Review: Angel & Faith #4 - "Live Through This, Part 4"

PLOT SUMMARY


The issue picks up the big fight from the last issue, with Nash and Pearl showing off an impressive array of powers. During the fight, Angel bits Pearl, and Faith slips one of the Mohra vials to Nash, then points it out to the entire crowd. The demon mob attacks Pearl and Nash, allowing Angel and Faith to slip into the basement, where they find that the people who'd been using the Mohra blood now have cells that are generating out of control.

Angel gets the endlessly regenerating people to help clear out the fight, and Pearl and Nash flee. He and Faith then mercy kill all the Mohra victims, while Pearl and Nash plot with Whistler back at their home. Faith tells Nadira she encountered Pearl and Nash, but again leaves Angel out of it. Faith runs into Alasdair and expresses her reluctance about lying to Nadira (about Angel) and Angel (about Giles) but he assures her that it's for the greater good.

Still, she decides to come clean with Angel, who is doing some research at Giles's place. She tells him if he crosses any lines trying to resurrect Giles, she'll stop him. Angel says that's exactly why she's there -- to stop him if he won't stop himself. Angel continues his research and seems to be acting very Giles-like in doing so, which Faith picks up on.

REVIEW

Gossip Girl "Rhodes to Perdition" Reaction

Just a couple days ago, I was having a discussion with a friend on Twitter about "Gossip Girl", in particular how this season seemed to be trudging along at a very slow, almost boring pace. So many of the ongoing threads have painfully telegraphed endings (Dan and his agent are almost definitely going to sleep together, possibly as soon as the next episode, there is no way that the Blair-Louis wedding happens and Serena will continue to do bland Serena things) and the show is getting badly overloaded with characters. We openly hypothesized what might be able to fix things, and everything we came to involved Charlie and somehow blowing things up with her.

While "Rhodes to Perdition" directly confronted that possibility, before setting things right again -- Max literally told everyone about Charlie/Ivy, but no one believed him, thanks to some joint duplicity between Charlie and Carol -- but there were hints that something bigger is coming.

Toward the end of the episode, as Carol and Chivy were discussing their ongoing arrangement (Carol gets money, Chivy gets to keep being Charlie in New York), and Carol said something to the effect of how her family would flip out if they ever knew what happened to the real Charlotte Rhodes.

God, I want to know the answer to that so badly, and I think introducing it would salvage what has been a meandering, directionless, punchless season. As soon as Carol said those words, my mind started going to all kinds of dark places. Is the real Charlie dead? Is she in jail? Was she kidnapped and has she be missing ever since? Obviously those are some really dark ideas, and reflect more on me than the tone of Carol's statement, but at this point bringing "real Charlie" into the picture is probably the only way to really shake this story up, and would give the show at minimum a solid three-episode arc to turn things on their head within the Rhodes/Van der Woodson/Humphrey family.

In other "Gossip Girl" happenings, the whole thing with Nate and his family and The Spectator was just yawn inducing. When did Nate get so useless in the bigger picture of the show? And again, all the Chuck/Blair stuff was fine, but again, we all know how that story ends, and we've seen this journey before, so it feels more like the writers not knowing what to do with the characters than any kind of actual progress. At least Louis wasn't actually in the episode to Chuck things up, so that's a huge positive.

Jersey Monday: Tiki Barber

Monday Night Football Matchup: New York Giants at New Orleans Saints

One of the things about trying to get at least one jersey from every NFL team is that at some point you'll have to eventually get jerseys from teams you don't like. And usually when you do that, you end up compounding the problem by getting the jersey of a player you don't like.

That's the case with my Tiki Barber jersey. It's the only Giants jersey in my collection, from back when the Giants wore this style that's more associated with their teams of the '80s and '90s. I have no plans to update the Giants slot in my collection to their current style because there's no one on the team that rises above my general dislike for the team (like, say, a Deion Sanders on the Cowboys or a Dave Meggett on the Patriots). And I obviously have no intention of wearing this jersey anytime soon. It's among the many in boxes in my basement, and the only reason it's even getting spotlighted here is to stick with the MNF theme (I already showed off one of my Saints jerseys and I have to save the other one for their next MNF appearance to keep the order going).

Jersey Monday will continue every Monday until I run out of jerseys to spotlight. And since I’ve got more than 150 of them, that could be awhile. For the remainder of the NFL season, Jersey Monday will feature one of the teams playing on Monday Night Football.

Lessons Learned from the 2011 NBA Lockout

One of the recurring themes from the recently (tentatively) ended NBA lockout was that both sides would use the lessons learned from the 1998-99 lockout and apply them to this negotiation. That didn't always seem like the case, particularly when marathon meetings led to little progress and both sides almost blew everything up. But they did learn from the last lockout, and they're likely to take the lessons from this lockout and apply them to the next one, either in 2017 or 2021.

So what did we learn from this lockout? I mean, aside from the fact that linking your text messaging to your Twitter account can be a very bad idea.

- "Deadline" is just a word
Throughout this process, we kept hearing about deadlines. The first one had to be June 30, the last day of the previous CBA, when both sides had to get a deal done to avoid a lockout. We all knew that deadline was bullshit. Then there was the October 1st "deadline", the last realistic day to get a deal done and start the season on time. Whoops. There was the mid-October "deadline" to save the season, which came and went without a deal. There was the NBA's "rollback" deadline, after which the clock "stopped", which should have proved once and for all that there was never a deadline at all in this entire process. A deal was always going to get done when it was going to get done (as vague as that sounds), regardless of deadlines set by the owners, players, media or even David Stern's "calendar".

