part of American history as well as solid proof that we’re better than all other countries.

Solid proof.

There’s the National Archives, but that tends to only preserve the absolute most important stuff, like the Constitution – if the Smithsonian is the garage, the National Archives is the mantle piece over the fireplace, reserved for the finest commemorative plates and some boring documents from the Civil War.

So there’s the Smithsonian, then, this grand institution that grabs virtually anything American and even vaguely famous and puts it up on display for people to look at. The wide net the Smithsonian casts can lead to some pretty mismatched collections all housed under the same roof – in the Smithsonian Museum of American History you can see Julia Child’s kitchen...

This could've been Pierre Trudeau's kitchen and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

...right across the hall from the world’s first robotically driven car...

I did not take a picture of that car.

...then run upstairs to see the flag that inspired the national anthem...

I wasn't allowed to take a picture of that flag. This one probably tastes better.

... is next door to an exhibit about the Muppets...

Proto-Kermit on the left there is freaking my shit out.

...and one floor down from a fairly comprehensive and depressing collection of World War 2 memorabilia.

Nazis. I hate these guys.

I don’t think America has been able to park its car in there for years.

It’s a lot to take in at once, especially when you realize that you’re not looking at a replica of the C-3P0 costume from Return of the Jedi; you’re looking at the genuine article.

This was exactly the droid I was looking for.

You can only have your mind blown so many times in one day before you’re absent mindedly shuffling past British warships and presidential artifacts in a history-saturated trance.

Some artifacts are more interesting than others.

I didn’t have this problem as much at the Newseum – the journalism museum located a few blocks from the Smithsonian. Maybe this is because the Newseum, in stark contrast to the field of journalism, is hip, high tech, and interesting, utilizing slick multimedia presentations laid out over seven different floors.

And good lord, man, look at the typography!

Or maybe it’s because, as interesting as Tim Russert’s desk is, it just doesn’t have the same emotional impact on me as the flag that inspired our country’s national anthem, a presentation on the sacrifices America’s military makes for our freedom, or a costume that was worn in a Star Wars movie. That said, the Unabomber’s cabin was pretty cool.

They wanted to show off where somebody who was batshit insane lived, and they didn’t have room for Charlie Sheen’s house.

Now, The White House - there was a museum experience. Not necessarily because there was anything especially incredible on display, but rather because, for about half an hour, the Secret Service considered me enough of a security risk to detain me in a small pseudo-prison by the front gate.

This may come as a surprise to you, but the official residence of the President is sort of a difficult place to get into. We had to apply months in advance for our tickets and undergo a full background check, and even once we were approved we weren’t allowed to take cameras into The White House – probably because they didn’t want us to take pictures of Obama’s fake birth certificate or something.

When we got to the visitor gates, a posse of Secret Service were there to meet us and all the other guests. One by one we had to flash our ID and have our information checked against what was on the gate list. My parents got through, but when it came to me, there was a problem.

You see, the information on my diver’s license said I was Truman Scott Capps, born 11/27/1988, whereas the information on the gate list said I was Truman Scott Capps, born 12/27/1988.

You see that? One month difference. Apparently, that’s the sort of clerical error a terrorist would make.

The Secret Service ushered me into a small area directly to the left of the gate, which was completely surrounded by portable hurricane fences, where I gave my information again to a White House aide for a second background check. I glanced around my makeshift prison and surveyed the two other occupants – both middle aged women from separate tour groups whose ID had similar discrepancies to mine. My understanding was that on your first day in the big house you have to kick somebody’s ass so you don’t get raped, but I decided I’d hold off and size up my fellow inmates before I started any fights.

There weren’t a lot of people coming through the gate that morning, so I got to stand and listen as the Secret Service agents stood around cracking wise and making asshole comments about coworkers they didn’t like and movies they’d seen recently. In case you were wondering, the United States Secret Service says Due Date was, “Pretty okay”, but I Am Number Four “Fucking sucked.”

After processing a particularly rowdy school group, each of whom apparently had a lot of trouble giving him their name, the agent in charge of the guest list looked over at me and wearily sighed, “You want my job?”

“That depends,” I said. “Do I get the gun, too?”

“You can have it all.” He said, shaking his head as another group of students approached.

Giving it some more thought, I realized that I probably wouldn’t trade jobs with this guy. Even though saying “I’m a Secret Service agent” is the second best bar pickup line after “I’m an astronaut,” I feel like his job is just a more aggravating and dangerous version of my job in the checkout room. How many tourists, I wonder, come to his checkpoint in direct view of the White House and ask, “Is this where the President lives?”

Tourists, Gateway students... What's the difference, really?

Seeing me talking to the guards, one of the other two women in the pen stepped over to the fence, within earshot of a sympathetic looking agent, and said the following:

“Hey so I’m pretty sure I know the problem with my ID it’s just that I’ve still got the same last name on my ID from when I was still married but I changed my credit card after I got divorced and I mean I probably should’ve done something about this sooner but I got divorced two years ago and since then I’ve had triplets and it’s just so difficult to get out of the house and do anything when you’ve got all that to do plus my best friend has the cancer and so it’s like I’m looking after her too but it’s just so cold out here I mean I know you say I can leave any time I want but it’s just so cold I mean if I have to wait another five minutes I think I’m just going to go wait on our tour bus because it’s just so cold out here you know I mean it gets pretty cold in Iowa I’m from Iowa you see but it’s not like I like being cold, you know just standing out in it, so yeah I think if it’s another five minutes I’m just going to go wait on the bus I mean I don’t need to see the White House this bad I mean it probably isn’t worth waiting in here for this long I’m probably just going to leave in another five minutes but I don’t know it’s just because my ID doesn’t match my credit card statement probably…”

At this point, I was considering asking the other woman in the cell if she wanted to join my prison gang and help me kill this Iowa loudmouth, but she was all but tunneling her way out Shawshank Redemption by then. Looking to the Secret Service agents I’d been talking to earlier, I saw them cracking up as they watched their fellow agent wither in this stream of conversation.

You heard it here first – the highly trained, heavily armed protectors of the Executive Branch are just as big of assholes as the rest of us. When, a few minutes later, my clearance came through and I was released, I went into the White House knowing that this place would be easy enough to break into if I just brought a Jackass DVD to distract the guards.

Truman Capps hopes the extra length makes up for the lateness, and no, that’s not what she said.

DC, Part 1

There’s not much else to be said about Chicago, really – which, I suppose, sounds like a cheap shot, even though I don’t mean it that way. We only spent a couple days there and only did a few things that, while interesting and culturally edifying, aren’t especially funny. For example, we took a bus tour of the city in which we saw, among other things, Barack Obama’s house…

There goes the neighborhood.

…but by far the comedy highlight of the blog was this Segway tour group we bumped into.

Doctors agree that riding a Segway is so nerdy that it actually can actually turn you back into a virgin.

We spent a week in Washington DC, though, and saw things that had both cultural and comedic value. So, really, what am I waiting for?

We got to Washington DC by way of the Baltimore airport. Having seen The Wire, I recognized the danger I had put myself in by being in Baltimore and as such walked through the airport as quickly as possible without touching anything.

Everyone in this picture is on crack. That is because this picture was taken in Baltimore.

There was no particularly cost effective way to get from Baltimore to Washington short of a cab, so Dad dropped a few extra bucks to get us a Lincoln Towncar which, all told, was far more luxurious than the airplane for a fraction of the price. Don’t believe me?


Yeah, that’s right: Complimentary magazine about fine wine. It’s so hoity-toity that I’d never heard of it, and I’m majoring in magazine journalism.

The only thing that took away from my enjoyment of the ride was our driver, Bill, who was clearly a troll of some sort because he could only communicate his conspiracy theories about the National Security Agency and the unconstitutionality of traffic surveillance cameras through a series of abrupt grunts and phlegmy coughs. Or maybe that’s just a Baltimore thing.*

*My godmother is from Baltimore and will probably take exception to all the stuff that I’ve said about her hometown, so I’ll take this opportunity to point out that Baltimore has a pro football team, which is far more than I can say for Portland. However, they’ve also had multiple pro soccer teams, so don’t get cocky.

After 40 minutes or so, Bill exited the highway and cordially grunted that we were now entering Washington D.C.

It did not make a stellar first impression.

Washington DC is markedly different from other American cities because one gets the impression that the people who laid it out were actually thinking about what they were doing. Most cities – notably Los Angeles – feel like the people building them had maybe two good ideas regarding urban planning which they halfheartedly implemented before saying, “Fuck it” and just letting fate take over.

DC, on the other hand, is all low-rise buildings, wide boulevards, and traffic circles. I don’t know what that does for congestion, but it does mean you get some pretty cool line of sight stuff.

Like this. This is cool.

All the important museums, monuments, and government buildings are located along the National Mall, and from each one you’ve inexplicably got a direct line of sight to another big, famous, picturesque thing, even if it seems geographically impossible.

A front view of the White House, from near our hotel…

…And a front view of the White House, from a completely different position.

At first, I assumed that instead of Washington DC we were in some sort of Inception theme park, but after a few days I realized that a lot of these grandiose buildings look pretty similar from either the front or the back – presumably because a huge tree-lined boulevard leading up to a back porch, some garbage cans, and a screen door wouldn’t have quite the same effect as all those columns and shit.

But, see, they planned it that way from the start. Street layout, architecture, monuments… They figured out the best places for everything to be so that everywhere you looked, you’d see something impressive. If I’d been in charge of designing Washington DC, I would not have thought of that. I’d probably just try to build the entire city in the shape of a wang or something.

Some elements of my philosophy were clearly at work here.

Much has also been made of Washington DC’s high crime rate, and I had the impression that our time in the capitol would be spent scampering from museum to monument in a hail of bullets.* But I didn’t once feel threatened anywhere downtown or in the vicinity of the National Mall, and this is coming from the guy who felt so threatened by the mouse in his house that he taped cardboard to the bottom of his door to keep it out.

*For the record, the only cool way to scamper is in a hail of bullets. Just in case you were planning on doing any scampering in the near future.

The reason for this safety is that virtually everyone wearing a uniform in downtown DC is carrying a gun. There’s the Secret Service, the United States Park Police, United States Capitol Police, Bureau of Engraving and Printing Police, DC Metro Police, and the security guards at the Smithsonian museums, every last one of whom is armed.

That’s just our nation’s capitol putting our best foot forward, I guess. As if to say, ‘America is a beautiful, well laid out place, and watch your step, asshole, because we’ve all got guns.’

Truman Capps will actually continue to talk about Washington DC in his next blog update, and when he does he won’t gush about city planning or law enforcement.

Truman's Chicago Adventure

Save Ferris!

