I suppose that the reason this married couple bickers as if they are children is some sort of play on the idea of “child-like wonderment” that is supposed to go along with this product. After all, TV’s have been pushing these new enhanced TV sets to us for awhile. I’m not an extremely social person, I admit, but I’ve yet to meet someone who has praised or desperately wanted one of these TV’s. It just seems like a set of extra features that my phone has already been able to do for three years, and most of us are more comfortable using that then a TV remote at this point.

The reason it irks me? Because it continues this push towards the inhumanity of everything. Every day the world is getting bigger, but your personal world is getting smaller. People stay in contact more with people who are a distance from them, and this seems like some sort of nightmare endgame for the scenario: we can’t even fucking talk to each other like normal human beings when we’re in the same room.

Finally, what kind of self-respecting man lets his wife push him around like this? You apologize and attempt to move on, not apologize and then apologize eight more times, and then play a song that says “it’s hard for me to say I’m sorry” when apparently it is really easy since you can’t stop doing it. Advertisers love to play on helplessness. I don’t want to psychoanalyze two people that I, frankly, hate already based on their passive-aggressive antics, but nobody should have a hold on you like this woman does to this man.

I’ve had quite a few girlfriends in my time — if any of them had changed their Facebook status to single (and I’m taking the leap that this matters as much as it apparently does to this man in the time period I was in), it would end with them apologizing to me, not the other way around. Honestly, it would probably be the end of the whole relationship. Yet this man just takes it like a complete and utter chump. Actually, an unironic status update that talked about how spicy those tacos last night were would probably be enough to drive me away. I’m picky like that.

I guess my problem with the product comes down to the fact that TV’s aren’t portable. You offer me no new utilization of anything by putting all the things “I love” in a product that I can’t move. I already have that: it’s called a desktop computer. I can even play TV on it if I want to wire it that way. Claiming that this is some sort of breakthrough (“The Wonder of Samsung!”) strikes me as spurious — all you’ve done is invented a commercial that sells unneeded TV services to people who would probably be better investing their money on therapy than smart TV’s.

Maybe then they’d actually be able to talk to each other.

Jeez, one more week and we’ll be at a month.

Another week of decent measurements and no weight loss. I’m going to attempt to turn the tables this week.

I’m not going to work out at all. No kettlebells or walks. This is also partially because I hurt my knee a bit with poor technique last Friday though, and I’d like to give it some rest. I’m also going to quit the recommended PAGG stack for a week, just to experiment, because it seems like I (anecdotally, again) lost more weight without it the first time I tried this back in February.

Still feeling good about the whole thing, still think it’s producing noticeable results on my belly, but would like the validation of pure weight loss.

This ad was conceived when a ConocoPhillips executive shouted forcefully at a director that had already delivered two not-good-enough ads: “Why can’t you make cute college girls understand that gas is good?” To which the director complained that this just wasn’t possible in a 30-second ad. The resulting commercial takes place after that director was fired, along with any spare plausibility that might have been hanging around in the corners of the ConocoPhillips office.

We can tell that this executive hasn’t been in college for the past thirty years, because if he had he would know that most college students don’t have their ideals morphed by a ten-second conversation with their peers. Where is the class? Why is this teacher still standing around awkwardly instead of telling them to get the hell out of his classroom?

Then we get to the actual message of the ad itself, which seems to boil down to the phrases “100 years,” “actually it’s cleaner,” and “it provides jobs.” 100 years really isn’t much in the long run, but I’m guessing it was used since it sounds big. I almost definitely won’t survive 100 more years. Environmentalists like the young lady in this commercial tend to take a longer-term look on things though, so 100 years probably shouldn’t mean much to her. The claim that it’s cleaner just reeks of dubiousness. I don’t know if it is true or false, mainly because they don’t pay me to research how clean gas is, but given that it was a big enough deal that they needed to make an advertisement claiming that it is, I would tend to lean towards false. Where’s the proof on that statement?