- Both sides were willing to sacrifice a season. No one was willing to sacrifice two. 
We heard from the beginning of this process (and by "the beginning", I mean two years ago, when negotiations started) we heard that the owners were willing to lose the entire season, because they'd lose less money than playing another season under the old deal. We'd also heard the players were prepared to lose the entire season, because they'd saved up for that possibility, and weren't willing to sign a bad deal just to play.

But that didn't mean either side wanted to give up MULTIPLE seasons, and once the players disclaimed the union and filed antitrust litigation, that was a possibility we were squarely staring at. David Stern called it the league's "nuclear winter" and though the commissioner was known for his hyperbolic statements throughout this process, he wasn't messing around. Letting this whole thing play out in the courts would have definitely cost us the 2011-12 season and likely cost us part or all of 2012-13. Even the most hardline of owners had to recognize that losing two (or more) seasons would have done irreparable harm to the league. This thing hitting the courts gave everyone the jolt of common sense they'd been lacking through this entire process.


- "Competitive Balance" was a myth
This wasn't so much a lesson we learned as a lesson we knew all along, but for all the NBA's talk about fixing the system to increase competitive balance, the final CBA -- at least as has been detailed -- really only takes minor steps toward that, if any. Yes, the luxury tax is more punitive, but it still exists. There is still a method by which teams willing to spend can outspend their opponents, and rest assured the smart high-spending teams will hire people to find every loophole possible to exploit. I'm sure the Lakers are already working on ways to work the mini-mid-level, the still existing extend-and-trade and even the new trade exception increase for non-taxpayers to their benefit.

- Negotiations can't happen in public
Because of the massive technology leap between 1999 and 2011, we knew way more about this lockout while it was going on than we did for the last one. However, that wasn't always a good thing. In fact, it seemed the more we got reports of "progress" and things be "close", the worse things actually got inside the room. Then, on the final day of the lockout, things got eerily quiet. They met for hours and hours, and there were no reports on Twitter of... well... anything. Only that they were meeting. Eventually some news of hope snuck out, but that was quickly followed by reports of more Jeffrey Kessler idiocy. It's almost like the sides had been playing the media against the other side all along, and only once things got down to brass tacks did they finally stop leaking any and everything.

- People care
Of all the dumb memes that came out of the lockout (how u, designer handbags, bloggisists, Guy Fieri burgers... and on... and on...), the dumbest had to be the "no one cares about the NBA" parrotting from non-NBA fans. If you needed any evidence that people care about the NBA, then you got it the day the lockout ended. Despite the announcement coming after 3 a.m. on the East Coast, Twitter immediately blew up, and seven of the nine non-promoted trending topics were about the NBA. At a time when most fans probably should have been asleep.

It helps that the NBA is a global game, and many of those fans were tweeting from places where the lockout ending announcement came at a more reasonable time, but that only goes to prove the "people care" lesson even more. Yes, domestically more people cared about the end of the NFL lockout than the NBA lockout, I won't deny that. But I'd argue that outside the United States, that ratio was probably flipped. And just because more people cared about the NFL here, that doesn't mean "no one" cared about the NBA. I'll never understand the need for some sports fans to justify their love of their own sport by trashing another one. Then again, that's really more of a general human behavior than a sports fan one, and I'm not really a psychologist, so I'll leave that one alone.

Looking Like a Season. How u (LIVE CHAT)

Desktop Girl of the Week: Gillian Jacobs

When I wrapped up the last DGOW tournament, I full expected that weekly selections would resume almost immediately. I did NOT intend to go months picking only two DGOWs, and I definitely didn't intend for the feature to turn into "Desktop Girl from a Likely Canceled NBC Show of the Week. But that's kind of what happened. I made one DGOW pick in October -- Amber Heard of the recently canceled "Playboy Club" -- and November's first DGOW selection is Gillian Jacobs.

Jacobs currently stars on "Community", which is one of the best shows on television, but so few people are watching it that NBC has left it off the midseason schedule. The network insists that it's not canceling the show, but a fourth season seems highly unlikely, which is a shame. "Community" is brilliant, and Jacobs is a huge part of that. Her character, Britta, strandles the line between being likable and completely contemptible in a comedic way. She started out as the love interest for Jeff, but she's grown into so much more.

Britta, as a character, is at her best when she's "Britta"ing things, probably best exemplified by this season's "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps" where she screwed up the group's psych evaluations, screwed up the storytelling at the pre-Halloween party and then screwed things up even more within the group when she scored the tests again. Normally a character that screws up that often is annoying, but Jacobs makes Britta endearing. She screws up, but only because she wants the best for the people around her.

I haven't seen Jacobs in much else, save for the awful 2009 movie "The Box" and a very weird Season 1 episode of "Fringe". Hopefully I won't have to see her regularly in anything but "Community" for years to come. Six seasons and a movie!

• Gillian Jacobs on IMDB
• Follow Gillian Jacobs on Twitter
• "Community" Official Site

As always with DGOW, I’ll provide a widescreen (1680x1050) image for downloading. If you want to see past DGOW, then just check the archive album.