My knowledge of Chicago prior to this trip was limited to the film Chicago, which I saw in theaters with my parents when I was 12, and a few John Hughes movies. The good news is that nobody burst into song and dance routines about murder; the bad news is that I didn’t spend my time in the Windy City tearassing around unsupervised in a sports car with my hot girlfriend of indeterminate ethnicity, either. Mixed bag, there.

Hispanic? Italian? Mia Sara - a foxy mystery for the ages.

Chicago is a very dark city, even during the daytime. It’s a city with a lot of tall buildings – really obnoxiously tall, all lined up next to each other, like the city is trying to compensate for being so far away from an ocean by extending as far as possible into the sky. The result of this is that you only get direct sunlight downtown for maybe half an hour a day, when the sun is directly overhead. Add into that the fact that the city’s most prominent form of public transportation is a railroad built over, as opposed to under, the streets, and you start to get the impression that Chicagoans just really have some sort of dispute with the sun.

I had to use a flash for this picture.

They also seem to be really angry at their hearts, arteries, and colons, because I would say that there are more steakhouses in Chicago than there are Starbucks in Portland, and all of them are doing a robust business. On my first night in town I had a ribeye steak so huge that I still feel full, and yet on every corner there was yet another similarly classy establishment offering a similarly huge chunk of beef to anybody with $45 burning a hole in his pocket. I think the city’s official motto is ‘Oh Jesus I’ve got the meat sweats and I haven’t pooped since Thursday.’

Essentially, Chicago is a city built on the concept of sitting in the shadows and eating red meat. Needless to say, it’s my kind of town.

I didn't get a picture of the steak, but I did get a picture of what is without question the finest pizza I have ever consumed.

On our first full day in Chicago, we went to the Chicago Art Institute to see their collection – some of the more famous stuff in particular, such as American Gothic, or Nighthawks, my favorite painting, by my favorite artist, Edward Hopper.

Before Mad Men, people just looked at this painting to see classy people being sad.


Edward Hopper, fresh from getting drunk and beating his wife, enjoys a cigarette before painting Nighthawks.

Yeah, that’s right, I’ve got a favorite painting and artist. Doesn’t everyone? Oh, you don’t? Hm. How quaint. Well, keep this in mind next time you want to criticize me for drinking at Taylor’s, you cretins.

We spent the evening at a taping of Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the NPR news quiz, before going to bed early so we could get up in time for our tour of the old Chicago Public Library building the next day. It was really fascinating to-

Jesus Christ, this was my last fucking spring break and I went to an art museum, a public radio taping, and then toured a fucking library? Holy shit, Peter Parker* is officially cooler than I am! I had friends getting drunk in Hawaii while my parents and I were in a theater cracking up as Paula Poundstone interviewed Judy Collins. Is anybody still listening, or have you all dozed off already?

*Pre-radioactive spider bite, of course. Post bite he’s a really bland nerdy guy who moonlights as Spider-Man, and being Spider-Man half the time is still way cooler than whatever I am 24/7.

Well, at some point we went up the Sears Tower! That’s cool, right? Tall buildings?

Is that the tallest building in America, or are you just happy to see me?

Actually, it was one of the low points of our time in Chicago. To go up 108 stories to the observation deck we had to pay $51 for our tickets. Yes, tickets. They’re selling tickets to ride in an elevator and look out a window. I would understand this business model if we were Amish or something, but I ride in elevators a lot. It’s not Avatar or anything, folks.

Of course, I can criticize it all I want, but still, there we were in a long line winding through the visitor’s center of Sears Tower, sandwiched in between a big fat Minnesotan family with no less than two screaming infants and a group of rowdy Middle Eastern students whose interests included jostling into us and speaking Farsi very loudly and then laughing in my ear.

The elevators they sent us up in were large freight-style models that would’ve been quite spacious if not for the fact that the surly tour guides shoehorned us in there as tightly as humanly possible. When we were at the head of the line and the doors opened, we were all but shoved into the elevator until everyone was either pressed face first against the wall or face first into some overweight German tourist’s flabby, sweaty backside.

There I was, sandwiched in between my mother and some Sarah Palin sounding housewife from Duluth, when the tour guide peeped in at the sardine-style conditions and yelled over her shoulder, “We’ve got room for three more!”

The entire elevator groaned. “No!” Dad yelled. “We don’t have room for three more!”

The tour guide shoved three of the Middle Eastern students into the elevator and sighed. “It’s only a 60 second ride.” She said, her exasperated tone suggesting that we were being major pussies about this whole thing.

When, 60 seconds later, we reached the top and were able to quit breathing the body odor of several other nationalities*, we found ourselves on the observation deck – a floor with glass walls allowing a fairly impressive 360 degree panorama of the city.

$51, and they don't even clean the window. JERKS.

*This wasn’t all bad, because one of the guys on our elevator was Johnny Depp. He just was. My parents insist it was just a guy wearing a trendy jacket, shades, and fedora, but take one look at this discreet picture I took in the reflection off the doors and tell me I’m wrong:

"We can't stop here! This is... Bat Country!"

And yeah, it was great to get up above all the shade and darkness and into the light and look down at all that urban sprawl we’d ascended out of, but then we saw an intimidating line extending all the way around the corner of the observation deck.

“What’s that for?” I asked a guide, gesturing to the line.

“The line for the elevator back down.” He grunted.

“Oh.” I muttered, watching three more grotesquely obese people join the line. “Well… I guess we should probably jump back in line, then, before it gets much longer.”

So, after another 20 minutes in line, they crammed us back into the elevator for the return trip. I had been shoved up so close to the wall that I could see my breath condensating on it when I heard the tour guide yell, “We’ve got room for three more!”

“We don’t!” I yelled. “It’s not possible! We’d have to take turns breathing!”

“It’s only 60 seconds, folks.” The tour guide grunted, shoving three terrified looking Japanese tourists in and shutting the doors.

Try this: Go up to somebody and ask them if they want to head on down to the city morgue and have sex with one of the corpses. When they (hopefully) refuse, point out that they’ll only have to do it for exactly 60 seconds. Chances are, they’re still not going to want to do it, because their qualm isn’t with the duration of the unpleasant task, but the task that they have to do it in the first place.

This seems like fairly simple logic to me. However, they clearly don’t hire the brightest bulbs to work in the visitor’s center at Sears Tower. I bet they don’t even have favorite paintings, let alone artists.

That being said, they DO have the ability to eat falafel sandwiches at Subway, which, as this picture confirms, are real things that exist in this world.

Truman Capps will be back soon with more tales of vague Midwestern interest.

Guest Update: Matt Takimoto

This final update comes to us from Matt Takimoto. He is Asian.

The State of the Union (Between My Ass and the Couch)

On February 28th, 1983, 121.6 million people watched the final episode of M*A*S*H. Was it the culmination of one of the great TV series in history? Yes. Was it the only thing on? Possibly. But mostly, it was because this was the only opportunity to watch it. If you missed it, that was it. 121.6 million people cried when Hawkeye’s chopper took off, and you get left out of every barroom conversation for twelve years until the Hallmark Channel picked up syndication rights. Fast forward to 2010, and the series finale of Lost. Arguably the most talked about show in history, the finale only garnered 13.5 million viewers, making it the 55th most watched finale, far behind such works of television genius like Magnum P.I and Family Ties. Fast forward to ten days ago. Ten days ago, I had watched exactly zero episodes of 30 Rock. Thanks to the magic of Netflix Instant Watch, Hulu Plus, I have now watched every episode of 30 Rock. And because, frankly, it’s ridiculous to watch a TV show on something other than a TV, my Playstation 3 puts the Internet on my television. My question: is this world we live in a better place?

The answer is, well duh. If I want something, whether it’s a pepperoni pizza, tickets to see Kid ‘n Play, or a $1000/hour escort, I can do it from the comfort of my own home, and without talking to another human being. All I need is one of those Jetsons robots that dresses and bathes you, and I will have to literally do no work to enjoy myself. The modern era of entertainment is like that $1000/hour escort I mentioned previously: fast, easy, and commitment-free. Twenty years ago, if I wanted to watch The Big Bang Theory, my options were either pick up the show from the next new episode, and somehow try and piece together earlier episodes through re-runs and word of mouth, or just come to grips with the fact that I missed out. Now, I could watch the whole series in the next 72 hours if I wanted to, or I could spend ten minutes on the Internet and catch myself up on everything that has happened in the past three years. God bless America.

Where do we go from here? A step further. Let’s throw out any semblance of a regular TV schedule, except for the first time a show is available for me to watch at my leisure. Every single thing that shows up on television should be immediately available on demand, because I’m too goddamn hip to watch a TV show at the same time as other people. I want to watch it at 2:15 AM in the midst of my mid-week ascetic shut-in because my cutoff sweatpants are too cumbersome to take on and off multiple times a day. This is America, all I want are the liberties the Founding Fathers fought to afford me. Yes, that’s right. George Washington crossed the Delaware River so ordinary Americans like myself can be two steps away from Real Housewives of Orange County at all times. Freedom isn’t free, but as long as you set up automatic bill pay, it’ll feel free.

Guest Update: Brent Jones

I'm in Washington D.C., and I don't even want to TELL you how late I stayed up waiting for guest contributor Brent Jones to email me his update, which he never did. So Brent, just know that while you did take more English classes than I did in high school, I can adhere to a deadline. Or, since I update biweekly, 104 deadlines per year. But hey, great job totally fucking up on doing the one thing you explicitly begged me to let you do.

Sorry, folks. I'll never go on vacation again, I promise. Tune in on Wednesday for an update from an Asian guy I know.

Truman Capps thinks finding guest writers is like finding a babysitter - you have to be really careful not to pick someone who'll drop the baby on its head. THANKS, BRENT.

Guest Update: Cameron Shultz

I'm in Chicago, and I'm about to go eat at a steakhouse so good they list it in those magazines they put on airplanes. Also, they have something called a Garbage Salad on the menu for $19, which leads me to believe that either the word 'garbage' has a different connotation in Illinois or every joke I ever made about the Midwest is completely true.

While I do that, enjoy this blog update from guest writer Cameron Shultz about the one time that he went to a major city or something like that. I'm just hitting CTRL + V. I literally have no idea what this is.

A Night in Gotham


The red markers around the club I visited indicate some of New York’s finest mugging locations.


This past summer I spent a week in New York City with my cousin, Kelley, and her niece, Fay. Aside from walking around Manhattan and eating stacks of pizza, I tried my best to extract that real New York experience from my trip. Something that was special--really worth remembering. Luckily for me, about two-thirds of the way in, I found it.

