doodledee

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]

Overnight something like 7 inches of light, fluffy snow fell in the Twin Cities. My driveway only had like maybe 5 on it, but I'll call it 7 because that's what the radio is saying it is and it makes it sound even more winter stormy.

I'd like to take advantage of the snowfall to remind everyone to please observe proper snow removal etiquette when clearing your walks and driveways. I saw a few of you using your snowblowers after we had that 3 inch dusting a couple weeks back. Bad form, people, bad form.

Also this: It's totally cool to wear your big winter boots to work, so long as you bring different shoes to wear once you're there. And if you accidentally forget your other shoes, it is totally acceptable to stomp around the office in your giant winter boots for the remainder of the day. And if you want to wear them down to the cafeteria to get coffee yelling "THESE ARE ME COFFEE BOOTS" that's ok, too. At least it's ok by me. Maybe you're the kind of person who would rather drive all the way home just to get a pair of shoes, and hey, more power to you. But if you are, methinks you're exactly the type of person who needs to spend more time stomping around the office in a giant pair of boots.

Also this: WOW a lot of people took snow days today.

Watch out for skitchers.

We went over and checked out the new Rainforest exhibit at the Como Park Conservatory the other day. The official website claims the "$2.1 million exhibit is a total emersion experience which allows guests to visit an authentic neo-tropical rainforest and explore the relationships between plants and animals." Um, yeah, 'total emersion' is maybe overselling it a bit - all those people waddling around in parkas kind of wrecks the 'emersion' - but my nutshell review remains this: pretty effing mint and totally worth the visit.

The exhibit is an out-and-back loop that runs through the looks-giant-on-the-outside-but-feels-oddly-small-on-the-inside new wing of the Conservatory. You get to see some cool turtles, a really, really neat giant fish tank, an anaconda, some spiders, and of course a ton of awesome plants. There's other stuff, too. It's all very well done. Especially the fist tank. I could sit in front of that thing for hours. Except for the fact that they have giant buckets of tarantulas right next to the fish tank. Creepers. Move along.

Also this: it's super duper humid in there. Super. Duper. Every minute or so, steam comes blasting out of these hidden steam canons, JUST LIKE IT DOES IN THE RAINFOREST. If you wear glasses, be prepared for them to *seriously* fog up when you first walk in. If you have a camera, be prepared for it to seriously fog up, too. The awesome turtles are the first thing you 'see' when you enter, and it was both funny and sad to watch people whip out their new fancy Christmas cameras only to find that their lenses were glazed over with a think rainforest fog. (Mine took upwards of 15 minutes to clear up.)

We ate our picnic lunch in the new 'restaurant' in the expansion. They didn't yell at us for bringing in outside food, which is good, because there really wasn't anywhere else to eat and I [naturally] wasn't jonsing to pay $6.50 for a kids corndog meal. Yikes.

After lunch junior and I tooled around the zoo for a few minutes. The monkeys were in especially good spirits. They must have known we were coming.

Get over there.

Como Park Conservatory [comozoo]
Tropical Encounters Exhibit [comozoo]

Holy crap, what a weekend in local sports. At least for me, anyway.

• On Friday night KC hooked me up with a ticket to check out the unreasonably good Gopher Hockey squad as they dismantled some joke of a team from Alabama. Something like five of the Gopher's big names were in Europe for the World Junior Tournament, which meant we got to watch a lot of 3rd and 4th liners prove their stuff. If you leave aside the fact that we may have set a WCHA record for fewest checks, it was still a solid performance. Well, except for the parts where Tyler Hirsch kind of shuffled around on the ice with his stick on his hip, spaced out and seemingly disinterested. Let's just say that I was surprised, but not overly so, to read on Saturday that Hirsch had been cut.
• After the game, we went over to Sally's to have a beer and watch the end of the Gopher Football bowl game. It was double plus jumpin' in there, what with the hockey game just getting out and it being a Friday night and the NFL network not being available anywhere else in the 5 state area. But they had it at Sally's. And can I just say it was riveting to watch the meltdown happen live? I couldn't look away. Even to fish the orange slice out of my Blue Moon. (Seriously, an orange. WTF is that about?) As the outcome became clear the atmosphere turned a little, uhh, rowdy. There were several bar-wide FIRE MASON chants. You know the rest.
• On Sunday Hoffmaldo scored me a ticket to the meaningless Vikes/Rams game. It was a good time, even though none of the Vikings appeared to be trying. The most surreal moment was when Tarvaris went down after a hard sack and had to leave the field, so Chilly sent Brad Johnson in to run a single play. The place went nuts. Like 3 weeks ago they booed that guy off the field, now they welcome him home as the prodigal son. Gotta love the NFL. I also waded through like 4 inches of mystery flood water inside the dome. Yuck.
• In Sunday's Strib, Sid suggested that Lou Holtz should be offered the U football coaching job. This on top of his pleading to bring in Bobby Knight to coach the U gopher basketball team. Can you imagine Bobby Knight and Lou Holtz both coaching at the U? I think we should do it, just to see how big of a mess it'll be when Sid's head explodes.
• Was I the only one who noticed late in the 2nd quarter of tonight's Timberwolves game that going into a timeout, the players chose to huddle on the court, away from the coaching staff? Huh? Does this mean the Dwayne Casey deathwatch is officially underway? Some would say yes.