Brockett Blog

AJ Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically mixes earnestness, anecdotes and humor to write a book that just feels … honest. He wears his biases on his (tasseled) sleeve, and isn’t afraid to write about instances where he changes his mind or looks bad in his quest for religious knowledge. His journey among the various sects of people who follow the Bible in one way or another makes for a great “gimmick” memoir, in the best sense of the word and the genre. One of my favorite excerpts comes in month seven, and it’s one that would have been hard to remove from my head during the presidential election:

The Bible’s antiwinking bias (there are at least four warnings against winkers) is one of the least-studied scriptural motifs around. I found negligible literature on the topic. But it does seem wise and ahead of its time, the wink being perhaps the world’s creepiest gesture, with the winker coercing the winkee into being a part of his little cabal.

Sarah Palin found out the hard way, and we all discovered no one looks good on a freeze-framed wink.

The advice I’ve been waiting for all along!

7. Avoid hiding your talent. Be out there networking, and limit your hours of solitude at the computer.

But then when will I get the chance to read the 742d different list of things a journalist should do when he isn’t working?

Errands this morning included another hit for my Wire fix (discs two and three of season two), filling up the gas tank ($2.07 in Joliet) and getting the oil changed. The last two bullet-pointed actions converged in an odd way as the mechanic hoisted the Buick LeSabre up for its physical.

Amid an amazing array of Golf Digests, coverless ESPN The Magazines circa the NFL draft and a Stuff magazine featuring Jaime Pressley on the cover, I found a relatively recent Forbes magazine from Sept. 15. A cover blurb highlighted a story about the automotive industry, which has become especially pertinent in recent days. Here’s an especially telling excerpt:

Ford–and GM, for that matter–says it’s still committed to pickups. But they insist that gas prices will remain in the range of $4 to $4.25 a gallon, so the shift toward more fuel-efficient cars and crossovers will be permanent. (GM is basing its business plan on oil at $130 to $150 per barrel in 2009; it’s now around $115.) Unlike the ’70s oil shocks, ”most customers realize now that this really is not a renewable resource. The mindset has shifted,” says Mark Fields, Ford executive vice president. ”In many customers’ minds, this is permanent.”

Will Americans eventually forget about those $100 SUV fill-ups when they buy their next car? Or have we developed a fear of the fire after having once been burned? In either case, it looks as though GM has been caught completely offguard by oil prices dropping to less than 50 percent of estimates. And the automotive industry still isn’t flexible enough to deal with rapid changes such as these. Although the current gas prices certainly appeal to my pocketbook, it’s probably another data point that the carmakers just don’t know what to do with.

No beverage served as the punchline for more jokes than Zima (except, of course, Schmitts Gay). And that was in just 15 years of existence! But sad news recently, as MillerCoors announced that the “lightly carbonated alchopop” beverage would be discontinued because of weakness in the “malternative” market.

Now, you aren’t going to find too many people who praise Zima, at least without using such qualifiers as “chicks drink” and “not Bud Light Lime.” But a passage in music journalist Rob Sheffield’s memoir Love is a Mixtape finds the time to offer a suggestion for those last Zimas lingering on the shelves:

“The spring of 1994 was marked by two key events in rock history: the death of Kurt Cobain and the birth of Zima. In case you don’t remember, and if you drank any Zima you surely don’t, it was a cheap, fizzy, clear, strong, thoroughly rancid malt liquor marketed as a hipster “alternative” beer with a shiny silver and black label that glowed in the dark. Let me reiterate – it was cheap. One night, Renee started rummaging through the kitchen for mixers. She found a sampler box of miniature liqueur bottles – an untouched Secret Santa gift from a day job she’d had a couple of years back – gathering dust on our shelves and started trying out recipes to cut the toxic kick of Zima …

But then, one night, in a flash of inspiration that rivals the creative energy of Chuck Berry the night he decided to mix country with the blues, Renee poured in some sickly sweet purple syrup called Chambord. With a little Chambord, a longneck of Zima became a handful of flaming violet glass, a bottle that looked like it could be set on fire and thrown at a bus or drunk with equally destructive effects. One Zima-and-Chambord would knock you on your ass; two would knock you on somebody else’s ass. It was the perfect rock cocktail.”

As an aside, I really enjoyed the book, even as a music fan who grew up just a few years too late to truly grap Sheffield’s hold on the 1990s music scene. He writes a heartbreaking song without any need for layers of strings.

Author David Hajdu gives a detailed, meticulously researched account of the early days in comic books with The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America. While the second half of that subtitle might be a little too far-reaching, the book gives a great sense of what it was like to create comic books at that time and how the slow rollout of outrage in the pre-Internet age overwhelmed the nascent form of entertainment. And while any comic book collector might be familar with the days of the self-imposed comic book “code,” it’s still amazing to read what was required:

* No magazine shall use the word horror or terror in its title.
* Policemen, judges, government officials and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.
* Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism and werewolfism are prohibited. (page 291)

On this last point I believe comics should continue to hold steady. There is no need to depict the ugly, hateful rhetoric of the anti-werewolf community, especially to our easily swayed youth.