We started the day late. Kelley was helping me find stuff to do on my own once she left for work, so we checked out some events on-line and she saw something that looked pretty interesting. There was a comedy contest at the Gotham Comedy Club where local journalists try their hand at stand-up and compete for the title of New York's funniest reporter. It wasn't free and the only way in was to be on the guest list. Kelley dialed the number on the site and spoke to a man named Ryan, who initially wasn't very helpful, but once Kelley mentioned that she was a CBS radio producer and that I was a visiting journalism student, he perked up, and said he would try to get me on the list and to text his email so that he could get back to us. The show started at six and it was already past three, so chances were pretty low there'd be room for me. The address he gave us was ryan@goldmanmccormick.com, and Kelley told me later that he’d said I should ask for Mr. Goldman at the door, even if he wasn't able to add my name to the list. We ate lunch and then I went with Fay to Times Square to buy a two-day pass that would allow me free entry to several well known locations around Manhattan, which I would use another day.

After purchasing the pass from Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, Fay and I caught the subway down to 23rd street. It was about ten to six, so we were right on time. Opening the door to Gotham we saw a long, dimly lit hallway bisected by a red velvet-covered chain rail. To the left was the host, and to the right was his beady-eyed bouncer. I gulped hard and proceeded forward.

"Good evening," the host said with a smile.

"Hi," I replied. "My name's Cameron Shultz. I think I might be on the guest list."

He flipped through the guest book a few times, and then frowned.

"No, I'm actually not seeing you."

Shit!

"Okay well, is, uh…Ryan Goldman around? Is there any way I could talk to him?"

The host stopped scribbling and looked at me, then at Fay, then turned and glanced back into the club. He flipped the pages of the guest book a few more times and said, "I'm just going to write you guys in."

I didn't respond, and instead stood there stupidly with my brow wrinkled, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. The host X’d out a table on his lectern and handed us a card with the number thirteen written on it. He smiled. "Enjoy the show, guys," he said.

Apparently I started walking into the club, and I think said something like "Thank you," as I passed. I’m not positive, though, as I was still dumbfounded by what had just happened. A waitress met us at the door and I handed her the card with the same trepidation one might have if they were using a fake ID for the first time. "Hi, welcome!" she chirped. "Let me show you to your seat."

Gotham Comedy Club is cramped, dark and shaped like a half-circle with chairs and tables arcing in rows along the back, then forming even rows that lead all the way up to the stage. The waitress led us into the club and over to a table for four directly in front and to the left of the stage. She handed us cocktail menus and asked us what we'd like to drink. It had been explained to me earlier that this venue had a two-drink minimum, so I ordered two Sierra Madras’s (…I know, I know) while Fay ordered a margarita. I couldn't stop fidgeting from the excitement. No one asked for our IDs; we were surrounded by 30 and 40-somethings wearing expensive clothes; it was all in a fucking New York City comedy club at six in the evening; and the comedians were all journalists!

As waited for the show to begin, I snatched up one of the programs from the table and pointed out to Fay that the show was being presented by Goldman McCormick Public Relations.

"Wow," I said, "it must mean that this Ryan Goldman guy is a bigger deal than we'd thought. He isn't just some event organizer—he’s got his own company!"

Pleased with myself for getting past the host and security without paying a cover fee or having my name on the guest list just because I'd asked for the right guy at the right time, I sipped my drink and skimmed through the rest of the program. It was full of the usual acknowledgements and ads, along with profiles of the each of the reporters performing that night and in the back it had a picture of professional comedian Franklyn Ajaye, who was the guest comic for the evening. Then I read the very last page, and nearly hit the ceiling.

It was a brief bio of the two executive producers of the show. A Mister Goldman and a Mister McCormick. Mr. MarkMcCormick of Goldman McCormick Public Relations. I had asked to speak with someone who didn’t even exist, and yet here we were. This sent Fay and I into private peals of laughter. We couldn’t believe it. Goldman and Mr. Ryan

It was around this time that the show started. The Emcee got everyone warmed up before the six reporters came on one at a time to perform their routines. Most of them were actually pretty funny for *cough* journalism folk *cough*. A few of them were downright ridiculous. One female scene reporter with heavy makeup and a squatty dog in her purse rambled for fifteen minutes trying to tell an incomprehensible story about an ex-boyfriend. But since she was drunk, she couldn’t stop snort-laughing and eventually the Emcee saved the show by running her off the stage. Isn’t she great, folks? I wrote down the punch lines to a few of the jokes I heard and will try to recreate them to the best of my ability for you:

"When an attractive older woman likes younger guys she's a Cougar. And that's great. Unfortunately the reversal of that isn't. No, it isn't at all. Attractive older woman who likes guys is a called a Cougar...An older man who likes young girls is what we call a pedophile, folks."

"When you see a group of ladies out together you know they're going to have a good time. There's that whole lookin' out for your sister mentality that women have when they go out together. Guys—they don't have that. You see a group of guys out together and you know they won't be having as good a time as the ladies. Ever have that awkward moment where you're walking with your buddies and one of you accidentally brushes the hand of another? ‘Did you just try to hold my hand, you fucking homo?’ Guys don't touch each other. Girls do. You ever wonder why girls always look so much better than guys? It's because they help one another out. When they're getting ready, you know, fixing each other's breasts, tightening this up here or whatever. Yeah, guys don't dress one another. You don't see a bro squat down and say to another bro, 'Hey, Jimmy, your left one's a hangin' a bit low today, buddy. Hold still and I'll stuff it back up there for ya.'"

"I don't like soccer. You know why? Because it gives third-world countries something to feel good about since, apparently, the U.S. sucks at soccer. Oh, you can score a goal from half-field? I have indoor plumbing; I feel like a winner every time I turn the water on. What's that? Your country's won two World Cups? Well ours won two world wars."

"This economy, man, this economy is in real bad shape. I know. I been around a while and I've got my own economic downturn indicators, and we're in some time tough times. You know how I know? Saw an Asian homeless man for the first time on the street the other day. I was like 'Oh, shit, we must be in some real big trouble.' He had a sign and everything…It was the most neatly organized sign I'd ever seen. Said: Will do science and math for food. And people weren't giving him money or nothin', they were just yellin' out complicated equations at him all day long. He's raising the curve for homeless people! They're probably like 'Fuck, I used to just be able to wash windows...Now I got to explain the theory of relativity, too."

"Met a woman on the plane the other day. Nice-looking woman, so I decided to ask her, 'What social groups do you interact with in your life?' And she said, 'Well I have personal relationship with God and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.' I realized at that point that I wasn't in the mood for that shit. So I said to her 'Girl, He’s seein' other people, you know. Has been for a long time.' Well that pissed her off. Told me I was going straight to Hell and everything unless I accepted Christ into my life. Even when I asked her if I was a good person – if I'm kind to others - she said no. So I'm down there with Hitler, and Stalin and Khan and all those evil, barbaric motherfuckers since the beginning of time? And I could just picture it. Going down there to Hell's orientation and getting to meet the Hell assembly. You know, Ted Bundy, Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, and having the ringleader say: 'Adolf, why don't you tell everyone how you ended up here?'

'I was responsible for World-War Two and the killing of six million Jews before committing suicide.'

'Great. Thanks, Adolf. Jeffrey, why don't you share?'

'Well, I would fuck young boys and eat'em. And you see, it's never the other way around. I don't know about any of you crazy people out there trying to eat the boys and then fuck’em, but it doesn't work.'

'Well done, Jeffrey. Franklyn, please tell us what you did to get to Hell.'

I'd stand up and say: 'Oh, all I did was not accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior.' And you would hear the collective 'oooOOOh...' and whispers of 'Daaamn,' reverberate through each layer of Hell."

Cameron Shultz swears to this day that he was already intoxicated when he ordered those Madras’s.

Vacation (All I Ever Wanted)


Just a big, sweaty mob of bros. Delightful.

It should come as no surprise to you that I’m not a beach person. I’m completely out of my element on a beach. There’s nothing for me there.

I mean, volleyball, really? I can’t understand why I would play volleyball unless it was 2004 and my PE teacher was making me. There’s sand, which is nice enough to look at through a window or perhaps from a safe distance, but once you’re up close it’s just getting in places that it’ll need to get cleaned out of later, e.g. shoes, or crevasses you didn’t know your body had. There’s swimming, which can be fun, but the waves are a little too much for me to deal with. And what’s left after that? Well, I guess I could lounge around and read a book, but I could just as easily do the same thing in a hotel bar, where the seating is far more comfortable and nobody expects me to be partially naked in public.

Reasons like these are why I’ve never spent a spring break in Cancun or Fort Lauderdale – that and the fact that the only place less enticing for me to visit than crime ridden, wartorn Mexico is Florida.

No, as I mentioned last week, my parents and I are visiting Chicago and Washington D.C. Is it lame for a 22 year old to spend his last spring break visiting museums with his parents? Perhaps so. But I guarantee you I’d look far lamer on a beach surrounded by partying coeds.

Imagine it for a second. Have you got it? I’m frowning. Drinks at the beach bar are too expensive, and all the girls have tattoos and weird piercings. At least I’ll be enjoying myself in Chicago and D.C.

I’ve never been to Chicago before, but my knowledge of it comes mostly from John Hughes movies – particularly Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In the former, Steve Martin’s goal for the whole movie is to get to Chicago, which makes sense once you’ve seen the latter, wherein Chicago is essentially a playground for Matthew Broderick and his friends. I mean, why wouldn’t everyone want to live in Chicago? It’s a city built on hijinx, with a random parade thrown in for good measure.

As for actual attractions in Chicago, I’m not really sure what we’re going to be doing, because I’ve been concentrating more on what we’ll be eating. Namely steak. Lots of steak. Many steaks. Chicago is also known for its deep-dish pizza, which, because pizza in and of itself is far too healthy, has been injected with enough cheese to make it as thick as a paperback novel, and its Italian beef sandwiches, which are basically roast beef sandwiches on hoagie rolls which have been soaked in the beef drippings.

I wonder, does the City of Chicago give a prize to the person who can die of congestive heart failure the fastest? If so, I’m totally going to be a contender. I don’t know if you heard, but I spent a weekend eating deep fried pizza in Scotland. I am ready for this.

After a few days testing the limits of what our digestive systems can handle in the Midwest, we’ll be boarding a plane and flying out to Washington D.C. We’ll be landing in Baltimore, and our first order of business will be to rent a car and get the hell out of Baltimore as quickly as possible with all the windows rolled up and the doors locked.

From there, it’s on to a week in Washington D.C., where we’re going to spend the week gorging ourselves on cultural edification in hopes of making up for gorging ourselves on red meat and cheese over the previous few days. Some of our planned destinations include:

The Newseum - See, it’s like a museum, but it’s all about journalism. Y’know, news, and stuff. Classic wordplay. As a journalism major, I imagine I’ll get a discount on admission; however, if they find out I used to work for the Oregon Daily Emerald they’ll probably charge me extra admission if they let me in at all, so nobody tell them, okay?