Jersey Monday: Tom Brady

Monday Night Football Matchup: Kansas City Chiefs at New England Patriots


Yes, I own a Tom Brady jersey. Let me explain.

It was the summer of 2002, and I'd just graduated from college. I was back home in Connecticut and one of the many graduation gifts I had was a $100 gift card to Dick's Sporting Goods. I used most of the gift card early that summer, on a pair of Allen Iverson signature edition Reebok sneakers -- which became my most frequently worn sneakers over the next few years, just because of how comfortable they were.

But I still had about $20 left on the gift card, and not a whole lot I wanted to buy. Then, one day, I was looking around the store and they had "last year" NFL jerseys at half price -- and this is back when NFL replica jerseys cost $40 instead of $85. Now, being from Connecticut, you get used to the fact that the only jerseys that are going to be in big box stores are those of the Patriots, Giants and Jets. And since the Patriots were coming off a Super Bowl victory, stores were overloaded with Pats jerseys. So, I used the last $20 on the gift card to buy this jersey, thinking that a few years down the line, it'd basically be a reminder of that random time the Patriots won a Super Bowl with their game-managing backup QB.

Whoops.

Obviously Brady turned out to be one of the best quarterbacks ever, and the Patriots went on to win two more Super Bowls with him under center (though they haven't won one in six seasons and don't look like they're exactly Super Bowl material this year). And this jersey really just serves as a reminder of how much I hate them.

Jersey Monday will continue every Monday until I run out of jerseys to spotlight. And since I’ve got more than 150 of them, that could be awhile. For the remainder of the NFL season, Jersey Monday will feature one of the teams playing on Monday Night Football.

Watching The Throne at Mohegan Sun

A couple years ago when I was front row for Britney Spears at Madison Square Garden, I thought I'd never have a better time at a concert. I was wrong.

Last night I was at Mohegan Sun for the Jay-Z and Kanye West "Watch The Throne" Tour, which exceeded every expectation I had for the show. There was no opening act, just Jay-Z and Kanye trading turns on the mic -- sometimes performing their solo hits and sometimes performing together. Honestly, from the moment the performers hit the stages (there was one main stage, and a sub-stage across the floor, and at the start of the show, Kanye was on the main stage and Jay-Z was on the sub-stage, which was right in front of me), the energy level in the arena was off the charts, and it just kept getting louder and louder throughout the night.

Seats weren't really necessary at this show; I think I sat down twice during the entire course of the performance (once during "Made In America" and once during Kanye's talk about love during the rollout of "Runaway"). And the end of the show was just sick. The "last" song of the night was "Ni**as in Paris", only when they got to the end of Kanye's verse, they started the song again from the top. They then performed the whole thing, and left the stage. Then they came back out and performed it AGAIN. Same song, three times, and the crowd -- myself included -- got more hype each time. Hell, they probably could've done the song a dozen times and we still would've wanted more. As it was, they wrapped things up with Jay-Z's encore and called it a night after nearly three hours.

I was impressed with the variety of songs they hit during the night. They got to the majority of the best stuff from "Watch the Throne" (though no "Murder to Excellence" was a bit disappointing), and mixed in a really good selection of past Jay-Z/Kanye collaborations ("Diamonds", "Run This Town", "Monster") and solo hits. Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" nearly brought the house down, as did Kanye's "Jesus Walks".

Oh, and speaking of those, they're just two of the six songs I got video of during the show. Hit the jump for all the videos, as well as a bunch of pictures.

Ripped: My Webcomic Debut

A few months ago, I backed a Kickstarter project for a new webcomic series that looked interesting. The series, "Ripped," was coming from the creative team of Emma Caulfield and Camilla Rantsen, and was based on the Jack the Ripper mythology, but with a different spin than what we'd seen done before. I actually backed the project twice, to get two different rewards, and on Tuesday, one of them came through.

If you look at the thumbnail of the comic to the left, you'll notice a pudgy fellow with a thick beard in the second panel. That, of course, would be me. I'm officially a comic character. You can click the image to head over to the site and get a more detailed view.

Now, I didn't just back this project to get drawn into the strip -- though that is an incredibly cool perk, and I love how artist Christian Meesey has rendered me -- but because Caulfield continues to produce incredibly creative ideas that tend to turn out amazing. "Bandwagon", the 2004 movie that was turned into a web series, is laugh-out-loud funny, "Contropussy", her previous webcomic, was incredible, and I can't say enough positive things about "TiMER", the 2009 sci-fi love story that I don't think nearly enough people have seen.

What I think I love best about Caulfield's projects is they tend to take concepts that are pretty straightforward and twist them just enough to really draw you in, making the conventional unconventional in a way. "Ripped" is only seven episodes in -- the strip comes out every Tuesday and Thursday -- but it already seems like it's going to continue that trend, and I suggest you get on board now.

Being Erica "Please, Please Tell Me Now" Reaction

After watching this week's impressive installment of "Being Erica", I had one immediate reaction: was "Please, Please Tell Me Now" the most important episode of "Being Erica" to date?

