Ha!

Looks like all three of my unlikely predictions came true, now that the Raiders have won their 5th game. Suck it, Feldstein! To review:

What I said before the season:

"The Denver Broncos will win at least six games. People are predicting that the bottom three teams in the AFC West are all going to be abysmal, to the tune of 4-12 or 3-13, but the fact is the schedule won't permit that. One of them is going to win 6 or more games, and I think it'll be the Broncos."

Current result: the Broncos have already won 8 games, with 2 games to go.

What I said before the season:

"The Oakland Raiders will win at least five games. This isn't schedule-related; rather, I think that they've gained enough experience to surprise a few teams, plus win three or so AFC West games. They're not the god-awful Raiders of years past, just the god-mediocre Raiders."

Current result: the Raiders have already won 5 games, with 2 games to go.

What I said before the season:

"I can't believe that people are assuming that simply because Tom Brady is back, the Patriots are going to be a 14-2 team. This team's problems go way deeper than Brady being injured; the defense is far more questionable than before, for all the offensive tools they might have. I predict they go 11-5, max."

Current result: the Patriots have already lost 5 games, with 2 games to go.

Nyah nyah nyah etc.

There's a great urinal

at Henry's in Berkeley. In this (slightly not-safe-for-work) video, I do what everyone should do to the Stanfurd tree.

Now that I've been to Minnesota

here are the U.S. states I've been to:

1. Arizona
2. California
3. Connecticut
4. Delaware
5. Georgia
6. Idaho
7. Illinois
8. Indiana
9. Maine
10. Maryland
11. Massachusetts
12. Michigan
13. Minnesota
14. Montana
15. Nevada
16. New Hampshire
17. New Jersey
18. New York
19. North Carolina
20. Ohio
21. Oregon
22. Pennsylvania
23. Rhode Island
24. Tennessee
25. Texas
26. Utah
27. Vermont
28. Virginia
29. Washington
30. West Virginia
31. Wisconsin
32. Wyoming

Ones I still need to hit up:

1. Alaska
2. Alabama
3. Arkansas
4. Colorado
5. Florida
6. Hawaii
7. Iowa
8. Kansas
9. Kentucky
10. Louisiana
11. Mississippi
12. Missouri
13. Nebraska
14. New Mexico
15. North Dakota
16. Oklahoma
17. South Carolina
18. South Dakota

This is using my personal criteria that for a given state to count, I must either have spent the night in the state or gone there on purpose for some reason. In other words, no layovers in airports or states that I've just driven through without stopping.

Any recommendations for what the next few states should be?

A few predictions

about the upcoming NFL season, with a nod to Aaron Feldstein (http://nec-roughness.blogspot.com/):

--The Denver Broncos will win at least six games. People are predicting that the bottom three teams in the AFC West are all going to be abysmal, to the tune of 4-12 or 3-13, but the fact is the schedule won't permit that. One of them is going to win 6 or more games, and I think it'll be the Broncos.
--The Oakland Raiders will win at least five games. This isn't schedule-related; rather, I think that they've gained enough experience to surprise a few teams, plus win three or so AFC West games. They're not the god-awful Raiders of years past, just the god-mediocre Raiders.
--I can't believe that people are assuming that simply because Tom Brady is back, the Patriots are going to be a 14-2 team. This team's problems go way deeper than Brady being injured; the defense is far more questionable than before, for all the offensive tools they might have. I predict they go 11-5, max.

I don't know much about the NFL these days, but I'd stake some cash on these things. Come by the bar if you want to enter anything in the wager book.

Let's put the pronunciation of "Nevada" to bed.

According to people who actually live there, the state of Nevada's name is pronounced with a short a, thusly:

nuh-va-dah (pronouncing the "a" as in "cat")

not with a long a, thusly:

nuh-vaaaah-dah.

The only argument I've ever heard for pronouncing the state's name incorrectly is that it's how Spanish speakers would pronounce it. But that's not true. Here's how an actual Spanish speaker (whom I recorded at the bar, because I'm nerdy) pronounces it:

http://pacificstandardbrooklyn.com/memo.m4a

You'll notice that he pronounces the "d" in the Spanish way (more like a "th"), as opposed to the American way East Coast people pronounce it. In short, the East Coast pronunciation of "Nevada" is incorrect in both English and Spanish. Please, stop.