More importantly, the jobs statement is just hilarious. If an environmentalist isn’t going to be swayed by an appeal to length, she almost certainly isn’t going to be swayed by the fact that there will be more people employed by said corporation that is doing evil. Try to imagine the mental breakthrough that the commercial creator wants her to have. “Oh man, jobs! That means me and my friends can actually eat tonight! If only I get lucky enough to have one!” Jobs are apparently now just as much of a scare tactic as terrorism. The ending phrase of “I might get a job once we graduate!” only furthers that sentiment. ConocoPhillips: Let us keep digging up natural gas or you’ll have no jobs!

Speaking of: what is the deal with these floating words? “CENTURY,” “ENERGY,” “ECONOMY,” and “ENVIRON” — I assume that is supposed to say environment, but it is (likely) as off-screen as the actual environment is to a for-profit corporation. Are these name tags? Can I create my own? Because if I had one while watching this commercial, it would say “BULLSHIT.”

Finally, this:

“I know, I know, you were just being brainwashed by your fellow hippies. Let me deliver the smuggest knowing nod I can for you.”

Susan to you, Mom to me, was a woman who had such passion for everything she threw herself into. She was an avid gardener, a terrific artist, and carried herself with a charisma and grace that was as rare as a red shard of the beach glass she liked to collect. I know that just about everyone here has some knowledge of the person that Susan was, and I’m sure that if you talked to her at length you knew how much her children meant to her, but what you might not know is that she was more passionate about being a mother than anything else she did. My parents separated at a young age, and I can vividly remember times when I was a child where my father had fallen asleep early while I was at his house, times where I was feeling extremely lonely. I would call her up and she would drop everything and speak to me for however long it took to bring me back to content. She would always try to make me think of things that would bring me the most joy, and inevitably we would wind up planning my next birthday party over the phone for hours. What kind of cake we’d have, who I’d invite, where we’d host it. We’d make lists of pros and cons to every part of it.

Mom had a heart attack in early 2009, and when she did I expected to have to take on bigger roles in the household. While I was able to do some things for her, like taking my sister to school in the mornings, she would never let me make the really big sacrifices in life. She implored me to keep taking my own path towards finding a good job, and not to settle for something trivial that I didn’t want to do just for the sake of money. She defended me when that approach was criticized. As I had started climbing the ladder to my own path, she began to see us more as equals rather than mom and son, but she was never above mothering me to the extent that she could. She always wanted to cook for me, she always wanted to make sure that I was sleeping well, and even despite her poor health, she wanted to absorb all of my problems from me just as she had when I was younger. A couple of months ago I’d received a ticket, and because I was driving a car that was in the name of my recently deceased father, I hadn’t yet updated the title, and the officer had told me that the only way they would waive the ticket is if I’d had it all updated by the end of tomorrow. After driving there with her with all the title information, and standing in line for what was something like an hour-and-a-half, they informed us that we’d need to pass the car through a county emissions test before the paperwork could be taken care of. I was flustered and frustrated, and as it was already 4:30, it seemed rather unlikely that I would be able to pull off the three separate trips I’d need to make the next day while still doing my job.

Mom took the car for me, I still don’t know how, and found a place that would pass the test for me. When she needed to be for her kids, she was superhuman. I know when the word hero is mentioned, it conjures up images of men in capes fighting crime and saving entire cities, but if you escape comic books and try to think of what an actual hero would say and do in this modern era, I believe Mom is the kind of person you’d come up with.

Her passing has saddened and shocked a legion of people. She had been diagnosed with bladder cancer just weeks earlier. By the way, don’t let her catch you calling it that. To her, it was a growth, nothing more and nothing less. Despite that, she was in good spirits. She was looking at diets to starve those cells, she was right back to work the next week, and she felt more guilty for inconveniencing the people close to her than she was scared of any of the particulars of her diagnosis. In fact, when I was able to talk to her for the last time, before she slipped into unconsciousness, one of the things she made sure to tell me was that she was sorry. Every day of her life where she had drawn someone away from the rest of their life unwillingly was total agony for her. For that reason, I know she’ll be at peace when we’re all done here, because she’ll finally have stopped being, in her mind, a burden to us.