First, let's take this from a technical perspective. Over three-plus seasons of "Being Erica", we've seen multiple uses of the Doctors' time travel powers, but we had little explanation on how they actually worked. "Please, Please Tell Me Now" did more than any previous episode to address that, with future Erica (seen above on the left) coming back to talk to present Erica and all but spelling it out. The doors we've always seen are metaphorical doors to divergent timelines, with the door itself representing a choice the person makes.

We've seen alternate timelines used on the show in the past (most notably in Season 1's "Leo" and Season 2's "What Goes Up Must Come Down"), but the show's never really addressed whether those timelines existed or if they were just illusions created by Dr. Tom to prove a point to Erica. Monday's episode pointed things much more in the direction of the former, with future Erica -- who, let's be honest, looked AMAZING for 43 years old -- pointing out specific doors to present Erica, including a timeline in which Leo is alive and, more direct to the plot of the episode, a door in which Erica didn't find out about her future and one in which she did.

But let's say you're not an Abed-esque stickler for timeline and parallel universe details. Then why would this episode still be so important to you? Simply put, because the lesson Erica learned is really the core lesson for the series, and one that too many people fail to learn in their life before it's too late. When Erica thinks she's going to die in 2019, because of what she learned from Kai and Dr. Fred, she kind of went over the deep end with an "OMG I have so much stuff I still want to do" mentality. She was ready to sell 50/50 to River Rock and go on all these crazy adventures, all because she "knew" her time was short.

So what lesson did she learn from future Erica? "Your time is short." Not because she was going to die in 2019, but because she's going to die. Period. It's the reality of life; sorry if that seems depressing, but it's true. And the fact is, you can't make every decision in life through the prism of "I'm going to die." If you did, you'd never do anything.

"We all know we're going to die. But the date, the exact moment, it's a mystery. It's a secret. And for a good reason. Knowing, it changes things. The way you act, the choices you make. You need to live fully in the present, unencumbered by the past or the future."

That's a bold statement coming from a show that has focused so heavily on "regrets", but "Being Erica" has never been about changing the past, only learning from it. If we spend every day trying to change mistakes we made in the past or trying to prevent mistakes we think might have been made in the future (if you can wrap your head around that bit of time-language manipulation) then we're not really living life. That's the lesson of this episode and of this show, and it's why this episode might have been the most important one of the series.

Jersey Monday: Adrian Peterson

Monday Night Football Matchup: Minnesota Vikings at Green Bay Packers

Last year, I took a look at my NFL jersey collection and pinpointed a couple teams that were in desperate need of an update, whether from a style perspective or a player perspective. At the top of that list was the Minnesota Vikings. I already had two Vikings jerseys, including an authentic, but both were for players no longer on the team. Well, they were no longer on the team at the time -- Randy Moss rejoined the Vikings briefly, kind of messing things up, but my Moss jersey was still the old style, and my Cris Carter jersey was out of date no matter how you looked at it.

So, in the interest of keeping with the times, I picked up this Adrian Peterson current style Vikings jersey. I'm not a huge fan of their updated style, but I do like the white jerseys a little more than the purple, so that's why I went with this one. As for why I went with Peterson, well, it's not like I was going to get a Brett Favre Vikings jersey, and they didn't really have a ton of other options. Besides, Peterson is one of the best players in the league, so it's not like this is a bad jersey to have. Quite the opposite in fact. Now, I don't wear it particularly often, because I'm not a Vikings fan and I've tried to narrow down the jerseys I do wear to the ones that represent the teams I actually like, but I don't regret the purchase in any way.

Jersey Monday will continue every Monday until I run out of jerseys to spotlight. And since I’ve got more than 150 of them, that could be awhile. For the remainder of the NFL season, Jersey Monday will feature one of the teams playing on Monday Night Football.

Review: Buffy Season 9, #3 - Freefall, Part 3

PLOT SUMMARY

Severin (the new character we saw at the end of issue 2) formally introduces himself to Buffy and tries to explain the situation, but the cops arrive, so they flee the scene and head back to Severin's place. The cops are still looking for Buffy, and they strike out at both her apartment and Xander & Dawn's place.

Severin fills in Buffy on his backstory: he and his sister got in with vampires (post-Harmony), and they found someone to turn his sister, who'd then turn Severin. Only, when the sister got turned, she was feral, and Severin accidentally used his power on her when she attacked him. Buffy thinks it has something to do with the seed. She calls a Scooby meeting, at which only Xander and Dawn show, but she gets Willow on the phone and admits that things might be worse without the seed. They all talk things through, and figure out what might be going on with the feral vampires (which Xander names "Zompires") and Severin says he knows where there's a nest of them.


While all that's going on, Spike is pounding the streets -- and a small demon -- for info, which leads him to Alcatraz, and a demon who was freed from a magical prison when the seed was destroyed. He wants to thank Buffy, and warn her about something called "The Siphon," who can rip mystical energy from anything he touches. At that moment, Buffy and Severin arrive at the nest, where Buffy kicks in the door only to see they vampires are already dead, and Severin is charging up his powers.

REVIEW

Story

I said that last issue felt more like an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" than the previous issue, and the same sentiment applies here. Xander even calls it out when Buffy calls the Scooby meeting and he says "is this three years ago?" And after the season-long ongoing mystery of Twilight, it's nice to get to the point on Severin (obvious name much?) relatively quickly.