Some cravings are so odd that even a pregnant woman will give pause, scrunch her nose and say “That’s gross.” I’m talking pop culture cravings, though, and lately I’ve been renting old Kurt Russell movies with my free in-store rentals through Blockbuster Online. Escape From New York – rented in honor of Isaac Hayes’ untimely passing – was much older than I thought, and gave off a vibe similar to that of The Warriors with its apocalyptic sets and fleeting glimpses of sunlight.

So, I had to see how things turned out in Escape From L.A., and … well, that was something. The movie epitomizes the “many years later, make a sequel for the fans and follow the template of the first movie.” Any time you invite the star to produce and write the movie, however, you’re liable to see a few more outrageous superhuman feats. Even Sylvester Stallone would walk out of L.A. and say it was a bit much. Many people talk about the (now laughably bad-effects-laden) tsunami surfing scene, but I appreciate the random appearance of a basketball court amid the morally corrupt. Enjoy:

Put journalists in a foreign land for more than two weeks, and their minds eventually will wander to carnal pleasures … and “easy” stories. Beijing Olympic organizers provided 100,000 condoms to participating athletes. But such acceptance of foreign affairs wasn’t always the case. Take this excerpt from the recent book Rome 1960 by David Maraniss, which is chock-full of interesting details from those Olympic games:

One place the men could not go was inside the women’s quarters, a separate sector on the other side of a raised highway and cordoned off by an iron gate and eight-foot wire fence. Village guards roamed the perimeter, and a no-nonsense Italian matron, Signora Ernestina Cabella Nardi, was stationed at the entry gate, deputized to separate the 611 female Olympians from the thousands of eager young men on the other side.

That anecdote is quickly followed by references to sexist and pervy journalists covering the games, which goes to show that while sexual permissiveness may change, some things will always stay the same.

I’ve spent parts of more than seven years in the greater DeKalb, IL area, both as a college student and a young professional. In that time, recognition from the greater popular culture at large has been fleeting, at best. A few small movies used the small-town or rural settings, but by and large people still fall back on Miss Cindy Crawford’s formative years.

So imagine my surprise to download a recent podcast of the Adam Carolla Show, based in Los Angeles and syndicated in some other markets, and hear a reference to my familiar corn capital. I enjoy the show for its clever segments and variety of interesting guests, and this particular instance involved ESPN sideline reporter extraordinaire Erin Andrews. The topic turned to Carolla’s experiences on Loveline, a show Andrews attended in person as a University of Florida undergraduate.

Carolla: All I remember is this. There is a huge difference between the University of DeKalb in northern Illinois and the University of Florida in terms of what [Dr.] Drew would say – and I know you all think of him as the world’s best doctor – Drew is a man of passion, and Drew would occasionally look out and see all the beautiful, tanned, blonde bodies and go, ‘Lot of talent out on this campus’ … and he’d never do a thing about it … When you go to DeKalb in northern Illinois, not so much talent …

It turns out, Erin Andrews as beautiful as she is, just a 5 … they’re that good looking there. The second you step off campus, you’re an 11 …

Bald Brian: She’s a DeKalb 12.

I’d like to step up for my Huskie (not husky) brethren, defend the honor of all the girls who might be impressed by such an impassioned blog defense. And, in the interest of fairness, we must remember that the DeKalb males are no great shakes either. But, I’m sorry. Like Walsh at the end of Chinatown might say, “Forget it, Hank. It’s Erin Andrews.”

Editor’s note: You Don’t Say features random, odd, strange or just ironic statements found in various books I’ve read.

Title: Bad TV
Author: Craig Nelson
Tag line: The Very Best of the Very Worst
Publication date: 1995
Page of excerpt: 101

Cultural anthropologists have conclusively proven that all corporations have at least one employee who makes everyone else working there wonder How does that person keep his job? For NBC that person is Conan O’Brien. Plucked from obscurity as a scribe for The Simpsons, Conan has never before performed on television (something immediately obvious to viewers), much less tried to replace someone like Dave the Great in our hearts. For those interested in educational programming, in fact, Mr. O’Brien is the perfect lesson in what qualities all good TV performers should have – comic timing, self-assurance, poise and tone and tempo expertise – since he isn’t blessed with any of them.

We’ve heard the opinions on Conan’s first days, but the web’s relative infancy has left most of the scathing words to the newspaper morgues and library microfiche. Not so for this book, which revels in the absurdity of TV’s lowest moments. No matter what Conan does, he will always be lumped in with “Thicke of the Night” (with Alan Thicke) and “The Starland Vocal Band Show” in at least one way.