The White House - I’m still sort of surprised that they let tour groups in here. Not only is this the home of the most powerful man in the world, but it’s also his office. This is where America works and sleeps and they let tourists come in and poke around. All I’m saying is, this makes George Clooney look like a real jackass for not letting people tour his house – what, like he’s that busy? He can’t find time in his schedule? Because the President can.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial - Because nobody in my family died in Vietnam, I think it’d be best if I refrain from posing for that classic picture where the guy reaches out and touches the wall. But I will think about Platoon basically the entire time, which, given that Charlie Sheen was in it, is still probably dishonoring the legacy of the dead somehow.

The Smithsonian - This one is difficult, because I’ve heard from a lot of people that you could basically live your entire life in the Smithsonian and not see all of it. We’re definitely hitting the Air and Space museum as well as the American History museum, but we’ve opted to give the following a pass:

National Museum of Natural History - I’ve seen animals – yes, even dead animals – before. Of course, I’ve also seen fighter jets and spaceships before, but they have the benefit of being awesome.

National Museum of African Art - I’m just not that interested. Am I racist? I don’t think I’m racist. Maybe I’m racist.

National Postal Museum - According to Wikipedia, one of the main attractions here is the ability to buy a souvenir envelope with your name on it. As cool as that sounds, I get an envelope with my name on it from the utility company every month, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it, National Postal Museum.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Jesus, I really hope we don’t visit this on the same day as we visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Is there a National Museum of Clowning we can visit afterwards to cheer ourselves up? Maybe the interactive collection at the American Waterslide Museum?

Truman Capps encourages anybody else who wants to write for this blog during his absence to contact him by 10:00 AM tomorrow, because that’s when he’s going to notify the “winners.”

Wanted: Temporary Hair Guy


Hair Guy is responsible for the cost of your 'inspiration'.


Do you like me? Do you want to be more like me? Do you want to write this blog?

Okay, obviously not. Let me go at this from a different angle:

If there’s one thing I’ve taken very seriously in the four years I’ve been writing this blog, it’s consistency. That’s sort of my gimmick – lots of other blogs start and then peter out quickly once the blogger realizes the inherent difficulty of making quality updates on a regular basis, but I’ve found that by sacrificing quality I can keep to a pretty solid schedule. If it’s Sunday or Wednesday, there’ll be something here for you to read.* Yes, you may be reading the literary equivalent of a home video of two deer fucking in someone’s backyard, but just imagine what you’d be doing if you didn’t have a blog to read. Meth, probably. You’re welcome.

*Notable exceptions include exactly one week ago, when I was shoehorning digital footage together as fast as possible to meet a deadline, and almost exactly two years ago, when I was holding The Ex Girlfriend’s hair back as she regurgitated red wine, tequila, and tortilla chips into a garbage can after a St. Patrick’s Day party, which, while disgusting, also taught me a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of the human digestive system.

Sticking to this schedule hasn’t been that difficult for me, for the most part. I spend most of my time in front of a computer, or at least near one, and I’m usually thinking something stupid about something inconsequential, which are really the only two criteria necessary for a Hair Guy update, aside from ‘Is it Wednesday or Sunday? (Y/N)”

However, sometimes I know I’ll be doing something in the near future that will keep me away from a computer for a long enough period of time that I won’t be able to update. This is pretty rare, seeing as I tend to pass on any activity that involves me not having Internet access. The blog is a great excuse to not go camping.

So now we get to the point:

Spring break is coming up – my last ever spring break. Like many college students burned out after a rough winter term, I’m going someplace exotic for the week to relax and unwind: Chicago, Illinois, crown jewel of the Midwest!* With my parents! And also Washington D.C.! Still with my parents.

*I’ve never been to the Midwest before, save for a couple of three hour layovers, but a girl checking out a camera today told me I have a Wisconsin accent, which just goes to show that anything is possible if you eat enough cheese curds.

I’m leaving next Wednesday and coming back Saturday after next. That’s three blog updates that need to be made, and I’ll be so busy frolicking on the shores of Lake Michigan that I won’t have time to blog it until afterwards.

In the past, when these situations would arise, I would call on one or two of my friends who I trusted to step in as guest writers for the time that I was gone, and they treated this like the chore it clearly was and is. But just yesterday I saw that Charlie Sheen is looking for an intern, and by God, if he’s allowed to find some idealistic sap to do his dirty work, I should be able to do the same.*

*I’m also in the market for some goddesses. Just think it over.

If you want to write one of the three blog updates while I’m gone, shoot me an email at trumancapps@gmail.com or hit me up on Facebook, along with a reasonably brief statement about what you intend to write about. Keep in mind, I’ll be judging you based on how much I laugh when I read your application, and also by how physically attractive you are. This gives women and Anderson Cooper an unfair advantage, but so be it.

Here’s some things you should keep in mind:

-Blog updates are about a thousand words long, and funny. Those are the only non-negotiable parts of this deal, and in the past guest writers have had trouble with them. This is a long form comedy blog. People don’t come here to see something short that makes them laugh; if they did, I could just post a picture of my it’s too bad Two and a Half Men got cancelled because they’d probably love this joke.

-I’ve been doing this twice a week for four years through sickness, breakups, and Info Hell. If you sign up to write an update and then crap out at the last second, I’ll understand, but I’ll also mock you on here, probably forever.

-Your name is going to be on this, and anywhere between four and eleven people will be reading it (more than that, if you count the people who Google ‘hairy guys’ and are disappointed when see what this blog actually is.) If for whatever reason freaks you out, I’d rather you be having those emotions now than when you’re trying to write the update.

So if you’re looking to positively destroy all of your credibility as a writer and speak to an audience that includes my old third grade teacher and the only two girls from my high school who aren’t pregnant yet, do please drop me a line.

Truman Capps figures he can probably blog about what a terrible idea this was in three weeks’ time.

Tiger Blood


The very picture of sanity.

When I watched Charlie Sheen’s 20/20 interview, I pulled up a Microsoft Word document and started taking notes on specifically how crazy he sounded so that I could describe the experience quickly to people who hadn’t seen the interview yet. Here’s what I came up with:

-Charlie Sheen talks the way I imagine my blog would look if I did cocaine, but when I’m imagining it I’m also doing tequila shots.

-Charlie Sheen talks like his brain has had a really bad day, so it’s masturbating to try and feel better about itself. “God damn it that barista was so mean to me today – good thing the only gear I have is go! I bet that cop who gave me a parking ticket didn’t know that I took more drugs than anyone could survive, and I only survived it because I’m me! You’re damn right I’m different! Yeah!”

-Charlie Sheen talks like he thinks he’s a contender to replace Steve Carell on The Office, and is also crazy.

-Charlie Sheen talks like a shitty actor playing the lead role in a made-for-TV biopic about Robert Downey Jr. in 1997.

But here’s what I think it is, more than any of that: Charlie Sheen is playing Charlie Sheen.

Not that he hasn’t been for a while, mind you – in Platoon he smoked weed through a shotgun, in Major League he played a pitcher who earns a reputation for being a hard living bad boy, and the plot of Two and a Half Men is basically “Charlie Sheen has sex more often than that other guy or his kid.”

But now it looks like Charlie Sheen’s immersion into Charlie Sheen has become so great that he’s pretty much lost himself and become a shapeless caricature of a stereotypical hedonistic lout. Think of it like Black Swan, only with less lesbian oral sex and like 100% more tiger blood.

The best thing that could’ve happened to Charlie Sheen in that 20/20 interview, from a public image standpoint, was for him to test positive on the drug test they gave him. The fact that he wasn’t on drugs when he was saying all those things means that that’s how Charlie Sheen is on a normal day.*

*He’s basically America’s creepy uncle when he’s stone cold sober, and he’s been very blunt and open about the fact that he occasionally does enough drugs to kill a normal human. Hearing that makes me want us to design some sort of Hannibal Lecter style cage that society can put him in whenever he starts ingesting substances that make even normal people act crazy.

But there’s something about his hedonistic persona that seems so forced, like he’s trying to prove something to the world, or maybe himself. He’s like a twelve year old who saw Caligula and is trying to become just like that, but in the most ham-fisted way possible.

“People say it’s lonely at the top,” he says, before sticking his arms out like wings and waggling them back and forth. “But I suuuure like the view!

If somebody wrote that as a line of dialogue in a screenplay about an egocentric Hollywood douchebag, people would laugh that line off as drawing the character too broadly. But Charlie Sheen doesn’t care. He wants to be that broadly drawn. He wants to drive the point home to the entire world that he’s fucked up and crazy, but he doesn’t have the subtle tact of Winona Ryder.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think Charlie Sheen is faking anything and I completely agree with the rest of the world that he’s crazy. Who other than a crazy man spends thousands of dollars on a secret cigar vault hidden behind a cupboard in his gym, only to blow the secrecy of the whole thing by showing it off to a camera crew and talking about what a nifty hiding place it is? Who speaks glowingly of drug use and a hard partying lifestyle, then turns around and demands to have something in his life that isn’t “TMZ’d up the butt”?*

*Charlie Sheen being mad about attracting paparazzi attention for acting like a contemporary Jabba the Hutt is about the same as me complaining about people reading my blog. I mean, seriously – just because I put it up publicly doesn’t mean you’re allowed to look at it, assholes.

But I think that, in addition to the undeniable crazy having an awesome pizza party in his brain, there’s also a very sane, very shrewd sense of public relations ensuring that everything he says and does is as over the top as can be.

I think this because Charlie Sheen is a 45 year old man with expensive tastes who just went from being the most highly paid actor in television to history to one of the most unemployed, which by his own admission in the interview has put him in a bit of a financial crunch. He’s got to pay for the life he’s built for himself, his children, and his ‘goddesses’ somehow, so it’s in his best interests to act full on crazy for the sake of keeping himself in the news and his persona in demand. For a television personality, there’s no bad publicity, but being forgotten is a death sentence.

And hey, I could be wrong. But three days after his 20/20 interview, Charlie Sheen started a Twitter account and got a million followers in roughly a day, setting a new Guinness World Record. If this tells me anything, it’s that 1) The people at Guinness are giving out records for anything these days, and 2) It pays to be crazy.

Truman Capps, due to a highly experimental blood transfusion in the early 90s, actually does have tiger blood.

On A Roll

I'm spending the night in the editing lab at Allen Hall, because I'm absolutely punishing the multimedia project(s) I'm working on. I have a blog in the works about Charlie Sheen, which you'll hopefully see within the next 24 hours.

In the mean time, here's the best thing ever:

Oscar Recap


...get it?