While it's easy to get caught up in the big twist at the end, a twist I'll fully admit I didn't see coming, to do so would be to ignore some of the great smaller moments in the issue. The interactions between Xander and Dawn -- both with the cops and later with Buffy -- are pitch perfect. Willow's reluctance to jump back into Scooby mode fits with her character and shows that they're not just going to throw away developments that fans may not have liked.

So far, it seems like writer Andrew Chambliss (and, obviously, exec producer/creator Joss Whedon) are doing as much as possible to distance this from Season 8 in terms of tone, if not story. The scenes in this issue take place in apartments and warehouses, not castles and military bases. The villains are vampires and Severin, who's big-bad-esque, but not exactly a dimension-creating, godlike possessive entity. And Buffy is snarky, not mopey.

If you dropped "Buffy" after Season 8, or, more likely, during Season 8, now's the time to get back in. These are the droids you're looking for.

Score: 5 out of 5

Quickie Comic Reviews: Batgirl, Dollhouse, House of Night, Spider-Man

I know I'm super late on this, since these are really last week's comics and new comics Wednesday is just a couple days away, but I wanted to mini-review a few books I picked up last week (and, for me, I'm not really THAT late, since I didn't get to buy anything until Friday, and didn't read any of these until Saturday). I'll have my full-length review of Buffy #3 later today.

The Avenging Spider-Man #1
OK, so this sin't so much a review of the issue as it is of the gimmick that Marvel executed. Well, "gimmick" isn't the right word, because that makes it seem negative. See, this issue came bundled with a redemption code for a free digital copy. Day-and-date digital versions of comics are still a relatively recent development, so bundled copies are a huge leap forward. I've always said this is how digital comics should work, and it justifies the $3.99 price point that most comics are coming in at these days. $3.99 for a print/digital bundle or $1.99 for a day-and-date digital only copy seems like the ideal solution for the industry. We'll have to see if Marvel's experiment with this issue works, and where it goes from here.

Batgirl #3
I decided to get the first issue of this series as part of the DCU relaunch because Adam Hughes is probably my favorite cover artist out there, and I wanted to see how Gail Simone handled the uncrippling of Barbara Gordon. I never thought I'd stick with the series beyond the initial issue, but the quality of it keeps me coming back every week. This issue, with Barbara getting some one-on-one time with Nightwing, really shone a spotlight on the fact that even though she's out of the chair, things aren't all perfect in Barbara's life. From a reading standpoint, this is one of the best monthly books out there, and the art is fantastic.

Dollhouse #5
I have mixed feelings about this issue. I liked it, but I thought it tried to straddle the line too much between concluding the five-issue arc and establishing key plot points for a possible follow-up mini-series. The conflicting interest was particularly noticeable when it came to Alpha, who was forced to revert to his villaneous state to save the day. The book all but abandoned him in its conclusion, still leaving a huge gap to be filled in between where we are now and where we see Alpha in "Epitaph Two".

House of Night #1
OK, first of all, launching this series with a $1 #1 was a brilliant move by Dark Horse. Beyond that, this was really just a great issue. I'm right in the middle of reading "Betrayed" right now, so it works out perfectly that the comic is set in the "gaps" of that book (it's basically happening at the same time, but not impacting the book's plot in any way). Seeing the characters I'd been picturing in my head brought to life (by Joelle Jones's stunning artwork) was incredibly cool, and having an ongoing story -- the one that will drive the five-issue miniseries -- wrapped around a self-contained flashback was a great narrative decision. I'm so glad I started reading this book series, and I really thank Dark Horse for making this comic. Probably the best non-Buffy issue I read all week.

Ultimate Spider-Man #4
Last, but not least, is the issue we've all be waiting for from this series. Through the first three issues, we'd essentially been getting flashbacks of how Miles Morales became the new Spider-Man, leading up to the scene we saw in Ultimate Fallout #4. This issue finally caught the story up to that scene, and moved it forward to where Miles will likely end up. I can't really complain about the slow pace of this series so far, beacause if you go back to the original "Ultimate Spider-Man" series, it seemed like it took even longer before Peter became Spider-Man. This issue did a good job of bridging Miles's past with his future, while also bringing in key characters from Peter's past. I loved the scene with Gwen Stacy -- who has been sorely missed since Fallout #1 -- and having Spider-Woman (aka Jessica Drew aka Peter Parker's clone) show up at the end was phenomenal. A great step forward for a series that seemed to struggle with its direction early on.

On the NBA, Depression and Crushing Reality

I took a walk in the rain this afternoon.

I don't know exactly why I did, at least on a conscious level. I could've easily reached the cafeteria without going outdoors, and on some level, I didn't need to go there at all. But I was drawn to the cafeteria not by the grilled chicken sandwich I ended up getting for lunch, but by the basketball court just beyond its doors.

I sat in the bleachers, lined up with the top of the key -- my preferred seating view for any basketball game I attend -- and just looked at the court. It, like many courts around the country right now, was empty. The sounds weren't of sneakers and dribbling balls and rattling rims. There were some birds chirping and raindrops falling, and me, staring out at an empty court.

It took every fiber of my being not to break down crying.

I sat there for, well, I don't know exactly how long, but it couldn't have been more than 10 minutes, just staring out at the empty court, rain falling on my head. On some level, I've known this day was coming for quite some time now. The ongoing NBA lockout has been an inevitability for about two years, and the rhetoric during the lockout has leaned much more towards a lost season than any kind of agreement.

