Saturday, January 02, 2010

BoneDaddy's Top Ten Shows of the Decade I'm king of the late lists.

10) Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. No one talks about this anymore, but for a while it was as funny as anything on TV. Laughing at it or laughing with it? Either way, you're laughing.

9) 24. Yes, it's a stupid show. Anyone who uses it as an excuse for Bush-era torture is simply an idiot. I got sick of the torture before most. Before it went off the rails, this show was fun, comic book entertainment. TV needs more action, bad accents and wives with amnesia.

8) World Series of Poker. Like everything else on this list, ESPN's heavily edited broadcast of the WSOP Main Event entertained, amused and informed. Nothing else on this list, however, made me money. Respect must be paid. Also, somewhere along the line I started liking Norman Chad. As former Bear Stearns exec Steve Beglieter made a raise - "That's a big bet! Especially in this economy!"

7) Freaks & Geeks. Has an Outsiders-esque cast of future stars. There's a lot of regret in TV geek circles that this show did not last beyond one season, but I'm not sure it needed to do more than it already had. (Technically, this show started in 1999, but most of the shows aired in 2000 and I suspect more people have seen it on DVD in the past decade than saw it broadcast so here it is.)

6) The Office. When I heard they were remaking the brilliant British show I thought, that's stupid. When I heard they cast Steve Carrell I thought, that's brilliant. And it is.

5) Friday Night Lights. Up and down seasons two and three keep this show from landing higher on the list. The first season was pitch perfect. Mr and Mrs Coach get the well deserved acting kudos and Taylor Kitsch sets the hearts a-swooning. For me, Zach Gilford as QB2 Matt Saracen is the heart and soul of the show.

4) Mad Men. The show has such great depth it takes me three pages to say anything about it. Sometimes commentary over at Pandagon, or from Mrs. BoneDaddy, or from Tony Kornheiser on the BS Report will make me re-think scenes in completely different ways because there are many valid ways to read this show. Also, it's one of those shows that just hit on a great cast top to bottom.

3) Lost. This could flip with #2 if it sticks the landing. It's also possible that it could plummet completely off the list if it squanders and sputters to a meandering nonsense ending. Scares me to type that, but it's true. Lost could finish as the longest Twilight Zone episode ever. That could be a great compliment. On the other hand, some of those Twilight Zone episodes aren't actually as good as we remember. (Please stick the landing ...)

2) Arrested Development. One of the best comedy casts of all time combined with the best comedy writing on TV. How good was this show? The jokes you only catch the second time around are better than the jokes other shows labor to set up and announce with a laugh track.

1) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I believe you could study modern U.S. presidents through the comedians who best lampooned them. Nixon through Herblock, Reagan through Doonesbury. Clinton through This Modern World. The best comedy about the W tragedy, and often the best commentary and even the best reporting of the time, came from The Daily Show. One thing the top 7 shows here have in common is great supporting casts. The Daily Show correspondents - going back to the time Ed Helms, Steve Carrell and Steven Colbert worked together and without missing a beat to today's Aasif Mandvi, John Oliver and Larry Wilmore - created some of the best moments on the show. I would buy a "This Week In God" DVD in a second and a "Daily Show news of the 2000s" even faster.

Honorable Mention/Haven't Seen Enough Yet/Cop Out Section: 30 Rock, Dexter (only on season 2), Sportscenter, The Wire (I'm guaranteed to love this show so I haven't watched any until I can devote the time to devouring the whole series, odd as that sounds), Battlestar Galactica (someone should pass a law separating new religions, mythologies and prophecies from TV science fiction. Just stop it.) and The Colbert Report.

Labels: Bush, Lists, poker, sci-fi, TV

09:57 bone daddy

Monday, November 02, 2009

What Poker Can Teach Us - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Labels: poker

12:05 cdogzilla

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

2008 in Books
I took up the 888 challenge this past year and succeeded, although with much less ambition that I intended. I tracked my books through my LibraryThing, which was a blast even while it managed to show me just how middle and lowbrow so much of my reading has become in the past year. In the 888 challenge, you read eight books in eight different categories and are allowed eight repeats. My initial categories were things like politics, history, over 25 years old and books I've been avoiding (generally meaty classics). By the end of the year, poker had its own category, I had split crime and pulp into two separate categories while combining history and politics into one and filling it out with a history of the World Series of Poker, and those books I'd been avoiding? Still generally avoiding them.

