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This might be the longest I have ever gone without posting. No good reason (except for life, school, kids, and working my way through the final levels of Assassin’s Creed II). And I should add “working on the house” to that list, since it’s always up there.

There are lots of good reasons to hate home ownership, but one of the best is probably this: I work on my house and have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. Being the classic underachiever that I am, this is an odd feeling. I tend to be good at everything I do. That sounds quite a bit arrogant, but it’s actually a harsh insult. I’m good at things only because I avoid the vast majority of things that I’m not skilled at. (That’s virtually a DSM-IV self-definition of underachieverhoodness.)

When you own a house, you don’t have a choice. Well, you actually do, but I can’t drop $500 to hire a handyman each time I need a ceiling fan installed. Plus—and I know I’m being stereotypical here—it seems unmanly to do that. So it’s with an excessive amount of pride that I look at the two gutter downspouts I installed yesterday. To an experienced workman, it’s a simple task, but the combination of cutting holes through the gutters with a jigsaw, choosing the angles, cutting gutter to fit, etc. was all new to me. I am actually anticipating tomorrow’s rain so I can watch my downspouts in action.

In my terribly limited choice of television viewing, 95% of my time is spent on only two subjects: soccer and The Amazing Race. Not surprisingly, I was excited about last night’s start of the sixteenth season. One of the rare joys of The Amazing Race occurs when they travel to a place you actually know, so I was excited when they headed off to Valparaiso, Chile. (That’s my picture above. One of the ascensors is in the center of the picturre.)

However, I do have to complain about their endless fascination with atypical couples. I watch the show for two reasons: (1) to see interesting places from the comfort of my living room, and (2) to see how everyday people react to foreign experiences. “Celebrity” couples don’t add a thing to the show. They actually cheapen it by taking the camera away from the experiences of real people. But I must be in the minority, since they did the same pandering with my previous favorite travel show, The Mole. The average viewer must be more likely to tune in if some Baldwin brother, reality show castoff,  or the Harlem Globetrotters are represented.

Speaking of  ”atypical” couples, their fascination with homosexual couples is also interesting. Now I don’t have the slightest problem with this, as anyone who knows me knows. Yet they do seem a bit obsessed with it, especially with finding couples and individuals willing to gloriously play the part of “Amazing Race Gay Contestant.” Probably their percentages are about correct—if 10% of the population is at least moderately gay, then 3 people out of 22 isn’t out of the ordinary. But I doubt 13.6%  of the population is as outspokenly gay as on the show. It’s also interesting because it is rarely a source of conflict, so it’s not as though they are choosing their couples in the hopes of a little entertaining brawling (unlike Big Brother or The Real World). Again, I don’t care, but I’d be interested in seeing the marketing decisions behind this since everything on the show eventually connects to marketing.

One final note: I love how Google now includes random Twitter tweets on its search page. I’m not sure it’s possible to have a worse advertisement for your product than a pointless Twitter banality. Just in case you start to think Twitter might be profound, Google proudly debunks this theory with fascinating insights into everyday lives like this one I grabbed last night:

twitter.com – 1 minute ago

Now folding clothes while watching amazing race 16…w/ sis … N switching channel tfc n abc..

Not THAT makes me want to sign up. More, please!

Since it’s FA Cup weekend (and thus no soccer showing on basic cable), and my Lego Star Wars partner is in St. Louis, I’m using my evening relaxation time to watch a few movies. This is a rarity for me, since watching a movie usually makes me feel as though I’m chained to a chair and unable to move. But I’m giving it a try.

Last night’s movie was Bright Star, a story about John Keats and his love affair with Fanny Brawne (before his early death at twenty-five from tuberculosis). Loads of kissing and coughing and longing glances. Overall a bit of a “blah” movie. As is often the case, I’m not sure how its ratings ended up in the low 80s on Metacritic.

If you are going to have a love story, the most important cinematic need is for the actors to actually appear to be in love. Didn’t work for me in Bright Star. Their love seems to begin randomly, and even their letters  and fits of despair seem part of a game more than true love (like much of Keats’ poetry to me—Ouch!). Instead it felt like two hours of uncomfortable sexual repression, as though the 19th century pinned them down so much that they didn’t even understand what they were feeling. I’m not saying we needed some classic bodice ripping, but the love was all a bit too chaste and intellectual to feel real. (Once again, much like his poetry.)