To paraphrase a couple of writers that I highly admire, the fact that her absence has caused us so much pain is proof alone of the kind of person she was. To feel this kind of sadness over the loss of someone is a blessing, because it shows that for a very long time, we were all lucky to have her in our lives. Feeling this way makes us human, and that humanity in itself is so beautiful that we have to remember how wonderfully alive we all are. I know this sounds illogical, and it may seem like I am compensating for my grief, but ever since she’s died, I feel that if I really listen, I can hear her voice in my head. I know that this won’t be an easy time for anybody, and it’s not an easy premise to accept that someone so great has left us before her time, but remember that she loved every last one of her friends here. Remember that she’ll be looking after everyone who she was close to in some way, and she’s closer to you than you might think. Most of all, remember the way she lived her life. The actions that she took and the way that she went about challenges. Nobody will ever be able to replace her physical presence on this planet, but if we can spread enough good around to compensate for her loss, I know that she will rest easier.

Thank you, Mom.

My father passed away in a trailer park. The fact that he had ruined his own life to the point where that was necessary is a source of sadness for me, but as he had cut himself off from anyone who could help him at the end, it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it. He died alone and overdosed and dead in a trailer, surrounded by other trailers, somewhere in central Texas. I’m not going to name the specific trailer park, both because I think that would be an eye for an eye and because I’m almost positive this place would not be above trying to sue me for defamation for it.

A man owns the place, and his son is the “manager” of it. Beer bellies one and two would be another name for them. Every shirt I ever saw them in was stained and every conversation I’ve ever had with them was passive-aggressive at best, unfriendly at worst. Because I’m mainly writing this to get it off my chest, rather than trying to create a serious piece of literary work, let me go to my tried and true friends for speeding writing up: the bullet points.

- I phoned ahead before driving to the place from Houston the first time. My idea was that me and my friend would go grab some belongings immediately, then I’d come back a second time within the month to grab the rest. I was informed that this was absolutely fine and was under the impression that while this would be a long drive for me, at least they had been courteous about it. How wrong would I end up being? Very.

- I arrive there with said friend, who had taken the day off work to help me. They then let me know that I wouldn’t be able to take anything home without an affidavit that said that I was the sole heir. After much legal chit-chat with uncles and lawyer friends, a meeting with the detective and other important figures in the town, along with several assurances that this would just be a quick matter and that then I could collect the stuff, my friend and I left for home empty-handed. I don’t mind taking the proper steps by the law, I very much mind that they misled me to believe that I’d be able to collect my things before I took a four hour drive. The beginnings of a grudge form.

- After trying to squeeze paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork into my schedule, I finally managed to collect the right papers that would let me be able to go back. One problem: phoning them ahead of time produced a very curious response that they were owed rental money for the trailer spot. Shocking, I know. It was well within their legal right to put my father’s property on lien until the rent was paid, and I’m astonished at how coincidentally that lined up with them sending me home the first time! I bite my tongue and pay it, hoping this is the last time I have to deal with them.

- My uncle and I drive up to central Texas again. It pours on the way up. We have to wait 45 minutes for the manager to become available to talk to, and another 30 for him to verify everything. Me and my uncle work our asses off for the better part of the day. He absolutely carries me through packing up my dad’s stuff and I’m forever grateful, because this was an extremely emotional time for me. We hit the police department for what was found on his body, we drop a ton of his clothes off at goodwill, and the other variable is that while there is plenty of stuff to take away, dead people tend to have a lot of garbage that needs to be taken care of. We filled up what was probably 20 bags of garbage, dumped some in the park’s dumpster before we left in the middle of the day to find the police department, and were about to dump the rest when the manager comes out, hands waving furiously.

“THIS IS A COMMUNITY DUMPSTER!!! YOU CAN’T THROW ALL THIS AWAY HERE!!!”

My uncle, who I have never seen angry before, just starts shouting down the man. I stand there in stunned silence, a broken kid who wants to be done with this, as he verbally undresses this slumlord. Insults are exchanged, but it doesn’t get to fists. It ends with him screaming us off of his property as I awkwardly try to drive this enormous pick-up truck that is two-to-three times the size of my own car and flee a scene that still seems too abstract to be real.