That said, my reading has always had more than its share of comics, sci-fi and crime. I shouldn't be shocked by how it looks in cover view.

Two of my favorite books of the year were admirably lowbrow. I can't say enough good things about Lucky at Cards and Grifter's Game, both reprinted by Hard Case Crime. Both are long on obsession and cons and short on meandering. Someone once described a good novel as being like a Ramones song. Bang! Bang! Bang! and you're done. Grifter's Game was initially published as Mona, but you should get the reprint because the cover of the original, while much more lurid, gives away the shocking and poetic ending. And Lucky at Cards features my favorite tag line of the year - "He could handle cards like a master. But could he handle her?" If that doesn't crack you up, go read James Patterson.

My political reading of late has been largely depressing. I'm sending Worst President Ever off with a bunch of anti-Bush books. Trainwreck:The End of the Conservative Revolution (and Not a Moment Too Soon)by Bill Press (and researched by Kevin at Ghost in the Machine) bookended the year nicely with Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal. Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy spends no time establishing that W was a horrible president - you already knew that - but tries to explain the possible psychological/Shakespearean family dynamics that lead to W's awful mental make-up. It's a slightly rude poke in the brain of the president. (Excuse the word brain there.) It does contain a lot of personal and Bush family information that may be new to you.

For complete and utter depression, however, I recommend The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How America's War on Terror Turned into a War on America's Ideals by Jane Meyer. It exhaustively details our inexcusable rendition and torture program. Dick Cheney is the star of the book, to his eternal shame. I'm glad I read it, but it truly made me sad.

Kid's books did not. I proudly used children's literature as one of my 888 categories. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was even better than I remembered. Peter is a true character, in every sense, and by the end of the book I disliked Fudge just like one might dislike a younger sibling - and this comes from someone who is but does not have a younger sibling. I'm too old to have read Holes as a kid, but I can easily see why it is heading for classic status. It will be read by generations of subversive kids. Tightly plotted and funny.

Nothing blew me away in 2008, the way Watership Down did in 2007. Although with two strong Lawrence Block novels, a new name may have achieved "Grab at Any Library Sale" status. I'll start 2009's 888 challenge conceding that poker, crime and children's literature may as well be categories and we'll see where it goes.

Labels: 2008, Books, Bush, crime, Lists, poker

14:49 bone daddy

Monday, February 11, 2008

Daniel Negreanu, poker player, Obama supporter. Possibly also Canadian, so don't expect him to do all the voting work.

Labels: 2008, Obama, poker

11:02 bone daddy

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Knows When to Hold 'Em James McManus on Barack Obama's poker history. Obama took up the game in the Illinois legislature apparently as a way to make connections. This is the third time or so I've heard he's a decent player, which makes me more inclined to vote for him. (I plan to drop this info at my next home game, which has members that lean too far rightward. That Obama's poker playing may switch votes says a lot about the fanaticism my group has for poker or the utter lack of enthusiasm many republicans have for their field.) McManus wrote Positively Fifth Street, about covering and playing in the 2000 World Series of Poker and the Binion murder trial. It's a decent book and he's supposedly at work on a book about the history of poker, which might be even better since the parts of Fifth Street that I didn't like were mostly autobiographical. (Link via Ghost in the Machine, which has become a nice clearinghouse for all things Obama.)

Labels: 2008, Books, Obama, poker

20:18 bone daddy

Friday, January 04, 2008

Top Six Novels of 2007

6) The Saturdays, Elizabeth Enright - This is a reissued, nearly lost gem of a juvenile novel, first published in 1941. The four Melendy kids decide to pool their allowances so once a week one of them can have a forty cent adventure instead of each of them trying to have a ten cent adventure. As history, the book is fascinating. A six year old walking alone around New York City to get to the circus! There's something beautiful about Enright's vision of childhold here that probably makes The Saturdays more appealling to grownups than actual kids. (My seven year old read this but only once and didn't seem to like it as much as me and Mrs. BoneDaddy.) She romanticizes siblings and long afternoons with little to do, out of the way playrooms and "what I want to be" dreams. Adults probably like that stuff more than kids.

5) Gone, Baby, Gone, Dennis Lehane (1998) - I've had this book forever. Fear of spoilers surrounding the movie convinced me to finally pick it up. Lehane doesn't do anything great, but he does a lot of things well. His dialogue is good, but I didn't put this away with my Elmore Leonard or anything. The sense of place is strong, if one note - this is not a Boston novel, it's a south Boston novel. And the plot ... well, if you've seen the movie you know the plot. The resolution is sad, mostly earned and admirably unflinching. I did tear through this in a day, so it also works as a good, but not really great thriller.