As for the writing and directing, it was all a bit too heavy-handed for me. Ah, a room full of butterflies to express her love. Uh-oh, a dead butterfly swooshing into a dustpan. Oh no, a rainstorm and a wet John Keats, followed by coughing, followed by blood.

Points for beautiful scenery, for avoiding grand 19th-century balls just for the fun of re-enactment, and for making a movie about poetry, but overall a 2.5 star movie.

Tonight’s choice: The Class, a French movie about a junior high school teacher struggling with ethnic identities in modern Paris. Ooooohhh.

Nothing says “high school love” like a gigantic Valentine’s Day bear. I saw a few of these imposing creatures roaming the halls yesterday, usually led by the hand of a girl glowing with love. I guess I should be happy for the couple—part of me thinks of Corduroy the bear, and the warmth of “I guess I’ve always wanted a friend” as Lisa sews on his button and leads him to his mini-bed—but the rest of me knows that this bear will most likely share a fate similar to the polar bear and the panda (pseudo) bear: an unstoppable slide into oblivion.

Yep, plushie, your best times are behind you. Chances are that you’ll go from that spot of honor in her bedroom to the top of the trash heap before the summer ends. You’ll be lucky if your tear-stained carcass makes it to the dump in one piece. If your original owner plays it right, you might arrive missing an arm or an eye, or Sharpied with threats and curses, or with a gaping obsidian chest wound like some Aztec captive. You might get drawn and quartered if he’s really a player!

So here’s to High School Love! Here’s to Valentine’s Day!

(I should note at this point how much I’m still deeply in love with Molly. Reader(s), don’t think this bear’s fate reflects poorly on my own High School Teacher Love. That’s a vastly better and deeper love, and one that’s bigger than the average bear.)

I spent part of my snow days working through A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. (Okay, I also read Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star again, but I’ve already made my Bolaño bromance loud and clear.) All I can say about the Literary History is: what an odd book! Who is the target audience for this bizarre hodgepodge of a book? It’s almost 1,100 pages long, and seems to contain three types of essays:

1. Quick overviews of mildly interesting historical or literary subjects. (Of course the person who would check out this beast is probably already intellectually well-rounded and won’t find much new here.)

2. Pretentious hyperspecific explorations by graduate students of  ideas that might be interesting but aren’t as profound as they seem to think. (Again, the target audience appears to be educated enough to laugh at these attempts at bamboozlement.)

3. A handful of in-depth mini-essays on intriguing possibilities that make you want to know more (like the “Yankee Doodle” vs. “The Star-Spangled Banner” essay).

So I guess it’s useful in that it gets you to think about big ideas, even if it doesn’t teach you much new. It felt like ten essays in a row dealt with the Founding Fathers’ battles over pure democracy vs. representative government.  Interesting subject, got me constantly switching sides between Adams and Jefferson, made me balance today’s political impasse with the 20th-century’s slow glide of progress, etc. However, I’m not sure that’s a satisfactory payoff for 140 pages of reading, so I doubt I’ll make it to page 1,095.

Update: Since they just canceled school again, change of plans. Maybe I’ll jump ahead to the 21st-century and see what it holds.

Yeah, it was a really great Super Bowl. (Though to be honest, I only watched 50% of it, and I really just wanted it to be over so I could watch the oddly much more violent Liverpool vs. Everton match on my DVR.)

More importantly, here are a few thoughts on the ads I saw. (No comments on the shockingly lame Tim Tebow ad that got all the hype in the two weeks before the game.)

1. Only Google (and perhaps Craiglist) could get away with the lamest, simplest ad ever. The Google ad somehow reminded me of how incredible Google truly is. I’m not sure anything else has had such a major influence on how we interact with the Internet. To even describe Google as a “search” seems a bit much, since 95% of the information you seek pops up in the first page of listings. When was the last time you had to truly search for information with Google? (If you do want to know, I’m sure Google is keeping track of that information for you!) That single, unadorned page is the home page on every web browser I use. Impressive.

2. The advertisement for the television show Criminal Minds made me ashamed of humans. (Not to be too melodramatic.) Why can’t I watch a football game with my kids without seeing violent ads for a television show that celebrates evil? Sorry, fans, but you’re taking pleasure in violence and in humanity’s base instincts. (And, yeah, I get the irony  of complaining about violence during a football game, but it’s the enjoyment of cruelty in shows like Criminal Minds that appalls me.)