The pleasures and limits of inconvenience.

In the midst of this e-book revolution, fans of physical books can take heart, I think, from the story of vinyl. Because I can't resist putting things in (loose and rusty) Heideggerian terms, here goes: vinyl dropped from the center to the margin of our culture. With the advent of cassettes and CDs, and the resulting loss of everyday expertise in vinyl and record players by most non-audiophile folks, the vinyl object and the record player themselves became what Heidegger might call "present-at-hand" for most: more object than tool, bulky, time-intensive, involving the placement (and maintenance) of a needle, the flipping of the record, and so on. There's no track reordering without a bunch of work; there's no shuffle between songs on separate albums without even more work.

Of course, that's what those (like me--guilty as charged) who have become vinyl revivalists began to miss after a while. And I don't think, as others have claimed, that it was pure nostalgia. It's a return to music as a physically produced medium, rather than an invisible, abstract, one-click shuffle on a computer. It's like actually watching bow put to strings on a violin, rather than just hearing the result. And it preserves the integrity of the album as a single piece of music. Now record players are back in major music stores and as part of stereo systems (they'd all but diseappeared, except as DJ units, at their lowest point).

Books are busy falling to the margins now, but I think they may be picked up again by newer generations who grow up doing the bulk of their reading on computers and e-book readers, not just barely kept in business by dyed-in-the-wool bibliophiles like me. The only thing that scares me a bit is that books don't have the same degree of inconvenience as vinyl does, so they might, paradoxically, be victims of their own relative efficiency. For instance, I don't see videotapes ever coming back; they certainly seem a tad out of date, but there's not enough of a difference between the experience of putting a videotape into a VCR and playing it and putting in a DVD (or playing a movie on your computer) to create a demand for videotapes. VCRs just seem slightly worse, less efficient and lower-quality. There will be videotape collectors, insofar as there are collectors of anything, but there ain't gonna be a new videotape industry, as there now is with vinyl and hopefully will remain with books. In the end, I think there is indeed enough of a difference between sitting down with a physical volume, with the smell of its paper and the look of its printed words, among other lovely physical minutiae, and sitting down with an e-book, that there will always be a market for well-made, high-end editions, broadsheets, and the like, probably by small and academic presses, much in the same way that small music labels put out vinyl editions. But that could just be my old-fashionedness talking.

In any case, now I'd like to broaden my horizons a bit, and move from a pretty pragmatic discussion of music, video, and book forms, to the idea of inconvenience, or presence-at-hand, in general. Plus hipsters. Because I think those concepts are what more extreme hipsters (the word "hipster" itself is beginning to seem more like a present-at-hand, rather than a ready-at-hand, word, these days, to the point where I don't like to use it but can't find a better alternative) are after, more than the rest of us: a complete presence-at-hand lifestyle. I don't think anyone considers seeking out the vintage, the odd, the kitchy as distasteful if it's done to a moderate degree; it's an essential human instinct to be collectors, to reach for what's at the margins of our culture in order to define ourselves as unique people or subgroups. But there's also an instinct to say "fuck off" to those at the extreme, those who won't lower themselves to the everyday, shallow coping behavior that is nonetheless essentially human: those who wear sunglasses at night, who just can't have a standard haircut or new, non-destroyed jeans, who won't go to large chain stores even if they're the cheapest place to find something they desperately need, who refuse to (non-ironically) like a new Avril Lavigne song even when it's good because it's corporate music (damn it, when are we all gonna join hands and sing "Girlfriend"?)

Life can't all be presence-at-hand without a trust fund, in other words.

But as I've said, I like my vinyl, not exclusively, but for my all-time favorite records (I just got REM's first two albums on 180-gram!), and I like my thick-paged, boutique-edition physical books. And you can bet if I ever live in a place where me and my friends can have lofts, we'll send messages to each other on the legs of thoroughbred pigeons. It'll be like having thirty iPhones that poop and mate.