We now appear to be days away from a rejection of the latest proposed NBA collective bargaining agreement, a move that will almost definitely result in the cancellation of the entire season, if not immediately, then eventually. As of right now, it appears that the best case scenario for seeing an NBA game again is November of 2012, and even that's not guaranteed. And while logically I've accepted that outcome, emotionally, I'm not ready for it.
During the last NBA lockout, in 1998-99, I was a freshman in college, experiencing one of the best times of my life. I had a full class schedule, a position at my school newspaper, a new group of friends and plenty of activity to fill my NBA-less days. And yet the absence of the league still hurt.

It's much worse this time around. I'm 31 years old, and while I have a full-time job (one I'm very grateful to have), I go home pretty much every night to an empty condo. My last girlfriend and I broke up about seven months ago, and given my obesity and my personality (more the former than the latter) it's unlikely I'll have another one anytime soon if ever again. I'm not even sure I can say I have a handful of real friends, and I rarely see even the ones I do have.

What I did have was the NBA, which has introduced me to a community of people I wouldn't have otherwise "met". I have countless "NBA" friends; I don't know all their names, and many of them don't know my name. And though I'm unlikely to ever meet most of them in person, I feel a kinship with them that's hard to articulate. And once the NBA season is officially canceled, that's going to be gone. Oh, sure, we'll all still get together on Twitter once in awhile, but it won't be the same. By the time the NBA does come back, it's likely that some of those people won't. There will be Twitter accounts that go dark, or even get deleted, Daily Dime Live participants who don't come back, bloggers who move on to writing about something else, and, to put it as simply as possible, fans who stop being fans.

I don't want to overstate the importance of this community to me, but the reality is I suffer from depression. Not the kind of depression where you feel sad because something is sad, but the kind where you stay up all hours of the night staring at the ceiling, wondering why you don't feel things that normal people feel. I get into negative emotional funks for days at a time, and I find it incredibly hard to break out of them. I don't take any medication for this condition because... I don't know, honestly... some misguided sense of hubris, maybe.

Over the years I've found ways to manage my depression, but it hasn't always been pretty. It reached a low point in late 2004, with a horrifying post on this blog that has long since been deleted. In in the months following that, I returned to being an active member of society, thanks in part to the NBA (and also to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", but that's a blog post for a different day). I'd lapsed as a fan following the '98-99 Lockout. LeBron James's entry to the league in 2003 started to get me interested on a regular basis again, but it was really in 2005 that I got back to my pre-'99 state of consuming as much about the NBA as I could. A few years later, I started a tiny NBA blog that got almost no traffic, but that blog was my gateway to the NBA Twitter community I mentioned above, and even when sports made me feel like crap, those people managed to make me feel better, and to be honest, the fact that I was feeling anything was such a huge step above where I was in 2004 that I looked forward to going home, turning on League Pass and immersing myself in that community no matter how I felt about that night's games themselves.

I think as I sat in the rain, that's what I was thinking of: the loss of that SOMETHING to go home to every night. Oh, sure, I'm sure I'll find ways to fill the time, whether its with TV shows or video games or exercise or even, God forbid, going out and meeting people, but I just can't get past the idea that it's not going to be the same and it's not going to be what I want. I've been asked the question of whose side I'm on -- the players or the owners -- multiple times throughout the lockout, and I've reached the point where the only answer I can give is this: I'm on the side of the people like me, fans who've made this game a part of their lives, and just want some NBA basketball to watch to make the days a little better.

R.I.P. Heavy D

I remember the day the iTunes Music Store opened up pretty well. I was working for Apple at the time, and we had the event streaming live in our in-store theater -- back when Apple Stores had theaters. I remember watching the keynote, being amazed by what Steve Jobs had pulled off, and then immediately thinking "OK, what's going to be the first song I buy?"

When the store went live, I flipped through the various browsing options it had, including the year-end Billboard charts. I decided to make my first purchase off of those, and when I came across "Now That We Found Love" by Heavy D and the Boyz, it was a no brainer. It was a song I'd had on cassette single, but somehow never got on CD and hadn't even illegally downloaded between 1998 and 2003. Now it's one of the top 50 most-played tracks in my iTunes library -- specifically, 43rd out of 13,155, putting it in the top 0.5% overall. Well, now it's much higher because I was listening to it on loop today after hearing the news that Heavy D died at the age of 44.

I feel like, as a rapper, Heavy D never really got quite the respect he deserved. It's easy to pigeonhole him as a "fun" rapper just because he wasn't vulger, profane or "gangsta", but his lyrical skills were really impressive. Probably the best example is the 1994 track "Let's Get It On", where Heavy easily holds his own with Brand Nubian's Grand Puba, Tupac Shakur and a young Notorious B.I.G. Some of his early stuff, particularly 1989's "Big Tyme" album, is equally quality.

Obviously, Heavy D is also always going to be associated with the TV show "In Living Color", for which he performed the theme song. Check out his moves during this live performance; for a big guy, he could really move.

Still, you know what stood out the most to me about Heavy D throughout his career, whether it was rapping or acting? He always seemed happy. I didn't know him personally, so I don't know if that was true or not, but just watch that "Now That We Found Love" video and try not to crack a smile. It's impossible. Just last month, he performed at the BET Hip Hop Awards and he seemed to be in great shape and great spirits, and it really seemed like it could be the launching point for a career renaissance. Now he's gone, and far too soon.