3. Dante’s Inferno. Don’t do it! Don’t buy it! It’s not a love story, it’s a philosophical discussion of humankind’s potential—good and bad—and God’s response to it. As an English teacher and a lover of Dante, I’m constitutionally required to oppose it.

One other random point: Did every sportswriter have a conference call and decide that every Super Bowl article would contain some hyperbole about how the Saints’ victory finally erased the horror of Katrina? BORING!

Our school’s once-a-year celebration of diversity is this Friday and I’m feeling a bit left out. We have belly dancers, a Multicultural Choir (which seems to avoid the “Multi-”), and some quality teacher lip-syncing. Sadly—and I’m partly responsible for this, since I didn’t appear for a tryout—there’s nothing to celebrate my English and Welsh heritage.

I searched the web for a Wales jersey and couldn’t find one. By that I mean I guess I could find one, but I’d have to send it from Wales, and it would cost $100. Apparently there isn’t much of a Welsh contingent in the U.S. (Okay, so that haven’t qualified for anything since the 1958 World Cup. Go ahead and kick them while they’re down!) I was going to rep my heritage all day long. No such luck.

So to all my Welsh readers…forget the Paypal donations and send me a Craig Bellamy jersey. C’mon, the guy took a golf club to his teammate’s legs! That’s some proud heritage, there.

How come when a guy writes its when he really means it’s it gets blamed on his high school English teacher, even if the guy dropped out in 1974? As though he hasn’t encountered 38,263 uses of it’s/its in in the intervening  years and couldn’t once have said, “Eh, that’s weird. Two different its. Wonder what the difference is.” Nobody looks at an old, fat guy and thinks, “Man, his gym teacher should have done a better job. Back in my day….”

(Yeah, I’ve been reading the Columbia Tribune comments section again.)

It’s easy enough to get down on the 21st century and think about how much better it might have been in the past. However, a few pages of the right history book can quickly change your mind. As I always say each time I sit down in the dentist’s chair, “It could be worse. I could have a toothache in Constantinople in 832 A.D.” (Okay, I don’t really think that, but it’s something similar.)

After reading The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 by Chris Wickham, I decided to keep up my history kick with The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 by Nicholas Shrady. (I should point out that this had nothing to with Haiti. I’d hate to be lumped in with those people who seem to wallow in a natural disaster with an ugly mix of trauma and fascination. My interest was historical and tied closely to my love of Voltaire’s Candide.)

Short version of a longer thought: This century sucks at times but it’s a lot better than the past! In the good ol’ days you get fascinating documents like the Romanus Pontifex of 1455 whereby Pope Nicholas V gave Portugal the right to:

to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery

Ouch! Add to this slavery a lot of greed, a lot of anti-Semitism, dynastic politics, and the  Inquisition and you begin to understand Voltaire’s gloomy conclusion to An Inquiry into the Maxim Whatever Is, Is Right:

What is necessary, o mortals?
Mortals it is necessary to suffer
To submit in silence, adore and die.

So here’s to 2010, where at least the dentist has Novocaine!

So I saw the Coinstar machine at the grocery and my first response, as usual, was, “Who the hell puts change into a machine that takes 15% just for counting it?” I guess if you were an illegal immigrant and couldn’t open a  bank account then it might make sense, but other than that it doesn’t show great financial acumen. Even more perplexing was the “Don’t put dirty money in the change machine!” handwritten sign taped to it. What does that mean? ill-gotten wealth? But what crime causes a criminal to end up with bucketfuls of change? Small-time crack dealing? Parking meter theft? If it means dirty as in unclean, then how do you judge whether your change qualifies? Clumps of dirt might cause the machine problems, but how can pennies with fingerprints and other gunk harm a high-tech counter? And do they really think the person who brings his or her change to the grocery store to abandon 15% of it in exchange for not having to count it is going to read the sign and then not dump the quarters in because of their impure state?

These are the pointless thoughts I’m forced into when the 98-year-old lady in line in front of me suddenly decides she needs a carton of Pall Malls and is then thoroughly (but in a time consuming manner) perplexed that they now come in a thoroughly un-Pall Mall-ish bright orange color.