Man, I used to be so damn diligent about the Academy Awards. I’d go out and see as many of the movies as I could, eagerly anticipate Oscar night, and occasionally liveblog the proceedings, both as a means of effective commentary and as a means to weasel my way out of actually writing a blog entry as opposed to just stringing together a bunch of one-liners about how Jeff Bridges played The Dude – more or less the Hair Guy equivalent of Twitter.

But I’m a TV man now, thanks in no small part to the fact that TV has the good sense to come meet me in my home while movies hunker down at the multiplex at Valley River Center and expect me not only to drive all the way out to see them in the car I don’t have, but also pay $10 when I get there. You know why so many people pirate movies, MPAA? Because leaving the house blows.

Since I gave up on movies in favor of TV, Oscar night has become the equivalent of bumping into your ex girlfriend at the mall and noticing that she’s looking particularly hot – so stylish and slickly edited that you forget all those times she charged you $15 for popcorn or led you to believe that Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull was a worthwhile use of anyone’s time. It makes you regret the fact that you only saw four of the Best Picture nominees, and wish you could go back Quantum Leap style and invest an additional 12 hours and $100 in the other six movies.

Danke schoen, film industry. For what it’s worth, here’s my impressions from tonight’s Academy Awards:

Hosting

If weed was a person, and it couldn't be Seth Rogen or Cheech or Chong or Willie Nelson or...

I think James Franco’s logic was this: He knew that he lacks the inherent charisma to make such a good impression with his hosting that he’d get invited back for a second go around, so rather than put his best foot forward and do the job with the dignity it deserves, he just got really high beforehand, because if you’re only going to host the Academy Awards once, you may as well do it baked, right?

I mean, why did they pick James Franco, anyway? Not only does he not necessarily scream ‘charismatic host’, he was one of the nominated actors this year. I guess the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just couldn’t find anybody more qualified – after all, this is just one of the most widely televised events of the year, and they did only have virtually every entertainer in Hollywood to choose from. Rock and a hard place. I understand.

Hey, I just made a 127 Hours joke! Can I host next year?

Best Supporting Actress

She was probably making all kinds of Parkinson's jokes during the Back To The Future reference at the beginning.

The awards were already off to a shaky start – the art directors didn’t exactly make compelling or well rehearsed speeches, and then Kirk Douglas, a national treasure and Hollywood icon, made a speech that, God bless him, was a bit awkward what with all the slow paced, racy comments about Anne Hathaway.*

*I shouldn’t criticize. If ever I’m lucky enough to meet Anne Hathaway, it’s going to be a real struggle not to wink at her and say, “Hey, thanks for getting naked in Brokeback Mountain. It really spoke to me, y’know?”

But then, he gave the award for Best Supporting Actress to Melissa Leo for The Fighter, a movie about Irish people in Boston yelling at each other that, sadly, is not The Departed. And she went up on the stage, accepted her award, and promptly said ‘fuck.’

Tacky? Yes. But not necessarily inexcusable. I say ‘fuck’ a lot, and I can’t guarantee you that I wouldn’t inadvertently do the same thing. But then, once she was done flapping her gums, she, Kirk Douglas, and his assistant turn around to walk off the stage and she takes his fucking cane away from him and mimes hobbling with it herself.

Allow me to clarify, Melissa Leo – Kirk Douglas is 94 years old and he had a stroke in the late 1990s. His need for that cane is far greater than your need to do slapstick prop comedy.

Best Original Score

The Inception score was basically one big tribute to this instrument.

The Social Network? Really, guys? Was there even music in that movie? It didn’t really make a big enough impression on me that I was aware of it. I mean, I’m sure it was fine, but I feel like if we’re going to bestow the film industry’s highest honor on something, it should be something that was good enough to at least be noteworthy.

Hey, you know what? Forget what I said. Let’s give the Congressional Medal of Honor to a single mother who works full time and completed her associate’s degree. I mean, she didn’t save a life or anything spectacular, but she’s doing really well, y’know?

Maybe this is just me and my friends, but whenever we mention Inception, or dreams, or the very act of falling asleep on a plane, somebody inevitably yells “BWAAAAAAAAAH,” in an homage to this song from the Inception score. There’s even an Inception noise button online.

Do you hear that, Academy? Inception’s score gave us an Internet meme. Did The Social Network’s score do that? Probably not, because a website where you push a button and hear part of an ultimately forgettable soundtrack wouldn’t be very popular.

All I’m saying is, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has now given Oscars to Eminem, Three 6 Mafia, and Trent Reznor, but not Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s almost like they don’t want me to go back to the movies.

Truman Capps feels just as clueless at the Emmys when they give out awards for reality TV – as though there’s anything worth rewarding there.

Squirrels


Image quality, not great. But I think you can still see what's important: THIS IS MY ENTIRE SPRING TERM.


And as it turns out, my college experience will end not with a bang, but with a whimper. Or if not a whimper, then whatever sound a guy not getting out of bed until noon every day makes. It’s probably more of a contented grunting. I look forward to finding out in a few weeks.

Rest assured, it didn’t come to this thanks to my own hard work. No, as you may remember, I’m dropping my electronic media concentration so I can focus on my filmmaking career next term and just graduate with a degree in magazine feature writing. Were I to stick with electronic media, I would’ve had to take a very stressful class about how to be a news anchor and a sequential class about how to create packages for local news at the same time in the spring if I wanted to graduate on time, which didn’t really make a lot of sense to me given that my interest in journalism is probably as great as your interest in Battlestar Galactica.

Of course, if I were actually going to focus on the things I wanted to do instead of journalism, my best bet would’ve been to go to a college with an actual film school instead of the University of Oregon. Or not go to college at all and just spend my days playing Fallout and drinking Jack Daniels.

Because honestly, what good is a degree in magazine feature writing going to do me? A sad fact of life is that a lot of magazine journalism involves interviews, more or less the bane of my existence because they put the goodness of my story in the hands of others, who can completely derail it by not being interesting. In one of my feature writing classes* there was a unit on long form feature essays, not unlike the sort of stuff I put on here. My enjoyment of the project was diminished when we were required to incorporate interviews with experts on the subject matter – because what the hell do I need with facts?

*I should mention that I had the distinct pleasure of taking Feature Writing 1 and 2 from Melissa Hart, arguably one of the finest professors at the University of Oregon and my favorite aged flower child.

You’ve heard all this before – I could fill a book with the reasons why I’m ambivalent towards journalism, and at this point I probably have. Knowing that, I’m surprised to find myself kind of sad to be leaving it behind next term, and then forever.

The operative words here are kind of - this isn’t end of Chinatown sad or anything. It’s more like the sort of sad you feel when Luke takes off Darth Vader’s helmet, knowing he’s his father, and they look one another in the eyes for the last few moments of Vader’s life until he suffocates. You’ve been dealing with one another for a long time and it’s sad that it’s over, but there was no other way, and so much other good and exciting stuff is happening elsewhere that you’re not going to let it get you down.

Looking back, I realize spent a lot of my time in the journalism school specifically trying to circumvent doing any actual journalism. In Reporting 1 last fall I wrote my final feature story about marching bands so that I could interview my friends from the OMB as sources. In Info Hell I was purposefully ambiguous about whether some of my interviews had taken place via email or not. Virtually all of my articles at the Oregon Daily Emerald were researched entirely on Wikipedia, and I only contacted sources when my desk editor essentially forced me to.

It was sort of like a game – how little actual journalism can I do while still graduating with a bachelor’s degree in journalism? The answer, I found out, was still one hell of a lot more than I wanted to do; which I suppose speaks to the journalism school’s credit. They’re going to make you do journalism whether you want to or not, just so you know that you got your money’s worth.

Now, though, I’ve basically won at that game, because next term I have not only no journalism but essentially no class at all, unless you consider a 100 level Geology lecture to be work. Now, at long last, all the journalistic bullshit that I had accused of keeping me from doing what I wanted to do is out of the way, and I’ll be free to maximize my creative output.

But then, there’s this Minecraft thing the kids keep talking about…

My old dog Sophie used to love to chase squirrels at the park – she’d go running after them as soon as we let her off the leash, they’d jump up a tree, and she’d promptly go find some raccoon shit to roll in. But one day, when we let her off the leash, she actually managed to get the drop on one particularly incompetent squirrel – it was too slow to start running, I guess, and Sophie clearly was going to catch up to it.

But once she was within range, she stopped, almost confused, and let the squirrel get away. Because she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with the squirrel – she just knew she was supposed to chase it.

That’s sort of me now. I’ve been chasing a term unencumbered by journalistic stress so that I can do what I actually want to do, and now that I’ve finally got it, I’m scared that I’m going to shy away from doing all the stuff I’d said I was going to do – publish the novel, submit some essays to some literary journals, finish the other novel, work on the screenplay – and just roll in raccoon shit instead.

Raccoon shit, in this analogy, is alcohol and video games, if I didn’t make that clear.

Truman Capps hopes you appreciate that he didn’t use the ‘dog chasing a car’ analogy from The Dark Knight. You’re welcome.

Bieber


It's like a zombie movie, with tween girls.

The problem with being almost completely disconnected from modern music is that you only become aware of new bands when you hear people talking about them, which, thanks to the seemingly random names bands are choosing these days, can make it hard to tell whether people are talking about a band at all. After the Grammys I was concerned when I heard that an arcade had apparently burned down and caused so much fallout on Twitter.

Some people list Snow Patrol as one of their favorite bands; to me it sounds more like an activity or a TV show about Canadian Mounties from the late 1970s. The Flaming Lips sound painful. I know nothing at all about Deerhoof save for the fact that they are a hipster band, and I use this knowledge solely as a punchline when I’m mocking hipsters (before now my stock hipster band had been Weezer until one of my hipster friends informed me that they had become too mainstream).

I’m out of the loop, is what I’m saying. It’s not my fault – if any of these bands wanted me to listen to them, they should’ve tried harder to be Pink Floyd between 1972 and 1979. But they did not, so I’ll continue to not listen to them. Easy come, easy go, I suppose.

Needless to say, Justin Bieber totally snuck up on me.*

*Man, can you imagine how many 14-year-old girls wish they could say that?

I was in England when I first became aware of the little tyke – not by hearing his music, necessarily, although I’m sure it was in the air and I’d just mistaken it for some ex-Spice Girl’s solo album or something. No, it was when I started seeing him cropping up in my friends’ news feeds.

Some of it (exclusively from women, mind you) was remarkably positive – a lot of accolades, not necessarily about the quality of Bieber’s music, but definitely about how cute he was. Being as most of the girls saying this were at least in college, I sort of figured Justin Bieber was over the age of consent. I guess I always knew women could be into jailbait too; I’m just surprised that I’m friends with so many of them.