4) The Abstinence Teacher, Tom Perrotta (2007) - For me it was a better year in non-fiction (with two giant exceptions coming), since I have to start talking about Perrotta's latest by saying it's not as good as either Election or Little Children. Ruth Ramsey accidentally tells the truth while teaching high school sex ed (oral sex - "some people enjoy it") and the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth begins a crusade against the school, sex ed and Ruth. They insert in the classroom a Tracy Flick-ish co-teacher, who is the only part of The Abstinence Teacher to be truly satirical. Perrotta writes with a lot of sympathy for Tim - former addict, Tabernacle member, soccer coach for Ruth's daughter and other half of the novel's focus. I suspect this novel signals Perrotta stepping away from satire towards a contemporary Updike area. He is a master of suburban unhappiness - which is rarer than it sounds - but also great at comedy. A slightly unsatisfying finish keeps this from finishing higher on my list.

3) The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead (2000) - Imagine if the elevator were more important than the car and the computer. If Otis were better known than Ford and Edison. Then imagine the power a corrupt union of elevator inspectors could have over a city, if that city existed in some kind of Brazil-ian (the movie, not the country) non-time, non-place. That's odd enough. But what if a new way of inspecting elevators split the union into the traditionalists and the intuitionists, who can feel what an elevator will do? If one side wanted to discredit the other side, they could frame Lila Mae, the first black female elevator inspector and an Intuitionist to boot, right? (Racism, by the way, is rampant. And it's a sign of the maturity of Whitehead's vision that Lila is the second black elevator inspector and the first one hates her because he feels he paid all the dues for her and she's stirring up the trouble that had settled down.) Odd, dense and certainly not for everyone, but I liked it.

2) Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972) - Now we get to the reccomendations without reservations. There's a long list of movies I won't see because I loved the book. The list of books I wouldn't read because I loved the movie too much was one book long. Watership Down, the movie, probably isn't nearly as good as I remember it. When I was nine, this movie had more of an impact on me than Star Wars, not that I'd have ever admitted it.

So I refused to read the book for a few decades. I'm funny that way. To my surprise - I have read other Richard Adams books - Watership Down is a masterpiece. The heft of the book always made me think it was crammed full of naturalistic garbage and meandering nature writing in British and/or rabbit slang, but the book is terrifically paced. Ultimately it's as much an adventure novel as an allegory with the nature writing complementing the story.

Watership Down is filled with chill scenes, and I don't think it's entirely because certain quotes ("There's a dog loose in the woods...""Can you run, rabbit?") are indelibly marked on my brain. Bigwig in the tunnel was utterly gripping and people, we're talking about rabbits here.

1)Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (2007) - My No Duh choice. The publishing event of the year was also the book of the year. Some of the nitpickers make some good points about the book. I have complaints here and there about other Potter books, but I'm also upping the degree of difficulty here. Rowling had to finish an epic story, tie up a bunch of loose ends, give many characters their due and tell a self-containted story for children and adults, all under a spotlight brighter than has ever been put on an author and Deathly Hallows got it done.

For me, the hype built up the experience. Because I partially experienced it all through the eyes of a seven year old I was reminded that story-telling is often a social activity. Round the campfire, in front of the TV, whatever. Stories and masses aren't enemies. The articles, the book discussions and yes, even the balloons in the Stop-n-Shop added to the fun but only because the book delivered. (Also helped that I managed to finish the book without encountering spoilers - even from my own house.) Harry walking through the woods surrounded by ghosts (you know what I'm talking about if you've read the book) is the quintessential moment of the series and it happens at the end. You don't get that often. And you get a fantasy like this probably once in a generation.

My honorable mention for 2007 goes to Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), not on the list because I'd read it before. It really holds up. I read it in preperation for the movie, then never saw the movie. Based on the reviews, I think I got a better experience. Dan Harrington's Harrington on Hold 'Embooks also almost made it onto my non-fiction list, but I figured that's kinda niche.

Labels: 2007, Books, Lists, movies, poker

10:55 bone daddy

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

We Have a Winner
Jerry Yang wins the 2007 WSOP.

Labels: poker

10:18 cdogzilla