Monthly Archives: January 2007

NBC’s Thursday night comedy line-up* is referred to as “homework” by some of us at the office. The idea is that, no matter how late you need to stay up, you literally *have* to watch the shows the night they air, because recapping the plot and recycling the jokes is such a cube farm ritual that by not watching, you can actually wreck your coworkers’ Friday. They want to come in and draw a mark on your hand, punt somebody’s garbage can, and set their im status to something “funny”, etc, etc. I’m sure we’re far from the only people who behave this way, though to be fair, we’re probably more dorky than most.
And that’s where NBC isn’t helping us out. Example: last night’s Office featured a running joke about a crazy ringtone. Great stuff. Of course the first thing work.buddy.Hoffmaldo does when he finishes the episode is jump on the NBC website, credit card in hand, ready to fork over a couple of bucks to buy the ringtone, just for the 15 minutes of yucks it will get the next morning. And it would have been genius. Except for one thing. There’s no ringtone for sale. Just like there were no bathrobes a couple weeks ago. Or Dundee statues before that. Or Timberlake boxes. Or Timberlake box song ringtones. Instead, they offer [free] bonus clips or the [free] producers cut. And when you think about how hard they push people to GO TO NBC.COM after every show, it’s dumbfounding that they aren’t cramming ‘buzz-driven’ junk down your throat. Seriously, duh. Especially for the easy digital stuff (ringtones), super duh.
I must be missing something.
* – Scrubs, Office, and 30 Rock (now minus Scrubs, because it suddenly sucks, and I gave it up.)

Last weekend some buddies and I went down to Madison to watch the Gopher hockey team lay a beat down on the clown show better known as Wisconsin’s Pride on Ice. It was a quick down and back of a trip. Seriously quick. I left on Saturday morning and I walked back thru my front door less than 28 hours later. I was greasy, achy, and exhausted. I think that means it was a great time.
Triptik and observations:

• Highway notes: traffic moved nicely, kwik trip serves a burger with unlimited fries, and that new jellystone park on the interstate looks insane. Ok, on to the Madison part.
• We rocked the State Street scene before the game. We got there around 4 and expected total chaos, but quickly determined that Madison more or less shuts down for the month of January because they don’t have J-term. Translation: the bars were full but not packed – a perfect situation for us old guys looking to find a place to sit down. Genius timing on the road trip, Gopher Hockey schedule makers.
• Our dinner and pregame pitchers were at State Street Brats. Nutshell: Outstanding. I had a red with spicy fries. I should have ordered 4 more. I was loving it. Pitchers were pricey, service was brutal, but they’ll be first on my list when we go back. Yay SSB.
• We also checked out some place called Wando’s that came in via some Madison rube references. Their claim to fame is that they serve giant drinks in fishbowls, which sounds cool, until you realize that you and your buddies are going to have to take turns sipping fruity blue fishbowl liquid thru little plastic straws. Uhh, maybe next time. Also this: the whole place smelled like fishsticks. Odd.
• Game time. The Kohl center, for all it’s convenience to the campus, doesn’t really do it for me. Sure it’s nice, and it’s loaded with amenities, but a college arena should be about intimacy and bad lighting and bench seats and banners and all that crap. You walk in to the well-lit lobby of the Kohl and stare up at all the Chihuly glass sculptures and down at the squeaky clean floors and you start to forget you’re on a campus. Then you go into the arena, which holds 17,000, and it’s got a ribbon scoreboard and fancy lighting and it, too, is clean and sterile, and it all just seems so… wrong. But hey, that’s just me. Badger rubes can’t seem to get enough of it. Tools.
• Legendary Wisconsin band and student section update: Like the hockey team, failed to show up for the Saturday night game. (Full disclosure: I heard the Friday game was a little rowdier. Uh huh.)
• Game over. Gophers win. Doy.
• After the game the crowd of 20 or so of us who had met up at the arena walked around for a while. We ended up at Brother’s. It was loud and lame. It was good to see Carl and Co, though, so we hung around for a while before bailing for greener pastures.
• A few more beers (I think?), then we ended up grabbing some chow at a ‘famous chili’ place back on State Street. Nutshell review: very good, though I got under-portioned compared to the other guys. I’m not sure what happened, I winked and everything. Interesting note about chili place: like every other place in Madison – including parking garages and nursing homes – beer was available for purchase, and the walls were covered with to flat screen televisions blasting ESPN. It’s like Madison only gets one channel or something.
• We drove back to Borly’s after downing our chili. We were talking about stopping at the casino to throw dice and turn cards, but – and I am not making this up – half the car wanted to go home and go to bed. It was like midnight. I know!

Kudos to Borly for the couch space and to Carl for handling the ticket logistics. Maybe next year I’ll live blog the whole trip.

The new gopher football coach is some guy named Tim Brewster. It was first reported as ‘official’ by ESPN last night, at which point the local media jumped on it like a forbidden trampoline. I saw the headline on the Strib’s website, sent out my obligatory “who the hell is Tim Brewster?!” emails and sat back and waited for the backlash to start. A couple of hours later ESPN forced everyone to re-evaluate their sources when they pulled their story, which was more or less the only source the local media was able to definitively point to. The Strib eventually got ahold of Maturi and switched their headline to “no new contract yet” or something, and by 10:30 the local TV crews were just reporting it as rumor. At least the one I watched did.
I went to bed comfortable with the chaos. When I woke this morning and heard it was official: Tim “Punky” Brewster is the new coach of the program. I guess hiring a no-name football coach is a 24 hour business.
Seems like kind of an odd choice. For all I know he’s a football genius who will bring us 6 Rose Bowls in the next 10 years, but here’s my initial take:

• He has no head coaching experience beyond the high school level. Here’s where I remind everyone that the Gophers play Division I college football in the Big 10.
• He hasn’t been in control of an offense since he was a high school coach. Apparently he ran a pretty good offense back at Whatever High he was coaching at, so here’s where I’ll remind everyone of what happened last time this town brought in a superstar head coach with a kick ass system and limited experience controlling an office.
• The biggest upside for Brewster is that he was apparently some sort of superstar recruiter in college. While at Texas, he apparently recruited much of the national championship team from the 05-06 season. Here’s where I point out that recruiting a bunch of kids from Texas to play for Texas maybe isn’t as hard as people think it is and, conversely, that getting the next Vince Young to come to play for Minnesota is probably a lot harder.
• His current gig is tight end coach for Denver. Before that he was tight end coach for San Diego. Here’s where I point out that a lateral career move between two division rivals is usually driven by one thing: money. Here’s also where I point out that if he’s such an awesome college recruiter (see above), why leave the college game to be stupid tight end coach in the NFL?.

On the bright side, Nostradoodle predicts 14 additional season tickets will be sold as a result of the hiring. Nostradoodle will not be one of them. Nostradoodle will, however, be happy to eat his hat and jump on the bandwagon as soon as this team shows signs of life.
It’s official: Brewster is new U football coach [strib]