But the vast majority of what I saw in my news feed was people absolutely condemning Justin Bieber. Slandering him up and down. Wishing death and destruction upon him and his career. From this, I surmised that Justin Bieber was Voldemort – I mean, God only knows what sort of evil, twisted soul could inspire so much hatred among so many people.


Well, needless to say, I don’t get it. But my not getting it is twofold.

First, the obvious one: Justin Bieber sucks. I’ve heard his music and it sounds the way good music does not. And yet, he’s got a gigantic, rabid fanbase. This does not make sense.

Only, to some degree, it does. If I’ve learned one thing from N’Sync, Britney Spears, the McRib, Lady Gaga, the Saw franchise, and University of Washington athletics, it’s that terrible things will always be inexplicably popular. To be honest, I’d be a little worried if Justin Bieber wasn’t a pop sensation. I’d be handing out copies of his CDs to people at the mall, yelling, “This guy sucks and you’re Americans! Why don’t you love him?

The second thing I don’t get is why people hate him so bad.

Again, Justin Bieber sucks. I can’t say this enough. He’s the musical equivalent of Twilight. If Justin Bieber were a sport, he would be soccer. If he were a college, he’d be the University of Wa- Oh, wait, I got them earlier.

But you should see the shit that the Internet wants to do to this kid.


And, for the purposes of comparison…


I think we need to take a step back and understand that just because somebody sucks doesn’t mean they necessarily deserve to die. I mean, good Lord, people, the boy is something like 16. I completely understand wanting to kill someone if they they’ve done something morally wrong or if they attend a school that paints their football field an abominable color, but Justin Bieber just makes really, really shitty music.

As someone who is incredibly prone to hyperbole, I understand that all the well constructed anti Justin Bieber rhetoric doesn’t really mean anything – it’s just shittalking for shittalking’s sake, and I’m all about that sort of thing. But I feel like the people who put so much energy into hating and mocking Justin Bieber are unwittingly becoming a part of the Bieber phenomenon. Let’s be honest: Justin Bieber is a commodity, and whether you love him or you hate him, you’re talking about him.*

*I get a free pass on this one because I needed something to write my blog about.

And let’s be honest here – nobody is going to be surprised if Justin Bieber gets a visit from the Attempted Suicide Fairy a time or four later in life. 16 is a vulnerable enough age when you don’t have legions of people who either deify or want to murder you; when all of this suddenly goes away in a few years he’s going to be a filthy rich adolescent who no longer has the eyes of the world keeping him from doing drugs and also groupies.

I don’t know. Speaking as someone who loves to hate things, I feel as though Justin Bieber just isn’t deserving of my ire. Just last night, for example, I went to a restaurant/nightclub where the service took forever, the waiter forgot our drink order, and the bathrooms were right next to the bar so you had to fight through a massive crowd of people every time you had to pee. I hated that place. It personally inconvenienced me and ruined my goddamn evening.

Justin Bieber just sucks, and as far as I’m concerned he can just keep right on sucking, with my blessing, as long as he wants to. This is, after all, America.

Truman Capps fully expects this update to get more hits than any of his other updates from the past three years because of its subject matter. Thanks, Search Engine Optimization!

Music Video


It just makes you want to high five the screen, doesn't it?

Our most recent assignment in my Advanced Electronic Media class was to create a music video, between two and four minutes long, for either an existing song or one of our own creation. At first I was excited about this project, but then I remembered that it’s pointless to make a music video anymore, because every music video made since the music video for Safety Dance has been vastly inferior to the music video for Safety Dance.

I love music videos. They combine one of my favorite parts of movies (the tightly edited montage) with one of my favorite parts of music (songs that I like), and from time to time they involve scantly clad dancing women, which I’m also okay with. When I listen to music, I have an interior music video that I play through in my mind for just about every song. There are some songs that I listen to not necessarily because I like them, but simply because they fit the scene in my head so well.

Case in point? Get Back, by Ludacris. I don’t necessarily like hip hop, and this is one of the most aggressively angry and vitriolic hip hop songs for a nerdy white guy to be listening to, but I can’t get enough of it because whenever I listen to it I picture a group of desperate survivors skillfully fighting off a horde of zombies in a mall, trying to hold out until the helicopter arrives to rescue them. It’s seriously awesome, and I recommend it – it’s way easier to envision all the nasty stuff Luda is talking about when you picture it being done to the bloodthirsty undead.

So yeah, if I’d had a huge budget, two months, all the equipment I wanted, and a cast and crew of hundreds, then that would’ve been the music video I made, and it would’ve been better than Safety Dance. But instead all I had was one consumer grade handheld camera, two weeks, no money, and whatever roommates I could round up.

I guess I knew going in that I wouldn’t be making a video that did the pictures in my head justice, so maybe that’s why I made the somewhat unwise choice to make a music video for the song In The Year 2525, by Zager and Evans.

In The Year 2525 is a special kind of terrible song. It’s so earnestly awful in just about every way that a song can be awful that you have to stop and applaud Zager and Evans for their strident desire not to be average, even if that means making a song that’s basically ear cancer.

In The Year 2525 is a repetitive song that modulates up a half step with each successive verse. There is no chorus. All of the lyrics are melodramatic to the point of being nonsensical, and they describe – quite seriously – a future in which man’s reliance on technology has grown to the point of dystopia.

In the year 5555
Your arms are hanging limp at your sides
Your legs not nothing to do
Some machine is doing that for you

Yeah. It’s like The Room of music. But hey, far better I couple this shitty song with a shitty music video, rather than bringing down something good, right?

So I shot and edited a silly little music video for it, basically a montage of people trying to use technology and having it crap out on them. Nothing perfect, but I felt good about what I’d done, given the time and budgetary constraints.

But for the past two days we’ve been watching everyone else’s music videos in class, and all I can say is that I now feel like I should just go be Amish or something, because a fair number of the videos we’ve watched have blown mine out of the water. They’ve blown mine out of the universe.

Some of the videos we’ve watched have been made with such a degree of skill and beauty that they honestly look better than the sorts of videos you’d see on MTV (presumably in the 30 second break between reality shows about drunk spoiled douchebags screaming at each other). One of the videos actually made our professor, who is a legitimate badass, cry.

And this whole time, my video, which has not been shown yet, is just festering in the middle of the stack of DVDs as the bar gets raised higher and higher by these small masterpieces, made by people with far more creative vision and enthusiasm for this assignment than I could ever hope to muster. Watching my video after all of these thoughtful, emotional works will be a lot like watching the movie Chinatown, followed by a grainy 30 second clip of a fat guy shitting in a dumpster.

It’s a bit disheartening, because in my magazine classes I’m the resident electronic media expert. People come to me with questions about FinalCut Pro and I feel like a genius, dispensing answers like, “The razor tool is the little button that looks like a razor” or “You hit Command + S to save.” Yes, to people with absolutely no electronic media experience whatsoever, I’m a straight up pro.

But you know what? I’m fine. I’m okay. These guys eat, sleep, and breathe electronic media, and have been for years. It stands to reason that they should be great at this, because they’ve probably invested thousands of hours sitting in the dark in front of a computer screen, watching files render or color correcting each scene until it’s perfect. They’ve put in the time, so they deserve the accolades and respect of the class.

Everyone is an expert at something, and I’ve always known that I don’t have the drive to become an electronic media expert. I had just hoped that maybe, by some crazy twist of fate, I would turn out to be the Mozart of electronic media without so much as trying. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m more of a technological Salieri because I’ve got strengths where those brilliant directors and editors have weaknesses.

I mean, how much Subway have they eaten in their lives? Probably less than me. I could shitrock them in the eating Subway department.

Truman Capps is thinking about getting sponsored by Subway, given how much free publicity he does for them.

On The Upcoming Holiday


On a plane once, I had to choose between watching this movie or staring at the seat in front of me for three hours. The seat in front of me was green. Very, very green.


For God’s sake, quit calling it Singles Awareness Day, would you?

Yes, I get it – Valentine’s Day is a holiday for people in relationships, and if you aren’t in one you can’t celebrate. That’s a damn shame, yes, but it’s no reason to get all butthurt and start changing the name of the holiday. Do you call Hanukkah Gentile Awareness Week?

It’s not even that it’s especially rude or offensive to people who are celebrating Valentine’s Day, because from what I’ve seen, couples on Valentine’s Day are too busy affirming the success of their relationship to notice the singles on the sideline trying to make everyone have less fun.

No, it’s more of a recommendation for your own good: People who go around bemoaning Valentine’s Day as Singles Awareness Day give the vibe that they get bitter and jaded when they see other people in love, which, as far as personality traits go, is not especially attractive.

So if you want to be celebrating Singles Awareness Day next year and the year after, by all means, go ahead and call it that.

What is this single person doing on Valentine’s Day? I’m getting a hotel room, and I’ll tell you why.

No, before you even start, this isn’t going to turn into a masturbation joke. If the schizophrenic hobo who has taken up residence under the tree in the vacant lot across the street from our house has taught me anything, it’s that masturbation, like true love, can happen anytime and anywhere, such as under the tree in the vacant lot across the street from our house, within the direct line of sight of our living room window. If he doesn’t need a hotel room, neither do I.

Okay, I guess that kind of turned into a masturbation joke anyway. Also, I managed to compare true love to a hobo masturbating – try to keep that image out of your head at dinner tomorrow, lovebirds.

Where was I? Oh, right. Hotel room.

I’m getting a hotel room because all three of my roommates have girlfriends, all three of them will be spending Valentine’s Day at our thin-walled house, and, at the risk of making yet another dirty joke in a blog my parents and third grade teacher read, that’s not a symphony I want to listen to.*

*If any of my roommates’ parents are reading this, I apologize for the baseless assumption I made about your son. I’m probably way off base, and he and his girlfriend are going to go read the Bible to blind elderly people in a retirement home or something.

Of course, making a hotel reservation this soon before Valentine’s Day would probably be impossible. Doing anything on Valentine’s Day is impossible – restaurants are jam packed, movies are sold out, Castle is a mob scene… Yes, I suppose love does make the world go ‘round, but all the love happening at once brings it to a grinding halt.

None of my relationships have fallen on Valentine’s Day. I consider it a blessing, really, that my love life seems to exclusively operate in the spring, summer, and fall, because I’ve never had to try and throw together a romantic evening at the same time as everyone else is.

Well, I suppose this isn’t entirely true. The Ex Girlfriend and I started officially dating on Valentine’s Day, but at that point it was too late for me to be expected to pull a romantic evening out of my ass.

The following year, of course, the pressure would have been on, because we’d be celebrating our anniversary and Valentine’s Day at the same time, not to mention her birthday, which was the day before Valentine’s Day. To be honest, I was pretty happy with that arrangement – as a boyfriend, all the major dates that I had to plan for and remember were within the same 48-hour period.