- We didn’t get everything. The trailer, which we’d thought might have been covered by insurance, was not. We left it there to get picked up by the bank. There were some things that didn’t come back. Most of it was trash, but there might have been a keeper or two in there. The most valuable thing we left there was my father’s old Isuzu Trooper. That was the first vehicle I ever drove, and while it probably topped out at 50, I have some fond memories of it. Mom and I had done some pre-leaving leg work to get an estimate on what it cost, but at that point I was so, so tired of dealing with these people. I just didn’t care anymore. I left her in charge of negotiating with them. The agreement was arranged to be $500 for the truck after I attained the proper title transfer paperwork. Of course, like most deals made over the phone, this wasn’t in writing.

So wait for it…wait for it…there was a storage fee! Yesterday we got a carefully worded check for $300 that said that endorsing it made the sale proper, no backsies, and so forth. We both signed it and I let her take the whole thing into her account.

I guess my takeaways from the scenario are that a) there is no extent that some people won’t go to take money from you, and you’re better off isolating and removing those people from your life as soon as you can, and b) I pray for massive karmic redemption to hit these people some day. It’s one thing to jerk around someone for money because they are being rude and manipulative, and I’m sure that my uncle’s behavior (no matter how well-deserved it was) played a role in that final fee, but to jerk around a grieving family. A family that doesn’t have much. A family that had to take a lot of time out of their schedule to be able to get up there in the first place. This was a gross abuse of power. It’s not altogether uncommon in this country for that to happen, but just because it doesn’t happen at the micro level as much as it happens at the macro level doesn’t absolve this park and it’s owners.

These people are scavengers of human misery. I wish them nothing but the same pain that they gave me.

I watched The Decision. I watched it beginning to end. With great fascination at the spectacle of the event. But that’s not really that unusual for me, I watch lots of games with the same level of interest, and I watch lots of shows intently as well. What separates TV from “show” to “event”, for me, is if you stay on the same station afterwards.

I’m a quick TV changer. If I see something bad coming on, I click out to a different channel as quickly as I possibly can. SportsCenter in particular, and ESPN in general, have been absolutely dreadful for the better part of the last decade. Yet here I was, enduring not only these two things but also copious amounts of Stuart Scott, out of utter shock. It’s a rare event when something beguiles me to the point that I am seeking validation that what I just saw actually happened. Yet here it was, basketball’s best player creating a triumvirate of star players looking for NBA title relevancy by taking less money than he had to, and he botched the message to the point that his jersey was being burned in the streets. I watched, I’m guessing, around three hours of ESPN after this happened. Which is more non-game ESPN than I have probably watched in the past six months.

I’m not here to poop on LeBron James. You can find that article on any sports website currently operating right now, I don’t think I need to add anything to that chorus. I am just entranced by this scenario. People who talked about how much they hated the ego that James had to do this, still wound up watching. People who I hadn’t talked to in years asked me what I thought about the unceremonious dumping of Cleveland on national television. I got unsolicited text messages from people who I rarely hear from declaring their thoughts on the matter.

And really, while the circumstances run contrary to just about every other big name free agent of the past, it’s the spectacle that set this thing over the top. By putting this on national television, LeBron James didn’t choose a new team, he destroyed the city of Cleveland. You can see this kind of callous behavior on an individual basis pretty easily, it’s the basis to just about every reality TV show ever, but rarely do you see someone with this scope of relevancy in an area do it. He gave cookie cutter answers about how the Cavs were what he wanted, but it was clear to anyone who has followed the NBA that no good free agents were coming to Cleveland with him and that he had no faith in Cavs management to put them over the hump. He was being politely callous.

A few people, including Magic GM Otis Smith, questioned how much of a competitor James was by ditching his team to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. I’m sympathetic towards James here because it was clear that he was never getting help in Cleveland, but at the same time, I think Smith has hit on a completely different point: it was the easy way out. The sports athletes as role models ideal has been gradually eroding before our eyes. The internet era has shown us, from drunken athlete photos, to Greg Oden’s penis, to full transcripts of police reports, that athletes are incredibly human. But nobody has ever shown it on such a large stage. No American star athlete is supposed to turn his back on those that raised him if the money is right.

On Thursday night in Greenwich, one of the walls of athlete-fan relations fell down in front of our eyes. If the internet was the first wrecking ball to the athlete-role model complex, then The Decision was a giant fire bomb dropped on the remains. These guys aren’t worthy of being idolized simply because they are great at sports, and they never were.