Jersey Monday: Ricky Watters

Monday Night Football Matchup: Chicago Bears at Philadelphia Eagles


Ah, the Logo 7 jersey: the lame step up from "unlicensed knockoff" in the early and mid '90s. It's easy to forget, but prior to the league-wide Reebok deal in the early '00s, there were about half a dozen companies that had licenses to make NFL replica jerseys. Champion was the primary supplier, and made jerseys that looked reasonably like the on-field product. Then there was Logo 7, which made really low-quality -- but also lower-priced -- jerseys. They were always this itchy, wide-spread polyester mesh, never had TV numbers and usually used the cheapest screen printing possible for the name and numbers. Eventually they switched to the same dazzle material that the other companies were using, but the inaccuracy of TV numbers (either misplaced or absent entirely) remained a mainstay until Reebok took over (of note, Reebok has sold Logo 7-esque jerseys at times in its run, usually at Walmart and at a much cheaper price than an "official" NFL replica).

This was my first Eagles jersey, and I know it was purchased in 1995, because that was Ricky Watters's first year with the team and the last year they wore this style of jersey (with the winged eagle logo, rather than the severed eagle head they currently use). Even as a Redskins fan, I loved those classic Eagles jerseys, and I really wish they'd use those as a throwback sometime, instead of those horrid 1930s jerseys they wore a few years ago.

I think most people remember Watters's Eagles career as a disappointment -- in part because of his unfortunate comments after short-arming a pass in a game -- but he actually topped 1,000 yards in each of his three seasons in Philadelphia. Hell, his average season in Philly was 1,200 yards and 10 touchdowns, which is pretty damn impressive. He went on to have three more 1,200-yard seasons in Seattle, before completely falling off and retiring in 2001.

Jersey Monday will continue every Monday until I run out of jerseys to spotlight. And since I’ve got more than 150 of them, that could be awhile. For the remainder of the NFL season, Jersey Monday will feature one of the teams playing on Monday Night Football.

The No Power Diaries: Rediscovering an Old Love

As of this writing (approximately 7 p.m. on Friday) I've been without power both at home and at my parents' home for more than six full days. The best estimate that CL&P can give me for restoring power at either location is Sunday by 11:59 p.m., which is essentially the company's catch-all estimate for all the towns in which they promised power restoration by the end of the weekend. Realistically, it's possible that I'll be without power well into next week, which is why I've been forced to rediscover a pastime that I'd long since forgotten: reading.

A little background (well, a lot of background... this is going to get very long): as a young child, I loved reading. I consumed any type of book I could get my hands on. I read at a much higher level than my age would have suggested, allowing me to borrow from my mother's reading library from about the age of seven. I read the novel "It" when I was nine years old -- maybe not the best parenting decision, but ironically its my sister who now has a fear of clowns, not me -- and was a regular reader of mystery novels, real life crime stories and, yes, even the "classic" novels. As a young sports fan, I also read as many sports books as I could. I particularly loved autobiographies of athletes; at a young age, I took them entirely at face value, not realizing until later in life that so many of them are either whitewashed or glorified takes on the athlete or embellished tales to make the athlete's life sound more interesting.

As I got older, my obsession with sports became such that almost every book I read was a sports book. This wasn't a bad thing, per se, as some of the most well-written volumes I've ever read were on the subject of sports. It was in this period of my life that I read books like "Ball Four" -- a book that was out of print at the time and took more than a month of searching at multiple used book stores to find (remember, this was in the early days of the Internet, before Amazon.com even existed) -- and "North Dallas Forty". It was also the time I started reading "Sports Illustrated" on a weekly basis, which was the beginning of the end of my love for books.

By this point in my life, I knew I wanted to be a sportswriter, and I started to consume as much sportswriting as possible. It was the mid-'90s, and access to the World Wide Web was no longer something reserved for the tech elite, and so I was regularly able to read great writing from the Washington Post, LA Times, New York Times and dozens of other newspapers. Of course, this took time, time that I'd previously used reading novels. So something had to go.

Community "Advanced Gay" Reaction

"Community" has been on a roll lately, after what some people said was a slow start to Season 3. The last two episodes were focused entirely on the core study group, with alternative formats that aren't usually tried on a mainstream sitcom, and everything worked. Thursday's episode, "Advanced Gay", brought things back to Greendale and expanded beyond the study group, but everything continued to work flawlessly, as the show referenced bits and lines from seasons gone by in a way that only it can.

There were three main stories going on in Thursday's episode:

• Hawthorne Wipes somehow became an icon in the gay community, leading to conflict between Pierce and his somehow still alive father
• THAT conflict led to issues between Jeff and Pierce's father, mostly because Jeff has daddy issues of his own
• In an unrelated story that somehow wove into the main story, Troy was recruited by the Air Conditioning repair school, and had to decide between a luxurious, but secret, life of air conditioning repair or life with his friends.

It might sound like hyperbole, but for the first half of this episode, literally every single line worked. Everything was funny, everything was snappy, and the stories were brilliant. That's not to say the second half was bad, but as stories needed to come to a resolution, things slowed down a bit, and it was running at about 85% joke efficiency, compared to the 193% efficiency of the first half. 