One of the many great things about us breaking up when we did, though, was that it spared me having to come up with The Most Romantic 48 Hours Of All Time. When you’re celebrating just a birthday or just an anniversary or just Valentine’s Day you can conceivably squeak by with some cheap roses, a dinner at Olive Garden, and maybe one of those plaques where you name a star after the girl, if you’re feeling really romantic.*

*If there’s intelligent life out there, I sure hope they don’t have lovestruck douchebags pointing a telescope around the sky, picking stars they like, and naming them after their girlfriends, because that puts us in danger of spending the rest of our lives living in the Leslie System.

When all of those events fall on the same weekend, though, you’ve got to be the Jack Bauer of love. You can’t just name a star after the girl at that point; you actually have to take her there, and when you arrive there need to be sentient beings with champagne and chocolate dipped strawberries waiting for you.

All told, that would’ve been a lot of time and energy for me to invest in somebody whose favorite show was Friends.

So yes, from a lazy man’s standpoint my Valentine’s Day will be awesome, but the main reason why I won’t be bitter on Valentine’s Day, even when I’m listening to all three of my roommates making whale music is this:

If those three, who I know for a fact drink beer on the toilet, have been able to find their blue heaven, there is absolutely nothing standing in the way of me or anyone else who doesn’t consume alcohol during a bowel movement.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is, get a divorce, Christina Hendricks. And while you’re at it, get rid of that restraining order, too. I think we can make this thing work.

Truman Capps would like to thank his roommates for providing him so much material, and also remind them that he loves them.

Addiction

I'll be honest: If they sold this in a powder, I'd snort it.


I’ve always felt like I dodged a bullet by not being a coffee drinker. Caffeine is both highly addictive and not especially good for you; the fact that I can’t stand the taste of coffee, be it in black or latte form, is one of those rare occasions where life gives me a thumbs up, winks, and says, “I got your back, Truman. Only in this one very specific and ultimately inconsequential category, but, regardless, I got your back.”

Yet unfortunately, I’ve found a meaty Yin to coffee’s jittery Yang: I am completely and utterly addicted to Subway.

To be honest, I really can’t imagine why. Growing up, when my family would stop at Subway on a road trip, I would always sigh in disappointment and look longingly at the inevitable McDonald’s across the street, jam packed with happy children caulking their arteries in fat and entombing within their intestines parasites that are probably with them to this day. To me, staring glumly at my lonely six inch tuna sandwich, this was torture.

Subway was no fun back then, in the dark pre-Jared days. The Subways my youth were decorated in a really drab style, the walls either tope or adorned with blown up black and white pictures of the New York Subway system. You may as well have been eating in a coffin.

And to a child, the fun of going out to eat somewhere is that it’s exotic – bold and fascinating new tastes, the likes of which you couldn’t get at home. My parents didn’t have a deep fryer. The burgers Mom made didn’t taste like the ones at McDonald’s. There was no playground and ball pit anywhere in our house, an injustice that I brought up with my parents frequently.

Going to Subway was a waste of that exciting trip out to eat – because who the hell wants to eat a tuna fish sandwich at a restaurant? I could get that at home! Hell, if they were going to just charge people for cold sandwiches, what was next? A restaurant for cereal? Bars where you paid to breathe?*

*As it turns out, nightmares come true.

In high school, any inclination I would’ve developed toward Subway was destroyed by my deskmate Matt in Art History senior year. Matt worked at Subway, a job he hated with a passion usually reserved for Middle Eastern holy wars. Each morning, Matt would slump into his chair beside me, look at me bleary eyed, and say,

“I smoked too much weed last night.”

Then, he would launch into a description of the previous night’s horrors at Subway that had made him feel the need to herb up. The meatballs in the meatball marinara? Not necessarily real meat, and whatever the balls were made of, they were never stored at the temperature rated as safe by the Department of Health. The tuna was mixed together daily, by hand, in a big vat in the back room by employees who did not wear gloves or wash their hands first. For about a month, Matt came to class with a gigantic and disgusting blister on the side of his hand, the result of a burn from molten frosting off an oven fresh cookie.

This naturally drove me away from Subway for a good long time, and to this day whenever I see a child eating a Subway tuna sandwich I want to run over and bat it out of his hands before sitting him down for a half hour lecture on germ theory, and also why you should never turn your back on warm frosting.

But then I got to college, where, in the student union, there’s a Subway. It’s always open. Always. Late at night or on Sundays, when all the other food vendors in the building are closed up and empty, there’s a lonely sandwich artist standing at Subway like the guard at Buckingham Palace.

Given the hours that most journalism majors keep, and the proximity of this Subway to Allen Hall, it was inevitable that I would start eating there. What wasn’t as inevitable was the fact that, over the past four years, my Subway intake has skyrocketed to the point that I’ve probably consumed so many $5 footlongs that, were they laid together end to end, they could stretch across the country. This, however, would be a tragic waste of a lot of good Subway that could be given to the homeless, or me.

It’s gotten especially bad this term. I’ve been meaning to save as much money as I can to further fund Girlfriend Is Better and my upcoming Los Angeles escapades, but with the long hours I wind up spending at school and how far away my house is, I’ve been finding myself at Subway basically every day for the past month or so.

I eat so much Subway I can’t even taste the sandwiches anymore. I might just be hooked on the experience – I know basically everyone at the student union Subway now, which, if Subway was Cheers, would probably make me Norm. It’s a shame, too, because if I were Frasier they could make a spinoff about me eating the same sandwiches in a new location with new people.

Yes, I should be packing my own lunches. The problem is that the only food I have in the house is half a loaf of bread and a mostly full packet of Taco Bell brand ground beef seasoning. I often have high hopes of going to the store to get more food, but being as I leave the house every day at around 9:30 and don’t get home until 9:30 or later, I usually miss the window in which I can shop.

Hell, even when I did have food in the house I’d have every intention of packing myself a lunch, but then it was like my subconscious would kick my memory in the nuts, and the next thing I knew I’d be at school, hungry, and on my way to Subway because I’d forgotten to pack a lunch.
I don’t know how I moved from childhood disdain to adolescent revulsion to outright late-college addiction to Subway. Maybe it’s something rooted in that childhood love of going out to eat, but mixed with a more adult sentiment about being healthy, hence why I seem to have settled on Subway, which claims to be a healthy establishment in spite of the fact that it offers not one but two kinds of Philly Cheesesteak (three if you count the new Meltastic Chipotle Steak and Cheese.)

I suppose if I had to pick a thing to get addicted to, though, I’d rather it be submarine sandwiches than heroin. Heroin doesn’t have a $5 menu, and sandwiches leave my veins fresh and appealing.

Truman Capps does not recommend the Veggie Delite, which tastes the way The Elephant Man looks.

Halftime

Not a flattering picture of Justin Timberlake, either.

We all have moments in our lives that, good or bad, get burned into our memories forever, where no amount of counseling or alcohol can unseat them. One of my sadder memories came at halftime of Super Bowl XXXVIII, in 2004.

Yes, that halftime show.

My parents and I were eating ribs and watching Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake flop around the stage and do something resembling music. I didn’t have any idea who Janet Jackson was, save for that she was related to Michael Jackson, which clearly meant she was crazy, and this was back before it was cool to like Justin Timberlake – it would be another two years until Dick In A Box.

If you liked N'Sync, you were gay. If you liked men sticking their dicks in boxes, you were hip and trendy.

So I was watching with muted interest when, at the end of the halftime show, Justin Timberlake ripped off part of Janet Jackson’s top and out flopped a gelatinous, unappealing boob, in front of the entire country, for a good second or so before a merciful cutaway.

Janet Jackson wasn’t, and isn’t, an attractive woman by any means. But I was 15, and at 15 you can’t be too picky about what kind of boobs you get to see during primetime. That said, I knew quite well what a good boob looked like – thanks, shower scene in Starship Troopers - and I resented that in this serendipitous moment where a celebrity was unwittingly exposed on TV, the celebrity in question had to be one of the few whose boobs I wasn’t interested in.

Why not Christina Aguilera? Why not Beyonce? Katy Perry’s career was just getting started then, right? I mean, hell, can Carmen Electra sing? I still would’ve settled for her over Janet Jackson. But no – a female popstar’s costume bursts open during the Super Bowl halftime show and it had to belong to this woman:


You know what? To be honest, I’d rather see Timberlake’s dick. Yeah, I said it.

Right after it happened, I looked at my parents beside me to see that they had missed it – they were both bent over their ribs, facing their plates, blissfully ignorant of the fact that their son had just grown up a little bit more. I contemplated mentioning it to them, but really, what would I say?

“Hey look, Mom and Dad! Tits!”

I just let it slide and kept eating.

I’ve gone into every Super Bowl halftime since then with a little trepidation. This is because the absolute best halftime show in the world is, at the end of the day, just a short, spectacle-heavy rock concert in a venue with terrible acoustics. This format does not really allow for a performance of equal parts entertainment value and symbolic beauty; no halftime show has ever inspired a homeless man to turn his life around and achieve more than any man has achieved before. The best a halftime show can do is make a fat person wait to get another hot dog.

But while there’s a definite low ceiling for how much a halftime show can achieve, there seems to be no bottom for how badly they can do. And, if I can say anything to the credit of this year’s halftime show, Lady Gaga was not involved – so there’s nowhere to go but down.

I don’t strictly dislike The Black Eyed Peas. To borrow a phrase from Jack Donaghy, I haterespect them. I hate that they’re four individuals of dubious musical talent with ridiculous stage names who have been brought together seemingly only to write songs that piss me off; I respect that they’ve some made their song ‘I Gotta Feeling’, which is so earnestly repetitive and bad, the go-to soundtrack for every house party, nightclub, and sporting event in the world.

Naturally, that was the song they were singing when they got airdropped onto the stage, dressed like extras from The Fifth Element, surrounded by white clad dancers.* And, to be honest, it wasn’t that bad – the visuals were cool and I’ve heard the damn song so much that I can tune it out like the buzz of fluorescent lights.

*All of the dancers were clapping in time and doing the wave, so clearly they aren’t Oregon football fans heyoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

But then, Slash showed up.

Usually a member of Guns N’ Roses showing up makes anything, from a garage sale to a bris, thousands of times better – especially when it’s Slash, the coolest one! But not tonight, no.

So there’s Slash, playing the opening riff to ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, and will.i.am shouts, “GIVE IT UP FOR SLASH, ERRYBODY!”, as though we would’ve thought the lanky guy with the Abe Lincoln hat playing Guns N’ Roses’ number one single would be anyone but Slash.