How delicious it was, that ESPN, the sports network that is blissfully unaware of how it has ruined so much of the appeal of the one thing it covers, helped contribute to the demise of one of the myths that is most central to it’s viewership. All for one hour of great TV ratings. Hope it was worth it.

No, instead we’re talking about Super Tennis, one of the best sports game to grace the Super Nintendo and a game that I have personally killed at least 50 hours of downtime playing. It’s a rare game for the SNES that manages to create a timing system where things are pretty balanced, even if winning technique does usually focus on a few main strategies.

There are three modes: singles, doubles, and circuit. Obviously, if you choose singles or doubles you’ll end up in an free play match against a computer opponent where you’ll get to choose the type of court (clay, grass, hard) and characters. If you pick circuit, you’ll be playing in 8 prestigious 16 player tournaments, places like the French Open…oh pardon me, the “Paris Open”. All four majors are there, and then also Nairobi, Tokyo, Beijing, and Rio. The number of sets changes depending on whether it’s a major or not. If it isn’t: 1, 1, 1, 3, and if it is: 1, 1, 3, 5. Win every tournament and you’ll get a match in a place that resembles hell with an incredibly awesome player named “Don J” who will probably beat your ass. Unless you played as a girl, because in 1991, boys ruled and girls drooled.

There are four shots once the point starts, and two different serve speeds. Topspin, backspin, slice, and lob are your weapons in a point. Each has it’s strengths and weaknesses: The backspin is probably your all-around strike: best for trading long strokes and trying to wait your opponent’s mistake out. It doesn’t have a weakness, but it’s incredibly hittable. Topspin is easily the best shot, especially on returns. You can often send them right back at the opponent and catch them in-between. However, if they do get to it, you’ll be at a disadvantage as you’re forced to return against a netbound player, and thats the worst situation to be in. Still, probably worth spamming against most of your adversaries. Slice is a set-up shot, it buys you time to attack the net if you want to, and also can be used to throw timing off. If you nail a slice on just the right timing, you’ll also hit an unreturnable shot that clips the net. However, slices also have a tendency to go wide if you hit side-to-side, so it’s a situational shot, and if you squib up the timing on your attempt, it will hit the net fairly easily. Finally, there is lob, which is utterly useless on it’s own accord. No computer opponent is slow enough to get caught by surprise on the lob, and most of them will settle under it and hit a smash at you. However, if you pair the lob with the topspin follow to the opposite side, you’re almost guaranteed to win the point as it’s hard to smash and then dash after something. It’s a very specialized strategy to be used against people who crowd the net, as well as superstar Don J. Flub the smash timing and you’re out a point, and that’s the roughest timing to nail in the game.

When serving, you’ve got your basic hard serve, which is best served up the middle or angled to the inside corner, and you have your “get it in” serve which rarely ever aces and which I would personally never use. I’ve read in a few reviews that you can also control the way the ball goes in the air with L and R. I’ve never found that necessary, and it’s one more button I can’t reach when I’m using my keyboard as a controller. But hey, maybe it works for you.

Every player has their own ratings that they are good and bad at (forehand, backhand, serve, volley), but unfortunately, you don’t find those out until you beat the game once. The best guy to use is Phil. I’d tell you the best girl but I was so disappointed that the game didn’t have a boss for the girls that I just turned it right off. Once you get the hang of the timing, it’s a pretty brisk game. You’ll definitely have a lot more problems with net-chargers, since the lob is not really all that effective at stopping them unless you master the topspin follow up, although there are a few long volley players who can stun you with a good shot every now and then. I usually have the most problems with Brian and Phil.

The biggest gripe with the game has to be the terrible camera angles you are forced to use when you play in the far court, since the camera doesn’t rotate with you. You don’t get the same look at the ball as it comes at you, so you will often mistime a shot terribly. I prefer to play defensively on that side of the court and just abuse topsin returns if at all possible. Once you get good at serving, you’ll probably ace about 30-40% of serves, so it shouldn’t be too hard to hold your own on those, but receiving in the far court is definitely a pain.

For me, Super Tennis is right up there with NBA Jam and Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball in replay value for SNES sports games. There isn’t a lot of depth to it’s modes, but there is plenty in the game play. That should be the most important thing to you anyway, right?