There were two particular things I loved about this episode. The first was the continued callbacks to "Inspector Spacetime", the Doctor Who knockoff introduced in the season premiere. On a lesser show, this would have been forgotten about, or maybe referenced once or twice more throughout the season. But "Community" has made it a recurring part of Abed's character, something it does regularly with all the characters. The fact that Annie lives above Dildopolis in a horrible neighborhood could've been a one-episode throwaway joke, but it wasn't. Troy's plumbing (and now air conditioning) magic repair skills are as much a part of his character as anything else. Even Jeff's constant texting -- its this attention to detail that adds great layers to watching every episode of "Community". 

The second thing I really loved is the casting of John Goodman as Vice Dean Laybourne of the Air Conditioning Repair Annex. In this episode, you really got a sense of just how ridiculous this character could have been if handled by someone else. But Goodman brings this natural sense of importance to the role, even as he's delivering lines in the most over the top way possible, so it all works. I thought he was good in the premiere, but in "Advanced Gay", he was great.

OK, now for the top lines of the episode, though I'm not sure anything topped Troy & Abed's secret handshake just being their normal handshake with the word "secret" whispered after it. I don't know exactly why, but that killed me. Also, there's probably even more I could have put in, but it would've turned into a transcript of the episode. 

Review: Amazing Spider-Man #673 - Spider Island Epilogue

It's really easy to be cynical about major comics crossover events -- to the point that one of my good friends noted that I'd gone from never having read a comic to "these events are all about selling books no one would normally buy" in less than five years -- and even easier to see that the event has an "epilogue" issue and go "c'mon, I thought we were done with this." I honestly had that reaction in regards to the "Fear Itself" 7.x issues, but my reaction to Amazing Spider-Man #673 was completely different.

After reading 672, I didn't think we needed MORE Spider Island, but what we did need was exactly what this issue delivered: a quick wrap up of some loose ends, so unnecessary after effects of the event don't linger over the story for months to come, except when they're supposed to. I know that may not make a lot of sense, but reading the issue it makes perfect sense. Writer Dan Slott balances the end of the two-month-long Spider Island adventure -- in part by quickly addressing and dismissing the less exciting things that happen after an event like this, like the clean up or the recovery of the general populous -- with some tantalizing set up for the issues to come.

Most notably, though, Slott starts to break some cracks into the OMD wall that Marvel erected around Peter Parker more than four years ago. (SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT FORWARD)...

The No Power Diaries: The First 72 Hours

As you may have heard, there was a bit of a snowstorm that hit the northeast this weekend, and a few people are currently stuck without power. And by a few, I mean something like three million. I'm one of them. And I may not have power until sometime next week. At this point, I'm going on 72 hours without power, which is, to put it simply, sucks. I haven't had a hot shower since Saturday morning, and I've spent the last three nights sleeping in approximately 45 degree temperatures. So how'd we get here?

SATURDAY

Approx. 3:30 p.m.: After a noon-ish pizza run, I watched the first set of college football games with increasing boredom. Finally, around 3:30, I decide that I'm bored enough to run to Best Buy and pick up "Captain America" on Blu-ray. I figure I can watch that, relax a little, then watch the Towson-Delaware game streaming on the Internet. I end up walking around Best Buy for awhile -- a LONG while -- and leave with four movies and a case for my new iPhone 4S.

4:45 p.m.: I arrive home after the extended Best Buy trip to discover the power is out. Now, I've lived in my condo for more than six years, and until Hurricane Irene this summer, I'd never had an extended power outage. So even after the Irene outage (which lasted about 36 hours), I wasn't anticipating any extended time without power. However, considering it took me 25 minutes to drive home from Best Buy (normally a 10 minute drive) and by this point the snow was coming down really hard, I realize I could be in for a long night. I pull out my work iPhone -- which has a reasonably full battery charge -- and open up the WatchESPN app to catch some college football.

5:30 p.m.: I realize just how dark it's getting, so I light candles. Lots of candles. And I have plenty more in storage. I guess this is sort of a positive, but I'd really like it if I didn't have to use the candles again.

7:00 p.m.: At this point I switch from watching college football to listening to it. I throw open an app called "Radio" and tune in to WNST to listen to Towson-Delaware. Switching to audio only and turning off the screen conserves some battery life.

8:00 p.m.: We're over three hours without power, so I decide to take the ice cream that's in my freezer and... put it in a bag of ice. There wasn't much left in the carton, so eating it probably would have been the smart choice here. I was still optimistic that power would come on before the night was out, so I kept the ice cream on ice. I did prepare a fine dinner of... a bowl of Cheerios.

Approx. 9:30 p.m.: iPhone #1 dies. This is the first point in the night when I realize I've really made no long-term power outage contingencies whatsoever. I've got one dead iPhone, a second one at about 70% battery life (which is decreasing as I continue to stream the Towson game) and an iPad with about 55% battery life but no 3G Data Plan.

10:15 p.m.: Towson loses. I'm now angry both because Towson lost to Delaware and I wasted the battery life of multiple iPhones listening to the game. At this point I slip into bed, which is freezing, and read about a third of "Marked", the first "House of Night" novel before going to sleep. Yes, I'm reading a novel that's written for a teenage female audience. I don't care. It's awesome.

SUNDAY