And then there was Fergie, gyrating all over Slash, singing the lyrics and absolutely pissing on this great song the same way she pissed herself at a concert a few years back.* I guess I don’t know what I expected to happen, because Axl Rose wasn’t there to sing. Maybe I just wanted to hear that guitar riff for a few minutes. That still beats the crap out of listening to Fergie sing it. To Slash’s credit, he didn’t seem to thrilled to have any part of this.

*This tidbit is really all I know about Fergie, and let me just say that when the only thing I know about a person is that they publicly wet themselves, it doesn’t bode well for my opinion of that person in the future.

Now, whenever I listen to Sweet Child O Mine, I’m going to think about that moment – the moment that Fergie changed a solid if not overbearing rock song into a hypersexualized, warbly abortion. I was fine with The Black Eyed Peas making their own shitty music, but this Super Bowl halftime show set the precedent that it’s okay for them to go out and destroy actual good music.

But hey – Janet Jackson’s saggy mammary sparked a backlash against smut in the media from the FCC. Maybe they’ll start fining rockstars hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing shitty covers of great songs. If that’s the case, Sebastian Bach had better watch his back.

Truman Capps wonders how many people Googled the word 'bris' and instantly lost respect for him.

In Shape


Bowflex, for whatever reason, advertised their home workout machine on Nickelodeon and thus imprinted itself on my childhood. I think it looks more like the torture machine from 'The Princess Bride', don't you?


Two thirds of my beefy roommates made it their New Year’s Resolution to get in shape this year, primarily by doing the mega-intense P90X workout routine, which, over the course of 90 days of rigorous calisthenics, weight training, yoga, and sweatbands, promises to turn even a contemporary Alec Baldwin into an Alec Baldwin circa 1992.

As a result of this, I will routinely wake up in the morning to the sound of fat men grunting and jumping around in my living room, accompanied by the shouted encouragement of the buff trainer in the video du jour. If I walk out of my room at just the right time, I can look down the hall and see my roommates’ asses rising and falling in time with the video’s royalty-free synth pop music as they do push ups.

It’s moments like these that we remember forever.

My approach to exercise has always been that I’ll start doing it when I need to do it – namely, when I start gaining weight. The idea, then, is to keep myself from gaining weight by trying to get a good walk in every once in a while, or maybe taking the stairs in the journalism school instead of using the elevator (which is primarily intended for handicapped students anyway, lucky bastards). As much as I hate undergoing physical activity, I know that it’s in the interests of avoiding future physical activity, so I cowboy up and do it.

Around New Year’s, I started to toy with the idea of getting ‘in shape’ in 2011. Of course, I’ve already got a shape – sort of a circle on top of a rectangle on top of two narrower rectangles – but I realized that it probably couldn’t hurt me to get into a more flattering shape. Maybe my torso could be more like a triangle, and my rectangle legs could be somehow meatier (in a good way).

And when better than now, after all? As a University of Oregon student I get free access to the Rec Center with all its exercise equipment and locker rooms and everything else that goes along with physical fitness. In four years the only time I’ve gone to the Rec Center was to drop something off with one of my friends who worked there.

The entire time I was in the building I felt the same sort of uncomfortable exclusion as I do whenever I’m in a church. At a church or a gym, everybody is reaffirming their faith, be it in God or their body. The only difference is that there are far more people I’d want to see naked in a gym than in a church.

And to me, that’s a difficult world to break into – not necessarily the world of spending time with people you’d want to see naked, although that is difficult, but the Cliff Bar eating, brightly colored Spandex wearing world of the gym.

I can imagine myself going to the Rec Center for the first time – walking in and awkwardly looking for a weight machine like the new kid looking for a table in the cafeteria. All eyes would be on me - Check out the new guy! - as I sat down at a sweatstained but unoccupied machine and started lifting whatever pitiful amount of weight I could manage.

And then, after a few minutes, some beefcake type in a Trailblazers workout shirt would come over, pull out one of his ear buds (in my nightmares he’s always listening to Kanye West, the international music of the douches) and say, ‘Hey, buddy, you’re actually doing that wrong.’

He would proceed, in such a goddamn friendly way, to show me the proper way to work out, pat me on the back, and stride off into the daylight as I wallowed in the contempt and pity of the rest of the gym.

The point is, I feel as though going to the gym is the recipe for a huge Classic Truman Capps Moment, and I’m trying as hard as I can to avoid those. Unsuccessfully.

In lieu of subjecting myself to that kind of embarrassment, I’ve resolved to start eating better for now, and then, once I get to California this summer, get a gym membership and start swimming regularly.*

*I picked swimming both because it supposedly exercises every part of your body at once, which is good for me because I’m lazy, and more importantly because Don Draper started doing it on Mad Men and it’s arguably the only thing he does that’s good for your health.

Because, you see, Los Angeles is basically one huge gym. Everyone works out. At work this summer, people asked me what gym I went to in the same way that regular people ask each other what their favorite color is. Also, it’s probably good networking, and it however marginally increases the chance that I’ll bump into Christina Hendricks. Because like all major celebrities, Christina Hendricks works out at a 24 Hour Fitness in North Hollywood.

I don’t know why I feel as though I’d be any safer from the helpful gym douchebags in Los Angeles – a city renowned worldwide for its vain douchebag population – than I would be in Eugene. Maybe it’s because in LA, I’d have the anonymity of the big city to protect me.

If somebody came up and publicly displayed my ignorance of fitness to the entire gym, I could just cancel my membership there and start anew elsewhere. I like to think I’d pick up all the essentials before I ran out of gyms in the San Fernando Valley.

What’s more likely is that working out in six months seems like a comfortable and friendly idea because it’s six months away. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, six months from now. In the meantime, I’m walking the two miles to and from my house several times a week and I haven’t had a Philly Cheeseteak in God knows how long.

Which, I suppose, puts me ahead of the entire State of Texas. So there’s that.

Truman Capps comprehends that to truly get into shape, you have to both exercise AND eat right, but he refuses to acknowledge this fact.

Class Dismissed


This is a mildly amusing pun, which they proceed to beat the shit out of for the next 70 minutes.


I feel like my class about gender and diversity in the media was pretty much designed to piss me off. It already earned itself a blog update a few weeks ago when we examined the injustice of people who choose to dress a certain way being stereotyped as people who like to dress that way, but last week this class really ground the shit out of my gears with a video about the fundamental racism, sexism, and elitism of television. I was so upset I nearly interrupted my riveting coverage of the BCS trip to talk about it, which I’m sure would’ve upset both of my readers.

From the outset, I suppose I knew this video and I weren’t going to be friends. I love television. On the list of things I love, I’d rate it slightly above chipotle mayonnaise and just behind the Batmobile, if that gives you any idea of how enthusiastic I am about the medium. I want to make television for a living, so imagine how I felt when I went to class and was shown a video that basically told me television hates women, minorities, and poor people as much as Mel Gibson does.

The gist of the video, Class Dismissed, which you can watch here on YouTube if you’re white and want to feel bad about it, is that television has historically misrepresented the working class in order to make everyone feel better about the sharp class divide in this country.

Working class people, the video alleges, are portrayed as boorish and stupid, while minorities are depicted in whitewashed circumstances that makes their problems seem simple and funny. The corporations buying ad time on TV apparently mandated these setups in order to minimize society’s problems with jokes so that people will keep buying their stuff.

Working class fathers like Homer Simpson, Archie Bunker, and Al Bundy are, according to the video, comically stupid so that America can laugh away the struggles of working class life, while real working class people will enjoy their representation and not instigate class warfare.

Likewise, poor black people are shown to be happy and live comfortably on shows like What’s Happening so that people will write off the problems of black poverty, while affluent black people like the ones on The Jeffersons are just there to show white people that black people are fine and we can stop worrying about inequality. Likewise, more accurate depictions of black poverty and drug use like those seen on hourlong dramas supposedly stereotype blacks as criminal savages.

It’s tough to know where to begin on a topic like this, but I guess I’ll just say what’s obvious: Everyone involved with Class Dismissed is wrong, and they probably don’t watch that much TV, either. I won’t say they’re stupid, though, because it takes a fair amount of tact to cobble together a few dozen out of context clips from classic television shows and then formulate a bullshit thesis around them. So in that regard, good job, guys!

Working class fathers aren’t portrayed as stupid and dysfunctional to make us feel better about poor people; they’re portrayed as stupid and dysfunctional because stupid people are funny, and comedy generally revolves around funny things happening. I really can’t imagine it being more complicated than that – if you’re writing a comedy about a working class family, it makes sense that the head of the household would be the one who fucks up the most. It makes it easy to up the stakes before the commercials because the father is usually in the position to do the most damage and create the most conflict with his shenanigans.

Furthermore, if you look at the working class fathers they show, like Homer Simpson or Archie Bunker, you’ll start to realize that while they’re not particularly intelligent, that doesn’t make them bad people. Homer loves his wife and kids and frequently makes sacrifices to do what’s best for them. Yes, Archie Bunker was an ignorant racist, but he also overcame his prejudices to give a eulogy at funeral for a Jewish friend and attempt to thwart a cross burning by a local Klan chapter.*

*Al Bundy is pretty soundly terrible, but that’s just because Married… With Children was an awful fucking show.

How do you like that, Class Dismissed? Did you stop a cross burning recently? Because the lynchpin of your black helicopter elitist conspiracy theory did. I guess that’s the part of the evil conspiracy where major corporations attempt to show that racism is bad.

As far as minorities are concerned, I don’t know what the Class Dismissed people are looking for. Poor black people being happy and not dealing with drugs and crime was racist, and rich black people was also racist, and poor black people being sad and dealing with drugs and crime was racist.

By this standard, the only non-racist representation of black people would be a comedy set in a housing project where all of the characters were sad crack addicts, but all of the crack usage would be played completely straight. Is that the kind of show you want to watch, Class Dismissed? It doesn’t whitewash poverty, and I guarantee you it’ll won’t make anybody feel good. The Crackheads, they’d call it.

What the producers of Class Dismissed don’t or refuse to understand is that you can’t go into a 22 minute three camera sitcom and expect to see something groundbreaking and beautiful that will fundamentally redefine the social structure of Western Civilization. That’s not because television can’t make people think, because it can, and does very often; it’s because an episodic series can’t give you an answer to a question that big.

The characters have to come back and have problems next week, which doesn’t work if in the previous episode they achieved total enlightenment, discovered the true meaning of Christmas, and learned some neat facts about fire safety too.

However, should anybody involved with Class Dismissed read this update, do please tell me how I can make a living being pointlessly outraged, because I would love to get in on that.

Truman Capps would also like to point out that Arrested Development was all about stupid, dysfunctional, greedy rich white people, and nobody in the video mentioned that show.