The Oscars recently switched from 5 Best Picture Nominees to 10. The rationale, as I understand it is so they can avoid the critique of “How could the Academy possibly have overlooked my movie? It was artsy with lots of weeping and a gay alcoholic idiot savant version of King Henry V as the lead. What else could they ask for?” The only thing that this move will do is downgrade the level of movie that is being slighted. “What? They didn’t nominate ‘2012’?” They have no chance of winning, but are still disgruntled at not being in the running.
Just like the brackets for March Madness. A ton of teams that were NOT selected would protest that they should have been. They might be right in that they deserve to be counted in the top 64 in the nation, but they don’t have much chance of being #1. The NCAA, like the Oscars, doesn’t give out silver medals.
Statistically, you wouldn’t lose much from March Madness if you started with only 16 teams. Except that all important TV revenue, of course. Or, you can go the other route and expand to 256 teams. I’d actually like to see 512 teams, because then I would get to see dozens of heads exploding as they try to fill out their brackets, prognosticating the probability on 5 levels in Wake Forest meeting Gonzaga or Marquette or UAB or George Mason or ...
It would really wear down the winning teams. Hopefully, they will all get worn down to the point where no team actually wins. Somewhere around the semi-final round the teams just give up and go back to class to take their mid-term exams. Stop the Madness!
They still take classes, right? Or do they just text it in from courtside?
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When I read my rants, raves and constant griping on this blog, they seem better in theory than in practice. It’s bloviated bombast at best. Now that I write it, the name “Bloviated Bombastic Blog” would have been better than “The Gripes of Wrath”. Maybe I could have lightened it up with the equally alliterative “Hogenmogen’s Happy Hour”. But, I’d probably be sick of those, given time.
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Just like the brackets for March Madness. A ton of teams that were NOT selected would protest that they should have been. They might be right in that they deserve to be counted in the top 64 in the nation, but they don’t have much chance of being #1. The NCAA, like the Oscars, doesn’t give out silver medals.
Statistically, you wouldn’t lose much from March Madness if you started with only 16 teams. Except that all important TV revenue, of course. Or, you can go the other route and expand to 256 teams. I’d actually like to see 512 teams, because then I would get to see dozens of heads exploding as they try to fill out their brackets, prognosticating the probability on 5 levels in Wake Forest meeting Gonzaga or Marquette or UAB or George Mason or ...
It would really wear down the winning teams. Hopefully, they will all get worn down to the point where no team actually wins. Somewhere around the semi-final round the teams just give up and go back to class to take their mid-term exams. Stop the Madness!
They still take classes, right? Or do they just text it in from courtside?
___________________
When I read my rants, raves and constant griping on this blog, they seem better in theory than in practice. It’s bloviated bombast at best. Now that I write it, the name “Bloviated Bombastic Blog” would have been better than “The Gripes of Wrath”. Maybe I could have lightened it up with the equally alliterative “Hogenmogen’s Happy Hour”. But, I’d probably be sick of those, given time.
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”Bombastic” would be a good description of the Spawn graphic novel, too. I dislike repeating a vocabulary word in such close proximity, but that’s the word I was thinking of while reading. I saw the HBO animated series and the live action movie back in ’97 or so. Those were pretty interesting, but lacking an overarching plot.
The premise is that Spawn is given all kinds of cool powers from Hell and set back upon the Earth to do something. He doesn’t quite understand his assignment and neither do I. In the movie, he teams up with a previous hell spawn who didn’t follow his assignment either. In a fit of special effects, they manage to kill the Devil. Doesn’t really leave a lot of room for sequels.
In the HBO series, they introduce this Angela “Heaven spawn” that they immediately drop, having gone nowhere. In the graphic novel, they make reference to having fought some epic battle with her, but it isn’t shown. In the movie, you get neither. So much for the T&A factor.
The graphic novel disappointed me. The creator, Todd McFarlane, ditched his paying gig at the major publishers to start the Spawn project without any interference. He should have kept an editor to weed out the wall-of-text narrations and the ham handed expositions. The artwork was great, but it was used mostly to show how “badass” the character can be. For example, we’re shown an ugly, seething creature that rips out human hearts. Half of the next page is taken up with a badass picture. “Ah, one more for my collection… So says THE VIOLATOR!! “ Would anyone really say that? Does it advance the story any?
99% of the time, the book is better than the movie. This is the other 1%, and the movie wasn't that great.
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Why isn’t the opposite of “bad-ass” a “good-ass”? I never got the hang of how women judge guy’s asses. Perhaps it is tight pants and youthful, perky muscle tone. I’m not jealous of a “good ass” guy, because after he turns 30, without regular exercise, a guy’s ass will either be bloated or saggy or both. Besides, anyone over 30 wearing tight pants is a poser or a queer, not a bad-ass. With baggy jeans and other looser fitting clothing, all claims that one’s ass is good, bad or ugly are unverifiable. You could require an ass-o-gram. If a suspected bad-ass submits to an ass-o-gram in the first place, you can safely assume that he’s no real bad-ass, unless he’s a poser bad-ass. See, there are so many complex rules to this badness thing that it’s hard to lay them all out in one place.
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I’ve never sat around thinking “This moment would be perfect if only I had some Paul Williams CDs playing right now.”
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I kind of wish that we lived in a simpler world where the bad guys wore funny costumes and talked in that sneering, superior way that bad guys in cartoons do. We could just throw them all in prison before they committed any crimes, and there’d be no Al Qaeda. And no congress.
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